“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 Russell.
“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 Günther tell you?” The faces were blank. “I saw the movie on television once. Black Sunday. A guy came up with an idea of killing the whole Superbowl 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 the nick of time — you know, how it usually happens in the movies. With my people, it was always the cavalry that got there in the 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 piss 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 — shit, 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 shit, 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 check points and security stuff everywhere. it'll really piss 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 mini-sub, 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 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 south-west-to-north-east vector, and at the end of each he shifted down south-east 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.