Mike Brannon came out of his chair, his face darkening with rage. “Now you get one thing straight, damn it! The nuclear submarines are not your Goddamned submarines! They belong to the Navy. And you hear this; I care a hell of a lot more about the hundred and twenty or so sailors who were on the Sharkfin than I do about the ship. Is that clear, sir?”
Captain Steel stared at Mike Brannon. “You make it perfectly clear, Admiral. But the problem remains. Someone destroyed the Sharkfin. And its crew. And that someone has got to be stopped. I’d rather not say any more until I have seen the pictures.”
“Tell your office to notify my Chief Yeoman of your schedule tomorrow. I expect to have pictures then. I’ll notify you as soon as they arrive.” Brannon turned to John Olsen as Steel left the office.
“You get the message off to Rota?”
Olsen nodded. “Good Chief you’ve got out there. He had them on the line, waiting, when I went out there. They’ve got a plane available. It will land at Andrews tomorrow at zero six hundred. I’ll be there.” He picked up the message and read it.
“The way this reads, Mike, it had to be a weapon. Probably a sound-seeking torpedo fired at her screw. Think it could have been that Soviet attack submarine that tracked her out of the Strait of Gibraltar?”
“I think so,” Brannon said. He went to his office door and opened it. “Chief, please notify Admiral Benson and Mr. Wilson of the CIA that I would appreciate it if they could be here in my office at zero eight hundred. We have information of great importance for them. Notify Captain Steel’s office that I expect him here at ten hundred tomorrow. I want you here by zero seven hundred at the latest. I expect to be here at zero six thirty.”
The Agency limousine eased out of the Pentagon parking area and began the long trip back to the CIA headquarters. Wilson pushed a button that slid a glass partition between the driver’s area and the rear seat and turned to Admiral Benson.
“Those pictures were scary,” Wilson said. “They don’t leave much doubt about what happened to that submarine. What I’d like to know is, how well do you know Admiral Brannon? He’s Irish and like a lot of the Irish he’s keeping his feelings to himself but he’s boiling inside. What’s he likely to do?”
“He’s submarine, I was aviation,” Admiral Benson said slowly. “I don’t know him that well. I know his record, his reputation. He’s tough. He’s direct. He’s a decent man, a hard worker. But what will he do? I think that’s pretty clear, Bob. He’s got to take this to the President.”
“Maybe,” Wilson said. He lit a cigarette and watched the smoke swirl away in the car’s ventilation system.
“What else can he do?” Benson said. “The pictures are excellent. Sharkfin was hit by a weapon fired by a ship from an unknown nation. He’s only got one course of action to take, to go to the President.”
“Then why did he order an attack submarine to leave Scotland at the same time he ordered that Medusa ship to start searching for the Sharkfin? Why did he order that attack submarine to go to the area where the Sharkfin was sunk and to obey only orders that came from him, from Brannon?”
“Who said he did?”
“We monitor every radio circuit going, you know that,” Wilson grunted. “He gave those orders. You give me your guess and I’ll give you mine about why he did it. I think he’s going to go after that Soviet submarine and sink it.”
“He couldn’t!” Admiral Benson protested. “His whole career would go down the drain. It’s unthinkable!”
“So?” Wilson said. He pushed a button that lowered the window on his side of the car and flipped his cigarette butt through the opening. He raised the window and looked at Benson.
“Admiral Brannon’s been in Washington for about three years. He knows the score, as you Navy people say.”
“What’s that supposed to mean, Wilson?” The CIA Director’s voice was suddenly sharp. “I’ve kept it to myself but you sometimes annoy the hell out of me when you put on that old Washington hand attitude. I know I’m relatively new to Washington but I’m not a complete idiot.”
“I apologize, Admiral,” Wilson said. “I didn’t mean it that way. What I mean is that we’ve lived in different worlds. In your world, the Navy, you expect people to be loyal, to do a good day’s work, to respect rank, that sort of thing. You assume that people can be trusted, especially if they’ve got rank. In my world, I expect people to be shitheads, if you’ll excuse the word.
“What I meant was that Admiral Brannon’s been in Washington in a damned tough job long enough to have been stabbed in the back, lied to, and he’s learned the score. He knows, I know, that if he takes this to the President — and he may do that, I’m not saying he won’t — but if he takes this to the President he knows what will happen.
“What will happen is there will be meetings, a lot of crisis meetings. You can’t keep crisis meetings secret in this town. The press will begin to snoop around and you can bet your last dollar that some son of a bitch who spends a lot of his time kissing the President’s ass will leak the story to some reporter. And within a few days the whole damned world will know we lost the Sharkfin.
“Once the story gets out we won’t be able to do a damned thing. The Russians will offer their sympathy and deny everything. We’ll be left with egg on our chin, a submarine on the bottom of the ocean, and a lot of good American sailors dead.” He lit another cigarette.
“Uncle Sam, the patsy,” he growled.
“You believe that?” Benson said.
“I’ve seen it happen before. The Cuban invasion project is a good example. That was supposed to be absolutely secret. But there were too many meetings, too many people in the damned project. Little things began to leak out. James Reston of the New York Times got the whole story weeks before the invasion.
“Happens that Reston is an honorable man. He went to his editors and told them they shouldn’t print the story. Might have been better for all of us if he had gone ahead and printed it. That might have killed the damned project.” He hunched down in the upholstered seat.
“Brannon knows his way around this town. I have to assume that he knows a little about how the Soviet mind works. If he did order that Soviet submarine wiped out — well, that would be about the best message you could send to the Kremlin. They’d understand that sort of action because that’s how they work.”
Admiral Benson fiddled with the snaps of the briefcase he held in his lap. “If we suspect he might go after that Soviet submarine, and I don’t for one minute think he will do that, but if we did suspect he might we’d be honor bound to go to the President and tell him.”
Wilson glanced at Admiral Benson out of the corner of his eye. “And if we did that and Brannon didn’t do anything his name would be shit with the President and the Joint Chiefs.”
“But if we just sit here and do nothing we’re right in the middle!”
“Comes with the territory,” Wilson said. “There might be a way around this whole thing, though.”
“How?”
“If we assume the Soviets did sink our submarine, and I’m damned sure they did, they had to have a reason because they don’t do things that serious without some reason. Maybe I can find out the reason. I’d need several days to do that, if I can even do it. You’d have to stall Brannon, convince him not to throw the baby out with the bath water while I try.”