USS Towers Box Set Page 8

  Without electricity, the only illumination inside the Turtle came from the glowing foxfire moss that surrounded the compass and depth gauge. Battling unfamiliar tides and physical fatigue from manually powering the submarine through the water, Ezra Lee had only about thirty minutes of air with which to conduct his attack and make his escape. Laboring, sweating, and—perhaps—grunting and swearing in the darkened confines of the tiny vessel, Lee managed to maneuver the Turtle under the hull of HMS Eagle. He set to work with the auger, but several minutes of unproductive drilling convinced him that he could not penetrate the hull planking of the British ship. He rested for a few minutes and then tried again, still without success. With his air supply running low, Lee was forced to abandon the attack.

  Nearly exhausted and starving for breathable air, Lee pumped out his ballast tanks shortly after he was clear of Eagle’s hull. He was probably hoping that the darkness would hide the top of his strange little craft as it protruded from the water.

  Luck was not with him. The British spotted his craft almost immediately and sent out a boat to capture it.

  Lee jettisoned the torpedo in the hopes of lightening his vessel enough to escape the pursuing boat. His tactic worked. Gaining speed, he managed to out-distance the British long enough for them to lose his tiny craft in the darkness. Lee escaped, with the Turtle intact.

  To all appearances, the first torpedo attack was a failure. But the night was not yet over. Lying forgotten on the bottom of the river, the torpedo’s clockwork detonator continued its countdown. One hour after Lee jettisoned it, David Bushnell’s weapon went off. The resulting explosion was huge, throwing an enormous plume of spray into the air and illuminating the darkened harbor like a flash of underwater lightning.

  Not one British ship was damaged, but Admiral Howe was shaken by it. Strange machines were prowling about beneath the waters of New York harbor—and the next underwater attack might well succeed where this one had failed. Admiral Howe moved his ships. The blockade was broken.

  Thanks (in part) to a crude weapon, with an even cruder delivery system, America became a nation. And, from the very moment of its infancy, the torpedo began to shape world events.

  CHAPTER 8

  MARINE BARRACKS AT EIGHTH AND I

  WASHINGTON, DC

  MONDAY; 07 MAY

  7:03 PM EDT

  “First off, Mr. President, it looks like the British Embassy was the only target.” The secretary of homeland security’s voice warbled slightly over the secure phone. “The Pentagon, the Capitol Building, and the White House are still under security lockdown, but there don’t seem to be any follow-on attacks. We’ve issued warnings to all of the other embassies, and they’re taking whatever precautions they deem appropriate. We’ll be releasing the lockdowns shortly, but I’ve directed all federal and military facilities to remain at an increased threat condition for the next seventy-two hours, just to be safe.”

  “Good call,” the president said. “Continue.”

  “Sir, we’ve got four biohazard teams working the embassy: one forensic survey team and three rescue teams. We’re concentrating on survivors first. We can start thinking about moving bodies after we’re sure nobody else is left alive in there. We don’t have a formal casualty report yet, but we’ve got a head count from the initial rapid sweep. Forty-two dead, so far, and about sixty survivors, nearly all unconscious or comatose.”

  “I see,” the president said.

  The secretary’s voice changed. “I’m afraid that Sir Anthony is among the dead, sir.”

  “I see,” the president said again. He stared across the conference room that had become his temporary Situation Room. The wall on the far side of the long oak table was dominated by a floor-to-ceiling bas relief of the Marine Corps emblem—the globe, eagle, and anchor, topped by a banner proclaiming Semper Fidelis (Always Faithful)—the words by which the U.S. Marines lived and died. Proud words, symbolizing the honor, courage, and sacrifice of men and women who were both warriors and keepers of the peace.

  But where was the honor in killing an embassy full of civilians? He had no doubt that the attackers considered themselves warriors. Whoever they were, whatever their agenda was, they were probably congratulating themselves on their bravery and declaring their attack a victory for their cause. But it wasn’t a victory, and it wasn’t the act of warriors. It was murder.

  “Sir?”

  The president flinched. It took a second to remember that Chapman was still on the phone. “Huh? What?” The president tightened his grip on the receiver and jerked his mind back to the phone conversation. “I’m sorry, Clark. What were you saying?”

  “Sir, we can go over this later.”

  “No,” the president said. “Now. Go ahead.”

  “We still don’t know very much about the bio-warfare agent, except that it’s a powerful hemorrhagic—the victims all show signs of bleeding from the nose, ears, and mouth. We also know that it works quickly, in hours rather than days. And that eliminates a lot of agents, including Ebola, plague, Q-fever, botulism, Hantavirus, anthrax, smallpox, and most of the other commonly weaponized bugs.”

  “Do we know how the attack was carried out?”

  “Yes, sir. The attack vector appears to have been the carpet.”

  The president’s eyebrows arched. “Say that again?”

  “Sir, I know how crazy that sounds,” Secretary Chapman said. “The bio-survey team can’t identify the agent—that’s going to take some lab work—but they can detect it. There are traces of the agent all throughout the building, but the highest concentrations by far are in the carpeting. Apparently, the carpet was pretty much saturated by the agent.”

  “How in the hell did that happen?”

  “We don’t know, sir. Not yet.”

  “All right,” the president said. “What’s our next move?”

  “Well, sir, there are going to be victims outside the embassy. Personnel who went home sick at the first sign of symptoms. Visitors, couriers, reporters, people who passed through the embassy but don’t work there. We’ll find some of them in clinics and emergency rooms. Some will be at home in bed. Some of them are probably dead by now.”

  The president sucked air through his teeth. “How contagious is this thing?”

  “We don’t know, sir,” Chapman said. “We won’t know that until we’ve identified the agent that was used.”

  “Or when the hospitals start filling up with sick people,” the president said.

  “CDC and USAMRIID don’t think that’s going to happen, sir”

  “How can they possibly know that?”

  “It’s an educated guess, sir,” Secretary Chapman said. “The agent concentration levels are massive. If this bug was really toxic in low concentrations, the attackers wouldn’t have had to use nearly as much to achieve the desired effect. They could have dropped an aerosol spray can in a bathroom trashcan, instead of saturating the carpets.”

  “Sounds like a reasonable assumption,” the president said. “But bear in mind that the people who did this are not reasonable. We don’t know what motivates them, or even what their goal is, short of murdering British diplomats.” He sighed. “Anything else?”

  “Not at the moment, Mr. President.”

  “Okay,” the president said. “When can I go home?”

  “The Secret Service should be giving the all-clear on the White House any time now. If you go ahead and whistle for your helicopter, the residence should be clear by the time you get there.”

  “Good,” the president said. “I’ve got work to do.”

  CHAPTER 9

  USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

  NORTHERN ARABIAN GULF

  WEDNESDAY; 09 MAY

  1826 hours (6:26 PM)

  TIME ZONE +3 ‘CHARLIE’

  Standing on the port side main deck of USS Towers, Captain Bowie was just about as hot as he could ever remember being—and for a man born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, that was no small feat. He was facing west, i
nto the setting sun, but the sky was still painfully bright. Behind him, the coast of Iran was only a few miles over the horizon, and the winds blowing in from the Iranian desert showed no signs of cooling down. The back and armpits of his blue coveralls were dark with sweat. The bill of his USS Towers ball cap drooped across his forehead like some dead—but still soggy—sea creature.

  He propped a steel-toed boot on a Kevlar life rail and looked out across the five hundred or so yards of water that separated his own ship from the merchant ship that was causing all the trouble.

  The motor vessel Lotus Blossom wallowed uneasily on the water, bulling her way through the waves rather than cleaving them cleanly. She was an ancient rust-bucket of a freighter, probably built in the postwar shipbuilding boom of the mid-1950s, and she had not aged gracefully.

  Bowie watched the old cargo ship bob and roll. The seas were calm, the waves low and almost lazy under the fierce Arabian sun, but the MV Lotus Blossom heeled alarmingly with each swell that passed under her keel. To Bowie’s trained eye, it was obvious that the old ship’s weight was not properly trimmed; in all probability, her cargo was not distributed evenly. Such an obvious oversight spoke of sloppiness and neglect. Not that Bowie needed any clues to tell him that the aging vessel was poorly maintained (and probably poorly manned). The ship’s appearance told that story all by itself.

  The Lotus Blossom was a Type-3 freighter, with her superstructure situated well aft. The forward three-quarters of her deck were dominated by two large cargo hatches and the V-shaped booms of a cargo crane that had once lowered crates and pallets into the twin cargo holds. The crane was gone now, or mostly gone. At some time in the past—possibly in the 1970s, when containerized shipping had become the cargo industry standard—the old ship had been converted from a bulk cargo carrier to a container ship. The conversion had been none too neat. The crane, which had obviously been too light to handle the standard twenty-foot–long steel shipping containers, had been hacked off with welding torches, leaving two truncated stubs sticking out of the winch housing like the stumps of poorly amputated arms.

  The ship’s superstructure had been white once, and the hull had been green, but the colors were nearly masked by the scabrous orange and brown of new rust over old. The ship’s name, painted across the stern in two-foot–high capital letters, had faded into near invisibility.

  Bowie looked at the ship and exhaled slowly through his teeth. Lotus Blossom. What an utterly inappropriate name. He had trouble associating the battered old tub with any sort of flower. To his mind, it required a liberal stretch of imagination to call the damned thing a ship—never mind a flower.

  The Lotus Blossom looked harmless enough, though. Even from five hundred yards away, the old girl looked tired to the bone, as though she might decide to give up the ghost in a minute or two, and slip beneath the waves for some long overdue rest. And, for all Bowie knew, the old freighter might do just that, which certainly didn’t make the ship any less dangerous to his crew. The Lotus Blossom was a suspected smuggler, and Bowie’s Visit, Board, Search, and Seizure teams were preparing to board the ship to search for contraband cargo. His teams would have their hands full confronting and controlling a potentially hostile crew, and trying to worm their way through every nook and cranny of an unfamiliar vessel while covering each other’s backs. They didn’t need the added angst of worrying about whether or not the ship was going to sink beneath their feet.

  From a tactical standpoint, Bowie wasn’t crazy about being this far away from the ship that his crew would be searching. His teams would be armed, but that didn’t make them invulnerable if things turned ugly over there. His gun crews were standing ready to rake the freighter with machine gun fire, or even the 5-inch deck gun, but Bowie couldn’t very well order them to shoot at the ship if his own crew members were aboard.

  If he could bring the Towers in closer, his gun crews would be able to see the tactical situation clearly and pick their own targets. For years, that had been the standard operating procedure for Visit, Board, Search, and Seizure teams. But the terrorist attack on USS Cole had demonstrated the folly of allowing any unknown vessel to get too close to a warship. The Navy had learned the hard way that the most powerful warship afloat is vulnerable to a close-in suicide attack.

  Captain Bowie gave the MV Lotus Blossom another careful once-over with his eyes. The crew of the old freighter probably had some small arms aboard, possibly quite a few—if they really were smugglers. But he was ninety-eight percent certain that the old tub was not crammed to the gunwales with explosives and rigged for a suicide attack on a U.S. warship.

  Odds were he could order his ship in nice and close to the old girl so that his gun crews could give good cover to his VBSS teams as they boarded. Unfortunately, he was not one hundred percent certain. And, like it or not, it was tactically smarter to risk some of his crew by maintaining a stand-off distance, than to risk all of his crew (and the ship) by getting in closer.

  * * *

  A watertight door opened behind Bowie, and he looked over his shoulder in time to see a small group of junior ensigns file out onto the deck. There were five of them: three men and two women. They stood for a moment, blinking and shielding their eyes against the unexpected brilliance of the setting sun.

  Bowie looked them over. They were a good crop of kids. Young, physically fit, and so desperately eager that their enthusiasm nearly shone out of their eyes like the beams of searchlights.

  Bowie had been a junior ensign himself once, and he had a pretty fair idea of what was racing around in their minds. Each of them had spent the last four years having his or her head crammed full of information on a dizzying array of subjects: naval history, tactical doctrine, theory of leadership, uniform regulations, military custom and law, formal dining etiquette, shipboard firefighting, and damage control. And now, they were itching to put all that knowledge to good use.

  In their own eyes, they were educated and dedicated professionals, ready to seize the reigns of authority and prove themselves as warriors and leaders of men. To the men and women who served under them, they were sea puppies—no experience, no common sense, and prone to sticking their little puppy dog noses where they didn’t belong.

  It was Bowie’s job, with the assistance of his officers and chief petty officers, to turn these sea puppies into by-God naval officers. Hands-on training would do some of the work. So would practical experience and the time-honored school of hard knocks. The majority would be well on the way to becoming useful officers by the end of this deployment. The real trick would be making sure they didn’t get anybody killed along the way.

  The hardest part for most of them would be the eventual realization that they would never master the technologies under their command. It would be a difficult and painful lesson for them to learn. They were intelligent, educated, highly motivated, and hungry for the respect of their peers and subordinates. It was natural and predictable that they would want to become experts on the equipment and procedures under their control. And many of them would spend their first sea tours trying to do just that. But Bowie knew from experience that it was an impossible task. The equipment and tactics involved were so complex that a person could spend half a career mastering one warfare area, and the other half of that career studying and working to stay on top of the rapid changes brought on by evolving technologies.

  An effective naval officer had to be the proverbial jack-of-all-trades and master of none. He or she needed a strong working knowledge of radar systems, sonar systems, cruise missiles, anti-aircraft missiles, communications systems, combat support logistics, torpedoes, turbine engines, firefighting systems, chemical warfare defense systems, navigation technologies, ship-handling techniques, weather patterns, electrical power generation, naval gun systems, infrared sensors, and about a hundred other disciplines, each of which required years to master. It simply wasn’t possible to become an expert in all of them, so a good officer had to be satisfied with becoming a capable leader f
or his subordinates: the enlisted men and women who were the Navy’s real experts.

  Successful officers learned to accept the limitations of the human brain and concentrated on knowing enough about each discipline to command effectively. Naval aviators tended to learn that lesson quickly. You didn’t need to know how to field-strip an F-18 engine in order to fly the aircraft.

  But some junior officers never quite got the message. They drove themselves unmercifully, trying to learn everything about everything, piling more and more pressure on themselves to achieve the impossible, until they either burned out or snapped.

  Bowie scanned the faces of his latest crop of junior officers. How many of them would not make it over the hump? How many of these bright young men and women would resign their commissions and limp home with their spirits in tatters, never really understanding where they had failed? One of them, probably. Perhaps even two. But wouldn’t it be great if, just once, all of them could make the cut?

  “If wishes were fishes,” Bowie said under his breath. He turned his attention back to the motor vessel Lotus Blossom. He would do everything in his power to help these puppies along, but only time would tell.

  “Gather round, ladies and gentlemen,” he said over his shoulder. “School is now in session.”

  Still blinking as their eyes adjusted to the sunlight, the young officers collected around him in a loose semicircle.

  “Let’s start with your assessment of the tactical situation,” he said. “And then we’ll go from there.” He looked at Ensign Patrick Cooper, the ship’s Undersea Warfare Officer. “Why don’t you kick us off, Pat? Take a look at our problem child out there and tell us what you see. Throw in anything you think might be tactically useful.”

  Cooper nearly flinched at the sound of his name, and then stood up straighter and squared his shoulders. “Yes, sir.” He looked out at the Lotus Blossom for several seconds. “Aft superstructure,” he said slowly. “So she’s a Type-3 freighter. It looks like she’s a converted bulk carrier. From here it doesn’t look like the ship fitters did a very clean job.”