"Hey!"

"Yes?" Bock looked down at a security guard.

"You're not supposed to be here."

"Sorry." He held up his tickets. "I just bought them, and I wanted to see where my seats were so that I would know where to park. I've never seen an American football game," he added, heavy on the accent. Americans, he'd heard, were always nice to people with European accents.

"You want to park in Area A or B. Try to arrive early, like before five. You want to beat the rush-hour traffic. It can be a bear out there."

Gunther bobbed his head. "Thank you. I'll be leaving now."

"No problem, sir. It's no big deal. I mean, it's the insurance, y'know? You have people wandering around, they might get hurt and sue."

Bock and Russell left. They circled the bottom level, just so that Gunther could be sure he had the configuration memorized. Then that became unnecessary when he found a stadium diagram printed on a small card.

"Seen what you wanted?" Marvin asked when they got back to the car.

"Yes, possibly."

"You know, that's pretty subtle," the American mused aloud.

"What do you mean?"

"d.i.c.kin' with the TV. The really dumb thing about revolutionaries is that they overlook the psychological stuff. You don't have to kill a lot of people, just p.i.s.sin' them off, scarin' them, that's enough, isn't it?"

Bock stopped at the parking-lot exit and looked at his companion. "You have learned much, my friend."

"This is pretty hot stuff," Ryan said, leafing through the pages.

"I didn't know it was that bad," Mary Patricia Foley agreed.

"How are you feeling?"

The senior field officer's eyes twinkled. "Clyde has dropped. Waiting for my water to break."

Jack looked up. "Clyde?"

"That's what I'm calling him-her-whatever."

"Doing your exercises?"

"Rocky Balboa should be in the shape I'm in. Ed's got the nursery all painted up. The crib is put back together. All ready, Jack."

"How much time will you be taking off?"

"Four weeks, maybe six."

"I may want you to go over some of this at home," Ryan said, lingering on page two.

"Long as you pay me." Mary Pat laughed.

"What do you think, MP?"

"I think SPINNAKER is the best source we have. If he says it, it's probably true."

"We haven't caught a whiff of this anywhere else...."

"That's why you recruit good penetration agents."

"True," Ryan had to agree.

The report from Agent SPINNAKER wasn't quite earthshaking, but it was like the first rumble that got people worrying about a major quake. Since the Russians had taken the cork out of the bottle, the Soviet Union had developed an instant case of political schizophrenia. Wrong term, Ryan reflected. Multiple-personality disorder, perhaps. There were five identifiable political areas: the true-believing communists, who thought that any divergence from the True Path was a mistake (the Forward-to-the-Past crowd, some called them); the progressive socialists, who wanted to create socialism with a human face (something that had singularly failed in Ma.s.sachusetts, Jack thought wryly); the middle-of-the-roaders, who wanted some free-market capitalism backed up with a solid safety net (or craved the worst of both worlds, as any economist could say); the reformists, who wanted a thin net and a lot of capitalism (but no one knew what capitalism was yet, except for a rapidly expanding criminal sector); and on the far right, those who wanted a right-wing authoritarian government (which was what had put communism in place over seventy years before). The groups on the extreme ends of the spectrum had perhaps ten percent in the Congress of People's Deputies. The remaining eighty percent of the votes were fairly evenly split among the three vaguely centrist positions. Naturally enough, various issues scrambled allegiances-environmentalism was particularly hot and divisive-and the biggest wild card was the incipient breakup of the republics that had always chafed under Russian rule, all the more so because of the political coda coda imposed from Moscow. Finally, each of the five groupings had its own political subsets. For example, there was currently a lot of talk from the political right of inviting the most likely Romanov heir-presumptive back to Moscow-not to take over, but merely to accept a semiofficial apology for the murder of his ancestors. Or so the cover story went. Whoever had come up with that idea, Jack thought, was either the most naive son of a b.i.t.c.h since Alice went down the rabbit hole or a politician with a dangerously simplistic mind-set. The good news, CIA's Station Paris reported, was that the Prince of all the Russias had a better feel for politics and his own safety than his sponsors did. imposed from Moscow. Finally, each of the five groupings had its own political subsets. For example, there was currently a lot of talk from the political right of inviting the most likely Romanov heir-presumptive back to Moscow-not to take over, but merely to accept a semiofficial apology for the murder of his ancestors. Or so the cover story went. Whoever had come up with that idea, Jack thought, was either the most naive son of a b.i.t.c.h since Alice went down the rabbit hole or a politician with a dangerously simplistic mind-set. The good news, CIA's Station Paris reported, was that the Prince of all the Russias had a better feel for politics and his own safety than his sponsors did.

The bad news was that the political and economic situation in the Soviet Union looked utterly hopeless. SPINNAKER'S report merely made it look more ominous. Andrey Il'ych Narmonov was desperate, running out of options, running out of allies, running out of ideas, running out of time, and running out of maneuvering room. He was, the report said, overly concerned with his waffling on the nationalities problem, to the point that he was trying to strengthen his hold on the security apparatus-MVD, KGB, and the military-so that he could keep the empire together by force. But the military, SPINNAKER said, was both unhappy with that mission, and unhappy with the halfhearted way Narmonov planned to implement it.

There had been speculation about the Soviet military and its supposed political ambitions since the time of Lenin. It wasn't new. Stalin had taken a scythe through his officer corps in the late 1930s; it was generally agreed that Marshal Tukhashevskiy had not really posed a political threat, that it had been yet another case of Stalin's malignant paranoia. Khrushchev had done the same in the late '50s, but without the ma.s.s executions; that had been done because Khrushchev had wanted to save money on tanks and depend on nuclear arms instead. Narmonov had retired quite a few generals and colonels also; in this case, the move had been exclusively one of economizing on military expense across the board. But this time also, the military reductions had been accompanied by a political renaissance. For the first time there was a true political opposition movement in the country, and the fact of the matter was that the Soviet Army had all the guns. To counter that worrisome possibility, the KGB's Third Chief Directorate had existed for generations-KGB officers who wore military uniforms and whose mission it was to keep an eye on everything. But the Third Chief Directorate was a mere shadow of what it had been. The military had persuaded Narmonov to remove it as a precondition to its own goal of a truly professional force, loyal to the country and the new const.i.tution.

Historians invariably deemed the age in which they lived to be one of transition. For once they were right, Jack thought. If this were not an age of transition, then it was hard to imagine what the h.e.l.l was. In the case of the Soviets, they were poised between two political and economic worlds, teetering, not quite balanced, not quite sure which way they would go. And that made their political situation dangerously vulnerable to ... what? Jack asked himself.

d.a.m.ned near anything.

SPINNAKER said Narmonov was being pressured to make a deal with the military, which, he said, was part of the Forward-to-the-Past mob. Group One. The danger existed, he said, that the Soviet Union would revert to a quasi-military state that repressed its progressive elements; that Narmonov had lost his nerve.

"He says he's had one-on-one meetings with Andrey Il'ych," Mary Pat pointed out. "Intel doesn't come any better than that."

"Also true," Jack replied. "It is worrisome, isn't it?"

"I'm not really concerned about a reversion to Marxist rule. ... What worries me-"

"Yeah, I know. Civil war." Civil war in a country with thirty thousand nuclear warheads. There's a cheery thought. Civil war in a country with thirty thousand nuclear warheads. There's a cheery thought.

"Our position has been to cut Narmonov as much slack as he needs, but if our guy is right, that might be the wrong policy."

"What's Ed think?"

"Same as me. We trust Kadishev. I recruited him. Ed and I have seen every report he's ever sent in. He delivers. He's smart, well placed, very perceptive, b.a.l.l.sy son of a gun. When's the last time he gave us bad stuff?"

"I don't know that he ever has," Jack replied.

"Neither do I, Jack."

Ryan leaned back in his chair. "Christ, I just love these easy calls.... I don't know, MP. The time I met Narmonov ... that is one tough, smart, agile son of a b.i.t.c.h. He's got real bra.s.s ones." Jack stopped. More than you can say for yourself, boy. More than you can say for yourself, boy.

"We all have our limitations. Even the bra.s.s ones go soft." Mrs. Foley smiled. "Oops, wrong metaphor. People run out of steam. Stress, hours, time in the saddle. Reality grinds us all down. Why do you think I'm taking time off? Being pregnant gives me a great excuse. Having a newborn isn't exactly a picnic, but I get a month or so off the fundamentals, real-life instead of the stuff we do here every day. That's one advantage we have over men, doc. You guys can't break away like we women can. That may be Andrey Il'ych's problem. Who can he turn to for advice? Where can he go for help? He's been there a long time. He's dealing with a deteriorating situation, and he's running out of gas. That's what SPINNAKER tells us, and it is consistent with the facts."

"Except that we haven't heard anything like this from anyone else."

"But he's our best guy for the inside stuff."

"Which completes the circularity of the argument, Mary Pat."

"Doc, you have the report, and you have my opinion," Mrs. Foley pointed out.

"Yes, ma'am." Jack set the doc.u.ment on his desk.

"What are you going to tell them?" "Them" was the top row of the executive branch: Fowler, Elliot, Talbot.

"I guess I go with your evaluation. I'm not entirely comfortable with it, but I don't have anything to counter your position with. Besides, the last time I went against you, turned out I was the one who blew the call."

"You know, you're a pretty good boss."

"And you're pretty good at letting me down easy."

"We all have bad days," Mrs. Foley said as she got awkwardly to her feet. "Let me waddle back to my office."

Jack rose also and walked to open the door for her. "When are you due?"

She smiled back at him. "October thirty-first-Halloween, but I'm always late, and they're always big ones."

"You take care of yourself." Jack watched her leave, then walked in to see the Director.

"You'd better look this over."

"Narmonov? I heard another SPINNAKER came in."

"You heard right, sir."

"Who's doing the writeup?"

"I will," Jack said. "I want to do some cross-checking first, though."

"I go down tomorrow. I'd like to have it then."

"I'll have it done tonight."

"Good. Thanks, Jack."

This is the place, Gunther told himself halfway into the first quarter. The stadium accommodated sixty-two thousand seven hundred twenty paying fans. Bock figured another thousand or so people selling snacks and beverages. The game was not supposed to be an important one, but it was clear that Americans were as serious about their football as Europeans were. There was a surprising number of people with multicolored paint on their faces-the local team colors, of course. Several were actually stripped to the waist and had their chests painted up like football sweaters, complete with the huge numbers the Americans used. Various exhortatory banners hung from the rails at the front of the upper decks. There were women on the playing field selected for their dancing ability and other physical attributes, leading the fans in cheers. Bock learned about a curious kind of demonstration called The Wave. Gunther told himself halfway into the first quarter. The stadium accommodated sixty-two thousand seven hundred twenty paying fans. Bock figured another thousand or so people selling snacks and beverages. The game was not supposed to be an important one, but it was clear that Americans were as serious about their football as Europeans were. There was a surprising number of people with multicolored paint on their faces-the local team colors, of course. Several were actually stripped to the waist and had their chests painted up like football sweaters, complete with the huge numbers the Americans used. Various exhortatory banners hung from the rails at the front of the upper decks. There were women on the playing field selected for their dancing ability and other physical attributes, leading the fans in cheers. Bock learned about a curious kind of demonstration called The Wave.

He also learned about the sovereignty of American television. This large raucous crowd meekly accepted stoppage of the game so that ABC could intersperse the play with commercials-that would have started a riot in the most civilized European soccer crowd. TV was even used to regulate play. The field was littered with referees in striped shirts, and even they were supervised by cameras and, Russell pointed out, another official whose job it was to look at videotape recordings of every play and rule on the rightness or wrongness of every official ruling on the field. And to supervise that, that, two enormous TV screens made the same replays visible to the crowd. If all that had been tried in Europe, there would have been dead officials and fans at every game. The combination of riotous enthusiasm and meek civilization here was remarkable to Bock. The game was less interesting, though he saw Russell genuinely enjoyed it. The ferocious violence of American football was broken by long periods of inactivity. The occasional flaring of tempers was muted by the fact that each player wore enough protective equipment as to require a pistol to inflict genuine harm. And so big they were. There could hardly be a man down there under a hundred kilos. It would have been easy to call them oafish and awkward, but the running backs and others demonstrated speed and agility that one might never have guessed. For all that, the rules of the game were incomprehensible. Bock had never been one to enjoy sporting contests anyway. He'd played soccer as a boy, but that was far in his past. two enormous TV screens made the same replays visible to the crowd. If all that had been tried in Europe, there would have been dead officials and fans at every game. The combination of riotous enthusiasm and meek civilization here was remarkable to Bock. The game was less interesting, though he saw Russell genuinely enjoyed it. The ferocious violence of American football was broken by long periods of inactivity. The occasional flaring of tempers was muted by the fact that each player wore enough protective equipment as to require a pistol to inflict genuine harm. And so big they were. There could hardly be a man down there under a hundred kilos. It would have been easy to call them oafish and awkward, but the running backs and others demonstrated speed and agility that one might never have guessed. For all that, the rules of the game were incomprehensible. Bock had never been one to enjoy sporting contests anyway. He'd played soccer as a boy, but that was far in his past.

Gunther returned his attention to the stadium. It was a ma.s.sive and impressive structure with its arching steel roof. The seats had rudimentary cushions. There was an adequate number of toilets, and a ma.s.sive collection of concession stands, most serving weak American beer. A total of sixty-five thousand people here, counting police, concessionaires, TV technicians. Nearby apartments.... He realized that he'd have to educate himself on the effects of nuclear weapons to come up with a proper estimate of expected casualties. Certainly a hundred thousand. Probably more. Enough. He wondered how many of these people would be here. Most, perhaps. Sitting in their comfortable chairs, drinking their cold, weak beer, devouring their hot dogs and peanuts. Bock had been involved in two aircraft incidents. One airliner blown out of the sky, another attempted hijacking that had not gone well at all. He'd fantasized at the time about the victims, sitting in comfortable chairs, eating their mediocre meals, watching their in-flight movie, not knowing that their lives were completely in the control of others whom they did not know. Not knowing. That was the beauty of it, how he could know and they could not. To have such control over human life. It was like being G.o.d, Bock thought, his eyes surveying the crowd. A particularly cruel and unfeeling G.o.d, to be sure, but history was cruel and unfeeling, wasn't it?

Yes, this was the place.

19.

DEVELOPMENT.

"Commodore, I have real trouble believing that," Ricks said as evenly as he could manage. He was tanned and refreshed from his trip to Hawaii. He'd stopped in at Pearl Harbor while there, of course, to look over the sub base there and dream about having command of Submarine Squadron One. That was a fast-attack squadron, but if a fast-attack guy like Mancuso could take over a boomer squadron, then surely turnabout was fair play.

"Dr. Jones is a really good man," Bart Mancuso replied.

"I don't doubt it, but our own people have been over the tapes." It was normal operating procedure and had been so for more than thirty years. Tapes from missile-sub patrols were always examined by a team of experts on sh.o.r.e as a back-check to the sub's crew. They wanted to make sure that no one might have been trailing a missile boat. "This Jones guy was one h.e.l.l of a sonar operator, but now he's a contractor, and he has to justify his fees somehow, doesn't he? I'm not saying he's dishonest. It's his job to look for anomalies, and in this case what he did was to string a bunch of coincidences into a hypothesis. That's all there is here. The data is equivocal-h.e.l.l, the data is almost entirely speculative-but the bottom line is that for this to be true, you have to a.s.sume that the same crewmen who tracked a 688 were unable to detect a Russian boat at all. Is that plausible?"

"That's a good point, Harry. Jones doesn't say that it's certain. He gives it a one-in-three chance."

Ricks shook his head. "I'd say one in a thousand, and that's being generous."

"For what it's worth, Group agrees with you, and I had some people from OP-02 here three days ago who said the same thing."

So why are we having this conversation? Ricks wanted to ask, but couldn't. "The boat was checked for noise on the way out, right?" Ricks wanted to ask, but couldn't. "The boat was checked for noise on the way out, right?"

Mancuso nodded. "Yep, by a 688 right out of overhaul, all the bells and whistles."

"And?"

"And she's still a black hole. The attack boat lost her at a range of three thousand yards at five knots."

"So how are we writing it up?" Ricks asked as casually as he could manage. This was going into his record, and that made it important.

It was Mancuso's turn to squirm. He hadn't decided. The bureaucrat part of him said that he'd done everything right. He'd listened to the contractor, booted the data up the chain of command to Group, to Force, and to the Pentagon experts. Their a.n.a.lysis had all been negative: Dr. Jones was being overly paranoid. The problem was that Mancuso had sailed with Jones for three very good years in USS Dallas, Dallas, and had never known him to make a bad call. Never. Not once. That Akula and had never known him to make a bad call. Never. Not once. That Akula had had been somewhere out there in the Gulf of Alaska. From the time the P-3 patrol aircraft had lost her to the moment she'd appeared outside her base, the been somewhere out there in the Gulf of Alaska. From the time the P-3 patrol aircraft had lost her to the moment she'd appeared outside her base, the Admiral Lunin Admiral Lunin had just fallen off the planet. Where had she been? Well, if you drew speed/time circles, it was possible that she'd been in had just fallen off the planet. Where had she been? Well, if you drew speed/time circles, it was possible that she'd been in Maine Maine's patrol area, possible that she'd left Maine Maine at the proper time and made homeport at the proper time. But it was also possible-and very d.a.m.ned likely-that she'd never been in the same area as the American missile sub. at the proper time and made homeport at the proper time. But it was also possible-and very d.a.m.ned likely-that she'd never been in the same area as the American missile sub. Maine Maine hadn't detected her, and neither had hadn't detected her, and neither had Omaha. Omaha. How likely was it that a Russian sub could have evaded detection by both top-of-the-line warships? How likely was it that a Russian sub could have evaded detection by both top-of-the-line warships?

Not very.

"You know what worries me?" Mancuso asked.

"What's that?"

"We've been in the missile-sub business for over thirty years. We've never been tracked in deep water. When I was XO on Hammerhead, Hammerhead, we ran exercises against we ran exercises against Georgia Georgia and had our heads handed to us. I never tried tracking an Ohio when I had and had our heads handed to us. I never tried tracking an Ohio when I had Dallas, Dallas, and the one exercise I ran against and the one exercise I ran against Pulaski Pulaski was the toughest thing I ever did. But I've tracked Deltas, Typhoons, everything the Russians put in the water. I've taken hull shots of Victors. We're so good at this business...." The squadron commander frowned. "Harry, we're used to being the best." was the toughest thing I ever did. But I've tracked Deltas, Typhoons, everything the Russians put in the water. I've taken hull shots of Victors. We're so good at this business...." The squadron commander frowned. "Harry, we're used to being the best."

Ricks continued to speak reasonably. "Bart, we are are the best. The only people close to us are the Brits, and I think we have them faded. n.o.body else is in the same ball park. I got an idea." the best. The only people close to us are the Brits, and I think we have them faded. n.o.body else is in the same ball park. I got an idea."

"What's that?"