“Interesting. What of security?”
“One problem is our friend, Manfred — more properly, his wife. She knows his skills, and she knows he is away somewhere.”
“I would have thought that killing her carries more risks than rewards.”
“Ordinarily it would appear so, but all of Fromm's fellow experts are also away — with their wives in most cases. Were she merely to disappear, it would be assumed by the neighbors that she'd joined her husband. His absence risks a comment by her, however casual it might be, that Manfred is off doing something. Someone might notice.”
“Does she actually know what his former job was?”
“Manfred is very security-conscious, but we must assume that she does. What woman does not?”
“Go on,” Qati said tiredly.
“Discovery of her body will force the police to search for her husband, and that is also a problem. She must disappear. Then it will seem that she has joined her husband.”
“Instead of the other way around,” Qati observed with a rare smile, “at the end of the project.”
“Quite so.”
“What sort of woman is she?”
“A shrew, a money-grabber, not a believer,” Bock, an atheist, said, somewhat to Qati’s amusement.
“How will you do it?”
Bock explained briefly. “It will also validate the reliability of our people for that part of the operation. I'll leave the details to my friends.”
“Trickery? One cannot be overly careful in an enterprise like this one.”
“If you wish, a videotape of the elimination? Something unequivocal?” Bock had done that before.
“It is barbaric,” Qati said. “But regrettably necessary.”
“I will take care of that when I go to Cyprus.”
“You'll need security for that trip, my friend.”
“Yes, thank you, I think I will.” Bock knew what that meant. If his capture looked imminent — well, he was in a profession that entailed serious risks, and Qati had to be careful. Gunther's own operational proposal made that all the more imperative.
“The tools all have levelers for the air plates,” Ghosn said in annoyance, fifteen meters away. “Very good ones — why all the trouble with the tables?”
“My young friend, this is something we can only do one time. Do you wish to take any chances at all?”
Ghosn nodded. The man was right, even if he was a patronizing son-of-a-bitch. “And the tritium?”
“In those batteries. I've kept them in a cool place. You release the tritium by heating them. The procedure for recovering the tritium is delicate, but straightforward.”
“Ah, yes, I know how to do that.” Ghosn remembered such lab experiments from university.
Fromm handed him a copy of the manual for the first tool. “Now, we both have new things to learn so that we can teach the operators.”
Captain Dubinin sat in the office of the Master Shipwright of the yard. Known variously as Shipyard Number 199, Leninskaya Komsomola, or simply Komsomol'sk, it was the yard at which the Admiral Lunin had been built. Himself a former submarine commander, the man preferred the title Master Shipwright to Superintendent and had changed the title on his office door accordingly on taking the job two years earlier. He was a traditionalist, but also a brilliant engineer. Today he was a happy man.
“While you were gone, I got hold of something wonderful!”
“What might that be, Admiral?”
“The prototype for a new reactor feed pump. It's big, cumbersome, and a cast-iron bastard to install and maintain, but it's—”
“Quiet?”
“As a thief,” the Admiral said with a smile. “It reduces the radiated noise of your current pump by a factor of fifty.”
“Indeed? Who did we steal that from?”
The Master Shipwright laughed at that. “You don't need to know, Valentin Borissovich. Now, I have a question for you: I have heard that you did something very clever ten days ago.”
Dubinin smiled. “Admiral, that is something which I cannot —”
“Yes, you can. I spoke with your squadron commander. Tell me, how close did you get to USS Nevada?”
“I think it was actually Maine,” Dubinin said. The intelligence types disagreed, but he went with his instincts. “About eight thousand meters. We identified him from a mechanical transient made during an exercise, then I proceeded to stalk on the basis of a couple of wild guesses—”
“Rubbish! Humility can be overdone, Captain. Go on.”
“And after tracking what we thought was our target, he confirmed it with a hull transient. I think he came up to conduct a rocket-firing drill. At that point, given our operational schedule and the tactical situation, I elected to break contact while it was possible to do so without counterdetection.”
“That was your cleverest move of all,” the Master Shipwright said, pointing a finger at his guest. ”You could not have decided better, because the next time you go out, you will be the most quiet submarine we've ever put to sea.'
“They still have the advantage over us,' Dubinin pointed out honestly.
“That is true, but for once the advantage will be less than the difference between one commander and another, which is as it should be. We both studied under Marko Ramius. If only he were here to see this!”
Dubinin nodded agreement. “Yes, given current political circumstances, it is truly a game of skill, not one of malice anymore.”
“Would that I were young enough to play,” the Master Shipwright said.
“And the new sonar?”
“This is our design from the Severomorsk Laboratory, a large aperture array, roughly a forty-percent improvement in sensitivity. On the whole, you will be the equal of an American Los Angeles class in nearly all regimes.”
Except crew, Dubinin didn't say. It would be years before his country had the ability to train men as the Western navies did, and by that time Dubinin would no longer have command at sea — but! In three months time he'd have the best ship that his nation had ever given one of its captains. If he were able to cajole his squadron commander into giving him a larger officer complement, he could beach the more inept of his conscripts and begin a really effective training regimen for the rest. Training and leading the crew was his job. He was the commanding officer of Admiral Lunin. He took credit for what went well, and blame for what went badly. Ramius had taught him that from the first day aboard the first submarine. His fate was in his own hands, and what man could ask for more than that?
Next year, USS Maine, when the bitterly cold storms of winter sweep across the North Pacific, we will meet again.
“Not a single contact,” Captain Ricks said in the wardroom.
“Except for Omaha.” LCDR. Claggett looked over some paperwork. “And he was in too much of a hurry.”
“Ivan doesn't even try anymore. Like he's gone out of business.” It was almost a lament from the Navigator.
“Why even try to find us?” Ricks observed. “Hell, aside from that Akula that got lost…”
“We did track the guy a while back,” Nav pointed out.
“Maybe next time we'll get some hull shots,” a lieutenant observed lightly from behind a magazine. There was general laughter. Some of the more extreme fast-attack skippers had, on very rare occasions, maneuvered close enough to some Soviet submarines to take flash photographs of their hulls. But that was a thing of the past. The Russians were a lot better at the submarine game than they'd been only ten years earlier. Being number two did make one try harder.
“Now, the next engineering drill,” Ricks said.
The Executive Officer noted that the faces around the table didn't change The officers were learning not to groan or roll their eyes Ricks had a very limited sense of humor.
“Hello, Robby!” Joshua Painter got up from his swivel chair and walked over to shake hands with his
