by Tom Clancy
It had evidently just come in, and there was snow on the first step. Ryan slipped and would have fallen had not one of the KGB men caught his arm. He gave Jack a look that in the West would have been accompanied by a smile, but the Russians are not a smiling people except when they want to be. He went up again, his hands firm on the safety rails. All you have to do ...
“Good evening,” a voice called. Not very loudly, but it didn’t have to be. Ryan squinted in the darkness and saw the glowing orange light of a cigarette. He took a deep breath and walked toward it.
“Chairman Gerasimov, I presume?”
“You do not recognize me?” A trace of amusement. The man flicked his Western-made butane lighter to illuminate his face. It was Nikolay Borissovich Gerasimov. The flame gave his face exactly the right sort of look. The Prince of Darkness himself...
“I do now,” Jack said, struggling to control his voice.
“I understand that you wish to speak with me. How may I be of service?” he asked in a courtly voice that belied the setting.
Jack turned and gestured to the two bodyguards who were standing at the front of the car. He turned back but didn’t have to say anything. Gerasimov spoke a single word in Russian, and both men left.
“Please excuse them, but their duty is to protect the Chairman, and my people take their duties seriously.” He waved to the seat opposite his. Ryan took it.
“I didn’t know your English was so good.”
“Thank you.” A courteous nod followed by a businesslike observation: “I caution you that time is short. You have information for me?”
“Yes, I do.” Jack reached inside his coat. Gerasimov tensed for a moment, then relaxed. Only a madman would try to kill the chief of the KGB, and he knew from Ryan’s dossier that he was not mad. “I have something for you,” said Ryan.
“Oh?” Impatience. Gerasimov was not a man who liked to be kept waiting. He watched Ryan’s hands fumble with something, and was puzzled to hear the rasp of metal scraping against metal. Jack’s clumsiness disappeared when the key came off the ring, and when he spoke, he was a man claiming another’s pot.
“Here.” Ryan handed it over.
“What is this?” Suspicion now. Something was very badly wrong, wrong enough that his voice betrayed him.
Jack didn’t make him wait. He spoke in a voice he’d been rehearsing for a week. Without knowing it, he spoke faster than he’d planned. “That, Chairman Gerasimov, is the warhead-control key from the Soviet ballistic-missile submarine Krasny Oktyabr. It was given to me by Captain Marko Aleksandrovich Ramius when he defected. You will be pleased to know that he likes his new life in America, as do all of his officers.”
“The submarine was—”
Ryan cut him off. There was scarcely enough light to see the outline of his face, but that was enough to see the change in the man’s expression.
“Destroyed by her own scuttling charges? No. The spook aboard whose cover was ship’s cook, Sudets, I think his name was—well, no sense in hiding it. I killed him. I’m not especially proud of that, but it was either him or me. For what it’s worth, he was a very courageous young man,” Jack said, remembering the ten horrible minutes in the submarine’s missile room. “Your file on me doesn’t say anything about operations, does it?”
“But—”
Jack cut him off again. It was not yet the time for finesse. They had to jolt him, had to jolt him hard.
“Mr. Gerasimov, there are some things we want from you.”
“Rubbish. Our conversation is ended.” But Gerasimov didn’t rise, and this time Ryan made him wait for a few beats.
“We want Colonel Filitov back. Your official report to the Politburo on Red October stated that the submarine was positively destroyed, and that a defection had probably never been planned, but rather that GRU security had been penetrated and that the submarine had been issued bogus orders after her engines had been sabotaged. That information came to you through Agent Cassius. He works for us,” Jack explained. “You used it to disgrace Admiral Gorshkov and to reinforce your control over the military’s internal security. They’re still angry about that, aren’t they? So, if we do not get Colonel Filitov back, this coming week in Washington a story will be leaked to the press for the Sunday editions. It will have some of the details of the operation, and a photograph of the submarine sitting in a covered drydock in Norfolk, Virginia. After that we will produce Captain Ramius. He’ll say that the ship’s political officer—one of your Department Three men, I believe—was part of the conspiracy. Unfortunately, Putin died after arriving, of a heart attack. That’s a lie, but try proving it.”
“You cannot blackmail me, Ryan!” There was no emotion at all now.
“One more thing. SDI is not on the bargaining table. Did you tell the Politburo that it was?” Jack asked. “You’re finished, Mr. Gerasimov. We have the ability to disgrace you, and you’re just too good a target to pass up. If we don’t get Filitov back, we can leak all sorts of things. Some will be confirmed, but the really good ones will be denied, of course, while the FBI launches an urgent investigation to identify the leakers.”
“You did not do all this for Filitov,” Gerasimov said, his voice measured now.
“Not exactly.” Again he made him wait for it: “We want you to come out, too.”
Jack walked out of the tram five minutes later. His escort walked him back to the hotel. The attention to detail was impressive. Before rejoining the reception, Jack’s shoes were wiped dry. On reentering the room he walked at once to the drink table, but found it empty. He spotted a waiter with a tray, and took the first thing he could reach. It turned out to be vodka, but Ryan gunned it down in a single gulp before reaching for another. When he finished that one, he started wondering where the men’s room really was. It turned out to be exactly where he’d been told. Jack got there just in time.
It was as worked up as anyone had ever been with a computer simulation. They’d never run one quite this way before, of course, and that was the purpose of the test. The ground-control computer didn’t know what it was doing, nor did any of the others. One machine was programmed to report a series of distant radar contacts. All it did was to receive a collection of signals like those generated by an orbiting Flying Cloud satellite, cued in turn by one of the DSPS birds at geosynchronous height. The computer relayed this information to the ground-control computer, which examined its criteria for weapons-free authority and decided that they had been met. It took a few seconds for the lasers to power up, but they reported being ready a few seconds later. The fact that the lasers in question did not exist was not pertinent to the test. The ground mirror did, and it responded to instructions from the computer, sending the imaginary laser beam to the relay mirror eight hundred kilometers overhead. This mirror, so recently carried by the space shuttle and actually in California, received its own instructions and altered its configuration accordingly, relaying the laser beam to the battle mirror. This mirror was at the Lockheed factory rather than in orbit, and received its instructions via landline. At all three mirrors a precise record was kept of the ever-changing focal-length and azimuth settings. This information was sent to the score-keeping computer at Tea Clipper Control.
There had been several purposes to the test that Ryan had observed a few weeks before. In validating the system architecture, they had also received priceless empirical data on the actual functioning characteristics of the hardware. As a result they could simulate real exercises on the ground with near-absolute confidence in the theoretical results.
Gregory was rolling a ballpoint pen between his hands as the data came up on the video-display terminal. He’d just stopped chewing on it for fear of getting a mouth full of ink.
“Okay, there’s the last shot,” an engineer observed. “Here comes the score ...”
“Wow!” Gregory exclaimed. “Ninety-six out of a hundred! What’s the cycle time?”
“Point zero-one-six,” a software expert replied. “That’s
point zero-zero-four under nominal—we can double-check every aim-command while the laser cycles—”
“And that increases the Pk thirty percent all by itself,” Gregory said. “We can even try doing shoot-look-shoot instead of shoot-shoot-look and still save time on the back end. People!”—he jumped to his feet—“we have done it! The software is in the fuckin’ can!” Four months sooner than promised!
The room erupted with cheering that no one outside the team of thirty people could possibly have understood.
“Okay, you laser pukes!” someone called. “Get your act together and build us a death ray! The gunsight is finished!”
“Be nice to the laser pukes.” Gregory laughed. “I work with them too.”
Outside the room, Beatrice Taussig was merely walking past the door on her way to an admin meeting when she heard the cheering. She couldn’t enter the lab—it had a cipher lock, and she didn’t have the combination—but didn’t have to. The experiment that they’d hinted at over dinner the night before had just been run. The result was obvious enough. Candi was in there, probably standing right next to the Geek, Bea thought. She kept walking.
“Thank God there’s not much ice,” Mancuso observed, looking through the periscope. “Call it two feet, maybe three.”
“There will be a clear channel here. The icebreakers keep all the coastal ports open,” Ramius said.
“Down ’scope,” the Captain said next. He walked over to the chart table. “I want you to move us two thousand yards south, then bottom us out. That’ll put us under a hard roof and ought to keep the Grishas and Mirkas away.”
“Aye, Captain,” the XO replied.
“Let’s go get some coffee,” Mancuso said to Ramius and Clark. He led them down one deck and to starboard into the wardroom. For all the times he’d done things like this in the past four years, Mancuso was nervous. They were in less than two hundred feet of water, within sight of the Soviet coast. If detected and then localized by a Soviet ship, they would be attacked. It had happened before. Though no Western submarine had ever suffered actual damage, there was a first time for everything, especially if you started taking things for granted, the Captain of USS Dallas told himself. Two feet of ice was too much for the thin-hulled Grisha-class patrol boats to plow through, and their main antisubmarine weapon, a multiple rocket launcher called an RBU-6000, was useless over ice, but a Grisha could call in a submarine. There were Russian subs about. They’d heard two the previous day.
“Coffee, sir?” the wardroom attendant asked. He got a nod and brought out a pot and cups.
“You sure this is close enough?” Mancuso asked Clark.
“Yeah, I can get in and out.”
“It won’t be much fun,” the Captain observed.
Clark smirked. “That’s why they pay me so much. I—”
Conversation stopped for a moment. The submarine’s hull creaked as it settled on the bottom, and the boat took on a slight list. Mancuso looked at the coffee in his cup and figured it for six or seven degrees. Submariner machismo prevented him from showing any reaction, but he’d never done this, at least not with Dallas. A handful of submarines in the U.S. Navy were specially designed for these missions. Insiders could identify them at a glance from the arrangement of a few hull fittings, but Dallas wasn’t one of them.
“I wonder how long this is going to take?” Mancuso asked the overhead.
“May not happen at all,” Clark observed. “Almost half of them don’t. The longest I’ve ever had to sit like this was ... twelve days, I think. Seemed like an awfully long time. That one didn’t come off.”
“Can you say how many?” Ramius asked.
“Sorry, sir.” Clark shook his head.
Ramius spoke wistfully. “You know, when I was a boy, I fished here—right here many times. We never knew that you Americans came here to fish also.”
“It’s a crazy world,” Clark agreed. “How’s the fishing?”
“In the summer, very good. Old Sasha took me out on his boat. This is where I learned the sea, where I learned to be a sailor.”
“What about the local patrols?” Mancuso asked, getting everyone back to business.
“There will be a low state of readiness. You have diplomats in Moscow, so the chance of war is slight. The surface patrol ships are mainly KGB. They guard against smugglers—and spies.” He pointed to Clark. “Not so good against submarines, but this was changing when I left. They were increasing their ASW practice in Northern Fleet, and, I hear, in Baltic Fleet also. But this is bad place for submarine detection. There is much fresh water from the rivers, and the ice overhead—all makes for difficult sonar conditions.”
That’s good to hear, Mancuso thought. His ship was in an increased state of readiness. The sonar equipment was fully manned and would remain so indefinitely. He could get Dallas moving in a matter of two minutes, and that should be ample, he thought.
Gerasimov was thinking, too. He was alone in his office. A man who controlled his emotions even more than most Russians, his face displayed nothing out of the way, even though there was no one else in the room to notice. In most people that would have been remarkable, for few can contemplate their own destruction with objectivity.
The Chairman of the Committee for State Security assessed his position as thoroughly and dispassionately as he examined any aspect of his official duties. Red October. It all flowed out from that. He had used the Red October incident to his advantage, first suborning Gorshkov, then disposing of him; he’d also used it to strengthen the position of his Third Directorate arm. The military had begun to manage its own internal security—but Gerasimov had seized upon his report from Agent Cassius to convince the Politburo that the KGB alone could ensure the loyalty and security of the Soviet military. That had earned him resentment. He’d reported, again via Cassius, that Red October had been destroyed. Cassius had told KGB that Ryan was under criminal suspicion, and—
And we—I!—walked into the trap.
How could he explain that to the Politburo? One of his best agents had been doubted—but when? They’d ask that, and he didn’t know the answer; therefore all the reports received from Cassius would become suspect. Despite the fact that much good data had come from the agent, knowledge that he’d been doubled at an unknown time tainted all of it. And that wrecked his vaunted insights into Western political thought.
He’d wrongly reported that the submarine hadn’t defected, and not discovered the error. The Americans had gotten an intelligence windfall, but KGB didn’t know of it. Neither did GRU, but that was little comfort.
And he’d reported that the Americans had made a major change in their arms-negotiation strategy, and that, too, was wrong.
Could he survive all three disclosures at once? Gerasimov asked himself.
Probably not.
In another age he would have faced death, and that would have made the decision all the easier. No man chooses death, at least not a sane one, and Gerasimov was coldly sane in everything he did. But that sort of thing didn’t happen now. He’d end up with a subministerial job somewhere or other, shuffling papers. His KGB contacts would be useless to him beyond such meaningless favors as access to decent groceries. People would watch him walking on the street—no longer afraid to look him in the face, no longer fearful of his power, they’d point and laugh behind his back. People in his office would gradually lose their deference, and talk back, even shout at him once they knew that his power was well and truly gone. No, he said to himself, I will not endure that.
To defect, then? To go from being one of the world’s most powerful men to becoming a hireling, a mendicant who traded what he knew for money and a comfortable life? Gerasimov accepted the fact that his life would become more comfortable in physical terms—but to lose his power!
That was the issue, after all. Whether he left or stayed, to become just another man ... that would be like death, wouldn’t it?
Well, what do you do now?
He had to change his p
osition, had to change the rules of the game, had to do something so dramatic ... but what?
The choice was between disgrace and defection? To lose everything he’d worked for—within sight of his goal—and face a choice like this?
The Soviet Union is not a nation of gamblers. Its national strategy has always been more reflective of the Russians’ national passion for chess, a series of careful, pre-planned moves, never risking much, always protecting its position by seeking small, progressive advantages wherever possible. The Politburo had almost always moved in that way. The Politburo itself was largely composed of similar men. More than half were apparatchiks who had spoken the appropriate words, filled the necessary quotas, taking what advantages they could, and who had won advancement through a stolidness whose perfection they could display around the table in the Kremlin. But the function of those men was to provide a moderating influence on those who aspired to rule, and these men were the gamblers. Narmonov was a gambler. So was Gerasimov. He’d play his own game, allying himself with Alexandrov to establish his ideological constituency, blackmailing Vaneyev and Yazov to betray their master.
And it was too fine a game to quit so easily. He had to change the rules again, but the game did not really have any rules—except for the one: Win.
If he won—the disgraces would not matter, would they? Gerasimov took the key from his pocket and examined it for the first time in the light of his desk lamp. It looked ordinary enough. Used in the designed manner, it would make possible the deaths of—fifty million? A hundred? More? The Directorate Three men on the submarines and in the land-based rocket regiments held that power—the zampolit, the political officer alone had the authority to activate the warheads without which the rockets were mere fireworks. Turn this key in the proper way at the proper time, he knew, and the rockets were transformed into the most frightening instruments of death yet devised by the mind of man. Once launched, nothing could stop them...
