42
ASP AND SWORD
PRESIDENT NARMONOV:
I SEND THIS TO YOU, OR YOUR SUCCESSOR, AS A WARNING.
WE HAVE JUST RECEIVED A REPORT THAT A SOVIET SUBMARINE IS EVEN NOW ATTACKING AN AMERICAN MISSILE SUBMARINE. AN ATTACK ON OUR STRATEGIC ASSETS WILL NOT BE TOLERATED, AND WILL BE INTERPRETED AS THE PRECURSOR TO AN ATTACK AGAINST THE UNITED STATES.
I MUST FURTHER ADVISE YOU THAT OUR STRATEGIC FORCES ARE AT THEIR MAXIMUM STATE OF READINESS. WE ARE PREPARED TO DEFEND OURSELVES.
IF YOU ARE SERIOUS IN YOUR PROTESTATIONS OF INNOCENCE, I URGE YOU TO CEASE ALL AGGRESSIVE ACTS WHILE THERE IS STILL TIME.
 
“‘Successor’? What the hell does that mean?” Narmonov turned away for a moment, then looked at Golovko. “What is happening here? Is Fowler ill? Is he mad? What goes on here? What’s this submarine business?” When he finished talking, his mouth remained open like that of a hooked fish. The Soviet President was gulping his breaths now.
“We had a report of a disabled American missile submarine in the eastern Pacific, and sent a submarine to investigate, but that submarine has no authorization to attack,” the Defense Minister said.
“Are there any circumstances under which our men might do this?”
“None. Without authorization from Moscow, they may act only in self-defense.” The Defense Minister looked away, unable to bear the gaze of his President. He had no wish to speak again, but neither did he have a choice. “I no longer think this is a controllable situation.”
 
“Mr. President.” It was an Army warrant officer. He opened his briefcase—“the football”—and removed a ring binder. The first divider was bordered in red. Fowler flipped to it. The page read:
 
SIOP MAJOR ATTACK OPTION **SKYFALL**
 
“So, what the hell is SNAPCOUNT?” Goodley asked.
“That’s as high as alerts go, Ben. That means the pistol is cocked and pointed, and you can feel the pressure on the trigger.”
“How the hell did we—”
“Drop it, Ben! However the fuck we got here, we are here.” Ryan stood and started walking around. “We better start thinking very fast, people.”
The senior duty officer started: “We have to make Fowler understand—”
“He can’t understand,” Goodley said harshly. “He can’t understand if he isn’t listening.”
“State and Defense are out—they’re both dead,” Ryan pointed out.
“Vice President—Kneecap.”
“Very good, Ben ... do we have a button for that ... yes!” Ryan pushed it.
“Kneecap.”
“This is CIA, DDCI Ryan speaking. I need to talk to the Vice President.”
“Wait one, sir.” It turned out to be a short “one.”
“This is Roger Durling. Hello, Ryan.”
“Hello, Mr. Vice President. We have a problem here,” Jack announced.
“What went wrong? We’ve been copying the Hot Line messages. They were kinda tense but okay until about twenty minutes ago. What the hell went wrong?”
“Sir, the President is convinced that there has been a coup d’état in the Soviet Union.”
“What? Whose fault is that?”
“Mine, sir,” Ryan admitted. “I’m the jerk who delivered the information. Please set that aside. The President isn’t listening to me.”
Jack was amazed to hear a brief, bitter laugh. “Yeah, Bob doesn’t listen to me very much either.”
“Sir, we have to get to him. We now have information that this may have been a terrorist incident.”
“What information is that?” Jack ran it down in about a minute. “That’s thin,” Durling observed.
“It may be thin, sir, but it’s all we got, and it’s a goddamned sight better than anything else we’ve got in.”
“Okay, stop for a minute. Right now I want your evaluation of the situation.”
“Sir, my best read is that the President is wrong, it is Andrey Il’ych Narmonov over there. It’s approaching dawn in Moscow. President Narmonov is suffering from sleep deprivation, he’s just as scared as we are—and from that last message he’s wondering if President Fowler is crazy or not. That is a bad combination. We have reports of isolated contact between Soviet and American forces. Christ knows what really happened, but both sides are reading it as aggressive acts. What’s really happening is simple chaos—forward—deployed forces bumping, but they’re shooting because of alert levels on both sides. It’s cascading on itself.”
“Agreed, I agree with all of that. Go on.”
“Somebody has to back down and do it very fast. Sir, you have to talk to the President. He won’t even take my calls now. Talbot and Bunker are both dead, and there’s nobody else he’ll listen to.”
“What about Arnie van Damm?”
“Fuck!” Ryan snarled. How had he forgotten Arnie? “Where is he?”
“I don’t know. I can have the Secret Service find out real fast. What about Liz?”
“She’s the one who came up with the brilliant idea that Narmonov isn’t there.”
“Bitch,” Durling observed. He’d worked so hard and wasted so much political capital to get Charlie Alden into that job. “Okay, I’ll try to get through to him. Stand by.”
“Right.”
 
“The Vice President is calling, sir. Line Six.”
Fowler punched the button. “Make it fast, Roger.”
“Bob, you need to get this thing back under control.”
“What do you think I’ve been trying to do!”
Durling was sitting in a high-backed leather chair. He closed his eyes. The tone of the answer said it all. “Bob, you have made things worse instead of better. You have to step back from this for a moment. Take a deep breath, walk around the room—think! There is no reason to expect that the Russians did this. Now, I just talked to CIA, and they said—”
“Ryan, you mean?”
“Yes, he just filled me in and—”
“Ryan’s been lying to me.”
“Bullshit, Bob.” Durling kept his voice level and reasonable. He called it his country-doctor voice. “He’s too much of a pro for that.”
“Roger, I know you mean well, but I don’t have time for psychoanalysis. We have what may be a nuclear strike about to be launched on us. The good news, I suppose, is that you’ll survive. I wish you luck, Roger. Wait—there’s a Hot Line message coming in.”
 
PRESIDENT FOWLER:
THIS IS ANDREY IL’YCH NARMONOV COMMUNICATING TO YOU.
THE SOVIET UNION HAS TAKEN NO AGGRESSIVE ACTS AGAINST THE UNITED STATES. NONE AT ALL. WE HAVE NO INTEREST IN HARMING YOUR COUNTRY. WE WISH TO BE LEFT ALONE AND TO LIVE IN PEACE.
I HAVE AUTHORIZED NO ACTION WHATEVER AGAINST ANY AMERICAN FORCES OR CITIZENS, YET YOU THREATEN US. IF YOU ATTACK US, WE MUST THEN ATTACK YOU ALSO, AND MILLIONS WILL DIE. WILL IT ALL BE AN ACCIDENT?
THE CHOICE IS YOURS. I CANNOT STOP YOU FROM ACTING IRRATIONALLY. I HOPE THAT YOU WILL REGAIN CONTROL OF YOURSELF. TOO MANY LIVES ARE AT RISK FOR EITHER OF US TO ACT IRRATIONALLY.
 
“At least we’re still getting these,” Goodley noted.
“Yeah, it just makes things so much better. It’s going to set him off,” Ryan announced. “This one’s really going to do it. You can’t tell an irrational person that he’s losing it....”
“Ryan, this is Durling.” Ryan fairly leaped at the button.
“Yes, Mr. Vice President.”
“He didn’t—he didn’t listen, and then this new one came in, and he reacted rather badly to it.”
“Sir, can you open a channel to SAC?”
“No, I’m afraid not. They’re on a conference call with NORAD and Camp David. Part of the problem, Jack, the President knows he’s vulnerable there and he’s afraid—well...”
“Yeah, everyone’s afraid, aren’t we?”
There was silence for a moment, and Ryan wondered if Durling felt guilty for being in a place of relative safety.
 
At Rocky Flats, the residue samples were loaded into a gamma-ray spectrometer. It had taken longer than expected, due to a minor equipment problem. The operators stood behind a shield and used lead-lined rubber gloves and yard-long tongs to move the samples out of the lead bucket, then waited for the technician to activate the machine.
“Okay—this is a hot one, all right.”
The machine had two displays, one on a cathode-ray tube, with a backup paper printout. It measured the energy of the photoelectrons generated by the gamma radiation within the instrument. The precise energy state of these electrons identified both the element and the isotope of the source. These showed as lines or spikes on the graphic display. The relative intensity of the various energy lines—shown as the height of the spike—determined the proportions. A more precise measurement would require insertion of the sample in a small reactor for reactivation, but this system was good enough for the moment.
The technician flipped to the beta channel. “Whoa, look at that tritium line! What did you say the yield on this thing was?”
“Under fifteen.”
“Well, it had a shitload of tritium, doc—look at that!” The technician—he was a master’s candidate—made a notation on his pad and switched back to the gamma channel. “Okay ... plutonium, we’ve got some 239, 240; neptunium, americium, gadolinium, curium, promethium, uranium—some U-235, some 238 ... I—this was a sophisticated beast, guys.”
“Fizzle,” one of the NESTers said, reading the numbers. “We’re looking at the remains of fizzle. This was not an IND. All that tritium.... Christ, this was supposed to be a two-stager, that’s too much for a boosted fission weapon—it’s a fucking H-Bomb!”
The technician adjusted his dials to fine-tune the display. “Look at the 239/240 mix....”
“Get the book!”
Sitting on the shelf opposite the spectrometer was a three-inch binder of red vinyl.
“Savannah River,” the technician said. “They’ve always had that gadolinium problem.... Hanford does it another way ... they always seem to generate too much promethium.”
“Are you crazy?”
“Trust me,” the technician said. “My thesis is on contamination problems at the plutonium plants. Here’s the numbers!” He read them off.
A NESTer flipped to the index, then back to a page. “It’s close! Close! Say the gadolinium again!”
“Zero point zero five eight times ten to the minus 7, plus or minus point zero zero two.”
“Holy Mary Mother of God!” The man turned the book around.
“Savannah River.... That’s not possible.”
“Nineteen sixty-eight. It was a vintage year. It’s our stuff. It’s our fucking plutonium.”
The senior NESTer blinked his disbelief away. “Okay, let me call D.C.”
“Can’t,” the technician said as he refined his readings. “The long-distance lines are all down.”
“Where’s Larry?”
“Aurora Presbyterian, working with the FBI guys. I put the number on a Post-it over the phone in the corner. I think he’s working D.C. through them.”
 
“Murray.”
“Hoskins—I just heard from Rocky Flats. Dan, this sounds nuts: the NEST team says the weapon used American plutonium. I asked him to confirm it, and he did—said he asked the same thing. The plutonium came from the DOE plant at Savannah River, turned out in February 1968, K Reactor. They have chapter and verse, he says they can even tell you what part of K Reactor—sounds like bullshit to me, too, but he’s the friggin’ expert.”
“Walt, how the hell am I going to get anybody to believe that?”
“Dan, that’s what the man told me.”
“I need to talk to him.”
“The phone lines are down, remember? I can get him in here in a few minutes.”
“Do that, and do it fast.”
 
“Yeah, Dan?”
“Jack, the NEST team just reported into our Denver office. The material in the bomb was American.”
“What?”
“Listen, Jack, we’ve all said that, okay? The NEST team got fallout samples and analyzed them, and they say the uranium—no, plutonium—came from Savannah River, 1968. I have the NEST team leader coming in to the Denver Field Division now. The long-distance lines are down, but I can patch through our system and you can talk to him directly.”
Ryan looked at the Science and Technology officer. “Tell me what you think.”
“Savannah River, they’ve had problems there, like a thousand-pound MUF.”
“Muff?”
“M-U-F, acronym: material unaccounted for. Lost material.”
“Terrorists,” Ryan said positively.
“Starting to make sense,” S&T agreed.
“Oh, God, and he won’t listen to me now!” Well, there was still Durling.
 
“That’s hard to believe,” the Vice President said.
“Sir, it’s hard data, checked by the NEST team at Rocky Flats, it’s hard, scientific data. It may sound nuts, but it’s objective fact.” I hope, oh God, I hope. Durling could hear Ryan thinking it. “Sir, this was definitely not a Russian weapon—that’s the important thing. We are certain it was not a Soviet weapon. Tell the President right now!”
“Will do.” Durling nodded to the Air Force communications sergeant.
 
“Yes, Roger,” the President said.
“Sir, we’ve just received some important information.”
“What now?” The President sounded tired unto death.
“It came to me from CIA, but they got it from the FBI. The NEST team has identified the bomb material as definitely not Russian. They think the bomb material is American.”
“That is crazy!” Borstein announced. “We do not have any missing weapons. We take damned good care of those things!”
“Roger, you got that from Ryan, didn’t you?”
“Yes, Bob, I did.”
Durling heard a long sigh over the line. “Thank you.”
The Vice President’s hand trembled as he lifted the other phone. “He didn’t buy it.”
 
“He’s got to buy it, sir, it’s true!”
“I’m out of ideas here. You were right, Jack, he’s not listening to anyone now.”
“New Hot Line message, sir.”
PRESIDENT NARMONOV, Jack read:
 
YOU ACCUSE ME OF IRRATIONALITY. WE HAVE TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND DEAD, AN ATTACK ON OUR FORCES IN BERLIN, AN ATTACK ON OUR NAVY BOTH IN THE MEDITERRANEAN AND THE PACIFIC....
 
“He’s close to doing it. Goddamn it! We’ve got the information he needs to stop this thing in its tracks and—”
“I’m out of ideas,” Durling said over the speakerphone. “These damned messages over the Hot Line are making things worse instead of better, and—”
“That seems to be the key problem, doesn’t it?” Ryan looked up. “Ben, you good driving in snow?”
“Yeah, but—”
“Come on!” Ryan raced out of the room. They caught an elevator to the first floor and Jack ran into the security room. “Keys to the car!”
“Here, sir!” A very frightened young man tossed them over. The CIA’s security force kept its vehicles just off the VIP lot. The blue GMC Jimmy four-wheel-drive was unlocked.
“Where are we going?” Goodley asked as he got into the driver’s-side door.
“Pentagon, River Entrance—and get us there fast.”
 
“What was it?” The torpedo had circled something but not exploded, and finally run out of fuel.
“Not enough mass to set off the magnetic exploder—too small to hit directly ... must have been a decoy,” Dubinin said. “Where’s that original intercept?” A sailor handed it over. “‘Propeller disabled by collision,’ Goddamn it! We were tracking a bad power plant, not a damaged screw.” The Captain smashed his fist down on the chart table hard enough to draw blood. “Come north, go active!”
 
“Oh, shit, conn, sonar, we have an active low-frequency sonar bearing one-nine-zero.”
“Warm up the weapons!”
“Sir, if we deploy the outboard we’ll get another two or three knots,” Claggett said.
“Too noisy!” Ricks snapped back.
“Sir, we’re up in the surface noise. The high-freqs from the outboard motor won’t matter much up here. His active sonar is low-freq, and that active stuffs liable to detect us whether we’re noisy or not. What we need now is distance, sir, if he gets too close the Orion can’t engage to support us.”
“We have to take him out.”
“Bad move, sir. We’re on SNAPCOUNT status now, if we have to shoot, that takes priority. Putting a unit in the water will tell us just where to look. Captain, we need distance to keep out of his active sonar, and we can’t risk a shot.”
“No! Weapons officer, set it up!”
“Aye, sir.”
“Communications, tell the Orion to get us some help!”
 
“Here’s the last one, Colonel.”
“Well, that was fast enough,” the regimental commander said.
“The boys are getting lots of practice,” the Major standing next to him observed as the tenth and final RV was lifted off the SS-18 at Alyesk. “Be careful there, Sergeant.”
It was ice that did it. A few minutes earlier some snow had blown into the missile capsule. The shuffling of boots had crushed and melted it, but then the subzero temperatures had refrozen it into an invisible, paper-thin skim of ice. The sergeant was in the process of stepping back off the fold-down catwalk when he slipped, and his wrench went flying. It bounced off the railing, twirling like a baton for a moment. The sergeant grabbed for it but missed, and it went down.
“Run!” the Colonel screamed. The sergeant needed no encouragement. The corporal on the crane swung the warhead clear and himself jumped from the vehicle. They all knew to go upwind.
The wrench nearly made it all the way down, but it struck an interior fitting and went sideways, gouging the skin of the first stage in two places. The missile skin was also the missile tank-age, and both the fuel and oxidizer were released. The two chemicals formed small clouds—only a few grams of each were leaking—but the chemicals were hypergolic. They ignited on contact. That happened two minutes after the wrench began its fall.
The explosion was a powerful one. It knocked the Colonel down, over two hundred meters from the silo. He instinctively rolled behind a thick pine tree as the crushing overpressure wave swept by. He looked a moment later to see the silo topped by a pillar of flame. His men had all made it—a miracle, he thought. His next thought reflected the humor that so often accompanies an escape from death: Well, that’s one less missile for the Americans to bother us about!
 
The Defense Support Program Satellite already had its sensor focused on the Russian missile fields. The energy bloom was unmistakable. The signal was downlinked to Alice Springs in Australia, and from there back up to a USAF communications satellite, which relayed it to North America. It took just over half a second.
“Possible launch—possible launch at Alyesk!”
In that moment everything changed for Major General Joe Borstein. His eyes focused on the real-time display, and his first thought was that it had happened, despite everything, all the changes, all the progress, all the treaties, somehow it had happened, and he was watching it and he would be there to watch it all happen until the SS-18 with his name on it landed on Cheyenne Mountain. This wasn’t dropping bombs on the Paul Doumer Bridge, or hassling fighters over Germany. This was the end of life.
Borstein’s voice was the sound of sandpaper. “I only see one ... where’s the bird?”
“No bird no bird no bird,” a female captain announced. “The bloom is too big, more like an explosion. No bird, no bird. This is not a launch, I repeat this is not a launch.”
Borstein saw that his hands were shaking. They hadn’t done that the time he’d been shot down, nor the time he’d crashed at Edwards, nor the times he’d driven airplanes through weather too foul for hailstones. He looked around at his people and saw in their faces the same thing he’d just felt in the pit of his stomach. Somehow it had been like watching a dreadfully scary movie to this point, but it was not a movie now. He lifted the phone to SAC and switched off the input to the Gold Phone line to Camp David.
“Pete, did you copy that?”
“I sure did, Joe.”
“We, uh, we better settle this thing down, Pete. The President’s losing it.”
CINC-SAC paused for a beat before responding. “I almost lost it, but I just got it back.”
“Yeah, I hear you, Pete.”
“What the hell was that?”
Borstein flipped the switch back on. “Mr. President, that was an explosion, we think, in the Alyesk missile fields. We, uh, sure had a scare there for a moment, but there is no bird in the air—say again, Mr. President, there are no birds flying now. That was a definite false alarm.”
“What does it mean?”
“Sir, I do not know that. Perhaps—they were servicing the missiles, sir, and maybe they had an accident. It’s happened before—we had the same problem with the Titan-II.”
“General Borstein is correct,” CINC-SAC confirmed soberly. “That’s why we got rid of the Titan-II ... Mr. President?”
“Yes, General?”
“Sir, I recommend we try to cool things down some more, sir.”
“And just how do we do that?” Fowler wanted to know. “What if that was related to their alert activity?”
 
The ride down the George Washington Parkway was uneventful. Though covered with snow, Goodley had maintained a steady forty miles per hour in four-wheel drive, and not lost control once, getting around abandoned cars like a race-car driver at Daytona. He pulled into the River/Mall Entrance to the Pentagon. The civilian guard there was backed up by a soldier now, whose M-16 rifle was undoubtedly loaded.
“CIA!” Goodley said.
“Wait.” Ryan handed over his badge. “In the slot. I think it’ll work here.”
Goodley did as he was told. Ryan’s high-level badge had the right electronic code for this security device. The gate went up, and the road barrier went down, clearing the way. The soldier nodded. If the pass worked, everything had to be okay, right?
“Right up to the first set of doors.”
“Park it?”
“Leave it! You come in with me.”
Security inside the River Entrance was also beefed up. Jack tried to pass through the metal detector, but was stopped by pocket change that he then threw on the floor in a rage. “NMCC?”
“Come with me, sir.”
The entrance to the National Military Command Center was barred by a wall of bullet-resistant glass, behind which was a black female sergeant armed with a revolver.
“CIA—I have to get in.” Ryan held his badge against the black pad, and again it worked.
“Who are you, sir?” a Navy petty officer asked.
“DDCI. You take me to whoever’s running this.”
“Follow me, sir. The man you want to see is Captain Rosselli.”
“Captain? No flag officer?”
“General Wilkes got lost, sir. We don’t know where the hell he is.” The enlisted man turned through a door.
Ryan saw a Navy captain and an Air Force lieutenant colonel, a status board, and a gang of multiple-line phones. “You Rosselli?”
“That’s right—and you?”
“Jack Ryan, DDCI.”
“You picked a bad place to come to, pal,” Colonel Barnes observed.
“Anything changed?”
“Well, we just had what looked like a missile launch in Russia—”
“Jesus!”
“No bird came up, maybe an explosion in the hole. You have anything we need to know?”
“I need a line into the FBI command center and I need to talk to both of you.”
“That’s crazy,” Rosselli said two minutes later.
“Maybe so.” Ryan lifted the line. “Dan, Jack here.”
“Where the hell are you, Jack? I just called Langley.”
“Pentagon. What do you have on the bomb?”
“Stand by, I have a patch through to Dr. Larry Parsons. He’s the NEST boss. He’s on now.”
“Okay, this is Ryan, Deputy Director of CIA. Talk to me.”
“The bomb was made of American plutonium. That’s definite. They’ve rechecked the sample four times. Savannah River Plant, February 1968, K Reactor.”
“You’re sure?” Jack asked, wishing very hard that the answer would be affirmative.
“Positive. Crazy as it sounds, it was our stuff.”
“What else?”
“Murray tells me you have had problems with the yield estimate. Okay, I’ve been there, okay? This was a small device, less than fifteen—that’s one-five kiloton yield. There are survivors from the scene—not many, but I’ve seen them myself, okay? I’m not sure what screwed up the initial estimate, but I have been there and I’m telling you it was a little one. It also seems to have been a fizzle. We’re trying to ascertain more about that now—but this is the important part, okay? The bomb material was definitely American in origin. One hundred percent sure.”
Rosselli leaned over to make sure that this phone line was a secure one into FBI headquarters. “Wait a minute. Sir, this is Captain Jim Rosselli, U.S. Navy. I have a master’s in nuclear physics. Just to make sure this is what I’m hearing, I want you to give me the 239/240 proportions, okay?”
“Wait a minute and I will.... Okay, 239 was nine eight point nine three; 240 is zero point four five. You want the trace elements also?”
“No, that’ll do it. Thank you, sir.” Rosselli looked up and spoke quietly. “Either he’s telling the truth or he’s one smart fuckin’ liar.”
“Captain, I’m glad you agree. I need you to do something.”
“What’s that?”
“I need to get on the Hot Line.”
“I can’t allow that.”
“Captain, have you been keeping track of the messages?”
“No, Rocky, and I haven’t had time. We’ve got three separate battles going on and—”
“Let’s go look.”
Ryan hadn’t been in there before, which struck him as odd. The printed copies of the messages were being kept on a clipboard. There were six people in the room, and they all looked ashen.
“Christ, Ernie—” Rosselli observed.
“Anything lately?” Jack asked.
“Nothing since the President sent one out twenty minutes ago.”
“It was going fine when I was here right after—oh, my God. ...” Rosselli observed as he got to the bottom.
“The President has lost it,” Jack said. “He refuses to take information from me and he refuses to listen to Vice President Durling. Now this is real simple, okay? I know President Narmonov. He knows me. With what the FBI just gave us, what you just heard, Captain, I think I might be able to accomplish something. If not—”
“Sir, that is not possible,” Rosselli replied.
“Why?” Jack asked. Though his heart was racing, he forced himself to control his breathing. He had to be cool be cool be cool now.
“Sir, the whole point of this link is that the only two people on it are—”
“One of them, maybe both now, is not playing with a full deck. Captain, you can see where we are. I can’t force you to do this. I’m asking you to think. You just used your head a moment ago. Use it again,” Ryan said calmly.
“Sir, they’ll lock us up for doing this,” the Link supervisor said.
“You have to be alive to be locked up,” Jack said. “We are at SNAPCOUNT right now. You people know how serious this is. Captain Rosselli, you are the senior officer present, and you make the call.”
“I see everything you put on that machine before it’s transmitted.”
“Fair enough. Can I type it myself?”
“Yes. You type, and it’s crossloaded and encrypted before it goes out.”
A Marine sergeant made room for him. Jack sat down and lit a cigarette, ignoring the signs prohibiting the vice.
ANDREY IL’YCH, Ryan tapped in slowly, THIS IS JACK RYAN. Do YOU STILL MAKE YOUR OWN FIRES IN THE DACHA?
“Okay?”
Rosselli nodded to the NCO sitting next to Ryan. “Transmit.”
 
“What is this?” the Defense Minister asked. Four men hovered over the terminal. A Soviet Army major translated.
“Something’s wrong here,” the communications officer said. “This is—”
“Send back, ‘Do you remember who it was who bandaged your knee?’ ”
“What?”
“Send it!” Narmonov said.
They waited for two minutes.
YOUR BODYGUARD ANATOLIY ASSISTED ME, BUT MY TROUSERS WERE RUINED.
“It’s Ryan.”
“Make sure,” Golovko said.
 
The translator looked at his screen. “It says, ‘And our friend is doing well?’ ”
Ryan typed: HE RECEIVED AN HONORABLE BURIAL AT CAMP DAVID.
“What the hell?” Rosselli asked.
“There’s not twenty people in the world who know this. He’s making sure it’s really me,” Jack said. His fingers were poised over the keys.
“That looks like bullshit.”
“Okay, fine, it’s bullshit, but does it hurt anything?” Ryan demanded.
“Send it.”
“What the hell is this?” Fowler shouted. “Who’s doing this—”
 
“Sir, we have an incoming from the President. He’s ordering us to—”
“Ignore it,” Jack said coldly.
“Goddamn it, I can’t!”
“Captain, the President has lost control. If you allow him to shut me off, your family, my family, a whole lot of people are going to die. Captain, your oath is to the Constitution, not the President. Now you look over those messages again and tell me that I’m wrong!”
“From Moscow,” the translator said. “‘Ryan, what is happening?’ ”
 
PRESIDENT NARMONOV:
WE HAVE BEEN THE VICTIMS OF A TERRORIST ACT. THERE WAS MUCH CONFUSION HERE, BUT WE NOW HAVE POSITIVE EVIDENCE AS TO THE ORIGIN OF THE WEAPON.
WE ARE CERTAIN THAT THE WEAPON WAS NOT SOVIET. I REPEAT WE ARE CERTAIN THE WEAPON WAS NOT SOVIET.
WE ARE NOW ATTEMPTING TO APPREHEND THE TERRORISTS. WE MAY HAVE THEM WITHIN THE NEXT FEW MINUTES.
 
“Send back, ‘Why has your President accused us of this?’ ” There was another pause of two minutes.
 
PRESIDENT NARMONOV:
WE HAVE BEEN THE VICTIMS OF GREAT CONFUSION HERE. WE HAVE HAD SOME INTELLIGENCE REPORTS OF POLITICAL TURMOIL IN THE SOVIET UNION. THESE REPORTS WERE FALSE, BUT THEY CONFUSED US GREATLY. IN ADDITION, THE OTHER INCIDENTS HAVE HAD AN INCENDIARY EFFECT ON BOTH SIDES.
 
“That’s true enough.”
 
“Pete, you get people in there just as fast as you can and arrest this man!”
Connor couldn’t say no to that despite the look he received from Helen D’Agustino. He called Secret Service headquarters and relayed the message.
 
“He asks, ‘What you—what do you suggest?’ ”
 
I ASK THAT YOU TRUST US AND ALLOW US TO TRUST YOU. WE BOTH MUST BACK AWAY FROM THIS. I SUGGEST THAT BOTH YOU AND WE REDUCE THE ALERT LEVELS OF STRATEGIC FORCES AND GIVE ORDERS TO ALL TROOPS TO EITHER HOLD IN PLACE OR WITHDRAW AWAY FROM ANY SOVIET OR AMERICAN UNIT IN CLOSE PROXIMITY, AND IF POSSIBLE THAT ALL SHOOTING BE STOPPED IMMEDIATELY.
 
“Well?” Ryan asked.
“Send it.”
 
“Can it be a trick?” the Defense Minister asked. “Can it not be a trick?”
“Golovko?”
“I believe that it is Ryan, and I believe he is sincere—but can he persuade his President?”
President Narmonov walked away for a moment, thinking of history, thinking of Nikolay II. “If we stand our forces down ... ?”
“Then they can strike us, and our ability to retaliate is cut in half!”
“Is half enough?” Narmonov asked, seeing the escape hatch, leaning toward it, praying for the opening to be real. “Is half enough to destroy them?”
“Well ...” Defense nodded. “Certainly, we have more than double the amount we need to destroy them. We call it overkill.”
 
“Sir, the Soviet reply reads: ‘Ryan:
“‘On my order, being sent out as you read this, Soviet strategic forces are standing down. We will maintain our defensive alert for the moment, but we will stand down our offensive forces to a lower alert level which is still higher than peacetime standards. If you match our move, I propose a phased mutual stand-down over the next five hours.’ ”
Jack’s head went down on the keyboard, actually placing some characters on the screen.
“Could I have a glass of water? My throat’s a little dry.”
“Mr. President?” Fremont said.
“Yes, General.”
“Sir, however this happened, I think it’s a good idea.”
Part of Bob Fowler wanted to hurl his coffee cup into the wall, but he stopped himself. It didn’t matter, did it? It did, but not that way.
“What do you recommend?”
“Sir, just to make sure, we wait until we see evidence of a stand-down. When we do, we can back off ourselves. For starters—right now—we can rescind SNAPCOUNT without any real degradation of our readiness.”
“General Borstein?”
“Sir, I concur in that,” said the voice from NORAD.
“General Fremont: Approved.”
 
“Thank you, Mr. President. We’ll get right on it.” General Peter Fremont, United States Air Force, Commander-in-Chief Strategic Air Command, turned to his Deputy Chief of Staff (Operations). “Keep the alert going, posture the birds, but keep them on the ground. Let’s get those missiles uncocked.”
 
“Contact ... bearing three-five-two ... range seven thousand six hundred meters.” They’d been waiting several minutes for that.
“Set it up. No wires, activation point four thousand meters out.” Dubinin looked up. He didn’t know why the aircraft overhead hadn’t already executed another attack.
“Set!” the weapons officer called a moment later.
“Fire!” Dubinin ordered.
“Captain, message coming in on the ELF,” the communications officer said over the squawk box.
“That’s the message that announces the end of the world.” The Captain sighed. “Well, we fired our shots, didn’t we?” It would have been nice to think that their action would save lives, but he knew better. It would enable the Soviet forces to kill more Americans, which wasn’t quite the same thing. Everything about nuclear weapons was evil, wasn’t it?
“Go deep?”
Dubinin shook his head. “No, they seem to have more trouble with the surface turbulence than I expected. We may actually be safer here. Come right to zero-nine-zero. Suspend pinging. Increase speed to ten knots.”
Another squawk: “We have the message—five-letter group: ‘Cease all hostilities’!”
“Antenna depth, quickly!”
 
The Mexican police proved to be extremely cooperative, and the literate Spanish of Clark and Chavez hadn’t hurt very much. Four plainclothes detectives from the Federal Police waited with the CIA officers in the lounge while four more uniformed officers with light automatic weapons took unobtrusive positions nearby.
“We don’t have enough people to do this properly,” the senior Federal worried.
“Better to do it off the airplane,” Clark said.
“Muy bien, Señor. You think they may be armed?”
“Actually, no, I don’t. Guns can be dangerous when you’re traveling.”
“Has this something to do with—Denver?”
Clark turned and nodded. “We think so.”
“It will be interesting to see what such men look like.” The detective meant the eyes, of course. He’d seen the photographs.
The DC-10 pulled up to the gate and cut power to its three engines. The jetway moved a few feet to mate with the forward door.
“They travel first class,” John said unnecessarily.
“Sí. The airline says there are fifteen first-class passengers, and they’ve been told to hold the rest. You will see, Senor Clark, we know our business.”
“I have no doubt of that. Forgive me if I gave that impression, Teniente. ”
“You are CIA, no?”
“I am not permitted to say.”
“Then of course you are. What will you do with them?”
“We will speak,” Clark said simply.
The gate attendant opened the door to the jetway. Two Federal Police officers took their places left and right of the door, their jackets open. Clark prayed there would be no gun-play. The people started walking out, and the usual greetings were called from the waiting area.
“Bingo,” Clark said quietly. The police lieutenant straightened his tie to signal the men at the door. They made it easy, the last two first-class passengers to come out. Qati looked sick and pale, Clark noticed. Maybe it had been a bad flight. He stepped over the rope barrier. Chavez did the same, smiling and calling to a passenger who looked at them in open puzzlement.
“Ernesto!” John said, running up to him.
“I’m afraid I’m the wrong—”
Clark went right past the man from Miami.
Ghosn was slow to react, dulled by the flight from America, relaxed by the thought that they had escaped. By the time he started to move, he was tackled from behind. Another policeman placed a gun against the back of his head, and he was handcuffed before they hauled him to his feet.
“Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Chavez said. “You’re the guy with the books! We’ve met before, sweetheart.”
“Qati,” John said to the other one. They’d already been patted down. Neither was armed. “I’ve wanted to meet you for years.”
Clark took out their tickets. The police would collect their luggage. The police moved them out very quickly. The business and tourist passengers would not know that anything untoward had happened until they were told by family members in a few minutes.
“Very smooth, Lieutenant,” John said to the senior officer.
“As I said, we know our business.”
“Could you have your people phone the embassy and tell them that we got ’em both alive.”
“Of course.”
The eight men waited in a small room while the bags were collected. There could be evidence in them, and there wasn’t that much of a hurry. The Mexican police lieutenant examined their faces closely, but saw nothing more or less human than what he’d seen in the faces of a hundred murderers. It was vaguely disappointing, even though he was a good-enough cop to know better. The luggage was searched, but aside from some prescription drugs—they were checked and determined not to be narcotics—there was nothing unusual. The police borrowed a courtesy van for the drive to the Gulfstream.
“I hope you have enjoyed your stay in Mexico,” the lieutenant said in parting.
“What the hell is going on?” the pilot asked. Though in civilian clothes, she was an Air Force major.
“Let me explain it like this,” Clark said. “You Air Scouts are going to drive the airplane to Andrews. Mr. Chavez and I are going to interview these two gentlemen in back. You will not look, not hear, not think about anything that’s going on in back.”
“What—”
“That was a thought, Major. I do not want you to have any thoughts about this. Do I have to explain myself again?”
“No, sir.”
“Then let’s get the hell out of here.”
The pilot and copilot went forward. The two communications technicians sat at their consoles and drew the curtain between themselves and the main cabin.
Clark turned to see his two guests exchanging looks. That was no good. He removed Qati’s tie and wrapped it around his eyes. Chavez did the same to his charge. Next both were gagged, and Clark went forward to find some earplugs. Finally, they set both men in seats as far apart as the airplane’s cabin allowed. John let the plane take off before he did anything else. The fact was that he despised torture, but he needed information now, and he was prepared to do anything to get it.
 
“Torpedo in the water!”
“Christ, he’s dead aft of us!” Ricks turned. “Best possible speed, come left to two-seven-zero! XO, take the return shot!”
“Aye! Snapshot,” Claggett said. “One-eight-zero, activation point three thousand, initial search depth two hundred.”
“Ready!”
“Match and shoot!”
“Three fired, sir.” It was a standard tactic. The torpedo fired on the reciprocal heading would at least force the other guy to cut the control wires to his weapon. Ricks was already in sonar.
“Missed the launch transient, sir, and didn’t catch the fish very soon either. Surface noise....”
“Take her deep?” Ricks asked Claggett.
“This surface noise may be our best friend.”
“Okay, Dutch ... you were right before, I should have dropped the outboard.”
“ELF message sir—SNAPCOUNT is canceled, sir.”
“Canceled?” Ricks asked incredulously.
“Canceled, yes, sir.”
“Well, isn’t that good news,” Claggett said.
 
“Now what?” the Tacco asked himself. The message in his hand made no sense at all.
“Sir, we finally got the bastard.”
“Run your track.”
“Sir, he fired at Maine!”
“I know, but I can’t engage.”
“That’s crazy, sir.”
“Sure as hell is,” the tactical officer agreed.
 
“Speed?”
“Six knots, sir—maneuvering says the shaft bearings are pretty bad, sir.”
“If we try any more ...” Ricks frowned.
Claggett nodded. “... the whole thing comes apart. I think it’s about time for some countermeasures.”
“Do it.”
“Five-inch room, launch a spread.” Claggett turned back. “We’re not going fast enough to make a turn very useful.”
“I figure it’s about even money.”
“Could be worse. Why the hell do you think they canceled SNAPCOUNT?” the XO asked, staring at the sonar scope.
“X, I guess the danger of war is over.... I haven’t handled this well, have I?”
“Shit, skipper, who would have known?”
Ricks turned. “Thanks, X.”
“The torpedo is now active, ping-and-listen mode, bearing one-six-zero.”
 
“Torpedo, American Mark 48, bearing three-four-five, just went active!”
“Ahead full, maintain course,” Dubinin ordered.
“Countermeasures?” the Starpom asked.
The Captain shook his head. “No, no—we’re at the edge of its acquisition range ... and that would just give it a reason to turn this way. The surface conditions will help. We’re not supposed to have battles in heavy weather,” Dubinin pointed out. “It’s hard on the instruments.”
“Captain, I have the satellite signal—it’s an all-forces message, ‘Disengage and withdraw from any hostile forces, take action only for self-defense.’ ”
“I’m going to be court-martialed,” Valentin Borissovich Dubinin observed quietly.
“You did nothing wrong, you reacted correctly at every—”
“Thank you. I hope you will testify to that effect.”
“Change in signal—change in aspect, torpedo just turned west away from us,” Lieutenant Rykov said. “The first programmed turn must have been to the right.”
“Thank God it wasn’t to the left. I think we’ve survived. Now, if only our weapon can miss....”
 
“Sir, it’s continuing to close. The torpedo is probably in acquisition—continuous pinging now.”
“Less than two thousand yards,” Ricks said.
“Yeah,” Claggett agreed.
“Try some more countermeasures—hell, go continuous on them.” The tactical situation was getting worse. Maine was not moving quickly enough to make an evasive course worthwhile. The countermeasures filled the sea with bubbles, and while they might draw the Russian torpedo into a turn—their only real hope—the sad fact of the matter was that as the fish penetrated the bubbles it would find Maine with its sonar again. Perhaps a continuous set of such false targets would saturate the seeker. That was their best shot right now.
“Let’s keep her near the surface,” Ricks added. Claggett looked at him and nodded in understanding.
“Not working, sir ... sir, I’ve lost the fish aft, in the baffles now.”
“Surface the ship,” Ricks called. “Emergency blow!”
“Surface capture?”
“And now I’m out of ideas, X.”
“Come left, parallel to the seas?”
“Okay, you do it.”
Claggett went into control. “Up ’scope!” He took a quick look and checked the submarine’s course. “Come right to new course zero-five-five!”
USS Maine surfaced for the last time into thirty-five-foot seas and nearly total darkness. Her circular hull wallowed in the rolling waves, and she was slow to turn.
The countermeasures were a mistake. Though the Russian torpedo was pinging, it was mainly a wake-follower. Its seeker head tracked bubbles, and the string of countermeasures made for a perfect trail, which suddenly stopped. When Maine surfaced, the submarine left the bubble stream. Again the factors involved were technical. The surface turbulence confused the wake-following software and the torpedo began its programmed circular search pattern, just under the surface. On its third circuit it found an unusually hard echo amid the confusing shapes over its head. The torpedo turned to close, now activating its magnetic-influence fusing system. The Russian weapon was less sophisticated than the American Mark 50. It could not go higher than twenty meters of depth and so was not drawn up to the surface. The active magnetic field it generated was cast out like an invisible spiderweb, and when that net was disturbed by the presence of a metallic mass—
The thousand-kilo warhead exploded fifty feet from Maine’s already crippled stern. The twenty-thousand-ton warship shook as though rammed.
An alarm sounded instantly: “Flooding flooding flooding in the engine room!”
Ricks lifted the phone. “How bad?”
“Get everybody off, sir!”
“Abandon ship! Break out the survival gear! Send out message: damaged and sinking, give our position!”
 
“Captain Rosselli! Flash traffic coming in.”
Ryan looked up. He’d had his drink, followed by something colder and carbonated. Whatever the message was, the naval officer could handle it.
“You Mr. Ryan?” a man in a suit asked. Two more were behind him.
“Dr. Ryan, yeah.”
“Secret Service, sir, the President ordered us to come here and arrest you.”
Jack laughed at that. “What for?”
The agent looked instantly uncomfortable. “He didn’t say, sir.”
“I’m not a cop, but my dad was. I don’t think you can arrest me without a charge. The law, you know? The Constitution. ‘Preserve, protect, and defend.’ ”
The agent was in an instant quandary. He had orders from someone he had to obey, but he was too professional to violate the law. “Sir, the President said ...”
“Well, tell you what. I’ll just sit right here, and you can talk to the President on that phone and find out. I’m not going anywhere.” Jack lit another cigarette and lifted another phone.
“Hello?”
“Hey, babe.”
“Jack! What’s going on?”
“It’s okay. It got a little tense, but we have it under control now, Cath, I’m afraid I’m going to be stuck here for a while, but it’s okay, Cathy, honest.”
“Sure?”
“You worry about that new baby, not about anything else. That’s an order.”
“I’m late, Jack. Just a day, but—”
“Good.” Ryan leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, and smiled blissfully. “You want it to be a girl, eh?”
“Yes.”
“Then I guess I do, too. Honey, I’m still busy here, but, honest, you can relax. Have to run. ’Bye.” He replaced the phone. “Glad I remembered to do that.”
“Sir, the President wants to talk to you.” The senior agent handed the phone toward Ryan.
What makes you think I want to talk to him? Jack nearly asked. But that would have been unprofessional. He took the phone. “Ryan here, sir.”
“Tell me what you know,” Fowler said curtly.
“Mr. President, if you give me about fifteen minutes, I can do a better job. Dan Murray at FBI knows everything I do, and I have to make contact with two officers. Is that okay, sir?”
“Very well.”
“Thank you, Mr. President.” Ryan handed the phone back and placed a call to the CIA Operations Center. “This is Ryan. Did Clark make the pickup?”
“Sir, this is an unsecure line.”
“I don’t care—answer the question.”
“Yes, sir, they’re flying back now. We don’t have a comm link to the aircraft. It’s Air Force, sir.”
“Who’s the best guy to evaluate the explosion?”
“Wait.” The Senior Duty Officer passed that along to the Science and Technology man. “He says Dr. Lowell at Lawrence-Livermore.”
“Get him moving. The nearest air base is probably Travis. Get him something fast.” Ryan hung that line up and turned to the senior Hot Line officer.
“There’s a VC-20 just took off from Mexico City inbound for Andrews. I have two officers and two—two other people aboard. I need to establish a comm link to the aircraft. Get someone to set that up, please.”
“Can’t do it here, sir, but you can in the conference room on the other side.”
Ryan stood. “Come with me?” he said to the Secret Service agents.
 
It could hardly have been more bitter, Qati thought, but a moment later he realized that this wasn’t true. He had faced death for a year now, and death by any cause was still death. Had he escaped—but he had not escaped.
“Okay, let’s talk.”
“I do not understand,” Qati said in Arabic.
“I have a little trouble with that accent,” Clark replied, feeling very clever. “I learned the language from a Saudi. Please speak slowly.”
Qati allowed himself to be shaken momentarily by the use of his native tongue. He decided to reply in English to show his own cleverness. “I will never tell you a thing.”
“Sure you will.”
Qati knew that he had to resist as long as he could. It would be worth the price.