They entered the building and walked down the gleaming, polished linoleum hallway shiny enough to see yourself. Photographs of each submarine in the fleet adorned the walls together with the appropriate photos of the president, secretary of the navy, chief of naval operations, and Admiral Charles “Rowdy” Yates, COMSUBLANT himself. If they could just do something about the painted cinderblock walls, the place might actually be an attractive place to work.
Buffalo gave a mock salute to Admiral Yates’s photo. “Howdy Rowdy!” he said in jest as part of his daily routine.
George snickered. Lannis ignored him.
It seemed that anyone in the navy who rose to the rank of admiral had a nickname, whether they wanted it or not. They either earned it through their deeds over the years, or it was associated with them because of the likeness of their name to some famous person or fictional character. In this case, the admiral’s nickname referred to Rowdy Yates, the Clint Eastwood character from the old television series Rawhide. As they all knew, there was nothing rowdy about Admiral Yates. He was all business.
As they approached the briefing area, George ran into Yeoman First Class Leona Harris. Yeomen are the navy’s administrative personnel, and Petty Officer Harris’s many years of experience, although mostly in other navy commands, made her an invaluable asset to George Adams. She was about fivefoot six with short blond hair and penetrating greenish-blue eyes. Buffalo referred to her in private as “Sparkle Eyes”, even though the nickname seemed to irritate George. George found her quite attractive. It was a wonder how a woman of such beauty could remain single amongst so many single men. Official navy regulations, of course, forbade any type of fraternization between officers and enlisted members of the service — regulations that George had never questioned in the past.
George saw her first and offered, “Good morning, Petty Officer Harris.”
She turned and handed him a stack of papers prepared for the briefing. “Good morning, Commander. Did you hear the news?”
“About Paris?” George guessed.
“No, al-Qaeda delivered another videotape to Al Jazeera. They are promising another nuclear attack on the U.S…. and soon!”
“They’ve declared that a dozen times since DC,” George replied. “So what’s news about that?”
“This tape has more details. It sounds more ominous.”
“What can be more ominous than saying they have a nuclear weapon and they’re going to sneak it into the country and blow up a major city?” George asked sarcastically.
“This time the tape says the first attack was a glorious victory for Allah, but not enough infidels died. At least three to five million U.S. citizens need to die before we begin to feel the same kind of pain Muslims have endured because of U.S. policy in the Middle East.”
“Okay, so other than specifying how many of us they plan to murder, that still doesn’t sound new.”
Lannis and Petty Officer Ed Humphrey, the admiral’s yeoman, stopped in the hallway nearby to discuss some papers. Seeing that they were within earshot, Petty Officer Harris became more formal.
“Well as you know, sir, exact translations are always a problem, and the sound quality is not too great on the copy our analysts finally obtained. But the speaker on the tape seems to be hinting they have more than one bomb, and they’re planning to use them soon.”
“How many and how soon?” George asked.
“We don’t know that. The analysts just think some of the sentence structure on the tape indicates plural warheads or plural operations being planned.”
“Great! So we continue to live in fear of an undeterminable threat for an undeterminable amount of time. Wow! If there’s anything terrorists know how to do, it’s instill terror. They’re masters at using psychology against us. It’s the unknown that gets us, and they really play that aspect to the hilt.”
“Sir?”
“It’s like this — if you know a bomb is going to go off at the corner drugstore on Tuesday, you can stay safe simply by staying away from the drugstore on Tuesday. But if you only know that a bomb is going to go off, but you don’t know when or where, it’s much more frightening because you can’t control it. As you walk down the street on any given day, the bomb could go off right next to you at any time. One minute you could be enjoying a clear, crisp, beautiful fall morning, and the next minute, paramedics are picking up the pieces.”
“Wonderful thought,” Petty Officer Harris responded sarcastically.
“The terrorists tease us,” George continued. “It’s like playing a game to them. They keep leaking these reports of more nuclear attacks so that we’re constantly wondering if it’s true or not. We don’t have a single day of peace. As far as we know, these nukes you’re talking about could already be in the country, or the whole thing could be a bluff.”
“We don’t think it’s a bluff, sir. The progress the CIA made in tracking down the origin of the DC bomb indicated a number of ex-Soviet warheads that could not be accounted for. Al-Qaeda could have gotten their hands on at least three or four of them.”
“Okay, so why do we think the attacks may be coming soon?” George asked as they moved down the hallway toward his office and away from Lannis’s prying ears.
George and Petty Officer Harris often played this question-and-answer game before the admiral’s briefing. George would ask every question he thought Admiral Yates might ask of him during the briefing. If Petty Officer Harris’s answer was incomplete or unconvincing, and he could not add anything to it, he would identify it as a weakness they needed to fix before the briefing. If at all possible, they would get the missing information by 0800. Otherwise, they would initiate actions to get it. Generally, the admiral wanted answers. But you could satisfy him, at least temporarily, if you already had an action plan to get the information and an estimate of when you would get it. What really irritated Admiral Yates was a staff member who had no answer and no plan to get the answer because he never even thought of the question.
Staff work had trained you to think like an admiral. You learned to anticipate the admiral’s questions. If you could do that, a staff assignment was great for your career. Once the admiral became convinced you were admiral-material yourself, you would get an excellent fitness report. A one-percent REP fitness report (meaning top one percent and Recommended for Early Promotion) signed by an admiral was like gold when your record went before a promotion board or a commanding officer (CO) selection board. The submarine CO selection board was meeting next month, and George Adams was up for command selection. He could not afford to screwup now.
“I don’t like this situation,” George confided to Petty Officer Harris. “Admiral Yates will be looking to me as the ops officer, and to Lannis as the intel officer, to provide answers about this latest threat. I don’t have any answers, and I’m pretty sure Lannis doesn’t either.”
“Admiral Yates is not one to take ‘I don’t know’ as an answer,” Petty Officer Harris reminded him.
“That’s true, but those are really Intel questions. Intel has to tell us about the threat. Ops is responsible for coming up with a response once Intel has defined the threat. At least it’s going to be pleasurable to watch Lannis squirm. Somehow, that guy always manages to come out of the admiral’s briefing smelling like a rose. Admiral Yates banters questions with him and even seems to enjoy the process and the personal interaction.”