submarine goes deep. Our job is to deliver these weapons.”
“Deliver?” Saratov murmured, his voice a mere whisper.
“These are old warheads from ICBMS, from the days when our missiles were not very accurate. To ensure the target would be destroyed even if the missile missed by a few miles, the designers heavily enriched the warheads. Each of these weapons yields one hundred meg-aeons.”
“One hundred million tons of TNT equivalent …” said Askold, staring at the containers.
Saratov scrutinized the general’s face. The man was mad. Or a damned fool.
“You have never been on a dieselstelectric submarine, have you?”
“No,” Esenin admitted.
“Any submarine?” Saratov bored in. “Have you ever been on any submarine?”
Saratov tried to collect his thoughts. “General, I don’t know who made this decision, but it was misinformed. A dieselstelectric submarine is an anachronism, an artifact from a bygone age. Every decision the captain makes, all of them, revolves around keeping the battery charged.”
Esenin looked unimpressed.
“These boats don’t really go anywhere,” Saratov explained. “They merely occupy a position. They can hide, but they can’t run. When discovered, they are so immobile that they can easily be destroyed. Do you understand that?”
“You made it to Tokyo Bay.”
“Indeed. And a heroic feat it was! All the Japanese antisubmarine forces were on the other side of the island, in the Sea of Japan.”
“We will have to be smarter than the Japanese.”
“Smarter? When this boat runs at three knots, it must snorkel one hour out of every twenty-four. At six knots, it must snorkel eight hours out of twenty-four. If we cannot get the snorkel up, we are down to one or two knots, just steerage way.” Saratov felt his voice rise. “I have been pinned before by American ASW forces. In peacetime. You cannot imagine what it is like, knowing they have you, knowing they can kill you if they wish, anytime they wish. My God, man! I’ve had dummy depth charges knock tiles off the sub’s skin.”
“I think you are a coward.”
Saratov took two deep breaths. “That may be the case, sir. But coward or not, I think you are a fool.”
“This boat is the only submarine we have in the Pacific,” Esenin said, shrugging. “It will have to do.”
“We are on a fool’s errand, a suicide mission. A competent antisub-marine force will quickly locate and kill us.” Pavel Saratov pointed at the deck. “Don’t you understand? This steel tube will be your coffin.”
“This boat will have to do.”
Saratov couldn’t believe it. “Why don’t you go alone, in a rowboat?
You will have the same chance of success, and sixty other men won’t die with you.”
“Enough of this,” Esenin snarled.
“So if by some miracle we get to Tokyo, we find an empty pier and tie up alongside. Your men steal a truck and you haul the warheads over to the rotunda of the Diet?”
The corner of Esenin’s mouth twitched.
“Better weld them to the deck, here in front of the sail,” Saratov said. He walked forward to the open hatch leading into the torpedo room. The men were loading torpedoes this morning. Four were already in. He stood with his back to Esenin, watching the men work the hoist and manhandle the ungainly fish.
The morning was warm, with little wind. Last year’s autumn leaves were crunchy underfoot.
Janos Ilin stood on a small hill amid the trees smoking a cigarette. His suit coat was open. Leaning against a tree was a rocket-propelled grenade (Rpg) launcher. At the foot of the hill, thirty meters from where Ilin stood, was a paved road.
The road was one of the feeders into the Lenin Hills, north of Moscow. Aleksandr Kalugin had a dacha three kilometers farther north. He would be coming along this road soon, as he did every morning, on his way to the Kremlin with his bodyguards. Kalugin had an apartment in the Kremlin, of course, which he used whenever he did not wish to spend an evening at home with his wife. For reasons unknown to Ilin, last night Kalugin had gone home. He was there now.
Kalugin’s armored Mercedes would soon be along. Two other vehicles would accompany it, both large black Mercedes, one in front of Kalugin’s vehicle, one behind. Each of the guard cars contained five heavily armed bodyguards who normally wore bulletproof vests. These men were competent, ruthless, and very dangerous. Janos Ilin had but himself and four other men. He intended to kill the bodyguards before they could get out of their cars. If he failed, the bodyguards would kill him.
Ilin had picked this spot with care.
Only a short stretch of road was visible here. The cars would come around a curve fifty meters away. The road was banked and wooded on either side here, so the cars could not leave the road. If the road was blocked, the cars would be trapped.
This whole setup gave Ilin a bad feeling, but he could not afford to spend time finding a better one. Unfortunately, Kalugin was paranoid — with good reason one had to admit — and his security force was top-notch. So far, the president’s loyal ones had not caught wind of Ilin’s intentions, a situation that could not last forever. Ilin was well aware of the security dynamics: he must strike soon or not at all.
Smoking the cigarette and enjoying the warmth of the morning air, Ilin wished he had more men. He had considered asking Marshal Stolypin for a few, then decided the gain would not be worth the risk. He had spent five years with the men he had now; trust was something that did not grow overnight. And trustworthy or not, every additional person admitted to the conspiracy increased the likelihood that it would be discovered. Janos Ilin, spymaster, well knew about conspiracies, the building blocks of Russian history.
The day before, he had gone to see Marshal Stolypin with a cassette player and a tape. On the tape was a conversation between Kalugin and one of his lieutenants, who at the time was in Gorky.
Stolypin had said nothing as he listened to the two men discussing the nuclear destruction of Tokyo. They debated the American response, discussed the probability that the Japanese might retaliate, and then got down to it.
“Unless we use extraordinary measures, Japan will inevitably win the war,” Kalugin told his confederate. “Our nation is too poor to finance the effort it will take to win with a conventional army and air force. The gap is too great.”
“You must seize absolute power. Destroy all who oppose you.”
“That would take time, and there is many a pitfall along the way. I have thought long about Russia. No one can take Russia back to where it used to be. No one. And if we try, the deputies will rescind their grants of power. Either the government will fall or Russia will face civil war again.”
“I, too, hear these things.”
“We must defeat the Japanese,” Kalugin said. “Victory or death — those are our alternatives. You understand?”
“I do. Have you seen the genuine affection the people have for Captain Saratov? Crowds chanting his name, resolutions demanding that he be promoted, decorated, his picture plastered all over Moscow…
Stolypin listened to the rest of it, then shoved the cassette recorder back across the table toward Ilin.
“If we want our country, we will have to fight for it,” Ilin said. “Again.”
The old man rubbed his hair with a hand, looking at nothing. “He is sending a submarine to Tokyo. Nuclear weapons will be aboard. The plan is to put the weapons in a fault on the seafloor. There is a fanatic aboard, a man named Esenin. He swore an oath to Kalugin. If threatened with destruction, he will detonate the weapons in the mouth of Tokyo Bay.”
“Will he do it?”
“By reputation, he is a patriotic zealot. He was an assassin for the GRU.”
“Yuri Esenin?”
“That’s right.”
“I thought he was dead.”
This morning Janos Ilin finished another cigarette without tasting it, then glanced at his watch. It was a few minutes past seven. He stamped his feet impatiently. The radio came to life. “Car.”
Fifteen seconds later, a black Mercedes came around the curve and into view. Nope. One of the ministers.
