Red Shark

Scott started to speak, but Radford held up a silencing hand. His Air Force Academy ring glittered like a diamond in shadow. “All your questions will be answered. Suffice to say we have a new crisis on the Korean peninsula. Marshal Jin says he wants peace, but the president doesn’t believe him. We think Jin and his cronies, not Kim, are behind the bombings, that they blamed them on Kim as a pretext to seize power. Hell, Jin opposed the disarmament agreement from the start. That NK defector we have, Jao, warned us that this might happen. Too bad we didn’t listen.”

Radford peered out at heavy traffic and said, “No one would shed a tear if Kim was stood up before a firing squad, but that’s not the point. We had an agreement with him, and it took years of hard negotiating to get it. We averted a bloodbath on the peninsula only because Kim had no other choice but to buckle to U.S., Japanese, and Chinese demands for disarmament. The damn South Koreans were ready to appease him and refused to believe that the whole goddamn regime was rotten, a house of cards waiting to collapse. And now we’re back where we started. Jin and his generals are hard-liners and liars to boot. He’s also a dedicated Communist. What’s worse, he’s out of touch with reality. Maybe even a little nuts. They all are. So it’s no surprise that Jin may be hatching a new plan to engage in nuclear blackmail.”

“What kind of plan?” Scott asked.

“Ah.” Radford turned his gaze full on Scott. “That’s what the president wants to know.” He lit a cigarette and replaced the lighter in the bolster’s socket before continuing. “Does this bother you?” He cracked the side window. “We’ve picked up, among other things, some signals intercepts that seem to indicate the NKs are up to something and that Jin is directly involved. We don’t know with what, but we’ll go into that when we arrive.”

“Where?”

“Not far, just down the road a ways.”

2

Mt. Vernon, Virginia

The car turned south onto the George Washington Memorial Parkway, away from Radford’s Crystal City headquarters. Whatever Radford had cooked up, Scott knew that there was no way he could avoid being shanghaied into service.

Radford was saying, “By the bye, there may be a citation in the works for you.”

Scott said nothing.

“Did you hear what I said?”

“Yes, sir, a citation.”

“From the president.”

One minute they wanted to cashier you, Scott thought, the next, hand out a citation. Anything to get you on board.

“For the Baltic operation,” Radford said. “We are not unaware of the risks you ran to kill that Chechen bunch before they could blow that Akula sky-high.”

“Yes, sir, thank you. All in a day’s work,” Scott said, not caring how trite that sounded. What had Alex Thorne called him, the Navy’s garbage man? Always cleaning up their messes. How apt, Scott thought. He had bragged about, had worn as a badge of honor, his status as likely the oldest commander in the Navy. He’d been passed over for promotion to captain once, though temporarily frocked as a captain for his mission to Russia to head off the Chechen terrorists. Once again a commander, his career would be finished if he was passed over for captain again. Though they always seemed to find a way to use him, the Navy couldn’t see fit to promote him to captain.

“You should try taking that chip off your shoulder,” Radford said, sounding riled. “You might find it does wonders for your career. What’s past is past. Try thinking about the future for a change.”

“I’m sorry, General, but that’s a little hard to do, especially when I have no control over it. Fact is, sir, it seems that you and Admiral Ellsworth have a lot of influence over any future I might have. Or whether I even have one.”

“Ellsworth holds you in very high regard.”

Scott said nothing.

“It’s true. When the chips are down he comes to you for help. That says it all. He even got your old command back, put you aboard the Tampa, I hear.”

“He did. But I’m not aboard her now. Instead, I’m here with you.”

Radford mused for a long moment, then said, “Well, the chips are down again. We need your help.”

Scott waited for Radford to say more, but the general merely looked out the car window at the moon rising over Maryland across the Potomac.

They turned off the GW Parkway into a Mt. Vernon town-house development and drove down streets lined with quadplexes, Japanese SUVs and sedans, then into a cul-de-sac and the driveway of a lighted end unit. Scott and Kennedy followed Radford into a modern suburban home furnished in the spare, generic style favored by the SRO for their safe houses.