TSUNAMI STORM (3 page)

Bremerton, Washington

U.S. Navy Captain Paul Jacobs wore his civilian attire, a tailored light gray suit with a light blue tie. He was five-foot ten, a lean 175 pounds with short dark hair and a hint of gray around the temples. His facial features were firm and moderately muscular with gentle blue eyes and a quick smile. At 44 years old, he considered himself to be in the prime of his life.

His girlfriend of four years, Lynn Waggoner, opened the door to her apartment and motioned for him to enter. She was five-six, slim, with red hair and green eyes and a complexion that tended to freckle in the summer sun. She was a legal assistant in a large law firm in Seattle, but lived on the western side of Puget Sound, choosing to take the ferry back and forth to work rather than stand the expense of living in the city.

Jacobs noted that she had been un-customarily quiet during their dinner at DeLuca’s Italian Restaurant. “So what’s going on?”

She set her purse down on the kitchen counter and turned to face him. “I need more. I need things to change and I want you to be part of that change.” She approached him, sliding her hands up his chest and around his neck. He responded by putting his hands around her waist. She looked up into his eyes. “You’ve put your time into the Navy. You could retire. You would have a nice pension and if you want to work there are major military contractors who would give you an executive position, a good salary and benefits. We could get married, start a family. We could be together all of the time, not just one month out of every six to eight months. We could have a real life.”

“Look, you knew who I was when we first met. I’m a submarine captain. My life is at sea, protecting our country. I love you, you’re a wonderful woman, and I don’t want to lose what we have, but don’t ask me to choose between you and my country. I can’t do that.”
Is she concerned about getting too old to have children?
He’d been concerned about that for some time; it just hadn’t come into the conversation until now. “There’s nothing stopping us from getting married. I’d really like that. I’d like a family too. In two to four years the Navy may rotate me into a desk job, and then we can be together, just like you want.”

“They’ll transfer you far away from here. You know that,” she said in an irritated voice. “My family is here, my roots are here. I don’t want to have to pull up stakes and move to some strange place just so we can be together. I want to be
here
, so our kids can grow up with their grandparents and not be bounced all over the world. I’m ready to make that commitment to you – to be your wife, the mother of your children, but it has to be here, and it needs to be now. I need to know you can make the same commitment to me, here and now.” He pulled back and removed his hands from her waist. Her arms slid down and hung loosely at her side. Her expression shifted from hopeful to fearful. “Paul, if you really love me, you’ll do this for me. You’ll retire. Just put in your notice. They’ll find someone else to command the sub. Do this for me.”

Jacobs slowly backed away from her, staring down at the floor. Panic filled his heart and his mind felt like it was spinning. “I can’t… I…”

“You don’t have to decide tonight, Paul,” she said. “But it has to be soon. We can be a family; we can be happy. Just focus on that.”

Jacobs slowly turned and went to the door and opened it. He turned to face her and opened his mouth to speak, but there were no words that came. He closed his mouth, walked into the hallway and gently closed the door behind him.

* * *

Jacobs woke at 4:30 AM in his room in the Officers’ Quarters on the Bangor Submarine Base. He pulled his sweats on, tied his running shoes, draped a towel around his neck and headed to the athletic track. He pushed himself through a hard twenty laps on the quarter-mile oval, trying to force his conversation with Lynn out of his mind. It wasn’t working. Images of a baby and a toddler forced their way into his brain:
a son, a daughter, a legacy in my life other than a rounded piece of hardened steel, a submarine that would someday be scrapped and forgotten.
This was the first day the concept of leaving a legacy had come to him. Every day before now was simply about serving his country, leading his crew, doing his best. Only now did deeper thoughts and longer spans of time entangle his mind.

He walked back to the Officers’ Quarters, showered, changed and entered the Officers’ Mess Hall for breakfast. Commander John Silverton waved him over to a table. Silverton was his Executive Officer on the
Massachusetts
. Silverton was six feet tall, the maximum height for a submariner, due to the size of the water-tight doors that separate the rooms, known as compartments. He had sandy hair cut short with a slightly reddish face and an infectious smile. His blue eyes constantly moved from one place to another, quietly taking in every detail around him.

“You look down in the dumps,” Silverton commented. “What happened?”

“Lynn wants to get married, have a family.”

“Hey, congratulations! You guys set a date?”

Jacobs looked at him sadly. “But only if I retire.”

“Ahhh,” Silverton replied, the smile disappearing from his face. “Biological clock ticking?”

“I don’t know, maybe,” Jacobs replied. “Mostly, I think she has found a guy she loves and wants to create something more in her life. I think she’s tired of being left alone for months at a time. Honestly, I can’t blame her. I just don’t know if I can be that guy for her.”

Silverton sat back and studied him for a moment. “Damn. So what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” Jacobs said, his emotions vacillating at a rapid pace.

“Well, if you’re going to pull the plug and retire, the Squadron 5 Commander is going to need to know now. We’re due to deploy in ten days. He’s going to have to find a new captain.”

“I know,” Jacobs said. “I’ve got to figure this out today.”

“Well, if you need to talk this through, I’m here.”

* * *

As they left the Officers’ Mess Hall Jacobs paused to look at the Administration Building where the Squadron 5 Commander’s office was located. He tried to imagine himself walking in and handing his retirement request to the Admiral. It didn’t feel real. When they reached the sub, Jacobs walked slowly around the control room. He touched the tactical display, the periscope, and checked the familiar gauges mounted all around him. He tried to imagine walking away from the sub and having a family with Lynn. The image of a baby and a toddler pushed their way back into his mind along with thoughts of leaving a living legacy behind. He wandered the compartments of the sub imagining what it would be like to never see them again. By noon he knew what he had to do.

Falls Church, Virginia

Vice Admiral James Billingsly, Deputy Director of Covert Operations at the Pentagon, and his beautiful wife, Jessica, hosted their monthly dinner party in their palatial estate in Falls Church Virginia. The 6,280 square foot mansion was centered in 28 acres of sprawling countryside with picturesque landscaping and manicured lawns. The paver brick driveway entered through two large stone and mortar pillars with a wrought iron gate, and swept into a large circle in front of the house. A spur led to a five-car garage, behind which was the office for the Vice Admiral’s security detail in the back, out of sight of the road. A wrought iron fence surrounded the entire 28 acres and was patrolled regularly by Navy Shore Patrol and guard dogs.

Billingsly smiled and nodded politely through the social conversation during dinner.
Damn waste of time,
he thought.
I can’t see why women want to go through the whole social ritual, but at least I can get some work done at the same time.
He had carefully sought out and groomed the friendship with the two other men present at the dinner. The fact that they were top level bureaucrats in Washington excited his wife’s social sense, but it was their positions of power that interested him.
Elected politicians lack the long-term experience of dealing with other countries, which makes them unreliable. Besides, how dependable is the word of a political hack who will be doing something else in four years. No. You have to depend on the people who do the real work, decade after decade, just under the political veneer.

At the conclusion of the dinner, the three men retired to the study for cigars and Cognac. Billingsly slowly rolled the cigar in his mouth while he sucked the flame from the wood stick match into the flat end, igniting the tobacco. He had come up through the ranks of the Navy primarily through carefully planned political acumen. He had spent the minimum required time at sea, but his real strength was working people. He was 58 and in line for his fourth star, which would make him a full admiral and eligible for a position with the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon. He was five-ten, broad in the shoulders and carried his success in a moderate pot belly. The hair on the top of his head had long since thinned to the point where he generally kept all of his hair cut short. He wore thin wire-rimmed glasses and had blue eyes that sometimes appeared gray.

Billingsly looked at the two men he had recruited. They had been quietly working together for years, helping to shape and steer America’s relationship with other countries. Billingsly was anxious to hear about China.

“You told them, right?” Billingsly asked.

“I told them exactly what you said,” Ralph Cummings replied. “But you know they don’t believe in God, right?” Ralph was the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury and spent most of his time flying to countries all over the globe, arranging for the sale of U.S Bonds and Treasury Notes. Cummings was thin and tall, just over six-four. His medium gray suit always seemed to be wrinkled, as if he slept in the only suit he had. At 37, he was near the height of his career in the Treasury Department. His experience and connections made him more of a permanent fixture at Treasury and less subject to replacement with the political change of the Secretary of the Treasury that often took place with the periodic change of the presidency.

“So who’d you talk to in China?”

“Minister Hu Gao Chen of the Ministry of Commerce,” Cummings said.

“Well,” Billingsly said, taking another puff on his cigar and blowing it into a smoke ring above him, “maybe he believes now.”

“Come on,” Ralph said. “It’s a different world out there now. The global economy is changing. Hell, with Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa collaborating to create a new banking system, it’s no surprise the Chinese don’t want to buy more U.S. debt. Yeah, we pay them good interest, but the Chinese are committed to buying up as much gold as they can. That message was loud and clear when I was there. And telling them the God of America would punish them for refusing to buy U.S. debt was a joke – a bad joke. But I told ‘em, James, I told ‘em.”

“Good,” Billingsly replied. “I think you will find them more cooperative on your next visit.”

“Look,” Ralph said, “I get the American Gung Ho thing, I really do. But you have to understand; the Chinese aren’t some dumb backward country anymore. They’re savvy, shrewd business people. They aren’t thinking about today, or tomorrow, or next year. They’re looking a hundred years down the road, and you know what they see? They see China where the U.S. is today, the single super power in the world. Do you know what the Chinese character for China is?”

“I can hardly wait,” Billingsly replied taking another puff of his cigar.

“It’s a rectangle with a line drawn down through the middle of it. It means the center. That’s how they see China, the center of the world, the only center and the only power that will prevail over everything. God, or no God, they intend to rule the world.”

Billingsly smiled. “They don’t know what real power is. You can’t become what you don’t understand. We wield the real power in this world. Just you remember that on your next trip to China. You’ll see. They’re smart enough to know who holds the power and who doesn’t. They’ll be happy to buy all the Bonds and Treasury Notes you offer them. Trust me, it’s a done deal.”

Billingsly looked over at Clive Bentonhouse, an Under Secretary in the Department of State. “So who’s not cooperating with you?” Bentonhouse was a career bureaucrat at State. He wore an immaculate dark-toned suit with a light gray shirt and a gold tie. He was 48, hair graying around the temples, well groomed, and at six feet tall with a medium build, he mixed well with diplomats from the Middle East. He spoke the local languages fluently, having grown up in Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon. His father was British and his mother American. The two had met during assignments in the Middle East and gradually arranged their placements to coincide with each other.

“The usual suspect,” Clive replied, “Iran has walked away from negotiations on limiting their nuclear ambitions, again.”

“When’s your next meeting with them?” Billingsly asked.

“Next week.”

“Send them a message,” Billingsly said. “Privately.” He checked the calendar on his phone and smiled. “Tell them that we will be sending them a warning on the thirteenth, at noon, their time.”

“What kind of warning?” Bentonhouse asked.

“Just leave it at that,” Billingsly replied. “They’ll figure it out.”

“Okay,” Bentonhouse replied, “the thirteenth at noon. You sure it’s okay to do things this way?”

“Which way is that?” Billingsly asked rhetorically. “Tell me, what did your Secretary of State know about foreign relations when he became your boss?”

“Nothing, really,” Bentonhouse replied.

“And how much experience do you have in foreign relations?”

“Twenty four years.”

“Look,” Billingsly said. “These political appointees will come and go. They can’t be trusted or depended on for anything approaching serious transactions. That requires our experience and collective wisdom. We serve a higher purpose than whatever political wind is blowing this week in Washington. We act in the interest of the world’s only superpower, to maintain and increase that superpower status and respect throughout the world. An elected politician can’t be expected to maintain that vision, always needing to be re-elected, that’s why we have to work beneath the surface, to continue the legacy that made us the one superpower of the world. That’s our purpose and our function. We make the politicians look good, and they never know the nitty-gritty details of how things are made to happen. That’s
our job
, and we do it well. Just remember, they may take the credit, but
we
are the ones who make things happen.”