“But he’s our best guy for the inside stuff.”
“Which completes the circularity of the argument, Mary Pat.”
“Doc, you have the report, and you have my opinion,” Mrs. Foley pointed out.
“Yes, ma’am.” Jack set the document on his desk.
“What are you going to tell them?” “Them” was the top row of the executive branch: Fowler, Elliot, Talbot.
“I guess I go with your evaluation. I’m not entirely comfortable with it, but I don’t have anything to counter your position with. Besides, the last time I went against you, turned out I was the one who blew the call.”
“You know, you’re a pretty good boss.”
“And you’re pretty good at letting me down easy.”
“We all have bad days,” Mrs. Foley said as she got awkwardly to her feet. “Let me waddle back to my office.”
Jack rose also and walked to open the door for her. “When are you due?”
She smiled back at him. “October thirty-first—Halloween, but I’m always late, and they’re always big ones.”
“You take care of yourself.” Jack watched her leave, then walked in to see the Director.
“You’d better look this over.”
“Narmonov? I heard another SPINNAKER came in.”
“You heard right, sir.”
“Who’s doing the writeup?”
“I will,” Jack said. “I want to do some cross-checking first, though.”
“I go down tomorrow. I’d like to have it then.”
“I’ll have it done tonight.”
“Good. Thanks, Jack.”
This is the place, Günther told himself halfway into the first quarter. The stadium accommodated sixty-two thousand seven hundred twenty paying fans. Bock figured another thousand or so people selling snacks and beverages. The game was not supposed to be an important one, but it was clear that Americans were as serious about their football as Europeans were. There was a surprising number of people with multicolored paint on their faces—the local team colors, of course. Several were actually stripped to the waist and had their chests painted up like football sweaters, complete with the huge numbers the Americans used. Various exhortatory banners hung from the rails at the front of the upper decks. There were women on the playing field selected for their dancing ability and other physical attributes, leading the fans in cheers. Bock learned about a curious kind of demonstration called The Wave.
He also learned about the sovereignty of American television. This large raucous crowd meekly accepted stoppage of the game so that ABC could intersperse the play with commercials—that would have started a riot in the most civilized European soccer crowd. TV was even used to regulate play. The field was littered with referees in striped shirts, and even they were supervised by cameras and, Russell pointed out, another official whose job it was to look at videotape recordings of every play and rule on the rightness or wrongness of every official ruling on the field. And to supervise that, two enormous TV screens made the same replays visible to the crowd. If all that had been tried in Europe, there would have been dead officials and fans at every game. The combination of riotous enthusiasm and meek civilization here was remarkable to Bock. The game was less interesting, though he saw Russell genuinely enjoyed it. The ferocious violence of American football was broken by long periods of inactivity. The occasional flaring of tempers was muted by the fact that each player wore enough protective equipment as to require a pistol to inflict genuine harm. And so big they were. There could hardly be a man down there under a hundred kilos. It would have been easy to call them oafish and awkward, but the running backs and others demonstrated speed and agility that one might never have guessed. For all that, the rules of the game were incomprehensible. Bock had never been one to enjoy sporting contests anyway. He’d played soccer as a boy, but that was far in his past.
Günther returned his attention to the stadium. It was a massive and impressive structure with its arching steel roof. The seats had rudimentary cushions. There was an adequate number of toilets, and a massive collection of concession stands, most serving weak American beer. A total of sixty-five thousand people here, counting police, concessionaires, TV technicians. Nearby apartments.... He realized that he’d have to educate himself on the effects of nuclear weapons to come up with a proper estimate of expected casualties. Certainly a hundred thousand. Probably more. Enough. He wondered how many of these people would be here. Most, perhaps. Sitting in their comfortable chairs, drinking their cold, weak beer, devouring their hot dogs and peanuts. Bock had been involved in two aircraft incidents. One airliner blown out of the sky, another attempted hijacking that had not gone well at all. He’d fantasized at the time about the victims, sitting in comfortable chairs, eating their mediocre meals, watching their in-flight movie, not knowing that their lives were completely in the control of others whom they did not know. Not knowing. That was the beauty of it, how he could know and they could not. To have such control over human life. It was like being God, Bock thought, his eyes surveying the crowd. A particularly cruel and unfeeling God, to be sure, but history was cruel and unfeeling, wasn’t it?
Yes, this was the place.
19
DEVELOPMENT
“Commodore, I have real trouble believing that,” Ricks said as evenly as he could manage. He was tanned and refreshed from his trip to Hawaii. He’d stopped in at Pearl Harbor while there, of course, to look over the sub base there and dream about having command of Submarine Squadron One. That was a fast-attack squadron, but if a fast-attack guy like Mancuso could take over a boomer squadron, then surely turnabout was fair play.
“Dr. Jones is a really good man,” Bart Mancuso replied.
“I don’t doubt it, but our own people have been over the tapes.” It was normal operating procedure and had been so for more than thirty years. Tapes from missile-sub patrols were always examined by a team of experts on shore as a back-check to the sub’s crew. They wanted to make sure that no one might have been trailing a missile boat. “This Jones guy was one hell of a sonar operator, but now he’s a contractor, and he has to justify his fees somehow, doesn’t he? I’m not saying he’s dishonest. It’s his job to look for anomalies, and in this case what he did was to string a bunch of coincidences into a hypothesis. That’s all there is here. The data is equivocal—hell, the data is almost entirely speculative—but the bottom line is that for this to be true, you have to assume that the same crewmen who tracked a 688 were unable to detect a Russian boat at all. Is that plausible?”
“That’s a good point, Harry. Jones doesn’t say that it’s certain. He gives it a one-in-three chance.”
Ricks shook his head. “I’d say one in a thousand, and that’s being generous.”
“For what it’s worth, Group agrees with you, and I had some people from OP-02 here three days ago who said the same thing.”
So why are we having this conversation? Ricks wanted to ask, but couldn’t. “The boat was checked for noise on the way out, right?”
Mancuso nodded. “Yep, by a 688 right out of overhaul, all the bells and whistles.”
“And?”
“And she’s still a black hole. The attack boat lost her at a range of three thousand yards at five knots.”
“So how are we writing it up?” Ricks asked as casually as he could manage. This was going into his record, and that made it important.
It was Mancuso’s turn to squirm. He hadn’t decided. The bureaucrat part of him said that he’d done everything right. He’d listened to the contractor, booted the data up the chain of command to Group, to Force, and to the Pentagon experts. Their analysis had all been negative: Dr. Jones was being overly paranoid. The problem was that Mancuso had sailed with Jones for three very good years in USS Dallas, and had never known him to make a bad call. Never. Not once. That Akula had been somewhere out there in the Gulf of Alaska. From the time the P-3 patrol aircraft had lost her to the moment she’d appeared outside her base, the Admir
al Lunin had just fallen off the planet. Where had she been? Well, if you drew speed/time circles, it was possible that she’d been in Maine’s patrol area, possible that she’d left Maine at the proper time and made homeport at the proper time. But it was also possible—and very damned likely—that she’d never been in the same area as the American missile sub. Maine hadn’t detected her, and neither had Omaha. How likely was it that a Russian sub could have evaded detection by both top-of-the-line warships?
Not very.
“You know what worries me?” Mancuso asked.
“What’s that?”
“We’ve been in the missile-sub business for over thirty years. We’ve never been tracked in deep water. When I was XO on Hammerhead, we ran exercises against Georgia and had our heads handed to us. I never tried tracking an Ohio when I had Dallas, and the one exercise I ran against Pulaski was the toughest thing I ever did. But I’ve tracked Deltas, Typhoons, everything the Russians put in the water. I’ve taken hull shots of Victors. We’re so good at this business....” The squadron commander frowned. “Harry, we’re used to being the best.”
Ricks continued to speak reasonably. “Bart, we are the best. The only people close to us are the Brits, and I think we have them faded. Nobody else is in the same ball park. I got an idea.”
“What’s that?”
“You’re worried about Mr. Akula. Okay, I can understand that. It’s a good boat, like a late 637-class even, for damned sure the best thing they’ve ever put in the water. Okay, we have standing orders to evade everything that comes our way—but you gave Rosselli a nice writeup for tracking this same Akula. You probably got a little heat from Group for that.”
“Good guess, Harry. A couple of noses went decidedly out of joint, but if they don’t like the way I run my squadron, they can always pick a new squadron boss.”
“What do we know about Admiral Lunin?”
“She’s in the yard for overhaul now, due out late January.”
“Going by past performance, it’ll come out a little quieter.”
“Probably. Word is that she’ll have a new sonar suite, say about ten years behind us,” Mancuso added.
“And that doesn’t allow for the operators. It’s still not a match for us, not even close to one. We can prove that.”
“How?” Mancuso asked.
“Why not recommend to Group that any boat that comes across an Akula is supposed to track him aggressively. Let the fast-attack guys really try to get in close. But if a boomer gets close enough to track without risk of counterdetection, let’s go for that, too. I think we need better data on this bird. If he’s a threat, let’s upgrade what information we have on him.”
“Harry, that will really put Group into the overhead. They’re not going to like this idea at all.” But Mancuso already did, and Harry could see it.
Ricks snorted. “So? We’re the best, Bart. You know it. I know it. They know it. We set some reasonable guidelines.”
“Like what?”
“The farthest anyone has ever tracked an Ohio is—what?”
“Four thousand yards, Mike Heimbach on Scranton against Frank Kemeny on Tennessee. Kemeny detected Heimbach first—difference was about one minute on detection. Everything closer than that was a prearranged test.”
“Okay, we multiply that by a factor of ... five, say. That’s more than safe, Bart. Mike Heimbach had a brand-new boat, the first rendition of the new sonar integration system, and three extra sonarmen out of Group Six, as I recall.”
Mancuso nodded. “Right, it was a deliberate test, and they worst-cased everything to see if anyone could detect an Ohio. Isothermal water, below the layer, everything.”
“And still Tennessee won,” Ricks pointed out. “Frank was under orders to make it easy, and he still detected first, and as I recall he had a solution three minutes before Mike did.”
“True.” Mancuso thought for a moment. “Make it twenty-five thousand yards separation. No closer than that.”
“Fine. I know I can track an Akula at that range. I have a very good sonar department—hell, we all do. If I stumble across this guy, I hover out there and gather all the signature data I can. I draw a twenty-five-thousand-yard circle around him and keep outside of it. There is no chance in hell that I’ll get counterdetected.”
“Five years ago, Group would have shot both of us even for talking like this,” Mancuso observed.
“The world’s changed. Look, Bart, you can run a 688 in close, but what does it prove? If we’re really worried about boomer vulnerability, why dick around?”
“You’re sure you can handle this?”
“Hell, yes! I’ll write up the proposal for your operations staff, and you can send it up the flagpole to Group.”
“This’ll end up in Washington, you know that.”
“Yeah, no more ‘We hide with pride,’ eh? What are we, a bunch of little old ladies? Damn it, Bart, I’m the commanding officer of a warship. Somebody wants to tell me I’m vulnerable, well, I’m going to prove that’s a load of horseshit. Nobody has ever tracked me. Nobody ever will, and I’m prepared to prove that.”
This interview had not gone the way Mancuso had expected at all. Ricks was talking like a real submarine-driver. It was the kind of talk Mancuso liked to hear.
“You sure you’re comfortable with this? It’s really going to light a fire up the line. You’re going to take some heat.”
“So are you.”
“I’m the squadron commander. I’m supposed to take heat.”
“I’ll take my chances, Bart. Okay, I’m going to have to drill the hell out of my people, especially the sonar troops, tracking party, like that. I have the time, and I have a pretty good crew.”
“Okay. You write up the proposal. I’ll give it a favorable endorsement and send it up.”
“See how easy it is?” Ricks grinned. If you want to be number one in a squadron of good skippers, he thought, you have to stand out from the crowd. OP-02 in the Pentagon would get excited about this, but they’d see that it was Harry Ricks who’d made the suggestion, and they knew his reputation as a smart, careful operator. On that basis, plus Mancuso’s endorsement, it would be approved after some hemming and hawing. Harry Ricks: the best submarine engineer in the Navy, and a man willing to back up his expertise with deeds. Not a bad image. Certainly an image that would be noted and remembered.
“So how was Hawaii?” Mancuso asked, surprised and very pleased with the Commanding Officer (Gold) of USS Maine.
“This is very interesting. The Karl Marx Astrophysical Institute.” The KGB Colonel handed the black-and-whites over to Golovko.
The First Deputy Chairman looked over the photos and set them down. “Empty building?”
“Nearly so. Inside, we found this. It’s a delivery manifest for five American machine tools. Very good ones, extremely expensive.”
“Used for?”
“Used for many things, like the fabrication of telescope mirrors, which fits very nicely with the institute’s cover. The same instruments, our friends at Sarova tell us, are used to shape components for nuclear weapons.”
“Tell me about the institute.”
“Much of it appears to be entirely legitimate. Its head was to have been the DDR’s leading cosmologist. It’s been absorbed by the Max Planck Institute in Berlin. They’re planning to build a large telescope complex in Chile, and are designing an X-ray observation satellite with the European Space Agency. It is noteworthy that X-ray telescopes have a rather close relationship with nuclear-weapons research.”
“How does one tell the difference between scientific research and—”
“You can’t,” the Colonel admitted. “I’ve done some checking. We have leaked information on this ourselves.”
“What? How?”
“There have been a number of articles published in various professional journals about stellar physics. One begins, ‘Imagine the center of a star with an X-ray flux of such and such,’ except for one small thing:
the star the author described has a flux much higher than the center of any star—by fourteen orders of magnitude.”
“I don’t understand.” Golovko was having trouble with all this scientific gibberish.
“He described a physical environment in which the activity was one hundred thousand billion times the intensity inside any star. He was, in fact, describing the interior of a thermonuclear bomb at the moment of detonation.”
“And how the hell did that get past censors!” Golovko demanded in amazement.
“General, how scientifically literate do you think our censors are? As soon as that one saw ‘imagine the center of a star,’ he decided that it was not a matter of state security at all. That article was published fifteen years ago. There are others. In the past week I’ve discovered just how useless our secrecy measures are. You can imagine what it’s like from the Americans. Fortunately, it requires a very clever chap to assimilate all the data. But it is by no means impossible. I’ve talked to a team of young engineers at Kyshtym. With a little push from here, we can initiate an in-depth study of how extensive the open scientific literature is. That will take five to six months. It does not directly affect this particular project, but I think it would be a most useful study to undertake. I think it likely that we have systematically underestimated the danger of third-world nuclear weapons.”
“But that’s not true,” Golovko objected. “We know that—”
“General, I helped write that study three years ago. I am telling you that I was grossly optimistic in my assessments.”
The First Deputy Chairman thought about that for a few seconds. “Pyotr Ivan’ch, you are an honest man.”
“I am a frightened man,” the Colonel replied.
“Back to Germany.”
“Yes. Of the people we suspect were part of the DDR bomb project, three are unaccounted for. All three men and their families are gone. The rest have found other work. Two could possibly be involved in nuclear research with weapons applications, but again, how does one tell? Where is the dividing line between peaceful physics and weapons-related activity? I do not know.”