Gordon Kent - Peacemaker

“Project Peacemaker will require that we secure the Gulf of Sidra for the Peacemaker launch vessel. This will be a major undertaking involving air and surface elements within fifteen miles of the Libyan coast. We will do a complete, repeat, complete fleet exercise that will mock up the entire operation. Fleetex is currently scheduled for October of this year. That is six-plus months to prepare for units that at this time are not in a high state of readiness!” He glared around the room. Full commanders avoided his hard eyes; lieutenant-commanders blanched. It was no secret that the fleet was below full manpower and that training was behind.

The captain held up a fist, from which an index finger pointed upward like a preacher’s. “Fleetex, Bermuda, October 96.” Another finger pointed. “To sea, November 96.” A third finger. “Peacemaker, Gulf of Sidra, December 96!” He glared. “Questions?” He said it like a man who dared anybody to ask a question.

A courageous commander murmured, “Is that date for Peacemaker firm?”

“Why wouldn’t it be firm?” the captain shouted.

A rash lieutenant, one of the few people in the room below lieutenant-commander, stood up, and Rafehausen groaned inwardly. The lieutenant said, “Bosnia and Peacemaker, that’s it, sir?”

“What else would you like?” the captain snarled.

“Uh—sir, Africa is ready to—” Rafehausen groaned silently again and thought Oh, Christ, another Al Craik!

The captain barked like an aroused Doberman. “Africa’s not even on my map! Bosnia and Peacemaker! Any other questions?”

Rafe had a question, but there was no point in asking it of this guy. It was a question that only Rafe himself could answer, anyway: How am I going to get an under-manned, inexperienced bunch of guys ready for sea in six lousy months? He looked at the man who would by then be his skipper. The guy had a reputation as a screamer and a morale-destroyer. My fucking A! Rafe thought.

Norfolk Naval Base.

“Peacemaker? The hell with it!”

Vice-Admiral Rudolph Newman was the flag commander of Battle Group Seven, which was beginning to take shape. “We’re going to do this right, for once,” he said. He sounded angry, as he always sounded, even when he wasn’t angry. “No Mickey Mouse!” he said.

“No, sir.” His flag intelligence officer was the hardnosed captain who had done the briefing where Rafe Rafehausen had sat in. With the admiral, however, he was sweet as honey. He had served with Newman twice before and knew what the man was like.

“Nothing we can do about this Peacemaker crap,” the admiral growled, “so we’ll have to do it. Keep something in the Fleetex script about it. You know how they scream if somebody’s pet project doesn’t get its due.”

“Yes, sir.”

“But I want a fleet exercise with guts . I want the men and officers who serve under me to know who the enemy is, and I want them to have this experience so they’ll be ready!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Victor-II class submarines. MiG-29s. I want my subs hunted by whatever the latest is that the Soviets have got—the Helix A?”

“Mmm—KA-27PL.”

“Well, extrapolate an upgrade. You know as well as I do the Soviets have one by now. The best, understand? Kirov-plus cruisers. I want an exercise against their best. I don’t want any of this ‘real-world’ crap. ‘Real-world’ means unreal world. Get me?”

“The, um, LantCom Planning Office is scripting a scenario. I’ve been picking their brains. They’re thinking, um, one threat as Libya and the other as Yugoslavia.”

“Negative! See, that’s exactly what I mean. That’s what they’d call ‘real world.’ We can lick those pathetic bastards without a rehearsal. Negative that. You script me a Fleetex that puts me against the Soviets in waters where they can bring their good stuff to bear. Get me?”

The IO nodded. He cleared his throat. “I’ll leave it to you to deal with LantCom, sir?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.”

Interservice Virtual Intelligence Center, Maryland.

“Peacemaker?”

Colonel Han was Chinese-American, an engineer. Suter, fresh from his briefing by his acidic new boss, George Shreed, disliked Han on sight. Han, he could tell, was Mister Nice Guy. Well, screw that.

“Let me put you in the big picture first,” Han said when he had settled behind his desk. “You know what IVI is, or you wouldn’t be here.” He pronounced the acronym for Interservice Virtual Intelligence like “ivy.” The halls of IVI . His round face smiled on Suter.

“Communications research,” Suter replied, “which is why it falls under the Agency’s umbrella.”

Han grunted. He was turning a ballpoint pen in stubby fingers. “The Agency’s mandate inside the US is communications, right.” He smiled again, but Suter suspected he disliked Suter on sight as much as Suter had disliked him. “So your responsibility will include keeping communications separate from anything else, anything that isn’t part of the CIA mandate. Right? I mean, that’s partly why you’re here. Right?”

“What’re you getting at, Colonel?”

“You don’t want your agency to get involved in things outside its bailiwick, right?”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow you.”

Han looked up at him and they stared at each other. Han dropped the pen. “Come on, I’ll show you around.”

They started at the top floor of the three-story building, where there was a suite of offices and meeting rooms that would have suited one of the new high-tech, high-risk companies. Suter thought that there was something vaguely pushy about the place, a bit too much of a good thing. “We entertain up here,” Han said. Our friends in Congress, he meant. At least that was the way Suter had heard it from Shreed.

The next floor down was a work floor, endless cubicles, an outer ring of small offices, some sort of atrium that looked down at the security desk and the lobby and up at the rain that was falling on a glass dome. In the back was a big, windowed cafeteria where people were already sitting drinking coffee. Again, there was the feeling of a start-up, lots of very young people, jeans and T-shirts, few neckties. “We hire them for their brains,” Han said. No explanation.

There were three floors below the surface. Each had its own security check and a security lock where, for a few seconds, they were held between closed gates. “If you’re claustrophobic, you’re not for us,” Han said. He held up a card to a television camera while they waited inside the lock, and a voice said, “Now the other gentleman, please.” Han moved Suter forward with pressure on his arm, and Suter turned his face up to be seen and then held up the temporary pass he’d been given. “Thank you,” the voice said. Suter couldn’t tell whether it was a human voice or a computer.

Down there, attempts had been made to disguise the fact that it was underground, but you couldn’t make windows where the outdoors was solid earth. It was bright and colorful, but at the end of a day a lot of people would breathe fresh air with real hunger. The spaces, as if to try to compensate, were larger, the cubicles fewer. The people were older, more male than female; Suter thought he recognized the look of ex-military. Uniforms, he knew, were not allowed.

The second below-ground level had at least two laboratories and a model-making shop. Han made this part of the tour pretty perfunctory, as if these were nuts-and-bolts places, not where the real work went on. Then they got in the elevator and started down to S3.

“So,” Han said. “What do you think?”

“Where’s Peacemaker?” Suter said. “It’s the reason I’m here.”