America (12 page)

“Okay,” Jake said. He glanced in the mirror to see that the other car was still following faithfully.

The day looked like another normal fall Sunday afternoon in New England, families out in cars, people jogging, kids on skateboards and bicycles.

“I assume that the National Security Agency is looking at all communications.”

“That's a safe assumption,” Jake replied.

“The CIA supplied dossiers on the team that trained here.” He patted an attaché case that lay on the seat between them. “I thought you might like to look at it.”

Jake opened the case, took out the top file. Vladimir Kolnikov.

“We've got a crime artist working with the surviving crew members. He's trying to put together facial sketches of the two men who aren't in the dossiers as a first step to identifying them.”

Vladimir Kolnikov. Ex–Russian naval officer, captain first rank. Twenty-five years' service, almost all of it in submarines based on the Kola peninsula. Was driving an illegal taxi in Paris when recruited by the CIA.

Jake looked at Kolnikov's photo. About two hundred pounds, if the rest of him matched the head-and-shoulders shot. Partially balding, with a short haircut, unsmiling, wearing civilian clothes.

He flipped through the other files, scanned them: Turchak, Steeckt, Eck, Gordin, Eisenberg, Boldt …

“There's gotta be more paper than this,” Jake said, tossing the files back into the attaché case. “There should be security evaluations, background investigations of some sort, reports, all that stuff. Someone decided these men could be trusted, that they weren't SVR agents. Who made that decision? What was it based on?”

“You'll have to talk to the CIA, Admiral. They aren't in the business of sharing information like that with FBI field types.”

“I suppose not.”

“What questions should we be asking?”

Jake took his time replying. “Who are these people? How did they steal a submarine? If you can figure out what they did, we can analyze our security plans and figure out what we need to do to prevent another theft.”

“And kick ass.”

“I guarantee you, if people haven't obeyed orders or have used bad judgment, they are going to be in deep trouble. An armed, state-of-the-art capital ship worth two billion dollars just slipped out of Uncle Sam's grasp.”

“I understand, sir,” Krautkramer said contritely.

“There are specific questions that must also be investigated carefully,” Jake continued. “When they realized that
America
was being boarded, surely one of the officers or chiefs or petty officers—someone—would give the order to kill the reactor, SCRAM it, which means stop the fission reaction by slamming in the control rods. With the reactor subcritical, the sub would be impossible to move very far. Oh, it might go a mile or two on residual steam pressure, but that would be it until the reactor could be restarted, a process that would take hours. Even if the SCRAM order wasn't given, I am amazed that one of the crew didn't hit the button anyway. It was so obviously the right thing to do. Why did this submarine nuke off over the horizon unSCRAMed? And when it did, why wasn't the destroyer authorized to sink it?”

*   *   *

At the naval base, Jake, Toad, and Ilin were met by a captain in uniform, Piechowski, and a chief petty officer, Hyer. They led the visitors into the simulator building.

After the introductions, the captain spoke directly to Jake. “You wanted to see an
America
-class submarine, but of course there aren't any.
America
was the first of her class. The next one is a floating shell, two years away from being commissioned. The next best thing is the simulator.”

“Okay.”

Captain Piechowski and the chief led them into a dark, cavernous room in the rear of the building. The walls were painted black, there were no windows, and the interior seemed to soak up the small spotlights that illuminated a desk and two chairs, the only furniture, which stood in one corner between two large steel cabinets.

“This is it,” Piechowski said. The chief unlocked the cabinet and removed five helmets with faceplates. “It's a virtual reality simulator.” He gestured around him. “This used to be the base gymnasium.”

Toad Tarkington looked at Jake, looked at the helmets, pursed his lips to speak, then changed his mind. Ilin took one of the helmets, examined it skeptically.

“Let's put on helmets,” Piechowski suggested, “and we'll give you the two-dollar tour. We have a set of gloves we'd like you to wear, Admiral.” Chief Hyer helped each man don a helmet and connect it to an electrical cable that led to a large bus on the wall.

When the system came on, the effect was extraordinary. With the helmets on they were standing outside the submarine, which was semitransparent. Captain Piechowski took Jake's arm and led him through the steel hull and ballast tanks and bulkheads to the control room. As Jake stood in the control room looking around, Piechowski went back to escort Ilin. When all of the guests were in the control room, the chief began talking. His voice sounded in their helmet headsets.

“Welcome aboard USS
America,
the most capable submarine in the world. We will do a complete tour of the ship in a few moments, but first I want to acquaint you with the main features of the control room, including the crown jewel of
America,
the Revelation sonar system.”

The large computer screens on the bulkheads came alive. Forward, on both sides, and in the rear of the room, the screens became windows that allowed the helmeted visitors to look directly into the sea. “We are sixty feet below the surface,” their guide told them, “under way at seven knots. If you will look at the starboard screen, you can see the hull of a ship protruding down into the water.” He used a pointer to enlarge the ship's hull, which grew in size as the computer zoomed in, until it became recognizable as a warship hull, one with a sonar bulb on its bow. The photonics mast was up, so the camera image was laid over the top half of the sonar picture, and now the superstructure of the warship leapt into view. The chief explained the mast and sonar, demonstrated some of their capabilities, then moved on.

Jake found himself staring at the joystick that controlled the sub. He reached for it and found that the image moved in his hand, although he could of course feel nothing. He moved the image with his hand, and the submarine reacted.

“Ooh boy!”

“Sensors in the room tell the computer where the helmets are, where you are looking. Sensors also track the position of the gloves.”

“So I can touch and manipulate the controls?”

“All the controls, levers, valves, knobs, switches, the works. We train the crew here in the virtual sim, teach normal and emergency procedures.”

The captain led them aft to see the reactor and engineering spaces, then forward through the boat, looking at pipes and valves and tanks and torpedoes and cruise missiles. They didn't go through the hatchways, although they could have; they walked through bulkheads and sealed hatches. The visitors examined the sonar hydrophones, looked at the intricacies of the computers and the ship's electrical systems, played with the photonics mast controls, inspected the radio room and torpedo room, walked through the solid mass of cruise missiles standing erect in their launchers, visited the galley and captain's cabin.

Finally their guide suggested they take off their helmets. The submarine disappeared, and the five of them were again standing in the large, dark room. Jake Grafton fought back the urge to reach out to feel for the submarine that had surrounded him just seconds ago.

Janos Ilin had his feet braced wide apart. His hands did move, probably involuntarily, trying to find something to restore his sense of balance.

“Hot damn,” muttered Toad Tarkington.

“And that, gentlemen,” said Captain Piechowski, “is the submarine the hijackers stole.”

“Did you see all those computer consoles in the control room?” Toad Tarkington whispered to his boss.

“Yeah,” Jake whispered back. One thing was crystal clear: Someone who knew a lot more than an ad hoc group of German and Russian submariners could learn in a couple of weeks had gone to sea with them in
America.
The systems would require highly trained experts to operate, and the Russian, Kolnikov, must have known that.

So who was that person?

*   *   *

When the cabdriver dropped Zelda Hudson in front of an old brick warehouse in Newark, he was dubious. “You sure about this address, lady?”

“It's the new economy,” she replied, “rising from the ashes of the old.”

“Ashes still look pretty cold to me,” he said, and got out of the car to help get her bag from the trunk and pull out the airport handle.

After she paid him she said, “Wait for a minute until I get in.”

The door was the tip-off that this building was not a crumbling wreck like the others that stood nearby. It was solid steel, inset so that it could not be jimmied, with an inletted cylinder lock. Of course there were no windows on the ground floor; the ones on the second, third, and fourth were covered with wire mesh and steel bars. Small video cameras were mounted unobtrusively high on the corners of the building.

The number of the building was above the door, in peeling paint. Beside the door, bolted to the brick of the building, was a sign that said, in inch-high black letters, “Hudson Security Services.” Under the sign was a telephone. She picked it up, pushed the button, waited until it buzzed. “Hi, it's me.”

The door unlatched with an audible click.

Zelda Hudson pulled the door open, waved to the cabdriver, and pulled her bag in. She made sure the door locked behind her. To her right was a wire-cage elevator. She used the lever to close the door, then pushed the Up button.

The first three stories of the old warehouse were open, with a magnificent high ceiling supported by a latticework of massive oak beams and trusses, barely visible amid the dusty gloom and cobwebs. The only light was from the dirty, painted-over windows. The thought struck Zelda Hudson, not for the first time, that this building could be renovated into a marvelous place, with lights and modern furniture and walls of glass bricks. She could almost hear the sound system playing jazz and the party laughter.

The top floor, “world headquarters” of Hudson Security Services, looked lived in. Lights hanging from the wooden beams illuminated rows of wooden tables sitting on sawhorses. Covering the tables were computers, monitors, and printers. Servers, storage units, and back-up power supplies sat on the floor wherever they would fit. Shelves held boxes of software, developers' kits, and manuals. Over, under, around, and through the clutter ran a veritable jungle of wires bundled with network and power cables. Piles of pizza boxes and mountains of computer paper overflowed from gray plastic garbage cans. Mounted high in the corners of the room were television monitors, which just now were tuned to CNN, MSNBC, and two other twenty-four-hour news networks.

In one corner sat a large caged system with racks of tapes and storage disks housing samples of almost every computer bug extant, as well as Hudson Security's own proprietary designs—Zelda's “unfair competitive advantage,” as she liked to say. Ideas and codes came from every source, acquired legitimately from libraries used by the international security industry, from hacking into government activities, and from stealing from some of the most creative elements of the hacker community.

Another system quietly hummed away in another corner, logging every network, computer, and software event seen by the SuperAegis contractor's own security systems. Algorithms would analyze those events without human involvement, searching for irregular activity, and setting off alarms when something was detected. Hundreds of thousands of these recorded events would eventually comprise the “audit trail” for postevent analysis of security breaches and routine security assessments.

Electronically projected on a recently painted section of wall in front of the workstations were duplicates of the very displays watched by the targeted contractor's security managers, complete with the highlighted yellow and red alarms that drew instant attention to suspicious activity.

That was almost the only vertical area within six feet of the floor not covered with politically incorrect posters and cartoons attacking anything and everything, but especially management, inelegant programming, and advertisements hyping “secure systems” that had been broken into and exploited.

Amid this clutter three people sat on folding chairs staring at the television monitors, two women and a man. They wore jeans or shorts, T-shirts, one of the women was smoking, all were young. Zelda's crew. On a normal workday there were a dozen.

No one paid any attention to her as she walked to her desk. She looked at the television to see what had them captivated. For the fifty-second time, CNN was running the video from the Boston television station helicopter. She was just in time to see Kolnikov squirt a burst at the camera.

“Someone hijacked a submarine yesterday morning,” the young man told Zelda. He was a tall, pale, intense youth with a scraggly beard. His name was Zip Vance. He had a Ph.D. from Stanford and an IQ close to two hundred. “It's still on every channel,” he added. “Been on since yesterday morning.”

The four of them watched the coverage for another hour. Little was said. Finally the women said good-bye and took the elevator, leaving Vance alone with Zelda.

“The White House asked for a news hold in the name of national security. The station in Boston told them hell no and put it on the air.”

“And the navy?”

“They're moving heaven and earth to get assets out there to find it. So far no luck.”

“What do you think?”

Zip Vance grinned. “I think we pulled it off,” he said and laughed aloud.