by Gordon Kent
Together, these ships would protect the battle group from air threats well beyond the visual horizon, and, with an E-2 Hawkeye from the carrier aloft, their range and detection would be still further improved. Each unit supported and fed the others, increasing the battle group’s circles of defense and attack to hundreds of miles. In an emergency, the carrier could send out a rotating series of tanker aircraft, called a chainsaw, that would allow projection of the battle group’s force to thousands of miles, as fighters and bombers flew out along the chain of tankers, getting gas at each one and carrying on to a distant target.
An oiler, USS Ajax, trailed the Decatur, her captain an aviator preparing to command a carrier by doing a tour on this deepwater ship. Farther astern, the helicopter carrier Rangoon held station several thousand yards away. Rangoon carried a marine expeditionary unit, which had its own air group of choppers and VSTOL Harriers, as well as tanks and marines. If Zaire really blew up, they would be the teeth of the US response. Rangoon had her own escort, as well, an older destroyer, the John P. Melward, which had been updated with a state-of-the-art ASW module and related weaponry but which lacked Decatur’s radar and missile power.
Alan knew that if he walked down to the ASW module, he would find that several of the surface ships had SQR-19 passive arrays—sonar “tails”—deployed, protecting the battle group from the intrusion of potentially hostile submarines. Every ship had an SH-60 Lamps III ASW helicopter, as well.
The battle group sailed today in a formation codenamed Cheetah. It was spread over twenty-one miles from flank to flank, eleven miles from the bow of the forward ship to the stern of the last. The formation was itself a response to the nuclear age: if all defenses fail and a nuclear missile or a nuclear torpedo hit, dispersal might protect some of the ships. They communicated electronically.
It all came together on the flag bridge.
Alan studied the computer screen and wondered if he would be able to grasp it all before the crisis came in Africa. Very much on his mind was the absence of the Fort Klock and its escort from the battle group. The decision had already been taken to split the force and leave the aircraft carrier and its escorts outside the Strait of Gibraltar. Fort Klock was thus denied air cover; the Andrew Jackson was denied the cruiser’s missile punch. It was a calculated but unavoidable risk: there had to be a force in the Atlantic off the African coast until the Zairian upheaval calmed down. And there had to be a force in the Mediterranean.
Split in two, the battle group sailed on, each part weakened, yet projecting circles of confident power on the ocean.
Alan had returned to the warm and smelly embrace of life at sea as if he had never left it. It helped him that many of the crises awaiting him in the flag operations room were the same crises he had been briefing at the Pentagon—Rwanda, the snatching of O’Neill, the advance across Zaire—as well as familiar ones of long standing—Bosnia, Iraq, movements of the Russian Navy, the latest a new report of a surface group coming out of Murmansk.
He had barely had time to notice the process of moving into his stateroom, although as a latecomer he had had to take a small one located amidships on the 0–3 level, close to the jet blast deflectors and their noise; normally, he would have bitched and tried to maneuver himself into a better one. He simply had no time or energy for it, however. A little grimly, he reminded himself of Rose: no time for herself. His consolation was that he had very little gear to move into it and he was hardly ever there, anyway.
He had dropped his helmet bag that first morning on the desk chair. There it sat for days, like a castoff. In its depths, the H & K P-9 lay in darkness, unused and unwanted.
He had hung his flight suit on the back of the door, distributed a couple of photos of Mikey and Rose in the small open patches between the pipes, thrown his flight jacket over the back of the chair, and put his laptop on the desk. That was about it, because at that point a yeoman had appeared at his elbow, saying that, uh, sir, the admiral wanted to see him.
17
October
Sarajevo.
Mike Dukas was watching his war-crimes unit turn into a functioning police entity. It was like building the ideal police operation from scratch—or trying to, because it wasn’t ideal, and conditions were shit, and support from the UN and IFOR was cautious. Nonetheless, they had put together a sort of intelligence unit, called among themselves “Stein’s guys” for the German who ran it, and an administrative function, and a liaison function that was all in Pigoreau’s brain, and an operations unit that was hot to trot but so far hadn’t had a single operation to test itself on. The division into separate functions was in fact so much smoke and mirrors; everybody did everything, and Dukas himself ran both intelligence and ops. He was reluctant to put much of it on paper or to wave organization charts at anybody, afraid that if he did they would all start to believe what was on the paper instead of what was on the street, and they would quickly become just another little bureaucracy, in business to keep themselves in business.
But they hadn’t caught any war criminals. They hadn’t even tried. They had no hard leads. In fact, they all knew that it would take three years to build a working organization and an intelligence network, and the big arrests would be made by the people who followed them in their jobs. But Dukas kept pounding into everybody’s head that he wanted to score—a couple of arrests, a couple of the names on The Hague’s list, something that would make CNN. Then the world would take them seriously.
He and Pigoreau had recruited two people over in Republika Srpska to act as cutouts for Mrs Obren; one of them, a farmer, drove his tractor over the border through a purported minefield to bring information and pick up American goods to sell back in RS. The other agent was an electrician with a girlfriend on the Bosnian side and a wife on the Serbian side; they got him a contract with the Air Force at Tuzla so he had an excuse to come across the border. Dukas guessed correctly that Yugoslav intelligence busted him at once and that thereafter he was a double, but he turned that to advantage by having Mrs Obren send her material through the farmer, while a third recruit left false messages for the electrician to carry over. Later, the Air Force let the electrician do some clumsy stealing of dumb stuff like open-comm frequencies, and they used him to feed crap to the Serbs.
Mrs Obren remained a problem, mostly Dukas’s problem. Pigoreau told him she was a double for sure, and Dukas, although not so certain as his now-close friend, knew she was dangerous. By then, however, he had been to bed with her several times and he had come to depend on those nights when she would come to Sarajevo and they would lie in the dark and talk and make love and eat food she got up to cook, sometimes at two or three in the morning.
“You are in love like a teenager,” Pigoreau said with a grimace. “Like a fourteen-year-old. Haven’t you ever fucked anything before, Michael?”
“Buzz off.”
“Bosnia is full of whores, my God, you can have your pick! I can even find you one without AIDS. Some real beauties, nice girls, as they will all tell you, not a professional among them, all forced into it by war. Heart-rending stories. For a cop, they’ll even do it for free.”
“You’re a cynical bastard, Pigoreau.”
“She’s got her hooks into you and you’re losing your objectivity.”
“Shut up about it, will you?”
“She’s a Serb double, Michael!”
“I know what she is, and right now she’s what I want. She’s giving us better information than anybody else we’ve got, so shut up about it.”
“All doubles give good information. If she’s being run by a Russian, which is very likely, she’s giving wonderful information! That’s the way the Russians are, they always give good stuff.”
“Then you’ve got no beef. If it’s good, then it’s good; who cares where it came from?”
“Michael, in the name of almighty God! She’s using you!”
“Prove it.”
But Pigoreau couldn’t prove it. All he could do was repeat t
he same worries, nagging, wearing down their friendship. Dukas came close to disliking him, but then the Djejevic Thing happened and they both had other matters to think about.
The Djejevic Thing was named for Radovan Djejevic, a name from the war-crimes list, somebody who had been running a small prison two years before near Srebrenica. His was one of the names that Mrs Obren had recognized, and over a couple of weeks she sent messages about him—that somebody said he was living in the French sector, that he was now a policeman, that he had a new name. Then she came over herself. Dukas debriefed her before he took her to bed, and she told him that Djejevic was now calling himself Radko Mslava and was a cop in the village of Ustar in the French zone. Dukas told Pigoreau and then went home with her; when he got to the office the next morning, Pigoreau had already looked into it, and it checked, and they had a target for their first operation.
“I thought you didn’t approve of my source,” Dukas said, not unkindly. He was pleased, full of good food and good sex, liking his friend again.
Pigoreau shrugged. “Sometimes, like I said, Michael, they feed you good stuff. We see how it plays out.”
It didn’t play out well. There were five of them, in a Humvee and a LandCruiser, and they had to accept a squad of French grunts to be allowed to make a raid inside the French zone. Then they got to the zone border, early in the morning, ready to go, and they could see the French troops assigned to them waiting on the other side, and the French soldiers at the border crossing wouldn’t let them cross. They were held up two hours, and when they finally got across and connected with their French support and made their way to Ustar, Djejevic was gone.
“It was a setup, Michael!” Pigoreau hissed at him. “She made a fool of you!”
“It’s the French fucking zone, wiseass!”
“It was her! It had to be her!”
“It didn’t have to be her! We got fucked at the border by your people! Explain that! You’re so fucking busy looking at my sex life you can’t see beyond the end of your goddamned big French nose!”
They were toe-to-toe, really into each other’s face, chins only inches apart. But Pigoreau didn’t swing at him as, later, Dukas admitted he hoped he would, because they both were gut-deep angry and a fight would have suited both of them. But Pigoreau was a cop, a hell of a good cop. “We will see,” was all he said.
Later, Dukas understood that Pigoreau had connections in French intelligence that weren’t on his résumé. Maybe, in that sense, Pigoreau was a sort of double agent, too—maybe they all were. At any rate, Pigoreau came into his ratty office eight days later and closed the door and put on a radio he had brought with him to frustrate any eavesdropping and told Dukas that the operation had been blown by another Frenchman on their roster.
“Rampon,” Pigoreau snarled. Rampon was from Lyon. He was a good worker, a little stolid, something of a boozer off-duty, but he pulled his weight. Now, Pigoreau said that Paris intelligence could trace the tip-off of Djejevic back through a captain in French military intel to a Frenchwoman with diplomatic status on the UN staff, and from her back to Rampon.
“They think Rampon was planted on us from the beginning. He tells the woman diplomat, she tells the intel captain, he arranges for us to be held up at the border and then he warns Djejevic.” Pigoreau made a face. “You were right, Michael. I couldn’t see beyond the end of my big French nose. I will resign, of course.”
“Like hell.”
“He is my countryman.”
“This is a mixed goddam unit; nobody wears his flag on his shoulder; he wasn’t your guy. But one thing, Pig—you gotta tell me this wasn’t a French operation. You follow me? You gotta tell me this wasn’t some part of French policy. Because if it is, you’re cooked.”
“I assure you, this is not French meddling! This is not my country’s policy. Rather the contrary; my contacts think this was some, what do you say, rogue?—rogue operation, some people in France who put Rampon in place at the beginning. Not French people pursuing French policy, but French people pursuing their own policy.” He spread his hands on the greasy gray plastic of the desk. “I am a patriot, Michael. I am not a plotter or a falangist.”
“What’s in it for them—these French people who aren’t French?”
“They are French, they are, but—ah, you are making fun of me. Of course. Well, I deserve it. What is in it for them is some separate arrangement with the Serbs, which means with Belgrade. Maybe paying an old debt, maybe keeping their side of an arrangement. Yes? It is not some little shit like Djejevic; they don’t care about Djejevic. It is maybe doing something to look good in Belgrade. What is it the British say—to ‘show willing’? I think these people, this, mm, this cabal, let us call it—you know ‘cabal’?—wanted to show willing to Belgrade, so they saved Djejevic.”
“A pretty well placed cabal,” Dukas growled, “if they had a diplomat and a military intel guy.”
Pigoreau shook his head. “Much bigger than that, Michael. Much bigger. These are very little fish.”
“Who says?” Dukas thought he knew who said, but he wanted to hear Pigoreau say it.
“My friends in Paris.”
“Good friends?”
“Contacts, Michael, nothing more. France is not like the States; a French cop has to work with the national security guys. It’s all the same, right? But Michael—I am not an agent of the Deuxième Bureau!”
“You better not be.” Dukas leaned across the desk toward Pigoreau. His mind was working quickly; what did Pigoreau’s “assurances” mean? Pigoreau was right: France wasn’t the US, and the French didn’t cut the security pie the same way; if you were a cop, you did what the national security boys wanted—if the Deuxième Bureau farted, you said Excuse me. But did it matter? After all, Dukas himself had friends in American military intelligence like Al Craik, friends at the FBI like Abe Peretz. Every man in the war-crimes unit probably had connections in his home country. “I don’t want you to resign,” he said. “I need you. Anyway, you’re my friend.”
Pigoreau stared at him, then jumped to his feet and threw himself on Dukas in a fierce embrace. “You are a big man, Michael—a great man! I will do anything for you!”
“I don’t want you to do ‘anything’! I want you to get rid of Rampon and I want you to shut up about Mrs Obren, okay?”
“Anything!” Pigoreau struck himself on the chest. “You are in my heart, Michael—friends forever!”
Two days later, Pigoreau planted a false operational plan on Rampon, and when it turned up with the French diplomat, Rampon was arrested. The diplomat made a quick, and permanent, trip to Belgrade. The French intel captain had been walled off and was left to dangle, with a security specialist from Paris planted on him as an enlisted word processor. Pigoreau reported that the man’s computer, telephone, and mail were monitored, and it was hoped he would ultimately lead them back to his masters in France. “Already, we think they use the internet to communicate—we don’t know how, but they think they have identified at least two web sites that are some kind of, mmm, intersections. What we call ‘switch points’—you understand?”
“Pass-throughs. Electronic cutouts. I get it.” Dukas grinned. “So, your French buddies going to screw us any more?”
“Never again, Michael,” Pigoreau said. “I assure you! The next operation we have in the French zone, we will be treated like the angels!” He grinned. He told Dukas a joke. He said everything would work out. It was only later in the day that Dukas heard him murmur, apparently to himself, “Still, Mrs Obren could very well have been part of it.”
At sea aboard the Andrew Jackson.
“Mud-people are imitators, like monkeys,” Chief Borne said. “They can seem really, really smart, but it’s all imitation—you understand what I’m saying? But the Jew, he’s smart, and that’s because he’s descended from Satan, and as we know, Satan is smart—the first among the Lord’s angels till he fell. You with me here?”
Sneesen nodded. His eyes shone: the world was
becoming clear.
“So the Jew, because he’s smart, uses mud-people to corrupt us. How? Music and sports. Who’s the big names in them?—mud-people. Who owns the big record companies, the big teams? Jews. Check it out—every one of them. Y’ever listen to mud-music, Sneesen? ‘’Course you have—how could you miss it? Thud-thud-thud, ump-ump-ump—it’s sex music, am I right? ‘Fuck me, fuck me.’ I even heard some, it’s just some mud-woman breathing like she’s coming. ‘Do it, do it.’
“So how does this serve the devil’s plan? By turning white, Christian men away from their true destiny and toward things that corrupt them. What can the devil want more, Sneesen, than for white men to get into mud-women and produce mongrel babies? Because a mongrel child is a mud-child—bad drives out good. So don’t you do it, you understand what I’m saying? Don’t listen to the music; don’t watch their so-called athletes; don’t mix with them. And don’t think you can get into the pants of one of them and get away, because I tell you, Sneesen, I’d sooner put my dick in the flame of a propane torch than a mud-pussy, because Satan’s hand is in there, just waiting to get a grip. And he never lets go.”
Sneesen swallowed hard. “So—should we try to help a white Christian man who’s got some mud-woman after him?”
“What d’you think the Lord wants, Sneesen? What d’you think your duty as a Christian white man is? Figure it out.”
Suburban Washington.
George Shreed was not immune to bad temper, despite his being a man of power, maturity, and sophistication. Perhaps those things in fact made him more vulnerable to his temper, not less. Physical pain didn’t help, either, nor fatigue, nor disgust with the world in which he felt he was forced to exist.
