More exploring followed, with both men carefully avoiding windows. Fortunately the lawn fell away on the front of the house, which had huge windows looking toward the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Taking his time, Jake unlocked the door to the garage and gently pushed it open, half expecting someone to be in there. There wasn't.
He flipped on the light —-A pickup. Four-wheel drive. Unlocked but no key. "Here's our way out if we can find a key," he told the Russian.
Back upstairs he went to the den, rooted through the desk drawers. Plenty of keys, but none that looked like it might fit the pickup.
"Look in the kitchen," he advised the Russian, who left him in the den.
After a bit Jake went downstairs and met Ilin heading for the garage with a key ring in his hand. "They were in a drawer with batteries and flashlights," Ilin said over his shoulder.
When they were satisfied they had the right key, Jake held up a hand, stopping Ilin from turning on the truck. "If we drive out now, they'll follow. We'll have a better chance after dark."
"That's hours away."
"We've got shotguns, water, and toilet paper. I'm in no hurry."
Ilin nodded and climbed out of the truck.
They sat on the stools at the kitchen counter, well back from the windows, shotguns on their laps. The Cessna was still up there, circling. On the walls were family pictures, teenage girls at the beach, girls with boys, a photo around a Christmas tree. Several of the framed pictures were of a couple in their fifties, the owners, probably.
"Who are these people?" Ilin asked. "Who owns this house?"
"The guy is a car dealer, I think. Maybe retired. There were some old awards from Ford Motor Company up in his office, a framed picture of a dealership."
"A capitalist."
"Yep. A leech. Sold cars to anyone who wanted one. Sucked the blood of the proletariat. The proletariat liked it, apparently, which is why America is full of cars and millions of people make an excellent living in the auto industry."
"Too bad Karl Marx didn't sell cars."
"And Lenin," Jake said, flashing a grin.
"I think after dark would be best," Ilin said, leaning back on his stool and making sure the shotgun was handy.
"There's food in the freezer and a television. Maybe even liquor. And a loaded gun at hand. What more do you want?"
"What I want is a cigarette." Without another word Ilin lit one. There were no ashtrays, of course. He found a saucer in the cabinet and used that.
Seated in the left seat of the P-3 Orion, Duke Dolan checked his watch. The sonobuoys were in the water, the TACCO and his troops were trying to sort out the undersea noises… and the copilot was talking to Scout One, the E-3 Sentry AWACS that was somewhere nearby, directing aerial traffic. The four-engine patrol plane was low, only two hundred feet over the ocean, so Duke was working hard as he hand-flew it.
Clouds were moving in from the west. The high overcast would come down during the day and showers would develop this evening, according to the weather briefer when Duke discussed the forecast with him this morning an hour before dawn. That was the thing about the military — the working hours were truly terrible. Up at three in the morning, brief and fly for twelve hours, debrief, sleep a little, then get up and do it over again. At least his crew was flying days. He hated flying all night and trying to sleep in the middle of the day.
This contact was a welcome break from the boredom of long patrols. The people in back were pumped, the copilot was energized, Duke was working hard. All this over an ocean empty in every direction as far as the eye could see, which was about eight or nine miles; then the sea and sky merged in a bluish haze.
Duke turned the selector knob on his intercom box so that he could listen to the crew in back as they sorted out the undersea sounds. The sonobuoys were set to reel out their hydrophones to different depths, so America couldn't hide under a temperature or salinity discontinuity. Not that the boat really needed to hide, Duke Dolan thought ruefully. It was so damned quiet that the P-3 had little chance of hearing it.
That thought had just crossed his mind when he heard one of the operators tell the TACCO, "I've got something here."
After a moment the TACCO began giving Duke heading changes. He brought him around in a fairly tight circle and had him fly toward an area he wanted investigated.
Duke Dolan was amused by the whole business. Didn't these people understand that they weren't going to hear America} That damned pirate, Kolnikov, was down there right now laughing at the U.S. Navy. Maybe that was the sound they heard, Kolnikov laughing.
The TACCO had him make a turn and come back over the area that he thought might have something.
Time passed as the plane droned along, turning this way and that, the pilots following the TACCO's orders. After about twelve minutes of this, the radar operator, who also ran the magnetic anomaly detector, or MAD gear, sang out, "MAD, MAD, MAD." He had a contact! "The needle pegged! Clear to the stop!" the man shouted over the ICS at the TACCO.
"Back around for another run," the TACCO told Duke. "We'll put a sonobuoy in on this pass, then work out his course and speed."
"When you get it all figured out, then what are you going to do?" Duke asked.
"Report it all to the heavies, I guess. They aren't going to let us shoot if there are American boats within a hundred miles. You know that as well as I do."
"Yeah," Duke said disgustedly and laid the P-3 over in a turn.
"P-3 went directly overhead," Eck said softly, just loud enough for Kolnikov to hear. There were still a few kibitzers in Americas control room, including Heydrich, and for some reason Eck felt they were intruders.
"Tell me if he comes back," Kolnikov said. He kept his attention on the ghostly shape of La Jolla on the flat-screen display. The noise generated by the prop pushing water shone like a floodlight on the presentation. Eck had softened the gain somewhat on the presentation to keep the light from overpowering the rest of the submarine. All sonar images were fuzzy, of course, but the computer cleaned up this one and gave it a tangible reality that made it leap at the viewer.
"The P-3 probably got us on MAD," Eck said. Kolnikov was too calm. The man just didn't seem to understand that their lives were at stake here.
Eck glanced at Kolnikov, was nodding affirmatively, a tiny up-and-down jerking of the head. Then it stopped. He was intent on La Jolla.
Two minutes ago he had picked up the sound of water passing around the array cable. After Eck designated noises on that frequency for the computer to sort out and display, the cable was visible on the port Revelation displays, a pencil-thin line that stretched from the port side of the submarine, above America, and disappeared astern. The thought struck him that the cable looked like a power line along a highway.
"He's turning and moving away," Kolnikov said to Turchak, who was at the helm control station. "Stay with him."
"I'm going to have to add a few turns."
"Okay."
"He knows we're back here," Turchak said softly, trying not to alarm Eck or the kibitzers. "He's started the dance to see if we'll stay with him."
"Surely not. We're too quiet. Turn on the sail lights, poke the photonics mast up a few feet and turn on the camera. Let's see if we can get this guy on television."
Rothberg scurried aft and raised the mast. Turchak flipped on the sail's floodlights, used primarily to light the gangway at night when the sub was against a pier.
Yes. After the image was enhanced by the low-light illuminator, there she was, La Jolla, on the forward screen, dim and ghostly.
"Try the blue-green illuminator," Kolnikov said over his shoulder to Rothberg, who was still at the photonics console.
"That might set off alarms," Turchak objected. Blue-green was often used by airborne and space-based sensors for submarine detection.
"Okay, ultraviolet," Kolnikov muttered.
In ultraviolet the American attack boat was slightly clearer. Kolnikov, Turchak, and Rothberg discussed f
requencies for a bit, then Rothberg changed the freq of the blue-green illuminator slightly, taking it off the freq they thought most likely to be expected, and tried that. La Jolla leaped clearly into view.
Several minutes passed. La Jolla turned again, five or six degrees back to the right.
"Stick like glue. He can't hurt us from that position, and no one else will shoot with him there."
"And if he manages to break away?"
"He doesn't know we're here," Kolnikov assured his friend. "We'll stick with him until the P-3 leaves, or any other antisubmarine forces that enter the area, then drop astern and break away." "I think he knows we're here."
"So. What can he do? We are within the minimum range of his torpedoes, they wouldn't travel far enough to arm, and he can't turn them back across his wake due to the safety interlocks. And if he tries to break away we'll gun him the instant he crosses our minimum range line."
Aboard La Jolla, Junior Ryder was examining his options. He had turned his boat fifteen degrees to the right and put in turns for six knots. He and his XO, Commander Skip Harlow, were listening to the raw sonar audio. As the boat's speed increased, it seemed to Junior that the gurgling noise got louder. He asked Harlow and Buck Brown what they thought.
Both nodded. Yes.
Then he turned the boat five degrees back to the right, to see if the noise would follow. It did.
"That fucking Russian has his nose up our ass," Harlow murmured. Sweat glistened on his forehead and ran down the crevices of his face. He swabbed at his face with his hand.
"He can't shoot us from there," Junior said thoughtfully, "but if he breaks away.."
"If he breaks away, we can shoot too."
"He didn't shoot us when he had us cold," Junior Ryder said slowly, thinking out loud. "He heard us, probably even knows what boat this is, knows we're hunting him, and he didn't shoot."
"He isn't hunting us," Harlow said without conviction. "We're hunting him."
"Oh, man!" Combat wasn't supposed to be like this, Ryder thought bitterly.
"So what do you want to do, Skipper?"
"I sure as hell don't want this asshole killing my crew. That's for damn sure. I want a high-percentage shot and I want to give him a low-percentage one."
Harlow leaned over to speak softly to Brown. "Is this contact America? Are you sure?"
"I don't have positive verification from the system," Petty Officer Brown explained. "I'm not sure of anything, sir. We have the signature of America in the computer, but they're going too slow for me to get anything but this gurgle."
"What if it's some Russian boat?" Harlow asked his commanding officer. "Some Russian skipper who thinks he's cute?"
"If that boat were Russian we would have heard him. Russian boats aren't this quiet. What do you suggest? You want to give this guy the first shot, just to be sure?"
Skip Harlow thought about it. The lives of everyone on this boat were on the line. So were the lives of everyone on the submarine following La Jolla.
One thing was absolutely certain: If La Jolla made it back to port, every decision made aboard her was going to be weighed by a board of senior officers seated around a long green table. Good judgment was absolutely essential at all times, yet there were always a host of unknowns in every combat situation. Harlow well knew that in the United States Navy the system was biased in favor of those captains who acted aggressively in the face of the enemy. Much would be forgiven a man who waded in swinging. The legacy of John Paul Jones was alive and well. Still, sinking an allied submarine would not be career enhancing.
"Stealing America was an act of war," he said finally, hoping this commanding officer would get his drift. Ryder did. He nodded once, seeming to make up his mind as he did so.
"Go back to our base course, slow to four knots," Ryder said to the chief of the boat, who gave the appropriate orders to his two helmsmen. "XO, let's set up snapshots on four torpedoes. Quietly. Any shot we get will be minimum range, point and shoot."
"Do you think he'll give us a shot, Skipper?" the chief of the boat asked.
"Oh, yes. Eventually. He didn't shoot when he had a free shot, when we didn't know he was there. He could have, but he didn't. In my opinion, he thinks that boat he's in is undetectable. He's going to let us be his shield while that patrol plane is in the area. Sooner or later those guys are going to leave. When we're all alone, Kolnikov and friends are going to try to sneak away. When they cross our minimum range line, we'll let 'em have it."
Shooting someone in the back who declined to shoot at you wasn't very sporting, but that thought didn't even cross Junior Ryder's mind. Buck Brown thought of it, but he bit his tongue. Those guys stole America, they killed six sailors. They had earned their tickets to hell.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Jake Grafton and Janos Ilin learned of the missile strike on New York City when they turned on the television in the kitchen of the house they were in, somewhere west of Manassas and a half mile or so north of Interstate 66. Grafton and Ilin had walked the halls, looked at the doors and windows, concluded that there was just no way for whoever was chasing them to enter the house without making noise, then they went back to the kitchen.
Jake found peanut butter in the cupboard. Ilin touched his finger to the peanut butter, tasted it experimentally, and made a face. They were eating it on crackers and drinking water when Ilin finally reached for the television and flipped it on. Some of the channels were off the air, so he flipped around until they found one that was on, CNN.
New York! The sub had E-bombed New York!
They started with the volume off so they could hear the sound of glass breaking, but eventually they turned it up so they could hear the audio. The television types were confused and besieging the military authorities for answers, which weren't forthcoming. At least two Flashlight missiles had struck New York City, perhaps three, maybe four — no one seemed to know. A fighter had crashed, perhaps several, perhaps there had been an air battle in the skies over the city, blocks of buildings were ablaze, firefighters couldn't get to the scene.
Manhattan and Brooklyn had been surgically removed from modern America. The power had failed. Lights, heat, elevators, and telephones didn't work, the subways didn't run, the streets were filled with cars, trucks, taxis, and buses that were no longer operable, the television and radio networks that originated there were no longer on the air. Eventually Grafton and Ilin learned that the television crews on the air were from New Jersey.
The whole scene reminded Jake of Baghdad during the Gulf War, with camera crews on rooftops looking at columns of smoke rising in the distance.
After a half hour of watching the breathless reporting and the guesses, good and bad, Jake turned the television off and walked through the house again with the shotgun in his hand. Standing well back from the windows, he looked out, trying to see if anyone were still out there.
And saw no one.
"What do you think?" he asked Ilin, who was doing the same thing.
"I think they may still be out there," the Russian responded. "I have nothing more pressing on my calendar."
"Maybe they are waiting for us to come out."
"That is possible. One wonders if the owners will come home this afternoon."
That, Jake suspected, wasn't in the cards. The house looked like it had been vacant for weeks, perhaps longer. There were no perishables in the refrigerator or cupboards. He pointed this out to Ilin.
They were trapped. The circuits in Jake's cell phone were fried the night before last — he had almost thrown the thing away, but Callie suggested he retain it to show to the insurance company if there were problems. She was confident their household insurance would pay their losses. A forlorn hope, Jake suspected, but he put the telephone on his dresser and left it there.
Now he wandered through this house looking for a cell phone. He checked the bedrooms and the owner's office area, looked in the drawers. He found a charger for a cell phone, but the instrument was not there.
New York!
Well, at least they had the pickup. Tonight.
"Are you married?" he asked Ilin.
"She died. Cancer." I m sorry.
"It was years ago. Life cheated her. She loved me, she loved life, she loved her country. Then she got sick and died young."
Jake thought of his wife. He and Callie had been lucky, extraordinarily so, and they both knew it. That realization dusted every day of their lives with magic. He didn't say this to Ilin, of course.
"People change," Ilin mused, "the world changes. When I finished school I was recruited by the KGB. My father was prominent in the defense department, his father had been a hero of the war against fascism. The KGB seemed the path of least resistance." He shrugged. "In those days we knew who the enemy was. America. And what a fine enemy you were, too. Rich, powerful, strong, at times stupid and heedless. We looked for cracks, for chinks in the armor, prepared for the final battle between good and evil, Armageddon. It didn't come. The Soviet Union was always a geopolitical oxymoron, an empire that tried to be a nation. It collapsed, finally, stunning us all."
They sat, each with his own thoughts, listening to the silence.
"So everything changed," Ilin continued after a while, "and nothing changed. Russia remained what it always was, poor and backward in so many ways, isolated, afraid of foreign ideas, struggling to keep up with the outside world, not sure it wanted to. Today the enemy is still America… and Europe and China and Japan. And given the state of affairs in Russia, that is good. When Armageddon comes we will be on the sidelines."
"Maybe it's here now," Jake Grafton said.
"The struggle has no beginning and no end. It is ongoing and everywhere. You comfortable Americans, you have never understood that basic fact. Change brings new challenges. That is the fallacy of SuperAegis. Regardless of how much money you spend or how clever you are, technology cannot give you security. Checkmate happens only in chess, not in human affairs. Man has been looking for a magic weapon since he first picked up a club. And hasn't found it yet.
"Nuclear weapons worked," Jake objected. "They prevented World War III."
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