The Iranian officer shrugged and glanced up at the overhead. “The Coast Guard should be up there somewhere.”
“They probably are, but closer in,” Graham said.
The ship’s com buzzed. “Con, this is the forward torpedo room. Let me talk to the captain.” It was Ziyax.
Graham took the phone from its bracket. “This is Graham. You’re supposed to be off duty.”
“We have a problem up here, Captain. A serious one.”
“What is it?”
“It would be better if you saw for yourself,” Ziyax said.
Graham was irritated. The next twenty-four hours approaching the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay would be the most crucial. If the Americans had somehow guessed that the Shehab was not headed south, and was instead heading toward Washington or New York, the U.S. Navy or Coast Guard could indeed have laid a trap for them. Last night he had ordered Russian conventional free-running HE torpedoes loaded in the remaining four bow tubes, as well as the four stern tubes, in case they got backed into a corner and had to fight their way out.
Winning such a fight one-on-one against an American ASW ship was not likely unless they got lucky, so he meant to avoid a confrontation whatever it took.
That was the major issue facing them, not some glitch in the forward torpedo room.
But if they were cornered he would immediately launch the missiles.
“Go up there and find out what’s going on,” Graham told al-Hari. “Whatever it is, get it fixed.”
“Yes, sir,” al-Hari said, and he left the con.
Graham was about to call sonar again, but he stayed his hand from flipping the switch on the com. Something was spooking him; something niggling at the back of his mind. Like al-Hari had done, he glanced up at the overhead as if he could peer through the maze of plumbing and wiring and the inner and outer hulls to the surface, to see what was waiting for them.
He walked over to the periscope pedestal, raised the search scope, and did a quick three-sixty in the fading light. The nearest sonar target was fifteen kilometers away, well over the horizon. They were utterly alone for the moment out here, the skies clear, the seas two meters or less.
He looked away from the eyepieces. The men were docile. They were obeying their orders without question now.
But something was playing with him, as if he were forgetting something important.
He took a second look, then lowered the periscope. The ship’s com buzzed.
“Con, this is the torpedo room.” It was al-Hari.
Graham answered. “Yes, what’s the problem up there, Muhamed?”
“Tube two’s inner door will not seal properly. The gasket is shot.”
“Do we have a spare?” Graham asked.
“Yes, Cap’n, but that’s not the problem. No one wants to open the door, not even at gunpoint, because of the radiation. And without the fix we will not be able to fire that missile.”
“Transfer the missile to another tube,” Graham ordered. His nerves were beginning to jump all over the place.
“As I said, no one will touch the missile,” al-Hari replied. His tone was maddeningly calm. “Do you want me to start shooting people? I can begin with Captain Ziyax.”
“No, we need every man aboard,” Graham said. He desperately wanted to visualize Jillian’s face. It was important to him. She’d known the right words, the right gestures to calm him down whenever he got like this. “You’re in charge up there. We need that missile, otherwise this entire exercise was for nothing. If you can’t get someone else to work the problem, do it yourself.”
Graham slammed the growler phone back in its cradle.
The bastards weren’t going to get away with it.They could have broken radio silence to call him home. They hadn’t been at war. No big secrets would have been revealed.
They would pay. All the sons of bitches would pay.
SIXTY-FIVE
McGarvey stood at the dock waiting for Jackson and his SEAL team to show up with the boat they’d promised for this time yesterday. It was late afternoon, nearly forty-eight hours since the backyard barbecue, and he was acutely conscious that time was not on their side.
There was a light chop on the river, and tonight it was supposed to be overcast with light rain likely. Nearly perfect conditions for a submarine to sneak past Norfolk and make it into the York River. And terrible conditions for a search-and-seize mission.
“Not their fault,” Dillon said at McGarvey’s shoulder. “NSW Group Three didn’t want to part with a boat unless they knew what the mission was.” Special Operations boats belonged to Naval Special Warfare Groups Three and Four, and always came complete with their own highly trained crews. They weren’t items of military equipment that were usually loaned out.
It had taken a call from Admiral Puckett himself to make the CO of Group Three see things in the proper light. That was last night, and still it had taken until now to find the proper boat in Norfolk, get it fueled and prepped, and bring it across the mouth of the bay and up into the York River.
Jackson had telephoned a couple hours ago that they would be under way within minutes; their estimated time of arrival at the Farm’s dock was 1800. It was that time now.
The sharp crack of a small explosion somewhere in the distance behind them was followed by the rattle of small-arms fire. It sounded like M8s to McGarvey’s ear. Liz and Todd had kept the batch of new recruits going through the course super-busy and out of the way, and even Gloria Ibenez, who’d come down for a second debriefing, had left for Langley this morning without knowing that McGarvey was here.
He and Dillon were dressed in SEAL night camos, their faces blackened, their weapons and other equipment in satchels at their feet. Their plan was to stay on the river near the only area deep enough to hide a submarine and wait for the Foxtrot to show up.
The approaches to the Panama Canal were being covered in case he was wrong about Graham. And if a missile launch was made from offshore up here, there was little or nothing that could be done about it, other than mount an all-out search along our entire coast. The risk, of course, was that the first whiff Graham got that they were on to him, he’d launch anyway. He had put them in a catch-22.
Adkins had somehow managed to convince the president and his staff to go up to Camp David for a few days. Rencke had called this morning with the news. Most of the key Cabinet members, along with a good portion of Congress, had quietly filtered out of town, not knowing exactly why, except that Don Hamel had quietly spread the word that now might be a good time to visit their constituencies. The media had started to sit up and take notice, but so far they’d come up with little more than speculation.
“It’s getting like a ghost town around here, and it’s driving them nuts, ya know,” Rencke said. “What about Mrs. M?”
“She’s far enough from downtown that she’ll be able to get out of the way if something happens,” McGarvey said. It was the best-case scenario because she had dug in her heels, and nothing he could say would convince her to go to their house in Florida.
He had considered trying to convince the president to order the evacuation of the city, but that would have done no good either. The panic would kill people, and if the attack did not occur, the government’s already dismal ratings would fall even lower.
“Good luck,” Rencke had said.
“They’re here,” Dillon said at his side.
McGarvey looked up from his thoughts as a low-slung, dark-hulled boat appeared in the dusk around the bend in the river. It was a Mark V Special Operations Craft used to insert and extract SEAL teams from operational areas where stealth was more important than heavy-duty armament. At eighty-two feet on deck, she displaced fifty-seven tons, and could do fifty knots through the water while making very little noise.