Nimitz Class (29 page)

“I hope you have enjoyed having a Navy for the past few years.”

Morgan knew he had shaken the Israeli. David Gavron betrayed no fear. But neither did he reply. He took a sip of coffee, and ruminated upon the fact that unless his government cooperated with Admiral Arnold Morgan there was likely to be big trouble, on a scale no one could cope with.

“Admiral,” he said. “I must confer with my superiors. I am sorry our meeting has been so brief. Can you let me have a number, or numbers, where I can speak to you later tonight?”

The admiral handed him a card with his office phone and fax, and his home number scrawled on the back.

“I’ll be waiting,” he said.

General Gavron headed back to his embassy. Admiral Morgan drove directly to Fort Meade. He ordered a roast beef sandwich, more coffee—the latter loudly…
“Black with buckshot!”
his own word for the tiny white sweeteners he used. He called Admiral Dunsmore in the Pentagon, and advised him to put any meeting at the White House on hold until the morning. Then he retired to his computer, conducting yet another search, for any submarine in all of the world which could, conceivably, have crept up on the
Thomas Jefferson
. Two hours later, he arrived at the same conclusion he had arrived at earlier. The only submarine not accounted for was the Russian Kilo reported sunk in the Black Sea.

He ran the CIA program of leading submarine commanders from all over the world for the sixth time in two days. There was no one on that list who was anywhere near the Black Sea at the appropriate time. The arrival of Bill Baldridge had presented him with the only real suspect—the Israeli, Adnam.

Admiral Morgan knew they had no real record of the man’s obvious brilliance. Everything about Adnam was shaded. To Morgan’s deeply skeptical mind, Adnam did not add up. And there had been an instant conspiracy by the Israelis to shield their man from investigation. Morgan believed General Gavron might not know Adnam’s whereabouts, but he believed there were some people in Tel Aviv who did.

The digital clock on his wall approached midnight. He sat in his armchair and turned on the television, picked up a West Coast baseball game, checked CNN occasionally. By 0100 he was asleep.

At 0210 the phone rang, and he reached for it like a striking cobra, wide awake in an instant.

“Admiral, this is David Gavron.”

“Shalom, David,” said Arnold Morgan.

“It took my superiors a while to gather the information you need. I am sorry to call you so late. It is just after 0900 in Israel.”

“To tell the truth, David, I don’t have anything much more pressing to do,” replied the admiral.

“No. I suppose not. Anyway I am instructed to inform you that the man you seek left the service of the Israeli Navy in November of 2001, eight months ago. We have no record of his present whereabouts.”

“What do you mean, ‘left’? Did he resign, desert, or was he fired?”

“I think it would be better if we spoke face-to-face. Can you come here right away? I’m at the Israeli embassy. I will meet you at the gate.”

“I’m leaving now.”

Morgan pulled on his uniform jacket and charged for the door, down the corridor and into his car. This was it. The Israelis were about to come clean. Adnam had plainly skipped town. The question now was, who was he working for? And where the fuck was he?

Two minutes later the admiral was racing south down the Baltimore-Washington Parkway at over 90 mph. He had never put it to the test, but he considered that in a straight fight between the Maryland State Police and the Director of the Office of National Security on an emergency mission, there would be only one winner—not the troopers.

Five minutes later, the tires of the staff car squealed as he hit the Capital Beltway at Exit 22, heading west across the northern end of the sleeping city. It took him under ten minutes to cover the twelve miles to Exit 33, the Connecticut Avenue intersection. He swung south toward Washington, turned off after a couple of miles, and came to a halt at the tall iron gates that guard the entrance to the embassy of Israel, some three miles out of town. Gazing through the dark at the striking stone building, with its great archways and Middle Eastern architecture, Admiral Morgan felt he could have been sitting right in the middle of Jerusalem.

Silently, General Gavron appeared at the car window and, as the gates swung open, instructed him to drive straight through. The admiral parked the car and stepped out onto Israeli territory. Silentguards observed him from the shadows. As he walked with the general
across the great courtyard he could feel the atmosphere of this tough, brave little country, no bigger than the state of New Jersey, so often under attack, and even here in Washington surrounded completely by a protective fence, the iron wrought in the decorative style of the homeland. Everywhere you could feel it, a kind of gallant bracing against the unseen threat.

They slipped unobtrusively through a door and stepped into a large, airy building, of the type favored by modern Arab sheiks, where thousands of years of desert tradition collide, finally, with modern Western technology. They walked down a corridor, past a portrait of David Ben-Gurion, another of General Moshe Dayan, and into a small anteroom, comfortably furnished, with two sofas and three big, burgundy-colored armchairs. The antique Persian rug, spread on the marble floor, was probably priceless. A white-uniformed Israeli serviceman stood by to bring them tea or coffee. And David Gavron asked the admiral to be seated. He then answered the three questions that Morgan had fired at him on the phone.

“We do not know what happened to Commander Adnam. He just…er…well…vanished. Into thin air. He was on station one day, and gone the next.”

“David, are you telling me the absolute truth? Because if you are not, the consequences might well be monumental.”

“We are a long way past telling lies, Admiral. I swear to you—and this is the solemn word of an Israeli officer, and friend to your country, Commander Adnam vanished. Plainly, I could not have told you this without the highest possible authority. In fact, I did know something of this when we met earlier. But I was under orders to reveal nothing.”

Admiral Arnold Morgan silently cursed himself for having even considered he was being told the entire truth by a member of the Mossad on the previous evening. But he understood the Israeli’s predicament. And forgave him now that the upper hand was clearly American. “Did anyone conduct an investigation when Adnam was first discovered missing?”

“Of course. He was our top submarine commander. The Navy
was very shocked. There was a time when we thought he might have been murdered. But Adnam had just taken off. We simply never heard anything, ever again.

“The Intelligence Service had a fairly thorough look. But I spoke to them again, a couple of hours ago. The whole matter remains a mystery. Commander Adnam’s parents were both killed in a small village which was bombed during the October War of 1973. As you know, our Achilles heel is poor records of immigrants. And they found no details of Adnam’s parents beyond about 1965. But there’s nothing suspicious. Except that it is a little unusual that no solid background information would be available on a man so prominent, and in such a sensitive area of our national defense. But that’s how it is for now.”

“Will your Intelligence services look again?”

“In the light of what you said to me, we consider the matter to be critical. We are reasonably sure Adnam is no longer in Israel. If he was, we’d have found him.”

“Will you keep me informed?”

“Of course. You have our deepest sympathy for the men who died on the carrier. As you know, we do not approve of surprise attacks for no apparent reason.”

Morgan smiled. He stood up and explained that he must go at once.

General Gavron said he understood, of course, and he escorted the American back, past the guards, to his car. It was 0320 when Morgan pulled through the gates, with the window down. And he heard General Gavron say very firmly, “Admiral, we did
not
hit your carrier. Do not waste your time thinking we did. And you can count on our support for
anything
you may need.”

Admiral Morgan saluted him as he left. And he could see the Israeli still standing alone, beyond the embassy fence. A nice man, he thought, in a big and dangerous job. “And now, I believe, a truthful man, which I suspect he likes better.”

He drove at a more leisurely pace back to the parkway, swinging off to his home in Montpelier, a few miles before the turning to Fort
Meade. He lived now in an official government residence close to his office complex, but he still owned and often visited the small, secluded, single-story frame house he had lived in while married. These days he had a housekeeper five mornings a week, and the place was spotless, but it looked and felt like a Navy officer’s wardroom. Admiral Morgan had never been long on chintz and deep sofas.

He poured himself a deep glass of bourbon on the rocks, called the Pentagon, and asked a duty officer to relay a message to the CNO after 0600 that he would be awaiting him in his office at 0700, with information of a highly sensitive nature. He then put in a call to the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet to check the arrival of Vice Admiral Rankov, and was agreeably surprised to hear he would be in Novorossisk later today.

He hardly touched the bourbon, and at 0420 Arnold Morgan hit the sheets and set his alarm for 0530. It had been a long night, but his adrenaline was still high, and most of the seventy minutes of rest he had allocated himself were wasted. His mind kept racing over the same questions. How long would it take the Mossad, and the USA, to find Commander Adnam? And where was he now and, worse yet, where was his fucking submarine? Had young Baldridge been right when he had suggested the unnamed enemy might strike again? Admiral Morgan was out of bed before the alarm even considered awakening him. He was showered, shaved, and dressed, and on the phone to Baldridge before 0540. Told his new field officer to be at the Pentagon by 0640 for a briefing.

Inside the Pentagon, he and Bill Baldridge pondered the revelations of General Gavron. “It’s changed the rules, hasn’t it, sir?” said the younger officer. “Either Adnam helped the Iranians get one of their Kilos into action very quietly—Bandar Abbas being so damned close to where the CVBG was working. Or he helped them get a new Kilo out of the Black Sea. And, if we accept he could have helped the Ayatollahs, I guess he could have helped anyone else do the same thing. It brings Iraq right back into the picture…and Libya…Syria…Egypt…Pakistan…any of ’em. Because if any one of those nations had Adnam, the only other thing they needed was money.”

“Yeah. To rent or buy a Russian boat and crew. But we still have to look at motive. And the nations with the most powerful motives are Iran, and, I guess, Iraq. The others are lightweight for something this big, and also would be much more afraid of the consequences. I don’t think we should take our eyes too far off the most obvious ball.”

“No. Guess not. And do you write the Israelis out of the list of suspects now?”

“Almost. I’ll make another couple of calls this morning. See if I can get Lessard on the line. Then we’ll have to see whether they found their lost commander. Or at least found out who he really is. Meantime I think we should brace ourselves for the fact that this President wants action. Right now. And I’m not sure what to advise. When you are as big and strong as we are, it’s damn difficult to punish someone on a large scale without starting World War III.”

At 0710, the Chief of Naval Operations walked through the door. Admiral Dunsmore beckoned both men to follow him into his office and ordered coffee, which was rapidly becoming a staple of Arnold Morgan’s diet. He then ordered the Intelligence Admiral to tell him everything.

The conversation lasted about five minutes. Admiral Dunsmore said little, absorbing every detail. Then he called General Josh Paul and said he thought they should meet with the President at the earliest possible time. He replaced the phone, and it rang within five minutes. The CNO just said, “I’m leaving now. I’ll be by your office in three.”

Admiral Morgan then called the Navy Intelligence office and left a message with an assistant to Admiral Schnider that Lieutenant Commander Baldridge would be working out of Fort Meade for the remainder of the week. Bill shrugged, and the two men headed for the garage. By the time they made it, General Paul and Admiral Dunsmore were already bound for the White House.

Seated in the back of the staff car, Scott Dunsmore ran over the situation with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, told him of the rising suspicion that Benjamin Adnam was the commander of the submarine which they now believed had destroyed the
Jefferson
. He
informed him of the defection of the Israeli Navy officer, how they had been promised the support and help of a very worried Mossad, and how Iran remained the prime suspect.

General Paul asked one question. “Do you guys think that this Adnam could have got one of the Iranian Kilos out through the Strait of Hormuz, hit the
Jefferson
, and then got back into Bandar Abbas without us knowing?”

“No. We don’t really. But since we thought the carrier was just about impregnable, and we were wrong about that, I suppose we have to accept the possibility that the guy who successfully got into the Battle Group, might also have successfully chugged in and out of the harbor without being spotted by the overheads. ’Specially during the monsoon.”

“Yeah. Guess so. We’re still not seeing three boats in Bandar Abbas. Just the two, right?”

“Uh-huh. But the third one still might be in that big covered floating dock. We just can’t get a look in there.”

The car pulled up to the West Wing entrance. The Secret Service men were there to meet them, hand over their passes, and escort them immediately to the same conference room they had used for the breakfast meeting with the President eight days previously. When they arrived, the Defense Secretary, Robert MacPherson, and the Secretary of State, Harcourt Travis, were already seated. The National Security Adviser, Sam Haynes, arrived within moments. Five minutes later the President himself walked in accompanied by his press chief, Dick Stafford. The doors were shut firmly behind them by the Marine guards, who remained on duty immediately beyond the door.