“The even better news,” muttered an older and more experienced colleague, “is that after Gleneagles it won’t be our turn for years. Let the others cope with the security headaches for a few years.”
MAREK GUMIENNY was not long getting back to Steve Hill. He had been escorted by the director of his own agency to the White House, and had explained to the six principals the deductions that had been drawn following the receipt of a bizarre message from the unheard-of island of Labuan.
“They said much the same as before,” Gumienny reported. “Whatever it is, wherever it is, find it and destroy it.”
“The same with my government,” said Steve Hill. “No holds barred. Destroy on sight. And they want us to work together on this.” “No problem. But, Steve, my people are convinced the USA is likely to be the target, so our coastal protection takes precedence over everything else-Mideast, Asia, Europe. We have top priority over all our assets-satellites, warships, the lot. If we locate the ghost ship anywhere away from our shores, okay, we’ll divert assets to destroy it.”
The American director of national intelligence, John Negro-ponte, authorized the CIA to inform their British counterparts on a “for your eyes only” basis of the measures the States intended to take.
The defense strategy would be based on three stages: aerial surveillance, identification of vessel and check it out. Any unsatisfactory explanation, any unexplained diversion from course, would generate a physical intercept. Any resistance would entail destruction at sea.
To establish a sea territory, a line was drawn to create a complete circle of three hundred miles’ radius round the island of Labuan. From the northern curve of this circle, a line was drawn right across the Pacific to Anchorage, on the south coast of Alaska. A second line was drawn from the southern arc of the Indonesian circle southeast across the Pacific to the coast of Ecuador. The enclosed area was most of the Pacific Ocean. It included the entire western seaboard of Canada and the USA and Mexico down to Ecuador, including the Panama Canal.
There was no need to announce it yet, the White House had decided, but it was intended to monitor every ship in that triangle steaming east to the American coast. Anything leaving the triangle or heading to Asia would be left alone. The rest would be identified and checked out.
Thanks to years of pressure by a few bodies often dubbed “cranky,” there was one procedural ally. Major merchant marine shipping lines had agreed to file destination plans, as airliners file flight plans, as a matter of routine. Seventy percent of the vessels in the “check it out” zone would be on file, and the companies that owned them could contact their captains. Under the new rules, there was also an agreement that sea captains would always use specific words, known only to their owners, if they were secure. Failure to use the agreed-upon word could mean the captain was under duress.
It was seventy-two hours after the White House conference when the first KH-n “Keyhole” satellite rolled onto its track in space and began to photograph the Indonesian circle. Its computers had been instructed to photograph, regardless of steaming direction, any merchant marine vessel within three hundred miles’ radius of Labuan Island. Computers obey instructions, so it did. As the KH-n began to photograph, the Countess of Richmond, heading due south through the Makassar Strait, was 310 miles south of Labuan. It was not photographed.
From London, the White House’s obsession with an attack from the Pacific was only half the picture. The warnings from the Edzell conference had been submitted in the UK and the USA for further scrutiny, but the findings were broadly endorsed.
It took a long, personal call on the hotline between Downing Street and the White House to conclude a concordat on the two most vital narrows east of Malta. The agreement provided that the Royal Navy, in partnership with the Egyptians, would monitor the southern end of the Suez Canal to intercept all ships save the very smallest coming up from Asia.
The U.S. Navy’s warships in the Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean would patrol the Straits of Hormuz. Here, the threat would only be from a huge vessel capable of sinking itself in the deepwater channel running down the center of the straits. The principal traffic here was of supertankers, entering empty from the south, coming back low in the water and full of crude after loading at any of the score of islands scattered off Iran, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
The good news for the Americans was that the companies owning such vessels are relatively few altogether, and ready to cooperate to prevent a disaster for all of them. Landing a party of U.S. Marines by Sea Stallion helicopter on the deck of a supertanker heading for the straits, but still three hundred miles short, and having a quick tour of the bridge, took very little time and did not slow the vessel at all.
As for threats number two and three, every government in Europe with a major seaport was warned of the possible existence of a ghost ship under the command of terrorists. It was up to Denmark to protect Copenhagen, Sweden to look after Stockholm and Gote-borg, Germany to watch out for anything entering Hamburg or Kiel; France was warned to defend Brest and Marseille. British Navy airplanes out of Gibraltar started to patrol the narrows, the Pillars of Hercules, between the Rock and Morocco, to identify anything coming in from the Atlantic.
All the way over the Rockies, Major Duval had put the Eagle through its paces, and it had performed perfectly. Below him, the weather had changed. The cloudless blue skies of Arizona betrayed first a few wisps of mare’s tail cloud lines, which thickened as he left Nevada for Oregon. When he crossed the Columbia River into Washington, the cloud below him was solid from treetop height to twenty thousand feet, and moving down from the Canadian border to the north. At thirty thousand feet, he was still in clear blue sky, but the descent would involve a long haul through dense vapor. Two hundred miles out, he called McChord AFB and asked for a ground-controlled descent to landing. McChord asked him to stay out to the east, turn inbound over Spokane and descend on instructions. The Eagle was in the left-hand turn toward McChord when what was about to become the USAF’s most expensive wrench slipped out of where it had lain jammed between two hydraulic lines in the starboard engine. When the Eagle leveled out, the wrench fell into the blade of the turbofan. The first result was a massive bang from somewhere deep in the guts of the starboard Fioo as the compressor blades, sharp as cleavers and spinning close to the speed of sound, began to shear off.
Each sheared blade jammed among the rest. In both cockpits, a blazing red light answered Nicky Johns’s yelled “What the f____________________ was that?” In front of him, Larry Duval was listening to something inside his head screaming, Close it down.
After years of flying, Duval’s fingers were doing the job almost unbidden, flicking off one switch after another: fuel, electric circuits, hydraulic lines. But the starboard engine was blazing. The built-in fire extinguishers operated automatically but were too late. The starboard Fioo was tearing itself to pieces in what is known as “catastrophic engine failure.” Behind Duval, the Wizzo was telling McChord: “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. Starboard engine on fire…”
He was interrupted by another roar from behind him. Far from shutting down, fragments of the starboard engine had torn through the firewall and were attacking the port side. More red lights blazed. The second engine had caught fire also. With reduced fuel and one engine functioning, the Eagle with Duval piloting could have made it down. But with both engines dead, a modern fighter does not glide like fighters long ago; it plunges like a bullet. Captain Johns would tell the inquiry later that his pilot’s voice remained calm and level. He had switched the radio to transmit, so that the air traffic controller at McChord did not need to be informed; he was hearing it in real time.