Michael Usher stormed into the ATTF meeting. “The Polish Navy just boarded a Liberian freighter in Gdańsk,” he said, and waved the NSA transcript in the air. “September 11, 2001 was only the opening salvo in the Global Age of Terror.”
Bliss watched the room filled with terror experts break out into pandemonium.
Usher gestured for quiet and read the report out loud. A tramp freighter taking reconditioned mammography machines to the railhead in St. Petersburg stopped off in Gdańsk to pick up twenty containers of canned cherries. A NATO plane searching for the train noticed the ship oozing radiation and sent a warning to the Gdańsk harbourmaster who refused permission for the ship to dock. When police boarded, they found the ship wired with explosives. “Poland has just kept the world’s largest radiological dispersal device from detonating,” Usher concluded.
“They also found another note: ‘Give us what is ours, then we will return the train and the terror can end.”
“Does it say what ‘ours’ is?” Mackenzie asked.
“Money,” he answered. “They want us to free up bank accounts being held frozen by international law enforcement for having terrorist or organized crime ties.”
“We can’t do that,” Mackenzie said.
“Of course not.”
“If they can threaten us with old x-ray machines, what will they do with the plutonium from the train?” Bliss asked.
14 On the Run