Commander-In-Chief

  Destroyers are so named because they are descendants of a class of ships known as torpedo-boat destroyers. Torpedo boats are a thing of the past, but torpedoes themselves are still a threat to surface warfare. They are now normally fired from submarines, of course, which is why destroyers are equipped with the most advanced antisubmarine warfare capabilities known to man.

  The James Greer was capable of antiair and antisurface missions as well, but there were no real surface threats to speak of in the area. Russia’s Baltic Fleet had several small corvettes and old frigates in port in Kaliningrad, but no surface ship captain would steam out to do battle with an Aegis-equipped guided missile destroyer unless either he was part of a large armada or he was insane.

  There were air threats around here; the Russians had been throwing a lot of aircraft in the theater to spy on, intimidate, and essentially piss off all the other nations that sailed on or flew over the Baltic, but the real menace to the James Greer in these waters would come from below the waves. There were a pair of upgraded Kilos in the Baltic Fleet, and while the vessels were not the newest Russian technology, they were quiet diesel subs, they were deadly, and, most important of all, their commanders and crew knew these waters better than anyone.

  It was for these reasons that the men and women on board the Greer took their jobs exceptionally seriously. For the last few weeks of their cruise they had been here in the Baltic Sea, so they were in the middle of Russia’s turf, and they had even been buzzed by two Russian Su-27 interceptors two weeks earlier while north of Poland.

  The captain of the James Greer was not a captain in rank, he was a commander. Commander Scott Hagen had been in the Navy since the Academy, he was forty-three now, and his wife told her friends he was going to stay in until the Navy sent armed men to drag him off base for sticking around past retirement age.

  He was a lifer.

  Hagen sat behind his desk in his wardroom at 1100 hours, scanning through some reports from his acoustical intelligence officer. He heard movement outside in the passageway, and then his XO rapped gently on his door before leaning in. “Message for you from the N3.”

  Hagen sighed in frustration. He’d been hoping this message wouldn’t come. “Bring it in, although I have a feeling I know what it says.”

  Kincaid entered the wardroom and handed the single page over to his captain without comment. Both men had seen the news about the missing plane over the Baltic late this morning. They had discussed the chance that they would be contacted by the Sixth Fleet’s director of operations (N3) and ordered into service. Hagen had bet they wouldn’t get that order. They were half a day away from the location of the crash, so they wouldn’t be involved in any real rescue, and due to the increased tension in the Baltic region, he felt the Navy would want to keep one of its most powerful weapons in the area, ready to employ quickly if shots were fired.

  But the XO took the other side of the bet. He couldn’t imagine the U.S. Navy missing out on the PR boon of taking part in such a high-profile public interest mission.

  Hagen nodded as he read, then summarized the order for Lieutenant Commander Kincaid. “You called it, XO.”

  A minute later, Commander Hagen wore a headset and patched himself into 1-MC, the shipboard PA system. He punched the transmit button, sending his voice throughout virtually every space on the ship. “This is the captain speaking. All hands give me your attention for a minute.

  “Some of you might not be aware that at around oh-eight-thirty Zulu time today, approximately two and a half hours ago, a Swedish passenger jet traveling from Stockholm en route to Dubai collided with a Russian military surveillance aircraft over the Baltic Sea, roughly one hundred ten nautical miles from our position. We have been ordered to make best possible speed toward the crash of Swedish Air 44 and assist with search-and-recovery operations.

  “This is going to be a grim job for all of us, to put it mildly, but it’s damn important. We owe those victims our best work, whether we rescue anyone alive or only recover remains.”

  He stopped transmitting for a moment while he ordered his thoughts, then pushed the button again. “While we are in the process of this recovery, we cannot and we will not allow ourselves to lose focus of our larger mission here in the Baltic. The tension between the Russian Federation and other national actors in the area was plenty high before this incident. It will only get higher. We might find ourselves called upon at any moment to . . . to respond to threats. The James Greer will suffer no loss of mission readiness while we are assisting in the recovery mission. None at all.”

  After he finished his address he put his comm set back in its cradle on the desk in his stateroom, then looked up at Phil Kincaid. “You know, XO, there’s one thing about this mission that I really don’t care for.”

  “That we’re heading due west when Russia is due east?”

  Hagen shook his head. “It’s not that. No, I guess our politicians haven’t noticed it just yet, but we are smack dab in the middle of a potential war zone, and we are operating in an AO that also contains naval combat forces of our adversary.”

  The XO nodded. He finished the thought. “And we’re about to go to a fixed spot on the water and let everybody in the world, including the opposition in the area, know where we are.”

  “That’s it. By the time we get on scene there will be zero chance for survivors, even if someone managed to live through a midair collision and impact with that cold water. So we’ll be there to pick up wreckage and bodies. Yeah, it’s important, but I sure as hell wish surface ships that aren’t going to be called to fight the Russians in a shooting war would spend their time on victim recovery, while the James Greer stays a hell of a lot more low-profile. Once the bad guys know where we are, it’s going to be hard to slip them if the time comes.”

  The XO just nodded.

  Hagen shrugged and stood up, heading for the passageway. “Nobody is asking us, so let’s head up to the bridge and get this ship hauling ass toward that well-publicized point in the middle of the ocean.”

  35

  The most-watched news channel in Russia was Channel Seven, Novorossiya, or New Russia, and the most-watched program was Evening News with Tatiana Molchanova. The striking raven-haired broadcaster was not only the favorite television news personality in the nation, it was clear she was also the favorite of Russia’s president. Volodin spoke to any journalist who managed to get a mike in front of him when he was out and about, but when he had either information or spin he wanted to deliver to the nation, he almost always went to the Evening News to sit live with Molchanova.

  It had become such a routine that Tatiana had taken for granted that Valeri Volodin would come to her, but in the past six months things had changed. Yes, she still got exclusives with the president, but he no longer appeared in her studio—now she, and her production team, had to go to him.

  Before the change in the arrangement between interviewer and interviewee, there had been difficulties of a logistical nature every time the Kremlin called the Evening News and said Volodin was on his way for an on-camera interview, because rarely did the TV station have more than an hour or two to prepare for his arrival. But the producers, the technicians, and Molchanova herself looked back to those days fondly now, because these days, the arrangement was significantly more difficult for them.

  Now a call would come to a senior producer from one of Volodin’s trusted inner circle, and notification would be given that the president was requesting Molchanova and her crew to arrive either at his offices in the Kremlin or, and this had been the case exclusively in the past three months, at his personal residence in the suburbs.

  Tonight was the fourth time the entire crew packed into a pair of helicopters and made the twenty-minute flight, landing on the lawn of a neighbor’s property and then rolling equipment to the gate in the wall of Volodin’s presidential residence. From here everyone was frisked and X-rayed befor
e being loaded back into a van kept on the property for transporting deliveries up the hill to the main house. From the driveway they were led into a living room. Furniture was carefully moved, light stands were erected, audio and video equipment was plugged in and tested.

  The satellite truck would pull up outside an hour after the helicopter arrived, and usually with only a half-hour or so to spare.

  While the techs and producers worked together to assemble the set, Molchanova was led by one of Volodin’s female attendants into a bathroom off the kitchen, and here she took care of her own makeup. While doing this she listened to one of her producers through her earpiece while he read her intro and the few questions they had prepared. Tonight, as was often the case, she demanded some changes.

  The questions were softballs by design. The crew of the Evening News had no specific knowledge of why they had been summoned by the president, so they needed to have only a few general setup questions ready to get the ball rolling. But even in the simple prepared opening, Tatiana Molchanova thought the tone wasn’t right.

  She changed her opening because she had noticed a change in her president in the past three months or so. He seemed more defensive, more nervy and testy with her questions. Gone were the days of the easy sly smile and the subtle sexual tension she felt during the interviews. Now he was on guard, ready to take issue with the smallest point.

  She knew her role—people joked that Channel Seven was “Volodin’s Megaphone,” after all—so she had never hit him particularly hard in her interviews, but now she wore kid gloves during their time together. And tonight, after the plane crash, she expected her president would be especially touchy.

  At six-thirty Volodin entered the living room and strode past nearly two dozen attendants, inner-circle confidants, and Channel Seven employees on his way to the lighted set. He greeted Tatiana with a friendly kiss and a smile; outwardly, this looked much the same as it had for his entire presidency, but Tatiana could see a change in the look, feel a difference in his touch.

  This used to be both business and pleasure for Volodin. Now it was all business.

  He looked older to the reporter than he had the last time they saw each other, just a month earlier, at the opening of a new restaurant in central Moscow.

  Volodin spoke first, because Volodin always spoke first. While she was still close in his grasp he said, “Miss Molchanova, you are looking more beautiful than ever.” Her blush had been painted on, but she flitted her long eyelashes and looked down with a wide smile. She felt his attraction to her, though there used to be some actual urges behind the sixty-two-year-old man’s words, and those seemed to have disappeared.

  It was the stress of the job, she assumed.

  “You are too kind, Mr. President.”

  She started to escort him to his chair, but he held her tight for a moment more. “You will ask me how I can ensure the safety of our sons and daughters serving in the military when traveling into Kaliningrad Oblast. Let’s not get distracted by attention-grabbing headlines and salacious events. The main issue is Lithuania.”

  He had given her hints in the past, directions for the interview, so she was not surprised.

  “Of course.”

  Nor was she surprised when he went further with his stage-managing of the interview.

  “But not directly. We will come to it slowly. We’ll deal with the accident in the Baltic first, then the attack on the train.”

  “Medlenno, da. Ya ponimayu.” Slowly, yes. I understand.

  “Khorosho,” he replied with a thin smile. Good.

  A producer wired the president with a microphone as he sat down, and then everyone sat awkwardly for a few moments, waiting to go live. Molchanova noticed Volodin fidgeting more than normal, but she averted her eyes, pretending to look down at the cards that held the same remarks and questions that would be broadcast on the teleprompter under the camera in seconds.

  Mercifully, as far as she was concerned, they went live quickly. She sensed Volodin’s fidgeting stop suddenly on her left as she began to read the opening that she’d demanded be softened to spare her any icy response from the president.

  “Mr. President, thank you so much for agreeing to speak with us today, as I know this must be a busy time for you.”

  Volodin smiled. “It is my pleasure, but frankly, I have been busy since I first entered government service forty years ago. These days are consistent with what I have experienced for a long time.”

  “Let me begin by asking you your thoughts of this morning’s apparent midair collision between a Russian aircraft and a Swedish aircraft.”

  Volodin nodded; he was ready with his spin. “Of course it goes without saying, I regret all loss of life in this incident. In this regard I am unlike President Jack Ryan of the United States, who quickly ran to the first lectern he could find with a microphone on it and passionately decried the deaths of two hundred ninety-eight people, omitting the eleven on the Russian military transport aircraft. I find it telling that the American President can be so flippant by conveniently forgetting about the deaths of Russians, whose lives clearly hold no value to him.

  “I will also add that the Russian aircraft was flying a legal flight in international airspace over the Baltic Sea. It had every right to be where it was and do what it was doing. It was the Swedish flight that had gone astray, though the Western media will make no mention of this.

  “As our great military has taken to international waters and international skies, the West has reacted with fear and anger, and they have resorted to reprisals. This has been coming for a long time, and I have predicted something just like this would occur.

  “The unfortunate souls on the Swedish airliner were pawns in the West’s game to pressure the Russian Federation to stay crouched and compliant within its own borders. The aircraft was sent off course by Swedish air traffic control under orders from the Swedish government, who in turn was taking its cues from the United States of America and Great Britain. It was their plan to create a provocative situation, a near miss, so they could use this as propaganda against Russia’s legal military maneuvers around the world.

  “I truly hope nothing like this ever happens again, but to ensure this, I call on the governments of the West to stop their aggressive behavior in peaceful international skies.” He looked into the camera. “Russia rejects your detestable premise that we are not allowed to engage with the rest of planet earth. We have as much authority to go places and do things as the West does, and we will never surrender our right of self-determination to those who would keep all Russians boarded behind fences and walls.”

  And that was that. Molchanova saw a restlessness in Volodin’s eyes and mannerisms that told her he was ready to move away from this subject.

  She thumbed through her cards deftly, omitting some follow-up questions about the crash. Then she said, “Even before the accident of the two aircraft, Mr. President, there were other recent events, all in the Baltic region, that seem to have the world on edge.”

  Volodin held a finger up and quickly leaned forward, a blast of energy. Molchanova was used to his mannerisms, so she did not flinch the way many foreign journalists did when interviewing the Russian president. “You put it magnificently, Tatiana Sergeyevna. You said they ‘seem’ to be on edge. And I am sure the simple population of many of these countries are genuinely horrified by the quickening of events there, but I ask them all to take care and say to themselves . . . Does this seem natural? A plane crash in the Baltic Sea, an attack in Lithuania on a train, on a natural gas facility? All in the same month? No, of course there is nothing natural to this all. This is well orchestrated.”

  “By whom, Mr. President?”

  “By the West. It is known by our intelligence services that the West feels their power waning over the nations that border the Russian Federation. A region we refer to as the ‘near abroad.’ Jack Ryan, the EU, NATO: Th
ey all want to surround Russia with their client states. Subservient governments who do the bidding of the cabal of countries who don’t share Russia’s strategic, economic, and national interests.

  “The attack on the natural gas facility. Done by environmentalists? I am suspicious of this. The attack on the Russian military transportation train. Perpetrated by a little-known Polish paramilitary unit? I think this highly unlikely.”

  “If you reject the official findings, Mr. President, who do you think was involved?”

  “We Russians can point fingers at specific groups, actors, and states, but we would do well to get away from this, because we have one adversary. The West. Whether these were the actions of the CIA, the British MI6, Central European groups working on the behalf of America, or anyone else hardly matters any longer. Russia is under threat from a broad coalition of aggressive, hostile nations. Our safety and security threaten them for some reason, our love for our country and our customs and our desire for prosperity only enrage them. I find it sad to say this, but the evidence is clear. They are, simply put, enemies of the Russian Federation.”

  Molchanova nodded thoughtfully and turned her head away from the president and back to the viewers at home, if only to read the next question on the teleprompter.

  She said, “The United States has reacted with anger after claiming a Russian Borei-class ballistic missile submarine is now crossing the Atlantic Ocean toward its shores. Is there anything you would like to say to respond to the allegations?”

  Volodin shrugged with an easy smile. “If you like, I’d be happy to respond.” Molchanova marveled at how completely he’d been able to morph himself from the man beset with nervous energy he’d been moments before the camera turned on to the calm, clever, and supremely self-assured chief executive he appeared to be now.