Confirming the deaths of all 6,000 men on board, a Navy spokesman at the Pentagon admitted late last night that no one had any solid theory as to what had caused the explosion inside the giant aircraft carrier.
—NEW YORK TIMES
DICK STAFFORD COULD SEE THE PRESIDENT IN CONVERSATION with Lieutenant Commander Bill Baldridge. They were walking quickly, just out of earshot. Stafford saw them stop momentarily—causing everyone else to stop as well, backing up the otherwise deserted E Ring second floor. Then the President turned around. “Dick, I want to talk to Lieutenant Commander Baldridge some more,” he said. “He can ride back with me. You and Sam come with us. Have someone bring Bill’s car over to the White House, will you?” Baldridge tossed the keys high, and Stafford caught them expertly left-handed way over his head. “Shortstop, University of Nebraska Huskers ’61,” he said.
Five minutes later, the Secret Service led the three-car Presidential motorcade back through the night, east toward the Potomac. “Okay, Bill. How can you be so certain the nuclear blast was not an accident?” the President insisted.
“I’m not ‘so certain,’ Mr. President. I am 100-percent certain. Someone has to prime those weapons and set up an electric impulse to start the explosive process. It’s a very delicate operation, setting off a chain reaction involving atoms, neutrons, and electrons.
“These weapons are specifically designed to prevent the process happening by accident. We’ve had one dropped in the deep ocean from a crashing aircraft, and it still didn’t go off. You could throw a small bomb into the weapons storage area, and that wouldn’t do it either. The entire ordnance area of the ship is again specifically designed to be able to take quite severe damage, without dealing itself a nuclear death-blow.
“If you launched a torpedo with a nuclear warhead in it, and the detonation system failed, for whatever reason, it would fail-safe…just keep on running until its fuel was finished. Then it’d sink to the bottom and remain entirely safe indefinitely. Once we actually recovered a nuclear bomb the Air Force dropped in the sea by mistake.
“When those babies go off, it’s for one reason only—because someone fixed ’em to go off. That’s why you never ever hear of nuclear bombs going off by mistake. They go off when they are told to go off.”
“Jesus,” said the President. “And you rule out sabotage?”
“Sure do, sir. You can’t get in the ordnance area, for a start. And if you did, you sure as hell could not be alone. And it would take two men and some very sensitive equipment to prime a nuclear warhead. It could not happen, unless everyone in the High Command was deranged and made a conscious decision to kill everyone in the ship. And even if that did happen…my brother Jack would have stopped it…I know he would.”
For the first time, the lieutenant commander’s control seemed to be slipping, and the President patted him on the shoulder. “No doubt of that, Bill,” he said. “He was a great man, and I cannot tell you how sorry I am.” Baldridge was glad of the dark because he did not want anyone to see him this upset, but the tears streaming silently down his cheeks were almost as distressing for the President as they were for him.
They rode in silence for a few minutes until the President said softly, “Bill, is there a nuclear warhead powerful enough to vaporize an aircraft carrier that would fit into a torpedo?”
“Oh, no trouble, sir. Remember that hunk of semtex that blew up the Baltic Exchange, plus a couple of streets, in London a few years back?”
“Uh-huh. IRA terrorists, right?”
“That’s it. Well, I’d guess that small hunk of semtex was the equivalent of ninety tons of explosive. A nuclear warhead inside a twenty-one-inch torpedo of the size that sank the Belgrano—an old Mark 8 two-star—might be the equivalent of sixty thousand tons of explosive, enough to knock down New York City.”
“Jesus Christ.”
The cars swung into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It was a little after 2:30 A.M. The President asked Dick Stafford to arrange a breakfast meeting for 8 A.M. in the White House. “This is political. I want you, Sam, the Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, Admiral Morgan, and no one else from the Navy…except for Bill here for technology assistance. And get a couple of CIA guys in who know something about the Middle East.”
The President went inside to his bedroom on the third floor, and Bill somewhat thankfully climbed into his faithful Mustang and headed down the drive, back out onto Pennsylvania Avenue. He drove up to Washington Circle and made a left for the short run down to Senator Chapman’s apartment at the Watergate. As he did so he felt the car slow uncharacteristically. There had been very few occasions in his life when he had resisted the opportunity of hours of sexual diversion in the skilled hands of Mrs. Aimee Chapman. Tonight was going to be one of them. He just didn’t want to be alone. He hoped she’d understand. About Jack and everything, and the huge gap in his life his lost brother would leave.
The senator’s wife turned out to be a model of understanding. She led him into her husband’s study, and then left him, while he called Jack’s widow Margaret in San Diego. No one would be sleeping anywhere in the Baldridge family. Not this night. Bill was on the phone for almost a half hour, and Aimee could only guess at the trauma with which he was dealing on the other end of the line. She heard his voice rise only once, and she caught his muffled words…“Mags, you’ve gotta get outta there…as soon as you can…San Diego’s gonna be like a ghost town…please call Mom…she’ll fix everything. Mags…you must take the girls to Kansas.”
Aimee saw the light flicker on the phone as Bill made a second call, to his mother. And when he finally emerged, she noticed his tearstained face. She poured him a drink, and that night she did not bother to coerce her longtime lover into anything less chaste than a good-night kiss. She held him in her arms until he slept, just as she had done in the nights after his father had died, years previously.
Aimee had been Bill’s girlfriend at seventeen, when he first went to Annapolis, his mistress through the years when he had very nearly married Admiral Dunsmore’s daughter. And his lover again after she had married her wealthy but somewhat disinterested politician, who quickly rose to the Senate, but not to much else.
Jack Baldridge had always thought Bill should have married Aimee. She was very beautiful, petite and dark like her French mother, and she had adored the tall, lean Midwesterner since they first met at a party at the U.S. Naval Academy. Like many other young Washington undergrads she found him irresistible with his deep and thoughtful intellect, his athletic frame honed by long summer months wielding a sledgehammer, mending fence posts out on the ranch.
As a Navy midshipman, that cowboy toughness served him well. He could outrun, out-train, and out-think most of his class. He probably could have played wide receiver for the Navy if he had taken football seriously.
But he never did. He was always too unorthodox, too likely to shrug it all off, decline to compete, as if being an outsider to all men was his mission in life. It had prevented him from getting on the “captain’s ladder” in the Navy. And it had prevented him from making a lasting commitment to any girlfriend. He was still single, risking God knows what, by sleeping in the Watergate, in the apartment of a wife of a U.S. Senator, a few hours before he was to have breakfast with the forty-third President of the United States.
Nevertheless, Bill Baldridge was a fairly remarkable young officer. His personal background put him on a first-name footing with some of the highest in the land. His professional Naval knowledge and high academic achievements made him stand out among his peers. And his personal characteristics enabled him to bring these two advantages together, to punch a high weight, far beyond his rank.
In the final reckoning, Bill Baldridge was a renegade. He looked like a younger, thinner Robert Mitchum, with the kind of piercing blue eyes you often find with deep-water yachtsmen, or plainsmen. But it was still hard to categorize him. In uniform he cut the relaxed figure of a six-foot-two-inch Naval officer. But back home in Kansas you would place him as a lifelong cowboy who had never left the Plains.
The morning newspapers seemed to contain nothing but the story of the stricken aircraft carrier. The Washington Post ran its front page ringed in a black border—U.S.AIRCRAFT CARRIER LOST IN NUCLEAR BLAST—6,000 DEAD—NAVY MYSTIFIED.
Bill Baldridge merely glanced at the story, straightened his tie, and fled for the Mustang, slinging his bag in the backseat, and heading back to the White House.
Both of the senior officers on board the lost aircraft carrier Thomas Jefferson were from western Kansas. Admiral Zack Carson, the Battle Group Commander, was born and raised on the family wheat farm near Tribune, Greeley County. His Group Operations Officer, Captain Jack Baldridge, was from Burdett on Route 156, southwest of Great Bend. Mr. Jethro Carson, the eighty-year-old father of the admiral, was said to have collapsed when told of the news, and was last night under sedation.
—GARDEN CITY TELEGRAM
Breakfast had been prepared for the ten men in a White House West Wing conference room. The President said he wanted no serious note-taking, just a very private chat with very trusted people.
He sat at the head of the table flanked by the Defense Secretary, Robert MacPherson, and the Secretary of State, Harcourt Travis. Dick Stafford, Sam Haynes, and Admiral Morgan completed the left-hand side of the table. There were seats on the right for Admiral Schnider, the head of the Naval Intelligence Office, the two CIA Middle East experts, and Bill Baldridge, who arrived just ahead of Sam Haynes.
Bill’s immediate boss, Schnider, seemed somewhat surprised to see him. Even more so when the President looked up and said cheerfully, “Hi, Bill. Sleep okay? Good to see you.”
With the two waiters dismissed, the President began, “Gentlemen, this is an off-the-record discussion. And I want to put my cards on the table even before we think of talking to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. I believe it is possible that the Thomas Jefferson was actually hit by an enemy torpedo armed with a nuclear warhead.”
He paused, let his words sink in. Then he said, “In Bill Baldridge here we have one of the best nuclear physicists in the country—a Naval officer with a doctorate from MIT. Bill has told me he believes it is impossible that a nuclear warhead could ever detonate accidentally, much less while it is stored, dormant, in the ordnance area of an aircraft carrier. So what’s left? Only the possibility of a hit against us. And for the purpose of this discussion, I want you to tell me, by whom, how, and why?”
“Well,” said Secretary MacPherson, “not many of the nations in that area have such a capability. Our intelligence says no terrorist group could make such an attack without significant help from a nuclear weapon state.”
“Bob, I’d be happier with elimination. Start by telling me who could have, but probably wouldn’t want to.”
“Forget the Brits. Forget France. Forget Pakistan. Forget Israel. They all have nuclear weapons, but would not use them, nor make them available to anyone else. Forget India. Their weapons are pretty basic, and they are not particularly fanatical about protecting their oceans. That only leaves the Russians, who are a possible source of weapons, and the Chinese, who we dismiss for several reasons. We are not of course sure about nuclear-weapon security in Russia and the Ukraine.
“But the weapon which may have destroyed the carrier had to be compatible to the system which launched it. That means the Russians would have to have supplied both.
“How about little guys with submarines—Algeria, Rumania, Poland,” interjected Admiral Morgan. “Not to mention Iran.”
“Yeah, how about those guys?” said Dick Stafford. “I guess they count as potential enemies of the USA.”
“May I have first who, then how and why?” asked the President.
“Sir,” said Harcourt Travis, another tall, steel-haired ex-Harvard professor. “The Jefferson was operational in the Arabian Sea, and she was probably going to enter the Gulf at least once. We should look at which nations would like America out of the Gulf, for whatever reasons. I suggest the answer must be both Iran, which wants to dominate the area, and Iraq, for more obvious reasons—insane regime, plus known animosity toward the U.S.A. I cannot think of any other nation which hates us sufficiently to try to pull off something close to genocide, which the sinking of a carrier is.”
Admiral Morgan interrupted. “I am assuming you all consider this must have been achieved by a submarine, rather than a surface ship.”
“I guess that would be the Navy thinking right now,” said the President, recalling the previous night’s discussions. “They believe the Battle Group would easily have stopped, and at the very least reported, any incoming missile delivered from an aircraft or surface ship. We’d know.”
“I am certain that is true,” said Admiral Morgan. “Also, sir, I checked this morning—no foreign ships were anywhere near the carrier on any of the radar screens. We have those reports in-house, sir. Captain Barry is in the air himself now, on his way to San Diego. He should be in Washington by tomorrow afternoon.”
“Okay. No advances on the submarine theory?”
“Well, sir, if I may speak as an ex-weapons officer in a Boomer,” said Baldridge, “I would think an incoming warhead would have been delivered in a torpedo rather than an air-flight missile. Fired from a range of say five thousand yards. I think I mentioned last night, get much closer to the bang, you got a real shot at blowing yourself up, as well as the target.
“Also it’s impossible for a big nuclear submarine to get anywhere near the center of a CVBG without being detected. We’ve tried. At high speed we pick ’em up passive in the deep field. If they’re slow—our active sonars pick up all big hulls. Period. In fair conditions the CVBG’ll get ’em at around thirty miles, no sweat. It wasn’t a nuke. It must have been a really quiet, modern, ocean going diesel boat.”
“So, who has ’em?” asked the President.
“Several nations,” said Baldridge. “The British, the French, the Russians, the Chinese. God knows who else. But I’m betting Admiral Morgan knows where every one of them is right at this moment.”
The admiral looked up and did not smile. “We gotta pretty good handle on them,” he said. “And as for feasibility, the only nation I could suggest might have tried, successfully, to pull off something like this would be Iran. First of all, they want us out of the Gulf. Their government is filled with Islamic fundamentalists.
“And they do own three Russian-built Kilo Class submarines, all stationed down at their Naval base in Bandar Abbas, only around four hundred miles from where the Thomas Jefferson was operating.
“The Iranians have been struggling to buy and organize a submarine fleet for several years now. They bought two secondhand Kilos from the Russian Black Sea Fleet, then they got their hands on a third, much newer one in 1996. We spotted all three of them on the satellite five days ago in Bandar Abbas. The latest pictures are in the Pentagon right now. I have checked. No one saw any one of them move. So I guess the latest pictures will still show all three in the same place.”
“And if they don’t? If one of them is missing?” asked the President.
“Then we have a live suspect,” said Admiral Morgan. “They have the motive. And the submarine.”
“How about Iraq?” said the President. “Could they have one of these Kilos?”
“They could, I suppose, in theory. But they have a serious problem with harbors. They have no infrastructure to run submarines. If they had, we’d have seen it. There’s nothing. If we assume they did somehow buy or rent such a boat from the Russian Black Sea Fleet, then they must have driven it out through the Bosporus, right under the eyes of our satellites, and the Turks.
“Then they must have driven all through the Med, past our surveillance at Gibraltar, then five thousand miles south, right around Africa, finding a way to refuel, then up into the Indian Ocean, north to the Arabian Sea, dodged through all of our Battle Group defenses and blown up the carrier with a nuclear-headed torpedo.
“At the conclusion of which, gentlemen, they would have no home port. They’d have to get rid of the submarine. In which case we, or someone else, will find something, or at least someone.”
The audience sat fascinated. Finally Defense Secretary MacPherson said, “Arnold, does this mean you write off the possibility of Iraq?”
“Well, not quite. I suppose they could—just—have pulled off what I just outlined, but I seriously doubt it. Submarines are very complex machines. For a long operational run, you need a real expert. I can’t see an Iraqi masterminding something like this. You see, we’re not talking even about the very best of the breed. We’re talking fucking genius. I hope we could produce one or two such commanders. The Brits probably have a couple too. After that you got yourself an empty cookie jar. Iraq? Forget it.”
“Stated like that, I guess so,” said the President. “It would have to be a million to one. What are the odds about Iran?”
“Well,” said Admiral Morgan. “I’d say if all three of their known submarines are still safely in port when we get the latest satellite pictures—then they probably did not do it. Because they would have needed to pull off exactly the moves I described for the Iraqis—and I cannot imagine an Iranian captain in the control room of a submarine on such a mission.”
“Okay,” said the President, through a mouthful of scrambled eggs. “Then what happened to the Jefferson?”
The City of San Diego was in shock last night as news of the lost aircraft carrier became known. The Naval base was stunned—more than 3,000 families were suddenly without fathers, some without sons, wives without husbands. For many it will be a night without end. The Navy’s worst ever peacetime disaster took a toll on this city from which it may never recover. San Diego alone has four times more bereaved families than San Francisco had in the earthquake of 1906.
—SAN DIEGO CHRONICLE
“It must have been an accident. There is no other explanation,” said Harcourt Travis.
“Agreed…no other explanation…must have been an accident…nothing else fits.” The men around the table were edging toward a conclusion, the sound political conclusion. The sensible conclusion. There was no dissenting voice, save for one. The most junior voice in the room.
“It was not an accident,” said Baldridge softly.
The President looked up. But it was MacPherson who spoke. “Bill,” he said. “I appreciate your concern, and everyone here appreciates your opinion and your knowledge of the technology. But you must see that we cannot go around making wild accusations against another nation, without one scrap of evidence. Nor even a feasible scenario that actually might fit a potential aggressor’s intentions. We’d look absolutely ridiculous.”
“True,” replied Baldridge. “But not quite so ridiculous as you might look if the sonsabitches hit us again.”
The President of the United States sat very still, and stared at Lieutenant Commander Baldridge. Then he turned away and said, “I did hear that. But every ounce of my political instincts tells me to ignore the nonaccident theory.”
“And remember, gentlemen,” said MacPherson gently, “This is a political discussion. We are trying to decide what to say, not what to do. Every sentence we utter will have enormous repercussions, both here and around the world. We must speak with the utmost prudence. We have to protect the President, the government, the Navy, and the morale of the nation. Not to mention the defense of the nation—one word from us, that we may have been vulnerable to attack, any attack, and it might give someone else…er…encouragement.”
“I don’t have a problem with any of that, sir,” chipped in the lieutenant commander. “But I am here as a scientist, and my trade is to distill many known facts into one major fact. It’s nothing to do with me what anyone says. The question I assume you want me to study is, did someone blow up our carrier? And if they did, Who? And how? And, after that, I guess we need to assess whether they might do it again. If you guys want me to, I’m real happy to work in total silence, deep in the background. If someone hit us, we must find that out, even if we never admit we’re checking.”
“I think that is straight,” said Admiral Morgan. “Right here we are moving into two separate spheres of operation. In my book too, Bill’s correct. We must find out if there is something going on, and I want to volunteer my services to head up that investigation, perhaps as a coordinator, answering to Scott Dunsmore.
“I would like to work closely with Admiral Schnider, and I would like to have Bill Baldridge in the field. He’s junior enough not to matter, and smart enough not to be easily fooled. He’s also arrogant enough to be a real pain in the ass, which is not that bad—since we don’t much want to hear what he finds out. In this way the main players, the President, Dick, Sam, Bob, and the Defense staff can devote their time to the formal investigation, keeping the public informed, and the careful management of the news—I hesitate to say manipulation because it’s not my business. But I understand the importance of how this catastrophe is presented to the world.
“Meanwhile, we can quietly get into the ‘down and dirty’ without telling anyone. That way, with a bit of luck, we might find out what these scumbags are really at.”
“From my point of view, I cannot stress too strongly that it is better for us to take ridicule from the media over an accident, than to admit we were hit,” Dick Stafford said. “That’s about a hundred times worse, because it would allow the media to slam us from every direction. There is an unspoken public sympathy for an accident, on the basis that we are all, generally speaking, human.
“But the press and television can whip up public fury at blind incompetence; and they can make a hit look like just that, blind incompetence. Then they will go for the President, every Republican senator, members of the Armed Services Committee, not to mention the Navy, and the Pentagon. I can only suggest that you never even consider making it public that a U.S. Navy carrier was hit by a missile. If you want to teach someone a real serious lesson, go do it, with my blessing, but please…don’t ever admit why you did it.”
“How about, if we did it?” asked the President.
“Say nothing,” said Stafford. “Look after the interests of this nation as you all think fit…you want to scare someone to death, fine…you want to beat the shit out of someone, still fine. But remember the media would not hesitate to urge the government to start dismantling the Navy, even though such a course of action borders on insanity. They will hang anyone in power at the slightest chance.”
In the terrible catastrophe which happened on the aircraft carrier Thomas Jefferson yesterday, the town of Hamlin lost one of its finest sons—Lieutenant Billy-Ray Howell, a U.S. Navy fighter pilot, aged twenty-eight, was one of the 6,000 dead. He had been flying an F-14 Tomcat off the deck of the carrier throughout her tour of duty. Lieutenant Howell’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Bobby Howell, proprietors of the Village Store, right off Main Street, were too upset to comment last night. They were awaiting the arrival of their daughter-in-law, Mrs. Suzie Howell, who was on her way from her home in Maryland.
—HUNTINGDON HERALD-DISPATCH
“One thing about a Republican administration,” said the President, “you get a lot of very wise, very erudite guys hanging around the White House. I think we are on the right lines, but there is one danger I want to point up. And I want each of you to have this in mind in all of our actions in the coming weeks. I do not want the Navy fucked over. I do not want these assholes telling the nation that nuclear weapons ought to be banned. The only freedom there is, on this troubled goddamned planet, is courtesy of the enormous power of the American Carrier Battle Groups. Even the Russians at the height of their own power were afraid of us. And I don’t want us to be undermined by a lot of left-wing bullshit and bleating. Bear that in mind, will you?”
Around the table there were sounds of agreement, and the President moved to wrap up the meeting. “I agree with Admiral Morgan’s proposal that he head up a deep background investigation, answering to Scott Dunsmore. And I would be grateful for the close support of Admiral Schnider for as long as it takes. Commander Baldridge will be seconded to the group as the man in the field. Please tell General Paul I would like to sit in on the military meeting at the Pentagon late this afternoon for an hour or so. I will probably broadcast again tomorrow evening. Thank you, gentlemen. Keep it tight.”
It was 10 A.M. when the breakfast group adjourned, and Admiral Morgan suggested that Baldridge and the two CIA men accompany him to the Pentagon for a talk before the afternoon meeting. The four of them piled into the big Navy staff car waiting at the door of the White House. Admiral Morgan told the driver to take them to the Washington Navy Yard.
It was just a few minutes’ drive, and Admiral Morgan told the driver to head for the submarine area at the Navy Memorial Museum, where the public can look through periscopes at the Washington skyline.
By this time the two CIA men, Jeff Zepeda, a Brooklyn-born expert on Iran, and Major Ted Lynch, one of the Agency’s leading financial and Middle East experts, were beginning to wonder what kind of a mystery tour this was. The suspense was short-lived. Admiral Morgan had whistled up a senior guide and they were escorted to one of the big periscopes in an area cordoned off by thick red velvet ropes. “You guys ever looked through a periscope before?” he said cheerfully.
“Not me,” said Jeff. “Nor me,” said Ted.
“Good,” replied the admiral. “Now I’m gonna get this thing focused. And then I’m gonna hand it over to Jeff. And I’m gonna tell you what you’re seeing.”
He adjusted the periscope himself, with the grace of someone who knows a lot about the subject. Then he said, “Okay, now take a look.” Jeff Zepeda stepped forward, grasped the handles, and stooped to peer at the Washington rooftops.
“You see the Capitol building?” he asked.
“Yup, got it. Hell, it looks pretty big through this thing, but somehow far away.”
“Now I’m going to ask you to imagine something…I want you to imagine that huge building is the USS Thomas Jefferson, okay? And I want you to imagine that you are about to punch a nuclear missile right into its guts and obliterate every single person in there. Thousands of them…”
All four men were absolutely silent. “I want you to understand that you are about to destroy the lives of thousands of decent people—perfect strangers to you…wives, children, mothers, fathers, and young men at the peak of their careers. The view you have now is the view he had when he called out his last order…‘Bearing one-three-five—range seven thousand yards now…fire!’
“Do you know how evil you have to be to pull off something like that, Jeff? If I’m right, and if Bill here is right, we are looking for one of the most ruthless assassins in the history of mankind. And I am afraid he’s also goddamned clever. Whatever they are saying at the White House and the Pentagon, we must find him, because, like Bill, I actually think the bastard might do it again.”
When Jeff Zepeda stepped back from the periscope he was plainly shaken. This was a man who had served in the embassy in Tehran until it fell to the Revolutionary Guards in 1979. A man who had gone undercover, in Arab dress, riding the Tehran railroad out to Damascus and back for three years. Jeff Zepeda had watched from doorways, from safe houses, as the massed thousands of the Ayatollah’s followers had raised their banners proclaiming, “Neither East nor West—Islamic Republic.”
He knew about trouble on the grandest possible scale, having struggled for months, making contact with the Hezbollah, trying to befriend one of the Mullahs, trying to free hostages. Yet few times, in his long career as a deep-cover CIA operative, had he listened to words which chilled him quite like those of Admiral Arnold Morgan. He just nodded curtly, but it was the nod of a professional who understood the stakes.
Admiral Morgan adjusted the view, then he said quietly, the menace gone from his voice, “Okay, Ted, please look through the periscope. That’s the top of the Washington Memorial in front of you. Imagine it’s the big radio mast on top of the bridge of the Thomas Jefferson. Right below, there is one of the Navy’s most accomplished professionals, Admiral Zack Carson.
“Standing right next to him is the President’s buddy, Captain Jack Baldridge, Bill’s brother. Both of them are just trying to keep the peace in those godforsaken seas around the Gulf. But they have just seconds to live, because you are about to issue your order—you’re going to blow everyone to smithereens.
“Keep staring for a moment, Ted. Try to imagine the sheer evil of this motherfucker in the submarine. He’s out there somewhere, Ted. And if it’s the last thing any of us ever do, we’re going to find him, and we’re going to destroy him. I want us to be clear on that. The sinking of that carrier was not an accident. We know it, the President knows it, and Scott Dunsmore definitely knows it. I just wanted to make a quick visit here to keep us on the ball, to clarify the magnitude of our present situation.”
One of the key officers who died on board the Thomas Jefferson was Ensign Junior Grade Jim Adams, the Arresting Gear Officer. His wife Carole gave birth to their first son in Boston two months ago. He was christened Carl Edward, after the Red Sox hitters Carl Yastrzemski and Ted Williams, but the South Boston Naval officer had never seen his son. Last night a Red Sox spokesman said that every member of the 2002 team would attend the memorial service for Ensign Adams at the Old North Church, the church of the patriots, later this month.
—BOSTON GLOBE
The four men drove swiftly across the bridge spanning the Anacostia River, and onto the parkway. Then they swung due west across the Woodrow Wilson Memorial Bridge and into the historic old eighteenth-century tobacco port of Alexandria, hometown of two great American generals, George Washington and Robert E. Lee.
Admiral Morgan told the driver to take them down to the harbor area, where he located a waterfront restaurant bar. Their reserved table, overlooking the broad expanse of the Potomac, was catching a nice southerly breeze, beneath the canopy of the screened porch. Their booth was separate, at least fifteen feet from any prying neighboring tables.
“It’s kinda quiet here,” the admiral said. “No one will see us, no one will recognize us, and no one will hear us. It’s swept every week. When we leave, we go straight through that door there, the one marked ‘No Entry,’ down a flight of wooden outside stairs and the car will be waiting.”
Admiral Morgan ordered coffee, and called his team to order. “Right, guys, now let’s just chew this over one more time. If someone hit us, it was with a torpedo from a submarine, right? And we’re agreed it was probably fired by Iran.”
Both Bill Baldridge and the admiral had heard in the opening reports from the Arabian Sea that the Thomas Jefferson had been steaming on a southwesterly course when she vanished. If the submarine had been waiting in the area the carrier could have come up on his port bow. The submarine would have steered southeast in order to aim its torpedo at a ninety-degree angle to the course of the huge ship—straight at the heart of the carrier as she passed, well below the surface.
Bill had noticed that Admiral Morgan called out an imaginary final command of the submarine, “Bearing one-three-five. Range seven thousand yards.”
“He even allowed for the two thousand yards the carrier would have traveled while the torpedo was on its way in,” Baldridge said aloud to himself. “This ole bastard’s smarter’n I am.”
“Okay,” said the admiral. “Let us assume we are Iranian. And our plan is to blow up a U.S. carrier in some kind of attempt to get Uncle Sam out of the Gulf. We have three Kilo-Class submarines, two of them constantly in refit, one of them in good shape. First, do we have torpedoes armed with nuclear warheads on board? Answer, no.
“We might have torpedoes which came with the boat from Russia, but they would not supply nuclear warheads, even though they do possess such things, already assembled. They might be found guilty of an injudicious sale, but they would not want to be found guilty of arming another nation to conduct a preemptive nuclear strike against the U.S. Navy. Even they are not that slow-witted.
“So where do they get the nuclear warheads?” asked the admiral.
“China,” replied Ted Lynch. “They could get ’em there, and bring ’em back by sea.”
“Very risky, that,” said Morgan. “There is such a thing as the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Our Navy and our satellites watch these matters very, very closely. In any event Chinese weapons would be most unlikely to fit a Russian export Kilo. That way the Iranians would need to be in some Chinese dockyard for a couple of months. And that we know hasn’t happened.
“So let’s assume the Chinese weapons were suitable, without any modification to the Iranian boat. There are two ways to get them aboard the Kilo…one, send ’em by Chinese freighter to Bandar Abbas…A nonstarter. We check that out. Two, a clandestine transfer at sea, from a freighter to the submarine. Another nonstarter because we know their submarines were all safely in Bandar Abbas last Friday.
“Even the Iranians would not much want to try shipping nuclear warheads right under our noses into their Navy yards, with the U.S. satellites watching above, and our guys on the ground. That, they know, might just cause us to get downright ugly.”
“Yeah,” said Jeff Zepeda. “I agree with that. I don’t think they would have risked the China deal. It’s too complicated, too far away, and too chancy. Plus the fact they are a nation that lives with screw-ups on almost every level. I can’t see them even attempting something that tricky, not with such a big margin for error, and, potentially, a huge downside to their own interests.”
“If I were an Ayatollah and I wanted to hit the American Navy,” said Baldridge, “I know what I would do. I’d reopen my lines to Soviet Russia. I’d either buy or rent a fourth Kilo-Class submarine from out of the Black Sea, I’d pay for it in cash, U.S. dollars, and it would have to contain a full outfit of torpedoes, at least two of them armed with nuclear heads.
“I’d send my team there to deal directly with one of those Russian captains who haven’t been paid for about two years. And I’d suborn him with a sum of money beyond his wildest, and then my very best commander would move in and bring the submarine out secretly through the Bosporus, underwater, with some amazing cover story to keep the crew in line. Remember, a hundred million bucks might be a lot of cash to the Mafia, but it’s peanuts to the government of a major oil-producing nation. Anyway, that’s what I’d do.”
“So,” said Admiral Morgan, “would I.”
“One minor problem,” said Ted Lynch, who was one of those Army officers who had spent several years attached to U.S. embassies and consulates in the Middle East. “It’s not legal. You have to give the Turks two months’ notice if you want to bring any warship through the Bosporus. That’s Turkish territory on both banks.
“If you hit the bottom and got stuck, the Turks could quite legally claim salvage rights, throw up their hands and say, ‘But you had no right to be there, especially with nuclear weapons, unannounced in Turkish waters.’
“There’s an old military saying which has stood the test of time since the Ottoman Empire. Actually I can’t remember it, but it means, translated from the Greek or Latin or something, ‘Fuck not around with brother Turk. Because he gets real pissed off, real quick.’ Trust me. Hit a shoal in the Bosporus, you’d never get your ship back.”
“Yeah, but the towelheads are fanatics,” said Admiral Morgan. “They believe in their God, Allah. They believe his kingdom beckons for the righteous, and that it would be a privilege to die in such a cause. Death means less to them than it does to us. Much more, spiritually. They would try something like this, if they really wanted to cast a monster blow against ‘The Satan USA’—because broadly that’s what they think of us.”
The four men were silent for a moment, each one of them pondering the possibility of anyone daring to run the gauntlet of the Turks. “The other thing you do have to remember,” said Baldridge, “is that such a journey would take you straight through the middle of Istanbul harbor! Can you imagine that? Plowing through the ferry lanes—the periscope leaving a huge white wake?”
“There are ways around all of that,” said Admiral Morgan.
“Yeah,” said Baldridge. “But not when you’re fucking around in about a hundred feet of water, with old wrecks and God knows what else on the sea bed.”
“Yes, there are,” said Morgan again. “The key question is, could Iran, or any Arab nation, come up with anyone good enough even to start such a mission? There are damn few submarine officers anywhere in the world who could pull it off. And they are probably British…the U.S. Navy hasn’t operated small diesel submarines for years.”
“There’s a lotta blind alleys here,” said Zepeda. “And they all lead us to a very clever Arab, who we don’t think exists.”
“Well, it’ll please the Pentagon guys this afternoon,” said Lynch. “You just know the brass wants to stick to the accident theory. And the politicians will not waver from it. You could tell the President does not believe it. But he really has no choice. An accident is a bitch and all that. But a nuclear hit on a U.S. ship…Christ! That could be war, and the populace might panic. The media would definitely panic. Or at least they would look as if they were panicking.”
“I think that is correct,” said Morgan. “And in a way that’s good for us. Because we are going to be asking a lot of questions. I’ll coordinate all the data on where every submarine in the world has been in the past three months. We’ll get a long way by elimination—I’ll pull up all the files on all detections. A lot of ’em will be whales, but we just might hit something. There was something a couple of months ago which kinda baffled me. I’d like to find out some more about that.
“But before that I’d like to talk to Ted about tracing large amounts of cash.”
“That gets harder each year. So many foreign banks, wire transfers, with no one paying attention.”
“Yup,” said Morgan. “But I think we might be talking about 10 million bucks minimum, in greenbacks. That lot had to come from somewhere.”
“Sure did, Admiral. I can’t promise record speed. But I think we get can some kind of a handle on that.”
“How do you start, Ted?”
“Well, we’ll make a few discreet inquiries in the naval ports around the Black Sea, particularly those where we know there are submarines. Big sums of money in small close-knit communities tend to become pretty obvious pretty quickly. But, if we are correct in our assumptions, it won’t be that surprising to find a few recipients. The hard part will be finding where that money came from, and precisely who distributed it. But it’s a whole bundle of cash, and it’s hard to hide a whole bundle of anything.”
Jeff Zepeda said he would get busy with various Iranian contacts and agents to see if he could smell out any such plot to demolish an American carrier.
Bill Baldridge seemed preoccupied with the problem of the mysterious Arab commander. “My view is this,” he said. “I may be wrong, but I really do not think the Iranians would have used one of their very public submarines—the three Russian-built Kilos in Bandar Abbas—to attack an American Battle Group.
“I mean, Jesus, that’s not terrorism, that’s like trying to start a goddamned war. I think it is so much more likely they will have gone for a fourth boat, purchased or hired from the Black Sea, and crept quietly around the globe until they found the Thomas Jefferson.
“I do realize that thereafter the problems become almost insurmountable, on a sheer technological basis. But there is one problem that refuses to budge from the very front area of my brain. You know what it is? They must have had someone—a brilliant Arab submariner, a guy who could creep through the Bosporus, the Gibraltar Strait undetected, past all the U.S. surveillance, on and under the surface, in the sky, and on the ships.
“This is a truly brilliant guy. Who could it possibly have been? They must have had someone in charge and that someone must have been one of their own, in the submarine, in the control room, calling the shots. But who trained him? Was he an American traitor? A British traitor? It is almost impossible to believe such a man could exist. But not, guys, as impossible as trying to establish that fucking uranium went off by mistake.”
The more Admiral Arnold Morgan heard from Baldridge the more he liked him. Actually he liked all of the men sitting with him in the corner booth of this little restaurant on the waterfront of colonial Alexandria. But it was Baldridge he really warmed to. Baldridge was a terrier, with a clear mind, and he was after a rat, and he was very, very focused, wrestling with the problem himself, assuming the responsibility was his.
“Einstein with a red-and-white dishcloth on his head,” Baldridge mused. “That’s who I’m after.”
Admiral Morgan chuckled, noting the Kansas scientist said “I” not “We.”
“Don’t let this eat you up, son,” he said. “Might affect your judgment.”
Lieutenant Commander Baldridge made no reply, gulped his coffee, and muttered absently, “The thing is, so far as I can see, the fucker’s still out there.”
What the American people are entitled to know is the precise odds against such an accident happening again. While selfsatisfied Pentagon staffers—particularly in the Department of the Navy—walk around making up absurd excuses for the catastrophe—there are fathers and mothers out there with boys trying to make it through the Academy at Annapolis. And those American parents want to know the risks of further accidents. Indeed they may rise up and demand to know the risks. It is one thing to make a statement talking about “a one-in-a-billion chance,” as the President did—but what is the reality? For how many more of our boys does the U.S. Navy represent a nuclear death trap?
EDITORIAL PAGE
—SAN FRANCISCO TIMES
Admiral Morgan, without getting involved in a debate, ordered a big bowl of Caesar salad and French bread for the table. “Let’s hit this and get back to the Pentagon,” he said. “Then we can spend four hours listening to the highest military brains in the country discuss an accident not even they believe happened.”
Everyone laughed. And an uneasy silence took over as they chomped their way through about four acres of beautifully dressed lettuce, munched the hot bread, and sipped the coffee.
Afterward, they slipped through the “No Entry” door, down the stairs, into the staff car, and were gone within fifty seconds, racing north up the Washington Parkway toward the Pentagon.
Inside the Chairman’s conference room, the meeting had not yet been called to order, but Admiral Dunsmore was reading out a report filed from Hawaii by Captain Barry, detailing the death and injury toll on the other ships. By far the worst of these was Port Royal, which had been operating within four miles of the carrier. Ten of her crew had been killed in the general carnage of flying glass and steel which occurs when a big warship is nearly capsized. Twenty more were injured, nine of them seriously. Only the freak angles of the waves had somehow flung Port Royal back onto her keel, otherwise she would have gone to the bottom, in short order. Right now she was limping back, toward the American base at Diego Garcia.
There were only minimum injuries on board the Vicksburg, but the O’Kane and O’Bannon, which had also been operating close-in, now had four men dead and another forty hospitalized, with severe burns, cuts, bruises, broken ribs, arms and collar-bones, sustained when the destroyer broached in the deep trough of the first huge wave from the blast. They too had cheated death, but like Port Royal, were making painfully slow progress back to Diego Garcia.
According to Captain Barry, the nuclear contamination had moved in the classic manner, down range, opening up into a fifty-mile-long trumpet shape. Several ships had not been in the path of the lethal radioactivity. Nonetheless, it had been an extremely difficult night, with Captain Barry operating in the pitch dark and fog, with unreliable communications.
Somehow he had managed to round up a couple of working helicopters to fly surgeons to the stricken ships, two of which were operating on small emergency lights only. There had also been a shortage of nursing staff, since the main hospital facilities had been on the carrier herself. None of the senior officers in the Pentagon envied Captain Barry his task that night.
Admiral Dunsmore called the meeting to order and briefly recapped the preliminary report from Captain Barry, which confirmed that a nuclear blast had destroyed the carrier, and very nearly taken two other warships with her. The report also contained information from the CIC of USS Hayler, in which the Anti-Submarine Warfare Officer had recorded the fleeting event of 11:45 A.M. on the morning of July 7, the day before the explosion, when one of his operators had come up with a new track, 5136, a disappearing radar contact, picked up on four sweeps but with no opportunity to discern course or speed.
As the CNO spoke, Admiral Morgan looked up sharply. “Did they put it on the link?” he asked, almost brusquely.
“Sure did,” replied Admiral Dunsmore. “Captain Baldridge acted on it too. Sent up two Seahawks, scanned the area to the stern of the carrier, dropped a sonobuoy barrier into the water—according to this, eighteen active buoys went down. All our ships in the area were alerted, but the line was never broken. Nothing came through, which suggests it was probably a whale.”
“Unless it was a diesel-electric submarine on battery power, at periscope depth,” interjected Baldridge. “A little further astern than we thought, and they actually saw one of the buoys, then turned away. To wait.”
“Surely, if they’d been at periscope depth, we would’ve picked them up on radar?” said Jeff Zepeda.
“We did,” replied Baldridge softly. “Track 5136, I believe.”
A profound silence suddenly enveloped the huge table deep in the Pentagon. There was something unreal about the young lieutenant commander’s words. How on earth could any submarine have got this close to the carrier and not been nailed? The two CIA men glanced at each other grimly. The commanders from the Pacific Fleet stared at their reports. Admiral Morgan glowered, and Scott Dunsmore frowned.
The CNO was about to speak when a Marine guard opened the door, slammed his heels together, and announced, “The President of the United States.” The Chief Executive entered accompanied by his security chief, and the Secretary of Defense. This particular President was in and out of the Pentagon more than any of his immediate predecessors. Not since Eisenhower had an occupant of the White House taken such a fervent interest in military affairs. And none of them had ever faced a more nerve-racking crisis than the one unfolding right here in Washington in the high summer of 2002.
“Sorry to be a couple of hours early,” he said. “But right now this thing is taking over. I may broadcast again either tonight or tomorrow, and I want to stay right on top of the situation. Fill me in, please?”
“Well, sir,” said Admiral Dunsmore. “We were just going over Captain Barry’s report, which mentions a radar contact on the previous day, spotted by one of our destroyers and checked out by our helicopters. Nothing very strong. The operators picked up on only four sweeps.”
“That’s about what you’d expect with a top guy,” said Baldridge, with a sudden urgency in his voice, and absolutely no regard for protocol. The President, however, was getting used to the careless but calculating manner of Jack Baldridge’s kid brother.
All eyes were now on the lieutenant commander. But the President spoke first. “Elaborate on that, Bill?”
“Well, sir, any submarine, on such a mission, is going to operate in a very clandestine way. I’d guess she would be moving at no more than three knots, at which speed a Russian Kilo is totally silent. Picture this: she is listening to the sounds of the U.S. Battle Group. She can hear the networks, pick up the sounds of the propeller shafts, especially the giant one which is louder than the rest, and belongs to the carrier.”
Right here, Admiral Morgan, the ex–nuclear submarine commander, interjected, “The submarine knows in which direction the surface ships are, but not precisely how far away the carrier is. With time, he will develop a fair idea of their course and speed. But only when he thinks he might see something will he slide up to periscope depth.
“The captain takes a good look down the sonar bearing in less than seven seconds. In the monsoon conditions, visibility’s poor. He probably sees nothing. He may then try the ESM to see if there’s radar anywhere on the bearing, but only for three seconds. This is very dangerous for him, because he might be spotted. He lowers the mast, real fast, and goes deep again, at which point the submarine has vanished without trace.
“Remember, if you will, her radio masts were never exposed for more than seven seconds; which translates, roughly, to four sweeps on Hayler’s radar. That’s when she picked up just two feet of the submarine’s big search periscope jutting out of the water. Then nothing…but she’s still there.”
“Shit,” said the President.
“Yeah, and that’s not all,” added Admiral Morgan. “Remember how slowly she’s going, silently at three knots, probably in a racecourse pattern over about four miles. If her commander is as smart as I think he is, he will just position himself upwind of the carrier, always upwind…because if the carrier is flying aircraft, she must be heading upwind for takeoff and landings. If the submarine stays upwind, the carrier will eventually come to him.
“When Captain Baldridge ordered up the choppers and dropped the buoys, the submarine commander may have heard them. He may even have seen them doing it. But more likely he came back in, a couple of hours later, came to periscope depth and actually saw one of the buoys, or even heard it transmitting. He just turned away again. And waited, perhaps for twenty hours, while the buoys ran out of steam and sank to the bottom. Then he came in again, moving closer to the carrier.”
“Jesus Christ,” said the President.
“Yessir,” said Morgan, adding, “I am not describing anything magical. I am just describing advanced operational procedures by atop class submarine commanding officer. The problem, at the beginning of this thing, was the same as it is now. Where the hell did the goddamned Arabs get such a man? I’m just afraid he might be American. Or British. No one else could possibly be that good.”
Admiral Dunsmore interrupted. “Thank you, Arnold. I am sure the President would prefer now to get into his own agenda, since we are all agreed that for the purposes of public announcement, this was an accident. I do not want anyone to forget that.”
“Actually, Scott,” said the President, “I am finding this all very instructive. If there are any technical points you think should be aired, please go ahead. For the moment, I would like you to run the meeting as you think fit.”
“Okay, sir. Anyone else have anything relevant to this meeting regarding procedures and actions on the ships?”
Admiral Dunsmore’s deputy, Admiral Freddy Roberts, had thus far been silent. But now he spoke up. “Sir, just this…I have been glancing through the list of radar contacts picked up that day, and transmitted on the link, as laid out in Captain Barry’s report. There were a total of fifteen, some of ’em big fish, maybe flocks of birds. Five of ’em from one ship, four from another. But there was nothing else from Hayler.
“Ships which report everything have historically jumpy ops rooms. Nothing wrong with that. Better safe than sorry. But I know the ASWO in Hayler, real good man, very experienced, Lieutenant Commander Chuck Freeburg. The point is, he thought it was something. That’s why he mentioned it and put a report on the link. I think we should definitely assume there was something. Chuck’s a very unjumpy guy.”
“Okay, Freddy. Thank you. Mr. President, I am, of course, bearing in mind that we are announcing only an accident. But, on the other theory, there is just one other point I would like Admiral Roberts to put forward, and it has to do with the time and weather.”
“Okay, sir. As you know I served some time out there myself in a destroyer, and I can tell you that by the end of June, the southwestern monsoon is beginning to sweep in from the African coast and throughout July and August you get a lot of real sticky weather conditions in the northern Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea.
“There’s often rain, and a dense, warm sea mist being carried along on a strange kind of wind, always feels too hot, but plays hell with the visibility, and pulls up a heavy sea.
“Now if I was going to take out an American warship I’d definitely do it in July or August. If I was a real fundamentalist who hated the U.S.A., I’d probably go for the Fourth of July. In my view they were four days late.
“But their timing was otherwise perfect. Dark falls quickly in the Middle East—by around six-thirty in the evening. The submarine would have come in close then, checking on the carrier every twenty minutes, at periscope depth, for maybe two hours. At around eight-thirty they were in position, waiting off her starboard bow.
“At nine o’clock local, we know they struck. At this time they were aware that there were still eight or nine hours of pitch-black darkness to come, making pursuit out of the question, ’specially with the predictable fog. Perfection makes me nervous. And these guys, whoever the hell they are, got a lot of things dead right.”
The President was thoughtful. “I would like someone to fill me in on exactly why the accident theory is so hard for an expert to accept. Admiral Morgan…?”
“We’re back to Commander Baldridge on that. Bill, run the technology past the President, would you?”
“Sir, let me start by assuming you have only limited knowledge of how a nuclear warhead works. Basically we are dealing with two hunks of radioactive material, probably uranium 235. Like all metals this is made up of atoms—this is a very little guy, about one four-hundredth of a millionth of an inch in diameter, which operates like a tiny solar system. Its core is the nucleus, made up of neutrons and protons. It is this nucleus which concerns us.
“The trick is to upset the basic balance of the atom’s nucleus, and somehow split it. We do it by helping extra neutrons to hit the nucleus which causes the whole thing to become unstable, and start to split apart. In turn, this generates energy, releasing more neutrons to bombard all the other nuclei, starting off a lethal chain reaction, with the bombardment process occurring 400 million million times in a split second.
“While all this is happening, the whole thing is being held together by the mechanism of the trigger, just long enough for a massive buildup of energy, and then a gigantic explosion.
“We achieve this in a warhead by placing two hunks of highly radioactive uranium 235 a safe distance apart on the edges of the warhead. The idea is merely to slam them together with sufficient force to hold the material together in one super critical piece, while the chain reaction goes completely and explosively out of control.
“To do this we have two explosive charges which must be detonated at precisely the same time, accurate to within one-thousandth of a second, in order to slam both hunks of uranium into head-on collision with each other, with precise force. If even one of the charges does not explode on time, or fails to explode correctly, the warhead will simply not function. The electronic impulse must activate the explosive on both sides, at the exact same moment. One half hitting the other is not sufficient for full force. They must be blasted into each other precisely as designed.
“There is a lot of room for error here, and the trigger device is very delicate. It must be set and activated with absolute precision. The radioactive material must be fabricated and assembled with immense care.
“You guys really think all this happens by some kind of a fluke…an accident…? Forget it. It could not, and did not, happen.”
“Thank you, Commander,” said the President. “I’m grateful for the explanation. Nonetheless, I know that everyone here understands the gravity of the implications. We will not be deviating in any way from the accident theory. Neither, of course, would any other nation in our position.”
For a moment, the great man hesitated, then he looked up and half-smiled. “It’s a funny thing, but from the moment Bill here mentioned he thought we’d been hit, I’d had it in my mind that there was some kind of an enemy submarine stalking our giant carrier and finally getting to the right range for the torpedo shot. But it’s not like that at all, is it?”
“Nossir,” said Admiral Morgan. “He did not do it like that. That submarine commander knew the two-hundred-mile by two-hundred-mile area of ops for the carrier. He got in there while she was far away—and then he just waited and waited…for the carrier to come to him…running silently at his lowest speed…with all the time in the world to set up and make his one shot count. A cool professional approach. I guess you’d call it military terrorism, an ambush on the grandest possible scale.”
“Yeah, I guess you would,” replied the President. “And right now there is only one thing that really matters. We must make someone pay…someone, somewhere, is going to pay a terrible price. The people of this nation did not elect me to preside over the destruction of the Navy—at the hand of some fanatic.
“If it should come down to two, or even three, suspects…I’ll hit the whole lot of them before I’ll let anyone get away with it.”
He glanced up at Admiral Dunsmore, who seemed to be shaking his head. “Scott? You have some kind of a moral problem with that?” the President said.
“Absolutely not, sir. I was just thinking about the irony of the situation—Admiral Chester Nimitz was the master of the trap. At Midway, he ordered the American fleet to wait and wait for Yamamoto’s carriers to come to us—and then we struck, hard and fast, sank four of them with dive bombers from right off the decks of the Enterprise. Now, all these years later, we may have lost the finest carrier of the Nimitz Class, sailing in the name of the great man, in precisely the same way, ambushed by a stealthy enemy.”
“Hmmm,” murmured the President. “We lost a carrier, too, didn’t we, at Midway?”
“Well, sir, the Yorktown was severely bombed and burned, but she survived the onslaught.”
“Oh, I thought she sank.”
“She did, sir, but that was three days later.”
“More bombs?”
“No, sir. They got her with a submarine.”