There were maps of the western approaches to the Canary Islands, and three different charts of the Canaries themselves—one showing all five islands from Grand Canaria to Hierro, including Tenerife, Gomera, and La Palma; another showing the other two big islands of Lanzarote and Fuerteventura much farther to the east, the latter only 60 nautical miles off Morocco’s northwest headland.
The entire seven-island archipelago stretched east to west for 250 miles, and Arnold Morgan had made but one mark on the entire nautical layout—a small circle located at 28.37N 17.50W, the main crater of the great Cumbre Vieja fault line.
Right now he was standing with President Bedford, staring at the depths of water that surrounded the island of La Palma, almost 10,000 feet high, 50 miles to the east, 5,000 feet all around the 1,000-meter line, 200 feet close inshore, and almost 100 feet sloping steeply west right below the cliffs, almost on the goddamned beach.
He glanced up as Admiral Dickson came in, the President having retreated to the far end of the room to speak with Henry Wolfson. It was clear already that the Oval Office was about to become Admiral Morgan’s ops room, and that an army of possibly five cleaners and tidiers would be required twice a day to keep even a semblance of order.
The former President’s secretary, Miss Betty-Ann Jones, the very lady who had been ordered to fire Arnold as soon as the result of the Presidential Election was known, was in the process of clearing her desk and preparing to leave for her home in Alabama. She had given herself no more than two hours to remain at her power desk outside the Oval Office, since it was rumored that Mrs. Arnold Morgan was on her way into the White House, essentially to take charge of her husband’s life while he tried to fight off the Hamas threat.
Betty-Ann need not have worried. Arnold Morgan treated everyone the same—Presidents, Admirals, Generals, Ambassadors, Emperors, and waiters. Usually with impatience, occasionally with irritation, but rarely with malice. He would not have remembered the manner of his removal from office—only that he was leaving his beloved nation in the hands of people whom he judged to be incompetent to handle the task. That almost broke his heart. Phone calls from secretaries did not figure in the equation. But he did want his capable wife close at hand in the hours of duress.
“Where the hell’s Kathy?” he growled to Admiral Doran.
“Who’s Kathy?” replied the Commander in Chief of the Navy’s Atlantic Fleet.
Arnold looked up from his charts, surprised. “Oh, Kathy? Sorry Frank, I was talking to myself…pretty familiar phrase in my life—they’ll probably inscribe it on my grave…‘Where the hell’s Kathy?’ ”
“Is that Mrs. Morgan?”
“That’s her. The best secretary I ever had, the best-looking lady who ever even spoke to me, and the best of my three wives, by several miles.”
Frank Doran chuckled. “You expecting her, sir?”
“Damn right. I just gave her back her old job, and told her to get right down here to the West Wing, on the double.”
“Is she coming?”
“Well, she told me she’d give some thought to working again for the rudest man she ever met. But not to hold my breath.”
Admiral Doran laughed out loud at that, and ventured that everyone had to refrain from the impulse to speak to wives and children as if they belonged on the lower deck.
Arnold was about to reply when Kathy Morgan came marching into the office, looking, as ever, radiantly beautiful.
Without looking up, he snapped, “ ’Bout time. COFFEE! And call the Iranian Ambassador and tell him he’s a devious lying son of a bitch.”
Admiral Doran was stunned. Admiral Dickson, who had attended this charade before, just shook his head. And Arnold leapt up from his desk and hugged his wife right in front of everyone.
Throughout all her years as Arnold’s secretary, she had always been astounded at the commands he gave her…Call the head of this, the head of that, ambassadors and diplomats, and say the most frightful things to them. To Arnold Morgan a request for speed of reply from a senior Russian Admiral translated to Tell Nikolai what’s-his-name to get his ass in gear…
The sudden order to lay into the Iranian ambassador was a mere “Welcome Home” to Kathy, who had promised to return to work only if it was for a two-week tenure.
Arnold introduced Frank Doran, and then instructed Kathy to tell that lady outside, Betty Something, that she was welcome to work as Kathy’s assistant in the smaller office for a couple of weeks. Failing that, to tell her to go now, and get a replacement.
The former Kathy O’Brien knew the White House routines as well as anyone, but she balked at this. “Darling, I cannot just arrive here and start firing people,” she said.
“Okay,” said Arnold, returning to his charts of the waters on the eastern Atlantic Ocean. “Get Frank to do it.”
“I’m not firing President McBride’s secretary!” said Admiral Doran.
“All right, all right,” said Arnold. “I’ll do it.” And with that, he walked out of the door and explained to Betty-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 Ronald Reagan, eastern end of the Mediterranean, maybe three days away. The frigates can all be in the area within six days—five of them are halfway there already, and the rest are ready to clear Norfolk tonight, five hours from now.”
“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 communiqués 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 dept
h 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…‘Cumbre Vieja. Canary Islands. It’s happened there before, and it will one day happen there again.’
“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.
“Taking a point 400 miles from the island of Montserrat…puts him around here at midnight…twenty-four hours later, he’s probably here if he’s steaming through these unpatrolled waters at around 12 to 15 knots…That puts him right here tonight and probably here tomorrow night…That ship he’s in will have to move very slowly over the SOSUS wires, maybe 6 knots all the way across here…That’s only 150 miles a day…Won’t reach the datum until October 9, right?…Bang on time, son of a bitch…”
“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, ‘Satellites nonoperational at this time.’ And that will leave him no option. He’ll have to fire visually, and that’ll bring him in to around 25 miles from La Palma. Right there he will be forced to loose off his missiles using visual range and bearing only.
“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 make them explode with split-second timing, crashing the two pieces of uranium-235 directly into each other with high explosive and stupendous force, accurate to a hundredth of a second. A couple of hundred pounds of TNT designed to blow the entire rocket to smithereens, on impact, will not fulfill those explicit timing credentials. But it’ll sure as hell disable it, and knock the damn thing into the sea.”
“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 name of the system is NAVSTAR GPS. It’s really a constellation of satellites orbiting the earth, a space-based radio-positioning and time-transfer system. It provides incredibly accurate data position, velocity, and time. That’s PVT in the trade.
“Over the years, it has become a worldwide common grid, easily converted to other local datums, passive, all-weather operational, real-time and continuous information, and survivability in a hostile environment. It’s a twenty-four-hour navigation service. And it’s all-American, totally controlled from Colorado. We put all the satellites up there, right on the back of a Delta II expendable launch vehicle, out of Cape Canaveral, Florida.”
“And we can make the system nonoperational?”
“We can do anything we damn please,” said Arnold. “But we will have to give ample warning to the international community, otherwise the consequences might be horrendous.”
“It beats the hell out of me why we ever made this military asset available to everyone else,” said the President. “Especially since the darn thing is so accurate.”
“Left to the military, it would not have happened. But Clinton’s Vice President, the great universal do-gooder, insisted. Of course the Military were furious, but Al’s boss did not think much of the Military, and that’s why we got a bunch of deranged Muslims able to fire accurate missiles anywhere they like.”
Even Paul Bedford laughed at this vintage Morganian discourse, despite a certain loyalty to a fellow Democratic President.
“So when do we switch ’em off, Arnold?”
“Well, if the submarine’s making 600 miles a day, and he’s aiming to arrive and fire instantly, immediately making his getaway, I’d say he’ll be within 200 miles of his launch zone by midnight on October 7. He’ll probably take a satellite fix in the small hours of the morning of the eighth, and then keep steaming in to his ops area. I guess we better shut the GPS off at midnight on Wednesday the seventh, and keep it off until either we destroy him or he fires his missiles.”
“That may be forty-eight hours with the world’s navigation system nonoperational?” said Paul Bedford.
“Correct,” said Arnold. “But at least they’ve got eight days to learn how to use a sextant and take a look at the stars and study the positions of the sun, and make their timing from GMT. Do ’em good. Turn ’em into proper sailors.”
“No alternative, is there?” replied the President.
“None that I can see. We have to switch off the GPS. Blind him. Drive him inshore. Force him to periscope depth.”
“Whi
ch side of the island?” asked President Bedford, peering at the charts.
“Oh, he’ll come east, right, Alan? Frank?”
“Not much doubt of that,” said Admiral Doran. “At least, that’s what I’d do. First, because I don’t want to get turned over by the tsunami, which I would be if I were west of the impact when the mountain collapses. And second, because I could tuck myself right in here…”
Frank pointed at the chart with a pencil, aiming at the waters to the northwest of the island of Gomera. “Right there,” he said, “I’m in 1,000 feet of deep water with the land behind me. Sonars are never as good looking into the land, and that’s what I’d be thinking—that I was trying to evade other submarines.
“I’d try to make it hard for the guys who were looking for me. I’d run deep and slow. Then I’d make my run in, right through this deep water, 7,000 feet on the chart, still moving slowly. I’d come to PD, take my mark on the island, one of these mountain peaks, get my range and bearing, then go deep again. Right here, 25 miles out I’d give myself a new visual check, then I’d fire two missiles, fast. Then head for shelter, probably behind Gomera or even Tenerife—away from the tidal waves.”
“Jesus,” said Paul Bedford. “I’m glad you’re on our side.”
“The only trouble is, Mr. President,” said Admiral Morgan, “we have just one slight glitch.”
“Lay it on me.”
“There is just one other smaller satellite system up there that we do not control. It’s the European GPS, the Galileo Project, which is still dwarfed by our own system. But it’s there, and it works, and anyone can get into its guidance system. I imagine our Hamas opponents are aware of this. But they must realize we will pull every trick in the book to screw ’em up. Therefore we must be aware of the problem. They might be navigating close in by the European system only.”
“We have to use everything in our power to blind our enemy,” replied the President.
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