by Nigel Seed
The cutter was now resting in the disturbed water above her victim. The rescue lights came on and the search for survivors started, more in following standard operating procedures than in any hope of actually finding anyone. The impact had been so violent that there had been little time for any escapes. The Petty Officer on the port wing of the bridge swung his searchlight around again, this time there was something there. A man in the water and he was still moving. The crew flung the scrambling net over the port side and some climbed down to grab the survivor. As they watched he slipped beneath the water. He may be an enemy, but he was still a sailor in need and two of the Coast Guard crew dived into the cold water after him. They swam down into the dark and found him by touch. Striking back for the surface they brought him back into the air. He was still alive, though in poor shape. They swam him to the side of the cutter and strong hands pulled him out of the water and into the ship.
In minutes they had him into their small sick bay doing everything they could to save the man they had tried to kill minutes earlier.
Chapter 24
New York is a city well used to sirens as emergency vehicles try to make progress through the crowded streets. But these sirens were different and the vehicles were moving slowly to weave through the mess of abandoned cars and taxis. Often they had to mount the sidewalk to get around the solid mass of abandoned vehicles. The vehicles were different as well. These were specialist military armored vehicles adapted for chemical and biological warfare. They moved slowly through the deserted streets of the city using their complex array of sensors to sniff the air. Searching for answers to determine what lethal substance had been used to cripple the most famous city on Earth, to determine what countermeasures were needed.
The hatches and viewing ports of these camouflaged vehicles were sealed tight as the crews moved them slowly forward and tried to interpret what their instruments were telling them. Their computerized systems had been programed with every known toxin that the US Military was aware of. In the early days of development the nerve agents developed by the German Army in the mid-1940s had been used as test chemicals and these were still in the databanks. As the leading vehicle reached the financial district the first traces of the droplets were picked up and analyzed. The results were sent back to a command vehicle well north of Central Park where specialists analyzed the findings.
They had to dig deeply into their records to find these long disused chemicals but eventually it became clear that amongst the horror and killing there was one small glimmer of light; this was a non-persistent agent, originally designed to disperse rapidly so that German troops could advance through the area without harm, after the ancient gas shells had done their deadly work on their enemies.
The breeze from the river and the light mist that still stirred through the streets was having its effect and the fatal droplets were being blown away and evaporating. Within an hour of starting the search for answers the chemical detection vehicles were able to report the city clear of nerve agent so that the emergency services and the investigators could enter the stricken streets to bring help to the survivors. Scattered through the city were people who had been injured in the panic, trampled by running crowds or crushed against walls and buildings by mobs of severely frightened people. Broken bones, crushing injuries and severe abrasions could be helped and most would heal. For those who had been touched by the deadly chemicals there was no help. Ambulances from all over the state came into Manhattan escorted by police cars and fire trucks. Their crews searched the streets for survivors and using handheld loudspeakers they urged people who had shut themselves away to come out and be helped. The number of bodies lying in the street or inside buildings that had been contaminated was truly awful. The department store that had been hit was particularly difficult for the rescue teams as most of the shoppers at that time of day had been women and children. In the enclosed space the gas had been horrendously effective.
In City Hall the casualty count kept growing as the reports came in. City morgues were swamped and the Army brought in casualty clearing specialists to deal with the overflow. Hospitals too were augmented by mobile military facilities that had been identified and prepared after the 9/11 attacks. Slowly the situation started to come under control. The mental trauma would take many more years to heal.
While the injured and the dead were being cleared from the city and dealt with according to their needs, other vehicles entered the area without fanfare. These were the forensic examiners made famous by TV shows that trivialized the complexity and thoroughness of their work. The scientists and their assistants combed through the debris of the banks, looking for indications of who had perpetrated this horror. They crawled the floors, examined locks, dusted for fingerprints and swabbed for DNA. The results were pitifully thin. The attackers had taken sound precautions to avoid leaving any trace. The prayer beads were found in one vault and the Arabic headdress hanging from a splintered doorway outside another.
The burnt out church was examined and the explosive residue sent for analysis. As they stood in what had once been the main aisle of the church the local police lieutenant looked around at what had been his spiritual home since boyhood.
He sighed deeply and turned to the investigators, “Where has the crucifix been moved to?”
“We haven’t moved anything out,” the technician told him, “this is just as we found it.”
The lieutenant grabbed a couple of his police officers and started a rapid search around the altar. With the permission of the forensic team, they moved ashes and debris aside and checked wherever the artifacts from the altar could have fallen. The stunning altar furniture that had been there throughout his childhood was gone.
He called the lead investigator across to him. “There is something odd going on here. This altar had two huge candle sticks and a wonderful crucifix. They were old and famous and now they are gone. This is something more than just an attack on a church.”
The investigator looked around. “That adds to what we are finding. This is far too professional for a random church attack by religious nuts. I’ll pass it up the chain.”
Chapter 25
In Washington there was less confusion than there might have been. The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had identified some weaknesses in response to assaults on the US mainland. Without fanfare, the military and other agencies had studied the actions taken after those attacks; they had found the errors and carefully put these to rights. Now a well-oiled machine swung into action to identify the source of the attack and to plan a response. There was to be no knee jerk reaction until all the facts were known. This attack had come from nowhere. None of the normal intelligence indicators had shown any increase in activity in the past few months. It was unlikely to be one of the groups who had been penetrated by US Intelligence or one that was under close surveillance. This in itself was a worry. Intelligence operators always worry about what they do not know. These attackers must be a sophisticated group with access to weapons of mass destruction. How then had they been missed by the best intelligence service in the world?
New York police and the FBI combing through the banks that had been looted were passing their findings, no matter how small, to join with other information being sifted and processed. Army Intelligence was trying to identify which military unit had been seen with Chemical Decontamination vehicles in the city. The Navy had divers down in the dark river water examining the wrecked submarines. The Coast Guard was patrolling with the Navy off the coast looking for anything that might give further clues, such as a support or command ship. The Navy was sweeping the Eastern Seaboard to ensure that there were no more submarines lurking. The Air Force had standing air patrols and AWACS aircraft, with their slowly spinning radar domes, watching over the city to ensure all civilian air traffic stayed well within the designated air lanes. Across the world US Intelligence agencies were calling all their informers and agents to try and identify the source of the attack. A
llied governments, and even those less friendly to the USA, were hurriedly trying to find out if any of their nationals had been involved.
In the studied quiet of the Intensive Care Unit of a city hospital, doctors worked hard to save the life of the single unconscious survivor of the attackers who had been rescued from the water. He had been transferred off the Coast Guard cutter as soon as possible and moved to one of the best medical facilities in the city. FBI agents stood guard at the door waiting for a chance to speak to him and to make sure that none of the victims from the city made an unofficial visit.
The evidence accumulated slowly and was collated carefully. There was to be no jumping to conclusions this time. The Ghutra headdress that had been found was a typical Arabic head dress used all over the Middle East. This seemed to indicate an Arabic connection until one of the analysts pointed out that in recent years they had become a fashion item among young people. His daughter wore one when she cycled to school.
Likewise the Muslim Prayer Beads, sometimes known as a tasbih, that were found in the vault. Although an indicator, this was not allowed to be conclusive evidence, especially as the string of beads bore no signs of wear.
The fire bomb attack on the church seemed to indicate a group intent on destroying a Christian place of worship. But there was a growing feeling that something was wrong. The destruction of the church could be by religious extremists, but the theft of Christian artifacts did not seem to fit the pattern expected of such people.
Intelligence officers were only too aware that the default blame setting in the US had become Al Qaeda, ISIL, or some other allied Muslim group, but the clues seemed just a little too obvious. They needed to make sure that the Arabs had not been set up as decoys, to focus retaliation on Al Qaeda, to allow the real culprits to escape.
The survivor in his hospital bed had been stripped of his clothing. His meagre belongings lay on an analyst’s table. The coveralls were of Russian manufacture. The green badge sewn to the sleeve was in Arabic but, crucially, when examined by an expert, the embroidered text was found to have been misspelled. His boots were German. He carried a Tasbih in his pocket, but one that was considerably more worn through use than the one found in the vault. His physical appearance had been assessed and he was thought to be of Middle Eastern origin. The abrasion to the front of both of his ears was unexplained. He had no tattoos and no more than superficial scars on his hands.
The most intriguing part of the puzzle was the wreckage of the missiles. The explosives that distributed the nerve agent had not been powerful enough to destroy all the delivery vehicles themselves. The twisted and damaged metal bodies were examined and puzzled over. They were not of any type known to modern US military authorities. Then one of the staff from the Harbor Defense Museum in Brooklyn spotted the wreckage in Central Park as he was trying to make his way home, from a visit to his daughter in Manhattan and identified the missiles as the V1 Flying Bomb from the Second World War. The intelligence team knew that close to twenty of these weapons had been used, but had no idea where so many of them could have come from.
The body of the NYC policeman who had been run down was recovered after a shocked witness reported him being deliberately killed by the US Army. His clothing was examined and traces of army issue camouflage paint were found. After analysis they were determined to be an exact match for the paint used by the army on its vehicles.
The bullet that had killed the young woman inside the vault was recovered and found to be a match for those fired from the US Army’s M-4 rifle. With the same bullet being widely available in gun shops across the USA, the discovery did not help much.
The Military Police started an intensive search to identify the military unit that had been in New York during the chemical attack. The local units had all been checked and ruled out of the search. After mobilizing Military Police units across the nation and widening the search considerably, the source of the vehicles was identified as a National Guard unit outside Baltimore in Maryland. When the commander was interviewed it was found that an official notification had been received that their Humvees were to be withdrawn temporarily for modifications and upgrades. This was to be carried out in batches of ten so as not to reduce the effectiveness of the unit. Three days later a group of fully accredited US Army drivers had arrived to collect the first ten trucks. Paperwork had been checked and was all in order.
Police reports were checked and the convoy had been seen heading into the Baltimore dock area, but no suspicions had been aroused so no action had been taken. They had not been seen to leave the docks and a rapid search was carried out to confirm they were not there now. It took time to search every part of the sprawling dock area of Baltimore, but no trace of the ten vehicles was found so it was a reasonable assumption that they were on a ship.
The records in both Baltimore and the massive ports of New York were gathered and checked for any vessels that were common to both at the right times. There were a number that matched, but either they were too small, or of the wrong type, to be carrying Humvees, or the time scales did not fit. A junior analysis clerk was given the task of a more detailed and laborious check, although nothing was expected. It had become clear that this had not been a real US military unit and that considerable organization had gone into the planning of this operation. It was also clear by now that this was something different to just a politically motivated terrorist attack.
The Navy examination of the two wrecked submarines was inconclusive to begin with. Visibility was poor and the currents in the shallow river are fierce. A massive recovery ship was brought up from the Norfolk naval base to raise the U-Boats from the bottom. V4-1 was the first to be raised as its position was closer to the dockside. Cables were passed around it, no mean feat in itself, requiring considerable skill from the US Navy divers. Huge flotation bags were attached and as the lift commenced, these were inflated to assist. Searchlights picked out the crippled black hull as it broke through the surface of the river. A submersible barge slipped beneath it and then, pumping out its tanks, raised the U-Boat clear of the water. The water gushed violently out of the gashed and twisted hull bringing two bodies with it and leaving another wedged in the tear in the hull with one arm hanging loose in some sort of supplication. The bodies were removed carefully so as not to destroy evidence. The presence of TV cameras ensured that due reverence was paid to the dead. Despite feelings running high, the US military are sensitive to claims of their callousness toward enemies and ensured there would be none of that this time.
Naval officers climbed warily inside the U-Boat. They made their way slowly forward and aft in two parties, stepping over twisted bodies and debris as they went. Follow-up parties of naval investigators collected documents and charts carefully, trying to ensure the waterlogged paper did not tear. The navigator’s GPS unit was removed to be tested to see if a record of the boat’s course could be found.
As the forward party moved on they came to the large missile compartment. Now empty, except for two battered bodies and the pathetic personal items in the water swilling around them. There was little to indicate what had been stored here. They moved through to the watertight door at the forward end of the compartment. Turning the door clamps they swung the hatch open to find four unconscious and injured crewmen lying against the bulkhead. They had been thrown violently around in the forward torpedo room and the oxygen was nearly gone when their saviors arrived, but beyond hope they were alive. That gave the Intelligence team four more sources of information and was seen as a gift.
Chapter 26
The Press, as usual, were baying for instant answers and White House press conferences were descending into a farce as the Administration tried to keep the situation under control. At the end of the day President Barker demanded a report from his National Security Advisor who was forced to admit that they still did not know who was responsible. There were clues that men from the Middle East had been crewing the submarines, but there were anomalies that pointed elsewhere.
The Pentagon, FBI, CIA and all other agencies were being extremely careful to ensure that, when the retaliatory strike came, it was aimed at precisely the right spot this time. In the interim, US Forces across the world remained at a high state of readiness. Allied nations were pledging support by the hour. The scale of the attack had yet to be fully assessed, but it was clear at the outset that when the numbers came in they would be bad. Perhaps even worse than the 9/11 attacks.
The American public was at first stunned, but was now becoming angry and the fury of a powerful nation must be channeled if it is not to do more harm than good. The President phoned the British Prime Minister to thank him for the prompt action of HMS Huntingdon and learned that the British Armed Forces were mobilizing. Reserves were being called up, “Called back to the Colors” as the Prime Minister termed it, an expression he had just learned from his military advisors and was ridiculously pleased with.
The President then called the Russian President to keep him up to date. The Russians were by no means the enemies of the past and the relationship between the two countries was improving rapidly, but they still had formidable forces and still became nervous when the US increased its military alert state. Sitting in the Oval Office, the President was pleasantly surprised to hear an unconditional pledge of support from Russia. He had not expected that. The numbers of civilians killed had appalled people across the world, even old adversaries. The Russian accepted a personal invitation to come to the White House urgently and join with the British Prime Minister to discuss a coordinated way forward. Other heads of government could be invited later.
