The Enemy Within

Farrell hid his distaste for Corbell’s reasoning. It shouldn’t take bad polling news to push and pull this White House into retaliating for one of the worst acts of terrorism ever conducted on U.S. soil, but he’d been around Washington long enough to know that domestic politics played a role in every administration’s foreign policy decisions. Civics textbooks aside, that was the way the world worked, and you couldn’t ignore it.

The President seemed to read his mind. He smiled wryly. “Well, I guess I don’t often get the chance to win votes by doing the right thing. Admiral Dillon?”

“Yes, sir?” The white-haired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs straightened in his chair, expectation plain on a face weathered by years spent at sea in all seasons.

“Put your forces in motion.”

FEBRUARY 5

In the Persian Gulf, east of Qatar.

The still, calm waters of the Persian Gulf exploded, blasted apart by a missile surging skyward from below the surface. Boosted at first by a solid rocket, it climbed rapidly, deploying tail fins, stub wings, and an intake for its jet engine. As soon as the airfoils bit into the air, the Tomahawk cruise missile arced over, diving for the concealment offered by low altitude.

The sea erupted again, eighty yards further north. Another missile roared aloft. Tomahawk after Tomahawk followed, taking flight at precise, thirty-second intervals.

Several miles away, a four-engine, propeller-driven plane orbited slowly above the water.

Lieutenant (jg) Pat Royce sat in the right seat of the Navy P-3C Orion, watching the launch through binoculars, counting the missiles. They fanned out slightly over the deep blue water of the Gulf, speeding away to the north at just under the speed of sound. Not terribly fast for a jet, Royce thought, but compared to this bus, that’s pretty zippy.

He keyed his mike, using the intercom to be heard above the thrumming roar of the Orion’s engines. “I’ve got six good birds so far, all heading in the right direction, Dave.”

The pilot and mission commander, Lieutenant Commander Dave McWhorter, nodded. He spoke into his own mike. “Sparks, pass the word, ‘Launch made on time, proceeding smoothly.’ ”

Except for quick scans of his instruments, the P-3 pilot kept his own eyes on the skyline, ready to throw the Orion into evasive maneuvers at the first sign of trouble. So far the launch area was clear of air and surface traffic, and the Tomahawk missiles were working as advertised. But they were still attacking a hostile foreign power, close to its shores.

McWhorter could feel the sweat beading up on his forehead. There were Iranian jet interceptors based at Bandar-e Abbas, scarcely two hundred miles east. Loitering like this to observe and report on the missile launch wasn’t terribly covert, and trouble could arrive a lot quicker than his old, lumbering turboprop could get out of it.

Six minutes began to seem an eternity.

As exposed as McWhorter and Roycc felt two thousand feet above the surface, Commander Mark Marino felt even more so a hundred feet under it. USS Helena, a Los Angelesclass attack submarine, lived by stealth, and the explosions of water and spray above him sounded like a combination brass band and steam calliope. And in order to fire its salvo of Tomahawk cruise missiles, his boat had to steer a straight course at periscope depth at creep speed, ghosting north at no more than four or five knots. The noise also blinded many of his own sonar arrays. Not that they were much good anyway in the warm, shallow waters of the Persian Gulf.

If any of the ultra-quiet diesel subs the Iranians had bought from the Russians were lurking close by, Marino and his whole crew could be dead before they even knew they were under attack.

Duckling that unprofitable and unnerving thought, he scanned Helena’s control room.

Chief Walsh, the boat’s senior fire control technician, hovered over his board, making sure that if the automated sequence went wrong, it didn’t get any worse. Not far away, Master Chief Richards, chief of the boat, manned the diving panel, working hard to keep the boat level. Each Tomahawk weighed almost two tons. With that much weight leaving the submarine’s bow every thirty seconds, Richards was kept busy trying to compensate for the rapid changes in Helena’s trim. The other officers and ratings packed into the control room were equally attentive to their duties.

Marino allowed himself to relax minutely. Except for a slightly greater air of concentration and a tendency to speak even more softly than usual, his crew might almost have been conducting a routine peacetime drill.

In a way, that wasn’t surprising. Once started, the launch process was virtually automatic. The sub’s navigation system gave the Tomahawks their starting point. Preloaded data packs fed in their destinations. Launch keys were turned and the fire control computers took over.