America (8 page)

Forward of the berthing area was the pressure bulkhead and, beyond that, the vertical launch tubes. The missiles were inside their tubes, which were sealed units. There was no provision for reloading tubes at sea—the thirty-four-foot diameter of the pressure hull meant that there just wasn't enough room, which was why the tubes were outside the pressure hull. Forward of the tubes was the bow sonar dome with its huge array. Beneath that array was another, a conformal array.

When he had seen all there was to see, Kolnikov closed the hatch and went back through the tunnel. Part of the ballast tank space, he knew, was utilized by the winch and cable for the towed array, but access to that compartment was on the first deck. On the second deck he went through the control room—Turchak was poring over a computer—to the hatch opening into the tunnel that led through the reactor compartment. The shielded tunnel was designed to prevent crewmen from absorbing any unnecessary radiation.

He exited the tunnel into the reactor compartment. There was really little to see. Everything was spotlessly clean. The control panel was in the engine room.

Kolnikov reentered the tunnel and went on aft to the engine room.

Gordin and two others were there. A normal engine room watch team was three men aboard this class of sub, one fewer than the
Seawolf
- or
Los Angeles–class.

On a Russian sub, one man would be enough, but American boats were not as highly automated. The Russian Navy could never get or keep enough qualified men, so they had to automate. For safety reasons, the Americans had never taken automation as far.
America
was more automated than any past boat, but still, a normal engine room team was three men, who spent their watch checking gauges and turning valves. Kolnikov had Gordin, Steeckt, and Brovkin, none of whom knew much about the reactor but had been taught to rush from station to station, checking this, adjusting that to keep everything within normal limits.

They were impressed. “This is a beautiful ship, Captain,” they gushed and expounded loudly as they touched and pointed.

The ship was beautiful, Kolnikov admitted ruefully. Everything reeked of quality. Everything the eye beheld was a wonder of design and manufacture. Nothing shoddy, quickly made, quickly finished.

It feels as if we are inside a giant watch, Kolnikov thought. He recognized the major assemblies, but that was all. He studied the control panel that Callahan had manned. According to him, the only SCRAM button still wired up was the one on this panel. SCRAM—there was an acronym! It stood for safety control reactor ax man, a title given to the man responsible for cutting the rope holding the control rods in the first nuclear core under the stadium at the University of Chicago should anything go wrong.

He would not attempt to rewire the SCRAM controls, he decided. One stray volt during the rewiring would drop the rods into the pile, killing the fission reaction. The reactor could be restarted, of course, if they knew what they were doing and had plenty of time and electrical power, but why take that risk?

“The electrical complexity is beyond my experience, Captain,” Brovkin said as he explained the intricacies of one of the major circuit-breaker panels. He led Kolnikov from panel to panel, showed him the fiber-optic wire bundles that carried information to the computers and actuators located throughout the ship. “I have never seen anything like this. Without diagrams one would be hopelessly lost.” The electrical diagrams, several thousand of them, were in the computer, of course. Finding the right diagram was the biggest problem.

If anything went wrong, anything …

Brovkin grinned at him. The fool!

Kolnikov knew that he was on a tightrope without a net. If the reactor had a problem, he couldn't kill it from the control room. If he accidentally SCRAMed it, he probably couldn't restart it. Either way they were all dead men.

He wondered if the others had carefully considered the risks. Or were they here because they thought he had? Maybe they just didn't care. “At some point in life you gotta just grab for it, man.” That was the American, Leon Rothberg's, explanation, and it was probably as good as any.

Kolnikov spent another hour exploring the boat, examining everything, trying to absorb all of it. The boat was two technological generations beyond anything he had seen in the Russian Navy or on the drawing tables. The torpedoes, fired by computers that displayed the tactical problem on large screens; the cruise missiles, with their breathtaking capabilities; and the remote periscope—all these things were marvels, yet the main technological jewel was the multistatic passive sonar. Truly it was a Revelation, revealing all things.

As he walked through the boat he paused often to listen and marvel at the quiet. He put his head against bulkheads, for any vibration or noise would be magnified by its transmission through a solid. Essentially nothing. As he listened he could hear his own heart beating. Years ago the Americans pioneered techniques to acoustically isolate mechanical noisemakers so the sound would not be transmitted throughout the hull of the boat. Now the Americans had taken that technology to a whole new level.

He would have to do something about the Americans crammed into the mess hall. Kolnikov conferred with Heydrich. “I intend to find a ship and surface near it before dusk, put these men into the water, get rid of them.”

“Do you want to keep anyone?”

“No. We would have to watch anyone we kept, keeping our people up around the clock. Put them over the side.”

“Several of them probably have the combination of the crypto safe. No doubt I can persuade them to open it. The codebooks would make us extremely wealthy men.”

“They will be worth pennies when we find the time to peddle them; they aren't worth the effort. Put all the Americans over the side.”

Heydrich grimaced. “These people will tell tales. Why not just shoot them, then jettison their bodies through a torpedo tube in the middle of the ocean?”

“You'd like that, wouldn't you?”

“I don't take unnecessary risks.”

“Risks are my department, Heydrich. We do it my way.”

CHAPTER THREE

As he rode the helicopter across the Delmarva peninsula and the Chesapeake Bay on his way back to Washington, Jake Grafton speculated about the urgent summons. He knew nothing about submarines—had spent his entire career in naval aviation.

He smiled to himself as he recalled Callie's enthusiasm this morning. When he was handed the assignment to the military liaison staff of the anti-ICBM project—Super-Aegis—he had been depressed. He knew enough about the navy to understand that the job was a dead end, on the career path to nowhere. The liaison team would get no credit for a job well done. Problems that led to complaints from foreign governments, however, would earn everyone involved sufficient notoriety to force his or her retirement.

Callie hadn't seen it that way. This job was a fine opportunity, she said, a challenge. “Someone chose you for this job because he knows you can do it well.”

Jake just nodded. He didn't tell her that Admiral Stuffy Stalnaker put Jake in this job because he didn't want to give him a job with a shot at promotion.

Ah, well. Bureaucracies were the same the world over. And regardless of how it went, Jake was ready to retire. Sharing the days with Callie would certainly be fun. And yet, as Callie had predicted, he was enjoying the challenge of the liaison team.

The space-based missile-defense system was a technological marvel, a marriage of computers, reactors, lasers, and infrared sensors that many said could never be made to work. That many didn't want to work. The system had certainly been expensive, more than fifty billion dollars so far, yet the politicians had approved the expenditures every step of the way. If SuperAegis worked—there was that caveat again—the industrial superpowers would be protected from the missiles of the great unwashed who hadn't been invited to share the prosperity of the booming world economy masterminded by the superpowers. That was the cynical view, of course, argued loudly and vehemently in Congress and the world press, but it lost out when the votes were counted. Politicians liked big-bucks defense projects and the public wanted protection. SuperAegis was a military-industrial PR dream come true, a hundred billion bucks for Congress to spend on something for everybody.

As the helicopter carrying Jake to Washington droned along, he reflected on the political battles and diplomatic maneuvering that had won approval for SuperAegis. Sharing the antimissile umbrella with Europe and Russia had been the masterstroke—an insight of pure genius from the secretary of state, Wallace Cornfeld—that had made SuperAegis diplomatically possible. And created a host of problems for the liaison team.

Inherent in the entire concept was the premise that the technology must be protected from states not under the SuperAegis umbrella, the so-called aggressor states. If an aggressor state learned enough about SuperAegis to defeat it, all the treasure and effort would have been expended in vain. Of course, the nations under the shield wanted to ensure that once SuperAegis was in the sky and operational, the United States could not turn it off if the winds of fortune shifted into another quadrant. In addition, the Americans did not want the Russians or Europeans to learn too much about the system for fear they would figure out ways to defeat it in some future crisis, nullifying its capabilities. SuperAegis presented a monstrously complex technical and political problem; military liaison was the place where many of these cares and concerns came together, generating heat and smoke and—who knows?—maybe fire.

Jake's boss was an air force three-star, Lieutenant General Art Blevins. Jake had tried to explain to General Blevins that the liaison team faced an impossible challenge. “There is no way,” he argued, “that we can absolutely prevent leaks or prove that leaks have not occurred. And to the extent that any potential enemy penetrates the security walls and learns about the technology, the SuperAegis shield is less effective. For the countries under the umbrella to have absolute protection, security would have to be absolutely perfect. The only way to get close to that standard would be to execute everyone who knows anything about SuperAegis as soon as the system is operational. Even then, we might get 'em too late.”

“I would appreciate it if you would put that recommendation in writing,” Art Blevins said. Although he never smiled, he did have a sense of humor. A small one.

“Security is never perfect,” Jake acknowledged, marching bravely where no one else cared to go. “Still, a hundred billion bucks isn't peanuts, and it's being expended for a system that an aggressor may know how to defeat when crunch time rolls around. And the protected nations will not know about the holes in the shield until the missiles fall on their heads.”

Blevins didn't seem disturbed by Jake's theorizing. “All military systems have that flaw,” he remarked.

“Sir, it strikes me that SuperAegis is our Maginot Line. And you know what happened to the French.”

“Indeed. A great many politically connected French contractors made a lot of money selling concrete to the government. Presumably the people in Congress and the White House also remember their history.”

“For Christ's sake, Art—”

“The SuperAegis decision has been made at the highest level, Jake. It's far too late for us to bitch. Let's see if we can make it work. Who knows, the politicians might actually be right, for a change.”

SuperAegis certainly was a knotty, challenging problem, Jake reflected this morning. And for that reason fun to work on.

He leaned his head back on his seat and closed his eyes. The drone of the engines made him sleepy.

*   *   *

After another round of looking, touching, seeking to understand, Vladimir Kolnikov returned to the control room, the heart of the ship. Rothberg had the sonar picture on the right main screen, which was huge. Kolnikov got close, studied the visual presentation of what was out there. This, he reminded himself, was not a television picture but a computer presentation. More magic!

He told Rothberg he wanted a ship large enough to take all of the Americans, and Rothberg played with the range controls on the sonar. Fifteen minutes later Kolnikov saw it, a fuzzy, indistinct irregularity almost hidden in the shimmering, inverted plane that was the surface.

Turchak listened without Comment as Kolnikov told him what he wanted, then he disconnected the autopilot with a sigh of relief. That infernal machine would take some getting used to. Turchak turned
America
toward the small freighter, which was still eight or nine miles away, and began rising slowly from the depths.

Kolnikov sat on the captain's raised leather-covered stool in the center of the compartment. That Heydrich … what facts could the American sailors tell that the FBI would not learn within days? The identities of the men who stole the sub? How many of them there were? These things were impossible to keep secret, so having the sailors confirm them to investigators cost nothing. Sparing the sailors' lives also sent a message to the Americans that the thieves were reasonable, rational men.

Kolnikov grinned at the thought.

*   *   *

“We've just returned from the White House,” General Flap Le Beau, commandant of the Marine Corps, told Jake Grafton, who had just been shown into the commandant's office by an aide. Flap shook Jake's hand, pointed toward a chair. Admiral Stuffy Stalnaker, the chief of naval operations, merely nodded at Jake when he came in, didn't say anything or offer to shake. Stuffy looked unusually dour this morning. For that matter, Flap didn't look happy either.

“Someone hijacked
America
this morning as she got under way for her first operational cruise,” Flap said as he dropped into the padded swivel chair behind his desk.

Flap summarized what he had learned at the White House briefing. He related how the hijackers had used the tug, sank it alongside as they boarded, forced half of
America
's crew into the water, and sailed away. He also told Jake about Harvey Warfield and
John Paul Jones.