“Mr. President,” interrupted an aide, “our surveillance flights confirm an invasion force heading from the Chinese mainland toward the Nationalist offshore islands of Kinmen and Matsu.”
The President was already visibly shaken by the sinking of the Utah and the attack on the Turner—no list of survivors had yet reached him. The aide’s news only deepened his consternation. “Well, right now, Richard,” he said, “we have to prioritize.” It was a word he usually disliked, but he didn’t have the time to think of a better one. “The American military has been taken completely by surprise, and my first job is to defend the United States.” He had already grasped what the think tanks at the Hoover Institution and the National War College would soon be impressing upon TV’s talking heads, namely that if terrorists could penetrate the nation’s military defenses, they could launch attacks against civilian targets at will — anywhere in the United States.
“Do you think they’ll attack Canada?” the Army chief of staff asked.
“No,” Homeland Defense director Harry Hawthorn replied. “Canada’s immigration policy’s a joke. Terrorists love Canada. They won’t attack Canada — be fouling their nest.”
The President nodded his agreement, but he had more important things to worry about than Canada. Besides, everybody already knew the score regarding Canada, its government the quintessential wimps. Full of good intentions, but in world affairs — no viability at all. The country, if you could call its disparate regions that, depended entirely on the United States for North American defense, droning on about “soft” power while the government in Ottawa continued humiliating its small but brave military through such wanton neglect that when Canadian peacekeepers were actually called upon to do something, the Canadian military didn’t have a single air-worthy plane to transport them. Hopeless. The President wanted no more discussion about Canada.
“How far is the carrier from Port Townsend?” he inquired of no one in particular.
“Fifteen, twenty miles west-nor’west in the strait.”
“Is that all?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Son of a— Who’s your man up there, Admiral?” he asked the CNO.
“Admiral Keach was commander of the battle group.”
“You heard anything from him that we don’t already know?”
“No, sir. He’s missing.”
“Missing? I thought he would have been up in the island.”
“He was, Mr. President — over by the bridge’s starboard wing lookout. Word is, the force of the explosions flung them both overboard. Apparently, the lookouts on the fantail suffered the same fate. Rescue helos he’d sent out earlier to pick up any Utah survivors hadn’t yet returned to the Turner. Anyway, it was pitch-dark.”
“They would have been wearing life jackets, though,” said the President.
“The two lookouts at the stern, yes, sir, but I don’t know about the admiral.”
A sky-blue folder with the presidential seal, containing a thick pile of pages, was placed in front of the President. On the first of the 230 pages was the heading CVN TURNER — PERSONNEL. There were six thousand names, a quarter of them asterisked with either KIAor MIA. The very battle group he’d intended to use to prevent a war in Asia, in a world already at war against terrorism, now lay immobile in the Juan de Fuca Strait. And for one overwhelmingly simple reason: the proudest and most powerful navy in the world had been grievously wounded and humiliated by a bunch of mines, weapons that, the U.S. mining of Haiphong notwithstanding, elicited the kind of contempt in naval officers as that accorded a backshooter in the Old West.
“If terrorists can sink two of our capital warships before we can even reach our littoral seas,” wrote the Wall Street Journal’s editorial, “what possible defense can we expect from the Navy?”
US SUB SUNK was the less erudite but more effective verdict of the tabloids.
As first editions hit the street on the East Coast, it was 3:00 A.M.
in the Straits of Georgia and Juan de Fuca, where the rescue effort of hundreds of small boats, together with a dozen U.S. Coast Guard patrol vessels and Canada’s two coast guard cutters, had begun.
Mayhem quickly followed in the wake of good intentions, as congested sea traffic, strong tides, and fog combined to endanger the would-be rescuers. Indeed, the fog was so thick that it obscured even the monolithic carrier, which, with her power cut, the gash in her side expanding till it was now over eleven feet wide, seemed beyond saving. The crippled leviathan’s aft section, from Elevator 4 to stern, looked to Admiral Bressard as if it would detach itself from the rest of the ship at any moment. The bone-grinding sounds of more bulkheads giving way, mingled with the cries from sick bays now rendered useless as air flows in the carrier — superheated by burst steam pipes leading from the reactors — made it necessary to bring hundreds of the wounded, many already suffering from severe scalding, up onto the forward flight deck. There, as corpsmen and other medics performed triage, surgeons did what little they could under the circumstances, the navy chaplains all but overwhelmed administering last rites. And yet, as the CNO and everyone else knew, there had been no battle in the strait — no enemy sighted.
During the massive if largely ad hoc rescue effort, which the media was referring to as “America’s Dunkirk,” the Turner’s captain, like all his fellow commanders in the CVBG, were ordered by the CNO to remain in DEFCON — Defense Condition—1. Maximum force readiness.
“Cautious,” said the New York Times.
“Scared,” said Le Monde.
Everyone on the remaining ships of the CVBG was increasingly nervous following the fate of Utah and Turner. It seemed that both the Times and Le Monde were right, the ships not daring to proceed through the strait for fear of three possibilities that Aegis analysis sensors now suggested but could not confirm: simultaneous detonation of five mines, two against Utah, three against Turner, either combinations of pressure/acoustic mines or coil rod induction fused bottom mines; a much more advanced, highly sensitive and comparatively cheap triple-axis fluxgate magnetometer-triggered mine; and finally, that the Utah and the Turner had been blown up by sensor mines measuring the electric current sent into the sea by the electrochemical reaction generated when steel hulls slice through iron-rich salt water. This latter type of targeting, however, was considered least likely by the Aegis electronic warfare officers, given the presence of the anechoic coating on the Utah, which would have minimized the metal/seawater electrochemical reaction.
For the Pentagon, the question of what type of mines had been used against the two warships was crucial to any planned defense in the future, because obviously neither of the comparatively sophisticated underwater defense systems aboard Utah and the Aegis cruisers had worked.