Debt of Honor

Sierra-One as a definite submarine contact, operating on his electric motors.' Junior told himself that Laval here had made his rep stalking HEN-class Russian subs, which were about as hard to track as an earthquake. He adjusted his headphones. 'Bearing steady at two-seven-four, getting hints of a blade rate on the guy.'

'Solution light,' the lead fire-controlman reported. 'I have a valid solution for tube three on target Sierra- One.'

'Left ten-degrees rudder, come to new course one-eight-zero,' Kennedy ordered next to get a crossbearing, from which would come a better range-gate on the target, and also data on the sub's course and speed. 'Let's slow her down, turns for five knots.'

The stalk was always the fun part.

'If you do that, you're cutting your own throat with a dull knife,' Anne Quinlan said in her customarily direct way.

Kealty was sitting in his office. Ordinarily the number-two man in any organization would be in charge when number-one was away, but the miracle of modern communications meant that Roger could do everything he needed to do at midnight over Antarctica if he had to. Including putting out a press statement from his aircraft in Moscow that he was hanging his Vice President out to dry. Kealty's first instinct was to proclaim to the entire world that he knew he had the confidence of his President. That would hint broadly that the news stories were true, and muddy the waters sufficiently to give him room to maneuver, the thing he needed most of all.

'What we need to know, Ed,' his chief of staff pointed out, not for the first time, 'is who the hell started this.' That was the one thing the story had left out, clever people that reporters were. She couldn't ask him how many of the women in his office he'd visited with his charms. For one thing he probably didn't remember, and for another, the hard part would be identifying those he hadn't.

'Whoever it was, it was somebody close to Lisa,' another staffer observed. That insight made light bulbs flash inside every head in the office.

'Barbara.'

'Good guess,' the 'Chief'—which was how Quinlan liked to be identified—thought. 'We need to confirm that, and we need to settle her down some.'

'Woman scorned,' Kealty murmured.

'Ed, I don't want to hear any of that, okay?' the Chief warned. 'When the hell are you going to learn that 'no' doesn't mean 'maybe later'? Okay, I'll go see Barbara myself, and maybe we can talk her out of this, but, god- dammit, this is the last time, okay?'

'OK!!'

18—Easter Egg

'Is this where the dresser was?' Ryan asked.

'I keep forgetting how well informed you are,' Golovko observed, just to flatter his guest, since the story was actually widely known.

Jack grinned, still feeling more than a little of Alice-through-the-Looking-Glass. There was a completely ordinary door in the wall now, but until the time of Yuri Andropov, a large wooden clothes cabinet had covered it, for in the time of Beriya and the rest, the entrance to the office of Chairman of the KGB had to be hidden. There was no door off the main corridor, and none visible even in the anteroom. The melodrama of it had to have been absurd, Ryan thought, even to Lavrentiy Beriya, whose morbid fear of assassination—though hardly unreasonable —had dreamed up this obtuse security measure. It hadn't helped him avoid death at the hands of men who'd hated him even more than they'd feared him. Still and all, wasn't it bizarre enough just for the President's National Security Advisor to enter the office of the Chairman of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service? Beriya's ashes must have been stirring up somewhere, Ryan thought, in whatever sewer they'd dropped the urn. He turned to look at his host, his mind imagining the oak bureau still, and halfway wishing they'd kept the old name of KGB, Committee for State Security, just for tradition's sake.

'Sergey Nikolay'ch, has the world really changed so much in the past—God, only ten years?'

'Not even that, my friend.' Golovko waved Jack to a comfortable leather chair that dated back to the building's previous incarnation as home office of the Rossiya Insurance Company. 'And yet we have so far to go.'

Business, Jack thought. Well, Sergey had never been bashful about that. Ryan remembered looking into the wrong end of a pistol in this man's hand. But that had all taken place before the so- called end of history.

'I'm doing everything I can, Sergey. We got you the five billion for the missiles. That was a nice scam you ran on us, by the way.' Ryan checked his watch. The ceremony was scheduled for the evening. One Minuteman-III and one SS-19 left—if you didn't count the SS-19's in Japan that had been reconfigured to launch satellites.

'We have many problems, Jack.'

'Fewer than a year ago,' Ryan observed, wondering what the next request would be. 'I know you advise President Grushavoy on more than just intelligence matters. Come on, Sergey, things are getting better. You know that.'

'Nobody ever told us that democracy would be so hard.'

'It's hard for us, too, pal. We rediscover it every day.'

'The frustration is that we know we have everything we need to make our country prosperous. The problem is in making everything work. Yes, I advise my president on many things—'

'Sergey, if you're not one of the best-informed people in your country, I would be very surprised.'

'Hmm, yes. Well, we are surveying eastern Siberia, so many things, so many resources. We have to hire Japanese to do it for us, but what they are finding…' His voice trailed off.

'You're building up to something, Sergey. What is it?'

'We think they do not tell us everything. We dug up some surveys done in the early thirties. They were in archives in the Ministry of the Interior. A deposit of gadolinium in an unlikely place. At the time there were few uses for that metal, and it was forgotten until some of my people did a detailed search of old data. Gadolinium now has many uses, and one of their survey teams camped within a few kilometers of the deposit. We know it's real. The thirties team brought back samples for assay. But it was not included in their last report.'

'And?' Jack asked.

'And I find it curious that they lied to us on this,' Golovko observed, taking his time. You didn't build up to a play like this all that quickly.

'How are you paying them for the work?'

'The agreement is that they will assist us in the exploitation of many of the things they find for us. The terms are generous.'

'Why would they lie?' Ryan inquired.

Golovko shook his head. 'I do not know. It might be important to find out. You are a student of history, are you not?'

It was one of the things that each respected about the other. Ryan might have written off Golovko's concerns as yet another example of Russian paranoia—sometimes he thought that the entire concept had been invented in this country—but that would have been unfair. Russia had fought Japan under the Czar in 1904-1905 and lost, along the way giving the Japanese Navy a landmark victory at the Battle of the Tsushima Strait. Thai war had gone a long way toward destroying the Romanovs and to elevating Japan to world-power status, which had led to their involvement in two world wars. It had also inflicted a bleeding sore on the Russian psyche that Stalin had remembered well enough to recover the lost territories. The Japanese had also been involved in post-World War I efforts to topple the Bolsheviks. They'd put a sizable army into Siberia, and hadn't been all that enthusiastic about withdrawing it. The same thing had happened again, in 1938 and 1939, with more serious consequences this time, first at the hands of Marshal Blyukher, and then a guy named Zhukov. Yes, there was much history between Russia and Japan.

'In this day and age, Sergey?' Ryan asked with a wry expression.