Ashes of Victory

— 28 —

Bearing two-one-zero. Speed one-six knots,” reported a sailor who sat behind a console on the first of three rows of operators working in the mission-control-like room.

Capt. Christine Blake stood with Hartwell Prost at the end of the front row. The DNI stared at the rightmost projection screen, which showed a beautiful motorsailer yacht cruising through calm seas.

“A Reaper started tracking it an hour ago,” Blake said, referring to a General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper unmanned aerial vehicle. “It’s coming from the suspect HVT grid and also the same location where we spotted the burning Coast Guard patrol boat, who reported approaching this specific vessel for inspection almost three hours ago. A cutter is on an intercept course. We want to reach it before it gets dark.”

Prost frowned at the fact that it had taken his “supposedly” nimble task force more than two hours from the time the patrol boat had been attacked to the time they were able to locate and start tracking the runaway yacht. And while inside their “supposedly” focused search area.

We have to do better than that, he thought, staring at the video feed from the UAV flying a racetrack pattern off the Virginia coast. The yacht had been identified as the Santo Erasmus.

“It left Lisbon six days ago headed for Newport News. One of our deep-sea cutters ran a routine boat safety inspection on it three days ago.”

Prost nodded. “And?”

“It says here that it was issued an RBS certificate for seaworthiness.”

“Of course,” Prost said.

“It’s currently headed southwest,” said Blake. “Away from Ford and the naval station.”

Prost tilted his head at her and said, “Probably has to do with our missing Newport News spy giving its crew a heads-up before going dark.”

“It’s currently forty-one miles northwest of Wilmington, North Carolina, on a bearing that will take it fairly close to MCAS New River,” Blake added, referring to the large Marine Corps air station in New River, North Carolina.

“We can’t let it get anywhere near our coast, Captain,” Prost said, his eyes on the yacht as it reflected the setting sun’s orange light.

“The cutter’s five minutes out.”

“Has it made contact with the yacht?”

Blake shook her head. “Negative, sir. Nonresponsive. And we can’t see anyone.” She tapped her tablet, and the image zoomed in over the bridge as she added, “Though it’s hard to see through its windows reflecting the sunset.”

“Take it out, Captain,” Prost said.

Blake looked up from her screen. “But the Coast Guard will get there in—”

“Now, Captain. Put a Hellfire through its bridge, and order the cutter to back off, just in case.”

“In case of what, sir?”

He shrugged. “In case it’s carrying enough explosives to damage a carrier. I don’t want the cutter anywhere near it.”

Blake did a double take on him, then she said, “Yes, sir,” and worked her tablet for a few seconds before announcing, “Stand by for missile shot.”

It took about forty seconds for one of the Reaper’s AGM-114 Hellfire missiles to reach its target. One moment, the yacht was coasting through pristine waters and the next it vanished in a white-and-red explosion that filled the screen. When the image returned, the large yacht had stopped and fire billowed from its bridge just as one of its masts toppled over. But it was still afloat and largely in one piece.

Prost frowned. “What type of warhead was that?”

“MAC, sir,” Blake replied, referring to a metal-augmented charge. “Eighteen pounder.”

“Then something’s wrong,” Prost said, staring at the vessel drifting beneath a rising column of smoke.

“No secondaries?” Blake offered, reading his mind.

“Right,” Prost said. “If there was indeed a large bomb or missiles or torpedoes aboard — enough to damage a carrier — their charges should have gone off, vaporizing that yacht.”

“Unless…they somehow got the explosives off,” Blake said.

“You think it met up with another boat?”

“There was that gap of more than two hours from the time we lost contact with the Coast Guard patrol boat to the time we started tracking it,” Blake said. “So, it’s possible.”

Prost made a face, then asked, “Captain, do you have a copy of the Coast Guard’s RBS inspection report from three days ago?”

She tapped her screen, then tilted it toward him. “What are you looking for?”

“What’s no longer there,” he replied, staring at the screen for a moment before looking away in disgust.

“Damn,” Blake said. “They had a Boston Whaler secured to the yacht’s forward deck.”

“And I don’t recall seeing one a moment ago,” Prost said.

Blake immediately reversed the video. “You’re right, sir,” she said, zooming in on the vessel’s bow. “No Whaler.”

“We’ve been conned,” Prost said, closing his eyes as he thought of one type of bomb that could be hauled aboard a Boston Whaler, yet capable of damaging a carrier. “That’s our new target, Captain,” he added.

“Sir,” Blake replied. “That’s a very popular boat. There have to be hundreds of them in these waters, and the RBS doesn’t specify model or size. And we’re almost out of daylight.”

“Then we’d better hustle,” Prost said. “Send out an emergency broadcast to all Coast Guard vessels, law-enforcement patrol boats, and every available aerial asset. Find and stop every last Boston Whaler on the Eastern Seaboard and prioritize those within a hundred miles from Virginia Beach. Also send word to Ford… and pray to God we’re not too late.

The old-school con required three elements. First, the victim had to suspect they were the target of a con. Second, the victim had to think they had figured out how to beat the con. And third, the victim had to be wrong about the true nature of the con.

Javier Ibarra had learned the old trick — immortalized by American jazz pianist and bandleader Bennie Moten in his 1926 song — from his mentor in the smuggling business.

In this case, he had begun the ruse by openly destroying that patrol boat, signaling his presence to American assets in the region. He then had sacrificed his beloved Santo Erasmus by dispatching it on a southwesterly course, away from his expected target, prompting coastal defenses to rush in the wrong direction, and making them think they had figured out his alternate plan. Finally, Ibarra had steered the very nimble Boston Whaler at almost forty-five knots toward their real target, while being ignored by a number of patrol boats and cutters speeding toward the North Carolina coast.

And now they’re about to find out how wrong they were, he thought.

They had stopped in near darkness beneath the last span of the bridge by South Thimble Island, the small body of land where Highway 13, running north from Virginia Beach via a two-lane bridge, transitioned into a tunnel beneath the bay. Continuing north for nearly a mile, the highway resurfaced at North Thimble Island, transitioning back to a bridge all the way to Cape Charles. The bridge-tunnel-bridge design spanning the twelve-mile entrance from the Atlantic Ocean allowed easy access for carriers and other large vessels in and out the bay without the need for a tall bridge.

Ibarra remained in the Boston Whaler, while his deckhands launched an Intex Excursion 5 inflatable dinghy with room for up to five adults. He entered the code for the weapon’s case and opened it carefully. Though completely stable, he couldn’t help but feel any wrong move would cause it to detonate.

Next, he lifted the plastic cover on the device’s keypad and entered the authorization code he’d committed to memory. This armed the device and brought him to a screen requiring him to set a timer. He entered fifteen minutes — long enough for the speedboat to reach its target in Hampton Roads less than ten miles away.

From here on out, he would rely on the Whaler’s Raymarine autopilot — which he slaved to the course plotted in the boat’s Garmin GPS — to complete the mission.

Closing and locking the metallic case secured to the stern, Ibarra started the engine and engaged the autopilot, before glancing over at his team on the dingy floating a few feet off starboard. Slowly he advanced the throttle to the two-thirds’ setting.

As the boat surged from beneath the concrete bridge span under the power of its Mercury engine, he dove off the side and swam toward the Excursion, where Mario Mendoza and Jorge Diaz helped him aboard. Sammy Chen then turned on the Minn Kota Endura trolling motor secured to an Intex motor mount, since the Excursion lacked a transom.

Slowly, and remaining within the protective night shadow cast by the bridge, the foursome began to make their way to the shores of Virginia Beach less than three miles away as the growl of the Boston Whaler’s engine vanished in the distance.

The whaler cruised uninterrupted for nearly twelve minutes at thirty knots under a star-filled night, passing dangerously close to a pleasure yacht and two fishing boats. Though everyone aboard the three vessels heard the rumbling engine, no one actually saw it. A Coast Guard Defender-class patrol boat finally spotted it skimming the waters south of King-Lincoln Park before turning to a northwesterly heading into Hampton Roads along a course less than a quarter of a mile from the shores of Newport News.

The Defender gave chase, focusing a spotlight on the boat’s stern. The moment its captain realized it was unmanned, he ordered the sailor manning the bow-mounted M240B to open fire.

Two miles away, on a pier near the intersection of 33rd Street and Sunset Terrace, Cmdr. Jeff Weathers, the executive officer of USS George H. W. Bush, had kept his ship on general quarters since receiving the alert less than thirty minutes prior of a possible rogue Boston Whaler approaching the Virginia coast.

He turned toward the petty officer manning the radio console as chatter exploded; the crew of the Defender had engaged an unmanned Whaler headed its way. Weathers didn’t even need his binoculars to see the distant flashes of machine gun fire.

A couple of seconds later, the reports reached the carrier.

Weathers raised the binoculars, focusing them on the shifting spotlight dancing over the deck of a white boat that—

Shit. Shit. Shit!

The attack on Truman still fresh in his mind, as well as the near miss on his own carrier, Weathers immediately ordered the sailors armed with shoulder-launched Stinger missiles to focus on the rogue boat.

The well-trained crew jumped into action, and within thirty seconds, four bright plumes rocketed away from Bush toward the Boston Whaler, now floating roughly a third of a mile away, its single outboard engine on fire after taking multiple hits from the Defender boat.

And that was the last thing he saw.

Inside the metallic case, a charge of conventional explosives fired a hollow uranium “bullet” down the barrel of the gun-type weapon, striking its cylindrical uranium target and achieving critical mass.

In microseconds, the exothermic reaction heated the air to incandescence as the fission event unleashed incomprehensible amounts of thermal energy into the surroundings, vaporizing the Boston Whaler, the Defender, and hundreds of thousands of gallons of seawater. The chain reaction created a fireball that reached almost eight hundred feet high, visible as far away as Richmond.

The airburst that followed a half second later propagated radially across the water toward Newport News with a pressure of more than two hundred pounds per square inch. The shockwave dropped to eighty psi five hundred feet from shore and down to twenty psi by the time it reached the shores of Christopher Newport Park at the western end of downtown Newport News.

The pressure wave crushed moored boats, surrounding warehouses, waterfront businesses, and parking garages. It slammed into the Newport Towers and River Park Towers apartment complexes just beyond Christopher Newport Park at fifteen psi, collapsing them. Dropping to five psi while propagating east toward West Avenue — roughly a thousand feet from the water — it shattered windows and tossed vehicles. It finally turned into a gust of very hot forty-mile-an-hour wind by the time it swept across Washington Avenue, almost a quarter mile from shore.

In the second that followed the blast, collapsing structures crushed more than three thousand souls living or working within the kill zone between the shore and West Avenue.

The blast released an enormous amount of heat into the atmosphere, reaching almost fifteen calories per cubic inch as it spread out in a circle from the blast site, igniting the shoreline of Newport News. Triggering fires and incinerating anyone who may have survived the initial airburst by the water, the heat wave dropped to five calories per cubic inch by West Avenue, inflicting third-degree burns on exposed skin.

At the same time, a radiation plume of five hundred rems rushed across Hampton Roads, contaminating the shoreline, finally falling to safe levels by the edge of Christopher Newport Park, near the collapsing apartment complexes.

To the west, the shockwave collided against Bush’s starboard at a pressure of eleven psi, pushing the carrier over almost six degrees to port while shattering all starboard-facing windows on the island superstructure. The deafening airburst swept across the largely empty flight deck; the aircraft from Carrier Air Wing 7 were at nearby NAS Oceana, their home when Bush was not deployed.

Radioactive debris, mixed with hundreds of thousands of gallons of seawater and sediment, surged skyward in a column of boiling gases and superhot particles. It reached a height of almost fifteen thousand feet, where the atmosphere fought back, flattening the shaft into the familiar mushroom cloud.

Luckily, the prevailing winds aloft carried the fallout over Chesapeake Bay and into the Atlantic Ocean, sparing the surrounding communities from a shower of radioactive debris.

Ibarra blinked as the horizon pulsated with white light before a deep rumble echoed across the bay, followed by the distant rising column of radioactive debris. Even from ten miles away, the blast was ominous.

“Dios mío,” mumbled Mario Mendoza, crossing himself.

Although Ibarra, as well as the rest of his crew, had known the nature of the mission and carried it out as ordered, the reality of having set off a nuclear device in a populated area had a sobering effect on all of them.

The Basque sailor had faced many challenges in his life, some at the hand of nature, like North Atlantic gales, and others at the hand of men, when he’d had to kill or be killed.

But this… this was… apocalyptic, surreal, like if the devil himself had reached from the lowest level of hell and pushed his fiery fist into the night sky over Newport News.

As he stared at the distant mushroom cloud pulsating with yellow and red atop the boiling stem, Javier Ibarra had the strange feeling that no amount of money would be enough to escape the manhunt that was sure to follow this Armageddon of his own creation.

And it was at this moment, as a light and warm breeze swept across Chesapeake Bay and into the Atlantic Ocean, that he realized that life as he knew it would never be the same again.

They sat in silence in the Situation Room staring at the high-definition images on the large TV screens as emergency crews from multiple counties descended onto Newport News, the sight reminiscent of the Truman incident a week before. Body bags once more lined the piers and also streets, as an army of rescue crews dug through the rubble of several flattened city blocks.

President Cord Macklin contemplated the ghostly feed with growing anger. Although the result of the blast could have been far worse had that boat been allowed to get closer to shore and to Bush, the scenes were nonetheless the stuff of nightmares.

And on top of dealing with this unprecedented disaster on the home front — and on his watch — the president also had to face the repercussions of this attack abroad. The latest damage report from Bush indicated that the carrier would not be heading out to sea in the foreseeable future.

Macklin had already made the single phone call that activated the massive government machine to provide every possible support to the navy town. Multiple local, state, and federal emergency response agencies under the coordination of the Department of Homeland Security had taken over warehouses just beyond the blast zone to set up a headquarters to deal with the disaster. Although radiation fallout had been contained over the water, crews still wore hazmat suits as a precaution. Working thirty-minute shifts inside the kill zone below 6th Street, they searched for survivors while helicopters flew nonstop carrying victims to hospitals in a five-state area.

It was a disaster on a scale unseen in America, but it was still only a small fraction of the damage that would have occurred had that Coast Guard Defender boat not stopped the rogue Boston Whaler when it did.

“And we now have a connection,” Hartwell Prost said, referring to the intelligence extracted from Prince Omar Al Saud by a CIA team operating out of a black ops site in Poland, where Cmdr. Jake Russo’s team had delivered the HVT after a brief stopover in Germany.

Macklin frowned. His first reaction after hearing the intel had been to get on the horn with President Xi Jiechi and confront him with the secret arrangement between the Saudi prince and General Deng Xiangsui. But Prost had talked him out of it, arguing that it was more valuable that the general didn’t know he had been made — for a time. Meanwhile, Prost was working with Secretary of State Brad Austin to go after the prince’s assets, as well as his supporters in Saudi Arabia, which included members of the royal family.

“We do have a connection indeed, Hart,” the president said. “And now it’s our turn at the bat.”

Brad Austin stepped out of the rear of the sedan in front of 601 New Hampshire Avenue, in the heart of Foggy Bottom.

Massive and opulent, the seven-story building occupied almost an entire city block in one of the most expensive real-estate enclaves in the nation. Designed to project the wealth and power of the oil-rich nation, its lobby was nothing short of stunning, with massive crystal chandeliers casting a soft glow on shiny marble floors, exquisite wood paneling, and expensive furnishings.

Austin walked straight to the aide waiting for him, next to the private elevator flanked by security guards in white uniforms, each holding an MP-5 submachine gun. They went up to the top floor, where he was received by Ambassador Adel al-Faisal, dressed in a traditional white cotton thawb. He complemented the ankle-length Arab tunic with a matching ghutrah headdress secured with a black goat’s-hair agal. The plump man, who had almost walked out of the United Nations assembly a few days before during Austin’s speech, did not smile as he extended a hand toward a pair of chairs across from his desk.

“Don’t need to sit down, Mr. Ambassador,” Austin said. “But you might need to.”

Al-Faisal blinked at that before asking, “What is the purpose of your visit? Your office said it was urgent.”

“It’s about your missing prince.”

Al-Faisal ran a finger over his thin mustache, his stare narrowing. “Prince Omar?”

Austin nodded.

The ambassador became visibly agitated. “Do you know who took him?”

Another nod.

“Was it the Mossad? The Shiites? Is there a ransom? I demand to know!”

“Actually, there is a ransom, but quite steep,” he said before producing his phone.

“What are you talking about? Prince Omar is eleventh in line for the throne. His well-being is a matter of national security. My government will do anything to get him back safely.”

“Then take a look at this.… Though again, I suggest you sit down first.”

The ambassador stared at him a moment before slowly sitting in one of the chairs.

Austin pulled up the video he had received from Prost just hours before and pressed play before passing it to the Saudi, who spent the next two minutes spellbound, listening to Al Saud’s confession.

“You see, Mr. Ambassador, since Prince Omar is, as you indicated, in line for the throne, that makes your government directly responsible for a nuclear attack against the United States, not to mention the deaths of over six thousand citizens, and thousands more wounded. And there’s the damage to three aircraft carriers, the destruction of one of our new subs, and the nightmare in Newport News.”

“This… this is…”

“My president sent me here today to ask what is your government prepared to do to make amends?”

“Amends?”

“You don’t expect us to just forget this.”

The Saudi stared back. “Is this… a threat?”

“You have twenty-four hours to respond. If we are not satisfied with your answer, we will be forced to… respond… in kind.”

The ambassador tried to stand his ground. “The world will never stand for that. Saudi Arabia will not be—”

“Mr. Ambassador, nobody likes Saudi Arabia except for Saudi Arabia. Right now, the world is in shock that a nuclear weapon was used against the United States. Once it becomes public that your government was responsible, no one will get in our way. But don’t worry… we’ll be sure to spare the oil fields and the refineries, for our own use.”

Al-Faisal’s face turned red with anger.

“Twenty-four hours, Mr. Ambassador,” Austin said. As he turned to leave, he tapped his watch and said, “Tick tock.”