Brink of War c-13

by Keith Douglass

  How much of the difference had been due to the fact that I had grown up without him? I would never know, and in truth, I might simply have inherited my uncle's temperament rather than my father's.

  The silence stretched out, although not comfortably. I had a sense of being observed closely, of being watched and assessed by the man in the bed. For my part, too, I was looking him over, whether trying to convince myself that this was him or trying to allow myself to believe that it could be, I wasn't certain.

  Finally, he spoke. "Are you really Matthew?" The voice had a distinct Russian accent, but underneath that, underlying the fluent English words, were traces of United States. It was the voice you would expect of someone who had spent the last forty years in Russia.

  I nodded. "Is it really you?" It sounded stupid the moment I said it, but what do you say to a ghost? An imposter ghost, perhaps, but even so my performance had to be believable.

  He nodded. "It's been a long time. Pull up a chair, why don't you?"

  The farce seemed impossibly mundane. All these years ― pull up a chair? I reeled, trying to maintain my equanimity.

  There was a small scuffling in the room, and a chair was produced. I reached out, touched the weathered old hand, felt the loose skin under my fingertips. The skin was warm, almost feverish. I held his hand as I sat down.

  The admiral and his two guards moved closer to the bed, as though some unseen barrier had been breached. I glanced away from my father's face and looked at the admiral. "I think we would like some time alone, if that could be arranged." And a smaller audience."

  A flash of annoyance across his face, then he nodded. "Of course ― but your father is not as strong as he seems." He glanced across the room at the hospital administrator for confirmation, who supplied it quickly. "I understand sometimes he becomes… confused." He made a small motion to the rest of the crowd, and they followed him out of the room.

  Finally, we were alone. I took a deep, shuddering breath, suddenly at a loss for words. What do you say to a man you believe has been dead for over forty years?

  "It is hard for me to believe it is you," he said. "As difficult for you as it is for me, I suppose." He took the breath, and tears shone in his eyes. "You don't know how many times I thought about you ― wondered what you would be like when you grew up. When they told me two weeks ago that I would see you, it- You understand, I thought I would die here without ever knowing you or seeing your mother again. I had to believe that, had to come to terms with that, in order to survive. It wasn't that I didn't love you both, more than you'll ever know. But as long as they knew that, they had power over me." He shuddered, evidently disturbed by the memories. "And now… your mother? Did she remarry?"

  "No. And I don't think she's ever given up hoping, either. She knew I was coming, and she sends her love."

  He nodded. "Somehow, I believe that. Not many women would have waited that long. Talk to me, Matt. My brother ― how is he? And my parents ― they must be dead by now." Despite his words, I could hear the hope in his voice.

  "Grandfather, yes. But your mother is still alive, and going strong.

  It was… it was difficult for her, as it was for all of us."

  He was staring through me now, seeing memories I would never share.

  "Tell me more."

  He was begging now, or at least as close as he would ever come to it.

  I heard the naked need in his voice, saw the tears well up again. "It's been so long, and sometimes I can't tell what I remember and what I just wish was true. Talk to me, son."

  Alarms went off in my head. I wanted so much to believe, to have this be the truth. Yet I had spent over half my life in the United States Navy.

  At least three times a year, and more often when in sensitive security positions, caution had been hammered into me about counterintelligence specialists.

  In the last few days, the Russians had already demonstrated that they knew far more than I'd thought about me personally. My family, my call sign, all the details that must be in their files.

  Enough to coach an imposter?

  "Tell me what you remember," I said.

  Nothing changed in his face, yet it seemed to me that the tired, aging eyes were slightly more alert. Revulsion flooded me ― and at that moment I knew the truth.

  But perhaps this wariness could be the result of living in Russia for forty years? As first a prisoner of war, then later a political prisoner inside this monolithic, secretive state, he would have more experience with lies, deceit, and treachery then I had ever encountered. He knew that this was no simple question from a son to a long lost father. No, it was something entirely different, something that almost broke my heart. It was a test.

  "Tell me how you met Mother." It was a story I had heard many times, and one that certainly wouldn't fade easily from his memory. If he was who he claimed to be, he would have replayed that scene millions of times in the last decades. "Tell me the story." He smiled slightly and seemed to relax. "She was a friend of Sam's sister. She told you about Sam?"

  I nodded. Sam had been his roommate at the Naval Academy, later a fellow aviator. Sam was shot down two years after my father, but there was no need to tell him that now.

  "It was the Senior Ball. I didn't have a date ― Sam said I was too ugly to get one on my own, so he fixed me up with a family friend." He shook his head, a bemused expression on his face. "Sam really screwed that one up. His date stood him up, so he ended up taking his own sister. And I met the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen in my life. Not that we saw many in those days, you understand. The Academy was ― well, it was the next thing to a monastery most of the time. Except for the town girls who wanted to marry a naval officer."

  "The Senior Ball ― yes, Mother told me about it several times." More than several, as a matter of fact. It was a standard family childhood joke, one that we told everyone. It was something you would have known from any sort of investigation into my family, since the incident had been widely reported after you were shot down. For days, the papers were filled with human interest stories about you two, your brother, me.

  The only problem with the entire tale was that it wasn't true.

  My father had indeed been a senior at the Naval Academy when he met my mother. But the Senior Ball wasn't the first time, not at all.

  In his day, liberty was much more restrictive for midshipmen at the Academy. During their senior year, they were free on weekends, if they did not have duty or were not restricted for a number of other reasons. My father probably had less liberty than most did. According to my uncle and my mom, he was something of a hell-raiser. He spent a fair amount of time confined to Naval Academy grounds for one infraction or another.

  The weekend he met my mother, my father was supposedly restricted to his room. A Volkswagen bug had miraculously disappeared from the faculty parking lot and been reassembled in a professor's office. After a thorough investigation, my father was implicated. And restricted to base with no liberty.

  Mother said he sneaked out somehow. I guess he never gave her all the details, but after my own time at Annapolis, I finally figured it out myself. Ingenious ― and a technique I don't want to pass on to future generations.

  At any rate, my father was an unauthorized absentee. Over the fence, the wall, whatever you want to call it, he headed into Annapolis for a night on the town. After all, as a senior he was fast running out of chances to break Naval Academy rules.

  10

  Tuesday, 22 December

  0900 Local (+3 GMT)

  USS Jefferson

  Off the northern coast of Russia

  Commander Lab Rat Busby

  The last message I'd gotten from our submarine hadn't been reassuring.

  The Akula and Victor still had her pinned down, and she had made no progress in repairing her engineering casualties. As a result, she had only a small fraction of her normal electrical power available to operate the ship, and had reduced her electrical load to a bare, life-sustaining
minimum. The sonar, the air purifiers, and the heat ― that was about it.

  The sub's skipper was convinced that the Akula had their range, and, reading between the lines, I could see he was worried. Real worried, as bad as I'd ever heard that cool Georgia Tech grad ever get.

  Still, if anyone could pull it off, it was him. There are no certainties in the delicate game of USW, but there were few people who played it better.

  That had been thirty minutes ago. Since then, nothing.

  Under normal circumstances, I wouldn't have worried. After all, submarines usually maintain radio silence except for once or twice a day when they come to communications depth and query the satellite for the broadcast. So not being able to talk with him immediately, not following his evasion of the two attack submarines play by play, was nothing out of the ordinary. But couple that with an engineering casualty, and the increasing tensions ashore, and I didn't like it. Not a bit.

  "But what's not to like?" Captain Smith asked me, leaning against my bulkhead in that calm, casual way he had. "Just playing the devil's advocate here, you understand. Remember, we're here for a friendship mission." He waved one hand vaguely in the air, intending to indicate the entire former Soviet Union. "Those MiGs-training opportunities. Nobody got hurt, did they? Airmanship, some good friendly competition ― that's what this is all about."

  "And you buy that?" I asked, immediately regretting the sharp note in my voice. Captain Smith was nobody's fool. He knew what was going on, had played this game during the Cold War, when the stakes were so much higher.

  "Sorry, sir. I know what you're trying to do," I said. "But I think there's plenty to worry about right now. Those air games ― pretty suspicious how everything has gone wrong during them. Wouldn't you say so?" I'd have been suspicious even without Tombstone's message the night before. I wondered if Captain Smith had noticed those bland phrases, the ones that seemed to contribute nothing to the message's content. Seen them, and thought of our earlier conversation on the secrets of admirals.

  The captain said nothing, his eyes boring holes in me.

  "And those two attack submarines," I pressed, "the Russian ones.

  Awful odd that the first major engineering casualty we have onboard our battle group submarine, they show up, don't you think? If I could figure out a way to blame them for it, I'd begin to suspect that they'd even caused the main coolant pump failures. But that would be stretching it a bit far, wouldn't it?"

  Captain Smith nodded, still saying nothing.

  "So I guess what I'm recommending is a heightened state of readiness," I finished. "There's no reason to suspect we're going to war with the Russians ― not under the circumstances. After all, there's a reasonable explanation for everything that's happened."

  Captain Smith finally stirred. "If you say so. I would say so, of course ― in public." He shot me a sardonic, half-amused, half-worried look.

  "But in private?" I asked.

  He shook his head. "This is the way it always starts," he said softly. "You go at it too long, you start thinking about it as a game.

  But it's not, it never really was. Even this airdale stuff ashore ― just another way to show the flag a bit, for both sides. If the Russians win, you think they're going to let us forget it? Remember, just as much as we're trying to scope out their capabilities, they're looking at us."

  I stood up and carefully brushed at the front of my trousers, wishing there were some way to do something about the wrinkles. Not that it mattered, really ― after as long as we'd been at sea, the cotton fabric seems to take on a life of its own. Still, it's always good to try to look one's best when going to see the admiral.

  "You going somewhere?" Captain Smith asked.

  I nodded. "You didn't come down here just to shoot the shit with the spooks. Call it a little intelligence at work, but I think Admiral Wayne sent you down here to get me. And, since there was no particular hurry or time frame expressed in the admiral's orders, you decided to take the opportunity to go on a little fishing mission of your own. Kind of see how the spooks feel about things, get a lay of the land before you drag me back down the corridor with my head up my ass." I saw by the expression on the captain's face that I wasn't far off the mark. "And maybe, if I'm way off base, set me straight before I go in to see the admiral. That about it?"

  There was a grudging look of respect in the captain's eyes. "You figure things out pretty good for an intelligence officer."

  I shoved open the heavy security door that led to my private office.

  "There's a reason they call us that."

  We found the admiral in TFCC, slouched down in his brown leatherette elevated chair, staring dully at the giant-screen display before him. A cup of coffee that looked to already be cool was in one hand. From what I could tell, Admiral Wayne was seriously short on sleep. Conducting antisubmarine warfare is like watching grass grow ― the pace is almost as fast and exciting, except when things are going really, really wrong. But the tension in a situation like this is nonstop ― you know that the second you leave, something will happen. It's a fact of life.

  "Sir, Commander Busby wanted to brief you on the latest intelligence," Captain Smith said quietly. He motioned me forward.

  This was news to me. From Captain Smith's cryptic comments, I had had the impression that Batman wanted to talk to me, not vice versa. God knows I had nothing new or exciting to offer, no arcane insight into the tactical scenario. It was just what it looked like ― an uncertain, unclear situation in which judgment calls would have to be made. And those would be made by Admiral Wayne, not me.

  Nevertheless, the captain had gone out of his way to make sure I understood what was going on. It wouldn't do to fail to support him. I cleared my throat and stepped forward to the side of Batman's chair.

  "Admiral?"

  Batman turned to stare at me, and I almost started at his expression.

  The lines in his face looked deeper, his eyes tired and worn. In the last eighteen months that he'd had command of the battle group, we'd been on the front lines almost continually. I'd seen him go from a jovial front runner with a booming voice to a quieter, leaner, and more deadly appearance. It was unsettling, as though conflict had burned away the polish and smooth political veneer that Washington had laid down, exposing the heart of the true man. For some reason, I had a flash of insight. This was what he'd looked like when he first started out, when he was still flying combat air patrol missions and bombing runs.

  If the Russians and Ukrainians had counted on encountering something besides a fully qualified and deadly serious flag officer on this ship, which Batman's reputation ashore may have led them to believe, then they were wrong. Real wrong.

  "Talk to me, Lab Rat," Batman said. Despite his appearance, there was no trace of tiredness in his voice. "You got any good news for me?"

  I shook my head, wishing that I did. "No magic answers, Admiral.

  It's just what it looks like ― problems." Briefly, I summarized the intelligence reports of the last several hours, emphasizing that all our summaries, assessments, and conclusions were mostly speculation. Finally, I said, "And as for our submarine, Admiral ― the last report was thirty minutes ago. He doesn't appear to have suffered a fatal engineering casualty, at least according to the acoustic sensors we have in the area.

  Nothing on sonar to indicate that he's putting out a lot of noise or that he's had to light off any emergency gear." "I think he's OK for now," Batman said slowly. He gestured at the large-screen display. "Sure, those two bastards hunting him are deadly.

  But this skipper ― I know him from way back. If I had to guess, I'd say he's searching for somewhere to hole up for a while, maybe an underwater canyon of some sort. Somewhere that he can have a little protection from the sensors of our two bad asses out there, take some time to think through the situation. That's what they do, you know ― submariners. The ballistic missile guys more than the fast attack, but they're all of the same breed.

  Quiet, cautious, and
absolutely deadly once they've made their minds up.

  No, I'm not immediately worried about him ― when he needs our help, you can be sure that he'll let us know, one way or the other."

  I nodded, relieved in some undefinable sense I could not describe. As closely as I'd worked with submariners in the past, I knew that Batman had a better sense of how they fight their own silent wars beneath the waves.

  "Then we sit and wait?" Batman smiled slightly. He pulled himself up to sit straighter in his chair. "I don't think so. I think we can give our friend a little help, maybe he's had something he hadn't planned on. TAO," he said, raising his voice slightly so that it carried to the flag tactical action officer, "how long does that S3 have on station?"

  "Another two hours, Admiral," the TAO replied immediately. "Plenty of gas, plenty of sonobuoys ― hell, he's bored out there."

  The years seemed to slip away from Batman as his face grew animated.

  He hopped off the pedestal his chair was perched on, and walked forward in the small compartment. He stood immediately behind the TAO, one hand resting lightly on the man's shoulder. "Then let's give them something to think about. Have the S3 lay a pattern of DICASS buoys as close to on top of that Akula as he can. And I want them all pinging, constantly. I want him convinced we can nail his ass to the bottom of the ocean floor anytime we want to. And I'm willing to bet that we'll see him and his little playmate bug out real shortly thereafter."

  "But our orders are to avoid USW operations," Captain Smith said, once again acting as devil's advocate.

  "I know what my orders are," Batman said calmly. Judging from his reaction, the admiral was used to Smith voicing the objections no one else had the balls to. "I also know what my inherent right of self-defense encompasses. In my judgment, a unit under my command is in imminent danger. I'm justified in taking all reasonable and appropriate measures to protect here. Under the circumstances, that means letting the Russians know that we know they're there. No more safety-of-navigation ops bullshit. They've taken this to a new level with those MiGs." "Admiral?" the TAO asked, his face stunned. "You want to give away our hand like that?"