The car reached the end of the driveway and turned west on Calvert. Outside the sweep of the headlights, the world was dark and powerless. Not because of some accident or natural disaster, but because of a deliberate attack against the city’s vital infrastructure.
The North Koreans were doing a lot of things that no hostile nation had ever done before, and no one seemed to have a clue what those crazy bastards were going to try next. Now that she thought of it, maybe the guards and the armor weren’t such a bad idea after all.
When the limo turned left onto Rock Creek Parkway, Mary reached for the car phone. Her government-issue cell phone was capable of making secure calls, but getting the encryption to sync up usually required a lot of tinkering. With the limo’s STE phone, the process was simple: click the Fortezza-Hyper crypto card into the slot, and press the ‘Secure’ button. The phone would do the rest.
Mary carried out these two simple steps and then called up the speed dial number for Rear Admiral Cynthia Long, Commander of the Office of Naval Intelligence.
The time was a minute or two before midnight, but the call was picked up after the first ring. “Admiral Long’s office, Lieutenant Jessup speaking.”
Mary settled back into the upholstery. “Lieutenant, this is the secretary of defense. Go secure on your end, and then please get me Admiral Long.”
Following a rapid succession of low-pitched audio tones, the green ‘SECURE’ light illuminated on Mary’s phone.
“Ma’am, the line is now secure,” Lieutenant Jessup said, “but the admiral is in a briefing at the moment.”
“Then go drag her out of it,” Mary said.
There was a pause before the lieutenant spoke again. “Ma’am, the admiral is meeting with senior ONI staff. She left orders not to interrupt her.”
Mary bit back the urge to raise her voice. She’d run into this particular wall before. Military personnel, especially the junior ones, sometimes had trouble taking civilian authority seriously. As they saw it, if you weren’t wearing a uniform, you couldn’t possibly be very important.
No problem. Nothing Mary couldn’t fix with a bit of minor calibration.
“I understand,” she said. “Could you please take a message for Admiral Long?”
“Of course, Ma’am,” said Lieutenant Jessup.
“Good,” Mary said. “Kindly tell the admiral to have her letter of resignation on my desk no later than seven a.m. Sorry, that would be oh-seven-hundred hours to you.”
There was complete silence on the other end of the line.
Mary spoke again. “Did you get that written down? Can you repeat it back to me?”
The young officer’s words came out in a rush as he tried to stammer a response.
Mary cut him off. “If your boss can’t find time for my calls, I’ll replace her with someone who can. Do I make myself clear, Lieutenant Jessup?”
“Yes, Ma’am! I mean, yes, Madam Secretary! I’ll get the admiral on the phone right away!”
Mary reached over and stroked the top of Knut’s head. “You do that,” she said. “And if I’m not talking to Admiral Long in the next sixty seconds, I’m going to hang up this phone and wait for her resignation to hit my desk.”
“Yes, Ma’am! I’ll be right back!”
Less than half of the sixty second deadline had elapsed when a female voice came on the line. “Admiral Long speaking. What can I do for you, Madam Secretary?”
Mary was looking through the limousine’s windows when she spoke. A pile of what looked to be chairs was burning on the sidewalk, six or eight people crowded around its circle of light and warmth. Farther down the block, a car was in flames.
“One of our most capable warships has been cut to ribbons by some type of North Korean super-submarine that’s not supposed to exist,” Mary said. “We don’t know the body count yet, but it’s not going to be pretty. We’ve got a few dozen nuclear missiles sitting right off the coast of Florida, and the citizens of our nation’s capital are burning cars in the street to keep from freezing to death.”
Mary checked her wristwatch. “I’m scheduled to brief the president in about forty minutes, and I very much suspect that I’m going to be out of a job before the sun comes up.”
“So here’s what you can do for me, Admiral. You can tell me how in the name of God we let this happen…”
CHAPTER 21
The voice was hushed but urgent. “Wake up, COB!”
Master Chief Ernie Pooler grunted, fumbled absently at his gray Navy blanket, and resumed snoring with the abandon of a tranquilized lumberjack.
A hard sleeper by nature, he was down so far into dreamland that he was practically comatose.
The star of his dream was a pigeon. Not just any old pigeon, but the one that had gotten itself into the ventilation sump aboard USS Dallas.
It had been a pitiful looking thing, skinny and bedraggled. Instead of surfacing and letting the bird fly away to fend for itself, the CO had decided to keep it aboard for the rest of the deployment. One of the engineers had improvised a cage, and the untidy creature had been adopted as the 128th member of the crew. Every watch section had fed the damned thing, and after three and a half months of overindulging on bread crumbs, crackers, and potato chips, the pigeon had become too fat to fly.
When the Dallas hit homeport at the end of the cruise, the CO had walked down the brow with that overweight feather ball riding on his shoulder like a parrot out of some old black and white swashbuckler flick.
The actual experience had been surreal enough, but the dream version of the bird was even more outlandish. It was dressed in a sequined tuxedo jacket, complete with black cane and rhinestone top hat. Unlike the real pigeon, whose vocalizations had been limited to the usual repertoire of twitters and coos, the dream bird could belt out show tunes like Mitzi Gaynor. It was singing now, nonsensical lyrics about dancing waffles and a lovesick toaster jilted by a pair of salad tongs.
Just as the musical avian was ramping up to the refrain, someone laid a hand on Pooler’s upper arm and shook it. “COB, wake up!”
Master Chief Pooler came alert with a promptness rarely found in deep sleepers. He rolled over and pulled back his privacy curtains to face the Messenger of the Watch.
The young sailor was dimly illuminated by the glow of a red-lensed flashlight. “Sorry to wake you, COB. But the Skipper wants to see you in the Control Room.”
Pooler yawned. “Tell him I’m on my way.”
The messenger nodded. “Aye-aye, COB.” He turned and disappeared down the darkened aisle of the berthing compartment.
As soon as the sailor was out of the way, the master chief climbed out of his rack and dressed by touch. With a career’s worth of practice at late night awakenings, he moved quickly, quietly, and confidently in the dark.
Chief Petty Officer berthing — known by long-standing Navy tradition as the “Goat Locker”—was one deck below the Control Room, and about seventy feet forward.
Pooler covered the distance in well under a minute, and walked straight to the commanding officer. “Morning, Skipper. You wanted to see me, sir?”
Captain Townsend held out a metal clipboard with a hardcopy message attached. “Morning, COB. Have a look at this.”
The master chief accepted the clipboard and began to read.
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