Another thirty minutes went by, and again he ordered the planesman to blow main ballast and take the Barracuda to PD once more. Up went the mast, and again they accessed. And this time, the signal came back from 22,000 miles above the ocean “…Proceed west to 57 degrees (16.50N)…Launch 282400SEPT09.”
At least that’s what it meant. What it actually read, coded, was…Proceed east to 157.00–56.50N — launch 300200NOV11. The time and launch date was plus two all the way. The chart references were coded as agreed — a lunch date in a restaurant on the wrong side of the Kamchatka Peninsula on the shores of the Sea of Okhotsk at end of November 2011.
Ben Badr knew that he had six days for the voyage, a little over 2,100 miles. That meant his father considered an average speed of 12 or 13 knots to be reasonable in these desolate mid-Atlantic seas. Desolate of warships, that is. He would cross the very center of the ocean, deep, at maybe 17 knots, and then slow down within a 1,000 miles of the U.S. Naval Base in Puerto Rico. He was not going that far anyway.
He went down to the navigation office where Lt. Ashtari Mohammed looked lonely without Shakira. She had left the correct charts on her wide desk, and they quickly checked the spot that would be their holding area for the next strike.
The target numbers, 16.45N 62.10W, were already in place in the missile room, preprogrammed into the computers in the nose cones of the Scimitar SL Mark 1s. Ben Badr made a careful note of the holding area, 16.50N 57W, and wrote it down for Lieutenant Ashtari. The selected area was 380 miles east of the target, approximately a half hour from launch to impact. No problem.
Ben Badr returned to the control room and issued his orders: “…Steer course two-seven-two…Make your speed 17…depth 600…”
General Tim Scannell knew he had just been dealt the unmistakable bum’s rush. He had called the President of the United States on the private line between his second-floor Pentagon HQ and the Oval Office, and for the first time in living memory, a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs had been put through to a White House Chief of Staff instead of the Chief Executive.
Big Bill Hatchard had been polite and accommodating, but that didn’t mask the fact that the phone call between the military’s executive chief and the C in C of all U.S. armed forces had been intercepted. And worse, Bill Hatchard had wanted to know precisely what the call was about. In the opinion of General Scannell, an unacceptable intrusion, but Hatchard had made it subtly clear that he either was told the reason for the call, or the CJC was not going to speak to President McBride.
And General Scannell, for the only time in a long and distinguished combat career, was forced to surrender. “Tell him it’s in relation to the contact from Hamas,” he said brusquely, his anger not so far beneath the surface. “And to call me back after he’s done with whatever the fuck he’s doing.”
The General slammed down the phone. On the other end, Bill Hatchard experienced no sense of triumph. Instead he felt a rather unnerving sense of apprehension, knowing that he had just made an enemy of America’s most senior and most revered Military Commander, a man who was not afraid in any way of either him or his boss. That was not good.
Bill Hatchard knew the rules. These high-ranking Pentagon guys were extremely powerful, and, more importantly, permanently installed in the White House. General Scannell would be there long after President McBride had departed. So would most of the other gold-braided Generals and Admirals who surrounded him. Quietly, Bill resolved not to mention the bad blood that had so quickly developed between himself and the CJC, to make light of it, as if all was well.
That was all forty-five minutes ago. And General Scannell still hadn’t heard anything from the Oval Office. He would undoubtedly have been even more furious had he heard the short, sharp conversation between the Chief and Hatchard half an hour previously. In essence it proceeded on the following lines:
“Sir, I wonder if you could return a call to the CJC’s office in the Pentagon?”
“What does he want?”
“Something about that Hamas business?”
“Have they received something new?”
“Don’t know, sir. He did not really want to talk to me, it was you he wanted.”
“Call him back and tell him if it’s new to try my line again. If it’s not, forget about it. I’m extremely busy.”
“Yes, sir.”
But the mighty nerve that had never deserted the slow-moving, ponderous Yale defensive lineman in a dozen games for the Eli’s now folded up on him. He simply could not bring himself to call the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and make him look small. This was nothing to do with tact and empathy. This was pure and simple dread. Bill Hatchard was not about to engage General Tim Scannell in open combat. And like many would-be executives, operating in waters too deep and too hot, he elected to do…nothing.
Which left an extremely angry General Scannell simmering in the Pentagon, currently on the line to Admiral Arnold Morgan—the only person around here who understands precisely what is going on.
The two men spoke very seriously. According to Admiral Morgan’s guess, the Barracuda was probably in the South Atlantic by now, somewhere in a million square miles of ocean off the east coast of Argentina.
He listened with interest to the General’s report of the troop movements out of the Middle East and was pleased to hear that there was no longer a Carrier Battle Group in the Gulf. Both men believed that the Hamas demand to vacate the U.S. Navy facility in Diego Garcia was insolent in the extreme. DG was, after all, an official British colony and, in any case, thousands of miles closer to Hindu India than Muslim Iran or Iraq.
But what occupied them most was the knowledge that the terrorist attack had been threatened for October 9. And that was a mere fifteen days away. Arnold was seriously worried about the deployment of one hundred U.S. warships in the Mid-Atlantic, both in terms of logistics and the fact that the C in C of all the U.S. Armed Forces knew nothing of the operation. And that he actively refused to know anything about the operation.
At this point, neither General Scannell nor Admiral Morgan cared one jot for the moral rectitude of the mission. As Arnold put it, “It cannot be right, just because the President says it’s right. And it cannot suddenly become wrong, just because the President refuses to consider it. The judgment itself, right or wrong, remains sacrosanct, whatever he thinks.”
The fact was that both men sincerely believed the United States to be under threat; a threat in which a million people or more might die, and several of its greatest cities might be destroyed. Unless, that was, the military moved fast and decisively. In General Scannell’s opinion, “If there is one chance in twenty this tidal wave might actually happen, we must either stop it, or harness all of our considerable defenses. Any other course of action represents a gross dereliction of duty.”
Given the evidence, the General put the chances of this attack on the lethal granite cliff face of La Palma not at one in twenty, but even money. They had to get the President on their side.
The duty officer stared at the screen, punching the button to download and print. The E-mail signal, unencrypted, was addressed personally to:
THE CHAIRMAN OF THE JOINT CHIEFS,
The Pentagon, Washington, U.S.A.