Vixen 03 Part 62

"Tell your boys we're free. We're back in deep water!"

The engine crew tackled their respective duties again, their faces wearing relieved smiles. One oiler began a popular chant and soon they all took it up in chorus with the hum from the great turbines.

Emma did not join in. Only he knew the truth behind the /owa's strange voyage. In a few hours the men around him would be dead. They might have been reprieved if the Iowa's flat bottom had remained firmly stuck in the shoal's mud. But it was not to be.

Fawkes was the lucky one, he thought. d.a.m.ned lucky. So far.

The President sat at the end of a long conference table in the emergency executive offices three hundred feet beneath the White House and stared Dale Jarvis squarely in the eye. "I don't have to tell you, Dale, the last thing I need is a crisis during the last few days of my administration, especially a crisis that can't wait until morning."

Jarvis felt the tingling fingers of nervousness. The President was noted for his volcanic temper. Jarvis had been present on more than one

occasion when the famous mustache, a delight of political cartoonists, fairly bristled with wrath. With little to lose, except his job, Jarvis counterattacked.

"I am not in the custom of interrupting your sleep, sir, nor the martial dreams of the Joint Chiefs, unless I have a d.a.m.ned good reason."

Defense Secretary Timothy March sucked in his breath. "I think what Dale means-"

"What I mean," Jarvis said, "is that somewhere out in Chesapeake Bay there are a bunch of nuts loose with a biological weapon that could conceivably exterminate every living creature in a major city and keep on exterminating for G.o.d knows how many generations."

General Curtis Higgins, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, gave Jarvis a doubting look. "I know of no weapon with that killing power. Besides, the gas weapons in our a.r.s.enal were neutralized and destroyed years ago."

"That's the bulls.h.i.t we give the public," Jarvis snapped back. "But everyone in this room knows better. The truth is the Army has never stopped developing and stockpiling chemical-biological weapons."

"Settle down, Dale." The President's lips were stretched in a grin beneath the mustache. He took a perverse sort of pleasure whenever his subordinates took to fighting among themselves. Casually, in a move to relieve the tense atmosphere, he leaned back in his chair and draped one leg over the armrest. "For the moment, I suggest we take Dale's warning as gospel." He turned to Admiral Joseph Kemper, the chief of Naval Operations. "Joe, since this appears to be a naval raid, it falls in your bailiwick."

Kemper hardly fit the image of a military leader. Portly and white haired, he could have easily been hired as a department-store floorwalker. He looked thoughtfully at the notes he had scribbled during Jarvis's briefing.

"There are two facts that bear out Mr. Jarvis's warning. First, the battles hip Iowa was sold to Walvis Bay Investment. And as of yesterday, our satellite pictures showed it docked at the Forbes shipyard."

"And its current status?" asked the President.

Kemper did not answer but pressed a b.u.t.ton on the table in front of him and rose from his chair. The wood paneling against the far wall slid apart, revealing an eight-by-ten-foot projection screen. Kemper picked up a telephone and said tersely, "Begin."

A high-resolution TV picture taken high above the earth flashed on the

screen. The clarity and color were far superior to anything transmitted to an ordinary home set. The satellite camera penetrated the early-morning darkness and cloud cover as though they did not exist, projecting a view of the eastern Chesapeake Bay sh.o.r.eline so clear it looked as if it came off a picture postcard. Kemper moved to the screen and made a circular motion with the pencil he used for a pointer.

"Here we see the entrance to the Patuxent River and the basin just inside Drum Point to the north and Hog Point to the south." The pencil held steady for a moment. "These small lines are the docks at the Forbes yard. ... A point for Mr. Jarvis. As you can see, Mr. President, there is no sign of the Iowa."

On Kemper's command the cameras began sweeping toward the upper end of the bay. Freighters, fishing boats, and a missile frigate pa.s.sed by in parade, but nothing resembling the ma.s.sive outlines of a battleship. Cambridge on the right of the screen; soon, the Naval Academy at Annapolis on the left; the toll bridge below Sandy Point; and then up the Patapsco River to Baltimore.

"What lies south?" the President asked.

"Except for Norfolk, no city of any size for three hundred miles."

"Come now, gentlemen. Not even Merlin and Houdini together could make a battleship disappear."

Before anyone could comment, a White House aide^ntered the conference room and laid a paper at the President's elbow.

"Just in from the State Department," the President said, scanning the print. "A communique from Prime Minister Koertsmann, of South Africa. He urgently warns us of an imminent attack on the United States mainland by the AAR and apologizes for any indirect involvement by his cabinet."

"It doesn't figure that Koertsmann would suggest an involvement with his enemy," March said. "I should think he'd categorically deny any connection."

"Probably hedging his bets," ventured Jarvis. "Koertsmann must suspect Operation Wild Rose has fallen into our hands."

The President kept gazing at the wording on the paper as if unwilling to accept the frightening truth.

"It looks," he said solemnly, "as if all h.e.l.l is about to break loose."

The bridge had been his only miscalculation. The Iowa's superstructure was too high to pa.s.s under the one man-made obstacle that stood

between Fawkes and his target. The vertical clearance was three feet lower than he'd reckoned.

He heard, rather than saw, the plywood gun-director housing being torn off the forward gun-control platform as it smashed into the overhead span of the bridge.

Howard McDonald slammed on his brakes and skidded to a sideways stop, toppling stacked crates of milk bottles in his delivery van. To McDonald, who was crossing the Harry W. Nice Memorial Toll Bridge to begin his regular milk route, it appeared that an airplane had crashed through the supporting girders almost on top of his truck. He sat there for a few moments in shock, his headlights illuminating a huge pile of debris blocking the two narrow north- and southbound lanes. Fearfully, he stepped from the van and approached, expecting to find mangled pieces of human anatomy embedded in the wreckage.

Instead, all he discovered were splintered sheets of gray-painted wood. His initial reaction was to stare at a low overcast sky, but all he saw was a red aircraft-obstruction light flashing atop the main span. Then McDonald walked over to the railing and peered down.

Except for what seemed to be the running lights of a string of vessels disappearing around Mathias Point, to the north, the channel was empty.

Pitt, Steiger, and Admiral Sandecker stood around a drafting table in Pitt's hangar at the Washington National Airport and examined a large-scale map of the area's waterways. "Fawkes did a radical facelift on the Iowa for a d.a.m.ned good reason," Pitt was saying. "Sixteen feet. That's how much he raised her waterline."

"You certain you have an accurate figure?" Sandecker asked. "That leaves a draft of only twenty-two feet." He shook his head. "It doesn't seem credible."

"I got it from the man who should know," answered Pitt. "While Dale Jarvis was on the phone to NSA headquarters, I questioned Metz, the shipyard boss. He swore to the measurements."

"But for what purpose?" said Steiger. "By removing all the guns and

replacing them with wooden dummies, the ship is totally useless."

"Number-two turret and all its fire-control equipment is still in place," Pitt said. "According to Metz, the Iowa can lob a salvo of two-thousand-pound sh.e.l.ls twenty miles into a rain barrel."

Sandecker concentrated his attention on lighting a large cigar. Satisfied that it was properly stoked, he blew a cloud of blue smoke at the ceiling and rapped the map with his knuckles. "Your plan is crazy, Dirk. We're meddling in a conflict way over our heads."

"We can't sit here and p.i.s.s and moan," said Pitt. "The President will be persuaded by the Pentagon strategists either to blow the Iowa out of the water, more likely than not spreading the QD to the winds, or to send out a boarding party to capture the gas sh.e.l.ls, with the idea of incorporating them into the Army's a.r.s.enal."

"But what good is a plague organism that can't be controlled?" asked Steiger.

" Ypu can bet every biologist in the country will be funded to search for an antidote," Pitt replied. "If one makes a breakthrough, then someday, somewhere, a general or an admiral may panic and give the order for its dispersal. Me, I don't want to grow old knowing I had an opportunity to save countless lives but failed to act."

"Pretty speech," said Sandecker. "I'm in total agreement, but the three of us are hardly in a position to compete with the Defense Department in a race to recover the two remaining QD warheads."

"If we could sneak a man on board the Iowa first, a man who could disarm the firing mechanism of the projectiles and dump the organism pellets over the side into the water ..." Pitt let his thought linger.

"And you are that man?" ventured Sandecker.

"Of us three, I'm the best qualified."