Tom Clancy, Steve Pieczenik, Jeff Rovin
War of Eagles
Acknowledgments
We would like to acknowledge the valuable assistance of Martin H. Greenberg, Ph.D.; Larry Segriff; Denise Little; John Helfers; Brittiany Koren; Victoria Bundonis Rovin; Roberta Pieczenik, Ph.D.; Carl La Greca; and Tom Colgan, our editor. But most important, it is for you, our readers, to determine how successful our collective endeavor has been.
ONE
When Jesse Wheedles was a young man stationed at the Charleston Naval Base, he had a very precise and accurate job description. The Athens, Georgia, native was chief mess management specialist. He was proud of that position. Wheedles was more than just a cook, more than just a bagger who put together MREs — meals ready to eat — for consumption by sailors in transit. Wheedles was a craftsman. His job was to make certain that whatever their rating, whatever their taste, when someone sat down in his mess hall, he or she had the best soup, hottest entree, and finest cookies and coffee in the United States Navy.
He had a paper napkin signed, “Amazing food!” by Undersecretary Sabrina Brighton proving just how well he had succeeded.
Wheedles wondered what life would have been like had he stayed with the navy. After his hitch, he took over the family restaurant, a roadside diner that was struggling to survive in the face of fast food and coffee bars. They hung on ten years, after which his dad sold the property to a developer, divided the profit among his three sons, and called it a day.
Wheedles lost his share of the $90,000 in an Internet start-up.
Now both the former mess chief and the naval base were doing something else. The base had been there for nearly ninety-five years, ever since President Theodore Roosevelt visited Charleston for its bicentennial celebration and decided that it would be a more suitable location for a naval facility than Beaufort. His decision didn’t sit well with the citizens of that city, who sent a wreath and their condolences when the base finally closed.
Southerners forgave, but they did not forget.
The military presence here had a long and significant history. During the American Revolution it had been the site of a major British siege. The fall of Charleston resulted in the single greatest loss of troops for the American cause and had effectively left the Southern colonies in the hands of the Crown. The proud port had also been one of the lifelines of the Confederacy, dry dock for the submarine
Fort Sumter, the flash point of the Civil War, was located here. The martial history of Charleston, built and shaped by sinew and soul, was too important to end with the cold, blind judgment of a computer.
But so it had.
The facility had been shut down in 1996 as part of the Base Realignment and Closure Program. That was a day of great mourning for the city. There was concern at the time that the loss of the fleet and four thousand support jobs would kill the harbor and drag Charleston with it. But federal agencies and commercial enterprises sailed to the rescue, filling the base with tenants and barely causing a skipped beat in the economic pulse of the city.
The redevelopment project even saved the struggling career of thirty-seven-year-old Jesse Wheedles. Thanks to his former navy CO who was on the harbor renewal advisory board, Wheedles got a job as the morning manager of Teddy R’s, a new waterfront restaurant that catered to freighter and tanker crews arriving or departing on the early morning tide. It was a great position, because he got to do something he enjoyed and was good at, and he loved arriving before sunup to turn on the grill and get the deep fryer bubbling. He loved the feeling of literally firing up his day almost as much as he enjoyed the taste of the night sea air. Unlike the navy, where everyone had been groomed and uniformed in a kind of hive look and personality, the men who came to his restaurant were multicultural. They looked, spoke, and even smelled different. He welcomed the opportunity to experience a little bit of Bulgaria or Hong Kong, of Venezuela or Great Britain right on his doorstep. Wheedles was also delighted by the fact that when he left work at two in the afternoon there was still warm daylight to enjoy with his wife and young twins.
There was just one thing Wheedles had never anticipated: that one day a freighter might explode in the predawn blackness, destroying a significant section of the dock, Teddy R’s, and ending his life.
TWO
Charleston PD Harbor Patrol Sergeant Al Graff had the wheel of his small white patrol boat. His partner, Officer Randy Molina, was in the well. He was scanning the mouth of the Ashley River with night-vision goggles, watching for small vessels. Over the past few months drug dealers from the Caribbean had been making drops along the Southeastern seaboard, meeting local distributors who brought the narcotics to shore in rowboats. Graff and Molina had not had a piece of that action yet. They hoped they would. The snakes who piloted those boats were generally not good swimmers. Especially if one of the oars accidentally struck them on the head.
It was a warm morning with a soft westerly wind. The eight-year veteran was about to turn back toward the mainland when something exploded a half-mile behind them. Both men turned. The blast lit the historic waterfront rooftops and the ornate spire of Saint Phillips. The rolling cloud itself blew much higher, spawning a spray of yellow and magnesium-white tendrils. They tumbled to earth tracing hot, jagged paths in the sky as the smoke roamed outward, thinning and growing darker. Within moments the surface shock wave of the blast had reached the boat, causing ripples that heaved the small vessel violently from side to side.
While Molina simultaneously radioed the Coast Guard and the CPDHP dispatcher for assistance, Graff swung the patrol boat toward the rising crimson cloud. It was obvious that a freighter had exploded. Graff could see the outline of the hull against the flames. The vessel was spilling oil into the harbor, which fueled the fire. There wasn’t a lot of it, since the ship had just arrived and not yet been refueled for the return trip, but there was enough to keep the area around it flaming.
A pair of CPDHP helicopters arrived within minutes to drop fire-retardant foam around the outside perimeter of the blaze to form a floating barricade that would keep it from reaching other ships. Big canvas hoses were rushed over by the harbormaster’s dock crew to keep embers from igniting buildings or wooden structures on neighboring vessels.
It appeared that only two structures had been damaged on the waterfront: the Southern Bells music shop and Teddy R’s. It looked to Graff like the restaurant had taken the bulk of the hit.
Trucks from the Charleston Fire Department, North Battalion, arrived just a few minutes later to help hose down the remaining structures and to mount an immediate search and rescue for survivors in the freighter or in the two burning buildings. The joint CPD/CFD antiterrorist task force was next on the scene, arriving moments after the main firefighting unit. While specialists from Fire Station 3 used their mobile hazmat lab to test for signs of radiological, bacteriological, or chemical agents, their CPD counterparts rushed to secure and search other vessels. The highway patrol blocked roads around the sector to keep perpetrators from escaping, while spotters directed patrolmen to buildings that had a direct line of sight with the afflicted vessel. If this was a rocket-propelled grenade,
