Scimitar SL-2 (2004) Page 37

  Kathy laughed at her incorrigible husband, as she always did.

  Back out in the dark waters of the Cape Verde Plain, Adm. Ben Badr held his personal letter from the Ayatollah. It read:

  Benjamin, you are a priceless soul in the cause of Allah. And soon you will carry his sword into battle. This letter is to remind you of the responsibility you bear in our crusade against the Great Satan.

  Perhaps I should remind you that our Islamic faith came originally from the deserts of Arabia. And it always had overtones of war. For the Prophet was also a Conqueror and a Statesman. There was no precedent for the word of the Prophet. It came directly from God, and within one hundred years, it destroyed the Persian Empire, and conquered great swaths of the Empire of Byzantium

  At that time, Arab armies swept through North Africa, obliterating Christianity in Egypt and in Tunisia, the home of their St. Augustine. Those armies ransacked the Iberian Peninsula and drove into France. Ah, yes, my son, from the very beginnings, we have been a warlike people.

  Remember too that Islamic science and scholarship were ahead of Europe for centuries. We gave them the idea of universities, which the Crusaders took home with them. We conquered Turkey, captured Constantinople, which became the capital of the Ottoman Empire.

  Only in the last three hundred years did the Unbelievers emerge from defeat and total irrelevance to dominate the Middle East. They redrafted our borders, invented new states, divided up our land, stole our wealth, our oil, and divided it up between European Imperialists, forcing upon us Western ways and what they think is culture.

  After we had triumphed for so long, the conquest of the entire world by our True Faith seemed inevitable. But it went wrong for us. And now Allah has granted us a way to make a huge stride to correct those three hundred years of Western arrogance and plundering.

  You must remember always, this is our endless Jihad, a war both spiritual and violent, and one that would have been blessed by the Prophet. This Jihad should be central to the life of every Muslim. We do not wish to steal what is not ours, but we dream of a wide Islamic Empire, one which is not dominated by the United States of America.

  My son, we want them out of the Middle East, and with them, their degenerate, debauched way of life. And if we cannot bend them to our wishes, we will surely make them grow weary of the conflict. I pray for your Holy Mission, and I pray that you and your brave warriors will succeed in this great venture. All Islam will one day understand what you have done. And we wish Godspeed to the Scimitars, and may Allah go with you.

  The Ayatollah did not sign the letter, but it was written in his own hand, and Ben Badr folded it and tucked it into the breast pocket of his shirt.

  Ben Badr was a consummate Naval professional, at ease with his crew, with his own abilities as a Commanding Officer, and with the rewards of his long training. He did not see himself as a candidate for a suicide mission, but in the deepest recesses of his own soul, unspoken and rarely considered, he knew he was prepared to die, if necessary, a hero, so long as he was fighting for what he and his people believed in. He was honored that he should be in the vanguard of those who were chosen. He would bring the submarine within range of the great volcano, and he would blast it with his tailor-made nuclear missiles. Either that, or he would die in the attempt. He neither sought nor expected death. But if death pressed its hot, fiery fist upon the hull of the Barracuda as he drove towards Cumbre Vieja, then he would face it with equanimity, and without fear.

  Admiral Badr checked with CPO Ali Zahedi to make sure that their course was correct and the speed still under 6 knots. He then moved down to the bank of computer screens outside the reactor room and talked for a while with CPO Ardeshir Tikku. Everything was still running sweetly after their long, and often slow, journey from the far eastern coast of China. This really was the most impressive ship, Russian engineering at its very best.

  The VM-5 PWA, reputed to be Russia’s most efficient nuclear reactor ever, was built up on the shores of the White Sea by the renowned engineers in Archangel. So far, deep within the Barracuda, it had never faltered and was still effortlessly providing steam for the GT3 A turbine. Ardeshir Tikku could not imagine any ship’s propulsion units running with more precision.

  The jet-black titanium hull slipped through the water. Every last piece of machinery on board was rubber-mounted, cutting out even the remotest vibration. If you listened carefully you might have heard the soft, distant hum of a computer. But that was no computer. That was the 47,500 hp turbine, driving this 8,000-tonner through the deep waters of the Atlantic.

  As each day passed Ben discerned a tightening of nerves among all the key men in the ship. Capt. Ali Akbar Mohtaj was very much within himself, spending much of his spare time with Comdr. Abbas Shafii, the nuclear specialist on board, who would prime the detonators on the Scimitar missiles. They had already decided to launch both the SL-2s at the mountain, especially if there was a problem with the satellites.

  Two SL-2s rather than one, the equivalent of 400,000 tons of TNT, would seem to guarantee the savage destruction of the entire southwestern corner of La Palma. Even if they were detected, even if American warships rained depth charges down upon them, even if the U.S. Navy found them and launched torpedoes, there would still be time. Only seconds. But time for the Barracuda to launch the two unstoppable missiles that would cause the tidal wave to end all tidal waves. Capt. Ali Akbar Mohtaj and Comdr. Abbas Shafii had thought about that a lot. They’d still have time.

  Meanwhile, Washington, D.C., prepared to meet its doom. If Ben Badr’s missiles hit the Cumbre, the Presidency of Paul Bedford would be flown en masse, at the last possible hour, direct from the White House to the new secret base of the Administration, at the northern end of the Shenandoah Mountains, out near Mountain Falls.

  The base, with all of its high-tech communication systems and direct lines to the Pentagon and various foreign governments, was constructed inside a heavily patrolled military base. It was a vast complex built almost entirely underground, fortuitously in the rolling hills to the west of the Shenandoah Valley, several hundred feet above sea level.

  Known in Washington circles as Camp Goliath—as opposed to Camp David—it was always envisaged as a refuge for the Government and the Military if the U.S. ever came under nuclear attack and Washington, D.C., was threatened. It took three days to activate all the communications, and it now stood in isolated, secret splendor, a five-star hotel with offices, situation rooms, every secretarial facility, every possible element of twenty-first-century technology required to keep the world moving.

  The President, along with his principal staff members and their assistants, would fly to Camp Goliath in one of the huge U.S. Marine Super Stallions, a three-engined Sikorsky CH-53E helicopter capable of airlifting fifty-five Marines into trouble zones.

  Just in case Hamas proved even more ambitious than it seemed so far, the helo was equipped with three 12.7mm machine guns. It would rendezvous in the skies above Washington with four cruising F-15 Tomcat fighter bombers to escort it to the American heartland beyond the Shenandoah River.

  Camp Goliath was located 15 miles southwest of Winchester, in the wooded hills above the valley where “Stonewall” Jackson’s iron-souled Southern regulars had held sway over the Union Army for so many months in the 1860s, and when Maj. Gen. Nathaniel Banks and his 8,000 troops were driven right back across the river—Harpers Ferry at the confluence of the Shenandoah and the Potomac. Here, General Jackson’s men captured 13,000 Northern troops; it was the site of Fort Royal, Cedar Ridge, and a little farther north, the bitter killing fields of Antietam.

  Camp Goliath stood above those historic Civil War farmlands on the Virginia-Maryland border, where the two great rivers met. And if the missiles hit the mountain in La Palma, and that great complex was activated, Hamas would surely feel the wrath of another generation of ruthless American fighting men.

  Meanwhile, the Washington evacuation continued. And by Sunday morning, the thousands o
f National Guardsmen who had joined the troops in the city were concentrating on a task equally as important as moving the Federal Government and its possessions out of harm’s way. They were now trying to safeguard the thousands of artifacts, documents, books, and pictures that recorded and illustrated the founding of the Nation and its subsequent development.

  Much of this priceless hoard is contained within the Smithsonian Institution—another great sprawling complex, which embraces fourteen museums—the collective custodians of literally millions of priceless exhibits, ranging from centuries-old masterpieces to modern spacecraft. In the gigantic National Air and Space Museum alone, there are twenty-three galleries displaying 240 aircraft and 50 missiles, a planetarium, and a theater with a five-story screen.

  Already, some of the museums understood they were not going to get this done, with thousands of items packed and in storage, not even on display. All of the staff had called the White House for guidance. Admiral Morgan was impatient: Priorities. Establish priorities, hear me? Concentrate on objects of true historic value. Forget all about those special exhibits. Abandon all mock-ups and models. Get photographs, copies of drawings. But concentrate on what’s real. And keep it moving over there…

  National museum curators are unaccustomed to such brusque and decisive tones. In some of the art galleries, there were so many pictures, it was impossible to crate and ship them all. Decisions had to be made to leave some in the upper floors of the buildings intact in the hope they might survive the initial force of the tsunami, and the subsequent flooding would not reach the top story.

  Chain gangs of troops and employees were moving up and down the massive staircases of the National Gallery of Art, trying to lift masterpieces, some of them from the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, either down to awaiting trucks or up to the higher galleries, please God, above the incoming waters.

  There were some tasks too onerous to even contemplate. The warships, submarines, and aircraft displayed in the 10,000-foot-long Memorial Museum in the Washington Navy Yard would have to take their chances. So would the massive collection of historic machinery, the heavy-duty engines that drove America’s industrial past, all located on the first floor of the National Museum of American History.

  An even more difficult task was the National Zoological Park. The Madison Bank took a special interest in the animals’ safety and set up an ops room in their Dupont Circle

  branch. Twenty people spent the day in a frenzy of activity, contacting other zoos inside a 100-mile radius, checking their spare capacity, trying to find temporary homes and suitable habitat for the creatures, in the limited time available.

  They hired cages from Ringling Brothers and trucks from U-Haul. They even commandeered a couple of freight trains from the Norfolk Southern Railroad. Everyone wanted to help the animals, though the Baltimore baseball management balked when a young Madison Bank zealot demanded they turn the 48,000-seat Oriole Park at Camden Yards into a bear pit.

  By the afternoon, the evacuation of the Zoological Park was well under way. And all over the city there were even more poignant reminders of the horrors to come. The historic statues, by special order of Admiral Morgan, were being removed and shipped out to the Maryland hills.

  This had caused the first real friction of the entire operation, because the National Parks official, who administers to the historic sculptures and their upkeep, decreed the task to be utterly impossible.

  “What do you mean impossible?” rasped the voice from the Oval Office. “Get the Army Corps of Engineers in here with heavy lifting gear, cranes, and trucks.”

  “It simply will not work, sir. The sculptures, in almost every instance, are too heavy.”

  “Well, somebody put ’em up, didn’t they? Someone lifted them.”

  “Well, yes, sir. But I imagine those people are all dead. And you can’t fax the dead, can you?”

  Arnold did not have the time for “smartass remarks from fucking bureaucrats.” “Guess not,” he replied. “You better try E-mail. But get the statues moved at all costs.” At which point he banged down the telephone.

  Within hours, the Army Corps of Engineers was on its way from Craney Island, at the head of the Norfolk shipyards, up the Potomac with barges full of the necessary hardware. By dusk, the great Theodore Roosevelt Memorial was being lifted from its island in the middle of the Potomac.

  And the 78-foot-high Iwo Jima Marine Corps Memorial, one of the largest sculptures ever cast, was being raised by crane, together with its black marble plinth, 500 yards from the Potomac at the north end of Arlington National Cemetery. The sight of the memorial being removed attracted a large, sorrowful crowd, watching the apparent conclusion of America’s most touching tribute to the courage of the U.S. Marines.

  “Don’t worry about it,” called one young soldier. “We’ll have this baby right back here by the end of the month.”

  Officers from the Engineering Corps were already inside the classic domed rotunda of the Jefferson Memorial, which houses the 19-foot-high statue of America’s third President, gazing out towards the Tidal Basin. It was a difficult task, but not impossible. Outside, there were four different-sized cranes and fifty troops to do the job, all experts in their trade.

  A young Lieutenant, under strict orders, used his mobile phone to call the White House.

  “We got it, sir. The Jefferson will be on a truck by midnight.”

  “That’s my boy…How about the Oriental cherry trees around the outside?” replied Admiral Morgan.

  “Gardeners say no, sir. They’ll die if we move ’em.”

  “They’ll sure as hell die if they get hit by a fucking tidal wave,” said Arnold.

  “Yes, sir. I did mention that to the gardeners. Well, words to that effect. But they said the trees could be replaced. It was a waste of time.”

  “Glad to see those gardeners are thinking, right Lieutenant?”

  “Right, sir.”

  The Lincoln Memorial, Arnold’s favorite, presented an even bigger challenge. Another 19-foot sculpture, this one of solid marble—Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth President, seated on a high chair, overlooking the Reflecting Pool of the mall, surrounded by his own immortal words carved in stone.

  It was considerably heavier than the sculpture of Thomas Jefferson, but the Engineering Corps was undaunted. As darkness fell, they began moving two cranes through the twelve towering white colonnades along the front of the building.

  There were dozens of others, some of which would be designated to take their chances, while others would be lifted and moved, like the Ulysses Grant Memorial and the bronze casting of Andrew Jackson on horseback, made from British cannons captured at the Battle of Pensacola in 1812.

  The eternal flame, which burned in a bronze font at the grave of the thirty-fifth President, John F. Kennedy, in Arlington National Cemetery, could not be extinguished, and Admiral Morgan and Senator Teddy decreed that a new flame would be lit from the original and transported to another military cemetery.

  They ordered the flame, which had burned without interruption since the President was laid to rest in 1963, to be extinguished the moment that the new one was relocated in consecrated ground. The entire grave site and Memorial were then to be sealed immediately in steel and concrete, in readiness for the relighting when the floodwaters subsided.

  Senator Kennedy was uncharacteristically shy and reserved about his late brother’s memory. But Arnold said precisely what was on his mind…“I’m not having some goddamned terrorist snuffing out the Eternal Flame at the grave of a truly great man. If it’s going to be extinguished, the Navy will attend to it. And the Navy will relight it at the proper time. Just so its light never dies, right here on American soil. And Teddy’s with me on that.”

  America was a nation that honored its heroes, and one of the largest memorials to be removed was the solemn 500-foot-long gleaming black marble wall that immortalizes the men who died, or remain missing, in the Vietnam War. Thousands of pilgrims visit
ed here each year, just to reach out and touch the stone, just to see a name. Arnold Morgan ordered it to be removed “by strong men wearing velvet gloves.” “I do not want to see one scratch on that surface when we return it,” he said.

  And there was already a company of Army Engineers in Constitution Gardens, carefully wrapping the long line of angular black marble tablets that bear the names of every last one of the 58,156 soldiers who were lost. The Memorial was set less than 300 yards from the stern, giant figure of Abraham Lincoln, who, perhaps above all other Americans, would have understood the cruel perversity of that distant battlefield.

  Admiral Morgan ordered an evacuation of the Peace Memorial erected to honor Navy personnel lost at sea during the Civil War and he asked someone to remove and store the statue of Benjamin Franklin, which depicts the old statesman in his long coat, holding the 18th-century Treaty of Alliance between the United States and France.