'Off with you now, Scruggins,' the lieutenant said briskly. 'Winder can keep the plot up ? such as it is.'
'No need to worry about the coffee, Scruggins,' I continued brightly, now convinced that I'd made a new friend in the lieutenant. Sure, he was a lot junior to me, but it never hurt to have a friend on every staff. 'We don't allow coffee around the equipment in CVIC. A shame, too ? we have to keep it so cold down there. That damned equipment, you know.'
A subdued and disgruntled Scruggins followed me down the five ladders to CVIC. From the little he said, he struck me as an OK fellow, although with a marked lazy streak. Aviation ratings are like that, just like their officers. If it doesn't involve being up in an airplane or flying, they don't have much use of it.
Scruggins had to be a bright fellow, his attitude aside. The AWs, as a rule, were almost as smart as the EWs. Almost.
I introduced the two petty officers, and left them in Martin's compartment, circling warily around each other like dogs about to stick their noses up each other's butts. They'd thrash out their pecking order, Scruggins would get interested despite himself, and the two would end up coming up with an answer to the intermittent electromagnetic signal we were picking up.
All in all, a good solution. And that was what leadership was all about.
Scruggins would finally come clean with Martin, and end up blaming the powers that be for his lack of data. In some way or another, he'd end up apologizing to Martin for the lousy answer he'd given him before. In the end, the two petty officers would end up honor bound to protect the carrier battle group against the horrible decisions made by their superior officers, taking on the challenge with the gusto that can match any two other underdogs in the world.
It would take more than a little commander-level leadership to solve the bigger problem, though. While I may be able to get two technicians talking to each other and forming up into a team, that didn't solve my real problem ? what to do about a submarine in the area. I headed down the passageway to find the admiral's N2 and brief him on the detection. In all probability, he'd want me to go see the admiral.
Intelligence ? you run into more no-win situations in this game than in any other warfare area. There are rarely certainties ? only probabilities, indications, and warnings, and the vast database of what the enemy has done in the past. When you're wrong, everybody remembers it. When you're right, sometimes they never even know it.
Another odd Catch-22 to the intel game The very best intelligence that peeks right into the enemy's knickers is often stuff you can't use.
It comes from national assets, the buzzword for satellite or other top secret airborne detection systems, or from a spy on the ground somewhere.
Or from a native source ? in this case, maybe a Russian dockworker who's making a little bit of extra money telling his buddies when submarines come and go in port. Whatever the case may be, the intelligence itself can be so highly classified that to give any hint at all about it would be to blow your sources completely or disclose some intelligence gathering capability that you would really rather the enemy didn't know about.
The classic example of this was the case of Coventry during World War II. The British had already broken the Enigma code, the cipher used to encrypt Nazi Germany's most sensitive communications. They were reading the German's mail, and knew that a massive air raid was planned against the small village of Coventry.
They knew it ? and could do nothing. If the British had attempted to evacuate the thousands of innocent civilians in Coventry, they would have exposed their own intelligence gathering capabilities to the Germans. The Germans would have abandoned Enigma, and moved on to another system that might have taken months ? even years ? to break. The British commanders were forced into one of the most gut-wrenching decisions an officer can ever make.
They made the right one, but at a cost that must have haunted them until the end of their days. They did nothing to warn Coventry of the inbound Nazi raid, took none but the most routine air defense precautions.
As a result, a flood of Nazi bombers crossed the Channel and smashed the small village into rubble, killing thousands. The lower levels of the British war-fighting organization knew nothing about the Enigma code, and responded in their normal fashion with a deployment of anti-air barrages and Spitfires. But it was too little, and too late, for the people of Coventry.
That's where the modern saying came from, of being sent to Coventry as an expression for being ostracized. In earlier times, to have been in Coventry was truly to have been left out permanently.
I briefed the admiral's N2, a senior intelligence captain by the name of Carl Smith. At first glance, Carl Smith was a nondescript, colorless man. He was even shorter than I was, and twenty pounds lighter. He'd never met a uniform that fit him well, and was constantly fighting to keep his shirt tucked in, his belt buckle centered, and his pants pulled up.
Looking at him, you'd probably dismiss him immediately.
That would be a grave mistake. Carl Smith's thin, plain face fronts one of the finest brains in the intelligence community today. He'd been deep selected for every rank since lieutenant commander, and was one of the most brilliant theorists on the capabilities and intentions of the cluster of post-Soviet Union countries that were making trouble around the world.
In addition to his education as an intelligence officer, Captain Smith was a student of history. He could recall every major and minor battle that I'd ever heard of, and had all that data stored in some fashion that made it instantly accessible to him. He was capable of the most amazing feats of military and tactical reasoning, drawing on examples and knowledge that were way beyond that of most officers.
On top of that, he was funny as hell. Carl had a saying Nothing is too cruel if it's funny. He was one of the biggest practical jokers onboard the aircraft carrier, although most officers were reluctant to believe it. It seemed incomprehensible to the swaggering jet jockeys that prowled the corridors of our carrier that this small, wimpy looking 0–6 could have engineered any one of the evil yet hilarious stunts that they'd been victims of. Moreover, he was too senior for easy retaliation, although I suspect occasionally that Carl would have welcomed the attempt.
At any rate, he listened carefully to what I had to say about the electromagnetic signals, nodded knowingly as I described the interaction between DESRON and CVIC. Finally, he spoke. 'Good move, that,' he said, referring to my adopting Scruggins into the CVIC community. 'Seen that before ? you take a guy like that, he's not all bad. He's just bored, doesn't have anything to do. All that tension gets turned to evil purposes, sort of like Lex Luther and Superman. Bet he turns into a model sailor now that you've given him a purpose in life.'
'Let's hope so. At the very least, it'll keep Martin happy. The guy likes to have a mission; he's sort of a crusader. I'm willing to bet that both he and Scruggins can learn something from each other.'
'In the meantime, what do we do about the submarine problem?' Captain Smith asked. He eyed me quizzically, waiting for my suggestions. That was just like Carl ? he'd probably already decided how to proceed, but wanted to give me the benefit of the doubt. Like I said ? a nice guy.
I shrugged, somewhat at a loss. 'I don't know there's much that we can do at this point,' I said. 'No sensors, no prosecution ? hell, we're so close to Polyamyy that we'll be lucky if we don't run over a couple dozen of them in the next two weeks. Taking into account the political considerations, I don't see that we have any options at all.'
Carl nodded again. 'About the way I figure it,' he agreed. Then Carl shook his head, as though clearing away a particular train of thought.
'Your admiral's not making this any easier, you know.' He said it quietly, with very little hint of emotion.
I froze. The whole point of the statement was to let me know that he, Captain Carl Smith, intelligence officer for the entire battle group, knew several things that he wasn't supposed to. First, he knew that Admiral Tombstone Magruder and I were on close terms. No big surprise there ? I'd been the ship's N2 intelligence officer when Admiral Tombstone was in command of the carrier battle group not so long ago. My tour normally would have been up a year ago, but I'd opted to extend it for a year.
Second, he knew about Tombstone's father and what the admiral was doing in Russia right now. Now, that was more of a surprise.
Most of the ship knew that during our last cruise Admiral Magruder had found indications that his father had survived his ejection so many decades ago over Vietnam. While they might not have the specifics, they did know one thing At some point the admiral's father had been alive and in country.
What they didn't know was the rest of the story. How Admiral Magruder had tracked his father's trail across
