U.S.S. Seawolf

because his thoughts were too personal for objective thought. Everyone in the room could see he was on the verge of tears, and everyone knew that the apparition of the Chinese torturing his terrified only son had taken him to the brink.

He left the room, and as he did so Arnold Morgan stood up and followed him out, hurrying after him. “Sir, wait…there’s something I want to tell you.”

The President turned around, and the admiral could see the tears streaming down his face.

“Listen, sir. I want you to know this…and you have my promise. If we hit that submarine, we’ll have Linus out of that fucking rathole inside three hours of the big bang. 1 got a plan. Stay with me, sir…I’ll get him out of there… that’s a promise.”

The President nodded, tried to smile, and patted his NSA on the shoulder. “Thank you, Arnold.…give me a few minutes. I’ll be right back.”

Admiral Morgan walked back into the Situation Room.

“How was he, Arnie?” asked Harcourt Travis.

“’Bout like any of us would be if some fucking Chinaman was getting ready to pull our son’s fingernails out.”

“This President is just about the best friend the military ever had,” said General Scannell. “We have to do our best for him, no matter what, even if the risks are high.”

Arnold Morgan was now back in the chair. “I believe, gentlemen, we just voted overwhelmingly to obliterate Seawolf before they get a handle on her technology…”

Everyone nodded. And the chairman continued, “Okay, now let’s try to formulate a rough plan, because we don’t have that much time. From that plan we’ll get some timing. As a point of principle, I think we should try to spring the crew, amid the mass confusion that there’s going to be in Canton when we split Seawolf’s nuclear reactor in half.”

“But how are we going to get a team in there?” asked Admiral Mulligan.

“With great difficulty, probably,” said Arnold Morgan. “But let’s stay with step one, how to destroy the submarine while she’s moored alongside in Canton. We got a bomb expert in here?”

“Not really,” said the CNO.

“I’ll get one,” interjected General Scannell, and he took from his pocket a slimline mobile phone and hit one button that patched him straight into his office, and everyone heard him say, “Get ahold of General Cale Carter, and have him send in the Air Force’s number one bombing expert…Situation Room, White House, inside the hour…tell him I’d prefer he came in person if he could…yup…right…’bye.”

They adjourned to a small private dining room at 2030, just as Vice Admiral Bergstrom landed on the White House lawn in a Navy helicopter from Andrews. Fifteen minutes later General Carter, a Southerner from Alabama, arrived and joined them for an excellent dinner organized by Admiral Morgan. In a sense it reflected his precise instructions to the chef: “Sirloin steak, medium rare…roast potatoes and whatever green vegetables you like…salad, but no rice, for Christ’s sake no rice, and nothing stir-fried.”

There were bottles of sparkling mineral water on the table, plus an ice-cold bottle of California sauvignon blanc — the admiral had growled that he never touched Chardonnay until after Labor Day.

No one tasted the wine, except for the President, who needed it, and Admiral Morgan, who wanted it. Between them they polished off the bottle while they brought General Carter up-to-date on the proposed bombing raid. The only opinion Admiral Morgan offered was that he favored a high-level bomb, from say 50,000 feet above the Pearl River, rather than a missile or a sea-skimmer.

General Carter nodded thoughtfully and said he’d like to make a few notes and then offer his opinion back in the Situation Room, where he could pull up a chart of the Pearl River Delta and “go professional on y’all.”

It was after 10:00 P.M. when Admiral Morgan finally had the meeting rearranged to watch General Carter make his recommendations in front of the large computer screen at the end of the Situation Room.

“Mr. President, Admiral Morgan, gentlemen, I’d like to start by saying we can most certainly hit and destroy USS Seawolf. The challenge, as I understand it, is that you don’t want anyone to know we did it?”

Admiral Morgan nodded.

“Well, that means we need to be real careful about how we deliver the bomb. The common misconception, however, is that the higher you are, the farther away from the target, as it were, the less chance you have of being detected. And that ain’t true. ’Specially near a naval or military base where there’s likely to be a lot of radar.

“Fact is, you’re more likely to be detected if you fly, high than if you fly really low. Now, using the terrain of the land surrounding the Delta, I’d say you’d be better with a low-level flight. Because if you stay at two hundred and fifty feet above the water, straight up the middle here, you will not be detected. You’ll be below the radars, which cannot find you, and you have the added cover of the land, which makes detection unlikely.

“Judging from where the navy base is, I’d say it was almost certain you would be detected flying at fifty thousand feet. Whatever stealth bomber we send, I think they’d catch it on the screen. I’m only guessing, but Chinese surveillance is probably on high alert while that submarine’s parked right there in the dockyards.

“So, gentlemen, I’m recommending we deliver the bomb in a regular Navy F/A-18 Hornet. I like the aircraft. It’s fast, makes well over one thousand mph, you can fly it off a carrier, and it’s capable of carrying a bomb underneath weighing almost eight tons. The weapon I have in mind is the laser-guided Paveway Three, type GBU- 24, made by Raytheon. It’s about fourteen feet long and weighs only a ton, very nearly half of which is high explosives. That thing’ll rip right through the casing of a submarine and straight into the reactor room like spearing an ole crawfish.

“Your pilot should use the old technique of toss-bombing. By that I mean he wants to come on in up the Delta with his throttles open wide, two hundred and fifty feet above the surface, making one thousand knots plus. ’Bout five miles before the target I wanna see him raise the nose on that Hornet to about forty-five degrees, climbing like a bullet, then release that bomb at the highest possible speed. That’ll have the effect of throwing it high, maybe another three thousand feet. Right then it’ll turn over and start dropping quietly toward its target.

“Its guidance system’s gonna be seeking the reflected light from the laser, looking for the marker, adjusting its trajectory to hit the middle of it, adjusting its fins as it flies, making its corrections.

“Long before the bomb hits, the attacking aircraft will be out and away — past Hong Kong seventy miles to the south in a little over four minutes. And by the time he hits the open water of the South China Sea, the submarine and everything anywhere near it will be radioactive history.”

“Thank you, General,” said Admiral Morgan. “I really appreciate that.”

“However, there is one further problem you may or may not have considered,” said the Air Force chief.

“Lay it on us,” replied the admiral.

“You will have to illuminate the target. We can program the bomb’s strike zone accurate to fifty feet. But that’s no good to you, is it? You want it accurate to five feet, so it hits the reactor room. If it misses by, say, ten feet, you’ll just punch a big hole in the submarine and blow some of it up. But you won’t blast the reactor room. To do that you gotta penetrate it with the bomb. That means you have to light up your target. And I’m not sure if you have anyone to do that.”

“I’m not sure, either,” said Arnold Morgan. “Jake, how’re we placed in Canton?”

Jake Raeburn, head of the CIA’s Far Eastern Desk, spoke up for the first time. “Admiral, we have several field operators in the area, three in Canton, one of ’em in the base. He’s the best of them. He’s Chinese, hates the regime, had a cousin killed in Tiananmen Square in 1989.”

“Not in the Navy, is he?”

“No, he’s a civilian electrician, been very valuable for several years. But he wants to bring his wife and son to America, which he’s been promised. If he could pull this off, it’d be his last mission. I don’t want him to die of radiation sickness.”

“What kind of gear do we need in there, Cale?” asked General Scannell.

“The device is small, electronic, with its own power pack. Trouble is, it doesn’t last that long. Once it’s aimed and switched on, we got about six hours before it dies on us.”

“You mean we’re not talking about a hand-held device that a man would aim at the correct spot on the submarine?” asked the President.

“Nossir. Someone’s gotta get this little contraption hidden and fixed in place beforehand, then switch it on