Terror At Dawn

FOUR

Lance Corporal Barry Griffin, USMC, was on his first deployment as a member of a recon team. His first assignment after boot camp had been as a member of the security force on board USS United States, and he found while he had a natural aptitude for the military lifestyle, he chafed at seeing other, more senior Marines load up in the helicopter and head for land on special missions while he guarded the door to the admiral’s cabin.

Oh, sure, he understood that the new kid had to pay his dues, and he wasn’t the only one on security duty. Still, as the cruise stretched on, he found himself determined to find a more active, a more — well, Marine — job within the United States Marine Corps. At his first opportunity, he applied for reconnaissance training.

The year of schooling had been alternately boring and everything he’d dreamed of. Over a twelve-month period, he’d earned dive, jump, and reconnaissance sniper certifications. The practical classroom sessions he found useful only so far as they would support the actual practice of his new skills, but he quickly discovered that knowledge was power. Jumping out of airplanes or drawing a bead on a bad guy’s head, he found himself in his element. During the simulated graduation exercises from reconnaissance and Ranger training, he knew he was in his element.

His orders to the USS United States had come as a pleasant surprise. God knows he’d spent enough time learning his way around the ship on his first cruise that he didn’t mind skipping that part of the transfer. He already knew the damage-control stations, the galley hours, where the best bunks were, and that the gym was better equipped than most shore stations. It was with a good deal of pleasure that he reported back on board, and soon found himself heading for the gym attired in minimal workout clothes while other jar-heads took up his former duty of guarding doors. Life in recon, at least on board the ship, consisted mostly of eating, working out, weapons training and cleaning, and staying ready.

His first mission to shore had sounded like a piece of cake. He and a first sergeant went in by rubber raft to a remote part of the Iraqi coast. Evading the military patrols, both friendly and enemy, as well as a host of smaller fishing vessels and massive commercial tankers, they went ashore in the dead of night. From there, a quick overland hike to check out the suspected terrorist training camp. They snooped around the perimeter, scurrying for cover in the barren land, and found little more than abandoned tents and bunkers.

Inside one of the bunkers was where the real surprises were. From a seemingly innocuous Quonset-type construction, the bunker spread down two levels. In the lower levels, they found caches of weapons, rations, and one other surprise — an Iraqi soldier, dead, desiccated, awkwardly sprawled on the concrete deck. They checked out the weapons first, including an abundance of medium-range ground-to-ground attack projectiles and a number of sets of MOPP gear.

As Griffin searched what appeared to be the barracks, he was surprised to find that whoever had occupied that area had left behind a good deal of personal gear. Not just clothes and uniforms, but also the pictures of families, toiletries, books — most of them appeared to be the Koran, but he couldn’t be certain of that. The sort of stuff you expected a man to take with him even if he was in a hurry.

“Maybe they bugged out,” he suggested to the first sergeant, who hadn’t spoken a word since they’d started searching the barracks. “Those bastards didn’t even give them time to get the pictures.”

“Maybe.” The first sergeant’s voice held a note of doubt. “Come on. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“But we’re not done yet.”

“Yes, we are. Move, asshole.” Griffin followed the first sergeant up two levels and out of the bunker, blinking as he emerged. The sun was just starting to come up, and already he could feel the temperature soaring.

“Over here.” To Griffin’s surprise, the first sergeant was standing under what appeared to be an outside shower and was stripping off his gear. The sergeant turned the handle, and water gushed out. Stripping down, the sergeant stepped under the water, shut his eyes, and washed down, rubbing hard at his skin. He motioned to Griffin to follow suit.

What was this, some sort of initiation ritual? So far, the first sergeant had offered not one word of explanation.

Seeing his hesitation, the first sergeant unfroze slightly. “Wash down,” he said. “I don’t know what that guy died of, but we sure as hell don’t want to carry it back to the ship.”

Even under the hot sun, Griffin felt his blood run cold as he considered the implications. It hadn’t occurred to him immediately, but it had to the first sergeant. The man left dead on the deck, the hastily abandoned barracks — the weapons. They’d been briefed on the possibility of biological and chemical weapons in the Iraqi arsenal, but all the reports said that any weapons, if they did exist, were stored far inland. Nobody had said anything about biochem at this site, nobody. But the first sergeant was acting as if…

“You think that’s what it was?” Griffin asked, his voice quiet as though to avoid alerting any deadly virus that happened to be around. He started stripping down, following the first sergeant’s lead, figuring he knew what he was doing. The water, when it hit him, was cool, and for a moment he luxuriated in the sensation, forgetting how dangerous the situation might be.

“Maybe. Maybe not,” the first sergeant said, his voice under tight control. “No point in taking chances. Soon as we get back, we go to Medical to get checked out.”

Griffin felt a rush of nausea. “I think I’m feeling — I’m not feeling so good.” He imagined he could feel the first signs of a disease creeping into his body, invading his lungs and worming its way into his blood through his skin.

“Bullshit,” the first sergeant said, in a not unkindly voice. “If it was chem, we’d already be dead. If it’s bio, we won’t know for a while. Best place for us is back on the ship.”

The no-nonsense tone of the first sergeant voice reassured Griffin, if only slightly. Still, he was relieved when they finally headed back across the sand, the sun now hammering at their backs and casting long shadows in front of them.

Yeah, back on the ship. That’s where they needed to be. He tried not to remember the spate of inhalation anthrax cases that had followed the September 11th attacks, tried not to imagine that he could feel disease racing through his veins.

Get back to the ship — just get back to the ship. Everything is OK.

But somehow, deep down in his gut, Griffith knew it was not.

Dirty brown water moved sluggishly past the hull, leaving a thin sheet of oil behind it as it lapped against the steel. The Suez Canal was not much more than a large ditch dredged out between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea.

Coyote stared out at the water from the Admiral’s Bridge, fighting off the feeling of claustrophobia. All aircraft on deck with none airborne, the constrained waters, his escorts strung out before and after the carrier in a sitting-duck formation — every war-fighting instinct in his body was screaming warnings. But this was an international waterway, and there were conventions to be observed. All nations were supposed recognize the rights of transit for the canal and forgo exercising attacks. At least that was the theory among civilized nations, and Coyote wasn’t so sure that particular description applied to any of the countries with a thousand miles of them.

They’d entered the canal just after dawn, in a queue of ships waiting for daylight. Several miles ahead of them, two supertankers trudged their way toward the oil refineries, empty now and riding high in the water. All around them, fishing boats and other smaller craft seemed determined to commit suicide under the bow of the massive aircraft carrier.

The attack on the USS United States had made everyone edgy, and the possibility that biological weapons were involved even more so. Jefferson was buttoned up tight. While Coyote felt immense sympathy for the sailors working belowdecks and in the hangar bay, there was no way he was transiting with the hangar bay doors open, no matter what the international rules of the sea said.

At the end of the transit, the Red Sea beckoned. More constrained waters, although not nearly on the order of the canal. What Coyote really wanted was one thousand miles of blue water in every direction. He thought longingly of previous cruises to the western Pacific, of the patrols off the coasts of Taiwan and Japan. At least there they’d had blue water to run to if they had to. Not that the Jefferson ran — not ever.

It was, he reflected, more a question of presence than anything else. The long-range land-attack Tomahawk weapons carried by the destroyers and cruisers could reach every target they needed to hit from the safety of the Indian Ocean. Launching air wing strikes would be no more difficult, just a matter of putting more gas in the air and asking the aircrews to suffer through a couple of more tankings. Coyote knew that they all would’ve gladly traded the extra tanking in exchange for the security of blue water.

Patrolling the Red Sea, sometimes within view of the coast, was intended to send a message to the littoral nations. A line from Hollywood echoed through his mind: “You want to send a message, use Western Union.”

No, the problem wasn’t that the aircraft carrier couldn’t fight from these waters — it was a question of defense. So close to land, their reaction time to a shore-launched missile or incoming raid was calculated in seconds rather than minutes. At sea, a broad, relatively flat ocean increased their radar-detection envelope tenfold, and they had more of that most precious commodity: time. Time to launch aircraft, time to deploy countermeasures, time to retaliate before the first shot even hit.

Had all the rules changed? The attack on the United States had proved that even a small, wooden vessel could launch a potentially serious attack on an aircraft carrier. Would it have been any easier for the United States to see it coming if they been in blue water instead of near land? Maybe. Maybe not.

The entire bridge crew was edgy over the small boats around them. Not that he could blame them. Added to the additional hazards of navigation with small boats in the area, there was the undercurrent of concern that any one of them might be preparing to launch a Stinger. If even one missile hit the flight deck, assuming they could make it given the steep angle up the side of the carrier, the results could be devastating.

Admiral,” a voice said quietly. “I think you want to see this.”

Coyote turned with a sigh. Captain Jason Coggins, commander of the air wing, stood at the entrance to the bridge, waiting for permission to approach. With him was Commander Bird Dog Robinson and a chief petty officer that Coyote recognized as chief of the avionics division.

Coyote started to ask whether it could wait so that he could devote his full attention to the transit. But he choked the question off, knowing Coggins would not have tracked him down unless it had been urgent. And besides, Captain Bethlehem was on the bridge one deck below, personally overseeing the transit. How would he have felt when he was a skipper of the Jefferson if Batman had been riding his ass at a time like this?

He did. It took a long time for him to turn you loose and trust your judgment, didn’t it? I thought I wasn’t going to repeat his mistakes.

Coyote motioned them forward. Without speaking, the chief stepped forward and held out a bundle of wires, the ends encased in electrical connections, the other ends cut jaggedly. Coyote recognized it for what it was, a wire bundle from an avionics box from a Tomcat. He took the wire bundle and examined the cut ends. They were snipped raggedly, the insulation stripped off in spots.

“They found it on the preflight of 101,” Coggins said soberly.

“In the aircraft?” Coyote asked. “Not in the work center?”

Bird Dog shook his head. “No, Admiral. One-zero-one was on the flight schedule this morning for surface surveillance after we complete the canal transit. The plane captain went out to check it early — he’s a new kid, pretty compulsive — and found it. We checked with avionics. No one was supposed to be working on this bird.”

“That’s not how they would do it, even if they were,” the maintenance chief put in. “A mess like this — no way. And even if they had cut the wires while the gear was still installed, the whole aircraft would have been tagged out. And nobody in avionics knows anything about it.”

Coyote studied the wire bundle, trying to avoid the conclusion that was staring him in the face. “Any chance somebody made a mistake and was just too stupid to admit it?”

All three of the other men shook their heads in the negative. Coyote sighed.

“Somebody cut this deliberately,” the chief said, speaking slowly, as though to give the officers time to catch up with him. “This was no maintenance action.”

Coyote turned bright, hard eyes on Bird Dog. “Sabotage. That’s what you’re telling me.”

Bird Dog’s face was cold and hard, and he looked older than Coyote had ever seen. There was no trace of the young lieutenant who had reported on board Jefferson so many years ago for his first cruise, a happy-go-lucky pilot who had since then seen more than his fair share of combat. No, there was a new expression of maturity and command in Bird Dog’s face. Coyote felt relieved to see it, and at the same time a bit sad. That’s what we do, turn youngsters into men. Takes longer with some than others.

“I’ve ordered an investigation,” Bird Dog said, his voice tight. It was clear that he took this personally. “And I want to get the master-at-arms involved in fingerprinting the bird right away, just on the off chance that something turns up.”

“There are a lot of people whose fingerprints ought to be on the bird,” CAG commented. “Be tough eliminating them.”

“I know. But it’s a step we have to take.”

“But why?” the chief said, angry. “Oh, sure, we have a few troublemakers, but those kids all know that something like this would risk the pilot’s life. None of them would go this far — or at least I would have sworn they wouldn’t. I guess I don’t know them as well as I thought.” A new note of bitterness was in his voice.

Coyote held up one hand. “Let’s not jump to conclusions. Like Bird Dog said, we’ll print it. Everybody’s prints are on file. Maybe it will turn out to be a mess cook or a yeoman. But how they would know where to cut, what would do the most damage — hell, I would’ve bet a lot of them couldn’t even find the flight deck. It’s not necessarily somebody in your squadron, Chief,” he said, including Bird Dog in his comments with a glance. “But you’re right, this is surely and truly fucked. We will find whoever did it, and I’ll make the bastard wish he’d never been born.”

The deck shifted slightly under his feet. The Jefferson was incapable of making the hard, tight turns of a destroyer or frigate, but she was fairly nimble, given her size. The movement was noticeable, and Coyote darted to the bridge wing to look out.

Far below, a ragged fishing boat was chugging up the starboard side, apparently oblivious to the tons of steel blocking its way. The vessel came astern, and moved so close that it disappeared in the shadow cast by the flight deck.

“General Quarters,” a strong female voice announced on the 1MC. As she spoke, the ship’s horn blasted out five short blasts, the international signal for immediate danger. The fishing boat appeared to take no notice.

Coyote swore violently and grabbed a bullhorn mounted along the bulkhead. “Fishing vessel on my starboard quarter, this is the captain of the USS Jefferson. Be advised you are standing into danger. Come right immediately to open distance and decrease your speed to fall astern of us.”

His words seemed to have some effect where the ship’s whistle had not. Coyote saw darkly tanned faces turn up toward him, a look of surly anger on the face of what appeared to be the vessel’s master. A few of the deckhands extended a middle finger at Coyote, then turned their backs to him. One sauntered to the edge of the deck, unbuttoned his fly, and took a leak over the side, aiming in Coyote’s direction.

For moment, Coyote was seized with the overpowering desire to either grab his.45 and let them know just how serious he was on a one-to-one basis, or jump over the side, swim over to the boat, and personally throttle its master.

A large hand descended heavily on his shoulder, and he turned to face CAG, who had a grim expression on his face. No words were necessary. Coyote let out his breath, tried to drain the tension out.

“You’re not the captain of Jefferson, Admiral,” CAG said quietly, his voice reaching only Coyote. “Bethlehem’s got it under control.”