The Sum of All Fears

17 PROCESSING

The days were shorter now, Jack told himself. It wasn't that he was all that late, just that the days were shortening. The earth's orbit around the sun, and the way the axis of rotation was not perpendicular with the plane of the… ecliptic? Something like that. His driver dropped him off in front of the door, and he walked tiredly in, wondering when the last day had been, outside of the weekends, when he'd seen his house in daylight and not outlined by electric lights. About the only good news was that he didn't bring work home — but that wasn't quite true either, was it? He brought no documents home, but it was less easy to clear out his mind than to clear off his desk.

Ryan heard the sounds of a normal house, the TV tuned to Nickelodeon. The washing machine was making noise. Have to have that fixed. He walked into the family room to announce himself.

“Daddy!” Jack Jr. ran over to deliver a hug, followed by a plaintive look. “Daddy, you promised to take me to a baseball game!”

Oh, shit… The kids were back in school, and there couldn't be more than a dozen home games left up in Baltimore. He had to, had to, had to… When? When could he break loose? The new communications center project was only half done, and that was his baby, and the contractor was a week behind, and he had to get that back on line if it was going to be ready when it was supposed to be…

“I'm going to try, Jack,” Ryan promised his son, who was too young to understand about any obligation beyond a father's promise.

“Daddy, you promised!”

“I know.” Shit! Jack made a mental note. He had to do something about that.

“Bed time,” Cathy announced. “Tomorrow's a school day.”

Ryan hugged and kissed both of his children, but the exercise in affection merely left an empty spot in his conscience. What sort of a father was he turning into? Jack Jr.'s First Communion was next April or May, and who could say if he'd be home for that? Better find out the date so that he could schedule it now. Try to schedule it now. Jack reminded himself that little things like promises to his kids were—

Little things?

God, how did this ever happen? Where has my life gone?

He watched the kids head to their rooms, then himself headed to the kitchen. His dinner was in the oven. He set the plate on the breakfast counter before walking to the refrigerator. He was buying wine in boxes now. It was much more convenient, and his taste in wine was getting far less selective of late. The cardboard boxes held a Mylar bag full of — Australian, wasn't it? About where California wines had been twenty years earlier. The vintage in question was very fruity, to mask its inadequacies, and had the proper alcohol content, which was what he was mainly after anyway. Jack looked at the wall clock. If he were very lucky, he might get six and a half, maybe seven hours of sleep before a new day started. He needed the wine to sleep. At the office, he lived on coffee, and his system was becoming saturated with caffeine. Once he'd been able to nap at his desk, but no longer. By eleven in the morning, his system was wired, and by late afternoon his body played a strange melody of fatigue and alertness that sometimes left him wondering if he were going a little mad. Well, as long as he asked himself that question…

A few minutes later, he finished his dinner. Pity the oven had dried it out. Cathy had done this one herself. He'd been — he'd planned to be home at a decent hour, but… It was always something, wasn't it? When he stood, there was a twinge of discomfort from his stomach. On the way into the family room he opened the closet door to pull a packet of antacid tablets from his coat pocket. These he chewed and washed down with wine, starting off his third glass in less than thirty minutes at home.

Cathy wasn't there, though she'd left some papers on the table next to her customary chair. Jack listened and thought he heard a shower running. Fine. He took the cable controller and flipped to CNN for another news-fix. The lead story was something about Jerusalem.

Ryan settled back into his chair and allowed himself a smile. It was working. The story was about the resurgence of tourism. Shop owners were loading up in anticipation of their biggest Christmas in a decade. Jesus, explained a Jew who'd opted to stay in the town of Bethlehem, was after all a nice Jewish boy from a good family. His Arab partner toured the camera crew through the store. Arab partner? Jack thought. Well, why not?

It's worth it, Ryan told himself. You helped bring that about. You helped make that happen. You have saved lives, and if nobody else knows it, the hell with it. You know. God knows. Isn't that enough?

No, Jack told himself in a quiet flash of honesty.

So what if the idea had not been completely original? What idea ever was? It had been his thought that had brought it together, his contacts that had gotten the Vatican on board, his… He deserved something for it, some recognition, enough for a little footnote in some history book, but would he get it?

Jack snorted into his wine. No chance. Liz Elliot, that clever bitch, telling everybody that it was Charlie Alden who'd done it. If Jack ever tried to set the record straight, he'd look like a swine stealing credit from a dead man — and a good man, despite his mistake with that Blum girl. Cheer up, Jack. You're still alive. You have a wife, you have kids.

It still wasn't fair, was it? Fair? Why had he ever expected life to be fair? Was he turning into another one of them? Ryan asked himself. Another Liz Elliot, another grasping, small-minded ass with an ego-size inversely proportionate to her character. He'd so often worried and wondered about the process, how a person might be corrupted. He'd feared the overt methods, deciding that a cause or a mission was so vital that you might lose perspective on the important things, like the value of a single human life, even the life of an enemy. He hadn't lost that, not ever, and knew that he never would. It was the subtler things that were wearing at him. He was turning into a functionary, worrying about credit and status and influence.

He closed his eyes to remind himself of what he already had: a wife, two kids, financial independence, accomplishments that no one could ever take away.

You are turning into one of them…

He'd fought — he had killed — to defend his family. Maybe Elliot was offended by that, but in quiet moments like this, Jack remembered the times with a thin, grim smile. Not two hundred yards from where he now sat, he'd drilled three rounds into a terrorist's chest, coldly and efficiently — steel on target! — validating all the things they'd taught him at Quantico. That his heart had been beating a thousand times per second, that he'd come close to wetting his pants, that he'd had to swallow back his vomit, were small things. He'd done what he had to do, and because of that his wife and children were alive. He was a man who'd proven his manhood in every possible way — winning and marrying a wonderful girl, fathering two God-sent children, defending all of them with skill and courage. Every time fate had presented its challenge, Jack had met it and gotten the job done.

Yeah, he told himself, smiling at the TV. Screw Liz Elliot. That was a humorous thought. Who, he asked himself, would want to? That cold, skinny bitch, with her arrogance and… what else? Ryan's mind paused, seeking the answer to the question. What else? She was weak, wasn't she? Weak and timid. Beneath all the bluster and the hardness, what was really in there? Probably not much. He'd seen that sort of National Security Advisor before. Cutter, unwilling to face the music. Liz Elliot. Who'd want to screw her? Not very smart, and nothing in there to back up what smarts she did have. Good thing for her that the President had Bunker and Talbot to fall back on.

You're better than all of them. It was a satisfying thought to accompany the end of this glass of wine. Why not have another? This stuff really isn't all that bad, is it?

When Ryan returned, he saw Cathy was back also, going over her patient notes in the high-backed chair she liked.

“Want a glass of wine, honey?”

Dr. Caroline Ryan shook her head. “I have two procedures tomorrow.”

Jack came around to take his place in the other chair, almost not glancing at his wife, but he caught her out the corner of his eye.

“Wow.”

Cathy looked up from her paperwork to grin at him. Her face was nicely made-up. Jack wondered how she'd managed not to mess her hair up in the shower.

“Where did you get that?”

“Out of a catalog.”

“Whose, Fredericks?”

Dr. Caroline Muller Ryan, M.D., F.A.C.S., was dressed in a black peignoir that was a masterpiece of revelation and concealment. He couldn't tell what held the robe portion in place. Underneath was something filmy and… very nice. The color was odd, though, Cathy's nighties were all white. He'd never forgotten the wonderful white one she'd worn on their wedding night. Not that she'd been a virgin at the time, but somehow that white silk had made her so… that, too, was a memory that would never go away, Jack told himself. She'd never worn it since, saying that like her wedding dress, it was something only to be used once. What have I done to earn this wonderful girl? Jack asked himself.

“To what do I owe this honor?” Jack asked.

“I've been thinking.”

“About what?”

“Well, Little Jack is seven. Sally is ten. I want another one.”

“Another what?” Jack set his glass down.

“Another baby, you dope!”

“Why?” her husband asked.

“Because I can, and because I want one. I'm sorry,” she went on with a soft smile, “if that bothers you. The exercise, I mean.”

“I think I can handle that.”

“I have to get up at four-thirty,” Cathy said next. “My first procedure is before seven.”

“So?”

“So.” She rose and walked over to her husband. Cathy bent down to kiss him on the cheek. “See me upstairs.”

Ryan sat still for a minute or two, gunning down the rest of his drink, switching off the TV, and smiling to himself. He checked to make sure the house was locked and the security system armed. He stopped off in the bathroom to brush his teeth. A surreptitious check on her vanity drawer revealed a thermometer and a little index card with dates and temperatures on it. So. She wasn't kidding. She'd been thinking about this and, typically, keeping it to herself. Well, that was okay, wasn't it? Yeah.

Jack entered the bedroom and paused to hang up his clothes, donning a bathrobe before joining his wife at the bedside. She rose to wrap her arms around his neck, and he kissed her.

“You sure about this, babe?”

“Does it bother you?”

“Cathy, to please you — anything you want that I can get or give, honey. Anything.”

I wish you'd cut back on the drinking, Cathy didn't say. It wasn't the time. She felt his hands through the peignoir. Jack had strong but gentle hands that now traced her figure through the outfit. It was cheap and tarty, but every woman was entitled to look cheap and tarty once in a while, even an associate professor of ophthalmic surgery at the Wilmer Eye Institute of the Johns Hopkins Hospital. Jack's mouth tasted like toothpaste and cheap white wine, but the rest of him smelled like a man, the man who'd made her life into a dream — mostly a dream. He was working too hard, drinking too much, not sleeping enough. But underneath all that was her man. And they didn't come any better, weaknesses, absences, and all.

Cathy made the proper noises when Jack's hands found the buttons. He got the message, but his fingers were clumsy. Annoying, the buttons were small and in those damned little fabric loops, but behind the buttons and the fabric were her breasts, and that fact ensured that he would not stop. Cathy took in a deep breath and smelled her favorite dusting powder. She didn't like perfume. A woman generated all the smells a man needed, she thought. There. Now his hands found her bare, smooth and still young skin. Thirty-six was not old, not too old for one more child. One more was all she craved, one more time to feel a new life growing within her. She'd accept the stomach upsets, the compressed bladder, the odd discomfort that merely gave detail to the wonder and the miracle of new life. The pain of birth — it was not fun, not at all, but to be able to do it, to have Jack at her side as he'd been with Sally and Little Jack, it was the most profound act of love that she had ever known. It was what being a woman meant, to be able to bring life to the world, to give a man the only kind of immortality there was, as he gave it to her.

And besides, she thought with a suppressed giggle, getting pregnant beat the hell out of jogging as a form of exercise.

Jack's hands removed her garment completely and eased her onto the bed. He was good at this, always had been, from their first nervous time, and at that moment she'd known that he would ask for her hand… after he'd sampled the other parts. Another giggle of past and present, as his hands slid over skin that was now both hot and cold to the touch. And when he'd asked, when he'd worked up the courage, she'd seen the fear in his eyes, the terror at the possibility of rejection, when she was the one who had worried — even cried once — for a week that he might not ask, might change his mind, might find someone else. From before their first lovemaking, Cathy had known. This was the one. Jack was the man with whom she would share her life, whose children she would bear, whom she would love to the grave, maybe beyond, if the priests were right. It wasn't his size or his strength, not even the bravery he'd had to show twice in her sight — and, she suspected, more than that in other places she'd never know about — it was his goodness, his gentleness, and a strength that only the perceptive knew about. Her husband was in some ways ordinary, in others unique, but in all ways a man, with all the strengths and few of the weaknesses…

And tonight he would give her another child. Her cycle, predictable as always, was confirmed by her morning temperature. Well, she admitted, it was mainly a statistical probability, but a very high probability in her case. Mustn't get too clinical, not with Jack, and not at a time like this.

Her skin was on fire now. Jack was so good at this. His kisses both gentle and passionate, his hands so wonderfully skilled. He was wrecking her hair, but that didn't matter. Surgical caps made perms a waste of time and money. Through the scent of the dusting powder now came the more significant smells of a woman who was nearly ready. Ordinarily she was more of a participant in these episodes, but tonight she was letting Jack take complete charge, searching over her silky skin for the… interesting parts. He liked that occasionally. He also liked it when she played a more active role. More than one way to do this. It came almost as a surprise. Cathy arched her back and whimpered the first time, not really saying anything. It wasn't necessary. They'd been married long enough that he knew all the signals. She kissed him hard and wantonly, digging her nails into his shoulders. That signal meant now!

But nothing happened.

She took his hand, kissed it, and moved it down so that he would know that she was ready.

He seemed unusually tense. Okay, she was rushing him… why not let… after all, she'd let him take charge, and if she changed now… She moved the hand back to her breast and was not disappointed. Cathy paid closer attention to him now. Tried to. His skills in exciting her were unchanged. She cried out again, kissed him hard, gasping a little, letting him know that he was the one, that her world centered on him as his centered on her. But still his back and shoulders were tense and knotted. What was the matter?

Her hands moved again, running over his chest, pulling playfully on the black hairs. That always set him off… especially as her hands followed the hairy trail down to…

What?

“Jack, what's wrong?” It seemed forever before she heard him speak.

“I don't know.” Jack rolled over, away from his wife, onto his back, and his eyes stared at the ceiling.

“Tired?”

“I guess that's it.” Jack slurred the words. “Sorry, honey.”

Damn damn damn! but before she could think to say something else, his eyes closed.

It's the hours he's working, and all that drinking. But it wasn't fair! This was the day, this was the moment, and—

You're being selfish.

Cathy rose from the bed and collected her peignoir from the floor. She hung it up neatly before getting another that was fit to sleep in and heading into the bathroom.

He's a man, not a machine. He's tired. He's been working too goddamned hard. Everyone has a bad day. Sometimes he wants it and you're not in the mood, and sometimes that makes him a little mad, and it's not his fault and it's not your fault. You have a wonderful marriage, but not a perfect one. Jack's as good a man as you have ever known, but he is not perfect either.

But I wanted…

I want another baby, and the timing is so right, right now!

Cathy's eyes filled with tears of disappointment. She knew she was being unfair. But she was still disappointed. And a little angry.

“Well, Commodore, I can't knock the service.”

“Hell, Ron, you expect me to have an old shipmate pick up a rental?”

“As a matter of fact, yes.”

Mancuso snorted. His driver tossed the bags into the trunk of the Navy Plymouth while he and Jones let themselves into the back.

“How's the family?”

“Great, thank you, Commodore—”

“You can call me Bart now, Dr. Jones. Besides, I just screened for Admiral.”

“All right!” Dr. Ron Jones observed. “Bart. I like that. Just don't call me Indy. Let's see, the family. Kirn's back in school for her doctorate. The kids are all in school — day-care, whatever — and I'm turning into a damned businessman.”

“Entrepreneur, I believe, is the correct term,” Mancuso observed.

“Okay, be technical. Yeah, I own a big piece of the company. But I still get my hands dirty. I got a business guy to do the accounting bullshit. I still like to do real work. Last month I was down at AUTEC on the Tennessee checking out a new system.” Jones looked at the driver. “Okay to talk here?”

“Petty Officer Vincent is cleared higher than I am. Isn't that right?”

“Yes, sir, Admiral's always right, sir,” the driver observed, as he headed off towards Bangor.

“You got a problem, Bart.”

“How big?”

“A unique problem, skipper,” Jones said, lapsing back to the time when he and Mancuso had done some interesting things aboard USS Dallas. “It's never happened before.”

Mancuso read his eyes. “Got pictures of the kids?”

Jones nodded. “You bet. How are Mike and Dominic doing?”

“Well, Mike's looking at the Air Force Academy.”

“Tell him the oxygen rots your brain.”

“Dominic's thinking CalTech.”

“No kidding? Hell, I can help him out.”

The rest of the drive occupied itself with small talk. Mancuso swept into his office and closed the soundproof door behind Jones after ordering coffee from his steward.

“What's the problem, Ron?”

Jones hesitated just a fraction before answering. “I think somebody was tracking Maine.”

“Track an Ohio? Come on.”

“Where is she now?”

“Heading back out to sea, as a matter of fact. Blue Crew is embarked. She links up with a 688 when she clears the strait for some noise checks, then clears to her patrol area.” Mancuso could discuss almost anything with Jones. His company consulted on the sonar technology for all submarines and anti-submarine platforms in the U.S. fleet, and that necessarily included a lot of operational information.

“Got any Gold Crew guys on base now?”

“The captain's off on vacation. XO's here, Dutch Claggett. Know him?”

“Wasn't he on the Norfolk? Black guy, right?”

“That's right.”

“I've heard good stuff about him. He did a nice job on a carrier group on his command quals. I was riding a P-3 when he kicked their ass.”

“You heard right. He's being deep-dipped. This time next year he'll be taking command of a fast-attack.”

“Who's his skipper?”

“Harry Ricks. Heard of him, too?”

Jones looked at the floor and muttered something. “I got a new guy working for me, retired chief whose last tour was with Ricks. Is he as bad as I hear?”

“Ricks is a super engineer,” Mancuso said. “I mean it. He's a genius at that stuff.”

“Fine, skipper, so are you, but does Ricks know how to drive?”

“Want some coffee, Ron?” Mancuso gestured at the pot.

“You might want Commander Claggett here, sir.” Jones rose and got his own coffee. “Since when have you turned diplomat?”

“Command responsibilities, Ron. I never told outsiders about the crazy stuff you did on Dallas.”

Jones turned and laughed. “Okay, you got me there. I have the sonar analysis in my briefcase. I need to see his course tracks, depth records, that stuff. I think there's a good chance Maine had a trailer, and that, Bart, is no shit.”

Mancuso lifted his phone. “Find Lieutenant-Commander Claggett. I need him in my office at once. Thank you. Ron, how sure—”

“I did the analysis myself. One of my people looked it over and caught a whiff. I spent fifty hours massaging the data. One chance in three, maybe more, that she was being trailed.”

Bart Mancuso set his coffee cup down. “That's really hard to believe.”

“I know. That very fact may be skewing my analysis. It is kinda incredible.”

It was an article of faith in the United States navy that its fleet ballistic-missile submarines had never, not ever, not once been tracked while on deterrence patrol. As with most articles of faith, however, it had caveats.

The location of American missile-sub bases was not a secret. Even the United Parcel Service deliverymen who dropped off packages knew what to look for. In its quest for cost-efficiency, the Navy mainly used civilian security officers—“rentacops”—at its bases. Except that Marines were used wherever there were nuclear weapons. Wherever you saw Marines, there were nukes about. That was called a security measure. The missile boats themselves were unmistakably different from the smaller fast-attack subs. The ship names were on the Navy register, and the sailors of those ships wore ballcaps identifying them by name and hull number. With knowledge available to anyone, the Soviets knew where to station their own fast-attack boats to catch the American “boomers” on the way out to sea.

At first this had not been a problem. The first classes of Soviet fast-attack submarines had been equipped with “Helen Keller” sonars that could neither see nor hear, and the boats themselves had been noisier than unmuffled automobiles. All that had changed with the advent of the Victor-III class, which approximated a late American 594-class in radiated noise levels, and began to approach adequacy in sonar performance. Victor-IIIs had occasionally turned up at the Juan de Fuca Strait — and elsewhere — waiting for a U.S. missile sub to deploy, and in some cases, since harbor entrances are typically restricted waters, they had established contact and held on tight. That occasionally had included active sonar-lashing, both unnerving and annoying to American sub crews. As a result, U.S. fast-attack subs often accompanied missile submarines to sea. Their mission was to force the Soviet subs off. This was accomplished by the simple expedient of offering an additional target for sonar, confusing the tactical situation, or sometimes by forcing the Russian submarine off-track by ramming — called “shouldering,” to defuse that most obscene of marine terms. In fact, American boomers had been tracked, only in shallow water, only near well-known harbors, and only for brief periods of time. As soon as the American subs reached deep water, their tactics were to increase speed to degrade the trailing sub's sonar performance, to maneuver evasively, and then go quiet. At that point — every time — the American submarine broke contact. The Soviet sub lost its track, and became the prey instead of the hunter. Missile submarines typically had highly-drilled torpedo departments, and the more aggressive skippers would have all four of their tubes loaded with Mark 48 torpedoes with solutions set on the now-blinded Soviet sub as they watched it wander away in vulnerable befuddlement.

The simple fact was that American missile submarines were invulnerable in their patrol areas. When fast-attack boats were sent in to hunt them, care had to be given to operating depths — much like traffic control for commercial aircraft — lest an inadvertent ramming occur. American fast-attack boats, even the most advanced 688-class, had rarely tracked missile submarines, and the cases where Ohios had been tracked could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Nearly all involved a grievous mistake made by the missile-boat skippers, the ultimate “black mark in the copybook,” and even then only a very good and very lucky fast-attack skipper had managed to pull it off — and never ever without being counter-detected. Omaha had one of the best drivers in the Pacific Fleet, and he had failed to find Maine despite having some good intelligence data provided — better than anything a Soviet commander would ever get.

“Good morning, sir,” Dutch Claggett said on his way through the door. “I was right down the hall at personnel.”

“Commander, this is Dr. Ron Jones.”

“This the Jonesy you like to brag on, sir?” Claggett took the civilian's hand.

“None of those stories are true,” Jones said.

Claggett stopped cold when he saw the looks. “Somebody die or something?”

“Grab a seat,” Mancuso said. “Ron thinks you might have been tracked on your last patrol.”

“Bullshit,” Claggett observed. “Excuse me, sir.”

“You're pretty confident,” Jones said.

“Maine is the best submarine we own, Dr. Jones. We are a black hole. We don't radiate sound, we suck it in from around us.”

“You know the party line, Commander. Now, can we talk business?” Ron unlocked his briefcase and pulled out a heavy sheaf of computer printouts. “Right around the half-way point in your patrol.”

“Okay, yeah, that's when we snuck up behind Omaha.”

“I'm not talking about that. Omaha was in front of you,” Jones said, flipping to the right page.

“I still don't believe it, but I'll look at what you got.”

The computer pages were essentially a graphic printout of two “waterfall” sonar displays. They bore time and true-bearing references. A separate set showed environmental data, mainly water temperature.

“You had a lot of clutter to worry about,” Jones said, pointing to notations on the pages. “Fourteen fishing boats, half a dozen deep-draft merchant ships, and I see the humpbacks were up to thin out the krill. So, your sonar crew was busy, maybe a little overloaded. You also had a pretty hard layer.”

“All that's right,” Claggett allowed.

“What's this?” Jones pointed to a blossom of noise on the display.

“Well, we were tracking Omaha, and the captain decided to rattle their cage with a water slug.”

“No shit?” Jones asked. “Well, that explains his reaction. I guess they changed their underwear and headed north. You never would have pulled that off on me, by the way.”

“Think so?”

“Yeah, I think so,” Jones replied. “I always paid real good attention to what was aft of us. I've been out on Ohios, Commander, okay? You can be tracked. Anybody can. It isn't just the platform. Now, look here.”

The printout was a computer-generated cacophony of dots that seemed for the most part to show nothing but random noise, as though a convention of ants had walked across the pages for hours. As with all truly random events, this one had irregularities, places where for one reason or another the ants had never trod, or places where a large number had congregated and then dispersed.

“This line of bearing,” Jones said. “This pattern comes back eight times, and it comes back only when the layer thins out.”

Commander Claggett frowned. “Eight, you say? These two could be reverbs from the fishing boats, or really distant CZ-contacts.” He flipped through the pages. Claggett knew his sonar. This is thin."

“That's why your people didn't catch it, either aboard or here. But that's why I got the contract to back-check your people,” Jones said. “Who was out there?”

“Commodore?” Claggett asked, and got a nod. “There was an Akula-class out there somewhere. The P-3s lost him south of Kodiak, so he was within maybe six hundred miles of us. That doesn't mean this is him.”

“Which one?”

“Admiral Lunin,” Claggett answered.

“Captain Dubinin?”

“Jesus, you are cleared pretty good,” Mancuso noted. “They say he's very good.”

“Ought to be, we have a mutual friend. Is Commander Claggett cleared for that?”

“No. Sorry, Dutch, but that is really black.”

“He ought to be cleared for that,” Jones said. “This secrecy crap goes way too far, Bart.”

“Rules are rules.”

“Yeah, sure. Anyway, this is the one that twigged me. Last page.” Ron flipped through to the end. “You were coming up to antenna depth…”

“Yeah, practice on the missiles.”

“You made some hull noises.”

“We came up fast, and the hull's made of steel, not elastic,” Claggett said in some annoyance. “So?”

“So, your hull went up through the layer faster than your 'tail' did. Your towed array caught this.”

Claggett and Mancuso both went very quiet. What they saw was a fuzzy vertical line, but the line was in a frequency range that denoted a Soviet submarine's acoustical signature. It was by no means conclusive evidence, but it, like all the other things Jones had notated, was dead aft of Maine's course.

“Now, if I was a betting man, which I'm not, of course, I'd give you two-to-one that while you were underneath the layer, someone might have been tooling along just over top, letting his tail hang under it. He caught your hull transient, saw you were going shallow, and ducked under the layer just as you came over it. Cute move, but your big up-angle meant that your tail stayed down longer than it should have, and that's where this signature came from.”

“But there's nothing after that.”

“Nothing at all,” Jones admitted. “It never came back. From there on to the end of the tapes, nothing but random noise and otherwise-identified contacts.”

“It's pretty thin, Ron,” Mancuso said, standing up to straighten his back.

“I know. That's why I flew out. In writing it would never sell.”

“What do you know about Russian sonar that we don't?”

“Getting better… approaching where we were, oh, ten or twelve years ago. They pay more attention to broad-band than we do — that's changing now. I sold the Pentagon on taking another look at the broad-band integration system Texas Instruments' have been working on. Commander, what you said before about being a black hole. It cuts both ways. You can't see a black hole, but you can detect it. What if you track an Ohio by what should be there but isn't?”

“Background noise?”

“Yep.” Jones nodded. “You make a hole in it. You make a black spot where there's no noise. If he can really isolate a line of bearing on his gear, and if he's got really good filters, and one dynamite sonar operator, I think it's possible — if something else cues you in.”

“That's real thin.”

Jones granted that observation. “But it's not impossible. I ran the numbers. It's not good, but it's not impossible. Moreover, we can track below ambient now. Maybe they can, too. I'm hearing they've started turning out a new large-aperture tail — the one designed by the guys outside Murmansk. Good as a BQR-15 used to be.”

“I don't believe it,” Mancuso said.

“I do, skipper. It's not new technology. What do we know about Lunin?”

“She's in overhaul right now. Let's see.” Mancuso turned to look at the polar-projection chart on his office wall. “If that was him, then if he headed straight back to base… it's possible, technically speaking, but you're assuming a hell of a lot.”

“I'm saying that this bird was just in the neighborhood when you fired that water slug, that you headed south, and so did he, that you gave him a hull transient which he reacted to, and then he broke contact on his own. The data is thin, but it fits — maybe, I grant you, maybe. That's what they pay me for, guys.”

“I commended Ricks for rattling Omaha's cage like that,” Mancuso said, after a moment. “I want aggressive skippers.”

Jones chuckled to break the tension in the room. “I wonder why, Bart?”

“Dutch knows about that job we had on the beach, that pickup we did.”

“That was a little exciting,” Jones admitted.

“One chance in three…”

“The probability increases if you assume the other skipper is smart. Dubinin had a great teacher.”

“What are you two talking about?” Lieutenant Commander Claggett asked in some exasperation.

“You know we have all sorts of data on the Russian Typhoon class, lots more on their torpedoes. Ever wonder how we got all that data, Commander?”

“Ron, God damn it!”

“I didn't break any rules, skipper, and besides, he needs to know.”

“I can't do that and you know it.”

“Fine, Bart.” Jones paused. “Commander, you may speculate on how we got all that information in one great big lump. You might even guess right.”

Claggett had heard a few rumbles, like why the Eight-Ten dock at Norfolk had been closed so long a few years before. There was a story floated about, spoken only in submarine wardrooms far at sea and well below the surface, that somehow the U.S. Navy had gotten its hands on a Russian missile sub, how a very strange reactor had turned up at the Navy's nuclear-power school in Idaho for tests and then had disappeared, how complete drawings and some hardware from Soviet torpedoes had magically appeared in Groton, and how two night missile shots out of Vandenberg Air Force Base had not appeared to be American missiles at all. Lots of operational intelligence had come into the fleet, very good stuff, stuff that sounded like it had come from someone who knew what the hell he was talking about — not always the case with intelligence information — on Soviet submarine tactics and training. Claggett needed only to look at Mancuso's uniform to see the ribbon that denoted a Distinguished Service Medal, America's highest peace-time decoration. The ribbon had a star on it, indicating a second such award. Mancuso was rather young for a squadron command, and very young indeed to be selected for Rear Admiral (Lower Half). And here was a former enlisted man who'd sailed with Mancuso, and now called him Bart. He nodded to Dr. Jones.

“I get the picture. Thanks.”

“You're saying operator error?”

Jones frowned. He didn't know all that much about Harry Ricks. “Mainly bad luck. Call it good luck, even. Nothing bad happened, and we've learned something. We know more about the Akula than we used to. A weird set of circumstances came together. Won't happen again in a hundred years, maybe. Your skipper was a victim of circumstance, and the other guy — if there was another guy there — was very damned sharp. Hey, the important thing about mistakes is that you learn from them, right?”

“Harry gets back in ten days,” Mancuso said. “Can you be back here then?”

“Sorry,” Jones said with a shake of the head. “I'm going to be in England. I'm going out on HMS Turbulent for a few days of hide 'n' seek. The Brits have a new processor that we need to look at, and I drew the duty.”

“You're not going to ask me to present this to the CO, are you, sir?” Claggett asked after a minute's reflection.

“No, Dutch… you trying to tell me something?”

It was Claggett's turn to look unhappy. “Sir, he's my boss, and he's not a bad boss, but he is a little positive in his thinking.”

That was artfully done, Jones thought. Not a bad boss… a little positive. He just called his skipper an idiot in a way that no one could ever call disloyal. Ron wondered what sort of hyper-nuc-engineer this Ricks was. The good news was that this XO had his act together. And a smart skipper listened to his XO.

“Skipper, how's Mr. Chambers doing?”

“Just took over Key West. Got a kid you trained as his leading sonarman. Billy Zerwinski, just made chief, I hear.”

“Oh, yeah? Good for him. I figured Mr. Chambers was going places, but Billy Z as a chief? What is my Navy coming to?”

“This is taking forever,” Qati observed sourly. His skin was pasty white. The man was suffering again from his drug treatment.

“That is false,” Fromm replied sternly. “I told you several months, and it will be several months. The first time this was done, it took three years and the resources of the world's richest nation. I will do it for you in an eighth of that time, and on a shoestring budget. In a few days we'll start to work on the rhodium. That will be much easier.”

“And the plutonium?” Ghosn asked.

“That will be the last metal work — you know why, of course.”

“Yes, Herr Fromm, and we must be extremely careful, since when you work with a critical mass you must be careful that it does not become critical while you are forming it,” Ghosn replied, allowing his exacerbation to show for a change. He was tired. He'd been at work for eighteen hours now, supervising the workers. “And the tritium?”

“Last of all. Again, the obvious reason. It is relatively unstable, and we want the tritium we use to be as pure as possible.”

“Quite so.” Ghosn yawned, barely having heard the answer to his question, and not troubling himself to wonder why Fromm had answered as he had.

For his part, Fromm made a mental note. Palladium. He needed a small quantity of palladium. How had he forgotten that? He grunted to himself. Long hours, miserable climate, surly workers and associates. A small price to pay, of course, for this opportunity. He was doing what only a handful of men had ever done, and he was doing it in such a way as to equal the work of Fermi and the rest in 1944-5. It was not often that a man could measure himself against the giants and come off well in the comparison. He found himself wondering idly what the weapon would be used for, but admitted to himself that he didn't care, not really. Well, he had other work to do.

The German walked across the room to where the milling machines were. Here another team of technicians were at work. The beryllium piece now on the machine had the most intricate shape and had been the hardest to program, with concave, convex, and other complex curves. The machine was computer-controlled, of course, but was kept under constant observation through the Lexan panels that isolated the machining area from the outside world. The area was ventilated upwards into an electrostatic air-cleaner. There was no sense in just dumping the metallic dust into the external air — in fact doing so constituted a major security hazard. Over the electrostatic collection plates was a solid two meters of earth. Beryllium was not radioactive, but plutonium was, and plutonium would presently be worked on this very same machine. The beryllium was both necessary to the device and good practice for later tasks.

The milling machine was everything Fromm had hoped for when he'd ordered it several years before. The computer-driven tools were monitored by lasers, producing a degree of perfection that could not have been achieved so quickly as recently as five years ago. The surface of the beryllium was jeweled from the machining, already looking like the finish on a particularly fine rifle bolt, and this was only the first stage of machining. The data readout on the machine showed tolerances measured in angstroms. The toolhead was spinning at 25,000 RPM, not so much grinding as burning off irregularities. Separate instruments kept a computer eye on the work being done, both measuring tolerances and waiting for the tool-head to show signs of wear, at which point the machine would automatically stop and replace the tool with a fresh one. Technology was wonderful What had once been the work of specially-trained master machinists overseen by Nobel Prize winners was now being done by microchips.

The actual casing for the device was already fabricated. Ellipsoidal in shape, it was 98 centimeters in length by 52 in extreme breadth. Made of steel one centimeter in thickness, it had to be strong, but not grossly so, just enough to hold a vacuum. Also ready for installation were curved blocks of polyethylene and polyurethane foam, because a device of this sort required the special properties of both the strongest and the flimsiest materials. They had gotten ahead of themselves in some areas, of course, but there was no sense in wasting time or idle hands On another machine, workers were practicing yet again on a stainless-steel blank that simulated the folded-cylinder plutomum reaction-mass primary. It was their seventh such practice session. Despite the sophistication of the machines, the first two had gone badly, as expected. By number five, they had figured most of the process out, and the sixth attempt had been good enough to work — but not good enough for Fromm. The German had a simple mental model for the overall task, one formulated by America's National Aeronautics and Space Administration to describe the first moon landing. In order for the device to perform as desired, a complex series of individual events had to take place in an inhumanly precise sequence. He viewed the process as a walk through a series of gates. The wider the gates were, the easier it would be to walk through them quickly. Plus/minus tolerances reflected slight closure of the individual gates. Fromm wanted zero tolerances. He wanted every single part of the weapon to match his design criteria as exactly as the available technology made possible. The closer to perfection he could get, the more likely it was that the device would perform exactly as he predicted… or even better, part of him thought. Unable to experiment, unable to find empirical solutions to complex theoretical problems, he'd over-engineered the weapon, providing an energy budget that was several orders of magnitude beyond what was really necessary for the projected yield. That explained the vast quantity of tritium he planned to use, more than five times what was really needed in a theoretical sense. That carried its own problems, of course. His tritium supply was several years old, and some parts of it had decayed into 3He, a decidedly undesirable isotope of helium, but by filtering the tritium through palladium he'd separate the tritium out, ensuring a proper total yield. American and Soviet bombmakers could get away with far less of it, because of their extensive experimentation, but Fromm had his own advantage. He did not have to concern himself with a long shelf-life for his device, and that was a luxury that his Soviet and American counterparts did not have. It was the only advantage he had over them, and Fromm planned to make full use of it. As with most parts of bomb design, it was an advantage that cut both ways, but Fromm knew he had full control over the device. Palladium, he told himself. Mustn't forget that. But he had plenty of time.

“Finished.” The head of the team waved for Fromm to look. The stainless-steel blank came off the machine easily, and he handed it to Fromm. It was thirty centimeters in length. The shape was complex, what one would get from taking a large water tumbler and bending its top outside and down towards the base. It would not hold water because of a hole in the center of what might have been the bottom — actually it would, Fromm told himself a second later, just in the wrong way. The blank weighed about three kilograms, and every surface was mirror-smooth. He held it up to the light to check for imperfections and irregularities. His eyes were not that good. The quality of the finish was easier to understand mathematically than visually. The surface, so said the machine, was accurate to a thousandth of a micron, or a fraction of a single wavelength of light.

“It is a jewel,” Ghosn observed, standing behind Fromm. The machinist beamed.

“Adequate,” was Fromm's judgment. He looked at the machinist. “When you've made five more equally as good, I will be satisfied. Every metal segment must be of this quality. Begin another,” he told the machinist. Fromm handed the blank to Ghosn and walked away.

“Infidel,” the machinist growled under his breath.

“Yes, he is,” Ghosn agreed. “But he is the most skilled man I have ever met.”

“I'd rather work for a Jew.”

“This is magnificent work,” Ghosn said, to change the subject.

“I would not have believed it possible to polish metal so precisely. This machine is incredible. I could make anything with it.”

“That is good. Make another of these,” Ghosn told him with a smile.

“As you say.”

Ghosn walked to Qati's room. The Commander was looking at a plate of simple foods, but unable to touch it for fear of retching.

“Perhaps this will make you feel better,” Ghosn told him.

“That is?” Qati said, taking it.

That is what the plutonium will look like."

“Like glass…”

“Smoother than that. Smooth enough for a laser mirror. I could tell you the accuracy of the surface, but you've never seen anything that small in your life anyway. Fromm is a genius.”

“He's an arrogant, overbearing—”

“Yes, Commander, he is all of that, but he is exactly the man we need. I could never have done this myself. Perhaps, given a year or two, perhaps I might have been able to rework that Israeli bomb into something that would work — the problems were far more complex than I knew only a few weeks ago. But this Fromm… what I am learning from him! By the time we are finished, I will be able to do it again on my own!”

“Really?”

“Commander, do you know what engineering is?” Ghosn asked. “It is like cooking. If you have the right recipe, the right book, and the right ingredients, anyone can do it. Certainly this task is a hard one, but the principle holds. You must know how to use the various mathematical formulae, but they are all in books also. It is merely a question of education. With computers, the proper tools — and a good teacher, which this Fromm bastard is…”

“Then why haven't more—”

“The hard part is getting the ingredients, specifically the plutonium or U-235. That requires a nuclear reactor plant of a specific type, or the new centrifuge technology. Either represents a vast investment, and one which is difficult to conceal. It also explains the remarkable security measures taken in the handling and transport of bombs and their components. The oft-told tale that bombs are hard to make is a lie.”