THE PRESIDENTIAL PARTY ENTERED THE PRIVATE ELEVATOR used by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and descended to the Pentagon garage accompanied by two U.S. Marine guards and two Secret Service agents. The other Navy brass remained in conference, except for Bill Baldridge, who arrived in the garage four minutes later. He reached the Mustang just as the three-car White House motorcade moved off through the lines of parked vehicles toward the bright light of the entrance.
As the big limousines swept past, Lieutenant Commander Baldridge stood back and saluted his Commander-in-Chief. The President, sitting alone in the rear seat, involuntarily returned the salute. And he glanced back at the Kansas officer, who was still standing quite still, a lonely, defiant figure among a thousand cars. “So long, Bill,” he muttered. “God go with you…and me.”
It was a little after seven-thirty in the evening when Bill finally left Washington and set off for Virginia, recrossing the Potomac and heading south along the west bank of the river. The traffic was still heavy and it took him thirty minutes to cover the sixteen miles to the Mount Vernon turnoff.
In another dozen miles he ducked left off the parkway onto a small country road, and in the glow of the July sunset he sped through a woodland drive into the precincts of a majestic, white-columned colonial house, built on a bluff overlooking the upper reaches of the Potomac estuary, with views across to the heights on the Maryland shore. By any standard, it was a spectacular piece of property, and it had taken the entire proceeds from the sale of one of the grandest houses on Boston’s Beacon Hill to buy it. The pity was, its owner now had a job of such magnitude, his time here was very limited. These days he lived almost exclusively in the official residence in the Washington Navy Yard, with its electronic security, and staff. But never a day passed without the great man thinking wistfully of this place.
A U.S. Navy guard, on duty in the foyer, opened the huge front door for Bill, took his bag, and led him into a high, bright summery room full of joyous, rose-patterned English chintz. But the slim, blond fifty-fiveish lady who advanced toward him wore a plain dark green silk sheath dress, with a single strand of pearls. Her smile seemed tired, and she held out her arms to him as if welcoming a little boy. Suddenly, the iron-clad discipline he had exercised for two entire days fell from him as a dark mantle, and he rested his head on her shoulder and wept uncontrollably. “Darling Billy,” she whispered. “I’m so very, very sorry.”
It took him several minutes to regain his composure, and when he did he just kept repeating over and over, “Jesus, Grace…It just seems so unfair…so goddamned unfair…why Jack…why the hell did it have to be Jack…?”
At that moment, Grace’s husband entered the room carrying a small silver tray and three glasses of Scotch and club soda. He handed a glass to his wife, selected one for himself, and gave one to their guest. Then he put his arm around Bill Baldridge’s shoulder and said gently, “I thought you might need this, Billy. You’ve been very, very brave.”
“Thanks, Pops,” said the lieutenant commander to Admiral Scott Dunsmore.
The three of them sat in easy companionable silence; three old friends, bound together during the long years of the early nineties when everyone had hoped Bill would marry the tall, fair-haired Elizabeth Dunsmore, the light of her father’s life.
Their seven-year affair had been fraught with all of the problems of Navy romances—mostly the long absences by the young officer, especially while Bill was trying not only to become a submarine commander but also to obtain his doctorate.
The U.S. Navy is traditionally cooperative when any of its more promising officers seeks the highest academic qualifications. But for Elizabeth, who was only a couple of years younger than her fiancé, it meant that Bill was either groping around the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, or sitting behind a twelve-foot-high pile of books in a granite-walled library in Boston.
When he occasionally broke free, she would invariably apply for a few days’ leave of absence from her Washington law firm, and accompany him to Kansas, where they would spend days riding the endless horizons of the Baldridge ranch. From time to time, the admiral would join them. He and Bill’s father would go out shooting quail together, attend cattle auctions, and drink beer out on the veranda. They had all been together when old Tom Baldridge had died after a short, brutal bout with cancer. They had all attended Jack’s wedding, and variously been together through the normal family triumphs and disasters.
When Elizabeth Dunsmore had suddenly announced five years previously that she had tired of waiting around for her sailor-cowboy, and was marrying a fellow Georgetown lawyer, the members of both families were saddened beyond words. Bill’s mother pleaded with her, Grace pleaded with her, Admiral Dunsmore pleaded with her, and Jack Baldridge pleaded with her. Bill did not plead with her, neither did he offer to marry her. He told everyone he guessed she knew her own mind. To Jack he confided that she’d never be happy with anyone except him. Which caused Bill’s big brother to get right back on the phone to Grace and tell her there was hope after all.
But in truth there was none. Bill Baldridge was not about to make the grand commitment. Elizabeth married her attorney, and Jack ended up by calling Bill a “pure-bred country asshole.” And he and his wife and Grace Dunsmore spent many a long dinner in Washington and San Diego bemoaning the absurdities of the youngest of the Baldridge sons.
But the family ties between the Dunsmores and the Baldridges remained strong. These days, the admiral still made the journey out to Kansas and shot quail with Jack and Bill, while Grace took long, leisurely horse rides through the big country with various Baldridge sisters and cousins.
Inside the U.S. Navy, however, the well-established, rigid standards of protocol and seniority remained unbroken. Bill called Admiral Dunsmore “Sir” or “Admiral” on all occasions. The admiral addressed him as “Bill” extremely rarely. But their friendship was so long and so lasting that the Chief of Naval Operations never batted an eyelid when the lieutenant commander called him “Pops” in the intimacy of either of the family homes.
And now the three of them sat quietly in this great house overlooking the Potomac, united in a shared grief over the loss of Captain Jack Baldridge, beloved brother to Bill, and beloved friend and surrogate brother to the admiral and to Grace. The captain had been such a huge presence in all of their lives because he was, although only the second son of Tom, the assumed head of the family. The eldest brother, Ray, who had never left the ranch and was married with four children, took it for granted that one day Jack would return from the high seas and take on the responsibility for the sprawling cattle empire.
Had he lived, Jack would have become the fourth Baldridge in as many generations to have served as an officer in the U.S. Navy and returned to run the complicated financial operation of a huge Kansas ranch. As old Tom had once announced, “None of us owns this place. We have just been given its custody, for each of our life-times. And like my great-grandfather, and my grandfather, I’m designating the future head of the corporation. And that’s obviously gonna be Jack. So don’t no one think of discussing it anymore.”
No one ever did. And outside the family, no one would ever quite comprehend the shocking sense of loss all of them now felt. And no one would ever feel Bill Baldridge’s sense of desolation quite like Grace Dunsmore.
They sipped their Scotch in silence for a while, until finally the phone rang in the hall and Grace went to answer it. She was just gone for a few minutes, and when she returned said, “It’s Elizabeth, and she wants to speak to you, Billy. You don’t have to, if you don’t feel like it.”
“Oh no, that’s okay, I’ll be happy to speak to her.” He was gone for some time, and was smiling when he returned. “She just wanted to talk about Jack for a while,” he said. “Aside from that she seems fine.” He did not of course report her parting words: “Good-bye, Billy. I love you, and that’s never going to change.” Before he could reply, she had put down the phone. Bill Baldridge’s smile was the smile of a man who had been required to make no commitment.
Grace Dunsmore’s smile was that of a mother who had guessed anyway precisely what her beautiful headstrong daughter had said. But now she excused herself, explaining that there was a light supper for the two men in the admiral’s study, a decanter of Johnnie Walker Black Label, a decanter of Château Haut-Brion, and half a decanter of port. “Select your poison,” she smiled, leaving them to it for the rest of the evening.
“Well, Billy, you tell me what’s on your mind. As if I don’t know.”
“Can I assume you agree with me that our carrier got hit? No accident. No sabotage,” Baldridge asked.
“Assuming you understand that this conversation, as with all of our private conversations, goes no further than these four walls.”
“Of course.”
“I know the carrier got hit. I knew it got hit about an hour before you nearly gave the President a heart attack on E Ring the other night. There’s no other explanation, as you well know. But I may not say so except in deadly private, and the President may never say so, whatever he thinks. But he knows, make no mistake about that. So does every member of the Navy High Command. We all know, and it happens to suit everyone real well for you to be the eager young officer saying it. Your opinions, advice, and judgments are all useful, but not irreplaceable, young Bill, so don’t get too pleased with yourself.
“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 afraid 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 ride 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.”
“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.
“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 farmland, 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.”
“Yup,” said Bill. But then he fell silent again. And once more the vision of the sinister black Russian Kilo stood stark before his mind’s eye, as it had done just about every two hours for the past five days. He knew exactly what it looked like, just as he knew the minutest detail of the conformation of a Hereford steer. Right now he seemed to occupy two worlds, each one several million light-years from the other—the soft winds and homely cattle out here, grazing on what a Kansan poet once described as the Lawns of God. And far away, the villainous, menacing, malevolent arena of international, militarized terrorism, into the black heart of which he must journey before the next week was done.
Ray drove the Cherokee up to the door of the big white clapboard house, with its long Doric columns, surrounded by great maple trees planted by generations of Baldridges.
Inside, across the high-timbered hall and through the arched doorway to the sunlit living room, sat the tall, white-haired matriarch of the family, Emily Baldridge, aged seventy-five. She was nursing a cup of English tea, a copy of the state magazine, Kansas, and Bill guessed, a broken heart.
She rose as he walked through the door, smiled and hugged her youngest son. “And how’s my Navy officer today?” she said, holding him appreciatively at arm’s length.
“Pretty good, Mom,” he said, secretly marveling at her control, so soon after the shocking death of the male head of the family. “My own news is varied. I’ve been appointed to an investigation into the accident on the carrier, and I’ve pretty well made up my mind I’m resigning from the Navy right after it’s over.
“Ray and I had a chat on the way out here. I’m coming home within the year.”
“Oh, bless you, Billy. I so hoped you would. It’s too much for Ray and me. I was always worried it may have been years before Jack could come back but now he’s not coming back and I was beginning to consider reducing the land and livestock. It’s too big for us.”
“I’d say it’s a good thing neither Dad nor Jack heard you say that, both of ’em hated selling anything. I don’t like it much either, so let’s not do anything. And, Mom, you were right. It would have been a long time before Jack got back home. They were going to make him an admiral for sure. He’d have ended up right at the top. In the Pentagon. He was the best potential battle commander I ever met. Everyone knows that. Scott always said he was just keeping the ole CNO’s chair warm for Captain Baldridge. And he didn’t mean me!”
“Ah, my darling, but he couldn’t ride a horse like you, could he?”
“No, ma’am, that he couldn’t. But he coulda taken on the Russian fleet. Coupla times I heard him say he’d a been real happy to do just that. Wasn’t he something?”
Bill knew he had to change the subject quickly. But there was something compulsive about the subject of Jack Baldridge. Bill gazed at his mother with profound affection, but he was too late. She was trying to tell him that Margaret and her two granddaughters were arriving from San Diego next week. But there were tears streaming down her face—hopeless, helpless, desolate tears for her lost, beloved second son, the only one of the three who looked just like his father. The one she had loved most of all.
“I’ll get him, Mom,” he blurted, incomprehensibly to her. “You can put the ranch on that. I’ll get him.”
But Emily Baldridge was too preoccupied regaining her own self-control to worry about Bill’s. She gratefully accepted the big white linen handkerchief he offered, and fled toward the door. “I’ll just go and rejoin civilization,” she called. “Go and have a rest. Let’s all meet on the veranda at seven.”
Bill stood and watched her go with huge sadness. She was such a handsome woman, still clinging to her starchy East Coast manners, still aware of the old taboo about showing emotion, still bearing the stamp of Wellesley College, plain as if someone had put a W* branding iron to her just before graduation. She and Tom Baldridge had seemed a slightly out-of-step couple to strangers, she so much more polished than the broad-shouldered Kansan rancher.
Bill followed his mother up the long oak staircase, through the arch set with the big longhorns and Indian regalia. He wandered along to his old room, the heavy, brightly covered Sioux blanket slung over the bed, the crossed Comanche lances beside the mirror, the big framed sepia picture of Crazy Horse gazing sternly across the room. It was the headquarters of a schoolboy scout, a veteran of a hundred battles in this historic plains Indian country. At the bottom of the bed were two pairs of cowboy boots, one with spurs. Inside the big pine wardrobe there were four Stetsons, and a selection of cowboy shirts and trousers, befitting the youngest son of one of the big ranchers in the area.
Ten minutes later he strode out over the veranda, dressed now in the only clothes in which he felt truly at home, the lightweight white Stetson pushed back a bit, just enough to take the glare off his eyes. Tonight he would ride alone for a while, heading west into the gigantic Kansan sunset. Bill’s spurs clanked lightly as he headed out to the stables.
He lingered for a while talking to Freddie, the big bay horse, which only he and Ray ever rode. Then he hoisted the big Western saddle, with its Indian markings and wide saddle horn, up and across the horse’s back. He tightened the girths, moving easily around the quarters, gently smoothing Freddie’s tail, unafraid of the hind hooves which could launch a man with the wrong touch twenty yards through the air.
When Bill rode out past the cattle pens, tipping his hat toward a couple of ranch hands mending a fence, no one would have guessed he had ever left this place.
“Hey, Billy, welcome back…terrible ’bout Jack. Everyone’s very sad out here right now.”
Bill Baldridge rode slowly westward, out between the two rivers. Forty miles to the southwest lay Dodge City, their nearest sizable town—his mom was a trustee of the museum there. Dead ahead lay more or less nothing, mile after mile of prairie, the wind making patterns on the bluestem. In this late afternoon light, the pasture seemed greenish gold in color. But as the south wind gusted the grasses bent before its gentle force and bluestems showed in long patches like the ripples on water. Bill stared, watching the blue patterns as he once had as a boy, dreaming of an ocean he had never seen.
Freddie’s hooves were almost silent on the prairie, so deep and lush was the grassland. The only sounds were the occasional soft crushing of the taller stalks, and the endless chirping of the cicadas. Glancing down, Bill could see bare patches where all of the grass and wildflowers appeared to have been the victims of a giant lawn mower, and the wind blew no patterns here.
The great Baldridge herds had passed by very recently. So recently none of the wildflowers had shot new blooms. Bill knew the cattle must be close, but he had to get back to meet his mother and Ray. Another mile or so and he must turn around, maybe let Freddie have a gallop home, blow him out a little, keep him young.
They kept going for a bit, now at a light canter through this lonely American outback, which renders its natives lifetime prisoners of a vast and silent beauty.
Bill gazed out in front of him, to a bank of high cloud building on the horizon. He squinted his eyes into the lowering sun, which was already becoming the color of spent fire. He could not see the herds yet, and he turned his horse around and began the ride home, with the last of the day’s warmth now upon his back. A mile from the ranch, riding now close to the creek where the ground was a little softer, he spurred Freddie on, urging him to gallop.
Up ahead he could see two cowboys rounding up the last of a half-dozen stray steers, down by the water. They nearly had them bunched now, riding with one man to the rear and one out on the left. Two steers kept wheeling away back toward the river. Instinctively Bill Baldridge urged Freddie forward, drawing his long whip from the left side of his saddle. He came up on the right, on an easy stride, just outside the leading runaway. The famous Kansan brand, B/B, was clear on their hides.
Bill Baldridge let out a yell, cracked the whip high over his head, and drove Freddie into the steer’s right flank, and turned the brute away, back to his pals in the bunch. Bill grinned at the look of stark relief on its bovine white face.
He rode in to the group, guarding the right-hand escape route. “Hey, thanks, Bill,” said the older of the two men, another tall cowboy, with a big tobacco bulge in his left, nut-brown cheek. “Ain’t lost your touch any, have you?”
The two men had not spoken for a couple of years, but there are some places where time stands, more or less, still.
Bill grinned. “No problem, Skip. These hot days they can get real determined to stay near the water.”
“Sure can. Staying long?”
“Uh-uh. Leaving Sunday.”
“Miss havin’ you around. We was thinking you might come back now…Jack and everything.”
“Next year I’ll be back. For good.”
They rode in silence for a little way, before Skip McGaughey spoke again. “Know what I hate most about the Navy, Bill?”
“Lay it on me.”
“I hate the way there are no gravestones for most men who die in big warships. You know, my grandfather was killed in the Pacific in World War II. Never found him. And my grandma always said how she wished there was just somewhere she coulda seen his name.”
“Yeah. ’Course in the Jefferson there were no bodies, not even any wreckage. Nuclear blasts don’t leave much behind.”
“At least it was instant.”
“No doubt about that.”
“We gonna have a memorial stone for Jack?”
“Guess so. Hadn’t really thought about it much. Mom’s kinda upset right now.”
“Hell yeah. Still, I think there should be something. You know, ever since yer dad passed away, we’ve always called Jack, ‘the Boss’, even though we didn’t see that much of him.”
“Yeah. I know you all called him that. I called him that myself. You already know, I guess, he was serving as the Group Operations Officer on the carrier, the admiral’s right-hand man. They were gonna make him a rear admiral for sure.”
“Guess then we’d never have seen him.”
“Not for a few years anyway.”
“That’s even more reason to have a memorial, eh?”
“What kind of thing? It’d have to be pretty low-key. Jack hated anything showy.”
“Well, some of the boys were thinking. You know how Jack used to go fishing down by those rocks on the creek. ’Bout four hundred yards from the main house. One of them rocks is pretty big, twelve feet tall, pure granite, like that strata over in the Flint Hills. How ’bout a memorial tablet in bronze set right in that rock, by a stone-mason. Something kinda quiet, and impressive…like him.”
Bill pondered for a moment, thinking again of Jack, of the great U.S. warship, of the black Russian Kilo he knew had sunk the Americans. Then he spoke. “Skip, I love it. Jack had fished down there all his life. He would a liked that. Really liked that. Right next to the water. Tell you what. I’ll draft the words, Ray’ll get a photograph, and we’ll have a bronze relief done of him in uniform. Head and shoulders. ’Bout a foot high, above the plaque. Lemme leave the casting and the mason up to you and Ray, can I? Then we’ll get it fixed up, and have a little service out here in the spring. Surprise Mom…get a few of the Navy High Command out. That little glade will be full of sailors and cowboys. When the priest blesses the stone, I guess Jack’s spirit will have come home, from half a world away…at least it will to all of us.”
“Beautiful, Bill. That’s gonna be real nice. And we’ll all be close to the boss every time those goddamned steers stray down by the river.”
“Hey, I’m glad we met up. That gate open at the pens?”
“Yup. I got young Razor right there, ready to close it soon as they go in.”
The three cowboys tightened their grip on the six strays, each man now with a drawn stockwhip. The horses squeezed in tight, edging up to the gateway. Then Skip broke loose, wheeled around, and came in behind fast, with a loud yell and a crack of the whip. The steers never even looked back, just bolted for the safety of the corral. Razor banged the gate shut behind them. “G’job, Skip,” drawled Bill Baldridge.
“Jest about gittin’ the hang of it now.”
And then Bill rode over toward the stables, calling back, “G’bye, boys—till next time, eh?”
“Yes, so long, Bill—don’t let ’em get you down.”
Then, somewhat mischievously, the young master of the big ranch called back, “Water trough’s a little empty.”
“Goddamit, I bin filling it for thirty-five years, I don’t guess any of ’em gonna die of thirst tonight.”
“Guess not. Just wanted to keep you sharp,” shouted Bill, laughing.
“Git owta here, willya?” chuckled the veteran cowboy.
Bill waved back, steered Freddie into the stables, where the fleet-footed Razor was now ready to hose him down, feed and water him. “Thanks, buddy,” said Bill, pressing a twenty-dollar bill into his hand. “Look after him while I’m gone.”
In the next-door stall he could see Jack’s old cow pony, Flint. To Bill he looked a bit forlorn, like everyone else around here. The sadness was everywhere, and Bill walked out into the bright sunset still thinking of Jack, and of the shocking unreasonableness of his death.
Before he showered and changed for dinner with his mother and Ray’s family, he sat briefly at his old schoolboy desk and wrote on an old legal pad the following words:
Beloved son of the late Tom Baldridge
and Emily Henderson Baldridge.
Lost at sea in the USS Thomas Jefferson
disaster, July 8. Captain Baldridge,
the Battle Group Operations Officer
on board the aircraft carrier, perished
in the Arabian Gulf along with all 6,021
men of the ship’s company. A fine cattleman,
a brilliant Navy officer, and a great Kansan.
Never Forgotten. By All at the B/B.
Dinner with his family was too sad for levity, and the discussion involved mainly the future of the fifty-thousand-acre Baldridge ranch. Emily Baldridge told Bill that when he returned he would move into the big house as the master of the operation. Ray and his wife and family preferred to remain in the more beautiful, but smaller, six-bedroom River House, a quarter of a mile away, beyond the horse paddocks.
Should Bill return with a wife, Emily would take up residence in the “Boot”—the three-bedroom ranch house across the front lawn, built by Bill’s grandfather, and never fully occupied since he died. The Boot, named because of its shape, was normal in every respect except that it had one huge room with a beamed cathedral ceiling hung with Indian regalia, including a painted kayak suspended from the rafters.
On every wall there were mounted moose heads, bison, even a wildcat. Indian blankets were thrown on the big handmade sofas. Three mighty bearskin rugs covered the polished wooden floor. The yawning stone fireplace made it probably the best room on the property for a winter evening.
Bill always thought it a pity they never used the Boot except for parties. He also thought that if his mother ever moved in, the bison and the wildcat had about ten minutes before she replaced them with paintings of what she would call “a more agreeable ambiance.” Emily herself was already planning a beautiful new house, to be constructed further along the river, for Jack’s widow, Margaret, and the two girls.
Like most Navy wives, Mrs. Jack Baldridge was accustomed to living on either the East Coast or the West Coast. But within hours of the news from the Arabian Gulf, Margaret had expressed a firm wish to bring her family deep into the rural heart of the United States. Deep into the rural heart of the Baldridge family, the closest place in all of the world to the memory of her lost husband.
Emily had been magnificent. She had dispatched two ranch hands and a lawyer to San Diego to supervise an immediate move east for Jack’s family. She had tried to point out that the quiet, secure pace of life out in Burdett might not be quite what Margaret imagined. But Margaret had been insistent that she intended to make a new life here.
Now Emily was preparing to welcome them all, with arms open as wide as the prairie, right into the bosom of the Baldridge cattle empire. They represented a new generation, and they were arriving to perpetuate what was already there. Emily could not resist a feeling of joy beyond her own tears. She adored Margaret, and her granddaughters, and had often been saddened by the fact that they would be too grown up by the time their father was ready to return to the ranch.
Jack’s death had cost them a natural-born leader, and a loving father, but in the eyes of Emily Baldridge, it had also made her family more complete. Tom would have loved that, all of the young Baldridges together at the B/B.
The following days passed quickly, and Bill spent much of them closeted with the family lawyers in Dodge City straightening out the trust in the aftermath of Jack’s death. He toured the ranch a few times with Ray and left written instructions for the accountants to try and buy five hundred acres more down near the creek, further west. There was some unproductive land to the north Ray wanted to sell, but the trust decreed no land could be sold without being replaced. The Baldridge acreage had thus never been reduced in three generations.
On Sunday morning, July 14, rested and dressed again in his newly pressed Naval uniform, Bill headed out to the Cherokee where Ray was waiting. Just as he opened the door, his mother hurried down the veranda steps. “Billy,” she called. “Before you go, just one thing…try to remember…to take care of yourself,” she said, reaching to embrace him.
“Don’t worry,” he reassured her.
Bill had told her nothing of where he was now going, but she was aware of his uneasiness. She sensed something sinister would accompany her last Naval officer, on his last mission, and Emily Baldridge watched in silence as the Cherokee drove out to the prairie in a cloud of dust.