Cranes were lifting a series of trailer vans onto the flight deck. When secured in place, deck parties erected various radio antennas. Other such objects were being bolted into place on the superstructure. The activity was being done in the open – there is no convenient way of hiding a 17,000-ton warship – and it was clear that Ogden, like two more sister ships, was transforming herself into a platform for the gathering of electronic intelligence – ELINT. She sailed out of the San Diego Naval Base just as the sun began to set, without an escort and without the Marine battalion she was built to carry. Her Navy crew of thirty officers and four hundred ninety enlisted men settled into their routine watch bill, conducting training exercises and generally doing what most had chosen to do by enlisting in the Navy instead of risking a slot in the draft. By sunset she was well under the horizon, and her new mission had been communicated to various interested parties, not all of whom were friendly to the flag which she flew. With all those trailers aboard and a score of antennas looking like a forest of burnt trees to clutter up her flight deck – and no Marines embarked – she wouldn’t be doing anyone direct harm. That was obvious to all who had seen her.
Twelve hours later, and two hundred miles at sea, bosun’s mates assembled parties from the deck division and told some rather confused young men to unbolt all but one of the trailers – which were empty – and to strike down all of the antennas on the flight deck. Those on the superstructure would remain in place. The antennas went below first, into the capacious equipment-storage spaces. The empty trailers were wheeled after them, clearing the flight deck entirely.
At Subic Bay Naval Base, the commanding officer of USS Newport News, along with his executive officer and gunnery officer, looked over their missions for the coming month. His command was one of the last true cruisers in the world, with eight-inch guns like few others. They were semiautomatic, and loaded their powder charges not in loose bags but in brass cartridge cases different only in scale from the kind any deer hunter might jack into his Winchester .30-30. Able to reach almost twenty miles, Newport News could deliver a stunning volume of fire, as an NVA battalion had learned only two weeks earlier, much to its misfortune. Fifty rounds per gun tube per minute. The center gun of the number-two turret was damaged, and so the cruiser could be counted on to put only four hundred rounds per minute on target, but that was the equivalent of one hundred thousand-pound bombs. The cruiser’s task for the next deployment, the Captain learned, was to go after selected triple-A batteries on the Vietnamese coast. That was fine with him, though the mission he really lusted for was to enter Haiphong harbor one night.
‘Your lad seems to know his business – till now, anyway,’ General Young observed about quarter of two.
‘It’s a lot to ask him to do something like this the first night, Marty,’ Dutch Maxwell countered.
‘Well, hell, Dutch, if he wants to play with my Marines …’ That’s how Young was. They were all ‘his’ Marines. He’d flown with Foss off Guadalcanal, covered Chesty Puller’s regiment in Korea, and was one of the men who’d perfected close-air support into the art form it now was.
They stood on the hilltop overlooking the site Young had recently erected. Fifteen of the Recon Marines were on the slopes, and their job was to detect and eliminate Clark as he climbed to his notional perch. Even General Young thought it an overly harsh test on Clark’s first day with the team, but Jim Greer had made a very big deal of telling them how impressive the lad was, and spooks needed to be put in their place. Even Dutch Maxwell had agreed with that.
‘What a crummy way to earn a living,’ said the admiral with seventeen hundred carrier landings under his belt.
‘Lions and tigers and bears.’ Young chuckled. ‘Oh, my! I don’t really expect him to make it here the first time. We have some fine people in this team, don’t we, Irvin?’
‘Yes, sir,’ the master gunnery sergeant agreed at once.
‘So what do you think of Clark?’ Young asked next.
‘Seems like he knows a thing or two,’ Irvin allowed. ‘Pretty decent shape for a civilian – and I like his eyes.’
‘Oh?’
‘You notice, sir? He’s got cold eyes. He’s been around the block.’ They spoke in low murmurs. Kelly was supposed to get here, but they didn’t want their voices to make it too easy for him, nor to add any extraneous noise that might mask the sounds of the woods. ‘But not tonight. I told the people what would happen if this guy gets through the line on his first try.’
‘Don’t you Marines know how to play fair?’ Maxwell objected with an unseen smile. Irvin handled the answer.
‘Sir, “fair” means all my Marines get back home alive. Fuck the others, beg your pardon, sir.’
‘Funny thing, Sergeant, that’s always been my definition of “fair,” too.’ This guy would have made one hell of a command master chief, Maxwell thought to himself.
‘Been following baseball, Marty?’ The men relaxed. No way Clark would make it.
‘I think the Orioles look pretty tough.’
‘Gentlemen, we’re losing our concentration, like,’ Irvin suggested diplomatically.
‘Quite right. Please excuse us,’ General Young replied. The two flag officers settled back into stillness, watching the illuminated hands of their watches turn to three o’clock, the operation’s agreed stop-time. They didn’t hear Irvin speak, or even breathe, for all that time. That took an hour. It was a comfortable one for the Marine general, but the Admiral just didn’t like being in the woods, with all the bloodsucking bugs, and probably snakes, and all manner of unpleasant things not ordinarily found in the cockpit of a fighter aircraft. They listened to the whispering breezes in the pines, heard the flapping of bats and owls and perhaps some other night fliers, and little else. Finally it was 02:55. Marty Young stood and stretched, fishing in his pocket for a cigarette.
‘Anybody got a smoke? I’m out, and I could sure use one,’ a voice murmured.
‘Here you go, Marine,’ Young said, the gracious general. He held one out to the shadows and flicked his trusty Zippo. Then he jumped back a step. ‘Shit!’
‘Personally, General, I think Pittsburgh looks pretty tough this year. The Orioles are a little weak in the pitching department.’ Kelly took one puff, without inhaling, and dropped it to the ground.
‘How long have you been here?’ Maxwell demanded.
‘ “Lions and tigers and bears, oh, my!”‘ Kelly mimicked. ‘I “killed” you around one-thirty, sir.’
‘You son of a bitch!’ Irvin said. ‘You killed me.’
‘And you were very polite about being quiet, too.’
Maxwell turned on his flashlight. Mr Clark – the Admiral had consciously decided to change the boy’s name in his own mind – just stood there, a rubber knife in his hand, his face painted with green and black shadows, and for the first time since the Battle of Midway, his body shuddered with fear. The young face split into a grin as he pocketed his ‘knife.’
‘How the hell did you do that?’ Dutch Maxwell demanded.
‘Pretty well, I think, Admiral.’ Kelly chuckled, reaching down for Marty Young’s canteen. ‘Sir, if I told, then everybody’d be able to, right?’
Irvin stood up from his place of repose and walked next to the civilian.
‘Mr Clark, sir, I think you’ll do.’
CHAPTER 22
Titles
Grishanov was in the embassy. Hanoi was a strange city, a mixture of French-Imperial architecture, little yellow people and bomb craters. Traveling about a country at war was an unusual exercise, all the more so in an automobile daubed with camouflage paint. A passing American fighter-bomber coming back from a mission with an extra bomb or some unexpended 20-millimeter cannon rounds could easily use the car for practice, though they never seemed to do so. The luck of the draw made this a cloudy, stormy day, and air activity was at a minimum, allowing him to relax, but not to enjoy the ride. Too many bridges were down, too many roads cratered, and the trip lasted three times what ought to have been the norm. A helicopter trip would have been much faster, but would also have been madness. The Americans seemed to live under the fiction that an automobile might be civilian-owned – this in a country where a bicycle was a status symbol! Grishanov marveled – but a helicopter was an aircraft, and killing one was a kill. Now in Hanoi, he got the chance to sit in a concrete building where the electricity was a sometime thing – off at the moment – and air conditioning an absurd fantasy. The open windows and poorly fitting screens allowed insects freer rein than the people who worked and sweated here. For all that, it was worth the trip to be here in his country’s embassy, where he could speak his native tongue and for a precious few hours stop being a semi-diplomat.