The Command полностью

When she finally dared to reach up and unfasten it, she was alone. Her purse lay at her feet. The good news was her badge was still there. The bad, that the SIG was gone.

By the time she got back to her car her tears were crumbs of salt on her cheeks. She rubbed them off, threw the chador in the backseat, and drove straight to the roundabout in the center of the city.

The madrassa was the same futuristic, kitschy, Saudi-financed white concrete she was beginning to really dislike. A figure stepped from the entrance as she approached, trotting off into the night. When she tried the handle, it was unlocked.

She hesitated in the entryway. Fighting the urge to go back to her apartment and chain the door forever. Then sucked air past a self-mocking smile. Her job was too boring? She never got to do any real counterterrorism?

She took a breath and eased the door open. An empty hallway. She tiptoed down it, easing her feet down on the carpet, until she came to the door with the number eight on it. Looked inside, warily, then switched the light on.

Just a classroom. No pictures on the walls. Only a table of the elements. She slid the drawer of the teacher’s desk out. Chalk. Pencils. A photocopied sheaf that turned out to be the answer key for a chemistry final. Yeah, there were probably people who’d kill for this. But they were all in high school.

Then her gaze steadied. Remembering a surge suppressor in a wall socket, a blank space on a tabletop.

A Sanyo desktop, not new, not old, plastic case slightly yellowed. It was set up with a battered-looking monitor. She looked underneath. It was plugged in.

Using the eraser end of one of the pencils, she turned the monitor on, then the computer. It powered up, but froze on the Sanyo screen. Which meant the boot sector on the hard drive was erased or inoperative.

Which in turn meant either that it was broken or that whoever had sat at it last had reformatted it.

Suddenly she wished she still had her gun. She didn’t want to be found here. She almost took the computer, but remembered: chain of custody. She turned the light off, closed the door, and went quietly out and down the corridor and out into the street.

Her shaking fingers groped in her purse for a coin. There it was. A pay phone. Diehl, answering. “Yeah? Aisha, that you?”

“It’s me,” she said. “And I think we just got a break.”

A Horn mile was five times around the main deck, through the star board breaker, the forecastle, down the side. Each time he went through the port breaker the smokers flattened themselves against the fire station. Marchetti and Hotchkiss were running, too. Nothing prearranged, they just happened to be out here. He only saw the senior chief occasionally, which meant they were doing about the same pace. He lapped the exec every couple of circuits, though.

Horn cut with a steady pitching whine through a sea that glowed like the green phosphorescent fluid that filled light wands. They were out of sight of land, had not glimpsed it all through the last week. Though once, to the south, distant clouds had hovered over what might have been land. That way lay the Egyptian coast, and Port Said, the by-now-familiar entrance to what navy men called the Ditch. To the west lay Alexandria. But both cities lay over the horizon, though identifiable on the surface search radar.

Nor had they seen Moosbrugger all week. Dan had placed her in the northern half of the box. The two destroyers maintained a close radar watch and kept their electronic surveillance and signals intelligence stacks manned. They were looking for a motor vessel, no name available as yet, nor even any description, that was suspected of preparing to get under way from somewhere in the eastern Med. Nothing further was available, neither its destination, its intended course, its cargo, or its nationality, and “somewhere in the eastern Med” covered a lot of territory. But those were his orders. So he put aircraft up early each morning and just before dusk, to sweep the approaches and visually identify any suspicious contacts. All in all, it was a lot less stressful than steaming in close company with the task force, and he’d let the crew relax. Five section steaming watches. A cookout on the fantail. Early movies on the ship’s closed circuit TV.

He came up on Marchetti, who was starting to lumber, and after a couple of false starts — the senior chief kept blocking him — took him going around the Sparrow launcher. Back here the wind was fresh, and the soar and drop of the deck made him stagger.