Scimitar SL-2

“How long ago, Jimmy?” he asked.

“I’d guess about half an hour,” replied his assistant. “What do we do?”

“Well, we can’t do much now. But we’d better schedule a very early start tomorrow. Say, 0600, in my office.”

“Okay, sir. You want me to call the Big Man? Or will you do it?”

Just then the Admiral’s other line rang angrily — General Scannell. George Morris told Jimmy to speak to Arnold Morgan while he dealt with the CJC and then Admiral Dickson.

Lieutenant Commander Ramshawe, still stark naked, dialed Admiral Morgan’s number in Chevy Chase, but Arnold had been watching CNN news.

“Well, sir, that’s taken a whole bloody lot of the guesswork out of this conundrum, right?”

“You can say that again, kid,” answered the Admiral. “Right now I’m planning to sit here and watch this thing develop…Maybe see if there was any warning. And I think that’s what we all should do. Then we better meet early…”

“Admiral Morris has scheduled a meeting in his office at 0600, which is where I’ll be. We can take a look at the CIA stuff, if any. Then I guess we better all meet up somewhere around 0900. My boss is on the line to General Scannell right now…Tell you what, sir, I’ll leave a message on your machine soon as I know where we’re meeting in the morning…I guess the Pentagon, but I’ll confirm.”

“Okay, Jimmy. Keep your eyes and ears open. This bastard’s serious. He just hit the fucking mountain with missiles, and that mega-tsunami’s getting closer by the minute, no doubt in my mind.”

“Nor mine, sir.”

“What’s happened? Will you please tell me what’s going on?” Jane Peacock had lost all interest in her magazine.

“Throw me that notebook, would you?” said Jimmy. “And that pen over there? Now, let me get some pajamas on. I’ve got to watch the news for at least the next couple of hours.”

0230 (Local), September 29.

The Barracuda was steaming swiftly away from the datum, 500 feet below the surface. They had been moving for three and a half hours, since the moment the last of the four Scimitars had been launched. They were headed east, making 15 knots through the dark water, a speed that Admiral Badr thought they could sustain for no more than two or three days longer, less because he feared the U.S. Navy hot on their trail than because Shakira had been uncertain where exactly the U.S. SOSUS system became more dense in the North Atlantic.

The men from Hamas were now 50 miles away from Admiral Badr’s strike zone, and a total of almost 400 miles from the stricken south coast of Montserrat. He planned to retain speed and keep running at moderate knots towards the disturbed and somewhat noisier waters over the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where he would be very difficult to trace. Later, when he cut back to 6 or 7 knots, crossing from the Ridge to the Canary Islands in open water, he would be impossible to trace — anywhere in this vast ocean.

They had eleven days in which to make their next launch zone and would spend three of them moving as fast as they dared for thirty-three hours to the Ridge, then forty hours heading north above its rocky underwater cliffs. That would give them eight days to tiptoe over the ultrasensitive SOSUS wires — traps that Shakira had warned Ben were primed to scream the place down if any intruding submarine crossed them. Once they turned east from the Atlantic Ridge, they would be in latitudes around 28 to 29 degrees, 300 nautical miles north of Miami, similar latitudes to places like Daytona Beach, Jacksonville, Cape Canaveral. Finally, they would take up position somewhere east of La Palma, depending on the U.S. defenses that Ben Badr fully expected would be patrolling the area.

In Lieutenant Commander Shakira’s opinion, there was no way that the U.S. Navy was going to let foreign submarines go charging around in the Atlantic anywhere north of the 25th parallel without wanting to know a lot about that ship’s business.

Admiral Badr, now without his ace-precision missile-direction officer and assistant navigator, was resolved to be excessively careful. He looked forward to his next satellite communication, when someone would doubtlessly tell him whether he had managed to wipe out the island of Montserrat.

0600, September 29

National Security Agency

Fort Meade, Maryland.

The CIA had been on the case all night. And generally speaking, they had drawn a blank as big as that in the newsrooms of the television networks and the American afternoon newspapers: the totally unexplained, and unexpected, eruption of the most volatile volcano in the Western Hemisphere. No reasons. No warnings. No theories.

The CIA was well up to speed with the threats and demands of the Hamas freedom fighters, and even more with the views of the most senior military figures in the nation.

They put twenty different field agents on the project, working through the night, searching and checking for any sign of a missile attack on Montserrat. But so far, they had turned up nothing except for the absolute bafflement of the local scientists, whose equipment had registered zero before the first explosion from Gage’s Mountain.

They sent in a preliminary report to the National Security Agency at around 0500, which Lieutenant Commander Ramshawe read with interest. Particularly the last paragraph, written by the senior case officer:… The complete absence of any warning before the eruption is regarded by the professionals as unprecedented. Every volcano betrays the smallest movement of the earth beneath its mountain, and indeed any upwards surge of the magma. This time there was nothing. Which, we think, indicates detonation by a man-made device.

Jimmy Ramshawe sifted through the reports, and the more he read, the more it became obvious that the Barracuda had struck again. Even small eruptions in relatively harmless volcanoes are signaled on their seismographs. And the equipment stationed in the Soufriere Hills was much more sophisticated than most, hooked up to a brand-new computerized system in the observatory.

There were reports of staggering amounts of ash covering Montserrat’s buildings, even in the supposedly safe north part of the island. Any building with a flat roof seemed to have a minimum of 12 to 18 inches of the stuff — thick, heavy ash, more like baking flour than the light, airy remnants of a bonfire.

There were reports of ash covering the gardens of Antigua on the southwest coast, especially at Curtain Bluff and Johnsons Point. Guadeloupe awoke to a hot, gray cast over the whole of Port Louis. The southern beaches of Nevis were distinctly off-white. And the southern end of Montserrat was on fire. Miles of green vegetation were still burning from end to end of the exclusion zone. The devastation was almost complete in the south, with even the old disused jetties on fire out over the water.

As the morning wore on, the pictures became more and more graphic. The television networks had helicopter crews up and filming at first light. This was the second mammoth volcano explosion in the Americas within four months, and every news editor in every newsroom in the entire country knew that this was a very big story. Not one of them, however, had any idea precisely how big.

Admiral Morris had his 48-inch screen tuned to CNN as soon as he arrived at Fort Meade. There were other home-news items of some interest, but nothing to rival the live pictures from what looked like the detonation of an atomic bomb in a Caribbean island paradise.

He and Lieutenant Commander Ramshawe took only ten minutes to scan the incoming reports, and a lot less to arrive at the inescapable conclusion that Hamas had done exactly what they had threatened.

Pay attention…You will see what we can do…and perhaps change your mind. The words of the letter were stark in the minds of both men. Dead on time, almost to the minute, they had blown another volcano. Now everything was in place. Tony Tilton’s missiles were real. They had exploded Mount St. Helens. Last night had proved it. And now the U.S.A. faced the greatest threat in its long history of wars and battles.

Admiral Morris picked up the telephone and called Arnold Morgan, confirming their meeting in General Scannell’s office at 0800. Arnold had been up most of the night, studying charts of the Atlantic, wondering exactly where the Barracuda might be, wondering where it was headed, wondering how to catch it. In thirty years, George Morris had never seen him so worried, so utterly anxious.

He and Lieutenant Commander Ramshawe gathered up all relevant charts and documents and climbed into a