Vixen 03

The admiral closed his eyes and lay still, exhausted by his efforts. Heidi moved forward and put her hand on Pitt's shoulder.

"Perhaps you should come back in the afternoon."

Pitt shook his head. "By then it will be too late."

"You'll kill him," Heidi said, her eyes welling with tears, her expression angry.

Bass's hand inched across the sheets and weakly gripped Pitt's wrist. His eyes fluttered open. 'Just needed a minute to catch my breath…. Don't go… that's an order."

Heidi read the tortured look of compassion in Pitt's eyes and she reluctantly backed away. Pitt leaned toward the admiral again.

"What happens next?"

"After the shell passes its zenith and begins the flight to earth, the altimeter's omnidirectional indicator begins signaling the decrease in altitude…"

Bass's voice trailed off and Pitt waited patiently.

"At fifteen hundred feet a parachute is released. Slows the shell's descent and activates a small explosive device."

"Fifteen hundred feet, parachute opens," Pitt repeated.

"At one thousand feet, device detonates and splits head of projectile; releases a cluster mass of bomblets containing the Quick Death organism."

Pitt sat back and considered the admiral's description of the projectile's operation. He looked into the waning eyes.

"The time element, Admiral. How much time between the parachute's ejection and the QD dispersal?"

"Too long ago… can't remember."

"Please try," Pitt implored.

Bass was clearly sinking. He fought to bring his brain into gear, but its cells responded sluggishly. Then the tension lines in his face relaxed and he whispered, 'I think… not sure… thirty seconds… rate of descent about eighteen feet per second…"

"Thirty seconds?" Pitt said, seeking verification.

Bass's hand released Pitt's wrist and fell back on the bed. His eyes closed and he drifted into coma.

55

The only damage to the Iowa after she slashed through the Molly Bender was a few scrapes to the paint on her bows. Fawkes had not noticed the slightest bump. He could have averted the tragedy if he had spun the wheel hard to port, but it would have meant swerving the battleship from the deep part of the cha

He needed every inch he could squeeze between the riverbed and the Iowa's hull. The months of gutting thousands of tons of nonessential steel had raised the ship from a wartime operational draft of thirty-eight feet to a few inches less than twenty-two, giving Fawkes a razor-thin margin. Already the great whirling screws were churning up bottom mud that dirtied the Iowa's wake for miles.

Fawkes's countless trips up and down the river in the dark, sounding every foot, marking each cha

Ever since slipping the moorings, Fawkes had worried about the danger of Kettle Bottom Shoals, a six-mile section of the river mazed with a network of shallow sandbars that could grip the Iowa's keel and hold her helpless miles from her goal.

He lifted one hand from the helm and picked up a microphone. "I want a continuous depth reading."

"Understood, Captain," a voice scratched back over a speaker.

Three decks below, two of Fawkes's black crewmen took turns calling up the depths as they appeared on the modified Fathometer. They gave their readings in feet instead of the usual fathoms.

"Twenty-six feet… twenty-five… twenty-four-five."

Kettle Bottom Shoals was begi

Down in the engine room Emma made a show of helping the pitifully small crew who were somehow ru

Not one to become mired in physical labor, Emma made himself useful by passing around gallon jugs of water. In that steaming hell no one seemed to take notice of his unfamiliar face; they were only too grateful to gulp down the liquid that replaced the body fluids ru

They worked blind, never knowing what was happening on the other side of the hull's steel plates, never remotely aware of where the ship was taking them. All Fawkes had told them when they boarded was that they were going on a short practice run to shake down the old engines and fire a few rounds from the main guns. They assumed they were heading out of the bay and into the Atlantic. That's why they were stu

The Iowa had rammed a shoal. The suction of the mud had drastically cut her speed, but she was still making way. "Full ahead" came down on the telegraph from the bridge. The two massive shafts increased their mighty revolutions as the engines threw their 106,000 horsepower into the task.

The faces of the men in the engine room mirrored confusion and bewilderment. They had thought they were in deep water.

Charles Shaba, the chief engineer, hailed the bridge. "Captain, have we run aground?"

"Aye, laddie, we've nudged an uncharted bar." Fawkes's voice boomed back. "Keep pouring it on till we've sailed past."

Shaba did not share Fawkes's optimism. The ship felt as if she were barely maintaining headway. The deck plates beneath his feet vibrated as the engines strained in their mountings. Then, slowly, he sensed their beat smoothing somewhat, as though the screws were biting into new water. A minute later, Fawkes shouted down from the bridge.

"Tell your boys we're free. We're back in deep water!"

The engine crew tackled their respective duties again, their faces wearing relieved smiles. One oiler began a popular chant and soon they all took it up in chorus with the hum from the great turbines.

Emma did not join in. Only he knew the truth behind the Iowa's strange voyage. In a few hours the men around him would be dead. They might have been reprieved if the Iowa's flat bottom had remained firmly stuck in the shoal's mud. But it was not to be.

Fawkes was the lucky one, he thought. Damned lucky. So far.

56

The President sat at the end of a long conference table in the emergency executive offices three hundred feet beneath the White House and stared Dale Jarvis squarely in the eye. 'I don't have to tell you, Dale, the last thing I need is a crisis during the last few days of my administration, especially a crisis that can't wait until morning."

Jarvis felt the tingling fingers of nervousness. The President was noted for his volcanic temper. Jarvis had been present on more than one occasion when the famous mustache, a delight of political cartoonists, fairly bristled with wrath. With little to lose, except his job, Jarvis counterattacked.

'I am not in the custom of interrupting your sleep, sir, nor the martial dreams of the Joint Chiefs, unless I have a damned good reason."

Defense Secretary Timothy March sucked in his breath. 'I think what Dale means 33

"What I mean," Jarvis said, "is that somewhere out in Chesapeake Bay there are a bunch of nuts loose with a biological weapon that could conceivably exterminate every living creature in a major city and keep on exterminating for God knows how many generations."