Commander-in-Chief

34

The USS James Greer (DDG-102) was an Arleigh Burke — class guided missile destroyer assigned to the Sixth Fleet and based in Naples, but at the moment she sailed west through the Gulf of Finland in moderate seas.

She was two months into a four-month cruise, having already been to Gibraltar, Portugal, England, Germany, and Gdańsk, Poland, before sailing here, the northernmost point of her voyage. She left Helsinki first thing this morning after a three-day port visit, and just prior to that she had been participating in passing exercises with the Finnish Navy’s fast attack craft Tornio and a pair of ships from the Finnish Coast Guard. PASSEX were joint drills between the ships from the two nations involving simulated air attacks, tactical maneuvering, and bridge-to-bridge communications set up around increasing coordination between the U.S. and allied ships that might find themselves working with the U.S. in a real fight.

The drills had gone well, and when they were finished the sailors and officers on the Greer enjoyed a performance of the Finnish Naval Marching Band, which was nice, plus thirty-six hours of liberty in the bars and restaurants of Helsinki, which was better. Not all the sailors and officers were granted shore leave, of course, but enough did to where the executive officer of the ship, Lieutenant Commander Phil Kincaid, had wandered the passageways for several minutes late the previous evening before encountering another living soul.

The Baltic PASSEX with Finland had been exciting, to a degree, but the 383 officers and crew on board the James Greer hadn’t joined the Navy to drill and listen to a Finnish marching band. They had joined to serve the United States, to project its interests and values around the world and to keep the peace, even if keeping the peace meant going to war.

Guided missile destroyers were known as the most versatile warships in the Navy. Larger than frigates but smaller than cruisers, they were capable of antiair, antisurface, and antisubmarine warfare, and they used the latest technology in the furtherance of each task. The Arleigh Burke was the first ship in the newest class of destroyers, designed around the Aegis Combat System. Commissioned in 1991, the class had gone through several flights of modernization over the past twenty-five years, and the James Greer was one of the most modern in the Navy’s sixty-four-ship inventory.

Destroyers are so named because they are descendants of a class of ships known as torpedo-boat destroyers. Torpedo boats are a thing of the past, but torpedoes themselves are still a threat to surface warfare. They are now normally fired from submarines, of course, which is why destroyers are equipped with the most advanced antisubmarine warfare capabilities known to man.

The James Greer was capable of antiair and antisurface missions as well, but there were no real surface threats to speak of in the area. Russia’s Baltic Fleet had several small corvettes and old frigates in port in Kaliningrad, but no surface ship captain would steam out to do battle with an Aegis-equipped guided missile destroyer unless either he was part of a large armada or he was insane.

There were air threats around here; the Russians had been throwing a lot of aircraft in the theater to spy on, intimidate, and essentially piss off all the other nations that sailed on or flew over the Baltic, but the real menace to the James Greer in these waters would come from below the waves. There were a pair of upgraded Kilos in the Baltic Fleet, and while the vessels were not the newest Russian technology, they were quiet diesel subs, they were deadly, and, most important of all, their commanders and crew knew these waters better than anyone.

It was for these reasons that the men and women on board the Greer took their jobs exceptionally seriously. For the last few weeks of their cruise they had been here in the Baltic Sea, so they were in the middle of Russia’s turf, and they had even been buzzed by two Russian Su-27 interceptors two weeks earlier while north of Poland.

The captain of the James Greer was not a captain in rank, he was a commander. Commander Scott Hagen had been in the Navy since the Academy, he was forty-three now, and his wife told her friends he was going to stay in until the Navy sent armed men to drag him off base for sticking around past retirement age.

He was a lifer.

Hagen sat behind his desk in his wardroom at 1100 hours, scanning through some reports from his acoustical intelligence officer. He heard movement outside in the passageway, and then his XO rapped gently on his door before leaning in. “Message for you from the N3.”

Hagen sighed in frustration. He’d been hoping this message wouldn’t come. “Bring it in, although I have a feeling I know what it says.”

Kincaid entered the wardroom and handed the single page over to his captain without comment. Both men had seen the news about the missing plane over the Baltic late this morning. They had discussed the chance that they would be contacted by the Sixth Fleet’s director of operations (N3) and ordered into service. Hagen had bet they wouldn’t get that order. They were half a day away from the location of the crash, so they wouldn’t be involved in any real rescue, and due to the increased tension in the Baltic region, he felt the Navy would want to keep one of its most powerful weapons in the area, ready to employ quickly if shots were fired.

But the XO took the other side of the bet. He couldn’t imagine the U.S. Navy missing out on the PR boon of taking part in such a high-profile public interest mission.

Hagen nodded as he read, then summarized the order for Lieutenant Commander Kincaid. “You called it, XO.”

A minute later, Commander Hagen wore a headset and patched himself into 1-MC, the shipboard PA system. He punched the transmit button, sending his voice throughout virtually every space on the ship. “This is the captain speaking. All hands give me your attention for a minute.

“Some of you might not be aware that at around oh-eight-thirty Zulu time today, approximately two and a half hours ago, a Swedish passenger jet traveling from Stockholm en route to Dubai collided with a Russian military surveillance aircraft over the Baltic Sea, roughly one hundred ten nautical miles from our position. We have been ordered to make best possible speed toward the crash of Swedish Air 44 and assist with search-and-recovery operations.

“This is going to be a grim job for all of us, to put it mildly, but it’s damn important. We owe those victims our best work, whether we rescue anyone alive or only recover remains.”

He stopped transmitting for a moment while he ordered his thoughts, then pushed the button again. “While we are in the process of this recovery, we cannot and we will not allow ourselves to lose focus of our larger mission here in the Baltic. The tension between the Russian Federation and other national actors in the area was plenty high before this incident. It will only get higher. We might find ourselves called upon at any moment to… to respond to threats. The James Greer will suffer no loss of mission readiness while we are assisting in the recovery mission. None at all.”

After he finished his address he put his comm set back in its cradle on the desk in his stateroom, then looked up at Phil Kincaid. “You know, XO, there’s one thing about this mission that I really don’t care for.”

“That we’re heading due west when Russia is due east?”

Hagen shook his head. “It’s not that. No, I guess our politicians haven’t noticed it just yet, but we are smack dab in the middle of a potential war zone, and we are operating in an AO that also contains naval combat forces of our adversary.”

The XO nodded. He finished the thought. “And we’re about to go to a fixed spot on the water and let everybody in the world, including the opposition in the area, know where we are.”

“That’s it. By the time we get on scene there will be zero chance for survivors, even if someone managed to live through a midair collision and impact with that cold water. So we’ll be there to pick up wreckage and bodies. Yeah, it’s important, but I sure as hell wish surface ships that aren’t going to be called to fight the Russians in a shooting war would spend their time on victim recovery, while the James Greer stays a hell of a lot more low-profile. Once the bad guys know where we are, it’s going to be hard to slip them if the time comes.”

The XO just nodded.

Hagen shrugged and stood up, heading for the passageway. “Nobody is asking us, so let’s head up to the bridge and get this ship hauling ass toward that well-publicized point in the middle of the ocean.”