The Threat

The security force held its own, dropping two attackers while losing one man to fire, and eventually drove the intruders back outside the perimeter fence. But meanwhile, using the gate action as a diversion, another team landed from a boat flying a huge Greenpeace flag. There were often demonstrations on the gulf, and Greenpeace often crowded the security zone. So no one had thought much of the boat until it ran up on the beach, disembarking six men who blew the seaside fence and penetrated the complex.

Only the timely arrival of a Mexican Army helicopter drove them out. The helo machine-gunned the boat and set it on fire. Both parties of intruders had left in the vans, abandoning one dead man. None of the reactor pressure walls, waste pools, or isotope storage areas had been breached.

“This time,” Dan muttered.

“‘This time’?”

“There are three valuable things in that plant. Fuel, waste, and isotopes. They couldn’t steal the fuel, not if the reactor’s operating. The waste, pretty much the same, as I understand it. But the isotopes: small, light, and valuable. They were after the isotopes.”

“Well, that’ll juice ’em to beef up their security,” Roald said.

* * *

He ate at his desk, a plastic sandwich from the cafeteria. Trying to ignore the abyss that beckoned whenever he thought about doomed things. Condemned, surrounded Sarajevo. Slumped bodies … when his mind recurred to that vision blackness shaded his sight, his stomach teetered between terror and nausea.

By early afternoon he’d gotten through his callbacks. He even wrote a little on his white paper, the one he’d been doing on the Threat Cell. Thinking about Laguna Verde, he added a section on radioactive materials.

Which reminded him, in turn, of Horn. Even now, with a Yankee White clearance, he couldn’t access certain files on the incident. Al Qaeda had modified that weapon, in some not-yet-comprehended way, to generate an enormous fallout. Detonated in the right place, dispersed by the prevailing winds, it would have made hundreds of square miles uninhabitable for years.

He closed the file — didn’t want to leave something like that glowing on his screen — and went out to Major Lynch’s cubicle. Rapped on it. “Ed.”

“Holy smoke. I’ve heard of riding the red-eye—”

“Everybody’s got to make a joke. Remember that thing about FedEx? The guys who were trying to import empty containers?”

“You mean UPS?”

“Yeah. The relief organization. Ever come up with anything more on that?”

Lynch told him he’d followed up as directed. “That’s what I was starting to tell you about yesterday, when you got the ring from Mrs. C. Transport security put out a closure bulletin on it. They didn’t find anything illegal, and the outfit’s clean.”

“Where were these containers going to, again?”

Lynch told him L.A., there was a big hub airfield near there. Dan nodded. “Okay … Where’s Miles these days? I meant to ask Bry this morning, but…”

Lynch said the DEA operative was at a forward location in Ecuador, where the Colombian, U.S., and host militaries were setting up a combined surveillance center. Dan thought this over and asked if DEA could forward a message. Lynch thought so. Dan sat at the agent’s desk, logged in, and typed a message from his account. He queued it and logged off.

He was headed back to his office when Gil Ouderkirk, the sergeant the Pentagon had sent to replace Ihlemann — a big taciturn guy with a shaven head that looked strange with a sport coat — said, “Commander? Call for you. State Department.”

It was a staffer responding to Dan’s inquiry on the stuff he’d left with Buddy Larreinaga. His uniform, wallet, passport, and so forth. Dan especially wanted his class ring back. It had gone too many places with him, bore too many dings from the ships he’d served on. The staffer said he’d located it, but it wasn’t in State’s system. It was coming back through a UN pouch. So it would go to New York, not D.C.

* * *

Around five he finished the report on Bosnia that De Bari had asked for, then wondered whom he should turn it in to. Sebold? Gelzinis? That would invite delay, maybe second-guessing from CIA and State. Dan wanted his words read unvarnished. Maybe it was futile, but he was trying to separate the president, the chief executive it was his duty and obligation to counsel, from Bob De Bari. For whom he was starting to cherish a real loathing.

Normally anything from NSC staff went through the executive secretary, in a nook off the Sit Room spaces, and from there to the president’s staff secretary. This could take anywhere from a day to a few minutes. He’d noticed anything political got a higher priority than national-security matters. Everything that went into the Oval was monitored. Even the scrap paper the president doodled on was accounted for. He’d gotten back copies of two of his counterdrug reports with the red “President has seen” stamp. Copies only; the originals of everything that went before that sanctified sight came back to the Sit Room, thence into the classified archives.