Nimitz Class (1997) Page 16

  “Good. Travel on scheduled airlines as unobtrusively as possible. I will ask the Royal Navy to meet you at Heath row—just enough concern to let ’em know you’re my man, but not enough to arouse suspicions of top-level secrecy. Just play it nice and low-key, and tell ’em nothing unless you have to.”

  “Check. Arnold’s office will let your guys know my flight number. I’ll leave Sunday night, arrive Heath row early Monday morning.”

  The two men walked across the hall together. “We’ll meet at 0800 on the terrace,” said the admiral, and Bill Baldridge prepared to walk up the old familiar staircase to the big bright spare room on the third floor, the one where he always slept, the one in which he and Elizabeth had spent so many nights together. It seemed like a long time ago.

  Before he went, he turned once more to the admiral, and said formally, “Sir, for one final time. Are you, personally, absolutely certain in your own mind that none of the other somewhat hostile Middle East nations could have pulled this off?”

  “Certain. Syria and Libya had both decommissioned their Soviet submarines by the end of 1995 because of a chronic lack of spares and technical support. According to the Mossad, there was a total of thirteen Arab boats deactivated at around that time. Most of ’em lost their ‘safe to dive’ certificates. One of the Syrians sank on its moorings!

  “Right now Syria is trying to buy three Kilos, but you need hard cash these days. There’s no military credit in Moscow. The Libyan situation with submarines has always been a bit like a Chinese fire drill. They haven’t dived below the surface for eight years, according to Fort Meade—despite owning six boats. The fact is they are all tragically inefficient.”

  “Good night, Admiral,” said Bill. “There is no doubt really that it was Iran, is there?”

  “Just a little bit,” replied Scott Dunsmore. “But not enough for you to concern yourself with.”

  And so the lieutenant commander climbed the stairs wearily, and went to bed all alone in his lovely room overlooking the broad river. But he dreamed his worst dream that night, the one where the giant black submarine pursues him along the seabed, trying to pin him and engulf him in evil. Evil under the water. He awoke sweating and breathless. Those kinds of dreams are commonplace among the submarine fraternity, caused, according to Navy psychiatrists, by years of suppression of terror, trying to avoid imagining the worst fate that can befall a submariner: death below the surface in a submarine that will no longer obey commands—death by suffocation or drowning. The imagination finds it almost impossible to shake away the ever-present proximity of death, which is the lot of the submarine officer.

  101000JUL02. 18N, 59E.

  Course 224. Speed 7. Depth 150 meters.

  260 miles southwest of the datum; due east Suqrah Bay, Oman.

  “Ben, we suffer many small problem, but big leak on main shaft hull gland getting very bad. Engineer say pumps not holding—wants to stop, then surface, and repair packing. Water pouring in.”

  “You tell your engineer, Georgy, that he may think he has problems down here, but they would probably be ten times worse on the surface.”

  “Ben, pumps working flat-out. A foot of water in the bilge. Spray everywhere. Crew very worried. Some younger ones very scared.”

  “I don’t care how much water is coming in as long as it’s not sinking us. Right now I am trying to balance the risk. You just have to answer one question: Are the pumps getting rid of as much water as we are shipping?”

  “Working flat-out, Ben, just. But draining battery.”

  “Then we stay submerged, but come above the layer, slowly to periscope depth. That will reduce the leak rate by nine tenths. If we stay shallow, we can stay out of sight without killing the battery. I’d like four hundred miles between us and the datum. Because, if we surface, and they catch us, we are dead men. All of us.”

  “How long, Ben? I must tell them something.”

  “Look, Georgy, this problem is mathematical. One hour from the datum there is a search area, in which we could be lurking, of around one hundred and fifty square miles, roughly twelve miles by twelve, a small patch for a dozen ships all looking for one submarine. But after six hours, running at seven knots, it becomes fifty-five hundred square miles. When we have gone four hundred miles the square becomes impossible, and that’s when we know we’re going to live, understand?

  “Go to the surface and we may be finished. The American surveillance is good when they are relaxed. Today it may be superhuman. If they suspect anything. Tell the crew, Georgy. We stay at periscope depth, and we keep running at seven knots, until either we are sinking, or our battery’s dying on us.”

  “Okay, Ben, you win. Your superman Teacher again, hah?”

  “As you say, Georgy. But restrict yourself to Superbrain Teacher.”

  Two hours after the eastern sun had fought its way above the Maryland horizon, Bill Baldridge and Scott Dunsmore sipped orange juice and ate toast and preserves, the younger man silent, while the admiral apprised him of Admiral Morgan’s findings.

  “He’s been on to Moscow, who are not admitting the drowned sailor was a member of the crew of the Kilo they thought had sunk in the Black Sea in April. Morgan’s men reckon it would just have been possible for a bottle to have washed through the Bosporus, across the Sea of Marmara, and down to the Greek Islands—but not a body, which would have been eaten. Doesn’t tally.

  “The Russians say they told Admiral Morgan the submarine had sunk when he made his inquiry back in May because they honestly believed it had. There was some debris, but nothing significant, and they searched for a month. But they never found the hull. The body of their crewman ought to confirm what they must have suspected, that the Kilo broke out of the Black Sea with its crew and has not been seen since. However, for reasons only they know, Moscow is not ready to confirm what Morgan now believes is the obvious truth.”

  “Holy shit!” said Baldridge.

  “Furthermore, if it was making eight knots through the Med it could very easily have been the boat one of Arnold’s men heard in the Gibraltar surveillance post in the early morning of May 5. The dates fit accurately with the Greek pathologist’s assessment of the time of death.”

  “How come no one else ever heard the damn thing?”

  “I would guess they were being very stealthy and then made a mistake. Arnold says our man heard them for less than thirty seconds—single shaft, five blades, sudden sharp acceleration. Then silence. He was damn sure it was a submarine. That’s why he made the report. He even said it was probably non-nuclear. He thought it was a diesel. Admiral Morgan thinks he was dead right.”

  “Sounds pretty decisive to me,” said Baldridge.

  “Things usually do when they fit as we want them to fit,” replied the admiral, thoughtfully. “But there is yet another piece to this jigsaw.”

  “Which is?”

  “The satellite pictures are showing only two of Iran’s three Kilos in residence at Bandar Abbas. That’s been so since Friday, July 5.”

  “Well, if one of ’em left, how come we did not see it immediately, and then track it?”

  “Good question. The fact is no one did see it leave. No one has seen it at all.”

  “Do you think it could have just crept out without anyone knowing, and then blown up the carrier?”

  “Search me. The experts say not a chance. But it’s still missing.”

  “If you ask me, that makes the Iranians doubly suspicious. They could have just moved the submarine to throw us off the scent of the one they hired in the Black Sea—the real culprit.”

  “Possibly. But Admiral Morgan’s men believe it would have been impossible for them to have got the Kilo out through the Strait of Hormuz without us knowing. We have the KH-11 satellite camera trained on that stretch of water night and day. Every day. I think they just moved it or hid it to confuse us. Either way they are beginning right now to look very, very guilty.”

  “No doubt about that.”

  “Go see
your mom, Billy. Then hit the gas pedal for Scotland. Let’s get busy.”

  They walked around to the front of the house, climbed into the rear of the Navy staff car, and headed north up the parkway to the Pentagon. Admiral Dunsmore jumped out in the garage and was met by a Marine guard, who escorted him into the private elevator and to General Paul’s office.

  The car swung around with a squeal of tires and headed to the airport. There Bill Baldridge grabbed his bag from the front seat and went to find his ticket. He had only an hour to wait before boarding, and he slept most of the way to the great sprawling city on the Missouri River which straddles two separate states. He would need to shuttle down to Wichita and then pick up a small local Beechcraft to Great Bend. Bill called his brother Ray from the airport, asked him to come pick him up, a journey of about thirty-eight miles.

  Kansas City International Airport is positioned in the top right-hand corner of the state, to the north of the river. It never felt much like home to Bill Baldridge. In fact he never felt anywhere near home until he buckled up his seat belt in the aircraft on the flight southwest to Wichita and heard that old down-home accent again. Today, flying through the clear cobalt-blue sky of the Midwestern summer he could see the great billiard table of his home state, millions of acres of wheat and the wide prairies of bluestem grass, the finest cattle-rearing pasture on this earth.

  Because he would not have presumed to have breakfast with the Chief of Naval Operations without wearing full uniform, he was still dressed as an officer in the U.S. Navy.

  The deeper he flew into the heartland, the more he yearned for his high-quilted boots, spurs, and chaps, and for the feel of his hard bay workhorse between his knees, his long whip and his Stetson. In the next ten minutes he knew he would see one of the great geographic phenomena in the USA—the sudden rise from the plains of a series of rounded dome-shaped hills. To a stranger looking down they looked like some ancient Indian burial ground, like the Valley of the Kings up the Nile from Cairo.

  These were the strange Flint Hills, rising one behind the other in a gently sculpted symmetry, now in July a deep green, but out in the distance, pushing against the horizon, a misty blue, sometimes almost purple. From the air they seem desolate, a place where a man could find true solitude.

  They were flying due east of Wichita now, over the interstate highway east to the Missouri border at the old Cavalry outpost, Fort Scott. Below, Bill knew, was the huge sprawling acreage of Spring Creek Ranch, owned by the Koch family, the principal employers in the state of Kansas—Koch Industries, of Wichita, the greatest privately owned oil-pipeline empire in the world.

  Old Fred Koch and Tom Baldridge had been quite good friends back in the 1960s, but Fred died young, and Bill Baldridge knew a bunch of brothers owned the company now. The youngest, and, Jack always said, the nicest, and the cleverest, was Bill Koch, who won the America’s Cup off San Diego in 1992. Jack had gone out to watch as a guest of his fellow Kansan a couple of times while he was in port. Jack had been saying for several years that Bill Koch should run for governor.

  They were finally descending, dropping down into Wichita Mid-Continent Airport, which coped on a daily basis with an armada of private jets bearing executives to the big oil and aircraft-building corporations.

  Nonetheless, when Bill stepped out into the hot plains afternoon, the air, as ever, tasted better. Three times on his stroll to the baggage area he was interrupted by people who recognized him and wanted to offer their condolences. Lieutenant Commander Baldridge was gracious and polite to them all, and as he picked up his bag, he heard another familiar voice: “Hey, Billy, comin’ on up to Great Bend with me, there’s just three of us. They told me you’d probably show up.” Out here, matters like short-hop air flights were strictly routine. The big Kansan families never even bothered with tickets. A highly reasonable monthly bill just came in to the Baldridge spread, and the ranch office paid it.

  And now Rick Varner, the pilot, picked up the Naval officer’s bag and began walking out to the Beechcraft. “I ran your ma out to Tribune yesterday,” he said. “There’s a little airstrip just to the southeast of the town. She wanted to visit poor old Jethro Carson. She said Zack’s death has broken the old boy apart. Hasn’t uttered but one word since he heard the admiral was gone. Apparently the whole of Greeley County is in mourning. Jethro was pretty old, but he was in great health till this. Your ma thinks it might finish him. She says you can get a broken heart at any age.”

  “Guess so, Rick. I’m not feeling that great myself. Mom seem okay?”

  “Stranger mighta thought she was. But I’ve known Mrs. Baldridge a lotta years. She was putting on a brave face. I never saw so many people so upset as they were last Tuesday when we heard about the carrier, and that Jack was on board. There were four of our office people in tears. My goddamned copilot was in tears. I was in tears. We did not see much of Jack recently—but it just seemed so real to all of us, you know, to have known someone for so long, and suddenly he was gone.”

  “He’s gonna leave a huge gap in our family, that’s for sure.”

  They rode in silence for the rest of the twenty-five-minute trip across the central plains before Rick finally dropped down and flew low over the huge bend in the wide, jade-colored Arkansas River. This is the famous swerve which gave birth to the city of Great Bend, right on the north bank, where the flow of the water switches from its northeast course to southeast across the low fertile plains to Wichita. After that it still runs wide and onward, almost due south into Oklahoma. The Arkansas is one of the great American rivers, flowing out of the Colorado Rockies for fifteen hundred miles across the western high plains of Kansas, then through the lush lowlands of southwest Kansas, right across the Oklahoma panhandle, into Arkansas. It hits the Mississippi fifty miles shy of the Louisiana border.

  Despite its massive interstate journey, all Kansans thought of it as their private river and anything it did before or after leaving the state was regarded as strictly irrelevant. Bill Baldridge considered that river his home waters.

  They put down at Great Bend’s small commercial airfield, where the lean, tanned figure of Ray Baldridge stood tall in a short-sleeved cotton shirt, light trousers, and a Stetson, waiting to welcome his younger brother home. “Good to see you, kid,” he smiled, but the loss of Jack was too overpowering and they walked out to the Cherokee pickup in silence.

  Ray broke the ice. “Mom don’t seem too bad, but I guess she’s fighting it,” he said. “So’m I, really. I just can’t believe we’ll never see him again.”

  “I don’t think I’m ever gonna get used to that.”

  “Well, the ranch is running fine. Making a ton of money this year, profits still going into the trust Dad set up. I’m just hop in’ you’ll leave the Navy soon and come out here and take it all over. I’m fine running the herds, overseeing the breeding, hiring and firing the guys, making it all happen. But I guess we all thought Jack’d take over the heavy-duty stuff, buying and selling land, budgeting for repairs, investing in new herds, watching the markets, deciding when to sell and all. Ain’t no one can do that for us really, ’cept for a member of the family. We got accountants to look like they’re doing it but not like it was you or Dad or Jack. I just wanna pure-bred Baldridge out here in charge.”

  “Yeah, Ray. I know. I just have one last job I’m gonna do in the Navy, then I’m resigning, mainly because I’m not going to be promoted any higher. I’d rather get out than stay a lieutenant commander for the rest of my career. I’d planned on coming home anyway this year or next. But, shit, I wasn’t really counting on taking over the whole operation. That’s one hell of a commitment. That’s a lifetime.”

  “You got it, Billy. But it’s your lifetime…and mine.”

  By this time, they had crossed the Pawnee County line, driving westward across the old Indian lands along a flat, near-deserted prairie road as straight as a gun barrel. To the left and to the right the landscape was identical, miles and miles of uncluttered farmla
nd, sometimes wheat, less often ripening corn, and, much more often, great swathes of prairie, endless grass, waving in the ever-present whisper of the south wind.

  This was the Big Country, the land of Wyatt Earp, the Dalton Brothers, Bat Masterson, Wild Bill Hickok, the Comanches, the Pawnee and the native Kanza, the plains Indians, who once rode out here behind herds of buffalo twenty-five miles long.

  The Baldridge Ranch, with its distinctive B/B brand, set in wrought iron on the high gateway to the house, was actually across the Pawnee border in Hodgeman County, built in a rich alluvial plain in the fork where the Pawnee River and Buckner Creek finally converge before meandering on down to the broad Arkansas. But the Baldridge land begins before the border, straddling two counties, and Bill could see part of the white-faced family herds of Herefords long before they came in sight of his mother’s house.

  He cast an expert eye over them. “Looking good, Ray,” he said. “A real credit to you. Like always.”

  “Thanks, little brother. We’ve been pretty lucky this year. Lotta rain in the late spring, brought the grass on—you know the story, the better the pasture, the less they wander, and the more weight they put on.”