Kolhammer shook his head. “No, sir. But it has been my experience in dealing with the executive level of government that they prefer to remain ignorant of operational details when such knowledge might prove unworkable.”
“Unworkable, or uncomfortable?”
“Both. Sir.”
President Roosevelt looked no less irate, but at least he didn’t appear to be getting any angrier. He was still clutching at an imaginary stress ball with his left hand. He seemed to notice the unconscious gesture, and deliberately placed both of his palms on the top of his desk, which was clear of any papers.
He sighed.
“Tell me what you were doing in Siberia, Admiral. I can’t imagine you’ll have a good explanation.”
Kolhammer resisted the urge to look around for a chair. It would have been an expression of weakness. He stood foursquare in front of the president and delivered his bad news straight, as he had twice in his own time, in this very room.
“When we discovered that the Dessaix had arrived here, out of sync with the rest of the task force, it became necessary to ascertain whether any other twenty-first assets might have come through in a similar fashion, and fallen into enemy hands. So I authorized a small covert team to enter the Soviet Union and begin searching.”
A noticeable tremor ran through Roosevelt’s upper body.
“You authorized a hostile act, against a friendly power, which could easily have led them into declaring war on us? When we already had our backs to the wall because of your arrival?”
“I did, sir. Although I respectfully submit that you should probably stop thinking of the Soviet Union as a friendly power, and accept that there is a war coming. Sooner, rather than later.”
Roosevelt’s nostrils flared as he sucked in air to control the flash of anger that showed in his eyes.
“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.
His uncle Hans, who would have survived this war had it not been for the Transition, had been removed from the death camp at Treblinka and publicly executed as an American spy, some six months earlier. The German propaganda minister, Josef Gцbbels, had personally seen to the release of the film footage into the free world, via Spain. Even now Phillip Kolhammer could feel an ungovernable rage gathering inside him as he remembered the first time he’d heard the news. He doubted that fate would play him an even break, but if it did, and he ended up in a room with Herr Doktor Gцbbels at the end of this conflict, there was a very good chance he would beat the little rodent to death with his bare hands.
When he regained control over the poisoned wellspring of his feelings, he found that Roosevelt was looking mildly abashed.
“I forget myself, Admiral,” the president muttered. “I apologize.”
Not knowing what to say, Kolhammer merely nodded, but he remained stiffly at attention.
After another few seconds of uncomfortable stillness, Roosevelt eventually broke. “Can you at least assure me that the Russians don’t have your ship?”
“No, sir. I cannot. As you know, we’re still doing all we can to find out whether it came through and fell into the wrong hands. If it did, it might not necessarily be in the USSR, of course. It could be in Colombia, or China, or buried under a mile of ice at the South Pole. I suppose it’s possible it could turn up tomorrow or a hundred years from now, given the temporal anomalies of the Dessaix’s arrival. We just don’t know.”