Final impact

“If I wanted to bring a crazy man in here to start yet another war I’d have called up General Patton,” he barked. “I expect better of you, Admiral. And I’m not getting it. I know all about your little mission, more than you’re letting on. Because Major Ivanov wasn’t just looking for lost ships out on the tundra, was he? He was actively building a resistance network, opposed to Soviet rule.”

“He was,” Kolhammer admitted.

Roosevelt’s hand slammed down on the desktop with a loud crack.

“Damn it all, Kolhammer, when where you going to tell me about that?”

The admiral controlled his own rising temper and forced himself to concentrate on the matter at hand, rather than speculating as to where Roosevelt had picked up his information. That line of thought threatened to spiral rapidly down into panic. If he knew about Russia, then he could know about the Quiet Room. But if that was the case, Kolhammer wouldn’t be standing here; he’d be in handcuffs. Unless of course Roosevelt had decided to let the Room be, or he’d somehow found out about Ivanov but nothing else. The next few minutes would tell. Outwardly, Kolhammer forced himself to remain phlegmatic.

“My special action team was supported for six months, Mr. President. After that, we could no longer sustain them in the field and they were withdrawn-most of them, anyway. Major Ivanov and Lieutenant Zamyatin, of the Russian Federation Defense Force, chose to stay of their own accord.”

“You ordered them home?”

“I recalled them. They didn’t come. They maintained, correctly, that their attachments-to the SEALs in Ivanov’s case, and the Royal Navy in Zamyatin’s-had expired. And that they were more than just free to stay in Russia, but obliged to do so.”

“Obliged to stay?” Roosevelt said, his tone incredulous.

Kolhammer nodded, carrying on regardless, determined not to give away any advantage. He privately wondered if Roosevelt had been briefed in on this by the Brits. They’d had an SAS guy called Hamilton in-country with Ivanov. A Russian specialist, detached by the then Major Windsor to help in the search for any Multinational Force assets that might have gone astray.

He’d know nothing of the Quiet Room’s domestic operations in the United States.

“Ivanov and Zamyatin regarded the Communist government as a hostile, occupying power,” he continued. “And they consider it their duty to protect the Russian people from all enemies, foreign and domestic. So they stayed.”

“Good Lord,” Roosevelt muttered. “It never ends with you people, does it?”

Kolhammer took that as a rhetorical question best not answered. He remained at attention while Roosevelt seemed to turn inward for a minute, examining the problem like a puzzle with a piece that just didn’t fit.

“And your missing ship? That would be the British vessel, the Vanguard?”

“Yes, sir, and possibly the two nuclear subs from our group. The Vanguard was our primary concern, though, since she was located within the area of the Transition’s effect back in twenty-one, as best we could tell. The nukes were a hundred miles away.”

“And you didn’t find her? Or any trace of her?”

Kolhammer shook his head, but all the old worries he had learned to suppress came bobbing back up to the surface. “We got nothing during the six months the team was in-country. A few wild rumors, but those are like Elvis sightings back in my day, if you’ll excuse the uptime reference, sir. People are forever reporting new ships, or planes from the future, winking through another wormhole. The Dessaix turning up like she did really bent everyone out of shape.

“Then again, the Soviet Union is a very big country, and they have an excellent security apparatus. They could be hiding any number of secrets in there, and Beria and Stalin would think nothing of killing ten million people to protect them.

“I’d be a lot happier if we had some U-Two coverage over them,” he continued. “And I-”

Roosevelt held up his hand to cut Kolhammer off. “No! I go through this every few days with the Joint Chiefs, Admiral. We have only a handful of those planes, and every last one of them is needed for hunting down the German A-bomb assets-even the two aircraft we assigned to monitoring the Nazis’ extermination camps. After your repeated demands, I might add-both here and in the press. Or have you forgotten that?”

“No, sir,” Kolhammer said, keeping his voice neutral, though only with the greatest effort.

The ’temps, he had found, were more than happy to play on the Holocaust for propaganda purposes, but getting them to commit assets to disrupt the program was another matter entirely. The whole thing was a waking nightmare, and his own intervention-which he considered a matter of unavoidable moral duty-had occasioned a personal tragedy.