Vixen 03 (Dirk Pitt 5)

The Iowa had rammed a shoal. The suction of the mud had drastically cut her speed, but she was still making way. "Full ahead"

came down on the telegraph from the bridge. The two massive shafts increased their mighty revolutions as the engines threw their 106,000 horsepower into the task.

The faces of the men in the engine room mirrored confusion and bewilderment. They had thought they were in deep water.

Charles Shaba, the chief engineer, hailed the bridge. "Captain, have we run aground?"

"Aye, laddie, we've nudged an uncharted bar," Fawkes's voice boomed back. "Keep pouring it on till we've sailed past."

Shaba did not share Fawkes's optimism. The ship felt as if she were barely maintaining headway. The deck plates beneath his feet vibrated as the engines strained in their mountings. Then, slowly, he sensed their beat smoothing somewhat, as though the screws were biting into new water. A minute later, Fawkes shouted down from the bridge.

"Tell your boys we're free. We're back in deep water!"

The engine crew tackled their respective duties again, their faces wearing relieved smiles. One oiler began a popular chant and soon they all took it up in chorus with the hum from the great turbines.

Emma did not join in. Only he knew the truth behind the Iowa's strange voyage. In a few hours the men around him would be dead. They might have been reprieved if the Iowa's flat bottom had remained firmly stuck in the shoal's mud. But it was not to be.

Fawkes was the lucky one, he thought. Damned lucky. So far.

56

The President sat at the end of a long conference table in the emergency executive offices three hundred feet beneath the White House and stared Dale Jarvis squarely in the eye. "I don't have to tell you, Dale, the last thing I need is a crisis during the last few days of my administration, especially a crisis that can't wait until morning."

Jarvis felt the tingling fingers of nervousness. The President was noted for his volcanic temper. Jarvis had been present on more than one occasion when the famous mustache, a delight of political cartoonists, fairly bristled with wrath. With little to lose, except his job, Jarvis counterattacked.

"I am not in the custom of interrupting your sleep, sir, nor the martial dreams of the Joint Chiefs, unless I have a damned good 78

reason."

Defense Secretary Timothy March sucked in his breath. "I think what Dale means-"

"What I mean," Jarvis said, "is that somewhere out in Chesapeake Bay there are a bunch of nuts loose with a biological weapon that could conceivably exterminate every living creature in a major city and keep on exterminating for God knows how many generations."

General Curtis Higgins, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, gave Jarvis a doubting look. "I know of no weapon with that killing power. Besides, the gas weapons in our arsenal were neutralized and destroyed years ago."

"That's the bullshit we give the public," Jarvis snapped back. "But everyone in this room knows better. The truth is the Army has never stopped developing and stockpiling chemical-biological weapons."

"Settle down, Dale." The President's lips were stretched in a grin beneath the mustache. He took a perverse sort of pleasure whenever his subordinates took to fighting among themselves. Casually, in a move to relieve the tense atmosphere, he leaned back in his chair and draped one leg over the armrest. "For the moment, I suggest we take Dale's warning as gospel." He turned to Admiral Joseph Kemper, the chief of Naval Operations. "Joe, since this appears to be a naval raid, it falls in your bailiwick."

Kemper hardly fit the image of a military leader. Portly and white haired, he could have easily been hired as a department-store floor-walker. He looked thoughtfully at the notes he had scribbled during Jarvis's briefing.

"There are two facts that bear out Mr. Jarvis's warning. First, the battles hip Iowa was sold to Walvis Bay Investment. And as of yesterday, our satellite pictures showed it docked at the Forbes shipyard."

"And its current status?" asked the President.

Kemper did not answer but pressed a button on the table in front of him and rose from his chair. The wood paneling against the far wall slid apart, revealing an eight-by-ten-foot projection screen. Kemper picked up a telephone and said tersely, "Begin."

A high-resolution TV picture taken high above the earth flashed on the screen. The clarity and color were far superior to anything transmitted to an ordinary home set. The satellite camera penetrated the early-morning darkness and cloud cover as though they did not exist, projecting a view of the eastern Chesapeake Bay shoreline so clear it looked as if it came off a picture postcard. Kemper moved to the screen and made a circular motion with the pencil he used for a pointer.

"Here we see the entrance to the Patuxent River and the basin just inside Drum Point to the north and Hog Point to the south."

The pencil held steady for a moment. "These small lines are the docks at the Forbes yard. ... A point for Mr. Jarvis. As you can see, Mr. President, there is no sign of the Iowa."

On Kemper's command the cameras began sweeping toward the upper end of the bay. Freighters, fishing boats, and a missile frigate passed by in parade, but nothing resembling the massive outlines of a battleship. Cambridge on the right of the screen; soon, the Naval Academy at Annapolis on the left; the toll bridge below Sandy Point; and then up the Patapsco River to Baltimore.

"What lies south?" the President asked.

"Except for Norfolk, no city of any size for three hundred miles."