“Don’t make the decision right now. Think about it. Maybe see one of the chaplains and talk it over with him. When you make any choice, make sure it’s one you can live with.”
“I will, Mr. Magruder. Thanks again.”
When Bannon was gone Magruder let out a long, ragged breath. Had he done the right thing? What if the kid really had been at fault, despite what the inquiry had found?
He decided he’d have to look into the story further before he could make any final decisions himself. That meant research, interviews, the whole wearying round of investigation.
It was hard to believe that it had been less than twenty-four hours since he’d been exalting over his liberation from paperwork and Pentagon bureaucracy, his return to the freedom of carrier life.
Like a mother duck surrounded by a gaggle of ducklings, the Soyuz led a handful of escort ships through the angry gray waters off the northern coast of Norway, heading southwest into the Norwegian Sea. Displacing sixty-thousand tons and measuring a thousand feet from ski-jump bow to stern, Soyuz represented an entirely new concept in the USSR’s naval thinking. The multipurpose aircraft carrier of the type employed so successfully by the Americans for over five decades was now an integral part of the Red Banner Fleet.
Admiral Vasili Ivanovich Khenkin winced as an aircraft thundered from the deck, probably one of the navalized MiG-29D fighters that provided aerial patrol and protection for the carrier. Khenkin was still not used to his new kind of ship, part of the legacy of Admiral Gorshkov’s bold naval expansion program. Soyuz was the second of his class — Soviet ships, unlike American vessels, were always regarded as “he”—and probably the last. Together with his predecessor, Kreml, Soyuz had blazed the way, but the latest aircraft carrier, just finishing sea trials in the Black Sea, was larger, the size of the great American supercarriers. The sixty airplanes crowded aboard Soyuz would give way to carriers with ninety or a hundred planes before long.
Khenkin looked around the cramped confines of Flag Plot at the staff of officers and seamen who managed the fleet’s operations under his command. How many of them realized the significance of this operation? He wondered if any of them realized that they were not merely embarked on the extension of Soviet control in one tiny region, but were actually reestablishing the USSR as a world power once again.
That was what it amounted to, at least. Since the middle of the Eighties Soviet power and Russian pride had taken a beating. Faced with a sagging economy, a hostile West, and a rising tide of discontent, the Motherland had barely survived intact. And at what cost? Retreat from Eastern Europe, and from the vital buffer zone that alone could prevent a repetition of Germany’s occupation of Russian soil. Compromise with liberal elements demanding reform in everything from freedom of emigration to private ownership of land and industry to the very organization and function of the government itself. Even the evidence of where it would all lead — the ethnic violence, the riots and strikes, the independence movements in states traditionally part of Russia — had not swayed the reformers from their headlong rush to virtual anarchy. It had taken the failure of Gorbachev and Yeltsin and their “new Union” to show the essential weakness of the reform movements, and just as the weak-willed Socialist Kerensky had been swept aside by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, so the democrats had been forced to return power to the hands of the only people who could maintain order, the hard-liners of the Soviet military.
Now the damage could all be undone. The death of the President had been regrettable, of course, but a necessary first step in the cleansing process. The war with Norway would end in quick victory, a needed symbol of renewed Soviet pride. The Americans had gone through the same sort of process with their short, sharp victory over Iraq, at a time when the USSR needed Western economic aid more than the continued existence of a long-time ally. Turnabout was only fair play, Khenkin thought smugly.
He wondered if General Vorobyev had considered that particular bit of symbolism while framing the campaign for Norway’s occupation. Symbols could mean a lot. The carrier, for instance. Starting out as the Riga, his name had been changed to the Admiral Flota Sovetskogo Soyuza Gorshkov, in honor of the Admiral of the Fleet who had inspired the carrier program in the first place after the troubles in the Baltics and elsewhere had made the name of one of the rebellious cities an inappropriate one for a Soviet warship to bear. Now he was the Soyuz, the Union, a symbol of the rebirth of a strong central government that would carry the USSR into the new century.
“Admiral,” an aide said with a crisp salute as he entered Flag Plot. “We have an updated report on the American aircraft carrier battle group.”
“Ah, excellent. Excellent, Orlov. Proceed.” Khenkin leaned forward in his seat, fixing his eyes on the young officer. This was a report he had waited a long time for.
“Around midnight last night Greenwich time the battle group altered course,” Orlov began. “They are now moving northeast at a speed in excess of thirty knots. Our satellite data is not as complete as we would wish due to increasing cloud cover in the area, but the best estimate is that they are ignoring the warnings regarding the Norwegian Sea.” Orlov was sweating, plainly worried at how the admiral would react to the report.
“Is that all? Then you are dismissed, Orlov.” Sagging back in his seat, Khenkin closed his eyes. No one had been sure how the Americans would react, but they gave every indication of being too wrapped up in domestic affairs to care what went on in Scandinavia. The planning had relied on the new American isolationism, the call that the United States could not continue as “the world’s policeman.” In the face of American responses from Iraq to North Korea to the Indian subcontinent, caution had suggested that the plan was foolhardy at best, yet the election of a U.S. President who openly favored massive and unilateral military cutbacks, as well as reductions in all areas of foreign aid, had been encouraging. And his timid reactions, first to the reoccupation of the Baltics, and later to the border dispute between Norway and the Union, had been enough to convince even the doomsayers among the Soviets. Now the Americans were finally beginning to act.
Perhaps the declaration of the exclusion zone in the Norwegian Sea had been too much like an ultimatum. Sometimes it seemed as if the Americans believed they owned the oceans. Khenkin had been against the declaration, but his superiors had overruled his objections. Now it seemed he was being proven correct after all. Instead of backing away from the crisis in Norway, it seemed the Americans were going to challenge the Soviet proclamation directly. But even so, there were still options open. Still a few ways to make the plan work.
“If the Americans are coming, it will risk everything,” Captain First Rank Dmitri Yakovlevich Bodansky, Khenkin’s Chief of Staff, said quietly. “Success depends upon winning Norway without provoking a wider conflict.”
“It is a danger, I agree, Dmitri,” the admiral replied slowly. “But it can still be nullified if we are careful. The American President will know that there is little their people can do to assist the Norwegians before our army completes the reduction of the last remaining resistance. He ‘will be seeing this as a gesture of defiance, a symbol to the world that the great superpower does not accept the dictates of a foreign country. We would do the same, would we not? I suspect the carrier battle group is functioning under strict rules of engagement to avoid open confrontation.”
“You do not believe they are planning to support their allies, Admiral?” Bodansky sounded incredulous.