Nimitz Class (1997)

by Patrick Robinson

  Baldridge, who, since leaving Faslane, was receiving the best lesson in modern warfare history he had ever had, was loving this talk. But he kept his eye firmly on the ball. He smiled and nodded in agreement. Then he said: “Who would be your second choice, sir?”

  “Well,” he said, “I’m not sure where Iraq would put a submarine after the mission. No one has seen it, and they plainly have not scuttled it, otherwise someone would have found wreckage. So I would have to say, Israel would be very high on my list. As things stand I imagine the Americans are anxious to get rid of Bandar Abbas as a submarine base, which of course is precisely what the Mossad would love.”

  “One more thing, sir. Where do you think the submarine came from—the one which destroyed the Jefferson?”

  “Well, I am certain it’s not British. So it has to be Russian. I’d say it came from the Black Sea.”

  “But how did they get it? Did they buy it? Rent it? And how did they get it out?”

  “I’m not sure how they got it. But those naval ports are full of the old Soviet Navy personnel, who rarely get paid. Men from the Middle East bearing gifts, like millions of dollars, would doubtless get a proper welcome in poverty-stricken communities like those.”

  “But how did they drive it out?”

  “Oh, straight through the Bosporus,” said the admiral crisply. “A deal with the Turks.”

  “Admiral Morgan says the Turks say emphatically not.”

  “Hmmmmm.”

  “Admiral, could they have got it out underwater through the Bosporus?”

  “I doubt it. No one ever has.”

  “Could Ben Adnam have done it?”

  But there was no time for an answer. The door pushed open, and a voice said softly, “Hello, Daddy…Commander Baldridge.”

  Bill turned and saw a slender woman in her mid-thirties. She had long dark hair that fell below her shoulders, and her face was gentle as well as striking. She gazed at Bill with a mildly amused expression. “I haven’t met many Americans,” she said.

  But the Kansan seemed slightly lost for words. He just stared into a perfect pair of calm, green eyes—perhaps, he thought, belonging to the lover of the man who had murdered his brother Jack.

  7

  2030 Monday, July 15.

  DINNER AT THE GRAND LOCHSIDE HOME OF SIR IAIN AND Lady MacLean was not, Bill thought, too shabby. It was served by the white-coated and red-bearded Angus, in a fifty-foot-long dining room with southerly views toward Strachur and the Cowal Hills. Annie had seated them, as a four, on a long, highly polished antique table, she and her husband facing across to Laura and Bill. Behind the American was a magnificent Georgian sideboard where a two-foot-long, perfectly cooked Scottish salmon had been laid out with a dish of new potatoes and another of fresh peas. In the center of the table were two silver dishes filled with mayonnaise.

  Bill guessed, correctly, that the admiral had caught the salmon. “Would you like me to serve everyone, sir?” asked Angus.

  “Oh yes, a bit of everything for everyone.” Then to Bill he added, “I never bother with a first course with salmon. Everybody would much rather have another bit of fish if they’re still hungry. Landed this one up on the Tay two days ago.”

  “That’s a heck of a fish, sir,” said Bill. “My brother was a fisherman, but he never caught anything like this on our local rivers in Kansas.”

  The admiral looked up sharply. “You said ‘was’—you mean he’s given up the greatest art of the sportsman?”

  “No, Admiral, I thought you knew. My brother Jack was the Group Operations Officer in the Thomas Jefferson.”

  “Good Lord, Bill. I am sorry. No one told me, and they should have.”

  “How absolutely awful,” said Laura, speaking for the first time. “Is that any connection with why you are here? Conducting some sort of investigation?”

  “Well, in a way I am. But it’s nothing to do with Jack. There are hundreds of people in the Navy who had relatives on the carrier, and thousands more outside.”

  “I don’t suppose it makes it any easier though,” she said. “Shared grief never lessens it.”

  “No, ma’am. It does not.”

  Laura looked at the sadness in his face. He really was, she thought, a very captivating man, not obviously married, and with the conspicuously cavalier air, and wayward eye, of so many submariners. Especially one other. Married mother-of-two or not, Laura assessed Lieutenant Commander Baldridge as a potentially dangerous presence in her life. Only once before had she met anyone with such instant allure.

  She was surprised when he smiled at her. “I’m beginning to adjust to the tragedy now, after a week. But I’ll never get used to not seeing Jack…not ever. He was one hell of an officer.”

  “I suppose it’ll be up to you to carry on the family tradition now.”

  “Not really. I’m leaving the Navy after this investigation. Going home to Kansas.”

  “Will you miss all the excitement?”

  “No. I don’t think so. I’ve gone about as far as I’m going in dark blue. They are not going to give me a full command.”

  “Upset one too many old admirals,” she laughed. “That’s a good way to conclude a promising career. At least it is here.”

  “You might be right at that.”

  “Bill,” said the admiral, “if you would like to ask Laura a few questions, I am afraid we are going to have to confide in her. But don’t worry. She’s spent quite enough of her life in and around the Navy to know what can be repeated and what can’t.”

  Bill tried to wheel the conversation out of its corner. He turned to her and smiled. “Now where are these two children I’ve been hearing about?”

  “Oh, they’re with Brigitte on their way to bed. They’re very young, three and five. After the long drive over here from Edinburgh I’ve just about had them for the day. I said good night before dinner. Their grandma is going up to see them in a minute—I hope.”

  “I guess Brigitte would be the nanny. I never met a proper English nanny.”

  “You’re not going to tonight either,” replied Laura. “Brigitte is from Sweden. She’s an au pair.”

  Then her face clouded over, and she said suddenly, “It’s Ben, isn’t it? That’s who you’ve come about.”

  Bill glanced at the admiral, who skillfully changed the subject. “Now, what would you all like to drink? There’s a bottle of cold Meursault here, and I opened a bottle of claret a while ago…Annie always drinks white wine with fish, so I know what she will have. But I don’t think white wine is mandatory with all fish. Matter of fact I prefer Bordeaux with salmon and that’s what I’m having.”

  Bill was really growing to like the admiral. “If it’s Bordeaux for you, it’s Bordeaux for me,” he grinned.

  “And me,” chimed in Laura.

  “What can I tell you about Ben Adnam?” Laura asked after the wine had been poured.

  Her father interrupted. “Laura, if it’s all right with you, I was proposing to leave you here with Bill for half an hour, after dinner, so you can answer his questions, or not, as you wish, in private. I think your mother would prefer not to have old memories…er…rekindled.”

  “But, Admiral, there’s something I did want to ask you,” said Bill. “Why does everyone nearly have a heart attack at the mere thought of going through the Bosporus underwater? I don’t get it. It can’t be that dangerous, can it?”

  “Yes. Yes, it can,” said the admiral, slowly. “Which is presumably why no one has ever even tried, never mind failed.”

  “But why? What’s so dangerous about it? It’s pretty wide, isn’t it? It’s a kind of bay, right?”

  The admiral smiled patiently. “In a way you are asking precisely the correct man,” he said. “I have been following various reports of Russians exporting ships to Middle Eastern nations for a couple of years. There’s been nothing but trouble over the submarine sales, especially to Iran, and some months ago I got Droggy to send me his latest chart of the Bosporus. Just t
o familiarize myself with the sheer difficulty of anyone, ever getting out through there, in a submarine, dived…just an academic exercise for an elderly retired officer with time on his hands.”

  “Then I have two critical questions,” said Bill. “First, who the hell’s Droggy? Second, can you tell me about the Bosporus?”

  “Certainly I can. Droggy is our jargon for the hydrographer of the Navy. As for the Bosporus, I have been extremely anxious about this for some months…thought no one would ever ask me to drone on about my new favorite subject…do you have a couple of months to spare?”

  “Sure I do, but I guess the Pentagon might wanna hear from me before September, Admiral.”

  They both laughed, but the admiral was serious. “The trouble with modern submariners like you,” he said, “is that you think the entire world runs on computers, that your search-sensors and electronic technology will give you everything you need. But you, Bill, and your fellow American submariners, these days are essentially big-ship, deep-ocean men. And all of your kit is designed for that.

  “Tackling the Bosporus requires inshore skills, which your Navy has largely thrown away. You haven’t trained for them for years, and, if we’re not bloody careful here, we’ll be doing the same.

  “Shallow water work involves a complete culture change, because so many things are completely different. For a start, your long-range sensors are useless, so you often receive no warning of approaching danger. As you know, charts and surveys get out of date. You must have the best and the latest, and make full use of them. Because, when you are operating close to shore, you are no longer sweeping like the cavalry across a wide uncluttered plain, you are groping about in the forest, like a bloody infantryman. So you have to know your ground.

  “That entails extremely accurate navigation—to five meters vertical, and fifty meters horizontal. Inshore, you’ve got to use your eyes. And remember, above all, you’ve lost the advantage of high speed, particularly to escape, if you’ve been careless. You simply can’t go fast, with the bottom that close.

  “And something else you may not know, Bill—you make twenty knots at two hundred feet, and you’ll leave a clear wake on the surface for all to see.

  “Only stealth, stealth and cunning, above anything you have ever done before, will keep you safe.”

  The American officer had never heard anyone speak like that. The admiral who faced him came from a different culture all right. A different world, and one which might ultimately lead to the master’s finest pupil, perhaps to the man who had found a way to destroy the Thomas Jefferson. Admiral MacLean no doubt told the young Adnam to use his eyes. “But,” thought Baldridge, “he sure as hell must have done a lot of listening.”

  Laura sighed gently. Her mother smiled the smile of the deeply tolerant. Unlike the American, they were very familiar with this particular lecture. And the admiral, visibly warming to his theme, pressed on, his focus now on the dark, swirling waters of the Bosporus.

  “It’s a nasty little stretch,” he muttered. “Not very wide for much of the way. And not very deep. There are parts which are very, very shallow for a submarine, right on the limits. Also it’s busy, almost all of the time, with deep-draft freighters going each way.

  “The channel is divided into two lanes, and of course you keep right. Overtaking is prohibited. And running south it’s often bloody difficult to stop. Imagine a seven-knot current in the narrowest bit.

  “Err to starboard, and you’re on the putty. Err to port, and you’re likely to have a head-on collision. In the most dangerous part, it’s too shallow to go deep, under an oncoming freighter. Also there’s a problem with a couple of wrecks, and I have my own doubts about the charting of the bottom. The soundings are a bit far apart for my taste.”

  At this point, the senior submariner began adjusting the dessert spoons and forks into a zigzag shape next to a mayonnaise dish.

  “Remember,” he said, pointing to the tablecloth with his knife. “You are navigating underwater, in the pitch dark, and there is a big S-bend about one third of the way down from the Black Sea…right here…parts of that are especially narrow. On either side there are shoals less than fifty feet deep.” He tapped the mayonnaise dish sharply with his fish knife. “If you stray out of your channel, which is less than a couple of hundred yards wide, you’ll hit the bank, and find yourself stuck on the surface, hard aground, in full view of everyone. And that would be very moderate news indeed.

  “Assuming you get through the S-bend, the south-going channel really closes in, immediately afterward, to its narrowest part, less than two hundred yards across. And that’s obviously where the current is at its worst, as the water surges through the bottleneck.

  “Running on down under the second bridge, there’s a damn great sandbank, bang in the middle of the south channel. The bottom comes up to eighty feet, which makes it impossible to duck under anything larger than a motorboat. And, to make it worse, there are already two bloody wrecks on that bank—one of them only forty-five feet down.

  “Looking at the chart, I would prefer to pick my moment, to hurry down the deeper north-going lane, if I could time it between the oncoming freighters and tankers. But that’s bloody dangerous, as you know.

  “Also the entire exercise is illegal. Under the Montreux Convention, the Turks don’t allow it. For any warships, of any nation. And they have a perfect right to stop any warship of any nation which has not given due notice, weeks in advance, of their intention to transit the Bosporus.

  “You still want to know why people have heart attacks at the very notion of going through the Bosporus underwater? Because, it’s not just bloody difficult and bloody dangerous, but if Johnny Turk catches you he’ll be bloody-minded, to say the least.”

  “Are you telling me it really is impossible?”

  “Not quite, Bill. But you need a master submariner for the job. Of my generation there are probably three, Admiral Elliott, whom you met. Me, just. And possibly Captain Greenwood, who’s apt to get over excited, but he might make it.”

  “And how about your best-ever Perisher?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “That’s Ben, isn’t it?” asked Laura.

  “That’s Ben.”

  “But why are you asking about him?”

  “Later,” said her father. “Bill will explain to you.”

  Laura smiled, plainly not considering that particular prospect akin to a sentence of death. “Very well, then,” she said. “Mrs. Laura Anderson, mother of Flora and Mary, will reserve her answers for private interrogation by the United States Navy sometime after ten o’clock in the admiral’s study.”

  “That, by the way, means that my daughter thinks you and she are going to sit by the fire and drink my best vintage port,” said the admiral. “Like the Turks with the Bosporus, I like to keep a firm hand on the stopper.”

  “Guess so,” said Bill. “You could get your cattle rustled real quick from what I can see.”

  Laura debated giving the American a cozy nudge with her elbow, but decided against it, on the grounds that her watchful mother would regard such an action as flirtatious for a married lady.

  The admiral himself moved the subject forward, inquiring whether Bill had time for a day at sea. “This is one of the best submarine training areas in the world, particularly for shallow waters.”

  “Admiral, I’d really appreciate that. It’s funny how insular our profession can be…we all share the same goals…but we get so far apart.”

  “Fine. I fixed it yesterday. We’ll need an early start. Get on board by nine.”

  The remainder of dinner passed quickly. The Kansan glanced at his watch and saw that it was after ten, and Laura caught him doing so. “I think the U.S. Navy may be tiring,” she said, pushing her chair back. “I’ll just help Mum for a few minutes, then I’ll be in to face my cross-examination. There’s a decanter on the drinks trolley, pour a couple of glasses of that port, before Daddy confiscates it.”

  Bill B
aldridge did as he was told. He thanked the admiral for a delicious dinner, and wished his hosts a good night. They arranged to meet for breakfast at 0715 the following morning.

  Inside the book-lined study, Bill found the port, poured two glasses, and sat by the fire. Laura arrived after ten minutes, her hair freshly combed, and wearing fresh lipstick. She sat elegantly in the opposite armchair, crossed her slender legs and said, a bit too softly, “Okay, Lieutenant Commander, I’m all yours.”

  Bill found himself wishing, profoundly, that this was indeed so. But before him sat the lady who might help him find the man who might have vaporized the Thomas Jefferson. Laura might be, he knew, the only line of communication they would ever have to the world’s most lethal terrorist.