Scimitar SL-2 (41 page)

“What’s that?” said Kathy, who was trying to beat her way through the piles of paper on the other office table.

“Come over here,” said the Admiral. “And I’ll show you what I mean…See this? These are the Canary Islands…

“And the big question is, will the
Barracuda
stay south if he’s coming in from somewhere east of the Caribbean? Or will he make a big circle and run north to surprise us?”

“I’m not really sure.”

“Well, north is best. We got two nuclear boats up there with the carrier…He can’t go there without getting caught. My guess is, he’ll stay south, come in towards the western Sahara, and then turn in for his launch. He cannot be more than 250 miles out when he launches, satellites or not…because if he can’t get in behind those islands, fast, the tsunami will dump him right on the goddamned beach in Long Island, upside down with his prop in the air.”

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:

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 of 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.