“I urge you, Mr. President, to order a nuclear strike on the Iowa at once.” Higgins’s normally reddish coloring had turned to gray.

The Iowa 245p>

The President looked like one hunted. His shoulders were hunched as though he were cold. “No,” he said with finality.

Higgins dropped his hands to his side and sat heavily in his chair. Kemper tapped the table with a pencil, quietly mulling something over.

“There is another solution,” he said slowly, deliberately. “We knock out the Iowa’s number-two turret.”

“Knock out the turret?” Higgins said, a skeptical look in his eyes.

“Some of the F-one-twenty Specters are carrying Satan penetration missiles,” explained Kemper. “Am I right, General Sayre?”

Air Force chief General Miles Sayre nodded in agreement. “Each aircraft is armed with four Satans, primed to gouge their way through three yards of concrete.”

“I see your point,” said Higgins. “But the accuracy? Miss, and you might unleash the QD.”

“It can be done,” said Sayre, a usually taciturn man. “As soon as the pilots fire the missiles, they switch guidance control to the ground troops. Your people, General Higgins, are close enough to the Iowa to lay a Satan within a two-foot diameter.”

Higgins snatched the phone and stared at the President. “If Fawkes maintains his firing schedule, we have less than two minutes.”

“Go for it,” the President said without hesitation.

While Higgins gave instructions to the forces deployed around the Iowa, Kemper consulted a file on the ship’s construction.

“That turret is protected with steel armor plating seven to seventeen inches thick,” said Kemper. “We may not destroy it, but we’ll sure as hell stun the crew.”

“The SEALs,” said the President. “Can they be warned of our intentions?”

Kemper looked grim. “We would if we could, but there has been no radio contact with them since they took to the water.”

Fergus could not make contact, because the radio had been shot out of his hands by a machine gun deployed on the Iowa’s citadel. A bullet had neatly amputated the middle finger of his left hand before biting through the transmitter and his right palm. The backup radio was also gone, strapped to the belt of a team leader who took a hit in the chest and now floated lifelessly somewhere downriver.

Fergus had lost six men out of his original party of thirty while boarding the Iowa. They had climbed the sides after shooting and then

246 VIXEN 03p>

looping small lines from crossbows across the ship’s stern. These were attached to nylon ladders, which in turn were pulled up to the bulwarks. The SEALs were met with a scathing fire when they reached the main deck. Individually and in small teams they began pouring a return fire at the ship’s defenders.