“Yes, sir!”
“Where’s Corporal Williams?”
“He’s aft, sir. He was making rounds in the engine room and reactor compartment.”
“Good. If Ellis is still in the same position, he’s ten or twenty feet from the aft hatch. Sergeant, get Williams on the horn and tell him to stand by at the aft hatch—pistol only. I’m going to try to find out what’s bugging Ellis and see if I can get him to disarm that warhead. If I’m unsuccessful, we’re going to have to take him out.”
After quickly briefing Corporal Williams, the captain stated, “All right, I’m going in to talk to him. Sergeant, step in with me, but stay here at this end of the compartment, concealed behind a missile silo until we determine Ellis’s current location and state of mind.”
“Yes, sir,” the marine replied.
The captain opened the hatch and looked into a seemingly empty missile compartment. With Ellis nowhere in sight, the captain and Sergeant Ramirez stepped quickly but quietly onto the elevated walkway and closed the hatch behind them. Once the sergeant had concealed himself behind the first missile silo, Captain Adams began to walk slowly along the central elevated walkway through the compartment toward the aft hatch. At each intersection between silos, he nervously checked right and left for any sign of Ellis, but there was none. About halfway through the compartment, the captain stopped and called in a loud voice, “John Ellis, it’s George Adams.”
“Don’t come any closer, Captain. I’ve got an armed peanut, and I’ll blow us all to quarks and bosons!” Ellis shouted.
He was still aft, at least three or four more missile silos from where the captain stood, and still on the starboard side.
“John, don’t be rash; I’m just here to talk to you. I need you to tell me what’s wrong. What is it that you want?”
“I want to take this peanut and get off of this sub, immediately!” Ellis screamed back.
“But John, that’s not part of the plan. Back on Platform Alpha, you said you fully supported the plan.”
“Screw your plan, Captain. I said that when I thought your plan included blowing up Mecca as a sign of our determination and capabilities. No one ever explained to me that you were just delivering an unarmed RV. I won’t have it; I won’t go along with that!”
The captain could hear Ellis sobbing in despair. He took a few more steps through the compartment hoping to get where he could talk to Ellis face-to-face.
“But John, we can’t do that. If we blow up Mecca, we’ll be killing hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of innocent people. That makes us no better than the terrorists.”
“That’s easy for you to say!” John screamed back. “You didn’t lose everyone you loved, everyone who meant anything to you in DC.”
George stopped. How could they have missed that in John’s background investigation? There had been nothing about John Ellis losing relatives in the attack on Washington DC.
“John, I’m sorry. I didn’t know you had family in DC. While it’s true I had no relatives there, I lost some very good friends. And many of the other members of this crew did lose relatives. The XO lost his wife and daughter, and even he agrees revenge is not the right answer.”
Ellis, still out of sight, continued to sob.
“John, if we target a single nuke against Islam’s most holy city, the number of radicals will expand beyond our wildest dreams. We will have opened up a can of worms that no one will be able to control. With that many radicals, it would be a virtual certainty they would strike us again with another nuclear weapon. Then we would be forced to retaliate.”
There was no reply.
“We’re not trying to cause a nuclear holocaust,” the captain continued, “we’re trying to prevent one!”
“Those assholes destroyed Washington DC, the capital of the free world. In return, Mecca, the capital of the Islamic world, should be destroyed as an example!”
“John, in this game, revenge doesn’t work. The Israelis and the Palestinians have demonstrated that time and time again. If we hit Mecca in revenge for DC, they will just hit us again in revenge for Mecca. I don’t want to get into a high-stakes pissing contest like that.”
“So then your plan doesn’t work at all!”
“Yes it does. First of all, we hope that by showing restraint and compassion, we will win over the hearts of the majority of Muslims in the world. To date, only a handful of Islamic nations have put forth even a halfhearted attempt to locate and capture terrorists. We intend to provide them with incentive to take on this task with all their heart and soul.”
“You’re just planning to hit them tit for tat, Captain. Sounds like a high-stakes pissing contest to me!”
“No, we’re not promising to hit them tit for tat. Our message to the world is that if there is another terrorist attack with a weapon of mass destruction, we will respond with our full force. In other words, if they strike again with a single nuclear weapon, we will respond by striking Islamic targets throughout the world with our one hundred and twenty nuclear weapons. Every Muslim holy site and major city will be destroyed. Our response will not be limited or measured; we will raze Islam from the face of the earth.”
George took a few more steps, until there were only four missile silos between him and the aft hatch. He still could not see Ellis, concealed further aft and somewhere off to George’s left side. George looked at the aft hatch where he could see the eyes of Corporal Williams watching him intently through the small glass porthole.
“John, our plan to re-introduce the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction is the best response—”
Ellis burst out onto the walkway, just two missile silos in front of the captain!
“Bullshit!” he yelled. “I’ve got my own plan, and it’s pure revenge! This timer is set for thirty seconds, and I’m engaging it NOW! If Mecca is not going to blow, then we are! It’s peanuts for you — Ha! Ha! Ha!”
The captain raised both hands over his head in a prearranged signal. Ellis looked momentarily confused, as if he thought the captain was surrendering, until he heard both the forward and aft hatches crash open. Heavy footsteps behind the captain were approaching from the forward hatch, and Corporal Williams rushed in through the aft hatch with his pistol at the ready. Ellis quickly ducked back behind the missile silo.
“Don’t shoot the silo!” yelled the captain as he hit the deck. He immediately heard two shots ring out in rapid succession followed by a thud and the crash of the warhead hitting the deck. The captain was momentarily dazed and confused. There was no way Corporal Williams could have gotten around the silo and made those shots. So who did?
“Target is down!” the captain heard. It was Sergeant Ramirez’s voice. He had apparently used the starboard outboard walkway to make his way aft along with the captain. When Ellis ducked behind the silo to escape Corporal Williams, he had come face-to-face with Ramirez, who had not hesitated to take him out.
“Get the warhead!” the captain yelled as he scrambled to his feet. “We’ve only got about ten seconds!”
“Already on it, Captain,” responded MacKenzie, whose footsteps the captain had heard behind him. MacKenzie had run straight for the warhead when the captain gave the signal. “Should have it in… DONE! She’s safe, sir!”