America

radiating noise into the water and listening for echoes. She was deep, perhaps so deep that the radiating beams would be deflected before or after they echoed off her hull. Then again. .

If he sank La Jolla, removed her from the problem, the P-3s would be free to ping. Still, finding a deep-running boat this quiet under the thermal layers would be very difficult. With luck, they might pull it off. And Kolnikov and Turchak and their colleagues would be dead. Of course, with La Jolla out of the problem, Kolnikov would be free to maneuver America to the extent of her capabilities and use the built-in tricks, such as the noisemakers and decoys.

La Jolla was much shallower than America, perhaps eight hundred feet deep. She was making four knots, hadn't altered course. She was, Kolnikov concluded, running up a bearing line that she had established when she heard the Tomahawk launches. She undoubtedly had her towed array deployed, maximizing her listening capability, although of course he couldn't see the array on the sonar displays. Perhaps if he were closer…

Or went active.

What if…?

'Let's find out how quiet this boat really is,' he said to Georgi Turchak. 'Ahead one-third, begin an ascent, then turn in behind La Jolla, staying at least a hundred feet below her wake so we won't get tangled in her array.'

'Are you crazy?' Turchak hissed.

'Sooner or later this guy may go active. He won't see us unless he does. If he does, we want to be below and slightly behind him. And we want to stay there. Now let's do it.'

'Why don't you just torpedo him now?' Heydrich asked conversationally, 'before he knows we are here. Escaping this P-3 afterward should not be difficult.'

'I signed on for the money, not to kill sailors.'

Turchak looked at him askance. 'Vladimir Ivanovich…'

'I have to sleep nights, goddamn it! Ahead one-third.'

Without another word Turchak pushed the power lever to the one-third-ahead setting and began the process of ascending as the boat accelerated. La Jolla was at one o'clock, crossing from left to right at a forty-five-degree angle, so he should be able to rendezvous without exceeding La Jolla's speed. Apparently she had not detected the beat of America's prop. If he had to speed up to catch her, the frequency would change, and detection might follow.

Let's be realistic, Turchak thought. America was going to be right behind her! He didn't know whether to laugh or cry. In all the years he had known Kolnikov he hadn't realized that the man was willing to bet everything in one wild, suicidal gamble.

Both men were watching the computer presentation in front of Turchak, and the forward-looking sonar display, so they didn't see Rothberg staring unblinkingly at their backs.

The explosion of the two Flashlight E-bomb warheads over Manhattan caused a complete, total, massive power failure in the heart of the most wired city on the planet. At the NASDAQ and New York Stock Exchanges the indexes had already fallen the maximum amount allowed in one day and the authorities had suspended trading minutes before the trillion-watt electromagnetic pulses destroyed the computers and communications equipment that made trading possible. The television and radio broadcasting network nerve centers in Manhattan were destroyed, leaving people all over the globe wondering why the video and audio of their program had suddenly disappeared.

Telephone switching units, Internet servers, mobile telephone transmission towers, heat and air-conditioning units, office equipment — the devastation was as total as that which had struck Washington, but affected more people since New York was a larger, denser city and the hub of so many of the world's networks.

Of course the power grid in the affected area failed. The fused switches and massive short circuits dragged down the power grid throughout the northeastern United States. All of New England temporarily lost power, as well as upstate New York, New Jersey, and much of Pennsylvania.

Electric trains all over the area coasted to a stop. Within a three-mile radius of the blasts, the electric motors in subway trains and regular locomotives were destroyed.

Fortunately the FAA administrator had grounded non-emergency private and commercial flights east of the Mississippi River — visiting a financial disaster upon the airlines and their employees and stranding and outraging a large portion of the traveling public — so no airliners packed with people fell from the sky. The electrical systems and navigation gear in the airplanes parked at Newark and JFK were totaled by the E-warhead blasts. The electromagnetic pulses from the blasts were sufficiently weak by the time they hit the aircraft parked at LaGuardia that they only damaged them, destroyed some delicate avionics, and left better-grounded or — shielded boxes unharmed.

Two police helicopters, airborne when the warheads detonated, went into uncontrolled autorotations, killing all aboard when they screwed themselves into the ground; a medevac helicopter transporting a heart attack victim crashed on final approach to a hospital landing pad; and a private jet descending into the New York area with a cargo of human organs for transplant went nose-first into the Hudson River.

In the minutes following the blast, millions of Manhattan office workers waited impatiently for power to be restored. Of course, the recent attack on Washington was common knowledge, so many immediately assumed the worst. As people discovered that even battery-operated devices no longer worked, the realization that New York had been attacked by E-warheads from USS America spread like wildfire.

When emergency generators failed to restore any level of electrical service — the emergency generators' were themselves dead — the dimensions of the disaster began making themselves felt as people tried to exit their buildings. Elevators were stuck where they had been when the pulses arrived. Those in transit were hung up between floors. Emergency crews began working to extract the passengers, a task that would take as long as twenty-four hours in some cases. The vast bulk of the people trapped in the office towers of Manhattan began trekking down endless dark staircases.

On the street they found that the sound of the city had completely changed. Not a single gasoline or diesel engine was running. The sounds of the streets were voices, angry, unhappy, some panicked, as everyone stared at streets crammed with dead vehicles. The gridlock nightmare extended from the Battery to Central Park and beyond. Many vehicles contained people trapped by electronic door locks that wouldn't open. Policemen used gun butts to shatter the safety glass of vehicles with people trapped inside. Since there were not enough police, volunteers attacked windows with anything handy.

Times Square, the beating heart of the city of New York, that pop-art cathedral to tacky outdoor advertising, was dark and strangely quiet. Theater and movie marquees and the giant electronic billboards were blank, the human energy gone. Under an overcast sky, New Yorkers and pilgrims alike stood stunned amid the ominously dead buildings, unsure what to think or do.

Endless columns of frightened, claustrophobic people trudged through Stygian subway tunnels to escape stalled trains and climbed the stairs from dark stations. They formed unmoving crowds at the subway exits, trapping those still underground, as they stared dis-believingly at the traffic jam from hell that blocked the streets.

Reports trickled in via messengers to police stations and City Hall. An absolute electrical failure — even water had ceased to flow through many of the city's supply pipes since the pumps that moved it were disabled. Without water, the sewage system would stop carrying away waste products.

The authorities quickly realized that they faced a catastrophic disaster of the first order of magnitude. Approximately eight million people were trapped in the affected parts of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, Manhattan, and New Jersey, unable to escape from a city that in one terrible moment had been rendered incapable of sustaining human life. Worse, getting outside help to the people who would need it would be extremely difficult; in fact, in many places, getting food and water in would be impossible for days to come — perhaps even weeks. Eight million people would need a lot of help. The usual disaster assistance organizations were going to be totally inadequate.

Gradually the authorities came to the realization that New York City, the beating heart of high-tech America, had become a death trap.

The warehouse in Newark that housed Hudson Security Services was far enough away from the epicenter of the two Tomahawk blasts over Manhattan that most of the computers inside escaped damage. Surge protectors