America (31 page)

“What floor are you fellows on?” Carmellini asked.

“Eight. I'm in training for the Boston marathon.”

When they reached the office, Toad sank gratefully into the chair behind his desk and tried not to look bedraggled. He eyed Carmellini without enthusiasm. Several inches over six feet, with wide shoulders, impossibly narrow hips, and hard, callused hands, the guy looked to be in terrific physical shape. The eight-story climb hadn't made him draw a deep breath. His forehead wasn't even damp.

“Bet you don't get a lot of visitors up here with the elevator out,” Carmellini said conversationally.

“You got that right. When most people drop by, I tell them to come back when the Redskins win their next home game. I hadn't been up the stairs in over an hour, so I made an exception in your case. To what miracle do we owe the honor of your presence?”

“I was in London. After the FAA grounded all the planes arriving on the East Coast, I was stuck. Flew to Montreal and rented a car, just got in.”

“You came straight here?”

“Yeah. I have a story to tell the admiral, but since you're sorta his alter ego, I'll tell it to you, just in case my former employer figures I'm here and sends someone looking for me before he gets back.”

“I'll let that alter ego crap go by if you'll tell me why the agency might be looking for you,” Toad said.

“Let's put it like this. The folks at Langley don't know where I am and may or may not be in a sweat about that. I resigned Monday before I went to England, effective in a couple weeks, then I decided to quit early.”

“I hope the bank doesn't repossess your car,” Toad said, eyeing Carmellini skeptically. It was almost as if the man were too glib, too smooth. One half expected him to pull three walnut shells and a pea from a jacket pocket and ask if you wanted to make a friendly wager.

Tommy Carmellini casually glanced around to see who might be in earshot—there was no one—then began. “Antoine Jouany. The company sent me to England to raid his computer.” He went on, telling Toad about it.

*   *   *

Captain Rebecca Allison's F-16 was pushing against Mach one when she dropped out of the overcast over the southern beach of Long Island. Try as she might, she couldn't get her radar to pick the Tomahawk out of ground return. She shallowed her dive and began scanning ahead and below for a glimpse of the small missile.

The thick haze under the clouds limited visibility to about three miles. Finding out a tiny cruise missile was going to be extremely difficult, she thought, and wondered if she had already missed it and flown by.

“Should be dead ahead,” the Sentry controller told her, “about two miles. The speed readout is five oh six.” Oh, man, 506 knots. Right against the Earth.

She kept the fighter descending, glanced at her indicated airspeed—550—and quickly scanned her instruments. All well.

She concentrated on the view through the HUD.

“One mile, at your twelve.”

She was down to three hundred feet on the radar altimeter now, and into the city suburbs. Streets and houses and schools flashed under the speeding fighter, giving her a sensation of speed that was sublime.

There!

Oh, so small! She was overrunning, so she picked up the nose and chopped the throttle, then dropped a wing to keep the missile in view. It was a hundred feet above the ground, maybe less, just clearing the highest obstacles as it roared along. Allison matched the missile's speed, then dropped down behind it into trail. It was so tiny, almost impossible to keep in sight.

She had never in her life flown so low and fast. The buildings were right there, she was barely clearing the roofs. Somehow she found the courage to glance at the weapons panel to verify the switch settings, then she squeezed the trigger on the stick to the first detent.

The Sidewinder gave her a tone, then dropped it as a cell phone tower whizzed past, only yards from the wingtip.

That rattled her for a second. She was right against the city, suicidally low.

Come on, Allison!

As she was trying again to get a heat lock-on, she realized that the missile was crossing over an airfield. It must be JFK! Without thinking she pulled up slightly, and in the blink of an eye was at five hundred feet. Below she saw the huge mat, runways, the control tower, the terminal with airplanes at every gate—she forced the stick forward and went rocketing by the control tower so low that she felt she could almost reach out and touch the thing.

The tower must have been a discrete navigation fix for the missile, she realized. Gritting her teeth, trying to ignore the blur under her, she added throttle, began closing the distance to the hard-to-see missile.

*   *   *

Stanley Schottenheimer found a missile, although unknown to him, it was not the one the Sentry controller had pointed out. Not that it mattered. There were three missiles, and if any of them could be shot down before they hit their targets, that would be a small victory.

The borough of Queens spinning beneath him unnerved Schottenheimer who, like Allison, had never flown so low and fast. No one did training like this—the risk was too great.

Schottenheimer gritted his teeth, forced himself to stay down on the rooftops and add throttle to close on the racing missile. With all the heat sources immediately below him, his Sidewinders also failed to lock on to the Tomahawk's exhaust, so he planned on using his gun.

Now the missile shot over LaGuardia Airport, the fighter only two hundred yards behind.

Closing, closing, he squeezed off an experimental burst from the twenty-millimeter Gatling gun mounted in the port wing root. And missed the tiny target.

The land fell behind as the missile shot out over the sound, then laid into a port turn. The radar altimeter went off, but the damn thing always did over smooth water.

He could see the missile plainly for the first time, unobstructed by haze and a cluttered background. And he wouldn't be hammering Queens with the twenty-millimeter. This was his chance!

He steepened his turn, tried to pull lead on the missile as the radar altimeter deedled insanely. He could see the shore coming up ahead, knew he had only seconds.

Over smooth water on a dark day it is always difficult to accurately judge one's height; in any event, Schottenheimer had too many things shrieking for his attention. Inevitably he slid inside the missile's turning radius. As he tried to nudge the pipper in the HUD onto the missile, the left wingtip of the F-16 kissed the dark water.

Still traveling at a bit over five hundred knots, the wing of the fighter tore off as it cartwheeled along the surface of Long Island Sound. As the fighter decelerated, spinning like a Frisbee, the eyeballs-out G ruptured hundreds of tiny blood vessels in Stanley Schottenheimer's brain, killing him instantly. He was dead when the fighter disintegrated. The engine made a mighty splash. The cloud of jet fuel and pieces that had been the rest of the plane grew and grew as the components of the cloud decelerated at different rates. The pieces of metal and sinew, wire and fiber and bone struck the water gently, almost like snowflakes, amid the rain of fuel droplets.

*   *   *

Tearing across the rooftops of Brooklyn at almost full throttle, Rebecca Allison succeeded in placing the HUD pipper on the tiny exhaust of the Tomahawk missile ahead of her and hesitated for a heartbeat. Some of her twenty-millimeter cannon shells were going to hit buildings and cars, doing God knows what in the way of damage. And if she succeeded in damaging the missile, it was either going to crash into a building or detonate immediately.

She certainly didn't have time to think about it as she streaked across the city, trying to keep the pipper on the missile and not smear herself across half of Long Island. They sent her to shoot down missiles—that was the mission when she and Schottenheimer manned the alert fighters. “Intercept and shoot down.”

Someone else had made the decision. Someone who was paid a lot more than an O-3 fighter jock.

She squeezed the trigger, held it down. A stream of twenty-millimeter shells vomited from the six-barreled cannon. For some reason, the stream was a few inches low, going under the Tomahawk. Instinctively Rebecca Allison moved the stick back a tiny fraction of an inch … and the river of cannon shells slammed into the missile.

The missile exploded in a blinding flash. A trillion watts of electromagnetic energy raced away at the speed of light.

Even though the electronics in Allison's fighter were hardened against the electromagnetic pulse from nuclear blasts, the close proximity of this one burned through the protection and fried every circuit in the airplane. Then the airplane overran the cloud of decelerating bits and pieces of the missile and swallowed a hatful. The pieces went through the various stages of the spinning compressor in a thousandth of a second. Blades ripped loose and were flung through the skin of the airplane, fuel lines were severed, the unbalanced engine began tearing itself apart. All this happened in the third of a second after the missile exploded.

Before Rebecca Allison even realized what was happening, her fighter exploded. The fireball of fuel and pieces splashed into the buildings of Brooklyn with devastating effect. In a dozen seconds twenty city blocks were on fire. A giant column of black smoke formed as the raging fire sucked in air from every direction. Soon the fire became so intense that the asphalt in the streets caught fire. The inferno blazed without sirens or alarms of any kind, because every electrical circuit within three miles of the blast was destroyed.

The other two Tomahawks, the one that Schottenheimer had died trying to shoot down and the one that had not been intercepted, crossed the East River and exploded over Manhattan. One detonated over the New York Stock Exchange, the other over Rockefeller Center. The missile that Allison destroyed had been targeted to detonate over the Empire State Building. The fact that it didn't get there made almost no difference to the damage caused by the attack: Almost every electrical switch, circuit, and microchip on the island of Manhattan was destroyed by the two stupendous pulses of electromagnetic radiation.

*   *   *

Kolnikov fully appreciated how the presence of the
Los Angeles
–class attack submarine
La Jolla
complicated the search problem for the P-3 overhead. No doubt before long other P-3s would be arriving. If
La Jolla
weren't there, the P-3s would go active, echo ranging or pinging with their sonobuoys. They had little chance of finding
America
if they listened passively, he suspected.

And that was a wonder. As quiet as
La Jolla
was—and it was quieter underway than a Soviet boomer tied to a pier—the Revelation sonar could still detect it. There it was on the bulkhead-mounted vertical displays—
he could see it!
It was a ghostly form in the gloom, illuminated by the sound of its hull moving through the water.

And
La Jolla
couldn't see him. His boat was too quiet for her sonar to detect passively.
America
was the ultimate stealth ship, so silent it was invisible to anyone without Revelation's ability to make sense of the massive data flows from the hydrophones.

Well, he reflected,
America
was invisible until someone went active, began radiating noise into the water and listening for echoes. She was deep, perhaps so deep that the radiating beams would be deflected before or after they echoed off her hull. Then again …

If he sank
La Jolla,
removed her from the problem, the P-3s would be free to ping. Still, finding a deep-running boat this quiet under the thermal layers would be very difficult. With luck, they might pull it off. And Kolnikov and Turchak and their colleagues would be dead. Of course, with
La Jolla
out of the problem, Kolnikov would be free to maneuver
America
to the extent of her capabilities and use the built-in tricks, such as the noisemakers and decoys.

La Jolla
was much shallower than
America,
perhaps eight hundred feet deep. She was making four knots, hadn't altered course. She was, Kolnikov concluded, running up a bearing line that she had established when she heard the Tomahawk launches. She undoubtedly had her towed array deployed, maximizing her listening capability, although of course he couldn't see the array on the sonar displays. Perhaps if he were closer …

Or went active.

What if…?

“Let's find out how quiet this boat really is,” he said to Georgi Turchak. “Ahead one-third, begin an ascent, then turn in behind
La Jolla,
staying at least a hundred feet below her wake so we won't get tangled in her array.”

“Are you crazy?” Turchak hissed.

“Sooner or later this guy may go active. He won't see us unless he does. If he does, we want to be below and slightly behind him. And we want to stay there. Now let's do it.”

“Why don't you just torpedo him now?” Heydrich asked conversationally, “before he knows we are here. Escaping this P-3 afterward should not be difficult.”

“I signed on for the money, not to kill sailors.”

Turchak looked at him askance. “Vladimir Ivanovich…”

“I have to sleep nights, goddamn it! Ahead one-third.”

Without another word Turchak pushed the power lever to the one-third-ahead setting and began the process of ascending as the boat accelerated.
La Jolla
was at one o'clock, crossing from left to right at a forty-five-degree angle, so he should be able to rendezvous without exceeding
La Jolla
's speed. Apparently she had not detected the beat of
America
's prop. If he had to speed up to catch her, the frequency would change, and detection might follow.

Let's be realistic, Turchak thought.
America
was going to be right behind her! He didn't know whether to laugh or cry. In all the years he had known Kolnikov he hadn't realized that the man was willing to bet everything in one wild, suicidal gamble.