Carl Swedborg, skipper of the fishing trawler Molly Bender, rapped the barometer with his knuckles, regarded it stoically for a moment, then walked over to the chart table and picked up a cup of coffee. His mind visualizing the river ahead, he sipped at the coffee and gazed at the ice that was building on the deck. He hated miserable wet nights. The dampness seeped into his seventy-year-old bones and tortured his joints. He should have retired a decade past, but with his wife gone and his children scattered around the country, Swedborg could not bear to sit around an empty house. As long as he could find a berth as skipper he would stay on water until they buried him in it.
"At least visibility is a quarter of a mile," he said absently.
"I've seen worse, much worse." This from Brian Donegal, a tall, shaggy-haired Irish immigrant who stood at the helm. "Better we have rotten weather going out than coming in."
"Agreed," said Swedborg dryly. He shivered and buttoned the top button of his mackinaw. "Mind your helm and keep wide aport of the Ragged Point channel buoy."
"Don't you fret, Skipper. Me faithful Belfast nose can sniff channel markers like a bloodhound, it can."
Donegal's blarney seldom failed to raise a smile from Swedborg. The skipper's lips involuntarily curled upward and he spoke in a stern tone that was patently fake. "I prefer you use your eyes."
The Molly Bender swung around Ragged Point and continued her course downriver, passing an occasional lighted channel buoy that came and went like a streetlight beside a rain-soaked boulevard intersection. The shore lights glowed dully through the thickening sleet.
"Somebody coming up the channel," announced Donegal.
Swedborg picked up a pair of binoculars and looked beyond the bows. "The lead ship carries three white lights. That means a tug with her tow astern. Too murky to distinguish her outline. Must be a long tow, though. I make out the two white thirtytwo-point lights on the last vessel in line about three hundred yards astern the tug."
"We're on a collision course, Skipper. Her mast lights are in line with our bow."
"What is the bastard doing on our side of the river?" Swedborg wondered out loud. "Doesn't the damn fool know that two boats approaching each other should keep to their starboard side of the channel? He's hogging our lane."
"We can maneuver easier than he can," said Donegal. "Better we alert him and pass starboard to starboard."
"All right, Donegal. Swing to port and give two blasts of the whistle to signal our intentions."
There was no answering blast. The strange tug's lights, it seemed to Swedborg, were approaching far more rapidly than he had any right to expect, far more rapidly than any tug he'd ever seen with a fleet of barges in tow. He was horrified as he watched the other vessel turn toward the Molly Bender's altered course.
"Give the fool four short whistle blasts!" Swedborg shouted.
It was the Inland Waterway danger signal — sounded when the course of an opposing vessel or its intentions were not understood. Two of Swedborg's crew, roused from sleep by the whistle shrieks, groggily entered the wheelhouse, instantly snapped to sudden astonishment by the nearness of the strange vessel's running lights. Clearly, she wasn't acting like a tug in tow.
In the few remaining seconds Swedborg snatched a bullhorn and shouted into the night. "Ahoy! Turn hard aport!"
He might as well have shouted at a ghost. No voice replied; no return whistle blast came through the icy dark. The lights bore down relentlessly upon the helpless Molly Bender.
Realizing collision was inevitable, Swedborg braced himself by clutching the lower frame of the window. Fighting to the last, Donegal frantically reversed engines and twisted the wheel back to starboard.
The last thing any of them saw was a monstrous gray bow looming through the sleet high above the wheelhouse, a massive steel wedge bearing the numeral 6 1.
Then the little fishing trawler was crushed to pieces and swallowed by the icy water of the river.
Pitt stopped the car in front of the White House gate. Jarvis was halfway out when he turned and looked back at Pitt. "Thank you for your assistance," he said sincerely.
"What now?" asked Pitt.
"I have the distasteful duty of booting the President and the Joint Chiefs of Staff out of their beds," Jarvis said with a tired smile.
"What can I do to help?"
"Nothing. You've done more than your share. It's up to the Defense Department to carry the ball from here."
"The Quick Death warheads," said Pitt. "Do I have your assurance they will be destroyed when the ship is located and taken into custody? 55
"I can only try. Beyond that, I promise nothing."
"That's not good enough," said Pitt.
Jarvis was too tired to argue. He shrugged listlessly, as though he no longer gave a damn. "Sorry, but that's the way it is." Then he slammed the door. showed his pass to the guard at the gate, and was gone.
Pitt turned the car around and swung onto Vermont Avenue. A couple of miles on he spotted an all-night coffee shop and slipped into a parking stall. After ordering a cup of coffee from a yawning waitress, he found the pay phone and made two calls. Then he downed the coffee, paid, and left.
54
Heidi Milligan met Pitt when he entered Bethesda Naval Hospital. Her blond hair was half hidden under a scarf, and despite the weariness around her eyes, she looked vibrant and strangely youthful.
"How is Admiral Bass?" Pitt asked her.
She gave him a strained look. "Walt is hanging in there. He's tough; he'll pull through."
Pitt didn't believe a word of it. Heidi was clinging to a slowly parting thread of hope and putting up a valiant front. He put his arm around her waist and led her gently down the corridor.
"Can he talk to me?"
She nodded. "The doctors aren't keen on the idea, but Walt insisted after I gave him your message."
"I wouldn't have intruded if it wasn't important." Pitt said.
She looked up into his eyes. 'I understand."
They came to the door and Heidi opened it. She motioned Pitt toward the admiral's bed.
Pitt hated hospitals. The sickening sweet smell of ether, the depressing atmosphere, the businesslike attitude of the doctors and nurses., always got to him. He had made up his mind long ago: when his time came, he would die in his own bed. at home.
His resolve was further braced by his first look at the admiral since Colorado. The waxen paleness of the old man's face seemed to blend with the pillow, and his rasping breathing came in unison with the respirator's hiss. Tubes ran into his arms and under the sheets, supplying sustenance and draining his body wastes. His oncemuscular body looked withered.
A doctor stepped forward and touched Pitt on the arm. "I doubt if he has the strength to speak."
Bass's head rolled slightly in Pitt's direction and he made a feeble gesture with one hand. "Come closer, Dirk," he muttered hoarsely.
The doctor gave a shrug of surrender. "I'll stay close, just in case." Then he stepped into the hall and closed the door.
Pitt pulled a chair up to the bed and bent over Bass's ear. "The Quick Death projectile." Pitt said. "How does it operate during its trajectory?"
"Centrifugal force… rifling."
"I understand," Pitt replied in a hushed tone. "The spiral rifling inside the bore of the gun rotates the shell and sets up a centrifugal force."
"Activates a generator… in turn activates a small radar altimeter."
"You must mean a barometric altimeter."
"No… barometric won't work," Bass whispered. "Heavy naval shell has high velocity with a flat trajectory… too low for accurate barometric reading… must use radar to bounce signal from ground."
"It doesn't seem possible a radar altimeter can survive the high g-forces when the gun is fired," Pitt said.
Bass forced a faint smile. "Designed the package myself. Take my word for it… the instrument survives the initial surge when the power charge is detonated."
The admiral closed his eyes and lay still, exhaus
ted by his efforts. Heidi moved forward and put her hand on Pitt's shoulder.
"Perhaps you should come back in the afternoon."
Pitt shook his head. "By then it will be too late."
"You'll kill him," Heidi said, her eyes welling with tears, her expression angry.
Bass's hand inched across the sheets and weakly gripped Pitt's wrist. His eyes fluttered open. 'Just needed a minute to catch my breath…. Don't go… that's an order."
Heidi read the tortured look of compassion in Pitt's eyes and she reluctantly backed away. Pitt leaned toward the admiral again.
"What happens next?"
"After the shell passes its zenith and begins the flight to earth, the altimeter's omnidirectional indicator begins signaling the decrease in altitude…"
Bass's voice trailed off and Pitt waited patiently.
"At fifteen hundred feet a parachute is released. Slows the shell's descent and activates a small explosive device."
"Fifteen hundred feet, parachute opens," Pitt repeated.
"At one thousand feet, device detonates and splits head of projectile; releases a cluster mass of bomblets containing the Quick Death organism."
Pitt sat back and considered the admiral's description of the projectile's operation. He looked into the waning eyes.
"The time element, Admiral. How much time between the parachute's ejection and the QD dispersal?"
"Too long ago… can't remember."
"Please try," Pitt implored.
Bass was clearly sinking. He fought to bring his brain into gear, but its cells responded sluggishly. Then the tension lines in his face relaxed and he whispered, 'I think… not sure… thirty seconds… rate of descent about eighteen feet per second…"
"Thirty seconds?" Pitt said, seeking verification.
Bass's hand released Pitt's wrist and fell back on the bed. His eyes closed and he drifted into coma.
55
The only damage to the Iowa after she slashed through the Molly Bender was a few scrapes to the paint on her bows. Fawkes had not noticed the slightest bump. He could have averted the tragedy if he had spun the wheel hard to port, but it would have meant swerving the battleship from the deep part of the channel and running her aground.
He needed every inch he could squeeze between the riverbed and the Iowa's hull. The months of gutting thousands of tons of nonessential steel had raised the ship from a wartime operational draft of thirty-eight feet to a few inches less than twenty-two, giving Fawkes a razor-thin margin. Already the great whirling screws were churning up bottom mud that dirtied the Iowa's wake for miles.
Fawkes's countless trips up and down the river in the dark, sounding every foot, marking each channel buoy, each shoal, were paying off. Through the diminishing sleet he made out the lighted mid-channel buoy off St. Clements Island, and a minute or two later his ears picked up its sepulchral tolling bell as if it were an old friend. He wiped his sweating hands one at a time on his sleeves. The trickiest part of the run was coming up.
Ever since slipping the moorings, Fawkes had worried about the danger of Kettle Bottom Shoals, a six-mile section of the river mazed with a network of shallow sandbars that could grip the Iowa's keel and hold her helpless miles from her goal.
He lifted one hand from the helm and picked up a microphone. "I want a continuous depth reading."
"Understood, Captain," a voice scratched back over a speaker.
Three decks below, two of Fawkes's black crewmen took turns calling up the depths as they appeared on the modified Fathometer. They gave their readings in feet instead of the usual fathoms.
"Twenty-six feet… twenty-five… twenty-four-five."
Kettle Bottom Shoals was beginning to make its presence known and Fawkes's hamlike hands clenched the spokes of the helm as though they were glued to them.
Down in the engine room Emma made a show of helping the pitifully small crew who were somehow running the huge ship. All were bathed in sweat as they struggled to handle duties that normally took five times their number. The removal of two engines had helped, but there was still far too much to do, particularly when they considered their dual role as engineers and, when the time came, gunners.
Not one to become mired in physical labor, Emma made himself useful by passing around gallon jugs of water. In that steaming hell no one seemed to take notice of his unfamiliar face; they were only too grateful to gulp down the liquid that replaced the body fluids running from their pores in streams.
They worked blind, never knowing what was happening on the other side of the hull's steel plates, never remotely aware of where the ship was taking them. All Fawkes had told them when they boarded was that they were going on a short practice run to shake down the old engines and fire a few rounds from the main guns. They assumed they were heading out of the bay and into the Atlantic. That's why they were stunned when the ship suddenly gave a shudder and the hull began creaking in protest beneath their feet.
The Iowa had rammed a shoal. The suction of the mud had drastically cut her speed, but she was still making way. "Full ahead" came down on the telegraph from the bridge. The two massive shafts increased their mighty revolutions as the engines threw their 106,000 horsepower into the task.
The faces of the men in the engine room mirrored confusion and bewilderment. They had thought they were in deep water.
Charles Shaba, the chief engineer, hailed the bridge. "Captain, have we run aground?"
"Aye, laddie, we've nudged an uncharted bar." Fawkes's voice boomed back. "Keep pouring it on till we've sailed past."
Shaba did not share Fawkes's optimism. The ship felt as if she were barely maintaining headway. The deck plates beneath his feet vibrated as the engines strained in their mountings. Then, slowly, he sensed their beat smoothing somewhat, as though the screws were biting into new water. A minute later, Fawkes shouted down from the bridge.
"Tell your boys we're free. We're back in deep water!"
The engine crew tackled their respective duties again, their faces wearing relieved smiles. One oiler began a popular chant and soon they all took it up in chorus with the hum from the great turbines.
Emma did not join in. Only he knew the truth behind the Iowa's strange voyage. In a few hours the men around him would be dead. They might have been reprieved if the Iowa's flat bottom had remained firmly stuck in the shoal's mud. But it was not to be.
Fawkes was the lucky one, he thought. Damned lucky. So far.
56
The President sat at the end of a long conference table in the emergency executive offices three hundred feet beneath the White House and stared Dale Jarvis squarely in the eye. 'I don't have to tell you, Dale, the last thing I need is a crisis during the last few days of my administration, especially a crisis that can't wait until morning."
Jarvis felt the tingling fingers of nervousness. The President was noted for his volcanic temper. Jarvis had been present on more than one occasion when the famous mustache, a delight of political cartoonists, fairly bristled with wrath. With little to lose, except his job, Jarvis counterattacked.
'I am not in the custom of interrupting your sleep, sir, nor the martial dreams of the Joint Chiefs, unless I have a damned good reason."
Defense Secretary Timothy March sucked in his breath. 'I think what Dale means 33
"What I mean," Jarvis said, "is that somewhere out in Chesapeake Bay there are a bunch of nuts loose with a biological weapon that could conceivably exterminate every living creature in a major city and keep on exterminating for God knows how many generations."
General Curtis Higgins, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, gave Jarvis a doubting look. "I know of no weapon with that killing power. Besides, the gas weapons in our arsenal were neutralized and destroyed years ago."
"That's the bullshit we give the public," Jarvis snapped back. "But everyone in this room knows better. The truth is the Army has never stopped developing and stockpiling chemical-biological weapons."
"Settle down, Dale." The Pres
ident's lips were stretched in a grin beneath the mustache. He took a perverse sort of pleasure whenever his subordinates took to fighting among themselves. Casually, in a move to relieve the tense atmosphere, he leaned back in his chair and draped one leg over the armrest. "For the moment, I suggest we take Dale's warning as gospel." He turned to Admiral Joseph Kemper, the chief of Naval Operations. "Joe, since this appears to be a naval raid. it falls in your bailiwick."
Kemper hardly fit the image of a military leader. Portly and white haired, he could have easily been hired as a department-store floorwalker. He looked thoughtfully at the notes he had scribbled during Jarvis's briefing.
"There are two facts that bear out Mr. Jarvis's warning. First, the battleship Iowa was sold to Walvis Bay Investment. And as of yesterday, our satellite pictures showed it docked at the Forbes shipyard."
"And its current status?" asked the President.
Kemper did not answer but pressed a button on the table in front of him and rose from his chair. The wood paneling against the far wall slid apart, revealing an eight-by-ten-foot projection screen. Kemper picked up a telephone and said tersely, "Begin."
A high-resolution TV picture taken high above the earth flashed on the screen. The clarity and color were far superior to anything transmitted to an ordinary home set. The satellite camera penetrated the earlymorning darkness and cloud cover as though they did not exist, projecting a view of the eastern Chesapeake Bay shoreline so clear it looked as if it came off a picture postcard. Kemper moved to the screen and made a circular motion with the pencil he used for a pointer.
"Here we see the entrance to the Patuxent River and the basin just inside Drum Point to the north and Hog Point to the south." The pencil held steady for a moment. "These small lines are the docks at the Forbes yard…. A point for Mr. Jarvis. As you can see, Mr. President, there is no sign of the Iowa."
On Kemper's command the cameras began sweeping toward the upper end of the bay. Freighters, fishing boats, and a missile frigate passed by in parade, but nothing resembling the massive outlines of a battleship. Cambridge on the right of the screen; soon, the Naval Academy at Annapolis on the left; the toll bridge below Sandy Point; and then up the Patapsco River to Baltimore.
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