America

Grafton and Ilin had walked the halls, looked at the doors and windows, concluded that there was just no way for whoever was chasing them to enter the house without making noise, then they went back to the kitchen.

Jake found peanut butter in the cupboard. Ilin touched his finger to the peanut butter, tasted it experimentally, and made a face. They were eating it on crackers and drinking water when Ilin finally reached for the television and flipped it on. Some of the channels were off the air, so he flipped around until they found one that was on, CNN.

New York! The sub had E-bombed New York!

They started with the volume off so they could hear the sound of glass breaking, but eventually they turned it up so they could hear the audio. The television types were confused and besieging the military authorities for answers, which weren't forthcoming. At least two Flashlight missiles had struck New York City, perhaps three, maybe four — no one seemed to know. A fighter had crashed, perhaps several, perhaps there had been an air battle in the skies over the city, blocks of buildings were ablaze, firefighters couldn't get to the scene.

Manhattan and Brooklyn had been surgically removed from modern America. The power had failed. Lights, heat, elevators, and telephones didn't work, the subways didn't run, the streets were filled with cars, trucks, taxis, and buses that were no longer operable, the television and radio networks that originated there were no longer on the air. Eventually Grafton and Ilin learned that the television crews on the air were from New Jersey.

The whole scene reminded Jake of Baghdad during the Gulf War, with camera crews on rooftops looking at columns of smoke rising in the distance.

After a half hour of watching the breathless reporting and the guesses, good and bad, Jake turned the television off and walked through the house again with the shotgun in his hand. Standing well back from the windows, he looked out, trying to see if anyone were still out there.

And saw no one.

'What do you think?' he asked Ilin, who was doing the same thing.

'I think they may still be out there,' the Russian responded. 'I have nothing more pressing on my calendar.'

'Maybe they are waiting for us to come out.'

'That is possible. One wonders if the owners will come home this afternoon.'

That, Jake suspected, wasn't in the cards. The house looked like it had been vacant for weeks, perhaps longer. There were no perishables in the refrigerator or cupboards. He pointed this out to Ilin.

They were trapped. The circuits in Jake's cell phone were fried the night before last — he had almost thrown the thing away, but Callie suggested he retain it to show to the insurance company if there were problems. She was confident their household insurance would pay their losses. A forlorn hope, Jake suspected, but he put the telephone on his dresser and left it there.

Now he wandered through this house looking for a cell phone. He checked the bedrooms and the owner's office area, looked in the drawers. He found a charger for a cell phone, but the instrument was not there.

New York!

Well, at least they had the pickup. Tonight.

'Are you married?' he asked Ilin.

'She died. Cancer.' I m sorry.

'It was years ago. Life cheated her. She loved me, she loved life, she loved her country. Then she got sick and died young.'

Jake thought of his wife. He and Callie had been lucky, extraordinarily so, and they both knew it. That realization dusted every day of their lives with magic. He didn't say this to Ilin, of course.

'People change,' Ilin mused, 'the world changes. When I finished school I was recruited by the KGB. My father was prominent in the defense department, his father had been a hero of the war against fascism. The KGB seemed the path of least resistance.' He shrugged. 'In those days we knew who the enemy was. America. And what a fine enemy you were, too. Rich, powerful, strong, at times stupid and heedless. We looked for cracks, for chinks in the armor, prepared for the final battle between good and evil, Armageddon. It didn't come. The Soviet Union was always a geopolitical oxymoron, an empire that tried to be a nation. It collapsed, finally, stunning us all.'

They sat, each with his own thoughts, listening to the silence.

'So everything changed,' Ilin continued after a while, 'and nothing changed. Russia remained what it always was, poor and backward in so many ways, isolated, afraid of foreign ideas, struggling to keep up with the outside world, not sure it wanted to. Today the enemy is still America… and Europe and China and Japan. And given the state of affairs in Russia, that is good. When Armageddon comes we will be on the sidelines.'

'Maybe it's here now,' Jake Grafton said.

'The struggle has no beginning and no end. It is ongoing and everywhere. You comfortable Americans, you have never understood that basic fact. Change brings new challenges. That is the fallacy of SuperAegis. Regardless of how much money you spend or how clever you are, technology cannot give you security. Checkmate happens only in chess, not in human affairs. Man has been looking for a magic weapon since he first picked up a club. And hasn't found it yet.

'Nuclear weapons worked,' Jake objected. 'They prevented World War III.'

'Nuclear weapons forced the struggle into other channels. And Russia lost. But the struggle never ends. As long as life continues, the struggle continues.' Janos Ilin gestured at the silent television set, then picked up a dead telephone and pointed it at Grafton. 'And America is losing.'

'Skipper, what if the navy sends another boat into this area?' Skip Harlow, executive officer of La Jolla, asked that question of his commanding officer, Junior Ryder. Two hours had passed since Buck Brown had told them of Americas presence behind them. The P-3 was still searching the area, dropping sonobuoys periodically, apparently searching in vain for the stolen submarine.

Ryder had been thinking of the message advising him to rise to periscope depth to receive an encrypted message via satellite. He had elected not to waste time or give away his presence by that maneuver. Now he wondered if he had made a mistake. There were a variety of things SUBLANT could have thought urgent enough to justify that maneuver, and Harlow was right, another sub entering the area was one of them.

If another boat entered the area, he thought Kolnikov aboard America would probably hear it first, at maximum range, before Ryder knew it was there. What if he elected to fire a torpedo at the oncoming boat while he was still too close to La Jolla for either him or Ryder to launch a torpedo at the other?

Oh, man! This could get crazy! Ryder looked around the control room, looked at the sailors on the consoles, his XO, the chief of the boat, the watch officer.

'We must be ready for anything,' he said. 'I want everything ready to go, torpedoes, decoys, bubble makers, everything.'

All the action stations were already manned, and mentally the skipper took stock. Even if his boat lacked America's capability, he would stack his crew up against any crew in the world. The two torpedo control consoles were manned, all four of the sonar consoles, the computers, the helm, the chief, of the boat watching everything, the guys on the plot backing up the automatic systems…. They were ready to shoot as soon as the boat's sensors found a target within the torpedoes' operating envelope. The torpedo control consoles automatically monitored the attack-director function and generated preset data on a continuous basis for two torpedoes, which could be fired instantly. The attack director received its data from the central computer complex, which integrated inputs from sonar, the ship's inertial nav system, underwater log, and analog dead-reckoning analyzer/indicator.

'Buck,' Ryder said, placing a hand on the first class petty officer's shoulder, 'if another sub comes into the area, I want to know it as soon as possible. If America shoots a torpedo, it will be at one of our guys, so the instant it leaves the tube, sing out.'

'Aye aye, sir.'

In a whisper in the exec's ear, Ryder asked him to go through the boat, check that all watertight doors were properly secured, that every station was manned and ready, and to say a word to everyone. Then he turned to the com officer. 'Encrypt and transmit a message via the underwater telephone. Tell that P-3 that we have found America. Tell them to clear the area and keep everyone else away.'

'Aye aye, Skipper. But the pirates have America's codebooks. They can decode the message.'