by Gordon Kent
Shreed’s hand clutched Suter’s right arm like a claw, and, for the first time, Suter was aware of Shreed’s age. There was something ancient about that grip, like some very old but powerful man’s hand clutching at him for momentary balance. “None of their crap matters,” he heard Shreed growl. His voice was intense, almost too soft to be heard. “Operations—little men moving other little men around. Trivia. No big thoughts.” Suter remembered Shreed’s saying—when?—that only station chiefs had power, meaning that only operations had power; what was he talking about now? It seemed like a contradiction. If Suter had been a more reflective man, he might have thought that Shreed was contradicting himself because he was suddenly old and suddenly in the position of the old man who believes that somehow he will recover all his missed opportunities with one last, great achievement. His ear was good enough, nonetheless, to hear the subtext that said that Shreed was separating himself from the rest of them.
“Don’t think small,” Shreed was muttering in his ear. “Have great thoughts.”
Suter felt he was supposed to say something. “There’s Peacemaker,” he muttered. People were going by in the corridor. Nobody looked at them, because people muttered secrets to each other along here all the time.
“That’s small, too,” Shreed rumbled. “It’s only a step.” He began to laugh nastily. “Crippled steps for crippled feet,” he said. “What do you want?”
“There may be something going on. I wanted you to know.”
“Spit it out.”
“Rose Siciliano came to me today with somebody asking about targeting data for Peacemaker.”
Shreed’s hawk’s eyes fastened on him. “And?”
“Somebody’s been laying off the idea on her that there’s too much attention being given to targeting for Peacemaker to be passive.”
“Meaningless.”
“It’s somebody she listens to. Some friend she got to do his Reserve duty there. He’s full-time FBI.”
Shreed leaned back against the wall. His deeply lined face seemed to sink in on itself for two seconds, giving him briefly an almost peaceful look. “Just chat, or has he got the wind up?”
“She was bothered enough to talk to me about it.” Suter had been delighted that she had called to him, in fact, although he wouldn’t say that to Shreed.
“Tell Touhey.”
“Touhey’s in Houston for a week. I thought of going to security, but they’d just make it worse. They’d underline it by going after it.”
Shreed nodded. “How concerned is she?”
“Not very. She compartmentalizes. If I tell her not to worry about it, she won’t. But this other guy—”
“Who is he?”
Suter had already checked. “Peretz. Ex-Navy. Like me. LCDR. Intel, didn’t make commander, got out. He’s in the FISA office in the Bureau. Not a fool. A friend of hers. And Craik’s.”
“Two weeks’ Reserve duty?”
“He’s just finishing the first week.” He didn’t need to add, So he’s got another whole week to cause trouble.
Shreed pushed himself away from the wall. “I’ll take care of it. You deal with Siciliano. Can you assure me you can stay objective about her? If she starts to get ideas, I don’t want you making excuses because you want to get in her pants.”
Suter let silence speak for him. He knew that Shreed would believe him less if he made some flossy protestation.
Shreed hobbled up the wide corridor. People hurried around him. “Don’t report it to your security people out there. Let me handle it.” He went two difficult strides down the corridor and then turned and started back, and Suter hurried to him.
“No, you handle it,” Shreed said. “I’m being stupid—martyring myself. Ego. You do it. Here’s what you do. There’s a full commander in ONI named Harley Ohlheim. My secretary will have the number. Set a meeting and see him today. Tell him to pull this Peretz in someplace else for the second week of his Reserve duty; we don’t care where it is, so long as he never goes back to Ivy. Don’t take no for an answer. Ohlheim thinks he’s going to be DNI one day, which is laughable, but it’s a useful weakness to play on. He’ll come around.” Shreed leaned his left elbow on his cane and scratched his nose. “Maybe this Peretz will forget all about Ivy. If he doesn’t—” He shrugged. He meant, Then we’ll do something else.
Suter rather hoped that Peretz wouldn’t forget. He liked this sort of maneuvering, the sense of something slightly underhand and therefore risky. The sense of being where things really happened, even if they were what Shreed had dismissed as trivia. And even as Shreed was distancing himself from such things, Suter was trying to get closer to them. He liked Shreed; more importantly, he admired him. In fact, he wanted to be Shreed. This is an ambition in an underling that is theoretically admirable but in practice extraordinarily dangerous.
20
October – November
On board the Andrew Jackson, at sea.
Time began to blur, as it does all too easily in the routine of the sailor. Pizza night, a Friday on the Jackson, came and went and came again. Seaman Lu returned to duty at CVIC, and he and Alan smiled. Petty Officer Djalik became a fixture in his routine, always visible in CVIC.
The flag captain suggested to him after a week on board that he really ought to eat in the flag wardroom because business got done there, and Alan realized that there was more to being on staff than met the eye.
Much more. For one thing, the flag N-2 (intel) functioned as the admiral’s ambassador, when the admiral trusted him, so in his first weeks aboard he flew off once to Walvis Bay, the huge tanker port on the Namibian coast, to check on what they might be able to make available in avgas and ship’s fuel; and once to Rota, Spain, to talk about juggling the Deny Flight duties over Bosnia because all the BG’s aircraft were still in the Atlantic.
He tried to keep up-to-date on O’Neill, but O’Neill had dropped down a black hole, and the sad but very human fact was that O’Neill dropped through a hole in his attention, as well: he was too busy to grieve. There was simply no news: the CIA had closed in on itself; the State Department was silent. So, as flag intel, and prodded by CinCLANTFLEET, he began to prepare for the possible evacuation of Americans from Zaire, a huge operation that made the plight of one missing intelligence officer a mere blip. Such an operation would necessarily involve the marines, and the Rangoon’s intel officer came aboard for a day and a night of briefings that took all Alan’s attention, and he deputized Kravitz to do the morning brief, fearing the worst, but Kravitz was okay and the admiral didn’t read him out.
At the same time, the Jackson’s air wing staff was preparing a bombing campaign against Libya. Alan believed that such a thing wouldn’t happen this cruise, but none of the young intelligence officers knew this, and they prepared target folders with the sort of humorless concentration that accountants bring to tax preparation. He was aware of Christy Nixon in CVIC during this effort, once watched two or three minutes of one of her briefings on a television screen. She seemed pretty, competent, a little flirtatious, not his type; he couldn’t see what was getting to Rafe about her. But you never could see what your friends saw in women.
Three days later, he was in CVIC getting viewgraphs so he could do a composite for the admiral, and Nixon was there. She gave him a big smile, a little wave. Don’t do that, he thought, but there was no reason why she shouldn’t. The truth was, she irritated him. Probably it was because of Rafe, for Rafe’s sake—absurd, as Rafe hadn’t asked him to be irritated on his account. She was working on Libyan SAM sites, and he was aware of her, some questions she asked, stuff she was getting for a brief she was going to do—thorough, patient, but spending too much time on the trivia. She just didn’t go about it the way he would have. When she was leaving, he said, “Mind if I walk along with you?”
“Not at all!” Again, the too big smile. Alan had learned at the Pentagon that these warm smiles were more a defense than anything else.
“Rafe talks about you a lot!�
�� she said as they headed down the p’way. She had a bunch of pubs squeezed against her chest, like a kid with schoolbooks. Alan didn’t pick up the cue about Rafe; instead, he said, “Can I give you a bit of advice?”
She turned and raised an eyebrow. Advice was never a good thing, to junior officers. “Yes, sir. Go ahead.”
Alan stopped at frame 133, where he had to cut across to the flag N-2 office, and they stood there, squeezed a little against the bulkhead so people could go past. “Focus,” he said. “You learn fast, but it looks to me like you keep trying to learn everything. What you want to do is figure out what the essentials are, learn those, ditch the rest. They don’t pay us to be perfect. They pay us to be right.” He looked at her and smiled at her earnestness, thinking Lord, was this me?
She looked back. There was a lot going on behind her eyes, although the earnest smile stayed firmly in place. “Am I in trouble?”
“Absolutely not. You’re a very good intel officer. Learn to scan the material and you’ll be even better. Look, I’m not in your chain. But you screwed up during Fleetex because, in the end, you couldn’t see the forest for the trees, right?”
Small nod. Smaller smile.
“Right. Now, you’re learning the whole history of air defense so you can give one brief to the admiral about Libyan SAMs. Predict, Christy, predict. Guess what he’ll ask. Learn that. Guess what he needs to know. Learn that. Ditch the rest. What’s the most important thing about the Libyan air defense?”
“The big stick. The location and range of their big missiles.” She was crisp, with no hesitation.
“That’s what’s important to aircrew, right. But to the admiral?”
She looked flustered, and he felt for her, cornered in a passageway, but this was the Navy. She shook her head.
“Maintenance. Infrastructure. Do the damn things still work? How old are they? Stuff like that. That helps the top echelon make big decisions.”
He saw in her eyes the spark of understanding.
“Okay, sir. I get the point. But sir? I like to know everything. Really.” She seemed to give a small jerk, as if the words had pulled her up, and she covered by shifting the load of pubs.
That was the way Sneesen saw them, rounding frame 133 and starting up the p’way. He barely remembered LCDR Craik from the flight from Bermuda, knew he was a friend of CDR Rafehausen’s. He recognized her, though. And he saw that she was at it again, curving her body like that, looking up into the guy’s eyes—just the shit she laid on Rafehausen.
He went by them, hating her. In his head, he didn’t say the n-word, because Borne had told him that was stupid and got in the way of right thinking. Instead, he called her what she was: mud-bitch.
Washington.
For Rose, Alan’s absence was a relief, at least at first. It was hard to admit it, but she liked coming back to the empty house and having nobody else’s emotional needs to deal with except the dog’s. She had to confront this unexpected part of herself, this place where she wasn’t a “real woman” but simply wanted peace. Privacy. A place of her own.
Then that passed. She missed him. She missed him physically, became as horny as a teenager for a few nights, got over it. Then a letter came from him, written in spurts over several days, not very coherent, not written with his full attention, and she felt such a pang of loss that she wept.
That was when she knew she was getting better.
At sea.
One morning, after he had briefed the admiral and was closing his laptop before leaving, the admiral said, “Did I understand it’s your wife who’s the launch officer on this USNS ship we’re going to ride shotgun for?”
“Yes, sir.”
The admiral spun a piece of message traffic with a finger. “We just got a request for a squad of marines to protect her ship. What’s that all about?”
“She asked some of us what sort of protection she ought to have. I suggested that the Bay of Sidra was a good place to have to deal with Libyan patrol boats, which don’t necessarily think their authority ends twelve miles from the coast. Plus they’re looking for something to take the world’s mind off Lockerbie.”
“You suggest she take marines?”
“No, sir.”
The admiral looked at the paper and made a note. “I’ll authorize four, not a squad. We’re going to need every marine we can get if we have to evacuate people from Zaire.” He looked at Alan and nodded. “Thanks for not trying to ask favors for her. Make a note for the CAG AI: I want a short précis of the cover we’re giving the Philadelphia once it hits the Gulf of Sidra.”
Mornings, he briefed the admiral, then the staff. Then he hit CVIC and ASW, met with the CAG AI, went back to his own cubicle and did the message traffic, then went through the squadron spaces hitting the highlights of the air wing’s day. Nearly four weeks after he’d come aboard, the admiral told him to make up a list of possible liberty ports along the African coast, because they might not be getting into the Med as quickly as they’d hoped. Alan had already decided the same thing, and so had most of the ship; there was a tension on board that came from five thousand people cooped up longer than they’d bargained for.
By then, they should have hit the same ports Fort Klock had—Nice, Naples, Antibes—and been as happy about it as Klock’s crew were. Instead, they were still outside the Pillars of Hercules, steaming up and down, carrying out cyclic air ops that were really raising the squadrons’ readiness but that were also driving a lot of young sailors with strong hormones nuts.
For Rafe’s sake, Alan was just as glad there were no liberty ports. He believed that Rafe and Christy Nixon couldn’t go ashore without heading for the nearest hotel. That was how far they’d come. He’d seen them in the squadron ready room together; there was sexual tension there, anticipation. They were both playing it cool, but you could tell. Everybody could tell, he feared. Despite his advice, Rafe had put her in his own aircraft. And maybe the atmosphere of the S-3 would be an anti-aphrodisiac: boredom, body smells, pissing in a bag, working as parts of the machine. Maybe routine flying would de-glamorize her. Maybe cows would give Ben and Jerry’s chocolate.
For his own sake, he wished they’d hit Naples tomorrow. He and Rose had planned to meet there. He’d had several letters from her, and he saw that things were getting better. Naples would have been wonderful.
21
November
The Strait of Gibraltar, aboard the Shark.
Suvarov smiled at Lebedev, who was his admiral’s son and his chief sonarman and who excelled at his job. Right now his job was to identify the USNS Philadelphia among hundreds of other merchant ships in the eastern Atlantic. As usual, he was doing a superb job.
“Dead ahead, 010 relative, four thousand meters,” Lebedev said quietly. “Two escorts, one Ticonderoga-class, one Burke-class.”
“How far from the Rock?”
“Fifteen thousand meters.”
“Make revolutions for three knots. I want to be dead ahead of the Philadelphia. I want her to pass directly overhead. Helm, place us bow up in the layer. Weapons, set up a passive torpedo attack, bow on.” The weapons officer looked appalled.
The tension on the bridge was like a layer of cigar smoke. It could be felt; it certainly had a smell. Suvarov watched Lebedev. He wasn’t rock steady, but he was solid enough. He conned the ship carefully. Suvarov watched the screen as he mentally counted the seconds. He didn’t need the sonar to feel the placement of the ships. He was taking an unholy risk: that the Americans did not have a tail deployed. They were about to transit the Strait of Gibraltar and he hoped they had no idea that he existed. If one American destroyer had an acoustic tail deployed, he might very well be caught, and that would ensure humiliation and might mean the end of the mission. Protest meant showing the Americans that he could have taken action had he desired. That was the language of the Cold War, and sailors spoke it better than anyone. Especially submariners.
He felt the ship slow, felt the change in attitude as Lebede
v changed the internal ballast and pointed the bow a few degrees up. The crew was silent. They did not need passive sonar to hear the big American ships passing. While every hand on the bridge sat glued to his screen, many white-knuckled, Suvarov watched them, looking slowly from man to man. They were not bad, and in that moment he loved them, even little Rubinov who was trying to hide his hyperventilation.
“Prepare revolutions for twenty-six knots,” he said, very quietly. The last American ship was almost directly overhead. The tidal race would start in forty minutes, a period of acoustic chaos.
Lebedev raised his head sharply. He laughed, two small barks like a lapdog. “It is a game!”
Of course he had never intended to fire. He had simply said hello. Protest, not fight. That was in his orders. The surface ship captains knew, but he wanted to give his crew this taste of the past, a knowledge of themselves.
Suvarov smiled. He turned to the engineer. “Run,” he said, and made a small gesture. The engines sang out and the Shark leapt forward. Suvarov knew that every sonarman on the American ships now knew his location. Their officers would get the message.
I was under you. I owned you. Welcome to the Med.
The protest had begun. So had his revenge.
Off Africa, aboard the Jackson.
“So,” Alan was saying to Kravitz, “this is right up your alley. List every deepwater port from here to Cape Town. We gotta be able to take on water, fresh foods, probably fuel—check with the Texaco [ship’s slang for the oiler that trailed the CV] on what they’ve got and what they’d need—and if the people are going ashore, the port has to be cleared. Check with the NCIS office here on the carrier. Think AIDS. Think terrorism. Okay? You see the scope of the problem? Give me a first draft by tomorrow.”
