by Ian Slater
“That’s a bogey ten for me,” quipped Larry, trying to ease the tension, the admiral smiling.
The note of levity, however, backfired, the caller becoming irate. “I don’t see anything funny ’bout it. We’ve lost more Americans in that Juan de Fuca Strait than we did on 9/11, and we’re gonna lose more if we don’t find out what the [blip] is going on.”
“You’re quite right,” King responded. “How about the other detection gear, sir? This FLIR — forward looking infrared. How good’s that?”
“It’s fine,” said the mollified caller. “But again, how high are you flying? Best thing is to get satellite surveillance for that.”
“Didn’t Admiral Johnson—” Larry began.
“Jensen,” the CNO corrected politely.
“Sorry, yeah, Jensen. He said he got satellite-reported anomalies in the strait early on and had ’em checked out.”
“Yes,” answered the CNO. “He dispatched a UAV.”
“A Predator.”
“No, another type,” answered Nunn.
“Can you tell me what kind it was?”
“No.”
“It was—” began the caller, but King used his delay button to call up a commercial, CNO Nunn visibly relaxing and thanking Larry during the break. “A retiree, right?” mused King, “stickin’ it to his old employer. I’m gonna get crap, though, for cutting him off. Censorship, blah blah blah …”
Nunn shrugged. “People generally understand it’s not a good idea to tell the enemy what kind of surveillance we’ve been using.”
King didn’t comment. Truth was, the Navy didn’t think it was a good idea to tell anyone anything anywhere, except come appropriations time on the Hill.
The red light was back on. “Admiral,” asked King, “you think the midget sub is still with us? In our waters? Maybe it’s gone. Hit the Aegis cruiser — that’d be three in a row — and ran?”
Nunn was caught unawares. Everyone, even the maverick Freeman, was operating on the assumption the enemy sub was still there.
“Ah, well, I doubt it’s gone, Larry. A midget sub doesn’t move that fast underwater and hasn’t got anywhere near the range of a normal-size sub.”
“Garbage!” It was Douglas Freeman, who, now with Aussie and David Brentwood, was listening to the King interview while still watching Darkstar’s flight south of Tatoosh Island down the wild beauty of the Pacific’s pounded coastline. Here and there, streaks of white appeared on the grayish screen, not surf, but isolated, pristine beaches that marked the verdant and rocky edge of America.
“What d’you mean, ’garbage’?” asked Aussie.
“CNO’s saying midget sub hasn’t got enough speed or range,” Freeman replied, his eyes still fixed on Darkstar’s feed. “Damn Piranha-class midget can do near ten knots and run for over a thousand miles. If it’s one of those, it could be halfway to Japan by now.”
“So you think the midget’s taken off, General?” put in Aussie.
“No. Why should it? Last kill less than twenty-four hours ago. Still undetected. Son of a—” Freeman pointed at Darkstar’s feed. “Get a load of this, boys.” The general pulled his head back from the screen to give them a better look. There was a knock on the door, a pause, then four sharp, rapid taps. Freeman pushed back his chair, strode quickly to the door, looked through the spy hole, and opened the door a crack, but left the chain on. “I gave at the office!” he quipped, then slid off the chain and opened the door fully.
“What we got, General?” It was Salvini.
“Trouble,” said Freeman, shaking hands with the “Brooklyn Bad Ass,” as he called Salvini.
Choir Williams, following, smiled. “General.”
The three men walked over to the laptop, David and Aussie exchanging greetings with the two newcomers, Aussie asking Salvini, “Who’s your fat friend?”
Choir Williams was in fact the slimmest Aussie had ever seen him, as trim as all of them except the general, who, as an inveterate jogger, was in remarkably good shape for his age, despite a slight post-middle-age paunch which he insisted was “hereditary muscle.” There was an awkward moment as Sal and Choir realized David Brentwood could shake only with his left hand.
“Well,” pressed the general, his impatience and wish to avoid any further embarrassment to David disallowing his four ex-SpecFor boys any opportunity to catch up on what each other had been doing in “peacetime”—a word they habitually uttered with the same contempt as did a grounded fighter pilot, “what d’you make of these?” He’d asked Salvini and Choir before they even put down their bags and heavy Draeger rebreathers. “Feed is coming in from south of Cape Flattery.”
“Piloted recon?” asked Sal.
“UAV,” explained Freeman. “Hot-spot feed. And we got a lot of small hot spots — the salt shaker effect on Tatoosh Island — off Flattery. Birds, yes, but other big hotspots that Aussie thinks are media news trucks, among other things. More big hotspots down on the Pacific coast. Must be over forty so far, and we haven’t reached Father and Son yet.”
“Seals,” said Salvini.
For a moment the general, tired, thought he meant “SEALs.”
“That so?” said Aussie doubtfully.
“Yeah,” said Salvini confidently, looking about the motel room for something to drink. “Surprised you haven’t got more of ’em on that trace.”
“Seals?” said Freeman, whose vanity habitually denied he was surprised by anything.
“Yeah,” repeated Salvini, his hands flapping in a bad imitation of the sea mammal. “You know, Flipper? Caves must be full of ’em.”
Seldom had Sal, Choir, Aussie, or David seen Freeman so taken by surprise.
“Sea caves are full of ’em,” continued Salvini. “That’s why the IR hot spots you’re seeing are so big.”
“Well,” Freeman began, “that’s no damn good! I figured on having you guys swim in and check out anything that might be the size of midget sub, but dammit — we haven’t enough people to investigate every damn cave up and down the coast.” He paused, fixing an anxious brow on Salvini. “How in God’s name do you know this, Sal? Seals? You’re from Brooklyn, for God’s sake.”
“The zoo,” said Sal. “Not seals but sea otters. Used to take my sister’s kids in the evening. Took my squad IR goggles for fun so the kids could see the critters all nestled up in their lairs. Big white blobs just like on your IR feed right there. They huddle together.”
“Aw,” said Aussie, “you don’t know dick! Could be anything in those sea caves.”
“Yeah,” conceded Sal nonchalantly. “But if you look at the feed’s scale—” He leaned closer. “—two inches to the mile. It’s got to be some pretty big mammals.” He paused, joshing Aussie, “Maybe they’re elephants!”
“Oh, very droll, Sal,” said Aussie. “Ha! Ha!”
“Wait a minute,” interjected David. “Sal could be right, General. The midget sub could be using a seal colony as infrared cover.”
Choir good-naturedly dismissed the idea of the enemy, whoever they were, using the collective heat signature of mammals as IR cover.
“And what d’you know about mammals, Choir?” challenged Aussie. “ ’Cept for those Welsh tarts you used to bed.”
“I’ll ignore your antipodean vulgarity.”
“Antipodean. I’m an American citizen, you Welsh turd!”
Freeman, ignoring Aussie’s joshing, pressed Choir for his explanation of why terrorists wouldn’t use such a cave.
“Noise,” answered Choir. “Ever hear the racket those creatures make? It’s worse than Aussie’s snoring.”
“So,” proffered the general, “what we need to look at are the caves without a hot spot. A cold cave’s where the sub’s mother ship, its milch cow — a trawler, whatever — stashes its food, torpedoes, mines, diesel fuel. An otherwise empty cave. Sub comes in literally ’when the coast is clear.’ Surfaces inside the sea cave, resupplies quickly, and heads back out.”
“Maybe,” suggested Davi
d, “that’s why the Navy hasn’t seen any signs of the midget surfacing for air replenishment.”
“Darkstar saw it,” Freeman corrected him. “That’s why Jensen dispatched that RIB with those divers Albinski and—” He thought for a moment. “—Dixon.” He sighed in exasperation. That General Blackmore had been right when he told the West Point graduates that nowadays you’d have to be part detective to be a good soldier.
Freeman played back the stored IR feed, looking now for cold caves, those whose residual daytime-stored heat signatures were so slight he’d passed them over. It was a dispiriting exercise. The cold cave count rose to 278, and Darkstar hadn’t yet reached the big Father and Son sea stacks south of Cape Flattery. Would the Navy have enough time to search them all before the sub attacked again? Or was Larry King’s suggestion accurate, that perhaps the terrorists’ sub had had its fill of death and destruction now that the decimated battle group had retreated.
“Cold caves, gentlemen,” he said, “with an anomaly near them. That’s what we’re looking for.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
In the Hindu Kush, more fighting had broken out as a resurgent Taliban battalion, financed out of Pakistan, was infiltrating back into Afghanistan to destabilize the nascent U.N.-protected government in Kabul, which in fact was mainly a U.S. operation. The Taliban leaders’ timing was brilliant — to strike when the U.S. Homeland Defense was consumed by a massive public panic attack even greater than that of 9/11. If the terrorists, or whoever, could easily attack America’s guardians, who could guard the guardians? The one qualified hope, media pundits such as CNN’s Marte Price were saying, was that “as terrible as the attack on our Navy is, it’s so far been confined to military targets and not defenseless citizens.”
“Silly woman!” opined Freeman, one ear listening to CNN, the other to the suggestions of his four SpecFor warriors brainstorming about how to narrow the search for where the sub might be hiding. “Marte should know better than that. Some poor son of a bitch civilian’s probably dead already, caught in that rain of shrapnel when the Aegis blew up.”
The general was right and wrong. A civilian night watchman, Carlito Vincennes of Cherry Point, had died three and a half minutes after he’d seen a light, which he thought was either out in the strait or in the woods across the bay. It had looked to him like a camera flash. Then he saw that it was a narrower beam of white light. A missile coming straight for him. “Incoming!” he screamed into his walkie-talkie. “Twelve o’clock low!”
The ensuing line of explosions that engulfed the Cherry Point refinery, as row upon row of storage tanks blew, killed Carlito and twenty-three other civilian nightshift workers. It also produced an enormous firestorm on land, the burning oil disgorged from the destroyed storage tanks flowing into the sea and forming a ten to fifteen acre firespill whose black columns of choking smoke and flames did a macabre dance hundreds of feet into the air. The heat was so intense that surrounding forests and bitumen roads caught fire as if by spontaneous combustion, trapping hundreds of families in the long lines of refugee vehicles already fleeing the rumored danger of radiation leakage from the sunken Aegis carrier and the Utah.
But where had the missile come from? “Incoming twelve o’clock low” had confounded Cherry Point’s head of security. As a reserve member of the Washington State National Guard, he’d understood “twelve o’clock” meant something had been coming head-on at Vincennes. But from which direction, land or sea? In short, what direction had Vincennes been facing? Sea or land?
It was only later, after 120 square miles of prime Northwest trees had been destroyed by the fire and the town of Birch Bay, near Cherry Point, was a charred, smoking ruin, that the already overstretched Coast Guard was able to triangulate the vectors from various reports about a “flash of light.” They deduced that the missile had been fired from the sea. So much for the midget having had its fill. It was, in fact, even more audacious. The reports of two trawlers — one Canadian and the other American — estimated that the “shoot and scoot” firing of the skimmer had probably taken no more than four minutes, including a possible crash dive.
Freeman at least now felt confident that the midget sub’s pen probably lay somewhere between Port Angeles and Cape Flattery.
Aussie Lewis, Brentwood, and Salvini agreed with the general’s hypothesis, which revolved around the simple but unchanging requirement in war that the closer you were to your supplies, the better.
“No Wal-Marts south of Flattery?” said Choir in his lilting Welsh accent.
“Exactly,” confirmed Freeman, calling COMSUBPAC-GRU-9 to turn Darkstar around back toward Cape Flattery. From the cape it could do another run along the seventy miles of coastline to Port Angeles, Freeman lowering the IR intensity recognition level. “Cold caves with a nearby anomaly,” Freeman repeated. “That’s what we’re looking for.”
“General, where’s that Navy NR-1B research sub?” asked Aussie.
Freeman glanced down at his watch, the bags under his eyes evidencing his lack of sleep over the last twenty-four hours. “It should be here by now.”
In fact, the Globemaster III ferrying the U.S. Navy’s research sub had landed at the Air Naval Station on Whidbey Island, one of the most beautiful islands in America, and among the longest. The highly classified midget sub was the one Bill Heinz had in mind when he complained to Charlie Riser about the kind of secrecy, interservice, and interagency rivalry that prevented vital information from getting to the right people in time, as had happened before 9/11.
While in the process of deplaning from the giant transport onto a wide-bodied Mack hauler normally used to move houses up and down the island, the Marine guard platoon of thirty men aboard ten Humvees were ordered to establish and maintain a “No Go Zone,” even on the naval station’s own runway, to provide a moving protective moat of a hundred yards in diameter around the small nuclear-powered sub. With “Deadly Force Authorized,” anyone, uniformed or civilian, violating the NGZ was to be shot. The problem, however, was that since the arrival of and transport of the sub was designated “Secret,” how could anyone be expected to know about the NGZ? It was bureaucratic nonsense, but so worried were the Navy and Homeland Defense about another attack following the Cherry Point disaster, that the rules of antiterrorist warfare, in the words of Homeland Defense director Harry Hawthorn, would have to be “amended as necessary.” Whether such amendment, however, lay within the provenance of the Marine guard officer on the spot, or with COMSUBPAC-GRU-9’s Jensen, or with the commandant of the Marines, was not clear.
Jensen, having arrived and placed himself in the lead Humvee, had been fretting for hours about the safe delivery of the NR-1B sub to the launching ramp at Keystone. He was convinced that not only had his CNO hopes gone down with Turner, Utah, and the Aegis cruiser, but any hitch en route to the ramp would mean the lesser but just as personally painful humiliation of demotion. When his cell phone rang, he started as if jabbed with a cattle prod. His driver, a gum-chewing Spanish-American, PFC Mendez, pretended not to notice.
“Margaret!” he snapped censoriously.
“CNN’s reporting that John Rorke and that scientist—”
“Alicia Mayne.”
“Yes. They’ve been found. Adrift on some wreckage, CNN says. Picked up off Vancouver Island, being taken to Port Townsend’s hospital. John Rorke looks rough, but he’s all right. He vindicated you on CNN. Said there was absolutely no warning when Utah was hit. The woman’s not so good, burns from the waist up, apparently. There was an oil slick on fire after the boat had sunk.” Margaret paused. “That CNN woman, Marte Price, has been calling, left I don’t know how many messages. I think you’re going to have to say something, dear. She called again just before—”
“When I get home,” he said sharply. Margaret could hear the background noise of the Humvee and knew he must be with a driver. “I’ll send get-well cards and condolences to all the Utah’s boys and their families. And to Alicia Payne—”
“
Mayne, with an M.”
“Yes,” said Margaret. “I’ll try to see her. What a dreadful time it is, Walter. All those families.”
“Admiral!” the Humvee’s radio blared. “Bravo One Charlie One.” It was an incoming message from the first of the twenty outriders assigned to protect the NR-1B on its way to the Keystone launch ramp. “We have a bogey five klicks from you.”
“Describe,” cut in the convoy’s Marine commander.
“Keep moving,” Jensen told his Humvee driver.
“Refugee column,” said the Bravo One. “ ’Bout two hundred meters long on the road. Estimate ten to fifteen vehicles. Looks like mostly families. Fifty, sixty people.”
“Admiral?” said the Marine major. Jensen knew the major was asking him who he wanted to exercise tactical command.
“It’s your call, Major,” Jensen told him.
“Yessir.” The major instructed, “Bravo One, get all those people out of the vehicles and off the road — hundred yards away at least. Make sure no one — repeat, no one — remains in the vehicles. Dogs, cats — nothing. I’ll send replacement riders from Bravo Three to scout ahead of you while you take care of this.”
“Roger that!” confirmed the Bravo One leader, who had already begun telling his men to move the refugees out of their cars and pickups into the adjacent field.
“What?” bellowed one of the refugees, an elderly man. “That’s a damned cranberry bog in there — under two, three, feet o’ water. We got kids here!”
