Twenty-four Days Page 4

  “What’s he want?”

  Tess sighed. “The material is Top Secret and requires clearances I do not even want. Have fun with… Candy.”

  What happened in the six hours since he left? The Director never over-reacted. In fact, in James’s entire intelligence career, only two emails were like this, one on 9/11 and the other when Osama bin Laden was killed.

  He opened the message as he took two steps toward the bedroom to see if Candy had finished her shower. Her music played, meaning she was digging through her four suitcases to find something to wear. He had at least five minutes. The email said, ‘Virginia missed call-in. Tie-in to Brit sub?’ It included a link and asked James to meet him as soon as possible.

  James put aside the question of ‘what Brit sub’ and started with ‘Virginia missed call-in’.

  The italics referred to USS Virginia, SSN 774, a nuclear attack submarine. Fully loaded, its warheads had six times the power of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. With 12 VLS tubes for ballistic missiles, four torpedo tubes for Mk 48 fish, it could seek and destroy enemy warships, project power ashore with fire-and-forget Tomahawk cruise missiles, carry out Intelligence-Surveillance-Reconnaissance (ISR) missions using the Advanced SEAL Delivery System—ASDS. With an admitted speed in excess of 32 knots, it ran quieter than most subs at five knots. Of all three classes of attack subs—Los Angeles, Seawolf, and Virginia—only the latter was designed for littoral assignments or penetration in shallow water. Overall, the Virginia-class subs were the world’s most deadly weapons

  James shuffled over to the bedroom door.

  “Honey bunny. A man’s here.” The enticing sounds of a woman preparing for a romantic evening fell silent. “I need to speak to him.” He chuckled with a mirth he didn’t feel. “He’ll be gone before you’re ready.” And so will I.

  He got no response and flung the front door open. SA Haster stood there, trench coat flapped open to reveal a rumpled off the rack suit, a blue shirt that clashed with the green in the jacket, and wingtips that had needed a shine since the BREXIT vote. An image of Ichabod Crane flitted through James’ brain. Most British MI-6 agents were natty dressers, believing their appearance mirrored their tradecraft. Clearly, SA Haster didn’t share that opinion.

  The man-bag over his shoulder reinforced the image.

  With a sweep of his arm, James growled, "Five minutes, SA Haster."

  James plopped into an overstuffed chair letting Haster find his own seat and considered his unwanted guest. The agent wore no wedding ring. He had long fingers, a pianist’s hands with chewed off fingernails and a nicotine stain on the first and second finger of his left hand. His eyes were red, face lined with worry.

  Haster shuffled from one foot to the other, arms crossed over his chest clutching an eight by ten manila envelope. James relented and motioned to a guest chair.

  "What brings you to my private getaway?"

  “Please forgive my abruptness in showing up during your holiday. Generally, I would chat a bit, have a cup of tea, but we have a situation here. Are we secure?”

  “Protocol requires I sweep for bugs wherever I stay, as I’m sure you do. Tell me what type of ‘situation’ we have and I’ll decide what’s sufficient.”

  Haster handed a pile of pictures to James. “Two days ago, MI-5 found five bodies floating in the Channel. Flag Officer Sea Training identified them as submariners from HMS Triumph SSN 19.”

  James pulled eye glasses from the drawer where he’d hidden them and flipped through the images. The bodies were bloated, some missing chunks of flesh, others entire limbs. One had its eyes pecked out. All were dressed in the remains of British naval uniforms. James recognized one victim, but couldn’t place him what with the damage.

  Haster tossed over more pictures. “These arrived the same day from your San Diego Police Department. Eight bodies identified by passport photos as British sailors.”

  Each image in the second group exhibited a mangled sailor on a barren concrete floor, body glistening as though wet, face a grim rictus of horror. All had raw red feral gashes across their necks.

  "We identified them as Parisher trainees,” and he tapped the first set of photos, “and like the first five, assigned to the HMS Triumph.”

  “The British Submarine Command Course, like our Basic Enlisted Submarine School?”

  Haster nodded as he fumbled a pack of cigarettes from his jacket. He looked around the room, found no ashtray, so stuffed them away and pulled a plastic sleeve from the manila envelope. It held a creased eight-by-ten sheet of white paper.

  “They found a note in one of the Parisher’s pockets.”

  James took the document out and held it to the firelight. It was twenty pound, ninety-two brightness, no watermark. The FBI had reams of it by every copy machine. The note was typed, Times New Roman 12, centered on the sheet, one-inch margins. He ran a finger over the lines of type, likely from an ink jet printer. Dark gray fingerprint dust overlapped dirt smudges. The message read, 9:5 Slay the idolaters wherever ye find them and besiege them and prepare for each an ambush. But if they repent and establish worship, then leave their way free. Lo! Allah is Merciful.

  It was signed ‘Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan’. The Pakistan Taliban.

  James shot a look over his glasses at Haster. “One of their members is Number Four on our National Counterterrorism Center’s Most Wanted list, responsible for the 2008 bombing of the Islamabad Marriott which killed more than fifty people and wounded another 300. They also claim responsibility for the Times Square bombing. We thought they were defanged. I guess not.”

  James reread the note. “This note is designed to scare the hell out of Britain. Where is the Triumph?”

  Haster’s face fell. “We’ve had no contact for three days. If it is hijacked, no one officially claimed it.” His temple pulsed and he forced his hands to his sides.

  “How the hell did they capture one of Britain’s most advanced nuclear subs—”

  SA Haster cut in. “The most advanced since its upgrade a month ago.”

  James mulled that over as he logged into the FBI’s secure database. Within moments, he had the basics on HMS Triumph. The sub was a Trafalgar-class sub, 4740 tons, 280 meters long, admitted speed of 32 knots. It carried McDonnell Douglas UGM-84B Sub-Harpoons and Trident II D5 missiles armable with Marconi Tigerfish Mk24's or one of thirty-eight nuclear warheads.

  His adrenaline spiked. “Tell me it carries no nuclear warheads.”

  SA Haster sighed as though explaining the obvious to a dunderhead. “Every British submarine does as part of our mandate to move nuclear weapons off the mainland. Triumph carries enough to destroy the world as we know it.”

  James bit back a string of profanities. “You might have led with that.” Winston Churchill’s words popped into his head unbidden, ‘The only thing worse than having allies is not having allies’. James rarely applied this to his British colleagues.

  "Calm down, SA James. Please. The warheads are equipped with Permissive Action Links, a gift from you Yanks, which makes them impossible to launch by accident or treachery.”

  “Yeah, right.” James needed to finish with Haster and get back to DC.

  “Baby, I’m bored.” Candy purred from the bedroom door in the little girl voice that drove James wild. Twenty minutes ago, he would have moved heaven and earth to fix any problem she had. Now, he felt her slip away like a boat loose of its anchor.

  “In a minute, Pumpkin.” James steepled his fingers under his chin and stuffed thoughts of Candy the Swimsuit Model away. "What was Triumph doing when it went missing?"

  "Participating in war games with a Dutch submarine."

  "The two collided?”

  "The Dutch say no, and we found no damage to the exterior of the Dolphun, their sub."

  "Any chance the Dutch sank it?"

  Haster snorted. “The Dolphun is a diesel, so quieter than some, but it could never sneak up on the Triumph. To be thorough, we confirmed it retained the expected armaments."
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  Besides, James considered it unlikely the Royal Netherlands with only four submarines and six frigates would risk war with one of the world’s naval powers.

  He forced himself to sit. "Walk me through what you did to find it."

  “Certainly—" Haster stopped as the bedroom door opened.

  “I waited a minute, Honey bun. Are you ready?” Her voice was petulant. James turned and smiled at his soon-to-be ex-date.

  “Candy. Please wait in the bedroom. I’ll only be a moment.” He turned away, ignoring whatever argument she might have. The door slammed and music blared.

  “Let’s go outside, SA Haster, give Candy some space,” and they stepped out into the pristine mountain air. James breathed deeply, pulling the essence of nature into his being, soaking in its calm and logic. A half-moon hung over the rocky peaks and insects chirruped as they went about their nocturnal business.

  Haster seemed oblivious as he reviewed the steps taken to locate Triumph and thoughts on how the sub base had been infiltrated.

  “But the fake Parisher IDs wouldn’t match the database.”

  Haster set his lips in a tight line. “The real photos were replaced, the responsible party arrested. He naively considered his treachery a contribution to the anti-nuclear cause.”

  “He replaced a homogenous group of sub trainees with Muslims?”

  Haster bristled. “Americans think all terrorists are Middle Eastern with beady eyes and prayer rugs wrapped around AK-47s. In fact, only fifteen percent of the world’s one billion Muslims are Arab. All cultures embrace Islam, SA James, be they white, black, brown or yellow.”

  James flushed, chastened, and turned to the link from Tess. It appeared to be a blog by an Eyad Obeid, the most recent post titled “Help”. It included a video.

  “I’ll check our satellite photos, see if we spotted Triumph.”

  “Here.” Haster pulled another envelope from his jacket and handed it to James. Inside, he found an array of timed images taken by America’s KH-12 satellite, one of the 30,000 pound LEO—low earth orbit—behemoths able to read a text message on a cell phone. "From your Director. These would show if Triumph was visible."

  James took everything inside. A hip hop song boomed from the bedroom as he dressed, buttoning with one hand as he stuffed his pockets with the other. "What’s the next step?”

  Haster remained silent. James arched a brow as he maneuvered cuff links into place. “What?”

  "Triumph has a chink in its armor."

  James liked this man less and less. He shrugged into his jacket and asked, "What’s a ‘chink’?”

  "We skipped the degaussing. We wanted to test our boys’ evasive skills."

  When a sub moved through the ocean, it squashed together the earth's magnetic fluxes, giving its enemies a way to find it. This was minimized by a process called ‘degaussing’.

  James’s brain tingled. “So when Triumph gets within range of a magnetic anomaly device, it stands out like coffee at high tea.”

  “Quite, though we’ve had no nibbles. One more issue you should know.”

  Haster pointed to a dead sailor James vaguely recognized.

  “Who is this?”

  “Sir George Linley, the Third Earl of Severne. If they will kill British royalty, SA James, they will kill anyone. We must find them.”

  James went still. Deep inside, a dull pain awoke, not for himself but a man he considered as close a friend as any he’d ever known.

  He took a long breath. "You want Otto to find Triumph."

  Otto was an artificial intelligence capable of finding almost anything on earth that could be written into a script. After his amazing success last year stopping a disaster of unimaginable proportions by using magnetic fluxes to find a submarine, the smartest minds in government tried to replicate him and failed. Sure, they had copied every single algorithm, but much like human DNA, Otto was more than mere code. Even his inventor, Kalian Delamagente, couldn’t explain how the miles of programming sparked the results they did. Her best guess had to do with his sophisticated ‘learning’ capacity. As a result, Otto remained a one-of-a-kind creation.

  “Your Director assures me the problem with Dr. Delamagente’s clearance can be solved.”

  “Ms.,” James corrected and then snorted. ‘Problem with her clearance’ put it mildly. "Even if I can clear her, America doesn’t force citizens to comply with government requests. We’ll have to find another way.”

  "And if they launch those missiles before you can ‘find another way’, you’ll accept responsibility for the bereavement of world citizens?”

  James said nothing. What could he say?

  Haster continued, “I’m told you two are friends. Persuade her to let you use this Otto."

  James laughed a mirthless laugh. “Most of the time, she won’t talk to me, which makes listening to me a challenge.” In fact, the last time they talked was when she blamed him for almost getting Zeke Rowe killed.

  That’s where he’d start. Zeke Rowe, former-SEAL, had the uncanny ability to block out fear, extraneous information, and slow things down in his mind’s eye giving himself time to calculate what the enemy would do and organize a reaction. And when Rowe found out Sir George Linley was dead, Katy bar the door. He would take those warrior skills right to the enemy. Stopping him would be like talking a herd of crazed elephants out of stampeding.

  “Give me until Sunday to work out the clearance,” by calling in every favor ever owed to him. “Maybe you find Triumph by then. Now wait so I can say goodbye to Candy.”

  Chapter Four

  Day Five, Friday, August 11th, mid-morning

  Columbia University Office of Dr. Zeke Rowe

  Zeke Rowe powered through his fifth set of forty handstand pushups, cooled down with a hundred sit-ups, and limped to the worktable on his bad knee—knees, but he long ago figured out you couldn’t limp on both legs—to see what new insights the endorphins would reveal about the million-year-old bones.

  He rubbed his eyes, flashing back to the shadowy figure outside his window at 2 am. He found footprints too large for a neighborhood kid taking a shortcut home. He stretched his neck, trying to touch ear to shoulder. Between spies and nightmares, there soon wouldn’t be enough warm milk in the world to put him to sleep.

  He should have run when he couldn’t’ sleep. It relaxed him. He loved the anonymity of night, had since he was a boy hiding from his drunken father. Good ol’ dad, a high school football star who destroyed his shoulder one bright fall day, recruiters from Notre Dame and Florida State looking on. He gambled his future on a rough sport and lost. At first, he got jobs because of his football fame. When those dried up, he blamed his wife and son. Rowe’s mother smiled through it, remembering the man she once loved, but Rowe ran until his brain had no thought other than getting oxygen into his starved lungs. Then, exhausted but satisfied, he studied how nocturnal predators hunt.

  They made it look easy.

  He wiped his face and neck with a towel, slowed his breathing, and then returned to the thick-boned braincase of an 800,000-year old Homo erectus. He ran his fingers over the rough surface, the worn teeth, sensing the creature’s history and the fullness of its ancient life. He found this skull next to a protowolf, yet there were no tooth or tool marks indicating either species preyed on the other. Rowe wondered if he held the earliest example of man and dog cohabitating.

  His brain tingled. Nothing captured his imagination like a mystery, which explained why he once loved the intelligence field. Where others were confused by details, Rowe buzzed with connections.

  The phone rang and went directly to voice mail. He and Kali planned to have dinner this evening so they could talk. Rowe knew what ‘talking’ meant.

  "Hey, Zeke. Been a while. Let's catch up. No pressure just because I left four messages. I'm in the neighborhood. I'll drop by.”

  Rowe scratched behind his left ear. He lived by the philosophy that people sucked. The only exceptions were his brothers on the Teams
, Kali, George—Sir George Linley—and Bobby James. He and James had worked together during Rowe’s intel days, but lost touch until last year when James needed Rowe’s help on a case. It ended with Rowe blowing the world’s most dangerous terrorist so far out of the sky no one could find his body. The prosecutor had to try Salah Mahmud al-Zahrawi in absentia, not an easy task when half the evidence was top secret and the other half circumstantial.

  In the process, Rowe almost died and met Kali. Pretty good year by SEAL standards.

  Why James needed help wouldn’t matter. He had made a promise to Kali.

  He turned to the wide, shallow drawers behind him stuffed to capacity with jaw bones, teeth, phalanges and other artifacts. He selected two pig jaws from the Spanish Gran Dolina dig he hoped would establish the skull’s time frame. The knots in his shoulders loosened and his breathing deepened as he lost himself in a long-gone world where days were marked not by a calendar, but the rhythm of the land.

  Until James strutted in like a Power Player at a hostile takeover.

  "Hey, bud. I like what you did with your wardrobe. Is that paleo chic?"

  The primeval figures melted away. Rowe rubbed his hands down his shorts, pockets shredded by tools and cuffs ragged from the desert landscape of his latest archeologic dig. Kali called these his comfort clothes. He never understood why James put such thought into clothes.

  "It ain't easy living in your fashion orbit.”

  “D’you think so? My personal shopper chose these. The pants are Italian wool, just out this season, the shirt ecru broadcloth with French cuffs. You know ecru isn’t white, don’t you?”

  Rowe returned to the bones, trying to reclaim the visceral memory. “Did you call at 2 am and say nothing?” James looked confused. “Whatever you’re here for will have to wait. I have a summary due in an hour.” Not true, but conversations with James always led to trouble. In fairness, when you’re a predator, all the world looks like your next meal.

  "Dropped in to chat with an old friend. What’s wrong with that?"