Colt's Crisis

by Tom Carroll

  Copyright © 2020 Thomas E. Carroll

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without the permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  ISBN: 978-1-947863-10-1 (Paperback edition)

  ISBN: 978-1-947863-11-8 (Kindle edition)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2020949629

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, dialogue, places, incidents and opinions expressed are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental, and not to be construed as real. Nothing is intended or should be interpreted as expressing the views of the U.S. Navy or any other department or agency of any government body.

  Cover art and design by bookcoverart.com

  The appearance of U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) visual information does not imply or constitute DoD endorsement. The United States Department of Defense's Prepublication & Security Review cleared this manuscript for public release on Oct. 26, 2020.

  Printed and bound in the United States of America.

  First printing November 2020.

  Published by Kirby Publishing, LLC

  Lacey, WA 98503

  Visit www.tomcarrollbooks.com for more information

  For Laurie, Amanda and Sean,

  and for all the men and women

  who have stood watch on a ship at sea

  Why is America lucky enough to have such men? They leave this tiny ship and fly against the enemy. Then they must seek the ship, lost somewhere on the sea. And when they find it, they have to land upon its pitching deck. Where did we get such men?

  James Michener, The Bridges of Toko-Ri

  Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia

  Large, shapeless patches of snow lingered on the grass and headstones as the sun cast its light over the sacred ground. The combination of a brisk wind and freezing temperatures that had kept the tourists away now gave the cemetery a haunting yet solemn air.

  The old man’s knees cracked as he slowly rose after setting down a bouquet of flowers at the base of the Space Shuttle Challenger Memorial. Marking the commingled and partial remains of the seven astronauts who had died aboard the Challenger in January of 1986, the memorial honored Captain Michael Smith of the U.S. Navy, Lieutenant Colonel Francis Scobee and Lieutenant Colonel Ellison Onizuka of the U.S. Air Force, astronaut and electrical engineer Dr. Judith Resnik, payload specialist Gregory Jarvis, physicist Dr. Ronald McNair, and high school social studies teacher Sharon Christa McAuliffe.

  The weathered and white-haired man looked at the seven faces depicted on the memorial and wondered how many years would pass before they were as forgotten as the over 400,000 other heroes interred at Arlington. He raised his right arm and saluted the seven victims as he had been taught to do so many years before at Annapolis. He paused to read the poem by Royal Canadian Air Force fighter pilot John Gillespie Magee, Jr. engraved on the back of the memorial.

  It read:

  High Flight

  Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth

  And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

  Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

  Of sun-split clouds, – and done a hundred things

  You have not dreamed of – wheeled and soared and swung

  High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,

  I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung

  My eager craft through footless halls of air…

  Up, up the long, delirious burning blue

  I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace

  Where never lark, or ever eagle flew –

  And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod

  The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

  Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

  As he turned from the Challenger memorial, the man reflected back on his own career, from naval aviator to test pilot and eventually, NASA astronaut. Most people would have considered that a sufficient level of achievement in one life, but ambition, ego, and a hunger to do more had led him to the U.S. House of Representatives, the U.S. Senate, and finally, to his appointment as the twenty-eighth U.S. secretary of defense, or more commonly, SECDEF. His predecessors were some of the most recognized names in government, starting with James Forrestal in 1947 and including Robert McNamara, Melvin Laird, James Schlesinger, Donald Rumsfeld, Caspar Weinberger, Dick Cheney, Robert Gates, Leon Panetta, Ash Carter, and James Mattis. It’s a fairly impressive and exclusive club which now included him, Patrick O’Kane.

  Yet over the last few years, his accomplishments had begun to seem more like just a list of jobs, and Pat found that his memories were focused more on departed family and friends than on medals, honors, and accolades. His wife had died more than ten years ago from a form of cancer that most people had never heard of and doctors were unable to treat. He missed his wife deeply, and now, as he approached eighty years of age, he wondered when his own time would come. At last, he arrived at her gravestone. It had been a day as cold as this when she was laid to rest, and tears soon formed in his eyes as he knelt to place the flowers he had so carefully cut from the garden she herself had artfully planted in their greenhouse more than a decade ago.

  Chief Warrant Officer and Supervisory Special Agent Glenn Carpenter watched O’Kane from a respectful distance. Carpenter was an experienced officer of the U.S. Army Protective Services Battalion, the unit within the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division which was responsible for the protection of SECDEF, the Army Chief of Staff, and other senior civilian and military officials of the DOD. He and his detail of five special agents were tasked with the 24/7 protection of the defense secretary, and they took their jobs seriously. Dressed in dark business suits and sporting the stereotypical sunglasses and earphone radios, most people assumed they were agents of the U.S. Secret Service.

  Carpenter saw O’Kane kneel at his wife’s grave, first with concern as the frail-looking man touched his chest and cried out audibly, but then with horror as O’Kane suddenly fell to the snow-covered earth. Carpenter drew his Sig Sauer 9mm pistol as he sprinted to reach the secretary. After checking for a pulse, he shouted into his radio microphone, “This is WHISKEY ONE. LEATHERNECK is down! I say again, LEATHERNECK is down!”

  Delta Airlines Flight 167 - Seattle to Tokyo

  Another flight.

  Another long, crowded, intercontinental flight.

  The Airbus A350 didn’t seem to be moving at all, even as it soared 36,000 feet above the earth. After decades of flying, Colt Garrett still marveled at the convergence of forces and technology that enabled an object this large to defy gravity and deliver hundreds of people across an ocean. And meanwhile, Colt figured, most passengers were probably more concerned with the movie selection than with the mysterious wonders of powered flight.

  Colt switched on the entertainment screen in his business class enclosure to track the flight as it cruised along the great circle route, from Seattle heading northwest across the Gulf of Alaska near Kodiak, continuing west and then southwest along the Aleutians and Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, then further southwest along the Kuril Islands and finally over the Japanese Islands. He found it interesting that a straight line between two points on the earth’s surface was depicted as a curve on some types of charts — one of his many idiosyncrasies as a retired naval officer was his insistence on not calling them maps. In a little more than ten hours, he’d be in Tokyo.

  Flying had been part of Colt’s work-life since gra
duating from college. First, he served as an officer in the U.S. Navy, then worked for a big six technology consulting firm, then ran his own management consulting practice for several years. He used to enjoy travel, particularly air travel. But since 9/11 and the resulting enhancements to air travel security, he no longer enjoyed the airline experience, which now seemed to be more similar to taking a long-distance bus ride. Now he was serving as undersecretary for policy at the U.S. Department of Defense, developing defense strategies which eventually were distilled down into policy recommendations for the secretary of defense and ultimately, the president of the United States. Although the job had its challenges, including long hours, lofty demands from legislative oversight committees, the relentless press, the job matched his skills, and he excelled at it. He was at his best when trying to sift through vast amounts of mundane information to find the true essence of a problem, a skill that had brought him success no matter his position in an organization.

  This flight from Seattle to Tokyo was the last leg in a long journey from the Pentagon in D.C. to the operating forces of the U.S. 7th Fleet, homeported in Yokosuka, Japan. Colt was on a fact-finding mission to observe the Navy’s level of capability in the Sea of Japan, as tensions between North Korea and the U.S. continued to escalate. He wanted to see first-hand how DOD policy was being carried out by U.S. naval and air forces in the Pacific theater.

  This trip was also allowing him to deal with some personal issues. His wife, Linda, was still living in their home in Olympia, the Washington state capitol, so Colt added a two-day layover so he could visit her and attempt to repair their marriage.

  Thirty years ago, locals would have said that Olympia was an hour south of Seattle, but today, with increasing traffic and the growth of Joint Base Lewis McChord near Tacoma, the halfway mark, the Seattle-to-Olympia commute could sometimes take up to three hours. Olympia was nestled at the southernmost end of Puget Sound, the second largest estuary in the U.S. Formerly the home of the famed Olympia Brewing Company (“It’s the Water”), state government agencies and a handful of colleges and hospitals now provided most of the employment opportunities in the surrounding areas of Thurston county.

  Colt had been a geographic bachelor ever since accepting the president’s appointment as defense undersecretary, more than three years ago. Although it meant relocating to the other Washington, Linda had declined to move with him. She didn’t think it was fair of Colt to ask her to leave her home, close friends, and family, all so he could chase his dream of “making a difference,” and their relationship had suffered ever since. Now, on the short side trip to Olympia, Colt had reconnected with Linda, and they had rekindled the deep affection they had cultivated from more than thirty years of marriage. Sadly, when it came time for Linda to drive Colt to the Seattle airport, their old frustrations managed to surface, and their goodbyes were emotional yet guarded.

  Their son, Dan, had sided with his mother, of course. The two had always been close, but even more so after Dan was commissioned as an ensign in the Navy and then, later, earned his Wings of Gold as a naval aviator, proudly following in the footsteps of Linda’s father. Afterward, wanting to be based close to home, Dan had asked to fly the EA-18G Growler electronic warfare aircraft in a squadron based at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island in Washington State. The squadron was currently embarked on USS Ronald Reagan, a Nimitz-class supercarrier, forward-deployed to the western Pacific. Colt hoped this trip would also allow him to visit the Reagan and see his son.

  When the flight attendant began handing out dinner menus, Colt glanced quickly at the interesting looking woman seated next to him. Actually, near him was more accurate. The Airbus 350-900 business class section was laid out in a 1-2-1 configuration in a herringbone pattern. Colt was seated in the left-hand seat of the two center seats. Leaning over to offer a menu, the flight attendant introduced herself as Ashley, making Colt wonder if that was her real name or her “flight” name. Some of his airline pilot friends had shared with him the growing practice of flight attendants using made-up names to protect themselves from the unwanted advances of inebriated passengers.

  “Mr. Garrett?” Ashley asked. “Would you like something to drink?”

  “Yes,” Colt replied. “I’ll have a Heritage BSB, neat. And the sirloin tip dinner if you have any left.”

  After taking Colt’s order, Ashley turned to the passenger near him.

  “And Commander, what would you like this evening?”

  During the boarding process, Colt had noticed that the confident-looking woman had a black, satchel-type Pelican case, about five inches thick, with two padlocks, shackled to her seat support. He momentarily flashed back to an experience many years ago involving a shackled briefcase, a memory he preferred to forget.

  After the flight attendant moved on to the next aisle, Colt turned to his neighbor and offered his hand.

  “Hmm, a navy commander with a courier case. You must be pretty important!”

  The woman looked back at him, squarely in the eye. “You’re looking pretty important yourself!” she teased, and they both laughed. Now, Colt had the opportunity to look closely at the woman for the first time. She appeared to be about forty years old, which made sense for a navy commander. She was casually dressed in dark jeans and a royal blue silk blouse, with a striking-looking solitaire diamond necklace, but no wedding ring. “I’m Jennifer Abrams,” she said. “But people call me Jen.”

  “I’m Colton Garrett, but people call me Colt.”

  “So, Colt, what do you do when you’re not flying across the Pacific?”

  “Well, I’m what most people call a policy wonk.”

  “How does one become a policy wonk?” she asked with a grin. “Is there a school for that?”

  “Kind of,” he replied. “I studied at the Jackson School at the University of Washington. Based my doctoral dissertation on Hobson’s Choice and how that concept is so often reflected in international relations.”

  Jen’s eyes narrowed in playful focus. “I think I’ve heard of that. Doesn’t it have something to do with the illusion of choice, being forced to pick between two bad options?”

  “Almost. What you just described is technically a dilemma. The concept of Hobson’s Choice is deciding between something and nothing at all. It’s supposedly based on a story about Thomas Hobson, who owned a horse stable in Cambridge. Students at Cambridge University would rent his horses, often selecting his best horses and then mistreating them. To prevent his best animals from constantly being abused, he created a rule that students could take any horse they wanted, as long as it was the horse next to the stable door. Take it or leave it.”

  “And you received a Ph.D. for that?” Jen kidded.

  Colt noticed and liked how her eyes seemed to sparkle when she spoke.

  “Not exactly,” he replied. “My research focused on negotiations between nations when one side holds all the cards, leaving the other party with only two options: accept the offer or walk away. No further negotiation; take it or leave it.”

  Jen thought for a moment, then asked, “So the concept of unconditional surrender used during World War II is an example of Hobson’s Choice?”

  “Exactly, although in war it typically means both sides still agree to abide by international law. Ulysses S. Grant was the first to use the unconditional surrender concept during the confederate surrender of Fort Donaldson in the Civil War.”

  Jen nodded, and Colt watched as she put on her noise-canceling headphones and picked up her paperback — the international signs that a conversation is over. Colt had lots of experience with this particular type of non-verbal communication. Such is the burden of a policy wonk, he thought.

  After dinner was served and eaten, the flight attendants began the evening ritual of morphing the business class section into a flying Pullman sleeping car, helping passengers push the correct buttons to convert their upright seats into flat beds. Colt and Jen both used the bathrooms to change into sleeping clothes, and then the
cabin lights were dimmed to allow passengers the luxury of sleeping their way across the Pacific.

  Six hours later, Colt abruptly woke from an old recurring dream involving a shackled courier case. His heart was racing, and his pajama top was wet with perspiration. He hadn’t had the dream for quite some time, and he thought he was through with them. But seeing Jen’s courier case must have brought back memories of that terrible day many years earlier. Colt was concerned he might have cried out during the dream, as his wife told him he had done frequently. He decided to use the restroom to freshen up and then get a cup of herbal tea before attempting to return to sleep. He was standing by the mid-cabin galley when flight attendant Ashley noticed him leaning against the plane’s bulkhead.

  “Trouble sleeping?” she asked sympathetically.

  “Yep, it’s one of the benefits of getting old. You can’t possibly sleep your life away!”

  “Who says you’re getting old?” she argued.

  Ashley had first noticed the nice-looking man seated in 12G when he boarded the flight in Seattle, and she had been waiting for a chance to initiate a conversation with him. She would often select a male passenger on transoceanic flights to engage in harmless flirting, safe in the knowledge she would never see the person again after the flight’s end. And this guy was appealing: medium height, slender build, and about sixty years old with dark brown hair and greying temples. He was conservatively and tastefully dressed in a classic Brooks Brothers Fitzgerald gray pinstripe suit, white oxford button-down shirt, and navy rep tie. He now wore black pajamas and the slippers provided in Delta’s business class amenities kit.

  “Well, sometimes I sure feel old. I’m Colt Garrett,” he said, offering his hand.

  “Nice to meet you, Colt. Ashley Walters. How did you get the name Colt?”

  “It’s short for Colton, an old family name, and I’ve been ribbed about it since I was a kid. How long have you been flying with Delta, Ashley?”

  “Ever since graduating from Western Washington. A bachelors in sociology didn’t leave me with many options, so I joined my roommate and applied to Delta.”