page he’d selected.
“Well, you have to look for other things,” Jones said. Only a Marine with
a loaded pistol would get him out of SOSUS now. He’d made that clear to
Admiral Mancuso, who had in turn made it clear to others. There had been a
brief discussion of getting Jones a special commission, perhaps to Com-
mander’s rank, but Ron had quashed that idea himself. He’d left the Navy a
Sonarman i/c, and that was as good a rank as he’d ever wanted. Besides, it
would not have looked good to the chiefs who really ran this place and had
already accepted him as one of their own.
Oceanographic Technician 2/c Mike Boomer had been assigned to Jones
as personal assistant. The kid had the makings of a good student, Dr. Jones
thought, even if he’d left service in P-3S because of chronic airsickness.
“All these guys are using Prairie-Masker systems when they snort. It
sounds like rain on the surface, remember? Rain on the surface is on the
thousand-hertz line. So, we look for rain”-Jones slid a weather photo on
the table-“where there ain’t no rain. Then we look for sixty-hertz hits, little
ones, short ones, brief ones, things you might otherwise ignore, that happen
to be where the rain is. They use sixty-hertz generators and motors, right?
Then we look for transients, just little dots that look like background noise,
that are also where the rain is. Like this.” He marked the sheet with a red
pen, then looked to the station’s command master chief, who was leaning
over the other side of the table like a curious god.
‘ ‘I heard stories about you when I was working the Ref-Tra at Dam Neck.
I thought they were sea stories.”
“Got a smoke?” the only civilian in the room asked. The master chief
handed one over. The antismoking signs were gone and the ashtrays were
out. SOSUS was at war, and perhaps the rest of PacFlt would soon catch up.
Jesus, I’m home, Jones told himself. “Well, you know the difference be-
tween a sea story and a fairy tale.”
“What’s that, sir?” Boomer asked.
“A fairy tale starts, ‘Once upon a time,’ ” Jones said with a smile, mark-
ing another 6ohz hit on the sheet.
“And a sea story starts, ‘No shit,’ ” the master chief concluded the joke.
Except this little fucker really was that good. “I think you have enough to
run a plot, Dr. Jones.”
“I think we have a track on an SSK, Master Chief.”
“Shame we can’t prosecute.”
Ron nodded slowly.’ ‘Yeah, me, too, but now we know we can get hits on
the guys. It’s still going to be a mother for P-SS to localize them. They’re
good boats, and that’s a fact.” They couldn’t get too carried away. All
SOSUS did was to generate lines of bearing. If more than one hydrophone
set got a hit on the same sound source, you could rapidly triangulate bearings
into locations, but those locations were circles, not points, and the circles
were as much as twenty miles across. It was just physios, lu-illu-r Inciul tun
enemy. The sounds that most easily traveled long distances won- ol (he
lower frequencies, and for any sort of wave, only the higher In-quom it’s
gave the best resolution.
“We know where to look the next time he snorts, too. Anyway, you can
cull Fleet Operations and tell them there’s nobody close to the carriers. I lere,
here, here, surface groups.” He made marks on the paper. “Also heading
west at good speed, and not being real covert about it. All target-track bear-
ings are opening. It’s a complete disengagement. They’re not looking for
any more trouble.”
“Maybe that’s good.”
Jones crushed out the cigarette. “Yeah, Master Chief, maybe it is, if the
flags get their shit together.”
The funny part was that things had actually calmed down. Morning TV cov-
erage of the Wall Street crash was clinically precise, and the analysis exquis-
ite, probably better than Americans were getting at home, Clark thought,
what with all the economics professors doing the play-by-play, along with a
nenior banker for color commentary. Perhaps, a newspaper editorialized,
America will rethink her stance vis-a-vis Japan. Was it not clear that the two
countries genuinely needed each other, especially now, and that a strong
Japan served American interests as well as local ones? Prime Minister Goto
was quoted in a conciliatory way, though not in front of a camera, in lan-
guage that was for him decidedly unusual and widely covered for that rea-
«on.
“Fucking Twilight Zone,” Chavez observed in a quiet moment, breaking
language cover because he just had to. What the hell, he thought, they were
under Russian operational control now. What rules did matter now?
“Russkiy,” his senior replied tolerantly.
“Da, tovarisch,” was the grumbled reply. “Do you have any idea what’s
going on. Is it a war or not?”
“The rules sure are funny,” Clark said, in English, he realized. It’s get-
ling to me, too.
There were other gaijin back on the street, most of them apparently Amer-
icans, and the looks they were getting were back to the ordinary suspicion
and curiosity, the current hostility level down somewhat from the previous
week.
“So what do we do?”
“We try the Interfax number our friend gave us.” Clark had his report all
typed up. It was the only thing he knew to do, except for keeping his contacts
active and fishing for information. Surely Washington knew what he had to
tell them, he thought, going back into the hotel. The clerk smiled and bowed,
a little more politely this time, as they headed to the elevator. Two minutes
later they were in the room. Clark took the laptop from its carry-case, in-
serted the phone plug in the back, and switched it on. Another minute, and
the internal modem dialed the number he’d gotten over breakfast, linking to
a line across the Sea of Japan to the Siberian mainland, thence to Moscow,
he supposed. He heard the electronic trilling of a ringing phone and waited
for linkup.
The station chief had gotten over the cringing associated with having a Rus-
sian intelligence officer in the embassy communications room, but he hadn’t
quite gotten to the whimsy stage yet. The noise from the computer startled
him.
“Very clever technique,” the visitor said.
“We try.”
Anyone who had ever used a modem would recognize the sound, the rasp
of running water, or perhaps a floor-polishing brush, just a digital hiss, re-
ally, of two electronic units attempting to synchronize themselves so that
data could be exchanged. Sometimes it took but a few seconds, sometimes
as many as five or even ten. In fact, it only took one second or so with these
units, and the remaining hiss was actually the random-appearing digital code
of 19,200 characters of information crossing the fiberoptic line per second-
first in one direction, then the other. When the real transmission was con-
cluded, formal lockup was achieved, and the guy at the other end sent his
twenty column-inches for the day. Just to be on the safe side, the Russians
would make sure that the report would be carried in two papers the next day,
on page 3 in both cases. No sense in being too obvious.
Then came the hard part for the CIA station chief. On command, he
printed two copies of the same report, one of which went to the RVS officer.
Was Mary Pat going through change-of-life or something?
“His Russian is very literary, even classical. Who taught him my lan-
guage?”
“I honestly don’t know,” the station chief lied, successfully as it turned
out. The hell of it was, the Russian was right. That occasioned a frown.
“Want me to help with the translation?”
Shit. He smiled. “Sure, why not?”
“Ryan.” A whole five hours of sleep, Jack grumped, lifting the secure car-
phone. Well, at least he wasn’t doing the driving
‘ ‘Mary Pat here. We have something. It’ll be on your desk when you get
there.”
“How good?”
“It’s a start,” the DDO said. She was very economical in her use of
words. Nobody really trusted radiophones, secure or not.
“Hello, Dr. Ryan. I’m Andrea Price.” The agent was already dressed in a
lab coat, complete with picture-pass clipped to the lapel, which she held
up. “My uncle is a doctor, GP in Wisconsin. I think he’d like tins.” She
smiled.
“Do I have anything to worry about?”
“I really don’t think so,” Agent Price said, still smiling. Protectees didn’t
like to see worried security personnel, she knew.
“What about my children?”
‘ ‘There are two agents outside their school, and one more is in the house
across from the day-care center for your little one,” the agent explained.
“Please don’t worry. They pay us to be paranoid, and we’re almost always
wrong, but it’s like in your business. You always want to be wrong on the