Turner continued, finishing with the intelligence they did have about the ship — submerged tonnage, speed, depth capability.
After another quarter-hour Turner finished and looked at Daminski.
“Anything to add, sir?”
“Just a couple things, Mr. Turner.” Daminski stretched and snapped his fingers for a cup of coffee. The engineer, tall lanky Mark Berghoffer, the Pennsylvania Dutch farmboy with the foghorn voice, leaped up, grabbed an Augusta coffee mug from the rack, splashed the hot brew into it and placed it before the captain. Daminski slurped loudly, then: “Here’s how I see it, guys. Feel free to jump in if I’m wrong. I think we can take this dude by sneaking up on him. Those big hull arrays will leave a hell of a baffle area in his stern, and the surface flow will be noisy from the propulsor. The ship itself is damned good, but I’m betting the crew is unfamiliar with their platform and they’re poorly trained. We’ve been at sea a hell of a lot more in the last six months than these people. Once we get a sniff of this guy we’re ordered to do a situation report. I’ll preload the damned thing in a radio buoy and poop it out the signal ejector so I don’t have to go to periscope depth in the middle of the approach. Then I’ll put out a horizontal salvo of four Mark 50s, wait for the detonations, then we go on to Naples for a night of beer, Italian food, and Italian women. Any questions?”
There were none. The briefing broke up. Daminski sat in the end seat for some time, finishing his coffee, staring at the intelligence profile of the Destiny-class, and thinking about fernandez’s questions: who was the Destiny’s captain?
And what the hell did they call the ship? And what would Destiny’s captain do if he detected their approach? Questions for which Daminski had no answers, and felt he should have.
Admiral Donchez glared at the air force security guard at the fortified entrance to the joint-staff headquarters. Even the navy’s number one admiral had to produce his ID card, his Pentagon bar-coded SCIF-access card, and have the photo-images on the cards compared to his face by two on-watch sentries before he could gain access. At last the sentries admitted Donchez into the maze of corridors leading to a large briefing room. Before Congress had mandated this joint service fever, this room had been the War Room, the information presentation facility for presidents and cabinet members and congressmen and generals. Now that the post-cold-war world’s threats were different, the joint staff had gutted and remodeled the room, making it look more like a movie set than the old functional war room. The joint staff briefing room was large but so packed with computer consoles as to seem cramped except for the table in the center of the room. The black table was ten feet wide and sixty feet long, the surface illuminated by a hanging contraption in the shape of a large racetrack shining fluorescent light down on the slick marble surface. The room’s north and south walls were electronic wall charts, their images driven by the computer consoles on the east and west walls. Off to the side of the large briefing table was a smaller table, seating only twelve, where the chairman of the Joint Chiefs liked to have his meetings. The entire facility was a SCIF, special compartmented information facility, built to elaborate specifications that attempted to prevent eavesdropping. These included the prohibition against windows or ventilation ducts leading to the rest of the building; the computer consoles were networked only with each other and to a barrier computer. Only the barrier computer was allowed to communicate with the outside world through sanitized phone lines and data cables. The barrier then scanned incoming data to ensure that it was virus-free. A second computer system was devoted solely to monitoring the barrier, making sure its integrity was maintained. Every phone in the room was a secure-voice unit, all passing through the modules of the barrier computer.
All this seemed fine for tactical or war-fighting strategy meetings, but JCS chairman General Rod Barczynski also favored the room for administrative meetings. Thirty-five years of living and fighting in tanks had made the general uncomfortable with rooms with windows and curtains and wood tables. Donchez could understand but still felt odd discussing, say, the latest uniform change in the war-fighting environment of the joint-briefing facility. Except, of course, this morning’s briefing was no administrative function.
Barczynski wanted answers. Dick Donchez’s career had been filled with sessions like these. To Donchez, success was not a matter of avoiding failure but of making the right decisions and taking the correct action when staring failure in the face.
Behind Donchez were his commanders-in-chief — John Traeps, the CINC naval forces Mediterranean, and Kenny Mckeigh, the CINC naval forces Atlantic — as well as his aide Fred Rummel. Vice C.N.O Watson was minding the store in Flag Plot. Donchez sat at the table across from the general and his staff, Donchez’s CINCS seating themselves beside him. He looked up at Barczynski.
“Afternoon, General,” Donchez said. “Having a good vacation?”
Donchez referred to Barczynski’s penchant for getting outdoors away from D.C. on weekends and holidays.
Being at work on the Christmas holidays, war or no war, was not his style.
“I’ve had a lot better, Dick,” the general said.
The general’s physical appearance made him seem an unlikely character to be in command of the nation’s military.
He was a large man, his barrel chest presiding over an equally broad paunch, but somehow Barczynski didn’t seem fat, just big. Someone seeing him at the grocery store would think him a boilermaker or a longshoreman. He had a habit of taking off his uniform jacket and rolling up his shirtsleeves, and when he did his thick forearms bulged from the shirt. Barczynski had a way of looking a man in the eyes with disarming directness, especially when asking — rarely ordering — that an action be taken, his eyes smiling, the laugh lines coming, as if to say I know you can do this, will you help me out? Those eyes also had the ability to get the truth from subordinates trying to cover their trails, and tails. They could also mesmerize bosses, disarming opponents.
And they worked wonders with the press, who loved him. There were rumors that when he retired he could win a presidential nomination. He was one of few officers able to weld a caring attitude for his men with a relentless commitment to the mission at hand. Officers and enlisted men alike would do things for Barczynski that they would never agree to do for anyone else, taking the unglamorous missions, hardship tours, the army’s dirty jobs. As a way to reward the men who worked hard for him, he was fond of building esprit de corps by throwing keg parties; wherever he had been assigned in his career he could always be found after hours in the officers’ club, usually with a Heineken in each giant fist, surrounded by younger officers. But his physical appearance and beer diplomacy masked a penetrating insight and a tactician’s mind unrivaled by most military academicians.
Donchez himself had enormous professional and personal respect for Barczynski as well as liking him as a friend and fellow officer, the two senior officers friends for the past several years. But even so, Donchez was wary of the army officer because he felt he was short on understanding of navy operations. Barczynski’s working knowledge of the fleet had come from joint-command operations during which he’d come back with a distaste for carrier battle groups, the navy’s starting offense. Over the last few years Donchez had convinced Barczynski of the utility of submarines, the usefulness of seal team commandos, the gunboat diplomacy of Aegis cruisers, the punch of an amphibious assault by a bat talion of Marines, and the value of sea-launched Javelin cruise missiles, but the general still balked at Donchez’s insistence that carrier air wings were worth their price tag, the general more comfortable with land-based air force fighters and bombers, which he’d been familiar with since his West Point graduation. Donchez had continued to press, and Barczynski had grudgingly gone along with the navy chief’s tactical recommendations, but as far as carrier battle groups were concerned, they were something that Barczynski tolerated rather than supported.