“Maybe they bugged out,” he suggested to the first sergeant, who hadn’t spoken a word since they’d started searching the barracks. “Those bastards didn’t even give them time to get the pictures.”
“Maybe.” The first sergeant’s voice held a note of doubt. “Come on. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
“But we’re not done yet.”
“Yes, we are. Move, asshole.” Griffin followed the first sergeant up two levels and out of the bunker, blinking as he emerged. The sun was just starting to come up, and already he could feel the temperature soaring.
“Over here.” To Griffin’s surprise, the first sergeant was standing under what appeared to be an outside shower and was stripping off his gear. The sergeant turned the handle, and water gushed out. Stripping down, the sergeant stepped under the water, shut his eyes, and washed down, rubbing hard at his skin. He motioned to Griffin to follow suit.
What was this, some sort of initiation ritual? So far, the first sergeant had offered not one word of explanation.
Seeing his hesitation, the first sergeant unfroze slightly. “Wash down,” he said. “I don’t know what that guy died of, but we sure as hell don’t want to carry it back to the ship.”
Even under the hot sun, Griffin felt his blood run cold as he considered the implications. It hadn’t occurred to him immediately, but it had to the first sergeant. The man left dead on the deck, the hastily abandoned barracks — the weapons. They’d been briefed on the possibility of biological and chemical weapons in the Iraqi arsenal, but all the reports said that any weapons, if they did exist, were stored far inland. Nobody had said anything about biochem at this site, nobody. But the first sergeant was acting as if…
“You think that’s what it was?” Griffin asked, his voice quiet as though to avoid alerting any deadly virus that happened to be around. He started stripping down, following the first sergeant’s lead, figuring he knew what he was doing. The water, when it hit him, was cool, and for a moment he luxuriated in the sensation, forgetting how dangerous the situation might be.
“Maybe. Maybe not,” the first sergeant said, his voice under tight control. “No point in taking chances. Soon as we get back, we go to Medical to get checked out.”
Griffin felt a rush of nausea. “I think I’m feeling — I’m not feeling so good.” He imagined he could feel the first signs of a disease creeping into his body, invading his lungs and worming its way into his blood through his skin.
“Bullshit,” the first sergeant said, in a not unkindly voice. “If it was chem, we’d already be dead. If it’s bio, we won’t know for a while. Best place for us is back on the ship.”
The no-nonsense tone of the first sergeant voice reassured Griffin, if only slightly. Still, he was relieved when they finally headed back across the sand, the sun now hammering at their backs and casting long shadows in front of them.
Yeah, back on the ship. That’s where they needed to be. He tried not to remember the spate of inhalation anthrax cases that had followed the September 11th attacks, tried not to imagine that he could feel disease racing through his veins.
Get back to the ship — just get back to the ship. Everything is OK.
But somehow, deep down in his gut, Griffith knew it was not.
Dirty brown water moved sluggishly past the hull, leaving a thin sheet of oil behind it as it lapped against the steel. The Suez Canal was not much more than a large ditch dredged out between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea.
Coyote stared out at the water from the Admiral’s Bridge, fighting off the feeling of claustrophobia. All aircraft on deck with none airborne, the constrained waters, his escorts strung out before and after the carrier in a sitting-duck formation — every war-fighting instinct in his body was screaming warnings. But this was an international waterway, and there were conventions to be observed. All nations were supposed recognize the rights of transit for the canal and forgo exercising attacks. At least that was the theory among civilized nations, and Coyote wasn’t so sure that particular description applied to any of the countries with a thousand miles of them.
They’d entered the canal just after dawn, in a queue of ships waiting for daylight. Several miles ahead of them, two supertankers trudged their way toward the oil refineries, empty now and riding high in the water. All around them, fishing boats and other smaller craft seemed determined to commit suicide under the bow of the massive aircraft carrier.
The attack on the USS United States had made everyone edgy, and the possibility that biological weapons were involved even more so. Jefferson was buttoned up tight. While Coyote felt immense sympathy for the sailors working belowdecks and in the hangar bay, there was no way he was transiting with the hangar bay doors open, no matter what the international rules of the sea said.
At the end of the transit, the Red Sea beckoned. More constrained waters, although not nearly on the order of the canal. What Coyote really wanted was one thousand miles of blue water in every direction. He thought longingly of previous cruises to the western Pacific, of the patrols off the coasts of Taiwan and Japan. At least there they’d had blue water to run to if they had to. Not that the Jefferson ran — not ever.
It was, he reflected, more a question of presence than anything else. The long-range land-attack Tomahawk weapons carried by the destroyers and cruisers could reach every target they needed to hit from the safety of the Indian Ocean. Launching air wing strikes would be no more difficult, just a matter of putting more gas in the air and asking the aircrews to suffer through a couple of more tankings. Coyote knew that they all would’ve gladly traded the extra tanking in exchange for the security of blue water.
Patrolling the Red Sea, sometimes within view of the coast, was intended to send a message to the littoral nations. A line from Hollywood echoed through his mind: “You want to send a message, use Western Union.”
No, the problem wasn’t that the aircraft carrier couldn’t fight from these waters — it was a question of defense. So close to land, their reaction time to a shore-launched missile or incoming raid was calculated in seconds rather than minutes. At sea, a broad, relatively flat ocean increased their radar-detection envelope tenfold, and they had more of that most precious commodity: time. Time to launch aircraft, time to deploy countermeasures, time to retaliate before the first shot even hit.
Had all the rules changed? The attack on the United States had proved that even a small, wooden vessel could launch a potentially serious attack on an aircraft carrier. Would it have been any easier for the United States to see it coming if they been in blue water instead of near land? Maybe. Maybe not.
The entire bridge crew was edgy over the small boats around them. Not that he could blame them. Added to the additional hazards of navigation with small boats in the area, there was the undercurrent of concern that any one of them might be preparing to launch a Stinger. If even one missile hit the flight deck, assuming they could make it given the steep angle up the side of the carrier, the results could be devastating.
Admiral,” a voice said quietly. “I think you want to see this.”
Coyote turned with a sigh. Captain Jason Coggins, commander of the air wing, stood at the entrance to the bridge, waiting for permission to approach. With him was Commander Bird Dog Robinson and a chief petty officer that Coyote recognized as chief of the avionics division.