“Just frightened.”
He knew that she struggled always against the fear of snow, ice, and cold, and he never ceased to admire her unwavering determination to confront her phobias and to work in the very climate that most tested her. “You’ve good reason this time,” he said. “Listen, you know what we’ll do if we get off this damned berg?”
She shook her head and shoved up her misted goggles, so he could see her lovely green eyes. They were wide with curiosity and delight.
“We’ll go to Paris,” he told her.
Grinning, she said, “To the Crazy Horse Saloon.”
“George V.”
“A room overlooking the gardens.”
“Möet.”
He pulled up his own goggles, and she kissed him.
Clapping one hand on Harry’s shoulder, Pete Johnson said, “Have some consideration for those whose wives don’t like frostbite. And didn’t you hear what I said? I said, ‘The gang’s all here.’” He pointed to a pair of snowmobiles racing toward them through the snow.
“Roger, Brian, and George,” Rita said with obvious relief.
“Must be,” Johnson said. “Not likely to run across a bunch of strangers out here.”
“The gang’s all here,” Harry agreed. “But where in the name of God does it go next?”
1:32
On the fourteenth day of a hundred-day electronic-espionage mission, the Russian nuclear submarine Ilya Pogodin reached its first monitoring station on schedule. The captain, Nikita Gorov, ordered the maneuvering room to hold the boat steady in the moderate southeasterly currents northwest of Jan Mayen Island, forty miles from the coast of Greenland and one hundred feet beneath the stormy surface of the North Atlantic.
The Ilya Pogodin had been named after an official Hero of the Soviet People, in the days before the corrupt bureaucracy had failed and the totalitarian state had crumbled under the weight of its own inefficiency and venality. The boat’s name had not been changed: in part because the navy was tradition bound; in part because the new quasi-democracy was fragile, and care still had to be taken not to offend the bitter and potentially murderous old-guard Party members who had been driven from power but who might one day come storming back to reopen the extermination camps and the institutions of “reeducation”; and in part because Russia was now so fearfully poor, so totally bankrupted by Marxism and by legions of pocket-lining politicians, that the country could spare no funds for the repainting of boat names or for the alteration of records to reflect those changes.
Gorov was unable to obtain even adequate maintenance for his vessel. In these trying days after the fall of empire, he was too worried about the integrity of the pressure hull, the nuclear power plant, and the engines to spare any concern for the fact that the Ilya Pogodin was named after a despicable thief and murderer who had been nothing more noble than a dutiful defender of the late, unlamented regime.
Although the Pogodin was an aging fleet submarine that had never carried nuclear missiles, only some nuclear-tipped torpedoes, it was nonetheless a substantial boat, measuring three hundred sixty feet from bow to stern, with a forty-two-foot beam and a draft of thirty-two feet six inches. It displaced over eight thousand tons when fully submerged.
The southeasterly currents had a negligible influence on the boat. It would never drift more than one hundred yards from where Gorov had ordered it held steady.
Peter Timoshenko, the young communications officer, was in the control center at Gorov’s side. Around them, the windows and gauges of the electronic equipment pulsed and glowed and blinked in the half-light: red, amber, green, blue. Even the ceiling was lined with scopes, graphs, display screens, and control panels. When the maneuvering room acknowledged Gorov’s order to hold the boat steady, and when the engine room and reactor room had been made aware of it, Timoshenko said, “Request permission to run up the aerial, Captain.”
“That’s what we’re here for.”
Timoshenko stepped into the main companionway and walked thirty feet to the communications shack, a surprisingly small space packed full of radio equipment capable of receiving and sending encrypted messages in ultrahigh frequency (UHF), high frequency (HF), very low frequency (VLF), and extremely low frequency (ELF). He sat at the primary console and studied the display screens and scopes on his own extensive array of transceivers and computers. He smiled and began to hum as he worked.