Nimitz Class (1997) Read online

  “Yes. I’m really looking forward to that. We have a lot of mutual acquaintances. I did a stint at the British embassy in Washington, as Naval attaché. I knew the previous CNO.”

  “Ah, yes. Just before my time. I think you’ll like Scott. He’s a very fine officer, and much more fun than you first think. Damned clever too…like all you senior guys.”

  “You flatter us, sir. We’re all very single-minded.”

  “So are defensive linemen,” replied the President. “But that’s not quite the same as being the commanding officer of a nuclear submarine or an aircraft carrier.”

  “Possibly not, sir, but I must say there was a really terrific chap played for the Redskins when I was here….”

  The President laughed. “Before we get back for lunch, Admiral, let me ask you a question which you will not have the slightest trouble answering.”

  “Of course.”

  “You are in a nuclear submarine. Your enemy, positioned in your stern arcs, fires a wire-guided torpedo at you on passive sonar, from a range of three thousand yards. With one thousand yards to run, it switches to active, pings you, and accelerates hard, straight at you. What do you do?”

  “I go full ahead and present my quarter to the torpedo, trying to hang on to my half-mile start. This means he is going to take something like another minute to catch me. At the same time I fire three or even four decoys to coax the torpedo away. I put the bow up and head for the surface at top speed. The torpedo gets very confused up there. The echoes off the waves interfere with its sonar once it gets within thirty feet of daylight. Also it can be confused by the turbulence in the water right behind my propeller. I’d almost certainly get away.”

  “Is that what you taught Benjamin Adnam, Admiral?”

  “Yessir. That’s exactly what I taught him.”

  “Thank you, Admiral, very much.”

  Dinner was arranged for the President’s house, Aspen Lodge, the grandest of the many residences scattered discreetly among the wooded acres of the estate. A succession of American Presidents had loved this place, from Roosevelt, who founded it, Eisenhower, who named it after his grandson, to Jimmy Carter, who negotiated the Middle East peace treaty here.

  Sir Iain MacLean was ensconced in Dogwood Lodge, where Anwar Sadat stayed in 1978. He spent most of the afternoon reading the reports of the Jefferson incident, then he strolled over to Aspen shortly after seven-thirty in the evening. He walked straight into the kind of discussion he might almost have predicted. The President and Admiral Dunsmore were wrestling with the question of whether Adnam was on the Kilo.

  The introductions were made, but the conversation remained rooted in speculation, on the man who wiped out the American aircraft carrier. They explained the speed with which the torpedo had hit the Kilo, and they both heard Sir Iain murmur, “Mmmmm. Crazy Ivan.”

  Then Scott Dunsmore asked the Scottish admiral directly: “Would you say Adnam was on board when we hit the Kilo?”

  “Absolutely not. And ‘Crazy Ivan’ merely clinches it for me. In my view there is only one man in all of the world who could have sent that four-line tip-off. And in my opinion that was Adnam.

  “Gentlemen, I know the man. He is ice-cold, self-protective, and damned smart. There is no possibility he remained on that submarine. He would have considered that tantamount to suicide. He either talked his way off, threatened his way off, or fought his way off. But he would not have stayed.

  “Besides, he had to get off. In order to complete his task.”

  “He did?” said the President.

  “Oh, certainly. The Iraqis were never going to allow the Kilo to dock. I always assumed they would, in the end, scuttle it, and we’d just find a bit of wreckage. Adnam, however, went a step further. He didn’t scuttle it. He didn’t have to. He got you to do it for him, with one, short, simple, air-mail letter from Cairo to Fort Meade.”

  “Jesus,” said the President. “That little sonofabitch. He’s been one jump ahead of us all the way.”

  “Not just one jump ahead of you. He’s been one jump ahead of everyone involved. One jump ahead of us, who misguidedly taught him. One jump ahead of the Mossad, one jump ahead of the Russians…three jumps ahead, I suspect, of the Iranians, the sworn enemies of his country. And a jump ahead of the United States. Tricky little bastard, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Clever, tricky little bastard.”

  “And the really worrying thing is, sir, there is not that much a great power can do about these bloody terrorist people. You could of course declare war, or even make a preemptive nuclear strike against Iraq. But it’s awfully messy. Half of the international community would go off its rocker with indignation. The damned media would be full of pictures of destroyed Iraqi hospitals and schools. You know what it would be like.”

  “I’m afraid I do, Admiral. All too well. In the end I suppose we just have to accept that if we are to police the world, with a dozen Carrier Battle Groups, we are going to end up, sometime, somewhere, losing one. It’s a terrible price, but the alternative is world chaos. And I am afraid the curse of the twenty-first century might very well be weapons of mass destruction in the hands of fanatics. Maniacs.”

  “Yessir. However, we are not powerless. We can persuade the Russians to cooperate by not selling those damned Kilos to nations of unstable government. But I hardly think you, Mr. President, could make a general policy to wipe out any small foreign submarine fleet you may consider to be a menace to the free world.”

  “No. We cannot go on doing that. But as you may have guessed, we did partly attend to that problem.”

  “I did guess that, sir. More or less the moment I heard about it.”

  “Meanwhile, there is not much more we can do, militarily, without admitting what happened to the carrier, which we will not do.”

  “There is of course the option of the dams,” said Sir Iain.

  “Which dams?” asked Scott Dunsmore.

  “The ones on the Tigris. The ones the Iranians were trying to blow up during their war with Iraq.”

  “I remember that,” said the President. “One of them was called the Samarra Barrage, correct?”

  “That’s it, sir,” replied Admiral MacLean. “Back at home, I shoot a few grouse with a chap who works on the Iraqi desk in the Foreign Office. He was telling me about it quite recently.”

  The admiral outlined, as well as he remembered, the facts about the two great Iraqi dams—the Samarra Barrage, which stands 115 miles north of Baghdad and holds 85 billion cubic meters of water. The second one, five times as big, is called the Darband-I-Khan Reservoir, and holds three cubic kilometres of water. This one is situated on a tributary of the Tigris, 130 miles northeast of the city, near the mountain town of Halabjah, right on Iran’s border, where three rivers converge.

  “It was the huge Darband Reservoir the Iranians tried to blow,” said the admiral. “But the Iraqis somehow found out and counter attack…that was the battle of Halabjah. It later transpired the Iranians were also on their way to the Samarra Barrage, but they never got there either.”

  “Yes,” said the President. “As I recall there was some talk of us taking one of those dams out during the Gulf War, but it was rejected because no one quite had the stomach to drown several million Iraqis. Matter of fact, I would not do that either.”

  “Quite so, Mr. President,” replied Sir Iain. “But my chap at the Foreign Office says these things have been studied much more scientifically recently. They do not assess the loss of life would be anything like so great as the Iranians hoped if they blew the dams. Maybe even minimal. But it would certainly wreck the Iraqi economy for years.”

  “How difficult to do?” asked the President.

  “Just a bit. But no more so than removing the Ayatollah’s submarines. More important is the timing. To put Baghdad completely out of action my chap assesses both dams would have to go at the same time. It would have to be right when the winter snow melt in the mountains was happening, when there was maximum
water. Then you could take Iraq right out of the world trouble equation for years and years. They’d be crippled financially, and probably emotionally.”

  “Then I guess we’ve got three months to consider whether the men of the Thomas Jefferson should be thoroughly avenged.”

  “Yessir. You do. But I won’t be able to help much then. You won’t need submarines….”

  The President was thoughtful. And Admiral MacLean spoke again. “You know, sir, I’d be inclined to rethink the whole procedure of Carrier Battle Groups. Let’s face it, we’ve just been shown, quite conclusively, that in these dangerous days, the big American police-man, on his world patrol, can be killed by a relatively unsophisticated knifeman. Because all defensive measures leak. No system is 100-percent certain.

  “Perhaps we should put smaller, cheaper units up front, which will allow us to retain our military capacity less densely.

  “If the guerrilla fanatic is going to strike at us, let’s give him a lesser target…not a multibillion-dollar carrier with six thousand people on board. That perhaps should be kept further back, safe and ready, for when we decide to punish the aggressor.

  “I expect you will have read, in the old days of Empire, we Brits always put a completely expendable gunboat up front, as a ‘mark of our interest.’ The battleship only showed up if the gunboat was attacked.

  “Sir, if we have a troublesome area in a city, we send in police patrols. We do not send in the chief of police.”

  The President’s face lit up as he cottoned on to the political advantages in such a new strategy. Admiral Dunsmore himself said, “Yes. It’s an interesting and often-considered thought. A few years back I personally doubted the wisdom of placing a huge carrier right between Taiwan and China….”

  But just then a uniformed security guard came through the door with a message for Admiral MacLean to call his daughter, Laura, at ten the following morning.

  “It’s a fairly local call, sir,” he said, conditioned by years of parsimony in the Royal Navy. “She took a few days off to visit a friend in New York. They’re going to a couple of operas or something. I think she’s staying outside the city with friends, Connecticut or New Jersey, I suppose. It’s a three-one-six area code.”

  “She sure is outside the city, Admiral,” replied the President. “Three-one-six is just to the west of New York. About fifteen hundred miles, out near my country, in the southern half of the great American state of Kansas.”

  “Oh dear,” said the admiral, wearily. “I was rather afraid of that. Her mother will be absolutely thrilled.”

  December 14. Fort Meade, Maryland.

  Admiral Morgan carefully slit open the special-delivery package which had arrived on his desk. It contained a small newspaper cutting, mounted on a sheet of crested diplomatic paper from the Israeli embassy.

  CAIRO. Monday. The body of a man in his early forties, wearing Arab dress, was discovered by Cairo police in the precincts of the Citadel early this morning.

  According to Police Chief Hamdi, the man had been shot once through the back of the head. His officers were acting on information received by telephone shortly after midnight. No murder weapon has yet been found, but police are still searching the area around the Mohammed Ali Mosque where the body was found.

  Chief Hamdi said that the incident bore the marks of a professional killing, carried out by a person or persons unknown. The body, in his opinion, had been robbed. It contained no documents, identification, or credit cards. There was, however, “considerable cash.” Police inquiries are continuing.

  Admiral Morgan delved deeper into the outer package, and pulled out a slim leather cigarette case. Inside the case was a small military badge, an anchor entwined with a heraldic vine, set upon a silver submarine—the coveted insignia of the Israeli Submarine Service. Looking closely Arnold Morgan could make out faded initials in the leather, “BA.”

  The accompanying white card brought a smile to the face of Admiral Morgan. Scrawled upon it were the words, “Just to remind him he was still a commander! Arrogant little bugger, wasn’t he? Best wishes, DG.”

  Admiral Morgan sat and thought. The leather cigarette case he would keep in his personal little military museum, which was comprised mostly of souvenirs from missions fought and won.

  The little badge he resolved to give to the President, as a souvenir of the fight to bring to justice the killer of the Thomas Jefferson. In the end, Boomer Dunning’s torpedo and the Mossad’s bullet had provided an extreme form of rough justice. But nonetheless justice.

  Midday. December 20. The White House.

  The two Marine guards shut the door softly, leaving Bill Baldridge in the Oval Office, face to face with the President.

  “Hey, Bill. Glad you could come,” he said, striding around his desk to shake hands. “I’ve arranged a little lunch for us, with Admiral Dunsmore and Admiral Morgan. I wanted the opportunity to thank all three of you in private for a damned difficult job conducted with just super professionalism.”

  “Thank you, sir,” replied Bill. “I appreciate that. Very much.”

  The President was silent for a moment, and then he said: “As you know, the operation was black, strictly nonattributable so there’s nothing I can really do about a reward. I can’t have you promoted, since you’ve retired from the Navy, and I cannot decorate anyone for their part in such a mission.” He grinned and added, “So I guess you’re just going to have to make do with my heartfelt personal thanks.”

  “That, sir, would be more than sufficient.”

  The President motioned for Bill to be seated and then he walked around to his desk once more. “Bill,” he said. “I am not quite as stupid as some people think. I remember it was you who blew the whistle on the accident theory.”

  “Yessir. At the time it was a pretty lonely spot to be in.”

  “I know it was. I also know it was you who insisted that the Arab commander of that Kilo must have somehow left a trail. You went and found him, identified him for the Mossad. Had you not found him, we might still be scratching our heads.”

  “I was lucky in Northwood, sir.”

  “I also remember it was you who warned me that Adnam was not in the Kilo when we hit it.”

  “Crazy Ivan, right?”

  “Crazy Ivan. The same words that wonderful Scottish admiral used. You got him for us too. And you were in Columbia at the final moment when we hit the Russian boat. Bill, I’d like to make you the youngest goddamned admiral in the Navy. But I can’t.”

  “Don’t worry, sir. There’s not that many warships on the prairie.”

  The President smiled. And then he produced from his desk drawer a small package, which he gave to the rancher from Kansas. “Open this, will you? I’m just going to the next office for a few minutes, then I’ll be back, and we’ll go and meet Scott and Arnold.”

  The President left, and Bill Baldridge stood alone in the Oval Office. He removed the wrapping, and held a flat, black jewelry box in his hands. When he opened it, he saw only a sheet of official White House paper, on which was inscribed a careful handwritten note from the President, signed only with his first name.

  The words were simple: “For Bill. Because you were brave enough to warn me. And because you are my friend.”

  Beneath the paper, pinned to the deep red velvet of the box, was a small military badge, an anchor, entwined with a heraldic vine, set upon a silver submarine.