In the aftermath of the October War the Australian Government had been appalled by the destruction of Cuba and the ‘holocaust’ of the ‘nuclear exchange’ with the USSR; subsequently, bi-lateral diplomatic relations had initially been frosty, and then positively frigid after the United States had refused to prioritise post-war aide to ‘the old country’, the United Kingdom. In recent months the Australians had curtailed exports of uranium and a long list of other rare earth metals essential for the US’s huge computer and electronics industries, and begun to regulate — ration might be a more accurate term — the supply, and hugely increase the price of bulk ores it still permitted to be transhipped to North America. Moreover, all Australasian military cooperation with US Armed Forces had ceased some months ago after the Seventh Fleet had attempted to ‘intimidate’ a Royal Navy squadron in international waters off Borneo. To emphasise the Australian Government’s continuing displeasure with Washington, it had made a huge public song and dance about Australian frigates and destroyers operating alongside elements of the former British Pacific Fleet escorting the later Operation Manna convoys east across the Southern Ocean to Cape Horn and the Falkland Islands beyond.
But Australia was hardly an enemy!
And even if Australia entertained hostile intentions towards the United States it was in absolutely no position to do anything about it.
Yet the USS Sam Houston had been tasked to patrol an area over five thousand miles distant from its nearest remotely legitimate ‘war target’, whatever was left of Vladivostok in the far east of the Soviet Union. Vladivostok was approximately four thousand miles beyond the effective range of a UGM-27 Polaris A2 submarine launched intercontinental ballistic missile fired from anywhere within the designated patrol box around Lord Howe Island.
Jackson Braithwaite had recalled the USS Sam Houston, cooking up the story about the boat having grounded and therefore, automatically needing to be dry docked before resuming normal operations. Yesterday, his missile technicians had confirmed that eleven of the sixteen A2s in the boat’s silos had been programmed to hit Australian cities; two each on Canberra, Brisbane, Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney, and one on the New South Wales coal mining port of Newcastle.
The USS Sam Houston’s crew of ten officers and one hundred men were presently quarantined on their boat, while provisional contingency arrangements were made on land to ‘contain’ them ashore. What terrified COMSUBRON Fifteen most was the knowledge that no one man in the chain of command could have issued those targeting orders, or tasked one of his SSBNs to patrol that far south. SUBRON Fifteen mainly operated in the waters of the Bering Sea in the far north of the Pacific Ocean, in the Sea of Japan or in the Sea of Okhotsk. Other than in rare transits to the Indian Ocean his boats never passed south of the Equator. The patrol orders and targeting co-ordinates for the USS Sam Houston’s missiles must have passed through half-a-dozen pairs of hands, checked and authorised at each stage and rubber-stamped by, if not scrutinised by the operations staff of Braithwaite’s own operational superior, COMSUBPAC, the Commander, Submarine Force, Pacific Fleet. In that chain of command Braithwaite was, de facto, the man responsible for the final ‘sign off’ of the sealed orders issued to each submarine’s captain twenty-four hours before departure from port.
However, he had not seen, let alone authorised the document that the commanding officer of the USS Sam Houston had handed him four days ago.
There had to be a traitor on his own staff!
Somewhere, here at Alameda!
The logic of the situation was as chilling as it was unavoidable and the premature return of the USS Sam Houston had inevitably alerted the traitor that his, or her, subversion of the chain of command had been identified. Nevertheless, if Braithwaite officially sounded the hue and cry it was likely to result in either the traitor going to ground or his becoming a laughing stock. The story about the SSBN grounding would wear thin soon but he could hardly squawk his alarm via normal channels to the Navy Department, or anybody else, without risking being accused of crying wolf or of being undermined by the very people who had conspired to subvert the USS Sam Houston’s patrol orders in the first place. A lesser man would have been paralysed on the horns of his dilemma. Not COMSUBRON Fifteen. He had decided that this thing had to swim back up the chain of command via secure back channels; via men and women he had known for years and whom he trusted with his life. He chaffed that it would be another twenty-four hours before the alarm bells rang in DC; but there was nothing he could do about that. He had set the hare running now all he could do was wait; meticulously maintaining the pretence that nothing was amiss. To support this fiction it was vital that he carried on as normal.
Collecting his cap he went out into his flag lieutenant’s office. The youthful officer leapt to his feet, the two uniformed female secretaries half-rose with a more dignified deference before their boss waved them down.
“I’m meeting my wife for lunch at the Club. You have the Club Secretary’s number if you need to get hold of me. I will be back on the base for my sixteen-thirty hours staff meeting. Tell the departmental chiefs in advance to keep it short and sweet.” He chuckled and shook his head. “My wife has relations flying in from Colorado this afternoon and my presence for cocktails at seven on the dot is required!”
“Yes, sir!” Braithwaite’s flag lieutenant acknowledged keenly.
There were spits of rain in the grey air as COMSUBRON Fifteen bustled out of the Headquarters Building — a long, low World War II vintage structure inherited from the adjacent Naval Air Station — and stepped into the back seat of the waiting gleaming black Navy Chrysler. Braithwaite registered that his driver today was not his customary chauffeur.
“What’s happened to Seaman Perez?” He inquired gruffly, his tone genuinely affable.
The immaculately uniformed Man behind the wheel did not turn his head.
“They told me he ate something that didn’t agree with him, sir.”
“Poor man.” The passenger stared out of the window as the car gently traversed the wide open spaces of the airfield making for the roads funnelling down to the crossing to the mainland. “What’s your name?”
“Grant, sir. Petty Officer Third class. I was in the depot office and it was on the board that you required a car to transport you to the Sequoyah Country Club, sir.”
Jackson Braithwaite lit a cigarette, a Camel, and allowed a little of his existential angst to leak out through the pores of his skin. The car rumbled over the bridge to Oakland. It was not an overlong drive to the club as his wife, Dolores, called the Sequoyah Country and Golf Club. He and Dolores had both been in their late thirties when they met. She was a golfer, an outdoor, party-going sort of woman; he was workaholic, constantly being posted away from home, utterly immersed in the Navy and its politics, and a very reluctant socialite but they had been happily married for nearly fifteen years for the simple reason that they allowed each other to live their own lives. Where those lives touched was where they lived their married life, mostly with no little bliss. There were no children, of course, and counter intuitively that probably contributed a great deal to their middle-aged contentment. Dolores’s father had left her a fat trust fund, which although somewhat diminished by her self-confessed profligacy and the recession caused by the October War, still enabled the couple — bolstered by Jackson’s not insubstantial Admiral’s stipend — to continue to bump along in the style to which they had become accustomed regardless of the appalling state of the World.