Command and control, p.23
Command and Control, page 23
But to Don, Lieutenant Commander Watkins’s class was a respite from the tornado of plebe year. Don had never been much of a liberal arts type, but to his surprise, he found naval history fascinating. Watkins could talk for hours on obscure Greek battles and Phoenician trade routes, but his favorite topic was the Napoleonic Wars.
Now, as Don sat in his office at ETG, the image of Lieutenant Commander Watkins popped into his head. The walrus mustache, the ever-present coffee cup, the way his voice rose when he wanted to make a point. When he spoke of Admiral Nelson, Watkins would often strike a pose, hand on hip, and call out Nelson’s famous phrase.
“What’s the Butcher’s bill?”
The Butcher’s bill in Nelson’s day was the accounting of dead and wounded from battle. Watkins delved into gory detail about what a cannonball could do to a wooden ship, how the splinters from the projectile strike caused as many deaths as the projectiles themselves. The surgeons in those days, he claimed, were often called butchers. They operated without anesthetic or antiseptic in less-than-ideal conditions. Even if the men lived after being treated by a surgeon, they often died from infections.
What’s the Butcher’s bill? Don thought.
The terrorist attack at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, had a Butcher’s bill that defied comprehension.
A full third of the most senior officers in the United States Navy and Marine Corps were dead. Another third were spread among the intensive care units of hospitals in Newport, Providence, and Boston. The Chief of Naval Operations was dead, and the Vice CNO was in a medically induced coma. The Pacific Fleet commander was deceased, and at least half of the other numbered fleet commanders were injured in some way.
The deputy commandant of the US Coast Guard had attended the International Seapower Symposium instead of the commandant, who had presided instead over the commissioning of the newest polar national security cutter entering Coast Guard service. The deputy commandant was among the dead.
And that was just the United States. The body of the United Kingdom’s First Sea Lord had already been loaded on a plane back to London, while the Operations Commander of Northwoods and the Commander-in-Chief Fleet were in intensive care in a Boston hospital. They would both live, but it was unlikely either of the two men would ever return to service.
The list of countries who had incurred naval leadership losses spanned the globe. France, Germany, Australia, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Spain, Brazil, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam.
And no Russians. It was impossible to ignore that fact. The Russian president, a famously cold-hearted man, had immediately sent his personal condolences to each nation who had suffered a loss but offered no official statement.
There had been no claim of responsibility for the bombing, but the tide of global public sentiment ran strongly against the Russian Federation. After decades of international meddling, surreptitious assassinations, and any number of heinous acts, it seemed that President Luchnik might have finally gone too far.
Except, of course, for the fact that they had not a shred of proof supporting any Russian involvement.
The FBI’s investigation was painstakingly slow, but they had made some progress. The crew of the tug was missing, and there was a twelve-hour block of time between their last radio communication and the explosion.
The day of the bombing, the tug had been remotely controlled, as had the detonation. That set of facts indicated a technologically sophisticated plan and an operator within line of sight of the explosion.
FBI and local law enforcement had combed the Newport area for days, going house to house to find anyone who might have seen something. So far, their efforts had yielded no leads. A separate team worked on the theory that the tug had been controlled via an unmanned aerial drone relay.
Don logged off the videoconference and slumped back in his chair. His head pounded, a dull aching throb that started at the base of his neck and radiated up into his skull. He pressed his palms against his eyes until he saw red splotches in his vision.
The answer would be in the details, he told himself. It would take time.
His desk phone sounded. Without opening his eyes, he reached out and felt for the speaker button. “Riley.”
Mark Westlund’s voice filtered into the room. “Don, we may have something.”
Without bothering to respond, Don punched the speaker button to end the call and stood. His chair rolled back into the wall with a solid thunk.
The center wall screen in the young officers’ bullpen-style office showed a map of the world. The existing conflict hotspots were tagged with red dots: Iran, the Balkans, Kashmir, Venezuela, and now Newport, Rhode Island.
Dre, Michael, and Mark stood when Don entered. He nodded at Dre, realizing he’d barely spoken to her since her return from Venezuela.
“Tell me,” Don said.
Like everyone in the building, Mark’s face looked haggard from lack of sleep, but his eyes held a spark of excitement.
“It’s something,” Mark began. “We know that the tug from the bombing was flagged in Dominica.”
Don nodded. “The Dominica Maritime Registry Incorporation. We knew that on day one.”
It was common for US maritime shipping companies to establish their fleets under “flags of convenience” for tax and regulatory reasons. The Republic of Dominica in the Caribbean had built a thriving cottage industry of flagging foreign vessels. One of their largest customers was Consolidated Tugs, an American company with a tugboat fleet in all major East Coast ports.
“Correct,” Mark continued. “We poked into their finances and found a suspicious cash transaction about ten days ago.”
Don felt his pulse quicken. “How much?”
“Ten thousand dollars,” Dre said, speaking for the first time.
Don frowned. “That’s not much.” He tried not to sound as irritable as he felt.
“It’s not,” Mark replied. “But where the money came from is interesting.”
Don felt his impatience growing. “And?”
“A bank in Dubai,” Dre said. “And the account matches the information we took off the Venezuelan general’s phone. But it gets better.”
A connection between Venezuelan weapons and the Naval War College bombing? Don was all in now.
Dre continued. “The general was a WhatsApp junkie,” she said. “Most of it was filled with absolutely filthy talk with his mistress, but there was a short exchange between the general and the arms dealer—only it wasn’t an arms dealer.”
“I’m not following you,” Don said.
“We assumed that the Venezuelans were buying the MANPADS from the arms dealer,” Dre said. “That’s not what happened. The arms dealer paid them. And the money came from the same account that sent ten grand to the Dominica Maritime Registry Incorporation.”
Don dragged a chair from the wall and sat down. “What do we know about the account?”
“It’s with a bank in Dubai,” Michael said. “Numbered account that’s been in place for more than a year. Even if we could hack it, there’s no way we can tell who owns it.”
“And the mobile number on WhatsApp?” Don asked. “Anything there?”
Dre shook her head. “Another dead end.”
“I’ve compiled a list of disbursements from that account since it was established,” Michael said. He touched a button on his keyboard, and the second wall screen sprang to life showing a spreadsheet containing a dozen transactions. Don scanned the column of information. Oman, Brussels, Pakistan, Switzerland, Mali, Panama, Cairo. The amounts ranged from $10,000 up to a few hundred thousand US dollars.
“I’m working on identifying the owners of the recipient accounts,” Michael said, “but most of them are numbered accounts as well.”
Don massaged the back of his neck. “So, all we really have are the locations and amounts to go on.”
“What about the dates?” Mark asked.
“Michael,” Dre said, “let’s add a column of the dates of all the conflicts since the account was established.”
Working together, it took Michael and Dre five minutes to update the spreadsheet.
“Let’s work with the assumption that a single entity is behind all of these attacks,” Don said. “What does this data tell us?”
“A week to ten days before each conflict, we have a disbursement from the Dubai account,” Dre said. “Some of the deposit sites make sense. For example, Oman and Pakistan could be correlated with the Iranian attack on the USS Black and the Kashmir separatists, right?”
Before Don could answer, Harrison Kohl appeared in the office doorway.
“I’ve been looking all over for you, Don,” Harrison said. “I have something you should see.”
“Join the party, Harrison,” Don said. “We have something you should see.”
Barbara Goldstein accompanied Harrison. In her mid-fifties, Barbara looked more like an elementary school teacher than a CIA analyst. The woman had a penchant for bright scarves and bland pantsuits. Today’s ensemble was a navy-blue pantsuit and a bright red, white, and blue scarf with a matching pin on her lapel.
Don watched Harrison’s face as Mark briefed him on the financial connection between the Venezuelan weapons and the tug. When Mark finished, Harrison nodded gravely.
“That’s some good work.” He leveled a look at Don. “I suppose you’re back on the Russian hobbyhorse?”
He didn’t say it in a pejorative way, but Don felt his face getting hot. He bit back a sharp answer.
“I’ve been giving some thought to how the Russians could take advantage of this chaos,” Harrison said. “If they’re out there stirring up the shit, then they must want to get something out of it, right?”
Don, swallowing his anger, nodded. “That stands to reason.”
Harrison motioned for Barbara to take one of the workstations. “I asked Barbara to run some OpIntel reports for me. She used to work at ONI back in the day.”
Dre frowned. “OpIntel?”
“Operational intelligence,” Barbara said crisply, as if she were lecturing a fifth-grade class. “Real-time assessment of operational moves as compared to historical data. Every large military in the world is a bureaucracy, and bureaucracies are based on procedures and routines. Name a country, and I can tell you what their operational and training patterns are based solely on OpIntel.
“Unless they’re up to something. Then their patterns change. If we overlay current movements on historical patterns, we can spot anomalies. Anomalies usually mean trouble.”
She finished typing and swiveled to face the screen. What played out on the viewscreen was a map of Russia and surrounding countries.
“The historical data is in blue,” Barbara said, “the last four months in red.” The red dots, representing Russian military units, made little racetracks on the screen.
“By tracking operational movements of Russian forces, you can see that they have been relatively static over the last four months. No pattern changes.”
Don felt his headache returning. “Which means what?”
“Which means,” Harrison said, “we’re not seeing any indication that the Russians are prepositioning forces to take advantage of all this chaos. When in the history of the world has that happened?”
Don wanted to put his head in his hands. He was so tired. “If it’s not the Russians, who is it?”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t the Russians,” Harrison replied. “What I’m thinking is worse.”
Don’s head snapped up. “Explain.”
“The same guy has been running Russia for over twenty-five years,” Harrison said. “He knows where all the bodies are buried because he buried them. He will own that country until his dying breath. But suppose someone wanted to get rid of him. How would you do it?”
The room was silent. Finally, Mark spoke.
“You’d get him overextended,” Mark said. “Make him responsible for an international crisis that he can’t worm his way out of.”
“Or more than one crisis,” Harrison said. “All at the same time.”
Don sat back down. The pieces fell into place in his mind. The pattern he had been looking for was right there in front of him.
“You think the Russians are doing this to themselves,” Don said.
“Worse,” Harrison replied. “I think we’re seeing a coup.”
34
Arctic Ocean
120 miles northwest of Prince Patrick Island, Canada
Control the Arctic. Control the world.
Captain Sergei Zaitsev considered the coin in his palm. It was a bit of cast metal with the slogan printed on one side and the emblem of the Russian Pacific Fleet on the other. The cheap gold paint was already beginning to wear off. Admiral Sokolov had ordered thousands of them made up and distributed to every sailor in the Pacific Fleet. Ships were ordered to paint the slogan in a prominent place in the crew’s mess and in the officers’ wardroom to remind everyone of their important mission to the future of Russia.
He wished he could trade in every one of these stupid coins for a bigger maintenance budget. The Arctic was a brutal playground. Even though his command, the Sovershennyy, was barely three years old, she badly needed a refit.
In the Mediterranean, a major maintenance problem meant a tow to a nearby port. Here, in the Arctic, it could mean death.
Control the Arctic. Control the world.
Sergei came from a family of sailors. He could trace the Zaitsev family military service to Mother Russia from present day all the way back to the 1917 Revolution. He could remember his father and grandfather talking about the Arctic in respectful terms, but they had never sailed these waters.
When Papa served some thirty-five years ago, it was a different world. His father was an officer on the Kirov, a Soviet nuclear-powered battle cruiser. It was a beast of a ship, named after a real Bolshevik hero.
Sergei slipped the coin into his trouser pocket and tried to get comfortable in the captain’s chair on the bridge of the Sovershennyy.
Papa would have been so proud to see his son become the commanding officer of a Russian Navy vessel. But compared to the Kirov, this Steregushchy-class corvette was a toy of a ship. A touch over one hundred meters long and only eleven meters wide, his command had none of the firepower or the brute strength of a battle cruiser, but Sergei was confident the Sovershennyy could hold her own in any fight.
He would order his executive officer to run more action station drills this afternoon. What his ship lacked in maintenance funds, he would make up for in better training.
Sergei sighed. Not that there was a lot of fighting these days. In fact, his mission was to monitor the activity of Canadian military vessels in the Arctic waters of the Beaufort, Chukchi, and East Siberian Seas.
It was boring, demoralizing work for a warship. Their orders were to get close enough to identify the Canadian ship, then hang back and report their movements to fleet headquarters every six hours. Every fourteen days, the Sovershennyy sailed off station to resupply and returned to her post within three days.
Even their resupply point was a joke. A tender based at Wrangel Island, a desolate bit of rock and snow that had a Russian radar station and nothing else. The crew wasn’t even allowed to go ashore in Wrangel—not that there was anything to do on shore, but that wasn’t the point.
The thing that really galled him, really made Sergei angry at his lot in life, was that when his ship came off station after fourteen days of religiously reporting the position of every Canadian warship to Pacific Fleet HQ every six hours, no one replaced them.
“Captain,” the young officer of the deck interrupted Sergei’s mental ramblings. “The noon report, sir.”
“Very well.” Sergei paged through the clipboard. Fuel reserves, freshwater levels, food, readiness status. He noted they had lost a third PK-10 decoy launcher. He waved the OOD over and pointed to the entry.
“Corrosion, sir,” he said. “Shorted out the firing circuit.”
Sergei signed off the report and handed it back. He left the comfort of his command chair and strode out to the bridge wing. The enlisted lookout greeted him with respect, then stepped away.
The crew knew that Captain Zaitsev liked to brood alone.
On the bright side, the weather for this stint on station was spectacular. A cloudless sky, a balmy zero degrees Celsius, and gentle winds left the sun-flooded sea calm and ice-free.
The lack of ice was what made the Arctic so important these days. On the Russian side of the pole, there were now entire months where tankers and cargo ships could transit the Northern Route entirely ice-free. Sergei had seen the numbers. A cargo ship sailing from Shanghai to New York could cut off two weeks of transit time, a savings of nearly a quarter of the shipping costs. For Russia, this new shipping lane in their backyard was a gold rush they intended to protect at all costs.
On the Canadian side of the pole, there was a similar ice-free passage, but it was tricky to navigate and therefore not as profitable. The Russian government understood information was power, so Captain Zaitsev and the fearless crew of the Sovershennyy were here to show the flag and gather information.
Sergei picked up his field glasses and scanned the empty horizon. The HMCS Ottawa, a Canadian frigate visible only on radar, was some fifteen nautical miles ahead carving a wake into the calm Arctic waters.
He wondered about the captain of the Canadian ship. Based on his position reports, his mission was to patrol the edge of his own country’s exclusive economic zone, a responsibility about as useful as Sergei’s own mission.
The Chinese were in the mix now, too. Unlike the Americans, the Chinese poured money into their Arctic program. For the last ten days, the latest ship in the Chinese fleet, the icebreaker-research ship the Snow Dragon, had been fifteen miles behind the Sovershennyy.
