America (35 page)

Harlow leaned over to speak softly to Brown. “Is this contact
America?
Are you sure?”

“I don't have positive verification from the system,” Petty Officer Brown explained. “I'm not sure of anything, sir. We have the signature of
America
in the computer, but they're going too slow for me to get anything but this gurgle.”

“What if it's some Russian boat?” Harlow asked his commanding officer. “Some Russian skipper who thinks he's cute?”

“If that boat were Russian we would have heard him. Russian boats aren't this quiet. What do you suggest? You want to give this guy the first shot, just to be sure?”

Skip Harlow thought about it. The lives of everyone on this boat were on the line. So were the lives of everyone on the submarine following
La Jolla.

One thing was absolutely certain: If
La Jolla
made it back to port, every decision made aboard her was going to be weighed by a board of senior officers seated around a long green table. Good judgment was absolutely essential at all times, yet there were always a host of unknowns in every combat situation. Harlow well knew that in the United States Navy the system was biased in favor of those captains who acted aggressively in the face of the enemy. Much would be forgiven a man who waded in swinging. The legacy of John Paul Jones was alive and well. Still, sinking an allied submarine would not be career enhancing.

“Stealing
America
was an act of war,” he said finally, hoping this commanding officer would get his drift. Ryder did. He nodded once, seeming to make up his mind as he did so.

“Go back to our base course, slow to four knots,” Ryder said to the chief of the boat, who gave the appropriate orders to his two helmsmen. “XO, let's set up snapshots on four torpedoes. Quietly. Any shot we get will be minimum range, point and shoot.”

“Do you think he'll give us a shot, Skipper?” the chief of the boat asked.

“Oh, yes. Eventually. He didn't shoot when he had a free shot, when we didn't know he was there. He could have, but he didn't. In my opinion, he thinks that boat he's in is undetectable. He's going to let us be his shield while that patrol plane is in the area. Sooner or later those guys are going to leave. When we're all alone, Kolnikov and friends are going to try to sneak away. When they cross our minimum range line, we'll let 'em have it.”

Shooting someone in the back who declined to shoot at you wasn't very sporting, but that thought didn't even cross Junior Ryder's mind. Buck Brown thought of it, but he bit his tongue. Those guys stole
America,
they killed six sailors. They had earned their tickets to hell.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Jake Grafton and Janos Ilin learned of the missile strike on New York City when they turned on the television in the kitchen of the house they were in, somewhere west of Manassas and a half mile or so north of Interstate 66. Grafton and Ilin had walked the halls, looked at the doors and windows, concluded that there was just no way for whoever was chasing them to enter the house without making noise, then they went back to the kitchen.

Jake found peanut butter in the cupboard. Ilin touched his finger to the peanut butter, tasted it experimentally, and made a face. They were eating it on crackers and drinking water when Ilin finally reached for the television and flipped it on. Some of the channels were off the air, so he flipped around until they found one that was on, CNN.

New York! The sub had E-bombed New York!

They started with the volume off so they could hear the sound of glass breaking, but eventually they turned it up so they could hear the audio. The television types were confused and besieging the military authorities for answers, which weren't forthcoming. At least two Flashlight missiles had struck New York City, perhaps three, maybe four—no one seemed to know. A fighter had crashed, perhaps several, perhaps there had been an air battle in the skies over the city, blocks of buildings were ablaze, firefighters couldn't get to the scene.

Manhattan and Brooklyn had been surgically removed from modern America. The power had failed. Lights, heat, elevators, and telephones didn't work, the subways didn't run, the streets were filled with cars, trucks, taxis, and buses that were no longer operable, the television and radio networks that originated there were no longer on the air. Eventually Grafton and Ilin learned that the television crews on the air were from New Jersey.

The whole scene reminded Jake of Baghdad during the Gulf War, with camera crews on rooftops looking at columns of smoke rising in the distance.

After a half hour of watching the breathless reporting and the guesses, good and bad, Jake turned the television off and walked through the house again with the shotgun in his hand. Standing well back from the windows, he looked out, trying to see if anyone were still out there.

And saw no one.

“What do you think?” he asked Ilin, who was doing the same thing.

“I think they may still be out there,” the Russian responded. “I have nothing more pressing on my calendar.”

“Maybe they are waiting for us to come out.”

“That is possible. One wonders if the owners will come home this afternoon.”

That, Jake suspected, wasn't in the cards. The house looked like it had been vacant for weeks, perhaps longer. There were no perishables in the refrigerator or cupboards. He pointed this out to Ilin.

They were trapped. The circuits in Jake's cell phone were fried the night before last—he had almost thrown the thing away, but Callie suggested he retain it to show to the insurance company if there were problems. She was confident their household insurance would pay their losses. A forlorn hope, Jake suspected, but he put the telephone on his dresser and left it there.

Now he wandered through this house looking for a cell phone. He checked the bedrooms and the owner's office area, looked in the drawers. He found a charger for a cell phone, but the instrument was not there.

New York!

Well, at least they had the pickup. Tonight.

“Are you married?” he asked Ilin.

“She died. Cancer.”

“I'm sorry.”

“It was years ago. Life cheated her. She loved me, she loved life, she loved her country. Then she got sick and died young.”

Jake thought of his wife. He and Callie had been lucky, extraordinarily so, and they both knew it. That realization dusted every day of their lives with magic. He didn't say this to Ilin, of course.

“People change,” Ilin mused, “the world changes. When I finished school I was recruited by the KGB. My father was prominent in the defense department, his father had been a hero of the war against fascism. The KGB seemed the path of least resistance.” He shrugged. “In those days we knew who the enemy was. America. And what a fine enemy you were, too. Rich, powerful, strong, at times stupid and heedless. We looked for cracks, for chinks in the armor, prepared for the final battle between good and evil, Armageddon. It didn't come. The Soviet Union was always a geopolitical oxymoron, an empire that tried to be a nation. It collapsed, finally, stunning us all.”

They sat, each with his own thoughts, listening to the silence.

“So everything changed,” Bin continued after a while, “and nothing changed. Russia remained what it always was, poor and backward in so many ways, isolated, afraid of foreign ideas, struggling to keep up with the outside world, not sure it wanted to. Today the enemy is still America … and Europe and China and Japan. And given the state of affairs in Russia, that is good. When Armageddon comes we will be on the sidelines.”

“Maybe it's here now,” Jake Grafton said.

“The struggle has no beginning and no end. It is ongoing and everywhere. You comfortable Americans, you have never understood that basic fact. Change brings new challenges. That is the fallacy of SuperAegis. Regardless of how much money you spend or how clever you are, technology cannot give you security. Checkmate happens only in chess, not in human affairs. Man has been looking for a magic weapon since he first picked up a club. And hasn't found it yet.”

“Nuclear weapons worked,” Jake objected. “They prevented World War III.”

“Nuclear weapons forced the struggle into other channels. And Russia lost. But the struggle never ends. As long as life continues, the struggle continues.” Janos Ilin gestured at the silent television set, then picked up a dead telephone and pointed it at Grafton. “And America is losing.”

*   *   *

“Skipper, what if the navy sends another boat into this area?” Skip Harlow, executive officer of
La Jolla,
asked that question of his commanding officer, Junior Ryder. Two hours had passed since Buck Brown had told them of
America
's presence behind them. The P-3 was still searching the area, dropping sonobuoys periodically, apparently searching in vain for the stolen submarine.

Ryder had been thinking of the message advising him to rise to periscope depth to receive an encrypted message via satellite. He had elected not to waste time or give away his presence by that maneuver. Now he wondered if he had made a mistake. There were a variety of things SUBLANT could have thought urgent enough to justify that maneuver, and Harlow was right, another sub entering the area was one of them.

If another boat entered the area, he thought Kolnikov aboard
America
would probably hear it first, at maximum range, before Ryder knew it was there. What if he elected to fire a torpedo at the oncoming boat while he was still too close to
La Jolla
for either him or Ryder to launch a torpedo at the other?

Oh, man! This could get crazy! Ryder looked around the control room, looked at the sailors on the consoles, his XO, the chief of the boat, the watch officer.

“We must be ready for anything,” he said. “I want everything ready to go, torpedoes, decoys, bubble makers, everything.”

All the action stations were already manned, and mentally the skipper took stock. Even if his boat lacked
America
's capability, he would stack his crew up against any crew in the world. The two torpedo control consoles were manned, all four of the sonar consoles, the computers, the helm, the chief of the boat watching everything, the guys on the plot backing up the automatic systems.… They were ready to shoot as soon as the boat's sensors found a target within the torpedoes' operating envelope. The torpedo control consoles automatically monitored the attack-director function and generated preset data on a continuous basis for two torpedoes, which could be fired instantly. The attack director received its data from the central computer complex, which integrated inputs from sonar, the ship's inertial nav system, underwater log, and analog dead-reckoning analyzer/indicator.

“Buck,” Ryder said, placing a hand on the first class petty officer's shoulder, “if another sub comes into the area, I want to know it as soon as possible. If
America
shoots a torpedo, it will be at one of our guys, so the instant it leaves the tube, sing out.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

In a whisper in the exec's ear, Ryder asked him to go through the boat, check that all watertight doors were properly secured, that every station was manned and ready, and to say a word to everyone. Then he turned to the com officer. “Encrypt and transmit a message via the underwater telephone. Tell that P-3 that we have found
America.
Tell them to clear the area and keep everyone else away.”

“Aye aye, Skipper. But the pirates have
America
's codebooks. They can decode the message.”

“Indeed, if they know what to do and how to do it, they can. I bet they won't bother. Go.”

“Yes, sir.”

*   *   *

Vladimir Kolnikov was standing behind his helmsman, Turchak, monitoring the bulkhead-mounted vertical displays when he caught the faintest flicker of light from the massive, shimmering shape of
La Jolla
on the Revelation display. Automatically he glanced at the photonics image, the computer-constructed image derived from television and inputs from the sensors on the photonics mast, which was elevated several feet out of the sail so it could look ahead.
America
's sail floodlights were still illuminated, which helped give the image clarity but … no, the flickering light was not present on that image.

“See that light!” he hissed at Turchak, who looked up from the screen where he had been monitoring the performance of the sub's autopilot. Like Kolnikov, Turchak's eyes went from display to display.

“
La Jolla
is using her underwater telephone,” Eck announced softly. “It's encrypted, I think, but I'm recording it if you want someone to try to decode it.”

“Who—?” asked Turchak, obviously mystified.

“The P-3,” Kolnikov said, disgusted with himself that he didn't realize instantly what the energy source was. “He's talking to the patrol plane. They'll pick up the audio on their sonobuoys.”

“He knows we're behind him,” Turchak said, as if he were a judge pronouncing a sentence.

*   *   *

Aboard the P-3, the sonobuoy operators did receive the message. After running it through the decoder, the TACCO took the printout forward for the pilot to see.

Duke Dolan read the message, then passed it back. “That's certainly clear enough,” he said.

“Yeah, it is,” said the TACCO. His name was Ruben Garcia. “I think we should indeed clear the area, but let's stay where we can hear the sonobuoys. If
La Jolla
doesn't get this guy, we can come back and look some more.”

“This message says
America
's following close behind
La Jolla.
You hear her?”

“Well, no, but—”

“Hell!” said Duke Dolan and threw up his hands. “We got plenty of gas and nothing better to do today, so why not?” He motioned to the flight engineer for climb power. As the props bit more deeply into the atmosphere, he lifted the Orion's nose and began a climb to the west. He said over his shoulder, “Better tell the Sentry to relay the message to SUBLANT.
La Jolla
waved us off.”