CHAPTER 29
Last Out
There was a vicarious exhilaration in watching them. The twenty-five Marines worked out, finishing with a single-file run that looped around the helicopters parked oft the deck. Sailors looked on quietly. The word was out now. The sea sled had been seen by too many, and like professional intelligence officers, sailors at their mess tables assembled the few facts and garnished them with speculation. The Marines were going into the North. After what, nobody knew, but everyone wondered. Maybe to trash a missile site and bring back some important piece of hardware. Maybe to take down a bridge, but most likely the target was human. The Vietnamese party bosses, perhaps.
‘Prisoners,’ a bosun’s mate third-class said, finishing his hamburger, called a ‘slider’ in the Navy. ‘It’s gotta be,’ he added, motioning his head to the newly arrived medical corpsmen who ate at their own isolated table. ‘Six corpsmen, four doctors, awful lot of talent, guys. What d’ya suppose they’re here for?’
‘Jesus,’ another sailor observed, sipping at his milk. ‘You’re right, man.’
‘Feather in our cap if it comes off,’ noted another.
‘Dirty weather tonight,’ a quartermaster put in. ‘The fleet-weather chief was smiling about it – and I seen him puke his guts out last night. I guess he can’t handle anything smaller’n a carrier.’ USS Ogden did have an odd ride, which resulted from her configuration, and running broadside to the gusting westerly winds had only worsened it. It was always entertaining to see a chief petty officer lose his lunch – dinner in this case – and a man was unlikely to be happy about weather conditions that made him ill. There had to be a reason for it. The conclusion was obvious, and the sort of thing to make a security officer despair.
‘Jesus, I hope they make it.’
‘Let’s get the flight deck fodded again,’ the junior bosun suggested. Heads nodded at once. A work gang was quickly assembled. Within an hour there would be not so much as a matchstick on the black no-skid surface.
‘Good bunch of kids, Captain,’ Dutch Maxwell observed, watching the walkdown from the starboard wing of the bridge. Every so often a man would bend down and pick up something, a foreign object that might destroy an engine, a result called FOD, for ‘foreign-object damage.’ Whatever might go wrong tonight, the men were promising with their actions, it wouldn’t be the fault of their ship.
‘Lots of college kids,’ Franks replied, proudly watching his men. ‘Sometimes I think the deck division’s as smart as my wardroom.’ Which was an entirely forgivable hyperbole. He wanted to say something else, the same thing that everyone was thinking: What do you suppose the chances are? He didn’t voice the thought. It would be the worst kind of bad luck. Even thinking it loudly might harm the mission, but hard as he tried he couldn’t stop his mind from forming the words.
In their quarters, the Marines were assembled around a sand-table model of the objective. They’d already gone over the mission once and were doing so again. The process would be repeated once more before lunch, and many times after it, as a whole group and as individual teams. Each man could see everything with his eyes closed, thinking back to the training site at Quantico, reliving the live-fire exercises.
‘Captain Albie, sir?’ A yeoman came into the compartment. He handed over a clipboard. ‘Message from Mr Snake.’
The Captain of Marines grinned. ‘Thanks, sailor. You read it?’
The yeoman actually blushed. ‘Beg pardon, sir. Yes, I did. Everything’s cool.’ He hesitated for the moment before adding a dispatch of his own. ‘Sir, my department says good luck. Kick some ass, sir.’
‘You know, skipper,’ Sergeant Irvin said as the yeoman left the space, ‘I may never be able to punch out a swabbie again.’
Albie read the dispatch. ‘People, our friend is in place. He counts forty-four guards, four officers, one Russian. Normal duty routine, nothing unusual is happening there.’ The young captain looked up. “That’s it, Marines. We’re going in tonight.’
One of the younger Marines reached in his pocket and pulled out a large rubber band. He broke it, marked two eyes on it with his pen, and dropped it atop what they now called Snake Hill. ‘That dude,’ he said to his team-mates, ‘is one cool motherfucker.’
‘Y’all remember now,’ Irvin warned loudly. ‘You fire-support guys remember, he’s gonna be pounding down that hill soon as we show up. It wouldn’t do to shoot his ass.’
‘No prob’, Gunny,’ the fire-team leader said.
‘Marines, let’s get some chow. I want you people to rest up this afternoon. Eat your veggies. We want our eyes to work in the dark. Weapons stripped and cleaned for inspection at seventeen-hun’rd,’ Albie told them. ‘Y’all know what this is all about. Let’s stay real cool and we’ll get it done.’ It was his time to meet again with the chopper crews for a final look at the insertion and extraction plans.
‘Aye aye, sir,’ Irvin said for the men.
‘Hello, Robin.’
‘Hi, Kolya,’ Zacharias said weakly.
‘I’m still working on better food.’
‘Would be nice,’ the American acknowledged.
‘Try this.’ Grishanov handed over some black bread his wife had sent him. The climate had already started to put mold on it, which Kolya had trimmed off with a knife. The American wolfed it down anyway. A sip from the Russian’s flask helped.
‘I’ll turn you into a Russian,’ the Soviet Air Force colonel said with an unguarded chuckle. ‘Vodka and good bread go together. I would like to show you my country.’ Just to plant the seed of the idea, in a friendly way, as one man talks to another.
‘I have a family, Kolya. God willing -‘
‘Yes, Robin, God willing.’ Or North Vietnam willing, or the Soviet Union willing. Or someone. Somehow he’d save this man, and the others. So many were friends now. He knew so much about them, their marriages, good and bad, their children, their hopes and dreams. These Americans were so strange, so open. ‘Also, God willing, if the Chinese decide to bomb Moscow, I have a plan now to stop them.’ He unfolded the map and set it on the floor. It was the result of all his talks with this American colleague, everything he had learned and analyzed formulated on a single sheet of paper. Grishanov was quite proud of it, not the least because it was the clear presentation of a highly sophisticated operational concept.
Zacharias ran his fingers over it, reading the notations in English, which looked incongruous on a map whose legend was in Cyrillic. He smiled his approval. A bright guy, Kolya, a good student in his way. The way he layered his assets, the way he had his aircraft patrolling back rather than forward. He understood defense in depth now. SAM traps at the ends of the most likely mountain passes, positioned for maximum surprise. Kolya was thinking like a bomber pilot now instead of a fighter jock. That was the first step in understanding how it was done. If every Russian PVO commander understood how to do this, then SAC would have one miserable time …
Dear God. Robin’s hands stopped moving.
This wasn’t about the ChiComs at all.
Zacharias looked up, and his face revealed his thought even before he found the strength to speak.
‘How many Badgers do the Chinese have?’
‘Now? Twenty-five. They are trying to build more.’
‘You can expand on everything I’ve told you.’
‘We’ll have to, as they build up their force, Robin. I’ve told you that,’ Grishanov said quickly and quietly, but it was too late, he saw, at least in one respect.
‘I’ve told you everything,’ the American said, looking down at the map. Then his eyes closed and his shoulders shook. Grishanov embraced him to ease the pain he saw.
‘Robin, you’ve told me how to protect the children of my country. I have not lied to you. My father did leave his university to fight the Germans. I did have to evacuate Moscow as a child. I did lose friends that winter in the snow – little boys and little girls, Robin, children who froze to death. It did happen. I did see it.’
‘And I did betray my country,’ Zacharias whispered The realization had come with the speed and violence of a falling bomb. How could he have been so blind, so stupid? Robin leaned back, feeling a sudden pain in his chest, and in that moment he prayed it was a heart attack, for the first time in his life wishing for death. But it wasn’t. It was just a contraction of his stomach and the release of a large quantity of acid, just the perfect thing, really, to eat away at his stomach as his mind ate away the defenses of his soul. He’d broken faith with his country and his God. He was damned.