Vixen 03 (33 page)

“What happens next?”

The Iowa
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“After the shell passes its zenith and begins the flight to earth, the altimeter’s omnidirectional indicator begins signaling the decrease in altitude… .”

Bass’s voice trailed off and Pitt waited patiently.

“At fifteen hundred feet a parachute is released. Slows the shell’s descent and activates a small explosive device.”

“Fifteen hundred feet, parachute opens,” Pitt repeated.

“At one thousand feet, device detonates and splits head of projectile; releases a cluster mass of bomblets containing the Quick Death organism.”

Pitt sat back and considered the admiral’s description of the projectile’s operation. He looked into the waning eyes.

“The time element, Admiral. How much time between the parachute’s ejection and the QD dispersal?”

“Too long ago … can’t remember.”

“Please try,” Pitt implored.

Bass was clearly sinking. He fought to bring his brain into gear, but its cells responded sluggishly. Then the tension lines in his face relaxed and he whispered, “I think … not sure … thirty seconds … rate of descent about eighteen feet per second …”

“Thirty seconds?” Pitt said, seeking verification.

Bass’s hand released Pitt’s wrist and fell back on the bed. His eyes closed and he drifted into coma.

The only damage to the Iowa after she slashed through the Molly Bender was a few scrapes to the paint on her bows. Fawkes had not noticed the slightest bump. He could have averted the tragedy if he had spun the wheel hard to port, but it would have meant swerving the battleship from the deep part of the channel and running her aground.

He needed every inch he could squeeze between the riverbed and the Iowa’s hull. The months of gutting thousands of tons of nonessential steel had raised the ship from a wartime operational draft of thirty-eight feet to a few inches less than twenty-two, giving Fawkes a razor-thin margin. Already the great whirling screws were churning up bottom mud that dirtied the Iowa’s wake for miles.

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Fawkes’s countless trips up and down the river in the dark, sounding every foot, marking each channel buoy, each shoal, were paying off. Through the diminishing sleet he made out the lighted mid-channel buoy off St. Clements Island, and a minute or two later his ears picked up its sepulchral tolling bell as if it were an old friend. He wiped his sweating hands one at a time on his sleeves. The trickiest part of the run was coming up.

Ever since slipping the moorings, Fawkes had worried about the danger of Kettle Bottom Shoals, a six-mile section of the river mazed with a network of shallow sandbars that could grip the Iowa’s keel and hold her helpless miles from her goal.

He lifted one hand from the helm and picked up a microphone. “I want a continuous depth reading.”

“Understood, Captain,” a voice scratched back over a speaker.

Three decks below, two of Fawkes’s black crewmen took turns calling up the depths as they appeared on the modified Fathometer. They gave their readings in feet instead of the usual fathoms.

“Twenty-six feet … twenty-five … twenty-four-five.”

Kettle Bottom Shoals was beginning to make its presence known and Fawkes’s hamlike hands clenched the spokes of the helm as though they were glued to them.

Down in the engine room Emma made a show of helping the pitifully small crew who were somehow running the huge ship. All were bathed in sweat as they struggled to handle duties that normally took five times their number. The removal of two engines had helped, but there was still far too much to do, particularly when they considered their dual role as engineers and, when the time came, gunners.

Not one to become mired in physical labor, Emma made himself useful by passing around gallon jugs of water. In that steaming hell no one seemed to take notice of his unfamiliar face; they were only too grateful to gulp down the liquid that replaced the body fluids running from their pores in streams.

They worked blind, never knowing what was happening on the other side of the hull’s steel plates, never remotely aware of where the ship was taking them. All Fawkes had told them when they boarded was that they were going on a short practice run to shake down the old engines and fire a few rounds from the main guns. They assumed they were heading out of the bay and into the Atlantic. That’s why they were stunned when the

The Iowa
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ship suddenly gave a shudder and the hull began creaking in protest beneath their feet.

The Iowa had rammed a shoal. The suction of the mud had drastically cut her speed, but she was still making way. “Full ahead” came down on the telegraph from the bridge. The two massive shafts increased their mighty revolutions as the engines threw their 106,000 horsepower into the task.

The faces of the men in the engine room mirrored confusion and bewilderment. They had thought they were in deep water.

Charles Shaba, the chief engineer, hailed the bridge. “Captain, have we run aground?”

“Aye, laddie, we’ve nudged an uncharted bar,” Fawkes’s voice boomed back. “Keep pouring it on till we’ve sailed past.”

Shaba did not share Fawkes’s optimism. The ship felt as if she were barely maintaining headway. The deck plates beneath his feet vibrated as the engines strained in their mountings. Then, slowly, he sensed their beat smoothing somewhat, as though the screws were biting into new water. A minute later, Fawkes shouted down from the bridge.

“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.p>

Fawkes was the lucky one, he thought. Damned 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

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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 damned 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 God 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 arsenal were neutralized and destroyed years ago.”

“That’s the bullshit 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 button 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

The Iowa
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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 shoreline 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 passed by in parade, but nothing resembling the massive 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 hell is about to break loose.”

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

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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 damned 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

The Iowa
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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 shells 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 piss 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 shells, with the idea of incorporating them into the Army’s arsenal.”