"Some. Marty isn"t much of a card player, but we got a bunch at work that meets once a week."
"Good as we used to be?" Morris asked as they headed off in the same direction.
"Are you kidding? You know where I work now?"
"I heard you ended up at Fort Meade after you hung it up."
"Yeah, and there"s bridge players at NSA who"re wired into the d.a.m.n computers-I"m talking a.s.sa.s.sins!"
"So how"s the family?"
"Just great. How"s yours?"
"Growing up too d.a.m.ned fast-makes you feel old."
"That"s the truth," Morris chuckled. He jabbed a finger at his friend"s star. "Now you can tell me about your new kid."
"Look at my car."
Toland turned around. Morris"s Ford had a personalized license plate: FF-1094. To the uninitiated it was an ordinary license number, but to a sailor it advertised his command: antisubmarine frigate number one thousand ninety-four, USS Pharris.
"You always were nice and modest," Toland noted with a grin. "That"s all right, Ed. How long you had her?"
"Two years. She"s big, she"s pretty, and she"s mine! You should have stayed in, Bob. The day I took command-h.e.l.l, it was like the day Jimmy was born."
"I hear you. The difference, Ed, is that I always knew you"d have your s.h.i.+p, and I always knew I wouldn"t." In Toland"s personnel jacket was a letter of admonishment for grounding a destroyer while he had the deck. It had been no more than bad luck. An ambiguity on the chart and adverse tidal conditions had caused the error, but it didn"t take much to ruin a Navy career.
"So, doing your two weeks?"
"That"s right."
"Celia is off visiting her parents, and I"m baching it. What"re you doing for dinner tonight?"
"McDonald"s?" Toland laughed.
"Like h.e.l.l. Danny McCafferty"s in town, too. He"s got the Chicago, tied up at Pier 22. You know, if we can scare up a fourth, maybe we can play a little bridge, just like the old days." Morris poked his friend in the chest. "I gotta head along. Meet me in the O-Club lobby at 1730, Bob. Danny invited me over to his boat for dinner at 1830, and we"ll have an hour"s worth of Att.i.tude Adjustment before we drive over. We"ll have dinner in the wardroom and a few hours of cards, just like old times."
"Aye aye, Commander."
"Anyway, there I was on Will Rogers," McCafferty said. "Fifty days out on patrol and I got the watch, right? Sonar says they have a goofy signal, bearing zero-five-two. We"re at periscope depth, so I put the search scope up, train it out to zero-five-two, and sure enough, there"s this Gulfstream-36 sailboat, moving along at four or five knots with the autosteering rig set. What the h.e.l.l, it"s a dull day, so I flip the scope to hi-power, and guess what? The captain and the mate-there"s one gal who"ll never drown!-are on top the deckhouse, horizontal and superimposed. The boat was maybe a thousand yards away-just like being there. So we turn on the scope TV camera and get the tape machine running. Had to maneuver for a better view, of course. Lasted fifteen minutes. The crew ran the tape for the next week. Great for morale to know just what you"re fighting for." All three officers laughed.
"Like I always told you, Bob," Morris noted. "These sub-drivers are a nasty, sneaky bunch. Not to mention perverts."
"So how long you had the Chicago, Danny?" Toland asked over his second cup of after-dinner coffee. The three had the submarine"s wardroom to themselves. The only officers aboard were either standing watch or asleep.
"Three busy months, not counting yard time," McCafferty said, finis.h.i.+ng off his milk. He was the first skipper for the new attack sub, the best of all possible worlds, a captain and a "plankowner." Toland noted that Dan had not joined him and Morris for "att.i.tude adjustment" at the base officers" club, during which they"d tossed down three stiff drinks apiece. It wasn"t like the McCafferty of old. Perhaps he was unwilling to leave his sub, lest the dream of his career somehow end while he was away from her.
"Can"t you tell from the pale, pasty look common to cave-dwellers and submariners?" Morris joked. "Not to mention the faint glow a.s.sociated with nuclear reactor types?" McCafferty grinned, and they waited for their fourth to arrive. He was a junior engineer, just about to come off reactor watch. Chicago"s reactor wasn"t operating. She was drawing electrical power from the dock, but regulations demanded a full reactor watch whether the teakettle was working or not.
"I tell you guys, I was a little pale four weeks ago." McCafferty turned serious-or about as serious as he ever got.
"How so?" Bob Toland asked.
"Well, you know the kinda s.h.i.+t we do with these boats, right?"
"If you mean insh.o.r.e intelligence gathering, Dan, you ought to know that that electronic intelligence stuff you collect comes to my office. h.e.l.l, I probably know the people who originate a lot of the data requests that generate your op-orders. How"s that for a revolting thought!" Bob laughed. He fought the urge to look around too obviously. He"d never been aboard a nuclear submarine before. It was cold-nuclear subs have nuclear-powered air conditioning-and the air was heavy with the smell of machine oil. Everything he could see sparkled both from being almost new, and from the fact that McCafferty had undoubtedly made sure that his crew had gotten things looking especially good for his friends. So, this was the billion-dollar machine that gathered all that ELINT data. . . .
"Yeah, well, we were up in the Barents Sea, you know, northeast of the Kola Fjord, trailing a Russian sub-an Oscar-about, oh, ten miles back of her-and all of a sudden we find ourselves in the middle of a friggin" live-fire exercise! Missiles were flying all over the d.a.m.ned place. They wasted three old hulks, and blasted h.e.l.l out of a half-dozen target barges."
"Just the Oscar?" Morris asked.
"Turned out there was a Papa and a Mike out there, too. That"s one problem with us being so quiet in these babies. If they don"t know we"re there, we can find ourselves in the middle of some really unpleasant s.h.i.+t! Anyway, sonar starts screaming "Transients! Transients!" from all the missile tubes being flooded. No way we could be sure they weren"t getting ready to put some real torpedoes in the water, but we stuck up the ESM and picked up their periscope radars, then I saw some of the things whipping over our heads. d.a.m.n, guys, for about three minutes there it was just a little hairy, y"know?" McCafferty shook his head. "Anyway, two hours after that, all three boats crack on twenty knots and head back to the barn. Your basic out-and-in live-fire. How"s that for a lively first deployment?"
"You get the feeling that the Russians are doing anything out of the ordinary, Dan?" Toland asked, suddenly interested.
"You didn"t hear?"
"Hear what?"
"They"ve cut back their diesel sub patrols up north, quite a bit, too. I mean, normally they"re pretty hard to hear, but mostly over the past two months they just ain"t there. I heard one, just one. Wasn"t like that the last time I was up north. There have been some satellite photos of them, a lot of diesel boats tied up alongside for some reason or another. In fact, their patrol activity up north is down across the board, with a lot of maintenance activity going on. The current guess is that they"re changing their training cycle. This isn"t the usual time of year for live-firing." McCafferty laughed. "Of course, it could be that they finally got tired of chippin" and paintin" those old "cans, and decided to use "em up-best thing to do with a "can anyway."
"Bubblehead," Morris snorted.
"Give me a reason you"d have a bunch of diesel boats out of service all at once," Toland said. He was wis.h.i.+ng that he"d pa.s.sed on the second and third rounds during Happy Hour. Something important was flas.h.i.+ng lights inside his head, and the alcohol was slowing his thinking down.
"s.h.i.+t," McCafferty observed. "There isn"t any."
"So what are they doing with the diesel boats?"
"I haven"t seen the satellite photos, Bob, just heard about them. No special activity in the drydocks, though, so it can"t be too major."
The light bulb finally went off in Toland"s head. "How hard is it to change batteries in a sub?"
"It"s a nasty, heavy job. I mean, you don"t need special machinery or anything. We do it with Tiger Teams, and it takes something like three or four weeks. Ivan"s subs are designed with larger battery capacities than ours, and also for easier battery replacement-they"re supposed to go through their batteries faster than Western subs, and they compensate for it by making replacement easier, hard-patches on the hull, things like that. So for them it"s probably an all-hands evolution. What exactly are you getting at, Bob?"
Toland related the story about the four Soviet colonels who had been shot, and why. "Then I hear this story about how the supply of batteries in Russia has dried up. No batteries for cars and trucks. The car batteries I can understand, but the trucks-hey, every truck in Russia is government-owned. They all have mobilization uses. Same sort of batteries, right?"
"Yeah, they all use lead-acid batteries. The factory burn-down?" Commander Morris asked. "I know Ivan likes One Big Factory rather than a bunch of little ones."
"It"s working three s.h.i.+fts."
McCafferty sat back, away from the table.
"So, what uses batteries?" Morris asked rhetorically.
"Submarines," McCafferty p.r.o.nounced. "Tanks, armored vehicles, command cars, starter carts for planes, lots of stuff painted green, y"know? Bob, what you"re saying-s.h.i.+t, what you"re saying is that all of a sudden Ivan has decided to increase his readiness across the board. Question: Do you know what the h.e.l.l you"re talking about?"
"You can bet your a.s.s on it, Danny. The bit on the four colonels crossed my desk, I eyeballed that report myself. It was received on one of our ferret satellites. Ivan doesn"t know how sensitive those Hitchhiker birds are, and he still sends a lot of stuff in the clear on surface microwave nets. We listen in to voice and telex transmissions all the time-you guys can forget you heard that, okay?" Toland got nods from the others. "The thing about the batteries I picked up by accident, but I confirmed it with a guy I know in the Pentagon. Now we have your story about increased live-fire exercises, Dan. You just filled in a blank s.p.a.ce. Now if we can confirm that those diesel boats really are down for battery replacement, we have the beginnings of a picture. Just how important are new batteries for a diesel boat?"
"Very important," the sub skipper said. "Depends a lot on quality control and maintenance, but new ones can give you up to double the range and power of old ones, and that"s obviously an important tactical factor."
"Jesus, you know what this sounds like? Ivan"s always ready to go to sea, and now it looks like he wants to be real ready," Morris observed. "But the papers all say that they"re acting like born-again angels with this arms-control stuff. Something does not compute, gentlemen."
"I have to get this to someone in the chain of command. I could drop this on a desk at Fort Meade and it might never get anywhere," Toland said, remembering his section chief.
"You will," McCafferty said after a moment"s pause. "I have an appointment tomorrow morning with COMSUBLANT. I think you"re coming with me, Bob."
The last member of the foursome arrived ten minutes later. He was disappointed with the quality of the game. He"d thought his skipper was better than this.
Toland spent twenty minutes reviewing his data in front of Vice Admiral Richard Pipes, Commander, Submarine Force, U.S. Atlantic Fleet. Pipes was the first black submariner to make three-star rank, a man who had paid his dues with performance as he"d climbed up the ladder in what had traditionally been a whites-only profession, and he had the reputation of a tough, demanding boss. The Admiral listened without a word as he sipped coffee from a three-starred mug. He"d been annoyed to have McCafferty"s patrol report supplanted by a speech from a reservist-but that att.i.tude had lasted only three minutes. Now the lines around his mouth deepened.
"Son, you violated a few security restrictions to give me some of that."
"I know that, sir," Toland said.
"Took b.a.l.l.s to do that, and it"s nice to see in a young officer, what with all the ones who just want to cover their a.s.s." Pipes rose. "I don"t like what you just told me, son, not one little bit. We got Ivan playing Santa Claus with all this diplomatic horses.h.i.+t, and at the same time he"s dialing his submarine force in. Could be a coincidence. Then again, it might not be. How about you and me go over to talk with CINCLANT and his intelligence chief?"
Toland winced. What have I got myself into? "Sir, I"m down here for a training rotation, not to-"
"Looks to me like you got this intelligence c.r.a.p down pretty pat, Commander. You believe what you just told me is true?"
Toland stiffened. "Yes, sir."
"Then I"m giving you a chance to prove it. You afraid to stick your neck out-or do you just offer opinions to relatives and friends?" the Admiral asked harshly.
Toland had heard that Pipes was a real hard-case. The reservist rose to his feet.
"Let"s do it, Admiral."
Pipes picked up his phone and dialed in a three-digit number, his direct line to CINCLANT. "Bill? d.i.c.k. I got a boy in my office I think you oughta talk to. Remember what we discussed last Thursday? We may have confirmation." A brief pause. "Yeah, that"s exactly what I"m saying. . . . Aye aye, sir, on the way." Pipes set the phone down. "McCafferty, thank you for bringing this man in with you. We"ll go over your patrol report this afternoon. Be here at 1530. Toland, you come along with me."
An hour later, Lieutenant Commander Robert M. Toland, USNR-R, was informed that he had been placed on extended active duty by order of the Secretary of Defense. In fact it was by order of CINCLANT, but the forms would be correctly filled out in a week or so.
At lunch that day in "flag country" of Building One of the complex, CINCLANT called in all his type commanders-the three-star admirals who controlled the aircraft, surface s.h.i.+ps, submarines, and replenishment s.h.i.+ps. The conversation was subdued, and ceased entirely when the stewards came in to change the courses. They were all in their fifties, experienced, serious men who both made and implemented policy, preparing for something they hoped would never come. This hope continued, but by the time each had finished his second cup of coffee, it was decided that fleet training cycles would be increased, and a few surprise inspections would be made. CINCLANT made an appointment with the Chief of Naval Operations for the following morning, and his deputy intelligence chief boarded a commercial airliner for a quick trip to Pearl Harbor, to meet with his opposite number in the Pacific.
Toland was relieved of his post and transferred to Intentions, part of CINCLANT"s personal intelligence advisory staff.
6.
The Watchers
NORFOLK, VIRGINIA.
Intentions was a small second-floor office normally occupied by four officers. Shoehorning Toland in there was difficult, mainly because all the cla.s.sified material had to be covered up while the civilian movers got the desk in place. When they finally left, Bob found he had just about enough s.p.a.ce to get into and out of his swivel chair. The office door had a cipher lock with five rocker switches concealed in a steel container. Located in the northwest corner of CINCLANT headquarters, the office"s barred windows overlooked a highway and little else. The drab curtains were closed anyway. Inside, the walls might have been painted beige once, but the plaster had whitened from underneath to give the office the sort of pallor expected in a yellow-fever ward.
The senior officer was a Marine colonel named Chuck Lowe, who had watched the moving-in process with a silent resentment that Bob only understood when the man got to his feet.
"I may never make it to the head now," Lowe grumped, sticking his cast around the corner of his desk. They shook hands.
"What happened to the leg, Colonel?"
"Mountain Warfare School out in California, day after Christmas, skiing on my own G.o.dd.a.m.ned time. The docs say you should never break the tibia close to the bottom," Lowe explained with an ironic smile. "And you never get used to the itching. Should have this thing off in another three or four weeks. Then I have to get used to running again. You know, I spent three years trying to break my a.s.s out of intel, then I finally get my G.o.dd.a.m.ned regiment, and this happens. Welcome aboard, Toland. Why don"t you grab us both a cup of coffee?"
There was a pot atop the farthest filing cabinet. The other three officers, Lowe explained, were giving a briefing.
"I saw the write-up you gave CINCLANT. Interesting stuff. What do you think Ivan"s up to?"
"It looks like he"s increasing readiness across the board, Colonel-"
"In here, you can call me Chuck."
"Fine-I"m Bob."
"You do signal intelligence at NSA, right? You"re one of the satellite specialists, I heard."
Toland nodded. "Ours and theirs, mostly ours. I see photos from time to time, but mostly I do signals work. That"s how we twigged to the report on the four colonels. There has also been a fair amount of operational maneuvering done, more than usual for this time of year. Ivan"s been a little freer with how his tankers drive around, too, less concern about running a battalion across a plowed field, for example."
"And you"re supposed to have a look at anything that"s unusual, no matter how dumb it seems, right? That gives you a pretty wide brief, doesn"t it? We got something interesting along those lines from DIA. Have a look at these." Lowe pulled a pair of eight-by-ten photographs from a manila envelope and handed them to Toland. They seemed to show the same parcel of land, but from slightly different angles and different times of year. In the upper left corner was a pair of isbas, the crude huts of Russian peasant life. Toland looked up.
"Collective farm?"
"Yeah. Number 1196, a little one about two hundred klicks northwest of Moscow. Tell me what"s different between the two."
Toland looked back at the photos. In one was a straight line of fenced gardens, perhaps an acre each. In the other he could see a new fence for four of the patches, and one patch whose fenced area had been roughly doubled.
"A colonel-army-type-I used to work with sent me these. Thought I"d find it amusing. I grew up on a corn farm in Iowa, you see."
"So Ivan"s increasing the private patches for the farmers to work on their own, eh?"
"Looks that way."
"Hasn"t been announced, has it? I haven"t read anything about it." Toland didn"t read the government"s secret in-house publication, National Intelligence Digest, but the NSA cafeteria gossip usually covered harmless stuff like this. Intelligence types talked shop as much as any others.
Lowe shook his head slightly. "Nope, and that"s a little odd. It"s something they should announce. The papers would call that another sure sign of the "liberalization trend" we"ve been seeing."