movements, he might have been cast in bronze. He was desperately

tired. He had stood at the helm of thelowa for nearly ten hours, wresting

the mighty ship through channels she was never designed to enter. The

palms of his hands were seeded with broken blisters, but he did not care.

He was in the homestretch of his impossible journey. The long, lethal

guns of number-two turret were already within range of Pennsylvania

Avenue.

He called for flank speed on the telegraph, and the vibration from deep belowdecks increased. Like an old war-horse at the sound of the bugle, the Iowa dug her screws into the muddy river and charged up the narrows beside Cornwallis Neck on the Maryland bank.

Thelowa looked like something not of this world; rather, it looked like a mammoth smoke-breathing monster erupting from the depths of hell. She forged ahead faster, sweeping past the channel buoys that fell back toward the first tendrils of dawn. It was as if she had a heart and soul and somehow knew this was her final voyage, knew she was about to die, the last of the fighting battleships.

Fawkes stared in fascination at the glow from the lights of Washington looming twenty miles ahead. The Marine base at Quantico fell behind the stern as thelowa’s irresistible mass hurtled around Hallowing Point and sped past Gunston Cove. Only one bend remained before her bows entered the straight channel ending on the edge of the golf course at East Potomac Park.

“Twenty-three feet,” the depth reader’s voice droned over the speaker. “Twenty-three … twenty-two-five …”

The ship dashed by the next channel buoy, her eighteen-foot five-bladed outboard propellers flailing at the bottom silt, her bow throwing sheets of white foam as she plowed against the five-knot current.

“Twenty-two feet, Captain.” The voice had a tone of urgency. “Twenty-two, holding … holding. … Oh God, twenty-one-five!”

The Iowa 231p>

Then she struck the rising riverbed like a hammer into a pillow. The impact seemed a sensation more known than felt as the bows bored into the mud. The engines continued to hum and the screws went on thrashing, but thelowa lay still.

She had come to rest below the sloping grounds of Mount Vernon.

58

“I didn’t believe it possible,” said Admiral Joseph Kemper as he gazed in admiration at the Iowa’s image on the viewing screen. “Sailing a steel fortress ninety miles up a narrow, meandering river in the dead of night is a remarkable feat of seamanship.”

The President looked pensive. He massaged his temples. “What do we know about this fellow Fawkes?”

Kemper nodded to an aide, who passed a blue folder to the President.

“The British Admiralty obliged my request for Captain Fawkes’s service record. Mr. Jarvis has added an addendum from NSA files.”