Final Bearing

by George Wallace

It rang six, seven, eight times, and he was ready to drop the telephone and go looking for a cheeseburger and a cup of coffee.

  Then someone on the other end picked up the call, fumbled with the instrument, and there was a faint, sleepy, "Si?"

  Kincaid hardly recognized the voice.

  "Pepe, that you?"

  There was a moment’s silence, a sharp intake of breath. When the man spoke again, he was wide awake.

  "Senor Kincaid. I do not wish to speak with you. Goodbye."

  Kincaid spoke hurriedly before the man could slam down the telephone.

  "Pepe, listen to me. It was not me who brought on the trouble. Taylor canned me and forced the investigation and in the process, he turned all of you. Please don't hang up. It's very important and I need your help.” Tom Kincaid quickly played his ace card. “You know you owe it to me, Pepe."

  Pepe Licciardi was the last name on the list of Kincaid's informants and most likely the one closest to the Colombian drug producers. Kincaid had saved him until last because he was certain he would no longer be among the living. But he was. Amazingly enough, he was. If anyone could find out for him what was happening, Pepe could.

  When he finally spoke again, the distant voice was little more than a reluctant growl.

  “Awwww, Senor Kincaid,” Licciardi moaned. “What a remarkably inopportune time for you to try to collect on a debt, my friend.”

  There was a considerable obligation due Tom Kincaid. The American agent had risked his own life, pulling a wounded Licciardi from a blazing, shot-up car only seconds before it exploded. That was Cartagena, almost ten years before.

  “I’m sorry, Pepe. I would not be asking if it was not important.”

  "Senor Kincaid, you must understand. It is mucho dangerous now," the Colombian said in a raspy whisper. "Worse even than ten years ago. De Santiago is one bad hombre. The man is convinced in his own mind that he is chosen by God to save his people. And that he should do it with the coca. There is much going on, my friend. Maybe even more than when you were here last. The Revolutionarios now control all the coca fields. No one is trusted anymore. They are desperate and moving on so many fronts.” Licciardi’s voice grew even quieter. “They are everywhere. The walls can hear my words. I think sometimes even my old cat is an informant.”

  “Listen, Pepe. Something is happening here that may be related to what you’re telling me, something that has me very concerned. We have evidence of a particularly high grade of coke that has been introduced here in the States. And it’s very powerful. It is killing folks. Common folks, not the usual addicts.”

  “I have heard rumors of such a new product.”

  “New product?”

  “Awwww!” Licciardi groaned again. “I should keep my mouth shut. It is so dangerous here, Senor Kincaid. So very dangerous. But yes, I have heard rumors. Rumors of a very powerful, very addictive powder. Something they have been testing in your country. That’s all I’ve heard. I swear! If any of de Santiago’s thugs suspected that I knew even that much…”

  “This is de Santiago’s way of increasing demand? Of reaching a new clientele? A strain of highly addictive cocaine. That would make sense.”

  “I do not know. Madre de Dios! I swear on my mother’s eyes…”

  “And how will he deliver his new product, Pepe? If this is a new thrust, he will have to have distribution for it to make any sense at all. We’ve only seen it here in Seattle so far and it appears to be coming through a new supplier that we don’t know anything about. Do you know anything about that? Can you find out?” Kincaid paused for effect. “Remember. You have had ten more years of life because I was able to pull you from that inferno, Pepe.”

  The man on the other end of the phone line seemed on the edge of tears. His voice quivered when he answered.

  “Yes. I owe you my life. And for that reason, I will try. For you, my friend, I will try. But don't expect much. Even for you, I can't do miracles. And now, I have a beautiful wife who loves me and a little daughter who draws pictures of birds and flowers en la escuela and brings them to me each day. For you…and for them…I will see what I can learn. The usual contact number?"

  Kincaid breathed a sigh of relief.

  "Yes. Taylor doesn’t know all there is to know. And thank you, Pepe. You will save many lives if you can get me even the smallest bit of information. But, Pepe, be careful. I don't have many friends left, I’m afraid, and I don’t want to lose you. I am now in your debt. And please kiss your wife and nina bonita for me."

  Licciardi laughed, but there was no humor there.

  "I will be careful, my friend."

  The line went dead.

  Kincaid was pulling his raincoat on when the phone rang. He almost ignored it, allowed the voice-mail to get it, but something in its shrill chime urged him to answer.

  He dropped his head and reached for the damned thing.

  “So, let me explain once again. You have been asking the wrong questions of the wrong people, Senor Licciardi. That is why you have been brought here.”

  The brutal torture had begun hours ago. Juan de Santiago stood quietly behind the one-way mirror the entire time, watching with great interest. Guzman was an artist at this. He almost never failed, but this time he was having little success. Still, de Santiago’s pleasure in observing him work bordered on the sensual. It was almost like watching the matador working el toro, but this bull could only resist with willpower and defiance.

  Tears streaked the tortured man’s face. He tried to blank out the awful pain in his groin but it was impossible. The alligator clips attached to his scrotum hurt bad enough on their own, but when the swarthy man with the complacent expression on his face impassively flipped the switch on the box he held, the pain was excruciating.

  “I swear I was only curious,” he managed to squawk through parched lips. “I once worked with Senor de Santiago…in the early days of the revolution. I only wondered what…”

  The red, hot bolt of fire seemed to rip his testicles apart, to explode inside his lower abdomen. He screeched, bawled, begged.

  De Santiago paced back and forth behind the glass. He was rapidly losing patience. This was fruitless. This man, this Pepe Licciardi, was too strong. So far, what little information he had provided was worthless. Still, de Santiago wondered with grudging admiration how the man could withstand the pain. It was truly a wonder and most unfortunate that he had used that determination to betray his leader.

  “You will tell me who ordered you to ask the questions. Who is paying you to be disloyal to your own people? You will tell me what you know of the JDIA.”

  “I…know…nothing…JDIA…”

  His bladder was instantly filled with molten lava and his legs jerked spasmodically. He gagged and vomited hot bile.

  De Santiago had seen enough. This was futile.

  “It would be so much simpler for you, Senor Licciardi, if you…”

  Pepe Licciardi heard the door crash open and someone else burst into the room, interrupting the interrogator’s ominous but soft-spoken words. As he tried to turn his head to see who it was, he felt someone grab his hair and brutally jerk back his head. Something hot raked across his throat all the way from one ear to the other. Oddly there was little pain, but he thought he felt his own warm blood flowing down his chest.

  “Good enough for him. He’ll bleed dry in moments. And he’ll never turn on his old boss again.”

  “But El Jefe, I was on the verge of learning…”

  “This one would never tell you what you want to know. Take him home. Leave his corpse somewhere where others will see what happens to the traitors of the revolution.”

  “As you wish, El Jefe. As you wish.”

  Commander Jonathan Ward climbed down the long ladder into Spadefish’s engine room lower level. Dave Kuhn was just climbing up out of the bilge when he hopped off the last rung. The engineer’s blue poopie suit was slimy with grease, water, and dirt.

  "Bilge diving again, Eng?" Ward asked with
a laugh.

  The bilges in these old boats collected all the oil leaks, seawater leak-off from the pumps, and anything else that might find its way down there. Working on the equipment down there was always a dirty, messy job, but there was no other way.

  Ward remembered when he himself was the engineer of a boat. He was in the Officers’ Club at the Royal Naval Base in Plymouth, England, comparing notes with the Chief Engineer of the HMS Superb over some very good Scotch. Ward was complaining about having to crawl through the bilges of his boat, making sure they were cleaned and painted. His Brit counterpart looked at him strangely.

  "Blimey, mate,” he said sardonically. “You crawl through your bilges? We shit in ours!"

  Kuhn looked up when he heard the skipper’s voice.

  "Yeah, Chief Bechtold was showing me the packing gland on number two main seawater pump. Been running hot lately. Don't like the looks of it."

  The equally grimy Machinist Mate Chief stuck his head up from the bilge when he heard his name. His chin almost rested on the steel diamond treads of the deck plates. He grabbed a rag and began to smear the oil that coated his hands and face.

  "I don't like it, Eng,” he said. “She needs to be fixed. Means cracking the pump casing open and pulling the motor though."

  The huge, three-speed electric motor stood six feet high and weighed at least a ton. Lifting it up off the casing was not a minor matter. In addition to its huge size and weight, a lot of piping and other equipment would be in their way, too.

  Kuhn looked back up at Ward.

  "Skipper, it means dry docking to fix. No way to get all these leaky valves to hold while we have the pump lifted. I’d say at least two weeks."

  Ward looked at the engineer then over at the recalcitrant pump.

  "That means a delay in ‘underway.’ How bad is it?"

  "Well, sir, it might hold until decommissioning,” Bechtold reluctantly answered. “Then again, it might seize up next week. No way of telling." Bechtold had been the Leading Machinist on Spadefish for close to ten years. Both Ward and Kuhn deferred to his experience with her mechanical equipment. "But we still have the emergency flax packing, and if worse comes to worse, we can operate on one pump. It'll just limit our speed some."

  Ward thought for a moment.

  "Yeah, limit her speed to about twenty knots. Less when we get in warm water. It'll have to do, though. We simply don't have the time to go to dry dock and fix it now." He squatted down and handed Kuhn a fresh rag. "Eng, can you come forward to the wardroom in a few minutes? The XO and I want to sit down with the department heads and discuss the rest of this re-fit and the mission."

  "Yes, sir. Need to check with Chief Hendrix first, though. The steam generator water level control system is acting up again. Needs an alignment. And Chief Lepke wants to show me the R-114 air-conditioning controller. Says it needs to be replaced. I'll be forward in half an hour if that's okay. Shouldn’t take me any longer than that to tell them ‘no’ in a real nice way."

  Ward winked at him and started back up the ladder.

  "Sure, Eng. See you in half an hour. And be gentle."

  Jonathan Ward opened the heavy, watertight door and walked through the tunnel over the sealed reactor compartment. The tunnel was a shielded passageway connecting the living spaces forward with the engineering spaces aft. Below his feet, through two inches of steel, two feet of polyethylene, and six inches of lead was the reactor compartment. Inside the compartment, the reactor core, a little over one hundred pounds of uranium-235, sat inside a three-inch thick steel pressure vessel that, in turn, rested in the primary shield tank. The tank contained two feet of water to slow and reflect back any stray neutrons. Around the outside of the tank, more lead absorbed gamma energy. All this shielding assured that Ward or any of the rest of the sub’s crew would receive more radiation from the sun topside than they did from the reactor while standing so close to it there in the tunnel. The watertight doors at either end were always kept shut when Spadefish was in port.

  Stepping through the forward door, Ward entered the passageway down the center of the upper level of the operations compartment. Just in front of him, the Weapons Shipping Hatch, the normal access to topside, allowed a shaft of sunlight into the interior of the boat. A metal ramp slanted down from the hatch, through the missing deck, and on downward through the mess deck below. From his vantagepoint, Ward could look through the heart of Spadefish, all the way into the torpedo room two decks below.

  As he walked up, a long silver cylinder was gently sliding down the ramp, restrained by cables from above. A clanging bell and flashing yellow lights warned everyone that a Tomahawk missile was slowly working its way down the loading ramp into the torpedo room in the lower-level operations compartment.

  Stan Guhl, the Weapons Officer, stood by the loading ramp, wearing a white hard hat with large red letters reading "Weapons Loading Supervisor." He finally took his eyes off the missile and noticed Ward standing behind him.

  "This is the fourth one, Skipper. Sixteen more to go. Looks like we're emptying the magazine of TLAM-Ds. You gonna tell me what we need all these Roman candles for?"

  "Later, Weps. As usual, you’ll know when you need to know," Ward answered. "Just make sure they all get aboard, get tucked into bed all nice and neatly, and checked out ‘sat.’"

  "Yes, sir."

  "And Weps, take a break in half an hour for a department head meeting in the wardroom," Ward added.

  "This is the last bird on the truck. We'll have it stowed in the room in twenty minutes. Then they have to go up to the magazine to load more. That'll take at least an hour. I'll give the crew a break and see you in the wardroom."

  Ward acknowledged with a nod then dropped down a ladder that deposited him just aft of the mess decks in the middle level. Just like upper level, the entire passageway was blocked, deck plates removed and the loading ramp angling steeply down to the torpedo room below. The silver cylinder containing the TLAM-D slid silently down the ramp as he watched.

  Loading the weapons used by a modern submarine was a complex procedure. The behemoths weighed upwards of four thousand pounds each and cost the taxpayers more than a million dollars per copy. The twenty-foot long, twenty-one inch diameter cylindrical shapes were filled with delicate electronics, powerful explosives, and toxic fuels. There was no room for error, and obviously no hurry in loading them, despite how inconvenient the operation was for the crew.

  Modern submarine design had placed the torpedo room on the lowest level of the operations compartment. Unlike their predecessors, whose torpedo rooms took up the entire bow compartment and had tubes that shot straight out in front of the boat, on these submarines the precious space in the bow was filled with a large, very sensitive sonar dome. The torpedo tubes shot at an angle out of the mid-section of the boat.

  This design meant that the weapons needed to be lowered from the main deck topside to the very bottom of the boat, through the main working, living, and eating spaces. It completely disrupted normal activity onboard the boat until the missiles were safely loaded and stowed.

  It could be worse, Ward reflected. They didn’t carry nuclear weapons anymore. Nukes complicated things even further. They required armed guards who got in the way even worse than the balky ramps did.

  He stepped into the galley, the tiny domain of "Cookie" Dotson. Preparations for lunch were well underway and mouthwatering aromas filled the tiny space. The ship’s cook, wearing a well-spotted apron, wiped the flour from his hands and grinned at his captain.

  "Skipper, just passing through or looking for a handout?"

  Cookie saw more officers in his galley during weapons loads than at any other time. It was the only route around the ramp without having to go all the way topside.

  "Just passing through," Ward answered, working his way around the industrial-sized mixer and stainless steel counter that filled the center of the space. “But something smells mighty good.”

  “It will be,” Cookie called after
him.

  Carefully skirting around the missile that was still slowly sliding down the loading ramp, Ward hopped into the wardroom pantry and finally found himself at his destination.

  The wardroom on Spadefish was small, no more than ten feet by seven feet, dominated by a large table that was bolted to the deck. Dark, wood-grained Formica and brown Naugahyde covers on the chairs and the short built-in couch at the far end did their best to give the room a little of the air of a men's club. The neat row of reactor plant manuals in the bookshelf above the couch and the three large double-lock safes beneath the serving buffet countered that first impression though.

  Ward poured himself a cup of coffee and settled down at the head of the table. He hard hardly swallowed a sip before the duty radioman handed him three aluminum clipboards containing radio messages addressed to Spadefish. Each bore a legend in large letters across the front, telling the reader the security classification of the messages inside. Ward set aside the green “Confidential” board and the yellow “Secret” one. He opened the red “Top Secret” clipboard and signed the pink disclosure sheet resting on top of the lone message inside it.

  The two-page communication was stamped "TOP SECRET, SPECAT SCI INCA TRAIL."

  Ward read through the text carefully, absorbing every word. It instructed him to get underway by the end of the week and proceed south to a patrol box off South America, near the Colombian coast. They were to intercept and monitor all radio traffic possible, especially any signals that appeared to originate from Juan de Santiago's operations. It also tasked him with keeping surveillance on any shipping that might pass through the assigned area. Simple enough.

  The Commander’s eyes grew a bit wider when he read the second page. The message described a covert operation being mounted by the SEALs high in the Colombian Andes. The SEALs would be pinpointing targets for him to take out. Looked like he and Bill Beaman would be working together again.

  Still more interesting, JDIA was the Operational Commander for this mission, not SUBPAC. Ward whistled softly. John Bethea and his shadowy agency carried even more clout than he had imagined.