Rubens' jaw tightened, and he made an effort to keep his voice calm. 'Madam Chairperson,' he said, 'I cannot stress this enough. That decision is shortsighted and it is wrong. If I could just have ten minutes with the President — '
'That is not going to happen, Mr. Rubens,' Bing told him, and the tone of her voice had the finality of a slamming door. 'He was very clear on the matter.'
'London has indicated that they are ready to go in with an SAS assault sometime tonight,' George Wehrum added. 'We will support their operation by sharing intelligence, by providing logistical support, and by making available ships and helicopters to evacuate crew members and passengers from those vessels and to provide medical support when and if that becomes necessary.'
'How are you going to evacuate over three thousand people in the middle of the North Atlantic?' Rubens asked. He looked around the room, trying to gauge the mood of the rest of the people at the conference table. It was crowded here, more crowded than it had been on Saturday morning.
'By aircraft carrier, of course,' Wehrum said. 'The Ark Royal is in pursuit of the target vessels now. And the USS Eisenhower — she was en route from Norfolk to the Med — she's been redirected and should rendezvous with the British squadron within twenty-four hours.'
'What, are you planning on building a tent city on the Ike's flight deck?' Admiral Prendergast asked, his tone sarcastic and possibly angry as well. Rubens wondered if the order to the Eisenhower had bypassed Prendergast on the way down.
'If necessary,' Bing told him. 'However, it almost certainly will not be necessary. The SAS is very, very good at what they do.'
Rubens could only shake his head. While an aircraft carrier was big enough to carry several thousand people — the Eisenhower had a complement of over fifty-six hundred — it would be an absolute nightmare trying to house, feed, and care for the needs of thousands of civilians as well. And that didn't even begin to address his original question, which was how the Navy would get those civilians off of the Atlantis Queen and onto the Eisenhower in the first place. They would not be able to transfer directly, not without risking a lot of damage to both ships. Personnel could be transferred by helicopter, but there would be only a few of those available, and each could carry only a handful of people — perhaps twelve to fifteen — at a time.
There was also a serious logistical question. If the Eisenhower's flight deck was covered with refugees, there wouldn't be room to handle flight operations — and there would be no place for the necessary small fleet of helicopters to land. No wonder Prendergast was pissed.
Of course, Bing was right in one respect. It probably wouldn't be necessary to evacuate the Atlantis Queen.
Either the SAS assault would be successful and the cruise ship secured… or the terrorists on board would push a button and blow her up.
There was also the question of the Pacific Sandpiper and her deadly cargo. The terrorists must be planning on using the plutonium somehow, if only as a bargaining chip.
'What about the Pacific SandpiperT General Barton said, as if he'd just read Rubens' mind. 'Suppose the terrorists are using the nuclear material on board to make a bomb?'
'I believe Dr. Cavenaugh has a report on that issue,' Bing said. 'Doctor?'
Dr. Bruce Cavenaugh was a member of the Atomic Energy Commission and served as an advisor on nuclear threats both to the NCTC and to Homeland Security. A rumpled man in a tweed jacket, the very image of an elderly professor, Cavenaugh stood to address the group, moving around to the lectern at the front of the room with a double handful of notes and folders before him.
'We've been reviewing the possibilities,' he told the group, 'given PNTL's cargo manifest for the Pacific Sandpiper While it's been widely reported that the ship carries enough plutonium to manufacture as many as fifty or sixty nuclear weapons, there is almost no chance at all that terrorists on board those two ships could create such a weapon themselves. For a nuclear explosion to be generated, two sub-critical masses of plutonium must be brought together very suddenly and very precisely. This requires precision tooling, and a means of reshaping the plutonium elements to achieve maximum effect. Usually, this means two hemispheres — imagine a ball cut in half — positioned so that conventional explosives slam the two halves together.' He brought his hands together in a sharp clap, and several people at the table jumped slightly. 'They achieve critical mass, and a nuclear explosion is the result. A second method is to machine a sphere of plutonium with a precisely drilled hole into which a plutonium cylinder is fired. A third would be to have one sphere of plutonium positioned inside a larger, hollow sphere, with conventional explosives around the outside to create a powerful implosion.
'But the plutonium on board the Pacific Sandpiper is carefully packaged in one-hundred-ton canisters bolted to the cargo hold deck, in such a way that the plutonium always remains sub-critical. It might be possible to use cutting torches to remove the storage containers inside each canister, true, but the plutonium is stored as plutonium oxide, an extremely fine powder. The terrorists simply don't have the facilities to transform that powder into pure, solid plutonium. If they slapped a critical mass of plutonium oxide together, the worst that would happen would be the release of a tremendous amount of heat.. enough heat to melt through the bottom of the ship and sink her… what became known as the 'China syndrome' back in the 1980s. There would be extensive contamination of the sea in the ship's immediate vicinity, of course, but no explosion.'
Rubens could feel the others at the table relaxing. Since the beginning of his crisis, the major concern had been that terrorists were attempting to seize the Sandpiper in order to either gain access to enough plutonium to make atomic bombs or threaten the United States with the possibility of a nuclear explosion.
'Dr. Cavenaugh,' he said. 'What about the possibility of a dirty bomb?'
'Ah! Yes. That is one possibility we've been looking at that does appear to pose a very real threat in this situation. The plutonium oxide is already in a fine powder form, as I said. If it were to be removed from its protective containers, a sufficiently powerful conventional explosion — an explosion big enough to destroy the ship, say — might hurl most of that powder into the atmosphere, where prevailing winds would carry it out over a large footprint. Any ships downwind of the explosion would be contaminated.'
'Then we will recommend that our British friends stay well upwind during their assault,' Bing said.
'How big of a footprint, Doctor?' Debra Collins wanted to know.
'That depends on wind speed, humidity, and several other factors,' Cavenaugh replied. 'But potentially five or six hundred miles long, perhaps fifty to one hundred miles wide.'
'Enough,' Rubens said, looking squarely at Bing, 'to blanket all of Manhattan and Long Island with radioactive dust, if they blow that ship up inside New York Harbor. That is what I want to be certain the President understands. Those ships changed course thirty-six hours ago, and are on a heading that appears to be aimed straight at Boston or at New York City, or, if they come further down the coast, Philadelphia or Washington, D. C. Our crisis assessment team at the NSA believes the enemy's target to be either Boston — it's the closest major city on the new course — or New York City.
'Right now, the Sandpiper and her cargo are nineteen hundred nautical miles from New York. That's four days at the speed they've been traveling since Saturday night. That makes it our problem as well as the Brits'.'
Bing shifted uncomfortably in her chair but said, 'The President has already been fully informed, and it is his decision that this situation be resolved by the British.'
'We have a special operations unit ready to go in,' Rubens said, 'on twenty minutes' notice, but they will need approximately twelve hours to redeploy to the Eisenhower Once there, however, they would be available to provide special combat intelligence to the SAS commander on-site.'
Bing appeared to consider this, then shook her head. 'The President has decided that this situation will be resolved by the British.'
Rubens heard the warning in Bing's voice and in the way she kept repeating her words: do not push. The harder he fought to have the NSA's combat action team included in the assault, the more deeply entrenched and stubborn Bing and her cronies would become.
He wondered, though, if the President really was dead set against U. S. forces participating in the op… or if this was Bing's way of defending her turf. Whichever it was, Bing had just slammed the door shut on Rubens, or she thought she had.
He was not willing to concede the victory to Bing and Wehrum, however, not yet. Rubens had tremendous respect for the British SAS. They were well trained and battle-tested. Some claimed they were the equals in most respects of the U. S. Delta Force.
