“No sweat,” Ricks observed comfortably. “Hell, Jim, I have to have something to do. How many contacts did you have on the patrol?”
“One Akula-class, the Admiral Lunin. Picked her up three times, never closer than sixty thousand yards. If he got a sniff of us—hell, he didn’t. Never turned toward us. We held him for sixteen hours once. Had really good water, and, well—” Rosselli smiled—“I decided to trail him for a while, way the hell away, of course.”
“Once a fast-attack, always a fast-attack,” Ricks said with a grin. He was a lifelong boomer driver, and the idea did not appeal to him, but what the hell, it wasn’t a time to criticize.
“Nice profile you did on him,” Mancuso put in, to show that he wasn’t the least offended by Rosselli’s action. “Pretty good boat, isn’t it?”
“The Akula? Too good. But not good enough,” Rosselli said. “I wouldn’t start worrying until we find a way to track these mothers. I tried when I had Honolulu, against Richie Seitz on Alabama. He greased my ass for me. Only time that ever happened. I figure God could find an Ohio, but He’ll have to have a good day.”
Rosselli wasn’t kidding. The Ohio-class of missile submarines were more than just quiet. Their level of radiated noise was actually lower than the background noise level of the ocean, like a whisper at a rock concert. To hear them you had to get incredibly close, but to prevent that from happening, the Ohios had the best sonar systems yet devised. The Navy had done everything right with this class. The original contract had specified a maximum speed of 26-7 knots. The first Ohio had made 28.5. On builder’s trials, Maine had made 29.1 due to a new and very slick super-polymer paint. The seven-bladed propeller enabled almost twenty knots without a hint of noisy cavitation, and the reactor plant operated in almost all regimes on natural convection circulation, obviating the need for potentially noisy feed-pumps. The Navy’s mania for noise-control had reached its pinnacle in this class of submarine. Even the blades of the galley mixer were coated with vinyl to prevent metal-to-metal clatter. What Rolls-Royce was to cars, Ohio was to submarines.
Rosselli turned. “Well, she’s yours now, Harry.”
“You couldn’t have set her up much better, Jim. Come on, the O-Club’s open, and I’ll buy you a beer.”
“Yeah,” the former commanding officer observed with a husky voice. On the way out, members of the crew lined up to shake his hand one last time. By the time Rosselli got to the ladder, there were tears in his eyes. On the walk down the brow, they were running down his cheeks. Mancuso understood. It had been the same for him. A good CO developed a genuine love for his boat and his men, and for Rosselli it was worse still. He’d had his extra shots at command, more than even he had gotten, and that made the last one all the harder to leave. Like Mancuso, all Rosselli could look forward to now was a staff job, commanding a desk, nevermore to hold that godlike post of commanding officer of a ship of war. He’d be able to ride the boats, of course, to rate skippers, check ideas and tactics, but henceforth he’d be a tolerated visitor, never really welcome aboard. Most uncomfortable of all, he’d have to avoid revisiting his former command, lest the crew compare his command style to that of their new CO, possibly undermining the new man’s command authority. It was, Mancuso reflected, like it must have been for immigrants, as it had been for his own ancestors, looking back one last time at Italy, knowing that they would never return to it, that their lives were irrevocably changed.
The three men climbed into Mancuso’s staff car for the ride to the reception at the Officers Club. Rosselli set his souvenirs on the floor and extracted a handkerchief to wipe his eyes. It isn’t fair, just isn’t fair. To leave command of a ship like this one to be a goddamned telephone operator at the NMCC. Joint service billet, my ass! Rosselli blew his nose and contemplated the shore duty that the remainder of his active career held.
Mancuso looked away in quiet respect.
Ricks just shook his head. No need to get all that emotional about it. He was already making mental notes. The Torpedo Department wasn’t up to speed yet, eh? Well, he’d do something about that! And the XO was supposed to be super-hot. Hmph. What skipper ever failed to praise his XO? If this guy thought he was ready for command, that meant an XO who might be a little too ready, and might not be totally supportive, might be feeling his oats. Ricks had had one of those already. Such XOs often needed some subtle reminders of who was boss. Ricks knew how to do that. The good news, the most important news, of course, was about the power plant. Ricks was a product of the Nuclear Navy’s obsession with the nuclear power plant. It was something the Squadron Commander, Mancuso, was overly casual about, Ricks judged. The same was probably true of Rosselli. So, they’d passed their ORSE—so what? On his boats, the engineering crew had to be ready for an ORSE every goddamned day. One problem with these Ohios was that the systems worked so well people took things casually. That would be doubly true after maxing their ORSE. Complacency was the harbinger of disaster. And these fast-attack guys and their dumb mentality! Tracking an Akula, for God’s sake! Even from sixty-K yards, what did this lunatic think he was doing?
Ricks’ motto was that of the boomer community: WE HIDE WITH PRIDE (the less polite version was CHICKEN OF THE SEA). If they can’t find you, they can’t hurt you. Boomers weren’t supposed to go around looking for trouble. Their job was to run from it. Missile submarines weren’t actually combatant ships at all. That Mancuso didn’t reprimand Rosselli on the spot was amazing to Ricks.
He had to consider that, however. Mancuso hadn’t reprimanded Rosselli. He’d commended him.
Mancuso was his squadron commander, and did have those two Distinguished Service Medals. It wasn’t exactly fair that Ricks was a boomer type stuck working for a fast-attack puke, but there it was. A charger himself, he was clearly a man who wanted aggressive skippers. And Mancuso was the guy who’d be doing his fitness reports. That was the central truth in the equation, wasn’t it? Ricks was an ambitious man. He wanted command of a squadron, followed by a nice Pentagon tour, then he’d get his star as a Rear Admiral (Lower Half), then command of a Submarine Group—the one at Pearl would be nice; he liked Hawaii—after which he’d be very well suited for yet another Pentagon tour. Ricks was a man who’d mapped out his career path while still a lieutenant. So long as he did everything exactly by The Book, more exactly than anyone else, he’d stick to that path.
He hadn’t quite planned on working for a fast-attack type, though. He’d have to adapt. Well, he knew how to do that. If that Akula showed up on his next patrol, he’d do what Rosselli had done—but better, of course. He had to. Mancuso would expect it, and Ricks knew that he was in direct competition with thirteen other SSBN COs. To get that squadron command, he had to be the best of fourteen. To be the best, he had to do things that would impress the squadron commander. Okay, so to keep his career path as straight as it had been for twenty years, he had to do a few new and different things. Ricks would have preferred not to, but career came first, didn’t it? He knew that he was destined to have an Admiral’s flag in the corner of his Pentagon office someday—someday soon. He’d make the adjustment. With an Admiral’s flag came a staff, and a driver, and his own parking place in the acres of Pentagon blacktop, and further career-enhancing jobs that might, if he were very lucky, culminate in the E-Ring office of the CNO—better yet, Director of Naval Reactors, which was technically junior to the CNO, but carried with it eight full years in place. He knew himself better suited for that job, which was the one that set policy for the entire nuclear community. DNR wrote The Book. Everything he had to do was set forth in The Book. As the Bible was the path to salvation for Christian and Jew, The Book was the path to flag rank. Ricks knew The Book. Ricks was a brilliant engineer.
J. Robert Fowler was human after all, Ryan told himself. The conference was held upstairs, on the bedroom level of the White House, because the air conditioning in the West Wing was down for repairs, and the sun blasting through the windows of the Oval Office made that room uninhab
itable. Instead they were using an upstairs sitting room, the one often delegated for the buffet line at those “informal” White House dinners that the President liked to have for “intimate” groups of fifty or so. The antique chairs were grouped around a largish dinner table in a room whose walls were decorated with a mural mélange of historical scenes. Moreover, it was a shirtsleeve environment. Fowler was a man uncomfortable with the trappings of his office. Once a federal prosecutor, an attorney who had not once defended a criminal before entering politics with both feet and never looking back, he’d grown up in an informal working environment and seemed to prefer a tie loose in his collar and sleeves rolled up to the elbow. It seemed so very odd to Ryan, who knew the President also to be priggish and stiff in his relationships with subordinates. Odder still, the President had walked into the room carrying the sports page from the Baltimore Sun, which he preferred to the local papers’ sports coverage. President Fowler was a rabid football fan. The first NFL pre-season games were already history, and he was handicapping the teams for the coming season. The DDCI shrugged, leaving his coat on. There was as much complexity in this man as any other, Jack knew, and complexities were not predictable.
The President had discreetly cleared his calendar for this afternoon conference. Sitting at the head of the table, and directly under an air-conditioning vent, Fowler actually smiled a little as his guests took their places. At his left was G. Dennis Bunker, Secretary of Defense. Former CEO of Aerospace, Inc., Bunker was a former USAF fighter pilot who’d flown 100 missions in the early days of Vietnam, then left the service to found a company he’d ultimately built into a multibilliondollar empire that sprawled across southern California. He’d sold that and all his other commercial holdings to take this job, keeping only one enterprise under his control—the San Diego Chargers. That retention had been the subject of considerable joshing during his confirmation hearings, and there was light-hearted speculation that Fowler liked Bunker mainly for his SecDef’s love of football. Bunker was a rarity in the Fowler Administration, as close to a hawk as anyone here, a knowledgeable player in the defense area whose lectures to men in uniform were listened to. Though he’d left the Air Force as a captain, he’d left with three Distinguished Flying Crosses earned driving his F-105 fighter-bomber “downtown” into the environs of Hanoi. Dennis Bunker had seen the elephant. He could talk tactics with captains and strategy with generals. Both the uniforms and the politicians respected the SecDef, and that was rare.
Next to Bunker was Brent Talbot, Secretary of State. A former professor of political science at Northwestern University, Talbot was a longtime friend and ally of the President. Seventy years old, with regal white hair over a pale, intelligent face, Talbot was less an academic than an old-fashioned gentleman, albeit one with a killer instinct. After years of sitting on PFIAB—the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board—and countless other commissions, he was in a place where he could make his impact felt. The archetypical outside-insider, he’d finally picked a winning horse in Fowler. He was also a man with genuine vision. The changes in the East-West relationship signaled to the SecState a historic opportunity to change the face of the world, and he wanted his name on the changes.
On the President’s right was his Chief of Staff, Arnold van Damm. This was, after all, a political assembly, and political advice was of paramount import. Next to van Damm was Elizabeth Elliot, the new National Security Advisor. She looked rather severe today, Ryan noted, dressed in an expensive suit with a wispy cravat knotted around her pretty, thin neck. Beside her was Marcus Cabot, Director of Central Intelligence, and Ryan’s immediate boss.
The second-rank people were farther away from the seat of power, of course. Ryan and Adler were at the far end of the table, both to separate them from the President and to allow their fuller visibility to the senior members of the conference when they began speaking.
“This your year, Dennis?” the President asked the SecDef.
“You bet it is!” Bunker said. “I’ve waited long enough, but with those two new linebackers, this year we’re going to Denver.”
“Then you’ll meet the Vikings there,” Talbot observed. “Dennis, you had the first draft pick, why didn’t you take Tony Wills?”
“I have three good running backs. I needed linebackers, and that kid from Alabama is the best I’ve ever seen.”
“You’ll regret it,” the Secretary of State pronounced. Tony Wills had been drafted from Northwestern. An academic All-American, Rhodes Scholar, winner of the Heisman Trophy, and the kid who had almost single-handedly resurrected Northwestern as a football school, Wills had been Talbot’s prize student. By all accounts an exceptional young man, people were already talking about his future in politics. Ryan thought that premature, even in America’s changing political landscape. “He’ll kick your butt, third game of the season. And then again in the Super Bowl, if your team makes it that far, which I doubt, Dennis.”
“We’ll see,” Bunker snorted.
The President laughed as he arranged his papers. Liz Elliot tried and failed to hide her disapproval, Jack noted from twenty feet away. Her papers were already arranged, her pen in its place to make notes, and her face impatient at the locker-room talk at her end of the table. Well, she had the job she’d angled for, even if it had taken a death—Ryan had heard the details by now—to get it for her.
“I think we’ll call the meeting to order,” President Fowler said. Noise in the room stopped cold. “Mr. Adler, could you fill us in on what happened on your trip?”
“Thank you, Mr. President. I would say that most of the pieces are in place. The Vatican agrees to the terms of our proposal unconditionally and is ready to host the negotiations at any time.”
“How did Israel react?” Liz Elliot asked, to show that she was on top of things.
“Could have been better,” Adler said neutrally. “They’ll come, but I expect serious resistance.”
“How serious?”
“Anything they can do to avoid being nailed down, they’ll do. They are very uncomfortable with this idea.”
“This was hardly unexpected, Mr. President,” Talbot added.
“What about the Saudis?” Fowler asked Ryan.
“Sir, my read is that they’ll play. Prince Ali was very optimistic. We spent an hour with the King, and his reaction was cautious but positive. Their concern is that the Israelis won’t do it, no matter what pressure we put on them, and they are worried about being left hanging. Setting that aside for the moment, Mr. President, the Saudis appear quite willing to accept the plan as drafted, and to accept their participatory role in its implementation. They offered some modifications, which I outlined in my briefing sheet. As you can see, none of them are substantively troublesome. In fact, two of them look like genuine enhancements.”
“The Soviets?”
“Scott handled that,” Secretary Talbot replied. “They have signed off on the idea, but their read also is that Israel will not cooperate. President Narmonov cabled us day before yesterday that the plan is wholly compatible with his government’s policy. They are willing to underwrite the plan to the extent that they will restrict arms sales to the other nations in the region to cover defensive needs only.”
“Really?” Ryan blurted.
“That does clobber one of your predictions, doesn’t it?” DCI Cabot noted with a chuckle.
“How so?” the President asked.
“Mr. President, arms sales to that area are a major cash cow for the Sovs. For them to reduce those sales will cost them billions in hard-currency earnings that they really need.”
Ryan leaned back and whistled. “That is surprising.”
“They also want to have a few people at the negotiations. That seems fair enough. The arms-sales aspect of the treaty—if we get that far—will be set up as a side-bar codicil between America and the Soviets.”
Liz Elliot smiled at Ryan. She’d predicted that development.
“In return, the Soviets want so
me help on farm commodities, and a few trade credits,” Talbot added. “It’s cheap at the price. Soviet cooperation in this affair is hugely important to us, and the prestige associated with the treaty is important for them. It’s a very equitable deal for the both of us. Besides, we have all that wheat lying around and doing nothing.”
“So the only stumbling block is Israel?” Fowler asked the table. He was answered with nods. “How serious?”
“Jack,” Cabot said, turning to his deputy, “how did Avi Ben Jakob react to things?”
“We had dinner the day before I flew to Saudi Arabia. He looked very unhappy. Exactly what he knew I do not know. I didn’t give him very much to warn his government with, and—”
“What does ‘not very much’ mean, Ryan?” Elliot snapped down the table.
“Nothing,” Ryan answered. “I told him to wait and see. Intelligence people don’t like that. I would speculate that he knew something was up, but not what.”
“The looks I got at the table over there were pretty surprised,” Adler said to back Ryan up. “They expected something, but what I gave them wasn’t it.”
The Secretary of State leaned forward. “Mr. President, Israel has lived for two generations under the fiction that they and they alone are responsible for their national security. It’s become almost a religious belief over there—and despite the fact that we give them vast amounts of arms and other grants every year, it is their government policy to live as though that idea were true. Their institutional fear is that once they mortgage their national security to the goodwill of others, they become vulnerable to the discontinuance of that goodwill.”
“You get tired of hearing that,” Liz Elliot observed coldly.
Maybe you wouldn’t if six million of your relatives got themselves turned into air pollution, Ryan thought to himself. How the hell can we not be sensitive to memories of the Holocaust?
“I think we can take it as given that a bilateral defense treaty between the United States and Israel will sail through the Senate,” Arnie van Damm said, speaking for the first time.