He turned to walk back to his ship.
“Wait,” the admiral called. “One other thing. You wouldn’t have known.”
“Sir?”
“Berlin has a passenger for you. That’s him now.” The admiral pointed to a figure walking down the ramp from the upper, administration level, now that the automatic fire-containment doors had all been raised. Beck saw a civilian, carrying a small suitcase.
The civilian came closer. He wore an expensive business suit and a fine silk tie. He glanced at the blood and burned flesh all around with a look more of disgust than of horror.
“Are you the von Scheer’s captain?” the man asked Beck. His voice was very refined. There was a certain aristocratic hauteur to his expression. His posture, his movements, were polished and smooth. And also subtly condescending.
“No. The captain is dead. I’m first officer.”
The admiral overheard. Admirals always do have eyes and ears in the back of their heads.
“I said you’re commanding officer now,” the admiral snapped. His tone conveyed, So act the part and get on with it.
“Indeed,” the civilian commented, taking this interplay in. He held out his hand and Beck shook it as firmly as he could. “Rudiger von Loringhoven,” the civilian said, by way of introducing himself.
Von Loringhoven began to walk toward the von Scheer’s gangway, forcing Beck to follow him.
“Who are you, exactly?” Beck asked.
“Diplomatic Corps. Are the kampfschwimmer aboard yet?” Kampfschwimmer, battle swimmers, were the German Navy equivalent of U.S. Navy SEALs or the Royal Navy’s Special Boat Squadron.
“Yes,” Beck said. “Before the fire, with all their equipment… If you don’t mind my asking, why are you here?” Beck realized that von Loringhoven spoke with a hint of a Spanish accent. There were much easier ways to get from Norway to Spain than by submarine.
Von Loringhoven handed his leather suitcase to a crewman and started down the ladder inside the forward hatch. He didn’t request permission to come aboard, or show any other courtesy. Halfway down, von Loringhoven glanced back up at Beck.
“It’s all in your secret orders, Captain. I should know, I helped write them.”
CHAPTER 1
Commander Jeffrey Fuller let the hubbub of the cocktail reception swirl around him in the huge grand ballroom of the posh and historic hotel. The crowd moved to its own indecipherable Washington rhythms. The strong conversational currents and nasty undercurrents of glittering socialites and power brokers seemed to be running way above his head, his feet hurt from standing for hours, and he was hoarse from too much talking. The weight of the bronze medallion of his brand-new Medal of Honor felt heavier and heavier on its ribbon around his neck. He tried to remind himself that the whole reception was in his honor, but Jeffrey could see by now that almost everyone had really shown up for selfish reasons. If anything, he told himself ruefully, the nation’s capital during this grimmest of wartimes was more unforgivingly competitive, and more politically manic, than ever before.
Still, part of Jeffrey felt very fulfilled. He was surrounded by so much sheer energy from all these people, and this moment was the ultimate achievement of his naval career. He was also grateful that, at least for the moment, he was being ignored, lost in the crowd of civilians and of men and women in uniform. He tried to rest his eyes, which hurt from the glare of so many TV camera lights. The reporters must have gotten the footage they wanted of him, because the different clumps of extra glare from those lights were far away in the gigantic room. Jeffrey welcomed his temporary sense of solitude within the mob — this came easily to a submariner, who lived in a cramped and crowded world and needed to make his own privacy, internally, wherever he was.
One of Jeffrey’s former shipmates, stationed now at the Pentagon, came by. “Hey, Captain. Way to go!” The two of them talked for a couple of minutes, then the other man moved on.
Again, Jeffrey savored a fleeting sense of joy, a tingling in his chest, and a lightness in his gut. The Medal of Honor… He tried not to remember that winning a medal in battle usually meant that other good people hadn’t made it back.
All around Jeffrey wineglasses and cocktail glasses and soft-drink glasses clinked. Tuxedoed waiters circulated smoothly through the hundreds of guests, offering tidbits of snacks on silver trays. The offerings were meager, compared to all the events the hotel had hosted over the years, because of wartime austerity. It wasn’t lost on Jeffrey that all the wines were inexpensive labels, and every one of them was American made.
Jeffrey had had little appetite at lunch. Now his stomach rumbled, not that anyone else would notice in this din. As a waiter passed, he grabbed a bite to eat — a cracker with cheese spread.
Jeffrey realized that none of the hors d’oeuvres he’d seen all afternoon included seafood. This wasn’t surprising, considering the amount of nuclear waste and fallout built up by now in the Atlantic. Some scientists said the ecological damage wasn’t really that severe, that the ocean was very vast and so the toxins were hugely diluted. The relatively small tactical atomic warheads now — used by both sides hundreds of miles from land — weren’t much compared to the many megatons the U.S. and USSR and other nuclear powers had tested in the atmosphere or in the oceans in the early Cold War. But it was very different, at least psychologically, in an actual shooting war. No one was taking chances, which was too bad. Jeffrey loved seafood.
He quickly went from feeling fulfilled to feeling glum. Some of the atomic weapons detonated in the oceans had been set off by his ship, on his orders. Jeffrey wondered for the umpteenth time how many whales and dolphins he’d killed, collateral damage to the environment as he went after high-value enemy targets. He rationalized that the Germans and Boers had started it all, this limited tactical nuclear war at sea. Allied forces needed to use nukes in self-defense. High-explosive weapons just weren’t effective enough when the enemy was firing at you with fission bombs. And precision-guided high-explosive weapons weren’t the cure-all some pundits had thought they’d be before the war. The Axis had figured out how to distort the Global Positioning Satellite signals, and how to detect and jam or kill a ground or airborne laser-target-homing designator. Some defense analysts had warned about such things, before the war. Maybe they hadn’t been able to get the right people to listen.
Jeffrey was self-aware enough to witness his own mood swings. So here I am, in glamorous wartime Washington, D.C., wearing my country’s highest medal for valor, and I feel like crap. He grabbed for another hors d’oeuvre as a pretty young waitress went by. I need to raise my blood sugar. That should help. The waitress paused politely and Jeffrey took a dumpling filled with some sort of meat. Then he watched what he already called “the process” start again.
The waitress saw his star-shaped bronze medallion out of the corner of her eye. She turned to look at his face, to make sure it was really him. Of course it was him: Commander Jeffrey Fuller, United States Navy, captain of USS Challenger. War hero. The man of the hour. On national TV, and on the cover of every newsmagazine — the Internet was so plagued by Axis hackers and misguided hoaxes that most people used hard-copy newspapers to follow the war and the troubled economy.