America (50 page)

“I never really wanted money. I wanted Zelda, and to get her I thought I would have to play her game. She never set out to hurt anyone; it was the game. You see that, don't you?”

Jake Grafton may have looked like a father figure, but Carmellini noted that he didn't nod, didn't say yes just to please Vance.

“Life doesn't often work out the way it should.” Even Vance seemed to realize that he had been rationalizing.

The doctor came in then, listened to Vance's chest with a stethoscope. “You gentlemen must leave. He's talked too long as it is. His right lung…”

“Thank you, doctor. Thank you, Zip.”

“You save her, Admiral. If we go to jail, that will be okay. Maybe when we get out Zelda and I will have another chance at life. We've screwed this one up pretty badly.”

*   *   *

There was a pay phone at the nurses' station twenty feet from Vance's room, and Jake used it. “This is Jake Grafton calling for General Le Beau.”

“He's in a meeting, sir.”

“Get him out of it.”

Sixty seconds later he heard Flap's voice.

“We were about an hour and a half too late, General,” Jake said. “Zelda Hudson was the brains behind the loss of SuperAegis and the theft of
America.
Someone kidnapped her out of her office this afternoon. They went to a fair amount of trouble to pull it off. Her partner got kicked a time or two and is in the hospital. He confessed to me. He thinks the man behind the kidnapping is Willi Schlegel, the number two at EuroSpace. According to Vance, he paid these two to put SuperAegis in the water.”

There was a moment of silence as the marine digested this news. “What now?” he said.

“Well, they didn't kill her. They took her from her building in a helicopter. The FBI will chase the chopper down, but they'll be long gone when they find it. I doubt that she's still in the area. These guys are French. I think it likely she's on her way to Canada by car or plane. Or Europe by plane. I recommend we get the FBI and immigration people involved. Search every car and truck crossing into Canada. Ask the FAA if anything flew out of the northeastern United States headed for Canada or Europe. It's possible they took a plane VFR without filing a flight plan, so we need to know if anything is in the air. Anything at all.”

“When will you get back here?” Flap asked.

“As fast as we can drive, sir.”

“I'll make it happen.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

A few strokes on the keyboard of the FAA computer revealed that the Gulfstream that left Teterboro was registered in France to EuroSpace. As the large corporate jet winged its way across the Atlantic, the U.S. Air Force launched two AWACS planes from bases in Germany.

Night had fallen when the Gulfstream changed its destination from Paris to Lisbon, Portugal. The AWACS Sentrys arrived on the scene as the Gulfstream taxied to the Lisbon executive terminal. Tracking the vehicles that left the terminal with side-looking radar proved a challenge, but when one of the vehicles went to the waterfront, Jake and Flap Le Beau grinned at each other. In front of them was a listing of the vessels in Lisbon harbor. One of them was a cruise ship,
Sea Wind,
owned by a German corporation in which the majority stockholder was … Willi Schlegel.

“It fits,” Flap Le Beau said. “Don't most cruise ships have cranes and dock-level openings for loading supplies?”

“The ones I'm familiar with do,” Jake agreed.

“They could pull something aboard at night, perhaps rig an awning so that the activity there can't be observed by anyone leaning over a railing or by a satellite in space.”

Flap called a travel agent he knew, got him after dinner, sent him back to his office. An hour later the man called back.

“
Sea Wind
is sailing the day after tomorrow from Lisbon. Her published itinerary calls for stops in the Azores, the Madeiras, Las Palmas in the Canaries, and Casablanca, before returning to Lisbon.”

“Is she full?”

“Not according to the computer. There are still cabins available, but they're damn pricey and the damn prices are all double occupancy. This is sorta a gourmet cruise for rich retirees.”

“Give me five cabins, five American couples. We'll call you with names in a couple hours.”

“How about in the morning?”

“Okay. But reserve them now.”

The man wanted a credit card to hold the cabins, so Flap pulled out his wallet and used his own. “Just a deposit,” he told his travel agent friend. “I don't have the credit limit to handle that amount.”

“Hell, man,” Jake told him when he hung up, “you're filthy rich. Use some of that money Jouany owes you.”

“Yeah, right.”

“You're not really planning on going yourself, are you?”

“I certainly am.” Flap gave Jake the commandant's stare.

“Well, you're kinda famous,” the admiral told him. “Black commandant and all that. Suppose one of these cruisers is a retired marine. He'll recognize you immediately.”

“I'll take care of it,” Flap said, in a tone that implied it was time to change the subject.

Jake did. “Maybe we ought to have State call the U.S. embassy in Lisbon. If the CIA could verify that Schlegel is on that ship I would feel a lot better about this.”

“Okay.” Flap picked up the phone and made the call.

“If he is aboard,” Flap said after he hung up, “we'll know in a few hours. That would prove to me that USS
America
is in the eastern Atlantic. If we get that verification, what say we call the president and tell him to turn on American air travel?
America
isn't going to fire any more missiles at the United States from there.”

“I hope you're right,” Jake said, “because if you aren't…”

“Jacob Lee Grafton, we've been betting our heinies for a lot of years. One more big bet won't make any difference.”

“You're the man,” Grafton said with a grin. “Call Camp David and tell the big honcho it's safe to come home.”

“I'll give them an opinion. While I'm at it, you call the air force and tell them I want a plane to get me and nine other fools to Lisbon in the morning.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

*   *   *

The fishing boat was trawling with three noisemakers. They weren't tremendously loud, but each of them emitted a steady, high-pitched sound. When the Revelation sonar in passive mode picked up the echoes of the sound off the shallow bottom, the effect was the same as if the noisemakers had been searchlights. The multiple noisemakers created a three-dimensional effect, eliminating many of the shadows on the irregular bottom and allowing any man-made item, such as the third stage of the SuperAegis launch vehicle, to be seen and recognized. That was the theory, anyway.

“So where the hell is it?” Heydrich demanded.

“You missed your calling,” Turchak told him from his station at the helm, without turning around. “With that tone of voice, you should have been a czar.”

“I don't know where the hell it is,” Kolnikov replied icily. “If I did, we would simply motor over to it and let you perform your heroics. Now why don't you find a seat in the back of the control room and watch people who know more about it than you do look for your missing third stage?”

They had been looking for a day. Almost ten hours. Kolnikov scrutinized the Revelation screens with care. The sonar wasn't designed for the task he was trying to perform with it, and the computer presentations were often murky, difficult to make out. Heydrich and the divers were there in the control room in addition to the normal crew. They were sitting in chairs or standing, occasionally moving around from pure frustration, all the time concentrating fiercely on the Revelation screens.

The shallow seamount over which USS
America
crawled was the top of an ancient volcano. There was some controversy, Kolnikov recalled, a few years back over whether one of these seamounts was the legendary Atlantis, covered by the sea. The volcano that made this seamount was old when the world was young. The cone had penetrated the surface and been eroded to nearly level by wind, rain, and surf. Then at some time during the geological past, the island sank beneath the waves. Or the sea rose. Whichever, the top of the ancient volcano was today about fifteen square miles in area and submerged to a depth of ninety feet.

Fifteen squares miles was a lot of area. If the SuperAegis third stage had made it here. Vladimir Kolnikov tried to curb his impatience. The noisemakers being towed by the fishing boat could not be heard at any great distance, but if he used active sonar and radiated a pulse, that
could
be heard. For hundreds of miles.

Trying to find the third stage of the rocket was like looking for a needle by candlelight. And other submarines might be out there, sharks angling for a torpedo shot. He could never discount that possibility. He glanced over his shoulder at Eck, who was searching for other submarines and trying to optimize the Revelation pictures. When he tired, this operation would have to be temporarily suspended. Boldt could check for other subs, but he couldn't do two things at once.

Weird shapes abounded on top of the seamount. There were ancient shipwrecks, at least one modern one, fantastic coral shapes, eroded rock.… Here and there the sub passed over the gloom of a deep fissure that was impenetrable to Revelation in the passive mode.

The first problem had occurred when the fishing boat had turned at the end of the first pass and started back. The radius of the turn had been so large that a segment of the seamount's surface would be left unexamined.

Kolnikov decided to risk the underwater telephone, which used sound. It could be heard at about fifty miles by
Los Angeles
–class subs. If there were any out there. But if the missing third stage was in one of the areas that were being missed, it would never be found. Kolnikov bit the bullet and handed Heydrich the telephone headset.

The fishing boat was plodding along now with GPS precision.

“How long to search this entire seamount?” Heydrich asked.

“Since we must rest and sleep, I would say another day, at least.”

The weather forecast that Boldt had downloaded when he raised the communications mast said a storm was brewing to the south. An area of low pressure drifting off Africa would become a tropical depression, then perhaps a hurricane.

Fortunately, the storm was well south, and in any event
America
should have recovered the satellite and be gone by the time it got seriously wound up. Storms were tricky. In these shallows the motion of the swells from a serious storm might rock
America.
That wouldn't be a problem if she were properly ballasted and making enough way to have full control with the planes, but at three knots she was so slow that the planes had little effect. No, Kolnikov thought, he didn't want to be caught at slow speed in these shallows if a serious storm happened by.

Where was the satellite?

Kolnikov glanced at Heydrich, wondering how long his patience would last if the satellite didn't turn up soon. He had sat in the back of the control room since the boat left Long Island Sound—when he wasn't locked up or sleeping; never a soft and fuzzy type, now Heydrich seemed to have an edge, an urgency about him. Perhaps it was the storm to the south.

Yes, the storm. Recovering the satellite. That was it.

*   *   *

The passenger list for the trip to Lisbon presented something of a problem. Flap's first thought was that he and Jake and eight of the toughest marines in the corps would go to Europe and kick butt. Upon further reflection, he realized that in addition to Jake Grafton he needed Sonny Killbuck's submarine expertise, Tommy Carmellini's knowledge of Zelda Hudson, and of course, Toad Tarkington. That was five men, and unless they were accompanied by five women, they certainly weren't going to melt into the cruise ship crowd.

Jake thought Callie would want to go—he
knew
she would want to go—and Toad's wife, Rita Moravia, was home. Jake Grafton nodded enthusiastically and said, “You bet,” whenever Rita's name was mentioned. Flap thought his wife might go even though she got seasick in a bathtub—she and Callie could schmooze their way through the passenger list. Flap needed two more women, and he knew whom he wanted. He talked to his chief of staff, and soon two of the toughest drill instructors in the corps had volunteered.

As the group waited to board the plane at Andrews, a man from the State Department—or perhaps he was CIA, he didn't say—arrived with ten passports. All brand-new, U.S. government–issue fakes. Each passport had the proper photo and birthday, but the name and rest of the information were bogus.

Callie didn't like her photo. Rita didn't like her new name—Betty—and Mrs. Le Beau was appalled that the fake passport contained her real birthday. “I don't see why they couldn't have taken five years off,” she said to Callie, who shared the sentiment.

The woman marine who was supposed to pretend she was Carmellini's significant other looked him up and down, then told him, “I've got a boyfriend who could break every bone in your body.”

“Izzatright?”

“Keep your hands to yourself, lover boy, and think pure thoughts. No funny business.”

Her name was Lizzy and she was from Oklahoma. When she wasn't on duty, she worked out in the gym. She had won some amateur bodybuilding competitions and thought she might try professional wrestling when this enlistment was up. Carmellini thought that if bone breaking were on the menu, Lizzy wouldn't need her boyfriend's help.

The airplane that was to fly the group to Lisbon was a civilian Gulfstream, much like the one that EuroSpace owned. Flap thought a military airplane would jeopardize the mission and insisted on a civilian-registered plane. The air force chartered one.