By Dawn's Early Light, page 8
“Yes, I know. But this shouldn’t take too long.” Bishop’s secretary was at the door. He motioned for her to close it. “No interruptions, Agnes.”
“Yes, sir,” she said. She withdrew, closing the door behind her.
“Okay, Paul, the president wants to speak to you.”
Thoreau was momentarily confused. “Who?”
“The president of the United States wants to talk to you. Encrypted video link.” Bishop turned the computer monitor on his desk so that it and the camera were trainined on Thoreau.
“About what?”
“The mission,” Bishop said. He touched enter, and the NASA logo was replaced by what appeared to be a live image of the White House.
A few moments later the picture was replaced by a live shot of President Hanson seated at his desk in the Oval Office. It wasn’t clear if he was alone or not.
“Colonel Thoreau, I’m sorry to interrupt your training routine. You must be very busy this close to a mission. Especially one that we’ve changed on you.”
“That’s okay, Mr. President. But I have to say that your call has come as a surprise, sir.”
“I want to talk to you about the satellite repair mission.”
“Yes, sir. The NRO’s Jupiter. We understand the need for secrecy.”
“You’re going up to replace its electronics and optics packages. You were told that they failed. But that’s not quite the whole truth. They were destroyed by a laser strike from an earth-based weapon.”
Thoreau took just a moment to digest what he was being told. There weren’t many nations that had the technical capability to accomplish such a strike. Russia was chief among them. But that didn’t make any sense. “Who did it, sir?”
“We’re working on that part. But you need to know that whoever is going on the space walk to make the repairs might be in some danger. Whoever blinded our satellite won’t want to see it fixed. We’re betting that they’ll wait until you’re finished, and then shoot it again. We don’t think that they’d take the risk of injuring one of you. The repercussions would be nothing less than extremely harsh.”
“I understand, sir.”
“But the possibility does exist that they’ll make a mistake,” the president warned. “I want you to understand what you’re going up against. And I want to give you the chance to back out.”
“How badly do we need that satellite, Mr. President?”
“Very.”
“Then we’ll go up and fix it, sir. That’s what we’re being paid to do.”
“You’ll have help,” President Hanson promised. “I can’t tell you exactly what kind of help, but you and your crew will not be on your own.”
Thoreau grinned. “It’s always good to have a backstop, Mr. President. We’ll do our best.”
“I know you will, Colonel.”
1305 EDT
THE WHITE HOUSE
President Hanson broke the connection, then looked over at Brad Stein and Carolyn Tyson, who’d listened off camera.
“He didn’t ask the million-dollar question,” Stein said.
“Which is?”
“Pakistan is obviously behind the attacks because of the test. They didn’t want anybody looking over their shoulders. There’s no question about that part. But what do they hope to gain? Where’s the payoff for them?” Stein was the president’s chief of staff, and he was supposed to have the answers. But he was floundering now and he knew it.
“Continue,” the president prompted.
“Even if they had a half-dozen H-bombs, they don’t have the means to deliver them. At least I’ve seen nothing from CIA or NSA to tell us otherwise. India’s on the verge of rolling across the border in an all-out offensive. China has jumped into the fray, condemning their allies, and even Putin supposedly had a long talk with Musharraf. Pakistan has the H-bomb, but they can’t use it or risk total destruction. They’ve got themselves into a no-win situation.”
“Sorry, Brad, but I can’t quite agree,” Carolyn Tyson said.
Stein shot her an angry look. “What are they going to do with the damn things?”
“First we have to ask what are we going to do about them?” she replied calmly. Stein didn’t like or trust her, because he thought that she was after his job. And he knew that she was a lot smarter than he was, and it rankled. Especially in discussions like these in front of the boss.
“What?” Stein demanded.
“Nothing, for now. The situation in Islamabad is too unstable for us to make any kind of overt move. Musharraf and most of their leadership is scattered all over the country at the moment, and they have to be watching for India to launch a preemptive strike any second. Given the right nudge they’d launch their weapons and say the hell with the consequences. That is something we definitely do not want to happen.”
“What are you suggesting?” the president asked. “Musharraf refuses to talk to me.”
“First we repair the Jupiter, which will give us the intelligence we need. And Frank Dillon is the right man to run interference for us. My last mission with the SEALs was aboard the Flying Fish. He was aboard. He was pretty young then, but he was a good officer. Knew his stuff.”
“The shuttle goes up in two weeks,” Stein reminded them unnecessarily.
“We haven’t heard from our team on the ground yet, but as soon as we do we’ll know more.”
“What else is there?” Stein asked. “What else have you come up with that we haven’t heard about?”
“Mostly speculation. But what if the bomb wasn’t fired from a tower or some other ground installation? What if it was dropped from an airplane? Or delivered by a missile?”
“That would tell us they had the means of delivery,” the president said unhappily.
“They still wouldn’t dare launch an attack on India,” Stein asserted.
Carolyn Tyson shook her head. “They wouldn’t have to. Just possessing thermonuclear weapons is enough to elevate them to near-superpower status. Once the situation out there stabilizes vendors would be lined around the block all wanting a piece of the action. Exporting H-bomb technology, for instance, could make them a lot of money.” She looked inward for a moment. When she looked up again she seemed to have gathered a new resolve. She liked being the DCI, but she hated the world that she’d inherited to keep an eye on.
“What does the CIA advise?” Hanson asked.
“We need to know if the bomb is portable. We need to know if there are others. We need to know if they have delivery vehicles. We need to know where they’re being kept. We’re assuming Chardar for now. And then we destroy them. Admiral Puckett agrees.”
“I see,” the president said after a longish silence.
“There’s no other option open to us, Mr. President,” she said. “A country like Pakistan simply cannot be allowed to have operational H-bombs.”
President Hanson nodded, a troubled expression on his face. “As soon as you hear something, anything from Scott, let me know, please.”
Tyson’s expression softened. “Certainly, Mr. President.”
1330 EDT
THE PENTAGON
The spy known to the FBI and ONI as John Galt backed out of the intercept-decrypt program that linked him with the White House computer system. He closed his laptop’s lid and looked out his office window toward the river. The day was warm and hazy.
He did not have complete access to every system within the White House, but he’d been able to dig deep enough to find out at least some of what he wanted to know.
The Discovery’s repair mission had not come as a surprise to anyone, least of all Galt. But the president’s warning, and promise, that the crew would have help was disturbing.
At the very least his customers had to be warned. Then he would have to find out what kind of help the president was talking about. Galt had not heard a thing, which was unusual for a man in his position.
Something had to be done. And he already had a couple of very good ideas.
He grabbed his cap, left his office and headed to the elevators. He kept seeing the look of calm determination on Lieutenant Colonel Thoreau’s face. He smiled to himself.
It was so much better to go up against a confident man. The victory was all the more sweet.
Into the Tiger’s Lair
1
0400 LOCAL
WEST OF OAHU
“Prepare to dive the boat,” Dillon said into the growler phone. He did a quick three-sixty, then glanced up at the billion stars overhead. No fanfare this time. Only the lights of a couple of fishing boats far away to the south, and the gleam low on the horizon behind them from Honolulu.
And neither the angels in Heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.
He’d wanted to call Jill. Wanted it with everything in his heart. He was the commanding officer; it would have been easy. No one would have known he’d broken orders. Only he.
He made another sweep, a shutter closing off that part of his mind, focusing him on the job at hand.
“Clear the bridge,” he ordered.
“Aye, aye, skipper,” Alvarez said. He disappeared into the boat, followed by the lookout, with Dillon right behind them, dogging the hatch.
His crew was in place when he reached the control room. “My hatch is secure,” he said, stowing his cap and binoculars. Exact routines were important aboard a warship, especially a submarine. Their lives depended on doing the same task in exactly the same manner every time.
“Skipper, I have an all-green board,” Alvarez announced. “Pressures in the tanks are normal. We are ready in all respects for dive.”
“Very well,” Dillon said. “Dive the boat. Make your depth sixty feet.”
“Aye, aye, dive the boat, make my depth six-zero feet,” Alvarez repeated the order.
Bateman sounded the warning klaxon, and as Alvarez went through the steps to dive the boat to periscope depth, Dillon pulled down the growler phone.
“Sonar, conn.”
“Sonar, aye.”
“How’s it look, Ski?”
“No subsea targets, Captain,” Chief Sonarman Leonard “Ski” Zimenski, came back. “I have numerous surface vessels to the southeast and northwest. Fishing boats, and one large vessel, inbound to Pearl from the southeast. A container ship.”
“Very well, keep a sharp lookout. We could be having company at any time. We’ve been advised that there’s at least one Akula about eight hundred miles west, possibly right on our track.”
“Aye, skipper. If he’s still around, we’ll bag him.”
Dillon hung up the phone.
He glanced at the masthead indicators. “Mastheads are wet,” he told his diving officer.
“The time is fourteen-twelve Zulu, skipper, shall I message Pearl?” Bateman, his hand on a growler phone, asked.
“Negative,” Dillon said. “No message to Pearl.”
“Ease your angle on the planes,” Alvarez told the planesman, and their rate of descent slowed as the chief of boat balanced the trim tanks. They stopped at sixty feet.
“Check all compartments and all machinery in all respects,” Dillon said.
“Aye, Captain,” Alvarez responded, and he passed the order to all sections from the forward torpedo compartments to the aft engine room.
Dillon raised the search periscope and made a quick three-sixty sweep, and then a second, much slower sweep. There was a jumble of lights to the southeast, and another off to the northwest. White lights stacked up in vertical columns, and red and green lights on either side. They were fishing boats working the waters west of the Hawaiian islands. He could not make out the lights of the container ship, which was still well below the horizon, and there were no other lights in any direction except for those of Oahu, now far to the east, but the Russians were somewhere out there. He could almost smell them.
He wanted a little time before they made contact. If he couldn’t make an end run to avoid the Akula, he wanted at least twenty-four hours to get his crew acclimated. It took that long even for the best to be transformed from a shore-based mob to a smoothly operating team of fighting men.
“All compartments report ready for sea in all respects, skipper,” Alvarez reported.
Dillon lowered the periscope, and turned to his control room crew. Bateman and Alvarez were looking at him, waiting for their next orders.
Everyone else was busy at their assigned tasks of keeping the Seawolf straight and level at precisely sixty feet. It was a task much like trying to balance an inherently unstable whale on a knife edge while moving through a fluid that was in a constant state of change. Salinity, temperature, and subsea currents all had serious effects on a submarine’s trim. The distribution of supplies, food, potable water, sewage, garbage—and even personnel—also had their effects. Their speed through the water and the boat’s attitude made a difference. At some combinations the Seawolf’s hull form was almost impossible to keep under control. Each time they fired a torpedo, or a tube-launched missile, the boat’s trim went through the gyrations of the damned.
Sailing a submarine submerged was like flying a helicopter through Jell-O; it was definitely a full-time job, and definitely not a hands-off experience.
“Make your course two-seven-zero. Increase speed to flank. Make your depth six hundred feet.”
“Aye, sir. Make my course two-seven-zero degrees, increase my speed to flank, and dive to six-zero-zero feet.”
Dillon reached up and braced himself. Bateman did the same at the periscope rail. Everyone else not strapped into their bucket seats braced themselves against something.
Within seconds Seawolf heeled sharply to starboard, her bows angled downward at twenty degrees, and she accelerated as if she were a fox with a hot poker suddenly stuck up her ass.
Alvarez was ginning ear-to-ear; he was back in the hood cruisin’ chicks in his lowrider, only this was a billion times more cool.
His normally unflappable, mild-mannered XO, Charlie Bateman, who wanted his own boat so that he could hurry up and retire to teach high school math and physics, looked like a kid in a Toys “R” Us store. His eyes were bright, his hair was slicked back like an Irish muskrat’s, and he leaned as nonchalantly as he could against the periscope platform rail. “All right,” he said softly.
Anyone who had ever experienced the Seawolf putting the pedal to the metal while turning and diving, couldn’t help from feeling like they had strapped on an F/A-18 Hornet and were being catapulted off the deck of a carrier. The accelerations were awesome.
They hadn’t gotten to their angles and dangles first time out before they’d been recalled to Pearl, so this would have to suffice. So far Dillon hadn’t heard anything serious crashing inside his boat, though he suspected that there’d be loose clothing, maybe a few books or CDs and a few odds and ends breaking loose here and there. But by the time the next watch came on duty everything would be properly stowed.
His chiefs would see to that.
“Passing one hundred feet,” Alvarez said. “Ease left on the helm.”
Seawolf’s starboard heel began to lessen as the helmsman backed off the rate of turn. Their heading passed west-southwest, and the five digital and one analog compasses in the control room all settled slowly on due west.
“Our new course is two-seven-zero degrees. Passing two hundred feet.”
Flank speed submerged was forty-six knots, which was a highly classified figure. But the trick in this maneuver was to maintain that exact speed. With the reactor putting out 110 percent power at straight and level, Seawolf could achieve her top speed within less than one mile from a standing start. Diving at a sharp angle, however, could add an extra four or five knots.
Alvarez played a delicate balancing act. Seawolf entered a highly unstable zone between forty-eight and fifty knots, in which she was susceptible to pitching downward so violently that recovery was theoretically impossible. The submarine could carry them beyond the crush depth.
Dillon had spent a lot of time thinking about the problem. Under certain combat conditions, when they were trying to outrun an enemy torpedo, for instance, they could end up in such a situation. He had developed a maneuver that worked three times out of five in the model tank. He didn’t know if he cared to try it in reality, but it was there.
“Passing three hundred feet,” Alvarez reported. He picked up the growler phone at his position, and said something to the engine room officer that Dillon couldn’t make out. He probably asked for a specific number of propeller revolutions to maintain flank speed on the way down.
“Passing four hundred feet.”
Dillon made his way around the periscope pedestal to the plotting tables, where the assistant navigation officer, Ensign Howard “Buster” Brown, was keeping the dead-reckoning paper plot with the compass readings, speed of advance (SOA) that they took from the boat’s external sensors, and a stopwatch. Twice during each six-hour watch, the DR plot was checked against the sub’s inertial guidance system’s position. Their position was updated when they could get a surface fix as well: satellite, celestial, radio beacon, radar, and visual.
Before they got into the Indian Ocean and up into the Bay of Bengal they would have to thread the needle through the Mariana Islands, south through the Philippines, then Indonesia, the lesser Sunda Islands, and finally the Timor Sea. Land masses, reefs, shallows, sea mounts, and warships from a dozen countries would be in their way. All of it negotiated at flank speed. Their initial plots would have to be right on the money.
Brown, a heavyset young man built like a tree trunk with deep-set dark eyes and close-cropped black hair, was next up for SOAC (submarine officers advanced course). His next billet would be as a section head; probably as chief navigation officer. The man was precise. Which was why Dillon had suggested to Alvarez that Brown start their plot.
“Did you get a reliable fix before we submerged?” Dillon asked.
“Yes, sir. I got a couple of good star shots, two independent satellite fixes, three radar bearings on the island, and I’ll do bottom profiling on each leg.”
