Nimitz Class (1997)

by Patrick Robinson

  The plain truth is, I don’t happen to believe in a lot of the policies we have sometimes used to shortchange the families of those who died in the service of this great nation.

  I happen to believe that those who die bravely and honorably wearing the uniform of the United States Marines or Navy or Army or Air Force represent the very best of our men, and their sacrifice is the highest one of all. But I do not have the power to turn back the clock.

  I intend to be guided by my own conscience. And I will not tolerate hardship for those who held together the very fabric of our society, while husbands and fathers set sail in their great warship to police this world on behalf of the United States of America.

  It takes a while to fully understand what we owe to those men…for their devotion to duty…for their skill…for their courage…for their downright patriotism. And right here I’m talking about men who come screaming out of the sky in big seventy-thousand-pound fighter attack bombers, slamming them down at high speed into the heaving decks of aircraft carriers, risking their lives day after day.

  I’m talking about the skilled technicians who talk ’em down, about the navigators, the engineers, the flight deck crews out there in the wind and rain, working in constant danger, to make sure the rest of us live our lives in peace.

  My fellow Americans, I am talking about humanity, kindness, and decency. Most things are not fair. Over six thousand men died in that Carrier Battle Group, through no fault of their own, through no weakness of their own, through no circumstance which any one of them could have foreseen or prevented.

  And behind them, they have left devoted spouses, and children who need the finest education we can provide for them, because most of them will grow up to be Americans as fine and as honorable and as accomplished as their fathers.

  My fellow Americans, there are many times when I too am heartbroken…heartbroken at the injustices I see around me. And often, like most Presidents, I can do too little about it. But in this instance, I can. And yes, I will.

  I am placing before Congress a special bill that will provide Jefferson serviceman with children a twenty-thousand dollar-a-year additional pension, until the children have completed college. It applies to four thousand families and will result in payments of approximately $800 million…substantially less than the cost of just one aircraft carrier…about $3.25 cents for every American, spread over one decade. Is there any one person sitting out there who would dare to suggest this was too high a price for us to pay?

  In addition there will be increased military pensions for everyone involved. I am afraid I do not have the power to make that forthcoming law retroactive to benefit other families, bereaved through other wars. But I can do it for those who suffered innocently from the terrible accident which occurred on the Thomas Jefferson.

  Once more I would like to state again that my prayers, and those of my family, remain with you, and will do so for all of my days in this place…. Good night to you, and God bless you.

  Admiral Morgan found himself standing up, his clenched fist held high. He watched Dick Stafford step forward onto the podium to announce that the President would take no questions. And he saw the great man walk away, alone.

  Admiral Morgan shook his head. “That President of ours,” he muttered. “Ain’t he something? He just slaughtered ’em. Made a pure ball-buster of a speech, blew $800 million, rode roughshod over 150 years of military tradition, told Congress to get into line or else, and there’s not a journalist or a politician in this country who would dare to utter one word of criticism about what he just said. Jesus. Sure glad he’s on our side.”

  He picked up the phone and requested someone bring him his regular late supper. He then retired to his computer and pulled up a chart of the Bosporus, which he studied carefully for a half hour. “Shit,” he said. “I’d rather Baldridge made that journey than I. That little stretch of water is really dangerous, and I hope to hell someone can persuade Iain MacLean to make the voyage.” And he added, to the empty room, “If he can’t make it, no one can.”

  He did not realize he was echoing the words of MacLean himself, speaking about Ben Adnam.

  Meantime he tried to find a baseball game on television, and settled down to wait until 0200 on the Sunday morning. He called the operator, told him to wake him at that time, and send in coffee, then to connect him to a number in Russia, out on the Crimean Peninsula, a Naval base to which he intended, like the British in 1854, to lay siege.

  The Black Sea Fleet’s headquarters in Sevastopol was the admiral’s target, and he barked the number to the operator…“011-7-692-366204…don’t speak to anyone. Get me on that line before they answer.”

  “Yessir. 0200 it is.”

  Admiral Morgan was tired. He ate his roast beef sandwich supper and fell asleep, leaning back in his big leather swivel chair. It seemed to him like moments before the phone on his desk rang. He picked it up instantly, heard a number ringing seven thousand miles away on the main Russian Navy Black Sea switchboard. He knew it would be a very quiet, almost deserted building this Sunday morning at 0900 local time. He knew also that Vice Admiral Vitaly Rankov was in residence this weekend, and he knew too that the Russian Intelligence officer made a habit of working Sunday mornings.

  He heard the phone pickup announce the Sevastopol Fleet Headquarters. Admiral Morgan barked crisply in English, hoping to intimidate the operator: “Connect me to Admiral Rankov right now…he is expecting my call…and I’m calling from the United States of America. Hurry up!”

  There was a single click, and the deep, calm voice of the exSoviet battle cruiser commander rumbled down the line in Russian: “Rankov speaking, and this better be important. I’m very busy.”

  “Vitaly, you bastard, you’ve been avoiding me,” said Admiral Morgan, chuckling as he heard Rankov groan. “Jesus to God, Arnold, is there no peace left in all of the world?”

  But he laughed. The two Naval Intelligence men shared many secrets. “You know I thought this was the one time I would be safe from you—what is it? Two o’clock in the morning in Washington?” Rankov asked. “Where the hell are you, and why can’t you sleep like normal people?”

  “Duty, Vitaly, a devotion to duty. These are busy days for me.”

  “I guess so. Did you just blow up half the Iranian Navy, by the way?”

  “Who, me?” said Morgan, practiced now in responding to this accusation. “Certainly not. I’ve hardly left my desk.”

  “What I meant,” the Russian continued patiently, “was this: Did your special forces just take out the Ayatollah’s submarines in Bandar Abbas?”

  “No one has mentioned it to me,” lied Admiral Morgan effortlessly. “Why, has something happened?”

  The innocence in his voice was a betrayal to a fellow member of his profession. “You tell me a huge whopper, Arnold, when you know as soon as I do when something big breaks. You are an American bastard. Iranian Holy Man take out fatwah on you if you’re not very fucking careful. Then you won’t bother me no more. Those tribesmen slice your balls off.”

  “They better be a lot more careful I don’t slice theirs off,” growled Morgan.

  “You’re a terrible man, Arnold Morgan. What do you want, as if I don’t know. The Kilo, hah?”

  “Will you tell me about it, Vitaly?” said Morgan, his voice softening. “As a friend. I have to know.”

  “Will you tell me why?”

  “I will. This is on the record, and I expect you to convey it to your superiors.” He continued in a flat monotone. “Vitaly, we think someone got ahold of your Kilo, ran it out of the Black Sea, and sank the Thomas Jefferson with a nuclear-headed torpedo.”

  Admiral Morgan heard the Russian’s sharp intake of breath on the other end of the line. Admiral Rankov’s shock was unmistakable. “Jesus Christ!” said the voice from Sevastopol. “Are you kidding me?”

  “No, old buddy, I’m not. And you’ve got about five minutes to convince me that a United States carrier with six thousand men on bo
ard was not vaporized for no reason at all by your fucking Navy. And if we happen to believe that is what took place, you won’t need to think of reducing your Black Sea Fleet any more. We’ll carry that little job out for you, real quick. You guys wanna buy some cheap crash helmets?”

  “Arnold, please. Don’t be ridiculous. Of course we did no such thing. You must believe that. Why would we? We’re friends, aren’t we? You have to believe what I say. Look at our history…we’ve never been that stupid. We are not under the control of fanatics.”

  “Matter of fact, Vitaly, I do not believe you guys had anything to do with it. Mainly because I never thought you had anyone that clever! I want you to help me, and I want you to tell me the whole truth about that Kilo, right now.

  “After that, I probably want you to do a few other things. You say you are our friends, as we are yours. Right now I need you to prove it. My country will not forget your response, either way.”

  “Very well, Arnold. I will tell you what I know and you may judge for yourself. Our search for the Kilo revealed nothing. We worked below the surface for three weeks, used every electronic device we have to sweep the bottom of the sea. Nothing. We now believe it is not there, and never was. The drowned crewman on the Greek island was a member of the ship’s company of Kilo 630.

  “His name was very clearly on the next-of-kin list. But there we have a problem. When the Kilo left, it did not relay its next-of-kin signal. Therefore the whole list is now suspect. As you know, there are always three or four changes, men going out as replacements for two or three other men who are not going. So I could not swear the man was in the crew, though the odds are he was.

  “We believe the submarine escaped, and absconded with a crew of about fifty. We have heard nothing since she left port. There’s been much financial hardship in the Black Sea Fleet, and we guessed these guys decided to make a break, probably took their wives and made it to some island in the South Pacific or South America. The fact is, Kilo 630 has vanished without trace. And I’m sure you can understand why I was too embarrassed to call you back.”

  “Yes, I can. Not many navies as big as yours lose submarines. That kind of thing only happens in Third World countries, eh?”

  “Yes, Arnold, like Iran.”

  The American ignored that one. And then he said, “You don’t think another country could have bought the submarine, do you? From some Naval agency in the Ukraine?”

  “Hell no. We might be short of cash. But not that short. We’ll fulfill genuine export orders for submarines for almost anyone, the Arabs, China, the Warsaw Pact nations. But we would not just flog off a diesel-electric submarine with a fully operational crew to some guy dressed in a sheet and carrying a sackful of cash. Give us some credit. We have to live in the international community, like everyone else.”

  “Well, Vitaly, if you guys are innocent, and Kilo 630 just went missing, there are but two alternatives. Somebody rented it. Or somebody hijacked it.”

  “I know you think we are very inefficient compared to the mighty USA, Arnold. But our investigations here in Sevastopol indicate nothing unusual occurred in the three days preceding her departure. Preparations were normal. The captain filed the correct documents for an exercise in the Black Sea, following a refit. Members of the crew made the usual phone calls to wives, three substitute crew members did not leave their homes until the morning of departure. Our security around the submarine jetties is always very high, and no one saw anything to suggest the captain was coerced, or that he left with a gang of armed terrorists on board.

  “The first thing to arouse suspicion was the absence of the next-of-kin signal. And of course no one reported that for three days. We just assumed the submarine comms had forgotten. It was another twelve hours before we became concerned there had been no communication whatsoever from Kilo 630. Then we found the bits of wreckage, which we now believe were planted.”

  “So where does that leave us, old buddy? I agree with you, theft is out of the question. Your submarine was not hijacked. There would be some clues if Kilo 630 had left Sevastopol at gun point. And they would surely have got a SATCOM signal away. No, I think your submarine may have been rented.”

  “From whom? The President?”

  “No, Vitaly. From the captain.”

  “Admiral, he only drives it. He doesn’t own it.”

  “But what might he say if someone approached him, and asked him to undertake a mission? To bring his submarine, and fool his crew into taking part? In return for which he would be given ten million American dollars?”

  “But he would know he could never come home, not if he stole a Russian submarine.”

  “Home? To what? A run-down apartment in a dockyard town on the Black Sea where everyone’s broke? Bullshit, Vitaly, I could buy a Russian submarine captain. So could anyone with a vast amount of money. And that money would also buy you the crew and the boat.”

  “But, Arnold, these men have wives and children. We have checked them all. No one knows anything. They just believe their men are dead. We have not made public our suspicions that this may not be so.”

  “Let me ask you one thing, what kind of torpedoes was this Kilo equipped for?”

  “Her basic inventory was for the SAET-60’s—you know, 533 millimeters, 7.8 meters long. They run at around forty knots, with a fifteen-kilometer range. Regular stuff, antisurface vessel. She was fairly new, a Granay Class, Type 877M. She was fully loaded with about twenty of them, with a couple of tubes specially for wire-guidance.”

  “How big’s the regular warhead?”

  “Four hundred kilograms.”

  “Can they take a nuclear variant?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did this one have any on board with that variant?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many?”

  “Two.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because everyone involved in our internal inquiry knows every fucking thing there is to know about Kilo 630.”

  “May I now assume you will do what you can to help us?”

  “Arnold, you can count on us to help find her, and to share information. Any information. I assume you also will share with us if you find her before we do?”

  “We will find her first.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “There’s an old saying in the States—because we want it more.”

  “You’re a terrible man, Admiral Morgan.”

  “I’ll tell you what I do want. I want you to keep a clear eye on the families of the crew of Kilo 630. See if anything might be going on…you know, anyone spending a lot of money, or anything.”

  “You mean you think someone paid every member of the crew to go and blow up the carrier?”

  “No. I don’t think you would need to. You just have to present the captain with a cash fortune. Let him con the crew into believing they are on some secret mission on behalf of the Russian Navy. What would the crew do? Take a huge payoff, possibly a half million dollars apiece, and run, if they have any sense. Make a new life somewhere. Just watch the widows and orphans for me, willya?”

  “Sure I will. What else?”

  “Not much. Except I would like to send one of my men over to Sevastopol when you are in town, maybe a coupla weeks. You could show him around, give him the updates, and he will tell you personally what’s happening in our own investigation.”

  “Okay. Let’s try to find Kilo 630, shall we?”

  Admiral Morgan tossed his old coffee cups and paper sandwich plate into the wastepaper basket, pulled on his coat, and checked the time, 0256. He was about to switch off the lights and his computer, when the phone unexpectedly rang.

  “Morgan, speak.”

  The voice on the end of the line was foreign and struggled for English words. “Admiral Morgan. I am Israeli Intelligence. Ask to speak you by General Gavron. I am in Istanbul, and I find your man. He leave here on Black Sea ship, November 26. Bought ticket for cash, Turkish lira to Odessa. His n
ame, Adnam, on passenger list. Ship docked November 27, 1300. He no jump overboard, he get there too. General Gavron hand over to colleague in Odessa now. Don’t think your man come back here. Bye, Admiral, I go now.”

  The line from Turkey clicked dead. For a change Admiral Morgan was still holding the phone. “No, he didn’t go back there. He went straight past—right through the harbor, at periscope depth,” he said to the empty room.

  He walked to his sprawling maps and charts on the big sloping desk. He switched on the light, pulled out the one of the Black Sea coastlines, and went to work with his dividers, muttering as he considered the maps. “Istanbul to Odessa…375 miles…at fifteen to twenty knots he’s in the next day.”

  The admiral then measured the distance from Odessa, across the water to Sevastopol. “Two hundred miles to the southern headland of the Crimean Peninsula. Did Benjamin Adnam make that journey…to meet the captain of Kilo 630?” he asked aloud.