FIVE
Stony Man Farm, Virginia,
10:10 a.m. EDT
For the second time in less than half an hour, Brognola said goodbye to the President of the United States. There had been further developments at the White House end of the secure direct line. Stunning developments. The big Fed hung up the phone and reentered the command center. The Coast Guard chopper’s live video feed showed the last of the fire-suited ENR team disappearing down the smoky hole. “What did I miss?” he asked. “Did they blow the hatch?”
“Didn’t have to,” Kurtzman said. “It wasn’t sealed from the inside.”
The head Fed scowled. “Did some Russians jump ship after it beached?”
“There’s no sign of that from satellite, Hal,” Kurtzman said. “No reports from land of exiting crew, either.”
“So you’re telling me they undogged the hatch from inside, like they were getting ready to abandon ship, like they knew it was going to crash, but then they didn’t bail after it ran aground?”
“That kind of impact could have incapacitated or killed the entire crew.”
“I’m sorry, Bear, I can’t buy that scenario,” Kissinger said. “The ship surfaced a couple miles offshore. All they had to do was power down and hoist a white flag. Which begs the question, did the crew ground the ship on purpose, and if they didn’t, why did they let it happen?”
“All we’ve got is a big fat pile of loose ends here,” Brognola told them. “We haven’t determined why the sub entered U.S. waters in the first place.”
“At this point, it doesn’t appear to have had hostile intent,” Delahunt said.
“I have something here I think you should all see,” Tokaido said. He tapped his keyboard and transferred the image on his workstation flat-panel LCD to one of the wallscreens. “I’ve gone over the spy-in-the-sky data second by second,” he said, “working backward from the instant the sub surfaced off Port Angeles. There’s no evidence that it surfaced before that. DOD satellites would have caught it for sure. They would have caught it optically. So, I’ve been looking for anomalies in UDAR laser surface refraction, temperature gradients, sonar signature, anything that would give us a directional vector seaward.”
“And?” Kurtzman said.
“Zip, vis-à-vis the sub. At a certain point using these analytical techniques, we hit old Heisenberg—the software filters start distorting the evidence, making its reliability suspect and therefore worthless. That’s the point I’ve reached.”
“So we’ve got nothing?” Kissinger said.
“Not quite,” Tokaido said, tapping the keys. “Check this out.”
A coastal map of the U.S. side of the strait appeared on the screen, overlayed by a faint green distance grid-work. The map scale was such that the Hook was visible in silhouette at the bottom left. Tokaido tapped on his keyboard again. “This is a real-time-sequence run-through,” he told them. “Estimated object speeds are in the bottom right screen.”
Three fine, parallel, brilliant orange-colored lines suddenly appeared well offshore. They grew longer and longer as they headed straight for land.
“Wakes,” Kissinger said.
“High speed, shallow running,” Brognola said. “Was it a torpedo launch?”
“They aren’t torpedoes,” Kurtzman said. “Or if they were, they didn’t detonate.”
“Jet Skis?” Delahunt said.
“Damn, they’re wave skimmers!” Kissinger exclaimed. “Superfast water assault vehicles. Like riding a Tomahawk missile bareback. They’ve got a Graphic User Interface, touch-screen controls. Our versions are two-man. SEALs use them.”
“And the Russian equivalent to our SEALs is Spetsnaz,” Wethers stated.
“Right,” Kissinger said.
“Where was the skimmer launch point relative to Port Angeles?” Brognola asked.
“About ten miles west,” Tokaido said.
“And landfall?”
“Freshwater Bay. It’s mixed rural and residential. Sparse population.”
“Any reports of a beach landing there?”
“Not yet, but things are very confused on the ground. At the moment 911 emergency lines are jammed.”
“How long before the sub’s grounding did the skimmers reach land?” Kurtzman asked.
“Looks like the wakes hit the beach twenty-three minutes prior,” Tokaido said.
In an explosion of pent-up frustration, Brognola demanded, “Are we under attack? If so, by whom? And by what? We have to come up with answers, people.”
The outburst was met by an uncomfortable silence.
Then Delahunt said, “We haven’t been able to ID the ship, Hal. The configuration isn’t part of the existing archive. It has elements of two previous designs, the Alfa and the Akula, and other elements that are unique to itself. Hunt and I have assembled a list of all the architects and engineers known to have worked on those programs. It spans almost forty years.”
“A penetration like this, however it was accomplished, requires new technology,” Kissinger said. “This is way beyond Akula.”
“How long have the Russians had it?”
“A long time,” Kissinger said. “My guess is it would take a decade or more to actually design and build a ship around it. The question is, how did they manage to hide an entirely new class of vessel from our inspectors? How many more are there? Where are they?”
“And why are they letting the cat out of the bag now?” Kurtzman added.
“DOD is going to have a field day tearing that sub apart,” Wethers said.
“Bear, do we know where it came from?” Brognola said.
“We know where it didn’t come from. It didn’t sail out of any of the previously identified naval shipyards or sub bases in the last twenty-four months. The construction site is equally a black hole.”
“Why aren’t we already at DEFCON 1?” Delahunt asked.
“The President has ordered our missiles retargeted and ready for launch,” Brognola replied, “but he is holding back the go-code. He has reason to believe that if this is an attack, it wasn’t coordinated by the Russian government or its armed forces.”
“Because they’re still denying it’s their ship?” Wethers said incredulously.
“No, Hunt, because the Russian government and military have just given the President complete access to their most sensitive internal-security material and to crack black-ops units already
