America

CHAPTER TWELVE

The wide road ran on and on toward the distant blue mountains, until it rounded a far curve or topped a rise and disappeared from view. Even then the road was still there, even if out of sight. It would faithfully reappear when you rounded the curve or crested the hill. That was the promise of America. In America there was always the road.

Jake Grafton was thinking of the road as he drove along in the government sedan with Janos Ilin in the passenger seat. Neither man had much to say. Ilin had readily agreed with Jake's suggestion of a drive for lunch when he intercepted him on the fifth-floor landing of the office building stairs. He looked almost relieved as he spun around and descended the stairs that he had just trudged up.

Jake headed west on Interstate 66. They were passing the Beltway exit when Ilin asked their destination.

"I thought we might have lunch in Strasburg," Jake said, "the hotel there."

"Fine," Ilin replied and asked no more.

They drove with the radio off. They had no audio cassettes or disks, so the only sounds were the hum of the engine and tires and the snore of truck diesels. As they passed Manassas the interstate narrowed to two lanes in each direction, the traffic thinned, and they were left with the September day, with its dissipating overcast and mild breeze, and the road. Always the road.

Jake knew what he wanted from Janos Ilin. He wanted to know what the Russian knew about the theft of USS America. He wanted to know who was behind the theft and what they hoped to accomplish. If they were Russians, he wanted to know. If they weren't, he was even more curious. Alas, he didn't know how to go about getting what he wanted.

The guy was so foreign! Oh, he spoke decent English, could understand and be understood, but Jake Grafton had been to Moscow and seen the place. Ugly, inhospitable, polluted, filled with people speaking an incomprehensible language and fighting like rats for the bare necessities, Moscow was as foreign to Jake Grafton as any spot he had ever been. Thinking about Moscow as he drove this morning, he remembered that sense of hopelessness that he had felt when he visited there years ago, immediately after the collapse of communism. At that time the population was still living in the shadow of the absolute dictatorship, an oppressive tyranny from which humanity and common sense had long ago been squeezed, if indeed there had ever been any. A more cheerless place he couldn't imagine.

And Moscow was Ilin's home, his national capital, the place where he had spent his life learning and pulling and climbing the ropes.

What, exactly, did he and Ilin have in common? Explain that, please.

"Your embassy," Jake said, breaking the silence, "does it have electrical power?"

"Oh, yes," Ilin said, grinning ruefully. "We Russians have worried for years about American intercept methods, so we hardened the wiring inside the building and installed extra generators. The lights will be on there even if the sun burns out."

"One assumes that contingency is extremely unlikely."

"No doubt, but if it happens, we will be ready. The ambassador will be able to see to write his report to Moscow: 'Today in America the sun burned out.' That is the way of a bureaucracy. When someone somewhere predicts a possible crisis, that prediction assumes a life of its own. Regardless of the likelihood of that crisis occurring, regardless of the cost in effort or money to guard against it, someone will build a career minimizing the damage that crisis could cause, if it ever happens."

I see.

"The bureaucracy rules."

"And the microphone in your belt buckle? Was that hardened against electromagnetic pulses?"

"Alas, no. It is history, as you Americans say."

"Why the microphone in the first place? All the liaison officers were free to return to their embassies whenever they wished and presumably reported everything that they saw or heard."

"Always the bureaucracy. By listening to what I heard, the bureaucrats could guard against incompetence or betrayal by me."

"Don't they trust you?"

"They trust me within reason. But the bureaucrats know that the world is a tempting place and people are weak."

"Are they listening now?"

"No," Ilin said and grinned. "I am free as an American, at least for a little while."

"And those little soliloquies outside my house in Delaware? What were they about?"

"Sol — what? Excuse me. I do not know that word."

"Soliloquy. A conversation with yourself."

Ilin grinned. "I tease the listeners, who cannot talk back."

Grafton smiled. At last he had a glimpse of the human being.

"So who stole our submarine?"

"Vladimir Kolnikov and Georgi Turchak and the rest of your CIA Blackbeard team."

"How did the Russian government find out about the Blackbeard team?"

Ilin grinned again. "Now I ask you — is this car wired? Are your people listening?"

"I don't know," Jake said. He drove in silence for about a minute, then when a place offered itself, pulled over to the side of the road and got out of the car. Ilin did likewise. They were alongside a cow pasture. Jake and Ilin climbed the fence and walked fifteen or twenty yards.

"They are not listening," Jake said. "I guarantee it."

Ilin laughed. "Your guarantee only means that you do not know if they are listening. I must factor in the possibility that you have a pure heart and an ignorant head."

"The world is never as it seems," Jake murmured.

"Occasionally it is," Ilin said.

"You are evading the question. How did the Russian government find out about the Blackbeard team. Answer it or refuse to do so, your choice."

"One of the members of the team told us."

"But the CIA vetted them," Jake pointed out. "None were SVR."

"A Russian cannot get out of Russia without the approval of the SVR. He can't get an exit visa. The bureaucracy knows something, always something, about everyone. They never let go. A Russian can never escape them. One of the members of the team worried that the SVR would eventually find out about his participation in the scheme and retaliate against him or his relatives. So he reported it."

"Who turned the team, told it to steal a U.S. sub?"

"I don't know." Ilin shrugged.

"The SVR?"

"That is a possibility. I do not know."

"Would a matter like that be routinely shared with you?"

"Never. Unless I was a part of the operation."

"How did you learn of the Blackbeard team?"

"I was assigned the job of making contact with one of them."

"Did you?"

"Yes. The one who betrayed their mission."

"But you told the director of the CIA of the team's existence?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

As Ilin weighed his answer, Jake added, "Were you told to do so by your government?"

"No."

"It was your idea?"

Ilin nodded, as if examining that reality for the first time. "Yes."

"If you had not told, what would have happened?"

"Presumably the team would have been captured in Russia, interrogated, perhaps tried publicly. It is difficult to predict because the decision about what to do with them would have been made at the highest levels based on what the leadership wanted from the United States at that time. It is possible they would have been executed secretly." He raised his shoulders a millimeter and let them fall.

"But you spilled the secret?"

"Yes."

"Wasn't that a risk? Isn't it possible the SVR will learn that you betrayed the service, betrayed your trust?"

"Life is full of risks," Janos Ilin said flatly. "Discussing this with you is one of them."

Jake Grafton tried to read the Russian's face. Was that statement true? Or magnificent fiction? "I can understand betting your life now and then, but you are putting it at risk rather freely, wouldn't you say? And for what? To save the lives of rogues you don't know?"

"In a country as poor as Russia, lives aren't worth much. Theirs or mine."

"Did the thought occur to you that the CIA might not be happy that you threw a monkey wrench into their plans?"

Janos Ilin's eyes narrowed. "Are you suggesting that the CIA wanted the Blackbeard team to fail?"

"That is a possibility," Jake Grafton said innocently, glancing at Ilin's face. "There are others."

"Did they want a Russian submarine, or would any submarine do? Is that where you are going?"

"A CIA team trained to steal a submarine stole one," Jake said, weighing his words. "The team fired missiles at an American city. That is the reality we must somehow explain."

Before Ilin could reply to that comment, Jake heard the buzzing of a light plane. It was the first one he had heard all day, so he automatically looked up. The plane was no more than a thousand feet above them, a high-wing Cessna with fixed gear, a Cessna 182 perhaps. Jake got a glimpse of two heads in the front seat.

"That's the first plane I've heard today," Ilin said, glancing up. "I thought only emergency aircraft were authorized to fly."

"He's probably gotten permission from someone," Jake responded slowly. The Cessna rolled into a turn, pointed its left wing at the two of them. As the Cessna held the turn, Jake realized the men in it were looking at him and Ilin. It flew away to the north, toward a low hill, descended gently, then turned steeply. Down to about a hundred feet, the plane came racing back toward the two men in the pasture.

Jake saw one of the men lean out the passenger window opening — obviously the glass had been removed. He had something…

A weapon.

"Jesus, he's got a gun!"

Before they could run more than two paces, a burst of automatic fire went over their heads and kicked up dirt.

As the plane went over, Jake Grafton darted north toward the nearest trees, away from the road. He heard Ilin puffing along behind him.

The four-strand barbed-wire fence along the tree line was old and rusty. Grafton threw himself flat and rolled under the bottom strand as he heard the airplane coming back. Ilin went under headfirst, digging wildly with his arms and legs. Both men managed to roll behind trees as the engine noise crested and a burst of submachine gun bullets beat a tattoo on the tree limbs and trunks over their heads. The white plane with faded blue trim swept on by with its wheels just above the grass, then began rising gently to clear the tree line to the east.

Ilin's chest heaved as he fought for air. His face was gray. Too many cigarettes.

"What was that comment you made about risks?" Grafton asked.

Unlike America, the control room in La Jolla was brightly lit. The room was directly under the submarine's sail. The computer consoles and control stations were arranged around the periscopes, which were so long they ran from the keel of the boat to the top of the sail when stowed. There were no Revelation panels on the bulkheads because the new sonar system with its massive computers for processing the raw audio data was not installed in La Jolla, or any other American submarine for that matter. At the forward bulkhead were two cockpitlike control stations, complete with airline-type control wheels. One of the stations controlled the planes, the other the rudder. The chief of the boat stood behind the two helmsmen, watching the analog depth gauges, compass, and trim indicators and checking them against the information presented on a computer display.

Petty Officer First Class Buck Brown sat at the primary sonar control station studying the displays, sampling frequencies, and designating tracks for the computer to follow and plot. Beside him sat three other sonarmen. There were actually eleven sonar consoles, but only four were necessary for full operation of the system. The others were there in the event one of these consoles had a maintenance problem, or to use for training purposes.

Brown had heard the sonobouys hit the water and correctly designated them as bouys. The fact that the tracks failed to move was the giveaway. The computer kept a running tactical plot, but to back it up, two sailors stood at identical drafting tables in the rear of the control room plotting the bearings and connecting the dots. The navigator checked them constantly. Junior Ryder, the skipper, also liked to glance at the charts as they drew, ensuring that the tactical picture he carried around in his head matched the picture that unfolded on the computer display and the plotting tables.

Ryder left his stool in the center of the room and walked the three steps aft to the plotting tables with his usual quick stride. He was a large man full of nervous energy, and it showed. Now he checked the boat's progress along the bearing line that Brown had laid down two hours ago when he first heard the Tomahawk launch.

He tried to decide what he would have done had he been the pirate captain aboard America after he launched the cruise missiles from the vertical launch tubes. Clear the area as fast as possible would be one's first instinct, he knew. However, the faster America left the area, the more likely it was that someone would hear her. Perhaps the Russian skipper had dashed a few miles, then slowed to minimize his noise signature… and listen.

Who was this Russian, Kolnikov, whom SUBLANT said stole America} An experienced submariner, obviously, but how experienced? How knowledgeable? Was he one of those Russians who knew how to think for themselves, or had he spent his life saluting and doing precisely what he was told?

After he launched the missiles, in which direction did he leave the scene? At three knots his boat would travel only a hundred yards in the minute that it took to get the three weapons airborne. One minute, a hundred yards… of course Brown had been unable to determine any change in bearing from the first launch to the last and thereby get a hint of America's course.

But afterward. . Kolnikov had launched missiles at Washington thirty-six hours ago from a position about 160 miles south. These missiles today could have been aimed at New York or Boston, maybe even Philadelphia. Did he intend to go northeast, toward Nantucket? Or east, out to sea? Perhaps south?

If he went west he would soon get into shallow water.. .

"Captain?" That was Buck Brown, on the sonar.

"Yes."

"I'm hearing something funny. . well, sir, I just don't know. It shouldn't be there and darn if I know what it is."

Was it possible, Junior Ryder asked himself? Have we met America leaving the area?

Junior Ryder slipped on a headset and adjusted it to fit. He pressed the earpieces to create a tight seal as he closed his eyes and concentrated. He heard… something, some kind of a gurgle maybe… nearly inaudible.

"Can you enhance it?"

"Yes, sir." Brown twiddled a few knobs.

Now the commanding officer could hear it better. Definitely a gurgle. "Is that us?"

"I don't think so, Skipper."

"What is it?"

"Sir, I'd just be guessing."

"Guess away, Buck."

"The problem is that I can't resolve a bearing. The array seems to say it's coming from dead ahead, and the flank sensors seem to indicate it's coming from behind. Does that make sense? Could it be between us and the array?"

Junior Ryder stood very, very still. "How long have you been hearing this noise?"

"I noticed it about three or four minutes ago, sir. But it's so faint, it may have been there for quite a while."

"Hours?"

"Oh no, sir. Maybe fifteen or twenty minutes. Maybe less. I'm sure if it had been there longer I would have noticed it sooner."

"So what is it? Take a guess."

"I'm probably way off base, sir. It kinda sounds to me like water swirling around an open torpedo tube. Or a couple of them."

The changing tone of the Cessna's engine drew Jake's attention. He put his head around the tree, looked for the plane. There it was, descending, turning, lining up on the pasture.

"Damn! They're going to land! Let's get the hell outta here."

He turned and charged into the woods, Ilin following.

The Russian was quickly winded. As they ran through the brush and second-growth timber, slapping limbs out of the way and being slapped by them, he managed to ask, "Who—? Who wants you dead?"

Grafton paused for a moment to let Ilin catch up. "I thought they were after you," he said, searching the Russian's face. At least it was no longer gray. Now it was bloodless, the color of old paper. "Maybe the SVR has found out about your chat with DeGarmo, the CIA banana."

Ilin leaned against a tree, trying desperately to get air. "Oh, no… They… would never… have let me… walk out… of the embassy." He took a huge breath and exhaled dramatically. "They would have sent me back to Russia… or executed me in the embassy… Not this…" he waved a hand at the men behind.

Jake Grafton could no longer hear the hum of the aircraft engine. Presumably the killers had shut off the plane and were now coming through the woods, searching for their quarry.

"C'mon," Jake said and led off.

Unless the gunmen were expert trackers, and this wasn't the Wild West, they were going to have to come slowly through the woods, looking carefully. Maybe he and Ilin had a chance.

Unfortunately they were going up a slope, which slowed them down, and Ilin was panting like a sled dog, which must be audible for a quarter mile.

After what seemed like a quarter hour, but was probably half that, they crested the ridge and found a trail along the top. Right or left?

Jake opted for right because the direction seemed to take them away from the highway. He felt like running but forced himself to walk. If he ran, Ilin would never keep up. As it was he was holding his side. Still, he too walked as quickly as he could.

They had gone a quarter mile or so when the trees ahead thinned.

A house. Jake glimpsed the brick. White trim. Big house, with chimneys.

Across the lawn, looking for signs of life.

No people, no cars in the driveway, no one visible in the windows.

He rang the doorbell on the entrance nearest the garage. He tried the knob. Locked, of course.

Felt around in the mailbox, looked under the doormat. Nothing. A flowerpot on the window ledge. He took it down, looked in.

"What are you looking for?"

"A key. Unless you want to run through the woods like a rabbit."

Now he heard the engine of the airplane, revving… taking off.

A light fixture… no. A box for milk deliveries… And there it was, taped to the bottom of the milk box.

Please, God, no alarm! Please!

He unlocked the dead bolt, then found he had to do the doorknob too. Finally the door swung open.

No alarm.

He relocked the door behind them, then looked around. They were in the foyer of a large house, ten or twelve rooms, well furnished. The place reeked of serious money.

"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 Americas 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."

Harlow leaned over to speak softly to Brown. "Is this contact America? Are you sure?"

"I don't have positive verification from the system," Petty Officer Brown explained. "I'm not sure of anything, sir. We have the signature of America in the computer, but they're going too slow for me to get anything but this gurgle."

"What if it's some Russian boat?" Harlow asked his commanding officer. "Some Russian skipper who thinks he's cute?"

"If that boat were Russian we would have heard him. Russian boats aren't this quiet. What do you suggest? You want to give this guy the first shot, just to be sure?"

Skip Harlow thought about it. The lives of everyone on this boat were on the line. So were the lives of everyone on the submarine following La Jolla.

One thing was absolutely certain: If La Jolla made it back to port, every decision made aboard her was going to be weighed by a board of senior officers seated around a long green table. Good judgment was absolutely essential at all times, yet there were always a host of unknowns in every combat situation. Harlow well knew that in the United States Navy the system was biased in favor of those captains who acted aggressively in the face of the enemy. Much would be forgiven a man who waded in swinging. The legacy of John Paul Jones was alive and well. Still, sinking an allied submarine would not be career enhancing.

"Stealing America was an act of war," he said finally, hoping this commanding officer would get his drift. Ryder did. He nodded once, seeming to make up his mind as he did so.

"Go back to our base course, slow to four knots," Ryder said to the chief of the boat, who gave the appropriate orders to his two helmsmen. "XO, let's set up snapshots on four torpedoes. Quietly. Any shot we get will be minimum range, point and shoot."

"Do you think he'll give us a shot, Skipper?" the chief of the boat asked.

"Oh, yes. Eventually. He didn't shoot when he had a free shot, when we didn't know he was there. He could have, but he didn't. In my opinion, he thinks that boat he's in is undetectable. He's going to let us be his shield while that patrol plane is in the area. Sooner or later those guys are going to leave. When we're all alone, Kolnikov and friends are going to try to sneak away. When they cross our minimum range line, we'll let 'em have it."

Shooting someone in the back who declined to shoot at you wasn't very sporting, but that thought didn't even cross Junior Ryder's mind. Buck Brown thought of it, but he bit his tongue. Those guys stole America, they killed six sailors. They had earned their tickets to hell.