by Ian Slater
Alicia involuntarily opened her mouth to scream as a corpse, its head all but severed, floating beside the body, bumped into her on the downward slide of a cresting wave. Her mouth, however, made no sound, and instead sucked in the scum of oil and a slippery, cold, choking substance that made her gag. It could have been a mélange of canned or frozen food that had exploded from containers as the Utah imploded from the mine’s pressure wave, but convinced that she’d swallowed human flesh, albeit inadvertently, the thought gripped her with an overwhelming revulsion. “Captain!” she screamed. But all she could hear was the agony of survivors and of the dying, and then a wave crashed into her, pushing her into the burning oil slick.
Through his binoculars high in the Turner’s island, Admiral Keach, the overall commander of the carrier’s battle group, could see the oil slick moving up and down like a fiery island, illuminating the final seconds of the Utah before she disappeared piecemeal below the heaving crimson-slashed surface of the strait. Keach had already ordered the carrier’s rescue Sea Knight helicopters aloft. Standing firm against the instinctive desire of all his battle group’s sailors to rush to help their stricken comrades from the Utah, Keach ordered all other elements of the battle group to stay where they were until further notice. On Turner’s bridge, Ensign Myers, though trying to hide his disgust with Keach’s decision, murmured his disapproval.
The admiral took it as a chance to educate the officer as well as to chastise him for not keeping his feelings to himself. “Mr. Myers,” he said. “What would you do as captain of one of the Aegis or destroyers? Go full steam ahead?”
Myers, surprised by Keach’s acute hearing, given the noise of the last helicopter taking off from Turner’s flight deck, had no time to react before the admiral was answering his own question. “Yes, you’d be the hero and dash ahead to help your fleet buddies. A noble sentiment, Mr. Myers, but what caused Utah to go down? Internal explosion? Torpedo? Friendly fire? A mine?”
The ensign was nonplused.
“Remember the Kursk!” added Keach. “Accidental firing in their own torpedo room.”
Already the Turner’s sensor arrays were monitoring the air for any radioactive leak from Utah’s reactor. That would be a double whammy — a lethal cloud of radiation sweeping over the entire battle group plus the enormous catastrophe that would assault the millions of Americans who inhabited the Northwest’s pristine mountains and coasts. What’s more, if the water from the countless streams and rivers that raced down from the high peaks of the Rockies and Cascade ranges to the sea-stack-dotted coast of Washington, Oregon, and northern California were contaminated, most of the western United States would die.
“COMSUBPAC-9 on the scrambler line, sir,” Turner’s Admiral Bressard informed Battle Group Commander Keach. “I think it’s Admiral Jensen himself.”
Keach took the phone from Bressard, Keach’s tone correct but not noticeably friendly. They had both dated Margaret, and Keach’s ego was as big as any of Turner’s air wing pilots. He hated losing.
“Admiral,” Jensen told Keach. “I’ve just received a disturbing message from the oceanographic ship Petrel. They sent it down by helo — no encryption capability.”
“What is it?” asked Keach.
“Petrel reports a possible hostile in the strait.”
Keach was so dumbfounded, all he could say was, “Utah’s gone, Admiral. Don’t you know—” He stopped, realizing there was a very good reason Jensen wouldn’t know what had happened to one of his attack subs. The subs didn’t make regular check-ins — such transmissions could immediately give away their position to an enemy.
“I know that …” began Jensen, his voice trailing off in a mumble. Keach was struck by the sudden metamorphosis. What had been the voice of a self-confident commander a moment before had vanished. Jensen was a man on the edge.
“Torpedo or mine, I’d say,” Keach told Jensen, “but could have been internal. Or a hostile. I don’t know.”
There was no response from Jensen, but Keach knew he was still on the line. “I have to go, Admiral,” said Keach, who immediately ordered a warning flashed to every ship in his battle group. The captain of the Aegis cruiser on his left flank asked for confirmation as to whether it was a “mini” or “midget” sub. Keach said that he had already requested confirmation of this in plain language message to the Petrel’s captain.
All Frank Hall could tell Keach, however, was what Albinski had written on his attack board—“Minisub”—the diver obviously not having enough time to put anything else down before his life was snuffed out.
“What’s wrong?” Margaret asked when Walter walked in, gray-faced, as if he had literally aged overnight.
“A disaster,” he replied, with the kind of deliberation that had always alarmed her. A “disaster” for Walter in what she called his “worrywart moods” had come to mean anything from the possibility of having to replace the muffler on his beloved Porsche to hearing that one of his Hunter Killers was in deep trouble somewhere in the Pacific.
“You look awful, Walter.”
Wordlessly, he flicked on CNN, and there it was, the lead story. How did those media bastards find out about this stuff so quickly? More than a headline, the news flash was taking over the entire 11:00 P.M. newscast. Not many details, but repetition ad nauseam of a “tremendous explosion” being reported by Seattle’s CNN affiliate; the high-profile anchor, Marte Price, claiming that it was believed to be one of the Navy’s ICBM “boomers”—Trident submarines. Normally, Jensen would have been scornful of the misidentification, quick to point out that it was a “Hunter Killer attack boat, you idiot,” but all he could think of now was to say a silent prayer that Keach was able to have Turner’s Sea Kings and every other available helicopter in the battle group rescue as many of Utah’s men as possible, and how he, COMSUBPAC-GRU-9, so recently at large in Seattle’s society circuit as guardian of Juan de Fuca’s and Puget Sound’s pristine environment, would be offered up by the White House as the sacrificial lamb for the catastrophe.
“Kimmel’s reputation was destroyed,” Jensen now told his wife, “when FDR fired him as CINCPAC after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Doug MacArthur had been just as guilty, in fact more culpable of ignoring warnings about an attack on Clark Field in the Philippines — parking all his damned planes in clumps, easier to guard, and easier for the Japs to destroy the next day. But fate was on Doug’s side — FDR didn’t have anyone else available on our east perimeter to take command.” Kimmel, he knew, had died in obscurity, and when MacArthur did get fired by Harry Truman for wanting to cross the Yalu from Korea and bomb China’s staging areas, he came home a hero, got a ticker-tape parade the likes of which New York had never seen. He slumped into his TV chair, saying, “They’ll crucify me, Margaret.”
She went to the kitchen and began making coffee. It would be a long night. Finally, her hand on his shoulder, she asked quietly, “How many men were aboard the Utah?”
“A hundred and thirty, give or take. A woman aboard too, one of our scientists. Torpedo specialist.”
Margaret bit her lip, thoroughly ashamed of herself. “Torpedo specialist” had made her think of a joke she’d heard among the Navy wives — torpedoes and penises. How could one think of such a vulgar thing at a time like this? Same thing, she remembered, when she was a child. Went to church every Sunday, frightened sometimes by the urge to yell out the foulest things. The more she tried to block it out, the worse it became. Walter said such things to her only when he began kissing her between her—
“Rorke,” said Walter softly. “He’s the skipper.”
Margaret nodded. As the wife of an admiral, she got to know most of the skippers. Like her husband when he was younger, they awed her. The responsibility of young men like John Rorke, who drove the nuclear-powered steam engines that carried the power to destroy worlds, impressed even someone from the rarefied air of Radcliffe College.
“Keach,” Walter said suddenly. “Your old beau. He’s safe on
the Turner. The carrier.”
“Oh, yes.”
They were both wrong. Six minutes after the last rescue helicopter had left the Turner’s darkened flight deck, three warhead mines, their release fuses initiated by the enormous downward push of the Turner’s 98,000 tons, detonated. The near simultaneous explosion of the mines caused what Alicia Mayne would have called a “geometric” rather than “arithmetic” progression, in that one plus one plus one did not equal three, but much more, the pressure wave so powerful that it lifted the huge warship into the air. It wasn’t by much, indeed it would have been barely perceptible to the naked eye, even in daylight, but it was enough to create a fissure running up from the great ship’s keel, or spinal column, to several decks above, in effect breaking the carrier’s back. Many survivors of the Utah, eight miles to the east, foundering amid the floating debris of the sub, unable to gain a purchase on any floatable wreckage and who had only life vests, were concussed into unconsciousness by the shock waves that sped through the water from the stricken Turner at nearly 3,000 miles an hour.
Below on the carrier’s flight deck, in the cavernous hangar, which, save for the rescue helos, did not yet house its air wing — the latter’s fighters, fighter-bombers, attack and recon aircraft, following standard procedure, having not yet flown to the carrier from Whidbey Island’s naval station — the crew witnessed an astonishing sight, one unique in the annals of naval history. Because their blast door was down, separating their section from the other two hangar zones, what appeared in front of them on the port side was not the huge wall that normally separated their hanger section from the support structures outside, but a jagged, ten-foot-wide gash four stories high, running from below the waterline all the way up to the hangar deck. Through the gash, the astonished crew could see the glittering diamonds of the Big Dipper. They could also hear a deluge as millions of gallons of roiling seawater rushed in. It sounded like a dam opening its spill gates, so at first no one could hear the screams and death throes of over seven hundred men and women, who, from the deep-set engine/reactor room through the aft berthing spaces, catapult equipment spaces, air filter cleaning shop, and aviation equipment storage, were drowning. The aft stern section of the carrier had been split asunder as if some giant had fire-axed the left rear side of the “boat.”
Despite the superb honeycombed watertight compartmentalization of the carrier, the massive damage meant that designated escape routes no longer existed in the maelstrom of twisted aluminum and steel. The portside list of the carrier was evident within minutes. Hundreds among the carrier’s six thousand were sucked out to sea and drowned. Others were burned alive in the scores of fires within the wreckage, the mines’ simultaneous explosions not allowing time for these victims to don life jackets and get out.
In Aft Bay 3, crew were moving quickly to take advantage of the ten-foot-wide, V-shaped gash, which, like the unsinkable Titanic, was never supposed to happen, given the ship’s three-inch high tensile steel. Scores of off-duty personnel, including sailors, still in their boxer shorts and T-shirts, along with female air mechanics and a female fighter pilot in shorts and tank tops, had formed a bucket brigade, stretching from the rear of Hangar 3. They passed life jackets and white oil-drum-sized Beaufort containers, which were quickly tossed overboard, falling over sixty feet past the burning, smoke-choked lower compartments. When the Beaufort drums hit the water, their CO2 cartridges triggered upon impact, inflating the orange-glow tent rafts that were capable of holding from six to twelve people or more, depending on canister size, each raft ingeniously stocked with emergency flasks of fresh water, Power Bars, salt tablets, morphine syringes, aspirin, acetaminophen, and toothpaste-sized tubes of nontoxic, oil-based sun cream which in a pinch could be consumed as a high source of protein. In addition, there were a hand-held GPS unit, flares, saline-generated lights, palm-sized energy beam locator with batteries, and, providing survivors were in a nonshadow satellite cone, a cell phone.
The sight of the battle group’s flagship, split keel to hangar deck, was devastating enough as the media arrived en masse in Port Townsend. Some, such as Fox and Britain’s ITN, went farther west along the wild and sparsely populated coast of the Olympic peninsula’s northernmost boundary to cover the story.
Just east of Port Townsend, a clutch of Middle Eastern networks and some European correspondents set up their gear, barely able to conceal their euphoria at the sight of the world’s only superpower humbled by the grievous damage to the aircraft carrier and the outright sinking of one of its premier warships. As if on cue, detritus continued to bubble up from the pressure-flattened wreckage that used to be the USS Utah. Everything from ragged slabs of the anechoic sound-absorbing tiles that had coated the sub’s exterior to the crushed body parts of U.S. submariners floated to the surface.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The shock hit America with the speed of light, on every TV in the country. Word of it got to incarcerated terrorists as well, who were overjoyed by the death and destruction wrought upon the “Great Satan.” The terrorists immediately saw what the Pentagon was slow to recognize — that this naval disaster, within the home waters of the United States, was a catastrophe more serious than the attack of 9/11, whether or not the number of lives lost was greater. Bombing buildings by crashing planes into them was one thing; the British, as New York mayor Giuliani had recalled at the time, had suffered far worse human and material losses in the terrible Nazi blitz of 1940. But strategically and tactically, this attack on the carrier in the Strait of Juan de Fuca had achieved something that shook the government and the military to the core. The enemy had penetrated to the very center of an American carrier battle group, despite its overwhelming firepower and state-of-the-art electronic surveillance. The group, whose whole raison d’être was to protect the carrier, had been brushed aside.
In particular, the White House wanted to know how neither of the billion-dollar Aegis cruisers had detected any unusual underwater activity, along with the sub-hunting destroyers, escort frigates, and the Lafayette-class submarine which, along with the Utah, was supposed to have made any such attempt a near impossibility.
Eleanor Prenty had never liked the war room, or what the staff called “the basement.” It had all the “gee whiz” stuff, but though smoking there had long been banned, she swore you could still smell cigar ash from time to time. And despite its no-expense-spared accoutrements, the room still felt like a bunker. The decor had certainly done nothing to ameliorate the President’s mood.
“C’mon, gentlemen,” he demanded. “What the hell’s going on? Two—two of our capital ships sunk within—”
“The Turner’s still afloat,” the CNO corrected him.
You dork, thought Eleanor.
“Yes, Admiral,” said the President. “But have you seen the pictures? It’s been gutted — top to bottom.” He was correct, for by now the V, which had reached as high as aft Hangar Bay 4, had expanded under the sustained strain of the initial separation of the bulkheads and was visible as a ten-to-fourteen-inch-wide cleft running the full width of the flight deck, revealing equipment spaces immediately below. And the track for one of the forward catapults was severed.
It was fast becoming apparent to anyone watching CNN, which numbered almost as many who had witnessed the 9/11 implosion of the World Trade Towers, that the Turner might well come apart, separating, as Marte Price diligently pointed out, along the cross deck line of arresting wire number two. The image that caught the public’s imagination, however, was that used by an excited Seattle commentator for CNN who opined that the damage to the Turner resembled an enormous “pie-shaped wedge.” To illustrate his analogy further, the commentator displayed the dramatic picture from the sixties showing how an A-shaped bow had knifed into a thousand-passenger Canadian ferry in the Strait of Georgia. “We are witnessing war in our home waters,” NBC declared solemnly, a truth echoed not as solemnly, and indeed joyously, by stations throughout the Arab world.
“Mr. President,
” interrupted an aide, “our surveillance flights confirm an invasion force heading from the Chinese mainland toward the Nationalist offshore islands of Kinmen and Matsu.”
The President was already visibly shaken by the sinking of the Utah and the attack on the Turner—no list of survivors had yet reached him. The aide’s news only deepened his consternation. “Well, right now, Richard,” he said, “we have to prioritize.” It was a word he usually disliked, but he didn’t have the time to think of a better one. “The American military has been taken completely by surprise, and my first job is to defend the United States.” He had already grasped what the think tanks at the Hoover Institution and the National War College would soon be impressing upon TV’s talking heads, namely that if terrorists could penetrate the nation’s military defenses, they could launch attacks against civilian targets at will — anywhere in the United States.
“Do you think they’ll attack Canada?” the Army chief of staff asked.
“No,” Homeland Defense director Harry Hawthorn replied. “Canada’s immigration policy’s a joke. Terrorists love Canada. They won’t attack Canada — be fouling their nest.”
The President nodded his agreement, but he had more important things to worry about than Canada. Besides, everybody already knew the score regarding Canada, its government the quintessential wimps. Full of good intentions, but in world affairs — no viability at all. The country, if you could call its disparate regions that, depended entirely on the United States for North American defense, droning on about “soft” power while the government in Ottawa continued humiliating its small but brave military through such wanton neglect that when Canadian peacekeepers were actually called upon to do something, the Canadian military didn’t have a single air-worthy plane to transport them. Hopeless. The President wanted no more discussion about Canada.
