H.M.S. Unseen

Lincoln Memorial. And each time the bells of nearby St. John’s Church behind the White House tolled out the hour, a thunderous chorus of the dead Vice President’s beloved anthem lifted up through the black winter skies of the American capital…. “ALL WE ARE SA-A-YING is GIVE PEACE A CHANCE.”

Martin Beckman had touched the soul of a nation. Those people, gathered on that freezing evening, believed that somewhere out there, perhaps on the mystic foothills of heaven’s Mount Olympus, the Great Champion of Peace still stood tall. And they believed that his voice would never be silenced, just as the voice of the Reverend King had never died away. They believed the memory of Martin Beckman would always remind the most powerful nations of an iron-clad world, to listen to his plea…for the plight of the Third World poor, in the name of God, to the plain, heartrending face of stark, human misery.

Perhaps in death, the Vice President’s avowed cause would grow even greater. But back in the Oval Office, where the President, his national security advisor, Bob MacPherson, and Admirals Dunsmore and Mulligan, wracked their collective brains, the talk was not of peace. It involved the massed resources of the United States Armed Forces taking up secret battle stations against the great underwater terrorist from a distant desert.

It was Secretary of State Harcourt Travis who would now bring the voice of the cold-blooded detective to the meeting. Apprised that evening, once again, of the suspicions of Admirals Morgan and Mulligan, this time he did not dissent, but he did suggest an organized short list of suspects be produced, just to demonstrate, if necessary, that things were not being run in a haphazard way.

Admiral Morgan’s face betrayed a hint of irritation as he replied, “I got it right here, Harcourt. Been updating it every four hours for three weeks. I’ll read it to you and give you a copy. Sometimes I forget that politicians spend at least a third of their time covering their asses. In my game you don’t always have time for that.”

“If this situation should somehow get out of hand, you might be grateful to me,” replied the Secretary of State, smiling thinly.

The national security advisor grinned back, no more warmly. “Goddamned bureaucrat,” he muttered. “Now pay attention. There are four nations that have submarines out there, which we cannot locate at present, and have not located during the entire period of the three crashes.

“One. A French strategic missile boat, 14,500-ton Le Temeraire, commissioned in 1999, based in Brest. She’s probably on patrol in the Bay of Biscay, but we discount her as a suspect. We’d have picked her up if she’d been in the middle of the Atlantic.

“Two. The Royal Navy has a Trident SSBN out there somewhere, HMS Vengeance. She’s bigger, 16,000 tons, also commissioned in 1999. If we ask the Brits where she is, they’ll tell us, but I don’t think that’s necessary in the light of our close association with them in this matter.

“Three. The Russians have two that we cannot locate. The first is TK-17. That’s one of those 21,000-ton Typhoons out of the Northern fleet, Litsa Guba. She was damaged by fire in 1994, but they repaired her. She’s a strategic missile boat. Most unlikely, but possible, although I’m damned sure we’da got her if she’d been in the area. The other is a Delta IV, K-18, 13,500 tons, out of Saida Guba, again the Northern fleet. We’ll probably pick her up in the next few days. She’s another strategic missile boat, and no more likely to have avoided detection than the Typhoon. But I am planning to touch base with Moscow tomorrow, just to check.

“Four. China also has one missing, her newest, 093. She’s a medium-sized 6,500-ton cruise missile attack boat commissioned in 2003. Received a new missile system up in Huladao back in 1998. But she’s based on the other side of the world. I suppose this is a possibility, but highly unlikely. That Chinese boat is way behind Western technology, and would be even less likely than the Russian Delta to avoid SOSUS. And I doubt the Chinese would wanna operate so close to us and so far from home. Remember, in the past two or three years, they have lost… er…some of their…er…top guys.”

Admiral Morgan then paused, and he peered over the half spectacles he used for reading. He was peering at the United States Secretary of State. “The other possibility, Mr. Travis,” he said, elaborately, “is called HMS Unseen. And for me, she’s fucking well named.”

“Thank you, Arnold. Just checking,” he replied, brightly, still smiling.

The President then asked the critical question. “How long do you think we have, to locate and destroy this fucking submarine before the world starts to speculate, then finds out about it? ”

“Not long, sir,” Admirals Morgan and Mulligan answered in unison. And the national security advisor added, “In my view probably less than two weeks. I think the media will stick to their theory that there’s a ‘Bermuda Triangle’ out on the edge of space…until it finally sinks in that Air Force Three was downed from a much lower altitude, in a very different place. Then they’re going to try and connect all three crashes in some other way…all with big U.S. interests. No other nation harmed, except the Brits, who are considered by our enemies anyway to be the fifty-first state. All the flights were easy to locate by departure times etc….

“Then there’s going to be one tiny whisper out of somewhere that Concorde’s pilot tried to shout ‘MISSILE.’ Then there’ll be a tiny leak of the last call from Air Force Three. Then there’ll be a barrage of inquiries demanding to know if there was anywhere the missile could have been fired from. Then the captain of that merchant ship will sell his story to a tabloid and the headline will read: ‘WERE ALL THREE AIRCRAFT SHOT DOWN BY MISSILES?’ Then one of the defense correspondent guys will actually wonder whether it could have been launched from a disappearing submarine.

“At which point we would have to run the risk of looking very, very foolish if we dismiss that as a possibility. That’s a worst-case scenario, but we want to be ready.”

“That, Arnold is not good. Not good at all.” The President was frowning deeply, his face displaying profound worry. “The ramifications are simply horrific. Imagine the press arriving at the conclusion that there is a rogue submarine, undetected, out in the middle of the Atlantic, knocking down passenger airliners. The mere fact that they got to that conclusion before we did will make us look criminally careless.

“Then they will go after us, dumb-ass military, dumb-ass politicians, etc. Then there will be a real crisis of confidence. There will be calls for my resignation and probably all of yours, too. Then there will follow a world airline crisis, with some passenger carriers refusing to make the North Atlantic run. That kind of stuff can bankrupt airlines, and passengers will cancel flights wholesale.

“That will cause a stock-market crash of every industry connected with airlines. You’ll see big, publicly held stocks cave in; corporations who build planes and aircraft parts will see staggering losses. Banks who are owed big sums of money from airlines and plane makers will go into a collective tailspin, if you’ll excuse the pun. The whole thing could turn into your worst nightmare.”

“Specially if that bastard Adnam bangs out another one,” growled Morgan.

“Jesus Christ,” groaned the President. “And you know the media are gonna just love it. They’ll come at us like a pack of starved dogs. And they’ll demonstrate all their familiar traits…ignorance, naivete, innocence dressed up as ferocity. I guess they’ll never learn that the games governments play are usually much deeper than the games they pretend to play.”

“Nossir,” replied the national security advisor. “They won’t ever learn that. But they’ll always love wading in and upsetting the applecart. Despite the obvious fact that any damn-fool hack can upset an applecart. That’s easy. It’s understanding the entire picture, then acting carefully, that’s hard. And anyway, the press don’t have time for that.”

Admiral Dunsmore, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, spoke next in his usual calm and thoughtful way. “Despite our general disapproval of the way the media are about to behave,” he said, “I think we can be sure they won’t do much tomorrow. They’ll be too busy handling the news story. But we should take very definite steps to keep the lid on this for as long as possible. No good can possibly come out of a public uproar.

“So far as I can tell, we have two objectives. One, to seek and destroy HMS Unseen before she strikes again. Two, to bottle up the situation, tight, until we do so. Even then we might never be able to announce what has happened.”

“Expertly stated, Scott,” said the President. “Please continue.”

“Thus I think we should have patrols organized around Iceland and right across the GIUK Gap. We should keep the John C Stennis group in the area and have them work east from 30 West, then move south for maybe 200 miles before heading west again. That way we might just push Unseen into an area covered by SOSUS. I would also like to see three more frigates up there, and I suggest Joe Mulligan and I have a strategy meeting as soon as possible.

“In regard to keeping the story tight, I think we should have our ambassador in Dublin pull a few strings to