Power Play (29 page)

“You’ve known him a long time?”

“Yes, I have . . . He saved my life on the oil rig.”

The navy car swept through the dark northwestern suburbs of Washington, and the two men rode in silence, until Mark Bradfield broke it.

“Where will he go now, Mack?” he asked.

“I think back to Tel Aviv. He hasn’t been home for a while. There’ll be a lot of people who want to talk to him.”

“I suppose so. Is he married?”

“Only to Israel. He’s a real Sabra of the blood: born there, Orthodox, and prepared to die for Israel, anytime, even if he’s the last man standing.”

“I guess it runs in the family. Bren Adan was probably the greatest Israeli field commander in history. And there’s been a few.”

“I don’t see him that often. But we’re never out of touch. I count him as one of my closest friends.”

“Well, he’s sure put us straight. We got the satellites in a line watching all the critical points—Severomorsk, Black Sea, Panama, GIUK Gap, and Solovetsky. We got NSA interception and the National Reconnaissance Office and the CIA on the case. Anything breaks, we’re on it.”

“Just one thing worries me,” said Mack, “and that’s our lack of hardware. If we spot something big, the Brits do not have a warship or even an ASW aircraft to deal with a problem. We may or may not have something in the area. But our problem remains constant. We don’t have big warships, or SEAL teams, or ASW aircraft, or top surveillance, in the northeastern Atlantic. And if we did, we don’t have anywhere to put ’em.”

That silenced the CNO. And just then the car pulled up outside the Mayflower Hotel.

“Gives us both something to think about, right?” said Mack as he climbed out. “See you tomorrow, 0900 sharp, with Simon Andre.”

 

 

 

A meeting such as this would normally have been carried out on the third floor, in the office of the most senior man, the world-traveled, geopolitical, intellectual secretary of defense, Simon Andre. However, this was all a little too close to “Action Stations.” The office of the CNO was much more of a navy ops room than the political hub of the Pentagon. In the entrance was a serving lieutenant commander, assistant to the CNO, plus a labyrinth of communications to US warships, bases, and all significant government departments.

The Harvard-educated Simon Andre was a veteran US ambassador, having, by gross personal miscalculation, ended up in the embassies of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Nairobi, Zagreb, and Beijing, drawing the comment
from General Lancaster, “Poor bastard’s seen more high explosive than Rommel.”

He was a calm and assured man, and he had been very thoroughly briefed on the FOM-2 operation, even before this first meeting with the principal US informants and advisers, Admiral Mark Bradfield and Captain Mack Bedford.

No one understood better than he the gravity of the loss of the Royal Navy. He also understood the breadth of the Russian problem and the obvious increase in its naval ambitions. No one was more clued in on the sly and disconcerting relationship Russia had with China. And few men knew with more certainty that Markova was a throwback to the old Soviet Union, a hard-eyed and ice-cold devotee of the KGB, currently disguised as a modern president.

Simon Andre had no doubt about the validity of the Russian threat, no doubt they would carry it out precisely as planned, given the chance. His many diplomatic contacts had long advised him how angry Moscow was about the humiliation in Iran.

And now it was time to act. Andre was the first of the three principals into the Pentagon that morning, looking forward to his new briefing by Mark Bradfield and talking to the best known of all Coronado’s SEAL commanders.

The question was, could anything be done before Russia made its opening move? And where, if anywhere, could the United States find a new naval station, with submarine facilities attached, plus a SOSUS listening station? This was the topic that occupied Bradfield, Bedford, and Andre for almost the entire morning. It was quickly agreed that the cerebral issues involving surveillance, electronic spying, and satellite strategies could probably be dealt with if the United States was prepared to offer 100 percent financing to countries like Norway, Denmark, Holland, or even France or Portugal.

But some of these were financially unstable, no place to invest, in Simon Andre’s opinion. Besides, all of them were reluctant to permit docking space to park regular surface US warships, never mind submarines. All these peripheral countries seemed to live in dread that, sooner or later, the United States would upset someone so badly, they themselves would become targets for retaliatory aggression. None of them had that tough old British attitude that all other nations were ultimately inferior to
the United States and United Kingdom—and they could take their nervous little concerns and shove ’em right up their jumpers.

They were well into the meeting when Admiral Bradfield played his surprise card for the first time. “It is my opinion,” he said, “that we have one standout country for all this—and I speak of a nation that traditionally loves us, feels we are a part of them, and may welcome us with open arms . . . Gentlemen, I refer to the emerald paradise of the North Atlantic, the Republic of Ireland.”

Mack Bedford had fleetingly heard this before. But Simon Andre was astonished and looked up sharply. “Ireland?” he said. “Well, how about that?”

“How about it?” replied the CNO. “Our first requirement for a new US Navy base is obvious—deep water inshore, an Atlantic vista, hopefully a nation that speaks English, and a coastline with a lot of bays and anchorages. It needs to be long and varied, cliffs and beaches, and a willing, educated workforce that will push hard if you pay ’em.”

Simon Andre, whose French ancestors had never set foot in the Republic of Ireland in ten thousand years, asked only one question: “How long is their Atlantic coast?”

And that did not stump Mark Bradfield. “It’s more than two hundred miles from Cape Clear in County Cork to Killybegs, a fishing town in Donegal in the North. If you can’t find a place somewhere there, you’re not looking hard enough.”

“And does all of that coastline face the Atlantic?”

“Every last yard. In the South you have deep indents cutting into the land in Cork and Kerry, then there’s the Shannon Estuary and County Clare, then Galway, Mayo, and Sligo. Donegal’s top left with a huge coastline that includes about a thousand bays and the highest cliffs in Europe.”

“How do you know all this?”

“My parents go there almost every year for a couple of weeks. Mom’s family is from Kerry. I spent a lot of time over there when I was a kid.”

“Mark,” said Simon Andre, “are you really serious? Do we actually think it’s possible to build and staff a new US Navy base in southern Ireland?”

“I am serious. We need somewhere of our own in the eastern Atlantic. Ireland has better credentials than anywhere else; geographically it’s easily the best, educationally it’s the best, as a nation they love us, and, most important of all, they’re broke.”

“It’s also got a mild climate, I believe,” said Simon Andre thoughtfully. “And if you’re blasting and building right on the Atlantic Ocean, that’s a consideration. A west wind gusting off the sea is a relative pain in the ass, but it’s twenty times worse when the wind is freezing, and it’s about to bring in a blizzard, and there’s ice everywhere.”

“That’s not Ireland,” said Admiral Bradfield. “You get palm trees in many parts of the country because they don’t have any serious cold.”

“Look, I accept the theoretical merit of such a plan,” mused Simon Andre. “In many ways, it would be ideal. But what the hell is the Irish government going to say when we call and suggest we’d like to build a modern version of the Norfolk Navy Yards in the middle of Galway Bay?”

At this point, Mack Bedford was punching the keyboard on his laptop, pulling up various maps of the west coast of Ireland. “I’ll tell you something, Admiral,” he said. “The northern part of that coastline is farther north than Newfoundland . . . Are you sure it’s warmer?”

“I know it’s warmer,” said Mark Bradfield. “And it’s because of the Gulf Stream, which flows across the Atlantic and washes onto the first shore it reaches, and that’s the west coast of Ireland.”

Simon Andre looked up and said, “Listen, gentlemen, it is clear to me that the United States must have either a base or a very strong ally in the eastern Atlantic. It makes no sense for us to be thousands of miles away from the Russian Navy’s highway into the rest of the world.

“Let’s look at this Irish situation, just exploratively for the moment. But let’s take on board the three salient issues: geographic, political, and economic. That should give us three sound directions in which to proceed: first, a short list of places where we could put a new base; second, how we propose this to the Irish government; and third, what it will cost in terms of building and persuading Ireland it’s a good idea.”

It was not difficult to see how Simon Andre had been a mainstay of US overseas policy since his early thirties. It would not have been a big stretch for an average bureaucrat to have made 374 points about this particular naval proposition, spanning about seven thousand pages with notations, flotations, rotations, and God knows what else.

Simon Andre had it wrapped up in three short sentences. And he achieved it with an effortless certainty. No one in the room was in any doubt of the task that stood before them. All of them had seen the engraved copperplate writing, framed on the wall behind the defense secretary’s
great mahogany desk. It read:
Let me see a complete reorganization of the North Atlantic fleet’s defensive strategy against Nazi U-boats. And if it won’t go on one side of one sheet of paper, it hasn’t been properly thought out—Winston Churchill.

Simon Andre was a devotee of Great Britain’s World War II prime minister. He owned every book Sir Winston ever wrote and was a board member of the Churchill Society, which meets every year in Independence, Missouri, 120 miles west of Fulton, where the great orator made the immortal speech on March 5, 1946:
An Iron Curtain has descended . . . dividing Europe into East and West.

The prospect of a new and vitally important naval project on the far side of the Atlantic was precisely the kind of grandiose scale that Simon Andre liked to ponder. He was a realist and a romantic, and he was one of those Americans who believed this granite-hewn nation should never drop its guard.

Simon Andre was not so much an admirer of Churchill as he was a disciple. He believed that when the mighty bulldog of Britain’s Parliament bowed out in 1955, the beat of its heart was never the same again. And today, more than a half century later, America’s political head of defense often ran a military problem through the back of his mind, just checking, wondering whether Winston would have approved.

And one thing he knew for absolute sure and certain—a new modern US Navy base, tucked secretly into a clandestine and lonely bay on the west coast of Ireland, glowering unseen at the Russians, packed with electronic venom, firepower, and seagoing efficiency, above and below the surface: Winston would have loved it.

“I may be second-guessing you, Mack,” he said, “but I imagine you would like this new place, wherever it is, to be built with a US Navy SEAL training area?”

“I think so, sir,” replied Mack. “One of our biggest problems has always been quick deployment. We are all set East Coast and West Coast, Virginia Beach and Coronado. But when you think about it, they’re both a long way from the rest of the world.

“You remember all that fuss we had with the Somali pirates—just because it took us so darned long to get to the middle of the Indian Ocean. It would be terrific if we could deploy direct from southern Ireland. Save us hundreds of hours of preparation.”

“Well,” said Secretary Andre, “there is obviously an element of intense secrecy about all this. I think you should be tasked with the preliminary geographic study of Ireland’s west coast with a view to locating suitable harbor sites. I don’t think Admiral Bradfield will object?”

“Certainly not,” said Mark.

“I will personally investigate the political procedures, and perhaps, Mark, you could look into the costs of building such a structure on a virgin coastline, bearing in mind that basic materials like steel and concrete must be shipped in from somewhere. Not to mention labor.”

“Affirmative,” replied Admiral Bradfield. “Time frame?”

“A week,” said Andre. “I expect Mack here wants to get back to base this afternoon, and there’s not much we can do about the Russians except to keep watching. So why don’t we break until next Monday, September 24, 0900, right here?”

So the meeting broke up. Assured the US satellites were watching with the greatest possible vigilance, each of the three returned to his own domain, Admiral Bradfield checking in with Captain Ramshawe at the NSA to keep them both posted if any suspect pictures came into Chantilly.

Mack hitched a ride on a navy flight returning to San Diego from Andrews Air Force Base. With a three-hour time gain, he made it back by late afternoon and reported to Admiral Andy Carlow, the SPECWARCOM commander, for a thorough debriefing about his immediate tasks.

That proved to be an agreeable meeting because the emperor SEAL had long fretted about the US Navy’s lack of an exclusive base in or around the UK. A brand-new facility in western Ireland would be a terrific asset, and if they could find the right place, Admiral Carlow would heavily back any attempt to do the deal with the Irish government.

All of this flying around as some quasi spy/diplomat had taken a minor toll on the fitness of the commander of SEAL Team 10. The following morning he was out of bed at 0430 (0730 on the East Coast) to greet his men on the grinder, pacing around while his instructors shook the class into action before sending them down to the Pacific beach to complete eighty push-ups before the morning running.