It was early in 1980 when he’d first run afoul of the bastards. Oh, he’d crossed swords with the Russians plenty of times during his rise up the Navy’s command pyramid. It was impossible to command any American ship anywhere in the world during the ‘60s and ‘70s without meeting Russian Bear bombers and Soviet trawlers, aggressive sub contacts and games of chicken … “chicken of the sea,” as the encounters were called. It was all part of the global muscle-flexing of the Cold War, a way for each side to test the other’s defenses, and to polish its own.
But in 1980, Vaughn had just made rear admiral, and his first deployed command had been a Navy carrier group operating in the Pacific. The temper of the U.S. Navy had been dismal then. It was not a good time for men, like Vaughn, with strong military aspirations. The Carter Administration had been hell-bent on slashing defense spending, and some members of a short-sighted Congress had been pushing for virtual disarmament. The American public, still wallowing in the post-Vietnam mire, had cared little about the need to maintain a strong guard against the communists.
Against that political backdrop, Vaughn had seen his being given command of a carrier squadron as a truly important step. He’d been certain that he could make a real difference in the way America’s battered military was perceived, both by the government and by the people.
One of the carrier’s ASW heroes had picked up a sub contact during routine patrol operations. The carrier’s antisub destroyers and frigates had converged on the area, searching, but had found nothing.
Somehow, the contact had made its escape.
It had been a time of increased tension throughout the world. Only a few months earlier, in December of 1979, the Russians had invaded Afghanistan, and nothing, not diplomatic efforts, not threats of an Olympic Games boycott or a grain embargo, nothing had convinced them to back down. There’d been several incidents at sea and in the air, and the threat of a war starting, by plan or by accident, had been very real. Standing orders from Washington held that no squadron commander could let Russian subs get close to one of the Navy’s precious carriers, and the vanished contact had already been well inside the squadron’s defensive perimeter. Vaughn had ordered the squadron to zigzag out of the area, while intensifying the search for the missing sub with his ASW assets.
Then the sub had broached dead ahead, rising out of nowhere in spray and foam like some huge, glistening whale. With all the grace and maneuverability of an eighty-story skyscraper floating on its side, Vaughn’s carrier had smashed into the Russian sub.
The full story might never be known, but later hearings and debriefings concluded that the Russian skipper had made a mistake. The sub, an Echo II nuclear-powered craft designed primarily for anticarrier operations, had evidently been trying to probe the American squadron’s defenses, another chicken-of-the-sea incident like hundreds of others. The Russian captain had probably eluded the earlier search by hiding his boat on the bottom, which, in those waters, was not very deep. When the American carrier had accidentally come bearing down on his location, sonar pinging away, he’d assumed that he’d been discovered and tried to get away. At the same time, the shallow water and the noise made by the other ships in the squadron had confused the American sonar. No one had heard the Echo II until it was already surfacing.
Why the sub had surfaced in the first place was another unknown.
Possibly the Russian skipper had thought he was under attack and decided that a fast surface was the only way to defuse a situation suddenly gone out of hand. Or perhaps there’d been a mechanical failure or a confusion in orders. Whatever the reason, before the American carrier could slow or change course, it had hit the Echo II just forward of the conning tower. Both vessels had suffered extensive damage, though obviously the sub had gotten the worst in the exchange. The sub had refused offers of assistance and had last been seen limping west on the surface. The carrier had suffered minor damage to her keel, and her forward sonar dome had been knocked out, requiring repairs in the States.
And that was when Admiral Vaughn’s troubles had really begun. An anti-military Congress had insisted on hearings to determine culpability in the matter. He’d been grilled mercilessly about his part in the affair, with most of the committee’s attention focusing on whether or not he’d been patrolling too aggressively.
Too aggressively! The Navy had held its own inquest, of course, and Vaughn had been cleared. He’d done nothing questionable, had operated within the letter of his orders, and had done nothing to bring discredit upon his service or his command.
So why had he lost his command and wound up at a damned Pentagon desk?
His transport to the Vicksburg was ready on the spot just vacated by the Helix, an HH-60 Seahawk with rotors unfolded and engine turning over.
Nodding to Bersticer and the others of his staff who were going across with him, he started across the flight deck.
It was inevitable, he thought, as he hurried across the steel deck, that the reason for his exile had been political. Once a Navy officer reached the rank of captain, hell, once he was a full commander bucking for captain, most of the forces that shaped his career were political in one way or another. But Vaughn’s problem had been part of the very focus of the Cold War, as well as the ongoing political blood-baths in Washington.
Incidents between U.S. and Soviet vessels had been particularly numerous back in the sixties, when the Russian navy was vigorously expanding under the guidance of its number-one sponsor, Soviet CNO Admiral Gorshkov. Harassment by both sides had been commonplace, with ships crossing one another’s paths, penetrating each other’s formations, even deliberately trying to ram. The number of incidents had grown until, at one point, collisions at sea were averaging an incredible one a month.
One of the worst of those had occurred in May of 1967, when the U.S. destroyer Walker cut in front of a Soviet vessel and sheered off, then sideswiped the destroyer Besslednyi, tearing loose a whaleboat and punching a hole in her side. The next day, unbelievably, the Walker had rammed a second Russian ship, holing her twice.
In 1972, in a little-publicized agreement signed during Nixon’s visit to Moscow, the U.S. and the USSR had agreed to hold yearly meetings, to exchange information and review charges arising from such incidents.
Called the Incidents at Sea Agreement, or INCSEA, it was designed to stop harassment on and over the high seas.
It had worked well for eight years. Unfortunately, by 1980 the political balance in Washington had become extremely precarious. Russian aggression in Afghanistan, communist support for the Sandanistas, the collapse of detente all had suggested a final breakdown of any dialogue with the Soviets. Certain factions in Congress, with political careers riding on SALT II and good relations with the Soviets, had hoped to reverse what seemed to be increasing intransigence on the part of Moscow. The ramming incident had appeared to be the Americans’ fault … or at least the fault of the admiral who had been aggressively hounding the Russian sub. By playing up the incident and doing some aggressive hounding of their own, they had hoped to prove the benevolence of U.S. intentions toward the Russians.
Too aggressive, the bastards had claimed. Even after being vindicated by the Navy board, there’d been little his supporters could do to shield him at the time. The Navy could not afford to antagonize the source of its yearly appropriations, and Vaughn, by fighting back, had made enemies on Capitol Hill.
So he’d been quietly shunted aside — out of sight, out of mind. In a Crippling turn of irony, another U.S. carrier, the Kitty Hawk, had collided with a Soviet Victor in 1984. The Russian had been running with no lights in the hours just before dawn, and the collision had left pieces of the sub’s propeller embedded in the Kitty Hawk’s hull. By that time, though, America’s military reawakening in the Reagan years had been well under way, and the men involved had suffered none of the probings or ostracism that Vaughn had suffered.
Vaughn understood the Navy’s reasoning — at least he tried to convince himself that he understood — but that didn’t change the bitter unfairness of it all. For twelve years he’d sat it out on the beach, his career at dead slow. His wife had left him four years earlier, a scandal in the tight circles of high-ranking Washington Navy society that had only added to his image as a has-been who’d never quite made the grade. He’d been ready to quit, to formally retire from the Navy, when the intervention of powerful friends in the Pentagon had opened up this new opportunity.
Command of CBG-14.
If he could carry out his orders … if Washington or the Russians didn’t screw him once again, he could still salvage his career, salvage his life. But the sinking of the Indian sub had raised the old specters once more. Biddle’s aggressive patrolling had triggered the incident … or at least, that was how Washington would interpret it.
And as COCBG, he was responsible for Biddle.
