America (6 page)

“They will fish some of the Americans from the sea and question them. Those men will talk.”

That process would take time. And no two of the Americans would tell the story the same way, Kolnikov reflected. Half-drowned men would tell disjointed tales, disagree on critical facts. “They'll talk,” he told the German. “And they will say that there are still Americans aboard this boat.”

“So?”

“That fact means nothing to you, Heydrich, but it will mean a great deal to the Americans. Trust me.”

*   *   *

A half hour later Harvey Warfield had two pieces of critical information. He knew that about fifty Americans remained aboard
America,
and he was convinced that the submarine had been hijacked. In addition to the testimony of the
America
sailors pulled from the sea, he had a videotape from the camera of the television news helicopter, which was sitting in the helo spot on the destroyer's fantail. Two navy helicopters were circling over the sub and destroyer, neither of which was equipped with a dipping sonar or any of the other high-tech paraphernalia of antisubmarine warfare. Warfield talked to the Pentagon duty officer on a scrambled radio voice circuit as he watched the video on a monitor mounted high in a corner of the bridge.

“At least a dozen men,” Warfield said. “They spoke accented English. One of the crewmen thought they were Russians, two thought they were Germans, one guy thought they were Bosnian Serbs, two swore they were Iranians, no one knows for sure. I'm watching them on videotape, though, shoot a submachine gun at the helicopter taking pictures. The guy just turns and shoots, like he was swatting at a fly.”

“How many Americans were killed?”

“At least eight that we know of. The Coast Guard has already recovered that many bodies.”

“Captain Sterrett?”

“Dead. Shot once at the base of the throat with a bullet that went all the way through.”

“I'll pass this along to the national command authority.”

“Better pass along this fact too, Admiral. This sub is going to dive in the very near future. If it is as quiet as everyone has been saying it is, I'll lose it unless I'm shot with luck. Whatever the brains in Washington want to do about this had better be done before this thing slides under.”

“Try to stay on it.”

“Aye aye,” Warfield said without enthusiasm and hung up the headset.

“What if this guy squirts a torpedo at us, Captain?” the OOD asked.

“He won't,” Warfield said with conviction. “I doubt that he has any torpedoes in the tubes ready to go, but even if he does, he won't shoot. This guy kept fifty hostages to ensure that we wouldn't shoot at him.”

“If he didn't have any hostages,” the XO asked, “would you sink him?”

“Right now. This very minute.”

“So the choice is to sink him with the gun or let him go.”

“Or try to ram him, disable the screws.”

Even as he said the words, Harvey Warfield was considering. If he could bend or break off just one blade, the sub would lose a great deal of speed and become a real noisemaker. He picked up the handset, asked for the Pentagon war room again.

The admiral there was unenthusiastic. “The evidence for a hijacking hasn't changed in the last five minutes, has it?”

“No, sir.”

“Still thin.”

Harvey Warfield had had enough lawyering. “We fry people in the electric chair with less evidence than we have right now,” he told the admiral. “The Coast Guard has eight dead American sailors stretched out on their deck.” Warfield lost his temper. “Are you going to wait for autopsies, Admiral?”

“If you ram the sub you will damage both ships, perhaps severely.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Perhaps crack the sub's reactor, have a nuclear accident right there in Long Island Sound. With thirty million people strewn around the shore.”

“There is that possibility,” Harvey Warfield admitted. He felt so helpless, listening to this cover-my-ass paper pusher while he watched a brand-new, genuine U.S. attack submarine armed to the teeth sail for the open sea with a bunch of criminals at the helm. Killers. Murderers.

“This decision needs to be made by the national command authority,” the Pentagon admiral said. By that he meant the president of the United States. “We'll get back to you.”

“Yes, sir.”

*   *   *

That was the situation twenty-seven minutes later when Kolnikov decided the water was deep enough. Two freighters were nearby, on their way out of Long Island Sound into the Atlantic, and several fishing boats. The Block Island ferry was about to cross the sub and destroyer's wake when Kolnikov reduced power. As two Coast Guard helicopters buzzed angrily overhead, the sub decelerated, gradually flooded its tanks, and settled slowly into the sea. The destroyer was abeam the submarine on the starboard side when the top of the sub's masts disappeared from sight. Crying raucously and soaring on the salty breeze blowing in from the sea, a cloud of seagulls searched the roiling water for tidbits brought up from the depths.

Aboard
John Paul Jones,
Harvey Warfield knew that he didn't have a chance of tracking the submarine unless he used active sonar, so he gave the order.
Jones
was a guided-missile destroyer, its systems optimized to protect a carrier battle group from air attack. The ship had an antisubmarine capability, but it certainly was not state of the art.

The sonar operator tracked the sub as it turned into the swirling water disturbed by the destroyer's passing, then lost it.

“This guy is no neophyte,” Harvey Warfield muttered darkly when the tactical action officer in combat gave him the news, but there was little he could do. He turned the destroyer, slowed to two knots, and waited for the wake turbulence to dissipate. All the while the sonar pinged on, probing for the submarine that was actually going back up the destroyer's wake at five knots, steadily opening the distance between the hunter and the hunted.

The TAO called the captain again. “The water is very shallow, sir. The sound is echoing off the bottom and other ships and thermal layers. It's like we're pinging inside a kettledrum. The scope is a sea of return.
America
might be one of those blips, but we would only be guessing. We could go passive, see if the operator can pick him out.”

“He'll never hear him. I'll bet a silver dollar that he's under that ferry this very minute.”

“That would be a good bet, Captain, but we can't pick him out of the return at this range. If you want to close, we can keep trying.”

“This guy won't wait for us to search the haystack,” Harvey Warfield said with conviction. He knew that pinning a submarine in shallow water under less than ideal conditions was an impossible task for a guided-missile destroyer like the
Jones,
equipped with fifteen-year-old sonar technology. He needed a helicopter or two, or a second destroyer. Even if he had those assets at his disposal, stealthy as the
America
was, he would need a pot full of luck. “Do whatever you think best,” Warfield told the TAO.

“Just like that,” Captain Warfield stormed at his XO. “Just like that! I will make a prediction. I predict that before very long those bastards in the Pentagon are going to wish to God they had given the order to destroy that boat before it submerged.”

*   *   *

Kolnikov did use the ferry, not by running along under it, but by keeping it between the submarine and the destroyer when he left the destroyer's wake. As he stole slowly away he was careful not to put the destroyer directly astern, in his baffles, so he could still see it on the sonar presentation. The active pinging from the destroyer's sonar resembled flashes of light on the screen.

When the destroyer was miles behind, Kolnikov threw the sub into a series of hard, tight turns designed to allow him to check his baffles to see if an American submarine was trailing him.

The sea was empty.
America
was alone.

“It feels strange going to sea without an American boat following along with his nose up our ass,” Turchak remarked.

Kolnikov thought this remark amusing. American attack subs usually picked up Russian boomers as they left port and followed them for months, quite sure the Russians didn't know they were there.

“I think this time we are really alone,” Kolnikov replied jovially and slapped Turchak on the back.

With the sonar presentation showing open sea ahead and to all sides,
America
swam deeper into the gray wastes of the Atlantic.

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 SuperAegis 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 wastebaskets. 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.”