But as bad as that was — and the death toll already had surpassed more than fifty thousand — the U.S. was infinitely better suited to deal with the crises than its neighbors to the south, while Canada, like Russia, was weathering the unprecedented challenges in relatively good shape. The Canadians, with the world’s largest supply of fresh water, were diverting substantial reserves to hard-hit California, which had been enduring drought-induced shortages long before its frightened citizenry had started hoarding water in all forms — bottles, huge plastic containers, bathtubs, and backyard swimming pools. The irony of water shortages on that scale, amid such widespread flooding, was so obvious that all but the dimmest TV commentators — and there were more than a few — even bothered to comment on it.
The West Coast’s biggest ports — Seattle-Tacoma, Oakland, and Los Angeles-Long Beach — were turning away ships packed with vital supplies — along with countless tons of plastic crap from China — so dock workers and engineers could make desperate attempts to shore up the wharves that were indispensable to the rest of the U.S.
The crisis — and the word seemed wholly inadequate to Lana — had sent the stock market into free fall, while banks across the country were taking an emergency “holiday” mandated by the federal government.
As Lana forked up the last of her potato salad and sliced turkey, Emma sidled up to her.
“You don’t look so great, Mom.”
“And you are an honest child,” Lana said, cupping Emma’s cheek for the first time in ages. “You’re right, though. I’m tired.”
“Are you going to get some sleep now?”
“Not just yet.” She finished her last bite and put aside her plate. “I’m going to duck into my office for a while, and I’ll probably be gone before you wake up in the morning. Everybody getting along okay?”
“Oh, sure. Even Dad’s keeping his mouth shut. I think he knows it’s real—finally. Besides, Esme wouldn’t take any more of his BS, even if he still thought it was all one big lying conspiracy. But he doesn’t. He even said that if he ever got his hands on the people who did this, he’d break them into pieces.”
At last, something Don and I can agree on, Lana thought. “Where’s he sleeping?” she asked Emma.
“A cot in the upstairs hallway. He’s the only guy. Well, the only big guy, so he doesn’t get a room. You want to know the other arrangements?”
“Not if you guys have it covered.”
“You’re still in your room, but Tanesa and I will be using the sofa bed in there.”
“Fair enough.”
“Mom?”
“Yes, Em.” She watched her daughter swallow, expecting more tears. Emma surprised her:
“I’m really worried about you. The last time it got really bad you took off and almost got yourself killed. Promise me you’re not going to do anything like that this time, that you’ll just sit at your computer and that’s it.”
“I promise,” Lana said. Perhaps too blithely.
“I mean it, Mom.”
“I’m not going anywhere.” Right now.
Emma returned to the living room. Lana headed to her office, locking the door and pulling out her phone. She wondered how long service would continue. Could last for a while, she realized. It was hard to flood communication towers on mountains and hilltops, and satellites were safely removed from earthly insanity.
Before calling Galina Bortnik, she checked with her colleagues to see if there were any leads on the Delphin’s location. At this point, knowing what they did about Hector Gomez, a.k.a. Grisha Lisko, the navy was gunning for its own vessel. But finding it was the challenge. DOD announced that the service had pinpointed the launch in the Southern Ocean near the fortieth latitude, a region known as the “Roaring Forties” for its fierce westerlies, but it could easily take days to get ships there, giving the rogue sub ample time to leave quietly. And at ten knots or less, the Delphin would be all but impossible to find. Its stealth capacities were phenomenal, and the only real limit to how long it could stay out there to launch all two dozen of its missiles was food. And Grisha Lisko and whatever help he had could not eat all the provisions in two years of bombing and feasting.
Nobody believed the sub would actually go undiscovered for a year or two. It could actually fire off those missiles with no more than fifteen minutes of preparation, a sobering reality that appeared to elude the House Speaker and Majority Leader, both of whom had said the U.S. should never retreat from the Arctic because of terrorist threats. Threats? They’d just nuked Antarctica. Lana still could not believe those two cretins would make such an ignorant statement. But the President, according to Holmes, felt hemmed in by the demagoguery on Capitol Hill.
“Who cares?” Lana had replied, sitting across from Holmes in his office just hours ago.
“Everyone running in the midterm elections,” he’d replied.
“What midterm elections? There won’t be any if this keeps up. Can’t they just put that crap aside for this?” she exclaimed. If they can’t, how can the country ever survive? she wondered, but only to herself.
“No, they can’t put it aside,” the deputy director said.
It would appear the House and Senate leadership, like the sub, could outlast any stalling strategy by the White House. According to Holmes, Admiral Wourzy had advised the President’s chief of staff that the sub could also go very deep.
“How deep?” Lana had asked Holmes, who had shaken his head. That was his muted manner of saying the information was classified.
Wourzy had also said the sub could make the most of the ocean’s salinity gradients to enhance its cover. All of which would make locating the Delphin harder than trying to find the missing Malaysian passenger jet a few years back, and that aircraft had been equipped with a pinger to make location and recovery possible. Plus, the crash itself had undoubtedly left an oil spill on the ocean surface. Wourzy had also noted that in stealth mode the Delphin would slow down all its fans and shut off any major equipment that wasn’t absolutely essential to the sub’s operation. “With its speed reduced, it’ll cover fifty miles in five hours. I know that doesn’t sound like much but that that’ll vastly increase the search radius compared to it holding steady,” the admiral had added in his briefing to the chief of staff, to which Holmes had been privy.
Which was why Holmes had begun to place special emphasis on Lana’s Russian contact. He’d wanted at least five of their colleagues to listen in, even prompt Lana if necessary, but she’d scotched the idea, pointing out that Bortnik had already demonstrated superb hacking skills. They could not risk any discovery that would undermine whatever trust Lana had developed with her so far.
She checked her watch. Almost 6:05 a.m. Moscow time. It felt much later than nine-plus Eastern.
Lana heard the children getting ready for bed. None of the exuberance that she recalled from when Emma had had sleepovers. The kids really were absorbing the fear on the faces of their parents.
She dialed Bortnik, who answered on the third ring. This time the woman didn’t wait to speak.
“I know your name,” she said to Lana.
“And I believe I know yours.”
Neither actually used the names; Lana considered that savvy on Bortnik’s part. “But there’s a problem,” Lana said.
“Go ahead.”
“How do I know that you are who you say you are?”