America

for a human ear to detect. Nothing else. He wondered about that oil pump. Why did it fail now? The trim pumps were oh so quiet, with new, well-lubricated bearings. The air circulation fans, the condensers… the boat was like a giant Swiss watch with a million moving parts.

Eck's face appeared green in the reflected light of his screen as he experimented with the Revelation computer. The large display screens on the bulkhead were quite dark, not because the sea was very quiet but because most of the natural noises of the sea had been filtered out. The system was waiting, listening, for a noise that should not be there. Still, an occasional flicker or momentary illumination showed ill-defined, ever-changing, fantastic shapes. They are nothing, Kolnikov decided, nothing at all. Or were they?

'This is an extraordinary system,' Eck said when he realized Kolnikov was watching over his shoulder. 'The computer can detect frequencies and wave patterns that are too faint to be presented optically. Ships at hundreds of miles, planes, whales calling for their mates — it's a fantastic piece of gear.'

'Skip the whales. Find me a submarine.'

'They are out here,' Eck said with conviction. 'I hear screw noises, gurgles… much too faint and momentary to get a bearing on. But they are real. I hear them. Revelation hears them. They are out there.' '

'Umm,' Kolnikov said. He too thought the American submarines were in these waters hunting America, and perhaps also British and French boats, but he didn't choose to discuss it with Eck. Eck, on the other hand, was not reticent. 'I thank my stars,' the German continued, 'I am not out there in this sea in one of those noisy old East German boats with this thing hunting me. God, it gives me chills just thinking of it!'

Kolnikov was idly watching the compass and monitoring the opening and closing of trim valves when Georgi Turchak came into the control room. He took Kolnikov aside and spoke very softly so that Eck wouldn't hear. 'It's the bearings in that pump. It's in a tight space and difficult to work on.' So..

'It's a bigger job than I thought. Three or four more hours, at least. We must drain the oil from the housing and rig a hoist to handle the pieces when we break it apart. And if we screw up the gaskets, we're out of luck: The spare parts inventories don't show any aboard.'

'So what happens if we can't get it back together?'

'We are out of luck. The pump forces oil into the main bearings. Without it—' He left the sentence unfinished.

'Can we limp along as is?'

Turchak nodded. 'If you are willing to tolerate the noise. And we proceed slowly.'

'An oil circulation pump…' Kolnikov tilted the stool and put his feet up on the tactical presentation. He studied his shoes.

'The men are worried,' Turchak said. 'They know the thing will make noise. They talked of little else while we worked.'

'What do you think?' Kolnikov asked and eyed his friend.

'We have done all we can, Vladimir Ivanovich. You must weigh the risks and decide how to proceed.'

'I must decide?'

'You.' Turchak sat heavily in the chair in front of the helm controls. 'My wife is dead, I haven't talked to my son in years — hell, I don't know where he is, and I guarantee you he doesn't know or care where I am. We are expendable, you, me, all of us. No one cares whether we live or die, whether we go back to France or Russia or wherever.' He jerked his head toward the rear of the boat. 'Those men back there helping me. They have no one. Oh, they want money, a chance at life. But they have nothing in this world. So you decide. Is the risk worth it?'

'What have we got to lose, eh?'

'Only our lives.'

'And they are worth precisely nothing.'

'Nothing at all,' Turchak said heavily.

'Okay,' said Vladimir Kolnikov. 'Let's crack the pump housing, replace the bearings. Try not to screw up the gaskets. If we can get it all back together more or less the way the shipyard had it, we'll get under way. Slowly.'

'What if we can't?'

'You are a good submariner, Georgi Alexandrovich. Do the best you can and we'll all live with it.'

'And then?'

'And then,' Kolnikov said, trying to sound optimistic, 'we will get under way and motor merrily toward the programmed launch point. If the tactical display is correct, we are only twenty-three miles southwest of it. We will head for it at five knots. Begin a gentle ascent so we get as little hull popping as possible as the pressure comes off. We will poke our masts up, get a GPS update, shoot, then run like hell.'

'It will be broad daylight. Midday.'

'That's right.'

'The Americans will be all over us.'

'We will go deep. I think this boat might take two thousand feet. We will find out, eh? That's below the depth any Los Angeles-ca.ss boat can reach. With a smidgen of good fortune, there will be some kind of thermal or salinity incongruity below a thousand feet. We will run awhile, clear the area, then go dead in the water and drift. They won't expect that. Deep and dead silent, we will be devilishly difficult to find. We'll drift for days if necessary. We'll outwait them. We've got plenty of time. The Americans will get impatient and eventually leave.'

'Drifting…' said Turchak, thinking about it.

'I've been watching the compass. The boat has turned about eighty degrees in the last two hours as we drifted. The trim pumps have had no trouble controlling our pitch attitude, and they are brand-new, dead quiet. If necessary, we could use the screw a little to give the planes some bite. A knot of way at the most, I trfink.' He thought about it a moment, then added, 'I have never seen a boat so quiet. I can hear my heart pounding. Drifting like this, we almost cease to exist.'

'The American subs will be looking for a quiet place in the sea,' Turchak objected. 'A black hole in a noisy universe. You know that as well as I.'

'Old boats are too noisy, this one is too quiet — what would it take to please you, good friend?'

'What if an attack boat shows up in the neighborhood and goes active?'

Kolnikov got out his lighter and played with it. 'I don't think an American skipper will take that risk. If he goes active, he's a beaconing target.'

'We'd better have a couple of fish ready,' Turchak advised. 'And we'd better be ready to run like hell. Just in case there's an American skipper out there with a bigger set of balls than you normally see in the woods.'

In Washington that morning Jake Grafton found that Flap Le Beau had sent a car and driver to pick him up. As the car carried him the two miles to the Pentagon, he scanned an intelligence summary of the previous day's events. He also glanced out the window, watching the traffic, which seemed to be almost back to normal. Most of the commuters lived in the suburbs, so their automobiles were far enough from the blast of the E-warheads to escape damage. There were no traffic signals in Washington this morning, of course, but police officers directed traffic at every major intersection. Heaven knows what the commuters would do when they reached work— perhaps add columns of figures by candlelight in buildings with windows that could not be opened.

The old mansion at the center of the White House complex had burned completely to the ground. Fortunately the East and West wings had been saved, but between them was a smoldering heap of rubble. Two people had died; one person had been critically burned.

The intelligence summary contained some specific assessments of damage caused by the two E-warheads and rough estimates of how long the repair efforts would take. And how much they would cost. The price tag was in the billions. Insurance lawyers were telling the press that the 'act of war' exclusion clauses present in every insurance policy meant that none of the damage was covered. Other lawyers were disputing that conclusion, arguing that unless it could be shown that a foreign power was behind the theft of the submarine that had launched the missiles, the act of war clauses should not apply. What was obvious was that the insurance companies had no intention of paying anyone but lawyers a solitary dime unless and until they were ordered to do so by final judgments of appellate courts, a position that was certainly in the finest traditions of American business. Make the bastards sue.