The wheel turns, and forward into time the fleets move toward their place on the wheel and the six-month period for which they exist: the presence of a battle group in the Mediterranean Sea. It is a figure of life—of coming into being and of going; of being born, and of dying; of existing only as an idea of the future and as a memory of the past.
The battle groups come and go. It is the wheel that is important.
Vice-Admiral Richard Pilchard commanded Battle Group Four. Battle Group Four served off Bosnia, drilled holes in the Adriatic, had liberty in Trieste and Naples. They won no glory, but they held the line, and their aircraft sent a message. Now Battle Group Four is split back into its component ships, in Norfolk, Charleston, Mayport, and Newport.
Vice-Admiral Nathan Green commands Battle Group Five, now on station off Bosnia; it changed its name when it arrived on station and became Task Force 155. It has a NATO name, too, but most people will keep calling it Battle Group Five, or BG 5.
Vice-Admiral Richard Toricelli commands Battle Group Six, now training in the Norfolk area. Vice-Admiral Rudolph Newman will command Battle Group Seven and is organizing his staff. Vice-Admiral Harold Rehnquist will command Battle Group Eight but has only just received those orders and will not sail for almost eighteen months.
Alan Craik is the Assistant Carrier Air Wing Intelligence Officer for BG 5, which is at the top of the wheel. On station. If not facing the animal, then at least very sensitive to its presence.
LCDR “Rafe” Rafehausen, now finishing a stint at the Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island, will soon report to VS-49 as its executive officer. LTjg Christine Nixon has already reported aboard VS-49 at Cecil Field, Florida, after her first, abbreviated tour working counternarcotics in Key West, Florida, to become its intelligence officer. Seaman Apprentice Henry Sneesen, Aviation Electronics striker, has joined VS-49 direct from his A school and boot camp in Orlando, Florida. VS-49 itself has existed as an entity with airplanes and men and women to repair them, maintain them, fly them, and fight them for only two months, but 49’s place on the wheel has existed for over a year. VS-49 is going to sea as the airborne antisubmarine squadron of an air wing assigned to USS Andrew Jackson in Battle Group Seven, commanded by Admiral Newman. And, like every battle group that the US Navy sends to sea, this one will endure wind and waves, merciless weather, stress, and danger, and not all of its members will return. But, unlike most, Battle Group Seven will have to fight.
Fort Reno, North Carolina.
Harry O’Neill was mad, and he had to piss so bad he could feel his bladder throbbing. He was doing a goddam stupid surveillance exercise, and he was still angry about last night’s exercise, and he wasn’t doing things very well. He hadn’t checked this part of the route for johns when he did the prep, only telephones. Would it be a screwup if he stopped to piss? And what would he do if one of the instructors came into the john with him—maybe spoke to him, even challenged him?
“Shit,” O’Neill muttered. He didn’t say it with any force. Last night still enraged him. He and a student partner had done a mock recruiting exercise, taking two instructors to dinner and pretending to make the first steps toward recruiting, pretending to have a cover and having to use the fake name and the fake ID and the fake profession. And what had been the instructor’s summary of what O’Neill had done? What had the black instructor said about the black student?
“Not credible,” he had said. Why? “Has to learn to dress.” O’Neill felt outraged. He’d worn the clothes he’d been wearing for years! What was it—the Burberry blazer? the Willis and Geiger shirt? the Church shoes? What the fuck did he mean?
Then he had got to the last line of the evaluation and understood—a lot.
“I don’t believe this put-on taste and ‘class’ in a black man.”
Harry O’Neill had seen where his real problem lay.
So he had tried to take out his anger by writing a letter to Alan Craik. He could let Craik, alone among his white friends, see his bitterness. “I been dissed by what I’m sure this bastard would call ‘one of my own people’!” he wrote. “I ain’t NEEGGAH enuf fo him. This NEEGGAH is 2 stylish 4 him! Jesus Christ, Al, haven’t these fuckheads ever seen a gentleman before?”
So now he was driving carefully down a road in Virginia, seething with rage and trying to do well in a surveillance exercise while keeping his bladder from exploding all over the rental car.
He wanted a john so bad he squirmed. He drummed on the steering wheel with his right hand and then jabbed the radio to turn off some sixties soft-rock crap and then jabbed it back on because the silence somehow made his bladder worse. He glanced into the left-side mirror and saw them still back there, the green Camaro with the two guys, nicely on his butt but hanging back. Where was the other one? And which was the other one—the red Saturn he’d seen twice with the dark-haired woman? Or the dark Cherokee with the older guy in the hat? “Shit,” he muttered again.
Ahead was the two-lane road down to the ferry. There would be a line for the ferry, but it went every fifteen minutes, and he could get into line and then hit the head at the ticket office and get relief. Yes! Except that his plan was to take the left before the ferry and force the guys following him to declare themselves, both cars, and then when they had done that he could go one-point-three miles to the little hill with the sharp left on the far side, take the left and get out of sight before they came over the hill so that at least one would go straight. If he was lucky. (Luck is not a planning factor, the instructor had said, but it is useful.) No, they would go straight, because the road turned again and then twisted like a snake for a mile, so they’d think he was up ahead. (That was his alternative, to speed up and stay on the road and use the twists to get out of sight. He might do that. In fact, that had been his original plan. But, goddamit, there wasn’t a phone with a john up there for six-point-two miles, and if he took the left there was one in point-seven!)
He swung left away from the ferry, trying not to feel his bladder as the road got rough, going deliberately slow so they wouldn’t lose him, drawing them along. They must be made to think that losing him was their fault, not his. Then he would make his phone call and leave the message and be out of it.
Phone call first, he told himself. He groaned. He knew that the phone call had to be first. Even if his bladder burst. Duty calls. Ha-ha. Call of nature. Right.
The Camaro was right back there where it should be, and then well behind it he could see another vehicle, dark-colored. Must be the Cherokee. Okay. Well, that was good, at least he knew who they were now.
He was chewing his tongue, a habit he’d got into since he got in this business. He’d never had nerves before. Now he chewed it almost viciously. The little hill was coming up, then the quick left. If the Camaro speeded up—! But it didn’t. It was okay. Distance was good, speed was good—
O’Neill went up the hill exactly right, wanting to gun it but keeping it just the same speed, not giving anything away (Nice job, O’Neill; thank you, sir, but I’d rather be pissing) and then, just over the crest, accelerated and hit the brake a tap as he jerked it left, a quick skid turn, and he was into the side road and swinging back right and out of sight, and he’d done it.
He’d done it! Nobody had followed him!
“Bladder, stick with me now!” he murmured, and he ripped the last seven-tenths to the convenience store he’d spotted three days before. There were two pump islands and a small parking area, and at the side a telephone he’d checked, and it had been working last time he came by. Please, God. He had the phonecard ready. He winced as he got out of the car and his bladder shifted, and he was sure he was walking bent over as he headed for the phone. God, if there was somebody there ahead of him, he’d crack! Some teenager, giggling and—
Nobody.