'He'll never hear him. I'll bet a silver dollar that he's under that ferry this very minute.'
'That would be a good bet, Captain, but we can't pick him out of the return at this range. If you want to close, we can keep trying.'
'This guy won't wait for us to search the haystack,' Harvey War-field said with conviction. He knew that pinning a submarine in shallow water under less than ideal conditions was an impossible task for a guided-missile destroyer like the
'Just like that,' Captain Warfield stormed at his XO. 'Just like that! I will make a prediction. I predict that before very long those bastards in the Pentagon are going to wish to God they had given the order to destroy that boat before it submerged.'
Kolnikov did use the ferry, not by running along under it, but by keeping it between the submarine and the destroyer when he left the destroyer's wake. As he stole slowly away he was careful not to put the destroyer directly astern, in his baffles, so he could still see it on the sonar presentation. The active pinging from the destroyer's sonar resembled flashes of light on the screen.
When the destroyer was miles behind, Kolnikov threw the sub into a series of hard, tight turns designed to allow him to check his baffles to see if an American submarine was trailing him.
The sea was empty.
'It feels strange going to sea without an American boat following along with his nose up our ass,' Turchak remarked.
Kolnikov thought this remark amusing. American attack subs usually picked up Russian boomers as they left port and followed them for months, quite sure the Russians didn't know they were there.
'I think this time we are really alone,' Kolnikov replied jovially and slapped Turchak on the back.
With the sonar presentation showing open sea ahead and to all sides,
CHAPTER TWO
Rear Admiral Jake Grafton and his wife, Callie, awoke Saturday at their beach house in Delaware. They had guests this weekend, both of whom were apparently still asleep. The Graftons pulled on pants and shirts, and tiptoed down the stairs and out the front door. They sat on the porch steps to put on their shoes, walked the block along the crushed seashell street to the public parking area, then crossed the dune on the boardwalk. Standing on the beach in deep sand, they took off their shoes again, tied the laces together, and draped them around their necks.
The wind this morning was off the sea. The Graftons walked along arm in arm as seabirds ran along the sand probing for mollusks and the September breeze played with their hair. They tried to get to the beach several times per month, but with two hectic schedules they were lucky to get there once every other month. This weekend trip had been eagerly anticipated for three weeks. Jake normally spent twelve hours a day at the office, seven days a week.
When the couple bought the beach house years ago they anticipated living here when Jake retired. As Callie walked the beach this morning, she suddenly realized that she and Jake hadn't discussed retirement in quite a while. He hadn't mentioned the future in months.
She glanced at him. He had thinning hair, which he combed straight back, and a lean face with a nose that was a trifle too large. His tan, she noticed, was pretty much gone. She reminded herself to make sure he put on sunblock when they returned home.
Now he smiled at her and squeezed her hand. 'We've got to get over here more often,' he murmured. 'It isn't fair for me to keep you cooped up in that flat in Washington.'
'If I wanted to come by myself, I could. I just don't like coming here without you.'
'I know how you feel.' He smiled again.
'Last night was a lot of fun,' she said. 'I really like the Russian, Ilin.' Last night Toad Tarkington, Jake's executive assistant, arrived at the beach house with Janos Ilin, a Russian.
Jake absentmindedly released her hand and jammed both fists into his trouser pockets. 'He's really smart,' Jake said tentatively. 'Supposed to be a bureaucrat in the Russian defense department, an accountant, he says. He's certainly a people person, smooth as old scotch. Almost too much so. This guy could sell magazine subscriptions at a home for the blind or charm his way out of jail. At times I wonder what the man who lives in there is really like.'
'Supposed to be a bureaucrat?'
'I think he's a very senior officer in the foreign intelligence service, the SVR, which is the successor to the KGB. Same paranoid bunch running it, doing all the nasty stuff they always did, but they aren't Communists now, they say. As if that makes a difference in an authoritarian society.'
'Do you really think having him here is a good idea?'
'Maybe not, but Ilin didn't want to spend the weekend at the Russian embassy and Toad didn't want to just turn him loose to see what trouble he could get into. Hell, the guy's first taste of freedom — he might run off to Vegas with a topless dancer sporting a new boob job and never be heard from again. You can imagine the repercussions!'
She made a rude noise.
'Toad had to do something with the guy,' Jake said with a shrug. 'His wife's on a cruise and the kid is at his grandmother's. Toad knew you and I were coming to the beach, so he brought him here.'
'Ilin makes a nice houseguest. I enjoyed visiting last night.'
Jake smiled. Callie, the linguist, had been studying Russian for the last year. Last night she refused to speak to Ilin in English, which he spoke well. The two of them had laughed merrily as she chattered away in fractured, broken, semi-intelligible Russian.
'Even if he is a spook, he's very charming,' she said as they strolled along, Jake with his hands in his pockets, Callie with her arms crossed in front of her.
Jake took his time choosing his words, then said slowly, 'He replaced the last Russian six weeks ago, two weeks after the Super-Aegis satellite was lost. The other guy was called home for a family emergency, according to Ilin. The other guy went back to the embassy one evening and Ilin showed up the next day with credentials and an explanation.'
'So have they figured out what went wrong?' Callie asked now. She touched Jake on the arm and he automatically reached for her hand.
'NASA is investigating. And the Russian rocket experts and the European experts. Someone said that every time three people meet in an office, it's like a session of the UN Security Council. I hear they even have the FBI turning over rocks and going through waste-baskets. In any event, no one is telling us diddley-squat.'
A thorough, comprehensive search had failed to find the satellite or the reactor it contained. Nor could any trace of excess radiation be found, which one would expect if the reactor had been damaged in the crash. Even worse, no one knew why the launch had failed or the entire tracking system had shut down.
'Surely there must be some theories,' Callie murmured.
'Theories are four for a dollar,' her husband admitted ruefully. 'NASA insists the prelaunch and launch procedures are not the problem, the Russians insist there is nothing wrong with Russian rockets, the Europeans deny that the expedited testing procedures they demanded for cost-containment purposes are to blame… but the fact is the satellite didn't reach orbit. It was presumably lost at sea.'
'I don't understand why it hasn't been found. It must be somewhere under the launch path. Shouldn't it?'
'Well, there's a debate about that. The trajectory was curving to the north when the third stage failed to
