The interior of the weapon was a maze. Qazi had expected this. He tried to remember exactly what he was looking for. Yes, that clip was on the wire leading from the battery. And this other clip was on the wire bundles that led to the detonators. Jarvis had had to scrape some insulation from both wires to affix the clips.
“Satisfactory.” He straightened and found himself looking at Admiral Parker, whose face was still obscured behind his gas mask. “I’m sorry, Admiral. But we need these weapons.”
Parker turned away. He seemed to be listening.
Now Qazi heard it too, a faint rumbling. What was that?
Qazi pointed his flashlight at the water contact with the doorway. The water was moving, ever so slightly. But it should move as the ship rocked at anchor. Parker was looking at the water too. Qazi felt the deck beneath his feet tremble.
Now he understood. The rumble had been the anchor chain running out. The ship was underway!
25
The officer-of-the-deck of the Aegis-class cruiser, USS Gettysburg, anchored three miles north of the United States, was momentarily confused. The carrier’s lights were moving in relation to him. The lookout on the port wing of the bridge had called it to his attention. The lights of the carrier had only been visible for the last fifteen minutes, since the rain had slackened. He quickly scanned the wind-direction indicator to see if the wind had changed; that would cause the ships to swing on their anchors. No. Perhaps his ship was moving, dragging its anchor — unlikely, since the wind velocity had also eased. But … He swung the alidade to the lighthouse at the entrance to Naples Harbor, just visible through the rain, and noted the bearing. He checked another point a little further up the coast. The bearings were the same numbers as in the pass-down log, the same numbers the radar operator in Combat had been verifying all evening. His ship was still stationary. But the carrier wasn’t.
“Bridge, Combat.” It was the squawk box, on this class of ships known as the Internal Voice Communication System which combined a telephone, a speaker system at selected locations, and all of the internal networks in the ship.
“Bridge, aye.”
“The United States is underway. We have them headed course Two Five Zero at four knots on radar.” The watch officer in Combat had established a track on the SPS-55 radar, which was operating.
The carrier was heading directly into the prevailing wind, in the same direction she had been pointing as she rode at her anchor. “Keep tracking her and call her up. Find out if we’ve missed something. Have someone check the messages.” Lieutenant (jg) Epley already suspected the worst. Somehow, some way, a message notifying the cruiser of a planned ship movement had gone astray. If so, he thought glumly, there would be absolute hell to pay. Somebody had dropped the ball rather spectacularly.
“Aye aye, sir.”
The OOD looked again through the water-streaked bridge window at the carrier’s moving lights as he twirled the handle on the “growler,” an old-fashioned intercom box. He could just hear the growler sounding in the captain’s cabin directly beneath the bridge.
“Captain.” The Old Man sounded half asleep. No doubt he was.
“Sir, this is the OOD. The United States seems to be underway. There’s no mention—”
“What?” The captain was fully awake now.
“Yessir. She’s moving. Combat verifies on radar.”
“Have you called her on the bridge-to-bridge?”
“Not yet, sir. Combat—”
“I’ll be right there.” The connection broke.
Epley pointed his binoculars at the carrier. He could see the masthead lights and the floodlights around the top of the island, though his view was slightly out of focus with all this moisture in the air.
“Bridge, Combat. Her speed is up to seven knots. No answer to our calls on Fleet Tactical or Navy Red.” Fleet Tactical was a clear voice UHF circuit. Navy Red, or Fleet Secure, was an encrypted voice circuit.
“Keep trying.”
“Watch to see if she turns,” the OOD told the port lookout and his quartermaster, who had already noted the time and event in the log.
The captain arrived on the bridge in less than a minute. He carried his shoes in his hand and tossed them on his chair. He wasted only ten seconds verifying that the United States was indeed underway, then grabbed the Navy Red radiotelephone. No answer. He called Combat and found they had had no luck either. He stuck his head out of the port bridge-wing doorway and yelled to the signalman to try and raise the carrier with his flashing light, then spent a tense, unhappy minute on the phone with the cruiser’s operations officer, who was as mystified as he was. The navigator was equally perplexed.
“Set the special sea and anchor detail, Mr. Epley. We’re going to see how fast we can get underway. We can’t let the flagship just steam off over the goddamned horizon without us. Then call the communications officer and tell him I want to see him here on the bridge in precisely sixty seconds.” He sat down in his chair and put on his shoes, fuming, “The goddamn flagship gets underway in the middle of the fucking night and no one aboard my ship knows jack about it. I’m going to get out of the goddamn navy and buy a pig farm.”
The call, when it came, was from Admiral Parker. The chief engineer summoned Jake to the telephone. He had been huddled with the navigator over a chart, plotting a course that would take the ship as far away from land as quickly as possible. The navigator had had to obtain the chart from his stateroom, since he couldn’t get up into the island to his office.
“Captain Grafton.”
“Jake, this is the admiral. I’m here with Colonel Qazi and he asked me to call you.”
“Yessir.” Jake listened intently. “Where are you, sir?”
“Uh, I think we’d better skip that. Are you the senior officer in charge?”
“Yessir. I think so.” Jake could hear someone whispering, but he couldn’t make out the words.
In a moment the admiral spoke again. “Qazi has armed a nuclear weapon. He …” Jake heard a muffled phrase, then a new voice came on the line.
“Captain Grafton, I am Colonel Qazi. You have heard Admiral Parker tell you I have armed a nuclear weapon. Do you doubt it?”
“No.”
“Unless you and your men cooperate and do precisely as I tell you, I will detonate this device. I will destroy this ship and every living soul aboard her.”
He paused and Jake pressed the telephone against his ear.
“Did you hear me, Captain?” His voice was calm, assured, confident.
“I heard you.”
“This is what you will do. You will restore power to the weapons elevators servicing the forward magazine. You will call off your marines. You will ensure your crew does not interfere with me or my men as we leave the ship. You will not interfere with the helicopters on the flight deck. If you interfere with me in any way, Captain, if you try to thwart me, I will detonate this device.”
“Let me talk to the admiral.”
“I think not, Captain. This is your decision, not his. You hold his life, your life, and the life of every man on this ship in your hands.”
“Including yours.”
“Including mine. I am in your hands. You have the power to decide if this weapon will be detonated. If it is, you will be responsible.”
Jake tried to laugh. It sounded more like a croak.
“This is deadly serious, Captain.”
“Looks to me like we have a Mexican standoff here, Colonel. You fail if you die here too.”
“No, sir. If this bomb explodes I will have shown the world the Americans cannot be trusted. No one will ever know why this bomb exploded, but the evidence will be irrefutable that it did. Your fleets will be disarmed by the American people. Your ships will be banned from the oceans of the world. I will have dealt a mortal blow to American power. I will have accomplished what the Germans and the Japanese could not in World War II. I will have destroyed the United States Navy. And I will have accomplished it very, very cheaply, at the cost of only my life and a few of my men. Think about it, Captain. You have ten seconds.”