Nimitz Class (15 page)

He knew about trouble on the grandest possible scale, having struggled for months, making contact with the Hezbollah, trying to befriend one of the Mullahs, trying to free hostages. Yet few times, in his long career as a deep-cover CIA operative, had he listened to words which chilled him quite like those of Admiral Arnold Morgan.
He just nodded curtly, but it was the nod of a professional who understood the stakes.

Admiral Morgan adjusted the view, then he said quietly, the menace gone from his voice, “Okay, Ted, please look through the periscope. That’s the top of the Washington Memorial in front of you. Imagine it’s the big radio mast on top of the bridge of the
Thomas Jefferson
. Right below, there is one of the Navy’s most accomplished professionals, Admiral Zack Carson.

“Standing right next to him is the President’s buddy, Captain Jack Baldridge, Bill’s brother. Both of them are just trying to keep the peace in those godforsaken seas around the Gulf. But they have just seconds to live, because you are about to issue your order—you’re going to blow everyone to smithereens.

“Keep staring for a moment, Ted. Try to imagine the sheer evil of this motherfucker in the submarine. He’s out there somewhere, Ted. And if it’s the last thing any of us ever do, we’re going to find him, and we’re going to destroy him. I want us to be clear on that. The sinking of that carrier was not an accident. We know it, the President knows it, and Scott Dunsmore definitely knows it. I just wanted to make a quick visit here to keep us on the ball, to clarify the magnitude of our present situation.”

The four men drove swiftly across the bridge spanning the Anacostia River, and onto the parkway. Then they swung due west across the Woodrow Wilson Memorial Bridge and into the historic old
eighteenth-century tobacco port of Alexandria, hometown of two great American generals, George Washington and Robert E. Lee.

Admiral Morgan told the driver to take them down to the harbor area, where he located a waterfront restaurant bar. Their reserved table, overlooking the broad expanse of the Potomac, was catching a nice southerly breeze, beneath the canopy of the screened porch. Their booth was separate, at least fifteen feet from any prying neighboring tables.

“It’s kinda quiet here,” the admiral said. “No one will see us, no one will recognize us, and no one will hear us. It’s swept every week. When we leave, we go straight through that door there, the one marked ‘No Entry,’ down a flight of wooden outside stairs and the car will be waiting.”

Admiral Morgan ordered coffee, and called his team to order. “Right, guys, now let’s just chew this over one more time. If someone hit us, it was with a torpedo from a submarine, right? And we’re agreed it was probably fired by Iran.”

Both Bill Baldridge and the admiral had heard in the opening reports from the Arabian Sea that the
Thomas Jefferson
had been steaming on a southwesterly course when she vanished. If the submarine had been waiting in the area the carrier could have come up on his port bow. The submarine would have steered southeast in order to aim its torpedo at a ninety-degree angle to the course of the huge ship—straight at the heart of the carrier as she passed, well below the surface.

Bill had noticed that Admiral Morgan called out an imaginary final command of the submarine, “Bearing one-three-five. Range seven thousand yards.”

“He even allowed for the two thousand yards the carrier would have traveled while the torpedo was on its way in,” Baldridge said aloud to himself. “This ole bastard’s smarter’n I am.”

“Okay,” said the admiral. “Let us assume we are Iranian. And our plan is to blow up a U.S. carrier in some kind of attempt to get Uncle Sam out of the Gulf. We have three Kilo-Class submarines, two of them constantly in refit, one of them in good shape. First, do we have torpedoes armed with nuclear warheads on board? Answer, no.

“We might have torpedoes which came with the boat from Russia, but they would not supply nuclear warheads, even though they do possess such things, already assembled. They might be found guilty of an injudicious sale, but they would not want to be found guilty of arming another nation to conduct a preemptive nuclear strike against the U.S. Navy. Even they are not that slow-witted.

“So where do they get the nuclear warheads?” asked the admiral.

“China,” replied Ted Lynch. “They could get ’em there, and bring ’em back by sea.”

“Very risky, that,” said Morgan. “There is such a thing as the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Our Navy and our satellites watch these matters very, very closely. In any event Chinese weapons would be most unlikely to fit a Russian export Kilo. That way the Iranians would need to be in some Chinese dockyard for a couple of months. And that we know hasn’t happened.

“So let’s assume the Chinese weapons were suitable, without any modification to the Iranian boat. There are two ways to get them aboard the Kilo…one, send ’em by Chinese freighter to Bandar Abbas…A nonstarter. We check that out. Two, a clandestine transfer at sea, from a freighter to the submarine. Another nonstarter because we
know
their submarines were all safely in Bandar Abbas last Friday.

“Even the Iranians would not much want to try shipping nuclear warheads right under our noses into their Navy yards, with the U.S. satellites watching above, and our guys on the ground. That, they know, might just cause us to get downright ugly.”

“Yeah,” said Jeff Zepeda. “I agree with that. I don’t think they would have risked the China deal. It’s too complicated, too far away, and too chancy. Plus the fact they are a nation that lives with screw-ups on almost every level. I can’t see them even attempting something that tricky, not with such a big margin for error, and, potentially, a huge downside to their own interests.”

“If I were an Ayatollah and I wanted to hit the American Navy,” said Baldridge, “I know what I would do. I’d reopen my lines to Soviet Russia. I’d either buy or rent a fourth Kilo-Class submarine
from out of the Black Sea, I’d pay for it in cash, U.S. dollars, and it would have to contain a full outfit of torpedoes, at least two of them armed with nuclear heads.

“I’d send my team there to deal directly with one of those Russian captains who haven’t been paid for about two years. And I’d suborn him with a sum of money beyond his wildest, and then my very best commander would move in and bring the submarine out secretly through the Bosporus, underwater, with some amazing cover story to keep the crew in line. Remember, a hundred million bucks might be a lot of cash to the Mafia, but it’s peanuts to the government of a major oil-producing nation. Anyway, that’s what I’d do.”

“So,” said Admiral Morgan, “would I.”

“One minor problem,” said Ted Lynch, who was one of those Army officers who had spent several years attached to U.S. embassies and consulates in the Middle East. “It’s not legal. You have to give the Turks two months’ notice if you want to bring
any
warship through the Bosporus. That’s Turkish territory on both banks.

“If you hit the bottom and got stuck, the Turks could quite legally claim salvage rights, throw up their hands and say, ‘But you had no right to be there, especially with nuclear weapons, unannounced in Turkish waters.’

“There’s an old military saying which has stood the test of time since the Ottoman Empire. Actually I can’t remember it, but it means, translated from the Greek or Latin or something, ‘Fuck not around with brother Turk. Because he gets real pissed off, real quick.’ Trust me. Hit a shoal in the Bosporus, you’d never get your ship back.”

“Yeah, but the towelheads are fanatics,” said Admiral Morgan. “They believe in their God, Allah. They believe his kingdom beckons for the righteous, and that it would be a privilege to die in such a cause. Death means less to them than it does to us. Much more, spiritually. They
would
try something like this, if they really wanted to cast a monster blow against ‘The Satan USA’—because broadly that’s what they think of us.”

The four men were silent for a moment, each one of them pondering the possibility of anyone daring to run the gauntlet of the Turks. “The other thing you do have to remember,” said Baldridge, “is that such a journey would take you straight through the middle of Istanbul harbor! Can you imagine that? Plowing through the ferry lanes—the periscope leaving a huge white wake?”

“There are ways around all of that,” said Admiral Morgan.

“Yeah,” said Baldridge. “But not when you’re fucking around in about a hundred feet of water, with old wrecks and God knows what else on the sea bed.”

“Yes, there are,” said Morgan again. “The key question is, could Iran, or any Arab nation, come up with anyone good enough even to start such a mission? There are damn few submarine officers anywhere in the world who could pull it off. And they are probably British…the U.S. Navy hasn’t operated small diesel submarines for years.”

“There’s a lotta blind alleys here,” said Zepeda. “And they all lead us to a very clever Arab, who we don’t think exists.”

“Well, it’ll please the Pentagon guys this afternoon,” said Lynch. “You just know the brass wants to stick to the accident theory. And the politicians will not waver from it. You could tell the President does not believe it. But he really has no choice. An accident is a bitch and all that. But a nuclear hit on a U.S. ship…Christ! That could be war, and the populace might panic. The media would definitely panic. Or at least they would look as if they were panicking.”

“I think that is correct,” said Morgan. “And in a way that’s good for us. Because we are going to be asking a lot of questions. I’ll coordinate all the data on where every submarine in the world has been in the past three months. We’ll get a long way by elimination—I’ll pull up all the files on all detections. A lot of ’em will be whales, but we just might hit something. There was something a couple of months ago which kinda baffled me. I’d like to find out some more about that.

“But before that I’d like to talk to Ted about tracing large amounts of cash.”

“That gets harder each year. So many foreign banks, wire transfers, with no one paying attention.”

“Yup,” said Morgan. “But I think we might be talking about 10 million bucks minimum, in greenbacks. That lot had to come from somewhere.”

“Sure did, Admiral. I can’t promise record speed. But I think we get can some kind of a handle on that.”

“How do you start, Ted?”

“Well, we’ll make a few discreet inquiries in the naval ports around the Black Sea, particularly those where we know there are submarines. Big sums of money in small close-knit communities tend to become pretty obvious pretty quickly. But, if we are correct in our assumptions, it won’t be that surprising to find a few recipients. The hard part will be finding where that money came from, and precisely who distributed it. But it’s a whole
bundle
of cash, and it’s hard to hide a whole
bundle
of anything.”

Jeff Zepeda said he would get busy with various Iranian contacts and agents to see if he could smell out any such plot to demolish an American carrier.

Bill Baldridge seemed preoccupied with the problem of the mysterious Arab commander. “My view is this,” he said. “I may be wrong, but I really do not think the Iranians would have used one of their very public submarines—the three Russian-built Kilos in Bandar Abbas—to attack an American Battle Group.

“I mean, Jesus, that’s not terrorism, that’s like trying to start a goddamned war. I think it is so much more likely they will have gone for a fourth boat, purchased or hired from the Black Sea, and crept quietly around the globe until they found the
Thomas Jefferson.

“I do realize that thereafter the problems become
almost
insurmountable, on a sheer technological basis. But there is one problem that refuses to budge from the very front area of my brain. You know what it is? They must have had
someone
—a brilliant Arab submariner, a guy who could creep through the Bosporus, the Gibraltar Strait undetected, past all the U.S. surveillance, on and under the surface, in the sky, and on the ships.

“This is a truly brilliant guy. Who could it possibly have been? They must have had someone in charge and that someone must have been one of their own, in the submarine, in the control room,
calling the shots. But who trained him? Was he an American traitor? A British traitor? It is
almost
impossible to believe such a man could exist. But not, guys,
as impossible
as trying to establish that fucking uranium went off by mistake.”

The more Admiral Arnold Morgan heard from Baldridge the more he liked him. Actually he liked all of the men sitting with him in the corner booth of this little restaurant on the waterfront of colonial Alexandria. But it was Baldridge he really warmed to. Baldridge was a terrier, with a clear mind, and he was after a rat, and he was very, very focused, wrestling with the problem himself, assuming the responsibility was his.

“Einstein with a red-and-white dishcloth on his head,” Baldridge mused. “That’s who I’m after.”

Admiral Morgan chuckled, noting the Kansas scientist said “I” not “We.”

“Don’t let this eat you up, son,” he said. “Might affect your judgment.”

Lieutenant Commander Baldridge made no reply, gulped his coffee, and muttered absently, “The thing is, so far as I can see, the fucker’s still out there.”