H.M.S. Unseen

possibly in the archives of the Israeli Navy. If they were, it’s dollars to a pinch of shit Adnam has a copy of them. Christ, he served as commanding officer of an Israeli submarine. I bet he knew every inch of those drawings.”

“Could be. If Harry’s best guess is correct, Ben Adnam knew how to make that conversion. The only gap in an otherwise reasonably logical progression is that we don’t know how the goddamned Iraqis did the engineering or where they found a trained submarine crew.”

“No…no we don’t. And it’s a big gap. But he’s fixed it before. I think we are going to assume they did it. And I think we have to consider ways of catching this submarine before he strikes again. I’m just not sure where to start. SOSUS came up with nothing. Do you think we have to talk to someone? Like Scott, or the President? Maybe Robert Mac?”

“I don’t know. For right now I think we ought to wait for twenty-four hours and see if anything comes out in the media or in the searches going on out there. I think if we’re going to propose a truly outlandish course of action, we need the boost of the continuing mystery. That way people will be a bit more ready to listen to us.”

“Okay…shall we regroup late afternoon tomorrow, compare notes…here?”

“Yes, 1700 hours.”

“You got it.”

The Navy Chief walked out still frowning. And as he did so Admiral Morgan picked up his secure line and dialed a number on the other side of the world. Seconds later the telephone rang in the big white mansion on the shore of Loch Fyne.

“Iain?”

“Speaking.”

“Arnold Morgan here.”

“Good afternoon, Arnold. How nice to hear you. I’m afraid to say, you have the most terrible problem.”

“I know. It’s him, isn’t it. Banging out airliners from a submarine.”

“Yes, Arnold. Yes it is. It’s him.”

7

1500. February 9, 2006.

The Oval Office.

Admiral Arnold Morgan had just walked through the door and the President was awaiting him, sitting quietly with Secretary of State Harcourt Travis. Before the admiral could utter even a word of greeting, the Chief Executive said curtly, “National Security Advisor, you are holding out on me.”

“Sir?”

“You are holding out on me. When Starstriker was lost this morning, you were the only person in that room who knew what had happened. You were expecting it. You reacted in about a half second. Too quick to absorb a mere possibility. And you were right, a full fifteen minutes in front of the world, and you said, ‘That bastard.’ I heard you.

“Arnold Morgan, I am sufficiently presumptuous to regard you as a true friend. And I’m not accusing you of anything. Not yet. But you better have a real good explanation for your apparent preknowledge.”

Admiral Morgan nodded to Harcourt, then said, “Sir, I do have some theories. And I will not pretend I did not have a gut feeling that this could happen. But when it actually did I was as shocked as the next man. Just a bit earlier. And you know me well enough, Mr. President, I tend to react quickly. If there was anything I coulda done to prevent that disaster, you know I’da done it. With or without your permission.”

And then, over two cups of coffee, in a talk which lasted almost thirty minutes, he recounted to the President and the senior foreign policy executive in the United States government every one of his thoughts, from the moment HMS Unseen went missing to the moment Starstriker was apparently blasted out of the sky.

He fitted the pieces together, and he plotted the progression of his ideas, and he made particular reference to the fact that he had no explanation as to how the Iraqis could have converted the British submarine into an antiaircraft weapon. In particular he pointed out the real gap, the real weakness in his argument: the question of where the Iraqis could have carried out the work, given the impossibility of their own situation; no deep water, no submarine base, and thus no home, no expertise, not many friends. He also pointed out that the American surveillance system was all-seeing but not fireproof. And the Iraqis had shown once before that they were capable of extraordinary cunning.

Finally, he talked about Benjamin Adnam and his belief that the presumed-dead terrorist must somehow be involved.

“I did not, sir, want to alarm you,” said the admiral. “Because I did not have one shred of proof. I still don’t. It’s all just my own thoughts. But when you think, and half believe something, and then you get a hard-ass fact that slams it all together…well, right then you start to believe you may be right. Which I now do.”

The President nodded. “Very well, Arnold. I understand. Two questions. One, how did Adnam know our oil- negotiating team was on board that particular Concorde flight?”

“That’s easy. There was a full Iranian delegation at the conference in Baku. Bob Trueman certainly knew at least two of them pretty well. I am sure they just asked politely about his long journey home, and, being a civilian, he told ’em he was flying Concorde the next morning out of Heathrow.”

“Right. And Starstriker?”

“That was Adnam’s real objective, and it was one of the most publicized flights in history. Scruff, Kathy’s highland terrier, knew Starstriker’s ETD from Dulles this morning.”

“Hmmm. I guess he did. How about the missile? Heat-seeking?”

“Nossir. Both aircraft were going too fast to risk chasing from anywhere astern. They were also damned high, and there are very strict range limits on these highly accurate SAMs. You’d only get one shot at a supersonic. My guess is that the missile was launched vertically, with preprogrammed radar. It adjusted trajectory and course automatically…it’s called fire-and-forget in the trade…came in from dead ahead…smashed straight into the nose.”

“Jesus. But Arnold, ought you not to have mentioned this to me beforehand?”

“Sir. For the past ten months I have been pondering the possibility that Adnam might be driving a stolen submarine. Naturally, my thoughts were that he might take another shot at us, even though I knew he had no major weaponry on board. But I didn’t have the remotest idea where he was. I was not even confident enough to talk to the Navy. It was just a theory, mostly intuition, no facts. Then Concorde goes down. Do I connect my off-beat military theory with a crashed British passenger aircraft? Maybe. But not strongly enough to start alerting the Navy to take action. Certainly not to bother the President of the United States.”

“No. I do see that. When were you going to speak to me?”

“Probably tomorrow evening. I told Joe Mulligan that before I said anything, we better wait to see that there was absolutely nothing from out of Starstriker’s cockpit, like, ‘We just ran out of gas.’ But, not for the first time, you preempted me.”

The President relaxed. “Guess I did. And you’re a pretty hard guy to preempt. But Jesus, Arnold, I never saw a public over-reaction like yours this morning. People thought you’d lost it.”

“Not quite, sir.”

“No, Arnold, not quite…and now what? What do we do?”

For the first time now, the refined, scholarly Harcourt Travis spoke. But first he stood up and walked, thoughtfully, the length of the Oval Office and back. “Arnold,” he said, “the trouble with theories is that they take on a life of their own. And if the very basis of their premise is wrong in the first place, they waste a thunderous amount of everyone’s time. Also, they have a way of quite unnecessarily annoying foreign governments with which we are compelled to deal.

“Greatly as I respect your instincts, I am obliged to remind you that a couple of air crashes do not necessarily give credence to a scenario from a Bond movie…mad underwater terrorist running amok with the world’s airlines.”

“No, Harcourt. I know they don’t.”