“Darkstar saw it,” Freeman corrected him. “That’s why Jensen dispatched that RIB with those divers Albinski and—” He thought for a moment. “—Dixon.” He sighed in exasperation. That General Blackmore had been right when he told the West Point graduates that nowadays you’d have to be part detective to be a good soldier.
Freeman played back the stored IR feed, looking now for cold caves, those whose residual daytime-stored heat signatures were so slight he’d passed them over. It was a dispiriting exercise. The cold cave count rose to 278, and Darkstar hadn’t yet reached the big Father and Son sea stacks south of Cape Flattery. Would the Navy have enough time to search them all before the sub attacked again? Or was Larry King’s suggestion accurate, that perhaps the terrorists’ sub had had its fill of death and destruction now that the decimated battle group had retreated.
“Cold caves, gentlemen,” he said, “with an anomaly near them. That’s what we’re looking for.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
In the Hindu Kush, more fighting had broken out as a resurgent Taliban battalion, financed out of Pakistan, was infiltrating back into Afghanistan to destabilize the nascent U.N.-protected government in Kabul, which in fact was mainly a U.S. operation. The Taliban leaders’ timing was brilliant — to strike when the U.S. Homeland Defense was consumed by a massive public panic attack even greater than that of 9/11. If the terrorists, or whoever, could easily attack America’s guardians, who could guard the guardians? The one qualified hope, media pundits such as CNN’s Marte Price were saying, was that “as terrible as the attack on our Navy is, it’s so far been confined to military targets and not defenseless citizens.”
“Silly woman!” opined Freeman, one ear listening to CNN, the other to the suggestions of his four SpecFor warriors brainstorming about how to narrow the search for where the sub might be hiding. “Marte should know better than that. Some poor son of a bitch civilian’s probably dead already, caught in that rain of shrapnel when the Aegis blew up.”
The general was right and wrong. A civilian night watchman, Carlito Vincennes of Cherry Point, had died three and a half minutes after he’d seen a light, which he thought was either out in the strait or in the woods across the bay. It had looked to him like a camera flash. Then he saw that it was a narrower beam of white light. A missile coming straight for him. “Incoming!” he screamed into his walkie-talkie. “Twelve o’clock low!”
The ensuing line of explosions that engulfed the Cherry Point refinery, as row upon row of storage tanks blew, killed Carlito and twenty-three other civilian nightshift workers. It also produced an enormous firestorm on land, the burning oil disgorged from the destroyed storage tanks flowing into the sea and forming a ten to fifteen acre firespill whose black columns of choking smoke and flames did a macabre dance hundreds of feet into the air. The heat was so intense that surrounding forests and bitumen roads caught fire as if by spontaneous combustion, trapping hundreds of families in the long lines of refugee vehicles already fleeing the rumored danger of radiation leakage from the sunken Aegis carrier and the Utah.
But where had the missile come from? “Incoming twelve o’clock low” had confounded Cherry Point’s head of security. As a reserve member of the Washington State National Guard, he’d understood “twelve o’clock” meant something had been coming head-on at Vincennes. But from which direction, land or sea? In short, what direction had Vincennes been facing? Sea or land?
It was only later, after 120 square miles of prime Northwest trees had been destroyed by the fire and the town of Birch Bay, near Cherry Point, was a charred, smoking ruin, that the already overstretched Coast Guard was able to triangulate the vectors from various reports about a “flash of light.” They deduced that the missile had been fired from the sea. So much for the midget having had its fill. It was, in fact, even more audacious. The reports of two trawlers — one Canadian and the other American — estimated that the “shoot and scoot” firing of the skimmer had probably taken no more than four minutes, including a possible crash dive.
Freeman at least now felt confident that the midget sub’s pen probably lay somewhere between Port Angeles and Cape Flattery.
Aussie Lewis, Brentwood, and Salvini agreed with the general’s hypothesis, which revolved around the simple but unchanging requirement in war that the closer you were to your supplies, the better.
“No Wal-Marts south of Flattery?” said Choir in his lilting Welsh accent.
“Exactly,” confirmed Freeman, calling COMSUBPAC-GRU-9 to turn Darkstar around back toward Cape Flattery. From the cape it could do another run along the seventy miles of coastline to Port Angeles, Freeman lowering the IR intensity recognition level. “Cold caves with a nearby anomaly,” Freeman repeated. “That’s what we’re looking for.”
“General, where’s that Navy NR-1B research sub?” asked Aussie.
Freeman glanced down at his watch, the bags under his eyes evidencing his lack of sleep over the last twenty-four hours. “It should be here by now.”
In fact, the Globemaster III ferrying the U.S. Navy’s research sub had landed at the Air Naval Station on Whidbey Island, one of the most beautiful islands in America, and among the longest. The highly classified midget sub was the one Bill Heinz had in mind when he complained to Charlie Riser about the kind of secrecy, interservice, and interagency rivalry that prevented vital information from getting to the right people in time, as had happened before 9/11.
While in the process of deplaning from the giant transport onto a wide-bodied Mack hauler normally used to move houses up and down the island, the Marine guard platoon of thirty men aboard ten Humvees were ordered to establish and maintain a “No Go Zone,” even on the naval station’s own runway, to provide a moving protective moat of a hundred yards in diameter around the small nuclear-powered sub. With “Deadly Force Authorized,” anyone, uniformed or civilian, violating the NGZ was to be shot. The problem, however, was that since the arrival of and transport of the sub was designated “Secret,” how could anyone be expected to know about the NGZ? It was bureaucratic nonsense, but so worried were the Navy and Homeland Defense about another attack following the Cherry Point disaster, that the rules of antiterrorist warfare, in the words of Homeland Defense director Harry Hawthorn, would have to be “amended as necessary.” Whether such amendment, however, lay within the provenance of the Marine guard officer on the spot, or with COMSUBPAC-GRU-9’s Jensen, or with the commandant of the Marines, was not clear.
Jensen, having arrived and placed himself in the lead Humvee, had been fretting for hours about the safe delivery of the NR-1B sub to the launching ramp at Keystone. He was convinced that not only had his CNO hopes gone down with Turner, Utah, and the Aegis cruiser, but any hitch en route to the ramp would mean the lesser but just as personally painful humiliation of demotion. When his cell phone rang, he started as if jabbed with a cattle prod. His driver, a gum-chewing Spanish-American, PFC Mendez, pretended not to notice.
“Margaret!” he snapped censoriously.
“CNN’s reporting that John Rorke and that scientist—”
“Alicia Mayne.”
“Yes. They’ve been found. Adrift on some wreckage, CNN says. Picked up off Vancouver Island, being taken to Port Townsend’s hospital. John Rorke looks rough, but he’s all right. He vindicated you on CNN. Said there was absolutely no warning when Utah was hit. The woman’s not so good, burns from the waist up, apparently. There was an oil slick on fire after the boat had sunk.” Margaret paused. “That CNN woman, Marte Price, has been calling, left I don’t know how many messages. I think you’re going to have to say something, dear. She called again just before—”