by Tom Clancy
“This is interesting,” the Major said. He dropped the translation on the desk of his immediate superior, another major, but this one was on the Lieutenant Colonel’s list.
“I’ve heard about this place. GRU is running the operation—trying to, I mean. Our fraternal socialist allies are not cooperating very well. So the Americans know about it at last, eh?”
“Keep reading, Yuriy Petravich,” the junior man suggested.
“Indeed!” He looked up. “Who exactly is this CASSIUS fellow?” Yuriy had seen the name before, attached to a large quantity of minor information that had come through various sources within the American left.
“Glazov did the final recruitment only a short time ago.” The Major explained on for a minute or so.
“Well, I’ll take it to him, then. I’m surprised Georgiy Borissovich isn’t running the case personally.”
“I think he will now, Yuriy.”
They knew something bad was about to happen. North Vietnam had a multitude of search radars arrayed along its coast. Their main purpose was to provide raid warning for incoming strikes from the aircraft carriers the Americans had sailing on what they called Yankee Station, and the North Vietnamese called something else. Frequently the search radars were jammed, but not this badly. This time the jammer was so powerful as to turn the Russian-made screen into a circular mass of pure white. The operators leaned in more closely, looking for particularly bright dots that might denote real targets amid the jamming noise.
“Ship!” a voice called into the operations center. “Ship on the horizon.” It was yet another case where the human eye outperformed radar.
If they were dumb enough to put their radars and guns on hilltops, that wasn’t his lookout. The master chief firecontrolman was in “Spot I,” the forward fire-director tower that made the most graceful part of his ship’s profile. His eyes were glued to the eyepieces of the long-base rangefinders, designed in the late 1930s and still as fine a piece of optical gear as America had ever produced. His hand turned a small wheel, which operated not unlike the focusing mechanism of a camera, bringing a split-image together. His focus was on the radar antenna, whose metal framework, not protected now with camouflage netting, made a nearly perfect aiming reference.
“Mark!”
The firecontrolman 2/c next to him keyed the microphone, reading the numbers off the dial. “Range One-Five-Two-Five-Zero.”
In central fire-control, a hundred feet below Spot 1, mechanical computers accepted the data, telling the cruiser’s eight guns how much to elevate. What happened next was simple enough. Already loaded, the guns rotated with their turrets, coming up to the proper angle of elevation calculated a generation earlier by scores of young women—now grandmothers—on mechanical calculators. On the computer, the cruiser’s speed and course were already set, and since they were firing at a stationary target, it was assigned an identical but reversed velocity vector. In this way the guns would automatically remain locked on target.
“Commence firing,” the gunnery officer commanded. A young sailor closed the firing keys, and USS Newport News shook with the first salvo of the day.
“Okay, on azimuth, we’re short by . . . three hundred . . .” the master chief said quietly, watching the fountains of dirt in the twenty-power rangefinders.
“Up three hundred!” the talker relayed, and the next salvo thundered off fifteen seconds later. He didn’t know that the first salvo had inadvertently immolated the command bunker for the radar complex. The second salvo arced through the air. “This one does it,” the master chief whispered.
It did. Three of the eight rounds landed within fifty yards of the radar antenna and shredded it.
“On target,” he said over his own microphone, waiting for the dust to clear. “Target destroyed.”
“Beats an airplane any day,” the Captain said, observing from the bridge. He’d been a young gunnery officer on USS Mississippi twenty-five years earlier, and had learned shore-bombardment against live targets in the Western Pacific, as had his treasured master chief in Spot 1. This was sure to be the last hurrah for the Navy’s real gunships, and the Captain was determined that it would be a loud one.
A moment later some splashes appeared a thousand yards off. These would be from 130mm long guns the NVA used to annoy the Navy. He would engage them before concentrating on triple-A sites.
“Counterbattery!” the skipper called to central fire-control.
“Aye, sir, we’re on it.” A minute later Newport News shifted fire, her rapid-fire guns searching for and finding the six 130s that really should have known better.
It was a diversion, the Captain knew. It had to be. Something was happening somewhere else. He didn’t know what, but it had to be something good to allow him and his cruiser on the gunline north of the DMZ. Not that he minded, the CO said to himself, feeling his ship shudder yet again. Thirty seconds later a rapidly expanding orange cloud announced the demise of that gun battery.
“I got secondaries,” the CO announced. The bridge crew hooted briefly, then settled back down to work.
“There you are.” Captain Mason stepped back from the periscope.
“Pretty close.” Kelly needed only one look to see that Esteves was a cowboy. Skate was scraping off barnacles. The periscope was barely above water, the water lapping at the lower half of the lens. “I suppose that’ll do.”
“Good rainstorm topside,” Esteves said.
“ ‘Good’ is right.” Kelly finished off his coffee, the real Navy sort with salt thrown in. “I’m going to use it.”
“Right now?”
“Yes, sir.” Kelly nodded curtly. “Unless you plan to go in closer,” he added with a challenging grin.
“Unfortunately, we don’t have any wheels on the bottom or I might just try.” Esteves gestured him forward. “What’s this one about? I usually know.”
“Sir, I can’t say. Tell you this, though: if it works, you’ll find out.” That would have to do, and Esteves understood.
“Then you better get ready.”
As warm as the waters were, Kelly still had to worry about the cold. Eight hours in water with only a small temperature differential could sap the energy from his body like a short-circuited battery. He worked his way into a green-and-black neoprene wet suit, adding double the normal amount of weight belts. Alone in the executive officer’s stateroom, he had his last sober pause, beseeching God to help not himself, but the men whom he was trying to rescue. It seemed a strange thing to pray, Kelly thought, after what he’d done so recently yet so far away, and he took the time to ask forgiveness for anything wrong he might have done, still wondering if he had transgressed or not. It was a time for that sort of reflection, but only briefly. He had to look forward now. Maybe God would help him to rescue Colonel Zacharias, but he had to do his part, too. Kelly’s last thought before leaving the stateroom was of the photo of a lonely American about to be clubbed from behind by some little NVA fuck. It was time to put an end to that, he told himself, opening the door.
“Escape trunk’s this way,” Esteves said.
Kelly climbed up the ladder, watched by Esteves and perhaps six or seven other men of Skate.
“Make sure we find out,” the Captain said, levering the hatch shut himself.
“I’ll sure as hell try,” Kelly replied, just as the metal fitting locked into place. There was an aqualung waiting for him. The gauge read full, Kelly saw, checking it again himself. He lifted the waterproof phone.
“Clark here. In the trunk, ready to go.”
“Sonar reports nothing except heavy rain on the surface. Visual search is negative. Vaya con dios, Señor Clark.”
“Gracias, ” Kelly chuckled his reply. He replaced the phone and opened the flooding valve. Water entered the bottom of the compartment, the air pressure changing suddenly in the cramped space.
Kelly checked his watch. It was eight-sixteen when he cracked the hatch and pulled himself to the submerged foredeck of USS Skate. He us
ed a light to illuminate the sea sled. It was tied down at four points, but before loosing it he clipped a safety line to his belt. It wouldn’t do to have the thing motor off without him. The depth gauge read forty-nine feet. The submarine was in dangerously shallow water, and the sooner he got away the sooner her crew would be safe again. Unclipping the sled, he flipped the power switch, and two shrouded propellers started turning slowly. Good. Kelly pulled the knife from his belt and banged it twice on the deck, then adjusted the flippers on the sled and headed off, on a compass course of three-zero-eight.
There was now no turning back, Kelly told himself. But for him there rarely was.
28
First In
It was just as well that he couldn’t smell the water. At least not at first. Few things can be as unnerving or disorienting as swimming underwater at night. Fortunately the people who’d designed the sled were divers themselves, and knew that. The sled was slightly longer than Kelly was tall. It was, in fact, a modified torpedo with attachments allowing a man to steer it and control its speed, essentially making it a minisubmarine, though in appearance it was more like an aircraft drawn by a child. The “wings”—actually referred to as flippers—were controlled by hand. There was a depth gauge and an up/down-angle indicator, along with a battery-strength gauge and the vital magnetic compass. The electric motor and batteries had originally been designed to drive the shape through the water at high speed for over ten thousand yards. At lower speeds it could go much farther. In this case, it had five-to-six-hour endurance at five knots—more if the craftsmen aboard Ogden were right.
It was strangely like flying over in the C-141. The whirring of the twin props couldn’t be heard any great distance, but Kelly was a mere six feet from them; the steady high-speed whine was already making him grimace inside his diving mask. Part of that was all the coffee he’d drunk. He had to stay nervously alert, and he had enough caffeine in him to enliven a corpse. So many things to worry about. There was boat traffic on the river. Whether it was ferrying triple-A ammo from one bank of the river to another or perhaps the Vietnamese version of a teenybopper crossing to see his girlfriend, there were small boats here. Running into one could be lethal in one of several ways, differing only in immediacy, not the final outcome. Perversely, visibility was almost nil, and so Kelly had to assume that he’d have no more than two or three seconds to avoid something. He held to the middle of the channel as best he could. Every thirty minutes he’d slow down and ease his head above the surface for a position fix. There was no activity at all he could see. This country didn’t have much in the way of electrical power stations anymore, and without lights by which to read or perhaps power radios, life for the ordinary people was as primitive as it was brutish for their enemies. It was all vaguely sad. Kelly didn’t think that the Vietnamese people were any more innately warlike than any other, but there was a war here, and their behavior, as he had seen, fell short of exemplary. He took his fix and headed down again, careful not to go deeper than ten feet. He’d heard of a case of a diver who’d died while making an overly rapid ascent after being pressurized for a few hours at fifteen feet, and he had no desire at all to relive it himself.
Time crept by. Every so often the overhead clouds would thin out, and the light of the quarter moon would give definition to the raindrops on the surface of the river, fragile black circles expanding and disappearing on the ghostly blue screen ten feet above his head. Then the clouds would thicken again, and all he’d see was a dark gray roof, and the sound of the falling drops would compete with the infernal whirring of the props. Another danger was hallucination. Kelly had an active mind, and he was now in an environment devoid of input. Worse, his body was being lulled. He was in a nearly weightless state, rather like it must have been in the womb, and the sheer comfort of the experience was dangerous. His mind might react by dreaming, and he couldn’t have that. Kelly developed a routine, sweeping his eyes over the rudimentary instruments, playing little games, like trying to hold his craft exactly level without using the angle indicator—but that proved impossible. What pilots called vertigo happened even more quickly here than in the air, and he found that he couldn’t manage it for more than fifteen or twenty seconds before he started to tilt and go deeper. Every so often he’d do a complete roll, just for the difference of it, but mainly he cycled his eyes to the water and back to the instruments, repeating the process again and again, until that also became dangerously monotonous. Only two hours into the passage, Kelly had to tell himself to concentrate—but he couldn’t concentrate on just one thing, or even two. Comfortable as he was, every human being within a five-mile radius would wish nothing better than to end his life. Those people lived here, knew the land and the river, knew the sounds and the sights. And theirs was a country at war, where the unusual meant the dangerous, and the enemy. Kelly didn’t know if the government paid bounty for dead or live Americans, but something like that must have been operating. People worked harder for a reward, especially one that coincided with patriotism. Kelly wondered how it had all happened. Not that it mattered. These people were enemies. Nothing would soon change that. Certainly not in the next three days, which was as far as the future went for Kelly. If there were to be anything beyond it, he had to pretend that there was not.
His next programmed halt was at a meandering horseshoe bend. Kelly slowed the sled and lifted his head carefully. Noise on the north bank, perhaps three hundred yards. It carried across the water. Male voices speaking in the language whose lilts had somehow always sounded poetic to him—but quickly turned ugly when the content was anger. Like the people, he supposed, listening for perhaps ten seconds. He took the sled back down, watching the course change on the compass as he followed the sweeping bend. What a strange intimacy that had been, if only for a few seconds. What were they talking about? Politics? Boring subject in a Communist country. Farming, perhaps? Talk of the war? Perhaps, for the voices were subdued. America was killing enough of this country’s young men that they had reason to hate us, Kelly thought, and the loss of a son could be little different here than at home. They might talk to others about their pride for the little boy gone off to be a soldier—fried in napalm, dismembered by a machine gun, or turned to vapor by a bomb; the stories had to come back one way or another, even as lies, which amounted to the same thing-but in every case it must have been a child who’d taken a first step and said “daddy” in his native tongue. But some of the same children had grown up to follow PLASTIC FLOWER, and he did not regret killing them. The talk he’d heard sounded human enough, even if he couldn’t understand it, and then came the casual question, What made them different?
They are different, asshole! Let the politicians worry about why. Asking those kinds of questions distracted him from the fact that there were twenty people like Kelly up the river. He swore in his mind and concentrated again on driving the sled.
Few things distracted Pastor Charles Meyer from the preparation of his weekly sermons. It was perhaps the most important part of his ministry, telling people what they needed to hear in a clear, concise manner, because his flock saw him only once a week unless something went wrong-and when something went badly wrong they needed the foundation of faith already in place if his special attention and counsel were to be truly effective. Meyer had been a minister for thirty years, all of his adult life, and the natural eloquence that was one of his true gifts had been polished by years of practice to the point where he could choose a Scripture passage and develop it into a finely focused lesson in morality. The Reverend Meyer was not a stern man. His message of faith was that of mercy and love. He was quick to smile and to joke, and though his sermons were of necessity a serious business, for salvation was the most serious of human goals, it was his task, he thought, to emphasize God’s true nature. Love. Mercy. Charity. Redemption. His entire life, Meyer thought, was dedicated to helping people return after a bout of forgetfulness, to embrace despite rejection. A task as important as that was worth a diversion of his ti
me.
“Welcome back, Doris,” Meyer said as he entered Ray Brown’s house. A man of medium height, his thick head of gray hair gave him a stately and learned appearance. He took both her hands in his, smiling warmly. “Our prayers are answered.”
For all his pleasant and supportive demeanor, this would be an awkward meeting for all three participants. Doris had erred, probably rather badly, he thought. Meyer recognized that, trying not to dwell on it in a punitive way. The really important thing was that the prodigal had returned, and if Jesus had spent His time on earth for any reason, that parable contained it all in just a few verses. All of Christianity in a single story. No matter how grave one’s misdeeds might be, there would always be a welcome for those with the courage to return.
Father and daughter sat together on the old blue sofa, with Meyer to their left in an armchair. Three cups of tea were on the low table. Tea was the proper drink for a moment like this.
“I’m surprised how good you look, Doris.” He smiled, concealing his desperate desire to put the girl at ease.
“Thank you, Pastor.”
“It’s been hard, hasn’t it?”
Her voice became brittle. “Yes.”
“Doris, we all make mistakes. God made us imperfect. You have to accept that, and you have to try to do better all the time. We don’t always succeed-but you did succeed. You’re back now. The bad things are behind you, and with a little work you can leave them behind you forever.”
“I will,” she said with determination. “I really will. I’ve seen . . . and done . . . such awful things. . . .”
Meyer was a difficult man to shock. Clergymen were in the profession of listening to stories about the reality of hell, because sinners could not accept forgiveness until they were able to forgive themselves, a task which always required a sympathetic ear and a calm voice of love and reason. But what he heard now did shock him. He tried to freeze his body into place. Above all he tried to remember that what he heard was indeed behind his afflicted parishioner as over the course of twenty minutes he learned of things that even he had never dreamed of, things from another time, since his service as a young Army chaplain in Europe. There was a devil in creation, something for which his Faith had prepared him, but the face of Lucifer was not for unprotected eyes of men—certainly not for the eyes of a young girl whom an angry father had mistakenly driven away at a young and vulnerable age.
