Scimitar SL-2 am-7

by Patrick Robinson

  “Minister,” he said, “you probably already know why I’m calling. You must have read about the terrorist threat in the newspapers, right?”

  The French minister confirmed and impressed his apprehension upon the Admiral.

  His government had just received a report from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology about the likely effects of a tsunami caused by the explosion of the Cumbre Vieja, and were concerned with the apparent seriousness of the situation. However, his Government wasn’t yet fully convinced that the threat was actually real. Contrary to the States conviction, they had seen no hard evidence that it would take place.

  Arnold asked him to simply accept, on trust, the opinion of the United States military on this matter. “Mind you, we intend to do everything in our power to stop them,” added Arnold. “And we’re not asking for assistance, though there will be damage to the cities and coastlines of many other nations.”

  “Yes, the Swiss scientists confirm the damage would be widespread,” was the reply.

  “And of course your own coast in Brittany may be on the receiving end of a very substantial tidal wave, possibly 80 feet high, straight into your Navy headquarters in Brest. That’s almost as much trouble as we’ll be in four hours later.”

  “I understand,” said the Frenchman hesitantly. “The issue for us is, firstly, do we believe in the threat? Secondly, do we think it is sufficiently serious for us to dismantle the entire European Global Positioning System? I’m sorry to say that the answer would be no.”

  “Well, we are not asking for a complete dismantling,” said Arnold. “Just a forty-eight-hour shutdown, if we have not already located and destroyed the submarine. You do understand that we will black out our own satellites, which represents a total of 90 percent of all the Global Positioning Systems in space?”

  “I imagine you will, Admiral. Given your history with the Middle Eastern nations, I’m afraid the French Government does not approve of anything you do east of the Suez Canal.”

  “Then I am obliged to inform you of the consequences. First, you will lose your Navy on your west coast. The Atlantic peninsula of Brittany will be catastrophically flooded. Secondly, you will forfeit the goodwill of the United States for a very long time. And should the eruption take place on La Palma, with all that it entails, we will not hesitate to make public the fact that it was France who essentially caused it, refusing even a modicum of cooperation in the cause of preventing a world disaster.

  “Thirdly, the President of the United States will ask Congress to approve a bill to level a 100 percent tariff on all French goods entering the United States. And fourthly, we will lock you out of the oil markets of Iraq and Saudi Arabia, both of which we effectively control. Which would seem a pity, for the sake of turning the fucking lights out for a couple of days.”

  “I will relay your thoughts, and your threats, to my President,” replied the French Foreign Minister.

  But Arnold had already slammed the phone down. “Vive la France, asshole,” he growled, to the mild surprise of Kathy, who had just come through the door with his roast-beef sandwich with mustard, but no mayonnaise.

  “Everyone’s late today, the French Foreign Minister, the sandwich…I’m being treated like someone who works in the mailroom.”

  Kathy laughed. “No luck with Paris?”

  “None. Can you get the French Ambassador in here right away. I need to try to get him to understand.”

  “Now?”

  The level of jocularity between the two was at its lowest level in recent memory. Outside the door, removal men were carrying priceless tables and lamps along the corridor. Army trucks were lined up outside. Officers were checking and recording every treasure every step of the way. The Pentagon had taken over the networks on the East Coast, broadcasting twenty-four hours a day from the Press Briefing Room four doors from the office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

  Government spokesmen were already urging families with no commitment to employers in Washington to leave the city in order to ease congestion. Traffic was being directed to state highways to the north and west, leaving Interstate Highways 66 and 270 in the main for Federal convoys and other official traffic.

  It was a little over two miles to the French Embassy, located on Reservoir Road on the northern border of Georgetown University. And Arnold Morgan awaited the arrival of the ambassador with growing impatience. Finally, Gaston Jobert showed up at 2:20 P.M. and Kathy ushered him into the Oval Office, where he was greeted by both Admiral Morgan and the President.

  Kathy brought them some coffee, and M. Jobert sat and listened to the chronology of events from beginning to end. Arnold left out nothing, from the missiles identified at Mount St. Helens to the blasting of Montserrat. He explained the Hamas demands, the impossibility of complying with them, and then he explained the strategy of the United States Navy. Above all, he specified the critical nature of the GPS satellites.

  “Generally speaking,” said Arnold, “he’ll send his missiles in under guidance from our own satellites. If he cannot locate them, he’ll search for the European one. And if he locates that, he’ll use that.

  “If he runs into a blackout situation, he’ll have to come inshore for a visual firing. And that’s when we’ll get him. Needless to say, I am mystified at the attitude of your Government, and I have invited you here essentially in order for you to make them see sense.”

  “Does my Government know the full history — the submarine, the missiles, and everything?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Well, I have understood with much…er, clarity…I see it would be very bad for France…if we were seen…to, er…have stopped you catching this submarine before it destroys your coast, and part of ours as well. That would be absolutely crazy…”

  “Well, M. Jobert, we know that, but I am afraid your Foreign Minister has not understood as well as you have,” said the President.

  M. Jobert, a debonair man of around fifty, slim, dark, Gallic in attitude, replied, “This was M. Jean Crepeau?”

  “That’s him,” said Arnold. “A very anti-American little man, actually, which is somewhat absurd in the world today. Can you imagine us refusing to help you in this way, if Paris was under threat of a major terrorist attack?”

  “No, Admiral Morgan. No. I cannot. But I have lived here for many years. I am very fond of the Americans, and this rather embarrasses me, as it will, in the end, embarrass my government.”

  M. Jobert paused for a moment and sipped his coffee. “As a diplomat, I am going to speak out of turn. But you have been frank with me. M. Crepeau is a man whose political ambitions are very much greater than his abilities. And our Prime Minister is not much better. But in the President himself, Pierre Dreyfus, you have a man of far greater stature and far more sense…a little too proud for his own good. But a man of intelligence and judgment.

  “Most people in my government are afraid of him…On the other hand, I am not, mainly because he’s married to my sister, Janine. I’ve known him since we were both about fifteen years old.

  “I have already discussed this with him. And I think a call direct from President Bedford tomorrow morning will sort this out fairly quickly. In the end, France has no option, because in the end, you would shoot our satellite down, n’est-ce pas?”

  Admiral Arnold smiled grimly. “You would leave us very little choice,” he replied. “The cities of Washington and New York, against your little sputnik Helios? No contest.”

  M. Jobert stood up to leave. “You may leave it with me, gentlemen,” he said. “I will speak to the President at length this evening. I’ll tell him it’s too much trouble to refuse your request…I believe the phrase was ‘a pity for the sake of turning out the fucking lights for a couple of days…’ ”

  “Nicely put,” said Arnold Morgan.

  11

  0800, Saturday, October 3

  Mid-Atlantic, 23.00N 38.40W

  Depth 600, Speed 6.

  Adm. Ben Badr held course zer
o-six-zero as they moved across the black depths of the Cape Verde Plain. Young Ahmed Sabah, Shakira’s brother and Hamas officer, had become a trusted confidant of the Barracuda’s CO, and the two men were studying the charts of the eastern Atlantic with Lt. Ashtari Mohammed, the British-born Iranian navigator.

  Nothing is real until it faces you, and what had once looked like a simple run into the Canary Islands now looked to be fraught with peril. They both understood that the threat that General Rashood had issued to the Pentagon had been made public. Plainly, the United States was taking major steps to locate and destroy them, and the nearer they crept towards the Canary Islands, the more dangerous the waters became.

  Neither officer had the slightest idea what form the U.S. defense would take, but Admiral Badr, a former submarine and surface CO himself, felt confident that they would not resort to a submarine hunt.

  “They won’t risk firing at each other, Ahmed,” he said. “I think it is much more likely that the Americans will go for frigates or destroyers with towed arrays. As long as we stay dead slow and deep, we’ll be almost impossible to find. The one worry I do have is the satellites. We need them for guidance of the Scimitars — and the GPS is just about entirely American.

  “If they believe we are going to wipe out their East Coast, they may just shut down the whole system. Which would be pretty bad for us. Because that would leave only the European system and I’m not sure we can log on to it. Whereas everyone has access to the U.S. system.”

  “Do you think the Americans could persuade the Europeans to shut down at the same time? Well, the Brits would cooperate. But the French might not. My own view is that they will somehow not get both systems to shut down at the same time…”

  “But what if they do?” Ahmed was wide-eyed and very worried.

  “Then we have no alternative. We’ll go inshore, take a visual range and bearing, and open fire on the Cumbre Vieja. The SL-2 has one advantage…Its nuclear warhead does not need the critical accuracy of the SL-1 non-nuclear. We bang that thing in there within a half-mile, we’ll split that volcano in half. The burning magma will do the rest.”

  “How close do we need to be?”

  “Around 25 miles. So long as we can see enough through the periscope to get a good visual fix on the volcano.”

  “Where do we fire from?”

  “We’ll have to see. If the satellites work, we’ll launch from a range of 250 miles…from this point here, about 30 miles south of the most easterly island, Fuerteventura. That would put us in very deep water around 30 miles off the coast of the western Sahara.

  “The moment we fire, we turn north and make all speed for the eastern coast of Fuerteventura…right here, see…off the city of Grand Tarajal. That’s going to take us one hour from the point of launch. But the missile will take twenty-five minutes to get there. The main explosion causing the landslide will take an estimated ten minutes, and then the tsunami wave will take another 30 minutes to reach the west coast of our island…not the east coast where we will be sheltering…The wave will go right past us. And we’ll just hang around under the surface until everything calms down.”

  “How about they do get the satellites shut off? What do we do then?” Ahmed was fast realizing the enormous risks they were taking.

  “Then we would have to come inshore, from the southwest…making for this point here.” Ben Badr pointed to the chart at a spot 20 miles off La Palma, in very deep water, 8,000 feet. “Right here we take our visual fix, we range these two points here on the chart…two lighthouses, Point Fuencaliente, right here on the southermost headland of the island…and then, nine miles to the north, Point de Arenas Blancas. We’ll see them both clearly through the periscope, right?”

  “Yes, sir, Admiral.”

  “In between those two points is the Cumbre Vieja. We have all the data we need on its precise spot, satellite photographs. We then take a third point, a mountain peak…and we take range and bearing…it’s a regular three-point fix. And even if the satellites are down, we can come back to that exact spot in the ocean, anytime we wish, with just a fast glance through the periscope.

  “The next time we come back, we launch the Scimitar SL-2 straight at the volcano, and this missile cannot miss…because it doesn’t have to be accurate…Even allowing for errors caused by wind direction, wind speed, turning circle, height adjustments…it still can’t miss…The warhead is so enormous, even if it is swept a half-mile off course, it will still blow the volcano.”

  “Admiral, have you given any thought about how we get away afterwards?”

  “Yes. I have. So has your brother-in-law. Somewhere in the South Atlantic, somewhere lonely, we bail out and board an Iranian freighter. The submarine will blow itself to pieces a half hour after we all leave. We have to scuttle her in the deepest water we can find. So she’ll never be discovered. Then we sail home on the freighter, disembarking a few men at a time, at various ports, all the way to Iran.”

  “So right now you want to steer a course more easterly?” interrupted Lieutenant Ashtari. “Presumably we’re going to our long-range launch position…to see if we can still get a fix on the overheads?”

  “Exactly. But we don’t need to make much of an adjustment…two degrees right rudder. I’ll speak to Ali Zahedi…just so long as he keeps our speed to 5 knots.”

  The Barracuda was moving quietly beneath the surface, some 540 miles short of its ops area. Sometime in the next three days, Ben Badr expected to pick up the beat of a U.S. warship. But so far, they had been in deserted waters, way south of the much busier North Atlantic shipping lanes.

  On this Saturday morning, the nearest U.S. ship to the Barracuda was Comdr. Joe Wickman’s guided-missile frigate, the Simpson, currently steaming southeast towards the northwest point of the Canaries — La Palma.

  Capt. Sean Smith had his frigate, the Elrod, already in the island area, moving east across the Canary current to a position north of Tenerife. There, he was awaited by Capt. Brad Willett’s USS Taylor, which had arrived shortly after midnight.

  The Kauffman and the Nicholas, commanded by Capts. Josh Deal and Eric Nielsen, were scheduled to arrive on station sometime in the next two hours, in a holding area 20 miles off Tenerife’s jagged northern headland of Los Roques de Anaga.

  The seven-frigate fleet out of Norfolk was proceeding in a long convoy across the Atlantic. They were the last to leave and were not expected on station until Sunday night. The Ronald Reagan Carrier Battle Group was currently approaching Gibraltar and was expected to arrive at her ops area northeast of Lanzarote by Sunday afternoon.

  Adm. George Gillmore, on board the electronic wondership the USS Coronado, was already 2,500 miles out from the Norfolk Base, and less than 1,000 miles from his ops area. They were expected to arrive around midnight on Sunday.

  The last arrival would be the carrier Harry S. Truman, laden with helicopters, and currently pushing through a storm system out over the Atlantic Ridge, escorted by two destroyers and a nuclear submarine, hull 770, the USS Tucson.

  They were all to the north of the Barracuda, unknown to Adm. Ben Badr and his men, who expected trouble but probably not as much as this. You’ll always be safe, if you stay deep and stay slow. The words of his father rang clearly in Ben’s mind. And still, somehow he felt vulnerable without Ravi and Shakira.

  This weekend, he was due to open one of the timed safes on board the submarine that held a sealed letter written, but not signed, to him as Commanding Officer from the learned Ayatollah who presently ruled the Islamic Republic of Iran. It had been his father’s idea to give Ben a sense of true purpose. It would provide confirmation that he wielded the curved sword of the Prophet Mohammed when he launched his missiles.

  Adm. Mohammed Badr had told his son what the envelope would contain. And he was most anxious to read it. He had tried twice already this morning, but the timing device was still locked, and Ben planned to give it another try in just a few hours.

  Meanwhile, back in the Oval Offic
e, Admiral Morgan had received another setback from Paris. A communiqué from the President had stated that despite a long conversation with his Ambassador in Washington, he remained undecided about the validity of the Hamas threat and the need to turn off the GPS.

  The French President said he would like to “sleep on the problem” and would give his decision on Monday morning. He continued, like his Foreign Minister, to believe that the Americans were exaggerating the importance of a terrorist attack on the volcano. He did not particularly wish to join the U.S. in alarming the entire world unnecessarily and being responsible for any death that might happen as a result of closing down the world’s global navigation system. He could see no merit in providing further fuel to world anti-American opinion, if the threat turned out to be spurious.

  Arnold Morgan was furious at the word “spurious.” “How could the damned threat be ‘spurious’?” he raged. “Who the fuck does this jumped-up fucking despot from some fourth-rate town hall in Normandy think he is? Answer that, someone?”

  “I guess he does,” said President Bedford, who happened to be the only other person in the room at present. “Does this mean I have to speak to him?”

  “It used to,” said Arnold. “Not anymore…KATHY! CONNECT THIS OFFICE TO THE PRESIDENT OF FRANCE RIGHT NOW!”

  “For President Bedford?” she inquired, standing in the doorway, and still not absolutely certain why her husband felt the need to yell through closed wooden doors rather than pick up the phone.

  “Tell him that,” growled Arnold. “Then put the little son of a bitch through to me.”

  Kathy shook her head and instructed the White House switchboard to make the call to the Palace Elysée in the northwest corner of central Paris, and to stress the urgency of the matter.

  Three minutes later, the French President was on the line…slightly confused…“Mais je le pense le President Bedford?”

  “Mr. President,” said Arnold Morgan. “I am sitting here in the White House right next to the President of the United States of America…and for three days now, we have been asking your co-cooperation in stopping what might be the worst terrorist threat this world has ever faced. Am I to understand you are not yet ready to give us your help? That, by the way, is a oui or a non.”