the University of Chicago should anything go wrong.
He would not attempt to rewire the SCRAM controls, he decided. One stray volt during the rewiring would drop the rods into the pile, killing the fission reaction. The reactor could be restarted, of course, if they knew what they were doing and had plenty of time and electrical power, but why take that risk?
'The electrical complexity is beyond my experience, Captain,' Brovkin said as he explained the intricacies of one of the major circuit-breaker panels. He led Kolnikov from panel to panel, showed him the fiber-optic wire bundles that carried information to the computers and actuators located throughout the ship. 'I have never seen anything like this. Without diagrams one would be hopelessly lost.' The electrical diagrams, several thousand of them, were in the computer, of course. Finding the right diagram was the biggest problem.
If anything went wrong, anything…
Brovkin grinned at him. The fool!
Kolnikov knew that he was on a tightrope without a net. If the reactor had a problem, he couldn't kill it from the control room. If he accidentally SCRAMed it, he probably couldn't restart it. Either way they were all dead men.
He wondered if the others had carefully considered the risks. Or were they here because they thought he had? Maybe they just didn't care. 'At some point in life you gotta just grab for it, man.' That was the American, Leon Rothberg's, explanation, and it was probably as good as any.
Kolnikov spent another hour exploring the boat, examining everything, trying to absorb all of it. The boat was two technological generations beyond anything he had seen in the Russian Navy or on the drawing tables. The torpedoes, fired by computers that displayed the tactical problem on large screens; the cruise missiles, with their breathtaking capabilities; and the remote periscope — all these things were marvels, yet the main technological jewel was the multistatic passive sonar. Truly it was a Revelation, revealing all things.
As he walked through the boat he paused often to listen and marvel at the quiet. He put his head against bulkheads, for any vibration or noise would be magnified by its transmission through a solid. Essentially nothing. As he listened he could hear his own heart beating. Years ago the Americans pioneered techniques to acoustically isolate mechanical noisemakers so the sound would not be transmitted throughout the hull of the boat. Now the Americans had taken that technology to a whole new level.
He would have to do something about the Americans crammed into the mess hall. Kolnikov conferred with Heydrich. 'I intend to find a ship and surface near it before dusk, put these men into the water, get rid of them.'
'Do you want to keep anyone?'
'No. We would have to watch anyone we kept, keeping our people up around the clock. Put them over the side.'
'Several of them probably have the combination of the crypto safe. No doubt I can persuade them to open it. The codebooks would make us extremely wealthy men.'
'They will be worth pennies when we find the time to peddle them; they aren't worth the effort. Put all the Americans over the side.'
Heydrich grimaced. 'These people will tell tales. Why not just shoot them, then jettison their bodies through a torpedo tube in the middle of the ocean?'
'You'd like that, wouldn't you?'
'I don't take unnecessary risks.'
'Risks are my department, Heydrich. We do it my way.'
CHAPTER THREE
As he rode the helicopter across the Delmarva peninsula and the Chesapeake Bay on his way back to Washington, Jake Grafton speculated about the urgent summons. He knew nothing about submarines — had spent his entire career in naval aviation.
He smiled to himself as he recalled Callie's enthusiasm this morning. When he was handed the assignment to the military liaison staff of the anti-ICBM project — Super Aegis — he had been depressed. He knew enough about the navy to understand that the job was a dead end, on the career path to nowhere. The liaison team would get no credit for a job well done. Problems that led to complaints from foreign governments, however, would earn everyone involved sufficient notoriety to force his or her retirement.
Callie hadn't seen it that way. This job was a fine opportunity, she said, a challenge. 'Someone chose you for this job because he knows you can do it well.'
Jake just nodded. He didn't tell her that Admiral Stuffy Stalnaker put Jake in this job because he didn't want to give him a job with a shot at promotion.
Ah, well. Bureaucracies were the same the world over. And regardless of how it went, Jake was ready to retire. Sharing the days with Callie would certainly be fun. And yet, as Callie had predicted, he was enjoying the challenge of the liaison team.
The space-based missile-defense system was a technological marvel, a marriage of computers, reactors, lasers, and infrared sensors that many said could never be made to work. That many didn't want to work. The system had certainly been expensive, more than fifty billion dollars so far, yet the politicians had approved the expenditures every step of the way. If SuperAegis worked — there was that caveat again — the industrial superpowers would be protected from the missiles of the great unwashed who hadn't been invited to share the prosperity of the booming world economy masterminded by the superpowers. That was the cynical view, of course, argued loudly and vehemently in Congress and the world press, but it lost out when the votes were counted. Politicians liked big-bucks defense projects and the public wanted protection. SuperAegis was a military-industrial PR dream come true, a hundred billion bucks for Congress to spend on something for everybody.
As the helicopter carrying Jake to Washington droned along, he reflected on the political battles and diplomatic maneuvering that had won approval for SuperAegis. Sharing the antimissile umbrella with Europe and Russia had been the masterstroke — an insight of pure genius from the secretary of state, Wallace Cornfeld — that had made SuperAegis diplomatically possible. And created a host of problems for the liaison team.
Inherent in the entire concept was the premise that the technology must be protected from states not under the SuperAegis umbrella, the so-called aggressor states. If an aggressor state learned enough about SuperAegis to defeat it, all the treasure and effort would have been expended in vain. Of course, the nations under the shield wanted to ensure that once SuperAegis was in the sky and operational, the United States could not turn it off if the winds of fortune shifted into another quadrant. In addition, the Americans did not want the Russians or Europeans to learn too much about the system for fear they would figure out ways to defeat it in some future crisis, nullifying its capabilities. SuperAegis presented a monstrously complex technical and political problem; military liaison was the place where many of these cares and concerns came together, generating heat and smoke and — who knows? — maybe fire.
Jake's boss was an air force three-star, Lieutenant General Art Blevins. Jake had tried to explain to General Blevins that the liaison team faced an impossible challenge. 'There is no way,' he argued,
'that we can absolutely prevent leaks or prove that leaks have not occurred. And to the extent that any potential enemy penetrates the security walls and learns about the technology, the SuperAegis shield is less effective. For the countries under the umbrella to have absolute protection, security would have to be absolutely perfect. The only way to get close to that standard would be to execute everyone who knows anything about SuperAegis as soon as the system is operational. Even then, we might get 'em too late.'
'I would appreciate it if you would put that recommendation in writing,' Art Blevins said. Although he never smiled, he did have a sense of humor. A small one.
'Security is never perfect,' Jake acknowledged, marching bravely where no one else cared to go. 'Still, a hundred billion bucks isn't peanuts, and it's being expended for a system that an aggressor may know how to defeat when crunch time rolls around. And the protected nations will not know about the holes in the shield until the missiles fall on their heads.'
Blevins didn't seem disturbed by Jake's theorizing. 'All military systems have that flaw,' he remarked.
'Sir, it strikes me that SuperAegis is our Maginot Line. And you know what happened to the French.'
