was not. Maybe they'd been tied together during the SAR operation a few hours ago — it would make sense if injured people had to be transferred from one ship to the other — but there was no reason the two should have kept racing for the horizon together. There was every reason not to do so, in fact; the last report from GCHQ indicated that a dozen or so ships had reached the spot where the Ishikari had blown up and sank hours before, and they were still finding survivors, miraculously, clinging to bits of flotsam in the water.
No, as he'd told the NSC people, there was something very wrong here. He'd already given orders to put Black Cat Bravo on full alert. If he had to, he'd put a team on board covertly and have them check things out.
With two and a half tons of plutonium at stake, it was best to be certain.
The two ships slid off the bottom of the screen, and the eye-in-the-sky was again staring down at blue water. 'Thanks, Chris,' he said. 'Route that through to Desk Three as soon as it's processed, will you?'
'Will do, Mr. Rubens. The Company's on my back for a copy, too. So's the NCTC.'
'Of course they are.'
Rubens checked out through several levels of security and walked back to his car in the NRO's north parking lot. As he walked, he pulled out his cell phone and saw that there was an urgent message waiting for him. Cell phones had to be switched off and surrendered to security inside the NRO's precincts; someone had been trying to reach him while he was inside.
That someone was Jeff Rockman, back in the Art Room.
'Rubens,' he said after calling back and getting Rockman on the line. 'What do you have?'
'We have all hell breaking out in the Atlantic, sir,' Rockman replied. 'The Pacific Sandpiper just shot down a Royal Navy aircraft that was checking them out. A second aircraft made it back to its carrier with some rather interesting film footage. The working assumption is that terrorists have hijacked both of those ships.'
'And NCTC has just put us all on a Broken Arrow alert.'
Broken Arrow. That was a holdover from the Cold War era, but still in force today. 'Broken Arrow' was the code for any unexpected event involving nuclear weapons or radiological nuclear weapon components, including, among other things, the theft, seizure, loss, or destruction of significant quantities of weapons-grade plutonium.
'I'm on my way,' Rubens told him. He did a fast calculation; he was in plenty of time to beat the Washington Beltway rush as he made the trek from northern Virginia to Fort Meade. 'I'll be there in forty minutes.'
'Lia!' Charlie Dean exclaimed, faking surprise. 'What's a gorgeous woman like you doing in a place like this?'
'Same as you, probably, Charlie,' she said with an impish smile. 'The voices in my head told me to come here.'
Dean grinned back at her. Like him, Lia had a communications implant in the bone behind her ear that linked her to Desk Three's Art Room back at Fort Meade. Rubens himself had called both of them earlier, directing them to the small town of Risley, just south of the M62 in Cheshire, England, and the gleaming offices of Pacific Nuclear Transport Limited. After they had been checked through the security booth upstairs, an armed guard had escorted them down several levels to a second checkpoint, then through to this large and expensively furnished waiting room. Large photographs of the PNTL fleet adorned two of the oak panel walls, while a third featured a Mercator projection of the world showing PNTL's global shipping routes.
Only moments after Charlie and Lia arrived, a male secretary appeared to usher them through into the offices of Sir Vincent Wallace, the vice president in charge of PNTL security. With him was another peer, Sir Charles Mayhew, vice president and Chief Operations Officer of Royal Sky Line, and a military officer, General Alexander R. Saunders, representing the UKSF, the British Directorate of Special Forces.
'Mr. Dean, Ms. DeFrancesca,' Wallace said cordially, 'welcome to England.'
'Thank you, Sir Vincent,' Dean replied. 'Good to be here. I'm sorry it couldn't have been under more pleasant circumstances.'
'I confess, Sir Vincent,' General Saunders said, 'that I'm somewhat at a loss as to just why these people are here. No offense to you two, but we are quite capable of handling our own piracy problems.'
'Of course you are, General,' Dean replied. He'd already been briefed by the Art Room on Saunders and his refusal of a formal offer of help from the American President. 'But perhaps the U. S. intelligence community can offer you a bit of technical assistance along the way.'
According to Rubens, the British Prime Minister had agreed to Desk Three's participation in what was now being called Operation Harrow Storm earlier that afternoon, and Saunders had already effectively been overruled. It would still be necessary to handle the man carefully; he had the reputation for being something of a prima donna and a fierce defender of his own bureaucratic turf.
'What technical assistance?' Saunders demanded. 'We have your NRO satellite data, and we know where the two target ships are. All that remains is to put together an assault team to go in and secure those vessels.'
'What we have in mind,' Lia said, 'is actually getting a small reconnaissance team on board the cruise ship. That team will then be in a position to inform and coordinate the main assault.'
'Wouldn't.. wouldn't you be risking everything that way?' Charles Mayhew asked. He was perspiring heavily, his face florid. 'I mean, if the terrorists get wind of what's happening…'
'Having decent intelligence going in increases the chances of success with the primary assault by at least threefold,' Dean said. 'We also have a unique opportunity here. There are enough civilians on board the Atlantis Queen that our recon team might be able to slip in among them unnoticed.'
'Wait, wait,' Wallace said, interrupting. 'You're saying that your team could be on board that ship and the terrorists wouldn't even know it?'
'And just how would you manage that, may I ask?' Saunders said.
'These people aren't cleared for Black Cat,' the voice of Jeff Rockman whispered in Dean's ear.
I know what the hell I'm doing, Dean thought, but he couldn't make an audible reply. It was tough, sometimes, trying to hold a conversation with invisible people looking over your shoulder, second-guessing you every step of the way.
'We've had combat teams looking at the problem already,' Dean told the others. 'We essentially have three options for I&I.'
' 'I and I'?' Mayhew asked. 'What's that?'
'Insertion and infiltration,' Wallace told him.
'Although some military types will tell you it stands for 'intoxication and intercourse,'' Dean put in. Wallace must have military experience, he thought. That made sense if he was the VP of security for a company that processed nuclear fuel. 'Our choices are to board the Atlantis Queen up the side from an ASDS, to approach from astern in a silenced helicopter, or to drop onto an open part of her deck by parachute.'
'Aren't you forgetting something?' Saunders said. He sounded irritatingly smug. 'Your target is moving at fifteen knots.'
'He didn't say it would be easy' Lia said.
'What is an… what you said,' Mayhew asked. 'A-D something?'
'ASDS,' Lia told him. 'Advanced SEAL Delivery System. It's a small, dry-deck submarine that can carry sixteen Navy SEALs and their equipment.'
'A larger submarine,' Dean said, 'one of our Ohio-class special warfare subs, would carry the ASDS close to the Atlantis Queen. We'd probably have to disable the target vessel, at least temporarily, possibly by fouling her screws.' He glanced at Mayhew. 'Unfortunately, the Atlantis Queen is driven by two azimuth thrusters — Azipods — rather than conventional screws. They're shrouded in such a way that it will be very difficult to foul them with a net or length of line, and we would have to damage or destroy both at the same time. That makes that approach very difficult, and extremely high risk.'
'Even if you took out the Queen's Azipods, the Pacific Sandpiper's screws would be intact,' Wallace pointed out. 'The speed of the two ships together would be greatly reduced. I'm not sure how well the Sandpiper would manage pushing both the Queen and itself — that's almost one hundred thousand tonnes — but they would still be making way.'
'Exactly,' Dean said. 'Which is why our ops planning team has suggested going in by parachute.
'The team would use a HAHO drop from several miles off and several miles up.
