They had eleven days in which to make their next launch zone and would spend three of them moving as fast as they dared for thirty-three hours to the Ridge, then forty hours heading north above its rocky underwater cliffs. That would give them eight days to tiptoe over the ultrasensitive SOSUS wires — traps that Shakira had warned Ben were primed to scream the place down if any intruding submarine crossed them. Once they turned east from the Atlantic Ridge, they would be in latitudes around 28 to 29 degrees, 300 nautical miles north of Miami, similar latitudes to places like Daytona Beach, Jacksonville, Cape Canaveral. Finally, they would take up position somewhere east of La Palma, depending on the U.S. defenses that Ben Badr fully expected would be patrolling the area.
In Lieutenant Commander Shakira’s opinion, there was no way that the U.S. Navy was going to let foreign submarines go charging around in the Atlantic anywhere north of the 25th parallel without wanting to know a lot about that ship’s business.
Admiral Badr, now without his ace-precision missile-direction officer and assistant navigator, was resolved to be excessively careful. He looked forward to his next satellite communication, when someone would doubtlessly tell him whether he had managed to wipe out the island of Montserrat.
The CIA had been on the case all night. And generally speaking, they had drawn a blank as big as that in the newsrooms of the television networks and the American afternoon newspapers: the totally unexplained, and unexpected, eruption of the most volatile volcano in the Western Hemisphere. No reasons. No warnings. No theories.
The CIA was well up to speed with the threats and demands of the Hamas freedom fighters, and even more with the views of the most senior military figures in the nation.
They put twenty different field agents on the project, working through the night, searching and checking for any sign of a missile attack on Montserrat. But so far, they had turned up nothing except for the absolute bafflement of the local scientists, whose equipment had registered zero before the first explosion from Gage’s Mountain.
They sent in a preliminary report to the National Security Agency at around 0500, which Lieutenant Commander Ramshawe read with interest. Particularly the last paragraph, written by the senior case officer:…The complete absence of any warning before the eruption is regarded by the professionals as unprecedented. Every volcano betrays the smallest movement of the earth beneath its mountain, and indeed any upwards surge of the magma. This time there was nothing. Which, we think, indicates detonation by a man-made device.
Jimmy Ramshawe sifted through the reports, and the more he read, the more it became obvious that the Barracuda had struck again. Even small eruptions in relatively harmless volcanoes are signaled on their seismographs. And the equipment stationed in the Soufriere Hills was much more sophisticated than most, hooked up to a brand-new computerized system in the observatory.
There were reports of staggering amounts of ash covering Montserrat’s buildings, even in the supposedly safe north part of the island. Any building with a flat roof seemed to have a minimum of 12 to 18 inches of the stuff — thick, heavy ash, more like baking flour than the light, airy remnants of a bonfire.
There were reports of ash covering the gardens of Antigua on the southwest coast, especially at Curtain Bluff and Johnsons Point. Guadeloupe awoke to a hot, gray cast over the whole of Port Louis. The southern beaches of Nevis were distinctly off-white. And the southern end of Montserrat was on fire. Miles of green vegetation were still burning from end to end of the exclusion zone. The devastation was almost complete in the south, with even the old disused jetties on fire out over the water.
As the morning wore on, the pictures became more and more graphic. The television networks had helicopter crews up and filming at first light. This was the second mammoth volcano explosion in the Americas within four months, and every news editor in every newsroom in the entire country knew that this was a very big story. Not one of them, however, had any idea precisely how big.
Admiral Morris had his 48-inch screen tuned to CNN as soon as he arrived at Fort Meade. There were other home-news items of some interest, but nothing to rival the live pictures from what looked like the detonation of an atomic bomb in a Caribbean island paradise.
He and Lieutenant Commander Ramshawe took only ten minutes to scan the incoming reports, and a lot less to arrive at the inescapable conclusion that Hamas had done exactly what they had threatened.
Pay attention…You will see what we can do…and perhaps change your mind. The words of the letter were stark in the minds of both men. Dead on time, almost to the minute, they had blown another volcano. Now everything was in place. Tony Tilton’s missiles were real. They had exploded Mount St. Helens. Last night had proved it. And now the U.S.A. faced the greatest threat in its long history of wars and battles.
Admiral Morris picked up the telephone and called Arnold Morgan, confirming their meeting in General Scannell’s office at 0800. Arnold had been up most of the night, studying charts of the Atlantic, wondering exactly where the Barracuda might be, wondering where it was headed, wondering how to catch it. In thirty years, George Morris had never seen him so worried, so utterly anxious.
He and Lieutenant Commander Ramshawe gathered up all relevant charts and documents and climbed into a staff car at 0700, fighting the traffic and arriving at the Pentagon by 0750. Up in the General’s office, the pervasive concern of the military had been heightened by the arrival of a new communication from the Middle East. E-mail. Traceable only to either Syria, Jordan, Iraq, or Iran. Useless.
It had arrived at 0415, and it was formal in its tone…To the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, The Pentagon, Washington, D.C.: We do not, you see, make idle threats. Remove your armed forces from the Middle East now. And bring the Israelis into line. You have exactly eleven days. — Hamas.
Admiral Morgan was already in his place at the head of General Scannell’s conference table. He was flanked by General Bart Boyce and the CJC himself. General Hudson was also in attendance, with Admiral Dickson and the Atlantic Fleet’s Commander in Chief, Admiral Frank Doran, former Commanding Officer of the Lake Erie, a 10,000-ton guided-missile cruiser out of Norfolk, Virginia.
The other newcomer was General Kenneth Clark, Commandant of the United States Marine Corps, and Admiral Dickson said he had the Commander of Submarine Force (Atlantic Fleet) on standby to fly in from Norfolk, if required.
Admiral Morgan opened the discussions by saying, “Gentlemen, it is perfectly clear now that Hamas have exploded their second volcano. We were 99 percent sure they had erupted Mount St. Helens, and I think we can now make that 100 percent.
“Last night, precisely as they had promised, they blew up Montserrat. I guess that’s game set and match to Hamas. With one match still to play…I need hardly remind you of the peril we are all in…It’s a scenario that once seemed remote, then much more likely…Now it’s a goddamned certainty. Are we broadly agreed on that summation?”
Everyone at the table nodded.
“So that leaves us with three essential tasks — the first of which is to begin the evacuation of Washington, Boston, and New York. The second is to nail the Barracuda, if and when it shows. Third is to hit and destroy the missile or missiles, if and when they are launched at the Cumbre Vieja.”