'Okay,' Wilmer said, then turned to Billings.
'Take her under the ice, Pete.'
As Wilmer leaned back against the railing on the central island, he told himself again that there was no real change. You were still under tons of water-just tons of ice over that. And surfacing was possible-unless the ice was too thick. And you always rode the instruments like a mother hen looked after her chicks; only, under the ice, the instrument readings had to be more precise and their readings could change more quickly.
An hour later, just as Wilmer was preparing to get Billings to take his promised sleep, the new sonar man called out, 'Blip, approximately five hundred off the starboard bowplane.'
Five hundred what, man?' Wilmer rasped. 'Sing it out!'
'Make that five hundred-four seventy-five yards now, sir.'
Wilmer was already standing behind the sonar man, Billings off to his right behind another console operator.
'Russian, Captain?' Billings asked.
'Hell if it's American-unless we got submarines they haven't told me about. Yeah, Russian, all right. Looks like this is kind of a busy street, huh?' Wilmer turned to Billings, then glanced back at the scope in front of him.
The man working the console tugged at his earphones, saying, 'Captain, I'm pickin' up something. I can't be sure what it is.'
'Gimme that,' Wilmer said, his words harsher than his tone. He took the earphones and twisted them around so he could hear; then looked down at the scope.
'Did a pinch on sonar once, a long time ago,' Wilmer recited, slowly.
Turning to Billings, he rasped, 'Load up number one and two with conventionals, and ready number three with-' Dropping the earphones, he shouted, 'Dammit-that was a torpedo being launched!'
'Captain! We got it on the scope here! Comm' right at-'
'Hard starboard-all ahead three quarters. Make that all ahead full!' Wilmer shouted. The Russian torpedo slicing through the water off the port bow sounded just inches away when it made an echo along the length of the hull. Wilmer, Billings, and every man on the bridge watched along its path as if somehow they could see it.
'Fire one! Fire two!' Wilmer snapped.
Chapter Twelve
'Zero deviant flux on my signal. Ten, nine, eight-'
Mikhail Vorovoi watched the entire firing complex from the steel-railed mezzanine with a sense of satisfaction that was evident in his smile. As the technician droned off the countdown for activation of the laser charge through the particle chamber, Vorovoi could already see in his mind's eye, the Army drone aircraft being set free on auto pilot miles away toward the upper atmosphere, the warheadless missiles being launched from the Ukraine uncounted miles away.
'How do you feel, Mikhail?' a voice said. He turned, saw the hand on his shoulder, looked into the icy blue eyes of the blonde-haired woman beside him, the white lab coat poorly concealing what he had found with her almost every night since they had first met when she'd just come to work on the project. 'Your first test on multiple targets, and both missiles and planes. You should be proud, Mikhail Andreyevich, dushenko.'
'Elizabeta,' he whispered, 'you know what this means. If my particle beam weapon passes this test, soon it will be operational, and then nuclear war will have become obsolete. Its threat will not hang over us anymore like a plague waiting to break. In just a few years, it will be these weapons that both our country and the Americans will rely upon! No more radiation, no mass murder''
'You still see this as a road to peace, Mikhail, I know that,' Elizabeta whispered.
'Odyin!' The technician shouted the final number. Then 'Switch on, charging, one-quarter, one-half, three- quarter, full power. Boost on number three''
'Myir,' he found himself saying, 'Peace. It is at hand, Elizabeta,' he murmured, holding her small hands in his. 'I must go down on the floor and fire the beam personally-I must.'
Their eyes met, and she smiled. He leaned toward her and quickly kissed her cheek, then ran toward the steel ladder that led to the firing arena. He took the ladder rungs two at a time, jumping the last three to the stone floor, then raced toward the center console.
'Here-go, move aside,' Vorovoi said to the technician. 'I will take charge personally.' His dark eyes focused on the instrument panel, the gauges, the indicators, the computer readout diodes.
'Boosting ionization twelve points,' he shouted, twirling one of the nearer dials. Punching the button for visual via the polar orbit satellite link he anxiously searched the screen, spotting first the low-altitude dot that he knew was the first aircraft, then the second aircraft. Soon-he watched the screen intently-he would see the missiles.
'Capacitance function readout'' he called out.
From behind him, a voice called back, 'Ten to the fifteenth capacitance, to the sixteenth, seventeenth-' there was a long pause-'ten to the eighteenth-'
'Hold at that,' Vorovoi interrupted.
'Ten to the eighteenth and holding capacitance, zero flux,' the voice called back.
His eyes scanning the monitor, Vorovoi saw what his instruments already confirmed-the two unarmed missiles were streaking through the sky toward the drone aircraft. 'Designating targets-now! Grid 83, target alpha. Grid 19, target beta. Grid 48-correction, 49-target gamma. Grid 27, target theta-lock!'
He leaned back, waiting, wanting desperately for manual firing mode, but knowing that the true test of his particle beam weapon system and its potential for light-speed pinpoint accuracy lay in the computer firing
