"Where to this time, Doctor?" the driver asked.

"Just drive around."

"What?"

"We need to talk," Kaminiskiy said.

"About what?"

"I know you are KGB," Kaminiskiy said.

"Doctor," the driver chuckled, "I am an emba.s.sy driver."

"Your emba.s.sy medical file is signed by Dr. Feodor Il'ych Gregoriyev. He is a KGB doctor. We were cla.s.smates. May I go on?"

"Have you told anyone?"

"Of course not."

The driver sighed. Well, what could one do about that? "What is it you wish to talk about?"

"You are KGB-Foreign Directorate?"

There was no avoiding it. "Correct. I hope this is important."

"It may be. I need someone to come down from Moscow. There's a patient I'm treating. He has a very unusual lung problem."

"Why should it interest me?"

"I've seen a similar problem before-a worker from Beloyarskiy. Industrial accident. I was called in to consult on it."

"Yes? What is at Beloyarskiy?"

"They fabricate atomic weapons there."

The driver slowed the car. "Are you serious?"

"It could be something else-but the tests I need to run now are very specific. If this represents a Syrian project, we will not get the proper cooperation. Therefore, I need some special equipment from Moscow."

"How quickly?"

"The patient isn't going anywhere, except into the ground. I'm afraid his condition is quite hopeless."

"I have to go through the Rezident Rezident on this. He won't be back until Sunday." on this. He won't be back until Sunday."

"Fast enough."

32.

CLOSURE.

"Can I help?" Russell asked.

"Thank you, Marvin, but I would really prefer to do this myself, without distractions," Ghosn said.

"I understand. Yell if you need anything."

Ibrahim donned his heaviest clothing and walked out into the cold. The snow was falling quite hard. He'd seen snow in Lebanon, of course, but nothing like this. The storm had scarcely begun half an hour before and there was already more than three centimeters of it. The northerly wind was the most bitter he'd ever experienced, cutting into his very bones as he walked the sixty meters or so to the barn. Visibility was restricted to no more than two hundred meters. He could hear the traffic on the nearby highway, but could not even see the lights of the vehicles. He entered the barn through a side door and already regretted the fact that this building had no heating. Ghosn told himself very forcefully that he could not allow such things to affect him.

The cardboard box that shielded the device from casual view was not actually attached, and came off easily. What lay under that was a metal box with dials and other accoutrements for what it pretended to be, a commercial videotape machine. The suggestion had come from Gunther Bock, and the actual body of the machine had been purchased as sc.r.a.p from a Syrian TV news agency which had replaced it with a new model. The access doors built into the metal body were almost perfectly suited to Ghosn's purpose, and the ample void s.p.a.ce held the vacuum pump in case that was needed. Ghosn instantly saw that it was not. The gauge that was part of the bombcase showed that the body had not leaked any air at all. That hardly came as a surprise-Ghosn was just as skilled a welder as he had told the late Manfred Fromm-but it was gratifying to the young engineer. Next he checked the batteries. There were three of these, all new, all nickel-cadmium, and all, he saw, fully charged, according to the test circuit. The timing device was next to the batteries. Making sure that its firing terminals were vacant, he checked its time-it was already set on local-against his watch, and saw that either one or the other (probably his watch) was a total of three seconds off. That was close enough for his purposes. Three gla.s.ses placed inside the box to ill.u.s.trate any rough handling in transit were still intact. The shippers had taken their care, as he had hoped.

"You are ready, my friend," Ghosn said quietly. He closed the inspection door, made sure it was properly latched, then replaced the cardboard cover. Ghosn blew warm breath on his hands, then walked back to the house.

"How will the weather affect us?" Qati asked him.

"There's another storm behind this one. I figure we'll drive down tomorrow evening, right before it starts. The second one will be short, maybe another inch or two, they say. If we go in between the two, the road should be all right. Then we check into the motel and wait for the right time, right?"

"Correct. And the truck?"

"I'll do the painting today, soon as I have the heaters rigged. That's only two hours' work. I have the templates all done," Russell said as he finished his coffee. "Load the bomb after I paint, okay?"

"How long for the paint to dry?" Ghosn asked.

"Three hours, tops. I want the paint job to be good, okay?"

"That is fine, Marvin."

Russell laughed as he collected the breakfast dishes. "Man, I wonder what the people who made that movie would think?" He turned to see puzzlement on the faces of his guests.

"Didn't Gunther tell you?" The faces were blank. "I saw the movie on television once. Black Sunday. Black Sunday. A guy came up with an idea of killing the whole Super Bowl crowd from a blimp." A guy came up with an idea of killing the whole Super Bowl crowd from a blimp."

"You're joking," Qati observed.

"No. In the movie they had a big antipersonnel thing on the bottom of the blimp, but the Israelis found out what was going on, and their CIA guys got there in a nick of time-you know, how it usually happens in the movies. With my people it was always the cavalry that got there in a nick of time, so's they could kill all the savage Indians."

"In this movie the objective was to kill the entire stadium?" Ghosn asked very quietly.

"Huh-oh, yeah, that's right." Russell was loading the dishes into the dishwasher. "Not like we're doing." He turned. "Hey, don't feel bad. Just taking out the TV coverage is going to p.i.s.s people off like you wouldn't believe. And this stadium is covered, okay? That blimp-thing wouldn't work. You'd need like a nuke or something to do the same thing."

"There's an idea," Ghosn observed with a chuckle, wondering what reaction he'd get.

"Some idea. Yeah, you might start a real nuclear war-s.h.i.t, man, guess whose people lives up in the Dakotas, where all those SAC bases are? I don't think I could play that kind of a game." Russell dumped in the detergent and started the wash cycle. "What exactly do you have in that thing, anyway?"

"A very compact and powerful high-explosive compound. It will do some damage to the stadium, of course."

"I figured that. Well, taking out the TV won't be hard-that's delicate s.h.i.t, y'know?-and just doing that-man, I'm telling you, it's going to have an effect like you wouldn't believe."

"I agree, Marvin, but I would like to hear your reasoning on this," Qati said.

"We've never had a really destructive terrorist act over here. This one will change things. People won't feel safe. They'll install checkpoints and security stuff everywhere. It'll really p.i.s.s people off, make people think. Maybe they'll see what the real problems are. That's the whole point, isn't it?"

"Correct, Marvin," Qati replied.

"Can I help you with the painting?" Ghosn asked. He might get curious, Ibrahim thought, and they couldn't have that.

"I'd appreciate it."

"You must promise to turn the heat on," the engineer observed with a smile.

"Depend on it, man, or else the paint won't dry right. I guess this is kinda cold for ya."

"Your people must be very hard to live in such a place."

Russell reached for his coat and gloves. "Hey, man, it's our place, y'know?"

"Do you really expect to find him?" the Starpom asked.

"I think we have a fine chance," Dubinin replied, leaning over the chart. "He'll be somewhere in here, well away from the coastal waters-too many fishermen with nets there-and north of this area."

"Excellent, Captain, only two million square kilometers to search."

"And we will cover only two-thirds of that. I said a fine chance, not a certainty. In three or four more years, we'll have the RPV the designers are working on, and we can send our sonar receptors down into the deep sound channel." Dubinin referred to the next step in submarine technology, a robot minisub which would be controlled from the mother ship by a fiber-optic cable. It would carry both sensors and weapons, and by diving very deep it could find out if sonar conditions in the thousand-to-two-thousand-meter regime were really as good as the theorists suggested. That would change the game radically.

"Anything on the turbulence sensors?"

"Negative, Captain," a lieutenant answered.

"I wonder if those things are worth the trouble," the executive officer groused.

"They worked the last time."

"We had calm seas overhead then. How often are the seas calm in the North Pacific in winter?"

"It could still tell us something. We must use every trick we have. Why are you not optimistic?"

"Even Ramius only tracked an Ohio once, and that was on builder's trials, when they had the shaft problem. And even then, he only held the contact for-what? Seventy minutes."

"We had this one before."

"True enough, Captain." The Starpom Starpom tapped a pencil on the chart. tapped a pencil on the chart.

Dubinin thought about his intelligence briefing on the enemy-old habits were hard to break. Harrison Sharpe Ricks, Captain, Naval Academy, in his second missile-submarine command, reportedly a brilliant engineer and technician, a likely candidate for higher command. A hard and demanding taskmaster, highly regarded in his Navy. He'd made a mistake before, and was unlikely to make another, Dubinin told himself.

"Fifty thousand yards, exactly," Ensign Shaw reported.

"This guy's not doing any Crazy Ivans," Claggett thought for the first time.

"He's not expecting to be hunted himself, is he?" Ricks asked.

"I guess not, but his tail's not as good as he thinks it is." The Akula was doing a ladder-search pattern. The long legs were on a roughly southwest-to-northeast vector, and at the end of each he shifted down southeast to the next leg, with an interval between search legs of about fifty thousand yards, twenty-five nautical miles. That gave a notional range of about thirteen miles to the Russian's towed-array sonar. At least, Claggett thought, that's what the intelligence guys would have said.

"You know, I think we'll hold at fifty-K yards, just to play it on the safe side," Ricks announced after a moment's reflection. "This guy is a lot quieter than I expected."

"Plant noises are down quite a bit, aren't they? If this guy was creeping instead of trying to cover ground...." Claggett was pleased that his Captain was speaking like his conservative-engineer self again. He wasn't especially surprised. When push came to shove, Ricks reverted to type, but that was all right with the XO, who didn't think it was especially prudent to play fast-attack with a billion-dollar boomer.

"We could still hold him at forty, thirty-five tops."

"Think so? How much will his tail's performance improve with a slower speed?"

"Good point. It'll be some, but intelligence calls it a thin-line array like ours ... probably not all that much. Even so, we're getting a good profile on this bird, aren't we?" Ricks asked rhetorically. He'd get a gold star in his copybook for this.

"So, what do you think, MP?" Jack asked Mrs. Foley. He held the translation in his hand. She'd opted for the original Russian-language doc.u.ment.

"Hey, I recruited him, Jack. He's my boy."

Ryan checked his watch; it was just about time. Sir Basil Charleston was nothing if not punctual. His secure direct-line phone rang right on the hour.

"Ryan."

"Bas here."

"What gives, man?"

"That thing we talked out, we had our chap look into it. Nothing at all, my boy."

"Not even that our impressions were incorrect?" Jack asked, his eyes screwed tightly shut as though to keep the news out.

"Correct, Jack, not even that. I admit I find that slightly curious, but it is plausible, if not likely, that our chap should not know this."

"Thanks for trying, pal. We owe you one."

"Sorry we could not be of help." The line went dead.

It was the worst possible news, Ryan thought. He stared briefly at the ceiling.

"The Brits have been unable to confirm or deny SPINNAKER'S allegations," Jack announced. "What's that leave us with?"

"It's really like this?" Ben Goodley asked. "It all comes down to opinion?" opinion?"