“Major Trace has proof,” Boomer said.
“Major Trace isn’t here, nor is her proof,” Senator Jordan pointed out.
Before Boomer could say anything, he swiveled his seat and looked at General Maxwell.
“Again, I want you to check out this submarine and those paratroopers.”
“All right.”
“You might want to try and find Colonel Decker,” Boomer added.
Jordan turned back to Boomer.
“Major, I think you will understand if I want you kept close at hand.
I’m turning you back to the custody of Agent Stewart. We have two days before the seventh. Let’s hope we find something more solid before then.”
“Let’s hope we don’t,” General Maxwell said as Boomer and Agent Stewart left the room.
“General, is there anything more you can tell me about this?” Senator Jordan asked.
“I find it very difficult to believe that this Line exists. You told me earlier that you do believe it. Give me your reasons, no matter how vague.”
“All I’ve ever heard are rumors,” Maxwell said.
“Every officer in the Army has heard of the WPPA, the West Point Protective Association. We know that most of the ring knockers scratch each other’s back.” Maxwell sighed.
“However, like the problem we have now — I have no proof but I’ve heard things. Things that I never cared to report because I didn’t want to believe them.”
“Things like what?”
“Let me give you an example,” Maxwell said.
“For the last thirty years, ever since Vietnam, there’s been a big rift in the Army between the conventional forces and the Special Operations forces. The Special Operations forces have conducted over ninety percent of the real-world missions since the close of Vietnam yet receive less than one percent of the budget. The conventional folks who run the Army have always been preparing for the big war, yet the trend in the latter half of this century has been the little war.
Anyway, I won’t go into the details or the positions of all the players, but suffice it to say that there are two opposing camps, and that the camp with all the firepower and the money and the pull is the conventional camp.”
“Hell, yeah, I know about that,” Senator Jordan said.
“I was on the committee that drafted a law over the Joint Chiefs protests to get the Special Operations Command designated a separate entity.”
Maxwell nodded.
“Anyway, there are rumors. About seven or eight years ago, one of the Ranger battalion commanders was causing a lot of trouble. The Rangers were under the Special Operations Command, but they were the darling of the regular Army guys. The Ranger has always been viewed as the ultimate infantryman.
The Army made a big push to get the Ranger regiment out from underneath the Special Operations Command and back-into the regular Army fold, under the 18th Airborne Corps.
The problem was that the battalion commander of the 1st Ranger Battalion at Hunter Army Airfield in Georgia thought they should stay under 1st SO COM command. And he was quite vocal about it despite warnings from his chain of command. He even went so far as to agree to testify before a congressional committee investigating the controversy.
“Two weeks before he was scheduled to testify, he was participating in a joint exercise at Hurlburt Field in Florida.
During a night operation, his helicopter crashed. He and twelve other Rangers were killed. The safety board at Fort Rucker investigated the case as they are required to do. I talked to one of the members of that board. He told me that they couldn’t get access to some of the information they needed to determine cause of crash. They ended up labeling it, like so many other unexplained crashes, as pilot error.
But he told me that what he did see of the crash site showed signs of a midair explosion.”
“You’re saying the battalion commander was killed?”
Jordan demanded.
“It certainly was convenient,” was Maxwell’s summary.
There have been other incidents over the years. Other accidents.
Hell, no one has yet figured out exactly what happened at Desert One, but that certainly cost Carter the presidency. I talked to Charlie Beckwith before he died, and he was bitter. There was something he wouldn’t tell even me. He had those Marine helicopters forced on him by the Joint Chiefs and he indicated there were other things that occurred at the behest of the Joint Chiefs that were not conducive to the success of the mission.”
Maxwell shrugged.
“I can’t prove anything, but there have just been too many coincidences. And there are too many right now.”
Jordan drummed his fingers on the desktop for a few minutes.
“All right, you’ve convinced me that doing nothing isn’t a good idea.
The possibility of a real threat here is just too high. I’ll go to the President with this and inform him of the situation.”
Maxwell had been thinking about this ever since landing.
“Let’s bring General Martin in for a meeting,” he suggested.
“For what purpose?”
“Let’s let him square off with Major Watson. See what happens,” Maxwell said.
“It might be interesting.”
CHAPTER 22
It was a perfect night for lovers on Waikiki but a terrible night for covert operations. The sea was smooth and flat.
The moon was three-quarters full and reflected off the mirror surface, giving forty-two percent illumination. The sound of the minimal surf on the sandy beach was surprisingly loud.
The submarine lay off shore, due south of Fort Kamehameha, over the horizon so the lights on shore couldn’t be seen. It was submerged, lying dead in the water 100 feet down, ten kilometers from the coast.
On the back deck, a hastily welded hatch opened in the hull, leading into the pressurized compartment — the dry deck shelter (DDS)-bolted to the deck. The two men climbing into the DDS wore wet suits and carried their gear in black mesh bags.
They ran through the pre-operations checks on the vehicle cocooned inside the DDS — the Mark IX Swimmer Delivery Vehicle (SDV). The batteries were at full charge, everything was functioning properly. The Mark IX was a long, flattened rectangle with propellers and dive fins at the rear. A little over nineteen feet long, it was only slightly more than six feet wide and drew less than three feet.
The two divers slid inside, closing the hatches behind them. For the trip in they would breathe off air from the tanks on the vehicle and they hooked their breathing gear up appropriately.
The man on the right spoke into the radiophone which was connected by umbilical to the sub.
“Mother, this is Little Bird. We are clear to proceed. Over.”
“Roger, Little Bird. We read all green in here. Over.”
“Flood and release. Over.”
“We’ll be waiting for you. Good hunting. Umbilicals cut and flooding and releasing. Out.”
The radiophone went dead. With a hiss, water began pouring into the DDS. The pilot worked at keeping the SDV at neutral buoyancy as the chamber flooded. Water also flooded into the chambers inside the SDV where the two divers lay on their stomachs peering out the front glass canopy.
Once the chamber was full, the large hatch on the end swung open. The pilot goosed the twin propellers, and the SDV was free of the submarine, clearing the DDS. The pilot controlled the Mark IX using stabilizers, both horizontal and vertical, added to the rear of the propellers.
The second diver was the navigator and he was currently punching in on the waterproof panel in front of him.
“Fixing Doppler,” he announced over the commo link between him and his cohort. The computerized Doppler navigation system was now updated with their current location and would guide them on their journey, greatly simplifying a task that previously was a nightmare in pitch-black seas. The SDV also boasted an obstacle avoidance sonar subsystem (OAS), which provided automatic warning to the pilot of any obstacles in the sub’s path — essential given that they could see little more than an inch out the front window and would be “flying” blind, trusting to the Doppler and their charts for navigation.