Pitt shut down a few more electrical controls, then stared out at the black abyss beyond the view port. Suddenly, an urgent cry rang out on the radio.
“Bloodhound, we’ve been . . .”
The transmission was cut midsentence and was followed by complete silence. Giordino popped forward in his chair and was returning the call even before he had his eyes open. Despite repeated attempts, his transmissions to the Narwhal went unanswered.
“We might have lost their signal in a thermocline,” Giordino offered.
“Or the transponder link was broken when they began running at speed,” Pitt countered.
They were manufactured excuses to reason away the truth neither man wanted to accept, that the Narwhal was in real trouble. Giordino continued making radio calls every few minutes, but there was no response. And there was nothing either man could do about it.
Pitt looked at the submersible’s depth gauge and wondered if they were tied to the bottom. Since receiving the interrupted call, their ascent rate had slowed to a crawl, or so it seemed to Pitt. He tried to keep his eyes away from the gauge, knowing the more he watched it, the slower it moved. Sitting back, he closed his eyes for a time, imagining the troubles the Narwhal might be facing, while Giordino diligently kept up his radio vigil.
He finally opened his eyes to see they were just over a hundred feet deep. A few minutes later, they
rocked to the surface amid a rush of bubbles and foam. Pitt kicked on the external lights, which simply reflected back a surrounding billow of fog. The radio remained silent as they rocked back and forth in the heaving waters.
Alone in a cold and empty sea, Pitt and Giordino both knew that the worst had happened. The Narwhal was no more.
70
WHAT DO YOU MEAN THE RESCUE TEAM DISAPPEARED? ”
The President’s angry voice echoed off the walls of the White House Situation Room on the lower level of the West Wing. An Army colonel, brought in by the Pentagon generals to serve as a sacrificial lamb, responded in a quiet monotone.
“Sir, the team failed to appear at the extraction site at the appointed time. The airfield support squad was not advised of any problems from the strike team and were themselves evacuated on schedule.”
“I was promised a low-risk mission with a ninety percent probability of success,” the President said, glaring at the Secretary of Defense.
The room fell silent, no one wishing to antagonize the man further.
Seated two seats down from the President, Vice President Sandecker found a touch of amusement to the inquisition. When called to an emergency meeting by the National Security Advisor, he was surprised to find no less than five generals seated around the Secretary of Defense in the conference room. It was not an omen of good things to come, he knew. Sandecker was no fan of the secretary, a man he found to be narrow-minded and trigger-happy. Yet he quickly put his personal feelings aside for the crisis at hand.
“Colonel, why don’t you tell us exactly what you know,” Sandecker said, deflecting the President’s anger.
The colonel described the planned mission in detail and the intelligence that supported the rescue strike. “The befuddling aspect is that there are indications that the team was successful in freeing the captives. Radio intercepts from Canadian forces in Tuktoyaktuk report an assault on the holding complex and the subsequent escape of the Polar Dawn’s crew. We’ve detected no indications that they were recaptured.”
“What if the Special Forces team was simply delayed?” Sandecker asked. “The nights are short up there right now. Perhaps they were forced into hiding somewhere for a period before making it back to the airfield.”
The colonel shook his head. “We sent an aircraft back to the extraction site under darkness just hours ago. They touched down briefly, but no one was there, and additional radio calls went unanswered.”
“They couldn’t have just vanished,” the President grumbled.
“We’ve analyzed satellite reconnaissance, radio traffic, and local contacts on the ground. They’ve all come up empty,” stated Julie Moss, the President’s National Security Advisor. “The only conclusion that can be made is that they were quietly recaptured and relocated to a new location. They might be back on the Polar Dawn or possibly flown out of the area.”
“What has been the official Canadian response to our request for release of the ship and crew?” Sandecker asked.
“There has been no response,” Moss said. “We’ve been curtly ignored through diplomatic channels, while the Prime Minister and Parliament continue to make outlandish claims of American imperialism that are straight out of a banana republic.”
“They have not limited themselves to words,” the Secretary of Defense interjected. “They have placed their military forces on alert status, in addition to their recent port closures.”
“That’s true,” Moss echoed. “The Canadian Coast Guard has started turning away all American-flagged ships approaching Vancouver and Quebec, as well as Toronto-bound barge traffic. It’s expected that their border crossings will be temporarily closed in a day or two.”
“This is getting quite out of hand,” the President said.
“It is even worse. We’ve received word that our pending natural gas imports from Melville Sound have been suspended. We have reason to believe the gas has been diverted to the Chinese, although we don’t know if this was directed by the government or the gas field operator.”
The President slunk into his chair with a dazed look on his face. “That threatens our entire future,” he said quietly.