The software is in the fuckin' can!' Four months sooner than promised!
The room erupted with cheering that no one outside the team of thirty people could possibly have understood.
'Okay, you laser pukes!' someone called. 'Get your act together and build us a death ray! The gunsight is finished!'
'Be nice to the laser pukes.' Gregory laughed. 'I work with them too.'
Outside the room, Beatrice Taussig was merely walking past the door on her way to an admin meeting when she heard the cheering. She couldn't enter the lab-it had a cipher lock, and she didn't have the combination-but didn't have to. The experiment that they'd hinted at over dinner the night before had just been run. The result was obvious enough. Candi was in there, probably standing right next to the Geek, Bea thought. She kept walking.
'Thank God there's not much ice,' Mancuso observed, looking through the periscope. 'Call it two feet, maybe three.'
'There will be a clear channel here. The icebreakers keep all the coastal ports open,' Ramius said.
'Down 'scope,' the Captain said next. He walked over to the chart table. 'I want you to move us two thousand yards south, then bottom us out. That'll put us under a hard roof and ought to keep the Grishas and Mirkas away.'
'Aye, Captain,' the XO replied.
'Let's go get some coffee,' Mancuso said to Ramius and Clark. He led them down one deck and to starboard into the wardroom. For all the times he'd done things like this in the past four years, Mancuso was nervous. They were in less than two hundred feet of water, within sight of the Soviet coast. If detected and then localized by a Soviet ship, they would be attacked. It had happened before. Though no Western submarine had ever suffered actual damage, there was a first time for everything, especially if you started taking things for granted, the Captain of USS Dallas told himself. Two feet of ice was too much for the thin-hulled Grisha-class patrol boats to plow through, and their main antisubmarine weapon, a multiple rocket launcher called an RBU-6000, was useless over ice, but a Grisha could call in a submarine. There were Russian subs about. They'd heard two the previous day.
'Coffee, sir?' the wardroom attendant asked. He got a nod and brought out a pot and cups.
'You sure this is close enough?' Mancuso asked Clark.
'Yeah, I can get in and out.'
'It won't be much fun,' the Captain observed.
Clark smirked. 'That's why they pay me so much. I-'
Conversation stopped for a moment. The submarine's hull creaked as it settled on the bottom, and the boat took on a slight list. Mancuso looked at the coffee in his cup and figured it for six or seven degrees. Submariner machismo prevented him from showing any reaction, but he'd never done this, at least not with Dallas. A handful of submarines in the U.S. Navy were specially designed for these missions. Insiders could identify them at a glance from the arrangement of a few hull fittings, but Dallas wasn't one of them.
'I wonder how long this is going to take?' Mancuso asked the overhead.
'May not happen at all,' Clark observed. 'Almost half of them don't. The longest I've ever had to sit like this was? twelve days, I think. Seemed like an awfully long time. That one didn't come off.'
'Can you say how many?' Ramius asked.
'Sorry, sir.' Clark shook his head.
Ramius spoke wistfully. 'You know, when I was a boy, I fished here-right here many times. We never knew that you Americans came here to fish also.'
'It's a crazy world,' Clark agreed. 'How's the fishing?'
'In the summer, very good. Old Sasha took me out on his boat. This is where I learned the sea, where I learned to be a sailor.'
'What about the local patrols?' Mancuso asked, getting everyone back to business.
'There will be a low state of readiness. You have diplomats in Moscow, so the chance of war is slight. The surface patrol ships are mainly KGB. They guard against smugglers-and spies.' He pointed to Clark. 'Not so good against submarines, but this was changing when I left. They were increasing their ASW practice in Northern Fleet, and, I hear, in Baltic Fleet also. But this is bad place for submarine detection. There is much fresh water from the rivers, and the ice overhead-all makes for difficult sonar conditions.'
That's good to hear, Mancuso thought. His ship was in an increased state of readiness. The sonar equipment was fully manned and would remain so indefinitely. He could get Dallas moving in a matter of two minutes, and that should be ample, he thought.
Gerasimov was thinking, too. He was alone in his office. A man who controlled his emotions even more than most Russians, his face displayed nothing out of the way, even though there was no one else in the room to notice. In most people that would have been remarkable, for few can contemplate their own destruction with objectivity.
The Chairman of the Committee for State Security assessed his position as thoroughly and dispassionately as he examined any aspect of his official duties. Red October. It all flowed out from that. He had used the Red October incident to his advantage, first suborning Gorshkov, then disposing of him; he'd also used it to strengthen the position of his Third Directorate arm. The military had begun to manage its own internal security-but Gerasimov had seized upon his report from Agent Cassius to convince the Politburo that the KGB alone could ensure the loyalty and security of the Soviet military. That had earned him resentment. He'd reported, again via Cassius, that Red October had been destroyed. Cassius had told KGB that Ryan was under criminal suspicion, and-And we-I! — walked into the trap.
How could he explain that to the Politburo? One of his best agents had been doubled-but when? They'd ask that, and he didn't know the answer; therefore all the reports received from Cassius would become suspect. Despite the fact that much good data had come from the agent, knowledge that he'd been doubled at an unknown time tainted all of it. And that wrecked his vaunted insights into Western political thought.
He'd wrongly reported that the submarine hadn't defected, and not discovered the error. The Americans had gotten an intelligence windfall, but KGB didn't know of it. Neither did GRU, but that was little comfort.
And he'd reported that the Americans had made a major change in their arms-negotiation strategy, and that, too, was wrong.
Could he survive all three disclosures at once? Gerasimov asked himself.
Probably not.
In another age he would have faced death, and that would have made the decision all the easier. No man chooses death, at least not a sane one, and Gerasimov was coldly sane in everything he did. But that sort of thing didn't happen now. He'd end up with a subministerial job somewhere or other, shuffling papers. His KGB contacts would be useless to him beyond such meaningless favors as access to decent groceries. People would watch him walking on the street-no longer afraid to look him in the face, no longer fearful of his power, they'd point and laugh behind his back. People in his office would gradually lose their deference, and talk back, even shout at him once they knew that his power was well and truly gone. No, he said to himself, I will not endure that.
To defect, then? To go from being one of the world's most powerful men to becoming a hireling, a mendicant who traded what he knew for money and a comfortable life? Gerasimov accepted the fact that his life would become more comfortable in physical terms-but to lose his power!
That was the issue, after all. Whether he left or stayed, to become just another man? that would be like death, wouldn't it?
Well, what do you do now?
He had to change his position, had to change the rules of the game, had to do something so dramatic? but what?
The choice was between disgrace and defection? To lose everything he'd worked for-within sight of his goal- and face a choice like this?
The Soviet Union is not a nation of gamblers. Its national strategy has always been more reflective of the Russians' national passion for chess, a series of careful, pre-planned moves, never risking much, always protecting its position by seeking small, progressive advantages wherever possible. The Politburo had almost always moved in that way. The Politburo itself was largely composed of similar men. More than half were apparatchiks who had spoken the appropriate words, filled the necessary quotas, taking what advantages they could, and who had won
