by Tom Clancy
“Well, I can't approach to less than thirty thousand yards under any circumstances. So… we'll close to fifty-K until we have a better feel for him, then ease it in as circumstances permit. One of us should be in here at all times as long as he's in the neighborhood.”
“Agreed.” Claggett nodded. He paused for a beat before going on. “How the hell,” the XO asked very quietly indeed, “did OP-O2 ever agree to this?”
“Safer world now, isn't it?”
“I s'pose, sir.”
“You're jealous that boomers can do a fast-attack job?”
“Sir, I think that OP-O2 slipped a gear, either that or they're trying to impress some folks with our flexibility or something.”
“You don't like this?”
“No, Captain, I don't. I know we can do it, but I don't think we should.”
“Is that what you talked to Mancuso about?”
“What?” Claggett shook his head. “No, sir. Well, he did ask me that, and I said we could do it. Not my place to enter into that yet.”
Then what did you talk to him about! Ricks wanted to ask. He couldn't, of course.
* * *
The Americans were a great disappointment to Oleg Kirilovich Kadishev. The whole reason they'd recruited him was to get good inside information on the Soviet government, and he'd delivered precisely that for years. He'd seen the sweeping political changes coming for his country, seen them early because he'd known Andrey Il'ych Narmonov for what he was. And for what he was not. The President of his country was a man of stunning political gifts. He had the courage of a lion and the tactical agility of a mongoose. It was a plan that he lacked. Narmonov had no idea where he was going, and that was his weakness. He had destroyed the old political order, eliminated the Warsaw Pact through inaction, merely by saying out loud, only once, that the Soviet Union would not interfere with the political integrity of other countries, and had done so in the knowledge that the only thing that kept Marxism in place was the threat of Soviet force. The Eastern European communists had foolishly played along, actually thinking themselves secure in the love and respect of their people in one of history's most colossal and least understood acts of lunacy. But what made the irony sublime was that Narmonov could not see the same thing in his own country, to which was added one more, fatal, variable.
The Soviet people — a term that never had any meaning, of course — were held together only by the threat of force. Only the guns of the Red Army guaranteed that Moldavians, and Latvians, and Tadzhiks and so many others would follow the Moscow line. They loved the communist leadership even less than the greatgrandfathers had loved the czars. And so while Narmonov had dismantled the Party's central role in managing the country, he'd eliminated his ability to control his people, but left himself no ethos with which to supplant what had gone before. The plan — in a nation which for over eighty years had always had The Plan — simply did not exist. So, necessarily, when turmoil began to replace order, there was nothing to do, nothing to point to, no goal to strive for. Narmonov's dazzling political maneuvers were ultimately pointless. Kadishev saw that. Why didn't the Americans, who had gambled everything on the survival of “their man” in Moscow?
The forty-six-year-old parliamentarian snorted at the thought. He was their man, wasn't he? He'd warned them for years, and they hadn't listened, but instead used his reports to buttress a man who was rich in skill but bereft of vision — and how could a man lead without vision?
The Americans, just as foolish, just as blind, had actually been surprised by the violence in Georgia, and the Baltic states. They actually ignored the nascent civil war that had already begun in the arc of Southern republics. Half a million military weapons had vanished in the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Mostly rifles, but some were tanks! The Soviet Army could not begin to deal with the situation. Narmonov struggled with it on a day-to-day basis like some kind of desperate juggler, barely managing to keep up, taking his effort from one place to another, keeping his plates in the air, but barely. Didn't the Americans understand that some fine day all the plates would fall at the same time? The consequences of that were frightening to everyone. Narmonov needed a vision, needed a plan, but he didn't have one.
Kadishev did, and that was the entire point of his exercise. The Union had to be broken up. The Muslim republics had to go. The Balts had to go. Moldavia had to go. The Western Ukraine had to go — he wanted to keep the Eastern part. He had to find a way to protect the Armenians, lest they be massacred by the local Muslims, and had to find a way to keep access to the oil of Azerbaijan, at least long enough until, with help from the West, he could exploit all the resources of Siberia.
Kadishev was a Russian. It was part of his soul. Russia was the mother of the Union, and like a good mother, she would let her children go at the proper time. The proper time was now. That would leave a country stretching from the Baltic to the Pacific, with a largely homogeneous population, and immense resources that were scarcely catalogued, much less tapped. It could and should be a great, strong country, powerful as any, rich in history and arts, a leader in the sciences. That was Kadishev's vision. He wished to lead a Russia that was a true superpower, a friend and associate to other countries of European heritage. It was his task to bring his country into the light of freedom and prosperity. If that meant dismissing almost half of the population and twenty-five percent of the land — so be it.
But the Americans weren't helping. Why this should be so, he simply did not understand. They had to see that Narmonov was a street without an exit, a road that merely stopped… or perhaps stopped at the brink of a great abyss.
If the Americans couldn't help, then it was within his power to force them to help. That was why he had allowed himself to be recruited by Mary Foley in the first place.
It was early morning in Moscow, but Kadishev was a man who had long since disciplined himself to live on a minimum of sleep. He typed his report on an old, heavy, but quiet machine. Kadishev used the same cloth ribbon many times. No one would ever be able to examine the ribbon to see what had been written on it, and the paper was from a sheaf taken from the office central supply room. Several hundred people had access to it. Like all professional gamblers, Kadishev was a careful man. When he was finished, he used leather gloves to wipe the paper clean of whatever fingerprints he might have accidentally left on it, then, using the same gloves, he folded the copy into a coat pocket. In two hours, the message would be passed. In less than twenty, the message would be in other hands.
* * *
Agent SPINNAKER needn't have bothered, KGB was under orders not to harass the People's Deputies. The coat-check girl pocketed the paper, and soon thereafter passed it across to an individual whose name she did not know. That man left the building and drove to his own work place. Two hours after that, the message was in another container in the pocket of a man driving to the airport, where he boarded the 747 for New York.
* * *
“Where to this time, Doctor?” the driver asked.
“Just drive around.”
“What?”
“We need to talk,” Kaminiskiy said.
“About what?”
“I know you are KGB,” Kaminiskiy said.
“Doctor,” the driver chuckled, “I am an embassy driver.”
“Your embassy medical file is signed by Dr. Feodor Il'ych Gregoriyev. He is a KGB doctor. We were classmates. May I go on?”
“Have you told anyone?”
“Of course not.”
The driver sighed. Well, what could one do about that? “What is it you wish to talk about?”
“You are KGB — Foreign Directorate?”
There was no avoiding it. “Correct. I hope this is important.”
“It may be. I need someone to come down from Moscow. There's a patient I'm treating. He has a very unusual lung problem.”
“Why should it interest me?”
“I've seen a similar problem before — a worker from Beloyarskiy. Industrial acciden
t, I was called in to consult on it.”
“Yes? What is at Beloyarskiy?”
“They fabricate atomic weapons there.”
The driver slowed the car. “Are you serious?”
“It could be something else — but the tests I need to run now are very specific. If this represents a Syrian project, we will not get the proper cooperation. Therefore, I need some special equipment from Moscow.”
“How quickly?”
The patient isn't going anywhere, except into the ground. I'm afraid his condition is quite hopeless."
“I have to go through the Rezident on this. He won't be back until Sunday.”
“Fast enough.”
32
CLOSURE
“Can I help?” Russell asked.
“Thank you, Marvin, but I would really prefer to do this myself, without distractions,” Ghosn said.
“I understand. Yell if you need anything.”
Ibrahim donned his heaviest clothing and walked out into the cold. The snow was falling quite hard. He'd seen snow in Lebanon, of course, but nothing like this. The storm had scarcely begun half an hour before and there was already more than three centimeters of it. The northerly wind was the most bitter he'd ever experienced, cutting into his very bones as he walked the sixty meters or so to the barn. Visibility was restricted to no more than two hundred meters. He could hear the traffic on the nearby highway, but could not even see the lights of the vehicles. He entered the barn through a side door and already regretted the fact that this building had no heating. Ghosn told himself very forcefully that he could not allow such things to affect him.
The cardboard box that shielded the device from casual view was not actually attached, and came off easily. What lay under that was a metal box with dials and other accoutrements for what it pretended to be, a commercial video-tape machine. The suggestion had come from Günther Bock, and the actual body of the machine had been purchased as scrap from a Syrian TV news agency which had replaced it with a new model. The access doors built into the metal body were almost perfectly suited to Ghosn's purpose, and the ample void space held the vacuum pump, in case that was needed. Ghosn instantly saw that it was not. The gauge that was part of the bomb case showed that the body had not leaked any air at all. That hardly came as a surprise — Ghosn was just as skilled a welder as he had told the late Manfred Fromm — but it was gratifying to the young engineer. Next he checked the batteries. There were three of these, all new, all nickel-cadmium, and all, he saw, fully charged, according to the test circuit. The timing device was next to the batteries. Making sure that its firing terminals were vacant, he checked its time — it was already set on local — against his watch, and saw that either one or the other (probably his watch) was a total of three seconds off. That was close enough for his purposes. Three glasses placed inside the box to illustrate any rough handling in transit were still intact. The shippers had taken their care, as he had hoped.
“You are ready, my friend,” Ghosn said quietly. He closed the inspection door, made sure it was properly latched, then replaced the cardboard cover. Ghosn blew warm breath on his hands, then walked back to the house.
“How will the weather affect us?” Qati asked Russell.
“There's another storm behind this one. I figure we'll drive down tomorrow evening, right before it starts. The second one will be short, maybe another inch or two, they say. If we go in between the two, the road should be all right. Then we check into the motel, and wait for the right time, right?”
“Correct. And the truck?”
“I'll do the painting today, soon as I have the heaters rigged. That's only two hours' work. I have the templates all done,” Russell said as he finished his coffee. “Load the bomb after I paint, okay?”
“How long for the paint to dry?” Ghosn asked.
“Three hours, tops. I want the paint job to be good, okay?”
“That is fine, Marvin.”
Russell laughed as he collected the breakfast dishes. “Man, I wonder what the people who made that movie would think?” He turned to see puzzlement on the faces of his guests.
“Didn't Günther tell you?” The faces were blank. “I saw the movie on television once. Black Sunday. A guy came up with an idea of killing the whole Superbowl crowd from a blimp.”
“You're joking,” Qati observed.
“No, in the movie they had a big antipersonnel thing on the bottom of the blimp, but the Israelis found out what was going on, and their CIA guys got there in the nick of time — you know, how it usually happens in the movies. With my people, it was always the cavalry that got there in the nick of time, so's they could kill all the savage Indians.”
“In this movie, the objective was to kill the entire stadium?” Ghosn asked, very quietly.
“Huh — oh, yeah, that's right.” Russell was loading the dishes into the dishwasher. “Not like we're doing.” He turned. “Hey, don't feel bad. Just taking out the TV coverage is going to piss people off like you wouldn't believe. And this stadium is covered, okay? That blimp-thing wouldn't work. You'd need like a nuke or something to do the same thing.”
“There's an idea,” Ghosn observed with a chuckle, wondering what reaction he'd get.
“Some idea. Yeah, you might start a real nuclear war — shit, man, guess whose people lives up in the Dakotas, where all those SAC bases are? I don't think I could play that kind of a game.” Russell dumped in the detergent and started the wash cycle. “What exactly do you have in that thing anyway?”
“A very compact and powerful high-explosive compound. It will do some damage to the stadium, of course.”
“I figured that. Well, taking out the TV won't be hard — that's delicate shit, y'know? — and just doing that — man, I'm telling you, it's going to have an effect like you wouldn't believe.”
“I agree, Marvin, but I would like to hear your reasoning on this,” Qati said.
“We've never had a really destructive terrorist act over here. This one will change things. People won't feel safe. They'll install check points and security stuff everywhere. it'll really piss people off, make people think. Maybe they'll see what the real problems are. That's the whole point, isn't it?”
“Correct, Marvin,” Qati replied.
“Can I help you with the painting?” Ghosn asked. He might get curious, Ibrahim thought, and they couldn't have that.
“I'd appreciate it.”
“You must promise to turn the heat on,” the engineer observed with a smile.
“Depend on it, man, or else the paint won't dry right. I guess this is kinda cold for ya.”
“Your people must be very hard to live in such a place.”
Russell reached for his coat and gloves. “Hey, man, it's our place, y'know?”
* * *
“Do you really expect to find him?” the Starpom asked.
“I think we have a fine chance,” Dubinin replied, leaning over the chart. “He'll be somewhere in here, well away from the coastal waters — too many fishermen with nets there — and north of this area.”
“Excellent, Captain, only two million square kilometers to search.”
“And we will cover only two-thirds of that. I said a fine chance, not a certainty. In three or four more years, we'll have the RPV the designers are working on, and we can send our sonar receptors down into the deep sound channel.” Dubinin referred to the next step in submarine technology, a robot mini-sub, which would be controlled from the mother ship by a fiber-optic cable. It would carry both sensors and weapons, and by diving very deep it could find out if sonar conditions in the thousand-to-two-thousand-meter regime were really as good as the theorists suggested. That would change the game radically.
“Anything on the turbulence sensors?”
“Negative, Captain,” a lieutenant answered.
“I wonder if those things are worth the trouble…” the executive officer groused.
“They worked the last time.”
“We had cal
m seas overhead then. How often are the seas calm in the North Pacific in winter?”
“It could still tell us something. We must use every trick we have. Why are you not optimistic?”
“Even Ramius only tracked an Ohio once, and that was on builder's trials, when they had the shaft problem. And even then, he only held the contact for — what? Seventy minutes.”
“We had this one before.”
“True enough, Captain.” The Starpom tapped a pencil on the chart.
Dubinin thought about his intelligence briefing on the enemy — old habits were hard to break. Harrison Sharpe Ricks, Captain, Naval Academy, in his second missile-submarine command, reportedly a brilliant engineer and technician, a likely candidate for higher command. A hard and demanding taskmaster, highly regarded in his navy. He'd made a mistake before, and was unlikely to make another, Dubinin told himself.
* * *
“Fifty thousand yards, exactly,” Ensign Shaw reported.
“This guy's not doing any Crazy Ivans,” Claggett thought for the first time.
“He's not expecting to be hunted himself, is he?” Ricks asked.
“I guess not, but his tail's not as good as he thinks it is.” The Akula was doing a ladder-search pattern. The long legs were on a roughly south-west-to-north-east vector, and at the end of each he shifted down south-east to the next leg, with an interval between search legs of about fifty thousand yards, twenty-five nautical miles. That gave a notional range of about thirteen miles to the Russian's towed-array sonar. At least, Claggett thought, that's what the intelligence guys would have said.
“You know, I think we'll hold at fifty-K yards, just to play it on the safe side,” Ricks announced, after a moment's reflection. “This guy is a lot quieter than I expected.”
“Plant noises are down quite a bit, aren't they? If this guy was creeping instead of trying to cover ground…” Claggett was pleased that his Captain was speaking like his conservative-engineer self again. He wasn't especially surprised. When push came to shove, Ricks reverted to type, but that was all right with the XO, who didn't think it was especially prudent to play fast-attack with a billion-dollar boomer.
