“Too many ifs,” Roger Breskin said.
Fischer was grim. “If he’s Horatio Hornblower, if he’s the fucking grandfather of all the sailors who ever lived, if he’s not a mere man but a supernatural force of the sea, then I guess we’ll have a chance.”
“Well, if he is Horatio Hornblower,” Harry said impatiently, “if he does show up here tomorrow, all flags flying and sailing like the clappers, I want to be around to say hello.”
They were silent.
Harry said, “What about the rest of you?”
No one disagreed with him.
“All right, we’ll need every man on the bomb-recovery project,” Harry said, fitting the tinted goggles over his eyes. “Rita, will you stay here and watch over the radio, put through that call to Gunvald?”
“Sure.”
Claude said, “Someone should finish searching the camp before the snow drifts over the ruins.”
“I’ll hand that too,” Rita said.
Harry went to the mouth of the cave. “Let’s get moving. I can hear those sixty clocks ticking. I don’t want to be too near when the alarms go off.”
CHAPTER THREE: PRISON
2:30
DETONATION IN NINE HOURS
THIRTY MINUTES
Within a minute or two of lying down, Nikita Gorov knew that he was not going to be able to get any rest. From out of the past, one small ghost materialized to haunt him and ensure that he would not find the peace of sleep. When he closed his eyes, he could see little Nikolai, his Nikki, running toward him through a soft yellow haze. The child’s arms were open wide, and he was giggling. But the distance between them could not be closed, regardless of how long or fast Nikki ran or how desperately Gorov reached out for him: They were separated by only ten or twelve feet, but each inch was an infinity. The captain wanted nothing half as much as to touch his son, but the unbreachable veil between life and death separated them.
With a soft, involuntary sigh of despair, Gorov opened his eyes and looked at the silver-framed photograph on the corner desk: Nikolai and himself standing in front of a piano-accordion player on a Moscow River cruise ship. At times, when the past lay especially heavy on him, Gorov was monstrously depressed by the photograph. But he could not remove it. He could not put it in a drawer or throw it away any more than he could chop off his right hand merely because Nikolai had often held it.
Suddenly charged with nervous energy, he got up from his bunk. He wanted to pace, but his quarters were too small. In three steps he had walked the length of the narrow aisle between the bed and the closet. He couldn’t allow the crew to see how distraught he was. Otherwise, he might have paced the main companionway.
Finally he sat at the desk. He took the photograph in both hands, as if by confronting it—and his agonizing loss—he could soothe the pain in his heart and calm himself.
He spoke softly to the golden-haired boy in the picture. “I am not responsible for your death, Nikki.”
Gorov knew that was true. He believed it as well, which was more important than merely knowing it. Yet oceans of guilt washed through him in endless, corrosive tides.
“I know you never blamed me, Nikki. But I wish I could hear you tell me so.”
In mid-June, seven months ago, the Ilya Pogodin had been sixty days into an ultrasecret, ninety-day electronic-surveillance mission on the Mediterranean route. The boat had been submerged nine miles off the Egyptian coast, directly north of the city of Alexandria. The multicommunications aerial was up, and thousands of bytes of data, important and otherwise, were filing into the computer banks every minute.
At two o’clock in the morning, the fifteenth of June, a message came in from the Naval Intelligence Office at Sevastopol, relayed from the Naval Ministry in Moscow. It required a confirmation from the Ilya Pogodin, thereby shattering the radio silence that was an absolute necessity during a clandestine mission.
When the code specialist had finished translating the encrypted text, Gorov was wakened by the night communications officer. He sat in his bunk and read from the pale-yellow paper.