by Tom Clancy
The canopy went up on emergency hydraulic power. After unbuckling himself Jackson fought his way around and tried to grab for his backseater. They had been friends for many years.
Chris was alive. It looked like a quart of blood had poured down the front of his flight suit, and when the first corpsman took the helmet off, he saw that it was still pumping out. The second corpsman pushed Jackson out of the way and attached a cervical collar to the wounded airman. Christiansen was lifted gently and lowered onto a stretcher whose bearers ran towards the island. Jackson hesitated a moment before following it.
Norfolk Naval Medical Center
Captain Randall Tait of the Navy Medical Corps walked down the corridor to meet with the Russians. He looked younger than his forty-five years because his full head of black hair showed not the first sign of gray. Tait was a Mormon, educated at Brigham Young University and Stanford Medical School, who had joined the navy because he had wanted to see more of the world than one could from an office at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains. He had accomplished that much, and until today had also avoided anything resembling diplomatic duty. As the new chief of the Department of Medicine at Bethesda Naval Medical Center he knew that couldn’t last. He had flown down to Norfolk only a few hours earlier to handle the case. The Russians had driven down, and taken their time doing it.
“Good morning, gentlemen. I’m Dr. Tait.” They shook hands all around, and the lieutenant who had brought them up walked back to the elevator.
“Dr. Ivanov,” the shortest one said. “I am physician to the embassy.”
“Captain Smirnov.” Tait knew him to be assistant naval attaché, a career intelligence officer. The doctor had been briefed on the helicopter trip down by a Pentagon intelligence officer who was now drinking coffee in the hospital commissary.
“Vasily Petchkin, Doctor. I am second secretary to the embassy.” This one was a senior KGB officer, a “legal” spy with a diplomatic cover. “May we see our man?”
“Certainly. Will you follow me please?” Tait led them back down the corridor. He’d been on the go for twenty hours. This was part of the territory as chief of service at Bethesda. He got all the hard calls. One of the first things a doctor learns is how not to sleep.
The whole floor was set up for intensive care, Norfolk Naval Medical Center having been built with war casualties in mind. Intensive Care Unit Number Three was a room twenty-five feet square. The only windows were on the corridor wall, and the curtains had been drawn back. There were four beds, only one occupied. The young man in it was almost totally concealed. The only thing not hidden by the oxygen mask covering his face was an unruly clump of wheat-colored hair. The rest of his body was fully draped. An IV stand was next to the bed, its two bottles of fluid merging in a single line that led under the covers. A nurse dressed like Tait in surgical greens was standing at the foot of the bed, her green eyes locked on the electrocardiograph readout over the patient’s head, dropping momentarily to make a notation on his chart. On the far side of the bed was a machine whose function was not immediately obvious. The patient was unconscious.
“His condition?” Ivanov asked.
“Critical,” Tait replied. “It’s a miracle he got here alive at all. He was in the water for at least twelve hours, probably more like twenty. Even accounting for the fact that he was wearing a rubber exposure suit, given the ambient air and water temperatures there’s just no way he ought to have been alive. On admission his core temperature was 23.8 °C.” Tait shook his head. “I’ve read about worse hypothermia cases in the literature, but this is by far the worst I’ve ever seen.”
“Prognosis?” Ivanov looked into the room.
Tait shrugged. “Hard to say. Maybe as good as fifty-fifty, maybe not. He’s still extremely shocky. He’s a fundamentally healthy person. You can’t see it from here, but he’s in superb physical shape, like a track and field man. He has a particularly strong heart; that’s probably what kept him alive long enough to get here. We have the hypothermia pretty much under control now. The problem is, with hypothermia so many things go wrong at once. We have to fight a number of separate but connected battles against different systemic enemies to keep them from overwhelming his natural defenses. If anything’s going to kill him, it’ll be the shock. We’re treating that with electrolytes, the normal routine, but he’s going to be on the edge for several days at least I—”
Tait looked up. Another man was pacing down the hall. Younger than Tait, and taller, he had a white lab coat over his greens. He carried a metal chart.
“Gentlemen, this is Doctor — Lieutenant — Jameson. He’s the physician of record on the case. He admitted your man. What do you have, Jamie?”
“The sputum sample showed pneumonia. Bad news. Worse, his blood chemistry isn’t getting any better, and his white count is dropping.”
“Great.” Tait leaned against the window frame and swore to himself.
“Here’s the printout from the blood analyzer.” Jameson handed the chart over.
“May I see this, please?” Ivanov came around.
“Sure.” Tait flipped the metal cloud chart open and held it so that everyone could see it. Ivanov had never worked with a computerized blood analyzer, and it took several seconds for him to orient himself.
“This is not good.”
“Not at all,” Tait agreed.
“We’re going to have to jump on that pneumonia, hard,” Jameson said. “This kid’s got too many things going wrong. If the pneumonia really takes hold…” He shook his head.
“Keflin?” Tait asked.
“Yeah.” Jameson pulled a vial from his pocket. “As much as he’ll handle. I’m guessing that he had a mild case before he got dumped in the water, and I hear that some penicillin-resistant strains have been cropping up in Russia. You use mostly penicillin over there, right?” Jameson looked down at Ivanov.
“Correct. What is this keflin?”
“It’s a big gun, a synthetic antibiotic, and it works well on resistant strains.”
“Right now, Jamie,” Tait ordered.
Jameson walked around the corner to enter the room. He injected the antibiotic into a 100cc piggyback IV bottle and hung it on a stand.
“He’s so young,” Ivanov noted. “He treated our man initially?”
“His name’s Albert Jameson. We call him Jamie. He’s twenty-nine, graduated Harvard third in his class, and he’s been with us ever since. He’s board-certified in internal medicine and virology. He’s as good as they come.” Tait suddenly realized how uncomfortable he was dealing with the Russians. His education and years of naval service taught him that these men were the enemy. That didn’t matter. Years before he had sworn an oath to treat patients without regard to outside considerations. Would they believe or did they think he’d let their man die because he was a Russian? “Gentlemen, I want you to understand this: we’re giving your man the very best care we can. We’re not holding anything back. If there’s a way to give him back to you alive, we’ll find it. But I can’t make any promises.”
The Soviets could see that. While waiting for instructions from Moscow, Petchkin had checked up on Tait and found him to be, though a religious fanatic, an efficient and honorable physician, one of the best in government service.
“Has he said anything?” Petchkin asked, casually.
“Not since I’ve been here. Jamie said that right after they started warming him up he was semiconscious and babbled for a few minutes. We taped it, of course, and had a Russian-speaking officer listen to it. Something about a girl with brown eyes, didn’t make any sense. Probably his sweetheart — he’s a good-looking kid, he probably has a girl at home. It was totally incoherent, though. A patient in his condition has no idea what’s going on.”
“Can we listen to the tape?” Petchkin said.
“Certainly. I’ll have it sent up.”
Jameson came around the corner. “Done. A gram of keflin every six hours. Hope it works.”
“How about
his hands and feet?” Smirnov asked. The captain knew something about frostbite.
“We’re not even bothering about that,” Jameson answered. “We have cotton around the digits to prevent maceration. If he survives the next few days, we’ll get blebs and maybe have some tissue loss, but that’s the least of our problems. You guys know what his name is?” Petchkin’s head snapped around. “He wasn’t wearing any dogtags when he arrived. His clothes didn’t have the ship’s name. No wallet, no identification, not even any coins in the pockets. It doesn’t matter very much for his initial treatment, but I’d feel better if you could pull his medical records. It would be good to know if he has any allergies or underlying medical conditions. We don’t want him to go into shock from an allergic reaction to drug treatment.”
“What was he wearing?” Smirnov asked.
“A rubber exposure suit,” Jameson answered. “The guys who found him left it on him, thank God. I cut it off him when he arrived. Under that, shirt, pants, handerchief. Don’t you guys wear dogtags?”
“Yes,” Smirnov responded. “How did you find him?”
“From what I hear, it was pure luck. A helicopter off a frigate was patrolling and spotted him in the water. They didn’t have any rescue gear aboard, so they marked the spot with a dye marker and went back to their ship. A bosun volunteered to go in after him. They loaded him and a raft cannister into the chopper and flew him back, with the frigate hustling down south. The bosun kicked out the raft, jumped in after it — and landed on it. Bad luck. He broke both his legs, but he did get your sailor into the raft. The tin can picked them up an hour later and they were both flown directly here.”
“How is your man?”
“He’ll be all right. The left leg wasn’t too bad, but the right tibia was badly splintered,” Jameson went on. “He’ll recover in a few months. Won’t be doing much dancing for a while, though.”
The Russians thought the Americans had deliberately removed their man’s identification. Jameson and Tait suspected that the man had disposed of his tags, possibly hoping to defect. There was a red mark on the neck that indicated forcible removal.
“If it is permitted,” Smirnov said, “I would like to see your man, to thank him.”
“Permission granted, Captain,” Tait nodded. “That would be kind of you.”
“He must be a brave man.”
“A sailor doing his job. Your people would do the same thing.” Tait wondered if this were true. “We have our differences, gentlemen, but the sea doesn’t care about that. The sea — well, she tries to kill us all regardless what flag we fly.”
Petchkin was back looking through the window, trying to make out the patient’s face.
“Could we see his clothing and personal effects?” he asked.
“Sure, but it won’t tell you much. He’s a cook. That’s all we know,” Jameson said.
“A cook?” Petchkin turned around.
“The officer who listened in on the tape — obviously he was an intelligence officer, right? He looked at the number on his shirt and said it made him a cook.” The three-digit number indicated that the patient had been a member of the port watch, and that his battle station was damage control. Jameson wondered why the Russians numbered all their enlisted men. To be sure they didn’t trespass? Petchkin’s head, he noticed, was almost touching the glass pane.
“Dr. Ivanov, do you wish to attend the case?” Tait asked.
“Is this permitted?”
“It is.”
“When will he be released?” Petchkin inquired. “When may we speak with him?”
“Released?” Jameson snapped. “Sir, the only way he’ll be out of here in less than a month will be in a box. So far as consciousness is concerned, that’s anyone’s guess. That’s one very sick kid you have in there.”
“But we must speak to him!” the KGB agent protested.
Tait had to look up at the man. “Mr. Petchkin, I understand your desire to communicate with your man — but he is my patient now. We will do nothing, repeat nothing, that might interfere with his treatment and recovery. I got orders to fly down here to handle this. They tell me those orders came from the White House. Fine. Doctors Jameson and Ivanov will assist me, but that patient is now my responsibility, and my job is to see to it that he walks out of this hospital alive and well. Everything else is secondary to that objective. You will be extended every courtesy. But I make the rules here.” Tait paused. Diplomacy was not something he was good at. “Tell you what, you want to sit in there yourselves in relays, that’s fine with me. But you have to follow the rules. That means you scrub, change into sterile clothing, and follow the instructions of the duty nurse. Fair enough?”
Petchkin nodded. American doctors think they are gods, he said to himself.
Jameson, busy reexamining the blood analyzer printout, had ignored the sermon. “Can you gentlemen tell us what kind of sub he was on?”
“No,” Petchkin said at once.
“What are you thinking, Jamie?”
“The dropping white count and some of these other indicators are consistent with radiation exposure. The gross symptoms would have been masked by the overlying hypothermia.” Suddenly Jameson looked at the Soviets. “Gentlemen, we have to know this, was he on a nuclear sub?”
“Yes.” Smirnov answered, “he was on a nuclear-powered submarine.”
“Jamie, take his clothing to radiology. Have them check the buttons, zipper, anything metal for evidence of contamination.”
“Right.” Jameson went to collect the patient’s effects.
“May we be involved in this?” Smirnov asked.
“Yes, sir,” Tait responded, wondering what sort of people these were. The guy had to come off a nuclear submarine, didn’t he? Why hadn’t they told him at once? Didn’t they want him to recover?
Petchkin pondered the significance of this. Didn’t they know he had come off a nuclear-powered sub? Of course — he was trying to get Smirnov to blurt out that the man was off a missile submarine. They were trying to cloud the issue with this story about contamination. Nothing that would harm the patient, but something to confuse their class enemies. Clever. He’d always thought the Americans were clever. And he was supposed to report to the embassy in an hour — report what? How was he supposed to know who the sailor was?
Norfolk Naval Shipyard
The USS Ethan Allen was about at the end of her string. Commissioned in 1961, she had served her crews and her country for over twenty years, carrying Polaris sea-launched ballistic missiles in endless patrols through sunless seas. Now she was old enough to vote, and this was very old for a submarine. Her missile tubes had been filled with ballast and sealed months before. She had only a token maintenance crew while the Pentagon bureaucrats debated her future. There had been talk of a complicated cruise missile system to make her into a SSGN like the new Russian Oscars. This was judged too expensive. Ethan Allen’s was generation-old technology. Her S5W reactor was too dated for much more use. Nuclear radiation had bombarded the metal vessel and its internal fittings with many billions of neutrons. As recent examination of test strips had revealed, over time the character of the metal had changed, becoming dangerously brittle. The system had at most another three years of useful life. A new reactor would be too expensive. The Ethan Allen was doomed by her senescence.
The maintenance crew was made up of members of her last operational team, mainly old-timers looking forward to retirement, with a leavening of kids who needed education in repair skills. The Ethan Allen could still serve as a school, especially a repair school since so much of her equipment was worn out.
Admiral Gallery had come aboard early that morning. The chiefs had regarded that as particularly ominous. He had been her first skipper many years before, and admirals always seemed to visit their early commands — right before they were scrapped. He’d recognized some of the senior chiefs and asked them if the old girl had any life left in her. To a man, the chiefs said yes. A ship becomes more than a ma
chine to her crew. Each of a hundred ships, built by the same men at the same yard to the same plans, will have her own special characteristics — most of them bad, really, but after her crew becomes accustomed to them they are spoken of affectionately, particularly in retrospect. The admiral had toured the entire length of the Ethan Allen’s hull, pausing to run his gnarled, arthritic hands over the periscope he had used to make certain that there really was a world outside the steel hull, to plan the rare “attack” against a ship hunting his sub — or a passing tanker, just for practice. He’d commanded the Ethan Allen for three years, alternating his gold crew with another officer’s blue crew, working out of Holy Loch, Scotland. Those were good years, he told himself, a damned sight better than sitting at a desk with a lot of vapid aides running around. It was the old navy game, up or out: just when you got something that you were really good at, something you really liked, it was gone. It made good organizational sense. You had to make room for the youngsters coming up — but, God! to be young again, to command one of the new ones that now he only had the opportunity to ride a few hours at a time, a courtesy to the skinny old bastard in Norfolk.
She’d do it, Gallery knew. She’d do fine. It was not the end he would have preferred for his fighting ship, but when you came down to it, a decent end for a fighting ship was something rare. Nelson’s Victory, the Constitution in Boston harbor, the old battleship kept mummified by her namesake state — they’d had honorable treatment. Most warships were sunk as targets or broken up for razor blades. The Ethan Allen would die for a purpose. A crazy purpose, perhaps crazy enough to work, he said to himself as he returned to COMSUBLANT headquarters.
Two hours later a truck arrived at the dock where the Ethan Allen lay dormant. The chief quartermaster on deck at the time noted that the truck came from Oceana Naval Air Station. Curious, he thought. More curiously, the officer who got out was wearing neither dolphins nor wings. He saluted the quarterdeck first, then the chief who had the deck while Ethan Allen’s remaining two officers supervised a repair job on the engine spaces. The officer from the naval air station made arrangements for a work gang to load the sub with four bullet-shaped objects, which went through the deck hatches. They were large, barely able to fit through the torpedo and capsule loading hatches, and it took some handling to get them emplaced. Next came plastic pallets to set them on and metal straps to secure them. They look like bombs, the chief electrician thought as the younger men did the donkey work. But they couldn’t be that; they were too light, obviously made of ordinary sheet metal. An hour later a truck with a pressurized tank on its loadbed arrived. The submarine was cleared of her personnel and carefully ventilated. Then three men snaked a hose to each of the four objects. Finished, they ventilated the hull again, leaving gas detectors near each object. By this time, the crew noted, their dock and the one next to it were being guarded by armed marines so that no one could come over and see what was happening to the Ethan Allen.