by David Poyer
“He’ll do what’s right. I trust the guy.”
It was less than the truth. Niles had said more than once that another command was the last thing he had in mind for Dan. If Niles became Chief of Naval Operations, he could forget ever going to sea again.
He took a slow breath, quieting his yammering mind. What you couldn’t change, he’d tried to learn to accept. He’d seen too many men let their ambitions warp their actions. Each time it had sickened him more. “Jack, if the Navy offers me another command, I’ll take it. If they don’t, I’ll do what they give me to do. I’d just rather not wall off the possibility, okay? I appreciate the offer. I know it’s well meant, and you can do everything you say. But no thanks.”
Byrne took it well; he probably had expected the refusal. And maybe Dan was just being blind turning down the opportunity. He’d stick till the O-6 board met. If he didn’t make captain then, it’d be time to think about what to do with the rest of his life.
He had lunch in the compound cafeteria with the bald man and Byrne. They thought it’d be just as well if none of the recent escapees went traipsing around town. He borrowed the phone again to call Blair at Manpower and Personnel. Then the bald man and Bone escorted them across the street back to the apartment. The dog trotted quietly at their side, glancing alertly at the passing cars, the passing pedestrians. Dan watched the windows of the Russian embassy, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. No one seemed to know they were right next door. Still, he’d be glad when they were on their way home.
Letting himself in, he heard voices in the kitchen, the clink of glass on glass. Faces turned toward him. Two were new since this morning. One he knew, but hadn’t expected here. The unfamiliar one was huge, well-built, solidly muscled. The new arrivals were in casual clothes, slacks and jackets over black muscle tees.
“Obie,” he said, surprised. “What the hell are you doing here?”
He hadn’t seen Teddy Oberg since shotgun training at the GrayWolf compound. The Team Charlie member came to his feet with a lazy respectfulness that was almost arrogance. “Sumo, this here’s my team leader at TAG, Commander Dan Lenson. A blackshoe, but he’s seen action. Iraq. Srebrenica. A diver, too—right?”
“Just a sport diver, Teddy. Just scuba.”
“Monty told us how you got the guy out, hitting the river, paying off a rowing team to do the snatch. Pretty slick. Buddy here I’d like you to meet: Jeff Kaulukukui. Young, dumb, and full of come. Sumo Man’s from Team Two, been in Bosnia hunting PIFWCS.”
“Hunting what?”
“Persons indicted for war crimes,” Kaulukukui said. His smooth features looked Polynesian, or more probably, Dan guessed, Hawaiian. His arms were as thick as Dan’s thighs, but despite that he didn’t look threatening.
“I hope Ratko Mladic’s on that list.”
“He is. You run into him?”
“I ran into him once,” Dan said. “Yeah.”
“You’re lucky to be alive.”
“I know. Did you get him?”
“Not yet,” the big guy said, and his smile dimmed. “He travels with a big PSD, but it’s low-key, hard to pick up. I was in a bar with him in Belgrade and I couldn’t do a thing but try not to get made myself. So, you know Teddy Bear, huh? Know there’s a restraining order out against him? Part of him, anyway.”
Dan played along. “Which part?”
“His hand. For self-abuse.”
As an answer, Oberg got Kaulukukui in a headlock. The two of them nearly demolished a couple of chairs. They reminded him of two lions playing. It got pretty realistic at the end, finishing with Oberg lashed into one of the now-shaky chairs with his hands zip-tied behind him.
The mention of teams, of course, meant Kaulukukui was a SEAL. The East Coast even-numbered teams, two, four, eight, and ten, were based out of the fenced compound down the road from TAG. He was in his late twenties, probably a second-class or first-class petty officer. But rank structure didn’t work in the SEALs the way it did elsewhere, Dan knew that. “Well, good to meet you, uh, Sumo. See you found the Polish beer.”
“No, brought that with us.” Kaulukukui left the “sir” off, but Dan didn’t get the feel it was usually there.
“So, what are you doing here, Teddy? I thought you were back at Little Creek.”
Oberg sat hunched forward, arms still behind him. His face was going purple, but he wasn’t making any progress on the zip ties. The creased seams on his face turned darker than the rest, suffused with blood. It occurred to Dan, not for the first time, that he didn’t know that much about Oberg. The man joked, but he didn’t reveal. “We staged out of there when you dropped out of sight.”
“Oh, yeah? Captain Mullaly didn’t—oh, wait a minute, he did. Four tickets. Now I get it.”
Oberg explained that when they got the message Dan and Monty were missing, after having met with someone presumed to be under FSB control, he’d organized a reaction team. “Jeff was in off deployment. He didn’t have anything to do other than get drunk and hop anything that moved at Hot Tuna, so we pulled some gear together and flew to Helsinki. I figured we’d get word where you were, and see what we could do. Then we heard you were headed for Warsaw, and caught a commercial down here.”
“Pretty flexible scheduling,” Dan said. “TAG cut your orders that way?”
Oberg gave him a funny look. “We don’t need no stinkin’ orders, sir. Ticketing, orders—they’re not the problem in the spec ops community they seem to be for the rest of the Navy. We just slap it on the Visa and sort it out afterwards.”
“Monty tell you about the Russki embassy?”
“Yeah. We’re staying off the balcony.” Oberg looked at the window. He twisted, holding out his wrists to Kaulukukui. “Okay, take ’em off. Or you’re really fucked, when I get out of ’em.”
“Say, ‘I’m an asshole.’ ”
“You’re an asshole. Now take them off.”
The Hawaiian produced a knife that Dan didn’t see how they’d gotten on a plane and flicked apart plastic. Oberg rubbed his wrists as the bigger man sat forward, smilingly waiting for the blowback. Instead he just said, “Monty, how about you and the Commander and me go get a bite?”
They had stek mexicaja at a café, then strolled through Lakenki Park as the chill of night arrived and the lights of the palaces winked on through the trees. Dan observed how Oberg watched everything around them without seeming to. It was the same unobtrusive watchfulness the Recon Marines he’d gone into Iraq with had had. Not a big man, especially compared to the Hawaiian, Oberg now gave an impression of quiet resourcefulness that wasn’t there the first time you looked at him. But then, he hadn’t seen much of the guy on their first mission, to Korea. He’d ridden one of the other ships in the task force.
Henrickson said, “Something you wanted to talk about, Teddy?”
“Yeah. I haven’t gotten the full download on what happened in Moscow, but I heard enough to figure we won’t be getting our Shkval from there.”
“I’d say that’s accurate,” Dan told him. “About all we really did was get to see a model demonstration. That, and raise the price for their third-country customers.”
“I thought we came close,” Henrickson said.
“There’s some feeling they had us on the string the whole time, Monty.”
“Well, sorry that didn’t work out. It would have been the easy way.”
“That it would,” Dan said. “Unfortunately, I don’t think we’re going to be talking to Yevgeny Dvorov again. So what’s on your mind?”
Oberg looked around at the trees again, at distant couples walking the winding gravel paths. “Who’s the Fifi?”
“De Cary? He’s French Navy.”
“Yeah? What branch?”
“An outfit called NAVFCO. I’m not sure what that is. The Department of Commerce fixed us up with him. The French operate carriers. Shkval’s a threat to them, too.”
“He cleared?”
“Well, I haven’t seen any documents yet
. Have you, Monty?” Henrickson shook his head. “So far we haven’t had to get into that because we’ve been operating overtly. Why?”
“He was asking me who I was, what I was doing here.”
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. But to answer your question, we haven’t seen any clearance on him—no. That what you wanted to talk about?”
Oberg did the casual 360 search again and came back to them. “Not exactly, sir. Question in my mind even before you left was, What’s Plan B? If Moscow didn’t pan out. So while I was sitting there at TAG with nothing to do, I got on the SIPRNET and did some searches, made some calls. Komponent’s apparently not the only ones involved with Shkval. There’s something called Ros-voor-u-shenya—”
“Rosvooruzhenye,” Henrickson said. “Komponent’s the design bureau, Rosvooruzhenye handles the sales.”
“Like our Foreign Military Sales directorate,” Dan said.
“Makes sense. But I asked a guy I know, he told me a name, and I pulled on that thread, you know how that works, and finally found a dude at NMIC, National Military Intelligence Center, who tracks high-tech sales. It took a while to get the blessings lined up but I finally talked to him. He sent me a list of Shkval-K buyers and how many units and sometimes, even the itinerary.”
Oberg paused. A small bridge over a canal came into view. A man stood on it aiming a camera at the palace. They turned and walked back the other way, the gravel crunching under their shoes. Dan felt weak, shaky. He kept falling behind, forcing the others to slow their pace. “Okay,” he said. “Go on.”
“Three countries have orders in so far. Iran, Ukraine, and China. But NMIC says Ukraine’s a cut-out. They only have one sub anyway, and it hasn’t been to sea for years. The real end destination for every unit the Russians ship to them is China. So actually, numberwise, the Chinese are buying at least two-thirds of all the Shkval-Ks Komponent’s exporting.”
Dan wondered why China needed so many anticarrier weapons. He saw from Hernrickson’s glance he wasn’t the only one. “Good detective work, Obie. So what have you got in mind?”
“I had him put in an RFI for the route of the Shkval-Ks leaving Ukraine for China.”
An RFI was a request for information, a tasking for the intel shop. Now they were both looking at the petty officer. “Go on,” Henrickson said.
“I call it Operation Kalashnikov,” Oberg said. “I’ve got the ship operator and the schedule they’re going out on. That operator routes via the Malacca Strait.”
Dan knew that narrow passage between Singapore and Sumatra. A vista lit in his mind: an endless procession of tankers stretching from one horizon to the other, low green hills on either side. He’d often reflected that a single torpedo into one of those deep-laden hulls would double the world spot price of crude. “Okay,” he said again, feeling a frisson up his spine as what Oberg was proposing took shape. “Go on, Teddy.”
“The Straits are full of pirates. They come out of the islands in small boats.”
“I don’t like this,” Henrickson said.
“Why not? You’ve seen the pirates out there,” he told Dan. “Haven’t you?”
He was never surprised by the omniscience of Navy scuttlebutt. “We had a multinational task force there at one time, patrolling to suppress them. But Teddy—are you serious? We’d have to—”
“We’d board as oil bunkerers, sir. That’s new since you were out there. Difference is, pirates just bust the safe and rob the crew. Bunkerers take the whole ship, run it inshore, and pump the fuel off into barges.”
Henrickson said, “You’re proposing we hijack a ship—”
“Whatever you want to call it. We rob the crew and leave them in the lifeboats.”
“Nobody gets hurt,” Dan put in.
“Nobody, no sir. And if you want, we don’t even have to rob them, just blow the safe for show, and that’d be covered by the shipper’s insurance.”
He felt like grinning. Oberg’s eagerness was almost funny. “Okay, we put them in the boats, you say—”
“Right. When we’re over the horizon we offload—to a boat, maybe a sub, whatever we’ve got. We set the ship on fire, to cover the theft, and nobody ever sees us again.”
“I don’t believe this,” Henrickson said. “It’d be an act of war.”
“Who with?” Oberg asked him. “The shipping line? It’s Chinese owned, but the crews are mixed, Nigerian, mostly. The captain’s Italian and it’s flagged Panamanian. Panama’s going to declare war? I don’t think so. Anyway, they’ll never know it was us.”
Dan was strolling with hands in his pockets. Their steaming breaths drifted ahead of them, like spirits departing their bodies. He’d nearly laughed. But now he was turning over the idea. Henrickson was right, it was illegal. And would probably be a lot riskier than Oberg was making out.
But wasn’t that what TAG Charlie was for? Covert operations, in support of Navy requirements? They’d tried the legitimate route, and gotten nowhere—worse than nowhere, and he recognized the shaky feeling now: despite the shots he was feverish. From swallowing half the Moskva River, no doubt.
It might also be a chance to poke a sharp stick into the Chinese. His grudge against them dated a long way back. He’d found Beijing’s fingers in too many dirty pies, from selling weapons to people who shouldn’t have them, to backing the pirates he’d hunted, to suborning a president he’d tried to serve.
The Great Game had always been bare knuckles and knees to the groin. But the Chinese didn’t feel bound by even the few rules they’d agreed to.
“Mullaly’d have to get it cleared. Mention it to him?”
“No sir. Figured it’d sound better coming from you. You’ve got the Congressional. That gives you clout, right? And your wife—”
He bit back an angry retort. Why did people assume that because Blair was in the administration, that gave him access, influence? The only thing that influenced this president were votes and money, and of the two, money spoke louder. He glanced at his companions and thought, But why disillusion them.
He almost spoke, then thought again. About guys who’d died with him, maybe even for him: in Iraq. The China Sea. Aboard USS Horn. Women without husbands. A little girl without a mother. He wasn’t going to let that happen again.
That was what command meant. You were responsible for whatever happened, good or bad, foreseen or unforeseen or even unforeseeable. That was how the Navy had run things since before there’d been a United States.
A hard rule, but one he understood. And one he’d tried to live by from the moment he’d stepped aboard his first ship, years before.
“We’ll look at those files of yours when we get home. But Monty’s right, too, Teddy. There’d be major grief if we screwed up. It’d have to be approved all the way. And we definitely wouldn’t go to Mullaly until we sandboxed it, the whole team, till there’s no question he could ask we couldn’t answer.”
“Absolutely, sir. Success through planning.”
“Another thing. No matter who’s on it, no matter how good they are at what they do, I’m doing the risk analysis myself. If it doesn’t look good, we don’t go, I don’t care how much the CNO wants it.”
They were both watching him now, in the sparkling darkness beneath the trees. He didn’t think they saw it, he tried not to show doubt or weakness to those he led, but he was trembling. His knees were shaky. He felt nauseated. It had to be fever. He didn’t think it was from fear. No. He didn’t think it was from that, at all.
10
Arlington, Virginia
He jerked awake, uncertain whether he’d actually cried out. This time he’d known about the bomb. Had known the trawler they tracked was not what it seemed. They’d tried to stop him, after all. Forbidden him to cross into Egyptian territorial waters. This time he’d obey. This time, he’d steer clear.
The well-known faces surrounded him on Horn’s bridge. “Left hard rudder,” he said, in the hard tone that meant I have the conn; obey thi
s order instantly. But no one moved. The bridge team looked through him.
His terror mounted. They had to listen. This time, he could save them.
A screaming started, distant on the wind—
Beside him his wife stirred, and the jostle of the queen-size stole him back from sleep again. He was home. They’d flown back into Andrews, and he’d called in to TAG for a Friday off and a weekend with Blair. Who for some reason had been snoring all night, and when she snored, he never seemed to lie easy. Not only that: they’d been uncomfortable with each other the night before. An argument over something so minor he couldn’t remember it now. He’d wanted her all evening, but something had told him it wasn’t mutual. And after the sharp words, they’d gone to bed, him first—he was still weak from the fever despite the Embassy clinic’s antibiotics. He must have been out when she came to bed.
“Bad dream?” she muttered sleepily.
“It’s okay.”
“Was I snoring again?”
“No. Not much, anyway.”
“So I was. You weren’t having those as often. Are they coming back?”
“No. First one in a while.”
He lay still, trying to recapture it, then wondered why it seemed to matter. As if a lost dream meant losing a part of who he was. How could you lose a memory and still be who you were? For a moment, half asleep and half awake, he’d glimpsed something significant about memory and self. But like an eel it slipped and twisted, and finally when he grabbed his hands were empty, and he was back in a world where little that mattered could be understood. He propped up the pillow and opened his eyes . . .
. . . to early-morning brightness lighting the sheers and gilding the intricate ironwork of the queen-sized bed Blair had ordered custom made. It glowed on the portraits of her father and mother, the matching wardrobes, the maple built-in that was always littered with her novels, hairbrushes, cosmetics, and, incongruously, the red secure phone of the OSD communication system. And on his side another table, not quite so bookladen but with a few, and the drawer he’d had to keep a pistol in just to get to sleep not long ago. He still had it in the house, but didn’t need it in arm’s reach anymore.
