“Oh, yes.”
They were both wrong. Six minutes after the last rescue helicopter had left the Turner’s darkened flight deck, three warhead mines, their release fuses initiated by the enormous downward push of the Turner’s 98,000 tons, detonated. The near simultaneous explosion of the mines caused what Alicia Mayne would have called a “geometric” rather than “arithmetic” progression, in that one plus one plus one did not equal three, but much more, the pressure wave so powerful that it lifted the huge warship into the air. It wasn’t by much, indeed it would have been barely perceptible to the naked eye, even in daylight, but it was enough to create a fissure running up from the great ship’s keel, or spinal column, to several decks above, in effect breaking the carrier’s back. Many survivors of the Utah, eight miles to the east, foundering amid the floating debris of the sub, unable to gain a purchase on any floatable wreckage and who had only life vests, were concussed into unconsciousness by the shock waves that sped through the water from the stricken Turner at nearly 3,000 miles an hour.
Below on the carrier’s flight deck, in the cavernous hangar, which, save for the rescue helos, did not yet house its air wing — the latter’s fighters, fighter-bombers, attack and recon aircraft, following standard procedure, having not yet flown to the carrier from Whidbey Island’s naval station — the crew witnessed an astonishing sight, one unique in the annals of naval history. Because their blast door was down, separating their section from the other two hangar zones, what appeared in front of them on the port side was not the huge wall that normally separated their hanger section from the support structures outside, but a jagged, ten-foot-wide gash four stories high, running from below the waterline all the way up to the hangar deck. Through the gash, the astonished crew could see the glittering diamonds of the Big Dipper. They could also hear a deluge as millions of gallons of roiling seawater rushed in. It sounded like a dam opening its spill gates, so at first no one could hear the screams and death throes of over seven hundred men and women, who, from the deep-set engine/reactor room through the aft berthing spaces, catapult equipment spaces, air filter cleaning shop, and aviation equipment storage, were drowning. The aft stern section of the carrier had been split asunder as if some giant had fire-axed the left rear side of the “boat.”
Despite the superb honeycombed watertight compartmentalization of the carrier, the massive damage meant that designated escape routes no longer existed in the maelstrom of twisted aluminum and steel. The portside list of the carrier was evident within minutes. Hundreds among the carrier’s six thousand were sucked out to sea and drowned. Others were burned alive in the scores of fires within the wreckage, the mines’ simultaneous explosions not allowing time for these victims to don life jackets and get out.
In Aft Bay 3, crew were moving quickly to take advantage of the ten-foot-wide, V-shaped gash, which, like the unsinkable Titanic, was never supposed to happen, given the ship’s three-inch high tensile steel. Scores of off-duty personnel, including sailors, still in their boxer shorts and T-shirts, along with female air mechanics and a female fighter pilot in shorts and tank tops, had formed a bucket brigade, stretching from the rear of Hangar 3. They passed life jackets and white oil-drum-sized Beaufort containers, which were quickly tossed overboard, falling over sixty feet past the burning, smoke-choked lower compartments. When the Beaufort drums hit the water, their CO2 cartridges triggered upon impact, inflating the orange-glow tent rafts that were capable of holding from six to twelve people or more, depending on canister size, each raft ingeniously stocked with emergency flasks of fresh water, Power Bars, salt tablets, morphine syringes, aspirin, acetaminophen, and toothpaste-sized tubes of nontoxic, oil-based sun cream which in a pinch could be consumed as a high source of protein. In addition, there were a hand-held GPS unit, flares, saline-generated lights, palm-sized energy beam locator with batteries, and, providing survivors were in a nonshadow satellite cone, a cell phone.
The sight of the battle group’s flagship, split keel to hangar deck, was devastating enough as the media arrived en masse in Port Townsend. Some, such as Fox and Britain’s ITN, went farther west along the wild and sparsely populated coast of the Olympic peninsula’s northernmost boundary to cover the story.
Just east of Port Townsend, a clutch of Middle Eastern networks and some European correspondents set up their gear, barely able to conceal their euphoria at the sight of the world’s only superpower humbled by the grievous damage to the aircraft carrier and the outright sinking of one of its premier warships. As if on cue, detritus continued to bubble up from the pressure-flattened wreckage that used to be the USS Utah. Everything from ragged slabs of the anechoic sound-absorbing tiles that had coated the sub’s exterior to the crushed body parts of U.S. submariners floated to the surface.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The shock hit America with the speed of light, on every TV in the country. Word of it got to incarcerated terrorists as well, who were overjoyed by the death and destruction wrought upon the “Great Satan.” The terrorists immediately saw what the Pentagon was slow to recognize — that this naval disaster, within the home waters of the United States, was a catastrophe more serious than the attack of 9/11, whether or not the number of lives lost was greater. Bombing buildings by crashing planes into them was one thing; the British, as New York mayor Giuliani had recalled at the time, had suffered far worse human and material losses in the terrible Nazi blitz of 1940. But strategically and tactically, this attack on the carrier in the Strait of Juan de Fuca had achieved something that shook the government and the military to the core. The enemy had penetrated to the very center of an American carrier battle group, despite its overwhelming firepower and state-of-the-art electronic surveillance. The group, whose whole raison d’être was to protect the carrier, had been brushed aside.
In particular, the White House wanted to know how neither of the billion-dollar Aegis cruisers had detected any unusual underwater activity, along with the sub-hunting destroyers, escort frigates, and the Lafayette-class submarine which, along with the Utah, was supposed to have made any such attempt a near impossibility.
Eleanor Prenty had never liked the war room, or what the staff called “the basement.” It had all the “gee whiz” stuff, but though smoking there had long been banned, she swore you could still smell cigar ash from time to time. And despite its no-expense-spared accoutrements, the room still felt like a bunker. The decor had certainly done nothing to ameliorate the President’s mood.
“C’mon, gentlemen,” he demanded. “What the hell’s going on? Two—two of our capital ships sunk within—”
“The Turner’s still afloat,” the CNO corrected him.
You dork, thought Eleanor.
“Yes, Admiral,” said the President. “But have you seen the pictures? It’s been gutted — top to bottom.” He was correct, for by now the V, which had reached as high as aft Hangar Bay 4, had expanded under the sustained strain of the initial separation of the bulkheads and was visible as a ten-to-fourteen-inch-wide cleft running the full width of the flight deck, revealing equipment spaces immediately below. And the track for one of the forward catapults was severed.
It was fast becoming apparent to anyone watching CNN, which numbered almost as many who had witnessed the 9/11 implosion of the World Trade Towers, that the Turner might well come apart, separating, as Marte Price diligently pointed out, along the cross deck line of arresting wire number two. The image that caught the public’s imagination, however, was that used by an excited Seattle commentator for CNN who opined that the damage to the Turner resembled an enormous “pie-shaped wedge.” To illustrate his analogy further, the commentator displayed the dramatic picture from the sixties showing how an A-shaped bow had knifed into a thousand-passenger Canadian ferry in the Strait of Georgia. “We are witnessing war in our home waters,” NBC declared solemnly, a truth echoed not as solemnly, and indeed joyously, by stations throughout the Arab world.