H.M.S. Unseen (23 page)

But at 1001 (EST), the operator came back on the line and delivered his message with a softly spoken jackhammer. “I’m sorry to inform you, sir, that we are now certain Starstriker is down in the North Atlantic, somewhere east of 30 West, her last-known was 50.30 North at 60,000 feet. We are alerting all ships in the area plus the appropriate United States agencies.”

Admiral Morgan replaced the receiver, looked at the highest-ranking officer in the United States Navy, and said, “He got her.”

Admiral Mulligan found it hard to speak. Their conversation of just three days earlier would haunt both men for years to come. But still the question remained: Was Ben Adnam really out there in a stolen diesel-electric submarine silently slamming passenger jets out of the Western skies on behalf of Islam?

“Well,” rasped Admiral Morgan, “with two supersonic aircraft down, for no reason, in roughly the same patch of water, in three weeks, an accident looks pretty goddamned coincidental.”

They walked back to the main room, uncertain what to do or say. But pandemonium had already broken out. When Shannon put the announcement out to the international air-sea rescue services, it took just a few minutes for the news to reach the British Broadcasting Corporation, and subsequently to be released in a news flash on the television and radio networks. This meant, broadly, that the entire world news media knew that Starstriker was down within twenty minutes of the crash.

The television people could not believe their luck. One of the great stories of all time was breaking, and there they were, in a room with the Boeing president, his PR chief, and other executives. Even the President of the United States was there. Even the head of the United States Air Force. Even the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. They even had the chairman of British Airways, which had lost the Concorde a mere twenty days earlier. These journalists were involved in the News Nirvana of the last hundred years.

In the opinion of Arnold Morgan nothing useful could possibly be achieved by any of the Presidential party, and he recommended that everyone leave immediately, an evacuation facilitated by the Secret Service. Admiral Mulligan made the same suggestion to Scott Dunsmore, and the military top brass were also out of there in record time, leaving Jay Herbert to protect John Mulcahy as best he could. The electronic satellite links to the great aircraft had been switched off, since it was plain there was nothing to which they could connect. Starstriker was history.

The Pentagon staff car dropped Admiral Mulligan at the White House. And there in the West Wing, behind the locked doors of the office of the NSA, sat the only two men in America who had even a partial, if outlandish, theory to explain what had happened. Each tried to assemble his thoughts, trying to decide what to do about the menace that might be lurking five hundred feet below the surface, somewhere in a million square miles of the North Atlantic.

“The trouble is,” said the Navy chief, “we still don’t have a shred of evidence, and I can’t just order a fleet to take off on some wild-goose chase. It would cost a fortune, which is not in our budget, and we’d hardly know where to start looking. Plus the operation would have to be ‘black,’ since we cannot alarm the populace. We’d need a dozen warships, which would alert the entire Armed Forces that something dead suspicious was going on right out there where the two jetliners went down.”

“I know, Joe. Don’t I just know. I think the best way forward is for us to analyze carefully the whole scenario…just to get it clear in our minds. That means we should assess the similarities between the two disasters, which is very simple.

“Both aircraft were maintained to the highest possible standards. Both of them just vanished off the airwaves around 30 West. Neither pilot, so far as we know, had time even to utter the word, SHIT. Which means they both blew up internally, or fell apart for unknown reasons. Or they were hit by a big guided missile, capable of perhaps a 50-mile range, at a speed somewhere between MACH-2 and MACH-3. Because of the obvious security surrounding Starstriker, there can be no question of a planted bomb. Neither does anyone think that was possible with Concorde. Which leaves us with the possibility of metal fatigue or structural weakness.

“But not on two aircraft built thirty years apart, one of which had been flying perfectly all its life, and the other judged to be the very last word in supersonic travel by every single one of the many, many world-class engineers at the Boeing plant.”

“I agree, Arnold, with all that. Which leaves
only
the missile.”

“Right. And the difficulty with that is simple; there is nowhere to fire it
from.
No land. No nearby ship, certainly not a warship. Unless the missile was delivered from space, which is not within present-day technology for us, it must have been fired from a submarine. A specially fitted submarine, one with a sizable surface-to-air system out there on its casing, probably in front of the fin like your man Harry’s Blowpipe, only a lot bigger.”

“Right, Arnold. And we have a missing submarine, nearly brand-new, whereabouts unknown, somehow taken beyond the very capable reach of the Royal Navy.”

“Correct. And we have the possibility of one of the most dangerous submariners who ever lived being at the helm. I’ve spoken to David Gavron in Tel Aviv, and he admits, very frankly, that when you get right down to it, they cannot be certain whether Commander Adnam is dead or alive. They never saw the body, which has now been cremated by the Egyptians. They only had his papers. Could have been anyone. They could even have been forged, probably by fucking Adnam himself.”

“Plus, Arnold, we have the irritating possibility that the plans for Harry Brazier’s Blowpipe system are very possibly in the archives of the Israeli Navy. If they were, it’s dollars to a pinch of shit Adnam has a copy of them. Christ, he served as commanding officer of an Israeli submarine. I bet he knew every inch of those drawings.”

“Could be. If Harry’s best guess is correct, Ben Adnam knew how to make that conversion. The only gap in an otherwise reasonably logical progression is that we don’t know how the goddamned Iraqis did the engineering or where they found a trained submarine crew.”

“No…no we don’t. And it’s a big gap. But he’s fixed it before. I think we are going to assume they did it. And I think we have to consider ways of catching this submarine before he strikes again. I’m just not sure where to start. SOSUS came up with nothing. Do you think we have to talk to someone? Like Scott, or the President? Maybe Robert Mac?”

“I don’t know. For right now I think we ought to wait for twenty-four hours and see if anything comes out in the media or in the searches going on out there. I think if we’re going to propose a truly outlandish course of action, we need the boost of the continuing mystery. That way people will be a bit more ready to listen to us.”

“Okay…shall we regroup late afternoon tomorrow, compare notes…here?”

“Yes, 1700 hours.”

“You got it.”

The Navy Chief walked out still frowning. And as he did so Admiral Morgan picked up his secure line and dialed a number on the other side of the world. Seconds later the telephone rang in the big white mansion on the shore of Loch Fyne.

“Iain?”

“Speaking.”

“Arnold Morgan here.”

“Good afternoon, Arnold. How nice to hear you. I’m afraid to say, you have the most terrible problem.”

“I know. It’s him, isn’t it. Banging out airliners from a submarine.”

“Yes, Arnold. Yes it is. It’s him.”

1500. February 9, 2006.
The Oval Office.

A
DMIRAL ARNOLD MORGAN HAD JUST WALKED
through the door and the President was awaiting him, sitting quietly with Secretary of State Harcourt Travis. Before the admiral could utter even a word of greeting, the Chief Executive said curtly, “National Security Advisor, you are holding out on me.”

“Sir?”

“You are holding out on me. When Starstriker was lost this morning, you were the only person in that room who knew what had happened. You were expecting it. You reacted in about a half second. Too quick to absorb a mere possibility. And you were right, a full fifteen minutes in front of the world, and you said, ‘That bastard.’ I heard you.

“Arnold Morgan, I am sufficiently presumptuous to regard you as a true friend. And I’m not accusing you of anything
.
Not yet. But you better have a real good explanation for your apparent preknowledge.”

Admiral Morgan nodded to Harcourt, then said, “Sir, I do have some theories. And I will not pretend I did not have a gut feeling that this
could
happen. But when it actually did I was as shocked as the next man. Just a bit earlier. And you know me well enough, Mr. President, I tend to react quickly. If there was anything I coulda done to prevent that disaster, you know I’da done it. With or without your permission.”

And then, over two cups of coffee, in a talk which lasted almost thirty minutes, he recounted to the President and the senior foreign policy executive in the United States government every one of his thoughts, from the moment HMS
Unseen
went missing to the moment Starstriker was apparently blasted out of the sky.

He fitted the pieces together, and he plotted the progression of his ideas, and he made particular reference to the fact that he had no explanation as to how the Iraqis could have converted the British submarine into an antiaircraft weapon. In particular he pointed out the real gap, the real weakness in his argument: the question of
where
the Iraqis could have carried out the work, given the impossibility of their own situation; no deep water, no submarine base, and thus no home, no expertise, not many friends. He also pointed out that the American surveillance system was all-seeing but not fireproof. And the Iraqis had shown once before that they were capable of extraordinary cunning.

Finally, he talked about Benjamin Adnam and his belief that the presumed-dead terrorist
must
somehow be involved.

“I did not, sir, want to alarm you,” said the admiral. “Because I did not have one shred of proof. I still don’t. It’s all just my own thoughts. But when you think, and half believe something, and then you get a hard-ass fact that slams it all together…well, right then you start to believe you may be right. Which I now do.”

The President nodded. “Very well, Arnold. I understand. Two questions. One, how did Adnam know our oil-negotiating team was on board that particular Concorde flight?”

“That’s easy. There was a full Iranian delegation at the conference in Baku. Bob Trueman certainly knew at least two of them pretty well. I am sure they just asked politely about his long journey home, and, being a civilian, he told ’em he was flying Concorde the next morning out of Heathrow.”

“Right. And Starstriker
?”

“
That was Adnam’s real objective, and it was one of the most publicized flights in history. Scruff, Kathy’s highland terrier, knew Starstriker’s ETD from Dulles this morning.”

“Hmmm. I guess he did. How about the missile? Heat-seeking?”

“Nossir. Both aircraft were going too fast to risk chasing from anywhere astern. They were also damned high, and there are very strict range limits on these highly accurate SAMs. You’d only get one shot at a supersonic. My guess is that the missile was launched vertically, with preprogrammed radar. It adjusted trajectory and course automatically…it’s called fire-and-forget in the trade…came in from dead ahead…smashed straight into the nose.”

“Jesus. But Arnold, ought you not to have mentioned this to me beforehand?”

“Sir. For the past ten months I have been pondering the possibility that Adnam might be driving a stolen submarine. Naturally, my thoughts were that he might take another shot at us, even though I knew he had no major weaponry on board. But I didn’t have the remotest idea where he was. I was not even confident enough to talk to the Navy. It was just a theory, mostly intuition, no facts. Then Concorde goes down. Do I connect my off-beat military theory with a crashed British passenger aircraft? Maybe. But not strongly enough to start alerting the Navy to take action. Certainly not to bother the President of the United States.”

“No. I do see that. When were you going to speak to me?”

“Probably tomorrow evening. I told Joe Mulligan that before I said anything, we better wait to see that there was absolutely nothing from out of Starstriker’s cockpit, like, ‘We just ran out of gas.’ But, not for the first time, you preempted me.”

The President relaxed. “Guess I did. And you’re a pretty hard guy to preempt. But Jesus, Arnold, I never saw a public over-reaction like yours this morning. People thought you’d lost it.”

“Not quite, sir.”

“No, Arnold, not quite…and now what? What do we do?”

For the first time now, the refined, scholarly Harcourt Travis spoke. But first he stood up and walked, thoughtfully, the length of the Oval Office and back. “Arnold,” he said, “the trouble with theories is that they take on a life of their own. And if the very basis of their premise is wrong in the first place, they waste a thunderous amount of everyone’s time. Also, they have a way of quite unnecessarily annoying foreign governments with which we are compelled to deal.

“Greatly as I respect your instincts, I am obliged to remind you that a couple of air crashes do not necessarily give credence to a scenario from a Bond movie…mad underwater terrorist running amok with the world’s airlines.”

“No, Harcourt. I know they don’t.”

“Plus the fact that your villain is: A) supposed to be dead, as far as anyone knows, and B) he is from a country that does not even own a submarine at all, far less the most lethal antiaircraft boat ever built.”

“I know that, too, Harcourt.”

“When I listen to you fit some of the pieces together, I do accept there is a remote chance you may be correct. But by God, Arnold, it is so remote.
If
the British submarine was not sunk,
if
it was somehow stolen,
if
this Adnam character is somehow still alive,
if
Iraq was somehow able to get it, hide it, convert it, man it, and operate it.
If
this same country was able to buy such a missile system from someone and fit it onto a submarine.
If
this Adnam was able to conceal himself in the North Atlantic,
if
he had been able to fire two untried SAM missiles from some kind of a jury-rigged launcher, and actually hit two of the highest-flying, fastest aircraft ever built.
If
, Arnold, your auntie had balls, I guess she’d somehow be your uncle. Count me out, pal. At least until you can provide me with one solitary shining F-A-C-T.”

The President shook his head. Then he repeated his last question. “Well, what do we do?”

“I honestly don’t know, sir,” replied the admiral, ignoring the onslaught of skepticism displayed by Harcourt Travis. “I suppose we could accept my theory and obliterate Baghdad in retribution. But we’d look pretty fucking silly if a different kind of truth came out about the crashes. So that’s out. At least for the moment.”

“You can say that again,” interjected the Secretary of State. “Do you have any idea what an uproar something like this could cause? Really, Arnold, even you have to get real on matters of this scale.”

“Harcourt,” replied Morgan, wearily, “you don’t have to keep reminding me of my shortcomings, mainly because I might have to remind you of a few of yours…lemme just run this technical detail past the chief.

“Just assuming my unsupported theory is largely correct, the search area for a submarine is, by now, massive. Take the spot around 30 West where the two aircraft vanished. It’s at 50.30 North. By the time we get out there with search aircraft, Commander Adnam could have been moving for twenty-four hours, leaving us a search area of at least 30,000 square miles. Expanding with every fucking minute that passes. By the time we get ships out there three days later, the target could be virtually anywhere.

“If you take 50.30 North, 30 West as the search-center, he could be on an 800-mile radius circle, or, stated another way, in a search area of over 2 million square miles…and that 2 million square miles is all water. Because the crashes happened bang in the middle of the ocean. One suspects by design.

“HMS
Unseen
could have gone north toward the coastal area of Greenland; west, way off the coast of the U.S.A. and Canada; east toward the west coast of Ireland; or south to absolutely nowhere. Adnam could be
anywhere in that area
. We’d have only one chance—that he gets careless and SOSUS picks him up, holds him long enough for MPA to get a fix. Sir, whatever, we’re still looking for a poisoned needle in the Sahara desert.”

“Supposition, supposition. The entire theory is one of supposition…we’re not just looking for a needle in the Sahara. We’re looking for a needle that probably does not exist. And in my book that’s probably a needle not worth looking for.” Harcourt Travis was on the verge of exasperation.

But the President wanted to proceed. “Arnold, how would it have been if we’d sent a fleet of nuclear submarines out there the moment we knew about the crash?”

“Better, but not much. They’d want three days minimum to get to the crash site.
Unseen
would still be more than 600 miles from the datum. That’s a 600-mile radius circle, or 1 million square miles. We’d still have to trip over the sonofabitch. And we’d be just as likely to trip over ourselves.”

“Who else knows your thoughts? Just Joe?”

“And our old friend Admiral MacLean. As you know, I visited him in Scotland. And I spoke to him again about two hours ago. He agrees. Adnam is on the loose, and he will almost certainly strike again. But Iain does have one thought which is useful…refueling.
Unseen
has a range of about 7,000 miles. He thinks it likely that Ben was topped up, say 1,000 miles out from the datum before Concorde. That means he’s probably used up more than half of it, running back and forth.

“Joe’s activating a search for any suspicious-looking tanker in the North Atlantic, Iraqi or otherwise, that is apparently going nowhere. If we find any, I guess we could have ’em tailed by a nuclear boat. That’s how the Brits caught
General Belgrano
off the Falklands. Tracking the refueling ship.”

“You want Harcourt to call some kind of council of war?”

“Not yet, sir. We better wait to see if anything whatsoever shakes out of the crashes in the next two or three days. I really think it would be crazy to start sending the Atlantic Fleet out right now. We’ve told ’em to maintain overhead surveillance in the immediate search area, and SOSUS has been briefed to be more than usually vigilant for
anything
that might be a U-Class signature anywhere in the North Atlantic. Meanwhile, I think we better keep our powder dry…. The last thing we need is coast-to-coast panic because an unseen enemy is wiping out international air traffic.”

“No. We won’t be thanked for causing that. But, Jesus, what if he hits another airliner?”

“Sir, I think we have to brace ourselves for that. But we’ll be much more alert, and I think we should quietly send a Carrier Battle Group into the area…they’re pretty good at finding submarines. Usually. Then we can keep land-based Maritime Patrol Aircraft working as well. Make it a general area search. But we should keep the SSN force well clear. Otherwise, we’ll end up with a Blue on Blue. If we stay with surface-and-air search only, we can say they’re just looking for wreckage.”

“Arnold, as always it was instructive in the extreme. Keep me well posted, will you? I agree we ought not to make an early, rash move. But please, if you have any thoughts whatsoever, make sure I know about ’em. Real early.”

“Absolutely, sir.”

The admiral walked toward the Oval Office door, and, as he opened it, the President spoke again. “That, by the way, was not an admonishment…just my way of congratulating myself on my choice of a national security advisor.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Then turning to the Secretary of State, the President said, “You were pretty hard on him, Harcourt. I know I told you to bounce him up and down a little, find out how strong his theory was, but you came close to making him look a fool.”

“Men like Admiral Morgan cannot to be made to look very foolish,” replied Travis. “He’s too damned clever. Also he happens to have the only theory in town about the crashes. But it is so far-fetched…more Hollywood than Washington…and I still believe it will be completely discredited in the end.”

Harcourt Travis stood, gathered up his documents, and made for the door. But he was leaving behind a man in a mammoth quandary. The President had always recognized the admiral’s paranoia about submarines, and he did not want to be sucked into some drastic action against an enemy that might not exist. As Morgan had pointed out, he had not one shred of proof that Ben Adnam was out there, no proof that he was even alive, never mind at the helm of a rogue submarine. Certainly nothing but a bunch of circumstantial evidence to back up a truly majestic theory of international terrorism on an unimaginable scale. Harcourt Travis offered the easy, do-nothing, political solution, the cynical, lethargic stance of the international statesmen. Never get into a fight you might not win.

Maybe the admiral’s losing it,
the President thought.
Maybe he’s just worked this one out a step too far, since, by his own admission, the Iraqis seem incapable of operating a submarine, much less making the missile conversion on the stolen submarine. And yet…and yet…being right has a virtue of its own. And with my own eyes I saw that Morgan was the only man in the United States this morning who was right, who was half expecting Starstriker might not make it across the Atlantic. What do they say in horse racing: keep backing him until he loses? I guess he’s my man, for better or for worse.