"Thank you, Captain."
He wondered though, how this man knew him. His presence here was supposed to be classified….
"Enter," Gordon called in response to the two sharp raps on the door. It opened, and Lieutenant (j.g.) Randall stepped in. He'd showered and donned clean, dry clothing, the blue one-piece jumpers worn by officers aboard the Pittsburgh, known as "poopie suits."
"You wanted to see me, Captain?"
"Yes, Lieutenant. Have a seat."
"Thank you, sir."
"I was wondering if you were the Lieutenant Randall who was the 2IC on a SEAL raid in Lebanon last month. The Bekaa Valley, looking for the American hostages."
Randall's eyes narrowed to hard slits. "Sir, I'm really not at liberty to talk about that."
Gordon sighed, then nodded. "I understand, Lieutenant. I'd just like to say — hypothetically, of course — that if you were the man on that operation, well, I'm damned glad you made it back."
Randall nodded slowly. "And… just hypothetically, of course, if I had been that man… how the hell would a submarine skipper know about that?"
"Hypothetically, he might have been holding down a desk at the Pentagon last month, before taking command of a sub. It's possible he worked at the Naval Special Operations Command Office, planning little excursions like the one into the Bekaa Valley.
"And as long as we're making this all up, we could, just hypothetically, assume that sub driver has been wondering if he was responsible for the deaths of two good men."
"I… see." Randall looked Gordon up and down. "You don't look like the typical REMF. Not what I always picture them like."
REMF was military slang for a rear echelon motherfucker, a peculiarly juicy term for hacks, yes-men, ticket-punching brass, politicians, malingerers, wanna-bes, and a whole zoo of hangers-on, part and parcel of the enormous logistical tail of every military deployment… necessary, some of them, even most of them, but personnel far from the whisper of bullets or the thin stink of gun smoke and fear.
"I was a REMF. But mostly I drive submarines for a living."
"You planned an op in the Bekaa? What was it called?"
"Operation Free Sanction."
"Huh. You know, there was a time or three when I really wanted to kill you, sir."
Gordon noticed that Randall had dropped the pretense. "I imagine that's so. But I wasn't responsible for abandoning you out there."
"I know, I know."
"Nor was the micromanaging my idea. They brought me down to their Agent Double-Oh-Seven bunker that night. Until then, I didn't even know they'd accepted the plan. I'd drawn it up, submitted it, and never heard about it again, until that night."
"But you were watching over our shoulders, huh?"
"Most of it. They… we lost track of you when you went back for First Squad. What I wanted to know was what went wrong?"
"You didn't know?"
"They didn't tell me. I was surprised at how many bad guys were on-site… and I know the objective turned out to be a dry hole. Waite wasn't there."
"No. He'd been there, and probably pretty recently. But they'd moved him out and moved half the damned Syrian Army in. We weren't fighting militia that night, Captain. It was Assad's best, his crack troops." He leaned forward, his hands clasping one another. "Sir, I think it was a trap."
"As in… they knew you were coming?"
"They knew we were coming. They moved the hostages out and the Syrian Guard in. And they held back until we'd committed ourselves. It was God's own luck we got out. Two of us didn't."
"But who? How?"
"I'd kind of like to know that myself, Captain."
"And why?"
"That seems pretty obvious, doesn't it? Uncle Sugar had a real setback, image-wise, when Eagle's Claw went sour at Desert One. Remember those photos of Iranian soldiers cheering above the wreckage of our crashed helos in the desert? Think of the propaganda mileage Assad and his backers in the Kremlin could get if they could parade a captured SEAL platoon through the streets of Damascus."
"I see what you mean."
"I'll tell you the truth, sir. I've got a bad feeling about this mission, too."
"Such as?"
"It has all the makings of a cluster fuck, Captain. Security so tight none of us can even talk to one another, but signs indicate that Soviet intelligence is stepping up the power a notch. A few days ago, two of us investigated some mystery tracks on a beach at Adak."
"Mystery tracks?"
"Probably a Soviet marine tractor, a kind of submarine with tank tracks… or maybe a true submarine that can crawl as well as swim. There've been reports of the things in
Alaska and Scandinavia for years. Anyway, it looks to hell like one went ashore at Adak… and just when we were there, waiting for our ride."
"Coincidence?"
"Maybe. SEALs don't get old believing in coincidence, though. Let me ask you this, Captain."
"Shoot."
"Did you get out of port clean?"
Gordon gave him a humorless smile, tight-lipped. "Negative. We picked up a tail."
"But you had someone to scrape it off?"
"Actually… no. Security concerns were such that we didn't have another boat to run interference for us. We shook him off with some fancy maneuvers off San Francisco."
"Hmm. Interesting."
"You've got that paranoid look to you."
"How do you know what I look like when I'm paranoid?"
Gordon shrugged. "Something about the eyes."
"I see too many coincidences running through here. It'd make anyone paranoid."
"Just because you're paranoid," Gordon quipped, "doesn't mean they're not all out to get you."
"You got that right. Did you have anything to do with the planning of this op?"
"No." Gordon's eyes widened. "Wait. Are you saying the ambush in the Bekaa Valley and this mission are connected somehow?"
"No. Not at all. I am saying that we have some very high-level leaks, possibly at the Agency, possibly in the Pentagon. Frankly, I smell a rat … a rat that looks to me like a mole."
"I take your point. The question is, what can we do about it?"
Randall leaned back in his chair, eyes closed. "Captain, I don't think there's a fucking thing we can do. I have my mission orders. You have yours. We follow the plan as best we can… and see what shakes out. Sir."
"Sure." Gordon nodded. "In other words, if we're walking into a trap, we stick our necks out and shout, 'Here we are!'"
"You have a depressing way with words, Captain."
"Thank you. I like to think it's one of my better features."
"Okay, so what makes you think you have radiation poisoning?" HMC Ronald Pyter was an old-Navy hospital corpsman; when he wore his dress blues, the gold hash marks, each one representing four years of service, seemed to go clear up his sleeve, from wrist to elbow. He ran Pittsburgh's tiny sick bay and dispensary like a benevolent and somewhat mellow tyrant, dispensing advice as often as pills.
O'Brien sat on the opposite side of the steel desk from Pyter. "Well, my hair is falling out in clumps…. "
"We already checked your dosimeter," Pyter said. "I showed it to you. You are not picking up anything close to a dangerous level of radioactivity."
"But my hair… "
"Doug," Pyter said, surprising O'Brien with his use of his first name, "do you trust me?"