Scimitar SL-2 (49 page)

He called for the satellite message, which he knew was from General Ravi.
Ben, the thoughts of both Shakira and myself are
with you at this time. If Allah is listening, as He surely must, His humble warriors will be safe. The prayers of all Muslims right now are only for you…to wish you the safest journey home after the Scimitars have done their holy work. Ravi.

2300, Thursday, October 8

The White House, Washington, D.C.

Admiral Morgan and President Bedford were gathered with senior Naval Commanders in the Situation Room in the lower floor of the West Wing. A huge, backlit computer screen showed a chart of the Canary Islands, a sharp red cross in a circle signifying the last two sightings that the Navy believed were of the
Barracuda
. A brighter white cross in a circle showed the spot Adm. Frank Doran on the Norfolk link now believed the
Barracuda
to be.

He had it already on the 25-mile radius line from the La Palma coast. Which was slightly jumping the gun. Admiral Badr had not yet made his final commitment to the run-in to the launch zone. And would not do so for another half hour. The U.S. Admirals’ estimates were about 16 miles ahead of themselves, which is a fair long way in a remote and deserted ocean.

Admiral Morgan was personally bracing himself to read a report from a hastily convened meeting in London of the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea. This august gathering meets only about every twelve to fifteen years, explicitly to draw up the International Regulations for the Prevention of Collisions at Sea, more generally known as the Rules of the Road.

Before him was the Convention’s first report of a day without GPS. And the opening instance of disaster, the very first serious wreck, astounded him. A Liberian-registered crude carrier of some 300,000 tons had somehow mistaken the southern shores of the entrance to the Strait of Magellan for the Isla de la Estada, turned sharp right making 20 knots, and driven the tanker straight onto the beach at Punta Delgada.

“Five hundred miles off course! In a calm, nearly landlocked bay, and he thought he was on his way through the roughest goddamned ocean waters in the world, on his way to Cape Horn!

“Jesus Christ!” said Arnold. “Jesus H. Christ.”

The second item did even less to restore his equilibrium. A Panama-registered freighter out of Indonesia had completely missed Japan’s huge southern island of Kyushu, never mind the port of Kagoshima, her final destination.

The freighter headed straight for the tip of the South Korean peninsula, but never made that either, charging straight into the seaport of Seowipo on the lush subtropical island of Jejudo and ramming into the evening ferry from Busan.

Arnold could hardly believe his eyes. The third item was equally appalling. The master of a 200,000-tonner, carrying crude oil to Rotterdam, slammed into the Goodwin Sands at low tide, six miles off the east coast of Kent at the north end of the English Channel, and was still jammed tight in about four feet of water.

There was another huge tanker on the beach in northern Nigeria, a chartered yacht parked 300 miles adrift off the wrong island in the West Indies, and the captain of a large cruise ship out of Naples was wondering why no one was speaking Italian on the island of Corsica.

Lloyds of London was apoplectic. Every fifteen minutes, there was another report from some remote corner of the globe where an expensive ship had lost its way and floundered ashore. Admiral Morgan was just beginning to see a glimmer of humor in all this, but the consequences of massive lawsuits directed at the United States for switching off the GPS prevented him from actually laughing out loud.

“The legal ramifications are clearly a nightmare,” offered Adm. Alan Dickson. “Lloyds might see it as an opportunity to get back at us after all these years—you know, that nutcase U.S. judge who nearly bankrupted them twenty years ago, holding Lloyds responsible for all those asbestos cases that happened years before anyone even dreamed the stuff was a health hazard.”

“They might at that,” said Arnold. “But they’ll have to do it here. And since it was essentially the Military that switched the GPS off for military reasons, we’ll probably refuse to submit to the judgment of civilians.”

“Good idea,” replied Admiral Dickson. “Meanwhile the world’s beaches are filling up with shipwrecks.”

“Driven and piloted by incompetents,” said Arnold. “Guys who should not hold licenses to navigate in open waters. And we gave all shipping corporations ample warnings of a forty-eight-hour break in GPS service. They put monkeys at the helm of their own ships, that’s their goddamned problem, right?”

“Absolutely, sir,” said the CNO. “Guess there’s no change in the eastern Atlantic. No sight nor sound of the submarine, for what? Almost a day?”

“Almost,” replied Arnold. “And right now we’re coming up to midnight. Just a few minutes and it’s October 9. D-day. I just hope the little bastard comes to the surface real soon. George Gillmore’s got the entire area surrounded.”

“Well, the only good thing about not seeing him is that he can’t fire without coming to PD. Just as long as he stays submerged, he ain’t firing. And that pleases me no end.”

“Me too,” said Arnold.

Lt. Comdr. Jimmy Ramshawe, sitting thoughtfully in the corner with his laptop, spoke suddenly. “You know, sir. I wouldn’t be the least surprised if we were way off in our assessment of the
Barracuda
’s position right now. I can’t imagine why he’d run right up to the most heavily patroled spot in the area and then hang around. If you ask me, he’s still lurking off Gomera. And he won’t close in till he’s good and ready to launch.”

“As a matter of fact, that’s what I’d do,” said Arnold. “I’d stay somewhere quiet and then run in at first light.”

“How long’s that, Arnold?” asked the President.

“Well, they’re four hours in front of us, so I’d say another couple of hours.”

“Not me, sir,” said Lieutenant Commander Ramshawe. “I’d go
while it was still bloody dark. And I’d go damn slow, so the minute I got there, I could get the periscope up and make my visual fix.”

“Have you ever been in a submarine, Ramshawe?” said Admiral Morgan, sternly.

“No, sir.”

“Well, you shoulda been. Got the right instincts. And I think you might be correct. Let’s get Frank on the line in Norfolk. See what he thinks. Then we’ll get a signal on the satellite to George Gillmore.”

Meanwhile, beyond the White House, the East Coast prepared for the final stages of evacuation, which, by Presidential decree, would begin at midnight. The streets were busier now than they had been for several hours. The lights were beginning to go out in several government buildings as skeleton staffs headed for the cars and the roads to the northwest.

The Police were scheduled to make the Beltway around the city one-way, counterclockwise, and designate the main Highway 279 “North Only” starting at midnight. This would enable all members of Government to head for the Camp Goliath area, fast.

President Bedford insisted on being among the very last to leave the deserted capital city. “Not until we know that the volcano has been blown,” he said. “Not until the tsunami is within 500 miles of our shores. That’s when we go.”

Over at the Pentagon, the Special Ops Room staff intended to remain functional until the very last moment before flying up to Goliath. The U.S. Marines had two Super Stallions ready to take off from the Pentagon, and two more on the White House lawn. Between them, they could airlift 220 key personnel from the teeth of danger.

As the clocks ticked into the small hours of the morning, the vast evacuation of the East Coast was almost complete. It was now October 9, and all the small towns from Maine to south Florida were very nearly depleted.

Places like Boston, Newport, and Providence, Rhode Island,
the Long Island suburbs, New Jersey, and the Carolina coastal plains were all but deserted. The one city still writhing in desperate last-moment agonies was the Big Apple—New York City—where the traffic snarls were still appalling, and the railroads were still packed with thousands of people trying to make it to safety, west of the city. But their journeys were much longer than those of the short-haul Washington evacuees and the New Englanders fleeing Boston for the relative closeness of the Massachusetts hills.

Trains took twice as long to return to New York, across the vast New Jersey flatlands, most of which were about six inches above sea level. And there were so many more thousands of people with nowhere to go. The Army was coping valiantly, bringing in hundreds upon hundreds of trucks, and commandeering just about every gallon of gas in the state. But the evacuation was just swamped with the massive throng of people trying to get out of the city, and the Army Commanders began to think that there were not enough trucks, buses, and trains in the entire world to sort them all out, before the whole goddamned place went underwater.

The Ops Room in the Pentagon received a new and heartfelt request from New York every hour. More transportation, more manpower, more helicopters. The last request read by Gen. Tim Scannell was from a Gulf War veteran, a high-ranking Colonel, and it ended thus…
“Sir, you have absolutely no idea what it’s like up here. I never saw so many frightened people. Terrified people, that is. They don’t know what’s going to happen to them. I implore you to get another hundred trucks into Midtown Manhattan. Or I’m afraid we’ll just go under.”

Admiral Morgan was well aware of the crisis facing the Big Apple, and he conferred with General Scannell on an hourly basis. They banned any form of crisis coverage by the media, shut down the New York newspapers, and took over the television networks, using them strictly to broadcast Military information and instructions to the population. Coverage of any kind of confusion,
or of human-interest stories that might spread panic, was absolutely banned.

Admiral Morgan told all corporate media managements that if one of them dared to transgress his guidelines, their building would be instantly shut down and then barred by the heavy guns of the tanks that roamed the New York City streets.

General Scannell actually appeared on the screen in a closed-circuit television linkup to all broadcasting stations on the East Coast to confirm the Martial Law threat made by the Supreme Commander of Operation High Tide. “We can cope with damn near anything,” he said. “Except for mass panic. Do not even consider stepping out of line.”

So far, no one had.

And now it was 0100 on the morning of October 9, D-day for the Hamas hit men. With exception of the churning cauldron of New York City, the East Coast evacuation was winding down. Millions of people had made their way to higher ground and now waited in the western hills from Maine to the Carolinas and beyond.

Military spokesmen occupied every television and radio channel, and their words were professionally calming, assuring the population that the front line of the United States Navy still stood between the terrorists and the execution of their attack on the great volcano in the eastern Atlantic.

Admiral Morgan had instructed the military broadcasters to sign off each one-hour bulletin after midnight with the reassuring, morale-boosting words…“We have the power, the technology, and the bravest of men to carry out the Pentagon’s defensive plan—and always remember the words of the great American sportswriter Damon Runyon,
The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong—but that’s the way to bet!”

0905, October 9

Eastern Atlantic

Barracuda,
28.21N 17.24W

Speed 5, Depth 600, Course 290.

The waters were still dark above the
Barracuda
as it ran silently along its west-nor’west course. They were three miles short of their launch position, running well below the layers, transmitting nothing, still undetected.

At 0530 local time, Admiral Badr slid up to periscope depth, and inside his seven-second exposure limit he was immediately aware that the entire area was “lousy” with antisubmarine units, active and therefore probably passive too. But the “layers” had protected him well, and he threaded his way deep again, into the great underwater caverns, which so distort and confuse probing sonars from the surface.

Ben had enough time to assess that there were almost certainly Viking aircraft combing the surface above him, but few ships. As they continued forward, however, he could hear active transmissions from helicopters and frigates inshore of him. All in all, he concluded there was a highly active layer of U.S. defense from about 12 miles off the towering eastern shores of La Palma.

For the fifth time in the early morning journey, he ordered a major course change, just to check that there was no one trailing behind him. Then he corrected it back to two-nine-zero, and slowly, making scarcely a ripple, he once more brought the ship to periscope depth for his final “fix.” And as the submarine slid gently into the now-brightening surface waters, he made one single order:

“PREPARE MISSILES FOR LAUNCH!”

They detected no close-active transmissions, and Admiral Badr nodded curtly to the helmsman, CPO Ali Zahedi, who cut their speed to just three knots.

“UP PERISCOPE, ALL-ROUND LOOK!”

Twenty seconds later—“DOWN!”

Ahmed Sabah, keenly aware of the seven-second rule drummed into him by Admiral Badr, knew the mast had been up too long. And he stared at the CO, trying to read either “rattled,” “desperate,” or “confused” into his leader’s facial expression. But he saw nothing, apart from a certain bland acceptance. And he did not like what he saw. Not one bit.

Allah!
thought the brother of Mrs. Ravi Rashood.
He’s given up, he thinks we’re trapped.

“Sir?” he said, questioningly.

And Ben Badr, apparently unhearing, said mechanically, “The place is swarming with helicopters. And I thought I saw a frigate inshore.” And then: