America

CHAPTER TWO

Rear Admiral Jake Grafton and his wife, Callie, awoke Saturday at their beach house in Delaware. They had guests this weekend, both of whom were apparently still asleep. The Graftons pulled on pants and shirts, and tiptoed down the stairs and out the front door. They sat on the porch steps to put on their shoes, walked the block along the crushed seashell street to the public parking area, then crossed the dune on the boardwalk. Standing on the beach in deep sand, they took off their shoes again, tied the laces together, and draped them around their necks.

The wind this morning was off the sea. The Graftons walked along arm in arm as seabirds ran along the sand probing for mollusks and the September breeze played with their hair. They tried to get to the beach several times per month, but with two hectic schedules they were lucky to get there once every other month. This weekend trip had been eagerly anticipated for three weeks. Jake normally spent twelve hours a day at the office, seven days a week.

When the couple bought the beach house years ago they anticipated living here when Jake retired. As Callie walked the beach this morning, she suddenly realized that she and Jake hadn't discussed retirement in quite a while. He hadn't mentioned the future in months.

She glanced at him. He had thinning hair, which he combed straight back, and a lean face with a nose that was a trifle too large. His tan, she noticed, was pretty much gone. She reminded herself to make sure he put on sunblock when they returned home.

Now he smiled at her and squeezed her hand. "We've got to get over here more often," he murmured. "It isn't fair for me to keep you cooped up in that flat in Washington."

"If I wanted to come by myself, I could. I just don't like coming here without you."

"I know how you feel." He smiled again.

"Last night was a lot of fun," she said. "I really like the Russian, Ilin." Last night Toad Tarkington, Jake's executive assistant, arrived at the beach house with Janos Ilin, a Russian.

Jake absentmindedly released her hand and jammed both fists into his trouser pockets. "He's really smart," Jake said tentatively. "Supposed to be a bureaucrat in the Russian defense department, an accountant, he says. He's certainly a people person, smooth as old scotch. Almost too much so. This guy could sell magazine subscriptions at a home for the blind or charm his way out of jail. At times I wonder what the man who lives in there is really like."

"Supposed to be a bureaucrat?"

"I think he's a very senior officer in the foreign intelligence service, the SVR, which is the successor to the KGB. Same paranoid bunch running it, doing all the nasty stuff they always did, but they aren't Communists now, they say. As if that makes a difference in an authoritarian society."

"Do you really think having him here is a good idea?"

"Maybe not, but Ilin didn't want to spend the weekend at the Russian embassy and Toad didn't want to just turn him loose to see what trouble he could get into. Hell, the guy's first taste of freedom — he might run off to Vegas with a topless dancer sporting a new boob job and never be heard from again. You can imagine the repercussions!"

She made a rude noise.

"Toad had to do something with the guy," Jake said with a shrug. "His wife's on a cruise and the kid is at his grandmother's. Toad knew you and I were coming to the beach, so he brought him here."

"Ilin makes a nice houseguest. I enjoyed visiting last night."

Jake smiled. Callie, the linguist, had been studying Russian for the last year. Last night she refused to speak to Ilin in English, which he spoke well. The two of them had laughed merrily as she chattered away in fractured, broken, semi-intelligible Russian.

"Even if he is a spook, he's very charming," she said as they strolled along, Jake with his hands in his pockets, Callie with her arms crossed in front of her.

Jake took his time choosing his words, then said slowly, "He replaced the last Russian six weeks ago, two weeks after the Super-Aegis satellite was lost. The other guy was called home for a family emergency, according to Ilin. The other guy went back to the embassy one evening and Ilin showed up the next day with credentials and an explanation."

"So have they figured out what went wrong?" Callie asked now. She touched Jake on the arm and he automatically reached for her hand.

"NASA is investigating. And the Russian rocket experts and the European experts. Someone said that every time three people meet in an office, it's like a session of the UN Security Council. I hear they even have the FBI turning over rocks and going through waste-baskets. In any event, no one is telling us diddley-squat."

A thorough, comprehensive search had failed to find the satellite or the reactor it contained. Nor could any trace of excess radiation be found, which one would expect if the reactor had been damaged in the crash. Even worse, no one knew why the launch had failed or the entire tracking system had shut down.

"Surely there must be some theories," Callie murmured.

"Theories are four for a dollar," her husband admitted ruefully. "NASA insists the prelaunch and launch procedures are not the problem, the Russians insist there is nothing wrong with Russian rockets, the Europeans deny that the expedited testing procedures they demanded for cost-containment purposes are to blame… but the fact is the satellite didn't reach orbit. It was presumably lost at sea."

"I don't understand why it hasn't been found. It must be somewhere under the launch path. Shouldn't it?"

"Well, there's a debate about that. The trajectory was curving to the north when the third stage failed to ignite. Apparently. Then the tracking stations lost it. At that speed and altitude, it could be anywhere from Africa to the Bahamas."

"You don't really think that something just 'happened,' do you?"

"No. I think it was sophisticated sabotage. Someone changed a few lines of software here and there. After the missile was lost, he or she went back in and changed it back. Someone else could have killed the tracking stations for several minutes. The FBI is investigating and apparently coming up dry."

"And the Russian response to the SuperAegis disaster was to send a spy to be a member of the liaison team?"

"It's that kind of world, I guess," Jake said lightly. "Drop a satellite and here they come. But who knows, there's a chance — a small one, of course — that Ilin is indeed what he is says he is, a career paper pusher, a bean counter."

"So why didn't he get a room at the Washington Hilton?"

Jake chuckled. "The times, they are indeed a-changin'," he said. "But they don't change overnight. Used to be a senior spook like Ilin couldn't leave the Russian embassy without an escort. They're afraid their people might defect or turn traitor or something. Presumably Bin's chock-full of state secrets that Russia's enemies would pay huge money for. He says his boss thinks he's growing up. They would like him to sleep at the embassy, but now he can play outdoors without adult supervision."

"How senior is he?"

"Equivalent of a major general, I think. Maybe a lieutenant general. The CIA says they think he's the number-two or — three man in one of the SVR's chief directorates."

"Are you and Toad corrupting him?"

"I'm just trying to be a decent host. Toad is probably trying to rot Bin's Cyrillic heart. I don't know. Or care. Ilin may be trying to show us that he isn't SVR because he can sleep outside the Russian embassy. Whatever. At some point you stop peeling the onion and let it be."

"Is he going to defect?"

"God, I hope not! It would be a disaster if he did."

"Do you like Ilin?"

Jake shrugged. "I haven't thought much about it. He is charming, but he's way too smart. Being around him makes me nervous."

Callie laughed. "Phooey. You're in his league, Jake Grafton." She shook her head. "Just for the record, though, I wish you and I had a little more time alone to practice this husband-wife thing."

"Me too," Jake agreed warmly and reached for Callie's arm. "I'm sorry the guys showed up. I could tell Toad to take him down to Ocean City this afternoon, get a hotel room with a good television and watch some football."

"No, no. They can stay. I didn't mean that."

"Honest. I can run 'em off."

"I know. But it would be impolite."

They walked on hand in hand.

"Last night was fun," Callie said, remembering. Ilin had asked the origin of the name of the project — Super Aegis. Jake replied that the space-based missile defense system was first christened Galahad, after the good knight with the enchanted shield. "Galahad's shield," Jake explained, "had a marvelous property; it would protect only those pure in heart. The president thought that this close to the Clinton era, people would think the name was some kind of political joke."

That remark got Ilin started on political jokes. He regaled the Americans with an hour's worth, all of which Callie forced him to repeat in Russian. Then somehow the conversation turned to grandmothers. Jake Grafton grinned as he walked the beach this morning, remembering.

"My father's mother liked to invite her friends over for cards in the afternoon," Callie had told her audience. "They smoked and drank gin until they were so snockered they could barely walk and thought they were so wicked. Grandmother would call me over to her and announce, 'Callie is going to help me cheat. Look at the other ladies' cards, honey, and tell me if you see any jacks.' My other grandmother was also a pistol. She's the one who taught me to pee without taking off my swimsuit." That comment brought a gale of laughter. "She also liked to skinny-dip and would wake me up at midnight to go skinny-dipping with her in her pool. She loved splashing around naked in the darkness, listening to the crickets and frogs, speculating about what the neighbors would say if they ever found out."

That got Toad talking about his grandmothers. He then mimicked the way they talked. Jake and Callie had never heard him mimic other voices before, so they encouraged him. He did an excellent John Wayne, good Jimmy Stewart, Jack Benny, Bill Clinton, and a passable handful of others. Although Ilin didn't know many of the voices, the Graftons did; Toad had them in stitches.

"What are you grinning about?" she asked her husband this morning as they walked the sand.

"Being alive," he shot back. "Like your grandmother, I enjoy it immensely. Come on, let's get our feet wet." Jake led Callie into the surf runout area. The water was cold on their ankles. In seconds a wave forced them to retreat. Back and forth they went, like children, as the surf chased them.

Eventually he misjudged a wave, which soaked his trousers from the knees down. He grinned ruefully at his wife, who was wearing a wide smile as the cold salt water swirled around her ankles.

They were crossing the beach, heading for the boardwalk across the dune, when Jake's cell phone rang. He removed it from his pocket and flipped open the mouthpiece.

"Grafton," he muttered and inserted a finger into his left ear to block out the sighing of the wind and surf.

Callie sat down on the boardwalk to put on her shoes as Jake concentrated on the telephone conversation. He didn't say much. Callie felt her spirits sink. The cell phone was nonsecure, Callie knew, so official business could not be discussed on it. More than likely this was a summons to return to Washington. When Jake glanced at his wristwatch, she knew.

"Okay," he said and closed the phone mouthpiece. As he put the phone into his pocket he looked at her and shrugged. He looked tired, she thought.

"Someone hijacked a submarine — if you can believe that. Big meeting in Washington. They're sending a helicopter. It'll be here in about an hour."

"Oh, Jake. I'm sorry."

"Damn!" he said. "You'll have to drive the car back to Washington."

"A submarine?"

"New London, he said. This morning."

"Is there any chance you could get back here tonight?"

"I don't know. Perhaps."

"Why don't you call me from Washington, let me know? I could thaw steaks and Toad can cook them tonight on the grill. I'll thaw one out for you."

"Okay."

She touched his cheek. "You seem happier than I've seen you in years, Jake. You're fully engaged."

"They keep me jumping, that's for sure."

"And you love it."

He grinned. "It's the niftiest job I've had in years. Maybe ever. The truth is that it's fun working with really smart people, like Ilin. Man, I didn't know there were this many geniuses in the world. At times I feel like I'm the dumbest kid in the class, but what the hey. I'm giving it my best shot. And yeah, that's fun."

They found Toad and Ilin sitting on the screened-in porch drinking coffee. In his mid-forties, Janos Ilin was a tall, lean man with craggy features and lively, expressive features. He greeted Callie now with a phrase in Russian, and she fired a few words back at him.

"Good morning, Jake," Ilin said to the admiral with a smile. Ilin liked to use first names. Apparently someone had told him that was the American custom and he took it to heart.

"So did you sleep okay?"

"Fine, Jake. Just fine."

"I'm going back to Washington in a few minutes," Jake said, more to Toad than Ilin. "You guys make yourselves at home. Callie is going to thaw steaks for tonight."

"Will you be returning this evening, sir?" Toad asked.

"I don't know."

Jake took his coffee with him when he went upstairs to pack. As he climbed the stairs he heard Callie speaking to Ilin in Russian, probably asking him what he wanted for breakfast. When Jake came back downstairs carrying his overnight bag, he found Ilin inspecting the bookshelf.

"Help yourself," he told the Russian. "Toad, how about driving me down to the hospital helo pad."

He kissed his wife, then went out to the car with Tarkington. As Toad piloted the car along the highway, Jake told him of the submarine hijacking. "USS America, according to the Pentagon duty officer. It's on television, he says; all the channels are running news specials. Turn it on when you get back, watch Ilin's reaction."

"Why?" Toad asked, referring to the theft of the sub.

"I dunno. Someone wanted a sub."

Toad whistled. "Holy…!"

After a bit Jake asked, "What do you think of Ilin?"

"He's sharp as a razor, Admiral. It's hard to figure what he's thinking, but I suspect that he has a low opinion of you and me. It's just a feeling I have, nothing specific."

"We are sorta small-caliber guys," Jake muttered.

"He speaks great English," Toad continued. "Has an excellent vocabulary. Seems to know a lot about a lot of stuff. He has something to say about every subject I could think to raise. This morning you saw him checking out your taste in literature."

As Jake mentally cataloged the thrillers, mysteries, and action-adventure novels that filled his shelves, Toad added, "He thinks we're nincompoops."

"There's nothing on my shelves that will disabuse him of that notion," Jake replied. "Let's let him hang on to it as long as possible."

Kolnikov had America running at three knots, five hundred feet below the surface of the sea, when he engaged the autopilot. He had seen submarine autopilots before, of course, but not an autopilot that was designed to run the ship all the time, except in the most dire emergency. He had never seen a submarine with completely computerized, fly-by-wire controls operated with a joystick, either. No fool, Vladimir Kolnikov knew the reason that naval engineers didn't trust submarine autopilots — if a stray electron galloped sideways through the system, the boat could be endangered within seconds. An out-of-control submarine could easily dive too deep, past its crush depth. The faster the sub was going when control was lost, the sooner crush depth would be reached. This one, Kolnikov knew, was operated by three computers that constantly checked on each other and compared data. Any two of them could outvote and override the third.

Still, engaging the autopilot was an act of faith, Kolnikov told himself as he pushed the final button and took his hands off the boat's joystick controls. If Rothberg and the Germans didn't have the computer system functioning properly, this was going to get very exciting very quickly.

Now Kolnikov watched the attitude indicator and the depth gauge, waiting.

All steady.

The machine kept the sub on course, without varying the depth a detectable amount. But for how long? And if something went wrong, how long would he have?

He looked around. Turchak, Eck, Boldt, and the other two Germans were frozen, staring at the gauges. Leon Rothberg was working on the master combat control station on the starboard side of the control room.

"Don't go to sleep," Kolnikov muttered to Turchak, who nodded in full agreement.

For the first time since he submerged the sub, Kolnikov left the captain's post. He was relieved to find the radio gear and encryption computer in the communications space, or radio room, in the area on the starboard side of the control room. No codebooks in sight, which meant they must be in the safe. He examined the safe, which, alas, was locked. He had been worried that the communications officer or his subordinates might have destroyed the crypto computer and the codebooks when they realized the sub was being hijacked. Apparently not.

As nifty as the sonar was, the codebooks and cryptographic computer were solid gold. Or would have been if the Americans hadn't known the submarine was stolen. No doubt they would change the codes within hours, if they hadn't already.

Yet any new system would be based on the encrypting algorithms contained in the computer, which meant that it was a prize without price for many of the world's intelligence agencies.

Kolnikov patted the machine once, then left the compartment and went forward through the control room into the crew's living area. He looked into the captain's cabin — very nice, bigger than he expected — and looked into each of the officers' staterooms, the wardroom, and the head. Finally he went down the ladder to the third deck. The galley and mess hall were under the control room. Right now the mess hall was jammed with Americans, packed like sardines. Two Germans were guarding them. Kolnikov didn't say a word, merely looked.

Under the mess hall were the cold rooms and auxiliary machinery space. After inspecting both compartments, Kolnikov climbed back up to the mess hall and went aft, into the torpedo room.

America had only four torpedo tubes, two on the starboard side and two port. All were empty just now. Eight Mk-48 torpedoes rested on cradles, ready for loading. Two contained dummy warheads, but six were war shots. In the center of the compartment was a compact berthing module, which had bunks for the six SEALs who would use the minisub. This module could be disassembled and removed from the boat in port, and the space used for more torpedoes.

His inspection complete, Kolnikov went through the galley— avoiding the mess hall where all the Americans were being held just now — into crew berthing. The berths were tiny, about the size of coffins, stacked three deep. Personal privacy could not be had here. There were, Kolnikov knew, not enough bunks for all the American sailors the boat normally carried — the junior men took turns sleeping. None of this surprised Kolnikov, who had spent almost twenty years serving in submarines.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If anything went wrong, anything…

Brovkin grinned at him. The fool!

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

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

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

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

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

"Do you want to keep anyone?"

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

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

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

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

"You'd like that, wouldn't you?"

"I don't take unnecessary risks."

"Risks are my department, Heydrich. We do it my way."