Icebound

merely because Nikolai had often held it.

Suddenly charged with nervous energy, he got up from his bunk. He wanted to pace, but his quarters were too small. In three steps he had walked the length of the narrow aisle between the bed and the closet. He couldn't allow the crew to see how distraught he was. Otherwise, he might have paced the main companionway.

Finally he sat at the desk. He took the photograph in both hands, as if by confronting it — and his agonizing loss — he could soothe the pain in his heart and calm himself.

He spoke softly to the golden-haired boy in the picture. “I am not responsible for your death, Nikki.”

Gorov knew that was true. He believed it as well, which was more important than merely knowing it. Yet oceans of guilt washed through him in endless, corrosive tides.

“I know you never blamed me, Nikki. But I wish I could hear you tell me so.”

* * *

In mid-June, seven months ago, the Ilya Pogodin had been sixty days into an ultrasecret, ninety-day electronic-surveillance mission on the Mediterranean route. The boat had been submerged nine miles off the Egyptian coast, directly north of the city of Alexandria. The multicommunications aerial was up, and thousands of bytes of data, important and otherwise, were filing into the computer banks every minute.

At two o'clock in the morning, the fifteenth of June, a message came in from the Naval Intelligence Office at Sevastopol, relayed from the Naval Ministry in Moscow. It required a confirmation from the Ilya Pogodin, thereby shattering the radio silence that was an absolute necessity during a clandestine mission.

When the code specialist had finished translating the encrypted text, Gorov was wakened by the night communications officer. He sat in his bunk and read from the pale-yellow paper.

The message began with latitude and longitude coordinates, followed by orders to rendezvous in twenty-two hours with the Petr Vavilov, a Vostok-class research ship that was currently in the same part of the Mediterranean to which the Pogodin was assigned. That much of it pleasantly piqued Gorov's curiosity: A midnight meeting in the middle of the sea was a more traditional and intriguing piece of cloak-and-dagger work than that to which he was accustomed in an age of electronic spying. But the rest of it brought him straight to his feet, trembling.

YOUR SON IN SERIOUS CONDITION KREMLIN HOSPITAL STOP YOUR PRESENCE REQUIRED MOSCOW SOONEST STOP ALL TRANSPORTATION HAS BEEN ARRANGED STOP FIRST OFFICER ZHUKOV TO ASSUME COMMAND YOUR SHIP STOP

CONFIRM RECEIPT

CONFIRM RECEIPT

At midnight Gorov passed control of his submarine to Zhukov and transferred to the Petr Vavilov. From the main deck of the research ship, a helicopter took him to Damascus, Syria, where he boarded a Russian diplomatic jet for a scheduled flight to Moscow. He arrived at Sheremetyevo Airport at three o'clock on the afternoon of the sixteenth.

Boris Okudzhava, a functionary from the Naval Ministry met him at the terminal. Okudzhava had eyes as dirty gray as laundry water. A cherry-sized wart disfigured the left side of his nose. “A car is waiting, Comrade Gorov.”

“What's wrong with Nikki? What's wrong with my son?”

“I'm no doctor, Comrade Gorov.”

“You must know something.”

“I think we'd better not waste time here. I'll explain in the car, comrade.”

“It's not 'comrade' anymore,” Gorov said as they hurried away from the debarkation gate.

“Sorry. Just long habit.”

“Is it?”

Although the social and economic policies of the communists had been thoroughly discredited, although their thievery and mass murders had been exposed, more than a few former true believers yearned for the reestablishment of the old order. They still enjoyed considerable influence in many quarters, including the nuclear- weapons industry, where production of warheads and missiles continued unabated. For many of them, repudiation of hard-line Marxist ideology was merely a self-serving recognition of the shift of power to more democratic forces, not a genuine change of heart or mind. They labored with apparent diligence for the new Russia while waiting hopefully for a chance to resurrect the Supreme Soviet.

As they left the busy terminal and stepped outside into the mild late spring afternoon. Okudzhava said, “The next revolution should be for more freedom, not less. If anything, we haven't gone far enough. Too many of the old nomenklatura remain in power, calling themselves champions of democracy, praising capitalism while undermining it at every turn.”

Gorov dropped the matter. Boris Okudzhava was not a good actor. The excessive ardency with which he spoke revealed the truth: The grotesque wart alongside his nose flushed bright red, as though it were a telltale blemish bestowed by God, the unmistakable mark of the Beast.

The low sky was mottled with gray-black clouds.

The air smelled of oncoming rain.

Several peddlers had been allowed to set up business outside the terminal. A few worked from large trunks, others from pushcarts, hawking cigarettes, candy, tourist maps, souvenirs. They were doing a brisk business, and at least some must have been comparatively prosperous, but they were all shabbily dressed. In the old days, prosperity had been an offense requiring prosecution, imprisonment, and occasionally even execution. Many citizens of the new Russia still vividly recalled the former consequences of success and the savage fury of envious bureaucrats.

The Ministry car was immediately in front of the terminal, parked illegally, with the engine running. The moment Gorov and Okudzhava got in the backseat and closed the doors, the driver — a young man in a navy uniform — sped away from the curb.

“What about Nikki?” Gorov demanded.

“He entered the hospital thirty-one days ago with what was first thought to be mononucleosis or influenza. He was dizzy, sweating. So nauseous that he couldn't even take fluids. He was hospitalized for intravenous feeding to guard against dehydration.”

In the days of the discredited regime, medical care had been tightly controlled by the state — and had been dreadful even by the standards of Third World countries. Most hospitals had functioned without adequate equipment to maintain sterilized instruments. Diagnostic machines had been in woefully short supply, and health-care budgets had been so pinched that dirty hypodermic needles were regularly reused, often spreading disease. The collapse of the old system had been a blessing; however, the disgraced regime had left the nation deep in bankruptcy, and in recent years the quality of medical care had deteriorated even further.

Gorov shivered at the thought of young Nikki entrusted to the care of physicians who had been trained in medical schools that were no more modern or better equipped than the hospitals in which they subsequently labored. Surely every patient in the world prayed that his children would enjoy good health, but in the new Russia as in the old empire that it replaced, a beloved child's hospitalization was a cause not merely for concern but alarm, if not quiet panic.

“You weren't notified,' said Okudzhava, absentmindedly rubbing his facial wart with the tip of his index finger, “because you were on a highly classified mission. Besides, the situation didn't seem all that critical.”

“But it wasn't either mononucleosis or influenza?” Gorov asked.

“No. Then there was some thought that rheumatic fever might be to blame.”

Having lived so long with the pressure of being a commanding officer in the submarine service, having learned never to appear troubled either by the periodic mechanical difficulties of his boat or by the hostile power of the sea, Nikita Gorov managed to maintain a surface calm even as his mind churned with images of little Nikki suffering and frightened in a cockroach-ridden hospital. “But it wasn't rheumatic fever.”

“No,” Okudzhava said, still fingering his wart, looking not at Gorov but at the back of the driver's head. “And then there was a brief remission of the symptoms. He seemed in the best of health for four days. When the symptoms returned, new diagnostic tests were begun. And then… eight days ago, they discovered he has a