“Most important of all, when America sends her sons and daughters into harm’s way, they must be the best-trained, best-supported, best-equipped forces we can put into the field. The fact of the matter is that we can do that and save money also, by making the system work more efficiently.” The nice thing about this new crop of senators, Bretano reflected, was they didn’t know what was impossible. He would never have gotten away with what he’d just said as recently as a year earlier. Efficiency was a concept foreign to most government agencies, not because there was anything wrong with the people, but because nobody had ever told them to do better. There was much to be said for working at the place that printed the money, but there was much to be said for eating eclairs, too, until your arteries clogged up. If the heart of America were its government, the nation would long since have fallen over dead. Fortunately, his country’s heart was elsewhere, and surviving on healthier food.
“But why do we need so much defense in an age when–”
Bretano cut him off again. It was a habit he’d have to break, which he knew even as he did it–but this was too much. “Senator, have you checked the building across the street lately?”
It was amusing to see the way the man’s head jerked back, even though the aide to Bretano’s left flinched almost as badly. That senator had a vote, both on the committee and on the floor of the Senate chamber, which was still open for business now that they’d gotten the smoke out of the building. But the point got across to most of the others, and the SecDef was willing to settle for that. In due course, the chairman gaveled the session to a close, and scheduled a vote for the following morning. The senators had already made their votes clear with their praise for Bretano’s forthright and positive statement, pledging their
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desire to work with him in words almost as naive as his own, and with that another day ended on one place, with a new one soon to begin in another.
NO SOONER HAD the UN resolution passed, than the first ship had sailed for the brief steam to the Iraqi port of Bushire, there to be unloaded by the huge vacuum cleaner-like structures, and from that point on, things had gone quickly. For the first morning in many years, there would be bread enough on the breakfast tables of Iraq for everyone. Morning television proclaimed the fact for all–with the predictable live shots of neighborhood bakeries selling off their wares to happy, smiling crowds–and then concluding with word that the new revolutionary government was meeting today to discuss other matters of national importance. These signals were duly copied down at PALM BOWL and STORM TRACK and passed along, but the real news that day came from another source.
Golovko told himself that the Turkoman Premier might well have died in an accident. His personal proclivities were well known to the RVS, and vehicle accidents were hardly unknown in his country or any other–in fact, auto mishaps had been hugely disproportionate in the Soviet Union, especially those associated with drink. But Golovko had never been one to believe in coincidences of any sort, most particularly those which happened in ways and at times inconvenient to his country. It didn’t help that he had ample assets in place to diagnose the problem. The Premier was dead. There would be elections. The likely winner was obvious because the departed politician had been wonderfully effective stifling political opposition. And now also, he saw, Iranian military units were forming up for road marches to their west. Two dead chiefs of state, in such a short time, within such a short radius, both in countries bordering Iran . . . no, even if it had been a coincidence, he would not have believed it. With that, Golovko changed hats–the Western aphorism–and lifted his phone.
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USS PASADENA WAS positioned between the two PRC surface-action groups, currently operating about nine miles apart. The submarine had a full load of weapons, war shots all, but for all that, it was rather like being the only cop in Times Square at midnight on New Year’s, trying to keep track of everything at the same time. Having a loaded gun didn’t amount to very much. Every few minutes he deployed his ESM mast to get a feel for the electronic signals being radiated about, and his sonar department also fed data to the tracking party in the after portion of the attack center–as many men as could fit around the chart table were busily keeping tabs on the various contacts. The skipper ordered his boat to go deep, to three hundred feet, just below the layer, so that he could take a few minutes to examine the plot, which had become far too complex for him to keep it all in his head. With the boat steadied up on her new depth, he took the three steps aft to look.
It was a FleetEx, but the type of FleetEx wasn’t quite . . . ordinarily one group played the “good guys” against the theoretical “bad guys” in the other group, and you could tell what was what by the way the ships were arrayed. Instead of orienting toward each other, however, both groups were oriented to the east. This was called the “threat axis,” meaning the direction from which the enemy was expected to strike. To the east lay the Republic of China, which comprised mainly the island of Taiwan. The senior chief operations specialist supervising the plot was marking up the acetate overlay, and the picture was about as clear as it needed to be.
“Conn, sonar,” came the next call.
“Conn, aye,” the captain acknowledged, taking the microphone.
“Two new contacts, sir, designate Sierra Twenty and Twenty-one. Both appear to be submerged contacts. Sierra Twenty, bearing three-two-five, direct path and faint. . . stand by … okay, looks like a Han-class SSN, good cut on the fifty-Hertz line, plant noise also. Twenty-one, also submerged contact, at three-three-zero, starting to look like a Xia, sir.”
“A boomer in a FleetEx?” the senior chief wondered.
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“How good’s the cut on Twenty-one?”
“Improving now, sir,” the sonar chief replied. The entire sonar crew was in their compartment, just forward of the attack center on the starboard side. “Plant noise says Xia to me, Cap’n. The Han is maneuvering south, bearing now three-two-one, getting a blade rate . . . call its speed eighteen knots.”
“Sir?” The operations chief made a quick, notional plot. The SSN and the boomer would be behind the northern surface group.
“Anything else, sonar?” the captain asked.
“Sir, getting a little complicated with all these tracks.”
“Tell me about it,” someone breathed at the tracking table, while making another change.
“Anything to the east?” the CO persisted.
“Sir, easterly we have six contacts, all classified as merchant traffic.”
“We got ’em all here, sir,” the operations chief confirmed. “Nothing yet from the Taiwan navy.”
“That’s gonna change,” the captain thought aloud.
GENERAL BONDARENKO DIDN’T believe in coincidences, either. More than that, the southern part of the country once known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics held little charm for him. His time in Afghanistan and a frantic night in Tajikistan had seen to that. In the abstract he would not have minded the total divorce of the Russian Republic from the Muslim proto-nations arrayed on his country’s southern border, but the real world wasn’t abstract.
“So, what do you think is going on?” the general-lieutenant asked.
“Are you briefed in on Iraq?”
“Yes, I am, Comrade Chairman.”
“Then you tell me, Gennady losefovich,” Golovko commanded.
Bondarenko leaned across the map table, and spoke while moving a finger about. “I would say that what concerns you is the possibility that Iran is making a bid for superpower status. In uniting with Iraq, they increase their
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oil wealth by something like forty percent. Moreover, that would give them contiguous borders with Kuwait and the Saudi kingdom. The conquest of those nations would redouble their wealth–one may safely assume that the lesser nations would fall as well. The objective circumstances here are self-evident,” the general went on, speaking in the calm voice of a professional soldier analyzing disaster. “Combined, Iran and Iraq outnumber the combined populations of the other states by a considerable margin–five to one, Comrade Chairman? More? I do not recall exactly, but certainly the manpower advantage is decisive, which would make outright conquest or at least great political influence likely. That alone would give this new United Islamic Republic enormous economic power, the ability to choke off the energy supply to Western Europe and Asia at will.
“Now, Turkmenistan. If this is, as you suspect, not a coincidence, then we see that Iran wishes to move north also, perhaps to absorb Azerbaijan”–his finger traced along the map–“Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, at least part of Kazakhstan. That would triple their population, add a significant resource base to their United Islamic Republic, and next, one assumes, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and we have a new nation stretching from the Red Sea to the Hindu Kush–nyet, more to the point, from the Red Sea to China, and then our southern border is completely lined with nations hostile to us.” Then he looked up.