America jg-9

by Stephen Coonts

"Much cheaper than a simulator made of hardware, which by the way also requires a computer to give it life."

  "Has the virtual sim replaced hardware completely?"

  "No, sir. Not yet. We still have an actual control room sim to teach crew coordination and procedures. The rest of it is done here. With the exception of America's reactor and engineering personnel, who do their training in the base reactor and engineering simulators. Those devices are also used for Seawolf- and Los Angeles-cass boats; the plants are sufficiently similar."

  "How big is the computer that runs this thing?" Toad Tarkington asked.

  "It's a mainframe. The system is capable of simultaneously han-

  dling ten people and ten sets of gloves, so the computing capacity must be generous. We have a smaller portable system that we take to other bases for refresher training and retraining on procedural revisions. It will handle just four people at a time."

  "How portable?"

  "An enhanced laptop runs it."

  The admiral glanced at the Russian. "Any questions, Mr. Ilin?"

  "It all seems quite amazing," Janos Ilin said, and carefully scrutinized the helmet he held in his hand. "Too bad you still use cords." He was referring to the electrical wires that connected the helmets and gloves to the computer. The use of the wires required the wearer of the helmet and gloves to be careful not to get tangled or wrapped around a fellow trainee.

  "We could go wireless," the chief commented innocently, "but wires make the system more secure. I am told there are people in this world who have the capability of intercepting wireless transmissions. Over time they could duplicate the contents of the mainframe, thereby discerning hardware and software design characteristics of America."

  Jake Grafton was tempted to smile, but the urge died before it reached his lips. Someone had stolen the whole submarine, not just the design.

  "Thank you for your time, Captain. You too, Chief. You've been most helpful."

  "Captain Killbuck, I asked for the best submariner in the United States Navy, and they tell me you're him." General Flap Le Beau, commandant of the Marine Corps, made this remark when he was introduced to Captain Leroy "Sonny" Killbuck in the Pentagon war room. Killbuck was on the briefing platform and Le Beau was seated in his usual chair, one of the large ones reserved for the Joint Chiefs arranged in a semicircle in the front of the room. In the chairman's seat was General Howard Alt.

  "That's very flattering, General," Killbuck said. "I heard you were the toughest marine in uniform."

  "They've lied to both of us, then," Le Beau shot back. Killbuck was a year or two over forty, just screened for flag, with a lot of American Indian in him apparently. He had high cheekbones, dark brown skin, jet-black straight hair, and a rugged, craggy face. Someone said he was Shawnee. A star on the staff of Vice-Admiral Navarre, the assistant CNO for underseas warfare, he was being groomed for high command.

  An African American, Le Beau was just a shade darker than Killbuck. He was a veteran of Vietnam and several brushfire wars since, a fearless knifefighter with the knack of inspiring people to give the very best that was in them. He liked to tell people that his name, Le Beau, was from his white ancestors, a family of Louisiana planters, but in truth he had no idea where it came from. His mother, who had called herself Twila Le Beau, died of a drug overdose when he was in his early teens; he never knew who his father was, and if he had grandparents who outlived his mother, he never knew them. He was, he told his closest friends, a Brooklyn sewer rat. Those who knew him would tell you that he had given himself to the marines body and soul, that he embodied the heritage and values of the corps; the troops said that even his blood was green.

  "So where's that submarine?"

  Sonny Killbuck gestured toward the map that formed the wall behind the podium. "We drew the black circle an hour ago, sir. The submarine was hijacked thirty-six hours ago, so this is a circle with a seven-hundred-and-twenty-nautical-mile radius, centered on New London. The submarine is somewhere within that circle."

  "I thought America had a maximum sustained speed of nearly thirty knots." Le Beau shot a glance at Stuffy Stalnaker, the CNO, who was sitting in his usual seat, looking sour. Vice-Admiral Navarre was sitting beside him. His face was stony.

  "It does, sir, but at anything over twenty knots the boat will begin to make some noise — and we haven't yet detected it on SOSUS." Beginning in the 1950s, the United States placed hydrophones on the ocean floor all over the world and gradually built a complete system. Today the raw data from hydrophone arrays was processed through a regional evaluation center, and the processed results were then passed to the main evaluation center in Washington, where they were correlated with information from other sources, such as satellites, human intelligence, patrol planes, etc.

  "The senior hijacker was apparently a former Russian submariner named Kolnikov," Sonny Killbuck continued. "Presumably he knows a great deal about SOSUS, knows to keep his speed down."

  "The yellow circle?"

  "That is the ten-knot circle, sir, with a three-hundred-and-sixty-nautical-mile radius. Obviously both circles continue to expand; eventually the submarine could be under any of Earth's oceans."

  "Okay."

  Killbuck used a pointer. "This is the Goddard SuperAegis launch platform, east of Cape Canaveral. We have a battle group proceeding into that area at twenty knots. Two of our attack boats that were in port in Georgia are now at sea, and two are being readied for sea. We have four boats on patrol in the North Atlantic; those are being diverted back to the seaboard of the eastern United States. Our antisubmarine patrol assets are flying patrols searching for the boat. In addition, Space Command is retasking their reconnaissance satellites to concentrate on the North Atlantic."

  "What is the range of the Tomahawk missiles aboard America}"

  "About one thousand nautical miles, sir."

  "So the Goddard launch platform is already within range of America's weapons?"

  "Yes, sir. That is correct."

  "I understand that America surfaced south of Long Island to put the rest of the crew in the water. Did any of these P-3s or satellites see her?"

  "Not to my knowledge."

  "What else should we be doing, Val?" General Alt asked Vice-Admiral Navarre.

  "We are doing everything within our power to find that ship, sir," Navarre shot back. "We'll not find it, though, until the hijackers start doing something with the boat, torpedo something, shoot a missile, or surface. We must be ready to close in if and when they break cover."

  "You think they'll use the ship's weapons?"

  Navarre took his time before he answered. "Taking the sub to sea is a hell of a feat for an untrained crew, or an undertrained one. Operating the ship's weapons systems is a whole different ball game. The submarine combat system is a fully integrated package, constructed like a telephone network. There is no one single monstrous software package, but a series of packages, all of which work together. Parisian taxicab drivers who once went to sea in old boats back when the world was young aren't going to have a clue."

  "This whole scenario is improbable," said General Alt. "But the fact is the damn submarine is gone and our crew is on dry land." Alt was a politician-bureaucrat to his fingertips, and he looked it. Smart, well educated, from a prominent family, Alt was the possessor of a large inherited fortune, which made him an anomaly in the armed forces. The American military had drawn its officers from the middle and lower middle class almost exclusively since the end of the Korean War. Perhaps Alt had seen the military as a bureaucracy to be conquered; in any event, he attended the Military Academy and made the army his career while his brothers went to Ivy League schools, then burrowed into the merchant-banking business.

  "When we get some idea of why they stole the ship," Stuffy Stal-naker said, "then we'll get a glimmer of where to look for it."

  "Do you have anything to contribute to this conversation?" Flap asked Killbuck.

  "They broke cover once already, surfacing," the capt
ain said. "We heard the boat surface. We didn't know it until two hours later, when the sound could be matched to an event. We haven't yet listened to America enough to collect a decent database."

  "This boat has been to sea numerous times for workups and testing," Flap objected.

  "Yes, sir. We haven't yet run it through the acoustic range off Andros Island. We are going over the sea trials and SOSUS records now, doing statistical studies. In forty-eight hours or so we hope to have a database we can work with."

  "Anything else?" Alt asked with the slightest edge in his voice. He, not the other chiefs of staff, ran the war room.

  "Yes, sir. During the night the SOSUS sensors picked up a sound that we could not identify. I'll play it for you."

  Killbuck signaled to one of the enlisted men who worked in the war room. Flap took a deep breath, exerted control over his own emotions. Parading useless information before the brass was an old, old briefing technique designed to deflect criticism when one had nothing tangible to report.

  Flap half closed his eyes, listened to a faint, faint sound. Definitely metallic. Killbuck played it four times.

  "And?"

  "The SOSUS people refuse to identify it," Killbuck said. He paused for a heartbeat, then added, "It's a low-frequency sound, per-

  haps a torpedo tube being flushed with compressed air. And that's just a guess."

  "Where?"

  Killbuck used his pointer. "What you heard is sound picked up by four sensors and mixed together by computer. We think it originated here."

  "Did you get a P-3 over there?" Flap Le Beau asked.

  "Yes, sir. He came up dry."

  "We must do better," General Alt said. "We must have planes out there to investigate anything suspicious. Let's get out there and get after that sub. Find him."

  "Yes, sir."

  "We find it, we're going to sink the son of a bitch," Stuffy Stal-naker said. "Shoot on positive identification. We aren't going to run over to the White House and watch the politicians wring their hands while those assholes sail off into the sunset. We're going to send those sons of bitches to Davy Jones."

  "Getting positive identification is critical," Val Navarre remarked. "We're putting our attack boats out there to look for America. The best way to find a sub is with another sub. We should have six boats at sea by tomorrow night. Other nations will do the same. There are going to be a lot of submarines in the North Atlantic very soon."

  After dinner in the sub-base officers' club, Janos Ilin excused himself and walked across the street to the bachelor officers' quarters, the BOQ, leaving Toad alone with Jake Grafton.

  "The FBI has the place surrounded," Toad said in a low voice, trying not to be heard by diners at other tables. "If he leaves the BOQ he'll be followed."

  "Ilin knows that. Or suspects it. He won't leave."

  "I saw you talking to that FBI agent just before dinner," Toad continued. "A report?"

  "They've found where the hijackers stayed for the past two weeks. The place is a cheap motel near Providence. Thirty-dollar rooms. And the FBI went into our beach house after we left this afternoon. The place is bugged, and the bugs are wired to a low-power transmitter."

  "Russian?"

  "Apparently."

  "But you didn't invite me and Ilin for the weekend until Friday."

  "The house has stood empty all summer, Toad. When Ilin joined the security team he learned the identities of everyone on the team. The FBI is checking, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that our apartment in Rosslyn is bugged, and Blevins's townhouse, and your house…. The FBI will check all of them."

  Commander Toad Tarkington leaned back in his chair. He was a few inches shorter than his boss, with a perfect set of white teeth and deep laugh lines that grooved his tan face. An F-14 radar intercept officer, or RIO, early in his career, he had spent the last few years as Jake's aide or executive assistant.

  Jake told Toad of seeing Ilin talking in the street during a smoke break that morning. "I don't think the Russians can get a surveillance team onto the base, but they might. If he does it again, we'll be listening too. And we'll burn the surveillance team."

  Toad looked speculatively at Jake. The admiral thought he knew what the younger man was thinking. "Yes, I know having Ilin around is a risk. But the Russians are our prime suspects for the theft of America. We need to determine if they are involved, and the sooner the better."

  "Are you going to tell Ilin that the hijackers were a CIA team being trained to steal a Russian sub?"

  "Yes. If he doesn't already know."

  "What if the Russians weren't behind it?"

  Jake turned over a hand.

  "The Russians are going to get a good laugh over that one."

  "As long as a laugh is all they get!" Jake muttered.

  Toad tapped the table with a finger three or four times. "Were you thinking what I was thinking when the simulator guys told us about that portable sim?" he asked, glancing up at Jake's face.

  "Yeah. The FBI is going to follow up on that. If the portable computer went off base to train the hijackers, someone took it off."

  When Toad went back to his room in the BOQ, Jake called for a car and rode to the base communications center. There he used a secure telephone to put in a call to General Flap Le Beau.

  "Jake Grafton, General. Thought I would give you a progress report." He did so. When he had finished talking, the marine told him that the rest of the America crewmen had been pulled out of the ocean by a freighter several hundred miles off the New Jersey coast.

  "So there are no more American sailors aboard that sub, sir?"

  "Not to our knowledge. Two are unaccounted for and may have been killed. Or they may have drowned at sea, although we don't think so. The America sailors think the missing men were killed by the hijackers. Fourteen are known dead and four are wounded."

  "Do the sailors have any ideas about what the hijackers are up to?"

  "They are full of ideas," Flap said heavily. "Nothing to back up their ideas, but they have them."

  A moment later in the conversation, Jake said, "I'm troubled about possible Russian penetration of the Super Aegis liaison team. We've done routine sweeps in the office and taken all the usual precautions, but we haven't been suspicious enough. The FBI says they've bugged my house at the beach. Ilin's dancing around chattering to himself. They're playing games, General." "I'll pass that to General Blevins."

  "I recommend a complete, thorough security review for the project, top to bottom, reexamine the credentials of everyone. I get this feeling that Ilin's onstage, that he expects us to catch him sooner or later." "And?"

  "Maybe Ilin's a diversion. He wants us to catch him. I would bet some serious change that he's just the first layer of the onion."

  Jake told the driver to park the car two blocks from the BOQ. He walked toward the building with his hands in his pockets. He saw smoke rolling out of an open window in the upper story of the building just seconds before he heard the fire alarm ring. People came running from the building, some half dressed. In less than a minute two fire trucks rolled up. Firefighters charged into the building while another group attached a hose to a hydrant with a minimum of lost motion.

  Jake was leaning against a tree a block away when Krautkramer found him ten minutes later. "We waited until he was in the shower," the FBI agent said, "then popped the smoke bomb and pulled the fire alarm. We unlocked the door, hustled him out with a towel around his waist within twenty seconds. He didn't flush the commode."

  "And?"

  "His black leather belt contains a microphone and battery-operated transmitter. There is an on-off switch so he can get through electronic scans."

  "A black leather belt? I've only seen him in that a couple of times."

  "He has three belts. Another black and a brown. Both are clean. Everything else in his luggage seemed innocent enough. We didn't have time to inspect everything closely, but we ran everything he had through a portable X-ray machine."


  "No cyanide pill in the heel of a shoe?" Jake asked savagely. "A bottle of invisible ink, maybe a cipher pad? A code ring from a cereal box?"

  "Ahhh… no."

  "Okay. Thanks for your help."

  "Sure, Admiral."

  "Someone or several someones who know that submarine inside out went to sea with it. Either they boarded the boat with the hijackers or they were already aboard. Who were they?"

  "We don't know yet, Admiral."

  "That boat is a giant, seagoing computer. No sane man would go to sea in it without an expert or two at hand. If the hijackers didn't force the U.S. sailors to stay at their posts and operate the boat for them, and apparently they didn't, it is only because they already had an expert. This is an inside job. Find the people on the inside."

  "We'll do our best," Krautkramer said. "We are going through the base files right now. There are people on leave, civilians on vacation, people out sick — all those people have to be accounted for. Then we have to figure out who knows what. It's just going to take time."

  "Send Toad Tarkington out to talk to me."

  Toad came walking down the sidewalk three minutes later.

  "I'm going back to Washington now," Jake told him. "You and Ilin stay with the FBI. Keep me advised. I told Krautkramer that someone who knows that submarine inside out went to sea with it. When they figure out who that person is, call me."

  "Aye aye, sir."

  "And keep an eye on Ilin. So far he's played us for suckers. Don't let him out of your sight."

  When the others had gone for the night, Zip Vance was alone with Zelda Hudson. She was, he knew, not going anywhere. The bathroom in the far corner of the upper story of the old warehouse had a shower in it. A couch piled with several blankets and a pillow was shoved against the wall near the door, beside the refrigerator and sink. She lived here, worked the computers at night until she finally wound down and slept. He had never seen her sleeping but knew that she must.

  "This is a dangerous game you're playing," he said tentatively.

  The remark irritated her. "We've been all through that."

  Indeed, they had argued many a night. Smart as he was, Zip Vance didn't understand Zelda Hudson. He chewed a fingernail and thought about what he wanted to say.