Chapter 8

Southern Florida

Clara was waiting under the bridge, with a view of the east-bound lanes of Alligator Alley, when the two MI6 cars passed over. She didn’t know if they’d discovered her laser ruse, and never thought of going back to her hide to find out. The time since she’d swum out was probably not sufficient for them to have taken a thorough look. Oh yes. The Later Gator would be an additional reason they would not have crossed the canal to look carefully.

When the cars had passed, she looked for Georg’s truck. She pried the lower part of her wet suit legs away from her skin to let the accumulated pee out. On one hand she thought that Georg deserved to enjoy the smell in the truck, a larger part of her wanted to be rid of her own wastes. The truck pulled over to the shoulder of the road at the agreed time: about five minutes after the Brits had passed. She quickly dumped the waterproof packs into the back of the Silverado, and climbed into the passenger area of the pickup.

Georg took a sniff of the air and commented, “Sorry about that. If we do this again, we shall provide a better way to deal with the toilet issues.”

“Do you know how hard it is to pee in your pants when you have trained yourself for a lifetime to avoid doing just that?” Clara pretended to be semi-angry. She was almost giddy now that the stress of the encounter was past.

“It is something you can get used to, you know.”

“But why would you ever want to?” She was chuckling now.

On the way back to the motel, she filled him in on all the information she had gleaned from the boys at MI6. Not that they provided so much information.

Georg said, “Well, it makes some sense. A nuclear device, exploding in the other USA – the Union of South Africa – could have a tie-in to the Israelis. And that would have repercussions all over the Middle East, if not the world.”

Clara wanted to keep her eye on what she viewed as her mission. She didn’t really want to get the Mossad involved in any way. “So where can we begin to look for Nin?”

G: “They did not provide any information on the route that Mr. Antonin might take to get to South Africa?”

C: “No. I had to keep it specific to the mission. I could not seem interested in where he might be. Just that he was missing his check-ins.”

G: “There are hundreds of routes he could have taken. The most likely, I think, is to go through North Africa, to try and get a lead on where specifically it’s going to be detonated.”

C: “North Africa is an awfully big place. There is no chance he could get info from the terrorists. He’s an Israeli, not Arab. He couldn’t take the time, and there wasn’t time to get inside the group. To turn somebody. That’s if he could even identify which group it is or where they were hiding. That would take weeks.”

G: “No. It would take a lot of months.”

C: “I got the feeling from the Brits that this was a seat of the pants, quickie job. Otherwise they’d have more information and probably use their own agents.”

G: “Yes, I agree. I doubt that they think their mission would succeed. But they had to do something. Hence hiring an outside contractor. Mr. Antonin was expendable from their point of view.”

C: “Nice people, these spy boys.”

G: “Some aren’t so bad. Some are worse. MI6 is usually somewhere in the middle.”

She took her robe into the shower and came out, washed and mostly dried in five minutes.

C: “So where do we start?”

G: “The bomb. If they are going to smuggle a nuclear bomb into South Africa, it has to come by ship. That could be from Casablanca or Rabat or Tunis. Though ... they are too difficult; they’d have to smuggle it in from whatever their real source is before they could trans-ship to South Africa. The government is unfriendly in Morocco and Tunisia. Algiers is a possibility, but where would they get fissile material? The ports in Libya are a mess after Gadaffi’s death. That leaves Alexandria, on the Med side. Of course, the easy solution is a ship out of Bandar Abbas in Iran. They have the goods and control the port.”

C: “You think we should head for Iran?” She sounded dubious.

G: “You anticipate me. You would look cute in a burka, although we’d have you in brown contacts. And if we get caught, we could sell you to the highest bidder.”

He was polishing his glasses with a perfectly innocent expression.

G: “But seriously, no. I cannot imagine Mr. Antonin went to Iran, and even less can I imagine either of us making any progress at all there – even if we could arrange travel.”

C: “That leaves everything out – except Alexandria. How long would it take to ship something from Alexandria to South Africa?”

G: “Perhaps a week, or a week and a half. But we have no idea when to start that countdown.”

C: “You know, Georg, if you thought that we should start in South Africa, you could have saved us all this trouble.”

G: “Oh, Miss. It is always my pleasure to discuss things with you. This way, you are more sure of the decision. And if I had just said ‘Let’s go to the USA’, we would have to have had an even more lengthy discussion than this. In fact...”

C: “Georg! Enough already. The only thing we have about South Africa is that the United States has a SEAL Team doing nobody-knows-what off the east coast. Should we head there?”