Nimitz Class

“There’s an old military saying which has stood the test of time since the Ottoman Empire. Actually I can’t remember it, but it means, translated from the Greek or Latin or something, ‘Fuck not around with brother Turk. Because he gets real pissed off, real quick.’ Trust me. Hit a shoal in the Bosporus, you’d never get your ship back.”

“Yeah, but the towelheads are fanatics,” said Admiral Morgan. “They believe in their God, Allah. They believe his kingdom beckons for the righteous, and that it would be a privilege to die in such a cause. Death means less to them than it does to us. Much more, spiritually. They would try something like this, if they really wanted to cast a monster blow against ‘The Satan USA’—because broadly that’s what they think of us.”

The four men were silent for a moment, each one of them pondering the possibility of anyone daring to run the gauntlet of the Turks. “The other thing you do have to remember,” said Baldridge, “is that such a journey would take you straight through the middle of Istanbul harbor! Can you imagine that? Plowing through the ferry lanes — the periscope leaving a huge white wake?”

“There are ways around all of that,” said Admiral Morgan.

“Yeah,” said Baldridge. “But not when you’re fucking around in about a hundred feet of water, with old wrecks and God knows what else on the sea bed.”

“Yes, there are,” said Morgan again. “The key question is, could Iran, or any Arab nation, come up with anyone good enough even to start such a mission? There are damn few submarine officers anywhere in the world who could pull it off. And they are probably British…the U.S. Navy hasn’t operated small diesel submarines for years.”

“There’s a lotta blind alleys here,” said Zepeda. “And they all lead us to a very clever Arab, who we don’t think exists.”

“Well, it’ll please the Pentagon guys this afternoon,” said Lynch. “You just know the brass wants to stick to the accident theory. And the politicians will not waver from it. You could tell the President does not believe it. But he really has no choice. An accident is a bitch and all that. But a nuclear hit on a U.S. ship…Christ! That could be war, and the populace might panic. The media would definitely panic. Or at least they would look as if they were panicking.”

“I think that is correct,” said Morgan. “And in a way that’s good for us. Because we are going to be asking a lot of questions. I’ll coordinate all the data on where every submarine in the world has been in the past three months. We’ll get a long way by elimination — I’ll pull up all the files on all detections. A lot of ’em will be whales, but we just might hit something. There was something a couple of months ago which kinda baffled me. I’d like to find out some more about that.

“But before that I’d like to talk to Ted about tracing large amounts of cash.”

“That gets harder each year. So many foreign banks, wire transfers, with no one paying attention.”

“Yup,” said Morgan. “But I think we might be talking about 10 million bucks minimum, in greenbacks. That lot had to come from somewhere.”

“Sure did, Admiral. I can’t promise record speed. But I think we get can some kind of a handle on that.”

“How do you start, Ted?”

“Well, we’ll make a few discreet inquiries in the naval ports around the Black Sea, particularly those where we know there are submarines. Big sums of money in small close-knit communities tend to become pretty obvious pretty quickly. But, if we are correct in our assumptions, it won’t be that surprising to find a few recipients. The hard part will be finding where that money came from, and precisely who distributed it. But it’s a whole bundle of cash, and it’s hard to hide a whole bundle of anything.”

Jeff Zepeda said he would get busy with various Iranian contacts and agents to see if he could smell out any such plot to demolish an American carrier.

Bill Baldridge seemed preoccupied with the problem of the mysterious Arab commander. “My view is this,” he said. “I may be wrong, but I really do not think the Iranians would have used one of their very public submarines — the three Russian-built Kilos in Bandar Abbas — to attack an American Battle Group.

“I mean, Jesus, that’s not terrorism, that’s like trying to start a goddamned war. I think it is so much more likely they will have gone for a fourth boat, purchased or hired from the Black Sea, and crept quietly around the globe until they found the Thomas Jefferson.

“I do realize that thereafter the problems become almost insurmountable, on a sheer technological basis. But there is one problem that refuses to budge from the very front area of my brain. You know what it is? They must have had someone—a brilliant Arab submariner, a guy who could creep through the Bosporus, the Gibraltar Strait undetected, past all the U.S. surveillance, on and under the surface, in the sky, and on the ships.

“This is a truly brilliant guy. Who could it possibly have been? They must have had someone in charge and that someone must have been one of their own, in the submarine, in the control room, calling the shots. But who trained him? Was he an American traitor? A British traitor? It is almost impossible to believe such a man could exist. But not, guys, as impossible as trying to establish that fucking uranium went off by mistake.”

The more Admiral Arnold Morgan heard from Baldridge the more he liked him. Actually he liked all of the men sitting with him in the corner booth of this little restaurant on the waterfront of colonial Alexandria. But it was Baldridge he really warmed to. Baldridge was a terrier, with a clear mind, and he was after a rat, and he was very, very focused, wrestling with the problem himself, assuming the responsibility was his.

“Einstein with a red-and-white dishcloth on his head,” Baldridge mused. “That’s who I’m after.”

Admiral Morgan chuckled, noting the Kansas scientist said “I” not “We.”

“Don’t let this eat you up, son,” he said. “Might affect your judgment.”

Lieutenant Commander Baldridge made no reply, gulped his coffee, and muttered absently, “The thing is, so far as I can see, the fucker’s still out there.”

What the American people are entitled to know is the precise odds against such an accident happening again. While selfsatisfied Pentagon staffers — particularly in the Department of the Navy — walk around making up absurd excuses for the catastrophe — there are fathers and mothers out there with boys trying to make it through the Academy at Annapolis. And those American parents want to know the risks of further accidents. Indeed they may rise up and demand to know the risks. It is one thing to make a statement talking about “a one-in-a-billion chance,” as the President did — but what is the reality? For how many more of our boys does the U.S. Navy represent a nuclear death trap?

EDITORIAL PAGE

— SAN FRANCISCO TIMES

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