Peacemaker

by Gordon Kent

  He looked down over the deck, down over the massed planes, past Rafehausen’s S-3 and the tiny figure of Sneesen, of whom he had actually heard because of the carrier-qual save, and the tiny figure of Rafehausen, whom he had already chatted with, to the bow and the sea beyond it and, through the early haze, the might of the Fort Klock. Admiral or no admiral, he was still a sailor, and he felt it in his throat and his gut. Please, Sir, make it all right. Give us the courage and the intelligence and the strength to make it all right.

  He reached for a clean sheet and started to write.

  Battle Group Seven, at sea …

  That day. At sea, north of Sweden, on the Poltava.

  Captain Suvarov had given a pre-sailing dinner, just like the old days. He had invited all the officers of his little group, and he had passed the wine and the vodka round and round and led them in roaring out old songs. He had given a little time for hard heads, and in the morning he had held a briefing and made his plans clear.

  Now he was on the bridge of one of his destroyers, spanking through the water on a day that would delight any sailor. No commander of a battle force could resist some little lift at such a scene—his force deployed around him, bow waves in their teeth like white bones, a blue sky and a fair wind that lifted whitecaps on the indigo water of the Barents Sea. He was momentarily one with every commander who had ever sailed—even his enemy, who was coming to meet him. It was his first multi-vessel command, and it would probably be his last command at sea.

  His plans were simple, as resources and old ships forced them to be simple. The surface-action group comprised two Sovremenny-class DDG guided-missile destroyers, the Poltava and the Okrylennyy; one antiquated Udaloy-class ASW frigate, the Borozdin; and two auxiliaries. They lacked air cover, they lacked big missiles, they lacked good supplies and reliable equipment, but by the time they had been at sea five days they did not lack morale or leadership.

  He stood on the bridge wing of the Poltava and exercised them again and again in air defense, ASW perimeter, anything he could think of to prepare them to look like a threat. Somewhere west of Africa was a Balzam-class spy ship, a specially designed scout that would track the American battle group mercilessly—and legally. The American battle group was now moving through the Atlantic toward the Mediterranean, as he had been told they would, but fleet intelligence believed they would divert or divide to cover central Africa, where they seemed to want to contest French hegemony. They would have to re-form to launch their new weapon in the Gulf of Sidra, off Libya in the Mediterranean, in March, probably when whatever was going on in Africa—a place Suvarov had never been and had no interest in—would be over. He must be there to contest that launch; until then, he was to “send a powerful message.”

  Suvarov was not a political officer. Life on shore confused him, and fleet politics gave him a headache. But at sea he was a different man. The doubts that affected every tiny action in port, every request for supplies, did not exist for him at sea. At sea, he was the master.

  Despite his orders, he was not going to meet the Americans in the Atlantic. He was going to take an apparently peaceful “show the flag” surface-action group—no Akula-class submarine evident—into the Mediterranean and, if the diplomats could arrange it, take his men ashore for liberty in Tunisia or Algeria. The Americans would not suspect his real mission.

  He would then take the nuclear submarine Shark, alone, to “visit” the American battle group.

  Down the coast of Africa, where no rules applied, where submarines almost never go. He doubted they would be watching for anything as dangerous as his Shark. He would penetrate their screen, scare them, and slip away. That was the hard part, the escape, but he would do it. Then he would sprint north, back to his little group of ships, and, when the Americans came, he would be waiting, waiting to use his favorite and familiar waters in the Med. They would have to react.

  First, however, he had to move his group three thousand miles from the tip of the Nordkapp to the Strait of Gibraltar. And the American battle group would then be, if intelligence was right, another three thousand miles farther south, off the coast of Zaire—except he believed that they dared not go that far. Somewhere north of there, let’s say—perhaps the Bight of Benin.

  At ten knots, his group would see Gibraltar in twelve days.

  He looked at his route, already approved in Moscow, cutting between the Faroes and the Hebrides, passing through the heavily traveled shipping lanes west of Ireland in broad daylight. That would send a message, too.

  And what were the Americans doing? Where would their battle group go? They were turning south in the mid-Atlantic, but how far south could their commander go and still support an exercise off Libya? Sierra Leone? There was good, deep water off the coast of Ghana, with dozens of isothermal layers to confuse and distort the American sonar. Would the Americans go so far south? Ideally, Suvarov wanted to wait for them in ambush, silent and deadly, letting the escorts and the hunters pass ignorantly overhead.

  Five years before, while the empire fell and Moscow was in chaos, North Sea Fleet had sent an unprepared Victor II to the Mediterranean with a poor crew and a bent and squealing main-propeller shaft. The frightened men on that ship had endured day after day of relentless prosecution from NATO planes and ships. They, and the entire Russian Navy, had been humiliated. Suvarov had not been aboard, but he still felt that humiliation to the core of his being. Now, he wanted the Americans to have to search for him and not find him, to have the feeling that they were naked to his 63cm torpedoes and his anti-ship missiles, that he held their carrier in his fist, just as they had done to the crew of the Victor II.

  He had a new intelligence report in his cabin that suggested one new factor, although he did not take it with any great seriousness. The Americans had replaced the commander of the battle group at the last minute, apparently over some balls-up in an exercise. The new man was reported to be much better than the old—in fact, given the highest rating, with “maximum future rank potential.” This report pleased Suvarov. He wanted to match their best. So—good. Let us see how well he deals with the most advanced nuclear submarine in the Russian Navy.

  Suvarov bent over the chart table and lit another cigarette. He motioned the navigator to him.

  “As soon as we weather the Nordkapp, we will pass these orders in radio silence.” He gestured at the chart. “Please prepare charts with these alternatives. Am I clear?”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “Carry on.”

  Out in the perfect autumn evening, two sailors chipped away at the twenty-seven layers of perfect enamel that sealed the 76mm bow turret from the weather—and kept it from rotating or functioning in any way. Up until now, the appearance of the Poltava had mattered far more than the reality. But their orders were clear, and they chipped with gusto. They had helped put the last layer on only six weeks ago; now, off it came. A paradigm of military life.

  And, tomorrow, the gun would work.

  Suvarov saw them as small figures. He knew what they were doing. He knew the consequences of what they were doing: there is only one purpose in freeing a gun, to make it ready to use.

  And the only purpose in making a gun ready to use is using it.

  How far would he go?

  He had asked himself the question a hundred times since Sergei had handed him his orders. Do not start a war. But there were levels and levels short of war, and at one of those levels waited revenge for the humiliation of five years ago.

  Two days later. Battle Group Seven, at sea.

  They had been underway thirty-eight hours when word came of the push into Zaire near Bikuba. The reports were scattered, and later the Agency would be excoriated for not having reliable assets in the area. Hutu refugees had been on the move for days, some answering the Tutsi call to come home, some moving away into eastern Zaire, and the Interahamwe militias had been more and more savage. They were trying to cow their own people, and although in the end more than a half a million of them
went home, in the short term they were terrified, and horrible things were done.

  Word reached the Tactical Flag Command Center at 0237 Zulu that communications among the front-line Zairian (FAZ) units along Lake Kivu were going down. This was held by the duty officer until 0630, when it was felt safe to tell the flag lieutenant, who, if he wasn’t awake should have been, that there was priority message traffic. In fact, Parsills had already seen it by that time and was using it as breakfast conversation with the admiral. In other words, they hadn’t yet worked out when the admiral was to be rousted out of bed and when he wasn’t.

  They tracked the situation for the next nine hours. By then it was clear that the major upheaval that Alan had foretold was taking place.

  O’Neill’s capture hadn’t been discovered yet.

  Eastern Zaire.

  Zulu stood at the intersection of two roads that were little more than streambeds in the pouring rain. His Toyota was axle-deep in mud; ahead of it, two old Bedfords were mired for good. His driver looked at him with the strained, frightened look of a boy fearing punishment from his father. “I can’t go around, Colonel—no room—!”

  Zulu waved at his communications officer and then tried to get a fix with his American-made GPU. He couldn’t find a third satellite in the heavy cloud cover, then got it briefly and tried to pick off coordinates. “Where the hell is Djutzic?” he snarled.

  “He’s near a small village, he says, but he doesn’t know which one. His map is no good.”

  “Oh, shit!” Zulu smacked the GPU with his palm. Nothing was working. He had expected to be pushing ahead into Rwanda by now; instead, they had been mauled behind the Zairian border and were withdrawing, or trying to, into an area they had never expected to have to fight in—no good maps, no recon, no local guides. “Have you raised Colonel Ntarinada?”

  “No, sir. The last contact I had, his ADC was headed west of Masisi.”

  “Masisi! That’s sixty fucking kilometers west of the border! Those shits! They’re running!”

  A gnarled captain, years older than was usual for his rank, trudged back from the mired trucks, his boots so thick with mud he seemed to have a tree-trunk at the end of each leg. He came up to Zulu silently and stood looking at him, rain dripping from his helmet and running down his face. “We’ll have to pick another route,” he said. “The trucks are hopeless.”

  “What’s your status?”

  “We lost three men right off. I’ve got six wounded in the lead truck. Those fucking Hutus, they deserted us! We were up against Rwandan regulars, they went through the Hutus and the FAZ like they weren’t there; we held, and when I looked around, we were all by ourselves! I didn’t think we were going to get out.” He wiped his face with a bandaged hand. “This isn’t what I thought, Colonel. These Rwandans are as good as anybody we fought in Croatia. We can take up a position, but—”

  They both heard it at the same time, the scream of an incoming artillery round; Zulu pulled both men down and the round passed over them and exploded with a thundering crump that shook the soaked earth.

  “Get your people out of the trucks and get moving! Put the wounded in my pickup—Jacov, back my truck around, get the boys to lift it out if you have to—we’re going up the other road—” He pulled the communications officer off the road and knelt as they heard another round come in and explode farther away, his lousy map, something sold by the Zairian Triple-A ten years before, spread in a puddle.

  “Get on to the other company and tell them to make for Masisi. Masisi—it’s on these shitty maps, so just tell them to get their asses there and take up a position. Then get on to Colonel Ntarinada or any of these Hutu shits you can raise and ask him what the fuck he’s doing! Tell him for me I can’t hold the Rwandan army alone!”

  Another round whistled in, and Zulu stepped into the mud of the road and stood there, shaking his fist at it as it went over, as if daring it to come for him.

  After it had exploded, he began to shout at his men. “Well, move out! Move out—move out—!”

  Two hours later. The Pentagon.

  The African message traffic was on Alan’s computer when he sat down to work. He went through it grimly, knowing where each place mentioned was, watching the Rwandan professionals going through the Zairian troops like a scythe through hay. He had no doubt now of a report about South African mercenary involvement; they must have gone in during the night and neutralized whatever early-warning system the Zairians had had. They would already have pulled out, he suspected, their job done. A report of black South African special forces heading home would not surprise him. Nor would one about the white Yugoslav mercenaries showing up in the battle.

  He sat in front of the screen, chewing a knuckle, asking himself Where is O’Neill? Where the hell is he?

  That afternoon. The flag deck of the Andrew Jackson.

  Parsills found the admiral in flag plot and comm’d him that another Priority message was in, this one Urgent and Eyes Only. Admiral Pilchard elected not to take it up on the island but came shooting down into TFCC, read the message, scheduled a staff conference for 1600, and went forward into the flag quarters and his own office. Parsills was already there.

  “Okay, the other shoe has dropped. A hell of a lot sooner than I thought. What’s it mean for us?”

  The message announced that a CIA case officer had disappeared and his abandoned car had been found in Eastern Zaire. Nothing more was known, but the Director was already calling for “all appropriate measures” to get their man back.

  Pilchard wanted to know if those appropriate measures included BG 7.

  Two hours later. The Pentagon.

  Alan Craik did not hear about O’Neill until somebody at the Agency who knew both him and O’Neill told him. She had taken over Shreed’s old job, had once been Shreed’s assistant when they were all involved together. Now, she told him to get on a STU, and then she read the messages to him. “The Director’s frantic, they say. Everybody in Ops is going nuts. They said they’d never let it happen again—the guy who was killed in Lebanon, remember? Alan, taking an Agency case officer is bad news.”

  “Oh, Christ,” he said. “Oh, Jesus, poor Harry. Goddamit!”

  “To hell, yeah. We’ll get him back, Al. We’ll get him back if we have to send in the marines.” She tried to make him feel good about how quickly it would happen: Whoever took him must already know they’d made a huge mistake. They’d probably thought he was a tourist. The State folks had already been on the blower to the French, who were propping up the Hutu militias. They’d damned well make things happen or Washington would really put the screws to Paris. They’d have him back within twenty-four hours.

  “Just his car? That was all they found?”

  “There’s a million stories; it’s only been a couple of hours. And we haven’t got anybody there. It’s local cops or somebody. One story is the Ugandan military crossed the border there and found it. You hear all sorts of things. We’ve got a team on the way and they’re sending people from Nairobi and Dar, plus FBI. It’s only a matter of time, Al.” She hesitated. “Unless he was meeting an agent, and the Dar guy says he didn’t have any agents yet.” She waited. “We’ll get him back.”

  “Yeah. Thanks for calling me.”

  He sat with his head in his hands. He tried to call Rose, but she was away from her desk. He tried to get Abe Peretz at the Bureau, but he was in a meeting.

  He felt so futile.

  Next day. Sarajevo.

  The news about O’Neill’s capture got to Dukas via the local CIA chief before it appeared in an intelligence report. He called Alan in Washington from a secure Air Force office and was able to talk openly over the encrypted link. Even through the digitization of the machine, Craik sounded to him keyed up, almost frantic. It wasn’t just O’Neill, Dukas thought. His job? Not Rose, surely.

  “How’s the world’s most beautiful woman?” he said.

  “Better. Working too hard. But—”

  Dukas waited, but
no explanation of the “but” came. She was okay, but—depressed? Manic? “She’ll get over it,” he said.

  “Yeah, of course. Sure.”

  Again Dukas waited. When nothing more came, he searched for something to say, some change of subject. “How bad is the thing with O’Neill?” he said lamely.

  “Bad and getting worse. Every day it goes on, his chances lessen. If he’s still alive.”

  “Jesus, Al, that’s not like you.”

  “Get real. If the Hutu militias have him, what are they going to do with him? The RPF have started a major push eastward and are driving half a million refugees ahead of them—good mine-sweepers, right? The militias are running even faster. No matter how good an idea it seemed at the time to snatch a CIA officer, now they’re beating their heads against the wall because it was the stupidest thing they could have done. Suicide! Instead of a hostage, they’ve got a target. The easiest thing is kill him. Worst thing is, any group stupid enough to do it in the first place are stupid enough to kill him.”

  “They won’t do that.”

  “Sure they will. We’re trying to keep him alive by spreading the word that we’ll deal for him. The French are on our side, for once—they’re blown away by it. The militias start snatching Big-Power intel guys, they’re cooked.”

  “Oh, Christ, the French! Well, my guy Pigoreau seems a straight arrow.”

  “Something smells bad in Paris—you remember that little op I did in Bosnia, the guy who went through the window when we went in by chopper? I had a warning about the French then.”

  “Zulu, you mean. Yeah, he’s on my list, but—nada. So, how are you?”

  He heard Alan sigh, wondered how a sigh got digitized. “I feel like shit. First Rose, then Harry—now I sit in a goddam office while you guys are doing stuff—Change the subject, for God’s sake.”

  “Uh—Hey, Africa! I got a report of some Serb troops in Africa. That make sense?”

  “Yeah, a couple hundred went through Libya last week—mercs, off to help Mobutu, which is pretty funny when you know that the Libyans are supporting the RPF. Somebody’s making it worth the Libyans’ trouble, I suppose. So? That’s it? That’s your change of subject? Some sparkling conversationalist you are. How’s your love life?”