3
"Working late, I see."
Commander Frank Gordon looked up from his desk, startled. Admirals did not pay friendly visits to junior officers in their Pentagon offices, especially long after closing time. The Pentagon was always alive — there were always people working late, or on the night watches — but the place still generally felt more like a civilian office than a military base, and most of the personnel, including nearly all of the civilians employed there, came in at seven or eight and went home by five.
"Admiral Goldman!" He started to rise. "I didn't hear you come in, sir."
"Sit, sit," the older man said, gesturing with his hand. "No formalities. It's after hours."
He nodded toward the coffeemaker on a table against one wall. "Can I get you some coffee, Admiral?"
"No, thanks. I heard you were working late. What's up?"
"Putting together my notes for a dog-and-pony show tomorrow. Another briefing for some budget wonks and bean counters from the GAO on programs that we can't tell them about because they're not cleared for it."
"You know, Frank, Rebecca hasn't been seeing a lot of you, lately. She's been complaining about being a Fort Fumble Widow."
Gordon's jaws clamped down hard. He was careful with his words. "I know, Admiral. And I'm truly sorry." He spread his hands, taking in the computer and the pile of papers on his desk. "But I just haven't been able to get clear."
"I know, son. And I'm not blaming you. But it's been damned tough on Rebecca."
"And on me, sir." He hesitated. "I… I really do love her, you know."
There. He'd said it.
Admiral Benjamin Goldman was the father of his wife, Rebecca. His relationship with the admiral had started off badly… just about as bad as was possible. He'd met Becca at a service dance and he'd been smitten hard. Well, so had she, though the word around the base had been that he'd deliberately put the moves on and swept her off her feet. The only trouble was, she'd been engaged at the time, and a sudden change of mind and the resultant late-night elopement had not sat well with the conservative elder Goldman. He'd not spoken to his daughter for several years after that, and the word was that Frank Gordon was on the old man's shit list… that he was never going to rate a decent command.
That was all old news now, thank God. He'd received command of the Bluefin, an aging diesel boat fitted out to carry commandos, and he'd acquitted himself well in a highly secret covert op in the White Sea two years before. After the success of Operation Arctic Fox, he'd received the promise of another submarine command, after his required rotation ashore.
That promise, frankly, had been pretty much all that had kept him going these last twenty months. Sometimes, he thought that his posting to the Pentagon — as a staff assistant in the Office of Naval Special Operations Command — was going to drive him stark, raving bug nuts, a pure Section Eight.
"I know you do," Goldman said, in response to Gordon's blunt statement. "And I regret the years lost. Petty. Stupid, really. But that's all behind us, right?"
"Absolutely, sir," Gordon said, but even yet, he felt a small, deep-buried and sullen bit of suspicion. Benjamin Goldman never did anything without purpose. Why was he bringing all of this up now?
"So… you got a moment?"
"Of course, sir."
"Come with me."
Puzzled, Gordon rose from his desk, towering over the small, wiry Goldman. Where was the man taking him?
"I expect you're anxious to get out of the Puzzle Palace," Goldman told him, using yet another of the countless names Pentagon employees used for the huge structure. Most simply called it "the Building," but those in a more critical mood referred to it as "the Fudge Factory,"
"Fort Fumble," "the Squirrel Cage," or — Gordon's favorite by far — "the Five-Sided Wailing Wall." "The Puzzle Palace" was a pet name contested by the occupants of the National Security Agency's huge facility at Fort Meade, Maryland. Both claimed title to the name with a jocular, my-place-is-worse-to-work-in-than-your-place proprietorship.
"Yes, sir," Gordon replied, with neither hesitation nor fear of ruffling Goldman's feathers. The admiral knew how he felt about his Pentagon assignment. For almost two years, he'd been marking time… doing an important job, yes, but driving a damned desk instead of a submarine, which to his way of thinking was among the more inhuman of mental tortures.
"Hmm. Does that mean," Goldman said, "that you think you'd be doing a better job, a more important job, somewhere else?"
The question caught Gordon by surprise. They'd been walking clockwise down the gleaming main corridor of D-Ring, but now Goldman swung them left into Corridor 4, heading deeper into the Pentagon's heart. Where the hell was the admiral taking him?
"No, sir," he replied carefully. He knew Goldman expected straight answers, but Gordon was feeling now like he was treading through a minefield. "But I do know that my best work isn't done behind a desk."
"Sea duty means long stretches away from home."
"Yes, sir. And Rebecca knew that when she married me."
For a moment, he wondered if he'd gone too far. Goldman's leathery face was impassive, but could easily be masking anger. They reached one of the red-framed security elevators, which Goldman summoned with a magnetic-strip ID card. The doors opened a moment later, and they stepped inside. Goldman used his card again to access a subbasement level that Gordon hadn't even known existed.
There were plenty of rumors about deep-underground chambers beneath the Pentagon, and some of them were even true. Gordon knew that a nuclear-safe war room existed down there, and fairly reliable rumor had it that there was at least one small nuclear plant as well… a fact that would not sit well with many of the civilian residents of Washington and its Virginia-side ring city had they known. The word was that secure communications and command facilities had been tunneled out of the bedrock beginning back in the fifties or early sixties, when it was taken for granted that the Building was ground zero for at least a couple of Soviet ICBMs.
"I want my daughter to be happy," Goldman said, as the elevator began descending rapidly. "But you also understand, I know, that I can't let my feelings as a father interfere with my duties as COMSUBSPECLANT."
"Of course not, Admiral." Now Gordon was really puzzled, and curious.
The elevator slowed, stopped, and opened up. They stepped into a narrow corridor with concrete-block walls and naked fluorescent tubes on the ceilings. As a top-secret underground facility, it bore little resemblance to Hollywood's concept of such mythic places. "Just where is it we're going, Admiral?"
They stopped at a checkpoint manned by two stolid-faced Marines, one prominently armed with an M-16. Goldman gave the other his ID card. "He's with me," Goldman said. "Temporary clearance, Blue-Five."
"I need you both to sign in here, sir," the Marine said.
"We call it the Bunker," the admiral replied as Goldman scrawled his name, rank, the date, and the time into a log, then handed the pen to Gordon. "Part of the Washington scene the tourists never see."
They went on past the checkpoint, taking several turns along the way and eventually climbing aboard an electric car, like a golf cart, which took them through a maze of subterranean tunnels. By that time, Gordon's sense of direction was thoroughly scrambled. There were places where water dripped from the ceiling and puddled on the bare, concrete floor, and he wondered if they were somewhere under the Potomac by then. Interesting thought. There were rumors of similar buildings and tunnels beneath the White House, and even of an ultrasecret underground highway going all the way from the White House subbasement out to the National Naval Medical Center in suburban Bethesda. Did this warren of labyrinthine tunnels connect somehow?