by Tom Clancy
“That’s all, you think?”
“Hey, I’m an eye-cutter, not a marriage counselor. Not my field.”
“Why did you say you’re not a marriage counselor. I never brought that up, did I?”
Clever son of a bitch, aren’t you? Katz thought, letting go of his mustache. Degree in psychology, maybe ... more likely self-taught. Cops were pretty good at reading people. Reading me, even? “Trouble at home for a married person generally means a troubled marriage,” Katz said slowly. “No, there has been no such comment.”
“You’re sure?”
“Quite sure.”
“Okay, thank you for your time, Dr. Katz. Sorry to have bothered you.” He handed over a card. “If you hear anything like that, I’d appreciate it if you called me.”
“What gives?” Katz asked. “If you want my cooperation, I want an answer. I don’t spy on people for the fun of it.”
“Doctor, her husband holds a very high and very sensitive government position. We routinely keep an eye on such people for reasons of national security. You do the same thing, even if you don’t think much about it. If a surgeon shows up with liquor on his breath, for example, you take note of it and you take action, correct?”
“That doesn’t happen here, ever,” Katz assured him.
“But you would take note of such a thing if it did happen.”
“You bet we would.”
“Glad to hear it. As you know, John Ryan has access to all sorts of highly sensitive information. Were we not to keep an eye on such people, we would be irresponsible. We’ve—this is a highly sensitive matter, Dr. Katz.”
“I understand that.”
“We’ve had indications that her husband might be acting ... irregularly. We have to check that out. Understand? We have to.”
“Okay.”
“That’s all we ask.”
“Very well.”
“Thank you for your cooperation, sir.” The investigator shook hands and left.
Katz managed not to flush until the man was gone. He didn’t really know Jack all that well. They’d met at parties perhaps five or six times, traded a few jokes, talked about baseball or the weather or maybe international relations. Jack had never begged off on an answer, had never said I can’t discuss that or anything. Pleasant-enough guy, Bernie thought. A good father by all accounts. But he didn’t know the man at all.
Katz did, however, know Cathy as well as he knew any other doctor. She was a thoroughly wonderful person. If one of his kids should ever need eye surgery, she was one of the three people in the world whom he would trust to do the fix, and that was the highest compliment he could pay to anyone. She’d backed him up on cases and procedures, and he had backed her up. When one needed advice, it was the other who got asked. They were friends, and associates. If they’d ever decided to leave the Hopkins/Wilmer faculty, they would have set up an office together, because a medical partnership is even harder to maintain than a good marriage. He might have married her, Katz thought, if he’d had the chance. She would have been an easy girl to love. She had to be a good mother. She drew a disproportionate number of kids as patients because in some cases the surgeon needed small hands, and hers were small, dainty, and supremely skillful. She lavished attention on her little patients. The floor nurses loved her for it. Everyone loved her, as a matter of fact. Her surgical team was extremely loyal to her. They didn’t come any better than Cathy.
Trouble at home? Jack’s playing around behind her back ... hurting my friend?
“That worthless son of a bitch.”
He was late again, Cathy saw. After nine this time. Couldn’t he ever get home at a decent hour?
And if not, why not?
“Hi, Cath,” he said on his way through to the bedroom. “Sorry I’m late.”
When he was out of sight, she walked toward the closet and opened the door to check the coat. Nothing. He’d had it cleaned the very next day, claiming that it had been spotted. It had been spotted, Cathy remembered, but, but, but ...
What to do?
She almost started crying again.
Cathy was back in her chair when Jack came through on his way toward the kitchen. He didn’t notice the look, didn’t notice the silence. His wife stayed in her place, not really seeing the television picture her eyes were fixed on while her mind kept going over and over it, searching for an answer but finding only more anger.
She needed advice. She didn’t want her marriage to end, did she? She could feel the process by which emotion and anger were taking over from reason and love. She knew that she ought to be worried about that, ought to resist the process, but she found herself unable to do either as the anger simply fed on itself. Cathy walked quietly into the kitchen and got herself a drink. She didn’t have any procedures tomorrow. It was okay to have one drink. Again she looked over at her husband, and again he didn’t notice. Didn’t notice her? Why didn’t he notice her? She’d put up with so much. Okay, the time they’d spent in England had been all right, she’d had a fairly good time teaching on staff at Guy’s Hospital; it hadn’t hurt her tenure at Hopkins a bit. But the other stuff—he was away so damned much! All that time back and forth to Russia when he was messed up with the arms treaty, so many other things, playing spy or something, leaving her at home with the kids, forcing her to lose time at work. She’d missed a couple of good procedures for that reason, when she’d been unable to get a sitter and had been forced to stick Bernie with something that she ought to have done.
And what had Jack been up to all that time? She had once accepted the fact that she couldn’t even ask. What had he been doing? Maybe having a good laugh? A little fling with some sultry female agent somewhere? Like in the movies. There he was, in some exotic setting, a quiet, darkly lit bar, having a meeting with some agent, and one thing might have led to another....
Cathy settled back in front of the TV and gulped at her drink. She nearly sputtered it back out. She wasn’t accustomed to drinking bourbon straight.
This is all a mistake.
It seemed as though there were a war within her mind, the forces of good on one side, and the forces of evil on the other—or was it the forces of naivete and those of reality? She didn’t know, and she was too upset to judge.
Well, it didn’t matter for tonight, did it? She was having her period, and even if Jack had asked—which he wouldn’t, she knew—she’d say no. Why should he ask if he was getting it somewhere else? Why should she say yes if he was? Why get the leavings? Why be second-string?
She sipped more carefully at her drink this time.
Need to get advice, need to talk to somebody! But who?
Maybe Bernie, she decided. She could trust Bernie. Soon as she got back. Two days.
“That takes care of the preliminaries.”
“Sure does, boss,” the coach said. “How goes the Pentagon, Dennis?”
“Not as much fun as you’re having, Paul.”
“That’s the choice, isn’t it? Fun or importance?”
“Everybody all right?”
“Yes, sir! We’re pretty healthy for this far into the season, and we have the bye this week to get everybody up to speed. I want another crack at those Vikings.”
“So do I,” Secretary Bunker said from his E-Ring office. “Think we can really stop Tony Wills this time?”
“We can sure try. Isn’t he one great kid? I haven’t seen running like that since Gayle Sayers. Defensing him is a bitch, though.”
“Let’s not try to think too far ahead. I want to be in Denver in a few weeks.”
“We play ’em one at a time, Dennis, you know that. Just we don’t know who we’re playing yet. I’d prefer L.A. We can handle them easy enough,” the coach thought. “Then we’ll probably have to handle Miami in the division game. That’ll be harder, but we can do it.”
“I think so, too.”
“I have films to look at.”
“Fair enough. Just remember, one at a time—but three more wins.”
Dubinin watched the water invade the graving dock as the sluices were opened. Admiral Lunin was ready. The new sonar array was rolled up on its spool inside the teardrop-shaped fairing that sat atop the rudder post. The seven-bladed screw of manganese-bronze had been inspected and polished. The hull was restored to full watertight integrity. His submarine was ready for sea.
As was the crew. He’d gotten rid of eighteen conscript sailors and replaced them with eighteen new officers. The radical downsizing of the Soviet submarine fleet had eliminated a large number of officer billets. It would have been a waste of skilled manpower to return them to civilian life—besides which there were not enough jobs for them—and as a result they’d been retrained and assigned to the remaining submarines as technical experts. His sonar department would now be almost exclusively officers—two michmaniy would assist with the maintenance—and all of them were genuine experts. Surprisingly, there was little grumbling among them. The Akula-class had what was for Soviet submarines very comfortable accommodations, but more important than that was the fact that the new members of the wardroom had been fully briefed on their mission, and what the boat had done—probably done, Dubinin corrected himself—on the previous cruise. It was the sort of thing that appealed to the sportsman in them. This was for the submariner the ultimate test of skill. For that they would do their best.
Dubinin would do the same. Pulling in a lot of old professional debts, and leaning heavily on the yard’s Master Shipwright, he’d performed miracles during the refit. Bedding had all been replaced. The ship had been scrubbed surgically clean and repainted with bright, airy colors. Dubinin had worked with the local supply officers and obtained the best food he could find. A well-fed crew was a happy crew, and men responded to a commander who worked hard for them. That was the whole point of the new professional spirit in the Soviet Navy. Valentin Borissovich Dubinin had learned his trade from the best teacher his Navy had ever had, and he was determined that he would be the new Marko Ramius. He had the best ship, had the best crew, and he would on this cruise set the standard for the Soviet Pacific Fleet.
He would also have to be lucky, of course.
“That’s the hardware,” Fromm said. “From now on ...”
“Yes, from now on we are assembling the actual device. I see you’ve changed the design somewhat ... ?”
“Yes. Two tritium reservoirs. I prefer the shorter injection piping. Mechanically it is no different. The timing is not critical, and the pressurization ensures that it will function properly.”
“Also makes loading the tritium easier,” Ghosn observed. “That’s why you did it.”
“Correct.”
The inside of the device made Ghosn think of the half-assembled body of some alien airplane. There was the delicacy and precision of aircraft parts, but the almost baffling configuration in which they were placed. Something from a science-fiction movie, Ghosn thought, whimsical for a brief moment ... but then this was science fiction, or had been until recently. The first public discussion of nuclear weapons had been in H. G. Wells, hadn’t it? That hadn’t been so long ago.
“Commander, I saw your doctor,” Achmed said in the far corner.
“And—you still look ill, my friend,” Qati noted. “What is the problem?”
“He wants me to see another doctor in Damascus.”
Qati instantly did not like that. Did not like it at all. But Achmed was a comrade who had served the movement for years. How could he say no to someone who had twice saved his life, once stopping a bullet himself to do so?
“You know that what goes on here....”
“Commander, I will die before I speak of this place. Even though I know nothing of this—this project. I will die first.”
There was no doubting the man, and Qati knew what it was to be seriously ill at a young and healthy age. He could not deny the man medical care while he himself regularly visited a physician. How could his men respect him if he did such a thing?
“Two men will go with you. I will select them.”
“Thank you, Commander. Please forgive my weakness.”
“Weakness?” Qati grabbed the man by the shoulder. “You are the strongest among us! We need you back, and we need you healthy! Go tomorrow.”
Achmed nodded and withdrew to another place, embarrassed and shamed by his illness. His Commander, he knew, faced death. It had to be cancer, he had so often visited the physician. Whatever it was, the Commander had not let it stop him. There was courage, he thought.
“Break for the night?” Ghosn asked.
Fromm shook his head. “No, let’s take another hour or two to assemble the explosive bed. We should be able to get part of it in place before we’re too weary.” Both men looked up as Qati approached.
“Still on schedule?”
“Herr Qati, whatever arrangements you have in mind, we will be ready a day early. Ibrahim saved us that day with his work on the explosives.” The German held one of the small hexagonal blocks. The squibs were already in place, the wire trailing off. Fromm looked at the other two, then bent down, setting the first block in its nesting place. Fromm made sure the block was exactly in place, then attached a numbered tag on the wire and draped it into a plastic tray that held a number of dividers, like the trays of a toolbox. Qati attached the wire to a terminal, checking three times to make sure the number on the wire was the same as that on the terminal. Fromm watched also. The process took four minutes. The electrical components had already been pre-tested. They could not be tested again. The first part of the bomb was now live.
27
DATA FUSION
“I’ve had my say, Bart,” Jones said on the way to the airport.
“That bad?”
“The crew hates him—the training they just went through didn’t help. Hey, I was there, okay? I was in with the sonar guys, in the simulator, and he was there, and I wouldn’t want to work for him. He almost yelled at me.”
“Oh?” That surprised Mancuso.
“Yeah, he said something that I didn’t like—something plain wrong, skipper—and I called him on it, and you should have seen his reaction. Shit, I thought he’d have a stroke or something. And he was wrong, Bart. It was my tape. He was hassling his people for not cueing on something that wasn’t there, okay? It was one of my trick tapes, and they saw that it was bogus, but he didn’t and he started raisin’ hell. That’s a good sonar department. He doesn’t know how to use it, but he sure likes to kibbitz like he does. Anyway, after he left, the guys started talking, okay? That isn’t the only bunch he gives a hard time to. I hear the engineers are going nuts trying to keep this clown happy. Is it true they maxed an ORSE?”
Mancuso nodded, despite the fact he didn’t like hearing this. “They came within a whisker of setting a record.”
“Well, the guy doesn’t want a record, he wants a perfect. He wants to redefine what perfect is. I’m telling you, man, if I was stuck on that boat, after the first cruise the first thing up through the hatch would be my seabag. I’d fuckin’ desert before I worked for that guy!” Jones paused. He’d gone too far. “I caught the signal his XO gave you, I even thought he might have been a little out of line, maybe. I was wrong. That’s one very loyal XO. Ricks hates one of his JOs, the kid does tracking-party duty. The quartermaster who’s breaking him in—Ensign Shaw, I think his name is—says he’s a real good kid, but the skipper’s riding him like a broke-down horse.”
“Great, what am I supposed to do about it?”
“Beats me, Bart. I retired as an E-6, remember?” Relieve the son of a bitch, Jones thought, though he knew better. You could only relieve for cause.
“I’ll talk to him,” Mancuso promised.
“You know, I heard about skippers like that. Never did believe the stories. Guess I got spoiled working for you,” Dr. Jones observed as they approached the ter
minal. “You haven’t changed a bit, you know that? You still listen when somebody talks at you.”
“You have to listen, Ron. You can’t know it all yourself.”
“I got news: not everyone knows that. I got one more suggestion.”
“Don’t let him go hunting?”
“If I were in your position, I wouldn’t.” Jones opened the door. “I don’t want to rain on the parade, skipper. That’s my professional observation. He isn’t up to the game. Ricks is nothing near the captain you used to be.”
Used to be. A singularly poor choice of words, Mancuso thought, but it was true. It was a hell of a lot easier to run a boat than to run a squadron, and a hell of a lot more fun, too.
“Better hustle if you want to catch that flight.” Mancuso held out his hand.
“Skipper, always a pleasure.”
Mancuso watched him walk into the terminal. Jones had never once given him bad advice, and if anything he’d gotten smarter. A pity he hadn’t stayed in and gone for a commission. That wasn’t true, the Commodore thought next. Ron would have made one hell of a CO, but he would never have had a chance. The system didn’t allow it, and that was that.
The driver headed back without being told, leaving Mancuso in his rear seat with his thoughts. The system hadn’t changed enough. He’d come up the old way, power school, an engineer tour before he got command. There was too much engineering in the Navy, not enough leadership. He’d made the transition, as did most of the skippers—but not all. Too many people made it through who thought that other people were just numbers, machines to be fixed, things to order, who measured people by numbers that were more easily understood than real results. Jim Rosselli wasn’t like that. Neither was Bart Mancuso, but Harry Ricks was.
So. Now what the hell do I do?
First and foremost, he had no basis for relieving Ricks. Had the story come from anyone except Jones, he would have dismissed it as personality clashes. Jones was too reliable an observer for that. Mancuso considered what he’d been told and matched it with the higher-than-usual rate of transfer requests, the rather equivocal words he’d heard from Dutch Claggett. The XO was in a very touchy spot. Already selected for command ... one bad word from Ricks and he’d lose that; against that possibility he had his loyalty to the Navy. His job demanded loyalty to his CO even while the Navy demanded truth. It was an impossible position for Claggett, and he’d done all that he could.
