by Tom Clancy
“So’s the hill. It’s a wash.”
“Tonight?” Kelly asked. It wasn’t hard to catch the meaning of the General’s words.
“Think you’re up to it?”
“I suppose we need to know that. When’s the mission going to go?”
Greer took that one. “You don’t need to know that yet.”
“How much warning will I have?”
The CIA official weighed that one before answering. “Three days before we move out. We’ll be going over mission parameters in a few hours. For now, watch how these men are setting up.” Greer and Young headed off to their car.
“Aye aye,” Kelly replied to their backs. The Marines had coffee going. He got a cup and started blending in with the assault team.
“Not bad,” Irvin said.
“Thanks. I always figured it’s one of the most important things you need to know in this business.”
“What’s that?” Irvin asked.
“How to run away as far and fast as you can.”
Irvin laughed and then came the first work detail of the day, something that let the men cool down and have a laugh of their own. They started moving the mannequins around. It had become a ritual, which woman went with which kids. They’d discovered that the models could be posed, and the Marines made great fun of that. Two had brought new outfits, both rather skimpy bikinis, which they ostentatiously put on two lounging lady-figures. Kelly watched with incredulous amazement, then realized that the swimsuit models had had their bodies—painted, in the interests of realism. Jesus, he thought, and they say sailors are screwy!
USS Ogden was a new ship, or nearly so, having emerged from the New York Naval Shipyard’s building ways in 1964. Rather a strange-looking ship, she was 570 feet long, and her forward half had a fairly normal superstructure and eight guns to annoy attacking aircraft. The odd part was the after half, which was flat on top and hollow underneath. The flat part was good for landing helicopters, and directly under that was a well deck designed to be filled with water from which landing craft could operate. She and her eleven sister ships had been designed to support landing operations, to put Marines on the beach for the amphibious-assault missions that The Corps had invented in the 1920s and perfected in the 1940s. But the Pacific Fleet amphibious ships were without a mission now—the Marines were on the beach, generally brought in by chartered jetliners to conventional airports—and so some of the ‘phibs were being outfitted for other missions. As Ogden was.
Cranes were lifting a series of trailer vans onto the flight deck. When secured in place, deck parties erected various radio antennas. Other such objects were being bolted into place on the superstructure. The activity was being done in the open—there is no convenient way of hiding a 17,000-ton warship—and it was clear that Ogden, like two more sister ships, was transforming herself into a platform for the gathering of electronic intelligence—ELINT. She sailed out of the San Diego Naval Base just as the sun began to set, without an escort and without the Marine battalion she was built to carry. Her Navy crew of thirty officers and four hundred ninety enlisted men settled into their routine watch bill, conducting training exercises and generally doing what most had chosen to do by enlisting in the Navy instead of risking a slot in the draft. By sunset she was well under the horizon, and her new mission had been communicated to various interested parties, not all of whom were friendly to the flag which she flew. With all those trailers aboard and a score of antennas looking like a forest of burnt trees to clutter up her flight deck—and no Marines embarked—she wouldn’t be doing anyone direct harm. That was obvious to all who had seen her.
Twelve hours later, and two hundred miles at sea, bosun’s mates assembled parties from the deck division and told some rather confused young men to unbolt all but one of the trailers—which were empty—and to strike down all of the antennas on the flight deck. Those on the superstructure would remain in place. The antennas went below first, into the capacious equipment-storage spaces. The empty trailers were wheeled after them, clearing the flight deck entirely.
At Subic Bay Naval Base, the commanding officer of USS Newport News, along with his executive officer and gunnery officer, looked over their missions for the coming month. His command was one of the last true cruisers in the world, with eight-inch guns like few others. They were semiautomatic, and loaded their powder charges not in loose bags but in brass cartridge cases different only in scale from the kind any deer hunter might jack into his Winchester .30-30. Able to reach almost twenty miles, Newport News could deliver a stunning volume of fire, as an NVA battalion had learned only two weeks earlier, much to its misfortune. Fifty rounds per gun tube per minute. The center gun of the number-two turret was damaged, and so the cruiser could be counted on to put only four hundred rounds per minute on target, but that was the equivalent of one hundred thousand-pound bombs. The cruiser’s task for the next deployment, the Captain learned, was to go after selected triple-A batteries on the Vietnamese coast. That was fine with him, though the mission he really lusted for was to enter Haiphong harbor one night.
“Your lad seems to know his business—till now, anyway,” General Young observed about quarter of two.
“It’s a lot to ask him to do something like this the first night, Marty,” Dutch Maxwell countered.
“Well, hell, Dutch, if he wants to play with my Marines . . . ” That’s how Young was. They were all “his” Marines. He’d flown with Foss off Guadalcanal, covered Chesty Puller’s regiment in Korea, and was one of the men who’d perfected close-air support into the art form it now was.
They stood on the hilltop overlooking the site Young had recently erected. Fifteen of the Recon Marines were on the slopes, and their job was to detect and eliminate Clark as he climbed to his notional perch. Even General Young thought it an overly harsh test on Clark’s first day with the team, but Jim Greer had made a very big deal of telling them how impressive the lad was, and spooks needed to be put in their place. Even Dutch Maxwell had agreed with that.
“What a crummy way to earn a living,” said the admiral with seventeen hundred carrier landings under his belt.
“Lions and tigers and bears.” Young chuckled. “Oh, my! I don’t really expect him to make it here the first time. We have some fine people in this team, don’t we, Irvin?”
“Yes, sir,” the master gunnery sergeant agreed at once.
“So what do you think of Clark?” Young asked next.
“Seems like he knows a thing or two,” Irvin allowed. “Pretty decent shape for a civilian—and I like his eyes.”
“Oh?”
“You notice, sir? He’s got cold eyes. He’s been around the block.” They spoke in low murmurs. Kelly was supposed to get here, but they didn’t want their voices to make it too easy for him, nor to add any extraneous noise that might mask the sounds of the woods. “But not tonight. I told the people what would happen if this guy gets through the line on his first try.”
“Don’t you Marines know how to play fair?” Maxwell objected with an unseen smile. Irvin handled the answer.
“Sir, ‘fair’ means all my Marines get back home alive. Fuck the others, beg your pardon, sir.”
“Funny thing, Sergeant, that’s always been my definition of ‘fair,’ too.” This guy would have made one hell of a command master chief, Maxwell thought to himself.
“Been following baseball, Marty?” The men relaxed. No way Clark would make it.
“I think the Orioles look pretty tough.”
“Gentlemen, we’re losing our concentration, like,” Irvin suggested diplomatically.
“Quite right. Please excuse us,” General Young replied. The two flag officers settled back into stillness, watching the illuminated hands of their watches turn to three o‘clock, the operation’s agreed stop-time. They didn’t hear Irvin speak, or even breathe, for all that time. That took an hour. It was a comfortable one for the Marine general, but the Admiral just didn’t like being in the woods, with all the bloodsucking
bugs, and probably snakes, and all manner of unpleasant things not ordinarily found in the cockpit of a fighter aircraft. They listened to the whispering breezes in the pines, heard the flapping of bats and owls and perhaps some other night fliers, and little else. Finally it was 02:55. Marty Young stood and stretched, fishing in his pocket for a cigarette.
“Anybody got a smoke? I’m out, and I could sure use one,” a voice murmured.
“Here you go, Marine,” Young said, the gracious general. He held one out to the shadow and flicked his trusty Zippo. Then he jumped back a step. “Shit!”
“Personally, General, I think Pittsburgh looks pretty tough this year. The Orioles are a little weak in the pitching department.” Kelly took one puff, without inhaling, and dropped it to the ground.
“How long have you been here?” Maxwell demanded.
“ ‘Lions and tigers and bears, oh, my!’ ” Kelly mimicked. ‘I ’killed’ you around one-thirty, sir.”
“You son of a bitch!” Irvin said. “You killed me.”
“And you were very polite about being quiet, too.”
Maxwell turned on his flashlight. Mr. Clark—the Admiral had consciously decided to change the boy’s name in his own mind—just stood there, a rubber knife in his hand, his face painted with green and black shadows, and for the first time since the Battle of Midway, his body shuddered with fear. The young face split into a grin as he pocketed his “knife.”
“How the hell did you do that?” Dutch Maxwell demanded.
“Pretty well, I think, Admiral.” Kelly chuckled, reaching down for Marty Young’s canteen. “Sir, if I told, then everybody’d be able to, right?”
Irvin stood up from his place of repose and walked next to the civilian.
“Mr. Clark, sir, I think you’ll do.”
22
Titles
Grishanov was in the embassy. Hanoi was a strange city, a mixture of French-Imperial architecture, little yellow people and bomb craters. Traveling about a country at war was an unusual exercise, all the more so in an automobile daubed with camouflage paint. A passing American fighter-bomber coming back from a mission with an extra bomb or some unexpended 20-millimeter cannon rounds could easily use the car for practice, though they never seemed to do so. The luck of the draw made this a cloudy, stormy day, and air activity was at a minimum, allowing him to relax, but not to enjoy the ride. Too many bridges were down, too many roads cratered, and the trip lasted three times what ought to have been the norm. A helicopter trip would have been much faster, but would also have been madness. The Americans seemed to live under the fiction that an automobile might be civilian-owned—this in a country where a bicycle was a status symbol! Grishanov marveled—but a helicopter was an aircraft, and killing one was a kill. Now in Hanoi, he got the chance to sit in a concrete building where the electricity was a sometime thing—off at the moment—and air conditioning an absurd fantasy. The open windows and poorly fitting screens allowed insects freer reign than the people who worked and sweated here. For all that, it was worth the trip to be here in his country’s embassy, where he could speak his native tongue and for a precious few hours stop being a semidiplomat.
“So?” his general asked.
“It goes well, but I must have more people. This is too much for one man to do alone.”
“That is not possible.” The General poured his guest a glass of mineral water. The principal mineral present was salt. The Russians drank a lot of that here. “Nikolay Yevgeniyevich, they’re being difficult again.”
“Comrade General, I know that I am only a fighter pilot and not a political theorist. I know that our fraternal socialist allies are on the front line of the conflict between Marxism-Leninism and the reactionary Capitalist West. I know that this war of national liberation is a vital part of our struggle to liberate the world from oppression—”
“Yes, Kolya”—the General smiled slyly, allowing the man who was not a political theorist to dispense with further ideological incantations—“we know that all of this is true. Do go on. I have a busy day planned.”
The Colonel nodded his appreciation. “These arrogant little bastards are not helping us. They are using us, they are using me, they are using my prisoners to blackmail us. And if this is Marxism-Leninism, then I’m a Trotskyite.” It was a joke that few would have been able to make lightly, but Grishanov’s father was a Central Committee member with impeccable political credentials.
“What are you learning, Comrade Colonel?” the General said, just to keep things on track.
“Colonel Zacharias is everything that we were told, and more. We are now planning how to defend the Rodina against the Chinese. He is the ‘blue team’ leader.”
“What?” The General blinked. “Explain?”
“This man is a fighter pilot, but also an expert on defeating air defenses. Can you believe it, he’s only flown bombers as a guest, but he’s actually planned SAC missions and helped to write SAC doctrine for defense-avoidance and -suppression. So now he’s doing that for me.”
“Notes?”
Grishanov’s face darkened. “Back at the camp. Our fraternal socialist comrades are ‘studying’ them. Comrade General, do you know how important this data is?”
The General was by profession a tank officer, not an aviator, but he was also one of the brighter stars rising in the Soviet firmament, here in Vietnam to study everything the Americans were doing. It was one of the premier jobs in his country’s uniformed service.
“I would imagine that it’s highly valuable.”
Kolya leaned forward. “In another two months, perhaps six weeks, I will be able to reverse-plan SAC. I’ll be able to think as they think. I will know not only what their current plans are, but I will also be able to duplicate their thinking into the future. Excuse me, I do not mean to inflate my importance,” he said sincerely. “This American is giving me a graduate course in American doctrine and philosophy. I’ve seen the intelligence estimates we get from KGB and GRU. At least half of it is wrong. That’s only one man. Another one has told me about their carrier doctrine. Another about NATO war plans. It goes on, Comrade General.”
“How do you do this, Nikolay Yevgeniyevich?” The General was new at this post, and had met Grishanov only once before, though his service reputation was better than excellent.
Kolya leaned back in his chair. “Kindness and sympathy.”
“To our enemies?” the General asked sharply.
“Is it our mission to inflict pain on these men?” He gestured outside. “That’s what they do, and what do they get for it? Mainly lies that sound good. My section in Moscow discounted nearly everything these little monkeys sent. I was told to come here to get information. That is what I am doing. I will take all the criticism I must in order to get information such as this, Comrade.”
The General nodded. “So why are you here?”
“I need more people! It’s too much for one man. What if I am killed—what if I get malaria or food poisoning—who will do my work? I can’t interrogate all of these prisoners myself. Especially now that they are beginning to talk, I take more and more time with each, and I lose energy. I lose continuity. There are not enough hours in the day.”
The General sighed. “I’ve tried. They offer you their best—”
Grishanov almost snarled in frustration. “Their best what? Best barbarians? That would destroy my work. I need Russians. Men, kulturny men! Pilots, experienced officers. I’m not interrogating private soldiers. These are real professional warriors. They are valuable to us because of what they know. They know much because they are intelligent, and because they are intelligent they will not respond well to crude methods. You know what I really need to support me? A good psychiatrist. And one more thing,” he added, inwardly trembling at his boldness.
“Psychiatrist? That is not serious. And I doubt that we’ll be able to get other men into the camp. Moscow is delaying shipments of antiaircraft rockets for ‘technical reasons.’ Our local allies are b
eing difficult again, as I said, and the disagreement escalates.” The General leaned back and wiped sweat from his brow. “What is this other thing?”
“Hope, Comrade General. I need hope.” Colonel Nikolay Yevgeniyevich Grishanov gathered himself.
“Explain.”
“Some of these men know their situation. Probably all suspect it. They are well briefed on what happens to prisoners here, and they know that their status is unusual. Comrade General, the knowledge these men have is encyclopedic. Years of useful information.”
“You’re building up to something.”
“We can’t let them die,” Grishanov said, immediately qualifying himself to lessen the impact of what he was saying. “Not all of them. Some we must have. Some will serve us, but I must have something to offer to them.”
“Bring them back?”
“After the hell they’ve lived here—”
“They’re enemies, Colonel! They all trained to kill us! Save your sympathy for your own countrymen!” growled a man who’d fought in the snows outside Moscow.
Grishanov stood his ground, as the General had once done. “They are men, not unlike us, Comrade General. They have knowledge that is useful, if only we have the intelligence to extract it. It is that simple. Is it too much to ask that we treat them with kindness, that we give something in return for learning how to save our country from possible destruction? We could torture them, as our ‘fraternal socialist allies’ have done, and get nothing! Does that serve our country?” It came down to that, and the General knew it. He looked at the Colonel of Air Defense and his first expressed thought was the obvious one.
“You wish to risk my career along with yours? My father is not a Central Committeeman.” I could have used this man in my battalion. . . .
“Your father was a soldier,” Grishanov pointed out. “And like you, a good one.” It was a skillful play and both knew it, but what really mattered was the logic and significance of what Grishanov was proposing, an intelligence coup that would stagger the professional spies of KGB and GRU. There was only one possible reaction from a real soldier with a real sense of mission.
