His voice took on a more serious tone. “And that’s pretty much why I asked you to come here.”
The Clarks waited for him to continue.
“What I’m about to tell you is highly classified,” the colonel said. “Your security clearance is no longer active, Mr. Clark, and there’s not enough time to renew it. Doc, your clearance is currently active, but it’s not high enough for this discussion, and there is no time to upgrade.”
Jon and Cassy exchanged glances. Clearly they were becoming more puzzled by the second.
“Ordinarily, that would put this little plan at a complete standstill,” said Colonel Dawkins. “We can’t usually bypass the legal and administrative hurdles for granting access to classified information. But this is not an ordinary situation.”
He paused until he had a nod of understanding from both of them.
“We can’t just throw Federal Law and military regs out the window,” he said. “But — according to my top legal beagle — there’s a way to do this, if we apply a highly creative interpretation of Executive Order #12968. Apparently there’s a loophole somewhere in the fine print for granting temporary access to classified material under what the order refers to as ‘extraordinary circumstances’.”
The colonel’s shark-like grin reappeared. “There are a couple of dozen nukes pointed at U.S. cities, and the man with his thumb on the button is crazier than a shithouse rat. Not to mention a science fiction rocket sub blasting the living fuck out of the Atlantic Fleet. I figure that qualifies as extraordinary circumstances. Would you agree?”
Jon and Cassy Clark nodded again, still no closer to understanding what this conversation was leading up to.
“I’m going to ask you to sign some papers in a minute,” Colonel Dawkins said, “to take advantage of that loophole. But the papers aren’t the important part. The legal consequences if you divulge this material aren’t really important either, at least not in the big scheme of things. Here’s the important part… If security on this op is blown, some of my Marines are going to die. That’s more or less guaranteed. And if word gets back to the North Koreans, there could be twenty or thirty million dead American citizens to keep my dead Marines company. I need you to both understand that.”
Cassy and Jon exchanged another look, and then both nodded again.
“We understand,” Jon said. “We don’t have a clue what you want us for, but we understand what’ll happen if we compromise security.”
“Good,” the colonel said. He reached for a pair of manila folders on a side table near his chair. “I’m going to need you to sign these before I tell you anything else. Your signatures won’t commit you to taking part in the operation we’re going to discuss. What they will do is make you legally and criminally culpable if you unlawfully disclose any of what you’re about to hear.”
He held out a folder and an ink pen in each hand.
This time, the Clarks didn’t have to exchange a look. Without a word, they reached for the folders and pens.
The paperwork consisted of a single-page acknowledgement form with a signature block at the bottom. Cassy rapidly read through the text and signed in the designated place. Then she read Jon’s form aloud to him, to save his eyes from unnecessary strain.
His scrawl on the paper was not aligned with the signature block, but Cassy didn’t think anyone would complain.
Colonel Dawkins took back the signed documents and laid them on his desk. “How many people does your sailboat sleep?” he asked.
“She can handle four pretty comfortably,” Jon said. “Six with some crowding, if nobody minds getting up close and personal with a dog who farts in her sleep.”
“Six is good enough,” the colonel said. “Eight would be better, but we can do it with six people.”
“Do what with six people?” Cassy asked.
Colonel Dawkins leaned back in his chair. “I’ve got in mind a little sailing vacation. The two of you and four passengers. Six dumb and harmless American tourists, happily bumming around the coast of Cuba in their seaworthy old sailboat.”
“With their dog,” Jon said.
“Right,” said the colonel. “With their dog.”
“These four other tourists that’ll be sailing with us,” Cassy said. “Can we assume they’ll be over-muscled Jarhead types? The kind who can do pushups with their eyebrows?”
Colonel Dawkins put on an air of exaggerated innocence. “Are you suggesting that I would deploy a detachment of U.S. Marines to covertly infiltrate our host country? Petty Officer Clark, I’m surprised at you! I would never even dream of such a thing.”
“Of course not,” Cassy said. “So these definitely-not-Jarheads that you’re sending… What exactly will they be doing?”
“Well, that’s where the plan starts to get a little crazy,” said Colonel Dawkins.
“Where it starts to get crazy?”
“Yeah,” the colonel said. “It gets a lot weirder from here.”
CHAPTER 47
Master Chief Ernie Pooler licked a finger and turned a page of his dog-eared paperback. It was a Bantam mass market reissue from the early eighties — the pasteboard cover and spine held together with masking tape; the yellowed pages going brittle with age. The jacket illustration — a bearded seaman in sou’wester and rain slicker silhouetted against a glowering sky — was nearly invisible behind creases and tape patches.
He had a hardcover first edition of the book in his collection at home, and an electronic copy on that e-reader whatsit that his kids had given him for Christmas. But this was the one he liked to read. The one that he got lost in.
His eyes found the top of the new page and his mind remained happily submerged in the adventures of young Harvey Cheyne aboard a decrepit fishing schooner in the North Atlantic.
Before long he knew where Disko kept the old green-crusted quadrant that they called the “hog-yoke”—under the bed-bag in his bunk. When he ‘took the sun, and with the help of “The Old Farmer’s” almanac found the latitude, Harvey would jump down into the cabin and scratch the reckoning and date with a nail on the rust of the stove-pipe.
Now, the chief engineer of the liner could have done no more, and no engineer of thirty years’ service could have assumed one half of the ancient-mariner air with which Harvey, first careful to spit over the side, made public the schooner’s position for that day, and then and not till then relieved Disko of the quadrant. There is an etiquette in all these things.
The words had flowed from Kipling’s pen in the century before last, and they had been printed, reprinted, and repackaged so often that even the long-dead author’s estate had undoubtedly lost track. But the prose and the story were fresh every time. Renewed with each re-reading in a way that Ernie had never been able to explain or even understand.
In a long and prolific career, Rudyard Kipling had written many books more famous and better received than Captains Courageous, but not one of those others held the wonder and majesty found in this simple tale of a boy discovering his manhood at sea. Not as far as Ernie Pooler was concerned, anyway.
It might be an exaggeration to say that Ernie’s first reading of the novel at age ten or eleven had inspired him to become a sailor. If books were significant factors in that decision — and they probably were — then Up Periscope by Robb White, and Run Silent, Run Deep by Edward L. Beach were equally responsible.