Torpedo! (The Silent War Book 3) Page 5

  “Affirmative, Chief,” Lee’s voice was calm. “We’ll keep taking pictures until we run past the target and then we’ll come about and make a run down the reverse course and take pictures. Then we’ll get into position again and run on this course and take another set of pictures. How much battery time in those sonar buoys, please?”

  “Twenty-four hours, sir.” Klinger answered. “Way I saw it, that submarine is on almost an even keel. I think we can get a better picture of the hole I think I saw in her stern if we come back on course a little bit to the starboard of this course run.

  “Very well, Chief, will do.” Lee turned to the Officer of the Deck. “It wasn’t a freighter after all. Let’s make the same turn we made before and we’ll come back down on the reverse course. I want to get some good pictures of her number on the sail for identification. Move it, damn it, give the orders. You’re the Officer of the Deck, you’re not here for a pleasure trip.”

  In the Sonar Compartment one of the men on watch lit a cigarette. “Fucking aircraft we’re looking for, hey? That was an SSBN, Chief. I saw the fucking missile hatches plain as day.”

  “You want to make Chief some day?” Klinger growled. “You, all of you, button your damned mouths when you leave this compartment. There’s something screwy going on and those people in Officer’s Country aren’t giving us the word the way they should. Until I give you the word all of you keep your fucking mouth shut. That’s an order.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Vice Admiral Mike Brannon sat at his desk contemplating the lunch tray that had been brought in to him. A dish of cottage cheese topped by a half a peach, two squares of dry toast, and coffee. He made a face and began to eat. There were times, he thought, when the Navy intruded itself too much into a man’s personal business. When you passed the age of sixty eating should be a pleasure, not a duty. But the doctors at Bethesda had impressed on Gloria Brannon that the Admiral was carrying too much weight and had to lose twenty-five pounds. Her orders to the Admiral’s staff had been clear; the Admiral was on a diet. The staff obeyed orders.

  He pushed the tray away as his office door opened. “Priority message from the Medusa, Admiral. I cleared the office area of personnel before I ran it through the decoding machine, sir.” The Chief Yeoman laid the message on the desk and picked up the tray. “I called Admiral Olsen’s office, sir. He’s on his way here.”

  “Thank you, Chief,” Brannon said. He read the message through. He was reading it for the second time when John Olsen walked in and closed the door behind him.

  “They’ve found the Sharkfin, John.” Brannon’s face was grim. “She’s on the bottom, right on her course line. Captain Lutz of the Medusa says they’ve got excellent pictures, lots of them.”

  Olsen looked at Brannon’s harsh face. “What do the pictures show, does he say, Mike?”

  “Her screw’s twisted off to the port side and there’s a big hole in her stern. She’s on an even keel. Lutz says there’s no mistake about the hole. It’s there, in her stern. He made four camera runs. The hole shows up clearly.” He glared at Olsen. “Just what in the hell could have twisted her screw off to one side and holed her in the stern?”

  “It couldn’t be anything she hit running submerged,” Olsen said.

  “I think she was hit by a weapon,” Brannon grated. “Lutz says in his message that he’s ordered a chopper out of Rota to meet him and pick up the pictures. Medusa has a chopper landing pad. But he hasn’t got any authority to order the pictures sent here by special courier plane. See the Chief and get that order off in my name at once and find out when the plane will be here.

  “I want you to meet the plane and pick up the pictures and bring them here. I want to see Captain Steel now, right now.” He picked up the message and read it again as Olsen went into the outer office. He was at his wall chart when Olsen came back into the office, trailed by Captain Steel.

  “The Medusa has found the Sharkfin, Captain,” Brannon said. “I need your engineering opinion. We’ll have pictures by tomorrow but Medusa has told us what the pictures show. Sharkfin is on the bottom on an even keel. Her screw is twisted or bent off to the port side. There’s a hole in her stern area.”

  “Is he sure it’s the Sharkfin?” Steel asked.

  “He’s got pictures of her number. No doubt. What I’d like to know is, would it be possible for the propeller shaft to burst its bearings or something and run wild and tear up the stern, twist the propeller off to one side?”

  “No.” Captain Steel said.

  “My thought also,” Brannon said. “The only other thing that comes to mind is that Sharkfin was hit by a weapon that destroyed her screw and blew a hole in her stern.”

  “You may be right.” Steel’s tone was grudging. “I told you it wasn’t a failure in her nuclear power plant. We need the pictures to make a reasonably accurate analysis. If the pictures bear out your supposition, Admiral, then you’ve got a very serious problem facing you. You’d better solve it quickly. I won’t have my nuclear submarines interfered with by anyone or anything.”

  Mike Brannon came out of his chair, his face darkening with rage. “Now you get one thing straight, damn it! The nuclear submarines are not your Goddamned submarines! They belong to the Navy. And you hear this; I care a hell of a lot more about the hundred and twenty or so sailors who were on the Sharkfin than I do about the ship. Is that clear, sir?”

  Captain Steel stared at Mike Brannon. “You make it perfectly clear, Admiral. But the problem remains. Someone destroyed the Sharkfin. And its crew. And that someone has got to be stopped. I’d rather not say any more until I have seen the pictures.”

  “Tell your office to notify my Chief Yeoman of your schedule tomorrow. I expect to have pictures then. I’ll notify you as soon as they arrive.” Brannon turned to John Olsen as Steel left the office.

  “You get the message off to Rota?”

  Olsen nodded. “Good Chief you’ve got out there. He had them on the line, waiting, when I went out there. They’ve got a plane available. It will land at Andrews tomorrow at zero six hundred. I’ll be there.” He picked up the message and read it.

  “The way this reads, Mike, it had to be a weapon. Probably a sound-seeking torpedo fired at her screw. Think it could have been that Soviet attack submarine that tracked her out of the Strait of Gibraltar?”

  “I think so,” Brannon said. He went to his office door and opened it. “Chief, please notify Admiral Benson and Mr. Wilson of the CIA that I would appreciate it if they could be here in my office at zero eight hundred. We have information of great importance for them. Notify Captain Steel’s office that I expect him here at ten hundred tomorrow. I want you here by zero seven hundred at the latest. I expect to be here at zero six thirty.”

  The Agency limousine eased out of the Pentagon parking area and began the long trip back to the CIA headquarters. Wilson pushed a button that slid a glass partition between the driver’s area and the rear seat and turned to Admiral Benson.

  “Those pictures were scary,” Wilson said. “They don’t leave much doubt about what happened to that submarine. What I’d like to know is, how well do you know Admiral Brannon? He’s Irish and like a lot of the Irish he’s keeping his feelings to himself but he’s boiling inside. What’s he likely to do?”

  “He’s submarine, I was aviation,” Admiral Benson said slowly. “I don’t know him that well. I know his record, his reputation. He’s tough. He’s direct. He’s a decent man, a hard worker. But what will he do? I think that’s pretty clear, Bob. He’s got to take this to the President.”

  “Maybe,” Wilson said. He lit a cigarette and watched the smoke swirl away in the car’s ventilation system.

  “What else can he do?” Benson said. “The pictures are excellent. Sharkfin was hit by a weapon fired by a ship from an unknown nation. He’s only got one course of action to take, to go to the President.”

  “Then why did he order an attack submarine to leave Scotland at the same time he ordered that Medu
sa ship to start searching for the Sharkfin? Why did he order that attack submarine to go to the area where the Sharkfin was sunk and to obey only orders that came from him, from Brannon?”

  “Who said he did?”

  “We monitor every radio circuit going, you know that,” Wilson grunted. “He gave those orders. You give me your guess and I’ll give you mine about why he did it. I think he’s going to go after that Soviet submarine and sink it.”

  “He couldn’t!” Admiral Benson protested. “His whole career would go down the drain. It’s unthinkable!”

  “So?” Wilson said. He pushed a button that lowered the window on his side of the car and flipped his cigarette butt through the opening. He raised the window and looked at Benson.

  “Admiral Brannon’s been in Washington for about three years. He knows the score, as you Navy people say.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean, Wilson?” The CIA Director’s voice was suddenly sharp. “I’ve kept it to myself but you sometimes annoy the hell out of me when you put on that old Washington hand attitude. I know I’m relatively new to Washington but I’m not a complete idiot.”

  “I apologize, Admiral,” Wilson said. “I didn’t mean it that way. What I mean is that we’ve lived in different worlds. In your world, the Navy, you expect people to be loyal, to do a good day’s work, to respect rank, that sort of thing. You assume that people can be trusted, especially if they’ve got rank. In my world, I expect people to be shitheads, if you’ll excuse the word.

  “What I meant was that Admiral Brannon’s been in Washington in a damned tough job long enough to have been stabbed in the back, lied to, and he’s learned the score. He knows, I know, that if he takes this to the President — and he may do that, I’m not saying he won’t — but if he takes this to the President he knows what will happen.

  “What will happen is there will be meetings, a lot of crisis meetings. You can’t keep crisis meetings secret in this town. The press will begin to snoop around and you can bet your last dollar that some son of a bitch who spends a lot of his time kissing the President’s ass will leak the story to some reporter. And within a few days the whole damned world will know we lost the Sharkfin.

  “Once the story gets out we won’t be able to do a damned thing. The Russians will offer their sympathy and deny everything. We’ll be left with egg on our chin, a submarine on the bottom of the ocean, and a lot of good American sailors dead.” He lit another cigarette.

  “Uncle Sam, the patsy,” he growled.

  “You believe that?” Benson said.

  “I’ve seen it happen before. The Cuban invasion project is a good example. That was supposed to be absolutely secret. But there were too many meetings, too many people in the damned project. Little things began to leak out. James Reston of the New York Times got the whole story weeks before the invasion.

  “Happens that Reston is an honorable man. He went to his editors and told them they shouldn’t print the story. Might have been better for all of us if he had gone ahead and printed it. That might have killed the damned project.” He hunched down in the upholstered seat.

  “Brannon knows his way around this town. I have to assume that he knows a little about how the Soviet mind works. If he did order that Soviet submarine wiped out — well, that would be about the best message you could send to the Kremlin. They’d understand that sort of action because that’s how they work.”

  Admiral Benson fiddled with the snaps of the briefcase he held in his lap. “If we suspect he might go after that Soviet submarine, and I don’t for one minute think he will do that, but if we did suspect he might we’d be honor bound to go to the President and tell him.”

  Wilson glanced at Admiral Benson out of the corner of his eye. “And if we did that and Brannon didn’t do anything his name would be shit with the President and the Joint Chiefs.”

  “But if we just sit here and do nothing we’re right in the middle!”

  “Comes with the territory,” Wilson said. “There might be a way around this whole thing, though.”

  “How?”

  “If we assume the Soviets did sink our submarine, and I’m damned sure they did, they had to have a reason because they don’t do things that serious without some reason. Maybe I can find out the reason. I’d need several days to do that, if I can even do it. You’d have to stall Brannon, convince him not to throw the baby out with the bath water while I try.”

  “I don’t know how you expect to do that. We haven’t got a single good agent inside of the Soviet Union who is far enough inside the system to know that.”

  “We don’t, sir, but Israel does. Dr. Saul, he’s the head of the Mossad, he might know. He’s got the best penetration into the Soviet Union of any of us and he’s a friend.”

  “I didn’t think of Israel,” Benson said slowly. “But if he knows he should have told us by now. We’re his best ally.”

  “That isn’t the way the game is played,” Wilson grunted. “If it’s okay with you I’ll go to Tel Aviv and see him. He owes me a few favors. If he knows he’ll tell me. I’d like a couple of those pictures Admiral Brannon gave you of the Shark-fin to take with me.”

  Admiral Benson sat quietly, looking out the window, turning the problem over in his mind. He opened and closed a snap on the briefcase and the sharp metallic sound hung in the air.

  “I’d better send you an interoffice memo telling you to go to New York, to the United Nations for some talks. That would account for your absence from the office.” He looked out the window at the wind-scarred countryside. “I’ll get back to Mike Brannon, tell him to stand pat for a few days.” He drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. “You know, running a carrier division was a hell of a lot more fun than this job.”

  Seated in his office with a cup of coffee Wilson looked at his watch. Ten in the morning, Washington time. Five in the afternoon in Tel Aviv. Isser Bernstein, a.k.a. Dr. Saul, would be in his office. No chief of Israel’s Mossad, its famed intelligence service, ever went home early. He reached for the scrambler phone and asked to be connected with Dr. Saul’s office.

  “How’s your health, my friend?” Dr. Saul’s hearty voice boomed through the mechanical artificiality of the scrambler.

  “Not so good, Doctor. Bad attack of nostalgia, I think. I desperately need to see someone.”

  Wilson sat back in his chair, visualizing the man at the other end of the telephone connection. A short man with a tanned bald head ringed with a fringe of gray hair that matched his small goatee and precisely trimmed mustache. Isser Bernstein was a former Irgun terrorist who had helped form the Mossad in 1945. In the years since he had risen to be its chief and had become a legend in the world’s intelligence circles.

  “Nostalgia can sometimes be difficult to treat.” Bernstein’s voice was solemn.

  “I know,” Wilson said. “I think you’re the only doctor who can help me. Do you remember our mutual friend, the one who smokes Kools and who went to a university in New York?”

  “Ah, yes. Not a person to help sick people.”

  “I know but I have to see him if I am to be cured of what ails me. I’d like to do that in your consulting room. Soon. Very soon, Doctor.”

  “So you suffer also from anxiety. Be calm. Don’t drink too much coffee. I will see what I can do.”

  The call came the next morning from the Israeli Embassy in Washington. A man’s voice instructed Wilson to be in New York that afternoon, that a seat had been reserved in his name on El Al Airlines. The man hesitated a moment and then said, “Dr. Saul advises you eat a light lunch, sir. The cuisine on the airline is famed for its excellence. You will be met upon arrival.”

  When Wilson walked into the terminal at the Lydda Airport the next day he saw Isser Bernstein’s secretary waiting for him at the Customs barrier. They smiled at each other and she nodded at the Customs agent who bowed slightly to Wilson. “Nice to see you again, Naomi,” Wilson said. “You get more beautiful every time I see you.”

  “
And you flatter without reason just as much as you always did. It’s been more than two years since that weekend in Athens and you never wrote me, not once.”

  “People in our business don’t write letters, you know that. You broke my heart when you told me you wouldn’t marry me.

  “People in our business don’t marry,” she said primly. He followed her through the crowded terminal, his trained eye picking out the unobtrusive men who were ahead of them and back of them as they moved through the crowd. Naomi led him to a battered Fiat parked in a No Parking zone. He cramped himself into the bucket seat beside her and reached for his cigarettes.

  “How’s the good doctor, and do you mind if I smoke?”

  “He’s fine and I do mind. Cigarettes give you cancer, don’t you know that?” She pulled the car out into the traffic behind a Mercedes with four men in it. “There’s another car behind us,” she said. “Even here at home Dr. Saul takes no chances.”

  Twenty minutes later the Fiat pulled up in front of a house surrounded by a high whitewashed wall with sharp spikes studding its top. Two men opened a heavy iron gate and came trotting out to the car. One of the men opened the car door on Wilson’s side and extended a hand to assist him out of the car.

  “Welcome home, Mr. Wilson,” he said, his teeth gleaming in his dark face. “The doctor is inside the gate.”

  “My old friend from the wars!” Isser Bernstein wrapped his arms around Wilson in a hug. “How is it you grow old and ugly with the years while I get ever more handsome and youthful?” He stepped back, his eyes shrewd. “And how is life for you these days with that airplane jockey your president put at the head of your company?”

  “He’s a good guy, very bright,” Wilson said. “He’s hung up on things like loyalty and trust and honesty.”