“Where’s the sub now?”
“We don’t know. The ASW commander in the Arkansas is certain that it’s no longer in our periphery.”
“If they don’t know where he is, how do they know he’s not just waiting somewhere to take another shot?”
Vitale pointed to the window. “Look out there. What you’re seeing is the biggest sub hunt in modern history. When that Kilo boat so much as turns a blade — and he’ll have to very soon — they’re going to kill him.”
“How’d he get away after firing his torpedoes?”
The operations officer just shook his head. “One of the dirty little secrets about antisubmarine warfare is that the old diesel/electrics, which we gave up years ago, by the way, are the stealthiest boats in the world. The sub skipper is either brilliant or incredibly lucky. He took an obsolete submarine and a mercenary crew and managed to get inside the most powerful battle group in the world.”
“And then escape,” added Boyce.
“Maybe there’s a lesson in this,” said Fletcher. He walked around from the end of the table and gazed out the window. “Our technology and our tactics evolved during the Cold War to battle the Soviet Union. Somewhere along the way we forgot how to fight an enemy like Al-Fasr with old-fashioned weapons.”
“Sort of like getting knifed when you thought you were in a gunfight,” Boyce said.
“Something like that. A lot of mistakes were made in this campaign.” Fletcher stood with his hands clasped behind him, his back to the group at the table. “Most of them mine.”
A hush fell over the room. Morse was doodling on a notepad. Vitale’s mouth was half open. Stickney looked mesmerized. They were all watching Fletcher.
“The biggest mistake,” Fletcher went on, “was in letting the military chain of command be subverted by outside influences. That was my error. It’s one I will carry responsibility for to my grave.”
The silence hung in the compartment like a shroud. None of them had ever heard a flag officer bare his soul as Fletcher was doing.
“When they convene my court-martial,” said Fletcher, “I will testify that it was my overweening ambition and my acquiescence to…” He paused, and everyone waited for him to mention Babcock, but he didn’t. Instead he said, “… my inappropriate deference to a non-military official.”
He turned and looked at them. “You all have brilliant careers ahead of you. I want you to remember what happened here so that you don’t have to repeat it. It seems that we go through something like this every generation or so — a short-circuit in our military leadership. It happened in Vietnam, with politicians determining our targets. In Iran with the mismanaged hostage rescue. It happened in Lebanon when officials in Washington presumed to manage an air strike against the Syrians.”
Fletcher went back to his seat. “And history will show that it happened in Yemen.”
Stickney was the first to speak up. “Admiral, may I ask the status of Mr. Babcock? The last I heard, he was—”
“In his quarters.” Fletcher glanced at his watch. “Within the hour, he will be flown off to Dubai, and then be on his way back to Washington, where, no doubt, he will arrange for me to be relieved of this command.”
Maxwell caught the sardonic note in Fletcher’s voice. It was odd, he thought. In the past two days he had actually come to like the white-haired admiral — the same Fletcher whom he had written off as an empty suit. At the eleventh hour the admiral had reached deep inside himself and found a source of inner steel. The tragedy of Langhorne Fletcher was that it happened too late.
“You’re dismissed, gentlemen,” Fletcher said. “You have my thanks for a job well done.”
As the officers headed for the door, he added, “Commander Maxwell, before you leave, may I have a word with you?”
The SCIF — Sensitive Compartmental Information Facility — was located amidships, down in the spaces of the Reagan’s surface plot, called Alpha Sierra. Two marine sentries guarded the entrance. The bulkheads of the compartment were specially treated and padded to prevent bugging or passive emissions monitoring.
At his worktable inside the SCIF, FBI agent Adam Korchek tilted back in his steel desk chair and rubbed his eyes. He hated this place — the claustrophobic sterility of the windowless compartment, halide lamps glaring from the overhead, the drab gray furniture. One bulkhead was lined with tape reels and disc players. Across the compartment six cryptologists, linguists, and intelligence analysts were laboring at their consoles.
For the past thirteen hours Korchek and Dick Mosely, the CIA officer who specialized in Arab terrorist organizations, had been analyzing the transcribed material that the marines had brought from Al-Fasr’s base compound. Most of the data was encrypted, which took time to decode and translate.
It was hard work, but by the time he’d worked through the third stack of transcriptions — the data from the optical storage unit in the Al-Fasr compound — Korchek knew he had struck pay dirt. He now had half a dozen recorded SatComm conversations between Al-Fasr and someone who was obviously in an influential position. Though the official’s name was never explicitly used, it was clear in the transcription that he and Al-Fasr were more than well acquainted.
As he sifted through the piles of transcriptions, something still troubled Korchek. There were these snippets of encrypted one-way transmissions and received messages. Some were clearly intended for a clandestine warship, relaying information and points of intended movement of the Reagan and its battle group. From the content of the messages, Korchek deduced that they were intended for a submarine, presumably the Kilo-class boat that had attacked the carrier.
Were these from the same source as the SatComm exchanges?
By his nature and experience, Korchek was a cynical man. He had no wife, no immediate family except for a pair of brothers in Chicago whom he despised. His early years in law enforcement had imbued him with a distrust of his fellow man, and it was this trait that had served him best in the field of counterintelligence. Like a bloodhound, Korchek had a knack for sniffing out the tiniest whiff of perfidy.
Now he was sniffing. He didn’t have the scent yet, but he knew that he was getting close.
Korchek returned to his piles of transcriptions. For another two hours he pored over them, puzzling out the meaning of the tiny encrypted snippets, looking for a pattern.
Suddenly it jumped off the page, jolting him like a hot spark. Of course! Korchek sat upright in the chair, staring at the piles of transcribed messages. It made perfect sense. Nothing solid, nothing provable, at least not yet. But he had the scent clearly in his nostrils.
He rose and went over to the watch officer, a pudgy lieutenant commander in khakis. He gave the officer a pink memo sheet with a handwritten name on it. “Download the background investigation file on this man. For my eyes only.”
The watch officer looked annoyed. “Is this urgent?” he said. “I’m pretty busy getting—”
“Do you want me to get the operations officer on the line? Just fucking do it and quit wasting time.”
The watch officer was not accustomed to being insulted by civilians. He glowered at Korchek for a second. Grudgingly, he picked up the pink sheet and read it.
A look of shock passed over his face. Nodding his head in amazement, he swung his chair around to his desk keyboard and began typing in the file download order.
Fletcher’s eyes bored into him. “Why didn’t you tell me that your father was Harlan Maxwell?”