The transfer took less than a minute, and before the authorities descended on the luxury hotel, the Sea Stallion was already back out over the water, cruising at two hundred knots on its way to Panzer Kaserne Marine Corps Base in Boeblingen, Germany.
Russo strapped the prince into a seat in the rear of the cabin before removing the black bag. He nodded to a navy corpsman, who took the prince’s vitals, and then gave him another injection.
Slowly the man’s eyes fluttered open. His head moved side to side as he tried to orient himself. After a minute, his gaze came to rest on the SEAL commander.
Russo watched the man’s face transition from surprise to anger.
“Do you know… who you just kidnapped?” Al Saud growled.
Russo smiled and then asked, “The biggest dick to ever walk the earth?”
Then he took an encrypted satellite phone from a cargo pocket and dialed a number. “Package en route,” was all he said before he hung up and turned to join his men.
“Look at the positive side, sir,” Lt. Cmdr. Robert Giannotti said. “Pretty soon we’re bound to run out of ammo and have to head home.”
“I’d settle for forty-eight-hour liberty in Subic Bay,” Marshon Chappelle chimed in from the sonar station. “Don’t know about you guys, but I’m starting to forget what a girl looks like.” Although the navy had allowed women on submarines since 2010, there were none aboard this tour of the Mighty Mo.
“Tired of your whales, Chappy?” Giannotti asked.
At the moment, Missouri cruised eleven thousand yards from the starboard side of Vinson at a depth of sixty feet. The high-definition cameras mounted on the photonic masts fed the flat screens with the surrounding surface activity — or lack thereof. Aside from the distant flattop silhouette of the carrier, he saw no traffic on the dark waters southeast of Kaohsiung, Taiwan, and nothing floating in the vicinity of the submarine. The stars were shining brightly, and the moon hung low in the western sky.
“Set our depth one-two-zero. Ahead one-third. Rudder amidships.”
Cmdr. Frank Kelly watched the crew carry out the order to get the submarine into firing position, and a few minutes later, he said, “Fire one.”
“Fire one, aye,” Giannotti repeated.
The weapons officer worked his keyboard before reporting, “Missile away.”
On the screen, a burst of cold gas shot the BGM-109 Tomahawk Land Attack Missile (TLAM) out of its Vertical Launching System forward of Missouri’s sail and toward the surface, before it accelerated to its cruise speed of 545 miles per hour in the direction of the lower coastline of China.
“Fire two.”
A second TLAM shot out of an adjacent VLS and shadowed the first one.
The eighteen-foot-long missiles stabilized in flight at low altitude as they streaked toward their target, relying on Global Positioning System for time-of-arrival control and navigation capability.
“Set depth three-zero-zero. Ahead two-thirds,” Kelly ordered before leaving Giannotti in command and retiring to his cabin, where he grabbed the five-by-seven photo and gazed into the smiling faces of his twin girls in a feeble attempt to avoid thinking about the souls that would be dead at his hand within the next ten minutes.
The three guards on duty at the missile site were enjoying an evening of freedom from their humorless sergeant of the guard, who had taken ill late in the afternoon.
The two corporals and a private first class were playing Da Bai Fen, a popular Chinese card game, while eating dried fish snacks and looking forward to breakfast.
The men were joking and laughing when they heard an odd sound in the distance and immediately stopped talking, carefully listening to the eerie screech. But none of them recognized the high-pitched noise.
The strange sound grew louder. The men looked at one another blankly before the obvious conclusion dawned on them, and they scrambled over one another to reach the nearby bomb shelter.
The first Tomahawk missile exploded in the middle of the compound, injuring the three guards and trapping them in the debris. In shock and disbelief, the three men heard the terrifying sound again. One of the men tried to crawl away, just as the second missile landed eight feet from the first point of impact, instantly killing the guards.
The back-to-back blasts, a combined two thousand pounds of high explosives, reached not only a dozen ballistic missiles on their fixed launching stations, but also an adjacent two-story concrete and steel structure fed by a small power station.
The fireball ignited the solid-rocket propellant in the missiles, triggering secondary explosions that licked the sky, the crimson glow of the resulting fire visible for miles. Sparks flew from severed electrical cables, and then the power station exploded, taking with it the entire structure it served: a state-of-the-art, ground-based anti-satellite laser system.
— 28 —
Bearing two-one-zero. Speed one-six knots,” reported a sailor who sat behind a console on the first of three rows of operators working in the mission-control-like room.
Capt. Christine Blake stood with Hartwell Prost at the end of the front row. The DNI stared at the rightmost projection screen, which showed a beautiful motorsailer yacht cruising through calm seas.
“A Reaper started tracking it an hour ago,” Blake said, referring to a General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper unmanned aerial vehicle. “It’s coming from the suspect HVT grid and also the same location where we spotted the burning Coast Guard patrol boat, who reported approaching this specific vessel for inspection almost three hours ago. A cutter is on an intercept course. We want to reach it before it gets dark.”
Prost frowned at the fact that it had taken his “supposedly” nimble task force more than two hours from the time the patrol boat had been attacked to the time they were able to locate and start tracking the runaway yacht. And while inside their “supposedly” focused search area.
We have to do better than that, he thought, staring at the video feed from the UAV flying a racetrack pattern off the Virginia coast. The yacht had been identified as the Santo Erasmus.
“It left Lisbon six days ago headed for Newport News. One of our deep-sea cutters ran a routine boat safety inspection on it three days ago.”
Prost nodded. “And?”
“It says here that it was issued an RBS certificate for seaworthiness.”
“Of course,” Prost said.
“It’s currently headed southwest,” said Blake. “Away from Ford and the naval station.”
Prost tilted his head at her and said, “Probably has to do with our missing Newport News spy giving its crew a heads-up before going dark.”
“It’s currently forty-one miles northwest of Wilmington, North Carolina, on a bearing that will take it fairly close to MCAS New River,” Blake added, referring to the large Marine Corps air station in New River, North Carolina.
“We can’t let it get anywhere near our coast, Captain,” Prost said, his eyes on the yacht as it reflected the setting sun’s orange light.
“The cutter’s five minutes out.”
“Has it made contact with the yacht?”
Blake shook her head. “Negative, sir. Nonresponsive. And we can’t see anyone.” She tapped her tablet, and the image zoomed in over the bridge as she added, “Though it’s hard to see through its windows reflecting the sunset.”