The trip from San Francisco to Honolulu is a long one. Nevertheless, Honolulu lies merely at the midway point between San Francisco and another island group of importance. It is a group of islands in the Marshall Chain. The largest of the islands leased by the US is the base of operations for the most sophisticated impact area in the world, Kwajalein Island.
Fewer then 3000 people live on the island, the majority of which are contractors who support the Kwajalein Missile Range. The active duty military stationed there believe that they have found their little slice of heaven. The three-mile long island is a mere half-mile long, the waters surrounding the island are every imaginable shade of blue, and the temperature never drops below 77 or rises above 88 on the Fahrenheit scale. The only drawback seems to be its distance from the rest of the country. This distance is what makes the island so critical to military.
The time on the island is two in the morning. On the beach, a small group of people scans the sky. There seems to be no other movement on any of the islands, but throughout the island, eyes are trained on monitors, radar screens and telemetry data on the three objects that suddenly appear. The clouds flash, and long white tails streak across the sky.
Both on the beach and in the control room everyone was happy with the results of the fifteenth test of the Minuteman IV intercontinental ballistic missile. Exactly twenty-nine minutes after they lifted off from Burpelson Air Force Base in California, the missile's inert warheads splashed down almost as planned. The impacts, over eight miles offshore threw water over five hundred feet into the air. These are not small missiles.
One of the thousands of monitoring devices that had tracked every movement of the missile on its trip continued to follow the warheads to their graves at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Before the days of such accurate missiles and tracking techniques, there had been a different procedure. The missiles were fired at one of the shallow atolls inside the ring of islands. They were then recovered by the Army's only submarine. Since the advance of guidance systems, the missiles are shot anywhere from five to fifteen miles offshore. This is first off, safer, and secondly economic. The waters outside the atoll run as deep as two miles, so there is no security risk from leaving them where they land.
This missile would prove to be the exception, in more then one way. Its impact had been near a spot that was not two miles deep. This spot was barely a half-mile deep. One warhead landed atop the sandbar, the others sunk. The trusty sub would have to be called out of retirement.
The Minuteman IV was an unregulated missile created to make up the gap created by treaties with the former Soviet Union. In the wake of change after the end of the cold war, the two superpowers found themselves at the mercy of the newer, smaller nuclear powered countries. India, North Korea, Pakistan, Iran, and the myriad other countries that felt they had to have nuclear weapons to be considered seriously. During the cold war, the nuclear weapon had been a politic weapon, not a military weapon. The threat of using a nuclear weapon was the bargaining chip. If another country used their weapons, they would be dealt with in a severe manner. With the changes of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, now nuclear weapons were a potential threat from countries that were patient, persistent, and much less likely to be swayed by logic or political pressure.
Technologically, the missile was a quantum leap from its predecessor. The body of the missile incorporated lessons learned from years of making stealth fighters and bombers. Advances in satellite tracking further allowed both the tests, and potential uses to be done in less obtrusive, harder to monitor spots and times. The first hint of a problem would be that telltale white streak as it acquired the target. Work continued to eliminate even that, but in reality that was working as well. Four missiles had been launched. Only three had been visible upon re-entry.
The group was now meandering back to the bunker that was the control room for the Kwajalein Missile Range. They believed that they had witnessed another flawless performance of the Minuteman. To their way of thinking, no more complications could have arisen from this test then the last test. Nothing could have been further from the truth. They did not yet know of the warhead on the sandbar, but even when they were told, it would be a minor complication. Pulling out the submarine to knock it off the sandbar would not be a problem either. However, the problems from Test 15 were nowhere near being solved.
On a neighboring atoll, uninhabited and unseen from the contented party lay two men. Covered by the bushes at the edge of the sand, one with his eyes glued to a pair of binoculars, the other huddled over a small piece of electronic equipment. The other exception to this test was that of the thousands of devices that had tracked the descent of the missiles, one was on this otherwise uninhabited atoll.
Speaking in a tongue foreign to both the natives of the island, and to the visiting Americans, the one with the electronic device whispered, “This is the one. All this waiting has finally come to an end.”
The man with binoculars set them down, and turned to his comrade, “Sandbar?”
The other nodded. “Now for the next part of the plan.”
Despite the hour, there was a flurry of activity around the command center. Personnel both military and civilian were moving in and out. Now they were mostly moving out. By midnight all activity had stopped. The night's action had been it for the day. No one was moving around now except for the guards. Even they had been busy all night. The Sandman tried to tap them on the shoulder as they had the others involved in the test.
Tests at the island had become so routine and without difficulty that the enlisted and officers alike had relaxed. Nothing ever went wrong, and the few times something did, the laid-back attitude of the South Pacific Island ruled the day. The biggest problem was that while Kwajalein served an important purpose, its mission ended up being non-essential to the remainder of the military. Neither the war in Iraq or Afghanistan nor the Grenada-sized flare-up on Aragon needed the technology tested, only the people stationed in the utopian island. As a result, the island was understaffed, and the only mechanic available to work on the island was aboard a safety check boat during the test.
The submarine's mission was scheduled for the next afternoon. Due to its disuse, the sub was in need of a new propeller. The officer in charge of the motor pool, had been onboard another of the many safety check boats scattered throughout the islands to monitor the missiles. When his boat arrived he just went to his quarters, without even knowing how critical the submarine was about to become.
Security at the base was as tight as most military installations before the World Trade Center incident. The airfield was a military controlled airfield, the port, which saw less activity then ever since the decrease in personnel had military police running security. No one got on or off the island without the knowledge of the military, so there was no desire to beef up the security. The way it had always worked in the past was secure enough. It was not as if two terrorists could have snuck a boat onto a remote part of the island and camped out for months casing the base. It was simply inconceivably impossible. No one could possibly be on the island with nefarious plans.
The two strange men finished packing up their hidden camp on the far side of the island and prepared to put their long conceived plan into motion. Months of waiting was paying off. The first time they had snuck onto the base they found out that the propeller was bad on the sub. Changing it out would be simple, finding the part was the harder part. An accomplice on Kwajalein had the answer. The man on whose property the men had been hiding simply walked into the local boat shop and picked one off the shelf. It was truly that simply. The bloated supply system of the military again proved to be as inept as it was outdated.
It had been a long night. The Staff Duty had been up since 0500 hours, and was not at his best for his 0300-hour rounds. After checking the main buildings, he glanced in the direction of the motor pool. From here, he could see that the gate was locked. Rather then physically check it as he had an hour ago, he went back inside. It had been locked at 0200 hours; it had to be locked now. Besides, no one made complete rounds at this hour, things were simply too calm in the paradise of Kwajalein.
Inside the gate of the motor pool, in the shadow of the building, the two men stood still watching the Staff Duty from afar. Directly behind them was a small, inflatable raft bobbing gently up and down with the quiet waves. The Staff Duty stretched, and then turned around, rubbing his eyes as he walked back inside. Quickly the two men slipped around the building to the door.
The knob was easy to pick, once inside the sub was easy to spot even without lights. It sat in the middle of the bay, on steel rails that curved gently down toward the garage door nearest the water. A 5200 series lock secured the chain that raised the door. Without a word, one of the men headed for the door and extracted a twelve-inch crescent wrench from a small bag. While the military continued to boast of the security of the 5200 by buying no others, a few people knew that it was no match for either a twelve-inch crescent wrench or a determined person. This particular lock was about to meet both. Within seconds, an audible pop emanated from the lock. The two men stopped all movement.
When they determined there were no more sounds indicating someone was coming to check it out, they both continued. The man at the door began the agonizingly slow movements required to raise the door silently. The other man started working on the propeller. Link by link, subdued click by subdued click, the door inched open.
Getting into the sub would be easy, maneuvering the sub trickier, but not impossible, the difficult part would be sliding the sub back into the water. The winch had been turned off, but not removed. Turning it back on would make noise, maneuvering the sub without it was nearly impossible.
The door reached the height necessary to allow the sub to slip out, and the first stranger slipped away from the opening. He tugged the winch wire towards the opening then slipped out the front door. In two minutes, the inflatable raft was silently moving between the two rails in the water. By the time he had the wire connected, the propeller was finished and the hatch opened. The first man started the electric trolling motor. A length of poles lay beneath the bow of the sub. In other posts, the poles would have been called camo poles, used to raise and hold up camouflage nets over vehicles. Here they were used to give a little extra advantage for removing lug nuts, or tight bolts. Or occasionally to move something bigger. In this case, something sub-sized.
With the tugging of the raft, and the pushing by the lever arm, slowly the sub began to slide toward the water. Once it reached the sloped part of the rails, the lever was unnecessary. The thief put the pole back where he found it, and scrambled onto the moving sub. Once it hit the water, the raft’s motor cut off, and it doubled back to the building. The sub slowly slid the remaining few feet into the water while the thief began slowly lowering the garage door at the same pace he had opened it. Without a sound, the sub drifted into the bay. In a few minutes, the raft caught up with the sub and the man slipped into the hatch. The raft was pierced starting an agonizingly slow leak, and then set adrift well away from the shore. By the time it was discovered it would not matter if it had washed ashore one of the other atolls or simply sunk from sight. It had served its purpose admirably.
The remainder of the stranger’s mission would flow almost as smoothly as the start. Retrieving the missile from the sandbar was easy. There was no telling how long before the army would be able to get a replacement sub to recover the missile, and by that time, the men, the mission and the missile would all be long gone and on to the next phase of the of plan. Even the sub was recovered, while it was not immediately needed, it presented another tool for future deeds, perhaps not as impressive as a missile capable of carrying nuclear payloads, or traveling five thousand miles, but impressive in its own way.
The playing field had not been leveled, but there was a toehold in place for one of the most long held fears. A missile with intercontinental range was now in the hands of someone who should never have access to a weapon of that ability. Somewhere in the world, a disturbing course of action began the repercussions of which would make the World Trade Center a small problem.
ANOTHER VERSION OF THE SAME FILE?
The trip from San Francisco to Honolulu is a long one. But Honolulu lies at the midway point between San Francisco and another island group of importance. It is a group of islands in the Marshall Chain. The largest of the islands leased by the US is the base of operations for the most sophisticated impact area in the world, Kwajalein Island.
Fewer then 3000 people live on the island, the majority of which are contractors who support the Kwajalein Missile Range. The active duty military stationed there believe that they have found their little slice of heaven. The three-mile long island is a mere half-mile long, the waters surrounding the island are every imaginable shade of blue, and the temperature never drops below 77 or rises above 88 on the Fahrenheit scale. The only drawback seems to be its distance from the rest of the country. This distance is what makes the island so critical to military.
The time on the island is two in the morning. On the beach, a small group of people scans the sky. There seems to be no other movement on any of the islands, but throughout the island eyes are trained on monitors, radar screens and telementry data on the three objects that suddenly appear. The clouds flash, and long white tails streak across the sky.
Both on the beach and in the control room everyone was happy with the results of the fifteenth test of the Minuteman IV intercontinental ballistic missile. Exactly twenty-nine minutes after they lifted off from Burpelson Air Force Base in California, the missile's inert warheads splashed down almost as planned. The impacts, over eight miles offshore threw water over five hundred feet into the air. These are not small missiles.
One of the thousands of monitoring devices that had tracked every movement of the missile on its trip continued to follow the warheads to their graves at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Before the days of such accurate missiles and tracking techniques, there had been a different procedure. The missiles were fired at one of the shallow atolls inside the ring of islands. They were then recovered by the Army's only submarine. Since the advance of guidance systems, the missiles are shot anywhere from five to fifteen miles offshore. This is first off, safer, and secondly economic. The waters outside the atoll run as deep as two miles, so there is no security risk from leaving them where they land.
This missile would prove to be the exception, in more then one way. Its impact had been near a spot that was not two miles deep. This spot was barely a half-mile deep. One warhead landed atop the sandbar, the others sunk. The trusty sub would have to be called out of retirement.
The Minuteman IV was an unregulated missile created to make up the gap created by treaties with the former Soviet Union. In the wake of change after the end of the cold war, the two superpowers found themselves at the mercy of the newer, smaller nuclear powered countries. India, North Korea, Pakistan, Iran, and the myriad other countries that felt they had to have nuclear weapons to be considered seriously. During the cold war, the nuclear weapon had been a politic weapon, not a military weapon. The threat of using a nuclear weapon was the bargaining chip. If another country used their weapons, they would be dealt with in a severe manner. With the changes of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, now nuclear weapons were a potential threat from countries that were patient, persistent, and much less likely to be swayed by logic or political pressure.
Technologically, the missile was a quantum leap from its predecessor. The body of the missile incorporated lessons learned from years of making stealth fighters and bombers. Advances in satellite tracking further allowed both the tests, and potential uses to be done in less obtrusive, harder to monitor spots and times. The first hint of a problem would be that telltale white streak as it acquired the target. Work continued to eliminate even that, but in reality that was working as well. Four missiles had been launched. Only three had been visible upon re-entry.
The group was now meandering back to the bunker that was the control room for the Kwajalein Missile Range. They believed that they had witnessed another flawless performance of the Minuteman. To their way of thinking, no more complications could have arisen from this test then the last test. Nothing could have been further from the truth. They did not yet know of the warhead on the sandbar, but even when they were told, it would be a minor complication. Pulling out the submarine to knock it off the sandbar would not be a problem either. However, the problems from Test 15 were nowhere near being solved.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On a neighboring atoll, uninhabited and unseen from the contented party lay two men. Covered by the bushes at the edge of the sand, one with his eyes glued to a pair of binoculars, the other huddled over a small piece of electronic equipment. The other exception to this test was that of the thousands of devices that had tracked the descent of the missiles, one was on this otherwise uninhabited atoll.
Speaking in a tongue foreign to both the natives of the island, and to the visiting Americans, the one with the electronic device whispered, "This is the one. All this waiting has finally come to a end."
The man with binoculars set them down, and turned to his comrade, "Sandbar?"
The other nodded. "Now for the next part of the plan."
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Despite the hour, there was a flurry of activity around the command center. Personnel both military and civilian were moving in and out. Now they were mostly moving out. By midnight all activity had stopped. The night's action had been it for the day. No one was moving around now except for the guards. Even they had been busy all night. The Sandman tried to tap them on the shoulder as they had the others involved in the test.
Tests at the island had become so routine and without difficulty that the enlisted and officers alike had relaxed. Nothing ever went wrong, and the few times something did, the laid-back attitude of the South Pacific island ruled the day. The biggest problem was that while Kwajalein served an important purpose, its mission ended up being non-essential to the remainder of the military. Neither the war in Iraq, nor the Grenada-sized flare-up in Atlantica needed the technology tested, only the people stationed in the utopian island. As a result, the island was understaffed, and the only mechanic available to work on the island was aboard a safety check boat during the test.
The submarine's mission was scheduled for the next afternoon. Due to its disuse, the sub was in need of a new propeller. The officer in charge of the motor pool, had been onboard another of the many safety check boats scattered throughout the islands to monitor the missiles. When his boat arrived he just went to his quarters, without even knowing how critical the submarine was about to become.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Security at the base was as tight as most military installations before the World Trade Center incident. The airfield was a military controlled airfield, the port, which saw less activity then ever since the decrease in personnel had military police running security. No one got on or off the island without the knowledge of the military, so there was no desire to beef up the security. The way it had always worked in the past was secure enough. It was not as if two terrorists could have snuck a boat onto a remote part of the island and camped out for months casing the base. It was simply inconceivably impossible. No one could possibly be on the island with nefarious plans.
The two strange men finished packing up their hidden camp on the far side of the island and prepared to put their long conceived plan into motion. Months of waiting was paying off. The first time they had snuck onto the base they found out that the propeller was bad on the sub. Changing it out would be simple, finding the part was the harder part. An accomplice on Kwajalein had the answer. The man on whose property the men had been hiding simply walked into the local boat shop and picked one off the shelf. It was truly that simply. The bloated supply system of the military again proved to be as inept as it was outdated.
It had been a long night. The Staff Duty had been up since 0500 hours, and was not at his best for his 0300-hour rounds. After checking the main buildings, he glanced in the direction of the motor pool. From here, he could see that the gate was locked. Rather then physically check it as he had an hour ago, he went back inside. It had been locked at 0200 hours; it had to be locked now. Besides, no one made complete rounds at this hour, things were simply too calm in the paradise of Kwajalein.
Inside the gate of the motor pool, in the shadow of the building, the two men stood still watching the Staff Duty from afar. Directly behind them was a small, inflatable raft bobbing gently up and down with the quiet waves. The Staff Duty stretched, and then turned around, rubbing his eyes as he walked back inside. Quickly the two men slipped around the building to the door.
The knob was easy to pick, once inside the sub was easy to spot even without lights. It sat in the middle of the bay, on steel rails that curved gently down toward the garage door nearest the water. A 5200 series lock secured the chain that raised the door. Without a word, one of the men headed for the door and extracted a twelve-inch crescent wrench from a small bag. While the military continued to boast of the security of the 5200 by buying no others, a few people knew that it was no match for either a twelve-inch crescent wrench or a determined person. This particular lock was about to meet both. Within seconds, an audible pop emanated from the lock. The two men stopped all movement.
When they determined there were no more sounds indicating someone was coming to check it out, they both continued. The man at the door began the agonizingly slow movements required to raise the door silently. The other man started working on the propeller. Link by link, subdued click by subdued click, the door inched open.
Getting into the sub would be easy, maneuvering the sub trickier, but not impossible, the difficult part would be sliding the sub back into the water. The winch had been turned off, but not removed. Turning it back on would make noise, maneuvering the sub without it was nearly impossible.
The door reached the height necessary to allow the sub to slip out, and the first stranger slipped away from the opening. He tugged the winch wire towards the opening then slipped out the front door. In two minutes, the inflatable raft was silently moving between the two rails in the water. By the time he had the wire connected, the propeller was finished and the hatch opened. The first man started the electric trolling motor. A length of poles lay beneath the bow of the sub. In other posts, the poles would have been called camo poles, used to raise and hold up camouflage nets over vehicles. Here they were used to give a little extra leverage for removing lug nuts, or tight bolts. Or occasionally to move something bigger. In this case, something sub-sized.
With the tugging of the raft, and the pushing by the lever arm, slowly the sub began to slide toward the water. Once it reached the sloped part of the rails, the lever was unnecessary. The thief put the pole back where he found it, and scrambled onto the moving sub. Once it hit the water, the raft’s motor cut off, and it doubled back to the building. The sub slowly slid the remaining few feet into the water while the thief began slowly lowering the garage door at the same pace he had opened it. Without a sound, the sub drifted into the bay. In a few minutes, the raft caught up with the sub and the man slipped into the hatch. The raft was pierced starting an agonizingly slow leak, and then set adrift well away from the shore. By the time it was discovered it would not matter if it had washed ashore one of the other atolls or simply sunk from sight. It had served its purpose admirably.
The remainder of the stranger’s mission would flow almost as smoothly as the start. Retrieving the missile from the sandbar was easy. There was no telling how long before the army would be able to get a replacement sub to recover the missile, and by that time, the men, the mission and the missile would all be long gone and on to the next phase of the of plan. Even the sub was recovered, while it was not immediately needed, it presented another tool for future deeds, perhaps not as impressive as a missile capable of carrying nuclear payloads, or traveling five thousand miles, but impressive in its own way.
The playing field had not been leveled, but there was a toehold in place for one of the most long held fears. A missile with intercontinental range was now in the hands of someone who should never have access to a weapon of that ability. Somewhere in the world, a disturbing course of action began the repercussions of which would make the World Trade Center a small problem.