“Very important,” the sub skipper said. “Depends a lot on quality control and maintenance, but new ones can give you up to double the range and power of old ones, and that’s obviously an important tactical factor.”
“Jesus, you know what this sounds like? Ivan’s always ready to go to sea, and now it looks like he wants to be real ready,” Morris observed. “But the papers all say that they’re acting like born-again angels with this arms-control stuff. Something does not compute, gentlemen.”
“I have to get this to someone in the chain of command. I could drop this on a desk at Fort Meade and it might never get anywhere,” Toland said, remembering his section chief.
“You will,” McCafferty said after a moment’s pause, “I have an appointment tomorrow morning with COMSUBLANT. I think you’re coming with me, Bob.”
The last member of the foursome arrived ten minutes later. He was disappointed with the quality of the game. He’d thought his skipper was better than this.
Toland spent twenty minutes reviewing his data in front of Vice Admiral Richard Pipes, Commander, Submarine Force, U.S. Atlantic Fleet. Pipes was the first black submariner to make three-star rank, a man who had paid his dues with performance as he’d climbed up the ladder in what had traditionally been a whites-only profession, and he had the reputation of a tough, demanding boss. The Admiral listened without a word as he sipped coffee from a three-starred mug. He’d been annoyed to have McCafferty’s patrol report supplanted by a speech from a reservist-but that attitude had lasted only three minutes. Now the lines around his mouth deepened.
“Son, you violated a few security restrictions to give me some of that.”
“I know that, sir,” Toland said.
“Took balls to do that, and it’s nice to see in a young officer, what with all the ones who just want to cover their ass.” Pipes rose. “I don’t like what you just told me, son, not one little bit. We got Ivan playing Santa Claus with all this diplomatic horseshit, and at the same time he’s dialing his submarine force in. Could be a coincidence. Then again, it might not be. How about you and me go over to talk with CINCLANT and his intelligence chief?”
Toland winced. What have I got myself into? “Sir, I’m down here for a training rotation, not to-”
“Looks to me like you got this intelligence crap down pretty pat, Commander. You believe what you just told me is true?”
Toland stiffened. “Yes, sir.”
“Then I’m giving you a chance to prove it. You afraid to stick your neck out-or do you just offer opinions to relatives and friends?” the Admiral asked harshly.
Toland had heard that Pipes was a real hard-case. The reservist rose to his feet.
“Let’s do it, Admiral.”
Pipes picked up his phone and dialed in a three-digit number, his direct line to CINCLANT. “Bill? Dick. I got a boy in my office I think you oughta talk to. Remember what we discussed last Thursday? We may have confirmation.” A brief pause. “Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m saying. . . . Aye aye, sir, on the way.” Pipes set the phone down. “McCafferty, thank you for bringing this man in with you. We’ll go over your patrol report this afternoon. Be here at 1530. Toland, you come along with me.”
An hour later, Lieutenant Commander Robert M. Toland, USNR-R, was informed that he had been placed on extended active duty by order of the Secretary of Defense. In fact it was by order of CINCLANT, but the forms would be correctly filled out in a week or so.
At lunch that day in “flag country” of Building One of the complex, CINCLANT called in all his type commanders-the three-star admirals who controlled the aircraft, surface ships, submarines, and replenishment ships. The conversation was subdued, and ceased entirely when the stewards came in to change the courses. They were all in their fifties, experienced, serious men who both made and implemented policy, preparing for something they hoped would never come. This hope continued, but by the time each had finished his second cup of coffee, it was decided that fleet training cycles would be increased, and a few surprise inspections would be made. CINCLANT made an appointment with the Chief of Naval Operations for the following morning, and his deputy intelligence chief boarded a commercial airliner for a quick trip to Pearl Harbor, to meet with his opposite number in the Pacific.
Toland was relieved of his post and transferred to Intentions, part of CINCLANT’s personal intelligence advisory staff.
6 – The Watchers
NORFOLK, VIRGINIA
Intentions was a small second-floor office normally occupied by four officers. Shoehorning Toland in there was difficult, mainly because all the classified material had to be covered up while the civilian movers got the desk in place. When they finally left, Bob found he had just about enough space to get into and out of his swivel chair. The office door had a cipher lock with five rocker switches concealed in a steel container. Located in the northwest corner of CINCLANT headquarters, the office’s barred windows overlooked a highway and little else. The drab curtains were closed anyway. Inside, the walls might have been painted beige once, but the plaster had whitened from underneath to give the office the sort of pallor expected in a yellow-fever ward.
The senior officer was a Marine colonel named Chuck Lowe, who had watched the moving-in process with a silent resentment that Bob only understood when the man got to his feet.
“I may never make it to the head now,” Lowe grumped, sticking his cast around the corner of his desk. They shook hands.
“What happened to the leg, Colonel?”
“Mountain Warfare School out in California, day after Christmas, skiing on my own Goddamned time. The docs say you should never break the tibia close to the bottom,” Lowe explained with an ironic smile. “And you never get used to the itching. Should have this thing off in another three or four weeks. Then I have to get used to running again. You know, I spent three years trying to break my ass out of intel, then I finally get my Goddamned regiment, and this happens. Welcome aboard, Toland. Why don’t you grab us both a cup of coffee?”
There was a pot atop the farthest filing cabinet. The other three officers, Lowe explained, were giving a briefing.
“I saw the writeup you gave CINCLANT. Interesting stuff. What do you think Ivan’s up to?”
“It looks like he’s increasing readiness across the board, Colonel-”
“In here, you can call me Chuck.”
“Fine-I’m Bob.”
“You do signal intelligence at NSA, right? You’re one of the satellite specialists, I heard.”
Toland nodded. “Ours and theirs, mostly ours. I see photos from time to time, but mostly I do signals work. That’s how we twigged to the report on the four colonels. There has also been a fair amount of operational maneuvering done, more than usual for this time of year. Ivan’s been a little freer with how his tankers drive around, too, less concern about running a battalion across a plowed field, for example.”
“And you’re supposed to have a look at anything that’s unusual, no matter how dumb it seems, right? That gives you a pretty wide brief, doesn’t it? We got something interesting along those lines from DIA. Have a look at these.” Lowe pulled a pair of eight-by-ten photographs from a manila envelope and handed them to Toland. They seemed to show the same parcel of land, but from slightly different angles and different times of year. In the upper left corner was a pair of isbas, the crude huts of Russian peasant life. Toland looked up.
“Collective farm?”
“Yeah. Number 1196, a little one about two hundred klicks northwest of Moscow. Tell me what’s different between the two.”
Toland looked back at the photos. In one was a straight line of fenced gardens, perhaps an acre each. In the other he could see a new fence for four of the patches, and one patch whose fenced area had been roughly doubled.
“A colonel-army-type I used to work with sent me these. Thought I’d find it amusing. I grew up on a corn farm in Iowa, you see.”
“So Ivan’s increasing the private patches for the farmers to work on their own, eh?”
“Looks that way.”
“Hasn’t been announced, has it? I haven’t read anything about it.” Toland didn’t read the government’s secret in-house publication, National Intelligence Digest, but the NSA cafeteria gossip usually covered harmless stuff like this. Intelligence types talked shop as much as any others.
Lowe shook his head slightly. “Nope, and that’s a little odd. It’s something they should announce. The papers would call that another sure sign of the ‘liberalization trend’ we’ve been seeing.”
“Just this one farm, maybe?”
“As a matter of fact, they’ve seen the same thing at five other places. But we don’t generally use our reconsats for this sort of thing. They got this on a slow news day, I suppose. The important stuff must have been covered by clouds.” Toland nodded agreement. The reconnaissance satellites were used to evaluate Soviet grain crops, but that happened later in the year. The Russians knew it also, since it had been in the open press for over a decade, explaining why there was a team of agronomists in the U.S. Department of Agriculture with Special Intelligence-Compartmented security clearance.