War of Eagles (2 page)

 

TOM CLANCY’S OP-CENTER: WAR OF EAGLES

 

A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with Jack Ryan Limited Partnership and S & R Literary, Inc.

 

PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley edition / June 2005

 

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eISBN : 978-1-101-00371-8

 

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a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
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We would like to acknowledge the valuable assistance of Martin H. Greenberg, Ph.D.; Larry Segriff; Denise Little; John Helfers; Brittiany Koren; Victoria Bundonis Rovin; Roberta Pieczenik, Ph.D.; Carl La Greca; and Tom Colgan, our editor. But most important, it is for you, our readers, to determine how successful our collective endeavor has been.

—Tom Clancy and Steve Pieczenik

When Jesse Wheedles was a young man stationed at the Charleston Naval Base, he had a very precise and accurate job description. The Athens, Georgia, native was chief mess management specialist. He was proud of that position. Wheedles was more than just a cook, more than just a bagger who put together MREs—meals ready to eat—for consumption by sailors in transit. Wheedles was a craftsman. His job was to make certain that whatever their rating, whatever their taste, when someone sat down in his mess hall, he or she had the best soup, hottest entrée, and finest cookies and coffee in the United States Navy.

He had a paper napkin signed, “Amazing food!” by Undersecretary Sabrina Brighton proving just how well he had succeeded.

Wheedles wondered what life would have been like had he stayed with the navy. After his hitch, he took over the family restaurant, a roadside diner that was struggling to survive in the face of fast food and coffee bars. They hung on ten years, after which his dad sold the property to a developer, divided the profit among his three sons, and called it a day.

Wheedles lost his share of the $90,000 in an Internet start-up.

Now both the former mess chief and the naval base were doing something else. The base had been there for nearly ninety-five years, ever since President Theodore Roosevelt visited Charleston for its bicentennial celebration and decided that it would be a more suitable location for a naval facility than Beaufort. His decision didn’t sit well with the citizens of that city, who sent a wreath and their condolences when the base finally closed.

Southerners forgave, but they did not forget.

The military presence here had a long and significant history. During the American Revolution it had been the site of a major British siege. The fall of Charleston resulted in the single greatest loss of troops for the American cause and had effectively left the Southern colonies in the hands of the Crown. The proud port had also been one of the lifelines of the Confederacy, dry dock for the submarine
H. L. Hunley
, and the home base for ironclad blockade runners.

Fort Sumter, the flash point of the Civil War, was located here. The martial history of Charleston, built and shaped by sinew and soul, was too important to end with the cold, blind judgment of a computer.

But so it had.

The facility had been shut down in 1996 as part of the Base Realignment and Closure Program. That was a day of great mourning for the city. There was concern at the time that the loss of the fleet and four thousand support jobs would kill the harbor and drag Charleston with it. But federal agencies and commercial enterprises sailed to the rescue, filling the base with tenants and barely causing a skipped beat in the economic pulse of the city.

The redevelopment project even saved the struggling career of thirty-seven-year-old Jesse Wheedles. Thanks to his former navy CO who was on the harbor renewal advisory board, Wheedles got a job as the morning manager of Teddy R’s, a new waterfront restaurant that catered to freighter and tanker crews arriving or departing on the early morning tide. It was a great position, because he got to do something he enjoyed and was good at, and he loved arriving before sunup to turn on the grill and get the deep fryer bubbling. He loved the feeling of literally firing up his day almost as much as he enjoyed the taste of the night sea air. Unlike the navy, where everyone had been groomed and uniformed in a kind of hive look and personality, the men who came to his restaurant were multicultural. They looked, spoke, and even smelled different. He welcomed the opportunity to experience a little bit of Bulgaria or Hong Kong, of Venezuela or Great Britain right on his doorstep. Wheedles was also delighted by the fact that when he left work at two in the afternoon there was still warm daylight to enjoy with his wife and young twins.

There was just one thing Wheedles had never anticipated: that one day a freighter might explode in the predawn blackness, destroying a significant section of the dock, Teddy R’s, and ending his life.

Charleston PD Harbor Patrol Sergeant Al Graff had the wheel of his small white patrol boat. His partner, Officer Randy Molina, was in the well. He was scanning the mouth of the Ashley River with night-vision goggles, watching for small vessels. Over the past few months drug dealers from the Caribbean had been making drops along the Southeastern seaboard, meeting local distributors who brought the narcotics to shore in rowboats. Graff and Molina had not had a piece of that action yet. They hoped they would. The snakes who piloted those boats were generally not good swimmers. Especially if one of the oars accidentally struck them on the head.

It was a warm morning with a soft westerly wind. The eight-year veteran was about to turn back toward the mainland when something exploded a half-mile behind them. Both men turned. The blast lit the historic waterfront rooftops and the ornate spire of Saint Phillips. The rolling cloud itself blew much higher, spawning a spray of yellow and magnesium-white tendrils. They tumbled to earth tracing hot, jagged paths in the sky as the smoke roamed outward, thinning and growing darker. Within moments the surface shock wave of the blast had reached the boat, causing ripples that heaved the small vessel violently from side to side.

While Molina simultaneously radioed the Coast Guard and the CPDHP dispatcher for assistance, Graff swung the patrol boat toward the rising crimson cloud. It was obvious that a freighter had exploded. Graff could see the outline of the hull against the flames. The vessel was spilling oil into the harbor, which fueled the fire. There wasn’t a lot of it, since the ship had just arrived and not yet been refueled for the return trip, but there was enough to keep the area around it flaming.

A pair of CPDHP helicopters arrived within minutes to drop fire-retardant foam around the outside perimeter of the blaze to form a floating barricade that would keep it from reaching other ships. Big canvas hoses were rushed over by the harbormaster’s dock crew to keep embers from igniting buildings or wooden structures on neighboring vessels.

It appeared that only two structures had been damaged on the waterfront: the Southern Bells music shop and Teddy R’s. It looked to Graff like the restaurant had taken the bulk of the hit.

Trucks from the Charleston Fire Department, North Battalion, arrived just a few minutes later to help hose down the remaining structures and to mount an immediate search and rescue for survivors in the freighter or in the two burning buildings. The joint CPD/CFD antiterrorist task force was next on the scene, arriving moments after the main firefighting unit. While specialists from Fire Station 3 used their mobile hazmat lab to test for signs of radiological, bacteriological, or chemical agents, their CPD counterparts rushed to secure and search other vessels. The highway patrol blocked roads around the sector to keep perpetrators from escaping, while spotters directed patrolmen to buildings that had a direct line of sight with the afflicted vessel. If this was a rocket-propelled grenade, they might be in time to stop the attacker from leaving.

It was a slick, tightly coordinated operation that had been rehearsed numerous times. There were no rivalries, no competition between the departments. Everyone knew exactly what to do, and they did it with unflinching courage.

Graff and Molina had two jobs: to watch the coast to make sure this wasn’t a distraction created by smugglers, and to search for anyone who may have survived the explosion.

A quick circuit of the blast perimeter did not produce any survivors. It did produce body parts, however, limbs with charred skin and remarkably clean, unblemished white bone bobbing on the choppy river. There were pieces of clothing that did not sink with the rest of the ship and tangled mats of hair and fresh blood. Graff was not equipped to retrieve the evidence, but he did photograph it, along with the target itself.

The pictures, taken with a sat-link digital camera, were automatically sent to the CHP and to the FBI field division in Columbia and to Bureau headquarters in Washington, D.C. There, the images would be compared to a database of shipyard attacks to look for similarities. The remains and clothing would be studied to try to isolate distinctive national, cultural, or obvious blast characteristics. If this were a deliberate event, laboratory examination would determine the nature of the explosive used. If they found a fragment of the container used to house the explosive, scientists might be able to locate and read skin cells shed by the individual who had placed it. That would not tell them his identity, but it would tell them his ethnicity.

Graff documented the scene unemotionally. He did not know who these people were or what they were doing on the vessel or dock. He did not know which of them had families. Since terrorism had become a daily possibility on every American calendar, Graff’s default setting was to protect the harbor, the city, and the nation. He was emotionless about his work but passionate about his responsibility. He was also thinking back as he took pictures, running through the first two hours of his shift to make sure there was nothing he might have seen that did not seem suspicious at the time: a light on the water, an unusual sound from the hull of the freighter, movement somewhere along the dark wharf.

Molina informed him that the “scoop sloop” would be there within a quarter hour. That was the patrol boat with the nets and freezers required for evidence recovery. Graff acknowledged the update as he stood on the prow and continued to take pictures. He took each one twice, one through a night-vision lens and another with a flash. Comparing the two would help forensics experts construct a true-color image of the remains, something that would help them to pinpoint skin tone.

As they neared the hole in the vessel, Graff saw something that punched through the professional detachment. Something that put the nature of the vessel, if not the explosion, in context.

He saw a little bead bracelet floating on the choppy waters.

With a little girl’s hand still attached.

The call came as a surprise to Paul Hood. He was just sitting down with a cup of coffee and a power bar when his assistant put through Lorraine Sanders, chief of staff to President Dan Debenport. The forty-six-year-old director of Op-Center was being asked to breakfast in the Oval Office at the White House.

He ate the power bar anyway. The china at the White House was Jacksonian—old and delicate—and the less he used the happier he was.

This was obviously not a crisis. That was not something a new president discussed over bran muffins. Also, an official car usually arrived within moments of the call. It was also not a social visit, since those invitations typically came with more than ninety minutes’ advance notice. It was certainly not a get-to-know-you meeting, because Hood knew Debenport well. The senator had been chairman of the Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committee, the group that controlled the budget of Op-Center. The fact that it was being held in the Oval Office indicated that it was to be a working breakfast. Moreover, the timing could hardly be coincidental. The White House knew what was happening this morning.

As an intelligence officer, Hood knew when he was in what analysts called “the twilight zone.” He had enough information to stay engaged but not enough to tell him why or with what. Op-Center’s FBI liaison once described it as working on a crossword puzzle where you have scattered answers but not enough connective tissue to help solve the damn thing.

Which is pretty much the state of American intelligence,
Hood thought. Traditionally reactive, using the military fist to squash an enemy instead of surgical subterfuge to cut him out. Destroy the entire puzzle, and you don’t need to worry about this one across or that one down.

Maybe it was just as well Hood did not know what was going on. He would find out soon enough and, besides, he was too exhausted to think. Hood was not just sleepy but sapped of energy, of imagination. It had been a long and difficult nine months since an electromagnetic pulse explosion had all but destroyed the National Crisis Management Center. Hood and his staff had not only been working around the clock to repair the facility and protect national interests, they had been looking for ways to streamline and economize, to reinvent Op-Center in the wake of severe budget cuts.