So that was the reason Autrey James spotted the tiny object on the surface of the immense ocean and called it out to the pilots on the ICS.
“Yo, Mr. P., looks like a man in the water at ten o’clock, two miles,” Autrey James said.
“Are you kidding me, James? You got eyes that good?”
“Looks like a man to me, sir, but I could be wrong.”
“Well, we’ll motor over that way just to find out if you are.”
The helicopter was an SH-60B Seahawk from USS Hue City, one of the two Aegis-class cruisers that Jake Grafton had sent charging northwest. The cruisers were doing just that right now, running abreast of each other a mile apart, making 32 knots, twenty-five miles east of the helicopter’s position.
Hue City’s commanding officer had launched his helo so the crew could get some flight time and he could find out what was over the horizon, beyond the range of his surface-search radar.
“Dog my dingies, James, danged if that ain’t a survivor. Is he alive, do you think?”
“His head’s still up, sir. Give me a hover and I’ll put the basket in the water.”
The basket was just that, a basket on the end of a winch cable. All the survivor had to do was crawl in, then James could winch the basket up to the chopper and help the survivor out.
Unfortunately, with the basket in the water just in front of him, the survivor made no attempt to get in.
“He ain’t gettin’ in, Mr. P.,” Autrey James told the pilot. He was leaning out the door of the helicopter so that he could see the survivor and the basket.
“Maybe he’s dead.”
“I don’t think so. Looks like his head is out of the water. Dead men don’t float like that.”
“You wanna jump in and help?”
“On my way,” said Autrey James. The pilot lowered the chopper to just a few feet above the water and James jumped into the sea.
One look at the survivor’s face told him the man was near death, too weak to help himself. With some pushing and pulling, James got the survivor into the basket. The other enlisted man in the chopper winched him up, then dropped the basket for James.
When James had his helmet on again, he informed the pilot, “We’d better head back quick, Mr. P. This guy is in real bad shape. His eyes don’t focus.”
“Try to give him some water.”
“I’ll try, but we need to get him to a doc.”
Autrey James leaned over the survivor, who was deathly cold, and shouted to make himself heard above the loud background noise, “Hey, man, you’re one lucky dude. You’re gonna be okay. Just hang on for a few more minutes.”
“Blankets,” James said to the other crewman. Both of them wrapped the survivor in wool blankets.
“Gracias,” said Ocho Sedano, and tried to smile. Then exhaustion overcame him and he passed out.
The carrier and her battle group got under way at dawn. Kearsarge stayed in Guantánamo Bay and began loading the marines that had been guarding warehouse number nine. The last of the warheads were going aboard the cargo ship this afternoon, then it would sail. When it left, Kearsarge would also get underway with the marines, all nineteen hundred of them.
The battle group steamed south from Guantánamo bay. For about an hour the southern hills of Cuba were visible from the decks of the ships, but they soon dropped over the horizon and all that could be seen in any direction was the eternal ocean, always changing, always the same. It was then that the carrier launched an E-2 Hawkeye, which carried its radar up to 20,000 feet. Everything the Hawkeye’s early warning radar saw was datalinked to the carrier’s computers, where specialists kept track of the tactical picture.
Toad Tarkington took Jake aside and showed him the latest message from the National Security Council. He was directed to destroy the viruses in the laboratory in the University of Havana’s science building, find and destroy the warhead-manufacturing facility, and to remove the warheads from the six missiles and destroy them in their silos.
As Jake read the message, Toad said, “They don’t want much, do they?”
“Where in hell is the warhead-manufacturing facility?” Jake groused. He went to find William Henry Chance to ask him that question. He found Chance in the wardroom drinking coffee with Tommy Carmellini. They were the only two people there at ten in the morning.
“Do you have any idea where we might find this factory for making biological warheads?”
“Sit down, Admiral. Let me buy you a cup of navy coffee.”
Jake sat. Carmellini went for the coffee while Jake repeated the question.
“It has to be someplace between the science building and the missile silos,” Chance said. “No one in their right mind would want to haul that stuff very far. A traffic accident of some type …”
Jake Grafton’s brows knitted. He tapped on the table. “If you were going to haul polio viruses around, what kind of truck would you use?”
Chance shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said.
“I’ve been thinking about it for five hours now, and I’ve got an idea. We’ll run it though the recon computers and see what pops out.” He got up from his chair.
“Mind sharing your epiphany?”
“I’d haul the stuff in milk trucks. Clean, sterile, and sealed. A dairy should have a sterile environment and the equipment to mix the viruses with some sort of a base, then load them into warheads.”
Jake turned and marched from the room just as Carmellini approached with the extra coffee cup and saucer.
“He didn’t stay long, did he?”
“No,” Chance grunted, and sipped at the coffee Carmellini had brought from the urn in the corner of the room.
“Think Grafton’s big enough for this job?” Carmellini asked.
“Yeah. I think he is.”
Three dairies met Jake’s specifications — they were located between Havana and the first of the missile silos, which were arranged in a line beginning forty miles east of Havana and going east from there. The silos were about fifteen miles apart.
“Cows. See if they have cows around them.”
“When?”
“The latest satellite photography. Whenever that was.”
Two of the dairies no longer had cattle in the adjacent fields. The one that did was scratched off the list. The other two were examined minutely by the carrier’s intelligence center experts and the National Security Agency photo interpreters in Maryland, who conferred back and forth via encrypted satellite telephones. The experts decided that neither dairy could be eliminated as a possible site for the warhead factory.
“We’ll do ’em both,” Jake Grafton said.
By three that afternoon the staff and air wing planners had come up with a draft plan. Actually the task, destruction of eight targets, was a relatively simple military one. Tomahawk missiles could take out the lab and the dairies without muss or fuss. They could probably also destroy the missiles in their silos, as the silos were hardened in a simpler age, when the threat was unguided air-dropped bombs. With their ability to power-dive straight down on a hardened target and penetrate ten or twelve feet of reinforced concrete, Tomahawks were the weapon of choice.
And they were out of the question. The president absolutely refused to take the chance that polio viruses might escape from a bombed lab or silo and kill tens of thousands of Cubans in their beds. An event like that would be political dynamite, with repercussions beyond calculation. No, the politicians said, American troops were going to have to lay their lives on the line to prevent just such an occurrence. And, Jake Grafton well knew, some of them would die.