The TERCOM data is prepared by the Defense Mapping Agency and then forwarded to a Theater Mission Planning Center. From there, it is transmitted via satellite uplink to the launch site. When previously unmapped regions are targeted, up-to-the-minute satellite imagery is employed by the DMA. Depending upon the accuracy of the mapping, the Tomahawk is precise enough to destroy a car-sized target thirteen hundred miles away.
Presidential Directive M-98-13 was received by the communications shack of the USS Pittsburgh at 12:17 p.m. local time. The encrypted order was sent digitally, via secure satellite uplink, and was quickly decoded and hand-carried to the submarine’s Captain George Breen.
The task directive gave Captain Breen his mission, his target, and his abort code. One of the twenty-four Tomahawks his submarine was carrying was to be launched of 12:30 p.m. local time toward a target in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. The precise coordinates were provided, backed up by the DMA TERCOM data for the missile itself. If the target were moved, the Tomahawk would switch to a fallback guidance program. The missile would search to the horizon for visual, microwave, electromagnetic, and other characteristics which in combination could only describe the target. It would then lock onto the object and destroy it. The only way to order the missile to self-destruct before reaching its target was if the captain received the abort code HARDPLACE.
Captain Breen signed the directive and passed it to Weapons Officer E.B. Ruthay. Stationed in the control room, he worked with Console Operator Danny Max to load the flight data into the Tomahawk’s computer. After it was downloaded and checked, the USS Pittsburgh slowed to a speed of four knots. It rose to periscope depth. Captain Breen gave the order to launch the missile. The hydraulically operated doors of one of the submarine’s twelve forward-located vertical launch system tubes was opened. The pressure cap used to protect the missile was ordered withdrawn. The Tomahawk was ready for firing.
Captain Breen was informed of the missile’s status. After making sure that there were no hostile aircraft or surface ships within detection range, he ordered Ruthay to fire at will. Acknowledging the order, the weapons officer inserted his launch key into the console, turned it, and pressed the firing button. The submarine shook perceptibly as the missile took off on its 455-mile journey.
Within five seconds of ascertaining that the Tomahawk was airborne, Captain Breen gave the order for the submarine to depart the region at once. As the crew took her deeper out to sea, Console Operator Max continued to monitor the missile’s progress. During the next thirty-two minutes, he would not leave his station. If the command came from the captain or weapons officer for the mission to be aborted, it would be Max’s responsibility to input the code for the satellite uplink and then push the red “destruct” button.
The USS Pittsburgh had a long history of firing Tomahawks. This included, most proudly, a flurry of missiles launched during Desert Storm. During that time, all of the Tomahawks had struck their targets. In addition, the submarine had never received an abort command.
This was Max’s first firing of a non-test missile. His palms were damp and his mouth was dry. It was a matter of pride that Tomahawk’s ninety-five-percent accuracy rate not catch up to the submarine’s one-hundred-percent success rate on his watch.
He glanced at the digital countdown clock. Thirty-one minutes.
Max also hoped that he wouldn’t have to pull the plug on his bird. If he did, it would take weeks for the rest of the crew to let up on the “firing blanks” and “unleaded pencil” jokes.
He watched the data stream in from the blazing missile as it prepared to cross two narrow time zones.
Thirty minutes.
“Fly, baby,” Max said quietly, with a paternal smile. “Fly.”
FORTY-EIGHT
Tuesday, 3:33 p.m.,
the Bekaa Valley
Phil Katzen sat at Mary Rose’s station inside the ROC. An armed, English-speaking Kurd stood on either side. Each time Katzen was about to turn something on, he had to explain what it was. One man took notes while the other listened. All the while, sweat trickled down Katzen’s ribs. Exhaustion burned his eyes. And guilt churned inside of him. Guilt, but not doubt.
Like most boys who’d ever played soldier or watched a war movie, Phil Katzen had asked himself the question often: How do you think you’d hold up under torture? The answer was always: Probably okay, as long as I was just being beaten or held underwater or maybe electrified. As a kid you think about yourself. You never think: How would you hold up if someone else were being tortured? The answer was very badly. And that had surprised him. But a lot had happened between the days when he’d played soldier in the backyard and now. He had gone to college at Berkeley. He’d seen the campus paralyzed by student marches for human rights in China and Afghanistan and Burma. He’d helped care for students who were weakened by hunger strikes against the death penalty. He himself had partaken in fish-free weeks to protest Japanese fishing tactics which netted dolphins along with tuna. He’d even gone shirtless for a day to call attention to the plight of sweatshop works in Indonesia.
Upon obtaining his doctorate, Katzen had worked for Greenpeace. Then he’d worked for a succession of environmental organizations whose funding came and went. In his free time he built houses alongside former President Jimmy Carter, and worked at a homeless shelter in Washington, D.C. He learned that the suffering of parents who couldn’t feed their children or the oppression of good souls opposed to tyranny or the pain inflicted on dumb animals was worse than one’s own physical pain. It was magnified by empathy and worsened by helplessness.
Katzen had felt sick when Mike Rodgers was being tortured. But he’d felt dehumanized because Sondra DeVonne had been forced to watch, told that her own punishment would be worse. In retrospect, Katzen knew that that was what had broken him. The need to get some of that dignity back for himself and for her. He also knew that the pain he’d caused Mike Rodgers was greater than the torture inflicted by the Kurds. But as he’d discovered with Greenpeace, nothing good came without a price. If you saved the harp seals, you robbed fur traders of their livelihood. If you protected the spotted owl, you put loggers out of work.
Now here he was, showing the people who had tortured Mike how to work the ROC. If he stopped telling them what he knew, his colleagues in the pits would suffer. If he continued, scores of people might be injured or killed—starting with that poor soul the ROC’S thermal-imaging system had shown lurking in the foothills. Yet an equal number of Kurds might also be saved.
Nothing good came without a price.
Most importantly, Katzen had bought time for his fellow hostages. With time came hope, and the hope-sustaining knowledge that Op-Center had not abandoned them. If something could be done to help them, Bob Herbert would find it.
Yet Katzen had also had the basic “S&S” course—seighty hours of safety and security. All Op-Center personnel were required to take them. Traveling abroad, American government officials were tempting targets. They had to know the fundamentals of psychology, of weapons and self-defense, of survival. Katzen knew that to survive, it was vital to be alert. However tired he was, however unsettled he felt about what was happening, he had to be aware of his surroundings. Hostages could not always count on rescuers to pull them out. Sometimes they had to seize on the distraction of a counterattack to escape. Sometimes they had to counterattack on their own.
Because Katzen had faith in Bob Herbert, he had decided to buy time by working as slowly as possible. He’d also decided to turn on equipment that would be useful to him. Radios, infrared monitors, radar, and the other basics. Since his two captors understood English, he was careful to avoid the Striker frequency. He would record it and listen later, if possible.
It was Katzen who had inadvertently aleited the Kurds to the presence of the lone spy in the foothills. The man had been listening to them with a sophisticated radio, possibly a TACSAT-3. With the help of the ROC’s laser imaging system, the Kurds had been able to follow him easily as he tried to get away. Every move he’d made had been radioed to the pursuers in the field. What the Kurds didn’t know was that the man had been prepared to beam a signal to Israel. Katzen had watched the man’s parabolic dish search for the uplink. As soon as he saw where the dish was headed—there was only the Israeli satellite in that sector of the sky—Katzen had switched to a simulation program which showed a field operative attempting to contact a recon group, code-named Veeb. Veeb, for Victory Brigade, was a group of unknown size and an indeterminate nationality in an unspecified region of the Syrian-Israeli border. The point of the simulation was to use ROC software to find out who and where they were.