For Honor, page 25
part #17 of Tom Clancy's Op-Center Series
Adoncia had returned shortly after two. A.M. with food and drink, assuming—correctly—that if she had left her smoke, she would be returning. She also brought more: news.
“The police are looking for you,” she said. “So here is what you will do.” She fished something from her pants pocket and pressed it in his palm. “I have written a map and a name. You say you are a rower; I hope you were truthful.”
“I was. Why?”
“I have arranged for a rowboat,” she said, planting herself gingerly on a stack of logs. “Another old friend, Camilio, is a custodian at the Granma Memorial—that’s the yacht we used to travel from Mexico with our little army in 1956.” She shrugged her bony shoulders. “We lost then, but won later. Sometimes you have to learn.”
“You did that impressively,” McCord said.
She smiled. “I believe you are being sincere. Because I have seen you when you lie. This is not that.”
McCord grinned self-effacingly. He was embarrassed to admit respect for rebels who had ultimately caused so much pain. Too many revolutionaries and too many terrorists had caused too much suffering. But so had legitimate governments, like those of czars and ayatollahs. Ultimately, it was a judgment about individuals, not ideas.
Adoncia stood on creaky knees. She remembered the newspaper in her back pocket, handed it to him.
“You can practice your Spanish,” she said.
“You’re going?”
“I must, and I will not see you again. No one should be coming for wood, but if they do the padre will tell them to let you be. Go around ten thirty tonight, which is when police shifts are near their end and cars are returned to their garages.” She offered her hand. “I thank you for a very exciting evening. One like this I have not had in many, many years.”
“It’s been an honor,” McCord said. “Do I … pay Camilio?”
“If you have the funds, yes. That would be nice. He is losing a boat, after all.”
“I have the money and I will pay. May I also leave this?” he asked, indicating the go-bag.
“There are always people who can use things,” she said. “I will inform the padre to collect it after you go.”
He thanked her again with a generous hug, which she returned. She departed in a flash of sunlight and then there was just the one bulb. McCord sat, texted Williams, and told him he would be needing a Coast Guard pickup or a ship from Guantanamo sometime between eleven and twelve P.M., depending on his point of departure. The director acknowledged with:
OK. YOUR INFO A1
McCord could only imagine what was popping to the north—and in the far north. And while part of him was sorry not to be in on the events, part of him was happy to be doing nothing.
Doing nothing in a tropical land with endless beaches where you are sitting in a woodshed.
But he did not lament too deeply. If the conceptual pieces of this fit as he imagined, JSOC would be having a far more difficult time of it.
The day passed slowly, his time divided between rest, memorizing the map Adoncia had drawn—which he shredded—and a struggle to read the news in Spanish. There appeared to be an item about a fugitive American—the description, at least, matched his own—but there was no drawing and it was only a paragraph on page seven. He used the wood instead of the chamber pot, and did so sparingly; it absorbed the odor, which he did not want clinging to him when he left.
He had shut the phone to conserve the battery. When he turned it on after nightfall, there was a text from Williams with time and coordinates and also a note:
Success
McCord looked at the coordinates on a map, saw where he had to be three miles out, and shut the phone again. He would need the GPS for later. He hoped that Adoncia had gotten him more than just an old wooden rowboat. For more than a half century, people who set out for the United States in those did not survive.
Several times during the day he had stood and walked around the tight little room, stretching his right leg. Ever since the second wound, the bad one, in Iraq, it got very stiff when he was inactive for long. He could not afford to let that happen.
A church bell told the time. Fifteen minutes before the appointed half hour McCord took a windbreaker from his go-bag, made sure he had his phone, wallet, and passport, then put the small suitcase under some wood. He shut the light and listened. Adoncia’s map had shown direction but not distance, and he used the outside sounds to visualize the street, the plaza, the way they had come. Taking several calming breaths and once again shaking his leg to make sure it could take a brisk walk, he opened the door.
There was no one outside and, moving quickly, he exited and shut it behind him.
McCord’s destination was literally due east, just a few blocks away past the Plaza de Armas. There was a series of old wooden piers in Havana Bay and he went to the first, where a tall man sat smoking a pipe, his feet over the edge, a fishing rod in his hand. As McCord neared he saw, bobbing gently in the smooth sea four feet below him, a white, fiberglass rowboat with two benches and wide sides.
“Señor … Camilio?” McCord asked tentatively.
“Si, Señor Roger. No hablo inglés.”
McCord came toward the man and noticed he was wearing sunglasses. The American removed all the cash he had from his wallet and held it toward the fisherman. Certain, now, that he was blind, he pressed the bills into Camilio’s hand.
“Gracias, Camilio,” McCord said. “Muchas gracias.”
“Si, si,” the man said affably, finally turning toward McCord and adding a heartfelt, “¡Que llegues bien!”
Have a safe journey.
The older man then pointed toward the north, in the direction of what McCord knew was the underwater Túnel de la Bahía. Thanking him again and moving carefully and quietly—there was a slight wind and the wooden planks were slippery—McCord lowered himself into the rowboat. It was about thirty-five hundred feet to the mouth of the bay and then he had the extra three miles; for the money he had just paid—nearly one thousand dollars, American—he probably could have bought himself a motorboat.
But Adoncia was right. This was better. If he were caught, of all the flimsy stories he could have given, going for a nocturnal row was at least remotely defensible.
The operative word being “remotely,” he thought as he set out.
The waters were still in the bay and he was in good enough shape to clock a steady three miles an hour. That put him over the tunnel in forty minutes. The waters were more challenging when he hit the gulf, since he was accustomed to rowing in rivers, not on a swelling sea. It took him a while to master the trick of going forward while the current insisted, sometimes strongly, that he should be headed toward shore. He had been chilly when he set out, wearing only the windbreaker; the effort warmed him and he was now sweating like he did back at Princeton. But with older, wearier arms.
But the cell phone compass kept his course true and, some ninety minutes later, he noticed an occasional white light flashing ahead. The intermittent nature of the light told him it wasn’t a buoy of any kind but a vessel—a vessel that was holding its position just past Cuba’s territorial waters.
McCord stopped long enough to shine his cell phone in that direction, then hurried toward a twenty-nine-foot Response Boat—Small II. Helping hands from two of the three crewmembers assisted him onto the side of the low, orange-and-black vessel.
“Mr. McCord?” said a welcoming voice as he came aboard.
“I am,” he said.
The second man threw a blanket over his shoulders and assisted him into the small, glass-canopied area. He sat behind the pilot, who greeted him pleasantly.
“The boat, sir?” the first man called over.
McCord peered into the dark at the faint lights of the island in the distance. “Cast her off,” he said. “Maybe she’ll find her way home.”
“That’s a nice thought, sir,” the young man said in earnest.
McCord looked at the man’s nametag and then gazed north. “Petty Officer Song,” he said, “it is very nice thought indeed.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
Silver Springs, Maryland
July 4, 4:00 P.M.
It was a single family ranch house on Rosemere Avenue. It was commutable by Yamaha VMAX and Aaron Bleich lived there with his girlfriend of three years, Jacqui, a Realtor. They met when she sold him this house; he fell in love, he said, when she lowered her commission so he could afford it.
The holiday mood was festive, consisting mostly of the staff of the Geek Tank and those officers like Williams and Bankole who did not have family obligations … or whose families preferred to be with hipsters, like the Roger McCords. Anne came by, though she would be leaving to attend a gathering the nature of which she did not reveal. As always, no one pressed her.
McCord had slept on the flight from MacDill—where he had been briefed by Williams before boarding—slept when he got home, and got up to bring his wife and two high-school-age daughters who wanted to “be cool” like Kathleen Hays or Charlene Squires and now Dongling Qui. He was surprisingly alert, though, as he told Williams and Anne, “sore as an old orangutan” after his row.
He had noticed at once that both Williams and Anne were distracted, and did not know if this were the time and place to ask if everything were all right. Williams himself seized an opportunity after Anne had left and the others were giving their dinner orders—Gary Gold rushing out to the supermarket with Bankole to get veggie burgers and curry sauce.
“You did great in Cuba,” Williams said, going to get a beer and handing one to McCord.
“I feel guilty,” McCord said. “It was almost like a Caribbean vacation.”
Williams smiled, but it was forced. “We didn’t get out of this one clean,” he said gravely.
“What are you talking about?” McCord said. “The injured troops—”
Williams waved his hand. “Volner is going up to see them—he spoke by Skype, said they were fine. Proud.”
“They should be. They prevented Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.”
“We—me, Op-Center—also authorized an action that sunk an Iranian cargo ship,” Williams said. “They’re calling it an onboard explosion as they were going to Anadyr to drop off unspecified equipment—which satellite images would disprove—and pick up fish. Privately, they are demanding that we pay for the ship.”
“Were any lives lost?”
Williams shook his head.
“Then they got off lucky.”
“The White House doesn’t see it that way,” Williams said.
“That’s ridiculous,” McCord said. He realized he was becoming agitated when his wife looked over from where Aaron was making balloon animals. “The original plan called for an attack on the landing pads.”
“And that was what was authorized,” Williams said. “The upshot of that would have been Midkiff’s ability to prove to Tehran he knew what they were doing. Harward called it ‘a precision exposé.’”
“God, I hate newspeak,” McCord complained.
“Anyway, by sinking the entire ship, the attack—which we deny was ours, of course—comes off as brutish, broad, and haphazard. Those were also Harward’s words.”
“So what do they want? Did no one thank us for picking this up in the first place, let alone pulling this off?”
“To the last point, the president’s brain trust agrees that the Iranians would have detonated one for show, kept the other for leverage, and denied—correctly, as it happens—that they broke any treaties. But having that one nuke would not have given the Iranians a huge tactical advantage. Only headlines for a few days.”
“Chase, I am so glad we have to wage battles at home and abroad,” McCord said. “Really keeps us in fighting trim.”
“As to the other question,” Williams went on, “there’s a chance JSOC may be benched and that I may follow.” He raised his beer. “Happy Independence Day.”
McCord was open-mouth aghast. “No one there would stand for that,” he said after lubricating his jaw with a swallow. “No one.”
“Then they’d be replaced,” Williams said. “It’s not a fait accompli, but January Dow also weighed in and said we blew the opportunity to turn Parand Ghasemi by failing to push her father.”
“What, is that possibility dead?”
“No, but it’s January’s baby now,” Williams replied. “About the only thing we appear to have done right was ID an active GRU agent who wasn’t on our radar, Yuri Bolshakov. He’s been added to Kathleen’s watch list. At least,” Williams added, “one of my people made a friend somewhere.”
It took McCord a moment. “Brightest spot in this,” he agreed. “She was a gem. I’d have loved to sit down and talk to her. Is she going to be okay?”
“Bankole and Wright will be working on that behind the scenes,” Williams said. “Jim has experience working with Cuban refugees in Florida—he knows a lot of people across the gulf.”
“She may not want our help, any help,” McCord said. “I get the feeling she’s been looking for this fight for a while.”
“Funny,” Williams said. “She would’ve gotten what she wanted even if you’d never met. Midkiff would have gotten what he wanted if we’d never spotted Konstantin Bolshakov taking a trip. Who knows what’s going to happen to Parand Ghasemi in Iran with this stain on her record. Maybe Harward is right. Maybe we should be sitting things out.”
McCord looked at his wife who was looking at him. He didn’t blame her: her husband, the girls’ father, had gone away on “business,” just returned, and was back in the saddle.
“We’ll talk about this tomorrow, Chase,” McCord said. “But everyone who was actually in on this, not on the sidelines, would agree that what we pulled off was pretty amazing. And—and—despite Harward and Midkiff, I for one am very happy Iran took this one in the shorts and doesn’t have a pair of nuclear warheads.”
Williams thanked his intelligence director, who joined his family and the celebration and the preparing of food. Standing alone by a hedge, Williams drank his beer.
He did not, in his heart, believe any of the what-ifs he had rattled off. When he was in boot camp—back during the Civil War, it felt like—a conundrum had been posed by a drill instructor: “If you went back in time with the full resources of the modern military, would you have stopped the Japanese from attacking Pearl Harbor?” The initial consensus was “yes.” Then the DI factored in the delay in the U.S. entering the war, allowing Hitler to take Britain, said delay also allowing him to throw more resources against Russia—and the Japanese concentrating on their domination of Asia and expanding westward. The result would likely have been a very different end to World War II, which would likely have allowed Germany to develop the atom bomb first.
Most of the new recruits changed their minds. But not Williams.
“No one turns a weapon against America if I am alive to prevent it,” he said.
The DI was impressed with the clarity of purpose, the simplicity of the logic.
Williams still believed that. Come what may, he would never put self before country, career before patriotism.
I’d do the same damn thing all over again, he thought with a sense of pride as he finished the beer, dropped it in a trash can, and went to help Bankole and Gold with their groceries.
EPILOGUE
Embassy of Pakistan, Washington, D.C.
July 7, 11:34 P.M.
The Interests Section of the Islamic Republic of Iran was based in Pakistan’s Embassy on Twenty-Third Street, a three-story, darkly fenced eagle’s beak of a structure that was made in sections of gray, rust, and hay-colored stone.
It was dark when the black BMW SUV pulled up to the gate. It arrived alone and was admitted without fanfare or incident. Once it was inside, two men emerged. The first was First Lieutenant Bahadur İpekçi, the younger of the men by nearly twenty years. İpekçi was a sharpshooter with NEZAJA—the acronym for the ground forces of the Iranian army—and was now seconded to Iranian diplomatic operations in the United States. Nothing he did here had anything to do with statesmanship.
İpekçi had been driving, and he carried diplomatic papers to go with the diplomatic plates of the SUV. The documents had not been needed; he had made the trip from Reagan International to the embassy without being stopped or questioned.
His passenger, whom he had not met before tonight, was a lean, tall, leathery man. He wore civilian clothes with obvious discomfort, as though they were the uniform of some rival forces—not the NEDAJA, his own branch of the service.
The Navy of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
With easy, efficient movements, the passenger grabbed his own suitcases from the tailgate while İpekçi, inherently wary, watched the street. The younger man did not know if the shooting at Quantico had been traced to him and surveillance assigned to his comings-and-goings; he did not think so, since he had not intended to kill the Bureau agent and had left the scene with careful haste. The action was in furtherance of a narrative, the specifics of which had not been shared with him. He was told only what he had to do, not why. And he was content with that. His job was to serve, not question.
As with this current task.
The men walked to the door where a night guard buzzed them in. By a gesture, İpekçi encouraged their distinguished guest to enter first. Ordinarily, the first lieutenant was not assigned chauffeur duties, what he called “hand-holding detail.” But he was told that it was important this man be delivered to the embassy, and that he be extended all courtesies and resources that the facility could provide. İpekçi knew little more than that, though what he knew was profoundly exciting. His superiors in Tehran had told him that this undertaking was vital to Iranian prestige, not only at home but in the eyes of the government’s Russian allies. And they assured him that it would not involve “supporting an agenda,” as with Quantico. This time, as they had put it, “the shots will be real.”
Whenever they were ready, the sharpshooter would be ready. Dr. Hafiz Akif and his family were already here. And whatever was required by his grimly silent countryman, he would receive. The first lieutenant could do no less for Captain Ahmad Salehi, late of the cargo vessel Nardis, which had been sunk by piratical Americans.
