Red Storm Rising

5. Sailors and Spooks

His eyes squinted painfully at the horizon. The sun was only half a diameter above the green-brown line of Maryland's Eastern Shore, a reminder, if he needed one, that he'd worked late the day before, gone to bed later still, then arisen at four-thirty so that he could get in a day's fishing. A slowly receding sinus like headache also let him know about the six-pack of beer he'd consumed in front of the TV.

But it was his first fishing day of the year, and the casting rod felt good in his hand as he gave it a gentle swing toward a ripple on the calm surface of the Chesapeake Bay. A blue or a rockfish? Whatever it was, it didn't nibble at his Bucktail lure. But there was no hurry.

"Coffee, Bob?"

"Thanks, Pop." Robert Toland set his rod in its holder and leaned back into the midships swivel chair of his Boston Whaler Outrage. His father-in-law, Edward Keegan, held out the plastic cup-cap from a large thermos jug. Bob knew the coffee would be good. Ned Keegan was a former naval officer who appreciated a good cup, preferably flavored with brandy or Irish whiskey-something to open the eyes and put a fire in the belly.

"Cold or not, damn if it ain't nice to get out here." Keegan sipped at his cup, resting one foot on the bait box. It wasn't just the fishing, both men agreed, getting out on the water was one sure cure for civilization.

"Be nice if the rock really are coming back, too," Toland observed.

"What the hell-no phones."

"What about your beeper?"

"I must have left it with my other pants." Keegan chuckled. "DIA will have to manage without me today."

"Think they can?"

"Well, the Navy did." Keegan was an academy graduate who had put in his thirty and retired to become a double-dipper. In uniform, he'd been an intelligence specialist, and now he had essentially the same job, which added civil service salary to his pension.

Toland had been a lieutenant (j.g.) serving aboard a destroyer based at Pearl Harbor when he'd first noticed Martha Keegan, a junior at the University of Hawaii, majoring in psychology and minoring in surfing. They'd been happily married for fifteen years now.

"So." Keegan stood and lifted his rod. "How are things at the Fort?"

Bob Toland was a middle-level analyst at the National Security Agency. He'd left the Navy after six years when the adventure of uniformed service had palled, but he remained an active reservist. His work at NSA dovetailed nicely with his naval reserve service. A communications expert with a degree in electronics, his current job was monitoring Soviet signals gathered by the NSA's numerous listening posts and ferret satellites. Along the way he'd also gotten a masters in the Russian language.

"Heard something real interesting last week, but I couldn't convince my boss it meant anything."

"Who's your section chief?"

"Captain Albert Redman, U.S. Navy." Toland watched a bay-built fishing boat motoring a few miles away, her captain laying out his crab pots. "He's an asshole."

Keegan laughed. "You want to be careful saying stuff like that out loud, Bob, especially seeing how you go on active duty next week. Bert worked with me, oh, must have been fifteen years ago. I had to slap him down a few times. He does tend to be slightly opinionated."

"Opinionated?" Toland snorted. "That bastard's so friggin' narrow-minded his scratch pads are only an inch wide! First there was this new arms control thing, then I came up with something really unusual last Wednesday and he circular-filed it. Hell, I don't know why he even bothers looking at new data-he made his mind up five years ago."

"I don't suppose you could tell me what it was?"

"I shouldn't." Bob wavered for a moment. Hell, if he couldn't talk with his kids' own grandfather…"One of our ferret birds was over a Soviet military district headquarters last week and intercepted a microwaved telephone conversation. It was a report to Moscow about four colonels in the Carpathian Military District who were being shot for gundecking readiness reports. The story on their court-martial and execution was being set up for publication, probably in a Red Star this week." He had entirely forgotten about the oil-field fire.

"Oh?" Keegan's eyebrows went up. "And what did Bert say?"

"He said, 'It's Goddamned about time they cleaned their act up.' And that was that."

"And what do you say?"

"Pop, I'm not in Trends and Intentions-those idiot fortune-tellers, but I know that even the Russians don't kill people for jollies. When Ivan kills people publicly, he does it to make a point. These were not manpower officers taking bribes to fake deferments. They weren't popped for stealing diesel fuel or building dachas with pilfered lumber. I checked our records, and it turned out we have files on two of them. They were both experienced line officers, both with combat experience in Afghanistan, both Party members in good standing. One was a graduate of Frunze Academy, and he even had a few articles published in Military Thought, for God's sake! But all four were court-martialed for falsifying their regimental readiness reports-and shot three days later. That story will hit the streets in Krasnaya Zvezda over the next few days as a two-or three-part story under 'The Observer's' by-line-and that makes it a political exercise with a capital P."

The Observer was the cover name for any number of high-ranking officers who contributed to Red Star, the daily newspaper of the Soviet armed services. Anything on the front page and under that by-line was taken quite seriously, both in the Soviet military services and by those whose job it was to watch them, because this by-line was used explicitly to make policy statements approved by both the military high command and the Politburo in Moscow.

"A multipart story?" Keegan asked.

"Yeah, that's one of the interesting things about it. The repetition means they really want this lesson to sink in. Everything about this is out of pattern, Pop. Something funny is happening. They do shoot officers and EM's-but not full colonels who've written for the journal of the general staff, and not for faking a few lines in a readiness statement." He let out a long breath, happy to have gotten this off his chest. The workboat was proceeding south, her wake rippling out toward them in parallel lines on the mirrored surface. The image made Toland wish for his camera.

"Makes sense," Keegan mumbled.

"Huh?"

"What you just said. That does sound out of pattern."

"Yep. I stayed in late last night, running down a hunch. In the past five years, the Red Army has published the names of exactly fourteen executed officers, none higher than a full colonel, and even then only on manpower officer in Soviet Georgia. The guy was taking payoffs for deferments. The others broke down into one case of spying, for us or somebody, three derelictions of duty while under the influence of alcohol, and nine conventional corruption cases, selling everything from gasoline to a whole mainframe computer nalyevo, 'on the left,' the shadow market. Now all of a sudden they waste four regimental commanders, all in the same military district."

"You could take that to Redman," Keegan suggested.

"Waste of time."

"Those other cases-I seem to remember the three guys who-"

"Yeah, that was part of the temperance campaign. Too many guys turn up drunk on duty, and they pick three volunteers, pour encourager les autres." Bob shook his head. "Jeez, Voltaire would have loved these guys."

"You talk with people who're into civilian intelligence?"

"No, my crowd is all military telecommunications."

"At lunch last-Monday, I think, I was talking with a guy from Langley. Ex-Army, we go way back. Anyway, he was joking that there's a new shortage over there."

"Another one?" Bob was amused. Shortages were nothing new in Russia. One month toothpaste, or toilet paper, or windshield wipers-he had heard of many such things over lunch at the NSA commissary.

"Yeah, car and truck batteries."

"Really?"

"Yeah, for the last month you can't get a battery for your car or truck over there. A lot of cars are not moving, and batteries are being stolen left and right, so people are disconnecting their batteries at night and taking them home, would you believe?"

"But Togliattishtadt-" Toland said, and stopped. He referred to the massive auto factory-city in European Russia, the construction of which was a "Hero Project" for which thousands of workers had been mobilized. Among the most modem auto complexes in the world, it had been built mainly with Italian technology. "They have a hell of a battery manufacturing facility there. Hasn't blown up, has it?"

"Working three shifts. What do you think of that?"

Toland examined himself in the full-sized mirror in the Norfolk BOQ complex. He'd made the drive down the evening before. The uniform still fit, he noted, maybe a little tight at the waist, but that was nature at work, wasn't it? His "salad bar" of decorations was a bleak row and a half, but he had his surface warfare officer's badge, his "water wings" he hadn't always been a glorified radio operator. His sleeves bore the two and a half stripes of a lieutenant commander. A final swipe of a cloth across his shoes and he was out the door, ready on this bright Monday morning for his annual two weeks of duty with the fleet.

Five minutes later, he was driving down Mitcher Avenue toward headquarters of the Commander-in-Chief, Atlantic Fleet-CINCLANTFLT — a flat, thoroughly undistinguished building that had once been a hospital. An habitual early riser, Toland found the Ingersoll Street parking lot half empty, but he was still careful to take an unmarked space lest he incur the wrath of a senior officer.

"Bob? Bob Toland!" a voice called.

"Ed Morris!"

It was now Commander Edward Morris, USN, Toland noted, and a shiny gold star on his uniform jacket designated him as the commander of some ship or other. Toland saluted his friend before shaking hands.

"Still playing bridge, Bob?" Toland, Morris, and two other officers had once established the most regular bridge foursome at the Pearl Harbor officers club.

"Some. Marty isn't much of a card player, but we got a bunch at work that meets once a week."

"Good as we used to be?" Morris asked as they headed off in the same direction.

"Are you kidding? You know where I work now?"

"I heard you ended up at Fort Meade after you hung it up."

"Yeah, and there's bridge players at NSA who're wired into the damn computers-I'm talking assassins!"

"So how's the family?"

"Just great. How's yours?"

"Growing up too damned fast-makes you feel old."

"That's the truth," Morris chuckled. He jabbed a finger at his friend's star. "Now you can tell me about your new kid."

"Look at my car."

Toland turned around. Morris's Ford had a personalized license plate: FF-1094. To the uninitiated it was an ordinary license number, but to a sailor it advertised his command: antisubmarine frigate number one thousand ninety-four, USS PHARRIS.

"You always were nice and modest," Toland noted with a grin. "That's all right, Ed. How long you had her?"

"Two years. She's big, she's pretty, and she's mine! You should have stayed in, Bob. The day I took command-hell, it was like the day Jimmy was born."

"I hear you. The difference, Ed, is that I always knew you'd have your ship, and I always knew I wouldn't." In Toland's personnel jacket was a letter of admonishment for grounding a destroyer while he had the deck. It had been no more than bad luck. An ambiguity on the chart and adverse tidal conditions had caused the error, but it didn't take much to ruin a Navy career.

"So, doing your two weeks?"

"That's right."

"Celia is off visiting her parents, and I'm baching it. What're you doing for dinner tonight?"

"McDonald's?" Toland laughed.

"Like hell. Danny McCafferty's in town, too. He's got the Chicago, tied up at Pier 22. You know, if we can scare up a fourth, maybe we can play a little bridge, just like the old days." Morris poked his friend in the chest "I gotta head along. Meet me in the O-Club lobby at 1710, Bob. Danny invited me over to his boat for dinner at 1830, and we'll have an hour's worth of Attitude Adjustment before we drive over. We'll have dinner in the wardroom and a few hours of cards, just like old times."

"Aye, aye, Commander."

"Anyway, there I was on Will Rogers, " McCafferty said. "Fifty days out on patrol and I got the watch, right? Sonar says they have a goofy signal, bearing zero-five-two. We're at periscope depth, so I put the search scope up, train it out to zero-five-two, and sure enough, there's this Gulfstream36 sailboat, moving along at four or five knots with the autosteering set. What the hell, it's a dull day, so I flip the scope to hi-power, and guess what? The captain and the mate-there's one gal who'll never drown! — are on top the deckhouse, horizontal and superimposed. The boat was maybe a thousand yards away-just like being there. So we turn on the scope TV camera and get the tape machine running. Had to maneuver for a better view, of course. Lasted fifteen minutes. The crew ran the tape for the next week. Great for morale to know just what you're fighting for." All three officers laughed.

"Like I always told you, Bob," Morris noted. "These sub-drivers are a nasty, sneaky bunch. Not to mention perverts."

"So how long you had the Chicago, Danny" Toland asked over his second cup of after-dinner coffee. The three had the submarine's wardroom to themselves. The only officers aboard were either standing watch or asleep.

"Three busy months, not counting yard time," McCafferty said, finishing off his milk. He was the first skipper for the new attack sub, the best of all possible worlds, a captain and a "plankowner." Toland noted that Dan had not joined him and Morris for "attitude adjustment" at the base officers' club, during which they'd tossed down three stiff drinks apiece. It wasn't like the McCafferty of old. Perhaps he was unwilling to leave his sub, lest the dream of his career somehow end while he was away from her.

"Can't you tell from the pale, pasty look common to cave-dwellers and submariners?" Morris joked. "Not to mention the faint glow associated with nuclear reactor types" McCafferty grinned, and they waited for their fourth to arrive, He was a junior engineer, just about to come off reactor watch, Chicago's reactor wasn't operating. She was drawing electrical power from the dock, but regulations demanded a full reactor watch whether the teakettle was working or not.

"I tell you guys, I was a little pale four weeks ago." McCafferty turned serious-or about as serious as he ever got,

"How so?" Bob Toland asked.

"Well, you know the kinda shit we do with these boats, right"

"If you mean inshore intelligence gathering, Dan, you ought to know that that electronic intelligence stuff you collect comes to my office. Hell, I probably know the people who originate a lot of the data requests that generate your op-orders. How's that for a revolting thought!" Bob laughed. He fought the urge to look around too obviously. He'd never been aboard a nuclear submarine before. It was cold-nuclear subs have nuclear-powered air conditioning-and the air was heavy with the smell of machine oil. Everything he could see sparkled both from being almost new, and from the fact that McCafferty had undoubtedly made sure that his crew had gotten things looking especially good for his friends. So, this was the billion-dollar machine that gathered all that ELINT data…

"Yeah, well, we were up in the Barents Sea, you know, northeast of the Kola Fjord, trailing a Russian sub-an Oscar-about, oh, ten miles back of her-and all of a sudden we find ourselves in the middle of a friggin' live-fire exercise! Missiles were flying all over the damned place. They wasted three old hulks, and blasted hell out of a half-dozen target barges. "

"Just the Oscar" Morris asked.

"Turned out there was a Papa and a Mike out there, too. That's one problem with us being so quiet in these babies. If they don't know we're there, we can find ourselves in the middle of some really unpleasant shit! Anyway, sonar starts screaming 'Transients! Transients!' from all the missile tubes being flooded. No way we could be sure they weren't getting ready to put some real torpedoes in the water, but we stuck up the ESM and picked up their periscope radars, then I saw some of the things whipping over our heads. Damn, guys, for about three minutes there it was just a little hairy, y'know?" McCafferty shook his head. "Anyway, two hours after that, all three boats crack on twenty knots and head back to the barn. Your basic out-and-in live-fire. How's that for a lively first deployment?"

"You get the feeling that the Russians are doing anything out of the ordinary, Dan?"' Toland asked, suddenly interested.

"You didn't hear"

"Hear what"

"They've cut back their diesel sub patrols up north, quite a bit, too. I mean, normally they're pretty hard to hear, but mostly over the past two months they just ain't there. I heard one, just one. Wasn't like that the last time I was up north. There have been some satellite photos of them, a lot of diesel boats tied up alongside for some reason or another. In fact, their patrol activity up north is down across the board, with a lot of maintenance activity going on. The current guess is that they're changing their training cycle. This isn't the usual time of year for live-firing." McCafferty laughed. "Of course, it could be that they finally got tired of chippin' and paintin' those old 'cans, and decided to use 'em up-best thing to do with a 'can anyway."

"Bubblehead," Morris snorted.

"Give me a reason you'd have a bunch of diesel boats out of service all at once," Toland said. He was wishing that he'd passed on the second and third rounds during Happy Hour. Something important was flashing lights inside his head, and the alcohol was slowing his thinking down.

"Shit," McCafferty observed. "There isn't any."

"So what are they doing with the diesel boats?"

"I haven't seen the satellite photos, Bob, just heard about them. No special activity in the drydocks, though, so it can't be too major."

The light bulb finally went off in Toland's head. "How hard is it to change batteries in a sub?"

"It's a nasty, heavy job. I mean, you don't need special machinery or anything. We do it with Tiger Teams, and it takes something like three or four weeks. Ivan's subs are designed with larger battery capacities than ours, and also for easier battery replacement-they're supposed to go through their batteries faster than Western subs, and they compensate for it by making replacement easier, hard-patches on the hull, things like that. So for them it's probably an all-hands evolution. What exactly are you getting at, Bob?"

Toland related the story about the four Soviet colonels who had been shot, and why. "Then I bear this story about how the supply of batteries in Russia has dried up. No batteries for cars and trucks. The car batteries I can understand, but the trucks-hey, every truck in Russia is government-owned. They all have mobilization uses. Same sort of batteries, right?"

"Yeah, they all use lead-acid batteries. The factory burn down?" Commander Morris asked. "I know Ivan likes One Big Factory rather than a bunch of little ones."

"It's working three shifts."

McCafferty sat back, away from the table.

"So, what uses batteries?" Morris asked rhetorically.

"Submarines," McCafferty pronounced. "Tanks, armored vehicles, command cars, starter carts for planes, lots of stuff painted green, y'know? Bob, what you're saying-shit, what you're saying is that all of a sudden Ivan has decided to increase his readiness across the board. Question: Do you know what the hell you're talking about?"

"You can bet your ass on it, Danny. The bit on the four colonels crossed my desk, I eyeballed that report myself. It was received on one of our ferret satellites, Ivan doesn't know how sensitive those Hitchhiker birds are, and he still sends a lot of stuff in the clear on surface microwave nets. We listen in to voice and telex transmissions all the time-you guys can forget you heard that, okay?" Toland got nods from the others. "The thing about the batteries I picked up by accident, but I confirmed it with a guy I know in the Pentagon. Now we have your story about increased live-fire exercises, Dan. You just filled in a blank space. Now if we can confirm that those diesel boats really are down for battery replacement, we have the beginnings of a picture. Just how important are new batteries for a diesel boat?"

"Very important," the sub skipper said. "Depends a lot on quality control and maintenance, but new ones can give you up to double the range and power of old ones, and that's obviously an important tactical factor."

"Jesus, you know what this sounds like? Ivan's always ready to go to sea, and now it looks like he wants to be real ready," Morris observed. "But the papers all say that they're acting like born-again angels with this arms-control stuff. Something does not compute, gentlemen."

"I have to get this to someone in the chain of command. I could drop this on a desk at Fort Meade and it might never get anywhere," Toland said, remembering his section chief.

"You will," McCafferty said after a moment's pause, "I have an appointment tomorrow morning with COMSUBLANT. I think you're coming with me, Bob."

The last member of the foursome arrived ten minutes later. He was disappointed with the quality of the game. He'd thought his skipper was better than this.

Toland spent twenty minutes reviewing his data in front of Vice Admiral Richard Pipes, Commander, Submarine Force, U.S. Atlantic Fleet. Pipes was the first black submariner to make three-star rank, a man who had paid his dues with performance as he'd climbed up the ladder in what had traditionally been a whites-only profession, and he had the reputation of a tough, demanding boss. The Admiral listened without a word as he sipped coffee from a three-starred mug. He'd been annoyed to have McCafferty's patrol report supplanted by a speech from a reservist-but that attitude had lasted only three minutes. Now the lines around his mouth deepened.

"Son, you violated a few security restrictions to give me some of that."

"I know that, sir," Toland said.

"Took balls to do that, and it's nice to see in a young officer, what with all the ones who just want to cover their ass." Pipes rose. "I don't like what you just told me, son, not one little bit. We got Ivan playing Santa Claus with all this diplomatic horseshit, and at the same time he's dialing his submarine force in. Could be a coincidence. Then again, it might not be. How about you and me go over to talk with CINCLANT and his intelligence chief?"

Toland winced. What have I got myself into? "Sir, I'm down here for a training rotation, not to-"

"Looks to me like you got this intelligence crap down pretty pat, Commander. You believe what you just told me is true?"

Toland stiffened. "Yes, sir."

"Then I'm giving you a chance to prove it. You afraid to stick your neck out-or do you just offer opinions to relatives and friends?" the Admiral asked harshly.

Toland had heard that Pipes was a real hard-case. The reservist rose to his feet.

"Let's do it, Admiral."

Pipes picked up his phone and dialed in a three-digit number, his direct line to CINCLANT. "Bill? Dick. I got a boy in my office I think you oughta talk to. Remember what we discussed last Thursday? We may have confirmation." A brief pause. "Yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying… Aye aye, sir, on the way." Pipes set the phone down. "McCafferty, thank you for bringing this man in with you. We'll go over your patrol report this afternoon. Be here at 1530. Toland, you come along with me."

An hour later, Lieutenant Commander Robert M. Toland, USNR-R, was informed that he had been placed on extended active duty by order of the Secretary of Defense. In fact it was by order of CINCLANT, but the forms would be correctly filled out in a week or so.

At lunch that day in "flag country" of Building One of the complex, CINCLANT called in all his type commanders-the three-star admirals who controlled the aircraft, surface ships, submarines, and replenishment ships. The conversation was subdued, and ceased entirely when the stewards came in to change the courses. They were all in their fifties, experienced, serious men who both made and implemented policy, preparing for something they hoped would never come. This hope continued, but by the time each had finished his second cup of coffee, it was decided that fleet training cycles would be increased, and a few surprise inspections would be made. CINCLANT made an appointment with the Chief of Naval Operations for the following morning, and his deputy intelligence chief boarded a commercial airliner for a quick trip to Pearl Harbor, to meet with his opposite number in the Pacific.

Toland was relieved of his post and transferred to Intentions, part of CINCLANT's personal intelligence advisory staff.