by Jeff Edwards
Heads nodded around the table, but Chief McPherson felt her muscles tighten. Her boss’s plan sounded great, but she knew that it had a hole in it—a big one. She chewed the inside of her lower lip for a few seconds. Would it be better to point it out now? Or should she wait and do it in private, so as not to embarrass Ensign Cooper in front of the other officers? Of course, if she waited to bring the problem to his attention, he would have to come back to this same table some time in the future with his hat in his hand and admit his mistake. That might be even more embarrassing for him.
The chief glanced up to discover that the captain was staring at her with a strange look on his face. Then it hit her. The captain already knew there was a problem. That was why he’d summoned her to a meeting that was otherwise all commissioned officers. He not only knew that there was a problem; he knew that she would spot it. And, obviously, he expected her to have a hand in fixing it.
She cleared her throat. “Uh … Captain? If I may?”
The captain nodded. “Of course, Chief.”
She continued. “Captain, the USW Officer’s plan is a good one, but I’m afraid that I have to disagree with one major part of it.”
Ensign Cooper stared at her, obviously shocked at the idea that his own chief petty officer would contradict him in front of the captain. “Um … which part do you … um … disagree with, Chief?”
Every eye in the room was on the chief now, and she was suddenly conscious of just how far out of her territory she was. “I don’t think we can afford …” She stopped, swallowed, and started again. “I don’t think we can afford to trust our tactical USW doctrine in this situation. In fact, I think we have to avoid using our tactical doctrine at all costs.”
The USWO rubbed behind his ear, a puzzled look on his face. “Help me out here, Chief. I’m trying to understand what you’re saying.”
“I know it sounds crazy,” the chief said. “But think about it, sir. Nearly every tactic in those books has been shared with NATO. Search patterns. Attack patterns. The timing of our zigzag plans. Even the spacing of our sonobuoys. The lion’s share of our doctrine was designed for use in cooperation with NATO. The Germans have been members of NATO since the get-go—which means they’ve already read our playbook. If we follow our doctrine, they already know what we’re going to do before we even do it.”
Captain Bowie nodded. “I think you hit the bull’s-eye, Chief. Excellent job. That explains how the Germans managed to clean Kitty Hawk’s clock so easily.”
The XO’s eyebrows went up for a few seconds. Then, he clapped his hands and rubbed them together briskly. “Sooooo … I guess we start by throwing the old book out the window and coming up with some new tactics.”
“I agree, sir,” the Combat Systems Officer said. And when we do get something hammered out, we can punch it into the Link and shoot it over to Benfold and Ingraham and see if they can suggest any improvements.”
The captain nodded. “Good call.” He turned back to the chief. “You’ve been doing this half your life—got any pet theories you want to try out against some no-shit hostile subs?”
Chief McPherson nodded. She’d been right. This was why the captain had invited her to this meeting. “I might just have one or two ideas gathering dust at the back of my brain, Captain.”
The captain smiled. “I kind of suspected that you might.”
The chief glanced at Ensign Cooper. His face had whitened visibly. She could nearly hear the thoughts tumbling around in his head. All of his knowledge of Undersea Warfare had come from studying tactical doctrine. Now, those neatly bound tactical manuals were useless to him. Even his training in the Undersea Warfare Evaluator’s course had been based entirely on the tactics written into the manuals. Outside of scheduled exercises, which were—again—based upon the doctrine contained in the manuals, he had no experience chasing submarines. He had no personal knowledge to fall back on, no pet tactical theories based on hard-won expertise. And now, the captain was asking him to forget everything he had studied and start from scratch.
Apparently catching the USW Officer’s expression of near terror, the captain said, “You look like you just stepped off a cliff, Pat, and you’re waiting to hit bottom.”
The USWO didn’t say anything.
“Don’t worry,” the captain said. “We’re going to be making this up on the fly, so anything we do is right. It may not work, and it might get us killed, but—since we have to shit-can the play book—nobody will be able to say that we were wrong.”
CHAPTER 26
U.S. NAVY CENTRAL COMMAND (USNAVCENT)
BAHRAIN
FRIDAY; 18 MAY
1025 hours (10:25 AM)
TIME ZONE +3 ‘CHARLIE’
Admiral Vincent Rogers, Commander Fifth Fleet, leaned back in his chair and squeezed the bridge of his nose between thumb and index finger. The ever-present stack of paperwork on his desk seemed to grow every time he took his eyes off it for a few seconds. Maybe it was reproducing itself through some mechanism of parthenogenesis that had heretofore lain dormant in paper products—perhaps a recessive gene hidden deep in the paper’s DNA that had somehow been activated by the stifling Middle Eastern heat.
Rogers ran his fingers through the iron-gray stubble of his flattop haircut. Eight days shy of his fifty-seventh birthday, he was an old man to the Sailors he commanded, but—to his own way of thinking—he was far too young to be chained to a desk full of reports, operational summaries, force projection studies, feasibility matrices, and whatever the hell else had found its way into his Urgent stack.
There were two quiet knocks on his door.
Admiral Rogers sat up. “Enter.”
The door opened, and his chief of staff, Commander Troy Moody, stepped into the office. Moody carried a yellow folder in his left hand. Under the color-coding system used by the USNAVCENT staff, yellow was reserved for SITREPs, or situational reports, from ships assigned to Fifth Fleet’s command.
The admiral’s eyes stayed locked on the yellow folder. “Say, Troy, I was just wondering … whatever happened to that paperless Navy we were supposed to be headed for? Remember that?” He pointed to his desktop computer and then to his laptop computer and finally to his palm-top. “As I recall,” he said, “these were supposed to get rid of those.” He pointed to the fat stack of papers on his desk. “That was a great idea. Whatever happened to it?”
Moody smiled. “Um … I believe that paper covers computer, sir.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
Moody held out the folder to the admiral. “You remember the rules, sir. Rock smashes scissors. Scissors cut paper. Paper covers rock. Well, somebody did a study, and it turns out that paper covers computer as well.”
Admiral Rogers accepted the folder. “By extrapolation, I assume that means that rock smashes computer.”
Moody pointed to the desk. “It certainly does, sir. Unfortunately, that still leaves paper.”
The admiral sighed. “No way around it, I guess.” He opened the folder. “What have you got here, Troy?”
“A SITREP from USS Antietam, sir.”
“I can see that,” the admiral said. “But I don’t feel like wading through four pages of minutiae in search of whatever little nugget of wisdom you found buried in there. Just give me the Reader’s Digest version.” He closed the folder. “What’s going on with Antietam?”
“They’ve completed repairs to their starboard rudder nearly a week ahead of schedule, sir. Barring problems during shakedown, they’re ready to put to sea now. I know you’ve been trying to scare up a fourth ship for your Search Attack Unit, sir. Looks like Antietam is going to be available after all.”
The admiral nodded. “Excellent work, Troy. The CNO has been up my ass for two days to come up with another ship.”
“So I understood, sir.”
“Good man. Now, get on the horn and tell the admin weenies to cut steaming orders for Antietam.”
“Already done, sir. They won’t be fin
al until you sign them, of course, but I’ve taken the liberty of starting the ball rolling, just in case you decided to assign Antietam to the SAU.”
The admiral nodded. “Excellent.”
“I didn’t think you’d want to waste any time,” Commander Moody said. “Antietam still has to do a quick shakedown after her rudder repairs. They’ll really have to drop the hammer to catch up. The SAU has a head start, and those guys are hauling ass.”
Rogers looked at his chief of staff. “Whiley will catch ’em,” he said. “He’s up for admiral after this tour, and he’s not going to pass up a chance to play war hero. They can use the sprint south as their shakedown. Then, if the rudder gives them any trouble, they can turn back to port and let the SAU continue on without them. But that’s not going to happen. Whiley won’t let it happen. He’ll be there, all right. You can bet your ass on it.”
“One more thing, sir,” Commander Moody said. “Captain Whiley is a senior full-bird captain, sir. He’s going to want to assume command of the SAU. I don’t imagine Captain Bowie is going to like the idea of giving it up.”
“Bowie’ll shit a brick,” the admiral said, “but there’s nothing I can do about that. Whiley outranks him seven ways from Sunday. If Whiley wants SAU Commander, it’s his.”
“Antietam is an air-shooter, sir,” Moody said. “I’ve been looking back through the daily OPSUM messages; that crew hasn’t done anything but Anti-Air Warfare for a long time. Undersea Warfare is a highly perishable skill. If you don’t use it, you lose it. If Captain Whiley is smart, he’ll let the Towers run the show.”
The admiral smiled. “If he were smart. Have you met Whiley?”
“No, sir.”
“He’s a dip-shit,” Admiral Rogers said. “Don’t quote me on that. Oh, he did all right with those Iranian MiGs last month, but the man is a weasel at heart.”
Commander Moody kept a carefully neutral face. “No comment, sir.”
The admiral’s smile grew even wider. “Good man! Now, get Antietam on the horn, and let’s kick their ass out of port.”
CHAPTER 27
LONDON
FRIDAY; 18 MAY
0928 hours (9:28 AM)
TIME ZONE +1 ‘ALPHA’
Andrew Smythe Harrington (OBE) was a top-echelon analyst with the British Secret Intelligence Service, better known to the world as the SIS, or “the Firm.” Nearing fifty, he looked closer to thirty, and—he admitted to himself as he twisted in his chair to ease the kink in his lower back—felt closer to sixty. Handsome in an Errol Flynn sort of way, Harrington had garnered a reputation as something of a ladies’ man (which he most certainly was not) and an exceptional chess player (which—all modesty aside—he most certainly was). But Harrington liked to refer to his real talent in life as “a gift for seeing the obvious.”
His office was on the third floor of SIS headquarters at Vauxhall Cross. Unlike the toweringly elegant Century House, which had served as the headquarters for the Secret Intelligence Service until 1995, the Vauxhall Cross complex was an architectural polyglot of cylinders, cubes, and truncated pyramids that had led its detractors to nickname it Legoland.
Harrington was entitled to a corner office on the top floor, both by seniority and by the influence conferred by his Order of the British Empire. But he had rejected a large, prestigious office in favor of a smallish cubicle with no windows. His job was to think, and he took that job very seriously. To ensure that his thinking was as efficient as possible, he avoided distractions wherever he could, including windows, unnecessary decorations, and the attractive female secretary that so many of his peers seemed to find indispensable.
He scanned the American newspaper article for the third time and then placed it carefully on top of the neat stack of papers in the center of his desk. There were over four hundred pages in the stack. Police reports, USAMRIID and CDC contagion projections, toxin concentration counts from the embassy after decontamination, medical reports from Walter Reed Hospital, regional threat assessments, a forensic analysis of the T2 trichothecene mycotoxin, and traffic analyses of known and suspected terrorist movements before, during, and after the attack. Also in the stack were the only three documents that really mattered: a copy of the visitors log from the British Embassy in Washington, a transcript of the interview of one Mr. Larry S. Burke, shift supervisor for the carpet cleaning company, and the Washington newspaper article.
Harrington laid his hand on top of the little stack. Everything was right here, in those three little bits of paper, as difficult to miss as the fox in the proverbial henhouse. How was it possible that no one else had seen it?
The carpet cleaning company, WizardClean, had dispatched a three-man crew to the British Embassy. But only two men had shown up to do the job. The Washington police were still searching for the third man, the missing Sailor, who hadn’t been seen since the night of the attack.
But Seaman Apprentice Jerome Gilbert was not the key to the puzzle. He had been added to the work crew just an hour or so before the attack. It was extremely unlikely that he could have been in on the plot. In all probability, Gilbert had been dead well before the two attackers had reached the embassy.
That meant the real third man was still missing, the regular third man for the WizardClean work crew assigned to the embassy. A twenty-eight-year-old Arab American named Isma’il Hamid. According to the shift supervisor from the carpet cleaning company, Hamid had reported for work with the rest of his crew, but he’d been too sick to go out with the truck.
Harrington picked up the transcript of the supervisor’s interview with the Arlington police, flipped to the fourth page, and scanned down to the relevant section.
------------------------------
Detective Scot J. Barnes:
ARLINGTON PD [3127] You said Mr. Hamid showed up for his shift, but he was too sick to work?
----
Witness Larry S. Burke:
WTN-16/CA-23077 That’s right. Sick as a dog, the poor bastard. Throwing up all over the place, and you could tell he was in major pain. He was trying not to show it, that whole macho Arab thing, but his stomach was hurting him so bad he could hardly breathe. He couldn’t even walk right. He was in rough shape.
----
Detective Scot J. Barnes:
ARLINGTON PD [3127] But he tried to work his shift anyway?
----
Witness Larry S. Burke:
WTN-16/CA-23077 Yeah. Hamid tried to play it off like he had the stomach flu. Said he’d taken some Pepto Bismol, and it was getting better. He wanted to go out with the truck.
----
Detective Scot J. Barnes:
ARLINGTON PD [3127] And you wouldn’t let him?
----
Witness Larry S. Burke:
WTN-16/CA-23077 Hell no, I wouldn’t let him. His crew was assigned to the embassy. That’s a big contract. Important people. I couldn’t have him puking all over the fucking place. I sent the new guy, the Gilbert kid, out with the truck in Hamid’s spot.
----
Detective Scot J. Barnes:
ARLINGTON PD [3127] Did Hamid seem to get upset about that?
----
Witness Larry S. Burke:
WTN-16/CA-23077 Upset? There’s your understatement of the year. He was fucking furious! Started yelling at me in Arabian, or Egyptian, or one of them rag-head languages. Excuse me. I mean some kind of Iranian talk, or something. Shocked the hell out of me when he started going ballistic on me. Hamid was always one of the quiet ones. Hard worker. Good attitude. I could use a half-dozen more workers just like him.
----
Detective Scot J. Barnes:
ARLINGTON PD [3127] Did he calm down after you sent the truck out?
----
Witness Larry S. Burke:
WTN-16/CA-23077 Not really. He collapsed. His knees just sort of folded, and he went down like a sack of bricks. He didn’t look like he was breathing right. That’s when I called 911. The paramedics said it was his appendix.
He had it bad, like it was rupturing, or something. The paramedics said he’d have been dead in another half-hour or so.
----
Detective Scot J. Barnes:
ARLINGTON PD [3127] Thank you. Now, tell me more about this Jerome Gilbert.
------------------------------
Harrington closed the transcript and returned it to the stack. Hamid had been slated as the third man in the attack; Harrington had no doubt of that.
The FBI and Washington police were searching for Hamid, and the American immigration authorities were watching the airports for him. But Harrington was nearly certain that Hamid was neither hiding nor trying to flee.
He pulled a telephone directory from his desk drawer and thumbed through to the government section. He found the listing he was looking for under Army Medical Directorate. It took him nearly ten minutes of conversations with underlings to actually lure a doctor to the telephone, and then another two minutes to explain who he was. At last, Dr. Kenneth Hale seemed to be prepared to answer his questions.
“I’ll try not to keep you long, Dr. Hale,” Harrington said.
“I appreciate that,” Dr. Hale said. “I am busy on the best of days, and this doesn’t happen to be a very good day at all.”
Harrington kept his voice carefully neutral. With another telephone call or two, he could have easily compelled Dr. Hale to appear in person. He hoped that wouldn’t be necessary. “Doctor, I’d like to discuss the human appendix for a moment.”
“What would you like to know?”
“First of all,” Harrington said, “how difficult is an appendectomy? And what is the normal postoperative recovery time?”
“The procedure is fairly straightforward,” the doctor said. “In most cases, the patient recovers very quickly and can be discharged in two or three days.”
“I see,” Harrington said. “I’d like to discuss a hypothetical patient. Let’s assume that an otherwise healthy young man, between the ages of twenty and thirty, underwent an appendectomy on Saturday a week ago. Is it safe to assume that he would be back on his feet by now?”