Balance of Power

by James W. Huston

  “So that’s it? We sit and wait until tomorrow morning?”

  “We sit, Mr. President,” said Admiral Hart. “But our aircraft keep searching, the battle group steams to the exact location where this happened and inspects every wave, and we find the people who did this,” he added.

  “I want to be kept fully informed,” the President said. “I’m going to have a press conference at seven A.M. to catch the morning news shows, and I’m going to announce that the American crew has been killed and the ship sunk. I don’t want anyone leaking that until I’ve had a chance to announce it. But before then, I want to know who did this. Understood?”

  They all nodded and rose to leave. “Stay here, Ms. Vaughan,” said the President. Molly looked embarrassed. She had no idea why the President had called her, nor why he’d singled her out after the meeting. She felt awkward and out of place. She waited for the President to speak again.

  “Thank you for staying, Ms. Vaughan,” he said when they were alone.

  “Certainly, Mr. President,” she replied stiffly. “What is it I can do for you?”

  “So that’s all we know,” the Speaker said to his entire staff in the large conference room next to his office. “It’s gotten ugly. We’ve been ordered not to talk to the press about it until the President’s news conference at seven in the morning. Everybody clear on that? If anyone talks, it will make me look bad, and it will make you unemployed. Clear?” They all nodded. “It’s already late,” he said, glancing at his watch. “If you need to, go home and get some sleep. But be here early.”

  Frank Grazio, a young assistant, nudged Dillon as everyone rose to leave. Grazio asked, “What do you think?”

  “About what?”

  “About the hijacking,” Grazio said. “What do you think is going to happen?”

  “How would I know?” Dillon said, annoyed.

  Grazio stopped, “Did I say something stupid?”

  “No. I just don’t know what to say. We don’t know who did it, so it’s hard to know what the right response is.”

  “No, the proper response is easy. We go and kick their asses,” Grazio said in his Long Island accent. “The question is whose ass to kick.”

  Dillon walked into the hall and headed toward his office.

  “Where you going?” Grazio said.

  “To my office,” he replied. “I’m going to find out everything I can about Indonesia. I don’t really know much more about it than what I saw in a weird Mel Gibson movie ten years ago. A Year of… something or other.”

  “Well,” Grazio said, slowing down, “I think I’ll call a friend of mine over at the Pentagon and see what Indonesia has in its military.”

  Dillon looked at him. “Get with Chuck. He’s probably already doing that. I doubt Indonesia itself is the one we’re dealing with, but it won’t hurt to know what they’ve got.”

  Grazio nodded and left.

  Dillon went into his office, sat down, and began to organize his thoughts. He had done research before, but never for anything this important. And never out of anger.

  6

  “I DON’T THINK YOU CAN HELP.” CAPTAIN ZEKE Bradford appreciated the enthusiasm of his two best fighter squadron commanders. They were always out front, ready to do whatever needed to be done. But this time it might just muck things up. “Those cigarette boats eluded the S-3, but we’re sending out attack planes to find them.”

  “We can help,” Caskey said. “We can check out ships on our radar, with our IR or our TVSU—we might be able to ID ’em.”

  Bradford regarded them with skepticism. “They’re probably all fiberglass and going like hell. Besides, the bastards launched a missile at you when you flew over the cargo ship and they probably still have shoulder-fired missiles—it could be a real problem.” Bradford shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Come on, Captain. We’ll be flying anyway. May as well let us try,” Caskey said. “If we don’t find anything, no harm done.”

  Bradford frowned, “Unless one of your junior officers with his fangs out flies into the water…”

  “Won’t happen,” Caskey said, trying to answer every objection. “I’ll make sure the crews are second cruise or above only.”

  Bradford’s resistance weakened. “What do you think, Drunk?” he said to Commander Dave Driver.

  Drunk nodded almost imperceptibly. “We can definitely help. I’m just wondering whether we should assign quadrants or radials so we’re not all out there running into each other.”

  Bradford nodded. “I already did, but we can make them smaller areas though, if there are more of us airborne.”

  Drunk looked at the air wing commander. “What are we supposed to do if we find ’em? We supposed to shoot ’em?” he asked, almost rhetorically. He pulled up the sleeves of his flight suit. “What looks like a sixty-knot cigarette boat to one pilot may be a thirty-knot ski boat to someone else.”

  “That’s the big problem. The plan isn’t to shoot ’em, it’s to find ’em. Then we can watch where they go and do what we need to later.”

  “You think they’re going to let us follow them?” Drunk said. “If they’ve got any sense at all, they’re going to be in those boats only about a minute—just long enough to get over the horizon. They’ll transfer to another ship as soon as they can—some ship that looks like your generic cargo ship found by the thousands all over these oceans. This is only about the busiest ocean in the world.”

  Caskey nodded. “I agree, CAG,” he said, calling the air wing commander by his generic initials. The title Commander of the Air Group was used widely in the Navy even though air groups haven’t existed since the fifties. “But we’ve got to look. One thing’s for sure—if we don’t look, we’ll never find them.”

  “You have an amazing grasp of the obvious,” Bradford said as he unconsciously straightened up, pulling his shoulders back. “Let’s get everybody airborne as soon as possible.”

  “Roger that,” said Caskey enthusiastically. “I’m gonna go rewrite the flight schedule. We gonna go with a flex deck or cyclic ops?”

  “I’d like to do a flex deck, but with two cycles of planes up at once. We can burn more gas to find them and not worry about recovery times. We’ll keep everybody out there for four or five hours. After that, we’ll go to cyclic if we haven’t found them. And if we haven’t found them by sunset, we’re cooked. We’ll have to report our failure to Washington and wait for further instructions, which will probably be to come home and turn in our commissions.”

  Caskey and Drunk left quickly to order their squadrons into the air.

  Caskey walked into his squadron’s ready room. “Messer, Mario, and Beef, we’re first up. Ops O,” he said, looking at his operations officer, “find three aircrew to be ready for the next go, which will be in a few hours. We’ll do flex deck for four hours to look for the three cigarette boats, then cyclic after that if we haven’t found them.” He looked at Lieutenant Barry Thacker, the SDO, the squadron duty officer. “You got a good ship’s posit on the chart?”

  “No, sir.” The lieutenant jumped up. “I haven’t updated it in a couple of hours.”

  Caskey stared at him. “Why not?”

  “I just haven’t sir, sorry.”

  “Sorry doesn’t cut it, Barry. Make it happen.”

  “Yes, sir.” Thacker copied down latitude and longitude and crossed to the chart on the sliding cork board in the front of the ready room. “We’re right here, sir,” he said, sticking a pin in the ocean north of the island of Java.

  “How far are we from where the Pacific Flyer went down?” Caskey asked.

  Thacker measured the distance on the chart with his pen. “About two hundred miles,” he answered confidently.

  “No sweat,” MC said. He looked at his watch and turned to Messer. “CVIC brief in five minutes. They’ll tell us which radials we’ll be searching. We’ll go to the last known location of the Flyer, turn outbound, and start looking. We’ll look for anything fast, and after
that, we’ll look for anything at all. But we’ll have to be careful of flying into controlled airspace. Little islands that are part of Indonesia are all over the place. Last thing we need is for them to get mad at us for flying into their country with armed airplanes without permission. Capiche?”

  They all understood perfectly. They also understood it was an exercise in futility.

  “I’ve got lots of ships and boats, MC,” Messer said, leaning toward his radar repeater as the F-14B turned southeast at five thousand feet. They could see other Constitution airplanes turning outbound on other radials at different altitudes, probably saying the same things either to themselves or the other aircrew.

  “Anything fast moving?”

  “Can’t tell.”

  “Well, let’s just start looking.”

  “Roger that. First contact—is five degrees left, ten miles.”

  Caskey banked the Tomcat gently to the left and headed for the first ship on the radar. The first of hundreds. They approached it carefully, mindful of CAG’s warning that the terrorists might have shoulder-fired missiles aboard and their own, more vivid memories of flying past the Flyer. They flew down the side at one thousand feet and looked carefully at the ship. It was clearly not a cigarette boat. Not even close. A hundred times too big. Just another tramp steamer.

  The next ship was less remarkable, and the next less remarkable still. Their enthusiasm softened gradually, imperceptibly, as they went from one target to another, all equally unlikely to hold any key to the cigarette boats.

  They flew outbound again and again, then turned around and headed back and looked at every ship or boat in their sector. It was always the same story. Too big, too slow, too something. Not even a good candidate as a mother ship—although Caskey had no idea how they might know if the cigarette boats had been hoisted aboard one of these ships.

  “Well, Messer, this has been a flail,” MC said as he turned back toward the ship for the last time. The sun set behind him toward Malaysia and Singapore. He raised his dark-colored visor to get a better picture of the darkening sea ahead of them.

  “Flail ain’t even the word,” Messer said, frustrated. “Never had much chance of finding these guys anyway. Too small.”

  “Too small, and we got too late a start.”

  It was another beautiful day on the equator, just as hot as the one before, just as hazy from the humidity and oppressive heat, and just as comfortable in the air-conditioned cabins and staterooms of the world’s largest warship. Comfortable in temperature but not temperament. Billings stewed as he thought of the men that had done this and tried to imagine why. It would be some “cause,” no doubt, some supposed reason to commit murder.

  The air wing had continued the search for the three elusive cigarette boats all through the night. As dawn approached, Admiral Ray Billings realized his one mission for the last twenty-four hours had been a failure. It hadn’t been a particularly tough mission: Find the three cigarette boats that carried off the men that murdered the Americans. Didn’t have to do anything else, just find them. Total, complete failure.

  Billings summoned his staff, the air wing commander, and all the squadron commanders to his wardroom. The group gathered around the table and took the offered coffee.

  “That it?” he began with no introduction, no preliminary statements. “We done looking?”

  Captain Bradford spoke in his deep voice. “We’re not done, sir, we’ll continue to look. But the circle of how far these guys could have gotten in”—he looked at his watch—“twenty-three hours, is a big one. They could have had a mother ship that craned them aboard, they could have been refueled, they could have scuttled the boats and climbed aboard a steamer, they could be tucked in some cove or cave somewhere waiting for time to pass. It’s hard to know.”

  “Wrong answer,” Billings said, leaning back in his chair. “What am I going to tell the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs? That we failed? That the most dangerous battle group since World War II, maybe ever, can’t find three shitty little motorboats?” His eyebrows angled angrily down toward his nose.

  “Sir,” said Drunk, “it’s a needle in a haystack, and it’s their haystack. They could be anywhere.”

  Admiral Billings shook his head and looked into the eyes of each officer present, one at a time, slowly. “Anyone got any more ideas? I think I’ve heard enough for this morning on how hard this is. What I want to hear is how to find them.”

  The skipper of VAW-121, the E-2C squadron, spoke. “I think we should keep our surface search radars active in the area all day. Carpet coverage. They’ve got to know we’re looking for them, but they probably don’t appreciate how well we can pick them out if they go too fast. They will be more inclined to rely on their speed than on hiding. And if they’re hiding, we wait for them to make a move.”

  “You all concur?”

  Bradford nodded, and put up one finger. “I’m changing the entire day’s schedule into surface search, so every airplane will still be devoting its entire flight to looking for these boats. That’s all we can do, unless you want to go full out, get every airplane airborne we can, and keep them airborne as long as we can.” He hesitated. “But that will exhaust the air wing and the planes in a day and we’ll have to cut back.”

  Billings shook his head. “No, no point in getting someone killed.” He thought to himself. “Anything else?”

  Captain Black, his chief of staff, spoke. “Admiral, even though we don’t know where these guys have gone, I think we should prepare contingency plans, so when we’re asked to do something about this, which seems likely, we’re as ready as we can be.”

  Admiral Billings glanced at him and nodded quickly. “I agree. Prepare a message to the Amphib group, give them an update. I want the Marines ready to go ashore on any beach within five hundred miles of here. Make it seven hundred. And from looking at the chart, that’s a lot of beaches. Tell them to find out what beach studies they have, and start working on the rest. I don’t care if there are ten thousand of them; start at number one and keep going until I say to stop.”

  He looked around for his intelligence officer, Commander Beth Louwsma. “I want every chart of this area pulled out and pored over by every intel officer on board, down to the lowest ensign. I want the charts all over the walls in CVIC, and I want all the aircrew studying those charts like their lives depend on it. I want everyone to look for where you’d hide if you were in a small fast boat and an American battle group was looking for you. We have to know this area like the back of our hand, and I mean every island.”

  Admiral Billings stood up, his juices flowing. “Beth, I want you to get messages off to whomever you need to—I’ll sign them—asking for imagery of every suspicious inlet, bay, cove, and port within seven hundred miles of here. We’ll send the Tomcats with TARPS pods into some of those places, but we may need permission from Indonesia to go in.”

  “Yes, sir,” Louwsma said, writing.

  Admiral Billings looked at his operations officer. “Get messages off to get us carte blanche from Indonesia to overfly some of their territory to find these murderers.”

  His operations officer nodded knowingly.

  “Everybody listen up,” he said and paused until all eyes were on him. “We don’t know if we’ll be going after them in an hour or three days. We have to be ready for anything. Get the ordnance ready. I want everything available, from Tomahawks to cluster bombs. Keep the laser-guided bombs ready—we may have to drop them into a cave. Alert the SEALs too—it may be their show.”

  “Yes, sir,” the operations officer said, as he wrote furiously in a small green notebook.

  “Anything else?” The Admiral looked around the table. “Okay. Let’s go. I’ll let you know if I hear anything else. Dismissed.” The officers hurried out of the cabin.

  The Constitution forced its way through the ocean, pushing mountains of water aside as it dashed westward toward the point on the surface of the ocean above the mangled hulk of the Pac
ific Flyer and the bodies of twenty-six Americans and two Indonesians. Billings was acutely aware of each one of lives that had been lost. He could picture their families, their houses or apartments, their normal lives.

  He looked at his watch and called for his communications officer to draft the message he had been dreading, the message to Washington telling them he had failed to find the men who murdered the American merchant sailors and a SEAL.

  7

  THE PRESIDENT STEPPED ONTO THE PLATFORM WITH Secretary of Defense Dick Roland and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs at his side. Just like the night before. He looked at the same tired faces of reporters who were constantly eager to undo him and make him look foolish. He sighed deeply.

  Roland, who had been chosen to run this particular press conference, took a paper out of his coat pocket and began. Unconsciously, he stood on his toes to look taller and more imposing. “We have received word from the U.S. task force on the scene that the Pacific Flyer, which was hijacked yesterday, was taken out to sea. Once in open ocean, the terrorists who had taken the ship murdered the crew and set explosives in the ship.”

  The President looked up when the press corps let out their audible gasps.

  Roland continued, “By the time Navy personnel located and boarded the ship all the crew had been killed, except the captain, and the terrorists had escaped. The captain has been taken hostage. The explosives found aboard were evaluated and it was determined that it would be too dangerous to try to disarm them. Our men abandoned the ship, but the explosives went off as they were evacuating. One Navy sailor was killed. Shortly after the rescue team was safely evacuated the ship exploded again and sank. Twenty-five members of the crew were murdered, all Americans, as well as two Indonesian port inspectors, and the ship and all its cargo were lost.” He looked up at the press. “That’s all I have. Are there any questions?”