Red Storm Rising

"Thanks, Pop." Robert Toland set his rod in its holder and leaned back into the midships swivel chair of his Boston Whaler Outrage. His father-in-law, Edward Keegan, held out the plastic cup-cap from a large thermos jug. Bob knew the coffee would be good. Ned Keegan was a former naval officer who appreciated a good cup, preferably flavored with brandy or Irish whiskey-something to open the eyes and put a fire in the belly.

"Cold or not, damn if it ain't nice to get out here." Keegan sipped at his cup, resting one foot on the bait box. It wasn't just the fishing, both men agreed, getting out on the water was one sure cure for civilization.

"Be nice if the rock really are coming back, too," Toland observed.

"What the hell-no phones."

"What about your beeper?"

"I must have left it with my other pants." Keegan chuckled. "DIA will have to manage without me today."

"Think they can?"

"Well, the Navy did." Keegan was an academy graduate who had put in his thirty and retired to become a double-dipper. In uniform, he'd been an intelligence specialist, and now he had essentially the same job, which added civil service salary to his pension.

Toland had been a lieutenant (j.g.) serving aboard a destroyer based at Pearl Harbor when he'd first noticed Martha Keegan, a junior at the University of Hawaii, majoring in psychology and minoring in surfing. They'd been happily married for fifteen years now.

"So." Keegan stood and lifted his rod. "How are things at the Fort?"

Bob Toland was a middle-level analyst at the National Security Agency. He'd left the Navy after six years when the adventure of uniformed service had palled, but he remained an active reservist. His work at NSA dovetailed nicely with his naval reserve service. A communications expert with a degree in electronics, his current job was monitoring Soviet signals gathered by the NSA's numerous listening posts and ferret satellites. Along the way he'd also gotten a masters in the Russian language.

"Heard something real interesting last week, but I couldn't convince my boss it meant anything."

"Who's your section chief?"

"Captain Albert Redman, U.S. Navy." Toland watched a bay-built fishing boat motoring a few miles away, her captain laying out his crab pots. "He's an asshole."

Keegan laughed. "You want to be careful saying stuff like that out loud, Bob, especially seeing how you go on active duty next week. Bert worked with me, oh, must have been fifteen years ago. I had to slap him down a few times. He does tend to be slightly opinionated."

"Opinionated?" Toland snorted. "That bastard's so friggin' narrow-minded his scratch pads are only an inch wide! First there was this new arms control thing, then I came up with something really unusual last Wednesday and he circular-filed it. Hell, I don't know why he even bothers looking at new data-he made his mind up five years ago."

"I don't suppose you could tell me what it was?"

"I shouldn't." Bob wavered for a moment. Hell, if he couldn't talk with his kids' own grandfather..."One of our ferret birds was over a Soviet military district headquarters last week and intercepted a microwaved telephone conversation. It was a report to Moscow about four colonels in the Carpathian Military District who were being shot for gundecking readiness reports. The story on their court-martial and execution was being set up for publication, probably in a Red Star this week." He had entirely forgotten about the oil-field fire.

"Oh?" Keegan's eyebrows went up. "And what did Bert say?"

"He said, 'It's Goddamned about time they cleaned their act up.' And that was that."

"And what do you say?"

"Pop, I'm not in Trends and Intentions-those idiot fortune-tellers, but I know that even the Russians don't kill people for jollies. When Ivan kills people publicly, he does it to make a point. These were not manpower officers taking bribes to fake deferments. They weren't popped for stealing diesel fuel or building dachas with pilfered lumber. I checked our records, and it turned out we have files on two of them. They were both experienced line officers, both with combat experience in Afghanistan, both Party members in good standing. One was a graduate of Frunze Academy, and he even had a few articles published in Military Thought, for God's sake! But all four were court-martialed for falsifying their regimental readiness reports-and shot three days later. That story will hit the streets in Krasnaya Zvezda over the next few days as a two-or three-part story under 'The Observer's' by-line-and that makes it a political exercise with a capital P."