by Gordon Kent
Sarajevo.
She came back to the city after a week away. In the “safe house” on Radovan Street—actually an empty apartment in a mostly deserted building—Dukas let Pigoreau and a British member of the team deal with Mrs Obren. They went over and over her story, challenged her with the bits they had got from Civil Affairs, had her in tears more than once. Pigoreau caught her in two small lies. He told Dukas she should be dropped.
After a grim lunch of stale sandwiches, Dukas took her quickly through an overview of signals, barely enough for her to communicate if they were to use her. Then they took a walk, and he talked to her about looking out for trackers and doing the likelier thing, which was making sure your trackers didn’t lose you, so you could deceive them some other way. He found himself liking her despite Pigoreau’s recommendation and resisted the feeling, because he was increasingly persuaded she was working for somebody else. The business of spying didn’t seem to surprise her enough.
In the afternoon, they sat in an almost empty room and went over the list of war criminals. They had two folding chairs, a broken card table, and cardboard cups of coffee that had got cold. He went through the list name by name, alphabetically. She knew only the four she had already given him. It was boring for both of them. At the end of the list was the name he had got from Alan Craik, the man who had run away through the snow.
“‘Zulu,’” Dukas said. “A man who calls himself ‘Zulu’ or ‘Colonel Zulu.’”
She shook her head, for perhaps the two hundredth time. Nothing else showed—no body language, no change of breathing, nothing to indicate it meant anything to her.
“Z for zip,” Dukas said to himself. She looked puzzled. He wondered if he should try her for a couple of months and realized what he was really wondering was how he could see her again. How he could get her into bed.
“Come home with me,” he said. She looked relieved.
9
August
Naval Air Station, Norfolk.
Seaman Recruit Henry Sneesen stood at attention in the hot Virginia sun and watched the two distant figures shake hands and salute. Sneesen held himself very tight so he wouldn’t touch the black guys on each side of him. Black skin gave him a creepy feeling, like he ought to wash afterward.
The old skipper was giving way to the new skipper—Darth Vader, in his terms, giving way to Screaming Meemie. Like most of the men in the squadron, he hated Screaming Meemie with a passion; as XO, Screaming Meemie had single-handedly drawn the brand-new squadron’s morale down to knee level. Now, as skipper, he would probably drive it right down into the deck.
Sneesen, however, wasn’t depressed. And he knew what depression was. The real thing, the black thing. The thing they give you medication for and muttered to your parents about institutionalizing you for. Sneesen had had his black years, all right. Now—joke; he smiled, standing at attention on the squadron grinder, shoulder to shoulder with blacks—now he was having his white years. He was wearing his dress whites, and so was everybody else, the officers in choker whites, red-faced in the sun. The old skipper even had a sword on. Cool.
But it wasn’t the whiteness of the spectacle (white sun bouncing off the concrete like a fantasy blade bouncing off magic armor) that made him happy now. It was the man in choker whites standing behind Screaming Meemie. He was the new XO, name of LCDR Rafehausen, and Sneesen worshipped him. Rafehausen had been on board five days, and Seaman Sneesen worshipped him.
It had happened the day before yesterday: Rafehausen had suited up for an ASW training flight in a squadron S-3B, and just before he taxied out toward the runway, the TACCO had called the back end down. Screaming Meemie had happened to be nearby when Rafehausen reported it, and he had blown his stack as he always did at every goddam thing that happened, big or little, and he began to scream at Rafehausen over the comm.
Sneesen didn’t understand even now why he had run out to the aircraft. He just had. Terror of Screaming Meemie, maybe. (Terror of that contorted face, the huge voice, the monster from the computer game that morphed into his dreams as The Great Arch Fiend.) He had waved at the copilot and climbed up into the aircraft, and, sitting in the TACCO’s seat while the half-scared, embarrassed female jg (Nixon, the squadron intel officer, not really black but colored, also Japanese or something—creepy) stood over him, Sneesen had punched buttons and stared at the unwilling screens and then, right there, using only the non-issue tool kit he always carried around, he had fixed it. Took the cover off the AN/ARS-4 ref system and unscrewed the two anchor bolts of a black box he could see was out of line—who the hell had installed that, anyway?—and pulled it out of its slot and pried up the contacts and checked the leads, cleaned this and that and taped a length of frayed cable, and when he put it back into its slot, it came up sweet and sweet and the whole crew cheered.
“Hey, genius, what’s your name?” Rafehausen, the new XO, had hollered at him from the front seat. Rafehausen was just as loud as Screaming Meemie, but for some reason, Sneesen wasn’t afraid of him.
“Sneesen, sir.” He was wearing blue shirt and dungarees, no rank designation. “Seaman Recruit, sir.”
“Well, goddam, Sneesen, if everybody in this squadron is as good as you are, this tour is gonna be a piece of cake! Okay—let’s take this bag of bolts for a ri-i-i-de!”
Not Screaming Meemie’s style at all. Screaming Meemie’s idea of praise was not saying something bad. He didn’t know what praise was. While Rafehausen, with a single sentence, had won Sneesen forever.
Band music played over the squadron PA. It sounded like fifty old men playing Sousa on beer bottles. Still, it gave them a cadence, and they began to march off the broiling tarmac. Sneesen loved this part. This was the Navy. This was his new life, in which he was one of the guys. No need to wear weird clothes now; no need to hear the jocks snarl “fag!” at him as they passed. That was all that time ago in high school. Now he was a new guy. Him and LCDR Rafehausen.
10
Carrier Quals, Early September
Norfolk Naval Base.
In the turning of the great wheel, BG 7, the battle group that was to sail for the Med in late October, was readying itself for sea. Qualifying pilots to land on the carrier was an important step in that process. Three squadrons of fighter aircraft were designated: VFA-149, VFA-161, and VFA-132, flying F/A-18Cs, due in from Cecil Field; VS-49, flying S-3Bs, with the multiple missions of ASW, tanking, and “Sea Control”, also at Cecil; VAQ-6, flying EA-6Bs, tasked with electronic warfare, currently en route from Whidbey Island, Washington; VAW-6, flying E-2C early warning aircraft, the largest planes in the wing, now at Oceana Naval Air Station, Norfolk; and VF-22, flying F-14s, also out of Oceana. They were at varying stages of readiness, flying aircraft of varying ages and states of art. VS-49 had the lowest ratings for overall readiness and the second-oldest aircraft of the air wing.
Carrier quals had been scheduled for the CV on which the squadrons would deploy, the Andrew Jackson. In two days, she would start unzipping troughs off the Carolinas, putting her nose into the wind while nervous pilots tried to put down on the flight deck without getting bad grades (or worse), then heading out again to do it all over. For the nugget aviators, and even for some of the veterans, it would be hell: three acceptable landings, or scrub. For the carrier’s skipper, himself a pilot, the carrier quals would also be a time of tension—a new command for him, a crew that was eight percent shy of manning levels, and ready rooms crowded with pilots strung out by the thought of having to put a multi-million-dollar piece of tin down on a postage stamp at a hundred and fifty knots. The CAG, an old friend of the CV’s skipper, was worried because he didn’t have enough trained Landing Signal Officers (LSOs), and his Air Boss, he thought, was a vain horse’s ass who didn’t believe in Murphy’s Law. And the Air Boss was worried because—well, because he was the Air Boss.
On the twenty-ninth of August, the Jackson was secured to the dock at Norfolk to take on those squadron personnel who wouldn’t be flying ab
oard with the aircraft. Rented school buses pulled up on the dock, and everybody aboard them stood up and started to grab his gear and make space with butt and elbows. It had been a hot ride over from NAS Norfolk, and a long, cold ride up from Cecil in a leased 747 for the crews from Florida squadrons. After part of a night and a day cramped up, the sailors of VS-49 were cranked, wired by seeing the carrier loom over them like a vast gray cliff. Sailors boiled out of the buses.
Sneesen, last off his bus, swung his sea-bag up on his shoulder and got in the line between two other white guys, then dumped the bag on the concrete when the petty officer in charge told him to, braced, checked his spacing, all that shit, and then gratefully swung the bag up again and headed up, up toward the hangar deck, which seemed from that angle to be somewhere on the roof. He fucking marched; he humped his sea-bag like a weight-lifter. He wanted to look Navy.
His section leader had told them three times what to do, and Sneesen had gone over it and over it. Don’t screw up, he had told himself. Don’t make yourself a dork. Don’t call attention to yourself. He turned at the top of the ladder, a little out of breath, and saluted the fantail, where the flag he couldn’t see was supposed to be, then saluted the deck officer, who was some ensign who wasn’t even looking at him. “Sneesen, Henry, Seaman Recruit,” he said, too loud, but the petty officer checking the list didn’t even look up but muttered, “Move along, move it—” Ahead, guys were swinging their sea-bags on the conveyor of the metal detector.
Sneesen dropped his bag on the conveyor and walked through the detector, allowing himself just a hint of swagger, and just after he got in the clear a shrill alarm went off, and everybody perked up and a black chief petty officer with an armband and a pistol belt said, “All right, who the fuck is Sneesen?” He had one of those scowling, Mike-Tyson faces. An intimidator.
“Oh, shit, Sneesen!” somebody groaned behind him.
His bag had set off the metal detectors. Oh, shit, indeed.
“Empty it,” the CPO said. He grinned. He seemed to enjoy Sneesen’s humiliation.
Sneesen yanked and pulled and piled stuff on the deck until his tool kit came out. His tool kit! Metal! His personal tool kit that he had had since tenth grade, with the Leatherman tool and the really cool combo wrench he had stolen from a Brookstone store and the set of Allen wrenches that had been his dad’s, and his Belrin sixty-five-part computer tool kit (bought with real money, sixty-nine ninety-nine, great stuff!) rolled up in a canvas thing he had bought at a yard sale. He hadn’t even thought about it, putting it in. It was him, that tool kit. “My tool kit,” he mumbled to the chief. He had to look way up to see that black, scowling face.
“I said Empty it!” The chief grabbed the bottom of the bag and with one hand upended it, and Sneesen’s life fell out on the deck, paper blowing away, metal rolling, clothes scattering. Guys started to laugh. They bellowed. They loved it!
Sneesen choked. Inside, a voice screamed, You fucking rotten nigger! If I had my way—if things were right—if, if, if—!
Off Norfolk.
Aboard USS Andrew Jackson as it headed out to sea for carrier quals next day, a representative cluster of the air wing’s officers and the BG flag staff were getting their sea legs—and their first sense of dangers ahead, as they went into a week at sea. In the flag briefing room, Admiral Newman was surrounded by his staff.
“LTjg Christy Nixon will now give the intelligence portion of the brief.”
Christy Nixon had black hair that she used to wear painted down her back and now wore short. She had skin the color of chocolate powder, the eyes of a cat, a broad forehead. She wasn’t quite black and she wasn’t quite Asian, but military people looked at her and guessed her heritage: a child of the Vietnam War, of a black father and a Vietnamese mother. Pretty, ambitious, smart, she was the AI of VS-49, the S-3 squadron to which Rafe Rafehausen had just reported.
Nixon hugged her arms to her chest. She was freezing cold—shipboard cotton khakis were insufficient for standing directly under the air-conditioning vent in the flag briefing room. “Good morning, sir. I’m LTjg Nixon of the Rat Catchers, and I’ll be—”
“I know your name,” the admiral said. He added, to his flag captain, “Jesus, Hank.” His tone was not savage, simply bored. Admiral Rudolph Newman, seated, sprawled in all directions. Nixon collected herself and went on.
“I’ll be briefing the Fleetex scenario as it now—”
The admiral raised his hand. “Everybody shut up!”
Silence. Even the soft whispers from the back ceased. In the port-side passageway outside, however, voices continued. “What’s up, dude? Man, that was some fucking landing, you know—!”
“Hey! Chief! You got to sign—”
“So I downloaded the stupid thing off the web and, bang—”
The admiral unfolded himself, stood, seeming to threaten the overhead. He jabbed a finger at the passageway. “Shut them up!” Then, to everybody around him: “From this moment, the blue-tile passageways are off limits to all but flag staff. All! Tell everybody else to go around. I want silence and I will have respect!” He sat down.
Christy Nixon tried to imagine walking all the way around the combat information center to the starboard passageway and back across, then twenty frames forward again, merely to get from her squadron ready room to the intel center. Was he kidding?
Everybody was looking at the admiral. He looked at her and raised an eyebrow. She continued. “As it is now constructed, the exercise—”
“Jesus, Nixon! Do you always interrupt admirals?” The admiral glanced around at the ship’s captain, the air wing commander, and the chief engineer. “I’ll tell you when to talk. Carry on, Miz Nixon.”
“Yes, sir. The exercise is designed to represent—”
“Who the hell drew that map?” The viewgraph showed a map of Libya superimposed over the central Caribbean.
“I did, sir.”
“I don’t know why you chose to draw Libya on the map when we’re going to exercise against the Russian North Fleet. Fix it.”
She stared at him.
The F-18 skipper jumped in. “Sir, it was my understanding that we were going to do a freedom-of-navigation operation inside the Libyan flight intercept region in the Gulf of Sidra.”
“Yeah, Palmtree. FONOPS in the FIR. What about it?”
“Sir, I believe LTjg Nixon’s orders were to brief that scenario.”
“I’ve already made this point clear. I want a proper Fleetex with an opposing battle group—a Kirov-class, high-value-unit surface-action group. I want to practice for a real fight. Not dicking with A-rabs. And I can’t really believe that this bright-looking young woman thinks she can come in here and flout my orders.”
“My error, sir,” CAG AI murmured. “The scenario we received was from LantCom.”
The flag N-2 was looking embarrassed—no, scared. She got it. He hadn’t passed on the fucking changes!
The admiral shook his head. “Don’t send that female up here again. She’s clueless.”
Off Cape Hatteras.
By the third day, anybody on the Jackson who wore scrambled eggs on his hat was also wearing a worried look on his face. Nobody said outright that the admiral was angry, but the frowns hurrying in and out of blue-tile country let everybody know he was, and that unhappiness ran down the chain of command like a lightning strike. The CV’s captain was definitely unhappy about the way his ship performed since a refitting; the CAG was definitely unhappy about the way the Air Boss was unhappy about the pace of carrier quals, which seemed “slow and irregularly paced,” according to a memo from the flag. The squadron skippers were unhappy about what the CAG had told them. The pilots were unhappy because of the way their skippers behaved and because, as a group, they knew they were on their way to posting a new record for carrier-qualification misery. Three aircraft had already had to head for the beach because their pilots couldn’t put them down on the deck. The one thing they had avoided was a crash.
At t
he Landing Signal Officer’s stand aft of elevator number four, however, the duty LSO refused to be unhappy. He was a lieutenant and he was doing a job he loved and he was damned if he was going to let the big bird sit on his shoulder just because the Air Boss was snarling into his earphones, “Rhythm! I want to see a rhythm out there! Recovery is ragged! Move them!”
Chris Donitz was old to be a lieutenant. He was a rare bird—he’d had a job after college, chucked it to join the Navy and fly. He had a degree in economics, not aerospace engineering, and he was contemplating where he might be on this sunny evening if he had kept his nose to the grindstone as a senior, fixed-income analyst in a major stock security firm, rather than, say, an LSO calling landings from a portside platform of a Nimitz-class carrier in the Cherry Point operating area. I got rhythm, he hummed to himself. Loved Gershwin. Maybe the Air Boss loved Gershwin, too; maybe that’s why he wanted rhythm.
The Air Boss was supposed to be one of the best fliers in the Navy and a damned good LSO in his day; it was just that now, he was tensed up, like everybody else. Except me, Donitz thought. I refuse to play Get the Guy Below You. He grinned at the half-scared junior pilots who were putting in their first orientation sessions on the platform.
Everything stank of JP-5, and the roar of aircraft on the deck was a counterpoint to the louder roar of aircraft punching off the catapults up forward. Donitz’s face was already sunburned a bright cherry red because his flight deck helmet had no visor, and the speed with which aircraft were being landed, cycled, and launched kept him always at his post, which had no shade. He had three so-called assistants from other squadrons, but it was all his responsibility.
“Fuck, that guy sucked!” bellowed the junior guy from the FAG squadron as an aircraft flashed past and all but bounced as it snagged the one wire. And he had. Some EA-6B guy fresh out of flight school; two power calls and a lame lineup.
“No grade!” Donitz shouted. He watched as it was written down. Poor bastard. Chris Donitz hated giving poor grades, especially to new guys. Those grades and comments would go up on the greenie board in the squadron’s ready room. Bad enough that most of his squadron-mates would have watched his lousy landing on the plat-camera relay to the ready-room TV. Donitz remembered all too well the demoralizing consequence, the loss of faith. But the guy’s landing had been impossible—at one point almost a ramp, then almost a waveoff, then a first-wire. Dogshit. Donitz hated humiliating people, hated making them miserable—but he hated more the idea that a guy who couldn’t come down in the groove and catch the three wire in the daytime was going to have to do it at night, no beach to fly to, combat conditions. Better to wash out now than screw up the entire ship on deployment.
