“Well, it’s absolutely needed,” said Leona. “But either way, you know both sides will do their utmost to stop us. If they don’t sink us, they’ll have spies and intelligence agents searching for us everywhere.”
George shook his head in agreement. “I know. They’re afraid of change even though the path they are on is the path of suicide. But in all fairness, they don’t know our intentions yet. They’ve probably seen too many James Bond movies, and they think we’re about to hold the world at ransom.”
“Hey, now there’s an idea. A little extra cash wouldn’t hurt!” joked Pappy.
“Very funny, Pappy.”
“Well if we told them our intentions, do you think it would take some of the heat off?” asked Leona.
“I doubt it,” George responded. “I think it’s going to take them years to get used to the idea. But we’ll let them know soon enough—at the time and in the manner of our choosing.”
Chapter 40
Moving at twenty knots, the Louisiana could not safely launch fighters. She needed to slow below ten knots to ensure a stable takeoff and landing. But even if they could launch, surveillance operations were not practical with the submarine moving at this speed because any fighter searching well astern of the Louisiana would have to engage its SQID drive to catch up. Although they were in the wide-open South Pacific, the captain did not want to risk making that much noise.
At the Kermandec Trench—10,047 meters (32,962 feet) deep—a subterranean ridge rises on the western side, breaks the surface, and forms a series of islands. About twelve hours out, the Louisiana slowed to eight knots and sent two fighters out on patrol, one westward to clear the way ahead and one eastward to clear their baffles astern.
“Captain, we’ve got trouble!” The words were spoken by Lieutenant Johnson, the pilot of the sub-fighter sent eastward to clear their baffles.
“What’s the problem, Lieutenant?”
“Sir, we searched back along our track, and at a maximum range we heard a submarine to the east cavitating heavily. It was definitely a nuke-powered attack boat, probably a Virginia- class SSN. She’s on our tail, sir!”
The captain smiled a faint smile. “Must be the Texas. How far out is she?”
“Based on our distance at the time and the faintness of the signal, I would say about ten hours.”
“Good job,” said the captain. Turning to the XO, he ordered, “All ahead flank.”
“Flank, sir?” asked the XO. “We’ll be cavitating…”
“You heard me, XO.”
“Navigator,” the captain continued, “when you get to the Kermandec Trench, turn north and follow the trench. The Kermandec Islands, just to the west of the trench, are thirteen small, uninhabited islands. When we get abeam the ninth island from the south, we’ll stop and go silent. I’ll give you the coordinates. We’ll offload the remaining warheads and teams. Further transportation has been prearranged. We’ve got six more teams and thirty more warheads to get off of here as quickly as possible. From the sounds of it, our friends are no more than ten hours behind us. I want everybody off in four hours. Understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good, let’s go. I want everything pre-positioned.”
Chapter 41
George sat alone in his small, cramped stateroom reading excerpts from the world’s news broadcasts. The world’s Muslim nations, particularly Arab nations, were lashing out at the United States and other Western powers. They accused them of complicity and intentionally allowing the Louisiana to remain at large. In response, the U.S., Britain, Russia, and China were redeploying their forces to cover additional areas of the globe.
A knock came at the door.
“Yes?”
“It’s Petty Officer Harris, Captain. I have your reports.” George and Leona were very careful to maintain a formal relationship when other crewmembers could be within easy earshot. They were proud that they had been able to pull it off. No one seemed the slightest bit suspicious.
“Certainly,” George responded as he opened the door.
Leona came in and closed the door behind her. “George, may I talk to you?”
George gave her a hug and a kiss on the cheek as he whispered in her ear, “You certainly know how to communicate with me, but I wouldn’t exactly call it talking.”
“No, silly, I’m not talking about that. I want to talk to you about our mission. There’s something that’s bothering me.”
“Sure. What’s on your mind?” George looked at her intently trying to discern whether she was having second thoughts about signing on for the mission. A nervous knot began to form in the pit of his stomach.
“Well first, let me say this has nothing to do with the basic premise of the mission itself. I’m still glad we’re doing it, and I am still glad I’m here.”
“I’m certainly glad to hear that!” The knot was starting to loosen in George’s stomach.
“My question is not whether we are doing the right thing, it’s more like, are we doing enough?”
“You want to do more?”
“Well, we say we will carry out our mission if radical Muslims carry out another terrorist attack with a weapon of mass destruction. So what happens if, instead, they carry out thousands and thousands of bombings with conventional explosives? It seems to me that when a suicide bomber straps on a belt loaded with explosives, walks into a crowded restaurant or nightclub, and blows himself up, the people who die in that explosion are just as innocent as the people who died in Washington, and they’re just as dead.”
“That’s true.”
“You know, I hear the terrorists take impressionable young teenagers, fill their heads with all sorts of propaganda, promise their families financial support, and maybe even drug these kids up and provide them with a prostitute their last night before sending them to their deaths. That’s wrong, too, but we’re not doing anything about that sort of attack.”
“You’re right. Our plan does not call for retaliation against any type of conventional attack. And there are several reasons.”
George paced the small stateroom looking for the right words to explain this policy to Leona. “First of all, I don’t think our plan would work to stop conventional attacks. Al-Qaeda is a dispersed, decentralized organization when it comes to attacks at that level. I don’t think there is any way the central leadership could prevent some local cell from carrying out a conventional attack. By stating that we would retaliate for a conventional attack we would pretty much be guaranteeing we would have to make the ultimate attack. I won’t put our people in a position of having to kill hundreds of thousands or even millions of people in retaliation for someone blowing himself up in a restaurant.”
“Okay, yeah, that makes sense. But couldn’t we just threaten it?”
“No, because when we failed to retaliate, we would lose our credibility in deterring the real thing.”
“That’s true. But I guess I just wish there was something we could do to stop these other attacks. So what other reasons are there for limiting the plan to nonconventional attacks?”
“Well, obviously the converse of what I just said about conventional attacks being decentralized is that I believe a strike with a weapon of mass destruction would require the participation of al-Qaeda’s central leadership. Therefore, they control whether it happens or not. It may also require the cooperation of at least one of the more fanatical Muslim nations to obtain the materials and the know-how to construct a weapon. So far, those nations have not participated in the War on Terrorism. We want and need their cooperation to bring this nightmare to an end.”
“So in all likelihood, things will just continue as normal with the usual number of bombings, murders, and assassinations by terrorist groups.”
“Yeah, they probably will. Muslims will continue to lash out at the West. They’ll continue to riot when they hear a rumor that the Qur’an has been flushed down a toilet, or when cartoonists draw a caricature of Mohammed with a bomb in his turban
. Nothing in the near term is going to stop that. You have to understand the mindset of the Muslim world.”
“And what is that?”
“Muslims look around and they see that their society has been left behind. The cultural, scientific, and economic progress of the West stands out in stark contrast to the poverty and mediocrity of most Muslim countries. We have a wonderful standard of living, and quite frankly, theirs sucks.”
“Lots of people live in poverty, but they don’t go around murdering everybody who doesn’t.”
“That’s true, but let me finish. Because of their lowly position in the world, they have a kind of inferiority complex. If you look around, there’s no real cutting edge technology or scientific advancements being made in Muslim countries. There’s nothing recognized by the rest of the world as being ‘best-in-class’ that young Muslims can point to with pride and say, ‘That was invented here,’ or ‘We make that here.’”
“Oh come on, George, there must be something. Besides, you’re judging them based on your criteria. They may not care about your criteria; they may be very proud of the things they make and do.”
“Hey look. Back in the Dark Ages, the Muslim world was the epitome of world civilization. Today, they’re unquestionably the bottom. Although there are lots of tremendously intelligent individuals who happen to be Muslim, Muslim nations are not known for great universities; you don’t hear of Muslim countries doing cutting-edge research to cure diseases; there are no great Muslim astronomers discovering new worlds; no Muslim physicists discovering the true nature of physical matter. On the economic side, there are no great Muslim financial institutions; no great Muslim manufacturers—there are no great cars, airplanes, computers, TVs, or goods of any type coming out of Muslim countries, except maybe rugs. Most Muslim countries don’t even have patent offices or recognize international treaties guaranteeing inventors the rights to their inventions. Personal ingenuity and economic opportunity are what made the West great. Without education and a system for promoting individual ingenuity, Muslims are stuck in a cycle of poverty.”
“Well whose fault is that?” Leona asked. “My impression is that there are so many things the Qur’an prohibits, they will never get out of that cycle. You know they can’t even set up a financial system that provides loans for businesses because it’s against Islamic law to charge interest. It seems as if the Qur’an tries to keep them in the sixth century, when it was written.”
“They do have some cultural hurdles to overcome, but like most people at the bottom end of the social ladder, instead of looking inward, they blame their condition on others. In this case, they blame the West. To them, colonial Western powers invaded and ruled over Muslim countries for a hundred years, and today those same powers bring all their military might to Muslim lands to guarantee their access to oil. The Muslim people receive a mere pittance in exchange for what is rapidly becoming the world’s most valuable commodity. So sure, they strike out at the West.”
“You make a good argument for their anger,” said Leona.
“They are in much the same position that African-Americans were in back in the nineteen fifties and sixties when angry blacks rioted and burned large portions of American cities. But in America, we worked through it. It took a while, and things aren’t perfect yet, but they are certainly a lot better. Many African-Americans are at parity with whites in their jobs and social level in American society.”
“I don’t know about Muslims, though.” Leona mused. “It seems right now like the Muslim world is in a death spiral—a spiral of poverty and rage, which is just sinking them lower and lower. More and more of them seem to be getting sucked into it. How do they end it?”
“They’ll end the death spiral in one of two ways: the same way African-Americans ended it, or in total destruction. It’s their choice. African-Americans ended it one small step at a time, through education and through leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., who preached nonviolent resolution of conflicts. Young Muslims have a choice. The peaceful ones just have to get involved.”
“I haven’t seen anybody like Martin Luther King, Jr. in the Muslim world.”
“I haven’t either,” said George. “But I’m confident there’s one out there. Like I said, there are many highly intelligent Muslims, and some of them must realize that new leadership is needed. It doesn’t take much of a genius to see that the strategy of militant leaders calling for attacks on the West has been a dismal failure. Great leaders do not display leadership by continuing to follow failed tactics just because their predecessors did.”
George walked over to his bookcase and began searching for a book.
“What are you looking for?”
“I remember Mark Twain said something once that is appropriate here, and he said it much better than I can.”
“Mark Twain wrote about Muslims?”
George laughed. “Not specifically, but he did write about humanity, and you know, we’re all human, even Muslims! Ah! Here it is.” George pulled a well-worn paperback from the case and leafed through it until he found the quotation. He read it to Leona: “Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.”
“Yeah, well they’re pretty loyal to the petrified strategy of militancy,” said Leona. “Something serious has to came along and wake them up.”
“That’s true, and I would have hoped an event as devastating as the attack on Washington would have made everybody stop and think. But unfortunately it hasn’t. However, there must be those among the Muslim population who realize how fortunate they are that Jonathon Thornton inherited the presidency. I’m sure you remember there was a sizable contingent in the Philadelphia Congress who wanted to nuke the entire Muslim world back to the Stone Age.”
“Oh yeah, and for a while it looked like they would prevail. Emotions were understandably running pretty high.”
“Well, I don’t agree with a lot of Thornton’s policies, but he was very effective at countering the nuclear contingent. Can you imagine what would’ve happened to the Muslim world if someone like George W. Bush had been the next president?”
“I doubt there would be much left of it.”
“I doubt there would be anything left of it!” said George. “At any rate, even if a great ‘Muslim Martin’ emerges tomorrow, it’s going to take a lot of years before Muslims and the West reach a level of parity similar to what African-Americans have achieved with whites. The process just has to run its course. I just hope our little mission can help get us there without things having to get worse first.”
“I hope so, too. George…?”
“Yes?”
“Can I communicate with you now?”
“What do you think we’re doing?”
“No, silly, not like that!”
“Oh.”
Chapter 42
“Captain, we’ve got trouble!”
Not again. George looked up from the navigation plot.
Lieutenant Johnson had just returned from another reconnaissance mission. George had slowed the Louisiana as they approached the ninth island in the Kermandec chain to launch Johnson’s reconnaissance mission toward the island and into the region beyond.
“What have you got, Lieutenant?”
Lieutenant Johnson, usually quiet and reserved, was bursting with excitement. Words tumbled out of his mouth almost too fast to understand. “Sir, we searched ahead all the way to the ninth island. We were there just about dawn, and we heard it clear as a bell!”
“Slow down, Lieutenant. You heard what?”
“Oh, sorry, Captain. Seaman Teague was on the sonar, and he heard a diesel boat that had been running on the surface during the night, and then they dived and went quiet. Well, pretty quiet…but not quiet enough! We were close enough to record the entire transition. As soon as Seaman Teague gets down here with the tape, we can analyze it in the Louisiana’s sonar computer. We should be able to get a positive ID on her, sir.”
“Good job, Lieutenant. Rem
ind me to put in a good word for you next time I see the admiral.”
They all laughed. “Thank you, sir,” Lieutenant Johnson joked. “But at this point, I don’t think any number of good words would put me in good stead with any admiral!”
Just then, Seaman Teague ran into the control room with the tape. The XO grabbed the tape and handed it over to Petty Officer MacKenzie. “Run this through for analysis, Mac. We need an answer right now.”
“Aye-aye, sir.”
MacKenzie loaded the tape into the sonar computer and began to run it through for audio analysis. It didn’t take long. Within a minute the computer display showed, “Kilo-class SS.”
“Whoa,” said the captain. “Who could that be way out here? Chinese? North Korean?”
“Those would be my guesses,” said the XO. “Most likely another Chinese boat coming to take the place of the one we disabled.”
Within another minute the type class had been narrowed down to a specific submarine: “Yunes. Nationality: Iran.”
The crew was stunned.
The captain and XO stood side-by-side studying the computer display. “What’s an Iranian Kilo doing way out here in the middle of the Pacific?” mused the captain. “This makes no sense. Iranian submarines rarely leave port, and when they do, they’re almost always used for coastal patrol in the Persian Gulf. What do you make of it, XO?”
“It’s highly unusual, but certainly not impossible for an Iranian Kilo to be out here,” responded the XO. They do have transoceanic range. I’m just surprised the Iranians would have the training and the logistics necessary to pull this off.”
“Let’s say that they do. You know, there is a theory that an Iranian Kilo, in fact the Yunes, has made a transoceanic voyage once before. The question, then, is why is she out here now?”
The XO looked at George, well aware of the evidence pointing to the Yunes as the submarine that delivered the nuclear warhead used in Washington DC. “Maybe they were sent out to stop us. If they believe we’re headed for the Indian Ocean to wipe out the Muslim world, that puts them squarely in the crosshairs.”
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