Torpedo! (The Silent War Book 3) Read online

  Captain Steel shrank back into his chair. “Did you bring me here in front of these people to threaten me? Did you bring this nation to the brink of nuclear holocaust to get rid of me? If so, Admiral, you have made the biggest mistake of your life!”

  Brannon’s eyes held Steel. “If you think that, Captain,” he said softly, “if you think that then your ego is beyond my comprehension, sir. And if you think that I cannot destroy you then you are mistaken. If the New York Times or the Washington Post were to be given documented evidence of the deplorable state of our nuclear submarine Navy when I came aboard I can assure you that the Chief of Naval Operations and you and I, would all be out on our collective asses.

  “I am prepared to take the consequences for my actions. Just as you had better be prepared to take the consequences if you choose to go running to your friends in the Congress.

  “To set your mind at rest, sir, I intend to wait three days for a Soviet response through Mr. Wilson’s contacts. If there is no response I intend to go to the President and the head of the National Security Council and inform them fully of what has happened. If the President agrees we will then announce the loss of the Sharkfin due to unknown causes.”

  Captain Steel sat in his chair, his body huddled in on itself. Then he began to straighten up. His eyes stared at Mike Brannon.

  “You have reminded me twice in recent days that you are a Vice Admiral and I am a Captain, sir, that I have no choice but to obey your lawful orders. Very well. But remember this, sir; if there is no response from the Soviets to this maniacal action on your part I will appear with you when you make your explanation to the President and I will destroy whatever warped line of reasoning you present. That is not a threat, it is a plain statement of fact. Sir!” He rose and left the office, slamming the door behind him.

  Admiral Olsen uncoiled his long frame from the sofa and poured coffee for the others. “He means that, Mike. He’ll be there and he’ll have the chairmen of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees in tow and they’ll be loaded for bear. Or for Mike Brannon.”

  “I’ll face that problem if and when it comes,” Brannon said. He sipped at his coffee. “Bob, you’re the ranking expert on the Soviet mind. What do you think they’ll do when they know they’ve lost one of their submarines?”

  “They could begin a nuclear war,” Wilson said slowly. “But I’d rule that out. When you hit back at them you sent a message they understand. You’re playing hard ball in the Big Leagues and they understand that, they do it all the time. I don’t think they’ll do anything. If it’s any use to you, Admiral, I’d be willing to testify that it’s my opinion that if you hadn’t taken the action you did the Soviets would have gone a hell of a lot farther in their next try.”

  “Thank you,” Brannon said. He turned toward Admiral Benson. “I expect to be kept fully informed of any information you get, anything.” He stood up and walked around in front of his desk.

  “Will do, sir,” Admiral Benson said. “My God, that must have been something, that action! Submarines fighting submarines underwater! I know a lot about combat in the air, one on one with the other guy, but submarines and underwater where no one can see anything, that’s something I can’t even imagine. Two SUBROC missiles, you said? What happens when those things go off near a submarine?”

  “Ideally,” Mike Brannon’s words came slowly, “you try to land one missile on each beam of the submarine. The explosions are simultaneous. The target is completely destroyed. Nothing is left.” He stared at the rug on the floor of his office. “A lot of men die, that’s what happens.” He walked to the door and Admiral Benson and Bob Wilson left his office.

  Igor Shevenko stopped at the door of his office and turned as Stefan Lubutkin came out of his office with an envelope in his hand.

  “Genuine?” Shevenko asked.

  “Yes, Comrade. I had a friend get these from a naval supply depot. Without a requisition, of course, a friend doing a favor for a friend.” Shevenko nodded and put the envelope in the inside pocket of his jacket. He left the KGB building and walked a block and got into a limousine that slowed and moved in to the curb for him. He settled in the rear seat beside Leonid Plotovsky.

  “I am sorry to have insisted on privacy, Comrade,” Shevenko said. “I took the liberty last night of having one of my experts look at your car while it was parked. He found these.” He reached in his pocket and handed the envelope to Plotovsky, who opened it and let two tiny electronic devices spill out into his seamed, clawlike hand.

  “Electronic bugs, Comrade,” Shevenko said softly. “Manufactured, I am afraid, by the electronics division of our Navy.”

  “Zurahv! “ The old man spat out the word.

  “I don’t know, sir,” Shevenko said. “I could find out, perhaps. But that is not the real reason I asked to meet you privately.” He took a deep breath as Plotovsky put the electronic bugs back in the envelope.

  “What is the reason for wanting to meet this way?”

  “I have been given information that I do not doubt, sir.” Shevenko quickly and concisely detailed the retaliation that the Americans had taken against the Soviet submarine.

  Plotovsky turned his lizardlike eyes on Shevenko. “How long will it be before Zurahv knows he has lost a submarine?”

  “I would say within three days, sir. It is not too unusual for one of our submarines to fail to report its daily position. It is quite unusual if one goes for two days without reporting its position. One other factor. Our submarine was checking to see if the Americans had put down sonar buoys around the wreckage of their submarine. Admiral Zurahv is anxious to get that report. When it fails to come he will know something is wrong.”

  “But you came to me first,” Plotovsky said in a soft voice. “You have the position, the authority to ask for a hearing before the Politburo where you could put this on the table for everyone to consider. Why didn’t you?”

  “You led the minority vote to oppose the test of the new torpedo, sir. You are the logical one to prevent Admiral Zurahv’s genie from escaping from the bottle, Comrade.”

  “You talk in riddles,” the old man said irritably. “Bottles and genies. Educating you in the West might have been a mistake, Igor.”

  “I trust not, sir. I know the American mind. It tends to relate crises to sports, that is, in American football a favorite offensive play is to fake a smash into the line and then throw a long pass. They even call such a pass a bomb.”

  “I don’t know anything about American football and I don’t want to,” Plotovsky grunted. “Put it in terms I am familiar with.”

  “Chess,” Shevenko said with a slight smile. “We have taken out one of their bishops. They have retaliated by exposing their queen to take a knight in return but if we move for their queen we risk an exchange of all the major pieces. The board will be dominated by pawns.”

  “I understand,” Plotovsky said. “Keep in touch with me. I’ll take you back near to your office.”

  Vice Admiral Brannon stood in front of the chart on his office wall. Admiral Olsen stood beside him, holding a pad and pen.

  “I want a Quiet Alert,” Brannon said. He put his finger on the area between the northern tip of Norway and Bear Island, in the Barents Sea. “If the Soviets come out of Polyarnyy with their missile subs they have to come through here.” His finger moved across the chart to the areas between Britain and Greenland and between Greenland and Iceland.

  “If any of them are already west of Bear Island they’ve got to move down through this area to get to the Atlantic. We’ve got the passes covered with the SOSUS arrays and passive mines. Same over on the east coast, the Sea of Okhotsk. If they move I want to know it. I want all attack submarines at sea. Deploy them in Quiet Alert positions to intercept anything that manages to get through the passive mine defenses.” He walked over to his desk and sat down.

  “I don’t think they’ll move anything by sea,” Olsen said. “If they’re going to attack they’d do it with land-based miss
iles. They have to figure that if they move by sea we’ll react as we did to the sinking of the Sharkfin.” He stopped as Brannon’s phone buzzer sounded. Brannon picked up the telephone and listened. He put down the phone and turned to Olsen.

  “Admiral Benson. He says they have reports of wide scale Chinese actions against Soviet units along their borders.”

  “Which means?” Olsen said.

  “It probably means that Peking is reading our radio traffic. Benson says there’s no reason for these flare-ups along the border. The border’s been quiet for months. He thinks they know what’s happened.”

  “Works in our favor, doesn’t it?” Olsen said. “The Soviets might think twice about taking on us and the Chinese at the same time.”

  “Or they might welcome the chance,” Brannon said.

  CHAPTER 11

  By any normal standard Captain Herman Steel was neither a social nor a sociable man. His life revolved around his work. His quarters in the BOQ, the Bachelor Officer’s Quarters, were small, sparsely furnished and in every sense an extension of his office in the Pentagon. Engineering texts were stacked neatly in piles on the one table in the small living room and on the table beside the metal military style cot that served as his bed. The kitchen in the quarters was small and the refrigerator and cupboards held only the foods the Captain used for his morning meal, which consisted of milk, two eggs, wheat germ and a banana whipped into a liquid concoction in an ancient electric mixer. Lunch was almost always taken at his desk, a double handful of nuts and dried fruits from a supply his Chief Yeoman kept in a drawer in his desk. Dinner was eaten at the BOQ Mess where out of long custom the stewards brought him either chicken or fish and two vegetables. He drank only water, milk, or fruit juices. Those officers who took tables near him at the evening meal refrained from smoking rather than risk his abrasive denunciation of tobacco and those who used it.

  He sat at his desk after the meeting with Vice Admiral Brannon and Admiral Olsen, a pad of lined yellow paper in front of him. He lettered the name “Brannon” at the top left-hand corner of the page and slowly drew a box around the name. He could handle Brannon, he thought. It would mean calling in an IOU from the Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. That worthy’s congressional district, thanks to Captain Steel, had been awarded a lot of military installations. Brannon was only a couple of years away from mandatory retirement for age, the Congressman could find cause for his early retirement.

  Admiral John Olsen was another matter. If he got rid of Brannon there was little doubt that John Olsen would succeed him. The Navy’s rigid formula for promotion and succession could not be altered. John Olsen was, in Steel’s opinion, more intelligent than Brannon and therefore more dangerous. He made a small box next to Brannon’s name and lettered in “John Olsen,” recalling the single instance when he had fenced with Olsen.

  The occasion had been shortly after Olsen had been assigned as Brannon’s Chief of Staff. Captain Steel had been called to Brannon’s office to discuss an appropriation he had requested for additional funds to build another nuclear training school. The very fact that his appropriation was being questioned had irked Captain Steel. He wasn’t accustomed to having his appropriations questioned.

  During the discussion he had remarked that he had submitted the appropriation for the nuclear training school because it was logical to do so. Admiral Olsen, sitting on a sofa in Brannon’s office, had smiled and said, “As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote, and I quote, The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience.’

  “The Navy’s experience, Captain, has been that it is not logical to build facilities when you don’t have sufficient men to utilize them. We don’t have enough volunteers for nuclear submarine schools to justify building another one.”

  Captain Steel’s reply, as he remembered it, had been short. “And I will quote to you, sir, from Thomas Henry Huxley: ‘Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men.’ ”

  Admiral Brannon had ended the discussion by tabling the appropriations request. That had been almost six months ago and the request was still tabled. What bothered Captain Steel was that Admiral Olsen had accurately quoted a Supreme Court chief justice. In Steel’s experience seagoing naval officers didn’t often read in those areas, let alone remember what they read. He drew a line between the boxes that contained the names of Brannon and Olsen. If he got rid of Brannon he’d have to contend with John Olsen. He thought a moment and then he drew an X across each box. If he moved carefully there was a possibility that he could get rid of Brannon and shunt Olsen off to another Flag job. Whoever succeeded the two men would know why they had been given the job. The Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee could take care of that small chore and the successors would know enough to stand well clear of Captain Herman Steel. He smiled gently and reached for his telephone and dialed the private line of Representative Walter W. Wendell, the venerable Congressman from Virginia and the long-time Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

  Captain Steel met the wizened Congressman near the flame that burned at the burial site of President John F. Kennedy in Arlington National Cemetery. The two men walked among the small grave markers, Captain Steel keeping his pace slow to accommodate the old politician. Steel recounted the events from the sinking of the Sharkfin to the meeting with Admiral Brannon earlier that day in a succinct manner. Representative Wendell stopped at a grave marker and looked up at Steel’s face.

  “Can’t say I disagree with what the Admiral did, Captain. Can’t say that any patriotic American would disagree. Most people would probably want the Admiral to run for the Presidency. I know,” he stopped and raised a veined and gnarled hand as Steel started to speak.

  “I know that what he did is an open act of war and against every rule in the book. Know that very well, sir. Know that before we get back from this little walk nuclear bombs might be falling all over the country.

  “But I don’t think that will happen. Roosians respect strength. They even fear it.” He stopped and rubbed his chin with fingers that were misshapen from arthritis.

  “And if the Roosians don’t do anything at all, and I don’t think they will, then your Admiral is going to be able to go to the President and while he may get his ass chewed off he ain’t gonna get fired from his job, Herman. That windbag we’ve got for a Secretary of State, Harold dee Antoine,” he pronounced the name with a downward twist of his long thin lips, “that big old windbag will get up on his hind legs and say that the Admiral done just what he would have done and the only fuss he’ll make is to ask why he wasn’t consulted so he could have advised the President to give orders to sink the Roosian submarine.” He grinned. “Not that he would have had the guts to do that.”

  “That’s not the point, Congressman,” Captain Steel said. “Brannon has now become a dangerous man. He’s committed an act of war and if he gets away with it we don’t know what he’ll decide to do next. He might, to use your words, he might decide to run for President. There’re enough Conservatives in the country, enough worried Democrats that it might work.”

  “Naw,” the Congressman scoffed. “You might be a genius, Herman, but you don’t know beans about national politics. You got to have an organization to get elected to any job. He’s got no organization. But I agree with one thing you said. If he gets away with this we don’t know what he might do next and I don’t like the idea of any admiral doing things with the military that I don’t first approve of. When he bypasses me he ain’t to be trusted, I’ll agree to that.”

  Captain Steel walked a few yards in silence. The old Congressman looked at him out of the corner of his eye.

  “Ain’t forgot that you’ve been very helpful to me, Herman. Let me think on this a little. If we don’t get burned up to a cinder by a nuclear bomb before we get back to our offices I’ll think on it real hard.”

  “Thank you,” Captain Steel said. “I’d caution you, sir, that this is something that no one
should know about.”

  “You teaching an old dog how to suck eggs?” Congressman Wendell asked. “I got my own ways, Herman, you know that. You just go back to your office and figure out how we can scare the Roosians shitless with your nuclear submarines. Leave the politicking to me because that’s what this little job is, politicking. It’s something I’m pretty good at.”

  “The one person we have to be careful to keep this from is Moise Goldman, the President’s Chief of Staff,” Steel said. “He hates me.”

  “You boys ought to get along better,” Wendell said with a sly smile. “Made a big mistake, you did, not getting next to that Jew boy. He’s pretty near as smart as you are. Good politician, too. He’s pure burned the ass off some people in the Congress since old Milligan decided he had too much country boy in him to be a distinguished kind of President and hired the Jew boy to make him look like a real President.” He laughed silently, his thin shoulders shaking.

  “Gets your cork, don’t it, me using them ethnic remarks? Keep in touch, you hear?”

  He walked off, shuffling along in his black high-topped shoes. Captain Herman Steel watched him, fighting back the anger he felt at the Congressman’s words, realizing that the old man had deliberately baited him as part of the price he was going to have to pay to get rid of Mike Brannon.