Donchez wandered toward the building entrance, back through the layers of security checkpoints, until he reached the lobby with its large plate-glass windows. Outside the storm raged, the road covered, the snow falling nearly horizontally. He pulled out a Havana and flicked his Zippo, glaring at a security guard who looked like he might tell Donchez there was no smoking inside.
A dispersion glue bomb, Donchez thought. With enough radioactivity to kill a city. He looked at the raging blizzard, wondering what effect, if any, the snow would have on the plutonium-dust killer. It might be the only thing that could save Washington, if Washington was the target.
Phoenix might track the Destiny. But it was up to Michael Pacino to take this son of a bitch out.
Chapter 29
Friday, 3 January
While a phone rang in General Barczynski’s Fairfax, Virginia, residence, the phone next to Pacino’s bunk buzzed, both phones attempting to convey the same information.
Five minutes after the phone buzzed, the local time just after midnight, Pacino stood in the control room with a crowd of officers, the North Atlantic chart out, the position of the Phoenix plotted with a bright blue dot, an orange navigation tape strip showing a straight line from Gilbratar in the Med to the Labrador Sea. As the message from Donchez had indicated, the chart plotter had drawn a red circle 1,900 miles around Washington, a blue one around Boston, a green one around Halifax, Nova Scotia, a purple one around Toronto.
The blue dot was inside all the circles, the circle surrounding the southernmost city, Washington, ending halfway up the Davis Strait between Greenland and Newfoundland almost to the Baffin Bay.
Pacino read the messages again. He could hardly believe it. Destiny, if it turned north, would be in the marginal ice zone by the afternoon. And it would definitely turn north, since it had come so far north already. If Donchez was right about the Hiroshima-missile theory, the Destiny had been in range of the northeastern cities for some time, at least a day.
Which seemed to go against the whole idea. If the Destiny was coming to throw up these Hiroshima missiles, why hadn’t it already fired them?
And what the hell was the Phoenix doing? Here’s a ship that gets almost blown away, shoots every damned torpedo in the inventory, and then follows the Destiny into the Atlantic.
Whoever her skipper was, he was either very brave or very stupid, and probably some combination of the two.
Pacino didn’t stop to think what he would have done in the same situation, knowing that he probably would have trailed the Destiny, but scoffing at the idea that he’d be dumb enough not to save a torpedo for himself.
It didn’t answer one question that nagged at him — if the Destiny had been so damned elusive in the Med, what had changed to allow a damaged 688 to track her clear across the North Atlantic? Pacino started to wonder if the UIF wanted them to track the Destiny, that maybe it was a decoy, and the cruise missiles were somewhere else, but the headache that came from that line of thought pounded between his temples until he decided to save it for later.
“O.O.D, do you have a course from the navigator?” The chart was not encouraging. The point bravo hold position was designed to stage Seawolf for an interception in mid-Atlantic, not the Labrador Sea. They’d have to go northeast to get around the point of Newfoundland, then turn to the northwest to go up the Davis Strait. That was over 1,300 nautical miles, almost thirty hours at flank speed. They wouldn’t catch up to the projected Destiny position until the next day in the morning watch. By then, anything could happen.
It might already be too late, Pacino thought.
“Yes, Captain,” Scott Court said from the conn.
“Proceed at flank until we’re within 100 miles of the Phoenix position. But get ready to come to PD in the next half-hour. There’s something I want to say.”
“Aye, aye, sir. Helm, right five degrees rudder, steady course zero five zero, all ahead flank. Dive, make your depth five five zero feet.”
Pacino picked up the microphone, deciding to do a quick brief of the crew before he tagged out the loudspeaker system.
“Attention all hands, this is the captain. We’ve just gotten a message from COMSUBLANT that our target, the Destiny, is identified and located north in the Labrador Sea. We are now departing the point bravo hold position and driving up at flank to intercept. Sometime in the next two days we will engage the Destiny and try to sink him. I urge all hands to get what rest they can in their next off-watch period, because once we get into the Labrador Sea I will right the ship for ultraquiet and man battle stations.” Pacino paused, wondering if he should say something more personal, feeling he’d fallen short of the famous World War II submarine skippers’ speeches to their crews, inspiring words of wisdom for the men to take into battle with them, words to tell grandchildren decades later, but he wasn’t a poet. “That is all. Carry on.” He put the microphone back into its cradle, thinking about what the crew thought, how they would react.
“Off’sa’deck, I’ll be in my stateroom drafting a message to go out in the next PD.”
“Aye, sir.”
Pacino moved out of control to the inner sanctum of his stateroom, took a blank message form out of his drawer and stared at it for some time, the chart of the Labrador Sea now engraved in his mind.
Comdr. Ibn Quzwini felt closer to death than at any time in his forty years. It was obvious that the work in the ballast tank would have suited itself better to the younger officers, but he was now third in command, the mechanical officer, the man who knew the ship’s systems better than anyone aboard. The ballast-tank work could not proceed without him. Still, it might have to if he succumbed to the cold and the exhaustion.
The tank was a frightening place to be, even in the dry dock. Quzwini had had to enter it in the Japanese construction yard just before the dry dock was flooded. He had been slated to be the last man in the tank to ensure that no shipyard worker had left tools in the tank that could cause rattles when submerged, that all the pipe supports were installed correctly, that nothing was forgotten. In those days just before the war, his only cares were that the ship be received from the Japanese in the best possible condition.
There were no thoughts about dying in combat or firing a missile that would kill several million people, such a thought could fill his stomach with acid. Better not to think it. Even in that shipyard entry, the ballast tank had been a horrible place, the size of it intimidating, with no platforms to stand on, only the structural framing in the space to be climbed up.
Now that the ship was submerged with the ballast tank full of rank-smelling compressed air, being in the tank was terrifying. If one of the tank vents came open, the tank would flood and kill the tank crew, although it was more likely that someone would fall from one of the tubes to the hull below or that one of the heavy loads would break a restraining chain and crush the man beneath it. Worse than the tank’s inhospitable geometry was its temperature, the air in side at zero degrees centigrade, cold enough to cause their breaths to form clouds of vapor. The alternating pattern of waiting and heavy exertion caused the men to freeze and then sweat, the next wait making the sweat a super coolant.
They all might die of exposure long before they died of falling or being crushed.
Quzwini, as he had for the last five hours, suppressed further thoughts about the lack of safety in the tank and returned to the task at hand, the lifting of the metal patch cut from the upper half of the number-one tube. The metal of the patch had been altered with the attachment of three lifting eyes, each connected to the hooks of a high-capacity chainfall. With three lifting lugs set up high in the tank at a structural hoop of steel, the tank crew winched the heavy hatch upward. It could go only one-and-a-half meters up before it hit the bottom of tube six above. It took them an hour to lift the patch that meter and a half, the patch rising in one centimeter increments, infinitesimally slow. When the patch clunked against the bottom of tube six, the chainfalls were locked, and the heavy warhead of the Hiroshima missile readied to be withdrawn. Pulling off the nose cone was slow, agonizing work, the connecting bolts tight from the factory.