“Settle down, Dale.” The President’s lips were stretched in a grin beneath the mustache. He took a perverse sort of pleasure whenever his subordinates took to fighting among themselves. Casually, in a move to relieve the tense atmosphere, he leaned back in his chair and draped one leg over the armrest. “For the moment, I suggest we take Dale’s warning as gospel.” He turned to Admiral Joseph Kemper, the chief of Naval Operations. “Joe, since this appears to be a naval raid, it falls in your bailiwick.”

Kemper hardly fit the image of a military leader. Portly and white haired, he could have easily been hired as a department-store floorwalker. He looked thoughtfully at the notes he had scribbled during Jarvis’s briefing.

“There are two facts that bear out Mr. Jarvis’s warning. First, the battles hip Iowa was sold to Walvis Bay Investment. And as of yesterday, our satellite pictures showed it docked at the Forbes shipyard.”

“And its current status?” asked the President.

Kemper did not answer but pressed a button on the table in front of him and rose from his chair. The wood paneling against the far wall slid apart, revealing an eight-by-ten-foot projection screen. Kemper picked up a telephone and said tersely, “Begin.”

A high-resolution TV picture taken high above the earth flashed on the

The Iowa 227_p>

screen. The clarity and color were far superior to anything transmitted to an ordinary home set. The satellite camera penetrated the early-morning darkness and cloud cover as though they did not exist, projecting a view of the eastern Chesapeake Bay shoreline so clear it looked as if it came off a picture postcard. Kemper moved to the screen and made a circular motion with the pencil he used for a pointer.

“Here we see the entrance to the Patuxent River and the basin just inside Drum Point to the north and Hog Point to the south.” The pencil held steady for a moment. “These small lines are the docks at the Forbes yard. … A point for Mr. Jarvis. As you can see, Mr. President, there is no sign of the Iowa.”

On Kemper’s command the cameras began sweeping toward the upper end of the bay. Freighters, fishing boats, and a missile frigate passed by in parade, but nothing resembling the massive outlines of a battleship. Cambridge on the right of the screen; soon, the Naval Academy at Annapolis on the left; the toll bridge below Sandy Point; and then up the Patapsco River to Baltimore.

“What lies south?” the President asked.

“Except for Norfolk, no city of any size for three hundred miles.”

“Come now, gentlemen. Not even Merlin and Houdini together could make a battleship disappear.”

Before anyone could comment, a White House aide^ntered the conference room and laid a paper at the President’s elbow.