“What seems to be the problem with your daughter?” The father answered this time.
“She cannot eat, and her other end–”
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“Vomiting and diarrhea?” MacGregor asked, checking her eyes out next. They seemed unremarkable as well.
“Yes, Doctor.”
“You’ve arrived here recently, I believe?” He looked up when the answer was hesitation. “I need to know.”
“Correct. From Iraq, just a few days.”
“And your daughter has a mild case of asthma, nothing else, no other health problems, correct?”
“That is true, yes. She’s had all her shots and such. She’s never been ill like this.” The mother just nodded. The father clearly had taken over, probably to get the feeling of authority, to make things happen, the physician surmised. It was fine with him.
“Since arriving here, any unusual things to eat? You see,” MacGregor explained, “travel can be very unsettling to some people, and children are unusually vulnerable. It could just be the local water.”
“I gave her the medicine, but it got worse,” the mother said.
“It is not the water,” the father said positively. “The house has its own well. The water is good.”
As though on cue, Sohaila moaned and turned, vomiting off the examining table and onto the tile floor. It wasn’t the right color. There were traces of red and black. Red for new blood, black for old. It wasn’t jet lag or bad water. Perhaps an ulcer? Food poisoning? MacGregor blinked and instinctively checked to be sure his hands were gloved. The mother was looking for a paper towel to–
“Don’t touch that,” he said mildly. He next took the child’s blood pressure. It was low, confirming an internal bleed. “Sohaila, I’m afraid you will be spending the night with us so that we can make you well again.”
It could have been many things, but the doctor had been in Africa long enough to know that you acted as though it were the worst. The young physician consoled himself with the belief that it couldn’t be all that bad.
IT WASN’T QUITE like the old days–what was?–but Mancuso enjoyed the work. He’d had a good war–he
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thought of it as a war; his submarines had done exactly what they’d been designed to do. After losing Asheville and Charlotte– those before the known commencement of hostilities–he’d lost no more. His boats had delivered on every mission assigned, savaging the enemy submarine force in a carefully planned ambush, supporting a brilliant special operation, conducting deep-strike missile launches, and, as always, gathering vital tactical intelligence. His best play, CoMSusPAC judged, had been in recalling the boomers from retirement. They were too big and too unwieldy to be fast-attack boats, but God damn if they hadn’t done the job for him. Enough so that they were all down the hill from his headquarters, tied alongside, their crews swaggering around town a bit, with brooms still prominent on their sails. Okay, so he wasn’t Charlie Lock-wood exactly, modesty told him. He’d done the job he’d been paid to do. And now he had another.
“So what are they supposed to be up to?” he asked his immediate boss, Admiral Dave Seaton.
“Nobody seems to know.” Seaton had come over to look around. Like any good officer, he tried to get the hell out of his office as much as possible, even if it only meant visiting another. “Maybe just a FleetEx, but with a new President, maybe they want to flex their muscles and see what happens.” People in uniform did not like such international examinations, since they were usually the ones whose lives were part of the grading procedure.
“I know this guy, boss,” Bart said soberly.
“Oh?”
“Not all that well, but you know about Red October.”
Seaton grinned. “Bart, if you ever tell me that story, one of us has to kill the other, and I’m bigger.” The story, one of the most closely guarded secrets in the Navy’s history, still was not widely known, though the rumors–one could never stop those–were many and diverse.
“You need to know, Admiral. You need to know what National Command Authority has hanging between his legs. I’ve been shipmates with the guy.”
That earned Mancuso a hard blink from CiNCPAC. “You’re kidding.”
“Ryan was aboard the boomer with me. Matter of fact,
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he got aboard before T did.” Mancuso closed his eyes, delighted that he could finally tell this sea story and get away with it. Dave Seaton was a theater commander-in-chief, and he had a right to know what sort of man was sending the orders down from Washington.
“I heard he was involved in the operation, even that he got aboard, but I thought that was at Norfolk, when they parked her at the Eight-Ten Dock. I mean, he’s a spook, right, an intel weenie …”
“Not hardly. He killed a guy–shot him, right in the missile room–before I got aboard. He was on the helm when we clobbered the Alfa. He was scared shitless, but he didn’t cave. This President we’ve got’s been there and done that. Anyway, if they want to test our President, my money’s on him. Two big brass ones, Dave, that’s what he’s got hangin’. He may not look like it on TV, but I’ll follow that son of a bitch anywhere.” Mancuso surprised himself with the conclusion. It was the first time he’d thought it all the way through.
“Good to know,” Seaton thought.
“So what’s the mission?” SuePAC asked.
“J-3 wants us to shadow.”
“You know Jackson better than I do. What are the parameters?”
“If this is a FleetEx and nothing else, we observe covertly. If things change, we let them know we care. You’ve got point, Bart. My cupboard’s pretty damned bare.”
They had only to look out the windows to see that. Enterprise and John Stennis were both in drydock. CiNiCPAC did not have a single carrier to deploy, and wouldn’t for two more months. They’d run Johnnie Reb on two shafts for the retaking of the Marianas, but now she lay alongside her older sister, with huge holes torched from the flight deck down to the first platform level while new turbines and reduction gears were fabricated. The aircraft carrier was the usual means for the United States Navy to make a show offeree. Probably that was part of the Chinese plan, to see how America would react when a substantive reaction was not possible, or so it would appear to some.
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“Will you cover for me with DeMarco?” Mancuso asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that Bruno’s from the old school. He thinks it’s bad to get detected. Personally, I think sometimes it can be a good thing. If you want me to rattle John Chinaman’s cage, he has to hear the bars shake, doesn’t he?”
“I’ll write the orders accordingly. How you run it is your business. For the moment, if some ‘can skipper talks to his XO about getting laid on the beach, I want it on tape for my collection.”
“Dave, that’s an order a man can understand. I’ll even get you the phone number, sir.”
“AND NOT A damned thing we can do,” Cliff Rutledge concluded his assessment.
“Gee, Cliff,” Scott Adler responded. “I kinda figured that one out for myself.” The idea was that subordinates gave you alternatives instead of taking them away–or in this case, telling you what you already knew.
They’d been fairly lucky to this point. Nothing much had gotten out to the media. Washington was still too shell-shocked, the junior people filling senior posts were not yet confident enough to leak information without authorization, and the senior posts President Ryan had filled were remarkably loyal to their Commander-in-Chief, an unexpected benefit of picking outsiders who didn’t know from politics. But it couldn’t last, especially with something as juicy as a new country about to be born from two enemies, both of whom had shed American blood.
“I suppose we could always just do nothing,” Rutledge observed lightly, wondering what the reaction would be. This alternative was distinct from not being able to do anything, a metaphysical subtlety not lost on official Washington.
“Taking that position only encourages developments adverse to our interests,” another senior staffer observed crossly.
“As opposed to proclaiming our impotence?” Rutledge
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replied. “If we say we don’t like it, and then we fail to stop it, that’s worse than our taking no position at all.”
Adler reflected that you could always depend on a Harvard man for good grammar and finely split hairs and, in Rutledge’s case, not much more than that. This career foreign service officer had gotten to the seventh floor by never putting a foot wrong, which was another way of saying that he’d never led a dance partner in his life. On the other hand, he was superbly connected–or had been. Cliff had the deadliest disease of a FSO, however. Everything was negotiable. Adler didn’t think that way. You had to stand and fight for some things, because if you didn’t, the other guy would decide where the battlefield was, and then he had control. The mission of diplomats was to prevent war, a serious business, Adler thought, which one accomplished by knowing where to stand firm and where the limits on negotiation were. For the Assistant Secretary of State for Policy, it was just an unending dance. With someone else leading. Alas, Adler didn’t yet have the political capital to fire the man, or maybe make him an ambassador to some harmless post. He himself still had to be confirmed by the new Senate, for example.