The Hammer of God (35 page)

After an hour, she gathered her strength and, with her right foot wedged in the crook between the craft and the motor shaft, and her other foot high on the propeller, she tugged at the top of the boat trying to bend it back while at the same time, applying her weight to the prop for leverage. She started to yank and buck her body in an attempt to overcome her own weight holding it down. After three hearty attempts, her foot slipped and she slid down and crashed into the shaft. Had she been a man she would have seen stars; as it was it made her gasp and immediately shot her back to when she tried to learn to ride on her brother's bike. She scrambled back to her original prone position on the little rubber continent that she was the sole inhabitant of. She looked around and there were sharks still keeping pace. She realized she was leaving a blood trail as her bleeding was running off the side of the boat. She tightened the straps of the bra around her knee to stem the flow better. Then she splashed water to clean the surface of the boat and break the trail of crimson she was leaving in her wake. She aimed the riffle and took a bead on the closest fin drawn by the blood just washed overboard. When it got as near as she thought it would she dropped her sights and fired three shots into the body of the shark. It immediately thrashed and slapped in the water. The other sharks converged on the agitation and the new blood in the water and a feeding frenzy began. She drifted away from the school of sharks now busy devouring one of their own. She watched until she could no longer see the fins above the wave caps. Then she rested. She slept with her arm locked around the upright prop.

∞§∞

The
USS Nebraska
, Ship, Submersible Ballistic Nuclear or SSBN 739, an Ohio class submarine, was the second ship in the navy's history to bear that name. But its proud legacy in the silent service was now the province of her current Captain, Bret “Mush” Morton. Whose submariner Grandfather distinguished himself in major battle actions in these very waters during a stretch from 1942 to 1944, when, on a regular basis, ten boats would leave Pearl Harbor and only 4 would return. Those odds made that 24-month span in World War II equal to a century of patrol in submarine years.

In this “second century” of sub operations, the big boats, like Mush Morton's, were relegated to deterrence by guaranteeing the nuclear annihilation of any would-be aggressor. To insure that mission they needed to survive. In subs, that meant remaining undetected. Not so easy when you are prowling the ocean in something almost as long as a 56-story skyscraper is tall and 42 feet wide, containing the men, equipment, nuclear weapons and power plants to move the whole 18,000 metric-tons of the thing at a classified speed exceeding thirty-knots. So they ran extremely silent and they ran very deep. For that reason, Mush wasn't used to getting flash traffic in the middle of his ‘hide and seek' peacetime patrols, and the order that he now held in his hands was as sketchy as they come. Simply stated and without the usual naval grammar, he was tasked to head for a map grid and look for anything unusual. That was it. No inkling of what he would or should be looking for. As far as he could remember, this would be the first time an SSBN was “looking for something” instead of trying not to be seen or heard by anything looking for it.

Back at fleet, the Rear Admiral, who was ComSubPac, was not sure either. All he had was a directive from the White House and some mission runner asking for assistance. But as the Commander Submarine Force Pacific, he was also part of the National Command Authority and this D.C. controller, code-named “Halfback,” was invoking the highest level of NCA priority.

∞§∞

Brooke was alternately dipping herself over the side for heat relief and rolling on to the craft to ward off the chill from the Pacific. She had lost feeling in her toes; rubbing them helped get the circulation going somewhat. Dehydration and thirst were her big enemies now; she hadn't had anything to drink in 20 hours and had been baking in the sun for half that time. Her mouth was dry and cracked. As she learned in the rugged survival course, when she was qualifying to be an FBI agent, her last hope was to capture her urine and filter it through some cloth, like her shirt. She started unbuckling her pants when she heard a sound. A swoosh of air, about 500 yards off; something, maybe a whale had breeched the surface. It was hard for her to make out over the wave caps, which gave her brief glimpses of something in the water, a huge grey hulk. Her eyes were salt-burned and she squinted and rolled them wide open in an attempt to squeegee off the stinging salt, but she still couldn't focus. The she saw a glint; something metallic had reflected the sun's light.
A ship!
Brooke started yelling, but to her surprise, only a squeak came out of her parched throat. She grabbed the rifle, pointed it in the air and let out three shot bursts. Although deafening to her, from her low angle, the sound quickly attenuated across the wave crests, each robbing the sound of a bit of the acoustic power that the gun had generated. The few thousand waves between her and the boat had reduced the sound level to the point that, when it reached the conning tower of the
Nebraska
, it was little more than a burble masked by the wave splash against the hull.

After seeing no change in the direction or activity, in fact, seeing the hulk pulling away from her, she decided to try one last-ditch effort. She switched to semi-automatic, and tried something she hoped which would increase the effective range of the ubiquitous Russian weapon she had studied at Quantico. She emptied the entire clip as she shot upwards arcing the gun towards the hulk. The rifle couldn't hit the boat with a straight shot, but she hoped that by whipping the rifle and arcing the shots into the air, they would gain distance, like an artillery shell. The clip emptied in less than 6 seconds. And then there was silence. She was truly alone now and not able to signal them or any other craft.

∞§∞

Mush and his exec officer were manning the bridge when five distinct plinks turned the men around, using the binoculars they focused on the aft deck of the sub. Three dimples in the hull were highlighted as a bullet rolled around in one of them. “Sir, I think somebody just shot at us?”

“Bob, I believe you're right?” He then leaned into the voice-powered interphone. “Helm, come around one eighty, I want a fix on a point 500 yards off our stern and I want to be there 2 minutes ago.”

“Aye, aye. Coming about, sir”

“Weps, I want the two fifty calibers manned, now? We might have pirates out here.”

“Deck guns on the way, sir.”

“Now who's got the balls to fire on a U.S. Navy warship?” Mush said as he scanned the stern and turned in the opposite direction of his turning boat, so that he kept his sights on the same patch of water that was rapidly coming around to his prow.

∞§∞

Brooke could see the boat turning now and she made out the conning tower jutting out of the water and its lookouts on the main mast. She tried to fight it, but a small cry welled up inside her. As the relief flowed from her chest in heaves and tears that washed the salt from her eyes, she thanked God. In a minute, she was checking herself; she reached around her back, arching her torso as she attempted to smooth out the crumpled back of her blouse.

∞§∞

“Is that what I think it is?” Mush said adjusting the focus of his binocs.

“It's been a long time, but not that long skipper. That… is a woman! A well built woman…”

Mush commanded into the interphone, “I want a recovery team on the deck now. Blankets, and alert sickbay. We got a survivor coming aboard.”

From the front hatch on the foredeck of the
Nebraska
four men emerged with grappling poles, heaving lines and stretchers. Each man clipped his lifeline to the receded buckles on the edge of the decking, least they be inadvertently in need of rescue due to a rogue wave or flailing subject.

Chief Boatswain Murray couldn't believe what he was seeing, a woman in a wet, white blouse, clutching to an overturned Zodiac in the middle of the Pacific.
You couldn't make this stuff up.

The Captain had made his way down to the bow where Mr. Murray was hanging off the edge reaching down to the woman. The other men stood gaping. She was a stunner and she was coming onboard in a transparent manner. Mush quickly stepped forward and covered her with a blanket and got her down onto the stretcher. She coughed out a “thank you.” Then the other men snapped out of it and all helped get her below and into sickbay.

Mush looked up at the bridge; he shrugged his shoulders to his exec, who returned the shrug, both thinking the same thing,
How do we put this one in the log book
? Then he ordered, “Weps below. Clear the deck. I don't like being exposed like this. Pull the cork, Hank!”

Executive Officer Henry ‘Hank' Evans hit the dive alarm and barked over the wailing horn, “Lookouts below! Clear the bridge.” He waited for Mush to get below and watched the forward hatch wheel to turn, indicating it was water tight sealed, then he lowered himself into the bridge hatch yelling, “Dive. Dive. Dive.”

∞§∞

“We got her!” Joey Palumbo blurted out as he barged into Bill Hiccock's White House office.

“Oh thank God, where was she?”

“Floating on a raft in the South Pacific about 3 miles from the sinking.”

“She okay?”

“She's banged up and bruised but she is alive and we should know more after she gets some rest.”

“We got lucky on this one, Joe”

“She's not the best of the best for nothing, Hic,” Joey said as he left to make arrangements for her to be ferried back from Midway on a SAM flight direct to Andrews.

Hiccock sat back, his broad shoulders finding the wings of his too comfortable desk chair and breathed a sigh of relief. This, his first “op,” almost bit the dust. Joey was right, Brooke Burrell had distinguished herself many times in her illustrious FBI career. Many times for Bill or something Bill was involved in. Bill glanced down at two platinum 5-point stars most people wrongly assumed were paperweights. This woman, Burrell, was a star in her own right. That's why he agreed to this whole cockamamie “ops” idea when Joey came up with it. The whole affair started out as a miscue by the modern day descendants of the Barbary Coast Pirates who plagued shipping lanes two hundred years earlier. Their new strategy was to board unsuspecting ships and usually just rip off what ever they could take from the crew's personal belongings and wallets, or what ever else was on board that they could fence on the open market. Occasionally there was bloodshed or a kidnapping but that brought shit loads of hell down upon them, so they dialed down their attacks to a level just below the point where any international effort to stop them could muster a counter force.

That was until they inadvertently took on a Maltese Freighter trying to navigate the straights of Gibraltar and stumbled onto an illegal shipment of nuclear material from the Uzbekistan arsenal, which was being siphoned off by a former Russian General with deep connections to the Moscow black market. The existence of the boat itself was a violation of 7 U.N. statuettes and 2 maritime laws. The hapless pirates catapulted a straightforward matter of piracy on the high seas into an international incident. Billions of dollars worth of American and NATO warships burned millions of gallons of fuel just hanging around the freighter. The most powerful military force on earth held impotent by the political realities of doing what the U.S. Navy was first commissioned to do by Jefferson in 1801: namely, seek out and kill pirates. So the strongest armada in the world and its allies just lumbered 200 yards from the rusting, floating violation, while their well-trained SEAL teams were specifically prohibited from donning so much as a bait knife.

The “crisis” was eventually resolved when a Russian destroyer sank the ship after an alleged rocket grenade attack from the freighter. Although every intelligence service in the world knew it was sunk to bury the evidence that would prove that Russia couldn't control its nuclear material. There it would have ended, except for something that came across Hiccock's SciAD network. A “compound” member of the network was approached to see if the Saudi company he worked for was interested in obtaining barium crucibles.

It was a suspicious request, in that it was an early chunk of nuke technology, more consistent with the Russian method of creating a bomb, as opposed to the American or Chinese, Indian or Pakistani. So Hiccock got operational authority to run a mission to acquire these crucibles to determine if, in fact, they were from the freighter and therefore prove the freighter was compromised prior to its sinking. If it were, it could be a golden chit to play in the international game of poker that the U.S. and other powers were enmeshed in. But for Hiccock it was pure defensive science;
Stop those things from getting into the wrong hands
.

For the delicate role of point person in this shady deal, Joey Palumbo, the former FBI Special Agent, now assigned to Hiccock's White House Quarterback group, tapped another FBI agent. One who had distinguished herself in many tight spots as an effective operator and one who was beyond reproach as to her loyalty and discretion. Her command of Farsi didn't hurt either.

Two very careful and elaborate backgrounds were established for Brooke, one as a high up arms merchant, Fiona Haran, who was masquerading as her
second
identity, Roan Perth, an insurance investigator. Brooke had to memorize the details of both identities to cover her real mission of getting the crucibles for America to study while blocking the bad guys from getting their hands on them. The “intermediaries” she was meeting with played along with her insurance identity, feeling confident and gracious enough to let Fiona have her little deception as Ms. Perth that they thought, she thought, she was putting over on them.

It was all going well until the op center lost her trail last Wednesday in a Maltese coastal town. Only to pick up her beacon, in the western edge of the Indian Ocean, an hour before what ever happened, happened.