Authors: Alan Zendell
I slept so soundly I didn’t hear Ilene’s alarm clock. She was in the shower when I opened my eyes, which gave me a chance to verify that it was Friday, and to check the mirror on our bedroom wall before she saw me. She’d already been through the shock of seeing my face messed up on Wednesday night and miraculously healed Thursday morning.
Friday morning, the right side of my face was peeling as if from a bad sunburn. The flash of the explosion had cost me a couple of layers of skin, but the burn wasn’t critical and the treatment I received in the ER had limited the damage. The scabs, which had still looked pretty raw on Wednesday night, (nine hours ago, for me) were drying out. None of that surprised me, but I knew Ilene would be upset when she saw my face, even though intellectually, if she thought it through she shouldn’t be surprised, either. The crucial question was whether the fact that my face still bore the evidence of the injuries I’d suffered on Thursday meant that my efforts on Wednesday night to convince William to change his tactics had failed.
The only way to find out was to call him. Now? At six in the morning? I wasn’t concerned about waking him, but what would I say? “Hi, William, I just wanted to ask whether the bloodbath at Howland Hook, yesterday, actually happened?” There was so much about this that I didn’t know how to handle. I decided to wait a while and see if he called me. He’d have to if he’d bought my proposal.
I was about to check the news when the bathroom door opened, and Ilene, wearing only a towel draped around her neck, stepped into the bedroom. Suddenly nothing mattered but her. She saw me staring into the mirror, but only my left profile was visible from where she stood.
“You’re up…,” she began, stopping when I turned so she could see the rest of my face. The only sound I heard was from her sudden intake of breath as she raised one hand to her mouth. She recovered quickly, crossing the ten feet that separated us into my outstretched arms. We stood that way, skin against skin, thigh to shoulder until I almost thought our bodies had merged. Words could never have expressed how we felt with the simple eloquence of our physical contact. I hated letting her go, but…
“Come, sit with me,” I said, drawing her to the bed. We perched on the end facing each other. There were a hundred things I wanted to say, but I couldn’t speak. I needed to look at her, touch her, feel her soft strength. It was as intense as the first time we made love, as intense but very different. The physical act seemed to embody everything we’d felt for each other in more than twenty-five years together, the preciousness of our marriage, the strength of our partnership.
Later, we lay next to each other, spent, glistening with each other’s sweat, struggling not to fall back to sleep. Ilene shook herself. “I’m going to be late, and so are you.”
“What if you waited a few hours to go in, today?”
“Really?”
“We have a lot of catching up to do. Fuck security protocols, I’m done shutting you out. Besides, I need you.”
“You’re sure?”
“I am, but you get a vote, too. Opening up to you could put you in considerable legal jeopardy. And you’d be bound by the rules I’ve been living with. You wouldn’t be able to tell anyone what you knew.”
“What about Jerry?”
“We’ll have to be careful and finesse what we say to him. I’m certain, now, that living days out of order isn’t a delusion. You must be too after this week, so we don’t need him for that. But I’d like to keep him involved. He’s perceptive and he’s a straight shooter. Having him there, being skeptical about everything, will force us to think through every step we take. I realized, watching what you were going through this week, that having someone like him there who knew the situation might make it easier for you, too. Let’s go to our appointment this afternoon and figure out how to keep him in the loop.”
I told Jim I’d been called in before I left on Thursday; he’d assume I was with my unit if I didn’t show up, today. Ilene left a few voice messages while I showered and then I told her about William, the unit,
Al Khalifa
, and how Thursday and Wednesday had played out from my point of view. “I need to find out if my conversation with William Wednesday night changed things, but I can’t just call and ask. Was there anything on the news last night about an explosion at a marine terminal?”
“No, nothing. What do you think that means?”
I wasn’t even sure I’d asked the right question. Would her Thursday night reflect what had happened on my Thursday or the Thursday that existed after my conversation with William?
“Maybe nothing. The terminal is pretty isolated, and even though the blast was impressive from a couple of hundred feet away, it’s possible no one but the people on the pier noticed, and most of them were either the ship’s crew or federal and local law enforcement. It wouldn’t have been hard for the feds to keep a lid on things.”
“What about the people at St. Vincent’s?”
“The Agency would have clamped a security clearance on the affair and passed it off as a shipping accident. The whole thing could be under the media’s radar.”
Ilene was quiet, clearly struggling with something.
“What are you thinking?”
“The explosion must have occurred the way you remember it. Why else would your face still be a mess?”
I’d been thinking about that, too. “I don’t think what happened on your Thursday would have affected my injuries. From my point of view, Thursday happened the way I remember it; there’s no changing that or the way it impacted me. I’m pretty sure I’d still have these marks on my face regardless of what happened on your Thursday. It all makes a strange kind of sense if you think of linear cause and effect. But I still need to know if what I said to William on Wednesday night changed anything else.”
We talked about how we could find out what had happened to
Al Khalifa.
“We could drive to the terminal and have a look,” she said.
“Only as a last resort, and you can forget the ‘we.’ Even if I was sure it was safe, you can’t go anywhere near there.”
“What about that website you used?”
My brain must still have been sluggish. That should have been the first thing I thought of. Ilene watched me bring up the site. A message alert in a flashing border appeared on the home page. “The Howland Hook Marine Terminal is closed. See below for relocated berthing assignments.”
We searched the list that followed.
Al Khalifa
was conspicuously absent.
Ilene and I just looked at each other. “He didn’t listen to you,” she said, then grabbed my shoulders. “What is it, Dylan?”
My face must have turned ashen.
“Samir. He might be dead.”
“You could call St. Vincent’s.”
“St. Vincent’s! God, Ilene, it’s Friday morning. They’re probably searching for me.”
“I could take you back. There’s probably a lot of confusion with all those casualties. Let them see that you’re okay and find out about your friends. Then sign a release and I’ll just ‘show up’ and take you home.”
By then, I had a pot of coffee brewing and Ilene had turned on CNN. They were doing one of their silly spin debates, two senators with opposing views on the federal budget shouting at each other, neither saying anything he hadn’t said dozens of times before. Then, one of the anchors said, “I’m being told we have video from a local New York newscopter. We’ve been talking about the pillar of black smoke rising from Newark Bay just north of Staten Island all morning. We can see it from our offices here in lower Manhattan, but no one’s been able to get close until now.”
The picture switched to a live feed from a helicopter holding position over the water, just west of Bergen Point. A cargo ship was mostly submerged in shallow water about a quarter mile off shore, leaning heavily to stern, its bow sticking up out of the water at about a thirty degree angle, black smoke pouring from every opening. So much for my theory that no one would notice if the tug blew up.
“We have orders to stay back from the ship,” came the audio from the helicopter. “The Harbor Patrol says the only reason it’s still above water is that its stern came to rest on a submerged sand bar, and there’s air in its forward compartments. The captain and crew were taken off two hours ago. They’re being held at Ellis Island.”
Fire boats were shooting streams of water at the ship from three sides. The burned out shell of a tugboat was still drifting close to shore. Through the smoke I recognized Howland Hook in the background. I couldn’t make out the name of the ship, but I didn’t have to.
The local news team thanked the pilot and the picture from the helicopter remained in a window on the screen, while in another, a jowly, red-faced man who looked like he’d been awake all night appeared. The graphic below him said, “Deputy Port Authority Commissioner, Peter O’Shaughnessy.”
An off-screen reporter was speaking. “What can you tell us about this, Commissioner?”
“We don’t know much at this point, Bill. Apparently, a freighter loaded with containers was being towed to its berth when one of the tugs accidentally rammed it, triggering an explosion. The ship was severely damaged, and you can see the result.”
“Any idea what caused the explosion?”
“We’ll be investigating that thoroughly, but it appears to have been an accident. The tug may have been carrying unsecured fuel drums that ignited on impact.”
“Do you have any reason to suspect terrorist activity?”
“None. I’m afraid that’s all I can tell you right now.”
I turned it off. They’d probably replay the helicopter footage and the interview all morning until the instant Nielsens told them people were tuning out.
“What do you make of that?” Ilene said.
“That guy might as well have been reading from a script. The feds are obviously controlling things. They’ll play it just like I said.”
“It looks like William listened to you, but they couldn’t prevent the sabotage of the ship.”
“Now that it’s on the news, I should be hearing from him shortly.”
As if on cue, my phone rang ten minutes later, and I was given the address for a secure Internet video conference. I lowered the lights so my battered face was barely discernable in its window on the screen. The others displayed William, Mary, Samir, (looking just as I’d seen him a week earlier,) and two men I didn’t know. One, a gruff-looking character in a black suit, was Carlton Manzone, William’s superior in the Agency. The other, who sat grim-faced and never spoke during the entire conference, was from Homeland Security in Washington. I forgot his name the minute the conference ended.
William did most of the talking. Without mentioning my Wednesday night phone call, he laid out the approach I’d tried to sell him. A trio of harbor patrol boats had been deployed Thursday morning to prevent
Al Khalifa
from docking, but late Thursday afternoon, Homeland Security intervened. They finally issued the impound order, informing the Captain that his ship would be escorted to its berth before dawn Friday morning. He and his crew were to disembark and undergo interrogation. When the ship had been berthed and the crew removed, we’d have been called in to search the ship under heavy security, but it had been blown up before it docked.
Mary said intercepted Internet chatter and cell phone calls confirmed that the explosion hadn’t been accidental. Someone didn’t want the ship searched. The conference went on a while longer with Manzone taking a few questions and then William said he’d be contacting Mary, Samir, and me individually within the hour.
When he called, he was as humble as I’d ever heard him. “Thanks to you, we weren’t on that ship when the tug went up.”
Close enough. There was no point in correcting him.
William said once the fire was out, the ship would be fitted with a floatation collar and towed to the Caddell Dry Dock, a couple of miles east of Howland Hook, about the same distance from where the hull’s rear end was now resting on the sandbar. The containers would be offloaded, and Samir and I would conduct a search for radioactive isotopes. The operation was expected to take several days; he’d let me know when.
Ilene was excited afterward. “You did it, Dylan. You saved them.”
“I guess I did. The only one I didn’t save was me,” I said, grimacing.
“About that,” she said, “it’s like last week when you were able to change some things, but not others. I wonder if I’ll ever get used to this. How does this square with your theory of significant events?”
“I’ve been trying to work that out since we saw the ship on TV this morning. If I’m right, blowing up the ship has serious repercussions downstream, so I couldn’t change that. But my unit’s presence on the pier, and the timing and location of the ship when the tug exploded were all localized events with respect to the time stream. They may have seriously impacted the families of the people who were hurt, but they had little or no impact other than that.”
“How can that be?”
“It’s like ripples in a pond. A pebble dropped in the middle of a lake would cause very small waves that damp out very quickly as they radiate outward from the point of impact. A couple of people being killed are like larger stones; they create bigger wave fronts but the effects still fade away before they reach the shore. But the bombing of the ship would be like dropping a small mountain into the lake. The resulting waves would inundate everything on the shore.”