Nimitz Class (16 page)

Admiral Morgan, without getting involved in a debate, ordered a big bowl of Caesar salad and French bread for the table. “Let’s hit this and get back to the Pentagon,” he said. “Then we can spend four hours listening to the highest military brains in the country discuss an accident not even they believe happened.”

Everyone laughed. And an uneasy silence took over as they chomped their way through about four acres of beautifully dressed lettuce, munched the hot bread, and sipped the coffee.

Afterward, they slipped through the “No Entry” door, down the stairs, into the staff car, and were gone within fifty seconds, racing north up the Washington Parkway toward the Pentagon.

Inside the Chairman’s conference room, the meeting had not yet been called to order, but Admiral Dunsmore was reading out a report filed from Hawaii by Captain Barry, detailing the death and injury toll on the other ships. By far the worst of these was
Port Royal
, which had been operating within four miles of the carrier. Ten of her crew had been killed in the general carnage of flying glass and steel which occurs when a big warship is nearly capsized. Twenty more were injured, nine of them seriously. Only the freak angles of the waves had somehow flung
Port Royal
back onto her keel, otherwise she would have gone to the bottom, in short order. Right now she was limping back, toward the American base at Diego Garcia.

There were only minimum injuries on board the
Vicksburg
, but the
O’Kane
and
O’Bannon,
which had also been operating close-in, now had four men dead and another forty hospitalized, with severe burns, cuts, bruises, broken ribs, arms and collar-bones, sustained when the destroyer broached in the deep trough of the first huge wave from the blast. They too had cheated death, but like
Port Royal
, were making painfully slow progress back to Diego Garcia.

According to Captain Barry, the nuclear contamination had moved in the classic manner, down range, opening up into a fifty-mile-long trumpet shape. Several ships had not been in the path of the lethal radioactivity. Nonetheless, it had been an extremely difficult
night, with Captain Barry operating in the pitch dark and fog, with unreliable communications.

Somehow he had managed to round up a couple of working helicopters to fly surgeons to the stricken ships, two of which were operating on small emergency lights only. There had also been a shortage of nursing staff, since the main hospital facilities had been on the carrier herself. None of the senior officers in the Pentagon envied Captain Barry his task that night.

Admiral Dunsmore called the meeting to order and briefly recapped the preliminary report from Captain Barry, which confirmed that a nuclear blast had destroyed the carrier, and very nearly taken two other warships with her. The report also contained information from the CIC of USS
Hayler
, in which the Anti-Submarine Warfare Officer had recorded the fleeting event of 11:45
A.M.
on the morning of July 7, the day before the explosion, when one of his operators had come up with a new track, 5136, a disappearing radar contact, picked up on four sweeps but with no opportunity to discern course or speed.

As the CNO spoke, Admiral Morgan looked up sharply. “Did they put it on the link?” he asked, almost brusquely.

“Sure did,” replied Admiral Dunsmore. “Captain Baldridge acted on it too. Sent up two Seahawks, scanned the area to the stern of the carrier, dropped a sonobuoy barrier into the water—according to this, eighteen active buoys went down. All our ships in the area were alerted, but the line was never broken. Nothing came through, which suggests it was probably a whale.”

“Unless it was a diesel-electric submarine on battery power, at periscope depth,” interjected Baldridge. “A little further astern than we thought, and they actually saw one of the buoys, then turned away. To wait.”

“Surely, if they’d been at periscope depth, we would’ve picked them up on radar?” said Jeff Zepeda.

“We did,” replied Baldridge softly. “Track 5136, I believe.”

A profound silence suddenly enveloped the huge table deep in the Pentagon. There was something unreal about the young lieutenant commander’s words. How on earth could any submarine have
got this close to the carrier and not been nailed? The two CIA men glanced at each other grimly. The commanders from the Pacific Fleet stared at their reports. Admiral Morgan glowered, and Scott Dunsmore frowned.

The CNO was about to speak when a Marine guard opened the door, slammed his heels together, and announced, “The President of the United States.” The Chief Executive entered accompanied by his security chief, and the Secretary of Defense. This particular President was in and out of the Pentagon more than any of his immediate predecessors. Not since Eisenhower had an occupant of the White House taken such a fervent interest in military affairs. And none of them had ever faced a more nerve-racking crisis than the one unfolding right here in Washington in the high summer of 2002.

“Sorry to be a couple of hours early,” he said. “But right now this thing is taking over. I may broadcast again either tonight or tomorrow, and I want to stay right on top of the situation. Fill me in, please?”

“Well, sir,” said Admiral Dunsmore. “We were just going over Captain Barry’s report, which mentions a radar contact on the previous day, spotted by one of our destroyers and checked out by our helicopters. Nothing very strong. The operators picked up on only four sweeps.”

“That’s about what you’d expect with a top guy,” said Baldridge, with a sudden urgency in his voice, and absolutely no regard for protocol. The President, however, was getting used to the careless but calculating manner of Jack Baldridge’s kid brother.

All eyes were now on the lieutenant commander. But the President spoke first. “Elaborate on that, Bill?”

“Well, sir, any submarine, on such a mission, is going to operate in a very clandestine way. I’d guess she would be moving at no more than three knots, at which speed a Russian Kilo is totally silent. Picture this: she is listening to the sounds of the U.S. Battle Group. She can hear the networks, pick up the sounds of the propeller shafts, especially the giant one which is louder than the rest, and belongs to the carrier.”

Right here, Admiral Morgan, the ex–nuclear submarine commander,
interjected, “The submarine knows in which direction the surface ships are, but not precisely how far away the carrier is. With time, he will develop a fair idea of their course and speed. But only when he thinks he might see something will he slide up to periscope depth.

“The captain takes a good look down the sonar bearing in less than seven seconds. In the monsoon conditions, visibility’s poor. He probably sees nothing. He may then try the ESM to see if there’s radar
anywhere
on the bearing, but only for three seconds. This is very dangerous for him, because he might be spotted. He lowers the mast, real fast, and goes deep again, at which point the submarine has vanished without trace.

“Remember, if you will, her radio masts were
never
exposed for more than seven seconds; which translates, roughly, to four sweeps on
Hayler
’s radar. That’s when she picked up just two feet of the submarine’s big search periscope jutting out of the water. Then nothing…but she’s still there.”

“Shit,” said the President.

“Yeah, and that’s not all,” added Admiral Morgan. “Remember how slowly she’s going, silently at three knots, probably in a racecourse pattern over about four miles. If her commander is as smart as I think he is, he will just position himself upwind of the carrier, always upwind…because if the carrier is flying aircraft, she must be heading upwind for takeoff and landings. If the submarine stays upwind, the carrier will eventually come to him.

“When Captain Baldridge ordered up the choppers and dropped the buoys, the submarine commander may have heard them. He may even have seen them doing it. But more likely he came back in, a couple of hours later, came to periscope depth and actually saw one of the buoys, or even heard it transmitting. He just turned away again. And waited, perhaps for twenty hours, while the buoys ran out of steam and sank to the bottom. Then he came in again, moving closer to the carrier.”

“Jesus Christ,” said the President.

“Yessir,” said Morgan, adding, “I am not describing anything magical. I am just describing advanced operational procedures by atop class submarine commanding officer. The problem, at the beginning
of this thing, was the same as it is now. Where the hell did the goddamned Arabs get such a man? I’m just afraid he might be American. Or British. No one else could possibly be that good.”

Admiral Dunsmore interrupted. “Thank you, Arnold. I am sure the President would prefer now to get into his own agenda, since we are all agreed that for the purposes of public announcement, this was an accident. I do not want anyone to forget that.”

“Actually, Scott,” said the President, “I am finding this all very instructive. If there are any technical points you think should be aired, please go ahead. For the moment, I would like you to run the meeting as you think fit.”

“Okay, sir. Anyone else have anything relevant to this meeting regarding procedures and actions on the ships?”

Admiral Dunsmore’s deputy, Admiral Freddy Roberts, had thus far been silent. But now he spoke up. “Sir, just this…I have been glancing through the list of radar contacts picked up that day, and transmitted on the link, as laid out in Captain Barry’s report. There were a total of fifteen, some of ’em big fish, maybe flocks of birds. Five of ’em from one ship, four from another. But there was nothing else from
Hayler
.

“Ships which report
everything
have historically jumpy ops rooms. Nothing wrong with that. Better safe than sorry. But I know the ASWO in
Hayler
, real good man, very experienced, Lieutenant Commander Chuck Freeburg. The point is, he thought it was something. That’s why he mentioned it and put a report on the link. I think we should definitely assume there was
something
. Chuck’s a very unjumpy guy.”

“Okay, Freddy. Thank you. Mr. President, I am, of course, bearing in mind that we are announcing
only
an accident. But, on the other theory, there is just one other point I would like Admiral Roberts to put forward, and it has to do with the time and weather.”

“Okay, sir. As you know I served some time out there myself in a destroyer, and I can tell you that by the end of June, the southwestern monsoon is beginning to sweep in from the African coast and throughout July and August you get a lot of real sticky weather conditions in the northern Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea.

“There’s often rain, and a dense, warm sea mist being carried along on a strange kind of wind, always feels too hot, but plays hell with the visibility, and pulls up a heavy sea.

“Now if I was going to take out an American warship I’d definitely do it in July or August. If I was a real fundamentalist who hated the U.S.A., I’d probably go for the Fourth of July. In my view they were four days late.

“But their timing was otherwise perfect. Dark falls quickly in the Middle East—by around six-thirty in the evening. The submarine would have come in close then, checking on the carrier every twenty minutes, at periscope depth, for maybe two hours. At around eight-thirty they were in position, waiting off her starboard bow.

“At nine o’clock local, we know they struck. At this time they were aware that there were still eight or nine hours of pitch-black darkness to come, making pursuit out of the question, ’specially with the predictable fog. Perfection makes me nervous. And these guys, whoever the hell they are, got a lot of things dead right.”

The President was thoughtful. “I would like someone to fill me in on exactly why the accident theory is so hard for an expert to accept. Admiral Morgan…?”

“We’re back to Commander Baldridge on that. Bill, run the technology past the President, would you?”

“Sir, let me start by assuming you have only limited knowledge of how a nuclear warhead works. Basically we are dealing with two hunks of radioactive material, probably uranium 235. Like all metals this is made up of atoms—this is a very little guy, about one four-hundredth of a millionth of an inch in diameter, which operates like a tiny solar system. Its core is the nucleus, made up of neutrons and protons. It is this nucleus which concerns us.

“The trick is to upset the basic balance of the atom’s nucleus, and somehow split it. We do it by helping extra neutrons to hit the nucleus which causes the whole thing to become unstable, and start to split apart. In turn, this generates energy, releasing more neutrons to bombard all the other nuclei, starting off a lethal chain reaction, with the bombardment process occurring 400 million million times in a split second.

“While all this is happening, the whole thing is being held together by the mechanism of the trigger, just long enough for a massive buildup of energy, and then a gigantic explosion.

“We achieve this in a warhead by placing two hunks of highly radioactive uranium 235 a safe distance apart on the edges of the warhead. The idea is merely to slam them together with sufficient force to hold the material together in one super critical piece, while the chain reaction goes completely and explosively out of control.

“To do this we have two explosive charges which must be detonated at precisely the same time, accurate to within one-thousandth of a second, in order to slam both hunks of uranium into head-on collision with each other, with precise force. If even one of the charges does not explode on time, or fails to explode correctly, the warhead will simply not function. The electronic impulse must activate the explosive on both sides, at the exact same moment. One half hitting the other is not sufficient for full force. They must be blasted into each other precisely as designed.

“There is a lot of room for error here, and the trigger device is very delicate. It must be set and activated with absolute precision. The radioactive material must be fabricated and assembled with immense care.