The general and Grimes were in a recreation room three decks below the operations-command section of the Enterprise’s bridge. The admiral had invited them there to hear Kerry’s speech on TV. The room was full of cigar smoke. The general paced the wall at the rear of the room as the President spoke. It was obvious that frustration was driving him crazy. Grimes sat to one side and listened to the President with his eyes closed; you could tell he wasn’t sleeping because of the reactions that flowed across his face — his cynicism was perfectly synchronized to the President’s emotional comments. He snuffed a laugh when it was over, which brought him an angry look from the admiral.
“Perhaps you have some solutions, Mr Grimes?” said Hayes, equally irritated.
“Perhaps I do, sir.” Grimes opened his eyes like a cat.
“You’re free to speak here, commander,” grunted Hayes. “Why keep us in suspense?”
“You’ll be the first to know, General,” said Grimes, raising a plastic cup as if in a toast. “No offence, sir,” he added, pointing his cup at the admiral.
A red phone on the wall rang loudly. An aide answered it, then pointed the receiver to the admiral.
“Must be The Man himself,” muttered Grimes.
Seated behind Grimes were eight men dressed in dark uniforms bearing Navy insignia. They were of mixed race, size and demeanour, and, to a man, clean and well ordered. The general knew they were Grimes’s SEAL team. He had met them but had never seen them in action. Perhaps that was the trouble: no one saw them in action. They never worked in plain sight, only in darkness, and always in secret. Each day they worked out in private, not mixing with the rest of the crew.
But today they were here under Commander Grimes’s orders to hear their President speak.
Now that the President’s speech was over, they waited for the order to depart. None of them spoke.
Grimes stood and put on a black beret. His men watched him like a group of dobermans waiting for orders. He didn’t seem to be paying any attention to them, but looked at General Hayes, who had walked to the front of the room to switch off the TV.
Then Grimes nodded to the admiral.
“Soon,” he said.
He turned and headed for the door. His men rose and quietly followed him.
The admiral shook his head. “My God, Tony, what’s with that bunch?”
“Dogs of war, Milborne,” said Hayes. “They get crazy when they’re chained up, I guess.”
The next development started in cyberspace.
In the flurry of messages that jumped from computer to computer across the vast complex called the internet, a single message — poetically titled 000.000.000.1 — dictated a list of banks to be involved in paying the ransom of the world. Financiers who had moments before been musing on the investment possibilities of a new global coastline were now on the phone with their closest military contacts, demanding an end to this nightmare. Suddenly, with the prospect of mighty skyscrapers wading knee-deep in water and sharks swimming in their basements, corporations, like the people walking the streets, like the poor who lived on the trickle-down — all found themselves united in despair. Businesses began to shut down preparatory to relocating to higher ground. Rumours spread by mouth and by cable depicting ever worse cataclysms that might be caused by tidal waves.
President Kerry’s speech had done nothing to calm the worry, which in many quarters soon became hysteria. Fights and drunkenness were epidemic in every stratum of society. Inevitably, the so-called terrorist nations became targets for the world’s venom. But, like a nest of snakes with a flaming torch thrown into their midst, these nations found themselves striking at each other.
By midnight the situation had become critical. No one was getting much sleep.
Off the bow of the Enterprise, two Trident subs brazenly surfaced. They sat there silently in the water while a chosen few inside the three vessels’ respective nerve centres had quiet words with one another. At half- past the hour, two angular black helicopters shot from a special hold at the rear of the Enterprise. Moments later the subs sank silently from view.
While Henry, Sarah and Shep slept comfortably belowdecks, Grimes was finally going to work. The helicopters bearing the SEALs lifted into the overcast night, free of marking lights. The sound of their rotating blades was muffled by the sloshing of the sea against the ship. The two choppers — Gadfly 1 and Gadfly 2 — vanished into the night like technological phantoms. Each of them carried two Hel fire and four HARM radar-destroying missiles, and each had twin PUFF 2 miniguns with a variable fire rate of 500 to 8000 teflon-coated uranium rounds per minute.
On the bridge of the Enterprise, Admiral Schumacher and General Hayes watched through infrared glasses. Even with these, augmented by starlight scopes, the twin helicopters could barely be seen, and then only during liftoff.
The general knew that neither of these machines matched the crew they carried for sheer lethal certainty. He lowered his glasses and went into the bridge. There a circular screen showed a tactical display of the choppers’ position. Two red dots proceeded with astonishing speed towards the coast of Chile. Admiral Schumacher slapped him on the back and handed him a cup of coffee. A sailor sat before the screen, muttering into a headset, a closed circuit connecting him with the larger com centre nestled several decks below them.
“I guess we’ll just have to let Grimes do his worst,” said Hayes.
Schumacher looked at him with severity. “What? That’s why I authorized this flight?” His even skin and greying hair seemed to puff up a bit as he continued.
“You’ve got to do better than that, Tony.” The admiral removed his wire-rimmed glasses and cleaned them nervously on his sleeve. “I’m the one who’s got to explain whatever happens.”
“I know you do, Milborne, and, with all due respect, I don’t have a thing to tell you. The man has these, well, hunches.”
Schumacher turned his back on Hayes and walked to the window. He studied the lights of Valparaiso and wondered how many of its citizens would notice two unlit helicopters buzzing around their haciendas in the middle of the night.
He turned around again and found Hayes right there, looking into his eyes. The general wore a gentle smile. It sat as lightly on his face as a feather does on a table, and seemed to the admiral just as likely to blow away.
“You can be certain, Milborne, that no one but me will be called on the carpet for this one,” said Hayes.
“The President wants action. From where I see it, that means Grimes.”
In fact, no one in Valparaiso saw the two choppers as they veered north, then inland towards the mountains. Merle Fawsett, six and a half feet of sinew, leaned towards the pilot of Gadfly 1 as they slid silently above the trees. He was trying to get a better view through the thermal windows, which revealed a landscape illuminated in the infrared.
“Don’t crowd me, Merle,” said Tom Jabiel, the pilot.
Like the other three men in the chopper he was clad in black-on-black plastic and kevlar. They looked more like insects than people.
Wake Michaels, the operator of the electronic cameras and sensors, punched Fawsett in the arm with a raised knuckle.