Nimitz Class

by Patrick Robinson

“I would like to work closely with Admiral Schnider, and I would like to have Bill Baldridge in the field. He’s junior enough not to matter, and smart enough not to be easily fooled. He’s also arrogant enough to be a real pain in the ass, which is not that bad—since we don’t much want to hear what he finds out. In this way the main players, the President, Dick, Sam, Bob, and the Defense staff can devote their time to the formal investigation, keeping the public informed, and the careful management of the news—I hesitate to say manipulation because it’s not my business. But I understand the importance of how this catastrophe is presented to the world.

  “Meanwhile, we can quietly get into the ‘down and dirty’ without telling anyone. That way, with a bit of luck, we might find out what these scumbags are really at.”

  “From my point of view, I cannot stress too strongly that it is better for us to take ridicule from the media over an accident, than to admit we were hit,” Dick Stafford said. “That’s about a hundred times worse, because it would allow the media to slam us from every direction. There is an unspoken public sympathy for an accident, on the basis that we are all, generally speaking, human.

  “But the press and television can whip up public fury at blind incompetence; and they can make a hit look like just that, blind incompetence. Then they will go for the President, every Republican senator, members of the Armed Services Committee, not to mention the Navy, and the Pentagon. I can only suggest that you never even consider making it public that a U.S. Navy carrier was hit by a missile. If you want to teach someone a real serious lesson, go do it, with my blessing, but please…don’t ever admit why you did it.”

  “How about, if we did it?” asked the President.

  “Say nothing,” said Stafford. “Look after the interests of this nation as you all think fit…you want to scare someone to death, fine…you want to beat the shit out of someone, still fine. But remember the media would not hesitate to urge the government to start dismantling the Navy, even though such a course of action borders on insanity. They will hang anyone in power at the slightest chance.”

  In the terrible catastrophe which happened on the aircraft carrier Thomas Jefferson yesterday, the town of Hamlin lost one of its finest sons—Lieutenant Billy-Ray Howell, a U.S. Navy fighter pilot, aged twenty-eight, was one of the 6,000 dead. He had been flying an F-14 Tomcat off the deck of the carrier throughout her tour of duty. Lieutenant Howell’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Bobby Howell, proprietors of the Village Store, right off Main Street, were too upset to comment last night. They were awaiting the arrival of their daughter-in-law, Mrs. Suzie Howell, who was on her way from her home in Maryland.

  —HUNTINGDON HERALD-DISPATCH

  “One thing about a Republican administration,” said the President, “you get a lot of very wise, very erudite guys hanging around the White House. I think we are on the right lines, but there is one danger I want to point up. And I want each of you to have this in mind in all of our actions in the coming weeks. I do not want the Navy fucked over. I do not want these assholes telling the nation that nuclear weapons ought to be banned. The only freedom there is, on this troubled goddamned planet, is courtesy of the enormous power of the American Carrier Battle Groups. Even the Russians at the height of their own power were afraid of us. And I don’t want us to be undermined by a lot of left-wing bullshit and bleating. Bear that in mind, will you?”

  Around the table there were sounds of agreement, and the President moved to wrap up the meeting. “I agree with Admiral Morgan’s proposal that he head up a deep background investigation, answering to Scott Dunsmore. And I would be grateful for the close support of Admiral Schnider for as long as it takes. Commander Baldridge will be seconded to the group as the man in the field. Please tell General Paul I would like to sit in on the military meeting at the Pentagon late this afternoon for an hour or so. I will probably broadcast again tomorrow evening. Thank you, gentlemen. Keep it tight.”

  It was 10 A.M. when the breakfast group adjourned, and Admiral Morgan suggested that Baldridge and the two CIA men accompany him to the Pentagon for a talk before the afternoon meeting. The four of them piled into the big Navy staff car waiting at the door of the White House. Admiral Morgan told the driver to take them to the Washington Navy Yard.

  It was just a few minutes’ drive, and Admiral Morgan told the driver to head for the submarine area at the Navy Memorial Museum, where the public can look through periscopes at the Washington skyline.

  By this time the two CIA men, Jeff Zepeda, a Brooklyn-born expert on Iran, and Major Ted Lynch, one of the Agency’s leading financial and Middle East experts, were beginning to wonder what kind of a mystery tour this was. The suspense was short-lived. Admiral Morgan had whistled up a senior guide and they were escorted to one of the big periscopes in an area cordoned off by thick red velvet ropes. “You guys ever looked through a periscope before?” he said cheerfully.

  “Not me,” said Jeff. “Nor me,” said Ted.

  “Good,” replied the admiral. “Now I’m gonna get this thing focused. And then I’m gonna hand it over to Jeff. And I’m gonna tell you what you’re seeing.”

  He adjusted the periscope himself, with the grace of someone who knows a lot about the subject. Then he said, “Okay, now take a look.” Jeff Zepeda stepped forward, grasped the handles, and stooped to peer at the Washington rooftops.

  “You see the Capitol building?” he asked.

  “Yup, got it. Hell, it looks pretty big through this thing, but somehow far away.”

  “Now I’m going to ask you to imagine something…I want you to imagine that huge building is the USS Thomas Jefferson, okay? And I want you to imagine that you are about to punch a nuclear missile right into its guts and obliterate every single person in there. Thousands of them…”

  All four men were absolutely silent. “I want you to understand that you are about to destroy the lives of thousands of decent people—perfect strangers to you…wives, children, mothers, fathers, and young men at the peak of their careers. The view you have now is the view he had when he called out his last order…‘Bearing one-three-five—range seven thousand yards now…fire!’

  “Do you know how evil you have to be to pull off something like that, Jeff? If I’m right, and if Bill here is right, we are looking for one of the most ruthless assassins in the history of mankind. And I am afraid he’s also goddamned clever. Whatever they are saying at the White House and the Pentagon, we must find him, because, like Bill, I actually think the bastard might do it again.”

  When Jeff Zepeda stepped back from the periscope he was plainly shaken. This was a man who had served in the embassy in Tehran until it fell to the Revolutionary Guards in 1979. A man who had gone undercover, in Arab dress, riding the Tehran railroad out to Damascus and back for three years. Jeff Zepeda had watched from doorways, from safe houses, as the massed thousands of the Ayatollah’s followers had raised their banners proclaiming, “Neither East nor West—Islamic Republic.”

  He knew about trouble on the grandest possible scale, having struggled for months, making contact with the Hezbollah, trying to befriend one of the Mullahs, trying to free hostages. Yet few times, in his long career as a deep-cover CIA operative, had he listened to words which chilled him quite like those of Admiral Arnold Morgan. He just nodded curtly, but it was the nod of a professional who understood the stakes.

  Admiral Morgan adjusted the view, then he said quietly, the menace gone from his voice, “Okay, Ted, please look through the periscope. That’s the top of the Washington Memorial in front of you. Imagine it’s the big radio mast on top of the bridge of the Thomas Jefferson. Right below, there is one of the Navy’s most accomplished professionals, Admiral Zack Carson.

  “Standing right next to him is the President’s buddy, Captain Jack Baldridge, Bill’s brother. Both of them are just trying to keep the peace in those godforsaken seas around the Gulf. But they have just seconds to live, because you are about to issue your order—you’re going to blow everyone to smitheree
ns.

  “Keep staring for a moment, Ted. Try to imagine the sheer evil of this motherfucker in the submarine. He’s out there somewhere, Ted. And if it’s the last thing any of us ever do, we’re going to find him, and we’re going to destroy him. I want us to be clear on that. The sinking of that carrier was not an accident. We know it, the President knows it, and Scott Dunsmore definitely knows it. I just wanted to make a quick visit here to keep us on the ball, to clarify the magnitude of our present situation.”

  One of the key officers who died on board the Thomas Jefferson was Ensign Junior Grade Jim Adams, the Arresting Gear Officer. His wife Carole gave birth to their first son in Boston two months ago. He was christened Carl Edward, after the Red Sox hitters Carl Yastrzemski and Ted Williams, but the South Boston Naval officer had never seen his son. Last night a Red Sox spokesman said that every member of the 2002 team would attend the memorial service for Ensign Adams at the Old North Church, the church of the patriots, later this month.

  —BOSTON GLOBE

  The four men drove swiftly across the bridge spanning the Anacostia River, and onto the parkway. Then they swung due west across the Woodrow Wilson Memorial Bridge and into the historic old eighteenth-century tobacco port of Alexandria, hometown of two great American generals, George Washington and Robert E. Lee.

  Admiral Morgan told the driver to take them down to the harbor area, where he located a waterfront restaurant bar. Their reserved table, overlooking the broad expanse of the Potomac, was catching a nice southerly breeze, beneath the canopy of the screened porch. Their booth was separate, at least fifteen feet from any prying neighboring tables.

  “It’s kinda quiet here,” the admiral said. “No one will see us, no one will recognize us, and no one will hear us. It’s swept every week. When we leave, we go straight through that door there, the one marked ‘No Entry,’ down a flight of wooden outside stairs and the car will be waiting.”

  Admiral Morgan ordered coffee, and called his team to order. “Right, guys, now let’s just chew this over one more time. If someone hit us, it was with a torpedo from a submarine, right? And we’re agreed it was probably fired by Iran.”

  Both Bill Baldridge and the admiral had heard in the opening reports from the Arabian Sea that the Thomas Jefferson had been steaming on a southwesterly course when she vanished. If the submarine had been waiting in the area the carrier could have come up on his port bow. The submarine would have steered southeast in order to aim its torpedo at a ninety-degree angle to the course of the huge ship—straight at the heart of the carrier as she passed, well below the surface.

  Bill had noticed that Admiral Morgan called out an imaginary final command of the submarine, “Bearing one-three-five. Range seven thousand yards.”

  “He even allowed for the two thousand yards the carrier would have traveled while the torpedo was on its way in,” Baldridge said aloud to himself. “This ole bastard’s smarter’n I am.”

  “Okay,” said the admiral. “Let us assume we are Iranian. And our plan is to blow up a U.S. carrier in some kind of attempt to get Uncle Sam out of the Gulf. We have three Kilo-Class submarines, two of them constantly in refit, one of them in good shape. First, do we have torpedoes armed with nuclear warheads on board? Answer, no.

  “We might have torpedoes which came with the boat from Russia, but they would not supply nuclear warheads, even though they do possess such things, already assembled. They might be found guilty of an injudicious sale, but they would not want to be found guilty of arming another nation to conduct a preemptive nuclear strike against the U.S. Navy. Even they are not that slow-witted.

  “So where do they get the nuclear warheads?” asked the admiral.

  “China,” replied Ted Lynch. “They could get ’em there, and bring ’em back by sea.”

  “Very risky, that,” said Morgan. “There is such a thing as the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Our Navy and our satellites watch these matters very, very closely. In any event Chinese weapons would be most unlikely to fit a Russian export Kilo. That way the Iranians would need to be in some Chinese dockyard for a couple of months. And that we know hasn’t happened.

  “So let’s assume the Chinese weapons were suitable, without any modification to the Iranian boat. There are two ways to get them aboard the Kilo…one, send ’em by Chinese freighter to Bandar Abbas…A nonstarter. We check that out. Two, a clandestine transfer at sea, from a freighter to the submarine. Another nonstarter because we know their submarines were all safely in Bandar Abbas last Friday.

  “Even the Iranians would not much want to try shipping nuclear warheads right under our noses into their Navy yards, with the U.S. satellites watching above, and our guys on the ground. That, they know, might just cause us to get downright ugly.”

  “Yeah,” said Jeff Zepeda. “I agree with that. I don’t think they would have risked the China deal. It’s too complicated, too far away, and too chancy. Plus the fact they are a nation that lives with screw-ups on almost every level. I can’t see them even attempting something that tricky, not with such a big margin for error, and, potentially, a huge downside to their own interests.”

  “If I were an Ayatollah and I wanted to hit the American Navy,” said Baldridge, “I know what I would do. I’d reopen my lines to Soviet Russia. I’d either buy or rent a fourth Kilo-Class submarine from out of the Black Sea, I’d pay for it in cash, U.S. dollars, and it would have to contain a full outfit of torpedoes, at least two of them armed with nuclear heads.

  “I’d send my team there to deal directly with one of those Russian captains who haven’t been paid for about two years. And I’d suborn him with a sum of money beyond his wildest, and then my very best commander would move in and bring the submarine out secretly through the Bosporus, underwater, with some amazing cover story to keep the crew in line. Remember, a hundred million bucks might be a lot of cash to the Mafia, but it’s peanuts to the government of a major oil-producing nation. Anyway, that’s what I’d do.”

  “So,” said Admiral Morgan, “would I.”

  “One minor problem,” said Ted Lynch, who was one of those Army officers who had spent several years attached to U.S. embassies and consulates in the Middle East. “It’s not legal. You have to give the Turks two months’ notice if you want to bring any warship through the Bosporus. That’s Turkish territory on both banks.

  “If you hit the bottom and got stuck, the Turks could quite legally claim salvage rights, throw up their hands and say, ‘But you had no right to be there, especially with nuclear weapons, unannounced in Turkish waters.’

  “There’s an old military saying which has stood the test of time since the Ottoman Empire. Actually I can’t remember it, but it means, translated from the Greek or Latin or something, ‘Fuck not around with brother Turk. Because he gets real pissed off, real quick.’ Trust me. Hit a shoal in the Bosporus, you’d never get your ship back.”

  “Yeah, but the towelheads are fanatics,” said Admiral Morgan. “They believe in their God, Allah. They believe his kingdom beckons for the righteous, and that it would be a privilege to die in such a cause. Death means less to them than it does to us. Much more, spiritually. They would try something like this, if they really wanted to cast a monster blow against ‘The Satan USA’—because broadly that’s what they think of us.”

  The four men were silent for a moment, each one of them pondering the possibility of anyone daring to run the gauntlet of the Turks. “The other thing you do have to remember,” said Baldridge, “is that such a journey would take you straight through the middle of Istanbul harbor! Can you imagine that? Plowing through the ferry lanes—the periscope leaving a huge white wake?”

  “There are ways around all of that,” said Admiral Morgan.

  “Yeah,” said Baldridge. “But not when you’re fucking around in about a hundred feet of water, with old wrecks and God knows what else on the sea bed.”

  “Yes, there are,” said Morgan again. “The key question is, could Iran, or any Arab nation, co
me up with anyone good enough even to start such a mission? There are damn few submarine officers anywhere in the world who could pull it off. And they are probably British…the U.S. Navy hasn’t operated small diesel submarines for years.”

  “There’s a lotta blind alleys here,” said Zepeda. “And they all lead us to a very clever Arab, who we don’t think exists.”

  “Well, it’ll please the Pentagon guys this afternoon,” said Lynch. “You just know the brass wants to stick to the accident theory. And the politicians will not waver from it. You could tell the President does not believe it. But he really has no choice. An accident is a bitch and all that. But a nuclear hit on a U.S. ship…Christ! That could be war, and the populace might panic. The media would definitely panic. Or at least they would look as if they were panicking.”

  “I think that is correct,” said Morgan. “And in a way that’s good for us. Because we are going to be asking a lot of questions. I’ll coordinate all the data on where every submarine in the world has been in the past three months. We’ll get a long way by elimination—I’ll pull up all the files on all detections. A lot of ’em will be whales, but we just might hit something. There was something a couple of months ago which kinda baffled me. I’d like to find out some more about that.

  “But before that I’d like to talk to Ted about tracing large amounts of cash.”

  “That gets harder each year. So many foreign banks, wire transfers, with no one paying attention.”

  “Yup,” said Morgan. “But I think we might be talking about 10 million bucks minimum, in greenbacks. That lot had to come from somewhere.”

  “Sure did, Admiral. I can’t promise record speed. But I think we get can some kind of a handle on that.”

  “How do you start, Ted?”

  “Well, we’ll make a few discreet inquiries in the naval ports around the Black Sea, particularly those where we know there are submarines. Big sums of money in small close-knit communities tend to become pretty obvious pretty quickly. But, if we are correct in our assumptions, it won’t be that surprising to find a few recipients. The hard part will be finding where that money came from, and precisely who distributed it. But it’s a whole bundle of cash, and it’s hard to hide a whole bundle of anything.”