The LaSallette was not a warship per se. Its superstructure was a forest of antennae, satellite receivers, radar dishes, and microwave arrays. More than half its crew of 214 worked on monitoring data pulled in by these various devices. Officially, the LaSallette was a C3 platform, for command, control, and communications. In reality, it was a spy ship. It cruised the upper reaches of the Persian Gulf periodically, snooping on Iraqi radio and TV transmissions, gathering intelligence, watching for any military movements. It had been compared to a floating AWACS plane, and this was not entirely inaccurate.
This day it was on a typical SigInt mission. A number of Republican Guard units had been on the move in the upper part of Iraq recently, some heading south, others moving east. Routine maneuvers perhaps. But the LaSallette had been sent into the northern gulf to troll the airwaves for any indications as to what these elite Iraqi units might be up to.
It was by fate then that its course brought it steaming over the horizon just as the AC-130 gunship had finished off the last survivors of Qak-Six’s number-one ferry. With its long-range snooping radar and TV equipment, the LaSallette was suddenly flooded with data emanating from the burning oil platform and the mysterious airplane orbiting above it. There was no doubt among those interpreting this information that the gunship had attacked the oil rig and had killed just about all of its occupants. The proof of this was pouring into the hard drives of the ship’s main computers.
And for the first time in a year and a half of rampage and destruction, the people flying the gunship suddenly had a very big problem on their hands.
They had witnesses.
By the time the LaSallette’s crew were called to their battle stations, the AC-130 was heading for the ship at full speed.
The captain immediately ordered his helicopter to launch. Gunners assigned to the .50-caliber deck guns scrambled to their positions. Everyone above the rank of CPO was issued an M-16 and a clip of ammunition. The communications shack was sending out messages to any and every Allied ship in the immediate vicinity—but the airplane’s jamming suite prevented all but the first few seconds of any message to escape. It made little difference. The captain had already done a sweep of his immediate area. The nearest U.S. ship was sixty miles away.
The LaSallette was trapped and very much alone.
The secure photo-fax machine in Smitz’s billet started beeping at exactly 3 A.M.
The CIA man rolled over, sleepily checked his alarm clock, and then clicked the fax machine’s Receive button.
A red sheet was the first to emerge. It was covered with black dots and a thick black band running diagonally down its side. This indicated the message he was about to receive was of the highest security—Eyes Only—and should be destroyed as soon as he was through reading it.
Smitz finally got out of bed and stumbled into his pants and shirt. He was used to these late-night interruptions by now. They had a certain rhythm to them. The fax would take sixty seconds to print out, long enough for him to reheat a half-filled cup of coffee from earlier that night. He slipped it into his microwave, and then visited the head. The fax machine and the micro beeped at exactly the same time. “Message received,” he typed into its keyboard. The machine clicked twice and then went silent.
He took his coffee from the micro, burning his fingers in the process. Finally he sat down to read the missive.
The cover sheet was protecting a photograph Smitz recognized as being shot from an aerial recon camera called an ICQ-23. It was a secret type used on U-2’s and some versions of the new RF-18 Navy recon fighter.
The photo showed a smoldering hunk of metal in the midst of an oil-slicked sea. Smitz didn’t know whether he was looking at the remains of a ship or an airplane or something else. It took the explanation on page three to tell him this was all that was left of an oil platform in the upper Persian Gulf known as Qak-Six.
The summary was brief. There were 322 people dead. No known survivors. The rig was perforated with holes, big and small. They were almost symmetrical in their placement. Smitz bit his lip. There was no doubt in his mind what horror had been visited on the oil platform. The AC-130 had struck again.
No sooner had he finished reading the grim report when his fax began beeping again. He hit the Receive button and started another blurry photo printing out.
This one he watched from the first moment of its inception, and as it scrolled out, he felt his eyes go wider and his jaw drop lower. There was no mystery about this image. It was a high-altitude photo of a ship, one that was in the process of sinking. It was obviously taken from a passing satellite just seconds before the vessel slipped beneath the waves. In the very northwest corner of the photo was a very small indication that looked like the rear end of an airplane in retreat.
Below the picture was a simple caption. “USS LaSallette C3 vessel sinking this day 705 hours GMT. With loss of all life.”
“Damn,” Smitz breathed.
He was still staring at the photo when his phone rang. The noise startled him so much he whacked his head on the ceiling of his tiny billet. He leapt for the phone, snagged the receiver, pulled on the cord, and finally brought it up to his ear. His eyes passed over the hands of his luminescent watch. It was 3:15 in the morning.
Who the fuck could this be?
The man’s voice at the other end sounded very far away.
“Hold for the President,” he said.
Chapter 15
This night had started out pretty much like any other for Norton and Delaney.
They’d lifted off about 2300 hours with Norton in the pilot’s seat of the Hind and Delaney riding up front.
Their first order of business was to transit fifty-five miles out in the Caribbean and do a routine navigation exercise around a spit of land called Whiskey Rocks. After this, they linked up with the other choppers and practiced formation night flying and refueling exercises. This completed, they all returned to base. While the other choppers were done for the night, Norton and Delaney took on more fuel, switched positions, and then took off again. They had two more hours of flying time available, and Delaney wanted to get more time behind the wheel. Yet no sooner were they airborne when they got a call from the base telling them to return immediately.
This had never happened before. They turned around, both thinking that the satellite window was closing sooner than anticipated. But as soon as they were down again, they saw the ground crew meander out of Hangar 2 to take care of the chopper. They didn’t seem to be in any hurry, indicating a satellite pass-over was not the problem. It had to be something else.
With Delaney agreeing to watch over the care and handling of the Hind, Norton hurried over to the Big Room to find out what was up.
He burst in, like a kid late for class, to find most of the usual suspects were there. Smitz, Rooney, Ricco, and Gillis, of course. The SEALs. The Army pilots. The CIA security people. As Norton was walking in, they were all starting on their way out. Everyone looked grim. No one said a word to him as they passed by.
“Jeesuz, what’s happened?” Norton asked Smitz, who was trying to hurry out of the room himself.
“The people running the gunship just fucked up,” he said breathlessly. “They sank a Navy C-3 ship. In the Gulf. Two hundred guys went down with it. They also nailed an oil platform, killed everyone on board that too.”