Pacino stared at the display as the view slowly orbited the hull of the Panther, the topside sailors bringing in the survivors and packing them down the hatch. Explorer II, he thought. Hell of a coincidence, since that was the ship that had saved Anthony three years ago, but certainly a happy one. The older Pacino had visited the ship and brought the captain and submersible commander bottles of thousand-dollar Kentucky bourbon in gratitude.
“Looks like they’re almost all aboard. Let’s get ready. Carlucci wants a briefing. He’ll be down any minute.”
This mission was almost over, Pacino thought. Just a milk run from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific and into AUTEC, and his son would be out of danger.
“Boss, I think you’re going to want to see this.” Angel Menendez’s voice always went up half an octave when he was alarmed, Director Allende thought.
“What is it Angel?” she asked, bringing her pad computer to her office’s SCIF conference room. On the display screen was a worried looking Vice Admiral Rob Catardi.
Allende took her seat. “Hello, Rob. News?”
“We’re late getting the intelligence digested, Madam Director, but here it is,” Catardi said. “A third Russian Yasen-M-class submarine sortied from Zapadnaya Litsa Naval Base on the Kola Peninsula the day after Panther was taken. She slipped to sea by dark of night, which the Russians never do. We detected multiple tugboats on the tripwire sound surveillance hydrophones at the exit of the base. I ordered an Orion spy satellite, the NROL-44, retasked to look down on the base and the Barents Sea, and this is what we saw. This is an infrared image, so it may look funky.”
A satellite photo came up on the screen. Allende leaned forward. Despite the varying heat signatures in the shape on the screen, the shape was unmistakably a Yasen-M-class submarine.
“Where’s he going, Rob?” she asked, afraid she already knew the answer.
“We don’t know for sure. Our Virginia-class submarine Texas was orbiting at the entrance to the GI-UK Gap, but sniffed exactly nothing.” The GI-UK Gap was the narrowing waters between Greenland, Iceland and the islands of the United Kingdom, which a ship would have to transit to pass from the Barents Sea into the North Atlantic. The gap was rotten with SOSUS network sound surveillance hydrophones.
“What about SOSUS?”
“Nothing. Madam Director, the Yasen-M is a goddamned invisible ghost.”
“You’re telling me a Virginia-class submarine was there and didn’t hear this guy?”
“That’s exactly what I’m telling you, Margo. The Yasen-Ms have us outmatched.”
“I guess we’re lucky Vermont tossed those nukes at a probability circle,” Allende said, “or else she and Panther would be on the bottom right now.”
“But we’re unlucky now, because that third Yasen-M is on his way south.”
“You don’t know that, Rob.”
“Margo, what the hell else would he be doing? The Russians don’t like going into the Atlantic. They consider it a USA-UK-EU lake. They operate in the Barents, the Arctic Ocean and the far north Pacific, well within comfortable missile range of the land of the free and the home of the brave.”
“Rob, when this Yasen-M was on the surface, did we get a hit on his periscope transponder?”
Catardi shook his head. The dark circles under his eyes seemed darker today, Allende thought. “It didn’t transmit.”
“Was this one of the subs we didn’t get transponders installed on?”
“No, he had one. It just failed.”
Allende sighed. Now what, she thought.
“Margo, this is just my brainstorming here, but I think you should find a way to leak the Operation Blue Hardhat program. Let the Russian spies find out that we wired up their subs and that every time they go to periscope depth, we have them dead to rights.”
“Why, Rob?”
“Because then fleet command would tell the third Yasen-M to back off, because the Americans know where he is.”
“So, you want to bluff this guy.”
“We’re metaphorically out of torpedoes, Margo. All we have left are main engines. We have to ram the Russians, from an intelligence point of view.”
“Admiral Catardi, I promise you I will think about it, but you’re talking about disassembling a hundred-million-dollar program and endangering the lives of at least forty field assets. And it would mean giving up our ability to monitor Russian ballistic missile submarines.”
Catardi looked down at his table, his expression falling. “It was just a thought, Margo.”
“Don’t worry, Rob,” she said. “We’ll think of something.”
“I have to go,” Catardi said. Allende could tell he wanted to hang up because he was upset and needed to throw his pad computer across the room or break a drinking glass.
“Later, and thanks for the update,” Allende said, and quickly broke the connection.
“Whoa,” Menendez said.
“Yeah,” Allende replied, trying to process the bad news. “Angel, how fast can you blow up Operation Blue Hardhat? Get our assets out and safe, then leak the operation’s activities — how long?”
“But don’t you need presidential authorization to crater an operation like this?”
“I already have it, Angel. So how much time?”
“On a good day? A month.”
“This isn’t a good day, Angel. You’ve got twenty-four hours,” Allende said.
“Then I’d better get going,” Menendez said, grabbing his fedora and tablet computer and lunging for the door.
“Sir, we think we’ve recovered from the Medved’ Grizli worm. The techs in Flag Plot say they’re ready to reboot. All the intelligence that was gained in the last nine days will arrive in a cascade.”
Vice Admiral Olga Vova, the Northern Fleet deputy commander, had knocked on Admiral Gennady Zhigunov’s office door, where he was catching up with the 200 email-a-day workflow, at a time early in the evening when he could get away with smoking a cigar and pouring a double vodka. When he thought about it, he worked better with a couple vodkas under his belt. Too bad it was frowned on during the workday, but no matter. In three years he’d be retired and would be able to pour vodka for himself all day and smoke cigars wherever he wanted to. The thought reminded him that he was widowed, that his beloved wife Nina would never have approved. Of the cigars or the alcohol. Yet, every day he missed her all the more, he thought. His adopted son, Boris Novikov, had urged him to find a new wife, but Zhigunov was 63 years old now, and losing the battle against getting fleshy and sagging everywhere. There was little chance of a man like him attracting a wife now.
“Sir? Do you want to come with me to Flag Plot?”
Zhigunov stared up at Olga Vova, “OV,” who had to outweigh him by many kilograms, her head alone the size of a bucket. In all his life, Zhigunov thought, he’d never seen a woman less feminine. He waved at her.
“I’ll be right down. You go on without me. I’ll join you there.” Vova might be his deputy, but he’d prefer not to ride the same elevator as the woman.
When he got to Flag Plot, the screens that formed the forward wall were all dark, as were the hundreds of monitors at the eleven long rows of tables facing the front wall, each station manned by an officer or warrant officer. Olga Vova was standing near the front row, bossing around the captain lieutenant heading the artificial intelligence division. Vova saw him and hurried up to him, her bulk overwhelming as she approached.