In this “second century” of sub operations, the big boats like Mush Morton’s were relegated to deterrence by guaranteeing the nuclear annihilation of any would-be aggressor. To insure that mission, they needed to survive. In subs, that meant remaining undetected. Not so easy when prowling the ocean in something almost as long as a fifty-six-story skyscraper is tall, and forty-two feet wide, containing the men, equipment, nuclear weapons and power plants to move the whole eighteen thousand metric tons of the thing at a classified speed exceeding thirty knots. They ran extremely silent and they ran very deep. For that reason, Mush wasn’t used to getting flash traffic in the middle of his ‘hide and seek’ peacetime patrols, and the order he now held in his hands was as sketchy as they come. Simply stated and without the usual naval syntax, he was tasked to steam at flank speed to grid I-7 on the map and look for anything unusual. That was it. No inkling of what he would or should be looking for. As far as he could remember, this would be the first time an SSBN was looking for something instead of trying not to be killed by something looking for it.
Back at fleet, the rear admiral who was Commander Submarine Force Pacific was not sure either. All they had was a directive from the White House and some mission runner asking for assistance. But ComSubPac was also part of the National Command Authority and this D.C. controller, code-named “Halfback,” was invoking the highest level of priority.
∞§∞
Brooke was alternately dipping herself over the side for heat relief and rolling on to the craft to ward off the chill from the Pacific. She had lost feeling in her toes; rubbing them helped get the circulation going somewhat. Dehydration was her big enemy now. She hadn’t had anything to drink for twenty hours and had been baking in the sun for half that time. Her mouth was dry, and the occasional salt spray stung her cracked lips. As she had learned in the rugged survival course when she was qualifying to be an FBI agent, her last hope was to capture her urine and filter it through cloth, such as her shirt. She had started unbuckling her pants when she heard a sound. A swoosh of air, about five hundred yards off; something, maybe a whale, had breached the surface. Over the wave caps, she glimpsed a huge grey hulk in the water. Her eyes were salt-burned and she squinted and rolled them wide open in an attempt to squeegee off the stinging salt, but she still couldn’t focus. Then she saw a glint; something metallic had reflected the sun’s light. A ship! Brooke started yelling, but to her surprise, only a squeak came out of her parched throat. She grabbed the rifle strap from around the shaft and lifted the weapon out of the water, where it wouldn’t corrode as fast. She shook out the water in the barrel then pointed it in the air and let out three, three-shot bursts. Although deafening to her, from her low angle, the sound quickly dispersed across the wave crests, each robbing the sound of a bit of the acoustic power the gun had generated. The scores of waves between her and the boat had each reduced the sound level to a point that, when it reached the conning tower of the Nebraska, was little more than a burble masked by the wave splash against the hull.
With no change in the direction or activity, the hulk continued to pull away from her. She decided to try one last-ditch effort. She switched to full-automatic and tried something she hoped would increase the effective range of the ubiquitous Russian weapon she had studied at Quantico. She emptied the entire magazine as she shot upward, arcing the gun toward the hulk. The rifle couldn’t hit the boat with a straight shot, but she hoped that by whipping the rifle and arcing the shots into the air, they would gain distance, like an artillery shell. The mag emptied in fewer than four seconds and along with it her ability to defend herself or signal any other passing ship.
And then there was silence.
Now she was truly alone.
∞§∞
Mush and his exec officer were manning the bridge when five distinct plinks turned the men around. Using the binoculars, they focused on the aft deck of the sub. Three dimples in the hull were highlighted as a bullet rolled around in one of them. “Sir, I think somebody just shot at us.”
“Hank, I believe you’re right.” He leaned into the voice-powered interphone. “Helm, come around one-eighty, I want a fix on a point five hundred yards off our stern and I want to be there two minutes ago.”
“Aye, aye. Coming about, sir.”
“Stand by for battle surface. Weps, I want the two fifty calibers manned, now. We might have pirates out here.”
“Deck guns on the way, sir.” The weapons officer said.
“Now who’s got the balls to fire on a U.S. Navy warship?” Mush said over the sounding klaxon horn as he scanned the stern, pivoting to keep his sights on a particular patch of water that was rapidly coming around to his prow.
Brooke could see the boat turning now and she made out the conning tower jutting out of the water and its lookouts on the main mast. She tried to fight it, but a small cry welled up inside her. As the relief flowed from her chest in heaves, and tears washed the salt from her eyes, she thanked God. In a minute, she was checking herself; she reached around her back, arching her torso as she attempted to smooth out the crumpled back of her blouse.
“Is that what I think it is?” Mush said, adjusting the focus of his binoculars.
“It’s been a long time, but not that long, skipper. That… is a woman! A well-built woman…”
Mush commanded into the interphone, “I want a recovery team on the deck now with blankets, and alert sick bay we got a survivor coming aboard.”
From the front hatch on the foredeck of the Nebraska four men emerged with grappling poles, heaving lines and stretchers. Each man clipped his lifeline to the receded buckles on the edge of the decking, lest they be inadvertently in need of rescue themselves due to a rogue wave or flailing subject.
Chief Boatswain Murray couldn’t believe what he was seeing: a woman in a wet white blouse, hanging on to an overturned Zodiac in the middle of the Pacific. You couldn’t make this stuff up.
The captain had made his way down to the bow where Mr. Murray was hanging off the edge as he reached down to the woman. The other men stood gaping. She was a stunner, and she was coming onboard in a transparent manner. Mush quickly stepped forward, covered her with a blanket, and got her down onto the stretcher. She coughed out a “thank you.” The other men quickly snapped out of it and all helped carry the stretcher below and into sickbay.
Mush looked up at the bridge and shrugged his shoulders to his exec, who returned the shrug, both thinking the same thing — How do we put this one in the logbook? Then he ordered, “Weps below, clear the deck, I don’t like being exposed like this. Pull the cork, Hank!”
Executive Officer Evans hit the dive alarm and barked over the wailing horn, “Lookouts below! Clear the bridge.” He waited for Mush to get below and watched the forward hatch wheel turn, indicating it was watertight sealed; then he lowered himself into the bridge hatch yelling, “Dive. Dive. Dive.”
∞§∞
“We got her!” Joey Palumbo blurted out as he barged into Bill Hiccock’s White House office.
“Oh, thank God, where was she?”
Joey handed Bill the communiqué with the confirming data. “Floating on a raft in the South Pacific, about three miles from the sinking.”
“She okay?”
“She’s banged up and bruised but she is alive and we should know more after she gets some rest.”
“We got lucky on this one, Joe.”
“She’s not the best of the best for nothing, Hic,” Joey said as he left to make arrangements for Brooke to be ferried back from Midway on a SAM flight direct to Andrews.
Hiccock sat back, his broad shoulders finding the wings of his too-comfortable desk chair, and breathed a sigh of relief. This, his first “op,” had almost bitten the dust. Joey was right; Brooke Burrell had distinguished herself many times in her illustrious FBI career for Bill or for an operation Bill was involved with. Bill glanced down at the two platinum five-point stars most people wrongly assumed were paperweights. This woman was a star
in her own right, which was the reason he had agreed to this cockamamie “ops” idea when Joey came up with it.
The whole affair started out as a miscue by the modern day descendants of the Barbary Coast Pirates that had plagued the world’s shipping lanes two hundred years earlier. Although today they used “Go Fasts,” swift, small boats armed only with AK-47s and rocket grenades, their tactics were the same. Board unsuspecting, unarmed, civilian and commercial ships and rip off whatever they could from the crew’s personal belongings and wallets, to whatever else was on board they could fence on the open market.
Occasionally there was bloodshed or a kidnapping, but that brought unwanted attention and military responses that hurt their operational ability and profit, so for the most part the attacks were generally scaled to below the point where the international community would make an effort to muster a counter-force. Until recently, the world collectively yawned upon news of another pirate attack.
However, not long ago a group of pirates triggered an international incident, when they took on an innocent-looking Maltese freighter trying to navigate the Strait of Gibraltar, and stumbled onto an illegal shipment of nuclear material supposedly from the Uzbekistan arsenal. The world’s intelligence agencies had accumulated enough intelligence over the years to know that a former Russian general, with deep connections to the Moscow black market, had commandeered these nuclear components in the confusion that followed the break-up of the USSR.
Meanwhile, pundits, news agencies, and governments all over the globe speculated in support or denial of the public allegations made by the NATO powers that the barely seaworthy rusting hulk held Russian nuclear contraband destined for some unstable regime with deep pockets and shallow restraint.
The political effect of all this was that American and NATO warships burned millions of gallons of fuel just hanging around the freighter. The most powerful military force on earth was held impotent by the political realities of doing what the U.S. Navy was first commissioned to do by Jefferson in 1801: seek out and kill pirates. Two centuries later, the strongest armada in the world and its allies just lumbered two hundred yards from the rusting, floating violation, while their well-trained SEAL teams were specifically prohibited from donning so much as a bait knife.
The crisis was eventually resolved violently when a Russian destroyer sank the ship after an alleged rocket grenade attack from the pirate-held freighter. Although every intelligence service in the world knew it had been sunk to bury the evidence that Russia couldn’t control its nuclear material, the public swallowed the attack story.
There it would have ended, except for something that came across Hiccock’s top-secret network a week later. Presidential Science Advisor Doctor William Jennings Hiccock created an intranet network of scientists. He dubbed the network Scientific Community Involved America’s Defense, or SCIAD for short. Modeling it on the atom, it had two rings. The closer in Element ring had 92 members. These were top-secret scientists cleared for any sensitive information. The second Compound ring had 300 members with just as prodigious brains but somewhat less-than-squeaky-clean clearances, so they received redacted non-top-secret data. Bill was known as “Nucleus,” and all information — speculation, theory and predictions — came to him.
A compound member of the network was approached to see if the Saudi company he worked for was interested in obtaining barium crucibles.
It was a suspicious request, in that it was an early chunk of nuclear technology, more consistent with the Russian method of creating a bomb, as opposed to the American, Chinese, Indian or Pakistani process. Bill immediately realized that the general, who had remarkably evaded any fallout from the freighter affair, was still at it, trying to sell off even more nuclear hardware. It was then that Joey Palumbo, his trusted head of security and a former FBI agent, came up with the plan to set up a buy for the hardware, ‘drug-deal’ style.
Over the objections of the CIA, which proposed assassinating the general, Hiccock got presidential operational authority to run a mission with the objective of acquiring these crucibles to determine if, in fact, they were from the Uzbekistan stockpile. If they were, it could be a golden chit to play in the international game of poker in which the U.S. and other powers were enmeshed. That was the president’s goal and the basis for his buy-in, but for Hiccock it was all about pure, defensive science: Stop those things from getting into the wrong hands.
For the delicate role of point person in this shady deal, Joey Palumbo, the former FBI special agent, now assigned to Hiccock’s White House Quarterback group, tapped another FBI agent, one who had distinguished herself in many tight spots as an effective operator and one who’s loyalty was beyond reproach. Her command of Farsi didn’t hurt either. He sold Bill on using Brooke Burrell under double-blind deep covers as the purchasing agent for an interested Middle-Eastern party willing to spend heavily to gain a membership in to the world’s nuclear club.
Two very careful and elaborate backgrounds were established for Brooke. One was thin and meant to be discovered; the other, the foundation cover was solid and thick and hid Brooke’s true identity as a U.S. Agent. Her thick cover was Fiona Haran, a high-up arms merchant who was masquerading as her second, thin identity, Roan Perth, an insurance investigator. Brooke had to memorize the details of both identities to cover her real mission of getting the crucibles for America to study while blocking the bad guys from getting their hands on them.
Throughout many meetings in Europe and the Middle East, Brooke, traveling as Roan Perth, was able to arrange a meeting with the general’s men. It did not take long for these intermediaries to pierce the thin cover story and land on the thick one: that Roan was, in fact, Fiona Haran. Oddly, that fact actually gave them confidence. Fiona’s position as a known arms merchant exclusively working for an oil-backed sect ensured that the money would be ample and good. So they let Fiona believe she was successful in hiding her identity. It also gave the general a negotiating edge; he would decide to reveal her deception or continue playing along depending on what strategic or financial advantage either direction afforded him at the time.
It had all been going well until the op center lost her trail last Wednesday in a Maltese coastal town. They had only picked up her beacon again, in the western edge of the Indian Ocean, an hour before whatever happened, happened. Bill looked down at the communiqué. He reread the line, “Rescued one shipwreck survivor, white Caucasian female, from water.” It gave him a momentary chill. It might not be Brooke.
∞§∞
Brooke awoke in a bunk looking up at the distinctive architecture of the riveted bulkhead above her. The room smelled of metal, oil and men. She was on a ship. She felt her cheek and found a bandage covering it and a bandage covering the hand she used to inspect it. She looked down and saw she was wearing a blue pajama set. ‘USS Nebraska’ was stenciled across the pocket over her right breast. She remembered her knee and lifted the covers; she instinctively went to bend it and found it hard to move because it was wrapped in a Velcro bandage. There was a gentle whirring sound that came from everywhere; “Power plant,” she thought. She became aware of the sound of a click every few seconds. She followed a tube up from her other arm to an IV; the drip controlled by a machine that ticked as it released whatever they were mixing in it and pumping into her.
“Hello,” she called out.
A few seconds later, a young blonde-haired man in an ensign’s uniform entered. She saw the medical staff insignia on his collar and judged him to be a ‘California surfer dude’ turned ship’s doctor, or at least pharmacist mate.
“Good evening. I’m Ensign Howell and I run the sick bay. Are you in any pain?”
“No. But I am thirsty; got any water around here?”
“Sure thing.” Ice cubes banged around the inside of the plastic pitcher as he filled a Styrofoam cup and brought it under her chin. She tried to hold it herself…
“Better let me help till you get those ‘boxing gloves’ off.”
; She drank and some dribbled; she used her bandaged hand as a napkin and dabbed her chin.
“How long have I been out?”
“About twelve hours. You were in pretty bad shape when they hauled you in.”
“I need to speak to the captain. I must make my report.”
“He’ll be here in a second; I rang for him when you awoke.”
On cue, Mush Morton walked into the compartment. He was a big fellow with a neatly trimmed red beard that flouted regulations, and soft eyes that were anything but regulation. His nose was well-defined, as was his scruffy jaw line, and he wore his skipper’s hat tilted back on his head, revealing a tuft of red. His uniform was loosely fitting and yet, despite all these non-regulation features, he still had the immediate effect of electrifying the room with command voltage as he entered.
“Happy with the accommodations? This, believe it or not, is a stateroom on a sub. Held in reserve for visiting brass. You seem like a pretty important VIP so I figured it was appropriate. Need anything?”
“I need to make my report.”
“Report to who?”
“Captain, can you excuse your man and close the door.”
“Sure. Mr. Howell, give us the room.”
The door shut and Mush pulled up a chair alongside the bed.
“I am on a mission, or was, for the President of the United States. I was blown off a ship as I was negotiating to get back some critical material that was stolen.”
The God Particle Page 2
