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 owa’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.p>

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

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VIXEN 03

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-“

“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.”

General Curtis Higgins, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, gave Jarvis a doubting look. “I know of no weapon with that killing power. Besides, the gas weapons in our arsenal were neutralized and destroyed years ago.”

“That’s the bullshit we give the public,” Jarvis snapped back. “But everyone in this room knows better. The truth is the Army has never stopped developing and stockpiling chemical-biological weapons.”