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 fiance, 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 Chateau 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
“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
