America

pasture on their left. They could see the headlights of the interstate beyond it.

'Are you game? Through the pasture?'

'Yes,' Ilin said. He was gripping the handle on the doorjamb tightly with his right hand and the shotgun with his left.

Jake turned hard, jumping the truck over the little embankment that lined the road. He rammed a post in the barbed-wire fence and kept going.

Thumps and scraping sounds. 'We're dragging half that fence with us,' he told Ilin.

On the other side of the pasture was another fence, which he rammed. The truck nosed over sickeningly toward the ditch that separated the highway from the farm.

Desperate, afraid he was going to bury the nose of the truck in the ditch, Jake swerved right violently. The left front wheel went into the soft ditch bottom, and he floored the accelerator.

After the first gut-wrenching deceleration, the truck picked up speed. Jake sawed at the steering wheel, then the left wheel found purchase and the truck shot through the ditch throwing mud and went up the embankment toward the highway shoulder. And almost collided with a semi.

He jammed on the brakes, waited until the traffic went by, then floored it again. With a roar the truck accelerated on the pavement, dragging several fence posts and gobs of wire. At sixty miles per hour the mess under the truck tore loose and went under the wheels in one final thump.

'Amen,' he said fervently.

'Amen,' Janos Ilin agreed.

'Armed and dangerous, driving a stolen truck. A rear admiral and a Russian spy. I can see the headlines now.' Jake laughed so hard he wheezed.

'The real American experience,' Ilin said. 'You made my trip to the States complete. I can never thank you enough.'

'You'd better come look,' Boldt told Kolnikov. 'I don't know how he did it without me hearing anything. I was in the next compartment.'

Vladimir Kolnikov took a last look at the computer screen above the helm. Turchak was still there in the chair, the joystick in front of him, monitoring everything. He had said little in the hours since the engagement with the two American submarines. America was deep now, fifteen hundred feet, running at fifteen knots to the southeast. The computer showed that she was making little noise at this speed. It was almost as if she were a black hole in the ocean. Above and behind they could hear pinging from sonobuoys. Due to a salinity discontinuity, apparently the P-3's TACCOs could not find America below the layer. The echo ranging appeared as flashes on the Revelation screens, almost like heat lightning on a far horizon.

'I'll come too,' Heydrich said from his chair in the back of the control room. He had been there most of the afternoon, watching silently. Now he heaved himself to his feet, shook down his trouser legs, and walked forward.

'Go ahead,' Turchak said, turning his head to glance at Boldt, then Kolnikov. 'You have to go.'

So Kolnikov followed Boldt with Heydrich trailing along. Through the passageway, around the corners, into the berthing compartment.

Leon Rothberg dangled from the overhead. He had stood on a box of oranges from the galley, wrapped his belt around a pipe, stuck his head in the noose, and kicked away the box. How long he had dangled there, silently strangling, was anyone's guess.

He was dead now, of course, his tongue black and protruding, his eyes wide, white, bulging, staring fixedly at nothing at all. Looking at him was hard, so after the first glance, no one did.

'Let's get him down,' Kolnikov said, and wrapped his arms around the dead man's legs. He lifted while Boldt and two other men who were there extracted Rothberg's head from the belt noose. They lowered the corpse to the floor.

'Put him in the meat locker.'

'I didn't hear anything,' Boldt said. 'Honestly. I would have—'

Kolnikov waved him into silence. Boldt and the other two carried Rothberg's corpse away, leaving Kolnikov alone with Heydrich.

'What now, Kolnikov? Can you and Turchak run these computers, make them do their magic things?'

'Don't be a fool.'

'Speaking for myself, there were times this afternoon that I thought we would soon be dead. Without Rothberg, we won't survive another afternoon like the one we just had.'

'Let's hope that was the only one.'

'We had better.' Heydrich searched Kolnikov's face. 'You genuinely regret killing those men in that other submarine, don't you?'

Kolnikov turned his back and went along the passageway toward the control room.

Turchak looked at him as he entered.

'He's dead, all right. Hung himself with his belt from a pipe in the overhead.'

'Aah…'

'Boldt was in the next compartment and didn't hear a thing, he says. Rothberg managed the perfect silent strangulation, so no one came to rescue him. Finally, he successfully accomplished something.'

'He must have known the men in the other submarines,' Turchak mused. 'Trained them, perhaps. Then to help kill them. .'

'Umm,' Kolnikov said as he read their position from the ship's inertial system readouts, checked it against the computer database, then checked it again against the paper chart on the plotting table. He checked the bearings on the pinging sources, listened a moment to verify that the faint signals were indeed fading.

'I thought if we had to do it… you know!' Turchak said, searching for words. 'I thought it would be self- defense.'

They were not going to run into an island tonight, or an underwater mountain, not on this heading. Nothing in this direction for at least a thousand miles. Reactor temperatures and pressures normal, nothing close by on the sonar, nothing threatening out there in that great empty universe.

'Go get something to eat,' he told Turchak. 'Then get some sleep. Come relieve me when you awaken.'

Turchak checked the autopilot carefully, ensured all was well, then went.

'You too, Eck. Sleep while you can. I'll call you if I need you.'

Vladimir Kolnikov sat alone in the control room with the computer screens and Revelation pictures. He smoked and watched and thought about life and death as the submarine burrowed into the silence of the great eternal ocean.

Traffic was light on the way into Washington. Jake kept the pickup at the speed limit.

'Hungry?' he asked Ilin. 'Want to stop?'

'And find out if we are still targets? No thanks. I'll eat in the embassy.'

'I have a theory I wish to try out on you.'

'A hypothesis?'

'Actually it's algebra. I'm trying to solve for X. Suppose someone wanted to see and test the components of the SuperAegis satellite. Which would be preferable, the blueprints, which I presume are on Consolidated Aerospace's computers, or the actual hardware?'

'The hardware, of course. The blueprints would be nice, but Consolidated has spent billions building and testing the components. Getting one's hands on the hardware would save years of effort and billions of dollars.'

Jake Grafton nodded. 'Salvaging that satellite is a possible use for the submarine. That SEAL minisub on its back might be used for that, if the water is shallow enough. Airplanes and recon satellites would see nothing, because on the surface there would be nothing to see. It's a possibility, don't you think?'

'So who is X?'

'X is the person who knows where the satellite is.'

'It is a theory,' Ilin said flatly.

'Would the Russians be interested in that satellite?'

'Beats me. A decision like that would be made way above my pay grade, to quote your Commander Tarkington. And believe me, they wouldn't tell me about it. And if they did, I wouldn't tell you.'