intelligence community, and one for which he was grateful. The Russians
had transmitted the dispatch to the Washington rezidentura, and from there
it had been hand-carried to CIA. Jack wondered what the uniformed guards
at CIA had thought when they had let the Russian spooks through the gate.
From there the report had been driven to the White House, and the courier
had been waiting for Ryan in his anteroom when he came in.
“Sources report a total of nine (9) ‘H-i i’ rockets at Yoshinobu. Another
missile is at the assembly plant, being used as an engineering test-bed for a
proposed structural upgrade. That leaves ten (10) or eleven (u) rockets
unaccounted for, more probably the former, location as yet unknown. Good
news, Ivan Emmetovich. I presume your satellite people are quite busy. Ours
are as well. Golovko.”
“Yes, they are, Sergey Nikolay’ch,” Ryan whispered, flipping open the
second folder the courier had brought down. “Yes, they are.”
Here goes nothing, thought Sanchez.
AirPac was a vice admiral, and in as foul a mood as every other officer at
the Pearl Harbor Naval Base. Responsible for every naval aircraft and flight
deck from Nevada west, his ought to have been the point command for the
war that had begun only a few days earlier, but not only could he not tell his
two active carriers in the Indian Ocean what he wanted, he could see his
nl her two carriers, silling side by side in dry docks. Anil likely to remain
thru- lor months, as a CNN camera crew was now making clear to viewers
.u loss the entire world.
“So what is it?” he asked his visitors.
“Do we have plans for visiting WestPac?” Sanchez asked.
“Not anytime soon.”
“I can be ready to move in less than ten days,” Johnnie Reb’s CO an-
nounced.
“Is that a fact?” AirPac inquired acidly.
‘ ‘Number-one shaft’s okay. If we fix number four, I can do twenty-nine,
maybe thirty knots. Probably more. The trials on two shafts had the wheels
.iitached. Eliminate the drag from those, maybe thirty-two.”
“Keep going,” the Admiral said.
“Okay, the first mission has to be to eliminate their airplanes, right?”
Sanchez said. ‘ ‘For that I don’t need Hoovers and ‘Traders. Johnnie Reb can
handle four squadrons of Toms and four more of Plastic Bugs, Robber’s del
D| Queers to do the jamming, plus an extra del of Hummers. And guess
what?”
AirPac nodded. “That almost equals their fighter strength on the is-
lands. ” It was dicey. One carrier deck against two major island bases wasn’t
exactly . . . but the islands were pretty far apart, weren’t they? Japan had
other ships out there, and submarines, which is what he feared in particular.
“It’s a start, maybe.”
“We need some other elements,” Sanchez agreed. “Anybody going to
say no when we ask?”
“Not at this end,” the Admiral said after a moment’s thought.
The CNN reporter had made her first live feed from atop the edge of the dry
dock, and it showed the two nuclear-powered carriers sitting on their blocks,
not unlike twin babies in side-by-side cradles. Somebody in CINCPAC’s
office must have paid a price for letting her in, Ryan thought, because the
second feed was from much farther away, the flattops across the harbor but
still clearly visible behind her back, as she said much the same things, add-
ing that she had learned from informed sources that it could be as much as
six months before Stennis and Enterprise could again put to sea.
Isn’t that just great, Jack grumbled to himself. Her estimate was as good
as the one sitting on his desk with Top Secret written on the folder in red
lettering. Maybe it was even better, since her source was probably a yard
worker with real experience in that largest of body and fender shops. She
was followed by a learned commentator-this one a retired admiral working
at a Washington think-tank-who said that taking the Marianas back would
be extremely difficult at best.
The problem with a free press was that it gave out information to every-
one, and over the past two decades it had become so good a source of infor-
mation that his country’s own intelligence services used it for all manner of
time-critical data. For its part, the public had grown more sophisticated in its
demands for news, and the networks had responded by improving both its
collection and analysis. Of course, the press had its weaknesses. For real
insider information it depended too much on leaks and not enough on shoe-
leather, especially in Washington, and for analysis it often selected people
motivated less by facts than by an agenda. But for things that one could see,
the press often worked better than trained intelligence officers on the gov-
ernment payroll.
The other side depended on it too, Jack thought. Just as he was watching
his office TV, so were others, all over the world. .. .
“You look busy,” Admiral Jackson said from the door.
‘ ‘I’m waiting just as fast as I can.” Ryan waved him to a seat. “CNN just
reported on the carriers.”
“Good,” Robby replied.
“Good?”
“We can have Stennis back to sea in seven to ten days. Old pal of mine,
Bud Sanchez, is the CAG aboard her, and he has some ideas I like. So does
AirPac.”
“A week? Wait a minute.” Yet another effect of TV news, was that peo-
ple often believed it over official data, even though in this case the classified
report was identical with-
Three were still in Connecticut, and the other three were undergoing tests in
Nevada. Everything about them was untraditional. The fabrication plant, for
example, was more like a tailor shop than an aircraft factory. The basic ma-
terial for the airframes arrived in rolls, which were laid out on a long, thin
table where computer-driven laser cutters sliced out the proper shapes.
Those were then laminated and baked in an oven until the carbon-fiber fabric
formed a sandwich stronger than steel, but far lighter-and, unlike steel,
transparent to electromagnetic energy. Nearly twenty years of design work
had gone into this, and the first pedestrian set of requirements had grown
into a book as thick as a multivolume encyclopedia. A typical Pentagon pro-
gram, it had taken too long and cost too much, but the final product, if not
exactly worth the wait, was certainly worth having, even at twenty million
dollars per copy, or, as the crews put it, ten million dollars per seat.
The three in Connecticut were sitting in an open-sided shed when the Si-
korsky employees arrived. The onboard systems were fully functional, and
they had each been flown only just enough by the company test pilots to
make sure that they could fly. All the systems had been checked out properly
through the onboard diagnostic computer which, of course, had also diag-
nosed itself. After fueling, the three were wheeled out onto the ramp and
llown oil just ul’lcr durk, north to Westover Air Force Base, in western Mas-
sachusetts, where they would be loaded in a Galaxy transport of the 3271)1
Military Airlift Squadron for a flight to a place northeast of Las Vegas that
wasn’t on any official maps, though its existence wasn’t much of a secret.
Hack in Connecticut, three wooden mockups were wheeled into the shed, its
open side visible from the residential area and highway three hundred yards
uphill. People would even be seen to work on them all week.
Even if you didn’t really know the mission yet, the requirements were pretty
much the same. Tennessee reduced speed to twenty knots, five hundred
miles off the coast.
“Engine room answers all ahead two-thirds, sir.”
“Very well,” Commander Claggett acknowledged. “Left twenty-de-
grees rudder, come to new course zero-three-zero.” The helmsman repeated
that order back, and Claggett’s next command was, “Rig ship for ul-
traquiet.”
He already knew the physics of what he was doing, but moved aft to the
plotting table anyway, to recheck the ship’s turning circle. The Captain, too,
had to check everything he did. The sharp course reversal was designed to
effect a self-noise check. All over the submarine, unnecessary equipment
was switched off, and crewmen not on duty got into their individual bunks as
their ship turned. The crew, Claggett noted, was already getting into the
swing.
Trailing behind Tennessee at the end of a thousand-yard cable was her
towed sonar array, itself a thousand feet long. In another minute the sub-
marine was like a dog chasing her own lengthy tail, a bare thousand yards
abeam of it, and still doing twenty knots while sonarmen listened on their
own systems for noise from their own ship. Claggett’s next stop was the
sonar room, so that he could watch the displays himself. It was electronic
incest of sorts, the best sonar systems ever made trying to locate the quietest
ship ever made.