America (34 page)

“Stay away from the windows. And look for guns. Any kind of guns.”

He went looking for a phone. The kitchen was to the right of the foyer, overlooking the parking area. There was a telephone there, of course. Dial tone. He punched 911.

As it rang he heard a popping outside. Muffled shots … then the line went dead.

“Bastards.”

He threw down the telephone and charged through the house looking for a gun cabinet. He found Ilin on the second floor, in a den, trying to open the gun cabinet with a key. “It was in the drawer.” Shelves filled with books lined the walls, soft leather chairs were arranged around a fireplace, a blowup of a thoroughbred hung over the fireplace.

Grafton picked up a book from a coffee table and broke the glass of the cabinet. “They shot out the telephone line,” he explained. The cabinet held half a dozen shotguns, all expensive double-barrels.

Grafton grabbed two—twelve gauge—then rummaged through the drawers in the bottom half of the cabinet.

He found a box of shells. Birdshot. What the hell!

He passed Ilin a handful of shells and pocketed the rest.

Someone was working on the door downstairs. He could hear it. He could also hear the buzzing of the light airplane, which sounded as if it were flying back and forth near the house.

He loaded the gun and went to the head of the stairs, where he could see the door. “Look out the windows, see if you can get a shot,” he told Ilin.

Several minutes passed. He wiped the perspiration off his face, tried to calm down. He had a gun in his hand, everything was going to be okay. They were going to live through this. Yeah.

The shotgun felt heavy, solid, good.

He eased down the stairs, trying to see out the windows.

There, at the window in the living room, someone looking in. He flipped off the safety, raised the shotgun, and fired both barrels as fast as he could pull the trigger. The glass in the window exploded outward.

Too late! The face had disappeared just before he fired.

He reloaded as quickly as possible, then eased over to the window and looked outside, ready to duck if someone out there decided he was enough of a target to be worth the effort.

No one in sight. No blood, either, which filled him with relief.

He got a glimpse of the plane, up there under the clouds.

“Did you wound him?” Ilin asked. He was on the stairs, his shotgun at the ready.

“I was too late.”

“So who wants you dead?”

“Nobody. I'm a junior flag officer in the navy. I don't know anything about anything. Nobody in his right mind would have any reason to want me dead. They must be after you.”

“No.”

“Think what you like,” Jake said. He checked the doors coming from the basement and garage—all locked.

“If they try to get in again, this is the way they will come,” he told Ilin and left him to keep an eye on these doors while he searched for food in the kitchen. He was hungry and thirsty.

There was little in the refrigerator. Jake checked the freezer, then the cabinets. Finally he filled a glass of water from the sink tap and took it to Ilin, who accepted it gratefully. Back in the kitchen he stood at the sink and drank two glasses full.

More exploring followed, with both men carefully avoiding windows. Fortunately the lawn fell away on the front of the house, which had huge windows looking toward the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Taking his time, Jake unlocked the door to the garage and gently pushed it open, half expecting someone to be in there. There wasn't.

He flipped on the light.… A pickup. Four-wheel drive. Unlocked but no key. “Here's our way out if we can find a key,” he told the Russian.

Back upstairs he went to the den, rooted through the desk drawers. Plenty of keys, but none that looked like it might fit the pickup.

“Look in the kitchen,” he advised the Russian, who left him in the den.

After a bit Jake went downstairs and met Ilin heading for the garage with a key ring in his hand. “They were in a drawer with batteries and flashlights,” Ilin said over his shoulder.

When they were satisfied they had the right key, Jake held up a hand, stopping Ilin from turning on the truck. “If we drive out now, they'll follow. We'll have a better chance after dark.”

“That's hours away.”

“We've got shotguns, water, and toilet paper. I'm in no hurry.”

Ilin nodded and climbed out of the truck.

They sat on the stools at the kitchen counter, well back from the windows, shotguns on their laps. The Cessna was still up there, circling. On the walls were family pictures, teenage girls at the beach, girls with boys, a photo around a Christmas tree. Several of the framed pictures were of a couple in their fifties, the owners, probably.

“Who are these people?” Ilin asked. “Who owns this house?”

“The guy is a car dealer, I think. Maybe retired. There were some old awards from Ford Motor Company up in his office, a framed picture of a dealership.”

“A capitalist.”

“Yep. A leech. Sold cars to anyone who wanted one. Sucked the blood of the proletariat. The proletariat liked it, apparently, which is why America is full of cars and millions of people make an excellent living in the auto industry.”

“Too bad Karl Marx didn't sell cars.”

“And Lenin,” Jake said, flashing a grin.

“I think after dark would be best,” Ilin said, leaning back on his stool and making sure the shotgun was handy.

“There's food in the freezer and a television. Maybe even liquor. And a loaded gun at hand. What more do you want?”

“What I want is a cigarette.” Without another word Ilin lit one. There were no ashtrays, of course. He found a saucer in the cabinet and used that.

*   *   *

Seated in the left seat of the P-3 Orion, Duke Dolan checked his watch. The sonobuoys were in the water, the TACCO and his troops were trying to sort out the undersea noises … and the copilot was talking to Scout One, the E-3 Sentry AWACS that was somewhere nearby, directing aerial traffic. The four-engine patrol plane was low, only two hundred feet over the ocean, so Duke was working hard as he hand-flew it.

Clouds were moving in from the west. The high overcast would come down during the day and showers would develop this evening, according to the weather briefer when Duke discussed the forecast with him this morning an hour before dawn. That was the thing about the military—the working hours were truly terrible. Up at three in the morning, brief and fly for twelve hours, debrief, sleep a little, then get up and do it over again. At least his crew was flying days. He hated flying all night and trying to sleep in the middle of the day.

This contact was a welcome break from the boredom of long patrols. The people in back were pumped, the copilot was energized, Duke was working hard. All this over an ocean empty in every direction as far as the eye could see, which was about eight or nine miles; then the sea and sky merged in a bluish haze.

Duke turned the selector knob on his intercom box so that he could listen to the crew in back as they sorted out the undersea sounds. The sonobuoys were set to reel out their hydrophones to different depths, so
America
couldn't hide under a temperature or salinity discontinuity. Not that the boat really needed to hide, Duke Dolan thought ruefully. It was so damned quiet that the P-3 had little chance of hearing it.

That thought had just crossed his mind when he heard one of the operators tell the TACCO, “I've got something here.”

After a moment the TACCO began giving Duke heading changes. He brought him around in a fairly tight circle and had him fly toward an area he wanted investigated.

Duke Dolan was amused by the whole business. Didn't these people understand that they weren't going to hear
America?
That damned pirate, Kolnikov, was down there right now laughing at the U.S. Navy. Maybe that was the sound they heard, Kolnikov laughing.

The TACCO had him make a turn and come back over the area that he thought might have something.

Time passed as the plane droned along, turning this way and that, the pilots following the TACCO's orders. After about twelve minutes of this, the radar operator, who also ran the magnetic anomaly detector, or MAD gear, sang out, “MAD, MAD, MAD.” He had a contact! “The needle pegged! Clear to the stop!” the man shouted over the ICS at the TACCO.

“Back around for another run,” the TACCO told Duke. “We'll put a sonobuoy in on this pass, then work out his course and speed.”

“When you get it all figured out, then what are you going to do?” Duke asked.

“Report it all to the heavies, I guess. They aren't going to let us shoot if there are American boats within a hundred miles. You know that as well as I do.”

“Yeah,” Duke said disgustedly and laid the P-3 over in a turn.

*   *   *

“P-3 went directly overhead,” Eck said softly, just loud enough for Kolnikov to hear. There were still a few kibitzers in
America
's control room, including Heydrich, and for some reason Eck felt they were intruders.

“Tell me if he comes back,” Kolnikov said. He kept his attention on the ghostly shape of
La Jolla
on the flat-screen display. The noise generated by the prop pushing water shone like a floodlight on the presentation. Eck had softened the gain somewhat on the presentation to keep the light from overpowering the rest of the submarine. All sonar images were fuzzy, of course, but the computer cleaned up this one and gave it a tangible reality that made it leap at the viewer.

“The P-3 probably got us on MAD,” Eck said. Kolnikov was too calm. The man just didn't seem to understand that their lives were at stake here.

Eck glanced at Kolnikov, was nodding affirmatively, a tiny up-and-down jerking of the head. Then it stopped. He was intent on
La Jolla.

Two minutes ago he had picked up the sound of water passing around the array cable. After Eck designated noises on that frequency for the computer to sort out and display, the cable was visible on the port Revelation displays, a pencil-thin line that stretched from the port side of the submarine, above
America,
and disappeared astern. The thought struck him that the cable looked like a power line along a highway.

“He's turning and moving away,” Kolnikov said to Turchak, who was at the helm control station. “Stay with him.”

“I'm going to have to add a few turns.”

“Okay.”

“He knows we're back here,” Turchak said softly, trying not to alarm Eck or the kibitzers. “He's started the dance to see if we'll stay with him.”

“Surely not. We're too quiet. Turn on the sail lights, poke the photonics mast up a few feet and turn on the camera. Let's see if we can get this guy on television.”

Rothberg scurried aft and raised the mast. Turchak flipped on the sail's floodlights, used primarily to light the gangway at night when the sub was against a pier.

Yes. After the image was enhanced by the low-light illuminator, there she was,
La Jolla,
on the forward screen, dim and ghostly.

“Try the blue-green illuminator,” Kolnikov said over his shoulder to Rothberg, who was still at the photonics console.

“That might set off alarms,” Turchak objected. Blue-green was often used by airborne and space-based sensors for submarine detection.

“Okay, ultraviolet,” Kolnikov muttered.

In ultraviolet the American attack boat was slightly clearer. Kolnikov, Turchak, and Rothberg discussed frequencies for a bit, then Rothberg changed the freq of the blue-green illuminator slightly, taking it off the freq they thought most likely to be expected, and tried that.
La Jolla
leaped clearly into view.

Several minutes passed.
La Jolla
turned again, five or six degrees back to the right.

“Stick like glue. He can't hurt us from that position, and no one else will shoot with him there.”

“And if he manages to break away?”

“He doesn't know we're here,” Kolnikov assured his friend. “We'll stick with him until the P-3 leaves, or any other antisubmarine forces that enter the area, then drop astern and break away.”

“I think he knows we're here.”

“So. What can he do? We are within the minimum range of his torpedoes, they wouldn't travel far enough to arm, and he can't turn them back across his wake due to the safety interlocks. And if he tries to break away we'll gun him the instant he crosses our minimum range line.”

*   *   *

Aboard
La Jolla,
Junior Ryder was examining his options. He had turned his boat fifteen degrees to the right and put in turns for six knots. He and his XO, Commander Skip Harlow, were listening to the raw sonar audio. As the boat's speed increased, it seemed to Junior that the gurgling noise got louder. He asked Harlow and Buck Brown what they thought.

Both nodded. Yes.

Then he turned the boat five degrees back to the right, to see if the noise would follow. It did.

“That fucking Russian has his nose up our ass,” Harlow murmured. Sweat glistened on his forehead and ran down the crevices of his face. He swabbed at his face with his hand.

“He can't shoot us from there,” Junior said thoughtfully, “but if he breaks away…”

“If he breaks away, we can shoot too.”

“He didn't shoot us when he had us cold,” Junior Ryder said slowly, thinking out loud. “He heard us, probably even knows what boat this is, knows we're hunting him, and he didn't shoot.”

“He isn't hunting us,” Harlow said without conviction. “We're hunting him.”

“Oh, man!” Combat wasn't supposed to be like this, Ryder thought bitterly.

“So what do you want to do, Skipper?”

“I sure as hell don't want this asshole killing my crew. That's for damn sure. I want a high-percentage shot and I want to give him a low-percentage one.”