“That sounds odd,” Pacino said. “I know the Russians. When they’re forward deployed, they often arrange to bring comfort women in their R&R ships or even on their sub tenders, but comfort women on the boat itself?” Comfort women were essentially prostitutes employed by the Russian Navy, their job to keep male morale from collapsing.
“Oh, that’s not the good news,” Allende said. “The good news is that one of them is ours.”
Pacino sat back and stared at Allende. “You’ve got an asset onboard the Belgorod?”
Menendez beamed. “We do indeed.”
“That is good news. What’s the bad news?”
“We haven’t figured out a way for her to communicate with us. We might not be able to get any data from her until Belgorod comes back to base.”
“Oh,” Pacino said. “Perhaps a hack into the radio antenna, like the Blue Hardhat operation you did to the Yasen-M boats?”
Allende shook her head. “We were forced to leak that to the Russians, and now they’re absolutely paranoid about their submarine masts and antennae. We don’t think we could get away with that now, which is why we’re using one of their comfort women. Human intelligence almost always trumps electronic intel, but not if there’s no way to pass us a message.”
“Well, keep working on it,” Pacino said. “The president has taken a personal interest in this operation, like he did with Panther.” As National Security Advisor, Pacino’s rank in the administration was near that of a cabinet officer and Carlucci treated him as if he were Allende’s boss. He wondered if the president knew about Pacino’s personal relationship with the CIA director. Probably did, Pacino thought. Spying on the spies was big business in Washington.
“I’ve got to get back to Langley. Good to see you again, Admiral,” Menendez said, collecting his hat, standing, and shaking Pacino’s hand. After he left the room, Allende poured them more coffee.
“Margo, you said there was something else?” Pacino checked his old, scratched Rolex. “I’ve got to brief the president in half an hour.”
“I don’t know how you’re going to feel about this one, Patch,” Allende said. “The vice president is seriously sick. Late-stage rectal cancer. It’s metastasized throughout her abdomen. Looks like all her major organs are affected.”
“Oh, no,” Pacino said. “She looked terrible at that Status-6 briefing.”
“She’s been taking some stem cell therapy, but it’s terminal and she’s only been given a few months. Maybe even less.”
“She knows the prognosis?”
“She’s the one who told me.”
Pacino shook his head. Karen Chushi was not a typical vice president. She was strong-willed, independent, and sometimes even a critic of the president’s decisions. Carlucci had brought her onto his ticket as a political move to appease the South, since Chushi was from Texas, and to appease the National Party, since she was friends with the other side of the aisle, so much so that some in the press had called for her to leave the American Party and defect to the National Party. But she’d stubbornly remained on. President Carlucci had tried to keep her contained, only bringing her into the circle when he absolutely had to.
“She’s planning on resigning by the week’s end,” Allende said.
“Any word on her replacement?”
“Carlucci doesn’t want new faces in the inner circle. I’m predicting he shuffles the cabinet and elevates a trusted person from within.”
“Maybe Hogshead or Klugendorf,” Pacino said.
Margo Allende just looked at him with that half-amused look she had when she was keeping a secret.
On behalf of Northern Fleet Commander Admiral Gennady Zhigunov, Captain First Rank Georgy Alexeyev had paid to close the Lamb’s Valhalla pub for tonight’s meeting, Zhigunov’s directive made in defiance of the orders of Admiral Olga Vova, who had placed the establishment off-limits. Zhigunov’s armed guards stood watch outside, keeping the regulars at bay. The servers and cooks had been dismissed for the night, more of the admiral’s staff sent in to serve their table and bring food.
Alexeyev sat opposite Sergei Kovalov, the Losharik captain seeming ill at ease, as he had all week. They’d just come from a long session with Zhigunov at his Northern Fleet headquarters, and the highlights of that meeting had been disappointing.
Kovalov waved over one of the enlisted men to bring a bottle of scotch to the table. The man seemed confused, so Kovalov walked him to the bar and picked out a new bottle of Oban and brought it back himself with two glasses. He poured for the two of them, then looked over at Alexeyev.
“To fallen comrades,” Kovalov said, raising his glass.
“Fallen comrades.” Alexeyev tossed down a gulp of the scotch, trying to distract his mind from his dead former engineer Matveev. And her ghost.
“This mission just keeps getting better,” Kovalov said, pulling over the large ashtray and lighting a cigarette.
“I wonder what the Status-6 delay is all about,” Alexeyev said, adjusting his eye patch. The false eye under it sometimes itched, but he was assured it was just allergies, not a return of the herpes that had infected him during the South Atlantic mission, leading to the loss of the eye.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if those Status-6 torpedoes don’t even work,” Kovalov said. “Seriously, a nuclear reactor in an autonomous torpedo, with a ten-megaton warhead? Manufactured by Sevmash? God help us. At best, those things will just be inert. There’s a thousand things that can go wrong with an unattended nuclear reactor. The damn things could have a runaway, or worse, they could self-destruct.”
“Hopefully, any self-destruct will just be their conventional explosives going off, not a nuclear explosion,” Alexeyev said, putting out his hand, and immediately Kovalov shook out a cigarette, handed it and his lighter to Alexeyev, who lit up and blew a cloud at the ceiling.
“That would scatter plutonium over the entire bay where it’s placed,” Kovalov observed. “And seriously, strategically? Tactically? What the hell good is a weapon that is out of communication with the Kremlin and Defense Ministry? If Vostov decided to push the nuclear button, those torpedoes won’t hear him.”
Alexeyev shrugged fatalistically. “Supposedly a stealthy team of underwater commandos — hydronauts, yes? — will be dispatched who will locate the weapons with a sonar homing device, then ping a particular sonar signal to program them with detonation directions.”
Kovalov scoffed. “Sounds unsophisticated to me. Honestly, what is Vostov’s motivation for doing this? Wasn’t it just six weeks ago he was playing nice with the Americans? Even after we lost Kazan, Novosibirsk and Voronezh?”
Alexeyev shrugged. Politics were impenetrable. At least their mission and equipment they could understand. Perhaps even control. “Have you seen the schematics and tech manual of the Status-6 units, Sergei?”
Kovalov shook his head and drained his glass. “Still too highly classified. We may not even have them when we sail.”
“How the hell—?“
“We’ll have an operation manual, Georgy. It’ll have knobology. But the inner workings and hidden mechanisms? Probably not in the book.” Kovalov pulled the cork on the scotch bottle and poured both of them more scotch. He shook his head. “This is madness. Laying ten megaton bombs in American ports. And carrying them there through the polar icecap?”
“Our ballistic missile subs go up at least once a year per ship,” Alexeyev said, trying to sound comforting, but he himself doubted they’d have an easy time of it.