The Trident Deception (36 page)

The president’s chief of staff leaned back in his chair, taken aback by the enraged woman glaring at him. “About what?”

“You know damn well what I’m talking about!”

Hardison shook his head. “I’m afraid not. Perhaps if you explained—”

Christine’s face turned red, the muscles in her neck straining as she yelled at him. “Dave and I were almost run over by a car outside Whitlow’s! We came within inches of being killed!”

Hardison laughed. “And you think I had something to do with it? Some idiot almost runs you over and you think I’m responsible?”

“You’re damn right I do! You made it clear from the beginning that Dave was a threat to this administration, and I have no doubt you’ve taken matters into your own hands.”

Hardison interlocked his hands across his waist. “I assure you I had nothing to do with this, Christine.”

He appeared unfazed by her accusation. If anything, he seemed amused, the corners of his mouth twitching upward. His flippant attitude ignited Christine’s rage. She’d had enough of Hardison, and she was finally going to do something about him. “You’ve gone too far this time, Kevin. I’m going to Director Larson, and you’ll be done as chief of staff by the end of this week.”

The smile disappeared from Hardison’s face as he sprang to his feet, towering over her. His voice dropped a notch as he spoke. “Don’t come in here and threaten me, Christine, especially over some paranoid delusion you’ve created about a hit-and-run driver.” A cold look settled over his face.

Christine stood erect, taking a step back from Hardison’s desk as he continued, “Whoever almost ran you over probably wasn’t paying attention, not some assassin I hired to take Hendricks out. Now why don’t you go back to your office, collect your thoughts, and get back to work? I’m sure there’s something you’ve neglected to attend to these last few days.”

There was an uneasy silence as they glared at each other, broken when the secure phone on Hardison’s desk beeped.

As he answered it, Christine mulled over his reaction. He seemed genuinely surprised and offended by her accusation. But she had watched him lay it on thick before, feigning surprise or ignorance. She just couldn’t tell if he was telling the truth. He was too good a liar.

Hardison hung up the phone, flexing his hand as he released the handset. “That was your alive-and-well ex-husband in the Command Center,” he said with a hint of sarcasm. But what caught Christine’s attention wasn’t the tone of his voice. It was the sudden fear in his eyes as he continued. “Our SOSUS arrays detected a damaged missile tube hatch being opened. It looks like the
Kentucky
survived. The best guess is they’re determining the extent of damage from the torpedo.” He paused for a moment before he added, “They’re not far from Emerald.”

Christine’s anger dissipated with the news. The
Kentucky
hadn’t been sunk and was closer than ever to launching. “I’ll be over at the Command Center,” she said. “I’ll let you know what I find out.”

58

PENTAGON

23 HOURS REMAINING

“We picked up the metallic transient near the Marshall Islands.” Captain Brackman spoke quietly as he stood between Christine and Hendricks in the deputy director’s office, examining the electronic map of the Pacific Ocean at the front of the Current Action Center. Christine studied the red circle expanding slowly into a teardrop shape heading west as Brackman continued, “We’ve biased the projection of the
Kentucky
’s position by limiting her possible courses from two-one-zero to three-three-zero. We know she’ll continue heading west toward Emerald.

“Unfortunately,” he added, “she’s definitely west of our naval forces.” Brackman pointed to a column of blue circles to the east of the red teardrop, “Our surface ships are too far away to catch the
Kentucky,
even at ahead flank. We’ve reassigned the P-3Cs to the leading edge of the
Kentucky
’s AOU, but their field density is porous due to limited sonobuoys, and once the
Collins
approaches the AOU, we’ll have to pull them out, since they could engage the wrong submarine.”

“Where is the
Collins
now?”

“The
Collins
is the blue half circle to the west of the teardrop.”

On the monitor on the far wall, the forward edge of the
Kentucky
’s area of uncertainty was almost touching Emerald, with the
Collins’
s blue semicircle a few inches to the left.

While Christine examined the display, Hendricks joined the conversation. “You need to talk to the president, Christine. We need to inform Iran. I understand the reasons for keeping this quiet up to now, hoping we could turn this off. But the
Kentucky
has made it past all three layers of our ASW barrier, and our main hope right now is the
Collins
. At this point, I doubt we can stop the
Kentucky
from launching. And once she does, our ballistic missile defense systems will be overwhelmed. You’ve got to convince the president to inform Iran.”

Christine reflected on Hendricks’s words for a moment, then nodded. “I’ll talk to him. I’ll head over to the White House, then come back here until this is over, one way or another.”

Before she left Hendricks’s office, she looked back up at the display. She wondered who would suffer and die. Would it be the innocent people of Iran or the men aboard the
Kentucky
? Everything hinged on whether they could find and sink the
Kentucky
before she launched.

As Christine studied the monitor in front of them, Brackman correctly surmised what she was thinking. “As you can see,
Kentucky
will enter Emerald as early as midnight tonight, depending on where she is in her AOU. Let’s pray the
Collins
finds her before she does. We just sent her the news the
Kentucky
survived. She’ll be downloading it off the broadcast anytime now.”

59

HMAS
COLLINS

22 HOURS REMAINING

Nine hundred miles east of the Northern Mariana Islands, Murray Wilson stood next to Brett Humphreys in Control as the
Collins
secured snorting, her battery recharge complete, the Officer of the Watch turning slowly on the periscope as they prepared to head deep. The
Collins
’s painfully slow pace grated on Wilson. Unlike American fast attacks that could have made the entire run east at ahead flank, the
Collins
spent half her time at periscope depth at ten knots, recharging her batteries between high-speed runs.

Although the
Kentucky
had been sunk, the
Collins
was still headed east at maximum speed. Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicles were being sent from Australia and San Diego in the event the
Kentucky
had come to rest on a shallow spot on the ocean floor. It was unlikely, but there was always the possibility. Finding the
Kentucky
would be the hard part, and Wilson hoped the
Collins
could help. As he checked the clock on the starboard bulkhead, calculating how long before the submarine would arrive at the position the
Kentucky
was reported sunk, his thoughts were interrupted by an announcement from Radio.

“Watch Leader, Commcen. Incoming message from the FEG.”

A moment later, a radioman entered Control, handing a message to Humphreys. Wilson noted a startled expression on the Captain’s face as he read the message. He handed it to Wilson. A few sentences down, his heart leapt to his throat. Tom was still alive. But then the somber realization set in. The
Kentucky
had made it past the surface ships, and the P-3Cs had expended most of their sonobuoys. The
Collins
was the most capable asset remaining.

Humphreys walked over to the navigation chart, Wilson joining him.

Wilson handed the message to the Petty Officer of the Watch. “Plot these coordinates.”

The leading seaman obliged, measuring off the longitude and latitude, drawing a small circle around the new point on the chart. The seaman leaned back out of the way as Wilson and Humphreys examined the target’s updated position.

With the original large area of uncertainty, Wilson hadn’t been sure they would find the
Kentucky
. But with the new fifty-kilometer-radius AOU—even accounting for the increased time it would take to close the distance—they would find the
Kentucky
. What Wilson didn’t know, however, was whether they would find her before or after she launched.

Humphreys turned to the radioman. “Acknowledge receipt and inform the FEG we will enter the target’s AOU in nine hours.” Turning to the Officer of the Watch, Humphreys ordered the ship down from periscope depth. “Make your depth one hundred meters and increase speed to ahead flank, course zero-nine-five. Load all torpedo tubes.”

*   *   *

Down in the Weapon Stowage Compartment, Chief Marine Technician Kim Durand, the Weapons Chief aboard the
Collins
, supervised the Torpedo Reload Party. Upon receipt of War Patrol orders, they would normally have loaded all six of the submarine’s torpedo tubes. But their target was far away, and the analog Mod 4 torpedoes had a nasty habit of overheating when powered up inside the tubes for more than a few hours at a time. Her Captain had decided instead to load their torpedoes when they were closer to their target. They were apparently closing in on it now.

The first torpedo had been loaded into tube One when Captain Wilson stopped by the Weapon Stowage Compartment. Shortly after the American’s arrival on board, the crew learned they were chasing a Chinese copy of the U.S. Trident submarine. In the American captain’s eyes she had expected to see the excitement of the hunt, the steely determination to find and sink their adversary. But she saw none of that—only an unexplainable sadness. There was more to this mission than their Captain and the American were letting on.

Kim knew this mission would be dangerous once they engaged their target. Even with the long range of their Heavyweight torpedoes—they could travel over twenty miles before running out of fuel—you had to get close to your opponent to sink the knife in. That meant you could be stabbed in return. Unfortunately, there were no flesh wounds in submarine combat. It was pretty much a binary result: You either got hit and died, or the torpedo missed and you survived. Kim hoped they would survive the upcoming battle, but she and the rest of the crew knew there was no way to predict how things would turn out.

And so, in the face of uncertainty, the crew’s confidence was unshakable. The marine technicians in the reload party were already making bets on which torpedo would sink their target. The second torpedo was already halfway into tube Two, being pushed forward steadily by the hydraulic ram temporarily attached to the back of the torpedo, and Kim ran her hand along the smooth, cold aluminum skin of the torpedo as it traveled into its new stowage location. As the nineteen-foot-long torpedo disappeared into the tube, Chief Kim Durand transferred a kiss from her hand to its tail, wishing it luck. Her bet would ride on the torpedo in tube Two.

As Captain Wilson left the Weapon Stowage Compartment, Kim wondered if somewhere to the east, her counterpart on their target was doing the same.

60

USS
KENTUCKY

18 HOURS REMAINING

It was almost 0100 GMT aboard the
Kentucky
when the crew submerged after inspecting their missile hatches; time for Tom’s evening watch as Officer of the Deck. The six-hour watch elapsed uneventfully as the
Kentucky
continued its inexorable march toward Emerald. After being relieved at midnight, Tom now toured through Missile Compartment Lower Level on his after-watch tour, checking the bilges for evidence of leaks and examining the ship’s equipment for malfunctions. As he passed the ten-foot-tall gas generators—soda-can-shaped cylinders filled with water that would be transformed instantly to steam by an explosive charge—he still found it hard to believe that simple steam could pop the sixty-five-ton missile above the ocean’s surface like a giant cork gun.

The steam impulse was essential, as the missile’s engine could not ignite while it was in the tube; the 1,400-degree heat from the exhaust would melt through the bottom of the submarine. So the missile launch system was designed to eject the missile above the ocean’s surface, where the first-stage motor would ignite, pushing the missile and its eight 475-kiloton warheads into the stratosphere on the journey toward its target.

As Tom completed his journey through the Missile Compartment, he climbed the forward ladder two decks and stepped through the watertight door into the Operations Compartment, stopping outside Missile Control Center. He punched in the cipher lock combination, then entered MCC to review the strategic weapon system status. Two missile techs were on watch, seated at the Launch Control Panel, monitoring the condition of each missile and tube.

“How are you guys doing?”

“Fine, sir,” one of the missile techs replied, glancing briefly at Tom before returning his attention to the console.

Tom reviewed the logs as the two missile techs sat quietly, neither one engaging the lieutenant in conversation. The missile techs would normally have peppered him with questions, eager to talk to anyone except the bloke sitting beside them, stuck together on the same watch cycle for weeks on end. It didn’t take long to run out of things to talk about once they got past the
What did you do last summer?
phase. But neither man seemed in the mood for conversation, which was consistent with what Tom had noticed throughout the submarine. He finished reviewing the logs in silence, then handed the clipboard back to the nearest petty officer.

As Tom stepped out of MCC, a burst of commotion greeted his ears. Angry shouts came from the Crew’s Mess, and he entered to find the two missile techs who had accompanied him topside, Kreuger and Santos, holding a third missile tech, Walworth, who was struggling to free himself. Reynolds, who had been Tom’s phone talker topside, stood across from the three, holding his hand to his nose, blood running down his face.