“Right. Boomer will stay here, make a preliminary plan, and bring it back when he’s done,” said Mulligan. “You probably want to get back to the White House and inform the President we will now need his formal approval.”
“He’s more anxious than anyone. That’s not going to be difficult. We’ll talk later.”
Arnold Morgan headed out the door, onto corridor seven, swung left onto E-Ring, the great circular outer-thruway of the Pentagon, where the senior commands of all three services operated, the Army on the third floor, the Navy and Air Force on the fourth. The President’s National Security Adviser knew this mighty labyrinth as well as he knew the inside of a Los Angeles Class submarine. He made straight for the office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and asked the Flag Lieutenant if anyone minded if he used the private elevator he had used when entering the building.
The young officer practically fell over himself organizing a guard to escort the legendary Intelligence admiral to the garage, where “Charlie’s waiting for me—if he values his life, career, and pension, that is.”
They drove out of the dark gloomy garage into an equally dark and gloomy December day. The driver sensed his passenger was in more of a hurry now than he had been earlier, so he drove as fast as he could back across the Potomac and into the downtown traffic. It was raining hard now, and the highway was swept by spray from speeding cars. “Keep going. I’m used to deeper water than this,” the admiral ordered as Charlie gunned the White House limousine straight down the fast lane.
Back at his office in the West Wing, the Admiral was handed a communication requesting his presence in the Oval Office. He picked up the phone and checked with the President’s secretary and was told to “report right away.” There were many problems to deal with this winter, but this President knew the difference between a problem and a potentially life-threatening international incident.
He was staring out at the rain-swept south lawn when Admiral Morgan arrived. He was clearly preoccupied, but he smiled and said, “Hi, Arnold. I’m glad to see you. Anything new in the Malacca Strait?”
“Yessir. It’s the third Kilo all right. Steaming northeast about four hundred miles into the South China Sea. Under Chinese escort. Heading for Haikou, I’d guess.”
“Damn,” the President whispered before looking up at his National Security Adviser. “Nothing much we can do, right?”
“Not without causing a fucking uproar,” replied the Admiral. “But there is one thing we must do.”
“Uh-huh?”
“We must make certain that goddamned Kilo, on that goddamned Dutch freighter, is the last goddamned Kilo they ever get.”
“No doubt about that, Admiral. What do you need me to do?”
“You have to inform me, as your NSA, and Admiral Mulligan as the professional head of the United States Navy, and your CJC, that you, and your most senior political colleagues, Bob and Harcourt, authorize the Navy to ensure that not one of the seven remaining Kilos on the China-Russia contract ever arrives in a Chinese port. You must further authorize Joe Mulligan that he has Presidential authorization to use any means at his disposal in order to ensure this instruction is carried out. Save, of course, for either declaring or causing a world war. It will of course be a Black Operation.”
“Right. Do you have any feeling about the diplomatic route?”
“I’d say nothing at the moment, sir. I do not want too many people to realize how worried we are.”
“Yes, of course. I’m seeing the Defense Secretary and the Secretary of State in the next hour. There’ll be a classified memorandum to both you and Admiral Mulligan by the end of the afternoon.”
“Yessir.”
“Oh, Arnold. I do have two questions. First, how much of a grip do we have on the other five Kilos?”
“Sir, there are two hulls under construction in Severodvinsk, not nearly so far advanced as the two we’re worried about. And there are three others at Nizhny Novgorod on the Volga. All of these are close to completion. If we are right, we will have located the final seven for China, and you may assume they will all be on the move by the end of next summer. Your other question, sir?”
“How much risk is there to our own submarines?”
“Some, sir. But every possible advantage is with us. I do not anticipate a major problem.”
“Thank you.”
Eight days passed, and then on the morning of December 12 Arnold Morgan received a phone call from Fort Meade suggesting he might like to drive out to see some newly arrived satellite pictures. Putting the phone down, the Admiral yelled through his open door for someone to get Charlie “on parade real quick.”
Including four minutes to cancel a lunch date, it took forty-one minutes to reach the Fort Meade exit on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway
—which was about five minutes off the Admiral’s own record for the White House-Fort Meade dash. Knowing how urgent the situation was, he was a bit disgruntled at how long it had taken them to get to Fort Meade but not as disgruntled as he would have been had Charlie broken his record.
At the entrance to the NSA, Admiral Morgan told Charlie to go get himself some lunch. “I’ll be at least one hour, maybe three. Be here.” As he strode through the door, at least four members of the staff stood rigidly at the mere sight of their former boss.
The Director’s office at Fort Meade, which represents the front line of America’s world military surveillance network, has housed some hard-nosed chiefs in its history, but none quite so pitiless in his pursuit of truth as Arnold Morgan.
The new man in the big chair had been handpicked by Morgan himself before he left for the White House. A New Yorker, Rear Admiral George R. Morris had previously been on patrol in the Far East, in command of the Carrier Battle Group of John C. Stennis, a 100,000-ton Nimitz Class ship commissioned in December of 1995.
Admiral Morris, always a serious, concerned kind of an individual, was a bit jowly in appearance and was known for his rather lugubrious sense of delivery. Right now, as Arnold Morgan was shown into his office, the new Fort Meade Director had taken on the appearance of a lovesick bloodhound.
“Things aren’t looking too clever up in the Barents Sea,” he said, standing to greet Admiral Morgan. “Take a look at this sequence of pictures. They’re in order.”
Admiral Morgan stared down and pushed the pictures closer together, checking the times. “Jesus!” he said. “That’s the Kilos. They’ve dived. How old are these?”
“A few hours, picked ’em up on Big Bird. About five minutes before you arrived I received a message saying they had surfaced about twenty miles offshore and were headed back toward harbor.”
“At least they haven’t left for good.”
“No. Guess not. Looks like they’re continuing to check the boats out and train the Chinese crew.”
“I don’t know how good the Chinese submariners were when they arrived, but if they want to drive those things home safely they have a lot to master. Just to operate the Kilos safely underwater is at least a three-week program. And by the time they start diving they ought to be competent with the hydroplanes, the diesels, the electric motors, and the sensors, the sonar radar, and the ESM. No one in his right mind would dive a submarine without understanding how it works.
“I’m not certain they will have had time to tackle all of the combat systems after just three months, but I do think that by the first or second week in January they will certainly know enough to go home underwater, even if they won’t be a fully trained front-line fighting unit.”
“I suppose, Arnold, the longer they stay in Russia, the more competent and dangerous they become.”
“Correct, George. Our interest is that they leave as soon as possible. And since they haven’t been in any hurry to get those Kilos underwater, my guess is they will clear Pol’arnyj in the next three weeks.”
“I assume we do not plan for the Kilos to reach China?”
“Correct, George. But this is Black. You plainly have to k
now. But inform no one else.”
“Nossir.”
Admiral Morgan picked up the safe line to the Pentagon, direct to the office of the CNO, and requested Admiral Joe Mulligan to expect him within the hour on a matter of high priority. He also requested that Commander Dunning be there as well. He then left Fort Meade as swiftly as he had arrived, telling Charlie to step on it.
Back at the Pentagon, Joe Mulligan was waiting. Admiral Morgan came through the inner door without knocking. “This might be it, Joe,” he said. “K-4 and K-5 both dived today for the first time. Worked offshore for a while, then headed back in. They may be here for the entire winter, but my instincts tell me they’re gonna be on their way home, under their own power, in three weeks. Straight out of harbor, sharp left, and on down the Atlantic. With six Russian submariners on board each boat to assist them. Six weeks from their departure date they’ll be in Canton. That’ll mean exactly one-half of the ten-Kilo contract will have been fulfilled.
“Fort Meade is watching the situation on an hourly basis. We have to move real quick. I’m assuming our plans are in order.”
“Yeah. As well as they can be with no real start date,” replied Admiral Mulligan. “I suppose there’s no earthly point trying to put the arm on Beijing, is there?”
“Well, we might just be able to blackmail them on trade issues, but that’s not the problem. What’s holding us back is the fact that we don’t want to let ’em know how much we care.”
By this time Admiral Morgan was pacing the office. “I just hope,” he was growling, “that we do not have to take out all seven of them. The Chinese are a lot of things, but they’re not stupid. I think they’ll get the message early in the proceedings. They’ll buy the Admiral Gudenko, which is not terrifically good news. But if we nail K-4 and K-5, they’ll almost certainly bag the order for the last five Kilos.”
“I wouldn’t be absolutely certain of that, Arnold.”
“I’m not absolutely certain, for Christ’s sake. That’s just my best guess. Meanwhile I better tell Harcourt to get the Russian ambassador in there right away and warn him what the subject is gonna be, so’s he brings the right aide.”
The Admiral picked up a telephone, got through to the office of the US Secretary of State immediately. A few minutes later Admiral Mulligan heard him sign off by saying, “Okay, I’m on my way.”
Forty minutes later Admiral Morgan was talking to the Secretary of State, who was voicing a very real fear that the Russians might in turn put the Chinese in the picture. “Tell ’em precisely how anxious we are. Which we do not want.”
“No chance of that, Harcourt. It would not be in their best interest to do so. What would happen if the Chinese said, ‘Oh, okay then, we won’t go ahead’? I’ll tell you the answer to that right now. The aircraft carrier order would go straight down the gurgler, which would probably cause a military trade war with the Ukraine. And Moscow would lose the biggest submarine order it has ever had—worth in total around three billion dollars, not including the Admiral Gudenko.”
“Hmmm. Then I suppose we better give old Nikolai some kind of a time limit, two days maybe, to make sure the submarines do not go to China. Don’t hold out a lot of hope though, how ’bout you?”
“None. But that’s the way we have to proceed. And when he refuses?”
“You know the President’s views, Arnold. He would just like the plan carried out in the most discreet way possible.”
“Right. Where we gonna meet the ambassador?”
“I think in this instance your office. There’s a kind of natural, hostile, quasi-military atmosphere in there. And we might just have a better chance of frightening him.”
“Okay, see you there at 1700, right? He ought to make it by then.”
“Correct. And by the way, you wouldn’t be civilized enough to produce a cup of decent coffee, would you?”
“Very possibly, but don’t count on it,” the Admiral called back. He was already thundering down the corridor, back to his lair, in which he intended to unnerve the senior Washington representative of the Russian government. He was good at that type of bare-knuckle diplomacy.
Harcourt Travis showed up on time and confirmed that Nikolai Ryabinin, the Russian ambassador, was on his way over to the White House, as all ambassadors surely must be, when summoned by the most senior representatives of the President of the United States.
Mr. Ryabinin was a short and stocky, white-haired career diplomat of some sixty-six summers, or in his case, winters. He was a native of Leningrad and had survived an early setback to his career when he was expelled from the Soviet Embassy in London as a spy after working as a junior cultural attaché for only three months. That happened during Sir Alec Douglas Home’s sudden purge in the mid-1960s along with about ninety of Nikolai’s more senior colleagues, who were also suspected of skullduggery.
But Nikolai had survived. He had represented the Kremlin in various posts in the Middle East including Cairo, and served as the Russian ambassador in Paris, Tokyo, and then Washington. He was wily, evasive, and extremely sharp. Deceptively so.
He now entered the West Wing in the company of his Naval attaché, Rear Admiral Victor Scuratov, a tall heavily built Naval officer who had until very recently been in charge of combat training programs in the Baltic.
The two men looked extremely uncomfortable as they were shown into Admiral Morgan’s office. Nikolai himself had been so concerned about meeting the former lion of Fort Meade that he had taken the trouble to call Admiral Vitaly Rankov, now ensconced in the Kremlin as the Chief of the Main Navy Staff, for a quick brief on what he might expect from the Americans.
“Arnold Morgan will not hesitate to have you removed from the United States if he feels you are not playing straight,” the Russian admiral had cautioned. “He’s a ruthless bastard and I’m glad I’m not in your shoes. Just remember one thing: if he makes a threat he will carry it out. So don’t even think of calling his bluff. Be honest with him, as honest as you can. His bark’s bad, but his bite’s worse.”
Mr. Ryabinin was not encouraged. And now he stood in the lion’s den, shaking hands with the lion himself and being told to “sit down, and I’ll give you a cup of coffee.”
The four men sat around a large polished table at the end of the room. Harcourt Travis came to the plate and said he presumed the ambassador and his attaché knew why they were here. They confirmed that they did but were very afraid that progress might prove extremely difficult. The Ukraine problem was not easily solvable, they explained, and if the Chinese did not get their submarines, there would be no completion of the aircraft carrier. This could cost the current Russian leader his Presidency, given the resulting unrest in the Ukraine, not to mention the despondency in the great Russian shipyard cities. And in Mr. Ryabinin’s view, the Russian President would rather have an angry America than no job.
“Do you have any idea how angry, Mr. Ambassador?”
“Yes, I do. And to make matters rather worse, I also understand why. My own view is that we should think very carefully about this. But in the end, the President of Russia will have to decide between a peaceful solution with yourselves, which would involve not selling the ships, and losing the next election. It would also involve seriously upsetting our biggest customer.”
“But if you do not do as we request, relations between East and West may revert to the dark ages of the Cold War, which in the end would be far more damaging for Russia than losing an order for a half-dozen submarines.”
“I understand completely, Mr. Travis. But it must be my unhappy task to hand this over to my President, and shall we agree that most men who have attained very high office have a self-interested streak?”
“Well, Mr. Ambassador, I think you must understand we feel very strongly about this, and if you do proceed with the Chinese order there will be a few hard financial truths for you to face in your future dealings with us. You realize we are able to make things difficult for any Russian President, including this one.
On the other hand, we can be, and are, extremely good friends to you.”
“So, I am afraid, are the Chinese.”
Admiral Morgan, who had been silent until now, decided it was probably time to fire a shot or two across the Russian bows. “How would it be, Ambassador, if we went out and blew the two Kilos out of the water, and then told the Chinese you knew all along what was going to happen but deliberately failed to warn them in the interest of keeping your hot little hands on that huge bundle of Chinese yuan and your President’s job?”
Nikolai Ryabinin was shocked at the frontal assault. So was Harcourt Travis, who dropped his expensive gold pen on the table with a clatter.
In flawless English, the veteran Russian diplomat, mindful of the warning of Admiral Rankov, said quietly, “That would be widely construed by the international community as an unwarranted act of war. Unworthy of the United States of America. A large number of dead sailors, whatever their nationality, does not play well in front of a large world television audience.”
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