Nimitz Class

The President laughed. “Before we get back for lunch, Admiral, let me ask you a question which you will not have the slightest trouble answering.”

“Of course.”

“You are in a nuclear submarine. Your enemy, positioned in your stern arcs, fires a wire-guided torpedo at you on passive sonar, from a range of three thousand yards. With one thousand yards to run, it switches to active, pings you, and accelerates hard, straight at you. What do you do?”

“I go full ahead and present my quarter to the torpedo, trying to hang on to my half-mile start. This means he is going to take something like another minute to catch me. At the same time I fire three or even four decoys to coax the torpedo away. I put the bow up and head for the surface at top speed. The torpedo gets very confused up there. The echoes off the waves interfere with its sonar once it gets within thirty feet of daylight. Also it can be confused by the turbulence in the water right behind my propeller. I’d almost certainly get away.”

“Is that what you taught Benjamin Adnam, Admiral?”

“Yessir. That’s exactly what I taught him.”

“Thank you, Admiral, very much.”

Dinner was arranged for the President’s house, Aspen Lodge, the grandest of the many residences scattered discreetly among the wooded acres of the estate. A succession of American Presidents had loved this place, from Roosevelt, who founded it, Eisenhower, who named it after his grandson, to Jimmy Carter, who negotiated the Middle East peace treaty here.

Sir Iain MacLean was ensconced in Dogwood Lodge, where Anwar Sadat stayed in 1978. He spent most of the afternoon reading the reports of the Jefferson incident, then he strolled over to Aspen shortly after seven-thirty in the evening. He walked straight into the kind of discussion he might almost have predicted. The President and Admiral Dunsmore were wrestling with the question of whether Adnam was on the Kilo.

The introductions were made, but the conversation remained rooted in speculation, on the man who wiped out the American aircraft carrier. They explained the speed with which the torpedo had hit the Kilo, and they both heard Sir Iain murmur, “Mmmmm. Crazy Ivan.”

Then Scott Dunsmore asked the Scottish admiral directly: “Would you say Adnam was on board when we hit the Kilo?”

“Absolutely not. And ‘Crazy Ivan’ merely clinches it for me. In my view there is only one man in all of the world who could have sent that four-line tip-off. And in my opinion that was Adnam.

“Gentlemen, I know the man. He is ice-cold, self-protective, and damned smart. There is no possibility he remained on that submarine. He would have considered that tantamount to suicide. He either talked his way off, threatened his way off, or fought his way off. But he would not have stayed.

“Besides, he had to get off. In order to complete his task.”

“He did?” said the President.

“Oh, certainly. The Iraqis were never going to allow the Kilo to dock. I always assumed they would, in the end, scuttle it, and we’d just find a bit of wreckage. Adnam, however, went a step further. He didn’t scuttle it. He didn’t have to. He got you to do it for him, with one, short, simple, air-mail letter from Cairo to Fort Meade.”

“Jesus,” said the President. “That little sonofabitch. He’s been one jump ahead of us all the way.”

“Not just one jump ahead of you. He’s been one jump ahead of everyone involved. One jump ahead of us, who misguidedly taught him. One jump ahead of the Mossad, one jump ahead of the Russians…three jumps ahead, I suspect, of the Iranians, the sworn enemies of his country. And a jump ahead of the United States. Tricky little bastard, wouldn’t you say?”

“Clever, tricky little bastard.”

“And the really worrying thing is, sir, there is not that much a great power can do about these bloody terrorist people. You could of course declare war, or even make a preemptive nuclear strike against Iraq. But it’s awfully messy. Half of the international community would go off its rocker with indignation. The damned media would be full of pictures of destroyed Iraqi hospitals and schools. You know what it would be like.”

“I’m afraid I do, Admiral. All too well. In the end I suppose we just have to accept that if we are to police the world, with a dozen Carrier Battle Groups, we are going to end up, sometime, somewhere, losing one. It’s a terrible price, but the alternative is world chaos. And I am afraid the curse of the twenty-first century might very well be weapons of mass destruction in the hands of fanatics. Maniacs.”

“Yessir. However, we are not powerless. We can persuade the Russians to cooperate by not selling those damned Kilos to nations of unstable government. But I hardly think you, Mr. President, could make a general policy to wipe out any small foreign submarine fleet you may consider to be a menace to the free world.”

“No. We cannot go on doing that. But as you may have guessed, we did partly attend to that problem.”

“I did guess that, sir. More or less the moment I heard about it.”

“Meanwhile, there is not much more we can do, militarily, without admitting what happened to the carrier, which we will not do.”

“There is of course the option of the dams,” said Sir Iain.

“Which dams?” asked Scott Dunsmore.

“The ones on the Tigris. The ones the Iranians were trying to blow up during their war with Iraq.”

“I remember that,” said the President. “One of them was called the Samarra Barrage, correct?”

“That’s it, sir,” replied Admiral MacLean. “Back at home, I shoot a few grouse with a chap who works on the Iraqi desk in the Foreign Office. He was telling me about it quite recently.”

The admiral outlined, as well as he remembered, the facts about the two great Iraqi dams — the Samarra Barrage, which stands 115 miles north of Baghdad and holds 85 billion cubic meters of water. The second one, five times as big, is called the Darband-I-Khan Reservoir, and holds three cubic kilometres of water. This one is situated on a tributary of the Tigris, 130 miles northeast of the city, near the mountain town of Halabjah, right on Iran’s border, where three rivers converge.

“It was the huge Darband Reservoir the Iranians tried to blow,” said the admiral. “But the Iraqis somehow found out and counter attack…that was the battle of Halabjah. It later transpired the Iranians were also on their way to the Samarra Barrage, but they never got there either.”

“Yes,” said the President. “As I recall there was some talk of us taking one of those dams out during the Gulf War, but it was rejected because no one quite had the stomach to drown several million Iraqis. Matter of fact, I would not do that either.”

“Quite so, Mr. President,” replied Sir Iain. “But my chap at the Foreign Office says these things have been studied much more scientifically recently. They do not assess the loss of life would be anything like so great as the Iranians hoped if they blew the dams. Maybe even minimal. But it would certainly wreck the Iraqi economy for years.”

“How difficult to do?” asked the President.

“Just a bit. But no more so than removing the Ayatollah’s submarines. More important is the timing. To put Baghdad completely out of action my chap assesses both dams would have to go at the same time. It would have to be right when the winter snow melt in the mountains was happening, when there was maximum water. Then you could take Iraq right out of the world trouble equation for years and years. They’d be crippled financially, and probably emotionally.”

“Then I guess we’ve got three months to consider whether the men of the Thomas Jefferson should be thoroughly avenged.”

“Yessir. You do. But I won’t be able to help much then. You won’t need submarines….”

The President was thoughtful. And Admiral MacLean spoke again. “You know, sir, I’d be inclined to rethink the whole procedure of Carrier Battle Groups. Let’s face it, we’ve just been shown, quite conclusively, that in these dangerous days, the big American police-man, on his world patrol, can be killed by a relatively unsophisticated knifeman. Because all defensive measures leak. No system is 100-percent certain.

“Perhaps we should put smaller, cheaper units up front, which will allow us to retain our military capacity less densely.

“If the guerrilla fanatic is going to strike at us, let’s give him a lesser target…not a multibillion-dollar carrier with six thousand people on board. That perhaps should be kept further back, safe and ready, for when we decide