Dubro had little choice but to allow the oilers to continue on then base
course. Covertness or not, his oil-fueled escorts were dangerously close to
empty bunkers, and that was a hazard he could not afford. Duhro drank Ins
wake-up coffee while his eyes burned holes in the bulkhead. Commander
Harrison sat across from the Admiral’s desk, sensibly not saying much of
anything until his boss was ready to speak.
“What’s the good word, Ed?”
“We still have them outgunned, sir,” the Force Operations Officer re-
plied. “Maybe we need to demonstrate that.”
Outgunned? Dubro wondered. Well, yes, that was true, but only two
thirds of his aircraft were fully mission-capable now. They’d been away too
long from base. They were running out of the stores needed to keep the air-
craft operating. In the hangar bay, aircraft sat with inspection hatches open,
awaiting parts that the ship no longer had. He was depending on the replen-
ishment ships for those, for the parts flown into Diego Garcia from stateside.
Three days after delivery, he’d be back to battery, after a fashion, but his
people were tired. Two men had been hurt on the flight deck the day before.
Not because they were stupid. Not because they were inexperienced. Be-
cause they’d been doing it too damned long, and fatigue was even more dan-
gerous to the mind than to the body, especially in the frenetic environment of
a carrier’s flight deck. The same was true of everyone in the battle force,
from the lowliest striker to … himself. The strain of continuous decision-
making was starting to tell. And all he could do about that was to switch to
decaf.
“How are the pilots?” Mike Dubro asked.
“Sir, they’ll do what you tell them to do.”
“Okay, we do light patrolling today. I want a pair of Toms up all the
time, at least four more on plus-five, fully armed for air-to-air. Fleet
course is one-eight-zero, speed of advance twenty-five knots. We link up
with the replenishment group and get everyone topped off. Otherwise, we
do a stand-down. I want people rested insofar as that is possible. Our
friend is going to start hunting tomorrow, and the game is going to get in-
teresting.”
“We start going head-to-head?” the ops officer asked.
“Yeah.” Dubro nodded. He checked his watch. Nighttime in Washing-
ton. The people with brains would be heading for bed now. He’d soon make
another demand for instructions, and he wanted the smart ones to pass it
along, preferably with a feel for the urgency of his situation. Pay-or-play
time was grossly overdue, and all he could be sure of now was that it would
come unexpectedly-and after that, Japan? Harrison and his people were
already spending half of their time on that.
The tradecraft, again, was of the bad-TV variety, and the only consolation
was that maybe the Russians were right. Maybe Scherenko had told them the
truth. Maybe they were not in any real danger from the PSID. That seemed a
very thin reed to Clark, none of whose education had encouraged him to
trust Russians to do anything pleasant to Americans.
“The wheel may be crooked,” he whispered to himself-in English,
damn it! In any event, what they’d done was laughably simple. Nomuri had
parked his car in the same lease-garage that the hotel maintained for its
guests, and now Nomuri had a key to Clark’s rental car, and over the left-
side visor was a computer disk. This Clark retrieved and handed to Chavez,
who slid it into their laptop. An electronic chime announced the activation of
the machine as Clark headed out into the traffic. Ding copied the file over to
the hard-disk and erased the floppy, which would soon be disposed of. The
report was verbose. Chavez read it silently before turning the car radio on,
then relayed the high points in whispers over the noise.
“Northern Resource Area?” John asked.
“Da. A curious phrase,” Ding agreed, thinking. It occurred to him that
his diction was better in Russian than English, perhaps because he’d learned
English on the street, and Russian in a proper school from a team of people
with a genuine love for it. The young intelligence officer dismissed the
thought angrily.
Northern Resource Area, he thought. Why did that sound familiar? But
they had other things to do, and that was tense enough. Ding found that
while he liked the paramilitary end of being a field officer, this spy stuff was
not exactly his cup of tea. Too scary, too paranoid.
Isamu Kimura was at the expected meeting site. Fortunately his job al-
lowed him to be in and out a lot, and to sit down with foreigners as a matter
of routine. One benefit was that he had an eye for safe places. This one was
on the docks, thankfully not overly busy at the moment, but at the same time
a location where such a meeting would not be overly out of character. It was
also a hard one to bug. There were still harbor sounds to mask quiet conver-
sation.
Clark was even more uneasy, if that were possible. With any covert re-
cruitment there was a period during which open contact was safe, but the
safety diminished linearly over time at a rapid but unknown rate, and there
were other considerations. Kimura was motivated by-what? Clark didn’t
know why Oleg Lyalin had been able to recruit him. It wasn’t money. The
Russians had never paid him anything. It wasn’t ideology. Kimura wasn’t a
Communist in his political creed. Was it ego? Did he think he was worthy of
a better post that someone else had taken? Or, most dangerously of all, was
he a patriot, the eccentric personal sort who judged what was good for his
country in his own mind? Or, as Ding might have observed, was he just
fucked up? Not a very elegant turn of phrase, but in Clark’s experience not
an unknown state of affairs, either. The simple version was dial < laik didn'tknow; worse, any motivation for treason simply justified lHMi;i>mp vmii
country to another, and there was something in him thai tvluscd ID led i <»mTollable with such people. Perhaps cops didn't like dealing wild llu-ii mintinants either, John told himself. Small comfort, that."What's so important?" Kimura asked, halfway down a vacant ijiiay. Theidle ships in Tokyo Bay were clearly visible, and he wondered if the meet ingplace had been selected for just that reason."Your country has nuclear weapons," Clark told him simply."What?" First the head turned, then the feet stopped, then a very pale-look came over his face."That's what your ambassador in Washington told the American presi-dent on Saturday. The Americans are in a panic. At least that's what Mos-cow Center has told us." Clark smiled in a very Russian way. "I must saythat you've won my professional admiration to have done it so openly, espe-cially buying our own rockets to be the delivery vehicles. I must also tell youthat the government of my country is decidedly displeased by this develop-ment.""The rockets could easily be aimed at us." Chavez added dryly, "Theymake people nervous.""I had no idea. Are you sure?" Kimura started walking again, just to gethis blood flowing."We have a highly placed source in the U.S. government. It is not a mis-lake." Clark's voice, Ding noted, was coldly businesslike: Ah, your car hasa scratch on the bumper. I know a good man to fix it."So that's why they thought they could get away with it." Kimura didn'thave to say any more, and it was plain that a piece of the puzzle had justdropped into place in his mind. He took a few breaths before speaking again:"This is madness."And those were three of the most welcome words John had heard sincecalling home from Berlin to hear that his wife had safely delivered their sec-ond child. Now it was time for real hardball. He spoke without smiling, fullyinto his role as a senior Russian intelligence officer, trained by the KGB tobe one of the best in the world:"Yes, my friend. Any time you frighten a major power, that is truly mad-ness. Whoever is playing this game, I hope they know how dangerous it is.Please heed my words, Gospodin Kimura. My country is gravely concerned.Do you understand? Gravely concerned. You've made fools of us beforeAmerica and the entire world. You have weapons that can threaten my coun-try as easily as they can threaten America. You have initiated action againstthe United States, and we do not see a good reason for it. That makes youunpredictable in our eyes, and a country with nuclear-tipped rockets and po-litical instability is not a pleasant prospect. This crisis is going to expandunless sensible people take proper action. We are not concerned about your