by Gordon Kent
Alan sighed. “Maybe that’s what we need—magic.”
“A magic weapon.”
“Interplanetary ballbuster.”
“Right. Meanwhile, we can’t keep one old man from getting his feet cut off.”
“Well—I gotta try, guys. I gotta try.” Dukas looked up, his eyes agonized. “You judge yourself by what you have the guts to do—not what it accomplishes in the big picture. If I stay here and do my job while all that shit goes on, I’m not a moral person.” He seemed embarrassed by using the word “moral.”
“A guy can get killed,” Alan said.
Dukas half-smiled. “I’m just so sick of shit. Like the Pollard shit. I want to—take a stand on something!”
Alan had a flash of the photo he’d found on the wall of the house in Pustarla. Colonel Zulu. He had been taking a stand. “Ever hear of the Battle of the Crows?” he said.
“What about it?”
“It happened six hundred years ago, and the Serbs lost. And it’s the biggest thing in their mystique—like the burning of Atlanta to the Daughters of the Confederacy. Those people have a long memory, Mike. Long passions.”
“Those people are insane,” O’Neill said.
“Some of ‘those people’ are Americans,” Alan said. He told them about the Chicago Bears ashtray in the house at Pustarla.
Dukas was taking out a little notebook and a pen. “There’s Americans all over that scene. No shit; I been reading the traffic. Fucking Croatians have a special-forces unit is two-thirds American—skinheads, Nazis, Aryan Nation, crazies—because they give them a historical link to Hitler, no shit.” He was making notes—Zulu, the ashtray, Pustarla. “Maybe it’s like the Pollard thing and it’s why I get so mad—people with two loyalties. You can’t have two loyalties; you got to decide. This mercenary, Soldier-of-Fortune shit sucks. You’re an American, you should act like an American, you don’t go someplace else and chop people’s feet off and rape little girls.” He was writing, talking to himself. “Maybe I’ll run into him, who knows? ‘Colonel Zulu at the Battle of the Crows.’ What an asshole.” He looked up as Rose came into the room, Bea a step behind her. His face broke into a smile when he saw Rose. “You light up the room, Babe.”
Bea was carrying a tray with a bottle of champagne and six glasses. Her eyes were red. “There’s six of us, nobody will get very much—it’s late—” She put the tray down. “But it’s a going-away.” She looked around at them. “I’m sorry about what happened.”
“Hey,” Dukas said. He went to her and put his arms around her. “Hey, me too.”
Rose poured the champagne into the tall tulip glasses. When she was done, she stood holding the bottle and looking down. “When we drink this—it’s kind of over, isn’t it. I think I’m gonna cry,” she said. She and Bea had an arm around each other’s waist.
“Don’t,” Dukas said.
“Harry’s going to Africa, and Mike’s going to Sarajevo, and I’m off to this new job, and in a few weeks Alan leaves the air wing—We’re all going—like pieces of paper, or something.”
“Except Bea and me,” Peretz said. “We’re not going anyplace.”
Alan took his wife’s hand. “We all volunteered.” He meant, It comes with the territory.
She sniffed and smiled and picked up a glass, and with eyes shining she raised her head. “Let’s look on the bright side! A year from now, we’ll be riding high! It will all have been swell, and everything will be great!” She sniffed again. “Somebody for Christ’s sake make a toast!”
Harry O’Neill stood. Alan and Dukas stood, and the six of them made a circle, their wineglasses almost touching in the middle. O’Neill said, “Good food—good wine—good friends.” He grinned. “I read it on a restaurant menu.”
“Friends,” they said together, and they drank. Then Rose did cry, and O’Neill looked across her head at Alan, his eyes wet, and Dukas sniffed.
Time seems to freeze, and he is able to look at them and to think but not to move, and he sees that they will never be like this again, not merely never so young again but never so comfortable; nor will life seem so easy. It is a turning-point, and what he senses but cannot put into words is that time brings trouble and pain, and it is coming to them. And, as if the effort to warn them causes time to run again, he moves, and the moment is shattered.
It is for such times that you keep a dog, because when it pushed its head into the circle and sneezed, everybody could laugh, and the mood was broken.
They wanted the others to stay the night in case they’d drunk too much, but people gulped coffee, and O’Neill said he had to get back and pack. He went out the door, drawing the others like leaves in the track of a car. Then Rose and Alan stood together in the driveway, watching them get into their cars and start them up, and they told each other they were okay. The tail-lights diminished down the street and disappeared, and they held each other in the warm darkness.
“We’re all going our separate ways,” Alan said. It saddened him. “You blink and everything’s changed.”
She pulled him closer and then rocked them both with her shoulder and hip, as if shaking him to make him forget such things. “How’d you like to take a horny helo pilot to bed?” she said.
“Girls get pregnant that way.”
“Yeah, I’d heard that.” She tipped her head back. “I sort of had it in mind.”
“Really?” He smiled back. Rose wanted six children, she said, a houseful; he thought three, max. They had only one.
“It works out just right if we’re quick.” Motherhood and a naval career could be made to mesh, she meant. “We might have to work at it all weekend.”
“You’re on.” They walked into the house with their arms around each other’s waist. Inside, the six empty glasses stood in a circle.
Part Two
Turning the Wheel
4
June – July
After the dinner that was supposed to have been O’Neill’s farewell but that became before it was over a farewell for everybody, they all went their ways. O’Neill was the first to vanish, into what he called “the wilds of Africa.” Dukas was suddenly too busy to answer his telephone. Bea Peretz had a long talk with her daughter and took her away for a week at Disney World, where she turned out to be the daughter she’d always loved.
Even Rose went away. Her new duty station was in Columbia, Maryland, a “new town” originally beyond the Washington, DC sprawl and now part of it, a suburb that was like stepping into some mediocre planner’s dream of about 1960, a small town the way a nature walk is nature. It was too far from Little Creek for her to commute, and so while Alan finished his tour with the air wing, Rose got herself a furnished apartment and tried to cover her lack of a home life with work. That was Rose’s solution to all problems—work.
Left to himself, Alan put their house on the market and got to know his son again. He drove around, too, getting his land eyes back, as he thought of it—learning that the world was not only gray p’ways and crowded rack rooms, and not only young people in blue and khaki, but that it had both the very old and the very young, the slovenly and the neat, the male and the gloriously, non-militarily female. The “boyz in the hood” look had really taken hold while he was away; every male under thirty and a lot of females, black and white, seemed to be wearing baggy pants and oversize T-shirts. He loved it. It was so different from the boat he wanted to sing and often did, just driving around with the radio on, singing and whacking his hands in time on the steering wheel.
In a little while, he would go to the new job at the Pentagon. He and Rose had agreed that they would take their time finding a new place to live, somewhere between his new post and hers. When he drew a circle on a map that touched Columbia and the Pentagon, the center was out there somewhere in Maryland. He figured it couldn’t be worse than Little Creek. Still, he wondered what it was like to live where you really wanted to.
She came home on weekends, and after several of them she said she was pretty
sure she was pregnant. Mikey, Alan, and the dog were all delirious to have her around. He asked her if she felt like a queen and she said no, after all it was only what she deserved.
They saw Mike Dukas a couple of times before he went to Bosnia. Alan saw him in Washington when he was going back and forth between his old duty and the new, as well. Mike was rushing around, learning a little Serbo-Croat to go with his Greek, getting outfitted by the marines in something approaching combat gear, getting briefings at State and DIA. He was pumped. Alan felt the nipping of envy, morosely aware that he was heading into three years of briefing admirals and putting together dailies. It was a good career move, but it wasn’t action. He told Dukas so at their last meeting.
“You’re a fucking action junkie!” Dukas said to him. They were wolfing down crabcakes. “Where’d you get it from? Life isn’t a goddam comic book, Al!”
“I’m not an action junkie!”
“You’re an addict. An adrenaline-rush addict.”
“Bullshit.”
“I’ve seen you!”
“Well, I’m going cold-turkey for three years, okay? And you, you Greek slob—!”
Dukas picked a bit of shell out of his teeth and put it on his plate. He leaned his round head toward Alan and growled, “I don’t want action! I just want to do some good!”
The next week, he was gone.
O’Neill was apparently in Africa, but Alan didn’t hear from him.
He had almost three weeks’ leave, but when his leave time was up and he went back to the air wing, it was a ghost. There was a lot of cleaning-up to do, old reports and pubs and general crap, but the life was out of it. He haunted the offices for a few days, thought of reporting to his new job early, resisted that (already leery of it, flinching from it) and volunteered to fill in at Atlantic Fleet Headquarters to keep himself from going bats in an empty office.
It gave him several days on a different point of the great wheel. He was sent to the intel sections where they were planning the next battle group’s pre-deployment “fleet exercise,” called officially Atlantic Fleet Battle Group Exercise 3–96, known now to everybody in the place as Fleetex. It was an interesting point to intersect the next BG, he found—looking at it not from the point of view of somebody on the carrier, but of somebody one step away from the strategic thinking of the Joint Chiefs.
Fleetex 3–96 existed then as an idea, expressed in a two-inch-thick, ring-bound planning book, five subordinate planning guides, and a rapidly increasing roomful of transparencies, viewgraphs, computer projections, maps, and graphics. He worked on one detail, and one that tickled him: figuring aircraft fuel consumption for eight dispersed supply points, of which one was to be a deep-draft, ocean-going oiler whose skipper was already designated in one of the pubs—Captain John H. Parsills, who, as a then commander, had been the first squadron skipper under whom he had ever served.
Wow! Skipper Parsills on an oiler! Here was the great wheel in one of its odder turns. Between being commander of a squadron and the captain of a carrier, a new 0–6 had to have experience as a deep-draft-vessel skipper, and the battle group’s oiler was often that ship. Fifteen years in the air, three years in the water!
Alan smiled. He didn’t even mind totting up fuel-consumption projections. Parsills had been a great guy, perhaps the finest CO he’d ever known. Helping him out, even on paper, was good.
Fleetex 3–96 was like a vast war game, with real ships and real aircraft for counters. It could best be understood by placing its master transparency, BG3/96-LL1, over its wide-view map (Exhibit 5). The map showed the Western Atlantic down to part of the Caribbean and north to the Carolinas. The transparency showed the Mediterranean, from Tripoli, Libya, north to the Adriatic and Venice. You put the transparency over the map, lined up the registration points, and saw the game scenario: Libya’s Gulf of Sidra thus became a bay in the outer Bahamas; Gibraltar was a spot in the northern waters, Bosnia both somewhere out in the Atlantic and, for hands-on bombing, the island of Vieques south of Puerto Rico. Reference to one of the planning books would reveal that a Canadian frigate and a British destroyer were to play opposing (Orange, read “Libyan”) forces, along with four smaller Bahamian gunboats, out of Nassau. (Nice duty, he thought.) Opposing-force air strikes would come from Marine Corps and Navy F/A-18s at Cherry Point, Beaufort, and Jax, with refueling by USAF KC-10s, mostly reserves, flying from East Coast bases. The focus of two of the three phases of the exercise was a point in the Bay of Sidra that looked, to Alan, dangerously close to Libyan territorial waters. Designated merely “Alpha,” it had on at least one viewgraph a ship’s symbol. Without going through the stack of binders, he could see that what Fleetex 3–96 was going to mock up was some sort of provocative action involving a US or NATO vessel in Libya’s Gulf.
This was not merely a game. You didn’t get that specific in a game.
It looked to him to be an interesting undertaking—“interesting” understood to mean dangerous, with serious international implications. Not to mention military: the Fleetex Phase One and Phase Two were scripted to stage an event at Point Alpha while running opposing-force actions against the battle group from two directions, which might as well be understood as Libya and Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia? With a wild card thrown in for good measure, representing either other Islamic nations in the region or somebody with the ability to do force projection in the southern Mediterranean. Meaning, it’s going to piss a lot of people off!
On his third day at his desk in a big room full of desks, somebody suddenly shouted, “Flag officer on deck!” and Alan, like everybody else, jumped to his feet and braced. Moments later, a remarkably tall man came in with an urgency that carried him to the center of the room before he even looked around. He was trailed by a captain, two commanders, and a smarmy-looking jg with chicken guts on his shoulder—somebody’s nephew who had got staff duty instead of a destroyer. Flag puke, as his friend Rafehausen used to call them—not the ones who had earned their way there, but the ones who were doing it on Daddy’s nickel.
The admiral stared around him and then made for the big table where the master chart was. While he was turned away, the guy at the desk next to Alan’s mouthed “BG” to him, and then something that Alan figured out as “Newman,” the name of BG 7’s admiral. It was The Man himself.
Admiral Newman leaned over the big chart. He must have been six-six, Alan thought, towering over everybody else, a rather gangly man who looked somehow untidy even in a spotless uniform. He had tough eyes and a not very forgiving jaw, and as he leaned over the chart, Alan could see him in profile. He was not looking at a happy man, he thought. And he was right.
“Where’s the nuclear sub?” Admiral Newman said in a raspy voice.
Somebody said that was being handled over uh there, and they all walked over there, and a female jg started to explain that Libya had diesel subs and so they were working on the scenario that—
“I want a nuclear sub in the opposing force. Victor II. Do it.” But he may have said the last words to one of the O-5s with him, although the jg staffer almost wet himself trying to show how willing he was to do it if only somebody would explain what a Victor II was. Alan looked at the guy next to him and winked.
The admiral took an 0–6 by the elbow (either his flag captain or his chief of staff, Alan guessed) and came to the center of the room and said in a low voice, as if he thought they couldn’t be overheard, “—gotta have more Soviet-style Orange forces; these guys don’t get it. This is not acceptable!” Then he strode out.
The room relaxed. Everybody seemed to think this was a pretty funny scene. The guy next to him said, “Oh, he does that about once a month. He wants to fight Commies!”
A couple of days later, Alan went back to the air wing offices and began to wind up his affairs. A week later, he was to report to the Pentagon. The experience with Fleetex remained as an interesting sideways look at the wheel, at least until he discovered what Rose’s role would be in what was to happen at that dot i
n the Gulf of Sidra designated Point Alpha.
Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania.
The Dar chief had a very fine job and thought he was a very fine fellow, one successful in an admirable line of work. He was clearly not so convinced of O’Neill’s worth, although willing to give him a little time before a final judgment, probably negative, was made. His name was John Prior, inevitably called Jack; he was white (hence not Black Jack); he had got as high as he would ever get in the Agency but didn’t yet know it. Fiftyish, lean, furrowed, he looked as if he might have a second career in modeling low-end fishing and hunting underwear.
“I understand you didn’t want to come here,” he said.
“Not exactly—”
Prior went right on. “Lots of people think they don’t want to come here. It’s stupid. You go where Uncle needs you, right? Well.” Prior had a very pleasant corner office in the embassy, with an American receptionist sitting outside (also Agency, minimally trained but capable). He had a good house and a fine car, and he lived in clear—that is, no assumed identity. O’Neill would not live in clear, at least some of the time.
“Locals’ll get on to you but not tight, you know? They live and let live, so long’s we share a little and pass some bucks along. That’s my bailiwick, dig? Don’t get into it. Leave it to me. They won’t hassle you much. How good’s your Swahili?”
“Excellent.” O’Neill had done a six-week immersion course.
“Bullshit.” Prior’s Swahili was terrible, therefore everybody’s must be. “Don’t get smart and try to go native or something. Black guys confuse them. Give yourself a year to fit in. Hey?”
“Well, I’ve looked at the files—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” He shoved a pile of folders across his desk. “These are Requests for Information from DC. I’ve tagged five of them for my attention. You get six and seven; they’re softballs, so you can learn on them.” He stared at O’Neill. “Don’t recruit anybody until I say so. The word is ‘Go slow.’”
