Joshua`s Hammer (47 page)

After a while the captain stopped twitching and Bahmad set about wiping down everything he had touched with his bare hands and searching the yacht for anything incriminating. He thought about finding the yacht's diving gear and retrieving his equipment, but that would take too much time, not only to find it and bring it up, but to clean it and dry it all off. He decided to leave it at the bottom of the harbor. The captain's body would be found sooner or later, but he didn't think that anyone would go diving beneath the boat until it was too late to make a difference. He would get new weapons.

He would get a hotel room tonight and in the morning he would fetch his things from storage and catch the early flight to Los Angeles. Just a few more days now and he would be free. He found that he was looking forward to his retirement with a great deal of relish.

Aboard Air Force One

"How are you doing, sweetheart?" President Haynes asked his daughter.

She looked up, a sweet smile on her face. "Hi, Daddy," she said. "The clouds look like castles this morning."

Haynes looked out the window. They were over Iowa enroute to San Diego at about 30,000 feet, and the cloud formations did indeed look like castles. Like the one at Disneyland where they were going tomorrow. The International Special Olympics' opening ceremony was three days from now, and Haynes was making a sweep through California in support of Governor S. Howard Thomas who was up for reelection in November. It was going to be a hot contest with a lot of major issues, not the least of which was abortion, which Haynes was against, but had to support publicly because of his party's position; a ban on smoking in all public places including beaches, parks and even streets, something he thought made some sort of sense but was a ridiculous infringement of people's freedoms by a heavy-handed government; and the elimination of the state income tax, even while Florida was grappling with the creation of a state income tax and Haynes himself was proposing the end of federal income taxes in favor of a flat-rate sales tax. Whatever position he took, there would be a hundred different voices opposing it, five dozen powerful lobbyist groups clamoring to get the attention of Congress and at least twenty talking heads on weekend morning television analyzing and dissecting every single move he and every other politician made. And it brought a smile to his face. This was what American politics was all about. The almost constant bickering, the dissentients, the name-calling and sometimes even mudslinging, the attempts at bribery and influence-peddling, the investigations and sometimes even impeachment proceedings; the give and take of compromise. All of it was working exactly the way the designers of the system had meant it to work. There was no dissolving of Congress or of the government, no tanks coming up Pennsylvania Avenue in another military coup, no President and his cabinet fleeing the country, no armed revolution pitting one people against another, leastways not since the Civil War.

"The clouds do look like castles Haynes said. He looked into his daughter's eyes. She seemed very happy. "Are you looking forward to the Olympics this weekend, sweetheart?" She was always so open and straightforward that he could tell what she was thinking and how she was feeling.

"I'm nervous, but I was thinking about something," she replied.

"What's that?"

"Just about everybody else is going to be just as nervous as me. Mom says all I can do is my best and don't worry about anyone else, 'cause they'll be trying to do their best. I hope. But I'm still nervous. Is it okay?"

Haynes glanced up as his chief of staff Tony Lang came around the corner. He looked nervous. Everybody aboard did. Haynes gave his daughter a peck on the cheek. "It's okay to be nervous, but not scared."

She thought about it for a moment, then nodded, her pretty blue eyes lighting up and a smile brightening an already impossibly bright face. "Gotcha." She looked like a cross between a blond, blue-eyed Scandinavian beauty and a mysterious, almond-eyed Siberian.

Haynes studied his daughter's round face for a moment, and his heart suddenly hardened. God help the sorry sonofabitch who ever tried to harm so much as a hair on her head. He felt a genuine sorrow and guilt for what had happened to bin Laden's daughter. He wished that he could somehow make it right, or at least explain to bin Laden how it had happened. But he could not. What he could do was protect his own child, while at the same time protect the freedom of the United States.

"Gotta go," he said, but his daughter was already looking out the window again. She could grasp some fairly complex ideas, but usually not more than one of them at a time. She was in some ways lucky, he thought.

He joined Lang and they went forward into the corridor separating the family's space with the President's private study and conference room.

"Henry would like to go over a few things with you, Mr. President, and Sterling wants to know if you'll agree to an off-the-record chat with the media sometime this afternoon before we touch down."

"Tell Henry to come up, and I want you to sit in on it too, because I have a few ideas--assuming he's talking about security for the games in San Francisco."

Lang nodded. "He's running into some brick walls, and he's probably going to ask you to pull your daughter out of the ISO."

Haynes's jaw tightened. "Not a chance. And you can tell Sterling that I'll talk to the media, but the issues will be limited."

"Anything but the games?" Lang asked.

"That's right," Haynes said angrily. He went forward, pausing at the open curtain to his wife's office. She was in conference with her press secretary and they looked up and smiled.

"Did you talk to Deb?" his wife asked.

"Just now. She's a little nervous, but she'll be okay."

"Would you like me to come back later, Mrs. Haynes?" the First Lady's secretary asked, starting to rise.

The President waved her back. "No. Henry wants to go over the arrangements for San Francisco, so I've just got a minute."

"Are we going to be okay up there?" The President's wife asked.

"We're going to make it okay, Linda, by covering all the bases, not by hiding," the President told her firmly. He held her eye for a moment, and a silent message of reassurance passed from him to her. She visibly relaxed. "I wouldn't take the games away from her for anything."

"It's been two months and nothing has happened," she said. "Do you want me to touch on it in my talks?"

Haynes thought about it and nodded. "It might not be a bad idea. But use a light touch, and maybe you'd better run it past Marty." Martin Schoenberg was the President's chief speech writer.

"Sure."

The President went to his conference room. He pressed the button for his steward, who appeared instantly. "How about some coffee, Alex?"

"Coming right up, sir."

Haynes was in shirtsleeves; not as informal as Clinton had been, but a lot less tense than Nixon. He set a hardworking but relaxed tone in his administration, and the people he'd gathered around him thrived in the atmosphere.

His coffee came in a large mug bearing the presidential seal, and a moment later Lang showed up with Kolesnik.

"Good morning, Mr. President," the chief of the Secret Service Protective Division said.

'"Morning, Henry. Tony said you had something for me."

"Yes, sir, but I'm afraid that it's not very, good news. San Francisco is a mess. There's just no way that we can guarantee your safety or that of your daughter in the games. It's as simple as that. We'd like you to pull your daughter out and cancel your part in the opening ceremonies."

"We've gone over this a hundred times."

"Sir, a lot of those athletes are coming from Muslim countries. Their families are coming with their moms, dads, brothers, uncles. At least men who claim to be brothers and uncles. And there's just no way we can check all of them. If bin Laden wanted to send an army to San Francisco, he could do it easily."

"But he's not going to do that"

"I'm sorry, Mr. President, but we can't be sure," Kolesnik countered. He handed the President a list of all the Special Olympians expected for the games. "There're nearly three thousand of them, plus relatives or guardians and coaches. At least four hundred are Muslims. But that's not the worst of it. Bin Laden has supporters just about everywhere, which means that the assassin or assassins could be German or Italian, or Japanese, even American."

The President flipped through the lengthy list, knowing exactly who these people were. Down syndrome runners, paraplegic swimmers, blind discus throwers, palsied high jumpers; athletes with dozens of afflictions doing the best they could. "That's exactly why bin Laden won't make his strike in San Francisco. He'd be killing Muslims. His own people. He'd never survive such an attack."

"In a strange way, Mr. President, you may be wrong for all the right reasons," Kolesnik said. "By killing his own people he would be sending a very clear message that absolutely no one is safe from him. It could dramatically increase his stature and that of the NIF, if anyone can follow such logic."

"Well, I for one cannot."

"The psychologists on our staff brought it up as a possibility, sir." Kolesnik was frustrated, but it was clear that he'd expected to run into a brick wall. "If it came to that, Mr. President, the Secret Service could supersede your orders." Under certain circumstances in which the President's life was clearly in danger, the Secret Service did have the power to override a President's wishes, even by gentle force if necessary, and take him out of harm's way.

"Don't even try to go there, Henry," Haynes warned.

Kolesnik straightened up. "Until you fire me, Mr. President, I'll do my job the best way I know how even if it means disagreeing with you."

The President handed the list back. "Is there any evidence that bin Laden is planning to hit us in San Francisco?"

"No, sir." Kolesnik replaced the list in his file folder. "But the bomb is already here in the States." "Anything on that from the FBI or CIA that I haven't seen?"

"No, sir."

"They tried to get McGarvey's wife and daughter and they failed. Maybe that's it," the President said. "Bring me some hard information and I'll cancel the entire ISO. Until then do what you can." Haynes softened. "I want you to know, Henry, that I'm not trying to be a bastard here. I appreciate the extraordinary efforts that your people take every day to keep me and my family safe. But you have to understand what I'm faced with. Whoever sits in this chair still has to go out and press the flesh on occasion, even if it means putting his life on the line. And that's just the way it is."

"Yes, Mr. President, we do understand," Kolesnik replied. "We'll do the best we can."

"That's all I can ask from anybody."

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

M/V Margo Off Cabo San Lazaro, Baja California

"There's something damned funny going on, if you ask me," Captain Panagiotopolous told his deck officer. It was after breakfast and they were steaming north at seventeen knots about two hundred miles off the Baja California peninsula. They were slightly ahead of schedule and if the weather held they'd be in San Francisco at least eight hours early.

The entire trip starting in Karachi three months ago had been a cocked-up affair, in the captain's estimation, although nothing terribly untoward had happened to them other than the brief but intense storm in the Arabian Sea. But there'd been an odd flavor to the home office communiques from Paris, a vagueness that the captain had never noticed before in his twenty-five years at sea. It was the new executives probably; kids who'd never been to sea themselves and yet felt competent to run a shipping company with a fleet of thirty-eight vessels that stopped at just about every port in the world. But the snot noses did know computers.

For two months while the Margo was in dry dock at the Tampa Marine Yards in Florida, Panagiotopolous had gone home to visit his family in Athens. But after just a few days he remembered why he had left in the first place. He took a small boat out to Delos where he worked up a sweat helping prune olive trees. Honest labor. Appreciated labor. When he got back to his ship he was refreshed, ready to go. But after a brief inspection he saw that none of the repairs done to the ship had been necessary. Some painting, a new reefer in the galley, a few new pieces of navigation equipment on the bridge; nothing essential.

He got to wondering what the hell was really going on. For instance, why had the Margo been yanked from service at that particular moment for unnecessary repairs. Instead of earning money, the company had lost a bundle. And, why had the deck cargo bound for San Francisco been unloaded and stored at the shipyard instead of being transferred to another ship?

Or what the hell were they doing with a helicopter tied down on the rear deck?

Panagiotopolous wasn't surprised by taking on last minute cargo. It happened all the time. But it was the way in which it had been handled in Colon at the eastern terminus of the Panama Canal that was odd. They were ordered to drop anchor in the holding basin, and within the hour the self-loading cargo vessel Antilles Trader out of Havana came alongside. A company representative came aboard with a bill of lading. The helicopter was to be loaded on the Margo's afterdeck for delivery to M. L. Murty, Ltd." in San Francisco. The documents were in order, but since it was Cuban equipment bound for a U.S. port a special clearance was needed, something the representative didn't have. When the captain called the company on SSB he was told in no uncertain terms that the Margo was his ship and his responsibility. He would either have to sail without the papers, or a new captain would be found to replace him. The clearance papers, he was promised, would be delivered to the ship with the harbor pilot in San Francisco Bay. If he was stopped in U.S. waters by the Coast Guard he would have to talk his way out of his problem.

"It makes no sense," he said.

"I agree," Schumatz replied. They stood on the port wing looking aft. "I could fray the cables and let the sonofabitch fall overboard. Nobody would be any the wiser. The insurance company would bitch, that's if the company even made a claim. Without the proper papers we shouldn't be carrying it, so if it simply disappeared they might say nothing."