“Here.” Ryan handed it over.
“What is this?” Suspicion now. Something was very badly wrong, wrong enough that his voice betrayed him.
Jack didn’t make him wait. He spoke in a voice he’d been rehearsing for a week. Without knowing it, he spoke faster than he’d planned. “That, Chairman Gerasimov, is the warhead-control key from the Soviet ballistic-missile submarine Krasny Oktyabr. It was given to me by Captain Marko Aleksandrovich Ramius when he defected. You will be pleased to know that he likes his new life in America, as do all of his officers.”
“The submarine was—”
Ryan cut him off. There was scarcely enough light to see the outline of his face, but that was enough to see the change in the man’s expression.
“Destroyed by her own scuttling charges? No. The spook aboard whose cover was ship’s cook, Sudets, I think his name was—well, no sense in hiding it. I killed him. I’m not especially proud of that, but it was either him or me. For what it’s worth, he was a very courageous young man,” Jack said, remembering the ten horrible minutes in the submarine’s missile room. “Your file on me doesn’t say anything about operations, does it?”
“But—”
Jack cut him off again. It was not yet the time for finesse. They had to jolt him, had to jolt him hard.
“Mr. Gerasimov, there are some things we want from you.”
“Rubbish. Our conversation is ended.” But Gerasimov didn’t rise, and this time Ryan made him wait for a few beats.
“We want Colonel Filitov back. Your official report to the Politburo on Red October stated that the submarine was positively destroyed, and that a defection had probably never been planned, but rather that GRU security had been penetrated and that the submarine had been issued bogus orders after her engines had been sabotaged. That information came to you through Agent Cassius. He works for us,” Jack explained. “You used it to disgrace Admiral Gorshkov and to reinforce your control over the military’s internal security, They’re still angry about that, aren’t they? So, if we do not get Colonel Filitov back, this coming week in Washington a story will be leaked to the press for the Sunday editions. It will have some of the details of the operation, and a photograph of the submarine sitting in a covered drydock in Norfolk, Virginia. After that we will produce Captain Ramius. He’ll say that the ship’s political officer—one of your Department Three men, I believe—was part of the conspiracy. Unfortunately, Putin died after arriving, of a heart attack. That’s a lie, but try proving it.”
“You cannot blackmail me, Ryan!” There was no emotion at all now.
“One more thing. SDI is not on the bargaining table. Did you tell the Politburo that it was?” Jack asked. “You’re finished, Mr. Gerasimov. We have the ability to disgrace you, and you’re just too good a target to pass up. If we don’t get Filitov back, we can leak all sorts of things. Some will be confirmed, but the really good ones will be denied, of course, while the FBI launches an urgent investigation to identify the leakers.”
“You did not do all this for Filitov,” Gerasimov said, his voice measured now.
“Not exactly.” Again he made him wait for it: “We want you to come out, too.”
Jack walked out of the tram five minutes later. His escort walked him back to the hotel. The attention to detail was impressive. Before rejoining the reception. Jack’s shoes were wiped dry. On reentering the room he walked at once to the drink table, but found it empty. He spotted a waiter with a tray, and took the first thing he could reach. It turned out to be vodka, but Ryan gunned it down in a single gulp before reaching for another. When he finished that one, he started wondering where the men’s room really was. It turned out to be exactly where he’d been told. Jack got there just in time.
It was as worked up as anyone had ever been with a computer simulation. They’d never run one quite this way before, of course, and that was the purpose of the test. The ground-control computer didn’t know what it was doing, nor did any of the others. One machine was programmed to report a series of distant radar contacts. All it did was to receive a collection of signals like those generated by an orbiting Flying Cloud satellite, cued in turn by one of the DSPS birds at geosynchronous height. The computer relayed this information to the ground-control computer, which examined its criteria for weapons-free authority and decided that they had been met. It took a few seconds for the lasers to power up, but they reported being ready a few seconds later. The fact that the lasers in question did not exist was not pertinent to the test. The ground mirror did, and it responded to instructions from the computer, sending the imaginary laser beam to the relay mirror eight hundred kilometers overhead. This mirror, so recently carried by the space shuttle and actually in California, received its own instructions and altered its configuration accordingly, relaying the laser beam to the battle mirror. This mirror was at the Lockheed factory rather than in orbit, and received its instructions via landline. At all three mirrors a precise record was kept of the ever-changing focal-length and azimuth settings. This information was sent to the score-keeping computer at Tea Clipper Control.
There had been several purposes to the test that Ryan had observed a few weeks before. In validating the system architecture, they had also received priceless empirical data on the actual functioning characteristics of the hardware. As a result they could simulate real exercises on the ground with near-absolute confidence in the theoretical results.
Gregory was rolling a ballpoint pen between his hands as the data came up on the video-display terminal. He’d just stopped chewing on it for fear of getting a mouth full of ink.
“Okay, there’s the last shot,” an engineer observed. “Here comes the score . . .”
“Wow!” Gregory exclaimed. “Ninety-six out of a hundred! What’s the cycle time?”
“Point zero-one-six,” a software expert replied. “That’s point zero-zero-four under nominal—we can double-check every aim-command while the laser cycles—”
“And that increases the Pk thirty percent all by itself,” Gregory said. “We can even try doing shoot-look-shoot instead of shoot-shoot-took and still save time on the back end. People!”—he jumped to his feet—”we have done it! The software is in the fuckin’ can!” Four months sooner than promised!
The room erupted with cheering that no one outside the team of thirty people could possibly have understood.
“Okay, you laser pukes!” someone called. “Get your act together and build us a death ray! The gunsight is finished!”
“Be nice to the laser pukes.” Gregory laughed. “I work with them too.”
Outside the room, Beatrice Taussig was merely walking past the door on her way to an admin meeting when she heard the cheering. She couldn’t enter the lab—it had a cipher lock, and she didn’t have the combination—but didn’t have to. The experiment that they’d hinted at over dinner the night before had just been run. The result was obvious enough. Candi was in there, probably standing right next to the Geek, Bea thought. She kept walking.
“Thank God there’s not much ice,” Mancuso observed, looking through the periscope. “Call it two feet, maybe three.” “There will be a clear channel here. The icebreakers keep all the coastal ports open,” Ramius said.
“Down ‘scope,” the Captain said next. He walked over to the chart table. “I want you to move us two thousand yards south, then bottom us out. That’ll put us under a hard roof and ought to keep the Grishas and Mirkas away.”
“Aye, Captain,” the XO replied.
“Let’s go get some coffee,” Mancuso said to Ramius and Clark. He led them down one deck and to starboard into the wardroom. For all the times he’d done things like this in the past four years, Mancuso was nervous. They were in less than two hundred feet of water, within sight of the Soviet coast. If detected and then localized by a Soviet ship, they would be attacked. It had happened before. Though no Western submarine had ever suffered actual damage, there was a first time for everything, especially if you started taking things for granted, the Captain of USS Dallas told himself. Two feet of ice was too much for the thin-hulled Grisha-class patrol boats to plow through, and their main antisubmarine weapon, a multiple rocket launcher called an RBU-6000, was useless over ice, but a Grisha could call in a submarine. There were Russian subs about. They’d heard two the previous day.
“Coffee, sir?” the wardroom attendant asked. He got a nod and brought out a pot and cups.
“You sure this is close enough?” Mancuso asked Clark.
“Yeah, I can get in and out.”
“It won’t be much fun,” the Captain observed.