Nimitz Class

Quetta. In March 1995 three American consulate officials were ambushed and their van sprayed with gunfire on a busy street in Karachi. The CIA thinks there is a connection between all three attacks.

“Baluchistan is set in a triangle where Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan meet. It’s a desperate place, damned nearly lawless, for centuries ruled by rich and powerful tribal chiefs. There was a lot of CIA activity in the area after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Thousands of tribesmen from Baluchistan found themselves working for the CIA, running arms and ammunition north to the resistance fighters, the mujahideen. And with that came some kind of a backlash. Students burned the American flag, and a strong nationalist movement grew up among the Pathans — that’s the most militant of the local tribes. A lot of them call themselves ‘the children of the CIA jihad.’ The World Trade Center guys were some of ’em.

“I personally examined the possibility of this crowd trying to pull off something like an attack on an American warship. But in the end I drew a blank. Even as a nation, Pakistan does not have the capacity.

“Their entire Navy has only seven somewhat suspect submarines capable of firing torpedoes. Most of them are French, and pretty old…although they have been recently operating a program to build a couple of new ones under license from France, Hashmat Agosta Class.

“And anyway, the whole history of submarines being built by foreign powers, under license, is very shaky. They either don’t work, or they keep going wrong. If you asked me if the Pakistan Navy could have sunk the Thomas Jefferson, I would have said most probably not. Could a group of Baluchistan tribesmen have commandeered a submarine from Karachi and done it? Absolutely not. We would have caught and destroyed them before they came within a hundred miles of the Battle Group, no ifs, ands, or buts. That is, if they hadn’t all killed themselves first.

“Zack Carson’s group could have put away the entire Pakistani Navy, never mind a couple of creaking Gallic submarines. It’s one thing to blow a hole in a garage in the Trade Center, rather sneakily setting fire to a few Cadillacs. But quite another to obliterate the world’s most powerful warship — not while it’s on full battle alert.

“My conclusions are thus identical to those of Admiral Morgan. It was Iran. Or Iraq. Most likely Iran.”

“That,” replied Bill Baldridge, “brings me to my next point. Whichever of the two nations it was, they must have had at least one, possibly six, senior Naval officers on board, all nationals. One of them must have been an outstanding submarine commander — a man with experience of a modern diesel-electric, and a high level of tactical expertise. Let me ask you the key question: who trained him? Answer that.”

“God knows,” said Scott Dunsmore, giving away nothing.

“I know as well,” said the lieutenant commander slowly.

“You do?”

“I do.”

“Surprise me.”

“The Brits. The man we seek was trained in Faslane, Scotland, at the Royal Navy’s submarine base on the Clyde.”

“How could you possibly know that?”

“Because there is no other alternative. Look, it is likely that this guy somehow got a submarine out of the Black Sea, through the Bosporus, and then took it on a journey of thousands of miles. Through the Med, down the Atlantic, around Africa and up into the Arabian Sea. He must have refueled at least twice, possibly three times, which is a highly technical, dangerous, and demanding exercise in the middle of a rough ocean. Just finding the goddamned tanker wants a bit of doing.

“And all the while, he kept that machine running, sometimes below the surface, sometimes at periscope depth, sometimes snorkeling to recharge his giant battery. Always traveling at, I’d guess, around eight knots, slowing to under five if anyone came near. Probably traveling at around two hundred miles a day. As far as we know right now, he made very few mistakes, if any.

“And then came the really tricky part. This bastard actually got in among the Battle Group. He got through our defenses, and, if he hit the Jefferson with a torpedo armed with a nuclear warhead, he got that dead right too. We have no indication that he fired more than one…but he did put a nuclear-tipped torpedo in exactly the right spot to blow away our carrier. All this without our people getting one single clue, because if they had it would have been on the link faster than you could say ‘towelhead.’ That’s a clever sonofabitch we’re dealing with here. Because no one gets to be that lucky. And I ask you one more time, Pops, who trained him?”

“I don’t know, Bill. I really don’t. You tell me.”

“Okay. Well, it was definitely not Ali Shamkhani or whatever that guy’s called who runs the Iranian Navy. Jesus, those guys couldn’t get a submarine through New York Harbor without hitting the Statue of Liberty.

“It could not have been any of the smaller nations with submarines. Most of ’em can’t even keep one submarine in good working order for longer than about a month. And the French never like telling another nation anything. They didn’t even train their best customers, the Pakistanis, very seriously.

“Nossir. This man was trained either by us, or by the Brits. I doubt it was us for several reasons. One, we have not used diesel-electric boats for years, and I doubt we still have the skills. And two, we do not train foreign nationals to drive submarines which may be used against us. So if the guy was trained here he must have been a traitor.

“The Brits, however, have trained foreign nationals. And their command qualification course is the best in the world. And they use diesels. I did hear they trained a couple of Saudi Arabian officers a coupla years ago when they were considering selling submarines to old King Fahd. I am not certain about this, but I think they also trained a few Israelis and Indians for the same reason. We should talk to the Brits, in my opinion.”

“I suppose you are right, Bill. I’ll admit I have been trying to avoid the subject. Because once we take the massive step of confiding in another government that we are possibly searching for the greatest terrorist in history, then we lay ourselves open to press leaks and God knows what else. You can imagine, damaging speculation by ‘specialist’ journalists, who always know just sufficient to be downright dangerous, but brutally unhelpful.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Nonetheless, I am afraid we are going to have to step up to the problem, just as you have done. By the way, why did you select Faslane in Scotland as being the site of the dirty deed?”

“Ah, now I was just coming to that. Shall we go next door and get into some supper and another drink? Then I’ll tell you my theory.”

“Good call, Bill. Want another Scotch or a glass of wine?”

“Wine, I expect, if it’s a selection from your cellar.”

The two men walked across the big downstairs hall of the great house, where the guard was still on duty and snapped, “Sir!” as the admiral and the lieutenant commander walked by, both in uniform. “Evening, Johnny,” replied the CNO. Inside the red-walled book-lined study — known as the Scarlet Nightclub to friends of the Dunsmores — Bill Baldridge picked up the empty, decanted wine bottle, and muttered, “Jesus! Haut-Brion ’61. The favorite wine of your fellow Virginian Thomas Jefferson. Pretty special.”

Admiral Dunsmore poured them each a generous glass, declined to remind the younger officer that it was he who had first told him about Jefferson’s love of Haut-Brion, and just said, sadly, “I don’t think we should drink to Jack’s memory in anything much less, do you?”

“Nossir. Nothing less.”

And so, they touched their glasses lightly, and the admiral said solemnly, “To the memory of a great Naval officer, Captain Jack Baldridge.” And for both of them the room was filled with a thousand memories, and they drank the forty-one-year-old, deep purple wine from the Graves district of Bordeaux. “And,” said Lieutenant Commander Bill Baldridge, “I am going to run to ground the guy who presumed to take away the life of my big brother.”

Scott Dunsmore was about to mention, “Faslane?” when the private telephone line next to his armchair rang. Bill could hear only snatches of the conversation and he could see the CNO scribbling notes on a pad. “Hi, Arnold, everything shipshape?

“They what?…Where?…Was he dead?…Well, yeah I guess he would have been. Did you talk to anyone yet? …Oh yeah, four in the morning…What correlates…? Maybe the guy was on vacation?…Yeah…yeah…Damned