America

to the side of the road and got out of the car. Ilin did likewise. They were alongside a cow pasture. Jake and Ilin climbed the fence and walked fifteen or twenty yards.

'They are not listening,' Jake said. 'I guarantee it.'

Ilin laughed. 'Your guarantee only means that you do not know if they are listening. I must factor in the possibility that you have a pure heart and an ignorant head.'

'The world is never as it seems,' Jake murmured.

'Occasionally it is,' Ilin said.

'You are evading the question. How did the Russian government find out about the Blackbeard team. Answer it or refuse to do so, your choice.'

'One of the members of the team told us.'

'But the CIA vetted them,' Jake pointed out. 'None were SVR.'

'A Russian cannot get out of Russia without the approval of the SVR. He can't get an exit visa. The bureaucracy knows something, always something, about everyone. They never let go. A Russian can never escape them. One of the members of the team worried that the SVR would eventually find out about his participation in the scheme and retaliate against him or his relatives. So he reported it.'

'Who turned the team, told it to steal a U.S. sub?'

'I don't know.' Ilin shrugged.

'The SVR?'

'That is a possibility. I do not know.'

'Would a matter like that be routinely shared with you?'

'Never. Unless I was a part of the operation.'

'How did you learn of the Blackbeard team?'

'I was assigned the job of making contact with one of them.'

'Did you?'

'Yes. The one who betrayed their mission.'

'But you told the director of the CIA of the team's existence?'

'Yes.'

'Why?'

As Ilin weighed his answer, Jake added, 'Were you told to do so by your government?'

'No.'

'It was your idea?'

Ilin nodded, as if examining that reality for the first time. 'Yes.'

'If you had not told, what would have happened?'

'Presumably the team would have been captured in Russia, interrogated, perhaps tried publicly. It is difficult to predict because the decision about what to do with them would have been made at the highest levels based on what the leadership wanted from the United States at that time. It is possible they would have been executed secretly.' He raised his shoulders a millimeter and let them fall.

'But you spilled the secret?'

'Yes.'

'Wasn't that a risk? Isn't it possible the SVR will learn that you betrayed the service, betrayed your trust?'

'Life is full of risks,' Janos Ilin said flatly. 'Discussing this with you is one of them.'

Jake Grafton tried to read the Russian's face. Was that statement true? Or magnificent fiction? 'I can understand betting your life now and then, but you are putting it at risk rather freely, wouldn't you say? And for what? To save the lives of rogues you don't know?'

'In a country as poor as Russia, lives aren't worth much. Theirs or mine.'

'Did the thought occur to you that the CIA might not be happy that you threw a monkey wrench into their plans?'

Janos Ilin's eyes narrowed. 'Are you suggesting that the CIA wanted the Blackbeard team to fail?'

'That is a possibility,' Jake Grafton said innocently, glancing at Ilin's face. 'There are others.'

'Did they want a Russian submarine, or would any submarine do? Is that where you are going?'

'A CIA team trained to steal a submarine stole one,' Jake said, weighing his words. 'The team fired missiles at an American city. That is the reality we must somehow explain.'

Before Ilin could reply to that comment, Jake heard the buzzing of a light plane. It was the first one he had heard all day, so he automatically looked up. The plane was no more than a thousand feet above them, a high-wing Cessna with fixed gear, a Cessna 182 perhaps. Jake got a glimpse of two heads in the front seat.

'That's the first plane I've heard today,' Ilin said, glancing up. 'I thought only emergency aircraft were authorized to fly.'

'He's probably gotten permission from someone,' Jake responded slowly. The Cessna rolled into a turn, pointed its left wing at the two of them. As the Cessna held the turn, Jake realized the men in it were looking at him and Ilin. It flew away to the north, toward a low hill, descended gently, then turned steeply. Down to about a hundred feet, the plane came racing back toward the two men in the pasture.

Jake saw one of the men lean out the passenger window opening — obviously the glass had been removed. He had something…

A weapon.

'Jesus, he's got a gun!'

Before they could run more than two paces, a burst of automatic fire went over their heads and kicked up dirt.

As the plane went over, Jake Grafton darted north toward the nearest trees, away from the road. He heard Ilin puffing along behind him.

The four-strand barbed-wire fence along the tree line was old and rusty. Grafton threw himself flat and rolled under the bottom strand as he heard the airplane coming back. Ilin went under headfirst, digging wildly with his arms and legs. Both men managed to roll behind trees as the engine noise crested and a burst of submachine gun bullets beat a tattoo on the tree limbs and trunks over their heads. The white plane with faded blue trim swept on by with its wheels just above the grass, then began rising gently to clear the tree line to the east.

Ilin's chest heaved as he fought for air. His face was gray. Too many cigarettes.

'What was that comment you made about risks?' Grafton asked.

Unlike America, the control room in La Jolla was brightly lit. The room was directly under the submarine's sail. The computer consoles and control stations were arranged around the periscopes, which were so long they ran from the keel of the boat to the top of the sail when stowed. There were no Revelation panels on the bulkheads because the new sonar system with its massive computers for processing the raw audio data was not installed in La Jolla, or any other American submarine for that matter. At the forward bulkhead were two cockpitlike control stations, complete with airline-type control wheels. One of the stations controlled the planes, the other the rudder. The chief of the boat stood behind the two helmsmen, watching the analog depth gauges, compass, and trim indicators and checking them against the information presented on a computer display.

Petty Officer First Class Buck Brown sat at the primary sonar control station studying the displays, sampling frequencies, and designating tracks for the computer to follow and plot. Beside him sat three other sonarmen. There were actually eleven sonar consoles, but only four were necessary for full operation of the system. The others were there in the event one of these consoles had a maintenance problem, or to use for training purposes.

Brown had heard the sonobouys hit the water and correctly designated them as bouys. The fact that the tracks failed to move was the giveaway. The computer kept a running tactical plot, but to back it up, two sailors stood at identical drafting tables in the rear of the control room plotting the bearings and connecting the dots. The navigator checked them constantly. Junior Ryder, the skipper, also liked to glance at the charts as they drew, ensuring that the tactical picture he carried around in his head matched the picture that unfolded on the computer display and the plotting tables.

Ryder left his stool in the center of the room and walked the three steps aft to the plotting tables with his usual quick stride. He was a large man full of nervous energy, and it showed. Now he checked the boat's progress along the bearing line that Brown had laid down two hours ago when he first heard the Tomahawk launch.