“Assume speed to be twenty knots made good over the ground. Indicate where on the course line Sharkfin would have made her next position report.” A black O showed on the course line. The desk speaker rattled.
“Sharkfin’s last position report was made just before she crossed the outboard edge of the SOSUS network, sir.”
“What other information do you have from SOSUS, Commander?” Brannon turned to Captain Steel. “SOSUS is our network of ocean bottom sensors, Captain.”
“I’m aware of that,” Steel snapped. Brannon shrugged and turned to watch as a red line appeared on the chart just south of the Strait of Gibraltar. The red line moved northward and then joined the black course line of the Sharkfin. The red line followed along the black line and then stopped. It reappeared, moving on a reverse course and veering to the southeast, away from the black line. The red line continued in that direction until it neared the west coast of Morocco, where it formed an elliptical loop.
“The red line is the track of a submarine, not one of ours,” Fencer said. “The break in the red line is where the other submarine passed out of the SOSUS area. It then returned and proceeded to the area where it has been on patrol. That area is shown as the elliptical loop on the chart, Admiral.”
“Do you have an ID on that other submarine?” Brannon asked.
“Yes, sir. We have a positive footprint confirmed by visual observations off Algeria, in the Med. She’s a late model Soviet nuclear attack submarine. I must point out, Admiral, that Soviet submarines often follow our submarines and surface ships. Our submarines follow their ships. It’s a rather common practice, sir.”
“But they don’t usually follow one of our ships that far, isn’t that so?”
“Yes, sir,” Fencher answered.
“Thank you, Commander. Please give my thanks to your staff.” Brannon turned to Captain Steel. “I’d like to see you in my office, sir, if you have time?”
“I don’t have time,” Steel snapped. “A congressional committee takes precedence over a vice admiral, I believe. I have to testify this morning. I can give you forty-five minutes this afternoon. At fourteen hundred. In my office.” He turned and left the Black Room, his steel-shod heels ringing on the tiled floor.
Brannon’s Chief Yeoman brought fresh coffee into his office. He put a list of telephone calls to be answered on the desk and left.
“Care to drug your system with a little poison?” Olsen asked as he poured the coffee. “The arrogance of that man! You’d think he flew three stars and that you were a snot-nosed ensign! I don’t know why you don’t lower the boom of rank on that man, Mike, I really don’t.”
“Don’t let it bother you, John,” Brannon answered. He stirred his coffee slowly. “I don’t let it bother me and I’ve been exposed to him for three years. You’ve only had that pleasure for the last six months.
“The Chief of Naval Operations gave me two major priorities when he assigned me to this job three years ago. One was to carry out the responsibilities of the office and God knows, that’s a heavy load. The other was to try, as subtly as I could, to restore the morale the submarine Navy has lost over the years and to increase the re-enlistment rate in nuclear submarines. The re-up rate had fallen to an all time low and cash bonuses for re-upping weren’t doing the job.
“To carry out that second priority I had to begin countermanding a lot of the directives that Captain Steel had put out. The sort of directives that coddled the graduates of the nuclear power training schools he had set up. I had to do that in such a manner that Captain Steel didn’t get his ass in an uproar and go running to the Congress to demand my head on a platter alongside the head of the Chief of Naval Operations.
“What did they teach us in War College? Know your enemy. Study your enemy. Understand him. I did that. I wound up not liking the man any more than I had but I did gain a lot of respect for him. He took an awful hazing at the Academy because of, well, call it ethnic bigotry. That same bigotry that Rickover had to deal with as a Jew. It gave the two men a common ground. That’s how they were able to work so closely together.
“Rickover had only one weapon he could use against the bigotry — his brain. He used it. He took the reality of the atomic bomb and the concept of nuclear power from that bomb and he literally created the nuclear submarine Navy all by himself and Steel has done nearly as much bringing the Navy up to date.”
“Don’t forget how he did that,” Olsen said dryly. “He sucked up a lot of powerful members of the Congress and when he had them in his hip pocket he sucked up to presidents, their White House staffs and to the press. He became a little tin god, untouchable.
“Once the nuclear submarine Navy was underway he coddled, that’s your word and it’s a good one, he coddled the nuclear school graduates until damned good submariners who hadn’t qualified to go through his schools got so fed up they either didn’t re-enlist or if they had a lot of time to serve they tried their damndest to get off the nukes. I know of cases where some of them offered as much as a thousand bucks to get a swap. I had to live with that in my command in Pearl Harbor and it almost drove me crazy.”
“I know,” Brannon said. “It’s taken me the better part of two years to get rid of the worst of the petty stuff. There’s still a hell of a lot to be done, a hell of a lot and it’s got to be done carefully and slowly.” He looked at Olsen, his dark blue eyes boring into the other man.
“Why do you think I asked for you as my Number One when Roger retired? I want someone I can trust to carry on the work. Someone who can make this nuclear submarine Navy into the same sort of submarine Navy we had in World War II and after the war. An outfit that good men will try their damndest to get into and will never want to leave. Captain Steel has been passed over for admiral but I know that he’s got a scheme going that’s going to override the Navy’s rules and give him his big star. I’ve only got another year and a bit in this job and then they’ll pipe me over the side. They don’t let you stay past the age of sixty-two. Unless you’re Captain Steel, of course.”
“He must hate you with a passion,” Olsen said slowly. “And he’ll hate me just as much. Fine shipmate you are, Mike, letting me in for this.”
‘I don’t think he hates anyone,” Mike Brannon said. “He’s too intelligent to waste emotion on hatred. I think he sees me as a problem he has to solve with his intellect.”
“Oh, sure,” Olsen said. He refilled the coffee cups from the carafe. “I can name two or three admirals he got rid of. Damned good men who didn’t want to go, either. But he got nasty about them and they went.”
“That was early, when he was starting to build his power base,” Brannon said. “He had to show his power so he could do the things that he wanted to do. He’s too good a politician now to try that sort of thing.” He pushed a button on his desk and his Chief Yeoman came in, a stenographic pad and pen in hand.
“Would you call the director of the CIA and ask him to sit in with me in a meeting in Captain Steel’s office at fourteen hundred today? Tell him I apologize for the short notice but I consider the meeting important.”
“Talk about politicians,” Olsen said, “Didn’t Steel try to torpedo Admiral Benson when the President proposed him as head of the CIA?”
Brannon nodded. “That’s one of the very few times Mr. Steel ever ran up on a reef. Johnny Benson had a hell of a record as a pilot and as a carrier skipper and when he made admiral he showed his colors as an administrator.
“I wasn’t playing politics asking him to sit in on the meeting. I’m worried about something else, John.” He rose and walked over to the window and stood looking down at the tree tops whipping in the wind.