Executive orders - Tom Clancy [350]
Transient, transient, mechanical transient bearing two-six-one, sounds like a noisemaker, probably released by contact Sierra-Fifteen. The torpedo bearing is now two-six-seven, estimated speed four-four knots, bearing continues to change north to south, sonar reported next. Hold it-another torpedo in the water bearing two-five-five!
No contact on that bearing, could be a helo launch, the senior chief said.
He'd have to discuss one of those sea stories with Mancuso when he got back to Pearl, the captain thought.
Same acoustical signature, sir, another homing fish, drifting north, could also be targeted on Sierra-Fifteen.
Bracketed the poor bastard. This came from the XO.
It's dark topside, isn't it? the captain thought suddenly. Sometimes it was easy to lose track.
Sure is, sir. From the XO again.
Have we seen them do night helo ops this week?
No, sir. Intel says they don't like to fly off their 'cans at night.
That just changed, didn't it? Let's see. Raise the ESM mast.
Raise the ESM, aye. A sailor pulled the proper handle and the reed-thin electronics-sensor antenna hissed up on hydraulic power. Pasadena was running at periscope depth, her long sonar tail streamed out behind her as the submarine stayed roughly on what they hoped was the borderline between the two enemy fleets. It was the safest place to be until such time as real shooting started.
Looking for-
Got it, sir, a Ku-band emitter at bearing two-five-four, aircraft type, frequency and pulse-repetition rate like that new French one. Wow, lots of RADARs turning, sir, take a while to classify them.
French Dauphin helos on some of their frigates, sir, the XO observed.
Doing night ops, the captain emphasized. That was unexpected. Helicopters were expensive, and landing on tin cans at night was always dicey. The Chinese navy was training up to do something.
THINGS COULD BE slippery in Washington. The nation's capital invariably panics at the report of a single snowflake despite the realization that a blizzard might do little more than fill the potholes in the street, if only people would plow the snow that way. But there was more to it than that. As soldiers once followed flags onto a battlefield, so senior Washington officials follow leaders or ideologies, but near the top it got slippery. A lower-or middle-level bureaucrat might just sit at his post and ignore his sitting department Secretary's identity, but the higher one went, the closer one came to something akin to decision or policy making. In such positions, one actually had to do things, or tell others to do things, from time to time, other than what someone else had already written down. One regularly went in and out of top-floor offices and became identified with whoever might be there, ultimately all the way to the President's office in the West Wing, and though access to the top meant power of a sort, and prestige, and an autographed photo on the office wall to tell your visitors how important you were, if something happened to the other person in the photo, then the photo and its signature might become a liability rather than an asset. The ultimate risk lay in changing from an insider, always welcome, to an outsider, if not quite always shunned, then forced to earn one's way back inside, a prospect not attractive to those who had spent so much time getting there in the first place.
The most obvious defense, of course, was to be networked, to have a circle of friends and associates which didn't have to be deep so much as broad, and include people in all parts of the political spectrum. You had to