America

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Jake Grafton and Janos Ilin waited impatiently for darkness to fall. They walked around inside the house they had entered as refuge from the gunmen who pursued them, glanced out of windows, paused to scan with the binoculars Ilin had found in the den, looked at the family albums and knickknacks, talked of inconsequential things.

Several times Jake flipped on the television to learn of the extent of the damage in New York City. The talking heads quickly informed him that billions of dollars in damage had occurred, an unknown number of lives had been lost, and private citizens and the authorities were trying to determine the extent of the catastrophe. Of course the politicians were making promises: aid, investigations, prosecutions, and punishment. General Alt also appeared for a sound bite, promising to find the stolen submarine in short order. How that was going to happen, he didn't say. He also didn't mention the fact that the commandant of the Marine Corps, General Flap Le Beau, had been given orders to find that sub by the president himself, who was more than a little put out with the navy.

Depressed, Jake could listen for no more than a few minutes before he turned off the idiot box.

They are out there," Ilin said gloomily, peering between drapes at the great outdoors, lawn and trees and sky. "They'll set up a roadblock."

"You saw that on a television show."

"We do roadblocks in Russia. A roadblock on a lonely road, then the car and the bodies go into a hole in the ground. The permanent disappearance, neat and tidy, with no witnesses, no evidence, and no bodies to wail over. People are left to speculate over the sins of the decedents and their fate. Stalin raised it to an art form."

When the last of the twilight had faded and he couldn't see the trees through the binoculars, Jake led the way to the garage. He used a shovel to break the lightbulbs in the automatic door openers, then turned off the light in the garage and engaged the truck's starter. It had been sitting there awhile and didn't want to start, although it cranked strongly.

After a bad moment the engine came to life.

Unfortunately the truck was parked with its tail to the door, so the backup lights would illuminate as he backed out of the garage. With the engine running, he turned on the truck's lights, then got out of the vehicle and used a hammer from the workbench on the backup lights. The taillights remained lit.

He tossed the hammer on the floor and climbed back into the vehicle, buckled his seat belt. Ilin had already done so. Ilin's shotgun was in his hands; Jake's was wedged beside him with the muzzle pointing down. He turned off the truck's lights and pulled the lever that put the vehicle in four-wheel drive, felt the small thunk of the transmission going in.

Now he pushed the remote opener that was tucked into a drink holder. As the door rose, both men rolled down their windows.

"Ready?" he asked, looking out his window, trying to see the lower edge of the rising door.

"Go."

He backed out carefully, turned the truck, then started down the drive. As soon as he cleared the retaining wall around the house, he turned hard right up onto the lawn. The truck's front tires spun on the sod, then gripped hard.

He could barely see what lay before him.

Hell, they're probably watching with night-vision goggles. They must hear the engine! He flipped on the headlights.

Around the house he went, trying to avoid the shrubbery, running over several bushes anyway.

"How are you going?" Ilin asked.

"Same way we came in. We'll go through the fences, see if we can get to the interstate."

They made it to the woods without any shots being fired. Finding the gate and the path through the forest took some backing up and swerving to scan with the headlights.

When he saw the gate, he gunned the truck, rammed the posts, knocking them over. They went along the path at about the speed a man could jog, knocking over saplings and being raked by low-hanging branches. Once a tree intervened, so Jake stopped, backed up, and maneuvered around it.

They couldn't find the spot where they had climbed the ridge, and the hillside was covered with trees anyway, so Jake stayed on the path, which was little more than a seasonal hiking trail.

He had gone at least a mile and a half when they came to a dirt road. Jake turned left, heading westward, parallel to the interstate, he hoped.

"This is probably our host's driveway," he muttered. "That'd be just our luck."

The road descended slightly. When they reached the bottom of the grade, the trees ended and they had a pasture on their left. They could see the headlights of the interstate beyond it.

"Are you game? Through the pasture?"

"Yes," Ilin said. He was gripping the handle on the doorjamb tightly with his right hand and the shotgun with his left.

Jake turned hard, jumping the truck over the little embankment that lined the road. He rammed a post in the barbed-wire fence and kept going.

Thumps and scraping sounds. "We're dragging half that fence with us," he told Ilin.

On the other side of the pasture was another fence, which he rammed. The truck nosed over sickeningly toward the ditch that separated the highway from the farm.

Desperate, afraid he was going to bury the nose of the truck in the ditch, Jake swerved right violently. The left front wheel went into the soft ditch bottom, and he floored the accelerator.

After the first gut-wrenching deceleration, the truck picked up speed. Jake sawed at the steering wheel, then the left wheel found purchase and the truck shot through the ditch throwing mud and went up the embankment toward the highway shoulder. And almost collided with a semi.

He jammed on the brakes, waited until the traffic went by, then floored it again. With a roar the truck accelerated on the pavement, dragging several fence posts and gobs of wire. At sixty miles per hour the mess under the truck tore loose and went under the wheels in one final thump.

"Amen," he said fervently.

"Amen," Janos Ilin agreed.

"Armed and dangerous, driving a stolen truck. A rear admiral and a Russian spy. I can see the headlines now." Jake laughed so hard he wheezed.

"The real American experience," Ilin said. "You made my trip to the States complete. I can never thank you enough."

"You'd better come look," Boldt told Kolnikov. "I don't know how he did it without me hearing anything. I was in the next compartment."

Vladimir Kolnikov took a last look at the computer screen above the helm. Turchak was still there in the chair, the joystick in front of him, monitoring everything. He had said little in the hours since the engagement with the two American submarines. America was deep now, fifteen hundred feet, running at fifteen knots to the southeast. The computer showed that she was making little noise at this speed. It was almost as if she were a black hole in the ocean. Above and behind they could hear pinging from sonobuoys. Due to a salinity discontinuity, apparently the P-3's TACCOs could not find America below the layer. The echo ranging appeared as flashes on the Revelation screens, almost like heat lightning on a far horizon.

"I'll come too," Heydrich said from his chair in the back of the control room. He had been there most of the afternoon, watching silently. Now he heaved himself to his feet, shook down his trouser legs, and walked forward.

"Go ahead," Turchak said, turning his head to glance at Boldt, then Kolnikov. "You have to go."

So Kolnikov followed Boldt with Heydrich trailing along. Through the passageway, around the corners, into the berthing compartment.

Leon Rothberg dangled from the overhead. He had stood on a box of oranges from the galley, wrapped his belt around a pipe, stuck his head in the noose, and kicked away the box. How long he had dangled there, silently strangling, was anyone's guess.

He was dead now, of course, his tongue black and protruding, his eyes wide, white, bulging, staring fixedly at nothing at all. Looking at him was hard, so after the first glance, no one did.

"Let's get him down," Kolnikov said, and wrapped his arms around the dead man's legs. He lifted while Boldt and two other men who were there extracted Rothberg's head from the belt noose. They lowered the corpse to the floor.

"Put him in the meat locker."

"I didn't hear anything," Boldt said. "Honestly. I would have—"

Kolnikov waved him into silence. Boldt and the other two carried Rothberg's corpse away, leaving Kolnikov alone with Heydrich.

"What now, Kolnikov? Can you and Turchak run these computers, make them do their magic things?"

"Don't be a fool."

"Speaking for myself, there were times this afternoon that I thought we would soon be dead. Without Rothberg, we won't survive another afternoon like the one we just had."

"Let's hope that was the only one."

"We had better." Heydrich searched Kolnikov's face. "You genuinely regret killing those men in that other submarine, don't you?"

Kolnikov turned his back and went along the passageway toward the control room.

Turchak looked at him as he entered.

"He's dead, all right. Hung himself with his belt from a pipe in the overhead."

"Aah…"

"Boldt was in the next compartment and didn't hear a thing, he says. Rothberg managed the perfect silent strangulation, so no one came to rescue him. Finally, he successfully accomplished something."

"He must have known the men in the other submarines," Turchak mused. "Trained them, perhaps. Then to help kill them. ."

"Umm," Kolnikov said as he read their position from the ship's inertial system readouts, checked it against the computer database, then checked it again against the paper chart on the plotting table. He checked the bearings on the pinging sources, listened a moment to verify that the faint signals were indeed fading.

"I thought if we had to do it… you know!" Turchak said, searching for words. "I thought it would be self-defense."

They were not going to run into an island tonight, or an underwater mountain, not on this heading. Nothing in this direction for at least a thousand miles. Reactor temperatures and pressures normal, nothing close by on the sonar, nothing threatening out there in that great empty universe.

"Go get something to eat," he told Turchak. "Then get some sleep. Come relieve me when you awaken."

Turchak checked the autopilot carefully, ensured all was well, then went.

"You too, Eck. Sleep while you can. I'll call you if I need you."

Vladimir Kolnikov sat alone in the control room with the computer screens and Revelation pictures. He smoked and watched and thought about life and death as the submarine burrowed into the silence of the great eternal ocean.

Traffic was light on the way into Washington. Jake kept the pickup at the speed limit.

"Hungry?" he asked Ilin. "Want to stop?"

"And find out if we are still targets? No thanks. I'll eat in the embassy."

"I have a theory I wish to try out on you."

"A hypothesis?"

"Actually it's algebra. I'm trying to solve for X. Suppose someone wanted to see and test the components of the SuperAegis satellite. Which would be preferable, the blueprints, which I presume are on Consolidated Aerospace's computers, or the actual hardware?"

"The hardware, of course. The blueprints would be nice, but Consolidated has spent billions building and testing the components. Getting one's hands on the hardware would save years of effort and billions of dollars."

Jake Grafton nodded. "Salvaging that satellite is a possible use for the submarine. That SEAL minisub on its back might be used for that, if the water is shallow enough. Airplanes and recon satellites would see nothing, because on the surface there would be nothing to see. It's a possibility, don't you think?"

"So who is X?"

"X is the person who knows where the satellite is."

"It is a theory," Ilin said flatly.

"Would the Russians be interested in that satellite?"

"Beats me. A decision like that would be made way above my pay grade, to quote your Commander Tarkington. And believe me, they wouldn't tell me about it. And if they did, I wouldn't tell you."

"But it is a theory."

"It is that."

Without electrical power, Washington reminded Jake Grafton of a dark, silent graveyard filled with monuments to fallen heroes. It was nearly midnight when he rolled to a stop near the Russian embassy. The lights there were on, of course, powered by generators hardened against nuclear blasts. A legacy of the bureaucracy, according to Ilin.

The two men looked up and down the street and saw no one. The FBI was hidden somewhere nearby, watching of course, filming everything that happened on that street. Ilin knew it and Grafton knew it so they both knew they were home free.

"I'll leave you with the shotgun," Ilin said. It lay on the floor out of sight. The Russian held out his hand and Jake shook it.

"See you at the office," Jake said as Ilin opened the passenger door and got out. He glanced around, ensuring they were alone, then leaned in, holding the door open.

"Thanks for an entertaining day," he said, then closed the door.

Jake Grafton sat behind the wheel watching as Ilin walked across the street and flashed his credentials at the guard.

When the Russian had disappeared into the embassy, Jake pursed his lips, whistled silently, then took his foot off the brake and drove away.

He found a parking place on the street near his apartment building in Rosslyn — despite the lateness of the hour, a tow truck was loading dead cars and hauling them away for repair. The empty parking places were a welcome sight. There were no people about, no one waiting in nearby doorways, no one sitting in a parked car.

He saw light in the window of his flat. Apparently Callie had found a lantern someplace, or three dozen candles.

Two lanterns. They lit the room well as Jake opened the door. Callie rushed him. As she hugged him he saw that Toad Tarkington was sitting on the couch. And someone…

"You remember Tommy Carmellini?" she said softly. "Toad brought him here to wait for you."

"Are you hungry?" she asked after the men shook hands.

"Starved. And thirsty. I'd love a warm beer."

Callie headed for the kitchen.

"Well?" Toad said. "How'd it go?"

Jake glanced at Carmellini.

"I told him all about it. I'll explain in a little bit."

"Okay," Jake said, accepting Toad's assessment of the situation without further question. "I think it went pretty good for something arranged on such short notice. The guys flying the Cessna were maniacs and scared the hell out of me with those submachine guns. Then later, up at the house, I got off a couple of shotgun blasts through a window at one guy when he was sneaking around the house, blew the whole window out. Hope to hell I didn't hurt him."

"A couple of minor cuts," Toad said. "Band-Aid stuff. He said it was nothing."

"I worried about that all day."

"Did Ilin buy it?"

Jake grinned ruefully. "I doubt it. He's a sharp cookie, and I did my best to be scared as hell. But I'm no actor. When he got out of the truck a half hour ago at the Russian embassy he thanked me for providing an entertaining day."

"Maybe he just got wise at the end. Did he say anything?"

"He didn't give me what I thought he might, but he said some things I thought interesting. I'll have to digest it. What did your uncle say when you got hold of him, told him we wanted to use his house?"

"Uh, I couldn't reach him, boss. He's in Arizona playing golf, I think."

"I had a few bad moments looking at photos on the wall. You weren't in any of them, thank God, then later Ilin went through the family photo album. If he saw you in any of the pictures he didn't mention it."

"Just for the heck of it," Toad said, "I'll go through that album the next time I'm there, just to see."

"I locked the truck, put the shotguns behind the seat. You'd better get it back there in the morning. Get that window fixed in case it rains."

"Yes, sir."

Callie brought in beer and a sandwich for her husband. She also brought beer for Toad and Carmellini, who gratefully accepted. Then she sat down at the table across from Jake.

"So, Carmellini, what brings you by for warm beer?"

"It's a long story," Tommy Carmellini said. "I got into town this morning and went straight to your office. The CIA doesn't know I'm around, but the immigration guy swiped my passport through the machine at the Canadian border, so they'll get the word pretty soon."

"Tell me about it," Jake said, and took a big bite of his sandwich.

Carmellini went through it all, from the assignment to raid the computer in Antoine Jouany's London office, getting Sarah Houston's eyeprint, the CIA's man in London, finding Houston wasn't in the employee file… then he dropped the bomb. "You were on one of Jouany's lists, Admiral, as a guy betting big money with him in the currency markets."

Jake Grafton was stunned. "Are you kidding me?"

"No. I'm not. You, the members of the Joint Chiefs, at least a dozen other high naval officers. Sitting there reading those names, the thought popped into my empty head that I'd been set up. That the people on that list were being set up. I was supposed to return triumphantly to Langley bearing the trophy list, and the smelly stuff would immediately hit the fan big time."

Callie couldn't resist. "But those people are military officers. The only wealthy flag officer I know about is General Alt, the chairman. And he inherited it. He certainly didn't pile it up saving dimes from his green checks twice a month. God knows we didn't."

Tommy Carmellini turned to face her. "No one is going to think your husband invested money, Mrs. Grafton. That looks like a payoff list. Everyone on Capitol Hill will see that in a heartbeat. They know all about that kinda stuff over there."

"When did you start trying to get to know Sarah Houston?" Jake asked.

"A couple months ago. No, make it about three months, since early June. But looking back, man, I gotta wonder, who's zooming who? As Aretha used to ask. Houston was smooth. I never once suspected."

"Then a month ago, around the first of August, Ilin told De-Garmo that the Russians knew of the Blackbeard team," Toad mused aloud, eyeing his boss.

"These events go together, but I don't know how," Jake muttered.

"America smacked New York today, Admiral," Toad continued. "Three Flashlight Tomahawks. Two of our attack boats went after her. She sank one, La Jolla, lost with all hands. She blew a tail fin off the other, Colorado Springs, which managed to do an emergency blow and get to the surface. Then America slipped away. Half a squadron of P-3s hunted the rest of the day and never found her, even with echo ranging."

Jake Grafton rubbed his forehead. Half the sandwich remained, but suddenly he had no taste for it. A hundred — plus American sailors dead. "We watched some of the New York news on television," he said. "Were a couple of planes lost?"

"F-16s, I heard," said the Toadman. "The Pentagon was a madhouse today. Philadelphia, Boston, Atlanta, or Miami. Serious money can be made if you can guess America's next target."

A half hour later, when the two men left, Jake and Callie got a few minutes alone.

"This whole mess is a monstrous tragedy," she told him.

He nodded.

"Do you want to listen to the news? Toad left us a battery-operated radio that he got somewhere."

"Nope. The news is all bad. After a while I just can't listen anymore."

"Did Ilin tell you anything useful?"

"Nothing specific. You gotta read between the lines, and it's tough. He talks and talks, sort of like Greenspan; doesn't say a whole lot. If that house was bugged and the Russian ambassador was listening, he can tell Moscow that Ilin didn't betray a solitary secret."

"Did he say anything of substance?"

"Not so you'd notice. He said he thought the theft of the submarine was an inside job. Hell, that's my opinion too."

When Callie went to get ready for bed, Jake sat down in his easy chair and tilted the thing back. He closed his eyes, recalling Ilin's words, how he had said them.

Ilin may have suspected the day was a show for his benefit, or worse, a ploy to trap him into making statements that could be used to blackmail him. Even so, did he point the way?

When Callie came back into the room ten minutes later she found her husband asleep. She spread an afghan over him and left him there.

He awoke several hours later. From the window he looked out at the dark city, silent except for occasional passing cars. The governor of Virginia had ordered out the National Guard to help prevent looting in the Virginia suburbs that were still without power, so occasionally an olive-drab truck or Humvee went slowly down the street.

Billions of dollars in damages in Washington and New York, several hundred people dead here, probably some dozens in New York, a submarine lost. . for what?

He thought he had the pieces of the puzzle. If he could just put them together in the proper way.

The stakes were huge. That was obvious. Whoever was behind this was betting the ranch, so the payoff must be equally huge.

Think big, Jake. Big.