The Command

The first team had identified two possible targets in Bahrain. The first was the American naval base. Bin Jun’ad had put them in touch with a friend from the mosque, a believer who worked in the fuel supply facility. This man had taken one of the men from the cell onto the base with him. They’d photographed the gate area and the fuel pier. They’d thought of sabotaging the pier, blowing up the valves with grenades, then using flares to ignite a raging fire in the harbor. But they later evolved a better plan: driving a truck onto the base during the huge Fourth of July rock concert and “Back Home” celebration that would pull hundreds of Americans together in the Desert Dome.

Al-Ulam studied diagrams, photographs, schedules. Detonated at the right point, a bomb would bring the dome down on the revelers. The death count might be close to a thousand.

The second possible target was an apartment building in the new suburb of Juffair. A new sixteen-story building, where American support personnel lived — contractors, visiting officers, civilian personnel and their families. This attack, too, would be via truck bomb, not unlike the one he’d built at Mashhad.

He cocked his head. The problem was, he had no explosives. He’d managed to bring detonators; they were easily concealed in his shaving kit. But the stocks of Polish plastic were exhausted. He could improvise something. But improvised explosives were never as potent as the manufactured article.

“What are you thinking?” bin Jun’ad wanted to know.

“I’m considering how to build the bomb.”

The rotund man in the thobe smiled cherubically. “You’re going to be pleased at this. Our man inside the base? He had a friend with access to their weapons storehouse. It was expensive to deal with him. But together they brought out almost a hundred kilos of American plastic explosive.”

Al-Ulam looked again at the screen. It showed the ground floor of the apartment building. He could see where the supporting pillars were located. The plastic would serve as the heart of the charge; the rest he could buy locally. Diesel oil, nitrate … His heart pounded with the same passion he’d felt in Buenos Aires, in Algeria, at Mashhad. Sixteen stories. No one in it would remain alive.

“That is good news,” he said. “Good news indeed.”

12

The Great Bitter Lake,

Suez Canal

Now muster all accused, witnesses, and chain of command in the wardroom for captain’s mast. Maintain silence about the decks.”

Marty Marchetti stood at parade rest. Horn was at anchor, but the waiting men still swayed in the passageway. He flexed his arms behind him, feeling the burn from a hard workout in the cramped rubber-matted weight room aft. Pain was weakness leaving the body. He’d heard that once, and it had stayed with him.

Like the anger stayed with you, when one of your guys was getting railroaded.

The starboard side 01 level passageway zigzagged out around the wardroom, the wood-grained metal door of which was closed as, he supposed, the captain and exec settled on what was going to happen in a few minutes. The chiefs had already sat in judgment, and the exec had done her quizzing the day before. His guys stood in line with the others, with, to his surprise, some of the bitches, too. He couldn’t get used to them. Gave him a start when he’d come around a corner and there was a pair of tits.

For some reason it seemed like he always went through the Ditch at night. The scenery: not worth looking at, even if you wanted to stand topside in suffocating heat and biting flies and gnats so micromean they bit you on the way down when you breathed them in. For hour after hour they’d bored through the narrow, dead-straight canal. He wondered why they called this the Holy Land when God had wasted so little time on it. It was flat and dead, and the villages that lined it were broken down and poverty stricken. They’d dropped anchor in the lake not long after dawn, to let the northbound traffic go by before proceeding on the second leg down to the Red Sea.

He stuck his chin out as somebody cracked the door. “Chiefs and div-ohs can come in,” Woltz, the command master chief, said. “Witnesses, too.”

He was the nearest to the door, so he went through first, with Chief Bendt and Lieutenant Osmani behind him. Then Gerhardt, the radioman, and Mr. Camill, because the communications officer was on anchor watch, and Lieutenant Sanduskie and Chief Andrews, the cryp-pies. They looked lost out of their little shack up on the 03 level, like hermit crabs blasted out of their shells.

The wardroom smelled of burnt coffee with an aftertaste of mold from the ventilation ducting. The tables were moved back to the bulkheads, except for the long one where the captain stood.