Red Frost

“They are the critical issue at this point,” Brognola said. “Something’s already burning inside.”

Kissinger immediately picked up the thread. “If sub’s reactors catch fire,” he said, “their nuclear material will be released into the surrounding air and water. If there are nukes onboard, they won’t detonate from the heat, but their payloads will be dispersed.”

Aaron Kurtzman pivoted his wheelchair to face the others. “With strong tides running all the way to Seattle and Tacoma,” he said gravely, “the scale of the disaster would be unthinkable.”

“And for all intents and purposes, irreparable,” Wethers added.

The last comment was met by silence.

“The ENR unit is going to have to work quickly,” Kissinger said. “They’ve got to get inside the ship, put out the fires and shut down propulsion. After that, they can start a full damage assessment, structural and nuclear. If it turns out the sub can be safely towed off the point, they have to identify and secure all hull breaches by sealing internal bulkhead doors.”

“Do you think they’ll meet resistance from the crew?” Price asked.

“A separate SEAL team will deal with that,” Brognola answered for him. “They’ll handle the initial boarding and pacification, if necessary.”

The scene on the live-feed video suddenly shifted as the Coast Guard chopper wheeled to the north, flying around the edge of the smoke plume. The Hook’s narrow road curved past the Daishowa pulp mill before joining up with the mainland at the head of the bay. Five Port Angeles police cars were parked across the two-lane road with lights flashing. On the far side of the cruisers, the town’s entire complement of fire engines and ambulances sat idling, waiting for an all-clear so they could approach the stranded ship.

Traffic had already started to back up on the road behind the EMTs. It wasn’t just night-shift mill hands who’d deserted their posts for a look, or morning-shift workers waiting around for their day to begin. The resounding impact of the sub’s grounding had awakened most of the city’s population. From virtually every street corner on the hillsides above the bay, if not every kitchen window, the black ship was a visible blot on the landscape. In response, whole families had piled into their cars and vans, heading for the Hook in hopes of getting a closer view of the spectacular accident. As a result, the streets of Port Angeles’s tiny downtown were gridlocked, bumper to bumper. The smarter folks, the few who could distinguish imminent danger from free circus, were already streaming out of town in the other direction, on Highway 101.

The Coast Guard helicopter veered to the left and swung out over Port Angeles Bay. Its video feed revealed an armada of small and large boats racing from the mainland shore, all making a beeline for the Hook and the object of curiosity. The chopper pilot flew low and fast on an intercept course.

Stony Man’s wallscreen filled with a bird’s-eye view of the sixteen-foot runabout leading the pack. Its lone passenger was hanging on to the windshield with one hand, trying to use a digital camcorder with the other. Rotor wash whipped a ring of froth around the little boat, forcing the photographer to sit down. It blinded the boat’s pilot, and he backed off on the throttle.

Someone in the hovering aircraft, presumably the pilot or copilot, addressed the oncoming fleet through a loud-hailer. “Return to the harbor at once! For your own safety, return to shore! This is a restricted area!”

A few of the boaters immediately turned back; however, most ignored the command. There was obviously no way to enforce it. There were too many boats and the helicopter was unarmed.

“Where’s Homeland Security?” Delahunt said.

“Basically, you’re looking at it,” Kissinger replied. “There’s a Coast Guard cutter on station out at the entrance to the Strait of Juan de Fuca. But that’s almost two hours away. A handful of part-time DHS personnel man the international border where the ferry from Canada docks.”

“No way anyone could have foreseen something like this,” Brognola said emphatically. “This should never have happened.”

“Okay, John,” Price said, turning to the Farm’s weapon systems analyst, “give us your best guess. How is what we’re looking at even possible?”

“The U.S. antisubmarine—ASW—warfare program consists of layered defenses using different technologies,” Kissinger said. “Some of them are cold war era, some more recent. There’s SURTASS, surveillance towed array system. RDSS, rapidly deployable surveillance system. LRMP, long-range marine patrol, armed with magnetic-anomaly detectors. There’s radar and stationary directional and nondirectional sonar buoys. A more recent development is UDAR, a satellite-mounted laser aimed at the sea. It reflects off and reveals a submerged sub’s wake.”

“Sounds pretty solid to me,” Delahunt said.

“Yeah, but you’ve got to keep in mind that the surveillance is covering a vast area above and below the surface. For decades, our ASW people have been monitoring the sub bases in the Sea of Okhotsk, the Barents Sea, the Kola Peninsula and Gremikha. At these choke points, Russian subs can be identified and tracked by satellite and by U.S. sub patrols on station. Past the choke points, in the open ocean, the technological net has holes.”

“What do you mean by ‘holes’?” Tokaido asked.

“There’s an overlap of radar bounce-back, called a shadow or convergence zone, that creates a blind channel thirty-three nautical miles wide. Subs can hide in it and evade detection. The Russians have perfected the welding of titanium for their sub hulls, which makes them harder to locate through magnetic anomaly. Some of their ships can make forty-two knots submerged to three thousand feet.”

“Our ships are fast, too, and our people are absolutely top notch,” Price countered. “In fact, there’s no comparison.”

“No argument there,” Kissinger said. “Equipment and personnel aren’t the problem. It’s mission creep. Between the end of the cold war and the start of the second Iraq war, our fleet’s patrol duties were reevaluated and redefined. The hostile threat from Russia was downgraded, and some of our subs were taken off SSBN patrol and converted into platforms for launching conventionally armed missiles against military targets in the Near East. Fewer patrols means bigger holes.”

“Sorry, it still doesn’t compute,” Kurtzman said. “Harder to detect isn’t the same as undetectable.”

“I can’t explain why UDAR and resonance scatter didn’t pick up that ship well out to sea,” Kissinger said. “At this point there’s not enough data to know what happened. After Able Team arrives on scene we’ll have more to work with.”

“Their ETA isn’t until 9:15 a.m., PDT,” Brognola said. “We can’t just sit here and twiddle our thumbs. From what the President told me, the Russians are denying all knowledge of the sub or the nature of the incursion. They are denying it’s even their ship.”

The chief of the cyberunit spoke up. “Hunt and Carmen, let’s search the DOD’s secure database and try to ID the ship from the hull configuration. Pull up everything about sub designers and shipyards. I’ll check the satellite surveillance library and backtrack all departures from the known SSBN and SSN bases. Maybe we can figure out where this sub came from and when it left its home port.”

“We don’t know its route after it entered the Strait of Juan de Fuca, either,” Tokaido said. “I’ll go over the sat-feed system replays, second by second. That might tell us something about the sub’s mission.”

“Did the President make it clear why he was calling in Able Team on this?” Price asked Brognola.

“He wants all means at his disposal.”

“Able can do things the white ops can’t,” Wethers said.

“Like shoot reporters?” Delahunt joked.

“Too many talking heads, not enough bullets,” Kissinger said.

“John’s right,” Kurtzman said. “This is going to be a three-ring circus. You can bet news helicopters from Seattle are already en route. There’s no way to stop the media even if the Navy seals off the airspace. You can see that wreck from Vancouver Island in Canada, twenty-six miles away.”

“Able’s mission isn’t a cover-up,” Brognola told his people. “The President wants someone on the ground who can cut through the bullshit. He anticipates problems with overlapping responsibilities in this crisis.”

“Turf wars between Homeland Security, FBI, CIA, Navy, Coast Guard and state and local police?” Delahunt asked.

“You got it,” Brognola said.

“Under the circumstances, Able Team is bound to step on some toes,” Kurtzman said. “And they never step lightly.”

“The President doesn’t care about that. He wants the job done fast, and he wants it done right.”

Tokaido pointed at the wallscreen. “Here come the good guys,” he said.

Live-feed video showed four Navy helicopters descending on the Hook in tight formation. As soon as their wheels touched the Coast Guard air station’s landing pad, men in black jumped from the bay doors.

They hit the ground running.

CHAPTER THREE

Port Angeles, Washington,

7:02 a.m. PDT

As Commander Reuben Starkey and his ENR crew hurriedly off-loaded gear from their helicopter onto a pair of handcarts, the thirty-two-man SEAL team closed on the grounded sub with autoweapons up and ready. Half of the commando unit took up bracketing-fire positions along the Hook’s riprap, the rest leapfrogging each other to the underside of the looming black bow.

A tight, excited voice crackled in Starkey’s communication headset. It was the SEAL team leader, Captain Bradford Munsinger. “ENR, we’ve got severe crush damage forward,” he reported. “Background rads are within acceptable limits. We’re going up.”

Commander Starkey and his four subordinates stopped shifting equipment; they turned and watched the SEALs in rapt silence. Like Starkey, the others were all career Navy men. In the seven years they had worked together at sub base Bangor, they had handled various highly classified and potentially catastrophic nuclear emergencies in Puget Sound, along the western seaboard and in the Pacific theater. Despite that experience and expertise, Starkey found himself cotton-mouthed by what lay before them this morning.