America (18 page)

Kolnikov didn't want to stream the sonar array, a raft of hydrophones that could be towed along in the submarine's wake. The array would limit his speed. He looked at his watch. Hours yet.

No, the thing to do was turn north and get away from this destroyer, then come back to an easterly heading in a couple of hours. He gave the order to Turchak, who was at the helm.

“Do you think the Americans have heard us on SOSUS?” Turchak asked.

“No. I think they are just searching.” Addressing Eck, Kolnikov asked, “Have you heard any patrol planes?”

“Two.”

“Did either of them cross directly overhead?” He wasn't worried about sonobuoys but about the magnetic signature of the boat, which the magnetic anomaly detectors, MAD, in the patrol planes could pick up if they flew close enough overhead. Theoretically, under ideal conditions the MAD gear could detect a submarine as deep as three thousand feet, but that was theory. The practical limit, Kolnikov knew, was much less. And conditions were never ideal.

“No,” Eck whispered, shaking his head. He was listening to the raw audio on his headset, verifying with trained ears what the computer was telling him.

“They are engaged in a random search pattern. They haven't heard us.”

“Lidar?” The Russians and Americans were experimenting with blue-green lasers mounted in aircraft to search shallow water for submarines.
America
had lidar detectors mounted on the sail and hull. Kolnikov didn't think the lasers could detect a sub at this depth, five hundred feet, but one never knew.

“Not a chirp.”

The Russian skipper smoked a cigarette as he monitored the display, watched Rothberg, kept an eye on Turchak and Eck.

“Are we below the surface layer?” he asked Turchak.

“I don't know.”

The bottom of the surface layer in the Atlantic should be between three and six hundred feet deep, depending on weather conditions. The surface layer was an area of relatively uniform temperature as the water was mixed by wave action. “Let's go deeper for a while. Go down to a thousand feet. Watch the water temp gauge.”

“A thousand feet,” Turchak echoed. “Aye aye, sir.” He opened the appropriate flooding valves and eased the stick forward a trifle, letting the boat sink deeper as it took on more water. Passing 575 feet there was a temperature drop, which Turchak mentioned to Kolnikov.

The destroyer had almost faded from the display when Heydrich came into the control room. He glanced at the heading indicator.

“What are you doing?” Heydrich demanded. “Where are we going?”

Kolnikov swiveled the captain's stool until he was facing Heydrich. “There has been a change of plans,” he said coldly. He removed his automatic from his trouser pocket and examined it. Heydrich stiffened a trifle.

The pistol's safety was on. The Russian captain held it up, clicked the safety off.

“A double cross! I should have known.”

“No double cross,” Kolnikov said. “Willi Schlegel will get exactly what he paid for. But we have plenty of time, so Turchak and I thought we would make some money in the interim. Hope you don't mind.”

“How?”

“We are going to shoot Tomahawks at some targets we selected. Mr. Rothberg has kindly agreed to help. I explained that you wouldn't mind, that this small project wouldn't interfere with our main mission. So he agreed.”

Heydrich didn't take his eyes off Kolnikov. “I cannot understand,” he said conversationally, “why you haven't killed me.”

“Don't tempt me. I'm very close.”

“Perhaps you worry that the men are loyal to me, not you. The Germans know who supplied the money. They will do as I say. Even Eck, he works for me. Tell him, Eck.”

Heinrich Eck's eyes widened and he sat up very straight. He looked from Heydrich to Kolnikov, then back again. “Don't get me in this. I do as I'm told. I just want to live to get paid, start out in a new life with a new passport and real money.”

Kolnikov never took his eyes off Heydrich. “Willi Schlegel likes you,” he said. “And Willi is paying the bills. Or some of the bills. Still, I do not think he would suffer unduly when this is over if I tell him that you didn't make it. An accident at sea, perhaps. Or a tragic incident with a loaded weapon. Maybe I'll just tell him I killed you because I didn't enjoy looking at you. Schlegel understands the uncertainty of life. You might be the shit that is going to happen.”

Heydrich eased himself into an empty chair in front of an unused console.

“Don't sit,” Kolnikov said. “You aren't staying. The captain's cabin has a keyed lock on the door. You will stay there for a few days. There are books on seamanship and navigation for you to read. I'll feel better knowing you are there improving your mind.”

As the two men were going down the passageway with Heydrich leading, the German shifted his weight, spun, and kicked with his right foot. Kolnikov had just enough warning. He grabbed the foot and pulled. Heydrich crashed to the deck. Two of the Germans heard the commotion and came running.

“Back to your stations,” Kolnikov said, glancing at them. He had the pistol in his hand pointed at Heydrich. “Heydrich isn't hurt.”

“What is this all about, Captain?”

“Later. Back to your stations.”

They went. Kolnikov locked Heydrich in the captain's cabin and pocketed the key. He was under no illusions about the strength of the lock, which was designed merely to allow the American captain to ensure that his private papers remained private. If Heydrich wanted out of that cabin badly enough, he was coming out. But that, both men knew, would lead to a final showdown. And Heydrich needed Kolnikov. At least Kolnikov hoped he did.

When he got back to the control room, he sat down on the captain's stool and lit another cigarette. “Let's run through the launch sequence, Rothberg. Right up until we shoot the first missile.”

Turchak put the boat on autopilot and came over to stand by Kolnikov. He whispered in his ear, “Why didn't you kill him?”

Kolnikov pretended that he didn't hear the question, and after a bit Turchak went off to the head.

*   *   *

At the end of the day, after everyone else had left, Zelda Hudson reviewed the E-mail messages Zip Vance had culled for her attention. Tonight there was quite a collection. These were classified, encrypted E-mails, messages sent from one department of the government to another, or to other persons within the department.

The government's new encryption protocol, developed by two Belgian software designers, was good, very good, but had several small flaws. Zelda's field was computer security, encryption standards, barriers to entry, trapdoors, backdoors, worms, etc. One of the foremost experts in the field, she had worked with the FBI, NSA, CIA, and Pentagon converting to the new protocol. And she had added on a few wrinkles of her own. In effect, she had developed wormholes that allowed her access to the U.S. government's deepest secrets.

Her colleagues here at Hudson Security Services were also experts, expert hackers, as she was when she was young. Her hacking had got her thrown out of her first college. She didn't get caught again but learned everything the universities could teach about the new science of computer systems.

Out of college she began consulting, applying her expertise for a fee. Soon she was swamped and began recruiting other hackers, people like herself who came to her attention when their hacking feats landed them in the news or in jail. When the furor died down or they were finally released from prison, she was there with a job offer that topped all others.

Of course, her company had been strictly legit for years and, as far as her employees knew, with the sole exception of Zip Vance, still was. The expertise of the hackers revealed the vulnerabilities of government and industry information systems, and she was in the perfect position to sell her services reducing those vulnerabilities. “Expensive and darn well worth it,” was the phrase she used in her presentations to win contracts. So she had grown her business and her reputation, made millions, paid huge salaries … and one fine day discovered that it wasn't enough.

Tonight she left her monitor and walked through the loft, remembering. She checked the elevator; the last person to leave, Zipper, had left it in the down position. She pushed the button to bring it up, waited as it rose clanking and groaning, and when it reached the top floor, threw the switch to disable it.

There was a trapdoor under one of the tables, and coiled beside it, thirty feet of knotted rope. That was the only emergency exit in case of fire. Still, in her mind the risk of unauthorized entry was potentially more devastating.

She had earned a hundred million from the Europeans for putting the SuperAegis satellite in the water. If EuroSpace could ultimately recover it, the corporation would owe her another hundred million.

Her deal with Jouany was more complex, with incentives based on the exchange rate between the dollar and the euro. She thought again about the possibility Jouany would refuse to pay. Obviously, if he stiffed her she couldn't sue to collect. What she could do was prove to the world that he had been in a deal to devastate the American economy. A revelation like that would ruin him.

No doubt Jouany had thought of that. His best move to counter that possibility was to destroy this computer center. Which would work if this were the only computer center she had.

Tomorrow she would go to the backup location and have Zipper send her the updated critical files. She would back them up and hide the disks.

Oh, the irony. The CIA had named Kolnikov and his crew the Blackbeard team. Kolnikov! Now Jouany and Willi Schlegel, those two were
pirates!
Two of the blackest scoundrels God ever made, and both wore business suits, pontificated to the press, made flashy charitable donations, and took their wives to the opera.

And she was going to take huge piles of money from them!

CHAPTER SEVEN

Jake Grafton walked from the Pentagon to the SuperAegis liaison spaces on the eighth floor of a Crystal City office tower. He paid little attention to traffic or anything else—he had too much on his mind. Tom Krautkramer, the FBI agent, was waiting in his office with Toad Tarkington.

“I've been talking to General Alt, Admiral Stalnaker, and Vice-Admiral Navarre,” he said. “I thought I might as well drop by and fill you in on what we have.” Krautkramer looked as if he hadn't gotten any sleep last night.

“We've got a number of leads to check. We are working with the phone company to get the long-distance records for the telephones where these people stayed, we're talking to neighbors, going over the apartments with forensic teams, basically pulling out all the stops.”

“Cut to the chase. What have you got right now?”

“A civilian technician who worked on the holographic simulator is missing, guy named Leon Rothberg. His supervisor says Rothberg has been asking for lots of unpaid time off—apparently his private life is a mess. The supervisor said that sometimes bill collectors call wanting to talk to him. Anyway, his landlord says he hasn't been around for several days.” He produced a photo and passed it to Jake, who glanced at it and handed it back. “He may be one of the two men who wasn't on the Blackbeard team.”

“This guy know the
America
's system?”

“According to his supervisor, Rothberg was a computer Ph.D. candidate who dropped out of MIT before turning in his dissertation. We're checking that out. The supervisor says he is a certified genius who knows every line of software code in
America.
”

“Bullshit,” said Jake Grafton.

“I'm quoting the supervisor,” Krautkramer replied.

“Sorry.” Jake felt like a jerk. Krautkramer was probably as tired as he was.

“One of the missing Americans is a petty officer named Callahan. The general opinion of the others is that he is dead, but no one knows for a fact. Callahan could be alive and well and on that ship. He was a reactor specialist.”

“The man who prevented the SCRAM.”

“Perhaps,” Krautkramer admitted. “It is possible. Callahan is or was in the midst of a nasty divorce and had a pregnant girlfriend. He was an above-average petty officer, but he may have been tempted. Or he may have been as honest as the day is long and killed by the hijackers because he didn't jump fast enough. We don't know.”

“Okay.”

“The leader of the Blackbeard team was Vladimir Kolnikov. Here is a copy of his file.” The FBI special agent passed a red folder to Jake, who glanced through it. Most of this stuff he had already seen. “We're doing our best here and in Paris,” Krautkramer continued, “to come up with more information on this guy, who his friends are, where and how he lived, what he drinks, what he reads, essentially the works. It's going to take a few days.”

“Who knew him best in Connecticut?”

“The simulator training officer. He spent up to eight hours a day with him for several weeks.”

“Let's fly him to Washington. I want to learn everything he knows about Kolnikov. Toad, see what you can do.”

“Yes, sir.”

“When you get more, Mr. Krautkramer, day or night, call me. Commander Tarkington will give you some phone numbers.”

When the FBI man was gone, Jake said to Toad, “Okay. How is it going in the office today?”

“If anyone here knew that the submarine was going to be stolen, I didn't get a hint of it,” Toad said gloomily. “They've talked of nothing else today. The general assumption is that the sub will attack the Goddard launch platform with a Tomahawk.”

“Ilin and the other spies?”

“The only time they've been outside is to go to lunch in the Crystal City mall. We went as a group. I stuck with Ilin like chewing gum on his shoe. He was not out of my sight. I even went to the men's room with him. We talked about submarines, baseball and football, politics, economics, the euro…” Toad shrugged.