Don Pendleton - Red Frost

Recurring disbelief.

The image on the screen was that shocking.

The bow of the huge black foreign warship jutted out of U.S. waters, its submerged propeller churning up plumes of froth. In the background, not one hundred yards away, stood the little orange Coast Guard air station hangar at the tip of Ediz Hook.

A second flat-panel wallscreen was filled with jerky live-feed video with sound from a circling Coast Guard helicopter. A dense pillar of smoke boiled up from the sub’s sail, drifting lazily south over the little mill town.

Brognola knew that at that moment additional Coast Guard and Navy helicopters from Neah Bay and Whidbey Island, respectively, were en route, as was the emergency-nuclear-response unit from sub base Bangor on Hood Canal. ETA on the ENR team was five more minutes. Meanwhile, scrambled A-6s from Whidbey Naval Air Station were already screaming low over the scene, sealing off the airspace.

As the Coast Guard video zoomed in tight on the sub’s stern and the churning prop, the head Fed couldn’t help but grimace. Nuke-powered boat running full tilt half out of the water, smoke pouring out amidships. Brognola wasn’t the only one who visualized dire consequences.

“For pete’s sake, why doesn’t the crew shut down the engines!” Barbara Price exclaimed.

“It’s got to be hotter than hell in there,” Hunt Wethers said. The African American, former Berkeley cybernetics professor gestured at the screen with the mouthpiece of his unlit pipe and said, “Why hasn’t anyone bailed from the sub?”

“Maybe they can’t get out,” Akira Tokaido suggested. “Exit routes all blocked…”

“Actually, the damage doesn’t look that bad,” Kissinger told the young Japanese American. “Like a lot of the Russian subs, the hull is probably made up of two layers, an inner and outer skin with six feet of crush space between them, so even grounded there might not be a full breach. I’ve never seen that design configuration before, but the ship is similar to the Bars class attack subs—something just over three hundred feet in length. There’s got to be at least thirty or forty crew on board.”

“Is it carrying nukes?” Delahunt asked. The redheaded former FBI agent and divorced mother of three put her finger right on the hot button.

“It’s an SSN, not a ballistic-missile sub,” Kissinger said, “but who knows what armament’s on board.”

“There’s a nuclear reactor, though,” Brognola countered.

“Actually there are probably two pressurized water reactors,” Kissinger corrected him.

“They are the critical issue at this point,” Brognola said. “Something’s already burning inside.”

Kissinger immediately picked up the thread. “If sub’s reactors catch fire,” he said, “their nuclear material will be released into the surrounding air and water. If there are nukes onboard, they won’t detonate from the heat, but their payloads will be dispersed.”

Aaron Kurtzman pivoted his wheelchair to face the others. “With strong tides running all the way to Seattle and Tacoma,” he said gravely, “the scale of the disaster would be unthinkable.”

“And for all intents and purposes, irreparable,” Wethers added.

The last comment was met by silence.

“The ENR unit is going to have to work quickly,” Kissinger said. “They’ve got to get inside the ship, put out the fires and shut down propulsion. After that, they can start a full damage assessment, structural and nuclear. If it turns out the sub can be safely towed off the point, they have to identify and secure all hull breaches by sealing internal bulkhead doors.”

“Do you think they’ll meet resistance from the crew?” Price asked.

“A separate SEAL team will deal with that,” Brognola answered for him. “They’ll handle the initial boarding and pacification, if necessary.”

The scene on the live-feed video suddenly shifted as the Coast Guard chopper wheeled to the north, flying around the edge of the smoke plume. The Hook’s narrow road curved past the Daishowa pulp mill before joining up with the mainland at the head of the bay. Five Port Angeles police cars were parked across the two-lane road with lights flashing. On the far side of the cruisers, the town’s entire complement of fire engines and ambulances sat idling, waiting for an all-clear so they could approach the stranded ship.

Traffic had already started to back up on the road behind the EMTs. It wasn’t just night-shift mill hands who’d deserted their posts for a look, or morning-shift workers waiting around for their day to begin. The resounding impact of the sub’s grounding had awakened most of the city’s population. From virtually every street corner on the hillsides above the bay, if not every kitchen window, the black ship was a visible blot on the landscape. In response, whole families had piled into their cars and vans, heading for the Hook in hopes of getting a closer view of the spectacular accident. As a result, the streets of Port Angeles’s tiny downtown were gridlocked, bumper to bumper. The smarter folks, the few who could distinguish imminent danger from free circus, were already streaming out of town in the other direction, on Highway 101.

The Coast Guard helicopter veered to the left and swung out over Port Angeles Bay. Its video feed revealed an armada of small and large boats racing from the mainland shore, all making a beeline for the Hook and the object of curiosity. The chopper pilot flew low and fast on an intercept course.

Stony Man’s wallscreen filled with a bird’s-eye view of the sixteen-foot runabout leading the pack. Its lone passenger was hanging on to the windshield with one hand, trying to use a digital camcorder with the other. Rotor wash whipped a ring of froth around the little boat, forcing the photographer to sit down. It blinded the boat’s pilot, and he backed off on the throttle.

Someone in the hovering aircraft, presumably the pilot or copilot, addressed the oncoming fleet through a loud-hailer. “Return to the harbor at once! For your own safety, return to shore! This is a restricted area!”

A few of the boaters immediately turned back; however, most ignored the command. There was obviously no way to enforce it. There were too many boats and the helicopter was unarmed.

“Where’s Homeland Security?” Delahunt said.

“Basically, you’re looking at it,” Kissinger replied. “There’s a Coast Guard cutter on station out at the entrance to the Strait of Juan de Fuca. But that’s almost two hours away. A handful of part-time DHS personnel man the international border where the ferry from Canada docks.”

“No way anyone could have foreseen something like this,” Brognola said emphatically. “This should never have happened.”

“Okay, John,” Price said, turning to the Farm’s weapon systems analyst, “give us your best guess. How is what we’re looking at even possible?”

“The U.S. antisubmarine—ASW—warfare program consists of layered defenses using different technologies,” Kissinger said. “Some of them are cold war era, some more recent. There’s SURTASS, surveillance towed array system. RDSS, rapidly deployable surveillance system. LRMP, long-range marine patrol, armed with magnetic-anomaly detectors. There’s radar and stationary directional and nondirectional sonar buoys. A more recent development is UDAR, a satellite-mounted laser aimed at the sea. It reflects off and reveals a submerged sub’s wake.”

“Sounds pretty solid to me,” Delahunt said.

“Yeah, but you’ve got to keep in mind that the surveillance is covering a vast area above and below the surface. For decades, our ASW people have been monitoring the sub bases in the Sea of Okhotsk, the Barents Sea, the Kola Peninsula and Gremikha. At these choke points, Russian subs can be identified and tracked by satellite and by U.S. sub patrols on station. Past the choke points, in the open ocean, the technological net has holes.”