Vixen 03 (Dirk Pitt 5)

"If all else fails, we'll need a good man at the controls of the helicopter. Sorry, Abe, but I can't fly one, so you're elected."

"Since you put it that way," replied Steiger with a wry smile, "how can I refuse?"

"The trick is to ferret out the Iowa before the boys at Defense," said Sandecker. "Not a likely event, since they have the advantage of satellite reconnaissance."

"What if we know exactly where the Iowa is headed?" Pitt said, grinning.

"How?" grunted a skeptical Steiger.

"The draft was the giveaway," answered Pitt. "There's only one waterway within Fawkes's steaming distance that would require a draft of no more than twenty-two feet."

Sandecker and Steiger stood silent and expressionless, waiting for Pitt to unravel the knot.

"The Capital," Pitt said with a certain finality. "Fawkes is going to run the Iowa up the Potomac River and hit Washington."

Fawkes's arms ached and the sweat of intense concentration rolled down his weathered face and trickled into his beard. But for his arm movements, he might have been cast in bronze. He was desperately tired. He had stood at the helm of thelowa for nearly ten hours, wresting the mighty ship through channels she was never designed to enter. The palms of his hands were seeded with broken blisters, but he did not care.

He was in the homestretch of his impossible journey. The long, lethal guns of number-two turret were already within range of Pennsylvania Avenue.

He called for flank speed on the telegraph, and the vibration from deep belowdecks increased. Like an old war-horse at the sound of the bugle, the Iowa dug her screws into the muddy river and charged up the narrows beside Cornwallis Neck on the Maryland bank.

Thelowa looked like something not of this world; rather, it looked like a mammoth smoke-breathing monster erupting from the depths of hell. She forged ahead faster, sweeping past the channel buoys that fell back toward the first tendrils of dawn. It was as if she had a heart and soul and somehow knew this was her final voyage, knew she was about to die, the last of the fighting battleships.

Fawkes stared in fascination at the glow from the lights of Washington looming twenty miles ahead. The Marine base at Quantico fell behind the stern as thelowa's irresistible mass hurtled around Hallowing Point and sped past Gunston Cove. Only one bend remained before her bows entered the straight channel ending on the edge of the golf course at East Potomac Park.

"Twenty-three feet," the depth reader's voice droned over the speaker. "Twenty-three . . . twenty-two-five . . ."

The ship dashed by the next channel buoy, her eighteen-foot five-bladed outboard propellers flailing at the bottom silt, her bow throwing sheets of white foam as she plowed against the five-knot current.

"Twenty-two feet, Captain." The voice had a tone of urgency. "Twenty-two, holding . . . holding. ... Oh God, twenty-one-five!"

Then she struck the rising riverbed like a hammer into a pillow. The impact seemed a sensation more known than felt as the bows bored into the mud. The engines continued to hum and the screws went on thrashing, but thelowa lay still.

She had come to rest below the sloping grounds of Mount Vernon.

58

"I didn't believe it possible," said Admiral Joseph Kemper as he gazed in admiration at the Iowa's image on the viewing screen.

"Sailing a steel fortress ninety miles up a narrow, meandering river in the dead of night is a remarkable feat of seamanship."

The President looked pensive. He massaged his temples. "What do we know about this fellow Fawkes?"

Kemper nodded to an aide, who passed a blue folder to the President.

"The British Admiralty obliged my request for Captain Fawkes's service record. Mr. Jarvis has added an addendum from NSA files."

The President slipped on a pair of reading glasses and opened the folder. After a few minutes he peered over the horn-rims at Kemper. "A damn fine record. Whoever picked him for the job knew his onions. But why would a man of his reputable background suddenly involve himself with such a bizarre venture?"

Jarvis shook his head. "The best guess is that the massacre of his wife and children by terrorists pushed him off the deep end."

The President mulled over Jarvis's words and turned to the Joint Chiefs. "Gentlemen, I'm open for proposals."

General Higgins took the cue and pushed back his chair and stepped to the screen. "Our staff planners have programmed a number of alternatives, all based on the assumption that the Iowa is carrying a deadly biological agent. First, we can call up a 80

squadron of Air Force F-one-twenty Specter jets to blast thelowa with Copperhead missiles. The attack would coincide with supporting firepower by Army units on shore."

"Too uncertain," said the President. "If the destruction is not immediate and total, you may well disperse the Quick Death agent."