USS Ronald Reagan
Gulf of Aden
1815, Thursday, 20 June
Maxwell counted six destroyers weaving in a criss-cross pattern across the Gulf. A squadron of sub-hunting helicopters was working fore and aft of the Reagan as the carrier cruised eastward into the Arabian Sea. Several miles away, two P-3 Orion patrol planes were skimming the ocean ahead of the battle group.
At the far end of the conference table sat Admiral Fletcher. Next to him sat Captain Stickney, and on the opposite side Spook Morse and Guido Vitale. Colonel Gus Gritti, haggard and shaking from fatigue, had given his account of the campaign, then gone to bed, promising to rejoin them in the morning.
Fletcher looked directly at Maxwell. “What makes you so sure it was Al-Fasr?”
“I’m a fighter pilot. I saw the way he flew, the fact that he was in the lead, the tactics he used.”
“Was there any chance that he could have survived the crash?” asked Fletcher. “Could he have ejected?”
“Not likely,” said Maxwell. “It would have to have happened in a split second before the MiG exploded .”
“I haven’t sen the HUD tape yet,” said Boyce. The Hornet’s cockpit video recorder taped everything the pilot saw through the HUD. “Let’s have a look.”
Maxwell reached into the zippered leg pocket of his flight suit and pulled out a cassette. “It was running the whole time.” He handed the tape to Morse, who inserted in the VCR mounted behind the conference table.
The flickering, grainy image shot through the windscreen of Maxwell’s Hornet appeared on the wall-mounted screen. Morse fast-forwarded the picture until the shape of a MiG-29 flitted into the HUD’s field of view. “That was the first engagement,” said Maxwell. “I took an AIM-9 shot, but he beat it.”
They watched the view change to the narrow walls of the canyon. Maxwell was chasing the MiG through the narrow ravine.
“Jesus,” muttered Boyce. “It looks like a video game.”
Suddenly the canyon bridge—the eye of the needle—appeared in the HUD. They saw the MiG roll up on its side and vanish through the hole.
The HUD view abruptly tilted sideways, and the eye of the needle zipped past the camera.
Several audible gasps came from around the table. “You’re either crazy as a bedbug,” said Boyce, “or you’re the world’s hottest fighter pilot.”
For the next several seconds, the MiG was gone from the HUD view. When it appeared again, it was in a high scissors, diving again toward the ground.
A SHOOT message appeared in the HUD. “That’s when I took the second AIM-9 shot,” said Maxwell.
The gray smoke trail of a missile could be seen aiming toward the rolling MiG. The missile exploded into the earth just behind the hard-turning MiG-29.
Again the MiG vanished from the screen. Not until several seconds later, after the Hornet had completed a reversal turn, did the terrain reappear. Scattered pockets of smoke and flame marked the crash site of the Fulcrum.
Morse pushed the STOP button. “The impact with the ground was out of the HUD’s field of view,” he said.
None of the officers at the table spoke.
Finally Fletcher rose. “Gentlemen, if the man flying that MiG was Al-Fasr, then this unholy war is over. The Marine unit has finished culling all the intelligence material from the terrorist base and the complex has been destroyed. I will to report to CNO and the Joint Chiefs that our campaign in Yemen is concluded and all our personnel have been extracted. The Reagan has suffered major battle damage and will be heading through the Straits of Hormuz to Bahrain.”
“What about the submarine threat, Admiral?” Boyce asked. “Do you have a fix on him?”
“I wish we did. SUBLANT has tagged the sub—a Project 636 boat named Ilia Mourmetz. The only Kilo class unaccounted for in this part of the world. It was sold to Iran, but it seems that it never arrived.”
“So who’s crewing it?” Boyce asked. “Who put the torpedoes into us?”
“Best guess is the Russian crew that was supposed to be delivering the boat to Iran and who most likely were bought out by Al-Fasr. The Russian government has been very forthcoming with data about the sub and the crew, mainly because they’re terrified that we’ll think they did it.”
“Where’s the sub now?”
“We don’t know. The ASW commander in the Arkansas is certain that it’s no longer in our periphery.”
“If they don’t know where he is, how do they know he’s not just waiting somewhere to take another shot?”
Vitale pointed to the window. “Look out there. What you’re seeing is the biggest sub hunt in modern history. When that Kilo boat so much as turns a blade—and he’ll have to very soon—they’re going to kill him.”
“How’d he get away after firing his
torpedoes?”
The operations officer just shook his head. “One of the dirty
little secrets about anti-submarine warfare is that the old
diesel/electrics, which we gave up years ago, by the way, are the
stealthiest boats in the world. The sub skipper is either brilliant
or incredibly lucky. He took an obsolete submarine and a mercenary
crew and managed to get inside the most powerful battle group in
the world.”
“And then escape,” added Boyce.
“Maybe there’s a lesson in this,” said Fletcher. He walked around from the end of the table and gazed out the window. “Our technology and our tactics evolved during the Cold War to battle the Soviet Union. Somewhere along the way we forgot how to fight an enemy like Al-Fasr with old-fashioned weapons.”
“Sort of like getting knifed when you thought you were in a gun fight,” Boyce said.
“Something like that. A lot of mistakes were made in this campaign.” Fletcher stood with his hands clasped behind him, his back to the group at the table. “Most of them mine.”
A hush fell over the room. Morse was doodling on a notepad. Vitale’s mouth was half open. Stickney looked mesmerized. They were all watching Fletcher.
“The biggest mistake,” Fletcher went on, “was in letting the military chain of command be subverted by outside influences. That was my error. It’s one I will carry responsibility for to my grave.”
The silence hung in the compartment like a shroud. None of them had ever heard a flag officer bare his soul like Fletcher was doing.
“When they convene my court martial,” said Fletcher, “I will testify that it was my overweening ambition and my acquiescence to. . .” he paused, and everyone waited for him to mention Babcock, but he didn’t. Instead, he said, “. . . my inappropriate deference to a non-military official.”
He turned and looked at them. “You all have brilliant careers ahead of you. I want you to remember what happened here so that you don’t have to repeat it. It seems that we go through something like this every generation or so—a short circuit in our military leadership. It happened in Vietnam, with politicians determining our targets. In Iran with the mismanaged hostage rescue. It happened in Lebanon when officials in Washington presumed to manage an air strike against the Syrians.”
Fletcher went back to his seat. “And history will show that it happened in Yemen.”
Stickney was the first to speak up. “ Admiral, may I ask the status of Mr. Babcock? The last I heard, he was—”
“In his quarters.” Fletcher glanced at his watch. “Within the hour, he will be flown off to Dubai, and then be on his way back to Washington where, no doubt, he will arrange for me to be relieved of this command.”
Maxwell caught the sardonic note in Fletcher’s voice. It was odd, he thought. In the past two days he had actually come to like the white-haired admiral—the same Fletcher whom he had written off as an empty suit. At the eleventh hour the admiral had reached deep inside himself and found a source of inner steel. The tragedy of Langhorne Fletcher was that it happened too late.
“You’re dismissed, gentlemen,” Fletcher said. “You have my thanks for a job well done.”
As the officers headed for the door, he added, “Commander Maxwell, before you leave, may I have a word with you?”
<>
The SCIF—Sensitive Compartmental Information Facility—was located amidships, down in the spaces of the Reagan’s Surface Plot, called Alpha Sierra. Two Marine sentries guarded the entrance. The bulkheads of the compartment were specially treated and padded to prevent bugging or passive emissions monitoring.
At his work table inside the SCIF, FBI agent Adam Korchek tilted back in his steel desk chair and rubbed his eyes. He hated this place—the claustrophobic sterility of the windowless compartment, Halite lamps glaring from the overhead, the drab gray furniture. One bulkhead was lined with tape reels and disc players. Across the compartment six cryptologists, linguists, and intelligence analysts were laboring at their consoles.
For the past thirteen hours Korchek and Dick Mosely, the CIA officer who specialized in Arab terrorist organizations, had been analyzing the transcribed material that the marines had brought from Al-Fasr’s base compound. Most of the data was encrypted, which took time to decode and translate.
It was hard work, but by the time he’d worked through the third stack of transcriptions—the data from the optical storage unit in the Al-Fasr compound—Korchek knew he had struck paydirt. He now had half a dozen recorded SatComm conversations between Al-Fasr and someone who was obviously in an influential position. Though the official’s name was never explicitly used, it was clear in the transcription that he and Al-Fasr were more than well acquainted.
As he sifted through the piles of transcriptions, something still troubled Korchek. There were these snippets of encrypted one-way transmissions and received messages. Some were clearly intended for a clandestine warship, relaying information and points of intended movement of the Reagan and its battle group. From the content of the messages, Korchek deduced that they were intended for a submarine, presumably the Kilo class boat that had attacked the carrier.
Were these from the same the same source as the SatComm exchanges?
By his nature and experience, Korchek was a cynical man. He had no wife, no immediate family except for a pair of brothers in Chicago whom he despised. His early years in law enforcement had imbued him with a distrust of his fellow man, and it was this trait that had served him best in the field of counter intelligence. Like a bloodhound, Korchek had a knack of sniffing out the tiniest whiff of perfidy.
Now he was sniffing. He didn’t have the scent yet, but he knew that he was getting close.
Korchek returned to his piles of transcriptions. For another two hours he pored over them, puzzling out the meaning of the tiny encrypted snippets, looking for a pattern.
Suddenly it jumped off the page, jolting him like a hot spark. Of course! Korchek sat upright in the chair, staring at the piles of transcribed messages. It made perfect sense. Nothing solid, nothing provable, at least not yet. But he had the scent clearly in his nostrils.
He rose and went over the watch officer, a pudgy lieutenant commander in khakis. He gave the officer a pink memo sheet with a handwritten name on it. “Download the background investigation file on this man. For my eyes only.”
The watch officer looked annoyed. “Is this urgent?” he said. “I’m pretty busy getting—”
“Do you want me get the operations officer on the line? Just fucking do it and quit wasting time.”
The watch officer was not accustomed to being insulted by civilians. He glowered at Korchek for a second. Grudgingly, he picked up the pink sheet and read it.
A look of shock passed over his face. Nodding his head in amazement, he swung his chair around to his desk keyboard and began typing in the file download order.
<>
Fletcher’s eyes bored into him. “Why didn’t you tell me that your father was Harlan Maxwell?”
Maxwell was taken aback. “Ah, it wasn’t relevant, Admiral. I don’t bring up my father’s name in connection with my own career.”
Fletcher nodded. “Knowing you as I do now, I understand. It so happens I’m well acquainted with your father. Served under him when he had the Second Fleet. He was a very good officer, a hard man to work for sometimes, rather blunt and fixed in his opinions. But you always knew where you stood with Harlan Maxwell. Sort of like you, I suspect.”
Maxwell kept his silence, wondering where this was going.
Fletcher pulled an envelope from his shirt pocket. “This came in on the net the day before yesterday. It seems that your father was worried and wanted to know if you were okay. I didn’t answer, because at the time you weren’t okay. You had been shot down in Yemen.”
Maxwell felt an old familiar emptiness as he listened to Fletcher. How long had it been? More than two years since he and his father had communicated, and then only to exchange terse Christmas greetings. It had been that way for most of his adult life, this discordant relationship. The elder Maxwell could never stop being the Admiral—the senior presence in his life. He could never stop being the rebellious son.
Now the Admiral was worried about his son.
“I’m probably violating a confidence by telling you this,” Fletcher said. “In his note, Harlan asked me not to let you know. But I find it troubling, such a disconnect between father and son.”
Disconnect. There was an understatement, thought Maxwell. He and his father had been disconnected since the day Sam—that was before he received the call sign “Brick”—announced that he had declined his appointment to the U. S. Naval Academy.
His father, an academy grad and the son and grandson of academy alumni, was apoplectic. The chill lasted until Sam graduated from Rensselaer and took his commission in the U. S. Navy.
The next major rift occurred when Brick, then a test pilot, left active Navy duty to become an astronaut. To his father, it was a breach of tradition. Maxwells were seagoing naval officers, not space cowboys.
No one, however, stood taller or prouder in the viewing area than Harlan Maxwell on the day his son lifted off in the shuttle Atlantis. It was his first flight into space and, as it turned out, his last, which caused the next rift between the Maxwells.
His father had not spoken to him since he resigned from NASA.
“My father and I don’t see eye to eye,” Brick heard himself saying.
“I never had a son, just daughters,” said Fletcher. “But I know something about trying to live up to someone else’s expectations. My own father was an admiral, you know.”
Maxwell nodded. He knew that he liked Fletcher.
“I’m going to answer Harlan’s letter,” Fletcher said. “You know what I’m going to say?”
Maxwell shook his head.
“I’m going to tell him that if I had a son like you, I would be the proudest man in the world. If he doesn’t immediately sit down and tell you he loves you, he doesn’t deserve to be a father.”
Maxwell didn’t know what to say. Old emotions were whirling around inside him like a storm. “Sir, I don’t—”
“Do the same thing. Go write a letter to your old man. Tell him you love him. Trust me, son, he wants to hear that more than anything.”
Maxwell fought back a well of tears. He nodded and said, “Yes, sir. I’ll do that.”