“As a matter of fact, that’s what I’d do,” said Arnold. “I’d stay somewhere quiet and then run in at first light.”
“How long’s that, Arnold?” asked the President.
“Well, they’re four hours in front of us, so I’d say another couple of hours.”
“Not me, sir,” said Lieutenant Commander Ramshawe. “I’d go while it was still bloody dark. And I’d go damn slow, so the minute I got there, I could get the periscope up and make my visual fix.”
“Have you ever been in a submarine, Ramshawe?” said Admiral Morgan, sternly.
“No, sir.”
“Well, you shoulda been. Got the right instincts. And I think you might be correct. Let’s get Frank on the line in Norfolk. See what he thinks. Then we’ll get a signal on the satellite to George Gillmore.”
Meanwhile, beyond the White House, the East Coast prepared for the final stages of evacuation, which, by Presidential decree, would begin at midnight. The streets were busier now than they had been for several hours. The lights were beginning to go out in several government buildings as skeleton staffs headed for the cars and the roads to the northwest.
The Police were scheduled to make the Beltway around the city one-way, counterclockwise, and designate the main Highway 279 “North Only” starting at midnight. This would enable all members of Government to head for the Camp Goliath area, fast.
President Bedford insisted on being among the very last to leave the deserted capital city. “Not until we know that the volcano has been blown,” he said. “Not until the tsunami is within 500 miles of our shores. That’s when we go.”
Over at the Pentagon, the Special Ops Room staff intended to remain functional until the very last moment before flying up to Goliath. The U.S. Marines had two Super Stallions ready to take off from the Pentagon, and two more on the White House lawn. Between them, they could airlift 220 key personnel from the teeth of danger.
As the clocks ticked into the small hours of the morning, the vast evacuation of the East Coast was almost complete. It was now October 9, and all the small towns from Maine to south Florida were very nearly depleted.
Places like Boston, Newport, and Providence, Rhode Island, the Long Island suburbs, New Jersey, and the Carolina coastal plains were all but deserted. The one city still writhing in desperate last-moment agonies was the Big Apple — New York City — where the traffic snarls were still appalling, and the railroads were still packed with thousands of people trying to make it to safety, west of the city. But their journeys were much longer than those of the short-haul Washington evacuees and the New Englanders fleeing Boston for the relative closeness of the Massachusetts hills.
Trains took twice as long to return to New York, across the vast New Jersey flatlands, most of which were about six inches above sea level. And there were so many more thousands of people with nowhere to go. The Army was coping valiantly, bringing in hundreds upon hundreds of trucks, and commandeering just about every gallon of gas in the state. But the evacuation was just swamped with the massive throng of people trying to get out of the city, and the Army Commanders began to think that there were not enough trucks, buses, and trains in the entire world to sort them all out, before the whole goddamned place went underwater.
The Ops Room in the Pentagon received a new and heartfelt request from New York every hour. More transportation, more manpower, more helicopters. The last request read by Gen. Tim Scannell was from a Gulf War veteran, a high-ranking Colonel, and it ended thus…“Sir, you have absolutely no idea what it’s like up here. I never saw so many frightened people. Terrified people, that is. They don’t know what’s going to happen to them. I implore you to get another hundred trucks into Midtown Manhattan. Or I’m afraid we’ll just go under.”
Admiral Morgan was well aware of the crisis facing the Big Apple, and he conferred with General Scannell on an hourly basis. They banned any form of crisis coverage by the media, shut down the New York newspapers, and took over the television networks, using them strictly to broadcast Military information and instructions to the population. Coverage of any kind of confusion, or of human-interest stories that might spread panic, was absolutely banned.
Admiral Morgan told all corporate media managements that if one of them dared to transgress his guidelines, their building would be instantly shut down and then barred by the heavy guns of the tanks that roamed the New York City streets.
General Scannell actually appeared on the screen in a closed-circuit television linkup to all broadcasting stations on the East Coast to confirm the Martial Law threat made by the Supreme Commander of Operation High Tide. “We can cope with damn near anything,” he said. “Except for mass panic. Do not even consider stepping out of line.”
So far, no one had.
And now it was 0100 on the morning of October 9, D-day for the Hamas hit men. With exception of the churning cauldron of New York City, the East Coast evacuation was winding down. Millions of people had made their way to higher ground and now waited in the western hills from Maine to the Carolinas and beyond.
Military spokesmen occupied every television and radio channel, and their words were professionally calming, assuring the population that the front line of the United States Navy still stood between the terrorists and the execution of their attack on the great volcano in the eastern Atlantic.
Admiral Morgan had instructed the military broadcasters to sign off each one-hour bulletin after midnight with the reassuring, morale-boosting words…“We have the power, the technology, and the bravest of men to carry out the Pentagon’s defensive plan — and always remember the words of the great American sportswriter Damon Runyon, The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong — but that’s the way to bet!”
The waters were still dark above the Barracuda as it ran silently along its west-nor’west course. They were three miles short of their launch position, running well below the layers, transmitting nothing, still undetected.
At 0530 local time, Admiral Badr slid up to periscope depth, and inside his seven-second exposure limit he was immediately aware that the entire area was “lousy” with antisubmarine units, active and therefore probably passive too. But the “layers” had protected him well, and he threaded his way deep again, into the great underwater caverns, which so distort and confuse probing sonars from the surface.
Ben had enough time to assess that there were almost certainly Viking aircraft combing the surface above him, but few ships. As they continued forward, however, he could hear active transmissions from helicopters and frigates inshore of him. All in all, he concluded there was a highly active layer of U.S. defense from about 12 miles off the towering eastern shores of La Palma.
For the fifth time in the early morning journey, he ordered a major course change, just to check that there was no one trailing behind him. Then he corrected it back to two-nine-zero, and slowly, making scarcely a ripple, he once more brought the ship to periscope depth for his final “fix.” And as the submarine slid gently into the now-brightening surface waters, he made one single order: