Shadow in the Night

Since we were invited, we all pitched in with the preparation for dinner; or rather we stood in each other's way trying to organize a three-course meal. Naturally this was delightful, too.

The same could also be said about the meal, itself. A committee of expert cooks had superbly prepared it. We had shrimp from a can for a shrimp cocktail, spinach from Ross' garden, roast beef from his freezer, cake that Heather had made in the morning, and in-between a bottle of wine from Ross' cellar, the bottle that he had offered earlier, a spicy red wine from a small winery in the Napa Valley some two thousand miles away at the opposite end of the country. Ross said that he had saved it for a special occasion, and that this seemed to be such a one.

With the meal concluded, Ross suggested that we should also consider staying for the night since the storm was brewing up into something much bigger than had been forecast on the weather report. He made some phone calls to confirm that the pattern had changed. The clouds became darker by the minute, moving in much faster now, accompanied by lightning. White caps could be seen on the water. "This is no time for camping," said Ross.

Ross and I had left the balcony where the dinner had been served, to report to the weather service that the storm was bigger than expected and was pulling whitecaps on the open waters. Ross felt that a small-craft warning should have been issued. He had a small telescope set up that he used for measuring the movements of clouds to calculate the wind speed. I voiced my astonishment that this was possible.

"It's nothing accurate," he said and pointed to the ceiling. "There is a small tower on top of the roof that contains the real instrumentation. I only calculate the variance between that and the open sea."

Heather, Tony, and Sylvia were busy clearing the table and finishing up in the kitchen. The dishes were already put away when I brought the empty wine glasses back. Heather had refilled them again to use up the little that had been left from dinner. She called to Ross and suggested that we should join them on the porch once we were done making the weather report. Ross agreed, but added that he first wanted show me some more of the results of his latest research work.

After the weather report call was made Ross asked me to wait in his office for a moment while he went back to the kitchen to get us some more to drink. "Is orange juice alright?" he called back.

I told him it would be great. While he was gone I overheard Sylvia on the balcony speaking to Heather. The conversation was about me.

"...You don't need to apologize for what has happened," said Sylvia to Heather.

"I wouldn't dream of it. I had the most wonderful time in my entire life during those days with Peter," Heather replied. "Something like that doesn't happen to one every day. I will never deny something that was so precious to me. But I can't tell you more than that."

"No, please don't."

"You probably wouldn't understand what I mean," said Heather. "I can hardly understand it myself. You're married to him, but I love him just the same. This was the first real love I ever knew. I think you will never know what it took that day to leave him on his way back to you. Running off was the only thing that I could do."

"Don't forget that we are in love, too," said Sylvia.

"Of course you are, but that's not the way it was when I got married to Winston," said Heather. "What a slavery that was! For Winston, everything was allowed, because of my marriage to him, everything cruel that is. Love was no longer a factor. I was a piece of inventory under his control. He said at one time, once you're married you don't need to be in love. I can tell that your marriage will never be like that. Pete would never dream of saying such a thing to you, or to anyone else. I could feel that he was in love with you, even then, both with you and with me, and with others too. Winston, on the other hand, had four girlfriends, and I'm sure he loved none of them. He said it was his right to have them. I can't imagine Pete ever saying a thing like that, not even about Ursula Fleischer. Nor did I feel cheated when Pete talked to me about you, or about her. It was nice to feel his love for you, and for Ursula, because I realized that he felt the same about me. I even have a hunch that he may have come to love you more, because of me. It's just a feeling. Something that was growing while we were together."

"Pete told me that loving you was the most natural thing," said Sylvia.

"I think it had something to do with what had happened to him in East Germany," said Heather.

"Did he tell you much about East Germany?" said Sylvia.

Heather nodded. I could see her reflection in the glass of the hummingbird feeder.

"Tell me, did you feel cheated in any way when he told you about what had happened in East Germany, though it happened only a few days before?" asked Sylvia.

"I've always felt cheated by Winston, never by Pete. It was exciting to hear Pete talk about his experiences, to hear him speak with such deep respect about other women. How could I feel cheated by that? It was nice to be able to sense what he felt, to sense the passion in his love, the joy, and the warmth, even to sense that the passion for love had not died out in the world. It was marvelous to listen to him, to the way he spoke about Steve and his wife. But then I wasn't married to him. Maybe you felt differently. Did the thought of it make you angry?"

Sylvia nodded.

"I can understand this," said Heather. "It's a natural reaction if one believes what we were taught. Winston certainly was big in demanding his territorial rights. I think it gave him a sense of security, owning me, not having to worry about my reactions as they were guaranteed to him by contractual loyalty. I think it gave him a sense of status and power. But he never knew the price this exacts from another. Maybe that's why there are so many divorces."

"You were divorced, then?"

Heather shook her head. "No, at first I buckled under," said Heather. "Life became agonizing and dull. It's terrible to see one's sensitivities go out the window. I became irritable. Finally I couldn't deal with the least bit of stress anymore. But it wasn't all his fault, he had a lot of stress to deal with."

Heather started to tell Sylvia all about Winston, how he went from the university to the steel industry as a process engineer. A year later he got laid off when the steel prices eroded. "We were barely able to hold on to our house," said Heather. "He was re-hired only once after that. He was hired for a brief period, to oversee the demolition of six brand new unused blast furnaces, which the company could no longer afford to pay taxes on. This must have felt like cutting his own throat."

Heather said that she and Winston left the city right afterwards, and moved to Kansas where he worked on his father's farm. But the farm was in trouble, too. "It was technically bankrupt like thousands of farms were in the area. More and more the conversation was about cost-cutting, trying to hold off the foreclosure they all knew deep inside would eventually happen. Their only consolation was that they were not alone in this plight. Winston's father always said that 417,000 other farms were bankrupt also. This seemed to give him hope. Then came the drought.

"The drought was heartbreaking," said Heather. She told Sylvia that Winston and his father would walk out into a field and break open some kernels of barley and just stare. She saw tears in his father's face. The kernels were hollow and much too light. The crop wasn't even worth the expense of harvesting it. They put cattle out to graze it. One of them died, because of a too high concentration of nitrogen from the fertilizer that hadn't been fully converted for the lack of water.

She told Sylvia that those pressures made Winston unbearable. He became mean, swore at her, and even hit her. But this wasn't the reason she left. She said that the final straw was his father becoming involved with the New Unity Church that was catering to financially troubled farmers. The church pushed a hate campaign against the 'Jewish devil,' the grain cartel operators that were about to devour their farms. The church told the farmers they were God's chosen people and urged them to defend themselves. So Winston and his father, like many others, went and bought themselves automatic weapons and boxes of ammunition.

"That's when you got divorced?" Sylvia asked.

"No, that would have been too painful. I simply walked out. It was a thousand times better to be alone, lonely, and destitute, than to be locked into such an explosive prison. Maybe this was also the reason why I allowed myself to fall in love with Pete on the very day we met. He was so free, so uncomplicated. He made no demands. He appreciated my need to be myself. There was a gentle passion in the air that was totally beautiful compared to that phony romance Winston and I had before we got married. Pete's love opened like the pedals of a flower in the morning sun. Everything unfolded by itself with no one pushing anything. Everything was easy and natural between Pete and me, and much more beautiful than any contrived romance could be. I don't think I really knew what love is, until then, and how its fire can lighten the world. I only knew what hate is."

Heather told Sylvia that she couldn't comprehend whom Winston and his father had thought they would shoot at with their guns. If it was really the cartels that were squeezing them, they would never be able to shoot at the people who had them under their thumb. The rulers of the cartels would never be found outside of their villas in Switzerland. The local bank would get the sheriff to evict the farmers once the foreclosure notice was served. They would then instruct the local real estate agent to sell the farm at auction. Then another real estate agent would put up a few pennies to buy the property in order to fill the land purchase orders that came from the cartels. She said they would have to shoot their own people with their machine guns.

Heather said that the language that was used scared her the most. They were calling Hitler their brother. She said that it was devastating to see how many fields were left bare once the farms were auctioned off. She could certainly see how this Hitler-type violence could attract a simple-minded farmer, a person who had worked all his life on the land and was about to loose it for no fault of his own.

Heather said that in a way she couldn't fault the farmers for being so angry, seeing all this productive capacity being idled when the funds simply weren't available anymore to plant the new crops, and this while human beings were starving to death in Africa, and even at home in the slums of the cities. The empty fields meant that plagues and deadly diseases could spring up again, caused by malnutrition, even some that for a long time were deemed a thing of history.

"I'm sorry you had to go through all this," Sylvia interrupted her.

"No, don't be sorry," Heather replied. "I've come out of this richer. I've come to realize that no one in the world has any power over me: no man, not even Pete; or any thing, including nuclear war. If a Russian bomb kills us tomorrow, so be it. I had life, and I had wonderful experiences. If it ends tomorrow, fine! The threat of it won't get me down today. This attitude, I got from Pete. He was so alive! His answer was that life is not an Olympic competition in which only one person out of the whole world can win. He said that life is love. He said, its principle is universal love. He didn't really know how to explain this. However, by the way he acted it was plain to see that he regarded the Principle of Universal Love that he discovered in East Germany, to be the only platform in the world that he could think of on which everybody wins. He was excited about this. I think we should all be."

"Unless we manage to screw this up, too," Sylvia interrupted her. "I nearly screwed this up in a big way."

Heather nodded. "That's easy to do, especially when all this is new. It doesn't seem real at first. At first it comes to light as something too good to be real. But eventually it did seem real. I didn't know this at first," said Heather. "I just felt that Pete had opened up a whole New World for me, a world that I never knew could exist. Yes, I did manage to screw this up. I think I have hurt Peter badly when I walked out. I think I did this on order to make it easier for us all to reestablish the Old World again. The challenges became too great. That's how I screwed up. Still, the sparkle of this New World that I had turned my back to, never did go away. It became a way of life that I am trying to hold on to. It made me love everybody more. I hope to bring some of that into Ross' life now."

"Yes, that is what Peter had proposed to me that we should all do for one-another," said Sylvia. "I was furious at first that he would even consider something like that. I answered him by proposing a divorce, but he just kept on loving me and fighting for me, raising me up. Eventually I did begin to sense the sparkle that you are talking about, of what he called the Principle of Universal Love. I never heard of a thing like that before. Now that I am beginning to be touched by it, I can barely imagine what a wonderful world we would live in if this were to happen on a global scale. However, Peter goes still further. He says that we have no choice, really, but to make this New World a reality. He says that the Old World has become too dangerous for us all to live in, in which no one might survive or very few. Still, I think what really drives him is the sparkle of the New World. I think that's the real gem."

"And why shouldn't it drive him, Sylvia," said Heather. "Can't you imagine what a wonderful world we really have within our grasp in which everybody wins, in which nobody looses? Right now we live in an Olympic world in which everybody in the world looses, except a few. In our Olympic world the entire game that we play revolves around a vicious struggle of beating everybody to the punch. That is why nobody wins. Can you imagine what the world will be like if this becomes history and we support one-another to such a degree that everybody wins in life? That's the sparkle that I saw in Pete, which I want to see everywhere. That's the New World that I want to live in as much as possible. Of course, getting there from where we are right now is a huge challenge. It seems almost impossible to get there. However, even against these odds, Pete pushes himself ahead. I think, sometimes he is quite scared about it, actually."

Sylvia nodded reluctantly.

Heather began to laugh. "Let me tell you about this strip joint in Key West," she added. "We came to this place without knowing what it was. Pete didn't walk out when he discovered what the pub was that we went to. It had featured live music for lunch, and had been recommended to us for its renowned fish fillets. Peter didn't seemed to be taken aback that it was also a strip-joint. Instead of being embarrassed he merely commented that the people in this place were probably more human, honest, and open to life than the entire Admiralty had been that had been squeezing information out of him for a week during the debriefing sessions, demanding information about East Germany that would betray the very people that had been his host."

I noticed with some surprise when I heard Sylvia and Heather talk on the balcony that Heather sounded like Lora the stripper. She even suggested to Sylvia that I probably would have invited her and Tony to this pub just for that very reason, if I had known this to be a strip palace, which I didn't. Yes, she had figured me out all right.

"Even under those circumstances it was nice to watch Pete enjoy life unimpeded," said Heather to Sylvia. "Of course he would never admit that he really enjoyed what he saw, at least some of it. He played the old game that one isn't supposed to enjoy that sort of thing in the presence of a lady. Fortunately, he played the game poorly. I just couldn't help loving him for whatever he did," she said. "Life is too short to let anything that is so intrinsically good slip away in self-imposed poverty, don't you agree?"

Their talking stopped right after that. I couldn't see why. I couldn't see the balcony from where I was. But I could see their reflection in the hummingbird feeder. They were embracing one-another.

"Would you like to spent a night with Pete again?" Sylvia asked quietly.

"If he still wants me," Heather replied in a happy voice. "It's up to him."

Luckily Ross came back at this point carrying a pitcher of freshly made orange juice. I was beginning to feel uncomfortable, then, about what was going on. I needed an excuse for going out onto the balcony to stop the girls discussing me. I picked on the first thing that came to mind.

"Say, Ross, what's with that boat out there in front of our bay?" I said to him. It pointed to a fishing boat, the only boat that was out there to be seen, the only thing that I could point to. The small boat also seemed rather vulnerable in the storm. The storm had already caught up with it. "Do you think they might be in trouble?" I said. "Should we go onto the balcony and take a look?"

Ross turned around and looked out the window. He looked stunned. He set the pitcher of orange juice down onto his desk and the glasses he brought without taking his eyes off the fishing vessel. He muttered something indecipherable that sounded like, "My God, here we go!"

He turned to me seconds later. "That isn't a fishing boat, Pete." He had stopped smiling at this point. His face had become tense. "This is a Russian surveillance ship, disguised as a fishing trawler. Damn! They shouldn't be so close to the shore!"

Ross grabbed a pair of binoculars that were hanging near the door of his office and rushed out onto balcony.

"Damn!" he shouted moments later and slammed his fist onto the glass-panel railing. All it took was a brief glance.

I was beginning to wonder what kind of coastal surveillance duty Ross was involved in. He stood on the balcony like a naval commander overseeing a battle.

"Here, take a look!" he said, handing the binoculars to me, shaking the hand that he had hurt hitting the railing. "That's a Russian boat all right," he said and went back inside to the telephone.

"It's too heavy," his voice came thinly from his office. "No, our fishermen aren't that crazy to stay out in a storm like that!"

He closed the door while he spoke on the phone.

The boat seemed to be in trouble. I gave the glasses to Heather and then to Sylvia. Moments later Ross called us into his office. "We'll watch them with the big telescope," he said.

He was considerably calmer now. He turned the lights off in the office, opened both windows and removed the black velvet cover that had hidden a large reflective type telescope. He aimed it carefully towards the boat. It was an exquisite instrument, finished in velvet black and chrome, with not a scratch on it. He had it mounted on a heavy table. I was just about to comment on it when Sylvia and Heather came into the room.

"It looks like the boat is sinking," said Heather urgently as she came in. "Shouldn't someone radio for help?"

"It seems to me they have lifeboats in the water beside them," said Sylvia.

Ross ignored them both.

I gave the binoculars to Tony. He simply shook his head at what he saw.

Within seconds the telescope was outfitted with a video attachment and a computer controlled tracking device. Ross opened a closet beside his desk that contained the electronics for the thing and a large screen.

"All right then, let's see," said Ross while the computer was scanning for the fishing boat.

"I suppose we will know in a few seconds whether the boat is sinking or not," I said to Ross.

"Pray that it is sinking!" Ross answered.

Within moments the boat came into view in perfect focus. What we witnessed seemed remarkable to me, considering the relative darkness and the poor weather that was upon us by then. Ross operated the computer, zooming in so that the boat filled the entire screen. Then he switched to what he called "image processing," and the boat stood out in even more perfect detail. It was rather chilling to watch a Russian warship with such a detailed clarity. We could see the individual sailors on board. The boat certainly wasn't sinking.

"Look at this," Ross said. "It's one of the spy ships of the Soviet Northern Fleet. They have lots of these."

He told us while we watched that the Soviet's Northern Fleet is the largest of the four fleets of the Soviet Union. It is based at Murmansk on the Barents Sea, with the bulk of it being based farther south on the north side of the Kola Peninsula at a gigantic complex of naval bases and support installations that constitute the greatest concentration of military power anywhere in the world.

"Just look at the shape of the antenna on the lower stern deck. It is part of a high speed data link using satellite communication facilities. From there it goes all the way back to the Kola."

He told us that the Kola complex is 60 km long and includes 16 complete air bases, all with runways of over 2000 meters. "It's the hub of the Soviet northern flank and possibly the most defensible military location on the planet. The area is remote from population centers, tucked away behind northern Finland. It is superbly protected against air attacks by its physical location, being hidden between mountains. It is also protected against any possible naval intrusion, by being located at the end of a rather large inland sea. He said the Kola is also the most forward air defense station the Soviet Union has against strategic bombers using the polar route from the USA against the Soviet heartland."

It certainly was amazing to realize how much was tied into this little fishing boat that we watched.

"They might be watching us on TV at the Kola," Tony joked.

"They could very well do that," said Ross. "They're watching the entire coastline, especially up here near the Norfolk naval installations."

"They wouldn't be equipped with nuclear armed missiles?" Tony asked.

Ross shook his head. "Information gathering is their reason for being here. In a ten-minute nuclear war the precise timing of everything makes all the difference. They are monitoring everything that goes on."

Ross stepped aside and looked out of the window from where the boat was barely visible now in the growing darkness. "Damn! How dare they come so near to the coast!" he said angrily. "I wish the Coast Guard would believe me and chase them back out."

He went to the cabinet and turned the video recorder on. "They'll have to believe me now," he said.

I asked him what it was that the girls had recognized as lifeboats. I certainly couldn't see anything.

"They were on the left side," said Heather, "black, quite big, almost too big for lifeboats. There seemed to be two of them."

"Something is going on out there," said Ross, "I can feel it in my bones. Something doesn't add up." He went to the telescope again and added an infrared filter. The image processor adjusted itself accordingly. Suddenly Sylvia and Heather shouted in unison; "There it is!"

There was something indeed, like a lifeboat near the fishing vessel, or rather two, one beside the other. But they were too steady for lifeboats.

"No, those are submarines," said Sylvia calmly.

"What submarines!" yelled Ross, pushing Tony aside, who stood in his way. He added another filter. Now the black painted submarines were quite visible. "Quickly everyone, turn all the lights off in the house!" Ross shouted, "...in the kitchen too," he yelled at Tony, "quickly please!"

He worked some more with the image processor. On the screen before us were the clear outlines of two submarines, each one submerged almost to its tower that was barely visible. Both subs were aligned in parallel with the fishing boat.

"Get those lights out," Ross repeated, "if they see us watching, we may be as good as dead. And the basement lights too!" he shouted towards the kitchen.

After a little more fiddling the sub's identification markings became visible.

"That's an old Yankee-1 class sub. They are used as nuclear-powered supply ships and attack submarines," said Ross after a few moments, wiping the sweat off his forehead.

He said that the Northern Fleet has sixty percent of the Soviets' nuclear missile subs. He also told us that most of them are permanently stationed off the US coast for pin-down missions against ICBM fields. The goal is to prevent our missiles from being launched while their big SS-26s are coming in from Siberia to destroy our missiles in their silos. "Whoever strikes first, has nine-tenths of the battle won."

Ross added that the subs' missiles might also be targeted against our coastal cities to destroy the nation's harbor facilities. He suggested that such an attack might take somewhat less then three minutes, from start to finish. "Some of the subs' missiles might even be targeted against our strategic bomber fields," he said, "which can be reached in less than eight minutes.

"It's impossible to get any aircraft off the ground in that short of a time-frame," said Tony.

"That's the point!" said Ross. "That's the advantage of launching from submarines, apart from their deadly load being indefensible."

Ross told us that the two subs that we saw were an older model of the Yankee-1 class. They had been taken out of service as primary missile carriers, but had still plenty of life left in them to serve as cargo ships or as backup attack submarines, and of course also as backup missile carriers. He said that the subs supplied the spy ships up and down the coast. He just couldn't figure out why they had come so close to the shore. He said that they had never done this in the past.

He turned to me with a questioning lock. "I wish I could figure this out. They normally do this far out at sea. Why not now. This doesn't add up, Peter. It doesn't look good."

"Perhaps the sea is too rough farther out," suggested Tony.

Ross agreed that this might be the reason. "Let's hope you're right," he said. He added quickly, "though I doubt it."

Nothing much happened while we watched. It seemed as if they could see us watching them, and that they were now waiting for the darkness to settle in.

"The trawler and the subs might just be communicating," Tony surmised.

Ross was much calmer now when he went back to the telephone. He called Norfolk again. He told them that we were watching the whole show and that we had the whole thing on videotape. Norfolk decided they wouldn't intervene at this point.

Ross showed us where the launch tube hatches were. He said there were at least thirty Russian subs on station at any given time, just outside the US territorial limits, a few Yankee-1 ships, with the bulk made up of Delta-I, Delta-III and the newest Delta-IV boats. He said, at first the subs showed up during naval maneuvers. Then the maneuvers became more frequent until they finally remained on permanent patrol. Ross said that what we were seeing was an extremely rare showing of a supply submarine, not to mention two. He told us that we were watching two of the five supply boats that are believed to service all the spy boats on the East Coast. He said that this principle was being used on the West Coast as well.

He also told us that on extremely rare occasions one of the Soviet's giant Typhoon subs turns up. Each one of them carries twenty long-range, nine-warhead missiles. He said that the Typhoons usually operate only near Murmansk and are designed to hide out under the northern ice cap where they are supposed to weather out the first round of a nuclear exchange. Their task is to stage the after-show, to deliver the final, lethal load against any surviving US city, should there be no unconditional surrender.

I had heard about the existence of the giant Russian subs, but I had never seen one. However, I could will imagine them by the way Ross talked. The Ogarkov Plan was built around a credible capability for waging and winning a limited nuclear war. That much I knew for certain. I told Ross about it.

"Who controls the last strike controls the outcome," said Ross calmly. This is the law of the game. The Russians are totally aware of this. Expert chess players know how the game is won in a tight match.

When this episode started, I was tempted to ask Ross what organization he worked for. This large log house, the expensive equipment, none of that existed just for some ordinary Coast Guard duties, stargazing, or bird watching. I felt, he might be working for the Navy. I was curious.

"Are you CIA or Navy?" I asked him. But I was one second late. At this very moment the submarine closest to the spy boat began to unload cargo! A long crate was hoisted out of the tower by a temporary crane. The crate must have been fifteen feet long. It took three sailors to steady it. As soon as it cleared the hatch the crate was lowered onto the deck of the sub.

"A torpedo?" Tony asked.

"Don't be naive, that's a missile," said Ross. He reached for the telephone without taking his eyes of the screen. He had one of those programmable telephones. A single button did it all. "Come on!" he said impatiently.

As soon as the crate rested on the deck of the submarine, hooks were transferred, and it was lifted off again from there by the fishing vessel. The crate appeared heavy and difficult to handle in the rough sea. The fishing vessel was also a great deal less stable than the sub. It lifted the crate momentarily, then bounced it back onto the sub's deck as the ship bobbed up and down in the heavy swells. The crate also bumped against the sub's tower twice, but it didn't appear to have been damaged.

We stood petrified while this drama unfolded. I think we instinctively knew what this meant. No one dared to say it out loud. If this type of cargo transfer was happening all along the coast, we could be witnessing the prelude to the end? That's what I was thinking. I had asked Ross earlier if the Russians had the capability to win a nuclear war.

"If they play their cards right, yes!" had been his answer.

"Come on! Come on!" shouted Ross more and more impatiently into the telephone. "No, damn it, I want the operations desk," he yelled into the phone. "No, not that idiot! Give me Captain Simons... No damn, it can't wait! It's urgent I tell you, hurry! Tell Jack, Ross is on the line."

He waited again. The minutes must have seemed to him like an eternity. They certainly did so to me. "OK Jack, listen good," he started to say in a loud and firm manner. "I'm watching a Russian trawler some three miles outside of my place, he is taking cargo from a sub, a big crate, long, heavy, something quite big. It looks like a cruise missile! I want you to call Navy Command Center and the Air Force. No damn it, I can't get through. So you must do it for me. They have put me on hold and turned that damn music on. Innocent!!! Sure it may be totally innocent. It may be absolutely nothing. But we can't take the chance, Jack!"

There was silence at our end.

"No Jack, it doesn't look like a crate of engine parts. The crate is over fifteen feet long. It looks like a packaged cruise missile... No Jack, it appears to be too small and too light for a ballistic missile... You don't think it's a missile. Believe me it is... Get Fred involved. No, I don't want to call him from here. I don't want my line tied up with bureaucrats in Washington. I need you to act as my communications center. You guys are more important to me right now... Oh, you got Fred already. That was quick work. What does he think? A cruise missile? Yes, that's what we thought... Gosh I hope not... Hold it Jack! Hold everything! Damn, here comes a second one out of that sub! Yes you heard me swear. I said they are hoisting another crate out... Yes, it's the same size and shape. No, it doesn't look like fuel or engine parts, I told you that... OK, that's a good idea, I agree you should alert NORAD. Right Jack. No, no, no, don't you dare! Have you gone mad? What can you do by yourself with a Coast Guard cutter against a modern submarine? ...Do I see guns? No, I haven't seen any guns. I'm sure though, they have guns on board... What do you mean it is your duty to go and investigate? Let the Air Force go out and take a look!"

Ross put the receiver down and shook his head, but he didn't hang up. He slammed his fist on the desk, angrily. "That idiot is getting himself killed," he said bluntly. "The Coast Guard is on its way. What the hell does he think he can do with a Coast Guard cutter? Jack's way out of his league, messing with nuclear subs."

The second unloading operation proceeded much smoother than the first, and at a more hectic pace. The weather had become worse and by the looks of it there was more to come.

"Those guys are insane," commented Ross, "look at the waves and the spray whipped up by the gust."

It was quite a show. It was a miracle the sailors weren't blown off the deck of the sub. How they managed to guide a heavy piece of cargo out of the hole and transfer the hoisting hooks in mid air in a storm like that was unbelievable, but they did it.

Ross reached for the phone. "Listen, here comes the third crate now. It is coming from the second sub. What do you think is going on? A first strike!!!"

I closed my eyes. The Ogarkov Plan is for winning a thermonuclear war. Its maximum option is a blueprint for a calculated first strike attack. "Whoever calls the first strike controls the battle," I remembered Ross saying.

"No Sir," I heard Ross answering the phone again, "No I didn't tell Jack to go out! I specifically told him not to go. I have witnesses here that can confirm that. Jack went on his own. Can you call him back? ...No, I don't believe the Russians have spotted him yet. But I don't know... What did my boss say? He thinks the situation is becoming delicate? God he has a way with words. It's damn scary if you ask me. Isn't anyone doing anything?... No Sir, Jack may force them to do something rash... I hope you can call him back, Sir... No, no, please don't hang up, I'll stay on the line."

After the third crate was dangling over the side of the fishing boat, before it was even lowered onto its deck, the second sub's tower crane was being disassembled. The first of the subs began to submerge. Then the second sub slid out of sight. The wave action caused the crate to hit the deck of the fishing trawler apparently quite hard. After this all the lights were turned off.

The trawler was barely visible now. It had become dark. We could see only shadows. Ross managed to increase the contrast somewhat. The moving shadows were obviously people. One was lighting a cigarette. The match looked like a flare. Then there was a sudden commotion. Within seconds an old F-4 Phantom appeared low under the cloud cover, a mere shadow. It flew less than a hundred feet over the vessel as far as I could make out with the binoculars. The Phantom disappeared and came back for a second run. During the two over-flights nothing was moving on the boat that we could see on the monitor.

"They must have picked the F-4 up on radar," said Tony.

Seconds later the frantic activity started again. Then it stopped once more. We could make out someone on the bridge. A large shadow waving his arms around. The vessel changed course and began steaming south.

"I think they've seen Jack's cutter on radar," said Ross. He had barely gotten the words out when a cloud of smoke obscured the ship. There was a fire. Out of the fire a sleek object emerged, trailing smoke. It leveled off, moving towards us.

"God they're shooting at us!" yelled Ross.

I stood petrified, shaking, while the telescope tracking mechanism locked itself onto the shell and followed it, but soon lost it.

"No, they are not shooting at us," said Tony calmly. "I've seen incoming shells before. This is not a shell. It's coming in too slow, too low, and too steady. This is one of those cruise missiles that they've unloaded."

"I have heard about rocket-launched cruise missiles!" said Ross and grabbed the telephone receiver again. "Sir! One of the missiles has just been launched," he said calmly and quietly, as if he was in awe of it, or as if he felt that all hope was lost. "This means the war is on," he said quietly.

"No damn, the war has been on for years!" I shouted at Ross, and ran outside onto the balcony to watch the cruise missile fly by.

"Hello, hello, did you hear what I said?" said Ross, almost shouting into the telephone once again. I could hear him on the balcony. "Yes, I have said the Russian trawler has just launched one of those damn cruise missiles that they received!" The shock must have worn off. He was getting angry again. "Did you hear anything I said; they have launched a cruise missile! All right! Are you doing something about it? Condition Red.... OK!"

The missile flew by less then fifty feet from the house, a silent shadow passing through the night. Not a sound of it could be heard over the storm. I noticed Tony standing beside me. I turned to him instantly. "This is your moment to be King. Take charge! This is an Air Force matter."

Tony didn't answer. He rushed inside.

"You're the highest ranking Air Force officer that we've got. Get it shot down!" I yelled after him.

"Sure, sure, you think the Air Force will take care of it!" Ross yelled into the phone. "I would hope so. They better! They darn well get this thing down!"

Tony had a hand on Ross' shoulder as I rushed into the room after him, from the balcony. His other hand was on the phone. "I need this," he said to Ross. "If it is just a single missile, I'll get it," he said to Ross in a confident tone of voice.

Ross let him have the phone and stepped aside to the telescope. He shook his head while he tried to aim the telescope at the boat once more.

"The cruise is probably aimed at Norfolk," I said to Tony.

"That makes no sense," Tony replied while he was waiting for his dialing to get through the system. "Hitting Norfolk through the back door makes no sense to me," said Tony. "If they take this route they'll go for the big one. It makes sense for them to go for the big fish through the back door. That's Washington. They must assume that the front door will be watched. That leaves them only..." He stopped in mid-sentence.

"Dagmar? Tony here. Listen good, Dagmar. This is serious. There is a cruise missile on the way to Washington. I have seen it being launched from offshore. You might intercept it close to Seymour Johnson Base. My hunch is it will pass just to the East of Raleigh. But you won't have more than seven minutes to intercept. If you have any training mission in the air, reroute all aircraft immediately into the area southeast of Raleigh. You might also contact Shaw Air Force Base. But I think they are too far away. You might want to call Richmond base too, if you have a chance, they might possibly have some AWACS there that would be helpful. No, you don't have time to go through the command chain. You are the general in charge from this moment on. You don't even have enough time to waste to repeat this message. However, if you have someone on shift that outranks you, by all means get him to alert Langley Airforce Base. They've got the 1st and the 307th combat wing and the Air Force Control and Intelligence Center all in one place, and they're right in the projected flight path. What? You have already alerted Langley Base while we spoke? You already have a response? Wow, no one could have done it faster. Congratulations, General Dagmar... What do you mean by being just a night shift communications officer? You are the General in Chief in times like that." Tony hang up.

He turned to Ross. "If this was a technical failure and the Air Force is dealing with only one single missile, you can consider the job done. That's what General Dagmar said."

"Who the heck is General Dagmar?" Ross answered without looking up. "I never heard the name Dagmar mentioned before."

"General Dagmar is my sweetheart girl at Johnson Base, the nightshift communications officer. She has ordered every aircraft to intercept that is in the air near Johnston Base. She has also broadcast the alert to every station at Langley Base and got three replies already. She further alerted the Air National Guard in Richmond. Our best bet is Langley, though. They've got the right platforms. They can track this thing with AWACs that guide the fighters to shoot it down. Dag said, consider it done. She didn't even seem concerned. Of course, if this was a planned attack with swarms of these coming in from all sides..."

"God help us then!" said Ross and cut Tony off.

Ross got the scope tracking the boat again. By then the boat had turned towards the open sea, possibly trying to get away from Captain Simons' cutter.

"They won't outrun the Coast Guard," said Ross. "It's just a matter of time before Jack will catch up with them." He took the phone again.

The computer kept tracking the boat. We watched it steaming out to sea. We watched it with bated breath, though there wasn't anything exciting to see. Ross seemed to have gotten through to the Coast Guard. "Let me speak to Captain Simons... What do you mean, you can't allow..."

As he spoke the tracking screen went white. I noticed a flash far out over the water. Then came the sound of an explosion. It must have been a huge explosion for the sound of it to travel so far over the wind. When the tracking picture cleared the boat was no longer visible. There was floating debris. The boat hadn't actually sunk. It had disintegrated as though it had been filled to the brim with dynamite.

Ross relayed the event over the phone. "No, that couldn't have been Jack shooting at them. You of all people should know that the Coast Guard doesn't carry large weapons," he said. "It was either a suicide blast, or a kill by a submarine."

While we watched, a sub surfaced, probably looking for survivors.

"I don't think they want any witnesses left behind," said Sylvia.

We saw people at the tower of the sub shooting into the water.

"What a waste of fine sailors!" commented Ross. "Damn it all!!!"

"I can't believe what I'm seeing," mumbled Tony. "It looks like the guys on the sub are shooting at something all right. Why would they be killing the survivors?"

"Maybe they are shooting to sink some equipment that is still afloat," commented Ross.

Minutes later the sub submerged again.

"Jack may be in great danger!" said Ross and picked up the telephone again. "Why can't you stop Captain Jack Simons? He must stay out of this area! The submarines mean business. They appear to have shot their own survivors or whatever else floated about... Radio silence! My God, break the radio silence! You can't let Captain Simons run into this trap... Sure you can come and see the whole thing on video tape, but you better have Jack with you!"

Twenty minutes later, Captain Jack Simons and his crew sat with us in the living room. The tape was rewinding. The phone to the Coast Guard was still open. The CIA was on its way with a chartered floatplane to pick up the tapes. More people from the nearby Coast Guard and Navy station were also coming up. But before any of them arrived we had a private celebration.

"Hooray, the fly boys got the cruise shut down!" shouted Ross, with the phone still in his hand. "They've got it! They've got it! They got it ten miles out of Arlington."

I shuddered, realizing how close it had come. Another thirty miles and Washington would have been a wasteland.

They had told Ross on the phone that thanks to our warning, and someone hitting the right buttons at Langley Base, bypassing all the lines of command, they had been able to get three AWACs in the air. Thanks to General Dagmar the entire elite fighter team had volunteered. The team from Seymour Johnson base had established a radar sighting. The sighting provided data for the AWACS to be pre-positioned. The rest, they said, was nothing more than a simple textbook exercise. Ross also said that the Russians denied any knowledge of the incident.

We watched the video tape three times that night, once with captain Simons, once with the chaps from the Navy, and once more with the CIA agents that dropped by and took the tape away. After that, everyone left.

It was rather strange to have peace again. But the peace was superficial. Questions and arguments arose in my mind, none of which made much sense because we would never know what really had happened. The final secret went to the bottom of the sea with the men who had launched the missile.

The commander of the spy ship might have been drunk, or trigger-happy, or gone crazy under the pressure of the circumstances. Or the launch might have been caused by malfunctioning equipment, or by a plain honest mistake by one of the sailors who had worked too hard and too long under extreme stress in bad weather. Or something went wrong during the chaos while they were trying to outrun the approaching Coast Guard cutter.

The one thing I found odd though, was that the Russians didn't alert us that an accident had happened, and more than that, that none of our automatic sensing equipment had detected the cruise. It had slipped by our radar, our sound sensors, and our infrared detectors, and our sound sensors. Maybe the accident was good for us. Obviously, we needed better equipment with more modern technology. Maybe we needed laser radar technology or something else based on new physical principles.

After everyone had left, none of us felt like going to bed. Who could sleep after that? Ross turned his telescope on and set the computer up to scan for more boats. We didn't get to bed until four in the morning. Around three, Ross got another bottle of wine from the cellar. But nobody felt like celebrating. We had come through the most decisive event, probably in all of human history, as Ross suggested, and had narrowly averted a global disaster. Still, nobody felt like celebrating. No glasses were raised, no speeches were made. We sipped at the wine and hardly talked. The episode was like a horrible dream. There was no feeling of victory, only the kind of emptiness one feels after a nightmare.

If it were not for the dirt on the floors and the filled ashtrays as testimonials, it might all have been a nightmare indeed, so unreal did it seem.

We decided to scrub the floors before going to bed. I never thought it could be an invigorating exercise, scrubbing floors, waxing and polishing them.

We tidied up until the early morning news came on. It was the most wonderful newscast imaginable. There was a brief mentioning of the sinking of an unidentified fishing vessel during a storm off the coast of North Carolina. It was all packed into a single sentence that revealed nothing. Then came the sports report. Nothing was said about Russia's missile, about submarines, about the failure of our cruise missile detection system. The door was left open for diplomacy.

From: The Lodging for the Rose - Episode 3: Winning Without Victory