Nimitz Class (1997) Read online

  “It is your position in the whole system that is so useful, indeed, it is possibly irreplaceable. You can do and say things we, who operate nearer the top, can never do or say. Happily your voice is not senior enough to incite the populace to riot. But be damned careful if you ever get within a mile of a journalist.”

  “Yessir. No one ever made that situation clear to me before. Not that clear anyway. But what I want to talk about is something that has been on my mind right from the start. Everyone agrees there are only two real suspects here. Iran, which has the wherewithal. Just. And Iraq, which probably does not, on account of its lack of deep water. Right?”

  “Ye-e-es,” said the admiral. “Although privately I have wondered about Pakistan.”

  “You have? You never mentioned it.”

  “I’m too important to risk saying things about which I am uncertain. I expect you have noticed, people have a tendency to rush off and act on my merest suggestion. I call it the ‘Yes, Boss Syndrome.’ That’s how it is in the military. That’s why we have lieutenant commanders to serve up ideas, and admirals, in the light of their much greater experience, to make decisions.”

  Bill Baldridge grinned. There were times when the old boy seemed so avuncular, but get him alone and you quickly understood why he occupied the chair at the very head of the U.S. Navy, and why he would undoubtedly become the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

  “Why Pakistan?”

  “Well, back in January of 1993, two CIA agents were gunned down outside the Agency’s headquarters in Virginia. The man wanted for those murders for a long time was from a tribe in Baluchistan. The guys who bombed the World Trade Center, one month later, were also from Baluchistan. All had connections in the capital city of Quetta. In March 1995 three American consulate officials were ambushed and their van sprayed with gunfire on a busy street in Karachi. The CIA thinks there is a connection between all three attacks.

  “Baluchistan is set in a triangle where Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan meet. It’s a desperate place, damned nearly lawless, for centuries ruled by rich and powerful tribal chiefs. There was a lot of CIA activity in the area after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Thousands of tribesmen from Baluchistan found themselves working for the CIA, running arms and ammunition north to the resistance fighters, the mujahideen. And with that came some kind of a backlash. Students burned the American flag, and a strong nationalist movement grew up among the Pathans—that’s the most militant of the local tribes. A lot of them call themselves ‘the children of the CIA jihad.’ The World Trade Center guys were some of ’em.

  “I personally examined the possibility of this crowd trying to pull off something like an attack on an American warship. But in the end I drew a blank. Even as a nation, Pakistan does not have the capacity.

  “Their entire Navy has only seven somewhat suspect submarines capable of firing torpedoes. Most of them are French, and pretty old…although they have been recently operating a program to build a couple of new ones under license from France, Hashmat Agosta Class.

  “And anyway, the whole history of submarines being built by foreign powers, under license, is very shaky. They either don’t work, or they keep going wrong. If you asked me if the Pakistan Navy could have sunk the Thomas Jefferson, I would have said most probably not. Could a group of Baluchistan tribesmen have commandeered a submarine from Karachi and done it? Absolutely not. We would have caught and destroyed them before they came within a hundred miles of the Battle Group, no ifs, ands, or buts. That is, if they hadn’t all killed themselves first.

  “Zack Carson’s group could have put away the entire Pakistani Navy, never mind a couple of creaking Gallic submarines. It’s one thing to blow a hole in a garage in the Trade Center, rather sneakily setting fire to a few Cadillacs. But quite another to obliterate the world’s most powerful warship—not while it’s on full battle alert.

  “My conclusions are thus identical to those of Admiral Morgan. It was Iran. Or Iraq. Most likely Iran.”

  “That,” replied Bill Baldridge, “brings me to my next point. Whichever of the two nations it was, they must have had at least one, possibly six, senior Naval officers on board, all nationals. One of them must have been an outstanding submarine commander—a man with experience of a modern diesel-electric, and a high level of tactical expertise. Let me ask you the key question: who trained him? Answer that.”

  “God knows,” said Scott Dunsmore, giving away nothing.

  “I know as well,” said the lieutenant commander slowly.

  “You do?”

  “I do.”

  “Surprise me.”

  “The Brits. The man we seek was trained in Faslane, Scotland, at the Royal Navy’s submarine base on the Clyde.”

  “How could you possibly know that?”

  “Because there is no other alternative. Look, it is likely that this guy somehow got a submarine out of the Black Sea, through the Bosporus, and then took it on a journey of thousands of miles. Through the Med, down the Atlantic, around Africa and up into the Arabian Sea. He must have refueled at least twice, possibly three times, which is a highly technical, dangerous, and demanding exercise in the middle of a rough ocean. Just finding the goddamned tanker wants a bit of doing.

  “And all the while, he kept that machine running, sometimes below the surface, sometimes at periscope depth, sometimes snorkeling to recharge his giant battery. Always traveling at, I’d guess, around eight knots, slowing to under five if anyone came near. Probably traveling at around two hundred miles a day. As far as we know right now, he made very few mistakes, if any.

  “And then came the really tricky part. This bastard actually got in among the Battle Group. He got through our defenses, and, if he hit the Jefferson with a torpedo armed with a nuclear warhead, he got that dead right too. We have no indication that he fired more than one…but he did put a nuclear-tipped torpedo in exactly the right spot to blow away our carrier. All this without our people getting one single clue, because if they had it would have been on the link faster than you could say ‘towelhead.’ That’s a clever sonofabitch we’re dealing with here. Because no one gets to be that lucky. And I ask you one more time, Pops, who trained him?”

  “I don’t know, Bill. I really don’t. You tell me.”

  “Okay. Well, it was definitely not Ali Shamkhani or whatever that guy’s called who runs the Iranian Navy. Jesus, those guys couldn’t get a submarine through New York Harbor without hitting the Statue of Liberty.

  “It could not have been any of the smaller nations with submarines. Most of ’em can’t even keep one submarine in good working order for longer than about a month. And the French never like telling another nation anything. They didn’t even train their best customers, the Pakistanis, very seriously.

  “Nossir. This man was trained either by us, or by the Brits. I doubt it was us for several reasons. One, we have not used diesel-electric boats for years, and I doubt we still have the skills. And two, we do not train foreign nationals to drive submarines which may be used against us. So if the guy was trained here he must have been a traitor.

  “The Brits, however, have trained foreign nationals. And their command qualification course is the best in the world. And they use diesels. I did hear they trained a couple of Saudi Arabian officers a coupla years ago when they were considering selling submarines to old King Fahd. I am not certain about this, but I think they also trained a few Israelis and Indians for the same reason. We should talk to the Brits, in my opinion.”

  “I suppose you are right, Bill. I’ll admit I have been trying to avoid the subject. Because once we take the massive step of confiding in another government that we are possibly searching for the greatest terrorist in history, then we lay ourselves open to press leaks and God knows what else. You can imagine, damaging speculation by ‘specialist’ journalists, who always know just sufficient to be downright dangerous, but brutally unhelpful.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Nonetheless, I am a
fraid we are going to have to step up to the problem, just as you have done. By the way, why did you select Faslane in Scotland as being the site of the dirty deed?”

  “Ah, now I was just coming to that. Shall we go next door and get into some supper and another drink? Then I’ll tell you my theory.”

  “Good call, Bill. Want another Scotch or a glass of wine?”

  “Wine, I expect, if it’s a selection from your cellar.”

  The two men walked across the big downstairs hall of the great house, where the guard was still on duty and snapped, “Sir!” as the admiral and the lieutenant commander walked by, both in uniform. “Evening, Johnny,” replied the CNO. Inside the red-walled book-lined study—known as the Scarlet Nightclub to friends of the Dunsmores—Bill Baldridge picked up the empty, decanted wine bottle, and muttered, “Jesus! Haut-Brion ’61. The favorite wine of your fellow Virginian Thomas Jefferson. Pretty special.”

  Admiral Dunsmore poured them each a generous glass, declined to remind the younger officer that it was he who had first told him about Jefferson’s love of Haut-Brion, and just said, sadly, “I don’t think we should drink to Jack’s memory in anything much less, do you?”

  “Nossir. Nothing less.”

  And so, they touched their glasses lightly, and the admiral said solemnly, “To the memory of a great Naval officer, Captain Jack Baldridge.” And for both of them the room was filled with a thousand memories, and they drank the forty-one-year-old, deep purple wine from the Graves district of Bordeaux. “And,” said Lieutenant Commander Bill Baldridge, “I am going to run to ground the guy who presumed to take away the life of my big brother.”

  Scott Dunsmore was about to mention, “Faslane?” when the private telephone line next to his armchair rang. Bill could hear only snatches of the conversation and he could see the CNO scribbling notes on a pad. “Hi, Arnold, everything shipshape?

  “They what?…Where?…Was he dead?…Well, yeah I guess he would have been. Did you talk to anyone yet?…Oh yeah, four in the morning…What correlates…? Maybe the guy was on vacation?…Yeah…yeah…Damned interesting…Call me first thing, willya…Yup…Great…Bye, Arnold.

  “Billy boy. The plot thickens.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “That was Admiral Morgan, still in his office. He just received a call from one of the monitoring guys at the intelligence office in Suitland, who has heard from one of our guys in Athens. There’s a small story running in the Greek papers. The body of a Russian seaman has washed up on the southern shore of a small island called Kithira, which sits around sixty miles northwest of the eastern end of Crete.

  “According to Arnold, the papers are saying the body had been in the water for a couple of months—they actually thought the man had been dead for around ten weeks. God knows how they work these things out. Anyway, the guy still had his dog tags on. The Naval attaché in the Russian embassy in Athens has apparently confirmed that he was a submariner.

  “They didn’t really have much choice—the cop on Kithira had made a notation of the rank and number, and photographed the guy’s metal submarine insignia, which was still attached to his jersey.

  “Arnold says it was pretty amazing anyone found him. The body was apparently in a really lonely spot jammed between a couple of rocks—some fisherman found him while they were looking for a trawl net which had got away and fouled the same rocks.”

  “I’m not absolutely certain how this ties in with us,” said Bill. “The Russians have submarines all over the place, don’t they? It’s not all that unusual for a man to be washed overboard in that particular Navy, is it?”

  “Not really. But Arnold’s guys in Gibraltar believe they heard a mystery diesel-electric boat in the Strait of Gibraltar in the small hours of May 5. They have an accurate record of the contact. Only transient. But in their opinion a solid detection of a non-nuclear submarine. Arnold’s just dug it all up on his computer. At the time he was sufficiently mystified to contact Moscow.

  “But the thing that’s getting to him now is this: Gibraltar is a little less than sixteen hundred miles from Kithira. Ten weeks ago, when the pathologist says the Russian sailor drowned, was somewhere between the twenty-sixth and twenty-eighth of April. According to Arnold, if that Greek physician is more or less accurate, and that submarine was making eight knots, or two hundred miles a day, the guy who fell off the boat, fell off the same boat our surveillance guys heard eight days later in the strait. He’s checking it all out, and talking to Moscow first thing.”

  “Holy shit!” said Bill Baldridge.

  “Yes. Well stated,” replied the admiral, pouring another couple of glasses of Bordeaux. “Meanwhile we can’t elaborate much more until we hear from Arnold again in the A.M. Now, tell me about Faslane.”

  “Right. Now, I expect you already know exactly where it is—on a lonely Scottish loch, west of Glasgow, with access to the Clyde Estuary, and then, beyond the Western Isles, to the Atlantic.

  “Faslane is just a short ride across the water from Holy Loch where we ran a Polaris Squadron for thirty years. This area is serious submarine country, with the most exacting standards of excellence in the world—and that includes all of our own bases here in the U.S. Of course both the U.S. Navy and the Royal Navy were as thick as thieves up there. There’s a lotta respect.

  “Faslane is also home to the toughest training on earth for officers who wish to become underwater commanders. It is known formally as the Submarine Commanding Officers Course, usually shortened to ‘The Periscope Course.’ Actually, the Brits always call it ‘The Perisher.’ And they jog the word around a bit. They say, ‘Failed his Perisher’ or ‘He did a bloody good Perisher.’ The guy in charge is called the Teacher, and he would refer to ‘One of my best Perishers.’”

  Baldridge took a long and appreciative swig of his Haut-Brion. He savored the deep vintage wine, took a long breath, and said, “Pops, the man we want was a Perisher, and an exceptional one, in that he was both foreign and brilliant.

  “I am nearly 100-percent certain about that. And I want you to fix it for me to go over there and find out who he was. Get me some clearance, and I’ll leave in a few days.”

  “Given the scale of the damage inflicted upon us, I’m tempted to suggest the Brits think of a new name for their Periscope Course,” replied the CNO.

  “No need, the whole program was ended in the Tory government’s defense cuts of 1994. A lot of people think it will never be adequately replaced. It had a 20-percent failure rate. Gave some guys nervous breakdowns it was so tough and dangerous. There is no place else in the world our Arab commander could have learned his trade the way the Royal Navy taught it in Faslane.”

  The admiral pondered for a few moments. Then he said briskly, “Done. I’ll have someone call the British submarine chief in London and get you some cooperation. I’m just trying to avoid going too high on this. You know what happens, the Brits’ bureaucracy is worse than ours. I call the First Sea Lord, he touches base with the Minister of Defense, he talks to the goddamned Prime Minister, he clears it with the monarch, who presumably checks with the Archbishop of Canterbury, and he with God, whom they all assume to be British.

  “Before you know it, the whole place will be seething with chatter—everyone trying to find out what we are doing. Then someone will. Better to keep this relatively low level. I will tell them little, just enough for you to get in to the submarine boss. He’ll be Admiral Sir Someone or other. Then I want you to tell him the absolute minimum, if you can. The Brits are inclined to be very cynical, and you will be pressed for information. But in the end, their hearts are always in the right place. And they’re always on our side. They’ll help.”

  The two men talked on, rehashing the ground they had already covered. It must have been Iran, and whoever commanded the submarine had most likely been taught in Scotland.

  Shortly before midnight they had a glass of port, and Bill Baldridge made one final request. “Pops, do you think you could arrange me a ri
de to the airport in the morning, and let me leave my car here? I’m going out to Kansas, just to see Mom and Ray and the family. Then I’ll go straight to London. No sense leaving on Friday. I’ll go Sunday night, get a full week in with the Navy if I need it.”

  “No trouble, Billy. Let’s just see what Arnold Morgan has for us first thing in the morning, then you get on your way. You got enough stuff with you?”

  “Yup. Suitcase packed. I kinda expected to be gone awhile when I first came to Washington.”

  “Cash?”

  “Arnold’s wiring it to Kansas. I told his office I thought I might be on a transatlantic trip before I arrived here.”