by Tom Clancy
“All that's right,” Claggett allowed.
“What's this?” Jones pointed to a blossom of noise on the display.
“Well, we were tracking Omaha, and the captain decided to rattle their cage with a water slug.”
“No shit?” Jones asked. “Well, that explains his reaction. I guess they changed their underwear and headed north. You never would have pulled that off on me, by the way.”
“Think so?”
“Yeah, I think so,” Jones replied. “I always paid real good attention to what was aft of us. I've been out on Ohios, Commander, okay? You can be tracked. Anybody can. It isn't just the platform. Now, look here.”
The printout was a computer-generated cacophony of dots that seemed for the most part to show nothing but random noise, as though a convention of ants had walked across the pages for hours. As with all truly random events, this one had irregularities, places where for one reason or another the ants had never trod, or places where a large number had congregated and then dispersed.
“This line of bearing,” Jones said. “This pattern comes back eight times, and it comes back only when the layer thins out.”
Commander Claggett frowned. “Eight, you say? These two could be reverbs from the fishing boats, or really distant CZ-contacts.” He flipped through the pages. Claggett knew his sonar. This is thin."
“That's why your people didn't catch it, either aboard or here. But that's why I got the contract to back-check your people,” Jones said. “Who was out there?”
“Commodore?” Claggett asked, and got a nod. “There was an Akula-class out there somewhere. The P-3s lost him south of Kodiak, so he was within maybe six hundred miles of us. That doesn't mean this is him.”
“Which one?”
“Admiral Lunin,” Claggett answered.
“Captain Dubinin?”
“Jesus, you are cleared pretty good,” Mancuso noted. “They say he's very good.”
“Ought to be, we have a mutual friend. Is Commander Claggett cleared for that?”
“No. Sorry, Dutch, but that is really black.”
“He ought to be cleared for that,” Jones said. “This secrecy crap goes way too far, Bart.”
“Rules are rules.”
“Yeah, sure. Anyway, this is the one that twigged me. Last page.” Ron flipped through to the end. “You were coming up to antenna depth…”
“Yeah, practice on the missiles.”
“You made some hull noises.”
“We came up fast, and the hull's made of steel, not elastic,” Claggett said in some annoyance. “So?”
“So, your hull went up through the layer faster than your 'tail' did. Your towed array caught this.”
Claggett and Mancuso both went very quiet. What they saw was a fuzzy vertical line, but the line was in a frequency range that denoted a Soviet submarine's acoustical signature. It was by no means conclusive evidence, but it, like all the other things Jones had notated, was dead aft of Maine's course.
“Now, if I was a betting man, which I'm not, of course, I'd give you two-to-one that while you were underneath the layer, someone might have been tooling along just over top, letting his tail hang under it. He caught your hull transient, saw you were going shallow, and ducked under the layer just as you came over it. Cute move, but your big up-angle meant that your tail stayed down longer than it should have, and that's where this signature came from.”
“But there's nothing after that.”
“Nothing at all,” Jones admitted. “It never came back. From there on to the end of the tapes, nothing but random noise and otherwise-identified contacts.”
“It's pretty thin, Ron,” Mancuso said, standing up to straighten his back.
“I know. That's why I flew out. In writing it would never sell.”
“What do you know about Russian sonar that we don't?”
“Getting better… approaching where we were, oh, ten or twelve years ago. They pay more attention to broad-band than we do — that's changing now. I sold the Pentagon on taking another look at the broad-band integration system Texas Instruments' have been working on. Commander, what you said before about being a black hole. It cuts both ways. You can't see a black hole, but you can detect it. What if you track an Ohio by what should be there but isn't?”
“Background noise?”
“Yep.” Jones nodded. “You make a hole in it. You make a black spot where there's no noise. If he can really isolate a line of bearing on his gear, and if he's got really good filters, and one dynamite sonar operator, I think it's possible — if something else cues you in.”
“That's real thin.”
Jones granted that observation. “But it's not impossible. I ran the numbers. It's not good, but it's not impossible. Moreover, we can track below ambient now. Maybe they can, too. I'm hearing they've started turning out a new large-aperture tail — the one designed by the guys outside Murmansk. Good as a BQR-15 used to be.”
“I don't believe it,” Mancuso said.
“I do, skipper. It's not new technology. What do we know about Lunin?”
“She's in overhaul right now. Let's see.” Mancuso turned to look at the polar-projection chart on his office wall. “If that was him, then if he headed straight back to base… it's possible, technically speaking, but you're assuming a hell of a lot.”
“I'm saying that this bird was just in the neighborhood when you fired that water slug, that you headed south, and so did he, that you gave him a hull transient which he reacted to, and then he broke contact on his own. The data is thin, but it fits — maybe, I grant you, maybe. That's what they pay me for, guys.”
“I commended Ricks for rattling Omaha's cage like that,” Mancuso said, after a moment. “I want aggressive skippers.”
Jones chuckled to break the tension in the room. “I wonder why, Bart?”
“Dutch knows about that job we had on the beach, that pickup we did.”
“That was a little exciting,” Jones admitted.
“One chance in three…”
“The probability increases if you assume the other skipper is smart. Dubinin had a great teacher.”
“What are you two talking about?” Lieutenant Commander Claggett asked in some exasperation.
“You know we have all sorts of data on the Russian Typhoon class, lots more on their torpedoes. Ever wonder how we got all that data, Commander?”
“Ron, God damn it!”
“I didn't break any rules, skipper, and besides, he needs to know.”
“I can't do that and you know it.”
“Fine, Bart.” Jones paused. “Commander, you may speculate on how we got all that information in one great big lump. You might even guess right.”
Claggett had heard a few rumbles, like why the Eight-Ten dock at Norfolk had been closed so long a few years before. There was a story floated about, spoken only in submarine wardrooms far at sea and well below the surface, that somehow the U.S. Navy had gotten its hands on a Russian missile sub, how a very strange reactor had turned up at the Navy's nuclear-power school in Idaho for tests and then had disappeared, how complete drawings and some hardware from Soviet torpedoes had magically appeared in Groton, and how two night missile shots out of Vandenberg Air Force Base had not appeared to be American missiles at all. Lots of operational intelligence had come into the fleet, very good stuff, stuff that sounded like it had come from someone who knew what the hell he was talking about — not always the case with intelligence information — on Soviet submarine tactics and training. Claggett needed only to look at Mancuso's uniform to see the ribbon that denoted a Distinguished Service Medal, America's highest peace-time decoration. The ribbon had a star on it, indicating a second such award. Mancuso was rather young for a squadron command, and very young indeed to be selected for Rear Admiral (Lower Half). And here was a former enlisted man who'd sailed with Mancuso, and now called him Bart. He nodded to Dr. Jones.
“I get the picture. Thanks.”
“You're saying o
perator error?”
Jones frowned. He didn't know all that much about Harry Ricks. “Mainly bad luck. Call it good luck, even. Nothing bad happened, and we've learned something. We know more about the Akula than we used to. A weird set of circumstances came together. Won't happen again in a hundred years, maybe. Your skipper was a victim of circumstance, and the other guy — if there was another guy there — was very damned sharp. Hey, the important thing about mistakes is that you learn from them, right?”
“Harry gets back in ten days,” Mancuso said. “Can you be back here then?”
“Sorry,” Jones said with a shake of the head. “I'm going to be in England. I'm going out on HMS Turbulent for a few days of hide 'n' seek. The Brits have a new processor that we need to look at, and I drew the duty.”
“You're not going to ask me to present this to the CO, are you, sir?” Claggett asked after a minute's reflection.
“No, Dutch… you trying to tell me something?”
It was Claggett's turn to look unhappy. “Sir, he's my boss, and he's not a bad boss, but he is a little positive in his thinking.”
That was artfully done, Jones thought. Not a bad boss… a little positive. He just called his skipper an idiot in a way that no one could ever call disloyal. Ron wondered what sort of hyper-nuc-engineer this Ricks was. The good news was that this XO had his act together. And a smart skipper listened to his XO.
“Skipper, how's Mr. Chambers doing?”
“Just took over Key West. Got a kid you trained as his leading sonarman. Billy Zerwinski, just made chief, I hear.”
“Oh, yeah? Good for him. I figured Mr. Chambers was going places, but Billy Z as a chief? What is my Navy coming to?”
“This is taking forever,” Qati observed sourly. His skin was pasty white. The man was suffering again from his drug treatment.
“That is false,” Fromm replied sternly. “I told you several months, and it will be several months. The first time this was done, it took three years and the resources of the world's richest nation. I will do it for you in an eighth of that time, and on a shoestring budget. In a few days we'll start to work on the rhodium. That will be much easier.”
“And the plutonium?” Ghosn asked.
“That will be the last metal work — you know why, of course.”
“Yes, Herr Fromm, and we must be extremely careful, since when you work with a critical mass you must be careful that it does not become critical while you are forming it,” Ghosn replied, allowing his exacerbation to show for a change. He was tired. He'd been at work for eighteen hours now, supervising the workers. “And the tritium?”
“Last of all. Again, the obvious reason. It is relatively unstable, and we want the tritium we use to be as pure as possible.”
“Quite so.” Ghosn yawned, barely having heard the answer to his question, and not troubling himself to wonder why Fromm had answered as he had.
For his part, Fromm made a mental note. Palladium. He needed a small quantity of palladium. How had he forgotten that? He grunted to himself. Long hours, miserable climate, surly workers and associates. A small price to pay, of course, for this opportunity. He was doing what only a handful of men had ever done, and he was doing it in such a way as to equal the work of Fermi and the rest in 1944-5. It was not often that a man could measure himself against the giants and come off well in the comparison. He found himself wondering idly what the weapon would be used for, but admitted to himself that he didn't care, not really. Well, he had other work to do.
The German walked across the room to where the milling machines were. Here another team of technicians were at work. The beryllium piece now on the machine had the most intricate shape and had been the hardest to program, with concave, convex, and other complex curves. The machine was computer-controlled, of course, but was kept under constant observation through the Lexan panels that isolated the machining area from the outside world. The area was ventilated upwards into an electrostatic air-cleaner. There was no sense in just dumping the metallic dust into the external air — in fact doing so constituted a major security hazard. Over the electrostatic collection plates was a solid two meters of earth. Beryllium was not radioactive, but plutonium was, and plutonium would presently be worked on this very same machine. The beryllium was both necessary to the device and good practice for later tasks.
The milling machine was everything Fromm had hoped for when he'd ordered it several years before. The computer-driven tools were monitored by lasers, producing a degree of perfection that could not have been achieved so quickly as recently as five years ago. The surface of the beryllium was jeweled from the machining, already looking like the finish on a particularly fine rifle bolt, and this was only the first stage of machining. The data readout on the machine showed tolerances measured in angstroms. The toolhead was spinning at 25,000 RPM, not so much grinding as burning off irregularities. Separate instruments kept a computer eye on the work being done, both measuring tolerances and waiting for the tool-head to show signs of wear, at which point the machine would automatically stop and replace the tool with a fresh one. Technology was wonderful What had once been the work of specially-trained master machinists overseen by Nobel Prize winners was now being done by microchips.
The actual casing for the device was already fabricated. Ellipsoidal in shape, it was 98 centimeters in length by 52 in extreme breadth. Made of steel one centimeter in thickness, it had to be strong, but not grossly so, just enough to hold a vacuum. Also ready for installation were curved blocks of polyethylene and polyurethane foam, because a device of this sort required the special properties of both the strongest and the flimsiest materials. They had gotten ahead of themselves in some areas, of course, but there was no sense in wasting time or idle hands On another machine, workers were practicing yet again on a stainless-steel blank that simulated the folded-cylinder plutomum reaction-mass primary. It was their seventh such practice session. Despite the sophistication of the machines, the first two had gone badly, as expected. By number five, they had figured most of the process out, and the sixth attempt had been good enough to work — but not good enough for Fromm. The German had a simple mental model for the overall task, one formulated by America's National Aeronautics and Space Administration to describe the first moon landing. In order for the device to perform as desired, a complex series of individual events had to take place in an inhumanly precise sequence. He viewed the process as a walk through a series of gates. The wider the gates were, the easier it would be to walk through them quickly. Plus/minus tolerances reflected slight closure of the individual gates. Fromm wanted zero tolerances. He wanted every single part of the weapon to match his design criteria as exactly as the available technology made possible. The closer to perfection he could get, the more likely it was that the device would perform exactly as he predicted… or even better, part of him thought. Unable to experiment, unable to find empirical solutions to complex theoretical problems, he'd over-engineered the weapon, providing an energy budget that was several orders of magnitude beyond what was really necessary for the projected yield. That explained the vast quantity of tritium he planned to use, more than five times what was really needed in a theoretical sense. That carried its own problems, of course. His tritium supply was several years old, and some parts of it had decayed into 3He, a decidedly undesirable isotope of helium, but by filtering the tritium through palladium he'd separate the tritium out, ensuring a proper total yield. American and Soviet bombmakers could get away with far less of it, because of their extensive experimentation, but Fromm had his own advantage. He did not have to concern himself with a long shelf-life for his device, and that was a luxury that his Soviet and American counterparts did not have. It was the only advantage he had over them, and Fromm planned to make full use of it. As with most parts of bomb design, it was an advantage that cut both ways, but Fromm knew he had full control over the device. Palladium, he told himself. Mustn't forget that. But he had plenty of time.
“Finished.”
The head of the team waved for Fromm to look. The stainless-steel blank came off the machine easily, and he handed it to Fromm. It was thirty centimeters in length. The shape was complex, what one would get from taking a large water tumbler and bending its top outside and down towards the base. It would not hold water because of a hole in the center of what might have been the bottom — actually it would, Fromm told himself a second later, just in the wrong way. The blank weighed about three kilograms, and every surface was mirror-smooth. He held it up to the light to check for imperfections and irregularities. His eyes were not that good. The quality of the finish was easier to understand mathematically than visually. The surface, so said the machine, was accurate to a thousandth of a micron, or a fraction of a single wavelength of light.
“It is a jewel,” Ghosn observed, standing behind Fromm. The machinist beamed.
“Adequate,” was Fromm's judgment. He looked at the machinist. “When you've made five more equally as good, I will be satisfied. Every metal segment must be of this quality. Begin another,” he told the machinist. Fromm handed the blank to Ghosn and walked away.
“Infidel,” the machinist growled under his breath.
“Yes, he is,” Ghosn agreed. “But he is the most skilled man I have ever met.”
“I'd rather work for a Jew.”
“This is magnificent work,” Ghosn said, to change the subject.
“I would not have believed it possible to polish metal so precisely. This machine is incredible. I could make anything with it.”
“That is good. Make another of these,” Ghosn told him with a smile.
“As you say.”
Ghosn walked to Qati's room. The Commander was looking at a plate of simple foods, but unable to touch it for fear of retching.
“Perhaps this will make you feel better,” Ghosn told him.
“That is?” Qati said, taking it.
That is what the plutonium will look like."
“Like glass…”
“Smoother than that. Smooth enough for a laser mirror. I could tell you the accuracy of the surface, but you've never seen anything that small in your life anyway. Fromm is a genius.”
