America

CHAPTER ONE

A small band played lively Sousa marches as USS America, America's newest nuclear-powered attack submarine, prepared to get under way on its first operational cruise. The raucous crowd on the pier was in a holiday mood that balmy September Saturday morning. As seagulls skimmed over the heads of the happy onlookers, the band swung into a heartfelt rendition of "Anchors Aweigh." The line handlers on Americas deck threw the last of the lines to the sailors on the pier, severing the connection between the sub and the land.

The sailors in white uniforms standing on the small, flat, nonskid surface atop the curved hull were going to sea for three months. As the gulls cried and the music floated away on the sea breeze, they took their last fond look at America — wives and kids and girlfriends and scores of navy officers high and low, miles of gold braid, and despite the early hour, barely eight A.M., dozens of civilian dignitaries up to and including an undersecretary of defense and the secretary of the navy. The congressional delegation from Connecticut was there — the boat had been constructed at Electric Boat — and of course various other senators and congresspeople high and low, those who were on defense committees in their respective houses and those who merely wanted to be seen on the evening news back home. Most of the political people even had a pithy sound bite ready if they were lucky enough to have a microphone thrust at them.

As the distance between the sub and pier widened, sailors blew their families kisses and everyone waved. When the last notes of "Anchors Aweigh" drifted off on the breeze, the band began playing "The Navy Hymn." Many of those on the pier and the sub's deck swabbed moisture from their eyes.

"Oh, hear us when we cry to thee, for those in peril on the sea," the skipper of the sub sang under his breath as he watched the pier slide aft.

"What a day!" the officer of the deck said, glancing at the wispy cirrus high above in the cerulean sky. This morning the sea breeze was light, just enough to roughen the surface of the water and make the sun's reflection on the swells twinkle wildly, as if the sunlight were reflecting off diamonds. Gulls hovered almost within arm's reach of the sail, begging for a handout.

America's commanding officer, Commander Leonard Sterrett, was shoulder-to-shoulder with the officer of the deck and two lookouts in the tiny, cramped bridge atop the sail. A temporary safety railing had been rigged around the bridge, but it would be removed and stowed before the boat dived. A hatch would then be lifted hydrau-lically into place to seal the opening.

The tug pulling the sub away from the pier seemed to be pulling effortlessly, with little white water from her screw.

With the band still playing, Captain Sterrett ordered everyone except the watch team on the bridge to go below. Time to say goodbye to earth and sky and families and get about the serious business of taking a brand-new, state-of-the-art attack submarine on patrol for the very first time.

Leonard Sterrett had been eagerly anticipating this day from the moment he had-been told, three years ago, that he was to be America's first commanding, officer. He had been working to earn a submarine command since that summer day twenty-three years ago when he walked through the gate at the Naval Academy in Annapolis to begin his plebe summer. Now he had it. The responsibility for a capital ship worth two billion dollars manned by 134 men was all his.

He turned in the cramped open bridge and waved one last time at the people on the dock, especially his wife and parents, who had shared his dream all these years. He could see them and his teenage daughter waving back.

Then he turned to face the sea.

The officer of the deck, Lieutenant Ellis Johnson, seemed to read the CO's mood. "Congratulations, sir," he murmured, just loud enough to be heard.

"Thank you," the skipper said and smiled at the sea and sky.

A mile or so away, barely making steerageway, USS/oA«Paul Jones, a guided-missile destroyer, kept a watchful eye on the covey of boats that had gathered to watch America get under way from the New London submarine base. For the last hour a small Coast Guard cutter had done most of the work of keeping the spectator boats corralled, mainly through use of a bullhorn. Overhead a helicopter belonging to a television station circled slowly, shooting footage for the evening news. One of the boats contained a delegation of antinuclear activists who had tried their best to raise a rumpus and be noticed by the camera folks in the news chopper. The Coast Guard skipper had threatened them with arrest and confiscation of their borrowed boat, so they were behaving themselves just now.

Aboard Jones, Captain Harvey Warfield focused his binoculars on America. The sail on the sub was located far forward on the hull, almost as if the attack boat were a boomer full of ballistic missiles. Well behind the sail was the squarish shape of a miniature submarine, a fifty-five-ton delivery vehicle for special-warfare commandos, SEALs. Although it was hard to judge from the portion of the submarine visible above water, to Warfield's practiced eye America looked slightly longer and sleeker than the navy's Seawolf boats. Perhaps the fact that he knew its dimensions exactly, 377 feet long and 34 feet in diameter, colored his perception. _ft

Certainly not the fastest or the deepest-diving U.S. submarine, America was the quietest, without a doubt the ultimate stealth ship. Designed for shallow-water combat, the most difficult environment submarines could fight in, America packed more computer power inside her hull than all the other submarines of the United States Navy combined. Originally the submarine had been laid down as USS Virginia; the name had been changed to get a few more votes in Congress, which was the way things worked in Washington in this age of Pax Americana. These things Warfield knew from press releases and briefings — he wasn't cleared for the really juicy classified stuff, the secrets the submariners put in the I-could-tell-you-but-then-I'd-have-to-kill-you category.

Which was just as well, Warfield thought. Submarines had never interested him much — months submerged, the crew packed into the tiny ship like sardines in a can, the ever-present threat of drowning or being crushed when the hull imploded…. Just thinking about it was enough to make Warfield's skin tingle. Submarining was tough duty, obviously, and somebody had to do it. Those who did certainly earned their extra dough every month, Warfield thought, and were welcome to it.

Warfield checked his watch. America had cast loose her lines right on time, just what he expected from Lenny Sterrett.

Today the Coast Guard seemed on top of the small-boat situation, the navigator and senior quartermaster were on the bridge, and War-field's officer of the deck was the best he had, so the captain reached for a pile of paperwork on the small table beside his raised bridge chair. After one last glance around, he picked up the first document in the pile and began reading.

Standing in the wheelhouse of the tugboat pulling America away from the pier, Vladimir Kolnikov lifted his binoculars and aimed them yet again at John Paul Jones. The destroyer was making only a couple knots, yet it was there, ready.

Ready for what?

That was the question, wasn't it? Ready for what?

How good was the skipper of the destroyer? How fast could he handle the unexpected? How quickly could the crew obey unanticipated directives?

"What do you think?" Georgi Turchak asked in Russian. He was at the helm of the tugboat. The captain of the tug lay in a corner of the small bridge, quite dead.

"You knew there would be destroyers," Kolnikov replied without lowering his binoculars. "We are lucky there is only one."

"What if there is another submarine out there?"

"Then we will soon be dead. Do you wish to back out now?"

"No, damn it. I wish you would tell me comforting things to make me think that we are going to pull this off, get filthy rich, and live to a ripe old age enjoying our money."

Kolnikov turned the binoculars, focused them on the captain of the submarine. He could see the features of his face plainly, see him talking to the officer of the deck, the OOD, and the lookouts, who were looking all over the horizon with their binoculars and paying no attention to the tugboat.

"He's going to want to release the line any moment now," Kolnikov said, more to himself than anyone else. He walked to the head of the — ladder leading down.

"Are you ready, Heydrich?"

The man below looked about him at other men hidden from Kolnikov's view. "Eck? Boldt? Steeckt?" There were fourteen men belowdecks, one on the fantail, and of course here on the bridge Kolnikov and Turchak, for a total of seventeen.

Now the man below looked up the ladderway at Kolnikov. His face was one of large cheekbones and tiny eyes. "We are ready, Russ-ki. Give the word."

"Very soon, I think."

The band was playing "America, the Beautiful" when the OOD used a bullhorn to call the tugboat. He could still hear the music plainly even though the sub and tug were about seven hundred yards from the pier. "We are ready to release the tow," he called.

Releasing the tow was a relatively simple maneuver. When the tugboat reduced power, the towline would go slack so the submarine's deck crew could release it from the towing cleat. Then the tug would accelerate away and the sub would proceed under its own power.

Kolnikov signaled to the man on the fantail of the tug, who began winding the towline tighter around a power winch as Turchak at the helm gently reduced power on the tug's engines.

The distance between tug and submarine began to decrease, while the men on the sub's deck waited in vain for slack to develop in the line.

It took several seconds for Captain Lenny Sterrett and the OOD, Ellis Johnson, to comprehend what was happening. Sterrett spoke sharply to Johnson, who barked into the bullhorn, "Get off the winch and give me some slack."

The white foam coming from the tug's fantail ceased as the distance between the two vessels closed. Kolnikov shouted at the man on the winch, waved his arms excitedly, and the distance continued to close until only a few feet of water remained between the two hulls.

Then smoke erupted from the fantail of the tug. Three seconds later, a minor explosion along the tug's waterline blew water into the air. The man on the fantail went over the side. Kolnikov rushed down the ladder from the tug's bridge and raced for the afterdeck.

Two more crewmen appeared on the tug's deck and ran aft.

"Man overboard, civilian from the tug!" The OOD shouted this message into the intercom, and in seconds it blared on the boat's loudspeakers.

In the control room the chief of the boat pronounced a curse word. "Oh, man!" he said. "First Greenville, then this!" Everyone in the control room knew what he meant — if the civilian in the water drowned before the sub crew could pull him out, the media would savage the navy and Captain Lenny Sterrett, which would probably sink his naval career.

Meanwhile the two vessels drifted without power. No slack developed in the towline, which continued to pull the vessels together until the tug's stern gently contacted the anechoic skin of the submarine below the waterline.

In the sub's tiny cockpit, Lenny Sterrett was trying to sort it all out. The men on the line-handling party on the submarine's deck threw the man in the water a line. He came clambering up it hand over hand with surprising agility.

"Cut that tow line," Lenny Sterrett roared at the senior petty officer on the sub's deck, who turned to grab an ax that had been thoughtfully carried on deck, just in case.

Too late. The man coming up the line pulled a weapon from beneath his loose-fitting wet shirt and shot the six unarmed men in the line-handling party as fast as he could pull the trigger. Then he scrambled for the open deck hatch.

All Lenny Sterrett heard were pops from the silenced reports, but the sight of falling men galvanized him, cleared away the cobwebs. He keyed the intercom and roared, "General quarters. Close all watertight doors. Prepare to repel unauthorized boarders."

Those were his last words, because even as he said them, a man with a sniper rifle standing on the wing of the tug's bridge shot him.

When the skipper went down, bleeding profusely, the OOD stood for a second, too stunned to move. The sight of two men crossing the line that held the sub to the tug hand over hand galvanized him. He jumped down the hatch into the sail. "You two, clear the bridge!" he shouted back up at the lookouts.

Neither man made it down the hatch. The sharpshooter on the tug didn't miss.

When he realized what had happened, the OOD closed the hatch and feverishly worked to dog it down. This evolution could not be done quickly. Unlike World War II submarines that patrolled on the surface and crash-dived to evade enemies, America was designed to submerge when leaving port and stay submerged for months.

Meanwhile, in the control room, the radioman punched a button to allow him to transmit on the ship-to-ship plain-voice frequency, Navy Blue. He was wearing a headset. "Mayday, America" he said. "Unauthorized armed personnel attempting to board America. Request assistance ASAP. Mayday."

The chief of the boat, who had been standing behind the helmsman, for in this new class of submarine there was only one, reached above his head for the safety cover that shielded the SCRAM button, which would drop the rods into the reactor, stopping the nuclear reaction. He broke the safety wire on the cover and lifted it.

Valuable seconds were wasted as the OOD wrestled with the hatch dogs. Finally he got them secured to his satisfaction, then he dropped down the ladder to the first deck, where he rushed below to the control room.

"Boarders," he roared. "SCRAM the reactor. Close all the hatches. Don't let them—"

At that moment two men carrying silenced submachine guns rushed in and shot Ellis Johnson. They each fired one aimed shot; the bullets struck the lieutenant square in the back. The chief of the boat already had his hands up, reaching for the SCRAM button, so they ignored him. He jabbed in the red button.

And nothing happened! Warning lights should have lit up like a Christmas tree, the power in the boat should have switched to battery backup….

"Hands up," the intruders roared, and one man stood with his weapon on the sailors as his companion dashed aft toward the engine and reactor spaces. The radioman was listening to excited voices from John Paul Jones.

He keyed the mike with his foot control. "Intruders in America—" he began, then they shot him.

The American sailors stood stunned, shocked, speechless. Unsure of what they should do to resist, most of them simply raised their hands and remained frozen. Those who had other ideas were mercilessly shot by the gun-toting men who came pouring through the main deck hatch in front of the sail and ran through the submarine.

Kolnikov was the last of the intruders to board. He paused on the deck, watched one of the Germans chop the towline through with an ax. The fantail of the tug was already awash. The demolition charges had produced noise and smoke and blown a nice hole in the side of the tug below the waterline, all of which was calculated to cause confusion on the American sub, where the sailors' innate caution would be overridden by the obvious peril of the man in the water and those aboard the tug. And it worked.

The downwash of the helicopter buzzing overhead made it difficult to stand on the open deck. Kolnikov lifted his submachine gun and squeezed off a burst. He was so close to the chopper that he saw holes popping in the Plexiglas. The machine veered away rapidly.

The destroyer was still a mile or so away, barely moving.

Good.

Kolnikov lowered himself into the open hatch.

"Captain, we have received a radio message from America. Armed intruders are boarding."

Aboard John Paul Jones, Captain Harvey Warfield took about two seconds to process that information.

"Verify," he barked at the OOD, a short, heavily built female lieutenant who used a telephone to call the radio room.

After listening a moment, the OOD said, "Put it on the loudspeaker on the bridge."

At the bottom of the ladder, Kolnikov found himself in a tight compartment above the control room. One of Kolnikov's men held a submachine gun on four Americans, who had their hands raised.

"Out," Kolnikov said to the American sailors, gesturing toward the ladder. "Up, into the water."

When the last of them was out, Kolnikov and the gunman went forward, opening the hatch to the space in the forwardmost part of the boat, which housed the sonar computers. One man was there. He was unceremoniously rushed aft at the point of a gun and pushed toward the ladder leading to the open air.

Kolnikov went aft, through the crew spaces and mast housings that protruded down from the sail. "Get them out," he told the two men there holding weapons on the Americans.

Then Kolnikov went into the control room. He knew what to expect — indeed, he had studied wall-sized photographs of the displays. Still, the massive screens and control consoles were so different from those on the submarines that he had served aboard in the Russian Navy, and before that the Soviet Navy, that he stopped involuntarily and took a deep breath.

The bodies of two men lay on the deck between the consoles, two wearing khaki. One was the body of the OOD, the other the control room chief. The radioman was slumped in his cubicle beside the control room.

"Get them out," Kolnikov told Heydrich, meaning the American officers and sailors who stood there with their hands raised. "The bodies too. Put them in the water."

"The men in the engineering spaces have secured the hatches," Heydrich said, "and jammed the dogs."

"You know what to do," Kolnikov replied.

Heydrich turned to the nearest man wearing khaki. He grabbed him by the arm, then turned to a sailor wearing a sound-powered telephone headset. "Tell them they have ten seconds to open that hatch, and if they don't, I shoot this man. Ten seconds later I shall shoot a second man. You will be last. Tell them to take all the time they want."

Heydrich put the muzzle of the pistol against the forehead of the sound-powered telephone operator. "If they SCRAM the reactor, we will kill each and every man on this boat. All of them. Every single one. The ten seconds start now. Tell them."

The operator was about twenty, with fair hair and acne. He began talking. He looked as if he were about to faint. Heydrich lowered his gaze to his watch, studied it. The talker was still delivering his message when Heydrich pointed the pistol at the man whose arm he held and killed him with one shot in the side of the head. The talker almost lost it on the spot.

He began babbling to Heydrich and Kolnikov, "No, no, they are opening the hatch. They are opening it!"

On the bridge of John Paul Jones, the captain and watch team listened without breathing to the garbled sounds of Heydrich and the sound-powered telephone operator. The dead radioman's foot rested on the push-to-talk pedal, so everything picked up by his lip microphone went out over the air.

"Are they recording this in the radio room?" Harvey Warfield snapped to the OOD.

The OOD spoke into the telephone she was holding against her ear. "Yes, sir."

The report of the silenced pistol was barely audible on the destroyer's bridge, but the fear in the voice of the talker and Heydrich's accented English came across plainly.

Harvey Warfield had heard enough. "General quarters," he roared. "All ahead one-third, Ms. OOD. Steer for the sub. Have the radio room send a flash immediate message to Washington telling them what's going on." The general quarters alarm began bonging away. The captain merely raised his voice to be heard above the hubbub. "Get some helicopters out here right now to sit on this sub and get the admiral at New London on the radio. Right now, people! Make it happen!"

The sullen men from the torpedo room and berthing spaces came slowly up the ladders and filed forward. The men from the engine room came through the reactor tunnel one by one. They looked at the dead men lying on the floor, at the Russians and Germans holding weapons, and filed on by.

The last American out of the engineering spaces was a second-class petty officer named Callahan — Heydrich was behind him with a pistol in his back. "This is the reactor man," he told Kolnikov in English. "He was at the panel."

"Half of them out now," Kolnikov told Turchak, "the other half later." He held up a hand to Callahan. "Not you. You stay here."

At that moment one of the SEALs stuck a knife into a German and grabbed his weapon. Heydrich killed the American sailor before he could get his finger on the trigger.

"Get them out of the control room," Kolnikov roared. "Get some into the water and the others down to the mess hall. Make the men going into the water carry the bodies. When they are in the water, shut the forward hatch. Turchak, let's get the boat moving."

He sat down at the control console and smoothly pushed the power lever forward a half inch. The motion of the boat steadied out. "Steeckt, up into the cockpit. Quickly now. We have no time to lose. Turchak, put the radar display on that screen right there," and he pointed.

"America is making way, Captain," the OOD reported to Harvey Warfield. "The lookouts report that men seem to be jumping into the water from the deck forward of the sail."

Warfield focused his binoculars. The radio transmission from America had ceased. The dead radioman's foot was no longer holding down the transmit switch; Warfield didn't know that, and it really didn't matter. The silence, however, was ominous. "Give me her course and speed," he snapped to the watch team.

"Little over a knot, sir. Coming starboard, heading passing one zero zero." "Distance?"

"Thirteen hundred yards."

He could see people going over the side into the water. Jumping. Three or four jumped as he watched. Two men shoved someone— a body, perhaps — into the water.

"How many people in the water? OOD, ask the lookouts." That was futile. He could see only the starboard side of the sub… the tug was just now coming into view as the sub turned. The tug was down seriously at the stern. "More than a dozen, Captain." "Get that Coast Guard cutter to pick them up."

"She's steady at two knots, Captain, probably just enough to keep the rudder effective, heading one two zero."

Aboard America, Kolnikov and Turchak studied the computer displays and controls on the consoles, the analog instruments, all the labels in English….

The whole thing — the control room, the computers, the displays, everything — was overwhelming. They had studied all the available information, had run through simulation after simulation, but neither of them was prepared for the reality of America s control room. Workstation after station, the sonar control group, the combat systems group, the engineering group — the enormity of the task before them hit them with hammer force. For the first time, Kolnikov was truly frightened.

Two of the men with them, both Germans, were computer experts. They were seated now at the consoles, taking it all in. Unfortunately, there was little time. A few minutes at most.

Rothberg, the American, was there, thank God. He was dashing from console to console, setting up displays, checking computerized data, selecting automated operating modes wherever possible.

"How does it look, Rothberg?" Kolnikov asked.

"No sweat," the American said without looking up from the console he was working on.

America was unique, in Kolnikov's experience, because the control room did not sit under the sail, but behind it, in a section of the hull that was clear of the machinery necessary to raise and lower the radar, communications, and photonics masts. This positioning was possible because America didn't have a conventional periscope, which formed the center of every other submarine's control room. The telescoping masts were housed in the sail, and none penetrated the pressure hull. Aboard America the periscope function was performed by the photonics mast, so-called because it contained sensors and cameras for capturing photons of light and heat, which were converted to digital form, run through the computers, and presented as images on one of these large screens in the control room. The information from these sensors could also be integrated with the data from all the other sensors, such as sonar and radar, to form a com-

plete tactical picture for the control room team and its leader, the commanding officer.

"How is the reactor functioning?" Kolnikov asked Callahan, the American sailor who was standing with Heydrich near the main tactical display in the center of the control room. This display was horizontal, a high-tech chart on which the boat's position and the position of all contacts, friendly and hostile, were automatically plotted by the computer in real time. And of course, the display could be advanced to predict positions at any future point in time, which allowed one to instantly see the closest point of approach, study possible attack headings, visualize possible defensive maneuvers, etc.

"Reactor's perfect," Callahan said. "Someone should be on the board, though, every minute."

"We don't have that luxury," Kolnikov muttered, more to himself than anyone else.

All the boat's systems were controlled from this room — the reactor, turbines, sonar, weapons, life-support systems, everything except the stove in the galley and the commode in the head. Of course, the reactor control panel in the engine room had more complete instrumentation — doctrine in the American and Russian navies demanded that the panel be monitored constantly, twenty-four hours a day, even if the reactor were shut down. Unfortunately, Kolnikov didn't have enough men. And the ones he did have didn't know enough to make sound decisions. He was going to have to monitor the readouts himself from the control room and trust to luck.

Kolnikov bent over and looked at the German the SEAL had stabbed. The knife had gone into his heart. He was still alive, but he would die soon. He motioned to two of his men. "Carry him below."

They blanched.

"He's dying. We can't help him. Do it."

Callahan took a step closer to Kolnikov, glanced around the control room to ensure none of his shipmates were there, then said, "Hey, listen. I've done my part. The only SCRAM button that is still wired up is in the engine room. How about letting me get off now? You guys sail over the horizon and bon voyage."

Kolnikov glanced at Callahan, then nodded at Heydrich.

A wave of relief crossed Callahan's face. He started forward with Heydrich following.

Twenty seconds later Heydrich walked back into the compartment, his pistol in his hand.

"He knew too much," Heydrich said to Kolnikov as he slid the weapon into his belt. "We'll get rid of the body later."

Kolnikov nodded. He had other things on his mind. He had read and studied every scrap of information he could get about this submarine from every conceivable source. "Are you certain you can handle this boat?" the man in Paris had asked last week at their final meeting.

"No one could be absolutely certain unless he had read all the manuals and spent many hours in the simulator," he had replied, a reasonable response, he believed.

"So you are willing to try it?"

"Assuming the boat is not damaged in the hijacking, we will be able to take the boat to sea, submerge it, and proceed slowly away from the North American continent. Then we will spend three or four days figuring out what we have, how it works, what we can do with it."

"What are the dangers of this approach?"

Kolnikov had maintained control of his face, though his shoulders twitched. "Submarining is not chess," he said coolly. "Mistakes can be fatal. We must pray the boat functions as it should. We have had a limited time to prepare, we haven't seen the real ship. We will be unable to properly deal with malfunctions or emergencies until we discover exactly how the boat is laid out, how the control systems work."

"And the reactor?"

"The operation of the reactor is mostly automatic. All the critical parameters are automatically monitored by a computer, which will shut down the reactor if anything goes wrong. People monitor the parameters to back up the computer — we will have to forgo that luxury. If the computer shuts down the reactor, we will abandon ship. That is our only option."

"And if the Americans come hunting for you?"

"I have no doubt that they will," Kolnikov had replied. "We must ensure that they are unable to find us until we are ready for them."

The man in Paris had looked at him as if he had lost his sanity. Perhaps he had.

Yet Turchak had believed, for the man was here. A former boomer skipper himself, Turchak had been the hardest sell. When he agreed to come, the others did too.

Now, as Kolnikov stared at the horizontal and vertical large-screen displays and the keyboards on the consoles surrounding him, the cold truth hit him like a hammer. They had been damn fools to attempt to sail this thing. It would take hours to work through the options of the weapons program; their only option just now was to run and pray that no one shoots.

Still, this was Vladimir Kolnikov's big chance, as it was for Turchak and the other Russians. On the beach, with no money or prospect for earning any, stranded in the midst of an absolutely corrupt third-world country — yes, Turchak and the others welcomed a chance to steal a submarine. Whether they would ever see any money for their efforts remained to be seen, but the Russians had nothing to lose.

Nothing to lose but their lives, and after all, what were they worth?

And if Kolnikov and Turchak and the others died trying for the gold… well, submariners risked their lives every time they went to sea.

The Germans were also here for the money. None of them had experience in nuclear submarines, but they were computer and sonar experts. Heydrich was neither. He was here because the man in Paris demanded that he be included.

How willing we are to volunteer for unknown risks when we are broke and hungry, standing on dry land.

Kolnikov turned to his most pressing problem, the American destroyer. Everything depended on what the skipper of the destroyer decided to do. "What is the destroyer doing now?" Kolnikov asked.

Eck, one of the German computer men, had a tactical display on the large-screen vertical display in the forward port corner of the compartment. Boldt, the other, worked on the ship's main system computer. Rothberg ran from one to the other, coaching them, reaching over their shoulders and pushing buttons when required. Eck's display showed tactical information from the main combat system computer, information derived from radar and photonic data. In fact, the image from the light sensor in the photonics mast, the tip of which was raised several feet above its housing, was presented on a large-screen vertical display that formed the centerpiece of the control room. The destroyer was about a thousand yards away, closing. Five more vertical displays hung on the port bulkhead, four on the starboard, and one each in the forward corners of the compartment. At the forward end of the space were two ship-control consoles, with vertical displays above them. Seven consoles to manage the integrated sonar suite lined the port side of the room. Four combat control station consoles were on the starboard side; the navigation engineering stations were behind the ship-control consoles and in front of the horizontal tactical display. A momentary twinge of panic gripped Kolnikov. Operating these systems with just five men — only one of whom, Rothberg, knew the systems cold — was idiocy, he thought.

"Close the main hatch and report when it is accomplished," Kolnikov ordered. "Have Steeckt ready the sail cockpit for diving."

At the starboard ship-control console, Turchak examined the information displays. He pushed buttons, tentatively at first, then with more confidence as he recalled the long conversations he had preparing for this day. The joystick that controlled the boat was there before him, waiting for his hand. He caressed it, then ran his fingers along the power lever. The rudder, he knew, was tied in with the joystick, so the boat would always slide through the water with minimum resistance. However, in the unlikely event there was a control computer, failure, they would shift to manual controls to move the hydraulic valves that controlled the rudders and planes.

Digital images of the undersea world constructed from sonar data could be displayed on any of the vertical screens in the room. These images presented a three-dimensional picture of the undersea space around the submarine. The images could be rotated to display the situation in any direction from the submarine, or indeed, put the sub in the middle of a three-dimensional world, but for now the displays showed only the sea ahead, below and on each flank.

The displays were divided into two halves, both of which were transparent, by a wriggling line. The line was the water's surface. Above the line, the images were derived from data from the photonics mast, below the line from the sonar.

The sonar was the top-secret black magic of which Kolnikov, Turchak, and the others had heard rumors but had little specific information. Revelation, the Americans called the gear — or multi-

static passive sonar, MSPS — because it made the sea transparent, revealing all. Using only the noise present in the sea from every natural and man-made source, listening from acoustic arrays in the bow, chin, sail, flanks, and stern of the submarine, the computers processed the data into a three-dimensional presentation that was awe-inspiring. The acoustic sensors themselves produced data at the rate of about thirty million bytes per second, which was processed by a system capable of handling twenty-five gigabytes per second. The sonar-processing system had more capacity than the computer systems of all the other U.S. submarines combined.

Magic!

Kolnikov stood looking, dumbstruck. The sea appeared clear as glass. He could see hulls of other boats, buoys, the bottom of the sound, the shards of a sunken ship…. The ocean was a tough, nonlinear medium. Temperature and salinity variations led to speed of sound changes that refracted and reflected sound waves, causing ducting, "mirrors," and other effects that required real-time modeling on board to predict what in- and outbound sound was going to do as a function of depth, direction, and distance. Submarines changed depth periodically to measure actual conditions, to provide input to the computer models.

The pictures that Revelation generated, Kolnikov realized, were going to be only as good as the computer model. If the model were wrong, the pictures would be dangerous fiction. He would have to keep that fact firmly in mind.

"Nine hundred yards, Captain, bearing zero nine zero relative, speed five knots," reported Heinrich Eck, referring of course to the destroyer. "We are steady on course one two zero degrees, making two knots. The destroyer is flashing us with an Aldis lamp." Of course none of them knew what the Aldis lamp message was about, but Kolnikov thought it was probably an order to heave to.

"When the hatches are closed, we will accelerate," he said.

Kolnikov found a chair and settled in. Behind him four Russian and German technicians stood watching the horizontal tactical display and fidgeting nervously. Leon Rothberg sat at a terminal checking automated defaults. Heydrich stood together behind the tactical display.

With studied casualness, Kolnikov removed a pack of unfiltered

Pall Mall cigarettes from a trouser pocket. He extracted one from the pack, tapped it gently on a thumbnail to seat the tobacco, then lit it. He inhaled deeply, then blew out the smoke with a sigh.

"Smoke will foul the air filters and trigger the smoke alarms," Rothberg said irritably.

"Turn off the smoke alarms," Kolnikov said and took another drag.

"What will the destroyer do?" asked Gordin, one of the Russians.

"I don't know," Kolnikov replied curtly. Gordin was another former submariner, a veteran of the Arctic icepack — he should know to keep his mouth shut.

"Hatches shut, Captain," Boldt reported. He was working feverishly on the computer displays and now had one up that showed every orifice in the hull. All were now sealed.

"Obtain verbal confirmation, please," said Kolnikov, refusing to hurry.

Another minute passed. Gordin looked as if he were going to pee his pants when Steeckt finally came into the control room, out of breath. "All hatches secure, Captain."

"It's all yours," Kolnikov said to Turchak. "All ahead one-third." He took another drag on his smoke.

With his eyes on the reactor display and the steam pressures, Turchak slowly advanced the power lever, careful not to cavitate the prop or stir up the mud on the bottom of the sound. The power lever was merely a computer input device: The computer pulled rods from the reactor and opened valves in the engine room to route steam to the turbines. Here in the control room, Turchak could feel the submarine respond to his power command. The sonar picture began changing as the sub surged forward. The effect was mesmerizing.

Kolnikov leaned over and studied the touch-screen reactor information. The temperatures and cooling flow rates seemed smack in the middle of the normal ranges.

"Magic," Eck whispered as he stared at the sonar display, unintentionally voicing the thought all of them were thinking. "Pure magic."

Kolnikov shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts. There was so much to be done. "Gordin, you and Miiller check the emergency gear. Extinguishers, hoses, nozzles, flashlights, tools, emergency breathing apparatus — all of it. Ensure that every man knows where everything is stowed." "Aye aye, Captain."

"Admiral, it looks like somebody just hijacked your new submarine," Harvey Warfield boomed into the telephone. The people in the Jones's radio room had the commander of the Submarine Group on the other end of the hookup. Apparently the admiral had been on the pier watching America get under way and had only now arrived in his communications center.

"Are you sure?" the admiral demanded.

Try as he might, Warfield couldn't remember the flag officer's name. "We received a radio transmission that I interpreted that way, sir. A lot of people from the tugboat boarded the sub, and the sub sent a Mayday, which wasn't repeated. The mike seemed to get stuck open, and it sounded as if the intruders were hijacking the boat. There are people in the water right now, and we're closing on them."

"Who is in the water?"

"Sir, I don't know."

"Well, goddamn it, Captain, I think we had better find out just who is in the water and what the hell is going on aboard that submarine before we go off half-cocked."

"Admiral, in my considered judgment, a bunch of pirates are stealing that submarine."

"What do you want to do about it?"

"Sir, the decision to disable or sink an American submarine needs to be made way above my pay grade."

"Jesus fucking Christ! You expect me to authorize that based on some unverified crap you heard over the radio?"

"No, sir. I'm just advising you. People are falling in the ocean off that sub, the tug is sinking, we've been signaling the sub, ordering it to stop. Whoever is running that show is ignoring our signals. They refuse to answer our radio calls. Something is terribly wrong! It looks to me like the goddamn sub has been hijacked."

The admiral mulled that comment for about two seconds. "Well, before we stick our dicks in the meat grinder, Captain, we need verification of this tale. I assume you've notified national command authority in Washington. Have you sent a flash message?"

"Yes, sir. I think we're drafting our third now. You should have received copies."

On that note, the admiral terminated the conversation.

"Asshole," roared Harvey Warfield as he slammed the telephone receiver down onto its cradle. He jabbed the squawk box. "Radio, get me the goddamn Pentagon. If I'm gonna sit here like a wart on a dog's ass watching that pigboat sail off over the horizon, I want a four-star on the hook with me."

He released the button and shouted to the OOD, "That sub is accelerating. Stay with it. Close to parallel at its four-thirty position at a range of a hundred yards. And give me some reports. I want to know when the gun and torpedo tubes are manned and ready. Tell me about the people in the water."

"The Coast Guard cutter will pick up the men overboard, Cap-tain.

Hijacked!

Yes, he was sure of it, though Harvey Warfield had to admit to himself that the evidence was sketchy. Although it sounded compelling, the radio show they had listened to could have been produced anywhere. The exploits of Orson Welles came immediately to mind.

Do this right, Warfield! There won't be any second chances.

He trained his binoculars on the white Coast Guard boat, which was now dead in the water. He could see the sailors rigging nets over the side and lowering a small boat.

Of course the admiral didn't want to take responsibility for sinking a brand-spanking-new two-billion-dollar submarine and killing a bunch of American sailors. Who would?

But if he, Harvey Warfield, didn't ring the fire alarm, the sub was as good as gone.

Hijacked!

The thought occurred to Harvey Warfield that there might be other submarines about, submarines that did not belong to the United States. He jabbed a squawk box button: "Combat, bridge, are there any subs on our plot?"

"No, sir. None."

"Unidentified aircraft?" Even as he said it, he knew the answer.

"A couple dozen, Captain. Five non-transponder-equipped targets; the rest, I believe, are light civilian planes not under positive radar control. But I have no way to verify that."

A feminine voice in his ear: "Captain, one of the lookouts reports that a television news chopper is hovering over our fantail. It appears to have bullet holes in the Plexiglas. We think the pilot wants to land on the fantail, sir."

"Let him land. See if he has any videotape of that sub. If he does, get it and put it on the ship's system. I want to see it here on the bridge. And transmit it to Washington. And I want a report on those people in the water. Get that Coast Guard skipper on the horn and get a report."

"Aye aye, sir."

"The Pentagon war room is on the line, Captain," said another voice.

Harvey Warfield picked up the telephone and identified himself. He tried to succinctly sum up the situation by citing only hard, verifiable facts.

The war room duty officer was a two-star. "Are any Americans still aboard America?"

"I don't know," Warfield replied bitterly. He could almost hear the other man thinking in the silence that followed.

"What is his course and speed?" the admiral in Washington asked.

"Up to ten knots now, sir, still heading one two zero for the open sea."

"Depth of water?"

"Two hundred feet at the most."

"Captain, you are the officer on the spot. I am not going to grant you permission to do anything. Anything you choose to do is your responsibility."

"Yeah," said Harvey Warfield, who didn't join this man's navy yesterday. He hung up the headset.

"Is the gun manned?" he called to the OOD.

"Yes, sir. Manned and ready."

"Have the gunnery officer fire a warning shot. Have him telephone me before he shoots."

"Yes, sir."

In seconds the telephone rang. "Captain, gunnery officer."

"A warning shot across their bow, Mr. Turner. Do not hit the submarine or any of those goddamn little boats running around out there."

"Yes, sir."

"Whenever you are ready, Mr. Turner."

"Aye aye, Captain."

Twenty seconds later the gun banged. The shell hit the water a hundred yards ahead of the sub, made a nice splash.

And the sub kept right on going. It was up to thirteen knots now.

Warfield jabbed the button on the squawk box labeled Radio.

"Tell everyone in the world, flash immediate: We have fired a warning shot across Americas bow and it was ignored."

When Warfield looked up, his XO was standing there, the finest naval officer he had ever been privileged to serve with, Lorna Dun-nigan. He felt better just having her there. As usual, she got right to it.

"What do you intend to do, Captain?"

"I don't want the responsibility for killing a bunch of Americans either," Warfield admitted. "I want more facts before I pull any triggers."

Vladimir Kolnikov was on his second cigarette when the splash of the warning shot showed on the integrated tactical display and on the sonar. He glanced at the photonics image — yep, there too.

"How deep is the water here?" he asked Eisenberg, his navigator.

"One hundred eighty feet below the keel, Captain."

"How long to the hundred-fathom curve?"

"Three hours at this speed."

"Fifty fathoms?"

"An hour."

Kolnikov leaned back in his chair and put his feet on the console in front of him. "I need an ashtray," he remarked to no one in particular.

"Aren't you going to sink this destroyer?" Heydrich asked. He was seated in an empty sonar operator's chair, watching.

"With what? It will take all night for us to figure out how to aim and fire a torpedo."

"So he can kill us at his leisure?"

"That's about the size of it. But he won't. The captain of that destroyer does not know what happened aboard this boat. He certainly suspects, but he doesn't know. None of the Americans know, and we are not going to help them find out. I wouldn't shoot at that destroyer even if I could."

"They will fish some of the Americans from the sea and question them. Those men will talk."

That process would take time. And no two of the Americans would tell the story the same way, Kolnikov reflected. Half-drowned men would tell disjointed tales, disagree on critical facts. "They'll talk," he told the German. "And they will say that there are still Americans aboard this boat."

"So?"

"That fact means nothing to you, Heydrich, but it will mean a great deal to the Americans. Trust me."

A half hour later Harvey Warfield had two pieces of critical information. He knew that about fifty Americans remained aboard America, and he was convinced that the submarine had been hijacked. In addition to the testimony of the America sailors pulled from the sea, he had a videotape from the camera of the television news helicopter, which was sitting in the helo spot on the destroyer's fantail. Two navy helicopters were circling over the sub and destroyer, neither of which was equipped with a dipping sonar or any of the other high-tech paraphernalia of antisubmarine warfare. Warfield talked to the Pentagon duty officer on a scrambled radio voice circuit as he watched the video on a monitor mounted high in a corner of the bridge.

"At least a dozen men," Warfield said. "They spoke accented English. One of the crewmen thought they were Russians, two thought they were Germans, one guy thought they were Bosnian Serbs, two swore they were Iranians, no one knows for sure. I'm watching them on videotape, though, shoot a submachine gun at the helicopter taking pictures. The guy just turns and shoots, like he was swatting at a fly."

"How many Americans were killed?"

"At least eight that we know of. The Coast Guard has already recovered that many bodies."

"Captain Sterrett?"

"Dead. Shot once at the base of the throat with a bullet that went all the way through."

"I'll pass this along to the national command authority."

"Better pass along this fact too, Admiral. This sub is going to dive in the very near future. If it is as quiet as everyone has been saying it is, I'll lose it unless I'm shot with luck. Whatever the brains in Washington want to do about this had better be done before this thing slides under."

"Try to stay on it."

"Aye aye," Warfield said without enthusiasm and hung up the headset.

"What if this guy squirts a torpedo at us, Captain?" the OOD asked.

"He won't," Warfield said with conviction. "I doubt that he has any torpedoes in the tubes ready to go, but even if he does, he won't shoot. This guy kept fifty hostages to ensure that we wouldn't shoot at him."

"If he didn't have any hostages," the XO asked, "would you sink him?"

"Right now. This very minute."

"So the choice is to sink him with the gun or let him go."

"Or try to ram him, disable the screws."

Even as he said the words, Harvey Warfield was considering. If he could bend or break off just one blade, the sub would lose a great deal of speed and become a real noisemaker. He picked up the handset, asked for the Pentagon war room again.

The admiral there was unenthusiastic. "The evidence for a hijacking hasn't changed in the last five minutes, has it?"

"No, sir."

"Still thin."

Harvey Warfield had had enough lawyering. "We fry people in the electric chair with less evidence than we have right now," he told the admiral. "The Coast Guard has eight dead American sailors stretched out on their deck." Warfield lost his temper. "Are you going to wait for autopsies, Admiral?"

"If you ram the sub you will damage both ships, perhaps severely."

"Yes, sir."

"Perhaps crack the sub's reactor, have a nuclear accident right there in Long Island Sound. With thirty million people strewn around the shore."

"There is that possibility," Harvey Warfield admitted. He felt so helpless, listening to this cover-my-ass paper pusher while he watched a brand-new, genuine U.S. attack submarine armed to the teeth sail for the open sea with a bunch of criminals at the helm. Killers. Murderers.

"This decision needs to be made by the national command authority," the Pentagon admiral said. By that he meant the president of the United States. "We'll get back to you." Yes, sir.

That was the situation twenty-seven minutes later when Kolnikov decided the water was deep enough. Two freighters were nearby, on their way out of Long Island Sound into the Atlantic, and several fishing boats. The Block Island ferry was about to cross the sub and destroyer's wake when Kolnikov reduced power. As two Coast Guard helicopters buzzed angrily overhead, the sub decelerated, gradually flooded its tanks, and settled slowly into the sea. The destroyer was abeam the submarine on the starboard side when the top of the sub's masts disappeared from sight. Crying raucously and soaring on the salty breeze blowing in from the sea, a cloud of seagulls searched the roiling water for tidbits brought up from the depths.

Aboard John Paul Jones, Harvey Warfield knew that he didn't have a chance of tracking the submarine unless he used active sonar, so he gave the order. Jones was a guided-missile destroyer, its systems optimized to protect a carrier battle group from air attack. The ship had an antisubmarine capability, but it certainly was not state of the art.

The sonar operator tracked the sub as it turned into the swirling water disturbed by the destroyer's passing, then lost it.

"This guy is no neophyte," Harvey Warfield muttered darkly when the tactical action officer in combat gave him the news, but there was little he could do. He turned the destroyer, slowed to two knots, and waited for the wake turbulence to dissipate. All the while the sonar pinged on, probing for the submarine that was actually going back up the destroyer's wake at five knots, steadily opening the distance between the hunter and the hunted.

The TAO called the captain again. "The water is very shallow, sir. The sound is echoing off the bottom and other ships and thermal layers. It's like we're pinging inside a kettledrum. The scope is a sea of return. America might be one of those blips, but we would only be guessing. We could go passive, see if the operator can pick him out."

"He'll never hear him. I'll bet a silver dollar that he's under that ferry this very minute."

"That would be a good bet, Captain, but we can't pick him out of the return at this range. If you want to close, we can keep trying."

"This guy won't wait for us to search the haystack," Harvey War-field said with conviction. He knew that pinning a submarine in shallow water under less than ideal conditions was an impossible task for a guided-missile destroyer like the Jones, equipped with fifteen-year-old sonar technology. He needed a helicopter or two, or a second destroyer. Even if he had those assets at his disposal, stealthy as the America was, he would need a pot full of luck. "Do whatever you think best," Warfield told the TAO.

"Just like that," Captain Warfield stormed at his XO. "Just like that! I will make a prediction. I predict that before very long those bastards in the Pentagon are going to wish to God they had given the order to destroy that boat before it submerged."

Kolnikov did use the ferry, not by running along under it, but by keeping it between the submarine and the destroyer when he left the destroyer's wake. As he stole slowly away he was careful not to put the destroyer directly astern, in his baffles, so he could still see it on the sonar presentation. The active pinging from the destroyer's sonar resembled flashes of light on the screen.

When the destroyer was miles behind, Kolnikov threw the sub into a series of hard, tight turns designed to allow him to check his baffles to see if an American submarine was trailing him.

The sea was empty. America was alone.

"It feels strange going to sea without an American boat following along with his nose up our ass," Turchak remarked.

Kolnikov thought this remark amusing. American attack subs usually picked up Russian boomers as they left port and followed them for months, quite sure the Russians didn't know they were there.

"I think this time we are really alone," Kolnikov replied jovially and slapped Turchak on the back.

With the sonar presentation showing open sea ahead and to all sides, America swam deeper into the gray wastes of the Atlantic.