' Terror at Sea,'' Rubens said. 'Yes. A bit on the tacky side.'
'The terrorists are demanding two billion dollars plus the release of several hundred prisoners. The President has announced that we will not negotiate.'
'I saw his press conference a few minutes ago,' Rubens told her.
'He wants to know if your Black Cat team is still ready to go.'
'It is.' Rubens did not add that most of Black Cat Bravo was already on board the carrier Eisenhower; now steaming less than two hundred miles to the south of the hijacked ships. Charlie Dean was en route on board a COD C-2A — the acronym stood for Carrier On-board Delivery — flying from England to a rendezvous with the carrier in another few hours. In addition, the USS Ohio, a special forces-capable submarine transport, was on her way from Norfolk with Navy SEALs on board and an ASDS strapped to her afterdeck.
'The President still insists that the British go in first,' Bing told him. 'We still fully expect the SAS to be able to capture both ships. However, should they run into trouble, the President is authorizing a limited military response.'
'A limited response? What the hell does that mean?'
'That we be prepared to assist British forces, but that they handle the brunt of the operation.'
'Fair enough.'
'The President is adamant, however, that we not risk a public relations debacle. With over three thousand hostages on board those ships, collateral damage is inevitable. We can't afford to be… to be associated with that.'
Rubens managed to bite back an acid reply. It wouldn't do to antagonize ANSA, who, together with the Director of National Intelligence, was one of the NSA's two conduits to the Oval Office.
But the chronic Washingtonian ass-covering infuriated Rubens. Bing was right, of course. With a military assault on those hijacked ships, there would be 'collateral damage,' as she so delicately put it, almost certainly. Counter-terrorist scenarios typically assumed a minimum of 10 percent casualties among any hostages present, and for the Adantis Queen, that meant an appalling figure of over three hundred civilians killed or wounded in the assault, many of them, probably, victims of friendly fire. If the attack stalled on the way in, leaving terrorists guarding the hostages time to begin killing their prisoners, the figure would be much, much higher.
But the alternative was either paying the ransom or watching all of the hostages die if the terrorists had explosives on board those ships — and that was a near certainty. Carrousel's interrupted report had mentioned trucks in the cargo hold. That might mean as much as several tons of high explosives on board the Atlantis Queen, enough to easily sink the ship.
Enough to easily create a titanic dirty bomb with the radioactive material from the Pacific Sandpiper.
Paying the ransom, Rubens knew, would not be an option. Some of those talking heads on the TV monitors had been urging just that: give them what they want; too many lives are at stake to play macho games.
But the lesson learned from the turbulent seventies and eighties, when international terrorism had first exploded across the national consciousness, had been that giving in to terrorist demands guaranteed more terrorist demands, more hostages taken, more lives lost. If al-Qaeda thought they could bully America into paying money and freeing prisoners, they would continue to bully America in a never-ending vicious circle.
Besides, no one in either Whitehall or Washington was going to let Khalid and his people blissfully sail off with a cargo of two and a half tons of plutonium. Rogue states such as Iran and North Korea had the industrial capability to turn MOX into weapons-grade plutonium; no one wanted to see them or al-Qaeda acquire sixty atomic bombs or use the stuff with conventional explosives to spread radioactive dust clouds over Western cities. There would be a military reckoning. There was no other viable choice.
'You can tell the President that we will be most discreet,' Rubens said at last, barely disguising the sarcasm. 'This isn't about who gets the credit, you know. Or about who gets the blame.'
'Sometimes, Bill,' Bing told him, 'I don't think you grasp the realities of modern global politics.'
'Sometimes I'm delighted that that's the case. I would be risking my sanity otherwise.'
She ignored the riposte. 'Tell me about this message your people picked up yesterday.'
'Your office has a copy. As does NCTC and CIA.'
'Yes, but what do you make of it?'
'Our listening station at Menwith Hill picked it up about sixteen hours ago. Shortwave broadcast. It purported to be from one of the Atlantis Queen's doctors. It pretty much verifies what we already know of the situation… but adds that he saw a number of crates on an upper deck with TIM-92' stenciled on them. He thought it important enough to make a special note of it. As with Carrousel, the transmission was cut off in mid-broadcast. We haven't heard from him since.'
'I was told you informed General Saunders directly.'
Her voice was cold, colder than usual. God, he thought. She's going to make it into a turf war. Within the intelligence community, information was power. ANSA would see his decision to bypass the NSC, the NCTC, and the President himself as undercutting her authority.
'Actually, Dr. Bing, I told Menwith Hill to pass the information on to Saunders. It is military intelligence critical to his operation, first, and second, I thought it would help mend fences if I made sure he heard it from a British intelligence source, rather than from us. I gather Saunders is sensitive about the… relationship we have with GCHQ.'
He didn't add that he doubted that Saunders would have accepted any information from an American source in the first place, or that Rubens had also transmitted the information to Lia and Akulinin in Southampton, just to be certain.
He could almost hear the wheels turning in Bing's head on the other end of the line. 'That was good thinking, Bill,' she said at last. 'And appropriate. Just remember that the President is very concerned about the diplomatic angles of this situation. You'd be best advised to keep the NSC in the loop with all of your decisions to disseminate information. We have protocols for controlling that sort of thing.'
'Of course, Dr. Bing.'
'We'll talk again after Harrow Storm.'
She hung up, and Rubens turned again to watch the talking heads on his wall. On NBC, a noted psychologist was discussing the sense of helpless anger within the Palestinian community that led to their feeling of betrayal and abandonment by the West.
On Rubens' computer screen, a map showed the North Atlantic, with several points marked by red and blue dots, and by thread-thin lines showing the courses of a dozen ships over the course of the past several days. The red symbol pinpointing the Atlantis Queen and the Pacific Sandpiper had been maintaining a steady heading of almost due west, toward America's eastern seaboard. They were now less than eighteen hundred nautical miles from New York City.
Blue symbols were closing in on the red from three directions — the Ark Royal and her consorts from the east, the Eisenhower battle group from the south, the Ohio from the west. Aircraft were shown as well, forming a ring around the hijacked vessels a hundred miles out. Two British frigates, the Campbeltown and the Sheffield, had closed to within about fifty miles of the two hijacked vessels. The rest were farther out, strung out from one hundred to two hundred miles away.
'So what's your real mission, Khalid?' Rubens asked aloud. 'You have to know we're 'not going to let you get anywhere near the U. S. coast with that plutonium, hostages or no hostages.'
If it was straight extortion — money for ships and hostages — they could have managed it with the Atlantis Queen alone and a few trucks full of high explosives. Why the added risk and complication of hijacking the Pacific Sandpiper as well?
Nor was it about hijacking the plutonium alone. The NSA had known almost immediately three days ago, on Saturday evening, when Khalid's people had begun transferring several hundred pounds of MOX from the Sandpiper to the Queen. Each large storage flask had a GPS tracking unit mounted on its casing, and each internal container had one as well; they could be tracked by satellite with superb accuracy, to within half a meter. If they tried to load even a single one of those containers onto another boat, the Agency would know and be able to track it anywhere in the world.
So this wasn't about trying to acquire plutonium for some rogue state's nuclear weapons program, either.
The Queen had radar. Khalid must know those ships and aircraft were out there.
