The aide left and all eyes turned to the DNI, who read it, then sat staring at it in obvious disbelief.
“Hart?” Macklin asked. “Anything you wish to share with the class?”
He looked up and caught the president’s eye. “One of our space-based assets picked up an unusual satellite phone message originating from the Virginia Beach area. They located the receiver about six hundred nautical miles west of Lisbon, Portugal.”
“Did they get a fix on the receiver?” the president queried.
“Yes, for a short period of time,” Prost replied in a tempered voice. “They’re certain it was a ship headed toward our Eastern Seaboard. The message was brief, but the course and speed were confirmed. After the transmission ended, they lost track of the ship.”
“What did it say?” Macklin asked.
Prost looked down and read, “Entering bay from sea trials in four days.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. And the message is two days old.”
“But it’s plenty,” SecDef Adair said. “The only vessel of significance currently undergoing sea trials out of NS Norfolk is the Ford, and it’s indeed planning to return to port at midnight tomorrow, so the intel looks good. Plus, the carrier is most vulnerable during transitions in and out of the base because it lacks the concentric protection of its escorts.”
“Dammit,” Macklin cursed then glanced at Prost. “Hart, I don’t care what you need to do, we’d better locate the person who made that satellite call.”
Adair nodded. “We’ve kept the Ford’s whereabouts hush-hush, sir. Always going out to sea at night and returning to port at night with just their navigation lights on to avoid attention. From shore, it looks like any other ship. And we’re keeping her in one of our remote piers, out of sight from the general public and even our own people. If someone’s talking, my guess is that it’s a crew member, and since the carrier is just going through sea trials, the crew is minimal.”
“Then we need to take a close look at everyone on the vessel,” the president said. “Who knew what, why and when, and more to the point, who did they tell?”
“I’m on it,” Prost answered. “I’ll contact NCIS and have their people put a priority on this. I’m also going to work with the Coast Guard, see if we can locate the ship that received the message.”
“We have to get on top of this intelligence breach,” Macklin said with a frustrated expression. “Bastards have already come after us with suicide planes, with some ghost submarine, and with Iranian missiles. God knows what they’ll try next.”
An aide walked in and whispered something to Secretary Adair, who turned to the president and said, “Ardent has cleared the canal. The convoy’s under way again.”
President Macklin smiled for the first time that day. “Well, good news for a—”
Prost’s phone dinged twice. He looked at it and frowned.
“What now?” Macklin said.
The DNI sighed, then said, “It’s about Night Out. HVT got away.”
To minimize any leaks, knowledge of Prince Omar Al Saud’s likely involvement had been kept within Prost’s secret dealings on Thirty-Eighth Street, the people in this room, plus Secretary of State Brad Austin. And that included the decision to move forward with Operation Night Out, the kidnapping of a member of the Saudi royal family by SEAL Team Six.
“Fuck!” Macklin growled. “How? I thought we had that yacht covered from every angle.”
“Minisub, sir. Not in the blueprints.”
“Clever bastard,” Adair said.
The muscles in Macklin’s jaw worked as he clenched his teeth in anger.
Slowly he stood and walked up to the 1868 painting of the Peacemakers, by George P. A. Healy, depicting Abraham Lincoln conferring with his generals. The president had had it hung next to his own photo posing in front of the F-105G.
For a moment, he tried to imagine the level of pressure that a Lincoln or a Wilson or a Roosevelt had felt during some of our nation’s darkest hours.
Or a Kennedy.
His eyes shifted to Aaron Shikler’s masterpiece that he had ordered hung in this room: JFK with his arms crossed and his head bowed in thought.
And now it’s my turn in the barrel.
Turning to Prost and Adair, Macklin said, “I did not start this war. But I sure as hell am going to finish it.” Pointing at the door, he added, “Now go and do what you must to get it done.”
Prost got in the rear of his sedan and told the driver to take him to the brownstone on Thirty-Eighth Street. He needed to think and regroup. The message from Cmdr. Jake Russo, via Capt. Blake, indicated that they had taken out pretty much everyone aboard except the damn HVT.
“Splendid,” he mumbled as he left the White House behind.
“Sir?” the driver asked, looking at him in the rearview mirror.
Prost ignored him, just as he tried very hard to put the failed mission behind him and focus on the next steps. Unfortunately for the DNI, the only image that filled his mind was that of the late William F. Buckley Jr.
Operation Night Out had indeed all the earmarks of a bundled agency job.
Petty Officer Second Class Marshon Chappelle leaned back in his chair, eyes closed, listening to a very different concert this afternoon: pods of western gray whales entering their winter breeding grounds after their yearly migration from Russia.
The music of the large baleen creatures was one of clicks, faint whistles, and pulse calls. Each lasted about two minutes at a fundamental frequency ranging from ten to forty hertz, as reported by Missouri’s BQQ-10 bow-mounted spherical active/passive sonar array. The lowest frequency sound a human ear could detect was around twenty hertz, but the system easily captured them, providing Chappelle with the full range of their courting songs — truly a perk of the job.
Across the control room, Cmdr. Frank Kelly stood arms crossed, regarding his operators from his position next to his XO, Lt. Cmdr. Robert Giannotti.
Kelly was in a foul mood. It had been more than four hours since breaking off from the tanker and starting his racetrack pattern, but aside from distant contacts off the coast of Vietnam, there had been no sign of anything remotely resembling a Type 212A submarine. And to put a cherry on his shit cake, the COMSUBPAC had not been pleased at his continued resistance to get his butt over to guard Stennis, instead of toiling around in the middle of the South China Sea wasting the taxpayers’ money. After a short and somewhat heated negotiation, Kelly had bought the Mighty Mo five hours before having to set course at flank speed toward the wounded carrier, and that meant he could hang in the area for less than one more hour.
“What do MLB and the US Navy have in common, boss?” Giannotti asked.
Kelly pinched the bridge of his nose. “Not in the mood, Bobby.”
“Three strikes and you’re out,” Giannotti responded anyway. “You’ve struck out twice with COMSUBPAC. I wouldn’t make it a habit, boss.”
Kelly shrugged. “I can handle a COMSUBPAC ass-chewing, Bobby. What I can’t handle is that bastard running loose after what he did to us… to my family.”
Tilting his head toward his commander, and leaning back in an exaggerated manner, the XO glanced down and said, “Well, sir, for what it’s worth, the admiral still left you with a little ass.”
The two closest sailors manning the weapons systems chuckled.
“Fuck off, Bobby.”
“Aye, sir.”
Kelly checked his watch, then turned toward the sonar station. “Chappy’s in one of his trances,” he observed. “Hopefully he’ll find something. We’re running out of time.”