easily from his memory. If he was who he claimed to be, he would have replayed that scene millions of times in the last decades. 'Tell me the story.' He smiled slightly and seemed to relax. 'She was a friend of Sam's sister. She told you about Sam?'
I nodded. Sam had been his roommate at the Naval Academy, later a fellow aviator. Sam was shot down two years after my father, but there was no need to tell him that now.
'It was the Senior Ball. I didn't have a date ? Sam said I was too ugly to get one on my own, so he fixed me up with a family friend.' He shook his head, a bemused expression on his face. 'Sam really screwed that one up. His date stood him up, so he ended up taking his own sister. And I met the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen in my life. Not that we saw many in those days, you understand. The Academy was ? well, it was the next thing to a monastery most of the time. Except for the town girls who wanted to marry a naval officer.'
'The Senior Ball ? yes, Mother told me about it several times.' More than several, as a matter of fact. It was a standard family childhood joke, one that we told everyone. It was something you would have known from any sort of investigation into my family, since the incident had been widely reported after you were shot down. For days, the papers were filled with human interest stories about you two, your brother, me.
The only problem with the entire tale was that it wasn't true.
My father had indeed been a senior at the Naval Academy when he met my mother. But the Senior Ball wasn't the first time, not at all.
In his day, liberty was much more restrictive for midshipmen at the Academy. During their senior year, they were free on weekends, if they did not have duty or were not restricted for a number of other reasons. My father probably had less liberty than most did. According to my uncle and my mom, he was something of a hell-raiser. He spent a fair amount of time confined to Naval Academy grounds for one infraction or another.
The weekend he met my mother, my father was supposedly restricted to his room. A Volkswagen bug had miraculously disappeared from the faculty parking lot and been reassembled in a professor's office. After a thorough investigation, my father was implicated. And restricted to base with no liberty.
Mother said he sneaked out somehow. I guess he never gave her all the details, but after my own time at Annapolis, I finally figured it out myself. Ingenious ? and a technique I don't want to pass on to future generations.
At any rate, my father was an unauthorized absentee. Over the fence, the wall, whatever you want to call it, he headed into Annapolis for a night on the town. After all, as a senior he was fast running out of chances to break Naval Academy rules.
10
The last message I'd gotten from our submarine hadn't been reassuring.
The Akula and Victor still had her pinned down, and she had made no progress in repairing her engineering casualties. As a result, she had only a small fraction of her normal electrical power available to operate the ship, and had reduced her electrical load to a bare, life-sustaining minimum. The sonar, the air purifiers, and the heat ? that was about it.
The sub's skipper was convinced that the Akula had their range, and, reading between the lines, I could see he was worried. Real worried, as bad as I'd ever heard that cool Georgia Tech grad ever get.
Still, if anyone could pull it off, it was him. There are no certainties in the delicate game of USW, but there were few people who played it better.
That had been thirty minutes ago. Since then, nothing.
Under normal circumstances, I wouldn't have worried. After all, submarines usually maintain radio silence except for once or twice a day when they come to communications depth and query the satellite for the broadcast. So not being able to talk with him immediately, not following his evasion of the two attack submarines play by play, was nothing out of the ordinary. But couple that with an engineering casualty, and the increasing tensions ashore, and I didn't like it. Not a bit.
'But what's not to like?' Captain Smith asked me, leaning against my bulkhead in that calm, casual way he had. 'Just playing the devil's advocate here, you understand. Remember, we're here for a friendship mission.' He waved one hand vaguely in the air, intending to indicate the entire former Soviet Union. 'Those MiGs-training opportunities. Nobody got hurt, did they? Airmanship, some good friendly competition ? that's what this is all about.'
'And you buy that?' I asked, immediately regretting the sharp note in my voice. Captain Smith was nobody's fool. He knew what was going on, had played this game during the Cold War, when the stakes were so much higher.
'Sorry, sir. I know what you're trying to do,' I said. 'But I think there's plenty to worry about right now. Those air games ? pretty suspicious how everything has gone wrong during them. Wouldn't you say so?' I'd have been suspicious even without Tombstone's message the night before. I wondered if Captain Smith had noticed those bland phrases, the ones that seemed to contribute nothing to the message's content. Seen them, and thought of our earlier conversation on the secrets of admirals.
The captain said nothing, his eyes boring holes in me.
'And those two attack submarines,' I pressed, 'the Russian ones.
Awful odd that the first major engineering casualty we have onboard our battle group submarine, they show up, don't you think? If I could figure out a way to blame them for it, I'd begin to suspect that they'd even caused the main coolant pump failures. But that would be stretching it a bit far, wouldn't it?'
Captain Smith nodded, still saying nothing.
'So I guess what I'm recommending is a heightened state of readiness,' I finished. 'There's no reason to suspect we're going to war with the Russians ? not under the circumstances. After all, there's a reasonable explanation for everything that's happened.'
Captain Smith finally stirred. 'If you say so. I would say so, of course ? in public.' He shot me a sardonic, half-amused, half-worried look.
'But in private?' I asked.
He shook his head. 'This is the way it always starts,' he said softly. 'You go at it too long, you start thinking about it as a game.
But it's not, it never really was. Even this airdale stuff ashore ? just another way to show the flag a bit, for both sides. If the Russians win, you think they're going to let us forget it? Remember, just as much as we're trying to scope out their capabilities, they're looking at us.'
I stood up and carefully brushed at the front of my trousers, wishing there were some way to do something about the wrinkles. Not that it mattered, really ? after as long as we'd been at sea, the cotton fabric seems to take on a life of its own. Still, it's always good to try to look one's best when going to see the admiral.
'You going somewhere?' Captain Smith asked.
I nodded. 'You didn't come down here just to shoot the shit with the spooks. Call it a little intelligence at work, but I think Admiral Wayne sent you down here to get me. And, since there was no particular hurry or time frame expressed in the admiral's orders, you decided to take the opportunity to go on a little fishing mission of your own. Kind of see how the spooks feel about things, get a lay of the land before you drag me back down the corridor with my head up my ass.' I saw by the expression on the captain's face that I wasn't far off the mark. 'And maybe, if I'm way off base, set me straight before I go in to see the admiral. That about it?'
There was a grudging look of respect in the captain's eyes. 'You figure things out pretty good for an intelligence officer.'
I shoved open the heavy security door that led to my private office.
'There's a reason they call us that.'
