The Socotra Incident (7 page)

“Red ball?”

“Oops, I didn’t say that. Enjoy your dinner. The door will lock by itself when you leave.” Ritter grabbed a coat from a hanger and opened the front door. He looked over his shoulder. “We’ll do this right when I get back.”

“Stay safe,” she said.

Ritter nodded and left.

Ritter found the rest of the team—Mike, Shannon, Carlos, and Tony—in the company conference room, waiting for him. Shannon’s face was pale, her lips pursed with tension. Tony’s considerable bulk jittered like it always did when he’d had a few too many energy drinks. Mike sat stock still next to the long table running through the middle of the room, his hands poised atop of the treated oak. He always reminded Ritter of a cobra, reared up and ready to strike.

A rail-thin Asian woman in her mid-twenties with straight black hair and thick-rimmed glasses sat at the table. She gave Ritter a quick wave when she saw him. Irene Ma was the newest permanent addition to the team

Shannon had plucked Irene from the cubicle farms at Langley after she’d inadvertently come across a Caliban Program operation in the Sudan. Irene had been an hour away from identifying Shannon, Ritter, and Mike to the FBI as international arms smugglers before Shannon made her an offer she couldn’t refuse and brought her into the program to keep her quiet and to co-opt her analytical acumen for the team’s purposes.

Carlos, seated in a high-back leather chair, kicked an empty chair toward Ritter as he came into the room. Carlos’s arm was still in a swing; a cast ran from just below his right shoulder to his wrist. Two bullets from a Libyan terrorist’s gun had nearly cost him the arm, but Carlos kept insisting the wounds were “just a flesh wound.”

“Get started,” Shannon said to Tony.

Tony hit a button on his lap top and a mess of word and PDF documents flashed on the screen.

“All this is from what Ritter got off that dead guy in Aden,” Tony said, with all the tact Ritter came to expect from the overly caffeinated analyst. “These are the shipping manifests for the
Opongsan
, a North Korean fishing boat flagged in Mongolia.” A red dot from a laser pointer circled a series of numbers on the screen. “This is the Lloyd’s of London insurance registry. That becomes important in a second.”

“I thought Lloyd’s stopped insuring anything in North Korea after they got burned paying for that helicopter that ‘accidentally’ crashed into a government building,” Carlos said.

The conference table vibrated as Shannon slammed a fist against the lacquered wood. She stared daggers at Carlos.

“Sorry,” Carlos said sheepishly.

The image on the screen blinked to show a map of the Horn of Africa and the surrounding ocean, a red circle around one of the thousands of ship-tracking symbols.

“The AIS tracking beacon for the
Opongsan
didn’t turn on until it was seventy-three miles off the coast of Yemen, which is odd. Lloyd’s requires that it be on before it even leaves the home dock in Wonsan,” Tony said. The screen flashed again, and the red circle was off the coast of Somalia.

“Now the ship is sitting at the Eyl anchorage, where Somali pirates keep ships until they’re ransomed.” Tony flipped the slides to show a satellite photo of a dozen ships in a ragged line extended from the coast.

“Slide six, now,” Shannon said.

Tony clicked ahead, and a grainy photo of an open case filled the screen. A spherical object covered in metal with protruding wires was equally spaced over the surface. A keypad was embedded in the green foam surrounding the sphere.

“Shit,” Mike said.

“It’s a nuke, implosion type, with a yield around three kilotons given the diameter and the amount of plutonium we think the North Koreans have,” Tony said.

“Is it enough to trigger the end times?” Shannon asked.

Tony frowned, then nodded.

A new window opened on the screen, and an icon for a small airplane flew over a map of northern Virginia. A white circle spread from the plane and encompassed an area from Dulles International Airport to the outer edge of Washington, DC.

“There’s no way a nuke that small could do that much damage,” Irene said.

“The physical damage from the blast—all the thermal, overpressure, and radiation effects—won’t trigger the end-times. If they detonate the bomb at altitude, the electromagnetic pulse will wipe out every computer in that radius.”

“Northern Virginia? Why is this such a big deal that you call it the ‘end times’?” Natalie asked.

“You ladies are new, and I’ll let you in on something that isn’t a secret,” Shannon said. She picked up a laser pointer and ran a dot along the highway running from Dulles into the nation’s capital. “There are fiber-optic cables running beneath the Dulles toll road that carry three-quarters—yes,
three-quarters
—of the world’s Internet traffic. Connected to those cables are data centers that handle most of the world’s banking transactions.

“An EMP blast will wipe out everything. Every record, everyone—and zero confirms how much money the world has in its bank accounts. We lose that data, and the world economy goes down like a proverbial house of cards.” Shannon set the laser pen down with a snap. “Need any more convincing?”

Natalie and Irene stayed quiet.

“And a bunch of Somali pirates have it,” Ritter said. Rumors of nukes for sale had al-Shabaab bubbled around the terrorist underworld since the fall of the Soviet Union; the device on the screen brought a decade’s worth of worst-case scenarios to life.

“For now. The pirates reached out to the Abu Sayf network, al Qaeda’s arms and financing arm in Saudi Arabia, through their al-Shabaab contacts, and they’re finalizing the sale,” Shannon said. “It’s going slowly—which is a blessing for us. Abu Sayf has been burned before by fake nukes, and they’re sending a specialist to confirm what they’re buying. The device is still on the
Opongsan
, as far as we know.”

“Why haven’t we hit it with a dozen cruise missiles? Let the fish worry about it?” Carlos asked.

“Because
as far as we know
the bomb is still on the boat, Carlos,” Shannon said. “We can’t send it to the bottom and hope for the best.”

“Who else knows?” Ritter asked.

“It’s safe to assume the North Koreans are aware, but there’s not a damn thing they can do about it from their side of the planet. Abu Sayf has been moving money around to make the delivery, and I notified the Directors before calling all of you in,” Shannon said.

“What do we do?” Carlos asked.

“Our first priority is to recover the device. Second is to destroy it before it becomes a threat to friendly nations. Mike, Eric, you’ll take a transport from Aviano to the USS
Ronald Reagan
, which is steaming through the Red Sea as we speak. You’ll link up with a SEAL team from and get to that nuke immediately, if not sooner. Understand?”

“Why are they waiting for us?” Ritter asked.

Shannon swallowed before speaking.

“They don’t know there’s a nuke involved. This is to protect our sources and tamp down on panic if word gets out that there’s a nuke loose in the wild,” Shannon said.

“They’re not going to appreciate being kept in the dark when they do find it,” Carlos said.

“No, which is why the mission is ostensibly to capture a high-value individual on the boat. Tony has a ready-made target packet for Mike and Eric to memorize during their trip. So, act surprised when you see the nuke. Once recovered, a specialist from another team within Caliban will link up with you, and you will assist them in taking control of the device,” Shannon said. Ritter had never heard mention of another team within the Caliban Program. What else was Shannon hiding from him?

“Why do we want it? Shouldn’t it go to some weapons of mass destruction team with some alphabet agency in Virginia? They’ve only been training for this kind of thing since…forever,” Tony said.

“I shared your concerns and others with the Directors, and this is the course of action they’ve decided on,” Shannon said. She sat up straight. “Eric, Mike, the SEAL team will outfit you with uniforms and weapons. Try and blend in when you’re aboard ship.”

“It’s easy. Just don’t use big words and make sure everyone knows you’re a SEAL everywhere you go, and you’ll fit in just fine,” Carlos said. As a veteran of the army’s Delta Force, he had a share of opinions and a raft of jokes about the navy’s special warfare arm.

Shannon slid a satellite phone across the table to Mike.

“Get going.”

Of all the things Ritter had come to hate during the long war on terror, helicopters were at the top of his list. He wasn’t sure whether it was the unending vibrations that churned in his stomach and turned his face green or the frighteningly low altitudes pilots chose to fly. Maybe it was the blades whirling over his head like the sword of Damocles.

He and Mike weren’t in a helicopter, technically. The V-22 Osprey flew with its engines horizontally to the ocean in the plane configuration; those same engines could rotate upright and turn the aircraft into a helicopter. The tilt-rotor and turboprop engines could get them most anywhere in the world quickly and land on a dime, but watching the damn thing transform in flight made Ritter long for his days in a Humvee. There were no surprises or engineering miracles to operate a Humvee. He and Mike had languished in the “plane” for the past fourteen hours as the Osprey flew over the Red Sea to the
Reagan
.

Ritter shivered as the smell of jet fuel washed through the plane. He made the mistake of glancing up and saw the hose and catch basket from the KC-130 refueling plane lift from view through the cockpit glass. Ritter hadn’t bothered counting how many times they’d refueled midair since they’d lifted off from Aviano. Infiltrating hostile nations and risking death and torture seemed a lot saner to Ritter than taking on jet fuel through a hose at God knows how fast and how high in a plane/helicopter with an identity crisis.

He looked down at the airsickness bag, open and ready in his hands.
There’s nothing left to give
, he thought. His stomach didn’t believe him and seized up. Ritter hunched over and struggled to keep himself together.

A hand shook his shoulder. The crew chief was in front of him, rotating his fist between thumbs-up and thumbs-down. Ritter gave him a thumbs-up but kept the bag handy. He looked over at Mike, who had his head against his chest, his arms tucked in. He’d been asleep since wheels up. The bastard.

Half an hour later, the crew chief took up a post at the starboard window and kept a keen eye on the tilt-rotor engine.

Ritter was about to ask whether there was a problem when the aircraft lurched forward. A high-pitched whine filled the cabin, and the crew chief divided his attention between the craft and the other window. Ritter’s seat vibrated fast enough that he thought an electric current was running through it. The noise ended with a thump and Ritter felt the aircraft regain its momentum.

The crew chief, anonymous behind his helmet’s visor and face mask, slapped him on the shoulder.

“Two minutes!” he yelled, his voice barely carrying over the din. The crew chief turned and reached for the sleeping Mike.

Ritter dropped the airsickness bag and grabbed a handful of the crew chief’s vest before he could make a painful mistake. Ritter jerked the man back and shook his head as he pointed at his own chest. The crew chief shrugged Ritter off and went back to the fore of the aircraft.

Ritter rose to his feet and took a few tentative steps toward Mike, one hand across the narrow aisle holding on for balance. Ritter picked up a foot and gave Mike’s knee a quick kick.

Mike’s hand snapped out, a naked blade glinting in the wan sunlight. Mike’s head snapped from side to side, his Applegate-Fairbairn held in a reverse grip in front of his chest. He’d slept like that for as long as Ritter had known him. Carlos, who’d known Mike for a few years longer, had never explained why the quiet man had such a reaction to being woken up.

Ritter held up a finger and mouthed, “One minute.”

The Osprey thumped onto the deck of the USS
Ronald Reagan
, and the rear hatch lowered with a pneumatic whine. Air whirled through the cabin as the Osprey’s blades churned through the air. A sailor in a blue vest ran up the ramp and waved for Ritter and Mike to follow him.

To an untrained eye, the deck of the
Reagan
was chaos. Sailors in different-colored vests ran between F/A-18 fighters crowding the edges of the deck. Steam hissed from a catapult built into the deck as it retracted toward the aft of the flight deck.

An elevator, nothing but a floor, raised another Osprey onto the flight deck. The wings rotated ninety degrees over the craft, and the blades folded to save space in the cramped holding decks below. A three-barrel, belly-mounted Gatling gun beneath the aircraft was a marked difference from the craft that had delivered Ritter to the
Reagan.

Ritter kept his eyes locked on the sailor as he followed him into the ship. They descended into a stairwell and past the cavernous hangar deck, where sailors readied more aircraft amid carts carrying laser-guided bombs.

“What’s going on?” Ritter asked their guide.

“Nothing, sir. Normal day of flight ops,” the sailor said as he twisted open the handle on a hatch.

The sailor pointed into a dimly lit hallway toward a single hatch surrounded by warning placards and a spinning red light.

“This is as far as I can go. They’re expecting you,” the sailor said.

Ritter stepped into the hatch and made his way to the closed door, which opened before he could knock on it.

A sailor in fatigue pants and an Under Armour T-shirt stood in the doorway, six inches taller and probably fifty pounds heavier than Ritter; all the additional weight was muscle. He had a jet-black head of hair with a short goatee and pale-green eyes.

“Come on, we’re almost done with the briefing,” the sailor said. He led Ritter and Mike past racks of weapons and open lockers full of deflated Zodiac boats and ropes.

The briefing room was full of SEALs, most sporting just enough facial hair to mark them way out of navy grooming regs, practically flaunted their privilege to break the rules for normal sailors. A dozen SEALs stood and sat in a semicircle around a big screen TV bolted to a bulkhead.

A man with a gold fig leaf rank insignia on his uniform took his attention from an old photo of the
Opongsan
. He was whipcord thin but looked like he was made of steel cable; he had close-cropped blond hair, and nearly invisible stubble covered his face.

“Ah, our ‘specialists’ have arrived,” the lieutenant commander said.

“Maybe they can tell us what we’re really doing,” said one of the SEALs.

“I’m Lieutenant Commander Devereaux, this is team Red Five. Would you care to introduce yourselves?” Devereaux said with false smile.

The hostility was expected. No serviceman liked charging into a fight blind or with lousy intelligence to guide him.

“I’m Eric. He’s Mike,” Ritter said. “You should have the target packet for Kamal Mustafa, already.”

“Sure, we’ve got it. Thing is, we aren’t quite sure what Kamal is doing on board a North Korean fishing boat.” Devereaux clicked on a laptop and brought up the photo of Kamal, who was actually a random detainee in Iraq who’d loaned his picture to the target packet.

“Great question. Why don’t we ask him?” Ritter said.

“Do you have any idea why the ship is heading due east from its last anchorage?” Devereaux asked.

“No. Last I heard it was off the coast of Somalia, perfectly still,” Ritter said.

SEALs grumbled at the answer.

“Three hours ago the
Opongsan
started moving. We’ve had a drone on it since it weighed anchor. There’s no activity anywhere above decks or radio transmissions. Do you know what’s due east of Somalia?” Devereaux asked.

“A whole lot of nothing until you hit the Maldives islands,” Ritter answered.

“Correct,” Devereaux said. “Which makes no sense, as that ship will run out of fuel long before that happens. So what is going on here, Eric?”

Nothing like getting put on the spot to ruin his day. Sticking to the spirit, instead of the letter, of his orders seemed like the best play.

“We believe Kamal has arranged to deliver a supply of nuclear material to the Iranian navy. One of their submarines will rendezvous with the
Opongsan
well away from shipping lanes and take on the material. So unless we want to deal with a crew of smugglers
and
an Iranian sub that doesn’t want to be messed with, I suggest we get going,” Ritter said. Why tell the truth when a lie will do?

“No one said anything about radioactive material,” one of the SEALs said, a ginger-haired man in his mid-twenties.

“Fitz is our explosives tech. He’s a bit more jittery than the rest of us,” Devereaux said.

“I’m jittery about my rod and tackle falling off if I stand next to the wrong connex for five minutes,” Fitz said.

Men shifted and grumbled. Fighting a foe you could see was easy for them; a silent poison like radioactive material, however, wasn’t something that could be beaten with bullets.

“If the Iranians get this material, it will shave years off their nuclear weapons program. We can kill this monster in the crib or wait for it to start eating cities,” Ritter said. “If it means anything, Mike and I will be right next to you when you board the ship.”

Ritter dangled the shared danger in front of the SEALs. There was a marked difference between how warriors reacted to a leader saying, “Go get ’em” versus “Follow me.”

“And what expertise are you bringing to this operation? You don’t look like the DS&T geeks or some NRC mouth breather who’d handle fissile material,” Fitz said.

“Who handles tactical questioning?” Ritter asked the room. A SEAL with a pockmarked face raised his hand.

“What rules are you operating under?”

“FM 34-52, the Detainee Treatment Act, some fucking UN mandate the Secretary of the Navy thought was clever.” The SEAL’s eyes crept up and to the right as he tried to remember the rest of the governing documents that would restrict how he could question anyone they found on the
Opongsan.

“We’re the interrogators, and we have no rules,” Ritter said.

Natalie pressed her key against the door lock and walked into her hotel room. Technically, the room was under the name Gloria Steinerman, an import/export logistics specialist sent to Austria to smooth out issues with a shipment of Mozartkugel chocolates to the American market just in time for Christmas.

She shut the door and scratched under the faux scalp of the shoulder-length blonde wig Shannon had given to her that morning.

“Can I take this thing off?” she said.

“How many ways can I say no? Stick to your cover until this is done,” Shannon said through her earpiece. At least the wig concealed the plastic nub deep in her right ear.

The room was dark hardwood furniture and mirrors. The king-sized bed boasted one thousand-count Egyptian cotton sheets and the latest in Swedish foam mattress technology. The receptionist had taken the time to explain the “sleep enhancements” the Hapsburg Hotel had added to the rooms in their last renovation. She shut the window blinds featuring 99 percent sunlight blockage. She didn’t need an audience from the high-rise across the street.

Natalie hefted her carry-on onto the duvet and unzipped the bag.
A hotel room that specialized in great sleep—what a concept,
she thought. She put a surgical mask over her mouth and snapped on a pair of latex gloves.

“Ten minutes to auction,” Shannon said.

“Then I’m two minutes ahead of schedule,” Natalie said. She looked at the ceiling and found the panel third from the wall and second from the easternmost window. She dragged a round table under the panel and took a plastic box from her carry-on.

“Not to rush you, but hurry,” Tony said.

Natalie kicked off her shoes, climbed on the table, and opened the box. A metal and plastic clamp, with tiny steel needles that looked more delicate than dangerous and made the device almost look like a set of fake vampire teeth used in Halloween costumes, rested in a bed of foam. This vampire clamp was connected to the local 4G cell phone network and the supercomputers Tony had at his disposal. Once she had the bug put on the wire running into Bronislava’s room, they’d see everything going in and out of her computer. Shannon would know all the other bids and edge out the rest of the competition by a reasonable margin.

She reached up and moved the ceiling panel aside slowly and deliberately.

“Get the clamp on the hard line. Thick, green wire,” Tony said. Natalie shifted the panel over and considered half a dozen insults for Tony. She’d been over this implant operation a hundred times in the last day and had trained for this exact mission when she was in Virginia. She put a lit penlight in her mouth and looked up.

What she didn’t train for was what to do if the wire was missing.

“It’s not here,” she said, her words garbled from the light. The space above the ceiling panel was bare but for a few wisps of spiderwebs.

“No, that can’t be right,” Tony said.

Natalie grabbed a chair and set it atop the table. It wobbled as she climbed up and got her head into the space between the panels and the true ceiling. The first thing her light found was a desiccated mouse; then she saw linear shadows in the distance.

“I’ve got it. It’s...maybe twenty feet to the east,” she said.

“The next room over,” Shannon said.