Sweepers

by P. T. Deutermann

  “Well, yes, I understand that, Admiral. But wouldn’t that do you even more damage, politically, I mean?”

  “I suppose it would, Karen,” he said. “But if this guy killed Galen Schmidt-not to mention Elizabeth Walshjust to get at me, then to hell with it, okay? I’m -ready to get this bastard before he does another one. Especially given his probable motive for doing it.”

  She was startled by the sudden ferocity in his voice. This was a side of him she had not heard before. “You can’t blame yourself for what’s happened, Admiral,” she said.

  “Thanks, Karen,” he said. “Maybe I’ll call Admiral Car penter and reinforce that notion. Maybe first thing tomorrow.

  That’s not a good idea, Karen thought quickly. Carpenter was already conscious of the ripples spreading among the flag community in Washington over this matter, starting with the cinder block Vice Admiral Kensington had pitched in the political pond. “Why don’t you let me work that problem, Admiral? I think if you called him you might, uh …” She wasn’t sure how to phrase it. He did it for her.

  “Might show some desperation, huh? And then he might decide just to pull the plug and let me sink or swim by myself. Did you tell him about our little sdance with Kensington?”

  “He’d already heard about it, Admiral.”

  Sherman laughed, making a harsh sound. “Why am I not surprised?”

  “Admiral, I think Admiral Carpenter has his heart in the right place here. He’s going to move on this matter, not sit on it.”

  You’re probably fight. Well, I think I’m going out and do a ten-mile run somewhere. I need to think.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said. “What time will you leave for Annapolis?”

  “I’ve got a car laid on for thirteen hundred. Why don’t you meet me at the Mall entrance? Maybe we’ll have some developments by then.”

  She agreed and hung up. She thought about calling Train back, then decided against it. That pregnant silence after she had mentioned the Army-Navy Club had made her angry.

  He had no fight to judge her-about anything. So why do you care? He’s just a civilian, and an odd-looking one at that.

  She went out to the front porch to enjoy the late-afternoon sun. Two things were bothering her. Train’s abrupt demeanor on the phone hinted at professional disapproval. If she was working for Carpenter, what the hell was she doing going places with this guy? But over and above that, -she still sensed that Train was interested in her, and, somewhat to her surprise, she felt herself responding to this interest.

  And if that was true, then maybe some of his antipathy toward the admiral was not entirely professional. She smiled to herself as she saw Sally’s car turning into the drive for the afternoon feeding. Train might even be jealous of Sherman, which was a bad joke: That poor man had bigger problems on his plate. She headed down to the barn to help Sally with the horses.

  Karen was surprised at how small the Naval Academy cemetery was as she waited behind and slightly below the main ceremonial group surrounding the canopied grave. The cemetery was located on a gentle hillside across a wide creek from the main campus, occupying five wooded acres on the Sevem River. Fortunately, it was not raining, because the crowd was far too large to fit under the two temporary blue-and-gold canopies that had been erected facing the grave site. Several three-and two-star officers had shown up for the service in the Naval Academy chapel. She wondered idly if their attendance was because they knew Galen Schmidt or if it was because the Chief of Naval Operations himself was attending.

  She shifted her feet on the cold grass, trying to keep her heels from sinking into the spongy lawn. She found it fascinating that Sherman, who was probably the human being closest to Galen Schmidt, had been relegated to a back row of the flag officers’ section by virtue of the fact that he was just a frocked one-star. The same thing had happened in the chapel. It must be strange, she thought, to have nearly every facet of your professional life dictated by your lineal number in the Naval Register.

  Now the Navy band was assembled on one side of the grassy hillside, playing appropriately funereal music while the admirals and retired admirals stirred uncomfortably on their folding chairs. The rest of the funeral audience, nearly two hundred officers and even some enlisted men, remained standing. The grave itself had been bordered with sections of incongruously green Astroturf, and the casket was perched on a chrome-plated frame above the hole in the ground. Up higher on the hill, there was a smaller crowd of onlookers, comprised mostly of tourists who happened to ‘ be visiting the Academy and a few dozen midshipmen. There were some civilian youngsters standing to one side who looked like military dependents, attracted by all the stars and big black cars.

  That morning, she had tried to check in with Mcnair, but he had not been available. Train had come in at 8:30, and she’d filled him in on the itinerary for the afternoon. He took it all aboard and then got on the phone to Admiral Sherman’s office to assure the admiral that NIS was moving on the case. He then made a copy of the Galantz personnel file and transmitted that to the NIS database administrator.

  Throughout the morning, he treated her with almost exaggerated civility, which she found a bit frustrating. This tension between us is going to have to stop, sho-thought.

  And somehow she knew she would have to make the first move.

  Karen got a surprise at midmorning: The archived investigation report on the Rung Sat incident was locked out. She had called Train over when she saw the banner on her screen.

  “What’s that mean? Unavailable?” Train asked, looking over her shoulder.

  “I don’t know,” Karen said. “But there was an index listing. Damn thing has to be somewhere.”

  “It may be a security problem,” Train had said. “Given what these guys purportedly were doing, I suspect any records related to SEALS are long gone.”

  “What exactly were they doing?”

  He thought about that for a moment, then shook his head.

  “I can’t tell you,” he replied. “But it wasn’t social work.

  Anyway, does it matter? We’ve established Galantz was a real guy and that he did go MIA. That corroborates at least part of Sherman’s story.”

  “How will that help to find him?”

  “It won’t.”

  The band stopped playing, and there was a long silence as the chaplain mounted a platform and approached the lectern to begin the traditional interment ceremony. The day was partly cloudy, and it was cooler than she had anticipated. Her uniform shoes did little to keep out the damp cold of the cemetery grass. The chaplain said something, and everyone stood, removed their uniform hats, and bowed their heads. She searched for Sherman again in the sea of dark blue uniforms, feeling a pang of sympathy for him. His usually outgoing expression was now a cold mask, devoid of any visible emotion. He appeared to be staring at a headstone monument to his right, as if unwilling to watch the bronze casket be lowered forever into the cold ground.

  About two hundred feet off to her right, she could see the burial crew clustered at a discreet distance around a bright yellow backhoe. She looked away and then looked back.

  Train von Rensel was in their midst, dressed in oversized overalls, just like the rest of the crew. He appeared to be carefully scanning the crowd in and around the cemetery.

  As she stared at him, their eyes met briefly across the open ground, but he gave no indication that he had seen or recognized her. The fact that he would not acknowledge her made her feel uneasy.

  Just after three o’clock, Captain Mccarty knocked once and let’himself into Admiral Carpenter’s office. The admiral was on the phone, as usual, and he waved Mccarty over to a chair. A minute later, he hung up. “So, what did you learn at Langley?”

  “I learned absolutely, positively nothing,” Mccarty replied, opening his notebook. “My contact in their general counsel’s office put me together with a woman-if you can call her that-from the Technical Operations Directorate.

  You should have seen her, a dead ringer
for Mrs. Khrushchev. A walking, talking, personality-free zone. Came in, sat down across the table from me in some kind of interview room, got her breath back after the effort of walking, and gave me what sounded like a fully rehearsed statement.”

  He consulted the shorthand in his notebook again. ““My name is Madeliene Parker-Smith. The Directorate of Technical Operations has no records pertaining to a Navy Hospital Corpsman Galantz. Any interdepartmental association of military personnel with the Directorate would be a matter of record and would involve the concurrence of both the Department of Defense and the individual’s military personnel agency… No record of such concurrence exists.’ We have spoken.”

  “Did you get a chance to explain the possible circumstances by which they might have come across Galantz in Saigon?”

  “No, sir. She delivered her speech, pushed some kind of a button under the table, and suddenly I had a brace of renta-cops standing next to my chair. I was escorted back to the badge lobby.”

  “Well, well, well,” the admiral mused, rotating his chair to face the windows, his fingers laced together behind his head. “They knew you were coming to see them about Galantz, specifically?”

  “Yes, sir. I’d given them HM I Galantz’s name and serial number. They knew.”

  “And had that answer ready.”

  “There stood Madeliene the Immovable, like General Jackson’s Virginians at First Manassas: a veritable stone wall. “

  The admiral swiveled back around. “So in a sense, we have an answer.

  This Galantz must have been spooked up.

  The question is, When?”

  Mccarty nodded. “On the other hand, Princess Happy may have been stating the bald truth. The Tech Ops people have never heard of the guy.”

  “Yeah. Okay. Let me pull the string one time at my level.

  Maybe I need to go see my dear friend, the Director of Naval Intelligence, after all. Sometimes spooks will trade secret signs and totems only with other spooks.”

  “And what shall we pass on to Karen Lawrence?”

  “Nothing. Which, in terms of facts, is what we have. Just some educated cynicism based primarily on our combined sixty years of experience in dealing with those people. We might as well try for the facts one more time before we worry her pretty little head about it.”

  “Aye, aye, Admiral,” Mccarty said in a tone that suggested he was not entirely in agreement. Carpenter eyed him over his reading glas ‘ ses.

  “Always a safe answer, Dan,” he pronounced.

  After Mccarty had left the office, Carpenter picked up the phone to his yeoman. “Get me through to Admiral Kensington,” he said. “On secure, please.”

  As the band broke into the Navy hymn, Karen had trouble controlling her eyes. The stately, dolorous, yet hopeful chords carried across the grassy slopes of the cemetery with such power that even the civilian tourists up on the hill stopped taking pictures to listen. So she was startled when she saw Admiral Sherman starting to rise out of his chair.

  He appeared to be staring at something up on the hill. -As she strained to see what or who it was, she caught a movement among the grave diggers standing around the backhoe.

  Train. He had apparently also seen the admiral’s sudden interest in something or someone up on the hill, and he was moving behind the backhoe, as if to go up the hill. She looked back at Sherman, who was standing now, causing the flag officers seated on either side to look up. Feeling a sudden fist of apprehension grab her heart, she looked back up the hill, half-expecting to see a man with a rifle. But there was just the same small crowd up there, so what on earth was he looking at? There, standing next to a group of midshipmen in uniform: a kid. No, a young man, not a kid.

  Scrawny figure. Black motorcycle jacket opened over a white T-shirt. A cigarette hanging from his lip in impudent mockery of the somber proceedings down the hillside. As Karen looked on, the young man apparently made eye contact with Sherman, because he grinned at the admiral. There was no mistaking it: an almost ugly flash of teeth. But then the midshipmen up on the hill moved across her line of sight, and he was gone. She looked back at Sherman, who was now sitting back down.

  Baffled, she looked for Train.

  He was no longer in sight.

  Forty minutes later, Karen and the admiral were heading back into Washington in his official sedan. She was anxious to ask him what it was that had attracted his attention up on the hill. But then she decided that she had better talk to Train first.

  “I’m very sorry for your loss, Admiral,” she said. The words sounded trite. She glanced over at the driver, a civilian from the Defense Department motor pool. “But we still have some business with the Fairfax County, um, people.

  They do want to meet.”

  “Well, not tonight,” he said immediately. “I’m still too upset about losing Galen. How about tomorrow? Although I shouldn’t even say that without looking at my calendar.

  Damn it.

  She waited for a few minutes. “I’ll talk to them. Perhaps we could meet off-line again, maybe in Great Falls this time,” she proposed. “Perhaps at my house. Same deal as last time, after working hours. That would be better than your having to go to Fairfax.”

  “Fine,” he said distractedly.

  He was staring out the rightrear window, his mind a thousand miles away.

  “I”Il call them this evening, then,” she offered. “Tentatively for tomorrow evening, say nineteen hundred?”

  “Fine.”

  At 5:30, Rear Admiral Carpenter walked down the C-ring to the offices of the Director of Naval Intelligence, Rear Adm. Kyle St. John Mallory. He smiled as he reached the door and glanced at the name board. What was it about the intel world, he wondered, that seemed to attract these pretentious-sounding names?

  “Come in, Thomas,” said Admiral Mallory, who came around his desk to shake hands. He was a tall, slim, and perfectly bald officer, and he was known for affecting British mannerisms and dress, even to the point of insisting on the traditional British pronunciation of his middle name as “Sin-Jin.’ True to form, he was wearing an off-white Royal Navy cardigan sweater that was about two sizes too big for him over his uniform shirt and trousers. He was senior to Carpenter, thus the instant familiarity and first name.

  “Kyle,” the JAG responded, shaking hands and then taking a chair as the DNI’s executive assistant withdrew, closing the door behind him. Mallory took the adjacent chair and offered coffee. Carpenter demurred.

  “Are your fields Working?” Carpenter asked, glancing up at the odd-shaped black boxes perched in the ceiling comers.

  “They’d bloody well better be,” Mallory replied.

  “Whose ears might be about to bum?”

  “Those people up the fiver.”

  “Ah. Just a moment, then, please.” He turned to reach the intercom on his desk. “Full SCIFF, if you please, Petty Officer Martin.” He waited, looking expectantly at the intercom box.

  “Full SCIFF, Admiral.”. A low humming sound filled the room, and the panel of floor-to-ceiling windows behind the DNI’s desk went opaque.

  “Thank you,” Mallory replied in an almost-singsong voice as he switched off the telephone console and turned back around to face Carpenter.

  “Funny you should mention that lot. But by all means, you first.”

  Carpenter cocked an eyebrow at him, then proceeded to tell the DNI about his probe regarding an ex-SEAL. He did not reveal the full context of his inquiry, but he did tell Mallory that the case involved homicide and that the ex SEAL was a likely suspect. He also mentioned that the individual supposedly had gone MIA back at the end of the Vietnam War.

  Mallory nodded patiently as Carpenter described the Technical Operations Directorate’s initial answer.

  “Well, that explains something,” he said when Carpenter was finished.

  “The deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency rang me up this morning. Seems those people were coming through channels, for a change.

&nbs
p; Wanted the Navy, the whole Navy, one presumes, to cease and desist making any further inquiries regarding one”-he got up and went to his desk to retrieve a piece of paper-“one Hospital Corpsman Galantz. That your fellow?”

  “That’s him. And that’s very interesting. First, my guy hits the old stone wall. Never heard of this individual, they tell him. Now you say they’re warning us off?”

  Mallory said nothing, but just raised his eyebrows expectantly, as if waiting for Carpenter to answer his own question. But the JAG just sat there, ostensibly thinking.

  “This may have been as simpld as a mild rebuff for going direct, Thomas,” the DNI prompted finally. “Was there some reason you did not bring the um, inquiry through our office?”

  “Yes,” Carpenter said.

  “There’s a client privacy problem. This involves another flag officer.”

  Almost as an afterthought, he added the fact that the CNO had been apprised.

  “All, I see,” Mallory said, his peevish expression revealing that he did not see at all.

  Carpenter ignored it. “I need to find this Galantz individual. We have reason to believe he may have survived his MIA status and is now here in the Washington area. Oh, and did I mention that the Fairfax County Police are involved?”

  “You said homicide,” the DNI said, resuming his seat.

  “What assets have you put on this problem?”

  “I have a new NIS operative on my staff. A guy called von Rensel.”

  “Ah, yes, we know Mr. von Rensel,” Mallory said.

  “He’s not famous in the intelligence community for being a team player,-

  I’m led to understand.”

  “From what I’ve heard, it was team playing that brought Navy Intelligence the Walker soy ring and that Korean thing,” Carpenter retorted. “Anyway, I plan to turn him loose to see what he can find.

  What I came to ask you to do was to pull the string with those people.

  Spook to spook.”

  Mallory didn’t like the crack about the spying cases. “I rather think their warning preempts any good that I might be able to do,” he said.

  “Going spook to spook, as you so quaintly put it.”