By Dawn's Early Light (16 page)

1800 EDT
THE WHITE HOUSE

“I want those men out of there, I don't care what it takes,” President Hanson said. He was as angry as Tyson had ever seen him. The events of the past twenty-four hours made them all mad. But the president had the power to do something about his anger.

They were gathered in the Oval Office. The DCI had brought over the CIA's Special National Intelligence Estimate and Watch Report on the developing situation in Pakistan. With the president were his National Security Adviser Dennis Nettleton and his chief of staff Brad Stein. They were at a loss for words, but Stein gave voice to his confusion first.

“Mr. President, Scott and his team were sent there to spy,” he said. “We can't deny it. So you'll have to call General Musharraf and ask for leniency. Under the circumstances, it's the only thing you can do.”

“We don't know that Scott has been identified yet,” Carolyn Tyson said.

“Oh, come on, don't be obtuse. You don't have siblings of your own, so you can't understand what it's like for the president.”

The man was an insufferable ass. “Mr. President, I think that we need to focus on the main issue at hand: That Pakistan not only conducted an aboveground test of a hydrogen device, but that the weapon was portable enough to be dropped from an airplane.”

“We're going to get to that, believe me, Dr. Tyson,” the president said precisely. “That, and the fact that the Pakistanis continue to develop sophisticated guided missile systems.” He gave Tyson a penetrating look to make his point. “Right now I want to talk about our people. Is there a plan to get them out of there?”

“We're working on scenarios—”

“I don't want scenarios, Carolyn. I want a plan. What are we doing to get them back?”

“I'm sorry, Mr. President, but for now we can do nothing but work out a number of different possibilities for rescue,” Tyson said, sticking to her original guns that such an operation would be impossible without hard intelligence. “First, we need to make sure that they were captured alive and not killed in the firefight. We don't have that answer yet. If we can find that out, and then find out where they're being held—it's our best guess that if they're alive the ISI will take them to one of its interrogation centers—then we can go ahead with a firm rescue plan. One that makes sense.”

“They could be in Islamabad or even Chaklala or Karachi by now,” Stein pointed out. “If that's the case, then getting them out of there might be impossible.”

“Carter's people worked out a plan to snatch our hostages out of Tehran.”

“Which didn't work, Mr. President.” Nettleton interjected.

“Not because of anything the Iranians did,” Hanson said. “It was because our aircraft got bogged down in the desert sand. The engines clogged up and there were crashes. Accidents.” The president paused a moment. “We
will
get them out of there.”

“Once we find out where they're being held, we can work out a plan to free them. Something that won't get the rescuers killed,” Tyson said. She was going to have problems with Stein, she could already see it in the way the man was girding himself.

“Getting them out of the country could be an even bigger problem than finding them,” Stein said.

“No,” Tyson said.

“Beg your pardon, Madam Director?” Stein asked.

Tyson turned to him. “I said, no, Brad. Getting them out of the country will
not
be the biggest problem. Finding out where they're being held will be. We don't have any reliable sources on the ground over there, otherwise we wouldn't have sent the team to watch the test. And considering what they found out for us, we'll pull out all the stops.”

“Okay, you tell us: how are we going to do it?”

“By submarine,” Tyson said. “Dillon is driving the
Seawolf
out that way right now. We'll send a SEAL team to rendezvous with him. He can drop them ashore, and they can fetch our guys back to the boat and then leave.”

“As simple as that?” Stein asked. His dislike was obvious this evening.

“Why no, Brad, almost nothing is as simple as that,” Tyson said. “First we'll have to pinpoint exactly where our people are being held. We'll need all the intelligence information we can get on the ISI installation, its location, as well as its layout. Then we'll need to send the
Seawolf
, by stealth, to within a few kilometers of Pakistan's highly patrolled coast, at which time a small team of operators—SEALs—will go ashore. They'll reach the prison by whatever means they can, neutralize as many guards as need be, defeat whatever other security and defensive measures they might encounter, release our four men, and bring them back to the submarine. That, Brad, is not a simple operation.”

“Fair enough, Carolyn,” the president said. “Do you have a timetable?”

“We've already worked it out with Admiral Puckett's people. The contingency plans are aboard the
Seawolf
, and there's a SEAL team standing by aboard the
Carl Vinson
in the Arabian Sea.” She shook her head. Being a SEAL might be dangerous, but it was a lot less contentious than being the DCI.

“There's every chance for a disaster,” Stein interjected.

“Yes, there is,” she said. She turned to the president. “A political solution, if there is one, would be for the best, Mr. President. Now that we know their H-bomb can be delivered by air the situation is even more critical than we first thought.”

“If India gets wind of that fact, we couldn't hold them back from a preemptive strike,” Nettleton said. “The whole region would go up in smoke. Along with half the world's oil supplies.”

“Then we all have work to do,” the president said. “Let's get to it.”

2000 EDT
THE OVAL OFFICE

Dennis Nettleton was on the speakerphone to the embassy of Pakistan on Massachusetts Avenue, just above Sheridan Circle. The president, along with Brad Stein and Carolyn Tyson, listened in, but remained silent.

“The ambassador is in conference, Mr. Nettleton,” Saiyed Aly, the ambassador's secretary, said. He was normally an affable man. This evening, however, he was cold to the point of haughtiness.

“Need I remind you, sir, that President Hanson wished to see Ambassador Husain this evening. In fact, he is waiting in the Oval Office at this moment.”

“It cannot be helped.”

“Considering the gravity of the present situation, we demand that Ambassador Husain acknowledges the president's request.”

“You are no longer in position to demand anything from us, Mr. Nettleton. We have long stood by, here in Washington and in New York at the United Nations, listening to this administration and the previous administrations kowtow to the terrorist demands of the Indian government.”

Nettleton gave the president a questioning look. It was unprecedented that any ambassador would refuse a summons from the president of the United States. But it was even more extraordinary that an ambassador's secretary would speak in such a harsh, peremptory manner to someone as high ranking as the president's adviser on national security affairs. Nettleton touched the mute button.

“How far should I push him, Mr. President?”

“He wouldn't be talking like that if Husain wasn't right there listening in,” the president said. Sandar Abas Husain was the ambassador appointed eighteen months ago by Pakistan's military government. In the last six months Husain had become increasingly aloof, at times even imperious, knowing of course that Pakistan was nearing completion of its thermonuclear weapon.

“What should I say?”

“Brad?” the president asked, turning to his chief of staff.

“I'd say press him. See what he does.”

Tyson nodded. “I agree. The only danger is if India finds out that Pakistan's bomb is portable. If Pakistan suspects that the Indians know, then they'll be forced into making an immediate preemptive strike. Go for broke.”

The president agreed. “But if India does find out, they'll make a preemptive nuclear strike. It'd come down to a race between them.” He nodded for Nettleton to get back to Aly.

Nettleton touched the mute button. “I'm sorry, Mr. Aly, but I thought that you said that the United States government was in no position to demand anything of Pakistan. I must have misheard. But then you are not the ambassador, you are not a diplomat, so we will forgive the lapse for the time being. Pakistan is dangerously close to finding itself in the same untenable position that Iraq found itself in: cut off from the rest of the world, isolated, reviled, economically sanctioned.”

“Pakistan will no longer hang her head in shame—”

“Be that as it may, Mr. Aly, the president wishes to speak with Ambassador Husain at the soonest possible moment on an issue of the gravest importance to the continued good relations between Pakistan and the United States.”

“The ambassador is in conference, as I have already told you, Mr. Nettleton.”

“Pakistan's security is at stake.”

“Don't threaten me, sir. Those days are gone forever. Pakistan's sting is much harsher than it has ever been. If we are threatened we will defend ourselves to the fullest limits of our considerable power. Against any enemy, near or far.”

When the connection was broken, the president looked at Dr. Tyson. “Do you think they know about Scott?”

She shook her head. “They would have made some reference. Even an oblique one. I think they're stalling for time.”

“Why?”

“The million-dollar question, Mr. President.”

“One that I need an answer for. And soon.”

2000 GMT
SEAWOLF
MID-PACIFIC

The movie tonight was
Contact
, with Jodie Foster.

Dillon unusually took the second hour of the first watch of every other cycle for his turn on the stationary bike in the torpedo room. Captain's privilege. A TV monitor was bracketed to a niche in the bulkhead and the nightly movie started at this hour.
Contact
was one of his favorite films, in part because Jodie Foster could have been Jill's twin sister.

She was sitting on the hood of her car, earphones over her head, her eyes closed as she listened to sounds from space.

The lack of sunlight and exercise were the twin enemies of submariners. Especially since the advent of nuclear power, which made extended underwater cruises possible. They could make freshwater and oxygen from seawater, but for sunlight they had to rely on UV lamps and vitamin D. Since there was nothing else to do aboard a sub except work, sleep, and eat, weight was always a problem. Stashed here and there in the odd corner throughout the boat were exercise machines: the bike in the torpedo room, a treadmill (which Dillon hated) just aft of the baffle behind the sonar dome, and several chin-up bars in engineering, in the crew's mess and in the doorway to the goat locker, which was chiefs' territory.

Dillon did an hour on the bike every other watch, and on the off watches did one thousand sit-ups in his stateroom.

A low-pitched rhythmic noise suddenly started. One pulse. Then two. Then three. Jodie Foster opened her eyes and sat up. She was trying to believe that she was actually hearing the signal she'd been working all of her career as a radio astronomer to hear.

A signal from an intelligent race on another planet.

Dillon loved this part. That precise moment of discovery that took your breath away; when anything and everything was possible. In school he'd been faced with two paths in nuclear physics: pure science or engineering. He'd made his choice, one that he'd never regretted. But he still looked at scientists with a kind of reverence. It was like being a lapsed Catholic who still nodded and mumbled “Hello, Father,” when a priest walked by.

Someone rapped on the side of a CO
₂
tank with his knuckles. Dillon looked over his shoulder. It was Master Chief Petty Officer Arthur “Mr. T” Young.

Young was the senior enlisted man aboard the
Seawolf,
and therefore was often called upon to be a buffer between the crew and the officers. He was almost always chief of boat starting out on patrol and coming back in. He was also COB whenever they found themselves in a tough situation.

If anyone could be said to uphold navy tradition, it was him. Except that he and the chief engineer Lt. Mario Battaglia were best of friends ashore. The navy usually frowned on fraternization between enlisted men and officers, but no one ever dreamed of breaking up this pair. Without them
Seawolf
would stop functioning as a tightly-run warship. Dillon and his XO gave the direction, but it was duos like Battaglia and Young who provided the glue that held everything together.

“Have you got a minute, Cap'n?” Young asked. He should have been nicknamed Popeye, because he looked like the cartoon character. Short, bowlegged, with thick ham hocks for arms. He and Battaglia, who was a stocky Italian from the Bronx, could have been brothers. But Mr. T. stuck because no one except for the captain knew what the middle initial stood for, and Dillon had promised never to tell a soul.

“Sure thing, Master Chief,” Dillon said. He reached over and turned the TV monitor's sound down as Jodie Foster drove at breakneck speed along the desert track beneath the mammoth radio telescopes.

Young came the rest of the way into the cramped corner of the torpedo room and rested a shoulder on a cable-covered bulkhead. He looked worried, which was a switch because he was usually an easygoing man. It was the crew who came to him with their troubles.

“I've got a bit of a problem, skipper. I surely don't know what to do about it, or if there's anything I can do.”

“Somebody find out your real name?”

“No, sir, it's not that. It's back ashore.”

Dillon frowned. Personal problems were
his
problems because of the effects they could have on the operation of his boat. “Okay, what's the deal?”

Young looked down at his shoes for an uncharacteristic moment or two. When he looked up he seemed sheepish yet determined. “You know my wife, Suze.”

“Of course.” A couple of times each year Dillon's wife Jill hosted a tea for the ladies of the
Seawolf
. And after each patrol Dillon and his officers and their wives staged a blowout picnic for the entire crew and their wives and sweethearts and kids. Suzanne Young was as well liked among the other enlisted men's wives as Young was with his boys.

“We've been married for twenty-four years, Cap'n. There isn't a thing I wouldn't do for her; climb mountains, walk through fire. Hell, I'd give my life if I thought it would make her happy. But it's not enough.”

“I'm all ears, Art, but you're not making sense,” Dillon prompted.

“There's another woman,” Master Chief Young blurted, and before Dillon could react, he shook his head. “But it's not what you're thinking. She's not some bar girl I picked up somewhere. You know, a one-night stand.” He looked away again for a moment. “Her name is Beth Anne Hoding. She's from Newport, originally, but she's living in Honolulu now. She moves to whatever base I'm assigned to. And it's been like that for eighteen years.”

Dillon stopped pedaling. For a moment he was struck dumb. He'd intervened in a domestic squabble from time to time, or dealt with a Dear John letter—once even a Dear John letter so cleverly disguised in a familygram that whoever vetted it in Pearl had missed the significance. But he'd never had to deal with anything like this.

“Have you told Mario about this?”

Young shook his head. “No one on earth knows about it except for you, Cap'n.”

“Well, you say that it's been going on for eighteen years. What's the problem all of a sudden?” Dillon asked. His question sounded callous to his own ears, but, damnit, what Young had been doing to his wife and to himself and therefore to the boat was wrong.

“Beth Anne has cancer. She's dying. And she has nobody except me.”

Jodie Foster was racing through the corridors, and pushing through doors in the main control building, all the while giving frantic instructions via her cell phone.

Dillon shook his head. “I'm sorry, Art. Why didn't you request emergency leave?”

“I wouldn't have gotten it if I'd had the guts to ask, sir. Beth isn't a relative. And I didn't know that she was sick until a couple of hours ago. She stuck a letter in my seabag, and I just got to it.” Young's wide, dark eyes were moist. “She told me not to worry.” He laughed. “Now that's a crock. I didn't know what to do, skipper. You're the only person I could turn to.”

“Is she seeing a doctor?”

“At Pearl General's oncology center.”

It was the same place that the navy doctors had sent Jill. Cancer sometimes made strange bedfellows. It was even possible that they'd seen each other, spoken.

“We can't turn the boat around, Art.”

“I wouldn't want that, sir. I just wanted to share this with somebody. With you, because your wife is sick too. Beth Anne wrote that she saw her at the hospital.”

No one else on the crew knew that Jill was sick, not even Charlie Bateman. COs were supposed to be invulnerable; somehow above the problems the rest of the crew might have. The chief's problem was doubly his now.

“I suggest that you figure out how you want to handle this, chief,” Dillon said. “When you get that worked out, then come to me and we'll figure out how to get it done when we get home.”

Young nodded his appreciation. “Will do, Cap'n,” he said. “And thanks.”

“Think the
whole
thing out, Master Chief,” Dillon cautioned sternly, “That includes what you're going to tell your wife.”

“Skipper, conn.” It was Bateman.

Young nodded. “Yes, sir,” he said, and he left.

Dillon answered the call. “This is the captain.”

“When you get a chance, skipper, Marc and Ski would like to run something by you.”

Dillon glanced at the television monitor. Jodie Foster was just realizing that the alien signal consisted of prime numbers.

“I'll be right there.”

 

Dillon splashed some cold water on his face in his stateroom, got a cup of coffee from the officers' wardroom and went up to the control room.

His XO was hunched over one of the chart tables with Lt. Jablonski and Chief Sonarman Zimenski. They had a very small-scale western Pacific and eastern Indian Ocean chart spread out. Superimposed was a clear plastic overlay, which showed the ocean bottom details: the sea mounts, ridges, abyssal plains, canyons, and littoral regions around the land masses.

Jablonski and Zimenski had worked out a series of plots on the overlay with a thin-line grease pencil, parallel rules, and dividers. All of the work could have been done on computer-generated charts, but tradition dies hard in the U.S. navy. Most sailors preferred using paper charts at least in the initial chalk-talk phase of a proposed operation.

“What's up?” Dillon asked, joining them. He'd decided to grab the
Contact
DVD later tonight and replay it in his stateroom. Captain's privilege.

Bateman looked up. “Marc and Ski came up with an idea for our mission station approach that looks good to me. Could give us a big advantage going in, especially if they suspect we're on our way.”

Dillon put his coffee aside. “Okay, what do you have?”

“I got to thinking about what happens when we show up in the Indian Ocean, Cap'n,” Zimenski said. “If it's a Kilo we're looking for, she's bound to be real quiet. Especially if they know we're coming for them like Mr. Bateman says. And especially if they have an idea
when
we're going to get there. So I took a look at the new thermocline predictions we loaded at Pearl just before we sailed.”

Zimenski replaced the very small-scale chart with a slightly larger one, that showed only the Indian Ocean east to the Malaysian peninsula and south to the Andaman Islands. He placed a matching overlay showing the bottom features, and a second clear overlay showing ocean currents and thermoclines.

“Once we cross the Andaman Basin and get into the Bay of Bengal we'll have a straight shot to where we think the Kilo should be waiting. About five hundred miles with nothing blocking our sound lines.”

Dillon knew exactly what his chief sonarman had come up with, but he just nodded.

“If they're waiting for us it'll be beneath the thermocline where they think they're all but invisible to sonar. Pearl predicts the line will be between eleven hundred seventy feet and twelve-fifty. If we make our initial approach beneath this level, and then stick our bow just into the duct boundary, we should be able to hear them as far as six hundred miles out.”

Zimenski looked up. “It's a deep sound channel. The Kilo would be in it, looking toward the east. But there's a secondary thermocline about one hundred feet beneath the main line. That's where we'll come in. Minimum sound resistance. Like a megaphone.”

“They wouldn't suspect us to be within range so soon,” Bateman said. “They might not be so careful with their noise management.”

“It would give us the chance to load and roughly preset a pair of torpedoes without anyone being aware of it,” Jablonski suggested.

Dillon tried to find fault with their plan, but he could not. He looked up and grinned. “Okay, gentlemen, good plan. Let's do it.”

Jablonski was happy, but Zimenski was flying high. He'd just pulled another Jonesy.

“Might just give
us
the advantage,” Dillon said. “Payback time for the crew of the
Eagle Flyer
.”

“All right,” Bateman said, grinning.