by Jeff Edwards
“I don’t know, sir,” LaBauve said. “I don’t have any details.”
The president hesitated for a few seconds and then nodded. “All right. Where are we going? Down to the bunker?”
“Negative, Mr. President. We don’t yet know how the attack was carried out, or whether or not more attacks are imminent. Command Post’s assessment says you’ll be safer outside of the White House until we can be certain that the residence is not a target.” He walked toward the French doors to the West Wing colonnade and opened the nearest one.
The president followed him, with the two other Secret Service agents a half-step behind. His legs seemed heavy, his steps stiff, as if the news had somehow weighed him down. He forced himself to think. “If the White House was a target,” he said, “we would have been hit first.”
“CP concurs with your reasoning, Mr. President,” LaBauve said. “But we can’t rule out the possibility that somebody jumped the gun and attacked the embassy ahead of schedule. It’s still possible that the embassy is just one of a series of coordinated attacks.”
The president walked out onto the colonnade. LaBauve slid smoothly past him into the point position, and the other agents took up positions behind the president’s left and right shoulders, putting the president in the center of a tight triangular formation. LaBauve’s position in front of the president was a clear sign of how seriously the Secret Service was taking the threat. As a rule, the president walked in front, and the agents assigned to his protection walked to the side and slightly behind.
LaBauve raised his right wrist to his mouth and spoke quietly into the microphone concealed in the cuff of his black suit jacket. “Eagle is moving.”
A rhythmic thumping in the sky announced the approach of Marine One, the presidential helicopter. The president stared up into the clouds, trying to spot it. He could hear sirens in the distance now. But that must have been his imagination. Massachusetts Avenue was too far away.
“Where’s my family?” he asked.
“Susan and Nicole are still in school, sir. Their agents have been alerted, and CP is preparing to evacuate them by motorcade. The first lady is at Bradford Hall, speaking to the Daughters of the American Revolution. Her agents have also been alerted, and CP has a scramble squad and evacuation team in route to her position. They’ll meet us at the Marine Barracks at Eighth and I.”
The president nodded. “Good.” Marine One appeared as a dark speck against the blue sky and grew rapidly as it dropped toward the White House lawn. He couldn’t help wondering how many people were dead. How many might be dying right now? “What about the vice president?”
“His security detail is evacuating him from OEOB now, sir.”
The vice president’s regular office was in the Old Executive Office Building.
“They’re moving him to the emergency response bunker?”
“Yes, sir.”
The president nodded. “Good. Any word on casualties at the British Embassy?”
“CP didn’t brief me on the details of the attack, sir,” LaBauve said.
“Of course,” the president said. His words were lost in the thundering winds churned up by the helicopter’s rotors as the big machine settled gently on the lawn.
LaBauve began shepherding the president toward Marine One the second the helicopter’s wheels touched the grass. A door swung down from the side of the helicopter and then unfolded itself into a set of stairs. A young Marine lieutenant trotted down the stairs, stopped to ensure that they were properly extended and locked, and then snapped to attention and saluted.
As the president and his security detail walked into the downwash of the helicopter’s rotors, LaBauve sidestepped to the left and slowed his own pace for a second or so, putting the president in the lead position for the last few steps to the stairs.
The president returned the Marine’s salute and climbed the short metal stairs into the interior of the helicopter.
He was belting himself into his seat when LaBauve climbed into the cabin, followed by his two flanking agents and then the Marine lieutenant. Thirty seconds later, the pitch of the rotors climbed an octave, and they lifted off the ground.
LaBauve spoke into his sleeve again. “Eagle is airborne.”
* * *
The Marine lieutenant’s chair was mounted backward from all the other chairs in the cabin, which left him facing the president. His eyes traveled quickly around the interior of the cabin, making sure that everyone was properly seated and belted in. He turned his eyes to the president. “Sir, Lieutenant Charles Donahue, Marine One in-flight Tactical Officer, standing by to report.”
The president stared out the window as the ground dropped away. “Make your report.”
“Sir, the disposition of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is as follows: The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, J1, J4, and J6 are at the Pentagon. J2 is at Langley. J3 is in the White House Situation Room. J5 is on an inspection tour in San Diego. J7 is aboard USS Mobile Bay in the Sea of Japan, and J8 is currently unlocated. The national security advisor is at Fort Meade.”
“Got it,” the president said, without looking at him. “What else have you got for me?”
Lieutenant Donahue held out a red satellite phone. “I have the secretary of homeland security patched in on this line, sir. He’s in his car. He has a secure-capable phone, but he can’t get his crypto to sync up, so this call is not secure.
The president accepted the phone and held it up to his ear. “Where are you, Clark?”
“On the beltway, Mr. President,” said Secretary of Homeland Security Clark Chapman. “In route to the Pentagon. ETA about fifteen minutes. Maybe ten if this traffic lets up.”
“All right,” the president said. “How much can you tell me over a non-secure line?”
“I can sketch in the basics, sir, and then fill you in on the details when I get to a secure phone that actually works.”
“Fair enough,” the president said. “Give me what you’ve got.”
“Sir, the British Embassy has been hit with some kind of biological warfare agent.”
The ice water was back with a vengeance. “Oh God. Is it anthrax?”
“We don’t know yet, sir. But whatever it is, it’s nasty as hell. We’ll have to get a team in there to look around. But the initial report seemed to indicate that nearly everyone in the embassy is either dead or dying.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Excuse me, sir?”
The president sighed. “Nothing, Clark. Please, continue with your report.”
“Well, sir, the initial stages of this thing are all pretty much standard operating procedure.”
The president interrupted him. “We have an SOP for this?”
“Yes, sir,” Chapman said. “At least we have one for a biological or chemical attack on a U.S. government building. We’re following that plan until the British are ready to take over. The British deputy chief of mission has assumed temporary duties as ambassador. He’s given us the green light to drive the containment and response until they can fly their own people in.”
“I take it the British deputy chief of mission wasn’t at the embassy during the attack.”
“No, sir. He’s in Seattle for the latest round of World Trade Organization negotiations. At least, he was in Seattle. He’s probably in the air by now, on his way back here.”
“I’m sure he is,” the president said. “Okay, we’re following our SOP, for the moment at least. Is it any good?”
Chapman sighed. “We don’t really know, sir. It looks great on paper, and it’s played pretty well in training exercises. I guess we’re about to find out how well it works in real life.”
“Looks like it,” the president said. “What have we done so far?”
“Sir, step one is to notify the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s already been done. USAMRIID is working on airlifting in a biohazard response team from Fort Detrick, a
nd CDC is sending us a couple of advisors. No ETA on either team yet, but they’re shaking a leg.”
“Okay,” the president said. “What’s step two?”
“Emergency Services evacuates a three-block radius around the attack site. That’s already in progress. As soon as the initial evacuation is complete, they will extend the evacuation zone to five blocks in the area downwind from the attack site, to create a buffer zone for wind-borne contamination.
“Step three is to get a medical team into the embassy—in biohazard suits, of course—to rescue and treat survivors. The British deputy chief of mission has already given us permission to enter the building.”
“We have a medical facility standing by to receive the victims?”
“Yes, sir. The infectious disease isolation units at Walter Reed are equipped and trained for this sort of scenario. They’ll have to ramp up their staff, but they’re already recalling off-duty personnel. I’ve authorized them to draw from other military medical facilities in the area to augment as needed.”
The president looked out the window. The flight to the Marine barracks at Eighth and I was little more than a hop. They were already descending toward the helicopter pad. “I’ll be on the ground in a couple of minutes,” he said. “I’m going to have to call the prime minister before too much longer to extend my condolences and to make a formal offer of support. I don’t envy whoever did this.”
“I don’t either, Mr. President,” Chapman said. “Prime Minster Irons isn’t going to rest until she tracks down every last one of them and nails them to a tree.”
The president nodded. That wasn’t much of an exaggeration. Emily Irons, better known to political satirists as “Iron-Balls Emily,” was widely regarded as the least tolerant and most volatile prime minister Britain had seen since Margaret Thatcher. Very quick to anger, she was utterly unforgiving of anyone she considered to be an enemy of her country.
Someone had just poked a stick into a hornet's nest. And if Frank knew anything at all about Emily Irons, there would be hell to pay.
CHAPTER 7
TORPEDO: THE HISTORY AND EVOLUTION OF A KILLING MACHINE
(Excerpted from an unpublished manuscript [pages 84–87] and reprinted by permission of the author, Retired Master Chief Sonar Technician David M. Hardy, USN)
It is an axiom in both philosophy and politics that a single determined person can change the world. Anyone who dares to argue the point is likely to face an exhaustive litany of famous names—Louis Pasteur, Robert Goddard, Sir Isaac Newton, Thomas Edison, Ferdinand Magellan, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Alexander the Great, Henry Ford, Grace Hopper, Adolf Hitler, Alan Turing—some of whom have changed the world for the better, and some of whom have changed it for the worse, but all of whom have inarguably left an imprint on the pages of history.
As citizens of the human race, we are well prepared to accept the idea that human beings can alter the fate of mankind. But we are far less likely to consider the effect of non-human influences on the course of world events. Perhaps it is a sort of species-centric conceit that blinds us to the effect of the inanimate object—the thing—on history.
And yet, through the sharply focused lens of hindsight, we can see that objects—tools, devices, or weapons—have often become the axis on which history itself has turned. Some of these incidences are easy to spot. On a cold December morning in 1903, a crude biplane clawed its way into the air over Kill Devil Hill at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The homemade aircraft’s maiden flight lasted only three and a half seconds, but it carried the future of aviation on its spruce and cotton muslin wings. And after that nothing would ever be the same.
Forty-two years later, a single bomb (with the innocuous nickname of Little Boy) devastated the Japanese city of Hiroshima. In a single instant of fire and destruction, the world was catapulted into the nuclear age.
At just before 1:00 PM on November 22, 1963, a rifle bullet killed John F. Kennedy. The president was struck by at least one other bullet (conspiracy buffs count a third), but medical opinions are virtually unanimous in saying that Kennedy would have survived his other injuries if not for the head shot. Popular theories argue for a second, or even a third gunman in the shooting, but no one seriously disputes the fact that a single 6.5mm bullet ended John F. Kennedy’s life. It’s impossible to know if the world was changed for the better or the worse in the wake of JFK’s assassination. But there’s no doubt that Lyndon Johnson’s vision for American was different from Kennedy’s. LBJ had different views on Vietnam, human rights, and the future of the space program. And he led the most powerful nation on Earth down different paths than Kennedy might have taken.
Are these examples proof of the concept that inanimate objects can drive the forces of history? To verify the validity of the assertion, we must work the problem in reverse, in the same manner that we can check our answer to a mathematical equation by working backward from the answer. To determine if the bullet that killed Kennedy was truly responsible for altering human events, we can ask two simple questions: If that particular bullet had misfired, or gone astray, would the world be a demonstrably different place than it is today? And, in natural corollary to the first question, would JFK have made different decisions as president than did his successor, Lyndon Johnson? If the answer to either question is yes, we must conclude that a single 6.5mm rifle bullet seized control of the destiny of the most powerful nation on Earth, and therefore the destiny of mankind.
The same sort of reverse check can be run on the atomic bomb question. If the bomb at Hiroshima had failed to detonate (for whatever reason), would the world be a different place? Would the nuclear arms race have ever come to pass? Would mankind have ever been forced to live under the threat of nuclear annihilation?
These examples are relatively easy to recognize: the airplane, the A-bomb, the bullet that killed a president. But there are other instances, other objects or machines that have shaped the fate of our planet.
One particular device has been the engine of history on numerous occasions, and yet its impact is almost entirely overlooked. The torpedo. On at least five verifiable instances in recorded history, the torpedo has become the lever of Archimedes: the machine that moved the world.
To examine the influence of the torpedo, we must examine the history of the torpedo itself. When was the torpedo invented? How did this influential and deadly device come into being?
Some military historians trace the origins of the torpedo back to the Roman Empire, and the fire ships that the ancient Romans would send drifting amongst the fleets of their enemies. Others prefer to attribute the invention of the torpedo to a sixteenth-century Italian inventor named Zambelli, who used a drifting boatload of explosives with a delayed fuse to destroy a bridge in 1585.
But the actual word torpedo was first applied to naval warfare in the late eighteenth century by a young colonial American named David Bushnell. Graduating from Yale University at the dawn of the American Revolution, Bushnell was inspired to use his engineering expertise to support the fight for American Independence. With the help of fellow Yale graduate Phineas Pratt, Bushnell designed an underwater bomb with a clockwork-delayed flintlock detonator. By modern standards, the device would be more properly classified as a limpet mine, but Bushnell chose the name torpedo—in reference to the harm-less-looking (but dangerous) torpedo ray. A member of the electric ray family (Torpedinidae), the torpedo ray can deliver a crippling electrical shock to its prey and its enemies alike. Bushnell hoped to emulate the torpedo ray’s nasty underwater surprise by attaching his clockwork bomb to the bottom of one of the British warships that were currently blockading New York harbor.
The blockade gave the British control of the Hudson River Valley, allowing them to effectively split the colonial forces in two. The situation was becoming increasingly desperate for the Americans. If the blockade remained unbroken, the revolution would likely fail.
Without a navy of their own, the colonials could not challenge the blockade. Alth
ough generally unrecognized by scholars and students of history, Bushnell’s torpedo—as crazy and as unproven as it must have seemed—held the only real hope for American independence.
Shortly after midnight on September 7, 1776, a young Army sergeant named Ezra Lee climbed into a tiny one-man submarine, pulled the hatch shut over his head, and submerged beneath the waters of New York harbor. His target was HMS Eagle, a sixty-four–gun man-of-war that served as the flagship of the British fleet. (In a tiny stroke of irony, the British Admiral Lord Howe had anchored Eagle within a few hundred yards of Bedloe’s Island, which would one day be renamed Liberty Island—the site for the Statue of Liberty.)
The submarine used in the attack was another of David Bushnell’s inventions. Constructed from curved oaken planks and strengthened with iron bands, the little one-passenger craft was shaped very much like a peach. Bushnell called his submarine the Turtle, and he equipped it with hand-operated propellers, ballast tanks, and a pair of hand-pumps that enabled the vessel to submerge or surface.
The torpedo was carried near the top of the little submarine, just above the rudder. Built into the top of the submarine was a vertically mounted auger, which the operator could use to screw the torpedo to the bottom planking of the target ship.
Without electricity, the only illumination inside the Turtle came from the glowing foxfire moss that surrounded the compass and depth gauge. Battling unfamiliar tides and physical fatigue from manually powering the submarine through the water, Ezra Lee had only about thirty minutes of air with which to conduct his attack and make his escape. Laboring, sweating, and—perhaps—grunting and swearing in the darkened confines of the tiny vessel, Lee managed to maneuver the Turtle under the hull of HMS Eagle. He set to work with the auger, but several minutes of unproductive drilling convinced him that he could not penetrate the hull planking of the British ship. He rested for a few minutes and then tried again, still without success. With his air supply running low, Lee was forced to abandon the attack.
