it?”
“Our decision, Admiral.”
“Hmm.” He hesitated, trapped by an abrupt and unaccountable anger. He suddenly found himself comparing the Drake woman to his sister-in-law Kathy, Matt’s mother. His brother Sam had not come back from a Navy raid over a Hanoi bridge in 1968. He remembered the look on Kathy’s face when she learned that her son had been accepted as a Navy aviator candidate. There’d been pain and fear, yes … but also a burning and enormous pride.
He forced the anger back. The girl had no way of putting things in perspective … and maybe that was to be expected. “Miss Drake, I don’t want to dampen the flames of true love, but you ought to remember that there are over six thousand other men on the Jefferson besides Matt.
Counting our supply ships and the attack sub assigned to CBG-14, there’s another twenty-eight hundred men in the rest of the carrier group, every one of them with a wife or a girlfriend or a fiance or a mother … someone who cares for them and is scared to death that they’re not coming back. What makes you so special?” She stiffened. “As I said, Admiral, it’s our decision. Our life. I–I’m sorry I troubled you.”
A twinge of conscience twisted in him. He opened his mouth to say something soothing, but Pamela Drake had already gone.
Tom Magruder watched her slim back and blond hair receding with the crowd of reporters. Then he shrugged, turned, and followed after the President.
Rear Admiral Vaughn stood with Captain Bersticer and other members of his staff just inside the open door leading from the island onto the flight deck, a scowl creasing his face. All of the officers wore their dress whites instead of khakis to mark the formality of the occasion, but Vaughn chaffed at the ceremonial trappings. The stupidity, the wrongness of his orders still stung, and he wasn’t sure he was going to be able to pull off the coming meeting without getting angry.
Correction, he thought. He was already angry. What was going to be difficult was not letting that anger show.
A staff officer standing at Vaughn’s elbow was wearing one of the ubiquitous Mickey Mouse headsets worn by deck personnel who needed to stay in touch with the ship’s radio network. “They’re inbound, Admiral,” the officer said. “Five minutes.”
He nodded, his scowl deepening. Admiral Vaughn did not like this at all.
“It is imperative that a close working relationship with your counterparts in SOVINDRON be established as quickly as possible,” his orders, received at 0300 that morning, had read. “To facilitate the exchange of necessary battle codes and communications protocols, you are directed to receive Rear Admiral Mcolai Sergeivich Dmitriev aboard your command at the earliest practical opportunity.”
Fine. He would welcome the admiral, shake the bastard’s hand even. What had followed in the orders was worse.
“Effective 26 March, you are further directed to shift your flag to CG-66, U.S.S. Vicksburg, the better to monitor ship deployments and possible air threats to your command. Commonwealth naval liaison officers will be assigned by Admiral Dmitriev as observers aboard CG-66, to facilitate joint tactical and strategic operations between vessels of CBG-14 and SOVINDRON.”
Micromanagement. It had doomed military operations before this one.
Somehow, the Washington bureaucracies, both military and civilian, always thought that they knew how to fight the war from the safety and comfort of the Potomac better than the men who were actually in the field. How many times had narrow-minded, fuzzy-headed, point-by-point direction from the rear screwed up an operation better left to the man in charge on the spot?
Vaughn had hoped to deal with the Russian presence at Turban Station by ignoring it. It wasn’t as though the battle group needed the Russians.
If anything, the Russians would be a definite hindrance in any upcoming conflict. Their ASW was more primitive, their ships noisier than their American counterparts. They had no weapon system at all like Phoenix and nothing like Vicksburg’s Aegis or SPY-1 radar. The entire history of Soviet big-carrier operations was only a few years old, and Vaughn had no confidence in their abilities to handle blue-water air operations with so-called “navalized” Frontal Aviation aircraft and inexperienced pilots.
But he was being forced to work closely with the sons of bitches, and he didn’t like it, didn’t like it at all. His orders were specific and to the point, signed by Admiral Fletcher T. Grimes, Chief of Naval Operations, and originating with the National Command Authority. That meant the President himself, and the National Security Council, and you couldn’t get any more high-powered than that.
It also meant that the decision was as much a political one as something born of military necessity. In this case, the Politics far outweighed the military practicalities. Mixing the two naval squadrons, Vaughn thought, was a recipe for certain disaster.
But Charles Lee Vaughn was a flag officer of the United States Navy, and questioning the orders did not even occur to him. Grumbling about orders, however, was the Navy man’s ancient and inalienable right. “What do you want to bet the Soviets worked all this out just to get a good look at Aegis?” he asked.
Captain Bersticer was standing between him and the open door leading out to the flight deck. “Could be, sir. The Russians have been wanting to look inside a Ticonderoga-class cruiser for a long time now.”
“Well, they won’t get a look now. Not at my expense. Did you pass my message to Cunningham?”
“Yes, sir. His intelligence officer has things well in hand, sir.”
“He’d damn well better. I don’t want these Russian bastards using this as an excuse to get their prying claws on Aegis.”
“They’re coming, sir,” the officer with the Mickey Mouse helmet called.
There was a stir among the officers and men waiting in the lee of Jefferson’s island. Vaughn could hear a distant, thuttering sound in the air that rose rapidly above the calls and last-minute shufflings of the greeting party.
Vaughn moved to where he could see past Bersticer and looked through the open door. The morning sun was still low, and the carrier’s island cast a deep and moody shadow across the mid-deck where the Russian helo was supposed to land. A mackerel sky still tinged with the reds and oranges of a fiery dawn glowed above the horizon. The thuttering grew louder, more insistent.
The helicopter was one of the new Ka-27s, a boxy-looking machine with the NATO code name Helix. Like other Russian naval helos, it used two counter-rotating main rotors, one set directly above the other, eliminating the need for a tail rotor or boom. Instead, it had a stubby tail with two massive stabilizer fins that, to American eyes, gave it an oddly unbalanced, incomplete look.
Vaughn watched as it drifted out of the early morning light and was eclipsed by the island’s shadow. The machine hovered for a moment, then settled to the deck with a bounce on four landing wheels, following the guidance of a yellow shirt who brought it in with crisp movements of a pair of bright-colored wands. The red star painted on the stabilizer looked very much out of place on an American carrier deck. Curiously, the machine also had the Aeroflot logo picked out in Cyrillic lettering on its hull. Vaughn remembered that the national airline of the former USSR had close connections with the Russian military services.
“Wait, boys,” Vaughn said as his aides made last-moment adjustments to their uniforms and began to move toward the door. “We’ll let them show themselves first. It’s our carrier, after all.”
As the rotors whined to a halt, U.S. sailors in dress whites were already unrolling a red carpet across the steel deck. The Helix’s cargo compartment door slid open with a bang, as a chief boatswain’s mate raised a bosun’s pipe to his mouth and sounded a piercing, welcoming shrill. Behind him, the ranks of Jefferson’s Marines, resplendent in their red-and-blue Class As, snapped to present arms, and as the pipe’s notes died away, Jefferson’s band crashed into an unrecognizable clashing that the tone-deaf Vaughn could only assume held some meaning for the Russians.
A Russian crewman appeared in the open cargo door, unfolding a metal ladder that extended to the Jefferson’s deck. The helo looked fairly roomy inside. The Helix normally served in the ASW role and would have had little space aboard for passengers. This one, evidently, had been refitted for use as a personnel carrier.
A heavyset man with steel-gray hair and a scowl to match Vaughn’s own stepped down the ladder and onto
