For the first time, the lieutenant commander’s control seemed to be slipping, and the President patted him on the shoulder. “No doubt of that, Bill,” he said. “He was a great man, and I cannot tell you how sorry I am.” Baldridge was glad of the dark because he did not want anyone to see him this upset, but the tears streaming silently down his cheeks were almost as distressing for the President as they were for him.
They rode in silence for a few minutes until the President said softly, “Bill, is there a nuclear warhead powerful enough to vaporize an aircraft carrier that would fit into a torpedo?”
“Oh, no trouble, sir. Remember that hunk of semtex that blew up the Baltic Exchange, plus a couple of streets, in London a few years back?”
“Uh-huh. IRA terrorists, right?”
“That’s it. Well, I’d guess that small hunk of semtex was the equivalent of ninety tons of explosive. A nuclear warhead inside a twenty-one-inch torpedo of the size that sank the Belgrano—an old Mark 8 two-star—might be the equivalent of sixty thousand tons of explosive, enough to knock down New York City.”
“Jesus Christ.”
The cars swung into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It was a little after 2:30 A.M. The President asked Dick Stafford to arrange a breakfast meeting for 8 A.M. in the White House. “This is political. I want you, Sam, the Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, Admiral Morgan, and no one else from the Navy…except for Bill here for technology assistance. And get a couple of CIA guys in who know something about the Middle East.”
The President went inside to his bedroom on the third floor, and Bill somewhat thankfully climbed into his faithful Mustang and headed down the drive, back out onto Pennsylvania Avenue. He drove up to Washington Circle and made a left for the short run down to Senator Chapman’s apartment at the Watergate. As he did so he felt the car slow uncharacteristically. There had been very few occasions in his life when he had resisted the opportunity of hours of sexual diversion in the skilled hands of Mrs. Aimee Chapman. Tonight was going to be one of them. He just didn’t want to be alone. He hoped she’d understand. About Jack and everything, and the huge gap in his life his lost brother would leave.
The senator’s wife turned out to be a model of understanding. She led him into her husband’s study, and then left him, while he called Jack’s widow Margaret in San Diego. No one would be sleeping anywhere in the Baldridge family. Not this night. Bill was on the phone for almost a half hour, and Aimee could only guess at the trauma with which he was dealing on the other end of the line. She heard his voice rise only once, and she caught his muffled words…“Mags, you’ve gotta get outta there…as soon as you can…San Diego’s gonna be like a ghost town…please call Mom…she’ll fix everything. Mags…you must take the girls to Kansas.”
Aimee saw the light flicker on the phone as Bill made a second call, to his mother. And when he finally emerged, she noticed his tearstained face. She poured him a drink, and that night she did not bother to coerce her longtime lover into anything less chaste than a good-night kiss. She held him in her arms until he slept, just as she had done in the nights after his father had died, years previously.
Aimee had been Bill’s girlfriend at seventeen, when he first went to Annapolis, his mistress through the years when he had very nearly married Admiral Dunsmore’s daughter. And his lover again after she had married her wealthy but somewhat disinterested politician, who quickly rose to the Senate, but not to much else.
Jack Baldridge had always thought Bill should have married Aimee. She was very beautiful, petite and dark like her French mother, and she had adored the tall, lean Midwesterner since they first met at a party at the U.S. Naval Academy. Like many other young Washington undergrads she found him irresistible with his deep and thoughtful intellect, his athletic frame honed by long summer months wielding a sledgehammer, mending fence posts out on the ranch.
As a Navy midshipman, that cowboy toughness served him well. He could outrun, out-train, and out-think most of his class. He probably could have played wide receiver for the Navy if he had taken football seriously.
But he never did. He was always too unorthodox, too likely to shrug it all off, decline to compete, as if being an outsider to all men was his mission in life. It had prevented him from getting on the “captain’s ladder” in the Navy. And it had prevented him from making a lasting commitment to any girlfriend. He was still single, risking God knows what, by sleeping in the Watergate, in the apartment of a wife of a U.S. Senator, a few hours before he was to have breakfast with the forty-third President of the United States.
Nevertheless, Bill Baldridge was a fairly remarkable young officer. His personal background put him on a first-name footing with some of the highest in the land. His professional Naval knowledge and high academic achievements made him stand out among his peers. And his personal characteristics enabled him to bring these two advantages together, to punch a high weight, far beyond his rank.
In the final reckoning, Bill Baldridge was a renegade. He looked like a younger, thinner Robert Mitchum, with the kind of piercing blue eyes you often find with deep-water yachtsmen, or plainsmen. But it was still hard to categorize him. In uniform he cut the relaxed figure of a six-foot-two-inch Naval officer. But back home in Kansas you would place him as a lifelong cowboy who had never left the Plains.
The morning newspapers seemed to contain nothing but the story of the stricken aircraft carrier. The Washington Post ran its front page ringed in a black border—U.S.AIRCRAFT CARRIER LOST IN NUCLEAR BLAST—6,000 DEAD—NAVY MYSTIFIED.
Bill Baldridge merely glanced at the story, straightened his tie, and fled for the Mustang, slinging his bag in the backseat, and heading back to the White House.
Both of the senior officers on board the lost aircraft carrier Thomas Jefferson were from western Kansas. Admiral Zack Carson, the Battle Group Commander, was born and raised on the family wheat farm near Tribune, Greeley County. His Group Operations Officer, Captain Jack Baldridge, was from Burdett on Route 156, southwest of Great Bend. Mr. Jethro Carson, the eighty-year-old father of the admiral, was said to have collapsed when told of the news, and was last night under sedation.
—GARDEN CITY TELEGRAM
Breakfast had been prepared for the ten men in a White House West Wing conference room. The President said he wanted no serious note-taking, just a very private chat with very trusted people.
He sat at the head of the table flanked by the Defense Secretary, Robert MacPherson, and the Secretary of State, Harcourt Travis. Dick Stafford, Sam Haynes, and Admiral Morgan completed the left-hand side of the table. There were seats on the right for Admiral Schnider, the head of the Naval Intelligence Office, the two CIA Middle East experts, and Bill Baldridge, who arrived just ahead of Sam Haynes.
Bill’s immediate boss, Schnider, seemed somewhat surprised to see him. Even more so when the President looked up and said cheerfully, “Hi, Bill. Sleep okay? Good to see you.”
With the two waiters dismissed, the President began, “Gentlemen, this is an off-the-record discussion. And I want to put my cards on the table even before we think of talking to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. I believe it is possible that the Thomas Jefferson was actually hit by an enemy torpedo armed with a nuclear warhead.”
He paused, let his words sink in. Then he said, “In Bill Baldridge here we have one of the best nuclear physicists in the country—a Naval officer with a doctorate from MIT. Bill has told me he believes it is impossible that a nuclear warhead could ever detonate accidentally, much less while it is stored, dormant, in the ordnance area of an aircraft carrier. So what’s left? Only the possibility of a hit against us. And for the purpose of this discussion, I want you to tell me, by whom, how, and why?”
“Well,” said Secretary MacPherson, “not many of the nations in that area have such a capability. Our intelligence says no terrorist group could make such an attack without significant help from a nuclear weapon state.”
“Bob, I’d be happier with elimination. St
art by telling me who could have, but probably wouldn’t want to.”
“Forget the Brits. Forget France. Forget Pakistan. Forget Israel. They all have nuclear weapons, but would not use them, nor make them available to anyone else. Forget India. Their weapons are pretty basic, and they are not particularly fanatical about protecting their oceans. That only leaves the Russians, who are a possible source of weapons, and the Chinese, who we dismiss for several reasons. We are not of course sure about nuclear-weapon security in Russia and the Ukraine.
“But the weapon which may have destroyed the carrier had to be compatible to the system which launched it. That means the Russians would have to have supplied both.
“How about little guys with submarines—Algeria, Rumania, Poland,” interjected Admiral Morgan. “Not to mention Iran.”
“Yeah, how about those guys?” said Dick Stafford. “I guess they count as potential enemies of the USA.”
“May I have first who, then how and why?” asked the President.
“Sir,” said Harcourt Travis, another tall, steel-haired ex-Harvard professor. “The Jefferson was operational in the Arabian Sea, and she was probably going to enter the Gulf at least once. We should look at which nations would like America out of the Gulf, for whatever reasons. I suggest the answer must be both Iran, which wants to dominate the area, and Iraq, for more obvious reasons—insane regime, plus known animosity toward the U.S.A. I cannot think of any other nation which hates us sufficiently to try to pull off something close to genocide, which the sinking of a carrier is.”
Admiral Morgan interrupted. “I am assuming you all consider this must have been achieved by a submarine, rather than a surface ship.”
“I guess that would be the Navy thinking right now,” said the President, recalling the previous night’s discussions. “They believe the Battle Group would easily have stopped, and at the very least reported, any incoming missile delivered from an aircraft or surface ship. We’d know.”
“I am certain that is true,” said Admiral Morgan. “Also, sir, I checked this morning—no foreign ships were anywhere near the carrier on any of the radar screens. We have those reports in-house, sir. Captain Barry is in the air himself now, on his way to San Diego. He should be in Washington by tomorrow afternoon.”
“Okay. No advances on the submarine theory?”
“Well, sir, if I may speak as an ex-weapons officer in a Boomer,” said Baldridge, “I would think an incoming warhead would have been delivered in a torpedo rather than an air-flight missile. Fired from a range of say five thousand yards. I think I mentioned last night, get much closer to the bang, you got a real shot at blowing yourself up, as well as the target.
“Also it’s impossible for a big nuclear submarine to get anywhere near the center of a CVBG without being detected. We’ve tried. At high speed we pick ’em up passive in the deep field. If they’re slow—our active sonars pick up all big hulls. Period. In fair conditions the CVBG’ll get ’em at around thirty miles, no sweat. It wasn’t a nuke. It must have been a really quiet, modern, ocean going diesel boat.”
“So, who has ’em?” asked the President.
“Several nations,” said Baldridge. “The British, the French, the Russians, the Chinese. God knows who else. But I’m betting Admiral Morgan knows where every one of them is right at this moment.”
The admiral looked up and did not smile. “We gotta pretty good handle on them,” he said. “And as for feasibility, the only nation I could suggest might have tried, successfully, to pull off something like this would be Iran. First of all, they want us out of the Gulf. Their government is filled with Islamic fundamentalists.
“And they do own three Russian-built Kilo Class submarines, all stationed down at their Naval base in Bandar Abbas, only around four hundred miles from where the Thomas Jefferson was operating.
“The Iranians have been struggling to buy and organize a submarine fleet for several years now. They bought two secondhand Kilos from the Russian Black Sea Fleet, then they got their hands on a third, much newer one in 1996. We spotted all three of them on the satellite five days ago in Bandar Abbas. The latest pictures are in the Pentagon right now. I have checked. No one saw any one of them move. So I guess the latest pictures will still show all three in the same place.”
“And if they don’t? If one of them is missing?” asked the President.
“Then we have a live suspect,” said Admiral Morgan. “They have the motive. And the submarine.”
“How about Iraq?” said the President. “Could they have one of these Kilos?”
“They could, I suppose, in theory. But they have a serious problem with harbors. They have no infrastructure to run submarines. If they had, we’d have seen it. There’s nothing. If we assume they did somehow buy or rent such a boat from the Russian Black Sea Fleet, then they must have driven it out through the Bosporus, right under the eyes of our satellites, and the Turks.
“Then they must have driven all through the Med, past our surveillance at Gibraltar, then five thousand miles south, right around Africa, finding a way to refuel, then up into the Indian Ocean, north to the Arabian Sea, dodged through all of our Battle Group defenses and blown up the carrier with a nuclear-headed torpedo.
“At the conclusion of which, gentlemen, they would have no home port. They’d have to get rid of the submarine. In which case we, or someone else, will find something, or at least someone.”
The audience sat fascinated. Finally Defense Secretary MacPherson said, “Arnold, does this mean you write off the possibility of Iraq?”
“Well, not quite. I suppose they could—just—have pulled off what I just outlined, but I seriously doubt it. Submarines are very complex machines. For a long operational run, you need a real expert. I can’t see an Iraqi masterminding something like this. You see, we’re not talking even about the very best of the breed. We’re talking fucking genius. I hope we could produce one or two such commanders. The Brits probably have a couple too. After that you got yourself an empty cookie jar. Iraq? Forget it.”
“Stated like that, I guess so,” said the President. “It would have to be a million to one. What are the odds about Iran?”
“Well,” said Admiral Morgan. “I’d say if all three of their known submarines are still safely in port when we get the latest satellite pictures—then they probably did not do it. Because they would have needed to pull off exactly the moves I described for the Iraqis—and I cannot imagine an Iranian captain in the control room of a submarine on such a mission.”
“Okay,” said the President, through a mouthful of scrambled eggs. “Then what happened to the Jefferson?”
The City of San Diego was in shock last night as news of the lost aircraft carrier became known. The Naval base was stunned—more than 3,000 families were suddenly without fathers, some without sons, wives without husbands. For many it will be a night without end. The Navy’s worst ever peacetime disaster took a toll on this city from which it may never recover. San Diego alone has four times more bereaved families than San Francisco had in the earthquake of 1906.
—SAN DIEGO CHRONICLE
“It must have been an accident. There is no other explanation,” said Harcourt Travis.
“Agreed…no other explanation…must have been an accident…nothing else fits.” The men around the table were edging toward a conclusion, the sound political conclusion. The sensible conclusion. There was no dissenting voice, save for one. The most junior voice in the room.
“It was not an accident,” said Baldridge softly.
The President looked up. But it was MacPherson who spoke. “Bill,” he said. “I appreciate your concern, and everyone here appreciates your opinion and your knowledge of the technology. But you must see that we cannot go around making wild accusations against another nation, without one scrap of evidence. Nor even a feasible scenario that actually might fit a potential aggressor’s intentions. We’d look absolutely ridiculous.”
“True,” replied Baldridge. “
But not quite so ridiculous as you might look if the sonsabitches hit us again.”
The President of the United States sat very still, and stared at Lieutenant Commander Baldridge. Then he turned away and said, “I did hear that. But every ounce of my political instincts tells me to ignore the nonaccident theory.”
“And remember, gentlemen,” said MacPherson gently, “This is a political discussion. We are trying to decide what to say, not what to do. Every sentence we utter will have enormous repercussions, both here and around the world. We must speak with the utmost prudence. We have to protect the President, the government, the Navy, and the morale of the nation. Not to mention the defense of the nation—one word from us, that we may have been vulnerable to attack, any attack, and it might give someone else…er…encouragement.”
“I don’t have a problem with any of that, sir,” chipped in the lieutenant commander. “But I am here as a scientist, and my trade is to distill many known facts into one major fact. It’s nothing to do with me what anyone says. The question I assume you want me to study is, did someone blow up our carrier? And if they did, Who? And how? And, after that, I guess we need to assess whether they might do it again. If you guys want me to, I’m real happy to work in total silence, deep in the background. If someone hit us, we must find that out, even if we never admit we’re checking.”
“I think that is straight,” said Admiral Morgan. “Right here we are moving into two separate spheres of operation. In my book too, Bill’s correct. We must find out if there is something going on, and I want to volunteer my services to head up that investigation, perhaps as a coordinator, answering to Scott Dunsmore.
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