by Joe Buff
Jeffrey retrieved his wallet, with his smart identification cards; he took his rank insignia from the collars of his uniform, washed the silver oak leaves, and pinned them to the collars of his coveralls. Much better. He heard the noise of an arriving helicopter and went outside. He’d been told this replacement aircraft would take him the rest of the way. With the damaged Seahawk sitting on the helipad, the new one landed in the parking lot.
The ride to Washington was routine. Jeffrey saw all the usual sights. They put down at the Pentagon. Federal Protective Service agents, brandishing submachine guns, hustled Jeffrey into one of the gigantic building’s entrances.
Jeffrey was surprised to see his squadron commander standing in the lobby, waiting for him. Challenger was home-ported at the New London Naval Submarine Base, on the Thames River in Groton, Connecticut. The ship belonged to Submarine Development Squadron TWELVE. Captain Wilson—a full captain by rank, not by job description like Jeffrey—as the squadron’s commander was addressed as “Commodore.”
Wilson watched Jeffrey approach, and frowned. “You’re one hell of a sight, as usual.”
Jeffrey winced. Wilson, a tall and muscular black man, was a tough and demanding leader, especially when dealing with Jeffrey one-on-one. Last autumn, when Lieutenant Commander Jeffrey Fuller had joined Challenger as her exec, Wilson—a full commander then—had been her skipper. Both men were promoted in February, to their present ranks and jobs, as part of a wider shake-up of military personnel because the war wasn’t going well.
“Did you fly down today, sir?” Jeffrey asked. Wilson’s regular office was on the base in Groton.
Wilson gave Jeffrey a sidelong glance. “Unlike you, I managed to not get shot at.”
Jeffrey recovered from the gibe much faster this time. Wilson was always doing this to him, because he’d spotted Jeffrey’s impetuous, rebellious streak practically the moment Jeffrey had reported aboard Challenger. Wilson beat him up about it, hard. The dynamic worked for both of them: Jeffrey knew he needed such mentoring, and felt tremendous respect for Wilson.
“Do they know yet if my trip was compromised, sir?”
“So far, the FBI thinks not. None was taken alive. Search dogs found their field latrines. The aggressors had been hiding in that area for several days.”
“I suppose there’s some comfort in knowing we’re secure, Commodore.”
Wilson made a face. “Captain, you don’t know the least of it. Come with me.”
The two of them walked down a long hallway and passed increasingly stringent security checkpoints. At one, Jeffrey was made to hand over his briefcase, to be retrieved later. Both men were scanned carefully for recording or camera devices. They were clean, and allowed to move on. Jeffrey’s borrowed firefighter boots were a size too large. They clumped as he walked. The boots were heavy, and hot.
They approached an anteroom, and Jeffrey saw another senior officer waiting. This was Admiral Hodgkiss, the four-star admiral who was Commander, U.S. Atlantic Fleet. A former submariner himself, Hodgkiss now was in charge of all American naval assets in the North and South Atlantic. Hodgkiss was short and wiry, with an almost birdlike build, but he was the smartest man Jeffrey had ever met. He possessed a nasty temper that kept his subordinates sharp—or got them transferred.
Hodgkiss liked results, and Jeffrey produced results, so Hodgkiss liked Jeffrey.
Hodgkiss shook Jeffrey’s hand warmly, then squeezed so hard it hurt and didn’t let go. He looked Jeffrey right in the eye with a piercing glare.
“You started the day off with a bang, didn’t you, Captain?”
“Yes, sir,” Jeffrey said politely; Hodgkiss released his grip. Hodgkiss had a reputation for being able to read peoples’ minds. Jeffrey kept his mind studiously blank. He wondered what was going on. Hodgkiss’s headquarters was in Norfolk. If he was here, with Wilson and Jeffrey, something big was happening.
“Come into the chamber of dark secrets,” Hodgkiss said. “We’ll fill you in, believe me.”
They went through a heavy door, guarded by two marines in full battle dress, with pistol holsters. Jeffrey felt uneasy, in a different way from during his helo flight.
So far in this war, every time I’ve been ordered to a meeting with top officials like this, it ends up with me going out to sea and getting almost blown up by atom bombs.
The room they entered was completely empty, with another heavy door on its far side.
Hodgkiss stopped and turned to Jeffrey. “You know you’ll be on the news tonight.”
“Admiral?”
“A cameraman got footage of your Seahawk landing and the rest of it after that. The censors made them delete any views of the aircraft and the body bag, and told them to run it only in black and white. It seems that so much blood in full color would be bad for home-front morale.”
“Understood, Admiral.”
“But the point is, your helo made it, and the two badly wounded are stabilized now. That sort of thing’s good for morale. The regional chapter of the Red Cross wants to award you and that chief lifesaving medals. They say that without the first aid you did, both men would’ve died.” Hodgkiss gave Jeffrey a crooked grin. “I believe some folks down Virginia way know a good photo op when they see it.” Hodgkiss waited for Jeffrey to say something. The admiral was skilled at using silence as a tool in conversations.
He forces you to fill the awkward silence . . . and God help you if you respond with something awkward, in any sense of the word.
“I’ll do whatever I’m ordered to do, sir.”
As Wilson stood by and listened, Hodgkiss chuckled. He patted Jeffrey on the arm; six inches shorter than Jeffrey, Hodgkiss had such presence and charisma that the man seemed larger than life. Hodgkiss’s touch was electrifying. “After the war, you ought to go into politics. The media love you, Captain, but then they always love a winner while he’s still winning. . . . But right now you have more pressing business.”
As Hodgkiss reached to open the inner door, he glanced up at the ceiling and rolled his eyes. He said, mostly to himself, “If they only knew.”
Through the door was a windowless conference room, with very thick walls and a low ceiling. The furnishings were comfortable but spare. There was only one occupant, a trim man wearing a blue pin-striped business suit. He sat in the middle of the far side of the conference-room table, going through papers. A laptop lay on the table, unopened. The man looked up when he heard the door, then stood.
Hodgkiss made the introductions. “Gerald Parker, meet Captain Jeffrey Fuller. Captain, our friend Mr. Parker here is from Langley.” Jeffrey tried to hide his surprise and mounting concern, but a poker face wasn’t one of his strong points. Langley was Central Intelligence Agency headquarters.
“Good to meet you, Captain,” Parker said. “I recognize you from your pictures.” Jeffrey fought off a grimace that wasn’t Parker’s fault. As a submariner, Jeffrey craved stealth above all else. Being so well known made him uncomfortable. His job was to hide, silent and out of sight. The two men shook hands.
“Sit, everybody,” Hodgkiss said, taking the head of the table. Jeffrey and Wilson sat down facing Parker. No one had even told Jeffrey what the agenda was. A briefing?
Hodgkiss glanced at Parker. “It’s your show.”
Parker sighed. “Where to begin?” Jeffrey judged him to be in his late thirties—roughly Jeffrey’s age. He spoke with a polished, upper-class manner that made Jeffrey think of Harvard degrees, or cocktails at the Yale Club, or a leading investment bank. Parker came across as outgoing, yet reserved at the same time. Jeffrey sensed the man projected a well-honed persona. He kept an invisible wall around himself that held everyone, and everything, at a distance emotionally.
There’s a level at which this guy can’t be touched. . . . His eyes are very arrogant. . . . The curl of his lips is too unforgiving. . . . I really don’t like him at all.
“Captain,” Parker said, “since our success in reinforcing the Central African pocket,
indications and warnings have intensified that the Axis plan a different aggressive move soon.”
“We’d have to expect that,” Jeffrey responded, trying to offer something noncommittal but informed. “They need to regain the initiative, militarily. And quickly, or the putsch leaders in charge in Berlin will be publicly undermined, their power weakened.”
“The problem for them, the big question for us, is where they can most effectively engage the Allies next. Militarily.”
Parker said that last word with the slightest hint of a sneer, then waited. Jeffrey tried not to react. He decided to learn from Hodgkiss and didn’t say anything, to let someone else fill the void that Parker had created by his pause.
Parker filled it himself, assertively. “Signals intercepts and code breaking, thanks to our chums at the NSA, are giving us conflicting signs.” The NSA was the National Security Agency. “Human intelligence, what we have of it, isn’t helping to clarify things much.” He let that hang in the air, like bait, looking right at Jeffrey.
He’s playing my game back at me already. . . . Careful, this guy’s an old pro from the infamous “Company.” A corporate survivor when other heads rolled, or he wouldn’t be here now. A veteran of inside-the-Beltway battles, in an outfit that doesn’t take prisoners. . . . But he doesn’t come across like your typical intell analyst. Too worldly wise a manner, and traces of well-traveled earthiness.
A spy handler, then? That’s wicked, dirty, Byzantine stuff.
Jeffrey decided to go with his own strengths, and be entirely straightforward and simply take Parker’s bait. “What sort of conflicting signs?”
“Satellite photos show there’s a buildup of forces in occupied Norway. The threat there would be a move against the UK, or, more likely, Iceland, to outflank the UK.”
“I could see that that would be a priority,” Jeffrey conceded. “It’d give the Germans much better access to the North Atlantic. . . . And their not-so-neutral helpers, the Russian Federation, would probably love to see something precisely like that.”
The Greenland-Iceland-UK Gap was a well-placed nautical choke point, an accident of geography that during the Cold War had helped block Soviet subs from reaching the open ocean easily. Now, with the G-I-UK Gap under Allied control, it did the same to modern German U-boats.
This was why the coup leaders knew they had to conquer France. They gained hundreds of miles of coastline that let out on the ocean directly, with near-indestructible U-boat pens still standing from World War II.
“We can’t tell how many of the assets we’re seeing in Norway are genuine,” Parker went on. “We know the Swedish arms industry is working under contract with Berlin to mass-produce and export dummy replicas of the Germans’ Leopard III tanks. Perfect for using as decoys. A fiberglass-variant body that on radar looks like ceramic-composite armor. Natural-gas burners to mimic engine heat, the works.” Sweden was neutral, assertively so, and shared a long border with Norway. “That’s just FYI. . . . Then there’s the North African front.”
“North Africa? But our pocket’s too strong for another Axis offensive. . . . Strike east instead of south? A push through Egypt and Israel? I don’t think so. Not with those dozen nukes Israel planted in Germany.”
“So you think North Africa’s a diversion, a bluff?”
Jeffrey hesitated. “That makes the most sense.”
“How do you know the alleged Israeli nukes in German cities aren’t the bluff?”
“They told the Germans where they’d hidden one, and they found it and disarmed it. It was real. That’s public info.”
“So maybe there was only the one, not twelve.”
Jeffrey blushed. Ouch. . . . This is frightening. “Does anyone know the truth then, besides Israel? If the Germans even suspect they’re bluffing, the deterrent effect would be lost.”
Parker smiled, though it didn’t seem to Jeffrey like anything to smile about. “After a couple of months of, shall we say, rather extreme search efforts, the Germans found another bomb.”
Jesus. “So it isn’t a bluff.”
“We do know the Germans are moving their tanks and dummy tanks all over the place like crazy. . . . And I want you all to see something.” Parker turned his laptop on. He activated a flat display screen mounted on the wall.
Wilson and Hodgkiss leaned closer.
An image appeared on the screen. Jeffrey could tell right away that it was a very-high-definition satellite photo. It showed two dozen airplanes, in formation, over water.
Jeffrey peered at the screen. With no visual cues in the picture, he couldn’t tell how big the planes were. “They look funny.” Their wings were too stubby compared to the fuselage bodies. “Where is that?”
“Black Sea,” Parker said. “And they are funny. . . . The following capability is highly classified, Captain. You’re seeing it on a need-to-know basis.”
“I understand.” Submariners had to be very good at keeping secrets.
“The actual image resolution is much finer than this display screen can reproduce. I do not exaggerate to say that on the original, with proper equipment, you can watch one of the copilots picking his nose. I could tell you exactly how long his fingernails are, but I won’t.” Parker tapped a few keys. The frozen still image, in shades of gray, suddenly changed to full-color movement in video—without losing any sharpness at all. The satellite camera followed the planes. The angle of the picture slowly shifted as the satellite orbited.
A pretty high orbit, maybe a thousand miles, to have such good dwell time. . . . I had no idea you could watch things, live, in color, from outer space so perfectly like this.
Now Jeffrey could see that the aircraft were flying right over the water: Backwash from multiple jet engines mounted on each fuselage—not on those stubby wings—created rooster tails on the sea. As the planes moved, and the amazingly powerful camera tracked them, a coastline entered the picture.
An inlet or bay.
The aircraft slowed and formed in single file. Jeffrey noticed ships, then buildings and vehicles on land. These established a sense of scale.
Jeffrey finally realized what he was seeing.
Holy crap, that’s the Bosporus Strait! That’s Istanbul! Those planes must be gigantic.
“Wing-in-ground-effect aircraft,” Jeffrey said aloud.
Parker cleared his throat. “We know the Soviets experimented with these things as far back as the 1960s. One project was called the ekranoplan. It actually flew. Flew very well, thank you. The Sovs canceled the program, even before the Berlin Wall came down. At least, we thought they did. We don’t know when they restarted, or how they hid it till now.”
Wiggies, as the U.S. Air Force called the basic concept, relied on a cushion of air trapped between the bottom of the wings and any smooth surface, such as water or a flat beach. This gave them vastly greater aerodynamic lift than airplanes flying higher up. In theory there was no limit to their dimensions—the bigger, the better. For short spurts, they could gain enough altitude to clear bridges—something Khrushchev had mysteriously boasted about, but the claim had been dismissed at first as Communist disinformation. Then an early American spy satellite caught a blurry, grainy picture of one at a pier—wiggies were basically seaplanes. Using pier-side objects of known size for comparison, that ekranoplan was, to this day, one of the largest flying machines ever built.
Jeffrey was rattled. He knew some U.S. companies sold much smaller wiggies for civilian use—including as water taxies—but nothing in the Allied inventory, including the biggest military-transport aircraft America had, came even close to what he was seeing now.
The Russian wiggies were intended as the ultimate amphibious invasion platforms. Coming at you from way out at sea. Low and under your radar. Moving at hundreds of knots. Each of them carrying troops and tanks and the whole rest of an army—with cargo capacity per plane so big it was scary.
“Where did they go?” Jeffrey asked.
“Watch,” Parker told him.
The picture went blank, then resumed, a different satellite pass.
Now the planes were in the Ionian Sea, well within the Med, between Greece and the boot of Italy. Both countries were occupied by the Germans. With the Axis also controlling Spain and North Africa and the Strait of Gibraltar between them, large parts of the Med amounted to an Axis lake.
The Russian wiggies moored at a port between the heel and toe of Italy. Jeffrey guessed this was the major harbor, Taranto, outside the range of Allied cruise-missile strikes from the Atlantic, or from Israeli waters too.
The video stopped.
“What was their cargo?” Commodore Wilson asked.
“That’s the whole point,” Parker said. “They carried no cargo. The wiggies themselves were the delivery.”
Jeffrey was shocked. “Russia sold them to Germany? In plain view, just like that?”
Parker nodded expressionless. “We estimate each has a lift capacity of over five hundred tons.”
Jeffrey grimaced—that was even more than he’d thought, five times what the air force’s huge C5-Bs could carry. “But if they’re German flagged now, or whatever you call it, can’t we take them out with B-Fifty-twos or B-Ones and B-Twos or something?” B-1s were supersonic strategic bombers. B-2s were subsonic stealth bombers. Like the others, B-52s had global reach from U.S. bases, with tanker planes refueling them in flight.
Hodgkiss shook his head impatiently. “They’d never make it there, let alone come back, going that far inside Axis-controlled and defended airspace. The air force already went through this with me. The anti-stealth radar the Russians invented works too well. And the Germans have surveillance assets concealed in satellites they built for Third World countries before the war, launched by the ArianeSpace consortium. They can watch us multispectrally and there’s nothing we can do about it. So forget about a surprise air attack.”