The rest of the e-mails were not as light. Pacino clicked into the security-clearance module of the
computer where several Release Twelve messages awaited him. One intelligence briefing highlighted the ominous developments in Sevastopol. During the night two more destroyers of the Ukraine's Black Sea Fleet had started their engines. The two that had warmed up their engine rooms two days before looked ready to put to sea. Apparently the mourning over the loss of the Ukrainian submarine had not canceled the plans of the fleet.
The day and night before, the aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov had been surrounded by ten cranes lifting dozens of pallets of supplies onto the deck high above the pier. The satellite photographs were chilling. The supplies weren't just parts for the ship or the aircraft. Most of them were food. Admiral Kuznetsov wasn't just upgrading her readi-. ness, she was getting ready to go to sea in the immediate future. The infrared scans were alert for her nuclear reactor to be started up within hours.
Naval Intelligence was also keeping a close eye on the submarines at the piers, but there seemed to be little activity. Probably the entire flotilla was grounded for a maintenance review, Pacino figured, which would mean the surface force would be unguarded when it sailed to the South Atlantic. He made a mental note to himself to see if NSA could confirm any communications coming out of the Ukraine about a submarine maintenance stand-down.
But other than the quiet of the sub force, it was obvious that the Black Sea Fleet would be at sea by next week on a combat mission.
Pacino took off the glasses, staring at the dark-
ness of Washington, nearing the southern curve of the Beltway before it crossed the Potomac. This was it, he thought. He had wondered if his tenure as Chief of Naval Operations would span a world crisis. It made him wonder—was that what he wanted? A war? Or would he rather retire in peace during a dead watch? But was that really for him— a four-year stint as the commanding admiral of the Navy, spent pushing paper, fighting only peacetime political skirmishes with the politicians and the other services? Or would he command a service at war, as his predecessors had? Was it now his turn? And again, was that what he wanted? He was nearing 50. In a half century of walking the earth, would this be his destiny, to fight and kill his fellow man? Why now, now that he was in command, the ultimate command for a naval officer, was he having doubts?
Despite the chilling nature of the messages, it was hard for Pacino to imagine that the Ukrainians were the enemy. There was an innocence to them. They had none of the menace of the Soviets, who had ruled half the globe when Pacino had been the executive officer of the Cheyenne. They had none of the anger of the United Islamic Front of God, the determination to exterminate the infidels of the other half of the world. They didn't even have the eye of the tiger that the Red Chinese had had when they crossed the line to push the White Chinese into the East China Sea, firebombing 35 cities to ashes and hitting the border with dozens of infantry and mechanized divisions. These people were just the Ukrainians, inheritors of a massive war fleet
with no mission, their recently elected young president having made the mistake of putting the fleet up for rent, willing to allow them to perform a mercenary mission for the highest bidder, willing to let his constituents' sons and daughters fight a combat mission for the purpose of invoicing a foreign nation in U.S. dollars. The world was making less sense, Pacino thought. And if this were to be the enemy, a rent-a-fleet, that Pacino had spent his life training to fight, then there was absurdity in the script. Could he get himself and his forces whipped into a frenzy to fight the military equivalent of a paid-by-the-hour security guard? He sighed, turning off the computer.
There was still something eerie and chilling in the atmosphere today, he thought. He could feel none of the excitement and anticipation he had expected at the prospect of taking his senior officers on a cruise to the Caribbean for a week on a luxury liner. There was a restlessness inside him, a disquiet. There was something deeply wrong. Something was coming, and coming soon. Coming for him. He could not put his finger on it, and somehow he doubted it had anything to do with the Ukraine or the feuding states of Argentina and Uruguay. This was something else. For a moment he was glad that Colleen had not come with him.
He was startled by the last thought. This was insane, he thought. He simply had to relax. This matter of thinking there was some dark force out there, some lurking evil, was an unhealthy sign. His Navy and his career had never been better. The only threat on the world scene was a mercenary
fleet, which could be defeated by a single U.S. submarine, as Kelly McKee had demonstrated. If Pacino were honest with himself, this was turning into the best time in his life. A half century of struggle and bitterness, and finally his life was rewarding. And he had spent so much time in the wars of his life that when blessed peace came, he couldn't recognize it. There was no danger, no evil out there waiting for him, he told himself. He was simply experiencing the post-combat jitters of a radar operator looking at a blank screen, the absence of a threat seemingly ominous after fighting so many of them.
There was no threat, he told himself again. There was nothing to be worried about. He looked out the window as the sun climbed over the horizon. The staff truck had reached the gate to Norfolk Naval Base, where an honor guard stood at attention on either side of the road. The base commander was obviously aware of the arrival of the Chief of Naval Operations. The truck arrived at the pier, the door opening. The pier was almost deserted. Pacino's arrival was timed to put him onboard the cruise ship long before the senior officers arrived so that he could greet them as the host of this week's stand-down.
The next hour was spent shaking hands, clapping shoulders, and schmoozing with the officers of the naval security task force that would escort out the Princess Dragon, Once on the ship, he took a few minutes in his stateroom suite, which was huge even by luxury liner standards. He unpacked and met his aide, fighter pilot Lieutenant Commander
Eve Cavalla, and walked down five decks to the wide receiving lobby where the companionway extended to the pier. Eve had arranged a cocktail party here to greet the arriving senior officers. For the moment there was nothing to do but wait for his men to arrive.
Pacino drank a cup of coffee with Eve Cavalla, watching as Admiral Bruce Phillips made his entrance down on the pier. Marching with him was a phalanx of submarine officers clad in formal service dress whites, with high collars, gold buttons, and full medals. Pacino tried not to laugh at his stunt. This was practically a vacation trip, and Phillips was marching in like the brigade commander at the Academy, missing only his ceremonial sword—but wait, Pacino thought, looking closer, realizing that Phillips and his honor guard did have their swords, marching with them drawn at their shoulders. He shook his head, watching as Phillips did a column right and marched in front of his platoon up the gangway to the top, executed a left face, rendered a sword salute to the American flag aft, then did a right face back to Pacino and gave him a sword salute, Phillips' eyes squinting in a war face. Pacino saluted back.
"Permission to come aboard, sir," Phillips barked.
"Granted, Admiral," Pacino replied, amused. It took a few minutes for Phillips and his men in "choker" whites, to get aboard with all the sword salutes, but eventually they had sheathed the weapons and were knocking back drinks at the bar with
the Hawaiian-shirted pilots and the black-shoe officers of the surface fleet.
Kelly McKee walked slowly down the fishing bridge, the wind blowing the hair off his face. His cheekbones burned in the harsh July sunlight and the force of the wind and salt spray. The fishing pier extended toward the harbor, perpendicular to the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel near the first tunnel that dived beneath Thimble Shoals Channel, the seaway leading from the piers of Norfolk Naval Station and the Norfolk International Terminal to the unrestricted waters of the Atlantic Ocean. The channel was a ruler-straight line with lit buoys on either side, resembling a runway when viewed at night from the bridge of a nuclear submarine
.
He hadn't expected to come here. He didn't know why he had come. For the last month— could it really be that long since Diana died?—he had been wandering inside the house, missing her, waiting for the front door to open, for Diana to come bouncing back in. He stared at her pictures. He opened dusty forgotten photo albums and sat in the easy chair, remembering. He played the old disks of their honeymoon. He would put his face in her pillow and smell her. Over the course of the month, her scent had worn off the house, leaving nothingness. All he could do was spray her perfume into the air, but eventually that ran out.
He visited the gravesite. She had wanted to be buried at a cemetery near the church where they'd been married, and for the last month he had witnessed the grave change. At first, it was a hump of
earth covered with artificial turf under a tent. A few days later, the tent was gone and the soil had been compacted flat, the turf mat disappearing. A few days later, fresh sod was placed on the top of the raw earth, the sod's seams naked. Weeks later, he could barely tell that the grass had been new sod, the seams having vanished. Every visit he brought roses, her favorite. And when he would bend down to lay the roses at the head of the grave, he remembered the first time he'd brought her the flowers. And the last. And every time in between.
He had ordered the granite headstone the week after she died. It had been promised for the one-year anniversary of her death, at least until he had visited the stone mason and doubled the price. It would be here inside another month, or so they'd promised.
When he wasn't wandering the house seeking a talisman of Diana or at her grave, he would scan the channels of the television, going through all two thousand of them silently, the unit muted, the house silent. He barely ate. Going to the grocery store was an exercise in buying the things Diana had liked.
There were visitors at first. His father-in-law, George Marchese, had come in his Lexus, wearing a suit costing three months of McKee's salary. He clapped McKee on the shoulder, told him that he had set up Diana's trust fund for McKee, then sat with him looking at photo albums. On a later visit, they'd visited the grave together. There were few words, and McKee knew Marchese was uncomfortable. There was no third visit.
His friends from the old days, Academy classmates, stopped by. It was as if they were visiting him in prison, sitting on the other side of a glass barrier. His friends from the boat came over, Karen Petri first, then the engineer, navigator, artificial intelligence officer, weapons officer, main propulsion assistant, radiation controls officer. It was so odd that these men still seemed so associated with their functions, just as Karen was his executive officer first, his friend second. Their visits were strained. Last week the phone rang, a voice saying simply, "green alert." It was the sensor officer, giving him the traditional signal that they would arrive at a moment's notice to drink his beer and empty his refrigerator. Except that they didn't rely on his beer stock, they brought three cases of their own, and hamburger meat and buns and charcoal, and within a few minutes there was a party roaring through his house, his officers' wives and girlfriends spending more time talking to him than the men did, the girls offering condolences, asking him what his plans were. And they seemed to share his silence when he said there were no plans. One of them asked if he was going to return to the ship. He said he'd left the Navy a month ago.
Bruce Phillips came very week. Every week he brought a bottle of Jack Daniel's. Every week they sat on the deck drinking, not saying much. Bruce reminded him that the captain's slot on the Devilfish was reserved for him, but McKee just looked down, silent.
The night before, a knock had come at the door as the sun was going down. He answered, wearing
jeans and a golf shirt, catching a glimpse of himself in Diana's hallway mirror. His face looked even thinner than it had when he returned from the South Atlantic. His hair had grown out, now covering his ears, his bangs hanging into his eyes. At first his beard had grown, but it itched and reminded him of wearing a beard at sea, and he had shaved ever since. When he opened the door, Karen Petri was there, her brown eyes looking at him in liquid sympathy. She was holding a bottle of merlot. She said little, just pouring for the two of them. At one point she told him the captain's billet was still open for him. As with Phillips, he'd remained silent, shaking his head.
When the wine was gone, McKee was nodding in exhaustion. Petri walked him to his bedroom. She stood him by the bed and pulled his clothes off, stripping him completely naked. She put him into the bed and sat on the bedcovers, looking deeply into his eyes, her hand stroking his face. He barely noticed; the wine had made him drowsy.
"Shut your eyes, Kelly," she'd whispered. He had felt her kiss on his forehead, and then the light clicked off and she was gone.
The sun came up in the morning, his signal to rise whether he was tired or not, hungover or not. He had taken to jogging to the beach and back, the pain of the exercise a release from the pain of missing Diana. After a shower he sat in front of the television widescreen and drank coffee, clicking through the channels, until by some miracle he found himself looking at the image of the Devilfish. He stared at it, then at Karen Petri, resplendent in
her starched service dress khakis, being interviewed by a reporter. He turned up the sound, but by then the picture had shifted to a helicopter view of the ships of Norfolk Naval Base.
"—a flotilla of surface vessels tasked with guarding the cruise ship Princess Dragon as the entire upper echelon of the Navy goes to sea this afternoon for a week of what Admiral Michael Pacino calls 'stand-down.' "
The story went on to describe the coming voyage. McKee tried to forget about it, and was barely conscious of starting the car and driving to the Bay Bridge-Tunnel, then pulling off to the fishing pier on the inland side. Around his neck were the binoculars his wardroom had given him as a present for his thirty-eighth birthday. He stood there leaning against the stainless-steel handrails, staring inland, looking for the hulls of ships approaching from over the horizon.
ladder to the first compartment, emerging into the centerline passageway of the lower level. The smells of lunch being cooked made him suddenly hungry, even at this early hour. He had changed the ship's chronometer to accord with local time when they'd penetrated the traffic-separation scheme of Hampton Roads so that they would instinctively know when the surface was in bright daylight and when it was dark. The change from Eastern European time was a seven-hour difference, and he had felt jet-lagged for two days. When he opened the door to his stateroom suite, the smell of the stew became stronger. Novskoyy and Svyatoslov looked up at him as he shut the door ! behind himself.
He took his seat at the head of the table and filled his bowl with the rabbit stew with its thick gravy. Svyatoslov passed him a basket with heavy | biscuits, then a plate of butter. He spread his linen napkin over his lap and buttered a biscuit, taking his first bite of the stew. It was excellent, hot and 1 spicy the way Martinique made it. The taste made him miss her.
"Anything new topside?" Svyatoslov asked between bites.
"Nothing. It's a nice sunny summer day. We should be fishing."
"This would taste good on a picnic table, eh, Captain?"
Novskoyy pushed his bowl away and wiped his mouth, saying nothing. When Grachev and Svyatoslov had finished, Grachev buzzed the steward, the dishes were swept away, and he poured from a ca-
rafe of coffee that the cook had made especially for him.
"It is time I told you about the mission," Nov-skoyy said.
Grachev put his cup down and glanced at Svya-toslov. "Then I suppose it is time we heard."
"It is not a pleasant situation. This afternoon the American Navy of Norfolk will put several ships to sea. It will be a small task force. The order of battle consists of two destroyers, the Tom Clancy and the Christie Whitman. Following them will be an Aegis II-class cruiser, the Admiral Hyman Rickover. There will be a submarine screening the task force, the USS Devilfish, an SSNX-class nuclear fast-attack sub with acoustic daylight imagin
g capability. And then, finally, the cruise ship Princess Dragon. The warships will be escorting out and providing security for the cruise ship, because it is going to sea with an unusual cargo—the entire contingent of ranking admirals and senior line officers of the U.S. Navy. They are sailing to the Caribbean for a week. The purpose of their trip is a retreat, a 'stand-down' as they are calling it, for the senior officers to put their heads together about the future of their navy."
Grachev stared into Novskoyy's eyes. "And that is important because ..." His voice trailed off, an attempt to prompt the consultant.
"Vepr will torpedo the submarine and deploy two Barrakuda mobile mines against each of the surface warships, then four Barrakuda mines against the cruise ship."
Grachev calmly took a sip of coffee while staring
over the rim at Novskoyy. "Let me get this straight. You want us to ambush not only warships, but an unprotected civilian cruise ship, which according to you is full of naval officers from the senior ranks of the American Navy."
"The Americans plan to attack the fleet sailing to Argentina. We are launching a preemptive strike." Novskoyy held up a disk. "Your Admiral sent a disk. Maybe you will find it worth watching." He laid it on the table and abruptly walked out.
Grachev looked at Svyataslov. "What the hell. Let's check it out."
Grachev brought up the video unit and plugged in the disk. It showed Kolov's office, the admiral appearing exactly as he had just before Grachev left him at the admiralty building.
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