Nimitz Class

peak of their careers. The view you have now is the view he had when he called out his last order…‘Bearing one- three-five — range seven thousand yards now…fire!’

“Do you know how evil you have to be to pull off something like that, Jeff? If I’m right, and if Bill here is right, we are looking for one of the most ruthless assassins in the history of mankind. And I am afraid he’s also goddamned clever. Whatever they are saying at the White House and the Pentagon, we must find him, because, like Bill, I actually think the bastard might do it again.”

When Jeff Zepeda stepped back from the periscope he was plainly shaken. This was a man who had served in the embassy in Tehran until it fell to the Revolutionary Guards in 1979. A man who had gone undercover, in Arab dress, riding the Tehran railroad out to Damascus and back for three years. Jeff Zepeda had watched from doorways, from safe houses, as the massed thousands of the Ayatollah’s followers had raised their banners proclaiming, “Neither East nor West — Islamic Republic.”

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.”

One of the key officers who died on board the Thomas Jefferson was Ensign Junior Grade Jim Adams, the Arresting Gear Officer. His wife Carole gave birth to their first son in Boston two months ago. He was christened Carl Edward, after the Red Sox hitters Carl Yastrzemski and Ted Williams, but the South Boston Naval officer had never seen his son. Last night a Red Sox spokesman said that every member of the 2002 team would attend the memorial service for Ensign Adams at the Old North Church, the church of the patriots, later this month.

— BOSTON GLOBE

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.’