by Jeff Edwards
“Go away,” Ann said. “Stop asking me questions. That will help a lot.”
“You’re absolutely sure that there’s nothing I can do?”
Ann leaned back and crossed her arms. “Am I absolutely sure? Absolutely?”
She pretended to study the matter for several seconds and then shrugged in apparent contrition. “I guess I’m not totally-positively-absolutely sure. I suppose … if you really feel the need to contribute … I should let you get in here and try to do your part.”
She held a fingertip against her lower lip. “Let’s see … This an entirely new mission profile for Mouse. He’s got to perform some specialized functions that aren’t built into his core program, so you should probably start by dumping the mission package I created for the submersible rescue, and purging the robot’s scratch memory and persistent memory. When that’s finished, upload a clean copy of the core program from the master disc packs, and sort through the mission library for the modules that most closely match the functions Mouse is going to need. Then, append those files to his core program, and modify any parameters that need adjustment. Don’t forget to load the program mods for covert search, and under ice operations, and don’t forget to disable his acoustic communications module. You’ll also need to load the bottom contour database for the operating area, the navigation data, and the environmental package, including currents, known navigation hazards, projected salinity profiles, and thermal structures of the water column. And when you’re done, run an end-to-end, and a loop-back test, and debug to check for errors.”
She smiled with exaggerated sweetness. “If you’re going to take care of all that, I’ll go grab a cup of coffee and a Danish.”
“I get the picture,” Sheldon said. “I don’t know how to do any of the stuff you need to accomplish.”
Ann gasped in mock surprise. “You don’t?”
Her fingers starting pecking away at the laptop again. “Then will you please stop interrupting me, so that I can do it?”
“Yeah,” Sheldon said. “I’m sorry.”
Ann stopped typing again. “I’m jerking your chain, Sheldon. I’ve already done all that junk. I just need to run one last program integrity test, to check for disagrees and resource conflicts, and then I’m done here.”
She tapped a key and leaned back. “There. That should take that about ten minutes to cycle. When it’s finished, as long as there aren’t any errors, our buddy Mouse should be ready to go play in the water.”
She checked her watch. “That’s pretty good timing. The Navy boys tell me that the sun will be setting in about fifteen minutes. Since we’re doing all this sneaking stealth business under cover of darkness, that works out just about perfectly.”
Ann stood up and stretched to get the kinks out of her back. “Come on, Cowboy. If you absolutely must help, you can lead me through this metal labyrinth to the wardroom. I really do want some coffee and a Danish.”
* * *
An hour later, Sheldon and Ann stood with a bunch of Sailor types on the boat deck, bundled up in heavy foul weather coats, and stomping their feet to keep warm. The sun was down now, and the moon wouldn’t rise for several hours yet. The darkness was broken only by the stars and the dim glow of amber-lensed deck lamps, cranked down to minimal intensity.
Mouse hung beneath the boat davit, a dark silhouette dangling at the end of the lifting cable for the destroyer’s Rigid-Hulled Inflatable Boats.
That particular bit of engineering had been Ann’s idea. At her suggestion, the robot’s lifting hardware had been made compatible with the single-point boat davits used aboard Navy warships. Any ship that carried RHIBs could launch and recover a Mouse unit without installing special equipment. From the Navy’s perspective, that made Mouse cheaper to buy and easier to integrate into the fleet, which—by extension—made it more likely that the Lords of Navy Procurement would decide to purchase lots of Mouse-series underwater robots from Norton Deep Water Systems.
As far as the company was concerned, the Navy procurement contract was the whole point of the Mouse project. Ann’s priorities were quite different, but they still came back to the bottom line. The Navy was Norton’s best customer. If the Navy didn’t buy underwater robots, then Norton would have no reason to build them. And if Norton didn’t build underwater robots, then Ann would have to either abandon her chosen profession, or go to work for Big Oil. And that was not going to happen.
Ann might not care for the military yahoos, but at least they thought they were doing the right thing. They were well-intentioned, if misguided. Those planet-killing bastards in the oil industry … they were a whole different breed of bad news. There were no good intentions in them at all: just mindless greed, with no thought to long-term consequence.
Ann looked up at the shadowy form of the disk-shaped robot hanging from the end of the boat davit. Norton had provided the funding, and the engineers, and the facilities, but Ann had breathed life into the strange little machine. Mouse was the culmination of her very best ideas, and the product of the hardest work she had ever done.
She exhaled sharply, the freezing Siberian air turning her breath to vapor in front of her face. She had poured her soul into this project. No way would she do that for the oil companies. Never.
Ann felt a jarring thump through the soles of her feet, followed by a prolonged scraping noise and a groaning of metal that she felt more than heard. The ship seemed to shudder until the groaning died away.
She looked at the nearest Sailor. “What the hell was that?”
“Probably a growler,” the man said.
“A what?”
“A growler,” the Sailor said. “A chunk of sea ice. Smaller than an iceberg, or a bergy bit. Maybe the size of a refrigerator.”
“There are chunks of ice out here the size of refrigerators?” Ann asked. “And they’re not freaking icebergs?”
“That’s right,” the man said.
Ann couldn’t see his face properly in the darkness, but the Sailor had an older voice. He was probably one of the senior petty officers, or maybe a chief.
“We’re transiting through the Kuril islands,” he said. “Passing into the Sea of Okhotsk, which is mostly covered by ice. The plan is to skirt the southern edge of the ice pack. As long as we don’t get too close to the pack edge, we’ll mostly run into grease ice. That’s usually just slush—not fully frozen. We’ll get some growlers too, about like the one we just rubbed up against. If we’re lucky, we won’t run into any bergy bits.”
“What are those?” Sheldon asked.
“Baby icebergs,” the Sailor said. “Maybe the size of a house. Not big enough to qualify as real icebergs. You don’t get real bergs in the Sea of O.”
Ann’s mouth felt suddenly dry. She nodded, though the man probably couldn’t see her in the darkness. “No icebergs,” she said. “That’s good to know. At least we don’t have to worry about sinking.”
The man laughed, but there didn’t seem to be a lot of humor in it. “I didn’t say that.” He stomped on the deck, the sound of his boot audible in the darkness. “Our hull is steel,” he said. “But it’s only a little more than a half-inch thick. A decent sized bergy bit will go through us like a can opener.”
“Please tell me you’re joking,” Sheldon said.
“I wish I was. Even a good sized growler could do a number on us, if we hit it the wrong way.”
“What about that killer radar?” Ann asked. “No sparrow shall fall, and all that crap. You can see the ice with that, right?”
“We’re in EMCON,” the man said. “Stealth mode. The SPY radar could probably see most of the ice, but it would give away our position. We’re running without it.”
“So how do we avoid hitting one of those baby icebergs?” Sheldon asked.
“We’ve got lookouts posted,” the Navy man said. “They’re watching the water in front of the ship. If they see anything off the bow, they tell the bridge and we turn to avoid it. We should be okay.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Ann said. ‘But didn’t the Titanic have lookouts posted too? That particular method of ice avoidance didn’t work out too well for those guys, as I recall.”
“You’ve got a point there,” the Navy man said. “But we have two advantages over the Titanic. Our watertight integrity systems and damage control technology are about a century more advanced.”
“Fine,” Ann said. “What’s the other advantage?”
The man laughed again. “We know we’re not unsinkable,” he said. “So we’re a lot more careful.”
“That’s comforting,” Ann said. “Now, we just…”
“Just a sec,” the man said. “I’m getting a call from the bridge.”
He paused for a couple of seconds, and then said, “Boat deck, aye!”
He snapped his fingers. “Peters! Shut off the deck lights. Everybody! Lights off—now!”
The amber lamps went off abruptly, plunging the deck into total darkness.
The Sailor spoke again. “Bridge—Boat deck, all lights are out. We are dark.”
“What’s going on?” Sheldon asked softly.
“Jets,” the Navy man said. “CIC can’t get a lock on the Bogies without lighting off our radar, but our Electronic Warfare guys are tracking emissions from at least four Zaslon S-800’s.”
“What does that mean?” Ann asked.
“It means there are at least four MiG-31 fighter jets out there, probably flying the edge of the ice pack to check for uninvited party guests.”
“Like us,” Sheldon said.
“Yeah,” the man said softly. “Like us. So we’re running quiet and dark, and generally hoping that they don’t detect us. There’s a good chance that they won’t. We’re pretty damned stealthy when we shut down all the toys.”
Ann stared up into the night sky, trying vainly to spot something moving against the backdrop of stars. “What happens if they find us?” she asked.
“Depends on who they belong to,” the Sailor said. “If they’re out of mainland Russia, they’ll more than likely just report our position back to their base. That will stir up some shit, because the Russians don’t like us up here, but it’ll be mostly be political. We probably won’t get shot at.”
“What if they’re not from mainland Russia?” Sheldon asked.
“Then they’re out of the Yelizovo air base on Kamchatka,” the man said. “Which means that they belong to our pal, Mr. Zhukov. If it’s those guys, they’ll shoot us between the eyes about ten seconds after they find out we’re here.”
“This is insane,” Ann said. “We’re dodging icebergs in the dark, and playing hide and seek with freaking fighter jets. What are we going to do for an encore? Juggle chainsaws?”
The Sailor chuckled. “You know what they say. It’s not just a job. It’s an adventure.”
“I’m not joking,” Ann snapped. “What the hell are we doing here? We’re practically asking to get killed.”
“This is what we do,” the man said. “This is our job. We’re kind of like Secret Service agents. We step in front of the bullet, so that our country doesn’t have to.”
“That’s crap,” Ann said. “That whole military-ethos/warrior-Zen thing is nothing but a load of self-aggrandizing macho bullshit.”
“It’s not bullshit, ma’am,” the Sailor said. “We’ve got a trigger-happy lunatic threatening to incinerate the Western United States. If he manages to unleash ten percent of the firepower at his command, he’ll kill more people than every war in history combined. Our job is to stop him any way we can. Even with our lives.”
The man sighed. “We don’t want to die, Ms. Roark. We want to go home to our families. We want to drink beer, and watch football on television, and barbecue hotdogs, and play catch in the back yard with our kids. But we will step into the path of the bullet, if that’s what it takes to stop the bad guys. Like I said—it’s what we do.”
Ann was about to reply, when the man spoke again. “Just a sec. The bridge is talking to me.”
After a few seconds, he said, “Bridge—Boat deck, resume operations, aye.”
He cleared his throat. “The Bogies have passed us by,” he said. “Peters, get the lights back on.”
The amber lamps came back to life. They seemed almost painfully bright after the long minutes of total darkness.
“Alright,” the Sailor said. “The bridge says we’re in position. Let’s get R2D2 in the water, and see if he can find a submarine.”
CHAPTER 43
U.S. NAVAL HOSPITAL
YOKOSUKA, JAPAN
TUESDAY; 05 MARCH
1855 hours (6:55 PM)
TIME ZONE +9 ‘INDIA’
“Ya zamyors…”
The old man’s voice was barely more than a whisper, but it snapped Agent DuBrul instantly back to alertness. His head came up and his body posture stiffened. The chair had lulled him into drowsiness. He stood up and took a quick step to the side of the hospital bed.
Swaddled in the green hospital sheets, Oleg Grigoriev looked like a poor job of embalming. His eyes were sunken, and his once swarthy skin was thin and papery. The iron-hard Soviet Sergeant had all but disappeared now, leaving in his place this dwindling husk of his former self.
The old man’s face had become a mirror. Gazing into its unsettling depths, David DuBrul saw the reflection of his own mortality. For the first time, he could truly imagine his own death. And for the first time, he knew in his heart that it was not an intellectual abstraction. It was a real thing. A true thing.
At some point in the future—whether an hour from now, or fifty years from now—he would draw his very last breath. When he released that final purchase of air, his life would flow out with it, expelled from its frail human vessel to mingle with the atoms of the universe. And David DuBrul would cease to exist.
He hoped that it wouldn’t be like this, that he wouldn’t die like this poor old Russian—failing by slow and painful inches in an unfamiliar bed, in a building full of strangers.
“Ya zamyors,” Grigoriev whispered again.
DuBrul nodded. “You’re cold?” He took a folded blanket from a side table, and spread it over the patient.
“Is that better?” He spoke in English. His Russian was fluent, but he knew that Grigoriev’s English was at least as good. And he did not want to speak to this man in his mother language.
From a standpoint of spy craft, the decision was not a good one. According to the book, if you had the language skills, you followed the subject into whatever dialect he was most comfortable using. It was easier that way to establish trust, which made your subject more likely to speak freely. Also, the need for mental translation made most people select their words carefully when speaking in a foreign tongue. Within the easy flow of their primary language, they tended to blurt out things might never be revealed under the more deliberate syntax of another tongue.
DuBrul didn’t care. He wanted the information in this man’s head. He needed it. But he would not speak in the language of the old man’s friends and loved ones in order to draw it out. He would not smile, and pretend to be a friend. The old man deserved better than that.
Grigoriev blinked several times, and struggled visibly to focus his eyes. “U vas est’ karta?”
DuBrul reached for a folder on a bedside table. “Yes,” he said. “I have a map.”
The DIA agents had hoped that this moment might come, and they’d prepared for it with a map of Kamchatka and the Sea of Okhotsk mounted to a sheet of foam core poster board. It weighed only a few ounces, but was stiff enough for easy manipulation by weakened fingers.
DuBrul held the map over the bed, within easy reach of the patient. The lines of latitude and longitude were clearly marked, and the place names had oversized labels, Russian above English.
The old man raised a shaky hand, and pointed one trembling finger toward a spot on the map, in the northeastern quadrant of the Sea of Okhotsk. DuBrul recognized the location from which K-506 had launched the first missi
le attack. He drew a small circle on the map using a felt tipped pen.
“Zdes’,” Grigoriev whispered. “Here. Zashishennaja pozicija.”
Agent DuBrul recognized the term. Zashishennaja pozicija translated loosely into ‘protected position.’ It was the Russian equivalent of the word defilade: a position fortified against attack by geographic barriers. Hills, ravines, that sort of thing.
DuBrul repeated the words. “Zashishennaja pozicija. I think I understand. These are the coordinates the submarine can shoot from, is that right? These are the places where explosives have been set to blow holes in the ice pack?”
“Da,” the old man whispered. “Strelyat. To shoot from …”
“How many zashishennaja pozicija are there?” DuBrul asked. “How many places can K-506 shoot through the ice?”
The old man’s hand dropped back to the sheets. He closed his eyes and breathed heavily for nearly a minute. At last, his eyelids fluttered open again. “Pyat,” he hissed.
DuBrul nodded again. Five.
Grigoriev lifted his finger to the chart again. His hand shook so badly that it took a few seconds to settle down. “Zdes’,” he breathed.
DuBrul circled the spot on the map.
Grigoriev’s palsied finger moved a few inches and touched the map again. “Zdes’.”
DuBrul marked the new spot with another circle. Again the finger moved, and DuBrul drew a fourth circle.
A shudder passed through the old man’s body and his hand fell away from the chart. The heart monitor mounted to the wall near his bed began beeping rapidly. The cardiac trace on the screen blinked from green to red.
DuBrul turned away from the patient. “Doctor?”
He raised his voice. “Doctor? Get in here!”
The door flew open, and Dr. Hogan covered the distance to the bed in two quick strides. He glanced at the monitor, and then looked over his shoulder. “Get a crash cart in here, now!”
Another shudder wracked Oleg Grigoriev’s body. His eyes seemed to roll back in their sockets, and a ribbon of foamy saliva rolled from the corner of his mouth.
