by Gordon Kent
“Oh—you know—”
“No, I don’t know. I read in the dailies that Bosnia’s overrun with German pimps and a lot of local talent. That true?”
“There’s a lot of outside money, a lot of poor people. A lot of girls, yeah—it’s a pretty sick scene.”
“And you?”
“I’m fine.”
“I mean you and the girls. Rose says you got a girl.”
Dukas felt himself blush. He cleared his throat. Yes, he’d written something to Rose. “Woman, not girl,” he said. “Well, I’m not so sure. One of those things, you know. Here today, gone tomorrow.”
“Rose said you sounded serious.”
Dukas mentally kicked himself for having told Rose. No, that wasn’t fair; he had wanted Rose to know, to sanction it. “Oh, you know—you think it’s something, and then it isn’t.” He searched for another change of subject, thought it was a hell of a thing when you called somebody specially and spent all the time trying to find something meaningless to talk about. He went back to O’Neill: How had they snatched him? From his house? The street?
Alan told him what he knew. “It’s bad, Mike—there’s no logic to it, which makes it worse. As if they simply took him for the sake of doing it, for the hell of it. Unless it was personal. Then it’s even worse.”
“What’s ‘personal’ mean?”
Craik hesitated. “He said a couple of times in letters that he’d met a woman—‘a real woman, at last’ was what he said.”
Oh, shit, Dukas thought, O’Neill, too. “They wouldn’t grab him over some woman. Would they?”
“Who knows what they’d do? It’s a civil war—that’s a hell of an opportunity to kill somebody. The official Agency story right now is O’Neill walked into the middle of something by accident and got snatched in the ‘turmoil of civil war,’ to quote their talking head. That’s bullshit, and they know it’s bullshit, but they’re trying not to scare whoever’s got him into killing him. If they didn’t do that five minutes after they snatched him. Meanwhile, I’m sitting here with my thumb up my ass, briefing admirals on five-year projections of Ukrainian air power.”
“Well, I’m sitting here in Sarajevo with my thumb up my ass, trying to write a report on all the swell things we’ve been doing while we haven’t been catching war criminals. We’re a great pair, Al. Christ, this call is cheering us up so much we better hang up before we kill ourselves.”
Days later, the local CIA guy told Dukas that there was a story that a headless female body had been found near where O’Neill had disappeared. Dukas lay awake at night with the image of that headless woman before him. Fear that he would cause such a thing to happen to Mrs Obren was the other side of his suspicion of her, the case officer’s guilt at sending the agent into a place where civilized rules didn’t apply, and beating, rape, and mutilation were tools of war. The thought that he might do that to her tormented him. The headless female body became hers.
Three days later, she came over from RS. He had decided, he thought, to terminate her status as an agent and simply try to keep her as his lover, but she brought what seemed like good information on a suspect, and next day Pigoreau told him that it had checked out; they even had sympathetic police in the target area, and they could start planning a raid. She came to Dukas’s apartment as a matter of course, and when she undressed he forgot his doubts and his reservations, marveling at her big, robust body and its power to arouse him. Sex in those days, in that place, was the only haven from the miseries of peacekeeping—sex and booze, and Dukas was keeping a tight rein on his drinking—and it had rare value for all of them. Pigoreau, he knew, went off to the whores, terrified of AIDS but needing something; Dukas guessed that some of Pigoreau’s suspicion of Mrs Obren was jealousy. Dukas suspected that it was that way with her, too—coming to him for a small piece of rest, even joy, in an otherwise bad life.
Lying in the dark with her, Dukas got her talking about her husband. He wanted to know enough to prove the man was dead. She had a terrible eagerness when she talked about the man, almost childlike. Dukas was hurt.
“What will you do if I find him?” he asked.
She pulled him against her, wrapped a leg over him. “I will be so grateful,” she whispered. “I will always be for you.”
“If I find him, then you’ll have him. He’s your husband.”
“I have room in my heart for two men.”
The picture in his mind was not of a heart with two men in it, like some sort of comic valentine, but both of them between her legs—two men, ignoring each other, pumping away, and she lying back, smiling. It was worse than the picture of the headless woman.
Aboard the Andrew Jackson.
Admiral Pilchard sat in an armchair in his office, his chin on his hand, one leg swinging slowly up and down. Parsills came in; an aide disappeared. The two men looked at each other. The capture of the American CIA officer by unknown forces in central Africa had changed everything. Now, it was not merely the possibility of having to repatriate Americans from a war-torn African country that faced them; now, it was the possibility of direct, angry, CIA-driven American involvement.
“That staff meeting was pretty pathetic,” Pilchard said.
“They’ll be up to speed tomorrow.”
“By tomorrow they won’t be up to speed! They’ll just have caught up with today. What’s happening?”
“Things are still breaking. It’s pretty confused. Nothing on the missing CIA guy. Something called the RPA is supposed to be thirty-five miles inside Zaire, but they deny they’re there. Uganda says they aren’t there, either. Mobutu says his army is throwing back the invaders and may have to move into Rwanda, tomorrow, if not sooner. All dicked up.”
“Just like us. Jack, that was one of the most pathetic meetings I’ve ever sat in on! This is supposed to be a goddam flag staff, not the Moe and Curly show!”
Parsills sighed, then grinned. “You know what’s wrong, Dick. You know how little these guys have been together. Give them some—”
“I don’t have any time to give!”
“I was gonna say ‘slack.’”
Pilchard took an angry turn up the room and back. “Using the ship’s N-2 for intel won’t work.”
“I told you that last week.”
“I know you did. You were right. That doesn’t help us. Shit! What’s the expectation for the next twenty-four hours?”
Parsills looked at a binder that held a thick sheaf of messages. “CIA have teams going in. State is leaning on Mobutu, or trying to—he’s in Monte Carlo having his hair done, or something. Actually, he’s got cancer and is there for radiation. There’s a lot of confusing stuff about the guy who was taken and what may have—” He looked up as Pilchard waved a hand. “Okay. NSA have intercepted some French traffic that indicates the French are serious about trying to help. Instructing their embassy in Kinshasa—that’s Zaire—to lean on the Hutus. Jesus, Dick, you need a goddam program to keep these guys straight—the French are in Kinshasa, but the CIA guy was snatched by Rwandans a thousand miles away, but the fighting’s a hundred miles south of there in Zaire!”
“What’re they asking of us?”
“National Security Advisor wants an estimate of steaming time to the mouth of the Congo, how many marines ‘and others’—ha! what’s that mean, you and me?—we can put ashore, maximum perimeter of controlled air space. Can we secure the major airfield in Kinshasa for air transports? Ditto Kisangani, which is four hundred miles up the Congo, ditto Lumumbashi, which I haven’t located yet but has some American missionaries and engineers—”
Pilchard held up a hand.
“Is there a bottom line?”
“Not yet. Too fluid.”
Pilchard looked at one shining shoe tip. He waggled the shoe. “Ask Sixth Fleet for an estimate of the consequences if we don’t enter the Med.”
“Whole BG?
“Whole BG and also only part. Part better be the Fort Klock and others, meaning if we keep the CV out
side regardless and somebody has to take up the slack over Bosnia.”
“Will do.”
“Then get me somebody who’s ahead of the curve on Africa and can up readiness so that we know what’s breaking before it breaks!”
Parsills looked at Pilchard with his head down, looking up almost slyly through his heavy eyebrows. “Well, I have a candidate.” He waited. “You know him.”
“Okay, say it.”
“Craik.”
“I knew you’d say that.” He made a face. “Mike Craik’s kid.”
“Yup.”
Pilchard thought about it. He got up, put his hands in his pockets. “He’s awfully young.”
“He’s the best intel officer in the fleet! He’s good enough on Africa that you picked him out of a shopful of experts to brief your people. He’s not just up to speed; he’s ahead of the curve. Nobody else is.”
“But he’s on a shore tour. He’s got a family. He just came off sea duty. I don’t want somebody who resents me for tearing him up by the roots!”
Parsills shook his head. “You just came off sea duty! He won’t resent you, Dick. O’Neill—the guy who got snatched—is his best friend. O’Neill was the Prowler AI when Craik worked for me; they were a team. Right now, I promise you, Craik is trying to find a way to get to his buddy.”
“I don’t know.” Pilchard shook his head. “He impressed the hell out of me, but—” He looked at the other man with shrewd eyes. “Would you go to the wall for him?”
“All the way.” That meant, Even to the end of my own career. Then Parsills said, “Would you?”
Pilchard hesitated. “I back my decisions to the hilt. I haven’t made a decision here yet.”
“Time’s a-wastin’.”
“Jesus, Jack—he’s only a lieutenant.”
“Deep-select for 0–4 last August, effective next year. You say the word, and he’ll come aboard as a lieutenant-commander. Flag intel. Our best hope!”
Admiral Pilchard looked out one of the ports that gave light to this almost elegant office. Outside, the gray Atlantic rolled, and, far in the distance, a destroyer almost faded into the haze. Pilchard tapped his big finger three times on his mahogany desk and then gave it one decisive rap.
“Make it so.”
The Pentagon.
A round-faced female jg made her way across the inner court of the Pentagon and into the other side of the building, then up two levels. She carried an attaché case, which she swung with some of the pleasure in the movement that kids feel sometimes in swinging a bookbag. She loved the Pentagon and she loved Washington, and she felt sorry for the person she was going to see. She had looked at the message she was carrying and she had seen it was a set of orders, and, cheerful as she always was, she felt really sorry for somebody who was going to have to give up duty at the Pentagon to go to sea.
She was astonished, therefore, when she had delivered the papers and had left the man’s little office and taken no more than a few steps down the corridor, to hear from that very same office a yell of delight that could have broken the eardrums of a mule.
16
October
Visualize modern warfare at sea as a set of interlocking circles. At the center of each circle lies a ship, a submarine, or an aircraft; the circles radiate from them and indicate their capabilities. One is the “far-on” circle, which shows how far a ship might go in any space of time—a minute or an hour or a day. Sub-hunters use the far-on circle, for example, when they have lost contact with a target. The far-on circle shows them the farthest that the missing submarine may have gone, in any direction, from the moment that contact was lost.
Another circle is the range ring. Any ship or plane or submarine may have several range rings, which radiate from it like irregular waves. The Fort Klock, for instance, a Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser, has one circle for the range of her defensive surface-to-air missiles, another for her Harpoons, still a third for her Tomahawks, but some of these are for land attack and some for ships, and so their circles, too, may be different. Smaller rings represent the ranges of her 76mm gun and her CIWS 20mm anti-missile defense system and still lighter weapons.
Yet it is not range, but targeting, especially over-the-horizon targeting, that drives the combat problem. A ship cannot shoot another ship two hundred miles over the horizon or even two hundred meters away in fog, no matter how vast her range circles are, if she does not know that the other ship is there. To target, the ship must see, but it “sees” with radar and sonar and satellite down-links. Radar extends vision to many miles, but it is limited by the same geometry that limits sight—the straight line of emission and reflection, and the curved surface of the earth, which line of sight touches as a tangent that we call the horizon.
A swimming man has a horizon of a few hundred yards. A man at the top of a thirty-foot mast has a horizon of almost twenty miles. Lookouts used to climb the highest mast of a sailing ship to get the widest horizon: a higher mast meant a wider circle, which was extended even farther if another ship’s mast-tops stuck up above that horizon. So modern targeting circles leap from each ship, laid down around each one by a geometry based on the ship’s and its target’s heights. And, as with the two sailing ships, the modern lookout has to remember that to see, is to be seen.
But, nowadays, one unit can target for another. It is possible to be out of the other ship’s targeting circle altogether and yet fire at him, so long as your targeting circle is extended by somebody else’s—a plane’s or a satellite’s, most likely. Using datalinks, aircraft or ships can extend another’s targeting circle out to the limit of weapon range, and a ship can hit something it can neither see nor detect with its own sensors.
An aircraft is a hugely extended mast, one with a sophisticated communications suite and a radar; cruising at thousands of feet over the water, it can see hundreds of miles, and it can tell the ship almost instantly of everything it sees. The aircraft runs the same risk as the lookout, however—what can be seen, can see. And so the aircraft is returned to the game of circles, and aircrew members have computer banks and kneepad cards and memories to help them know which potential enemy has a long-range surface-to-air missile, and how fast that enemy is moving and can move, and whether it has detected the aircraft, and where its far-on circles reach.
Enemy and friendly sea- and land-based aircraft and ships further complicate this laying-down of circles, until the ocean’s surface and the sky above it become a maze of interlocking curves, a madness of arcs, a puzzle scribbled by a child gone berserk with a pair of compasses. The amount of data to be assimilated at a glance during a naval battle becomes so immense that the human being finds the world not simplified by electronics, but confounded by it, and the decision-maker still has to have some part of himself that trusts his intuition, aided by training, complicated by prejudice, muddied by desire; and the human commander continues to make decisions and to suffer with their consequences as commanders have since Drake.
And then there is the surface on which the compasses scratch their puzzles, the sea: water, spray, waves that tower to mast height and roll hundreds of feet between crests; roaring storms that strip radar masts from enduring hulls; fog and rain and snow that attenuate radar emissions; heat and cold and salinity and whales and shrimp and krill that interfere with sonar. Decks still pitch; horizons still tip; weapons still fire into and across currents and gales. The gunner sighting down the bronze barrel with his linstock in his hand, waiting for the wave to lift his target into view, would understand: these are moving puzzles, in all three dimensions.
Battle Group Seven pushed across the gray Atlantic. The range rings of her ships pushed invisibly ahead, projecting offensive power far beyond the visible horizon. The targeting rings of her radar expanded and contracted as operators shifted their focus; through satellite-fed datalinks, these coordinated with other data, and the group’s knowledge of its path illuminated it for a thousand miles.
The sky was wintry, and a ra
w, damp wind blew across the decks. On the smaller ships—the destroyers Decatur and Melward, the frigates Hull and Macon—spray smashed up from the bows and across the decks. The ocean-going tug Frank Balducci rode the waves like a toy boat, up, cresting with a smash; down, rolling, and up again.
For the new flag intelligence officer on the flag deck, there was little sense of this outer weather. Twenty-four hours after touching down on the carrier’s deck, he stood above a datalink display and studied this new task as if the screen might tell him how he would function here, separated from the familiar ready rooms, the ship’s intelligence center, the cluster of AIs. Here, his job was not to be the day-to-day conduit of tactics, but the eye and part of the brain of the flag. His long, intense face was lit from below by the glow of a computer terminal. Its predominantly green hue made his eyes sparkle and gave his intensity an almost demonic edge. His compact, wrestler’s frame was hunched with concentration and his dark hair was almost invisible in the surrounding dark.
The computer terminal was set to show the disposition of the battle group, and he saw it from the point of view of the flagship, the range and targeting circles as clear to him as if they were really on the screen: the Andrew Jackson, tagged CVN, occupied the center of the screen. There was no Aegis cruiser on the screen; the Ticonderoga-class cruiser Fort Klock had parted company the day before, with Isaac Hull, an ASW frigate of the Oliver Hazard Perry class, as escort. They would enter the Mediterranean and cruise between Nice and Naples before rendezvousing with the USNS Philadelphia and the Peacemaker twelve days before the Peacemaker launch; long before then, the flag intended to have the rest of the battle group in the Mediterranean, as well. The other Arleigh Burke-class ship, the Steven Decatur, was two thousand yards astern of the carrier, her robust surface-to-air missile capability describing a circle that covered the entire battle group. Two older frigates of the FFG 7 class covered the flanks, providing both ASW and anti-missile protection. They did not have the radar capability of the Decatur, but, in combat, Alpha Whiskey, the air warfare commander on the Decatur, would control their missiles and use them as an extension of his own radar via datalink.