Ann that his secretary of many years was now in residence, and that she would be taking over. Betty-Ann should now clear her desk, but she was more than welcome to stay as an assistant in the smaller office, so long as she was sharp and stayed on her toes.
Admiral Morgan did not wait around for a chat. Having established his opening chain of command, he returned to the Oval Office and trusted that matters secretarial would somehow sort themselves out.
He sat at the head of his new table and suggested Admirals Dickson and Doran be seated on either side so they could each look at the Atlantic charts. “We’d better have some coffee, and some cookies,” he told Kathy. “None of us had any lunch. And can you make sure I have a pair of dividers, a compass, rulers, calculators, notepads, and pencils?”
“How about a sextant and a telescope, since you appear to be going back to sea?” Mrs. Arnold Morgan had lost none of her edge.
Just then the President himself arrived and Arnold introduced him to his wife. “You were very good on television, sir,” she said. “Very neat the way you kept those reporters in line.”
“From the wife of Admiral Morgan, I’m taking that as a major compliment,” he replied, smiling. “And you’re nothing like so stern as he is — and much better looking.”
Arnold invited Paul Bedford to sit down and join them. “I’m starting right now with our opening plan to trap that submarine,” he said. “We’ll finalize our evacuation plans tomorrow. But I want to get some heavy warships into the area we believe he’s heading towards. We just might get lucky and trip over him, and I don’t want to deny us that chance.”
“How many ships, Admiral?”
“I think for the moment we want to send in a dozen frigates. We can use the Oliver Hazard Perry guided missile ships. Then I guess we want to move an aircraft carrier into the area and pack its flight deck with helicopters.
“I think Admiral Dickson and I are agreed we’re more likely to catch this bastard from the air, rather than in deep water with submarines. As you know, submarine hunts are very difficult. They usually end up with subs under the same flag shooting at each other by mistake”
“Do we have a CVBG anywhere near?”
“We do. The
“Did our departed President know that?”
“The hell he did. If we’d been listening to him, we would not have been ready.”
“One thing, Arnold. The communiques from the terrorists. None of them actually mentioned the Cumbre Vieja, did they? Are we certain we got the right volcano?”
“Sir, you have to get into deep volcanology to find that out,” chuckled Arnold. “Hamas mentioned the eastern Atlantic, and when you’re talking tidal waves, that means the Canary Islands. Because of the height of the mountains and the depth of the ocean.
“There is nowhere else in the Atlantic where such a tsunami could develop. And when you express that scenario to any volcanologist, they say, before you finish your sentence…
“It’s not even the height of the mountains and the deep ocean that make it unique. It’s the enormous volume of underground water, the lakes beneath the volcanic range. That’s what will explode the cliffs into the sea…if those bastards hit the Cumbre with a nuclear-tipped missile.
“And, Mr. President, we have clear photographs of the Hamas C in C standing on top of the Cumbre Vieja this year with known Iranian volcanologists, studying the terrain. They also kidnapped, interrogated, and then murdered the world’s top volcano expert in London last May.”
President Bedford nodded. “I guess that’s about as decisive as it gets,” he said. And Arnold spread out the big chart of the Atlantic in front of them and began a recap on the scale of the problem.
“The question is, sir,” said Admiral Dickson, “will he ever get that far? Maybe he’ll just stand off and let fly with his missiles from maybe 1,000 nautical miles out?”
“We can’t let him, Alan,” said Arnold Morgan. “We cannot let him.”
“Hard to know how to stop him.”
“Hard but not impossible. Question one. How do his missiles get their guidance?”
“They just hook up with the world global navigation system, the GPS,” replied Admiral Dickson. “Steers them right in. The satellite does the rest. Punch in the numbers and fire ‘n’ forget.”
“Question two, Alan. Who owns the GPS?”
“Essentially, we do. There’s twenty-seven satellites up there orbiting the earth every twelve hours. All American Military, made available to all the world’s navigators. They’ll guide anyone home, friend or foe.”
“Correct. So, Question three. How do we stop this bastard tuning his missiles into our satellites and homing in on the volcano’s crater?”
“Well, I guess we could switch ’em all off, so nobody could access them.”
“Correct, Alan. And that would do just what I want him to do — drive him inshore. Because when he comes to the surface to check his GPS, his screen will read, ‘
“And that’s where we have a chance. Because we’ll have our frigates and helos combing the area. When he comes to the surface for a visual fix, we might just pick him up him first time. And even if he gets his missiles away, we have two and a half minutes’ flying time to locate and kill with a SAM. Failing that, we’ll have to rely on ground missiles, probably Patriots, set in a steel ring around the volcano…Take ’em out before they hit.”
“It’s going to take a lot of very brave men to man that missile battery up there on top of the volcano,” said the President.
“We got a lot of very brave men,” replied Arnold Morgan, sharply.
“Will a nuclear warhead detonate if a Patriot slams into it, in midair?” asked the President.
“Probably not, sir,” said Arnold. “These things do not explode on impact. You have to
“What are our chances?”
“They’re very good, once we switch off the GPS.”
“I was coming to that,” replied President Bedford. “I assume we can’t just shut it down and leave it at that, can we? I mean, what about all the navigation, all over the world…Christ, there’d be ships running aground all over the place, wouldn’t there?”
“Sir, if we just shut off the GPS,” said Arnold, “I’d say we’d have a couple of dozen supertankers high and dry on various beaches within about five hours. The rest would be turning around in large circles, baffled by that most ancient of skills, or lack of it.”
“You’re right there,” said Admiral Dickson. “Most merchant ship navigators couldn’t find their way out of the harbor without GPS. And most of them have grown up with it. We’ve had military satellites up there since the early 1970s.
“Your average navigator on a big freighter or a tanker knows nothing else. And there are probably four thousand yachtsmen at any one time groping around the oceans entirely dependent on the GPS to find their way home.”
“Who runs GPS?” asked the President.
“Fiftieth Space Wing’s Second Space Ops Squadron, out at Falcon Air Base, Colorado,” said Arnold. “The full
