Dear Ripley,
Really, I have been very patient with you, but even my patience has limits which have, alas! been reached. I offer you one last chance to deliver to me–at once–the Brown-Ash Mark IX in your possession, failing which your epitaph will read: “Like father, like son.”
Your sincere friend.
35. THE SLEEPER AWAKES
7 JUNE 2008
A FEELING OF RELIEF WASHED OVER RlPLEY FORTE. HE was a Lazarus entombed seeing the first ray of new morning’s light, a sleeper awakened by a trumpet blast from on high. Banished were his feelings of helplessness, of hopelessness, of fatigue and disaffection. Here, at last, was something he could grasp, something he could act on, confirmation that another attack was coming. Thank God for foes who thought themselves cleverer than they were.
The coining assault would be the last. The letter implied it, and the fact that only eighteen days remained before the Alamo would gain the sanctuary of Matagorda Bay meant that it would be difficult to mount another major attack in time, should this one fail.
Why now, after nearly three months, when Admiral Hodge had steadily been refining his security measures, closing one by one the chinks in Task Force 71-Able’s armor? The reason had to be related to place, not time. Any time would have suited the enemy to destroy the Alamo, and in fact on two previous random occasions he had tried to do so. The interval between the previous two attacks had been twenty-one days. Since then, 84 days had elapsed. Unless there was a good reason to delay the next attack, a determined enemy would have launched one long before now so that if it failed, he would have yet another chance. But he did not. Why not?
Forte thought he knew.
He pulled out a chart showing the Alamo’s track from pickup near the coast of South Africa to its present position off the tip of the Yucatan. A dotted line indicated the course of the Alamo from that point to Matagorda Bay. Some difference, some discrepancy between the intended course and the track actually made good, would account for the long delay. Was there one?
There were, in fact, several. Up to this point, the Alamo had traversed open sea–the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea–over deep water; from here on, there was no deep water. It had also transited, and would again, relatively shallow waters over the continental slope; these elements, being noncontrastive, canceled each other out. But one feature of what lay ahead differed sharply from all that had come before: the trench that had been laboriously dredged out of the sea bottom, connecting the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico with Matagorda Bay. It was unique. Over the continental slope, as in the open sea, the Alamo was, to a certain extent, maneuverable. With as little as six hours’ warning of danger ahead, by means of tugs and Flettner sails, it could maneuver to one side or another and perhaps save itself. The chance was small but significant.
In the newly dredged channel that possibility vanished. The forward momentum of the iceberg could not be checked. Therefore, even if danger was detected ahead, they could do nothing to avoid it. Once it entered the channel, anyone with a pocket calculator could compute just where it would be at a given moment. The three-kilometer width of the channel and the momentum of the berg itself made it hostage to a well-planned assault, which could be launched at the moment the aggressor deemed most favorable to success.
The assault would take place in the channel. Forte felt it in his bones.
But the feeling in his bones was not enough. Was there solid evidence, and if so, of what? Forte believed there was. With the sky and open sea under constant surveillance, the greatest danger to the Alamo was from the unseen ocean depths. Yet surface and subsurface hydrophones, attack submarines, satellites, agents’ reports– all had produced exactly nothing. The complete absence of submarine traffic was another indication that while the attack would come from below, it would not come from a submarine. Forte believed, in fact, that the attack had already been launched and that when the Alamo was in the proper postion, it would take place. He based his belief on the evidence so far adduced, together with the words his “sincere friend” had said would be his epitaph: “Like father, like son.”
One: The writer of those words was most probably a Russian.
Two: His Russian “friend” would therefore be well acquainted with the story of his father Gwillam Forte’s 1998 victory over the Russian 17th High Seas Fleet in the Battle of the Black Channel. There, single-handed, with the aid of particle weapons aboard the antique battleship U.S.S. Texas and a man-made tsunami, he had sunk an entire Russian fleet, but at the cost of his own ship and his own life. When the Texas sank to the bottom of the Houston Ship Channel, its atomic reactors blew up, creating an immense column of water that engulfed the enemy flagship.
Three: The Alamo in less than two weeks would enter a similar channel, and Forte’s son would be aboard. The Russians had already tried and failed to subdue the Alamo with a plague of anthrax and three million tons of flaming crude oil. In this escalation of destruction, nothing was left but a nuclear weapon.
Four: To blow up Gwillam Forte’s son as he himself had been blown up would have a vast appeal to the Russian sense of drama, for it was a punishment that exactly fit the crime, poetic justice personified.
Five: Since the U.S. Navy had made surreptitious attack by land, sea, and air virtually impossible, the bomb was probably already in place in the gulf channel, had been perhaps for months.
As Forte saw it, there was one flaw in his reasoning. If the Russians had been so cooperative in helping save the Alamo from the pestilence and the fire, why did they now wish to destroy it with a nuclear bomb? The question disturbed Ripley Forte only briefly. He put it down to factional infighting in the Kremlin.
Forte was sure that a bomb had somehow been sequestered in the channel, that the Russians had planted it, and that it would be detonated when the Alamo passed over.
Forte consumed one cup of coffee after another, pacing up and down the cabin, piecing together a plan of action. He had two objectives: to recover the bomb, preferably without detection by those who had been watching him on behalf of the Russians, and to dispose of it, preferably without blowing up the western hemisphere. To accomplish either purpose, he had to disappear, but in such a way as not to arouse suspicion.
Then there was the question of the Brown-Ash Mark IX.
At 1100, he sat down at the keyboard to translate the plan into action.
His communications program had been devised by the National Security Agency and was restricted to a limited number of addresses. He entered his cipher password.
Forte’s plan called for the enemy to intercept and decode some of his messages but not all.
He checked the sick call roster once more and jotted down the name Frank Gilbey.
Then messages in cipher began to flow to Tokyo, to the Linno in the South China Sea, to Houston, Washington, D.C., New York City, and other places.
Before he was finished, replies began to appear in swift lines on his printer-decoder.
The first was from the Texas Medical Center in Houston, from a kidney specialist.
The second was from Joe Mansour, who promised that the equipment and teams Forte needed would be ready in Corpus Christi within twenty-four hours.
The third, from SD-1 in Houston, said that the BAM-IX had begun to churn out data that didn’t quite jibe with the data produced by the mainline computers.
The fourth–the only message received in the fairly low-grade OXX-7 cypher–was from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon.
Mr. Ripley Forte, on the Sun King:
The spectacular success of the Sun King and Alamo, due to the courage, determination, and skill of yourself and your crew, is applauded by all Americans and Texans. Your success, nevertheless, I am sure you will agree, would have been problematical without the computational capabilities of the Brown-Ash Mark IX. This is yet another testimony to the remarkable power of this machine and its unique position in the nation’s strategic arsenal.
According to published information, you will not be in need of these capabilities until the capture of your next iceberg, at the beginning of Antarctic summer in late October. Allied defense planning, on the other hand, requires this capability by mid-July for a new installation–I’m afraid, for security reasons, I cannot divulge its nature–in Japan.
Presidential authority (after consultation with the President of Texas) has been granted, accordingly, to transfer the Brown-Ash Mark IX computer in your possession at SD-1 in Houston to the Japanese