"You're worried about Mr. Akula. Okay, I can understand that. It's a good boat, like a late 637-cla.s.s even, for d.a.m.ned sure the best thing they've ever put in the water. Okay, we have standing orders to evade everything that comes our way-but you gave Rosselli a nice writeup for tracking this same Akula. You probably got a little heat from Group for that."

"Good guess, Harry. A couple of noses went decidedly out of joint, but if they don't like the way I run my squadron, they can always pick a new squadron boss."

"What do we know about Admiral Lunin?" Admiral Lunin?"

"She's in the yard for overhaul now, due out late January."

"Going by past performance, it'll come out a little quieter."

"Probably. Word is that she'll have a new sonar suite, say about ten years behind us," Mancuso added.

"And that doesn't allow for the operators. It's still not a match for us, not even close to one. We can prove that."

"How?" Mancuso asked.

"Why not recommend to Group that any boat that comes across an Akula is supposed to track him aggressively. Let the fast-attack guys really try to get in close. But But if a boomer gets close enough to track without risk of counterdetection, let's go for that, too. I think we need better data on this bird. If he's a threat, let's upgrade what information we have on him." if a boomer gets close enough to track without risk of counterdetection, let's go for that, too. I think we need better data on this bird. If he's a threat, let's upgrade what information we have on him."

"Harry, that will really put Group into the overhead. They're not going to like this idea at all." But Mancuso already did, and Harry could see it.

Ricks snorted. "So? We're the best, Bart. You know it. I know it. They know it. We set some reasonable guidelines."

"Like what?"

"The farthest anyone has ever tracked an Ohio is-what?"

"Four thousand yards, Mike Heimbach on Scranton Scranton against Frank Kemeny on against Frank Kemeny on Tennessee. Tennessee. Kemeny detected Heimbach first-difference was about one minute on detection. Everything closer than that was a prearranged test." Kemeny detected Heimbach first-difference was about one minute on detection. Everything closer than that was a prearranged test."

"Okay, we multiply that by a factor of ... five, say. That's more than safe, Bart. Mike Heimbach had a brand-new boat, the first rendition of the new sonar integration system, and three extra sonarmen out of Group Six, as I recall."

Mancuso nodded. "Right, it was a deliberate test, and they worst-cased everything to see if anyone could detect an Ohio. Isothermal water, below the layer, everything."

"And still Tennessee Tennessee won," Ricks pointed out. "Frank was under orders to make it easy, and he still detected first, and as I recall he had a solution three minutes before Mike did." won," Ricks pointed out. "Frank was under orders to make it easy, and he still detected first, and as I recall he had a solution three minutes before Mike did."

"True." Mancuso thought for a moment. "Make it twenty-five thousand yards separation. No closer than that."

"Fine. I know I can track an Akula at that range. I have a very good sonar department-h.e.l.l, we all do. If I stumble across this guy, I hover out there and gather all the signature data I can. I draw a twenty-five-thousand-yard circle around him and keep outside of it. There is no chance in h.e.l.l h.e.l.l that I'll get counterdetected." that I'll get counterdetected."

"Five years ago, Group would have shot both of us even for talking like this," Mancuso observed.

"The world's changed. Look, Bart, you can run a 688 in close, but what does it prove? If we're really worried about boomer vulnerability, why d.i.c.k around?"

"You're sure you can handle this?"

"h.e.l.l, yes! I'll write up the proposal for your operations staff, and you can send it up the flagpole to Group."

"This'll end up in Washington, you know that."

"Yeah, no more 'We hide with pride,' eh? What are we, a bunch of little old ladies? d.a.m.n it, Bart, I'm the commanding officer of a war warship. Somebody wants to tell me I'm vulnerable, well, I'm going to prove that's a load of horses.h.i.t. n.o.body has ever tracked me. n.o.body ever will, and I'm prepared to prove that."

This interview had not gone the way Mancuso had expected at all. Ricks was talking like a real submarine-driver. It was the kind of talk Mancuso liked to hear.

"You sure you're comfortable with this? It's really going to light a fire up the line. You're going to take some heat."

"So are you."

"I'm the squadron commander. I'm supposed to take heat."

"I'll take my chances, Bart. Okay, I'm going to have to drill the h.e.l.l out of my people, especially the sonar troops, tracking party, like that. I have the time, and I have a pretty good crew."

"Okay. You write up the proposal. I'll give it a favorable endors.e.m.e.nt and send it up."

"See how easy it is?" Ricks grinned. If you want to be number one in a squadron of good skippers, he thought, you have to stand out from the crowd. OP-02 in the Pentagon would get excited about this, but they'd see that it was Harry Ricks who'd made the suggestion, and they knew his reputation as a smart, careful operator. On that basis, plus Mancuso's endors.e.m.e.nt, it would be approved after some hemming and hawing. Harry Ricks: the best submarine engineer in the Navy, and a man willing to back up his expertise with deeds. Not a bad image. Certainly an image that would be noted and remembered.

"So how was Hawaii?" Mancuso asked, surprised and very pleased with the Commanding Officer (Gold) of USS Maine. Maine.

"This is very interesting. The Karl Marx Astrophysical Inst.i.tute." The KGB Colonel handed the black-and-whites over to Golovko.

The First Deputy Chairman looked over the photos and set them down. "Empty building?"

"Nearly so. Inside, we found this. It's a delivery manifest for five American machine tools. Very good ones, extremely expensive."

"Used for?"

"Used for many things, like the fabrication of telescope mirrors, which fits very nicely with the inst.i.tute's cover. The same instruments, our friends at Sarova tell us, are used to shape components for nuclear weapons."

"Tell me about the inst.i.tute."

"Much of it appears to be entirely legitimate. Its head was to have been the DDR's leading cosmologist. It's been absorbed by the Max Planck Inst.i.tute in Berlin. They're planning to build a large telescope complex in Chile, and are designing an X-ray observation satellite with the European s.p.a.ce Agency. It is noteworthy that X-ray telescopes have a rather close relationship with nuclear-weapons research."

"How does one tell the difference between scientific research and-"

"You can't," the Colonel admitted. "I've done some checking. We have leaked information on this ourselves."

"What? How?"

"There have been a number of articles published in various professional journals about stellar physics. One begins, 'Imagine the center of a star with an X-ray flux of such and such,' except for one small thing: the star the author described has a flux much higher than the center of any star-by fourteen orders of magnitude."

"I don't understand." Golovko was having trouble with all this scientific gibberish.

"He described a physical environment in which the activity was one hundred thousand billion billion times the intensity inside times the intensity inside any any star. He was, in fact, describing the interior of a thermonuclear bomb at the moment of detonation." star. He was, in fact, describing the interior of a thermonuclear bomb at the moment of detonation."

"And how the h.e.l.l did that get past censors!" Golovko demanded in amazement.

"General, how scientifically literate do you think our censors are? As soon as that one saw 'imagine the center of a star,' he decided that it was not a matter of state security at all. That article was published fifteen years ago. There are others. In the past week I've discovered just how useless our secrecy measures are. You can imagine what it's like from the Americans. Fortunately, it requires a very clever chap to a.s.similate all the data. But it is by no means impossible. I've talked to a team of young engineers at Kyshtym. With a little push from here, we can initiate an in-depth study of how extensive the open scientific literature is. That will take five to six months. It does not directly affect this particular project, but I think it would be a most useful study to undertake. I think it likely that we have systematically underestimated the danger of third-world nuclear weapons."

"But that's not true," Golovko objected. "We know that-"

"General, I helped write that study three years ago. I am telling you that I was grossly optimistic in my a.s.sessments."

The First Deputy Chairman thought about that for a few seconds. "Pyotr Ivan'ch, you are an honest man."

"I am a frightened man," the Colonel replied.

"Back to Germany."

"Yes. Of the people we suspect were part of the DDR bomb project, three are unaccounted for. All three men and their families are gone. The rest have found other work. Two could possibly be involved in nuclear research with weapons applications, but again, how does one tell? Where is the dividing line between peaceful physics and weapons-related activity? I do not know."

"The three missing ones?"

"One is definitely in South America. The other two are merely missing. I am recommending that we launch a major operation to examine what's happening in Argentina."

"What about the Americans?" Golovko mused.

"Nothing definite. I expect they're as much in the dark as we are." The Colonel paused. "It is difficult to see how they would have an interest in wider proliferation of nuclear weapons. It's contrary to their government policy."

"Explain Israel, then."

"The Israelis obtained nuclear material from the Americans over twenty years ago, plutonium from their Savannah River plant, and enriched uranium from a depot in Pennsylvania. In both cases the transfers were apparently illegal. The Americans themselves launched an investigation. They believe that the Israeli Mossad pulled off one of the greatest operations in history, aided by Jewish-American citizens in sensitive positions. There was no prosecution. What evidence they had came from sources that could not be revealed in court, and it was deemed politically inadvisable to reveal security leaks in so sensitive a government activity. Everything was handled quietly. The Americans and Europeans have been lax in selling nuclear technology to various countries-capitalism at work, there is a huge amount of money involved-but we made the same mistake with China and Germany, did we not? No," the Colonel concluded. "I do not believe the Americans have any more interest in seeing German-made nuclear weapons than we do."

"Next step?"

"I don't know, General. We've run all our leads down as well as we can without risk of detection. I think we need to look at activity in South America. Next, some careful inquiries within the German military establishment to see if there is any indication of a nuclear program there."

"If there were, we'd have known by now." Golovko frowned. "Good Lord, did I really say that? What delivery systems are likely?"

"Aircraft. There is no need for ballistic launchers. From Eastern Germany to Moscow is not all that far. They know our air-defense capabilities, don't they? We left enough of our equipment behind."

"Pyotr, just how much more good news will you leave me this afternoon?"

The Colonel smiled very grimly indeed. "Nu, "Nu, and all those Western fools are rhapsodizing about how safe the world has become." and all those Western fools are rhapsodizing about how safe the world has become."

The sintering process for the tungsten-rhenium was simplicity itself. They used a radio-frequency furnace much like a microwave oven. The metallic powder was poured into a mold and slid into the furnace for heating. After it became dazzlingly white hot-unfortunately not hot enough actually to melt the tungsten, which had a very high thermal tolerance-pressure was applied, and the combination of heat and pressure formed it into a ma.s.s that while not quite metallically solid was firm enough to treat as such. A total of twelve curved sections were made one after the other. They required machining to modest tolerances of shape and smoothness, and were set aside on their own section of shelving installed in the fabrication plant.

The big milling machine was working on the final large beryllium component, a large metallic hyperboloid about fifty centimeters in length, with a maximum width of twenty. The eccentric shape made for difficult machining, even with computer-a.s.sisted tools, but that could not be helped.

"As you see, the initial neutron flux will be a simple spherical expansion from the Primary, but it will be trapped by the beryllium," Fromm explained to Qati. "These metallic elements actually reflect neutrons. They are gyrating about at approximately twenty percent of the speed of light, and we will leave them with only this exit into the cone. Inside the hyperboloid will be this cylinder of tritium-enriched lithium deuteride."

"It happens so fast?" the Commander asked. "The explosives will be destroying everything."

"It requires a new way of thinking. As fast as the actions of the explosives are, you must remember that we require only three shakes for the bomb to complete the detonation process."

"Three what?"

"Shakes." Fromm allowed himself another of his rare smiles. "You know what a nanosecond is-that is one billionth of a second, ja? ja? In that span of time, a beam of light goes only thirty centimeters. The time it takes a beam of light to go from here to here." He held his hands out about a foot apart. In that span of time, a beam of light goes only thirty centimeters. The time it takes a beam of light to go from here to here." He held his hands out about a foot apart.

Qati nodded. Surely that was a very brief time indeed.

"Good. A shake' is ten nanoseconds. The time for light to go three meters. The term was invented by the Americans in the 1940s. They mean the time for a shake of a lamb's tail-a technical joke, you see. In other words, in three shakes, the time needed for a beam of light to go approximately nine meters, the bomb has begun and ended the detonation process. That is many thousands of times less than the time required for chemical explosives to do anything."

"I see," Qati said, speaking both the truth and a lie. He left the room, allowing Fromm to return to his ghastly reveries. Gunther was waiting out in the open air.

"Well?"

"I have the American side of the plan," Bock announced. He opened up a map and set it on the ground. "We will place the bomb here."

"What is this place?" Bock answered the question. "How many?" the Commander asked next.

"Over sixty thousand here. If the bomb's yield is as promised, the lethal radius will encompa.s.s all of this. Total dead will number between one and two hundred thousand."

"That is all? For a nuclear bomb, that is all?"

"Ismael, this is merely a large explosive device."

Qati closed his eyes and swore under his breath. Having only a minute before been told that it was something completely out of his experience, now he was being told the reverse. The Commander was bright enough to understand that both experts were correct.

"Why this place?" Bock explained that, too.

"It would be very gratifying indeed to kill their President."

"Gratifying, but not necessarily beneficial. We could take the bomb into Washington, but I evaluate the risks of detection as serious, far too serious. Commander, my plan must take into consideration the fact that we have only one device and only one chance. We must therefore minimize the risk of detection and base our target-selection on convenience more than any other factor."

"And the German end of the operation?"

"That is more easily accomplished."

"Will it work?" Qati asked, staring off at the dusty hills of Lebanon.

"It should. I give it a sixty-percent chance."

At the very least we will punish the Americans and the Russians, the Commander told himself. The question came next: the Commander told himself. The question came next: Is that enough? Is that enough? Qati's face became hard as he considered the answer to that. Qati's face became hard as he considered the answer to that.

But there was more than one question. Qati thought himself a dying man. The disease process had its ebbs and flows, like an inexorable tide, but a tide that never quite restored itself to where it had been a year or a month before. Though today he felt well, he knew that this was a relative thing. There was as much chance that his life would end in the next year as there was that Bock's plan would succeed. Could he allow himself to die and not do everything he could to see his mission accomplished?

No, and if his own death was likely, what importance should he give to the lives of others? Were they not all unbelievers?

Gunther is an unbeliever, a true infidel. Marvin Russell is another, a pagan. The people you propose to kill ... they are not unbelievers. They are People of the Book, misguided followers of Jesus the Prophet, but also people who believe in the one G.o.d.

Yet Jews were also People of the Book. The Koran proclaimed it. They were the spiritual ancestors of Islam, as much the children of Abraham as the Arabs. So much in their religion was the same as his. His war against Israel was not about religion. It was about his people, cast out of their own land, displaced by another people who also claimed to be motivated by a religious imperative when it was really something else.

Qati faced his own beliefs in all their contradictions. Israel was his enemy. The Americans were his enemy. The Russians were his enemy. That was his personal theology, and though he might claim to be a Muslim, what ruled his life had precious little to do with G.o.d, however much he might proclaim the opposite to his followers.