Los Angeles Class

6

Frank Gordon pulled his Skylark to a stop in the driveway of his Lincolnia Park home, on the suburban outskirts of Alexandria just south of I-395. Though it was past sunup, the sky was still dark, mantled in a low ceiling of heavy, gray clouds promising rain. Early as it was, traffic sounds were picking up on the nearby highway, and the flashing headlights of early commuter traffic glimpsed through the trees were growing more numerous. Rush hour on a Saturday morning wasn't nearly so bad as during the week, but enough military and defense corporation employees worked on the weekend to make him glad he'd made it home before the traffic really picked up.

Letting himself in the front door quietly, he tiptoed into the front hall.

"Good morning."

Becca's voice was cold, and a trifle hard. She was curled up on the big, overstuffed chair in the living room at the end of the hall, wearing her blue nightgown, and with her legs tucked under a blanket. "I'm sorry, Becca," he said. "Something came up." She yawned as she uncurled from the chair. Rebecca Gordon was lovely, a bit pudgy since she'd turned forty, but still attractive and possessing a beauty that had more to do with grace and presence than weight. "It's funny," she said. "I thought the Pentagon was pretty damned high-tech. There's this new invention out, called the telephone."

"I'll have Appropriations look into that," he replied, trying to turn it into a jest.

"Damn it, Frank. We were supposed to have dinner with the Pattersons. Remember?"

He closed his eyes. He'd completely forgotten about that, even before Goldman had entered his office. "No," he said. "I forgot. Were they upset?"

She shrugged. "It's kind of becoming a habit, you know? So, something came up that you couldn't call home?"

He thought about that. The truth was he hadn't even thought about calling, not after he'd been taken into the underground combat center. "No. I couldn't. I was with your dad all night."

She arched one perfect eyebrow at that. Mentioning her father was virtually a code phrase between them, meaning he'd been engaged in business that he simply wasn't allowed to discuss. Not with anyone, even her. "And you didn't check your messages."

"No, damn it!" he snapped. "I didn't! What we were dealing with… well… I wasn't at my desk, and I couldn't get away. That's all!"

He saw her eyes darken and felt the rise of her anger, but she nodded after a moment. "Fine. I'm going back to bed."

"You didn't need to stay up for me."

"Of course not! My husband could be lying dead in an alley somewhere. He never calls, and I never know when or if he's coming home! I should just go to bed and wait for the police to call me! Of course I can sleep when I don't know if I'm going to be awakened by him coming in at dawn, or by a phone call from the hospital!" Whirling, she stormed down the hallway toward the stairs. "Becca, please… "

"You know where the blankets and pillows are. You can sleep down here! If you ever sleep, of course!" She was crying now. "Sometimes I don't know whether I married a man or a computer!"

"O… kay," he said softly after she was gone. He heard the bedroom door slam upstairs. "Looks like I fucked up again, big-time."

He was too damned tired to be angry in response. The exchange they'd just played out was fast becoming the rule rather than the exception. Late hours at the Pentagon, missed dinners and social events, forgotten opportunities to call…

Rebecca put a high priority on social formalities and propriety. He understood why that was important to her. She'd gone through seven kinds of hell from her father when she'd broken off an engagement to elope with a certain young submarine officer. She'd been accused of impropriety and worse, he knew. She'd been fighting clinical depression for years, now, and was taking Valium to combat it. Lately, it had been as though she was trying somehow to demonstrate she was socially competent, going through the proper whirl of dinner parties and social engagements, as if to prove to the world that she could do the social thing with the best of them.

Dinner parties, while a grim necessity for any naval officer, were simply not on Gordon's priority list… not in the top twenty, at any rate. For the past year, especially, he'd been bearing down on his career to the virtual exclusion of everything else, taking on more and more responsibilities at ONSOC, working longer hours, and generally obsessing over the future course of his naval career. That career had very nearly become beached. He'd been working hard to catch up… and to prove, especially to Goldman, that he had what it took to skipper a nuke boat of his own.

He was only recently beginning to understand that excluding everything but career in his life was also excluding his family. He rarely saw Ellen and Margaret, his two girls, anymore. And Rebecca… were hermoods and down periods worse, lately? "Excitable depression," her doctor had called her condition. The Valium, he'd warned, only suppressed the moods, and couldn't in any way be considered a cure.

So far as Gordon was concerned, everyone got a little down from time to time. If Becca would just get over it, pick up and get on with her life, everything would be fine. Fine.

He looked at his watch. Almost 5:30… and though he was tired, he didn't feel like he could sleep at all. For a moment, he hesitated, wondering whether or not he should go upstairs and try to talk to Becca.

Another part of his mind translated 0530 hours EST to 1230 hours in Lebanon. Where were the SEALs left on the ground after the evacuation at LZ Bravo? How were they planning on reestablishing contact and getting picked up?

He decided to go back to the office and wait the situation through… both situations, in Lebanon and at home. He rubbed his eyes, then giggled at a sudden, wry gallows-humor thought. Which was the more desperate situation right now? The Bekaa Valley? Or Becca's Valium?

Maybe, he decided, he was more tired than he knew. No matter. He could catch a nap on the sofa in his office later, and maybe get caught up on the Quarterly Reports that were due next week

Quietly, and with a last guilty glance up the stairs, he let himself out the front door.

They waited until well past dark to slip from their safe place.

They'd spent the daylight hours hiding in a storage shed behind a garage on the outskirts of Habbush. Hidden behind stacks of parts crates, rusted engine blocks, decaying tires, piles of chain and cable and rusted-out oil drums, they'd watched the day pass through the narrow gaps in the splintery boards that formed the shed's back wall. From there, they'd seen soldiers passing through in convoy, heading east, up the mountain face. Judging by their uniforms, they were government soldiers, troops answering to the Christian-rightist Beirut government… but that didn't make them the good guys, not by a long shot. Had they been Israeli — the IDF controlled this region, at least in theory — Randall might have attempted contact… but these were the people who'd orchestrated more than one massacre of civilians in the past few years, including the brutal slaughter of eight hundred civilians — mostly women and children — in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in southern Beirut five years before. The Christian Phalangists were at least as bloody-handed as the Shi'ite Hezbollah, and Randall was taking no chances on an encounter with either group.

Spinelli was just hanging on. He'd lost a lot of blood before they'd finally been able to pack the wound well enough to stop the bleeding, and he was drifting in and out of consciousness, drugged with morphine and weak from loss of blood.

There wasn't a lot they could do for him, though, and it was too risky going out in daylight. Habbush was on one of the country's main east-west roads, and that road paralleled the western end of a thirty-inch oil pipeline that stretched all the way across Lebanon, the southwestern corner of Syria, and all the way across Saudi Arabia to Dhahran and Bahrain on the Persian Gulf; an offshore terminal fed oil tankers gathering at the coast from Europe and the Americas. Because the pipeline was a strategic asset — and an obvious target for terrorists — it was heavily patrolled.

But at the pipeline terminus there would be a fair-sized dock area and plenty of boats and small craft. It was worth the risk if they could get down there. They just couldn't risk doing it in the light.

Once it was completely dark, however, they gently carried Spinelli out to the truck, which they'd parked under the shed's rotting eaves, and laid him on a mattress they'd found in the building. They'd wrapped Lieutenant Gallagher's body in a sheet of canvas and taped it up in a makeshift body bag earlier. Still disguised as militia — Christian or Islamic scarcely mattered now — they set off down the mountain road at a sedately inconspicuous pace.

McKenna's Arabic got them past two more checkpoints without incident. Passwords, it seemed, were not necessary if you could claim with enthusiastic shouts and gestures that you were looking for American commandos who'd attacked a camp in the Bekaa Valley, and who might still be in the neighborhood.

They reached the sea around midnight, but the port area at the end of the oil pipeline was crawling with troops, so they turned south and followed the coast road to the seaside village of Al Khudr. They chose one particular boat, a thirty-foot green-and-white fishing trawler with a high vertical prow and a small pilothouse set well forward. It was tied up by itself to a rickety pier on the north end of the marina area, with rubber tires slung over the sides as fenders to protect the wooden hull as it rocked in the gentle, Mediterranean swell. Eyes were painted on the prow, in Levantine fashion; the name La Joie was picked out on the transom in gold letters.

Silently, Randall, McKenna, Bowman, and Anderson walked out on the pier and slipped aboard the boat, while

Payton stayed with Spinelli in the back of the truck. They'd expected the boat to be deserted, but… "Qui va la?"

French, after Arabic, was the most common language in worldly Lebanon. There were two civilians aboard, asleep in the nets at the boat's stern, an older man and a teenage boy, both terrified at the apparitions moving stealthily and armed about the deck.

"You will not be harmed," Randall told them in stilted, high-school French. Reaching into a pouch slung from his harness, he pulled out a heavy packet containing a roll of gold coins minted for just such a need. "But we need transport in your boat. We will pay you well…. "

There were initial protests, then avaricious bargaining… but clearly the fishermen's interest in the gold outweighed any ideological concerns they might have had. Swiftly, the SEALs brought Spinelli and the lieutenant's corpse aboard, while Anderson kept the wide-eyed civilians under guard. Within twenty minutes, La Joie was under way, chug-chugging clear of the breakwater, then swinging her blunt prow west, toward the open sea.

Little was said on the voyage. Randall's French was years rusty, but the fisherman and his son both spoke Arabic and a little English, so communication was no problem. McKenna sat in the stern, trying to use his Motorola to contact American aircraft in the area, quietly intoning "Starship, Starship, this is Free Sanction, do you copy" like a mantra. Randall went to work on the fishing boat's fish finder, a small electronics package in the pilothouse connected with a low-powered civilian sonar unit on La Joie's keel. It was a simple enough task to find a way to disconnect a key wire in the control unit, then tap it against the contact in Morse code, sending out the cryptic signal "Free Sanction, Free Sanction" over and over again.

"Got 'em!" McKenna said at last, nearly two hours after their departure from port. By then, they were well past the twelve-mile limit, still cruising slowly toward the west. "An E-2C off the Nimitz. They know we're here."

The E-2C Hawkeye was the Navy's answer to the big AWACS aircraft flown by the Air Force, a prop-driven collection of sensitive electronic monitoring and detection gear beneath an enormous, revolving radome that looked like a flying saucer.

"Instructions?" Randall asked.

"They say to stay on this heading. We'll be met."

"Good enough."

It was just growing light in the east when Payton called to the others. "Periscope, port beam!"

They looked, and watched with numbed emotions as the periscope, mottled in camouflage gray-greens, slowly rose from the sea atop a feather of wake, followed in moments by the blunt, charcoal gray tower of a submarine's sail marked with the characters SSN 697. It was a Los Angeles class submarine, the Indianapolis, one of two attached to the Nimitz battle group.

The fisherman turned and looked at Randall. "You are Americans, non?"

Randall shook his head. "Non," he said. "Russe." Let them, and Syrian military intelligence, chew on that. He doubted that these civilians would know the difference between an American submarine and a Russian.

Sailors appeared on the submarine's forward deck, some of them armed with M-16s. Lines were tossed, and La Joie was brought alongside.

"Merci, Capitaine" Randall told the fisherman. "We appreciate the help."

"And we the gold," the man said with a gap-toothed grin. "We are available for charter any time!"

Spinelli died during the medevac flight from the Nimitz to Naples later that day.

"Gordon?"

"Admiral Goldman!"

"Don't get up." The admiral made a stay-put motion with his hand as he stepped into Gordon's office. He placed his briefcase on Gordon's desk. "I just thought you'd like to hear. Free Sanction made it out. The rest of them, I mean."

Gordon felt a wave of relief wash through him. "Thank

God! Casualties?"

"Two dead. A couple of the others were dinged a little, but nothing serious." He frowned. "One of the dead was the team's Wheel. Lieutenant Gallagher."

"Damn. I'm sorry."

"It happens."

"Yes. But this time it was for nothing." Gordon had been chasing the events of the past few days around and around in his thoughts. It was hard not to take the blame for the op's failure. It had been his idea, his plan, after all. He wondered about the families of the dead men. It was one thing to have a father, a husband, a son die in exchange for some lofty goal — the liberation of Americans held by Middle East terrorists, for example.

But the team had gone in and turned up a dry hole. The hostages might have been at Objective Nevada, but they'd been moved before Free Sanction had arrived.

Worse, worse by far, was the knowledge that Hezbollah and Syrian troops had been waiting there in force, almost as if they'd set a trap for the expected arrival of American rescuers.

"It wasn't for nothing," Goldman said after a long moment. "We know that Waite was being held at Objective Nevada. One of our people saw where he'd left his name, and the letters CE."

"'CE'?"

"Church of England. Anyway, it looks like our intel was good. Just… a bit late."

"Either that," Gordon said, "or they knew we were coming."

"An ambush?"

"Remember how much political capital the Iranians got out of the failure of Eagle's Claw?"

"Sure. They weren't responsible for the failure, though."

"Oh, we did it all to ourselves. Too few backup helos in the op plan, an unexpected sandstorm, and a bunch of civilians joyriding out in the middle of the desert where they had no business being. And finally, the collision of one of the tankers with a helicopter." Gordon closed his eyes and tried to picture what it must have been like that night at Desert One, with America's one chance at rescuing fifty-two hostages in the balance. "But the Iranians took the crash and turned it into a great victory for the Revolution."

"You think Hezbollah wanted to do the same?"

"It's certainly a possibility, Admiral. One we ought to be looking at carefully."

"Failure doesn't necessarily imply enemy action."

"Of course not. There is a precise military-technical term for what happened at Objective Nevada the other night… and at Desert One, for that matter."

"And that is?"

"A cluster fuck. Pure and simple."

Goldman chuckled. "Not a bad term."

"But it shouldn't have been. Everything went exactly right. Every man did what he was supposed to do. But there were Syrian troops at the objective, not to mention a hell of a lot of militia. And they shouldn't have been there."

"Mmm. Maybe. Still, no student of military history can help but notice how many battles are won through sheer dumb luck. But that cuts both ways, you know. While one side is winning through luck, the other side is losing." He shrugged. "Sometimes the coin toss just comes up tails."

"And I'd like to be sure no one was playing with a jiggered coin."

"That's G2's show," Goldman reminded him. "They'll be looking at that op real closely, believe me."

Had it been a trap? Or coincidence? Right now there was no way to know, but Gordon knew that Intelligence would be digging into the possibility of a leak somewhere along the line of command from the Pentagon all the way down to SEAL Team Two.

He found himself wondering about the intelligence sources he'd heard quoted, though. HUMINT was so damnably frustrating. People were fallible… and fickle as well. An informer could be bought, or turned. Or planted by a clever foe.

And no matter what the cause, two good men were dead… and Frank Gordon had helped to kill them.

"I have something for you here," Goldman said, flipping open his briefcase. He extracted a manila string-tie envelope and handed it to Gordon.

Gordon had seen similar envelopes often enough in his eighteen years of naval service to know what it was.

Orders.

He accepted the package, and with one glance for reassurance at Admiral Goldman, unwrapped the string and pulled out the top page.

His vision was blurring. He could scarcely read the words on the paper.

He held in his hands the fulfillment, the realization of twenty-three years of work, blood, training, dedication, and belief.

Frank Gordon had entered the Navy in 1969, upon his graduation from Annapolis. After his initial training at the U.S. Navy Submarine School at Groton, Connecticut, he'd had his first sea tour… aboard the submarine tender Canopus, which had spent most of her time tied up at a dock at the sub base at Bangor, Washington.

And because he'd run off with an admiral's daughter while he was still at Groton — the same admiral who was now standing there on the other side of Gordon's desk with a knowing grin on his face — it had looked as though Frank Gordon's career was never going to go anywhere more interesting than the leaden gray-skied purgatory of Bangor.

He'd gone the whole nuke career track. Every submariner officer who wanted to go anywhere wanted to go nuke … and most especially wanted to go with the nuclear fast-attack force — not the big, quiet, sneaking mobile fortresses of the SSBN boomers, but the swift and deadly sharks of the sea, the Sturgeons and, especially, the Los Angeles attack boats. That's where the prestige was. The glory. The promotions. The coveted chance at an eventual promotion to admiral and a flag command. He'd served aboard several boats, learning each department — engineering, navigation, weapons. He'd endured the interview every prospective nuke officer dreaded with Hiram Rickover, a man known as the Father of the Nuclear Navy… and a man who could have given Torquemada a few pointers in the tactics of inquisition. Rickover had passed him with a gruff "Not bad," high praise indeed from the father who could make or break any aspiring nuke officer's career with a single sarcastic word.

But after serving as XO aboard the ancient diesel boat Bluefin during the Iranian hostage crisis, he'd found himself, after yet another training billet, again on board the Bluefin, this time as her CO. Admiral Goldman had a long memory, and less than pleasant feelings for the brash ensign who'd eloped with his daughter just before her high-society wedding. The upward track of his career had begun lagging almost from the first, with missed promotions and less than strategic tours of duty.

It wasn't pleasant for any junior officer to think about, but the command ranks in the U.S. Navy, captain and above, were heavily politicized. A Navy commander on someone's shit list, an officer who didn't have some fairly impressive friends and patrons in high places, was lucky to make captain and would never make admiral.

It looked as though Commander Gordon was never going to rise higher in his chosen career, or command anything more prestigious than the Bluefin. Then, two years ago, he'd taken the Bluefin into one of the Soviet Union's innermost sancti sanctorum, the forbidden White Sea east and south of the Kola Peninsula. His mission, code-named Arctic Fox and still so highly classified it wasn't likely to see the light of day for another fifty years, had involved the transport and insertion of a Navy SEAL team near the Soviets' heavily guarded submarine base at Severodvinsk. At the end of that mission, he'd received the smallest ray of hope, again from Goldman, that he might yet find himself in command of a nuke. His estrangement from his powerful father-in-law had ended, thanks largely to Rebecca's interventions, he was sure, but also in part to his handling of his boat in those desperate hours within sight of the Soviet Empire's most closely guarded havens.

He was proud of what he'd done, proud, too, of his abilities.

And now, in his hands, was his reward. "I… I'm not sure what to say, Admiral."

" 'Thank you' will do, son."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome. You've earned it." He paused, lips pursed, as though considering what to say next. "Things haven't always been clear sailing between us, Frank. I regret that. And partly, too, you know, I had to be careful not to appear partial. Nepotism is an ugly, filthy thing, especially if it puts an unfit man in command of a Navy's ship or sub."

Gordon blinked. He'd always been focused so tightly on Goldman's anger over his elopement with his daughter he'd never considered the opposite tack, that Goldman was withholding the best billets because he didn't want to appear to be fostering his son-in-law's career.

It was an interesting new slant, one that put a whole new light on things.

"But your handling of the Bluefin in Arctic Fox," Goldman went on, "was nothing short of brilliant. I told you there might be a new command in it for you, after a year or two ashore. And here it is."

"I appreciate this, Admiral. I'll do my best."

Goldman made a sour face. "I had little to do with it, beyond signing off on the recommendation. As for doing your best, you'd damned well better if you know what the hell is good for you!" The smile robbed the words of their sting… or most of it.

"Does Rebecca know?" he asked. It was an odd position to be in. An admiral's daughter sometimes had near-instant access to information that could take some time trickling down the chain of command.

"Of course not. She could be a Russian spy!"

The words were both joke and rebuke. Of course no one in Goldman's position would discuss information as sensitive as who was going to be in command of a Navy submarine with anyone not authorized to receive that information, even if she was family. Gordon had just come close to insulting the admiral simply by suggesting such a thing.

"Just checking, sir," he said, trying to change his gaffe into a joke. "Navy wives have their own communications setup, you know. They pick up and transmit information at speeds faster than light, and no one can ever figure out just how they know what they know. I thought maybe I had the inside track, there."

"Well, you're right about that, but I'll leave it to you to break it to her." His expression had gone a bit cold. "Frank, is everything all right between you and Becca?"

He sighed. "Some rough seas, sir. Every marriage has them." He wondered what Rebecca had told her father.

"I know. But… this new command is going to take you back out to sea, son. And the word is, it'll be soon."

Gordon's eyes widened at that. "What?… "

"At this time, no comment. But break it to her gently, son."

"Aye aye, sir."

He snapped his briefcase shut. "Okay. I gotta make tracks." He extended a gnarled hand. "Good luck, son."

Gordon shook the hand. "Thank you, sir. Thank you for everything."

It wasn't until some minutes after Goldman had left that Frank Gordon thought of something else. These orders had been written two weeks before. Why had Admiral Goldman taken him into the Pentagon subbasement to watch the SEAL op in Lebanon that night? To teach him the seriousness of command responsibility?

Or to prove something more, something deeper, a something as deep and as cold as the depths of the Marianas Trench?

"Damn you, Ben Goldman," he whispered.