“Thank you, General.”
Perhaps, he thought, Chang’s offer of assistance was purely self-serving. After Chang’s failure with the Russian Kornon to get the RONE supercomputer, the general was probably trying to rehabilitate himself in the hierarchy of Chinese intelligence, to prevent the kind of international strain the murder of an American official’s daughter would undoubtedly place on Chinese-American relations — relations which were never good at best, and worse than usual right now because of Taiwan’s ever-growing assertive industrial and military strength. Though unlike Kornon he hadn’t been “transferred”—that is, exiled to Xinjiang, China’s Siberia, as punishment for his failure to grab the latest American technological breakthrough — Chang, like Kornon, would no doubt have to do something spectacular to get back into the good graces of his superiors. Helping Beijing avoid American charges of China’s ineptitude in the matter of solving the murder of a young American woman would certainly do the trick. It might put Chang firmly back on the road toward becoming party chairman, head man of China.
In any event, Charlie Riser didn’t care about the fact Chang might be helping him just to ingratiate himself with Beijing. The point was, Chang was the one party official who was at least trying to get to the bottom of it. And for that, God bless him.
CHAPTER NINE
While Admiral Jensen anxiously waited for the result of Albinski’s and Dixon’s second dive, he filled in time with an unannounced inspection tour of the submarine base on Hood Canal, instructing his driver/aide Davis to begin with the “James Bond” house. He meant the huge Magnetic Silencing Facility shed built over water, at the base of which the Trident Boomers and Hunter Killer subs entered in order to be degaussed. This process wiped off their magnetic signature through rows of enormous electrical coils, thus reducing their vulnerability to enemy detection.
Jensen was also inspecting his base’s Explosive Handling Wharf, another enormous shed built over water. In this one the forty-four-foot-long, seven-foot-wide Trident D-5 missiles, with their distinctive royal-blue fiberglass protective domes, were being loaded into each of two football-field-long, 18,000-ton Tridents, or boomers. Each boomer held two rows of twelve missiles. Atop each missile sat fourteen five hundred — kiloton reentry vehicles, each housing a thermonuclear warhead. Thus, each boomer was capable of striking, over a range of eight thousand miles, 192 different targets, all of which could be hit from just one U.S. submarine. And each of these 192 bombs was ten times more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima. Now, of course, Japan was one of the U.S.’s most reliable allies in Asia. And China, which had once fought with the U.S. against Japan’s imperial expansionism, was considered by Washington to be its biggest single threat, notwithstanding America’s ongoing war against terrorism.
Satisfied with the efficiency level at both the MSE and the Explosive Handling Wharf, the admiral was driven the mile or so south along the shoreline road to the triangular-shaped Delta Refit Pier, with its docking facilities for two boomers and room for another one in its dry dock. Jensen, continuing to reassure himself that all was well — as it needed to be for a prospective CNO — headed for the “mange,” the deforested clear-cut areas in the otherwise heavily forested seven-thousand-acre site where the stocks of C-4 and D-5 missiles were housed deep underground. He worried about the vulnerability of the area, despite the presence of the heavily alarmed security fence that ran around the huge base. He’d assured Washington after 9/11 that even though the “manges” were as visible from the air as any clear-cut area in a commercially logged forest, they were safe. The protective sheath around the missiles was so far underground that no bomb — not even their own state-of-the-art guided bunker-busting GBU-15s — could penetrate. Except a nuke.
The secure phone in his Humvee rang. It was the 0800 to noon watch duty officer reporting another anomaly. It spooked the admiral, though he took care not to show it as he waved nonchalantly to the skipper of the sleek tug that was gently nudging a boomer into position in the azure blue water that lapped peacefully against the Delta Refit pier.
Switching to open voice so his aide in the Humvee could hear him, Jensen asked the duty officer for more details of this latest Darkstar photograph.
“It’s in the same general area as before, Admiral — a bit farther north, in the direction of our San Juan Islands.”
“Where exactly?” Jensen demanded as his aide brought up the Canadian Hydrographic Service 1:80,000 scale chart of Juan de Fuca Strait. It showed the waters between the Olympic Peninsula and Admiralty Inlet to the southeast, and north to the edge of the 172 San Juan Islands.
“Exact position,” reported the duty officer, “latitude forty-eight degrees twenty-two minutes and three seconds, longitude 123 degrees and four minutes.”
Jensen’s aide punched in the coordinates and immediately had a red circle on the map, depth reading plus or minus 364 feet.
“How big an area?” asked Jensen.
“Irregular shape — discoloration—’bout two hundred yards in diameter—”
“Wait a minute,” said the admiral. How the idea came to him, he didn’t know. Maybe it was the jolt of his breakfast coffee, waking him up after the long night. “Enter ’Kelp beds location,’ “ he instructed the aide, explaining how such discoloration could be caused by large vessel traffic through the strait, ships’ bow waves pushing brown kelp before it was scattered again by wind and current.
In milliseconds the laptop’s screen was pockmarked with brown splotches along the long western coastline of Whidbey Island north of Hood Canal and in the funnel-shaped area of sea bounded by Whidbey in the west and narrowing eastward into the long Juan de Fuca Strait between Vancouver Island and the Olympic peninsula. Still, Jensen was so anxious about his possible promotion that he ordered the Coast Guard to check it out, and started imagining everything from a hostile sub being in the area to hostile antisubmarine mines being placed on the bottom — which, when he thought seriously about it, made no sense. For one thing, there was the extensive underwater SOSUS microphone array the U.S. Navy had in the area, as well as all around the Pacific. For another, this second anomaly’s location, which was now being investigated by Albinski and Dixon, was not in the egress channel for his subs, unlike the first location. But to be absolutely sure, he demanded that the Coast Guard do a depth-sounding run of this new anomaly, as well as a visual check. Yes, he told himself, admittedly it was a very small area. The duty officer said it was a hundred yards or so across in the 625-square-mile area. But again he thought of Admiral Kimmel, C in C Pacific, who hadn’t been given the report of a radar anomaly north of Oahu on the morning of December 7, 1941.
He called the duty officer. “Any report yet from the deep dive at anomaly one?”
“Not yet, sir. Petrel is on station now.”
“Very well,” said the admiral. “I still think—”
He was interrupted by the DO. “Sir, Coast Guard has seen kelp in the vicinity of anomaly two.”
“By God,” said Jensen, turning to his aide. “Why didn’t anyone else think of kelp beds before me, Davis?”
The aide shrugged. “Not as smart as you, Admiral.”
Jensen laughed, the first time he’d done so in over forty-eight hours. “You sucking up, Davis?”
“I’d like a posting to Hawaii, sir.”
“Well, you’re not gonna get it.” They both laughed. Ahead was the Explosives Handling Wharf. At its apex, two fully armed Marines manned an M16 machine gun behind sandbags. Another two stood guard as line handlers, in their orange life preservers, as tugs secured boomer SSBN 659, the USS Will Rogers, into which one of the big, white, tree-trunk-diameter D-5 missiles was about to be lowered. Jensen was once again aware of the awesome responsibility he had. Little wonder he worried about everything, from the safety of the missiles to the guards on his sub base’s perimeter.