Choke Point

ahead?”

Myers, surprised by Keach’s acute hearing, given the noise of the last helicopter taking off from Turner’s flight deck, had no time to react before the admiral was answering his own question. “Yes, you’d be the hero and dash ahead to help your fleet buddies. A noble sentiment, Mr. Myers, but what caused Utah to go down? Internal explosion? Torpedo? Friendly fire? A mine?”

The ensign was nonplused.

“Remember the Kursk!” added Keach. “Accidental firing in their own torpedo room.”

Already the Turner’s sensor arrays were monitoring the air for any radioactive leak from Utah’s reactor. That would be a double whammy — a lethal cloud of radiation sweeping over the entire battle group plus the enormous catastrophe that would assault the millions of Americans who inhabited the Northwest’s pristine mountains and coasts. What’s more, if the water from the countless streams and rivers that raced down from the high peaks of the Rockies and Cascade ranges to the sea-stack-dotted coast of Washington, Oregon, and northern California were contaminated, most of the western United States would die.

“COMSUBPAC-9 on the scrambler line, sir,” Turner’s Admiral Bressard informed Battle Group Commander Keach. “I think it’s Admiral Jensen himself.”

Keach took the phone from Bressard, Keach’s tone correct but not noticeably friendly. They had both dated Margaret, and Keach’s ego was as big as any of Turner’s air wing pilots. He hated losing.

“Admiral,” Jensen told Keach. “I’ve just received a disturbing message from the oceanographic ship Petrel. They sent it down by helo — no encryption capability.”

“What is it?” asked Keach.

“Petrel reports a possible hostile in the strait.”

Keach was so dumbfounded, all he could say was, “Utah’s gone, Admiral. Don’t you know—” He stopped, realizing there was a very good reason Jensen wouldn’t know what had happened to one of his attack subs. The subs didn’t make regular check-ins — such transmissions could immediately give away their position to an enemy.

“I know that …” began Jensen, his voice trailing off in a mumble. Keach was struck by the sudden metamorphosis. What had been the voice of a self-confident commander a moment before had vanished. Jensen was a man on the edge.

“Torpedo or mine, I’d say,” Keach told Jensen, “but could have been internal. Or a hostile. I don’t know.”

There was no response from Jensen, but Keach knew he was still on the line. “I have to go, Admiral,” said Keach, who immediately ordered a warning flashed to every ship in his battle group. The captain of the Aegis cruiser on his left flank asked for confirmation as to whether it was a “mini” or “midget” sub. Keach said that he had already requested confirmation of this in plain language message to the Petrel’s captain.

All Frank Hall could tell Keach, however, was what Albinski had written on his attack board—“Minisub”—the diver obviously not having enough time to put anything else down before his life was snuffed out.

“What’s wrong?” Margaret asked when Walter walked in, gray-faced, as if he had literally aged overnight.

“A disaster,” he replied, with the kind of deliberation that had always alarmed her. A “disaster” for Walter in what she called his “worrywart moods” had come to mean anything from the possibility of having to replace the muffler on his beloved Porsche to hearing that one of his Hunter Killers was in deep trouble somewhere in the Pacific.

“You look awful, Walter.”

Wordlessly, he flicked on CNN, and there it was, the lead story. How did those media bastards find out about this stuff so quickly? More than a headline, the news flash was taking over the entire 11:00 P.M. newscast. Not many details, but repetition ad nauseam of a “tremendous explosion” being reported by Seattle’s CNN affiliate; the high-profile anchor, Marte Price, claiming that it was believed to be one of the Navy’s ICBM “boomers”—Trident submarines. Normally, Jensen would have been scornful of the misidentification, quick to point out that it was a “Hunter Killer attack boat, you idiot,” but all he could think of now was to say a silent prayer that Keach was able to have Turner’s Sea Kings and every other available helicopter in the battle group rescue as many of Utah’s men as possible, and how he, COMSUBPAC-GRU-9, so recently at large in Seattle’s society circuit as guardian of Juan de Fuca’s and Puget Sound’s pristine environment, would be offered up by the White House as the sacrificial lamb for the catastrophe.

“Kimmel’s reputation was destroyed,” Jensen now told his wife, “when FDR fired him as CINCPAC after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Doug MacArthur had been just as guilty, in fact more culpable of ignoring warnings about an attack on Clark Field in the Philippines — parking all his damned planes in clumps, easier to guard, and easier for the Japs to destroy the next day. But fate was on Doug’s side — FDR didn’t have anyone else available on our east perimeter to take command.” Kimmel, he knew, had died in obscurity, and when MacArthur did get fired by Harry Truman for wanting to cross the Yalu from Korea and bomb China’s staging areas, he came home a hero, got a ticker-tape parade the likes of which New York had never seen. He slumped into his TV chair, saying, “They’ll crucify me, Margaret.”

She went to the kitchen and began making coffee. It would be a long night. Finally, her hand on his shoulder, she asked quietly, “How many men were aboard the Utah?”

“A hundred and thirty, give or take. A woman aboard too, one of our scientists. Torpedo specialist.”

Margaret bit her lip, thoroughly ashamed of herself. “Torpedo specialist” had made her think of a joke she’d heard among the Navy wives — torpedoes and penises. How could one think of such a vulgar thing at a time like this? Same thing, she remembered, when she was a child. Went to church every Sunday, frightened sometimes by the urge to yell out the foulest things. The more she tried to block it out, the worse it became. Walter said such things to her only when he began kissing her between her—

“Rorke,” said Walter softly. “He’s the skipper.”

Margaret nodded. As the wife of an admiral, she got to know most of the skippers. Like her husband when he was younger, they awed her. The responsibility of young men like John Rorke, who drove the nuclear-powered steam engines that carried the power to destroy worlds, impressed even someone from the rarefied air of Radcliffe College.

“Keach,” Walter said suddenly. “Your old beau. He’s safe on the Turner. The carrier.”

“Oh, yes.”

They were both wrong. Six minutes after the last rescue helicopter had left the Turner’s darkened flight deck, three warhead mines, their release fuses initiated by the enormous downward push of the Turner’s 98,000 tons, detonated. The near simultaneous explosion of the mines caused what Alicia Mayne would have called a “geometric” rather than “arithmetic” progression, in that one plus one plus one did not equal three, but much more, the pressure wave so powerful that it lifted the huge warship into the air. It wasn’t by much, indeed it would have been barely perceptible to the naked eye, even in daylight, but it was enough to create a fissure running up from the great ship’s keel, or spinal column, to several decks above, in effect breaking the carrier’s back. Many survivors of the Utah, eight miles to the east, foundering amid the floating debris of the sub, unable to gain a purchase on any floatable wreckage and who had only life vests, were concussed into unconsciousness by the shock waves that sped through the water from the stricken Turner at nearly 3,000 miles an hour.

Below on the carrier’s flight deck, in the cavernous hangar, which, save for the rescue helos, did not yet house its air wing — the latter’s fighters, fighter-bombers, attack and recon aircraft, following standard procedure, having not yet flown to the carrier from Whidbey Island’s naval station — the crew witnessed an astonishing sight, one unique in the annals of naval history. Because their blast door was down, separating their section from the other two hangar zones, what appeared in front of them on the port side was not the huge wall that normally separated their hanger section from the support structures outside, but a jagged, ten-foot-wide gash four stories high, running from below the waterline all the way up to the hangar deck. Through the gash, the astonished crew