Dwight simply stared at his mug of coffee. With a sense of embarrassment he replied, “Uh, yeah, I guess that’s what I was asking.”
“Well, we can’t have it both ways, Dwight. I made a decision. We made a decision. Everyone on my crew gave up things in doing so. But I, for one, have no regrets. I could have continued on in my navy career to command other submarines and perhaps to command fleets of submarines. But for what end? The submarine service has become useless for defending this country against its greatest threat. The path I’ve chosen achieves something the entire country has been unable to achieve — security against nuclear terrorism. That’s something no one else can claim.”
“Hear, Hear!” said Pappy, raising his coffee mug in a gesture of salute to George. “I agree. Damn the torpedoes — full speed ahead!”
They both turned to Dwight as if to challenge him, but he quickly joined them in toasting the mission. “Hey, I agree a hun’erd percent! If I didn’t, none of us would be sitting here on this platform today. I say, let’s get the job done!”
“Agreed!” responded George. “So what do you have on the schedule today?”
“Looks like the sky’s gonna to be clear today. It’s too bad that submarine of yours is so long — it sticks out from under the rig at the back end. That means you’ll have to submerge until nightfall, and we’ll have to see if we can get the fighters mounted tonight.”
“That’s okay,” responded George. “We’re ahead of schedule thanks to the overcast yesterday. We can work topside today in your hangar, continuing to dismantle the warheads under John’s supervision. We need time this afternoon for John to train the teams we’re sending out from here. I would suggest you and your Platform Alpha crew get some rest today because it’s going to be another long night. I want to finish everything up tonight and get out of here before dawn if possible.”
“How many teams are leavin’ from here, George? You know we can get any number of guys and warheads into the U.S. from here. We’re flying to and from our rigs in the Gulf all the time. The air traffic controllers know us — we would never be stopped or searched within the timeframe it would take us to get them ashore and dispersed into the general population. Same thing goes for our crew boats. We’re running them back and forth all the time.”
“We’re sending out twelve two-man teams from here — twenty-four crew members in all. Each team will take five nuclear warheads. That’s sixty warheads in all. We’re maintaining the two-man rule, so with each set of warheads we offload, two of our crewmembers go with them to blend into society, take up residence, and vigilantly wait for the day they are called into action. Three teams should be able to fly ashore to Mississippi in your GenCon helicopter, and four others can go back in your crew boat. From there, those seven teams can easily disperse and disappear into American society. Five other teams, fluent in Spanish, are going to take that disguised fishing trawler you promised me to the Mexican coast and disperse into Mexico.”
“The trawler is coming in tonight, after dark,” said Dwight. “If it got here any sooner, it would raise suspicions.”
“Terrific.”
“Where are the teams going to go?” asked Dwight.
“No one knows where any of the teams are headed, not even me. That way, if any team or individual is captured, only that set of warheads is possibly compromised. Each team is free to devise their own communication protocol for maintaining contact with each other and for signaling each other in case of emergency or capture. In that way, we don’t establish a predictable communication pattern, which could be used by intelligence analysts to identify and locate our teams around the world. In addition, if one team member is captured, the other team member may be alerted in time to escape and find a new hiding place for the warheads. We know from past experiences, when our fighting men have been tortured as prisoners of war, every man can be brought to the breaking point. It would only be a matter of time before one of our captured members gave up the identity of his teammate and the location of the warheads. We only ask our team members to hold out for twenty-four hours.”
The captain continued, addressing both Dwight and Pappy. “You know, with all the publicity we’ve gotten, there’s not that many places around the world where a guy with an American accent can just show up out of the blue and take up residence without raising a lot of suspicions, right? Can you think of any place, XO, where that wouldn’t happen?”
“Well, not really, Captain. In most other English-speaking countries, you need a British accent to go unnoticed.”
“That’s right. But one place where you can get away with it is the good ol’ USA. As for getting the weapons into the country, it’s amazingly simple. After all the promises from the government and the Homeland Security Department to make the country safe after 9/11 and DC, the U.S. is still the easiest country in the world to smuggle a nuke into. We offload them into Mexico and carry them across the border into southern Arizona, New Mexico, or Texas. That border is like a sieve — anything can get through. Despite the fact that the Border Patrol made over a million apprehensions last year of illegal immigrants crossing into the U.S. from Mexico, millions of others made it unscathed.”
Dwight looked skeptical. “I don’t know. If the Border Patrol is catching so many, that may not be the best way to go.”
“Well, if you don’t like that way,” George continued, “all you have to do is hide the warhead in some legitimate cargo and ship it in through Long Beach or New Orleans. You’re going to be successful ninety-eight or ninety-nine times out of a hundred.”
Dwight nodded, “That approach seems eminently logical to you and me, George, but if it’s that easy, why didn’t al-Qaeda smuggle the DC bomb in that way?”
George shrugged. “I don’t know. Their mindset is so totally different that all their actions seem crazy to us. Just look at the War in Iraq. Hundreds of those guys blew themselves up in self-sacrificing homicides for no reason. Now that’s crazy.”
“Why do you say they did it for no reason?” asked the XO.
“Because they didn’t have to do it to get us out of there. We said all along that as soon as the country stabilized, we were leaving. All they had to do was wait a year or so, and we would have been gone.”
“That’s true, it was pretty stupid,” the XO agreed. “But back to the subject of DC, how do you think they got the bomb in, Dwight?”
“I don’t know, but it’s different from a bunch of illegals hoppin’ the Rio Grande. When you’re carryin’ a nuke, it’s a little different! If you’re a terrorist, that’s an asset you can’t afford to lose. So who knows, maybe they teamed up with a drug cartel, or they could have bribed some poor fisherman who thought they were using his boat to smuggle in people or other contraband. We’ll probably never know for sure.”
“Gentlemen,” the captain interrupted, “I hate to interrupt this tantalizing conversation, but we’ve got work to do.” George was uneasy talking about this subject since the discussion would inevitably turn to the possible role of the Annapolis.
“Okay,” said Dwight, “but one more thing about that trawler coming tonight. It’s also bringing you a full load of fresh produce, milk, and other consumables you’re going to need once you get underway. We also have a crew boat coming in from New Orleans with additional stores. We bought out all the MREs at several of the local Army-Navy Surplus stores along with all the frozen dinners at some of the grocery stores around New Orleans. We told them if anyone asked any questions about why they were buying so much food, to tell them they had been chartered by GenCon to supply one of our rigs.”