“There was nothing else you could have done, sir,” OS3 Carey insisted. “Nothing.”
Skeeter stared at the clutter arrayed on the table. The last hour had been an inquisition, a demanding professional look at every second of time from the moment he detected the incoming aircraft to the attack. The admiral’s questions had been pointed and direct, the Chief of Staff openly accusatory. Maybe that was not what the admiral had intended, but it certainly sounded like it if you were the individual doing the answering.
In the end, the admiral had concluded that his performance at TAO had been inadequate, and had ordered the COS to place a letter of reprimand in his service jacket.
Not good enough. He hadn’t made the grade.
Paper charts and tracing paper cluttered the table in front of him, and the entire control of the flag battle group had shifted to ancient methods men had used for centuries to sail these waters. They were moving in closer to the coast of Greece, waiting for instructions on their next port call for repairs. Work crews scampered over the superstructure, trying desperately to resurrect any bit of combat capability left in the shattered gear. Deep in the bowels of the ship, some of the spare electronic components had survived, and the engineering officer and combat-systems officer had said they thought they might be able to jury-rig a rudimentary Furuno radar and one radio circuit in the clear. Secure, encrypted communications were out of the question. The radio components were stored too far above the waterline to have survived.
Shiloh was in better shape. The Aegis cruiser had been specially hardened to withstand EMP, and most of her vital combat circuitry was located well below the waterline. According to the helo that had ferried her XO over ten minutes earlier, she’d have to replace some exterior antennas, but would probably be fully operational within a matter of hours.
Shiloh would be coordinating the medical evacuation of the flash-blinded lookouts and other casualties, including the bridge watch-standers from both ships, as soon as she could raise Jefferson to provide a helo.
“I should have…” Skeeter’s voice trailed off, uncertain and wavering. He stared down at the paper, the lines delineating the Aegean Islands and surrounding waters blurring as his eyes drifted out of focus, clouded with tears. “I should have-” he tried again, searching within himself for an adequate definition of how he’d failed the ship.
“You couldn’t have.” Carey was emphatic. “He stayed outside of our engagement zone, and there was enough ambiguity in the situation that anyone might have made the same decisions. You did your best.”
Skeeter finally looked up at him. “It wasn’t good enough.”
2
Even at this early hour, the Beltway was a diamond necklace of headlights. Unmoving headlights. The attack on USS La Salle had occurred late evening Washington time, and by 0400 all roads leading into the Pentagon were tied up in what amounted to rush-hour traffic.
Rear Admiral Matthew “Tombstone” Magruder throttled his cherry GTO into neutral and set the parking brake. The traffic ahead of him had not moved in ten minutes, and he was tired of holding the powerful engine in check with the brakes. He’d spent too many hours restoring and maintaining the car over the last twenty years to take for granted the possibility of obtaining spare parts for any component in it.
Hot-and-cold-running admiralsyou hear it all the time but you don’t believe it until something like this happens. Every flag staff on every deck and ring is busting ass to get in the office and show the Old Man how on top of things they are. Politicians, half of them. Wonder how much time they spend thinking about the men and women out there on the front line.
For Tombstone, the question was more than academic.
The Mediterranean was one part of the world he knew well, particularly this small corner of it. In earlier years, as CAG of Carrier Air Wing 20 on board the USS Jefferson, he’d taken his men and women into harm’s way to give air support to UN forces involved in a civil war. It had been about this time of year toono, wait, a little later. (Carrier 7: Afterburn) October and November, if memory served. The water had taken on an icy sheen as winter approached, a harder, more brilliant shade of blue. The islands themselves were still green, basking in the warm waters that eddied and flowed around them as they had since the days of the Peloponnesian Wars. And the entrance to the Black Sea itselfthe narrow funnel of Bosphorus that opened into what the Russians had once considered their own private lake.
Not that Turkey had agreed. He grimaced at the memory. The Battle of Kerch as it was now called had ended with a clear victory for the American battle group and the Marine expeditionary unit that accompanied them.
However, the odds of maintaining a permanent peace among the nations bordering the Black Sea seemed slight. To the north, there was Ukraine. Once a part of the Soviet Union, this newly independent state was suffering the ravages of decades of Communist rule. Its people were an odd mixture of European and Asian cultures. It was also the home of the legendary Cossacks he’d confronted so recently in the Aleutian Islands. (Carrier 9: Arctic Fire)
In that conflict, he’d found that the legendary savagery of their warriors had not been exaggerated.
The recent political maneuverings between Ukraine and Russia gave him no reason to feel confident about the Black Sea nation’s future.
Politically and culturally, the two nations were close. Russia had already provided some evidence of her determination to re-form the former Soviet Union, albeit encompassing a slightly smaller area. Belarus had already been reabsorbed into the Russian hegemony, and Ukraine appeared to be not far behind. Despite Ukraine’s protestations of democracy and prayers at the altar of capitalism, the tenets of socialism were too deeply ingrained in its culture for anyone to expect any miracles.
The other nations surrounding the Black Sea were just as worrisome.
Turkey held the southern coast of the Black Sea, and for that reason had been for years the recipient of massive American foreign aid. The pundits in Washington called her the gatekeeper to the back door of the Mediterranean, and permanent military missions as well as ongoing technical support were a routine part of the relationships between the two nations.
However, like many nations in the region, Turkey was moving away from the centered, global approach to politics and toward a hard-line fundamentalist Islamic approach. With it came the ever-so-subtle realignment of attitudes. While formal treaties and alliances remained in place, in recent years Turkey had begun to view American support as an unwanted and unwelcome intrusion. Not the money, not the technologyjust the influx of Western culture. As a result, Turkey appeared to be moving away from the Western world and reestablishing her ties with Iraq and Iran.
Finally, the west coast of the Black Sea. Bulgaria and Romania shared that coast, and both had substantial ties to Ukraine.
And Greece. The ancient nation, with its smattering of islands and reefs, comprised the western border of the Aegean Sea, the entrance to the Black Sea, while Turkey held the east. Since ancient times, the Aegean Sea had been a naval battleground of renown. Through the Aegean and into the Black Sea via the Bosphorus was a trade route as old as history could record, and it had been the site of the final battles between the Greek and Roman empires.
No, there was no reason to be surprised that trouble was brewing again in this part of the world. History has a memory, and those lessons that nations failed to learn they were doomed to repeat.