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Karnack had an air force colonel with him, and a civilian in a sport coat and dark slacks whom he introduced as his “political advisor”— which Dan figured was spelled CIA. They sat on one side of the table, leaving the delegation from Bahrain to take the other. Dan added that up: the intelligence-side captain who’d accompanied him from CO-MIDEASTFOR; a Commander Hooker, the base security guy; Diehl, Ar-Rahim, and himself.

Karnack opened a file folder the colonel gave him. “You’re Lenson?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I respect any man who wears the Congressional, but I’m not happy about what happened in Manama. It took too long to get your security force in the water, and you weren’t ready to repel a waterborne attack. Nor were you maintaining proper lookouts.”

“I don’t know who gave you that information, sir, but none of those assertions are correct,” Dan told him. “Did you read our OPREP?”

“And the other reports. You were lucky the Bahrainis took out that dhow before it got close enough to do some serious damage.”

Dan controlled himself. Karnack was still listening; if Dan got emotional he wouldn’t be. “I’d like to respond to those points, sir?”

“You’ll have your chance. The CINC told me this incident’s going to be the subject of a congressional investigation.”

“Congressional,” the captain from COMIDEASTFOR repeated. “I can see a JAG Manual investigation. But bleeding Christ, sir, why congressional? There was no loss of life, no property damage—”

The civilian said, “Same reason we investigated the Khobar Towers bombing. To find our security holes and fix them.”

Dan said the major security hole was that he hadn’t been permitted to be ready to defend himself. The colonel started to interrupt, but Karnack gestured for him to speak.

Dan recounted his initial arming of his patrols and the subsequent orders to pull the weapons off the boats. He’d also requested more security on the pier, but had been told that was a national, meaning local, responsibility. Finally, he recounted how when he got the call warning him a situation was developing, he’d requested permission to respond preemptively but couldn’t get it through the chain of command. “I called away my security teams, armed the boats, and stationed one off my beam as a sanitizer. I sent the other one into the inner harbor under my inherent right of self-defense. As for the Bahrainis stopping the dhow — it was my men who identified it, neutralized it with fire, boarded, and prevented the last of the terrorists left alive from triggering it in the middle of the fishing fleet. And so far I haven’t heard any objection. If there hadn’t been a bomb aboard, though, I’d be hanging by my thumbs. Right?”

“We’re guests in Bahrain,” the colonel said. “We’re guests here in Saudi, too. Arabs are very sensitive about their sovereignty. Don’t ever forget that.”

“Even guests have the right to defend themselves. Especially if we’re here to protect the regimes hosting us.”

“This is a bigger issue than you and your ship, Commander.”

“I understand that, sir,” Dan said. “And I agree, I acted wrongly. What I should have done, in retrospect, was to refuse to stay in a port where the authorities knew a possibility of attack existed, without being permitted reasonable means of protecting my men and women.”

The unspoken point being that Karnack had been responsible for those rules of engagement. From their expressions, he saw they understood, and didn’t like, what he was saying, spoken aloud or not.

Karnack drew an invisible triangle on the tabletop with his fingernail. “Okay, we’ve cleared the air on that issue. Let’s move on. What I want to know is, is there anything new on the dhow’s crew, the weapons, who built the bomb? Who’s behind it, and who they’re linked to?”

Hooker started to outline what they had, but Karnack cut him off with a shake of his head. “What I’m really interested in is this doctor figure. He sounds like the traveling mastermind, the outside expertise.”

“He designs a hell of an interesting bomb,” the civilian said.

“We’d like to know more about him, too,” Diehl said. He was the only person there who didn’t seem intimidated by three stars. He patted his paunch like an old dog. “Unfortunately, he’s disappeared. None of the captured plotters know who he is or where he went. At least, according to the SIS.”

The civilian in the sport coat said, “We think he’s Egyptian, but currently based out of Sudan. He may be with the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the group that assassinated Sadat. So he’s probably been at this a while. He escaped across the causeway to Saudi in a light-colored 1992 Mercedes S-class.”

“So that’s the Sudanese connection,” the captain said, looking enlightened.

“How do you know that?” Hooker demanded. “The Bahrainis don’t know any of that, do they? Because they sure as hell didn’t tell us.”

“He was traveling on a diplomatic passport.”

“How do we know—”