'Yeah, even I'm not that ignorant. So here I am, Arnie. I didn't break the law. I served my country's interests as best I could under the circumstances, and look what good it's done me.'
'Damn. How is it that Bob Fowler never was told?'
'That was Sam and Al. They thought it would have poisoned Fowler's presidency. Besides, I don't really know what the two of them said to the President, do I? I never wanted to know, I never found out, and all I have is speculation—pretty good speculation,' Ryan admitted, 'but that's all.'
'Jack, it's not often I don't know what to say.'
'Say it anyway,' the President ordered.
'It's going to get out. The media has enough now to put some pieces together, and that will force Congress to launch an investigation. What about the other stuff?'
'It's all true,' Ryan said. 'Yeah, we got our hands on Red October, yeah, I got Gerasimov out myself. My idea, my operation, nearly got my ass killed, but there you go. If we hadn't, then Gerasimov was poised to launch his own coup to topple Andrey Narmonov—and then there might still be a Warsaw Pact, and the bad old days might never have gone away. So we compromised the bastard, and he didn't have any choices but to get on the airplane. He's still pissed despite all we did to get him set up over here, but I understand his wife and daughter like America just fine.'
'Did you kill anybody?' Arnie asked.
'In Moscow, no. In the sub—he was trying to self-destruct the submarine. He killed one of the ship's officers and shot up two others pretty bad, but I punched his ticket myself—and I had nightmares about it for years.'
In another reality, van Damm thought, his President would be a hero. But reality and public politics had little in common. He noted that Ryan hadn't recounted his story about Bob Fowler and the aborted nuclear launch. The chief of staff had been around for that one, and he knew that three days later, J. Robert Fowler had come nearly apart at the realization at how he'd been saved from mass murder on a Hitlerian scale. There was a line in Hugo's Les Miserables that had struck the older man when he'd first read the book in high school: 'What evil good can be.' Here was another case. Ryan had served his country bravely and well more than once, but not one of the things he'd done would survive public scrutiny. Intelligence, love of country, and courage merely added up to a series of events which anyone could twist out of recognition into scandal. And Ed Kealty knew how to do just that.
'How do we spin-control all this?' the President asked.
'What else do I need to know?'
'The files on Red October and Gerasimov are at Langley. The Colombian thing, well, you know what you need to know. I'm not sure even I have the legal right to unseal the records. On the other hand, you want to destabilize Russia? This will do it.'
RED OCTOBER, GOLOVKO thought, then he looked up at the high ceiling of his office. 'Ivan Emmetovich, you clever bastard. Zvo tvoyu maht!'
The curse was spoken in quiet admiration. From the first moment he'd met Ryan, he'd underestimated him. and even with all the contacts, direct and indirect, that had followed, he had to admit, he'd never stopped doing it. So that was how he'd compromised Gerasimov! And in so doing, he'd saved Russia, perhaps—but a country was supposed to be saved from within, not without. Some secrets were supposed to be kept forever, because they protected everyone equally. This was such a secret. It would embarrass both countries now. For the Russians, it was the loss of a valuable national asset through high treason—worse still, something their intelligence organs had not discovered, which was quite incredible on reflection, but the cover stories had been good ones, and the loss of two hunter submarines in the same operation had made the affair something that the Soviet navy had every desire to forget—and so they hadn't looked far beyond the cover story.
Sergey Nikolay'ch knew the second part better than the first. Ryan had forestalled a coup d'etat. Golovko supposed that Ryan might as easily have told him what was happening and left it to the Soviet Union's internal organs—but, no. Intelligence services turned everything to their advantage, and Ryan would have been mad not to have done so here. Gerasimov must have sung like a canary—he knew the Western aphorism—and given up everything he'd known; Ames, for one, had been identified that way, he was sure, and Ames had been a virtual diamond mine for KGB.
And you always told yourself that Ivan Emmetovich was a gifted amateur, Golovko thought.
But even his professional admiration was tempered. Russia might soon need help. How could she go for that help to someone who, it would now be known, had tampered with his country's internal politics like a puppeteer? That realization was worth another oath, not spoken in admiration of anything.
PUBLIC WATERWAYS ARE free for the passage of all, and so the Navy couldn't do anything more than prevent the charter boat from getting too close to the Eight-Ten Dock. Soon it was joined by another, then more still, until a total of eleven cameras were pointing at the covered graving dock, now empty with the demise of most of America's missile submarines, and also empty of another which had briefly lived there, not American, or so the story went.
It was possible to access the Navy's personnel records via computer, and some were doing that right now, checking for former crewmen of USS Dallas. An early-morning call to CoMSuuPAC concerning his tenure as commanding officer of Dallas got no farther than his public affairs officer, who was well-schooled in no-commenting sensitive inquiries. Today he'd get more than his fair share. So would others.
'THIS IS RON Jones.'
'This is Tom Donner at NEC News.'
'That's nice,' Jonesy said diffidently. 'I watch CNN myself.'
'Well, maybe you want to watch our show tonight. I'd like to talk to you about—'
'I read the Times this morning. It's delivered up here. No comment,' he added.
'But—'
'But, yes, I used to be a submariner, and they call us the Silent Service. Besides, that was a long time ago. I run my own business now. Married, kids, the whole nine yards, y'know?'
'You were lead sonar man aboard USS Dallas when—'
'Mr. Donner, I signed a secrecy agreement when I left the Navy. I don't talk about the things we did, okay?' It was his first encounter with a reporter, and it was living up to everything he'd ever been told to expect.
'Then all you have to do is tell us that it never happened.'
'That what never happened?' Jones asked.
'The defection of a Russian sub named Red October.'
'You know the craziest thing I ever heard as a sonar man?'
'What's that?'
'Elvis.' He hung up. Then he called Pearl Harbor.
WITH DAYLIGHT, THE TV trucks rolled through Winchester, Virginia, rather like the Civil War armies that had exchanged possession of the town over forty times.
He didn't actually own the house. It could not even be said that CIA did. The land title was in the name of a paper corporation, in turn owned by a foundation whose directors were obscure, but since real-property ownership in America is a matter of public record, and since all corporations and foundations were also, that data would be run down in less than two days, despite the tag on the files which told the clerks in the county courthouse to be creatively incompetent in finding the documents.
The reporters who showed up had still photos and taped file footage of Nikolay Gerasimov, and long lenses were set up on tripods to aim at the windows, a quarter mile away, past a few grazing horses which made for a nice touch on the story: CIA TREATS RUSSIAN SPYMASTER LIKE VISITING KING.
The two security guards at the house were going ape, calling Langley for instructions, but the CIA's public affairs office—itself rather an odd institution—didn't have a clue on this one, other than falling back on the stance that this was private property (whether or not that was legally correct under the circumstances was something CIA's lawyers were checking out) and that, therefore, the reporters couldn't trespass.
It had been years since he'd had much to laugh about. Sure, there had been the occasional light moment, but this was something so special that he'd never even considered its possibility. He'd always thought himself an expert on America. Gerasimov had run numerous spy operations against the 'Main Enemy,' as the United States had once been called in the nonexistent country he'd once served, but he admitted to himself that you had to come here and live here for a few years to understand how incomprehensible America was, how nothing made sense, how literally anything could happen, and the madder it was, the more likely it seemed. No imagination was sufficient to predict
