Free Allah's Scorpion by David Hagberg

had help from inside? ” Gloria asked.
    Rencke shrugged. “It’s starting to look that way, especially with what I came up with this morning just before you got here.”
    “Whose system did you hack this time?” McCann asked, but Adkins held him off.
    “You have our attention, Otto,” the DCI prompted.
    “The five guys they sprung had been transferred from the main prison population in Delta to minimum security outside the fence at Echo that morning,” Rencke said.
    “Whoever signed the order is our man,” McCann said.
    “It ain’t that easy, kimo sabe.” Rencke shook his head. “Those guys weren’t al-Quaida, at least they weren’t directly fighting our troops in Afghanistan. They were Iranians that a Marine patrol ran into just across the border a few klicks inside Afghanistan. Way south, near the Pakistani border. They said they were lost.”
    “It’s no secret that the Iranians sent people to help the Taliban,” McCann said.
    “Navy officers?” Rencke asked. “Four hundred miles from the Gulf of Oman?”
    All of a sudden it was beginning to make sense to Gloria. The Cuban help, the Gitmo contact, the transfer of prisoners. Even what they’d been doing inside Afghanistan, but very near to Pakistan.
    “What the hell were they doing there?” McCann demanded.
    Gloria interrupted. “Which way were they headed?”
    “Northwest,” Rencke said.
    “I’ll tell you what they were doing there,” Gloria told them. “Trying to get back to Iran after meeting with bin Laden.”
    McCann and the others had skeptical looks on their faces, but Rencke was beaming, practically bouncing off the chair.
    “Continue,” Adkins said.
    “Either bin Laden called them across to parley, or the Iranians offered, but it was just plain bad luck on their part that they were caught,” Gloria said. “They were so important that al-Quaida was willing to risk its assets in Gitmo to get them out. But if something went wrong they had to be killed.”
    It dawned on everyone else what she and Rencke were getting at.
    “Are you trying to say that the bastards want to hit us by sea?” McCann asked.
    “It’s something we gotta think about,” Rencke replied. “They could hijack a container ship after it’s cleared its outbound port.”
    “That’s not out of the realm of possibility,” Adkins said. “It’s happened before.” He looked at the others. “We all remember the incident under the Golden Gate Bridge two years before 9/11.”
    Al-Quaida had smuggled a small Russian-built nuclear demolitions device aboard a cargo ship bound for San Francisco. It had been set to explode while the presidential motorcade was crossing the bridge ahead of more than one thousand Special Olympians participating in a half-marathon.
    “If it hadn’t have been for Mac, the president and a whole lot of people would have lost their lives.”
    “There’s a lot tighter port security just about everywhere these days,” McCann said.
    Rencke shrugged. “Okay, so maybe they could rendezvous with a private yacht somewhere offshore and load just about anything imaginable. From there they’d be virtually unstoppable.”
    “We know the shipping lanes, we could watch them by satellite,” McCann argued.
    “We know the shipping lanes, but they know our technical means schedules,” Rencke countered. “We can’t watch every piece of ocean 24/7. It just ain’t possible.”
    Gloria’s gut was twisted into a knot. She’d been stationed at the UN, and was at her desk in the American Delegation’s headquarters across the street when the first airliner struck the World Trade Center. She’d been
within a block of ground zero, helping with rescue operations when the first tower had collapsed. The following days and weeks had been made more surreal by the fact that she and a lot of other people had known that something big was on the wind.
    They’d been so damned helpless. There was so much data coming in that it was impossible to process and