War of Eagles o-12 Page 3

  “You’re saying, Mr. President, that either I accept reassignment, or I’m fired,” Hood said.

  “Not at all, Paul,” the president told him. “You can resign, effective as of eight-thirty A.M. this morning. You can say it was always part of your plan to get Op-Center on its feet and move on.”

  “At the risk of belaboring something you want to see over and done, sir, are you saying you need me here, or are you saying you need me out of Op-Center?” Hood asked.

  “Both. Paul, the military is not happy with some of the budget initiatives this administration is taking. I have to equal the ledger.”

  “By giving them Op-Center?”

  “In a word, yes.” The president leaned back. “You’re not a neophyte, Paul. You know that this is how things work. As for the new position, that’s my way of maintaining balance. I need someone who will continue to interact with Op-Center on a personal level and who will form close relationships with personnel at other intelligence agencies here and abroad.”

  “You are saying, sir, that you want a personal intelligence officer.”

  “Cabinet level without the title,” the president said. “And don’t look so glum, Paul. That’s a promotion.”

  “I understand, sir. Doesn’t that interfere with the NSA and their mission?” Hood asked.

  “You’ve met General Carew,” the president said. He looked at Sanders. “How did the vice president describe him?”

  “He said the general has brass ballistics,” she replied.

  “That’s right,” the president said. “And Vice President Perry ought to know. They served together in Vietnam. The point is, whatever Carew knows, the DoD will know.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question, sir,” Hood said. “How will General Carew take my being here?”

  “He will like it about as much as General Rodgers liked serving under a civilian,” the president replied. “But he will have to live with that. Your only contact with the general will be when you require information from the NSA. You will not be at their disposal.”

  “I see. What about staff, sir?”

  “We have budgeted two assistants, both off premises,” Lorraine Sanders replied. “We felt it best to have your telephones and computers located in a less trafficked area. We have assigned them space in the renovated basement of the Winder Building at 600 Seventeenth Street.”

  “The U.S. trade rep has offices there,” Hood said.

  “Correct.”

  “But the basement,” Hood said. “Isn’t that also where they held prisoners during the Civil War?”

  “As I said, it’s been renovated,” Sanders replied.

  “Right.” Hood had gone from one basement to another. “Have you already hired the staff?”

  “No,” Sanders replied. She smiled. “We want you to be comfortable with your associates.”

  “This office will not be looking over your shoulder,” President Debenport assured him. “What do you say? I need my own intelligence resource, my own confidant. I need Paul Hood.”

  Damn him, Hood thought. Damn the president for making something expedient sound desirable. And damn him for leaving Hood unemployed if he declined the offer. He had alimony and child support. Hood would not let indignation over the process affect his responsibilities.

  “I accept the post,” Hood told him.

  “Thank you,” the president replied, rising.

  Debenport sounded sincere, which was something. It made Hood feel marginally better about having been shanghaied. Besides, the president was right. This was Washington, and Hood would have been lucky to make a lateral move, let alone enjoy an upkick in a new administration.

  It still had not really hit him that he would not be returning to Op-Center, that the responsibility of running it — and the privilege — had been taken from his shoulders. Unlike the ending of his marriage, there was no sense of relief to counterbalance the sudden, encroaching emptiness.

  Hood forced himself not to dwell on that. He had just accepted a new job. That was where his attention must go.

  Hood and the chief of staff rose. Sanders told the new special envoy that she would show him to his office and come back around three, after she had arranged for help to organize and equip the Winder Building space. He thanked her while the president was still within earshot. Hood may have come from Los Angeles, but he had good manners as well.

  As they walked down the corridor, the sense of avoidance Hood had felt earlier was gone. It had been replaced by a sense of courteous attention. Maybe it was all in his imagination, or maybe it was something palpable in his walk or his carriage, a stalwart if unconscious evidence of his new access to power.

  Whatever it was, Hood resolved to ignore it. Yesterday he was the director of Op-Center. Today he was a special envoy to the president.

  Tomorrow he could be indicted over a cheese Danish.

  As they neared the area where the vice president had his small office, Hood felt one of his two cell phones vibrate. It was the one on his right hip, the secure STU-III unit he carried for Op-Center business. He slipped it from the loop on his belt and checked the number.

  Hood replaced the phone without taking the call. He felt guilty about that, but it was the right thing to do.

  Whatever Bob Herbert had to say would probably be better spoken — and heard — when it had cooled.

  SIX

  Durban, South Africa Monday, 3:10 P.M.

  The Gold Coast of Africa is no longer the gold coast of Africa.

  The honor of being one of the richest, most profitable, and fastest-growing regions on the continent has passed from western Africa along the Gulf of Guinea to the eastern coast of South Africa, with the city of Durban as the anchor. Because of the subtropical climate, with high temperatures and significant amounts of rainfall, the area has always been a perfect environment for growing. Beginning in the middle 1850s, thirty years after the British first established a major port there, significant sections of arable land were earmarked for sugarcane. The crop was easy to cultivate and export, much in demand, and produced significant profits.

  Over a century and a half later, sugar continues to play a prominent part in South Africa’s agriculture, with Durban as the biggest sugar port in the world. Tourism has grown as well, with miles of beachfront having been developed into one of the most popular and celebrated vacation spots in the world. Along the Golden Mile, where summer lasts all year, the beautiful beaches are protected by shark nets, there are swimming pools with water slides, and there is an array of markets and merry-go-rounds, shopping centers, and world-class restaurants, nightclubs, and five-star hotels, all a few steps from the ocean.

  Ever since the late nineteenth century, when a railroad was built to give inland regions access to the port, workers from the rest of the continent and from as far as India have come to work in the fields. Investors from other nations have come as well, creating an international mix unparalleled in most of Africa. Some of those individuals used the port and its resources to smuggle goods and receive cash. Men like the infamous drug lord Yakuba Balwon moved heroin through Durban, then laundered the money through the London-based Windsor Global Securities Bank. Others sold Rophy tablets, which was short for Rohypnol, an addictive relaxant that was most popularly used as a date rape drug.

  Because of Durban’s multinational nature, and because it has been an economic lifeline to blacks and whites alike, the city has been spared much of the violent racial tension that devastated other regions. None of the local workers, black or white, lived as comfortably as the plantation owners, investors, or tourists, but there is always money in everyone’s pocket, and the end of apartheid, when it came, was peaceable. The only noticeable difference is the number of British and Afrikaner businessmen who are selling their interests in the port and portside concerns to financiers from India, Germany, France, and China.

  Something that has not changed over the years are the sugar silos. Stuffed with raw brown sugar, they stand side by side
in clusters across the landscape. Once made of brick and stone, the fifty-meter-tall towers are now constructed of aluminum and steel with a ceramic veneer to help control the temperature. They are connected at the top by enclosed bridges, which allow workers to move from one to the other with stampers, jackhammer-like devices with round bottoms that are used to compress the contents. The silos are rated by tonnage, not volume. Even if they are full, there is usually room for more sugar.

  The air smells sweet around the structures, like cotton candy. Despite the presence of inner and outer doors, large, rough granules spill from hatches and cover the ground and the raised walkways. Like ants, the sugar is nothing by itself. En masse, however, the power of these twenty-five-ton mountains is immense. The silos are akin to the revered seven pillars of wisdom of many local faiths. South Africans regard the towers as the sentries of prosperity. They ensure economic security for this area, its investors, and its workers.

  The largest of the sugarcane repositories are located along the Maydon Wharf. The workers here, mostly from Kenya and Nigeria, have unusually strong legs, the result of having to forcibly lift their feet hard when they move along the sticky walkways. They work in ten-hour shifts, with a half hour for a brown-bag lunch and two other fifteen-minute breaks. Their job is to see that the raw sugar stems move from truck or train to processing plant to silo to freighter in a timely and efficient manner with as little spillage as possible.

  Twenty-two-year-old native of Durban Moshood Azwe was not concerned about losing a little “sweet gold” here and there. The silos attracted flies, and the loose grains kept the insects low to the ground, away from his face. That made him a more efficient worker as he directed trucks to the elevators that carried the sugar to the tops of the silos. These dump trucks backed up to funnels, which had filters to catch cane or other debris the processing plant had missed.

  There were few deliveries at this hour. Most were made in the morning, before the heat and dampness could affect the unsiloed sugar. Azwe was beginning to think about going to the João Tavern with his buddies when a dump truck arrived. It did not have a familiar logo from the de Gama Company or KwaZulu-Natal Shipping Associates, the firms that usually transported sugar to the silos. There was a loosely fitted tarpaulin stretched across the top of the truck to keep the sun off the cane. It would not be necessary to remove it. The flap in back would simply ride up on the sugar as it was dumped into the bin below.

  Azwe was standing on the ramp that circled three-quarters of concrete bay three. It was located beside the centermost of the six silos in this section. As the truck backed in, Azwe held up his big hands so the driver could see. He was not supposed to allow anything to be off-loaded without first checking the bill of lading. The young man jogged over to the driver and jumped from the ramp to the driveway. He did not put his hand on the ramp lest the oil in his skin pick up sugar. The glaze was like glue, extremely difficult to wash away.

  Azwe was a tall man. He put a hand on the side view mirror and dipped his head into the open window.

  “May I see your documents?” he said. His voice had a clucking quality that was native to the region centuries before the arrival of the Europeans.

  The driver, a young man who looked Madagascan, turned to another man who was sitting in the passenger’s seat. The second man handed the driver a clipboard. He gave it to Azwe.

  “Thank you,” Azwe said as he looked at the document. He frowned deeply as he flipped through sheet after sheet. They were pages torn from the South African edition of Time magazine. “What is this?” Azwe demanded as he looked back into the cab of the truck.

  The young Durban did not have time to react before a silenced Beretta that had been concealed beneath the clipboard put a raw, red hole in his forehead. He gasped softly as he dropped to the ground between the front wheel of the truck and the side of the bay. He was twitching at the wrists and hips as blood spat from the wound in the front of his skull. Azwe’s eyes were open, blinking incongruously as red drops fell on them. After a few moments, they shut.

  The man in the driver’s seat jumped out. He stepped over the oddly angled body of the bay foreman and hurried to the back of the truck. The passenger also got out. He went to the elevator control box, which hung from a thick cable at the rear of the bay. As he pressed the blue button that opened the elevator door, the driver went to the back of the dump truck. He reached under the flap and removed a cooler. He popped the lid. The plastic container was packed with C-4. He pulled a detonator from his jacket pocket, set it for four minutes, and jabbed it into one of the explosive bricks. Then he took the open cooler and put it on the elevator as it rose from the floor.

  He and the other man quickly removed four other coolers from the back and opened them. They contained a half-dozen bricks of C-4 each. He set the timers to blow five seconds after the initial blast.

  When the explosives had been off-loaded, the elevator was sent back into the silo. It would travel under the ramp, then up an external chute before being dumped into the top of the silo.

  The two men hurried back to the truck. They had watched the silos for several days from a motorboat and from the nearby Victoria Street Indian Market. The entire process would take three minutes. That would give them enough time to get away. When the blast occurred, it would not just impact the silos, it would destroy the security cameras and the shack where the videotapes were recorded. Nothing would be left to attach them to this action. All investigators would find was the abandoned truck, the Beretta with its serial numbers filed off, and a torn copy of Time magazine.

  One hundred seconds after the truck drove from the bay, the men were outside the chain-link fence that surrounded the silos. Moments after that, the C-4 exploded. The blast blew out the top of the silo as if it were a party favor. Steel and ceramic tile were flung outward, along with huge pieces of fused sugar. The jagged sheets caught the late afternoon sunlight and flung it in all directions — up, down, and around. The explosion sent the other coolers tumbling along the covered bridges on either side. They detonated as they reached the other silos, blasting out the sides and driving chunks of debris into the silos that were facing them along the northern side. Multiple booms echoed through the harbor. They were joined by sharp cracks as massive pieces of shrapnel ripped into the second row of towers, ripping off the tops and sending them into the water as powdery rain. Cracks appeared in the sides of all six silos, some hairline, some like vast geologic fissures. The three most heavily damaged silos on the south surrendered first, dumping sugar and pieces of themselves onto the ground and against the adjoining structures. The impact caused the smaller fractures in the northern towers to expand, bringing them down within seconds.

  In less than a minute, the familiar Maydon Wharf landmarks were six distinct mounds of rubble beneath a cloud of smoke that smelled like roasting marshmallows. Though there were only a few small fires in the wreckage, firefighters rushed to the site to search for survivors. The KwaZulu-Natal Metro Police also arrived to search for clues. The silos were not heavily protected locations, because no one benefited from their destruction.

  Until now.

  SEVEN

  Washington, D.C. Monday, 9:11 A.M.

  Nothing ticked off a career intelligence officer more than not having intelligence. And right now, Op-Center’s intelligence director was extremely ticked off.

  The people who glided past Bob Herbert’s open office door would not have known anything was wrong with the forty-eight-year-old officer. Their quick, questioning glances and hushed conversation suggested they knew there was something amiss at Op-Center, though no one knew exactly what that was. They may have heard rumors from Bugs Benet or seen the new arrival when she strode through the hall. But no one knew what it meant.

  Including Herbert.

  The intelligence chief sat quietly behind his desk in his new, state-of-the-art wheelchair. His expression was neutral. He appeared to be a man very much in control. But physical peace was a hair-trigger c
ondition that rested, like crustal plates, on a molten sea of emotion. And Herbert’s emotions were bubbling.

  Herbert had come to work a half hour before, after spending a long night overseeing the software setup of Op-Center’s lean but crackerjack intelligence division. He had arrived expecting to experience an exciting start-up with his colleagues, the culmination of six months of team effort, Sunrise at Campobello. Instead, Herbert found something much different.

  A few minutes after Herbert had passed the upstairs guard — who logged him as present, information that went to the computers of all the division directors — Bugs Benet called to inform him that there was someone in Paul Hood’s office, a three-star general. A woman. She obviously had the creds to get downstairs, she had an ID card that gave her access to Hood’s office when she swiped it through the lock, and she told Benet to call a meeting of the senior staff for ten A.M. in the Tank, the conference room at Op-Center. Then she shut the office door.

  “That was the last I saw or heard of her,” Benet told Herbert. “I’m calling you first.”

  “Where is Paul?” Herbert asked.

  “At the White House,” Benet said.

  “Oh?” That did not sound good. Washington had a singular way of removing an individual from power and assuring a continuity of command. This was it. “Did you try calling him?”

  “No. That will go on the phone log.” Benet lowered his voice. “If Paul has been dismissed, his security status may have changed. I don’t want to be accused of passing operational data to an outsider.”

  It was a valid point. Paranoid, but valid. Herbert asked to be put through to the general.

  The woman took the call. She introduced herself as General Morgan Carrie, the new director of Op-Center, and said she would brief Herbert and his colleagues at the staff meeting. When Herbert asked what that meant for Paul Hood, she told him she did not have that information and would see him in forty-five minutes.