She was now threatening to do it again, a mob of screaming adolescents jabbing the air with “Peace for Penghu” and burning Old Glory near the perimeter rope in Lafayette Park across from the White House. Another smaller but just as vocal group was holding signs promising to pay the singer’s fare to the Penghu. “Neither group,” Marte Price reported, “is clear on exactly where Penghu is.”
The McCain was sailing into night as the show was broadcast, the ship darkened, all lights below rigged for red. Admiral Crowley entered the Combat Information Center and in a voice as calm as ice told John Cuso, “I’ve been thinking, John. If I were terrorists, I’d attack us at first light.”
The incoming secret three-letter-coded message was received by John Rorke’s USS Encino at four hundred feet below the surface of Bashi Strait via the attack boat’s extremely low frequency aerial, which it periodically played out hundreds of yards behind it from a keel-flush integrated spool set on its port side. ELF was secure, being out of view of aerial reconnaissance or other shipping that might be in the area, but it was so slow — its transmission rate this morning one letter every twenty-six seconds — that it was used more often than not to instruct a submarine to come to periscope depth and raise its communications mast in what Encino’s crew called “the quick pop-out.” At periscope depth, Encino’s radio mast quickly pierced the sea/air interface and, hopefully before any hostile got a chance to discover the mast by satellite infrared recon, received a three-second burst message from COMSUBPAC HQ in Hawaii.
“Must be urgent,” Encino’s executive officer said.
“It had better be,” said John Rorke. “I don’t like exposing myself for anything less.”
“How ’bout your honey, Skipper?” quipped the navigator.
Rorke gave an obligatory grin, but when the navigator had said “your” honey rather than “a” honey, it made him inwardly wince, and he saw that the executive officer sensed it. A certain amount of sexual innuendo was part of a Navy man’s life — hell, any man’s life, he thought — but cooped-up men sometimes went over the line. It wasn’t the words they used — Rorke knew the lexicon from Bangor, Maine, to Bangor, Washington, and he was no prude, but he’d found that whenever he’d started getting serious about a woman, the innuendos and unending sexual “jokes” made him feel defensive — no, protective — about her. Alicia evoked in him a respect for women that usually waned when he was simply chasing “poontang.”
The XO had shot the navigator a warning glance, but the latter was busy confirming Encino’s position, having taken advantage of the brief “pop-out” of the ultrahigh frequency mast to get a fix before the masts were retracted into the sub’s sail. This would allow him to correct for the ship’s inertial navigation system, which, despite twenty-first-century computers’ linked gyroscopes and movement- sensitive accelerometers, could often drift up to 1,700 yards. It was an important correction, enabling the sub’s captain and the handful of officers privy to such information on the boat to know exactly where Encino was. This was especially useful, as Rorke’s mentor, Admiral Jensen, had once said, “if you actually want to hit something with a torpedo.”
Once submerged well below periscope depth, Rorke and the XO watched as two weapons officers from the sub’s missile department simultaneously opened two small green combination safes. Both officers extracted one of a half-dozen black plastic capsules from each, with the number on each of the nontransparent capsules received via the UHF burst message being the same. The code phrase within each of the two extracted capsules was also the same, in this case BLAIR KEITH.
The fact that both capsules contained the same name, as duly witnessed by Rorke and his XO, allowed all four officers to concur that the President’s order for Encino to fire all twelve of its Tomahawk land attack missiles at the target identified only by coordinates was valid. None of the crew would know what the target was, not even the weapons officer, who now, with deliberate yet unhurried pace, punched the given coordinates into his red-eyed firing procedures console. Only the navigator, his computer verifying his manual chart plot, knew the coordinates were for an island off southwestern Taiwan. But he did not know exactly what on that island was being targeted. In this war, as in peacetime patrols, the sub had remained submerged, cut off from the world and news of it for months at a time, night and day distinguished only by whether sections of the sub were rigged for red. Not even the coveted fifty-word familygrams, whose delivery could give the sub’s position away, were being received. Only Rorke, who’d been rushed from the plane to the sub’s dock to take command of Encino after the sub’s captain had unexpectedly died at sea from a heart attack, knew about the present situation between the two Chinas.
His mind no longer on Alicia, on women, on anything but the care he must take to arrive secretly at the launch point an hour away, Rorke reviewed all the known idiosyncrasies of the Encino. The crew was already in “ultraquiet” mode, signaled by simple voice command from Rorke. No klaxon had sounded his order, and no klaxon would sound “Battle Stations” at launch point. There would be no noise on the sub that might alert hostiles. All mixing machines in the galley, all washer-dryers, and so on, no matter how quiet their rubber mountings, were to be turned off. In the galley the cook’s menu changed to ground prime beef hamburgers — better than any in the civilian world — ready to be quickly cooked in a silent microwave, its ear- piercing “done” alarm permanently silenced, replaced by a colored light indicator. Those not on duty had to be in their bunks, and, if using Discmans, Walkmans, and the like, were allowed the use of only one earpiece. The chief of the boat, otherwise known on Encino as “Old Testament,” ritually informed every newcomer to the boat, “God help the man I find curtained in his bunk who doesn’t hear an order because his eardrums are being bombarded by some rap crap!”
A towel hastily pulled around his waist, an auxiliaryman caught in mid-shampoo, all water noise cut off as “ultraquiet” was answered, emerged from the stall, mumbling obscenities, his hair still streaked with suds. A torpedo tech made way for him, flashing him a mocking “Come hither!” look that the suds man returned with a murderous glare. Every one of the fifteen officers and 149 enlisted men now knew this was no drill, and in their bunks men turned to their private comforts: a picture of family, a Bible, girlfriends, and, for some, a passage from the Koran; for others, there were dreams of what they’d do if God, or Fate, spared them from fatality in this strangest of conflicts of constantly shifting “trouble fronts.”
Rorke had not told them that America had been attacked in the Northwest. Some were bound to have loved ones there, and why burden men on the boat with the anxiety of not knowing, of being unable to do anything out here deep in the netherworld of ocean? The best they could do, that he could do, Rorke knew, was get on with the job. Though badly shaken by the loss of the Utah, he was confident that he could get the 360-foot-long boat to launch point at precisely the right time — providing he could keep Encino in perfect trim. Encino did not have the bow thrusters some other boats had, which allowed them to hover at launch point, but barring any unforeseen circumstances, he told himself, he should have no trouble.
The more superstitious among the crew, however, who nursed their captain’s death and recalled Rorke’s clumsy arrival — he’d slipped and fallen while coming aboard on the rain-slicked gangway — took these as two very bad signs, several of the crew believing in the theory that things come in threes.
“Eternal Father Strong to Save” was the hymn played over McCain’s PA to the carrier’s five-thousand-plus men and women, the boat’s starboard aft elevator space crowded with off-duty personnel for whom the ship’s quartermaster had distributed song sheets. The religious and nonreligious who had gathered here were as diverse as American society itself, but all were bound by a patriotism so deeply felt and honored it aroused sniggers and embarrassment among other Western nations, except, ironically, in Russia, once its bitterest foe. But no one could be embarrassed now as the stentorian voice of the padre led the huge ad hoc choir in rough unison with such feeling that no one but the most self-indulgent cynic could fail to be moved by the swell of love for fallen comrades, so intense it could be heard by lookouts aboard the Aegis cruisers guarding the flanks of the huge man-o’-war.
Admiral Crowley had determined that there would be no burial in the light of day for the enemy to take advantage of. When morning broke, he and the entire battle group would be ready to attack Penghu, the President surely giving first licks to McCain, whose air wing had been so grievously harmed by the PLA air force and for which everyone on the carrier held Beijing, its protestations notwithstanding, totally responsible.
A complaint was brought to Commander John Cuso that “Eternal Father Strong to Save” was “sexist,” said it referred to the creator as being masculine.
“What do we do?” asked the chief petty officer from the section in which the complainant originated.
