General Scannell broke with long-standing Pentagon tradition by inviting the retired Admiral Morgan to chair the lunchtime meeting on the basis of his considerable experience as a strategist and a Commanding Officer, and by virtue of his months-long involvement with the terrorist volcano threat.
Admiral Morgan accepted, pretending to be put out, protesting that he was supposed to be retired, enjoying himself hugely.
“Aren’t you?” asked Admiral Dickson, handing over a preliminary chart of the deep waters around La Palma.
“You bet I am,” replied Arnold, glaring at the detailed map of the ocean depths. “Now where we gonna find these fucking underwater towelheads?”
The great man hadn’t lost his touch, no doubt of that, and the three senior officers who sat at the table with him, in General Scannell’s private conference room, all felt a stab of nostalgia for the old days, of not so long ago, when the world was a simpler place.
As recently as one year previous, this meeting would not have taken place privately, on a Saturday. It would have happened in the West Wing’s Situation Room in the White House, with the full backing and probably the attendance of a President who believed in these men. This was different. The meeting was on the verge of being subversive. The current President did not trust their judgment.
“I think we all accept that if Mount St. Helens was deliberately exploded, it was hit probably by a broadside of cruise missiles coming through the early morning fog. Correct?” Admiral Morgan was swiftly arranging his ducks in a line.
Everyone nodded.
“Those missiles must have been fired from a submarine, which we photographed leaving the Yellow Sea, and was picked up twice, north of the Aleutians. No other submarine in the entire world fits the pattern, and every one of them is accounted for. The dates fit. The speed fits. And the possible attack on Mount St. Helens fits.
“Also, we have the perfect witness — a highly reliable, highly respected Seattle Bank President standing at the foot of the mountain. He’s a banker and a lawyer, paid to have suspicions, but not reckless imagination.”
Admiral Morgan paused. “Gentlemen, that’s not 100 percent, cast-iron fact. But it is way, way too strong to be dismissed. Agreed?”
Everyone nodded again.
“And therefore,” continued the Admiral, “in light of the letter received from Hamas, we must face the possibility that there is a boatload of Middle Eastern terrorists determined to bang a big hole in the face of a cliff of La Palma. Militarily, any other line of thought is childish. That’s what we’re for, goddamnit. To keep this country safe. And we have no right to go around making half-assed assumptions that it might not happen. And I think it will happen, unless we can get between their fucking missile and that cliff.”
“Correct,” said General Scannell. “I hope we are all agreed on that…gentlemen?” Once more, Admirals Dickson and Curran nodded their agreement.
“And for the purposes of this meeting,” said General Scannell, “we should concentrate on how we catch ’em. Which is unlikely to be easy. We learned that the hard way.”
“Essentially, we’re looking for a submarine-launched cruise missile,” said Admiral Dickson. “I suspect not a big ICBM that we would pick up a long way out. I’d say it’s a cruise, probably to be fired at around a 500-mile range. You can fire ’em from 1,000 miles, but that would give us too long to locate it. They’ll want to be in closer than that, maybe only 250 miles…25 minutes up range from the target. No nearer. Freddie?”
The Pacific Fleet submarine chief was frowning. “That’s likely to add up to one hell of a lot of water, sir,” he said. “If we take a best-case distance of a 500-mile north — south line, up and down the La Palma coast…forming a box out into the Atlantic from both ends…with the Cumbre Vieja volcano in the middle…then take a spot 500 miles due west of the mountain, we’re talking probably 200,000 square miles of ocean. If the
He paused for a moment, then added, “If I were trying to launch and get away, I’d probably go for around 300 miles up range of my target…So if we placed a cordon up to 500 miles out, we’d kind of have him trapped… Except the little son of a bitch could creep right out underneath us, dead slow in very deep water, and vanish. As he has done a few times before.”
“How many ships would we need?” asked the Chairman.
“Well, if we had a hundred in all — twenty submarines, plus frigates, destroyers, and cruisers — they’d each have to look after 2,000 square miles — roughly a 45-mile square each.”
“Jesus, Freddie…we didn’t have that many ships in the South Pacific in 1944,” said Arnold Morgan.
“And our enemy didn’t have nuclear submarines that could go as deep, stay there indefinitely, and run so quietly as this bastard,” replied the COMSUBPAC. “And I’ll tell you something else. Even then, with that big a fleet, we still might not catch him. With any less than hundred ships, I’d say we were almost guaranteed to miss him.”
“Even if we caught him, chances are he’d get one of his missiles away,” pondered Admiral Morgan.
“I’m not too bothered about that,” replied Admiral Curran. “Because I think we’d nail that missile. But I’m sure, sir, as ever, you’d rather nail the archer than the arrow.”
That was an old favorite policy of Admiral Morgan’s, and Arnold smiled wryly. “You got that right, Freddie,” he said. “But hunting submarines in a big pack is very difficult…”
“We’d have to use a box system,” said Admiral Curran. “You know, give each U.S. submarine an area in which he must stick…otherwise we’ll have ’em shooting at each other…”
“And there’s always a problem with that,” replied Arnold. “You pick the enemy up and track him to the edge of your box, then you’ve either got to break the rules and pursue him into somebody else’s box or let him go and hope your nearest colleague will pick him up as well.”
“Actually, sir, I was thinking of a search box only. I suggest our submarine COs will have orders to open fire and sink the enemy instantly.”
“Freddie, I think that’s exactly correct,” said Arnold. “Which means we can’t have our guys rampaging all over each other’s designated areas. In the final reckoning, the box system is usually best. Though I did once hear the Royal Navy’s High Command was somewhat less than thrilled when one of their submarines picked up the Argentinian submarine somewhere north of the Falklands and then let him go because they’d reached the end of the patrol box.”
“I guess that’s always the downside,” said Admiral Curran, thoughtfully. “But generally speaking, the worst- case scenario would be one of our nuclear boats hitting another.”
“Well,” said General Scannell. “I’d be more than happy for you guys to work on some kind of a fleet plan for Monday’s meeting…but I would like to know if we have enough ships!”
“No problem,” replied Admiral Dickson. “Right now we have Carrier Groups patrolling the northern Gulf, the east end of the Strait of Hormuz, the northern Arabian Gulf, and one in readiness at Diego Garcia. There’s a fifth preparing to leave Pearl Harbor. All of them could be in the mid-Atlantic in well under three weeks. That’s fifty-five ships.”
“Okay. The rest, I presume, are already in the Atlantic, or in Norfolk, or New London, or somewhere else on the East Coast?”
“Correct, sir. We do not have a problem getting a full complement of ships into the operational area.”
“As for the
“Hell, yes, we got a hundred ideas,” said Arnold Morgan. “None of ’em reliable. But it seems to me, if this bastard unleashed a battery of submarine-launched cruise missiles at Mount St. Helens, somewhere off Washington State, or even Oregon, earlier this month, he’s got to be on his way to the eastern Atlantic by now.
“He will not want to go the longest way around. Not the way he came, all the way back north of the Aleutians, way down the coast of Asia, and then all the way across the Indian Ocean. That’s too far. Twenty thousand miles plus, most of it at slow speed. It’d take him nearly three months.”
Arnold Morgan let that rest for a few moments, and then he continued, speaking quietly to three very senior men who found it impossible to accept that he was no longer their spiritual leader.
“And this clever little son of a bitch certainly will not want to take the shorter route across the Pacific Basin,” said the Admiral. “As you know, it’s literally trembling with our SOSUS wires. No, sir. He’ll know that. And he’ll avoid
