"Bolan, Mack - Stony Man 35 - Message To America" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bolan Mack)

pect vessel in international waters off the Canary Is-
lands. During an intense close-quarters firefight, the
Phoenix team had killed eighteen of the twenty-man
crew; only the captain and first mate survived the as-
sault. A search of the hold turned up four pounds of
high-grade fissionable material, still in its Russian-
marked, lead-lined safety container. Before Gary
Manning set off the explosive charges that blew the
bottom out of the ship, scuttling it in two hundred
fathoms of water, Rafael Encizo sent out a garbled
distress call in Spanish. When rescuers arrived at the
scene three hours later, other than debris that had
drifted over a wide area, there was no sign of the
cargo ship or its crew. All were presumed lost in an
unexplained accident at sea.
For the first five days of around-the-clock interro-
gation by Phoenix Force, the captain and his first mate
had refused to confirm what the Stony Man cyber
squad had already uncovered from its review of sat-
ellite and radio intelligence: there had been contact
between the Panamanian cargo ship and an uniden-
tified small fishing trawler in the North Atlantic. On
the sixth day, the mate gave up the nationality, port
and name of the trawler. A further check showed that
the Varuskya Liset was owned by a relative of a high-
ranking Russian military officer. The officer had
known connections to the Chechen mafia and to Ser-
gio Ishmael Eshamani, as well as access to nuclear
stockpiles.

The Panamanian cargo ship, on the other hand, had
no link, direct or indirect, to the arms merchant. It
turned out to be the leased property of the Libyan
government. Which led Kurtzman and the others to
conclude that the Soviet cesium had already been
bought and paid for. Because the ship had gone down,
Libya had lost its entire investment, on the order of
tens of millions of dollars--something that had to
have strained the relationship between buyer and mid-
dleman. Accordingly Stony Man considered it un-
likely that Libya was the customer for the Riga ma-
terial. As the ship had sunk without witnesses,
apparently by accident, Eshamani could not know the
jeopardy his operation was in.
Phoenix Force's recovery of the cesium had fanned
the White House's fear that Eshamani planned to es-
tablish a global pipeline for Soviet nuclear contra-
band. That was something the President wanted
stopped at all costs, the buyers and sellers neutralized,
any nukes or material seized or destroyed. Surveil-