Outside his window, it was beginning to snow, tiny brittle flakes crashing out of a gray overcast. It set the tone for his day.
Shortly after one o’clock, he got a call from the DDO, the Deputy Director of Operations.
“Carl, one of my people working at Sheremetevo Airport dropped a note on us,” Oren Patterson told him.
“Somebody in Moscow is going somewhere?”
“Right. You know who Colonel General Dmitri Ivanovich Oberstev is?”
“Director of the Red Star project”
“And Colonel Alexi Cherbykov?”
“The director’s aide”
“And Admiral Grigori Orlov?”
“C-in-C, Navy”
“You got ’em all. You’re getting good at this, Carl.”
“That makes me feel better, Oren”
“Anyway, there’s a couple more people our asset wasn’t sure of. Vladimir Yevgeni may have been one of them. They all crawled aboard a VIP Ilyushin transport and took off.”
“It’s the right composition for a group we’re very interested in,” Unruh said. “Did your asset get a destination for this bunch?”
“No, but the plane was not headed in the direction of Plesetsk. Going out on a limb, I’ll say they’re going to Vladivostok.”
“The heavy hitters are going to conduct the search, you think?”
“Either that, or the boss man is so pissed at them, he’s told them to get it back personally.”
“I’d go for that, Oren. Put Oberstev in flippers and have him drag it back. How about data on the package?”
“We’re still poking and prodding.”
Unruh wanted to tell him to prod his sources with some red-hot branding irons, but knew better than to suggest it. They could only move as fast as they could move without bringing attention to themselves.
In mid afternoon, at an instruction from his secretary over the intercom, he cut short one conversation and punched another button on his phone.
“Jack, if you’re not calling with good news, I don’t want to talk to you,” he told Evoy.
“I’m calling to say we’re showing seven major CIS battle-wagons en route to the scene. I think we can assume a few submarines, also. NSA eavesdropped on several messages they’re sure were aimed at subs because they were coded on ELF frequencies.”
“What’s the ETA on the warships?”
“The Kirov — she’s a rocket cruiser — is leading a task force of three and is about seventy-six hours away. There’s a task force with the Kynda that will hit there ten or twelve hours later. Again, they may have a sub closer.”
“Anything else?”
“There’s a deep submersible named the Sea Lion that’s been operating in the Barents Sea. As of two hours ago, when we had a KH-11 go over, the submersible has been recovered, and the research vessel is headed for Murmansk at seventeen knots. That’s top speed for that ship, Carl.”
“Interpretation?”
“I’d say that the submersible at Vladivostok is inoperative. They’re going to fly this hummer eastward. We’re watching to see if they fly a Candid into Murmansk.”
The Candid was the NATO code name for the Ilyushin II-76, a heavy military transport.
“Good, Jack. Let me know.”
Unruh hung up, but the intercom blared immediately. “Yes, Joanie?”
“Wilson Overton is on three.”
“You told him to call back sometime?”
“More or less, but he’s rather insistent.”
“Okay.” He pressed the three button. “How you doing, Will?”
“I’m okay. How about you, Mr. Director?”
“Holding the fort down. What can I do for you?”
“I need a confirmation. I’ve tried to reach a number of people today, but they’re either out of the office, out of town, or out of the country.”
“Sounds good to me,” Unruh said, meaning it.
He did not like the thought of confirming anything for anyone outside of the agency or the White House.
“My sources tell me that a CIS rocket went down in the Pacific Ocean. They tell me that a nuclear reactor is running wild.”
“That right?” Unruh asked, his mind racing for alternatives to, “no comment.”
“Uh-huh. The way I’ve got it, and the way the Post’s going to run it, this nuclear reactor is going to radiate the whole Pacific Ocean. Is that right, Mr. Director?”
“I don’t know how one tiny reactor is supposed to contaminate something as big as the Pacific.”
“It’s tiny?”
“It must be if it was on a rocket. Is that what you’re telling me, Will?”
“Are you confirming the facts, Mr. Director?”
“You know who you ought to talk to, Will? Robert Balcon. He might know something I don’t.”
“Balcon hasn’t been available all day.”
“Did you call the CIS Embassy?” Unruh asked. Hell, it was their rocket. Let them deal with the media.
“They’re the ones who are out of the country.”
“Damn? Is that right?”
“You’re the Director of Intelligence. Aren’t you supposed to know things like that?”
Unruh sighed. “Read me what you’ve got.”
He had learned early on to never volunteer anything, but also to never lie to the press. He listened closely to Overton’s story.
“Well, Mr. Director?”
“If I were you, Will, I’d double-check your facts on the size of the reactor.”
“But the rest is accurate.”
“A Soviet A2 went down a couple thousand miles west of Hawaii, though I hope you won’t publish those coordinates. It carried a component for their space station. That’s all I’ll say right now, Will.”
“I can live with that. Thanks, Mr. Unruh.”
Unruh hoped to hell that Overton could not find many more confirmations before press time.
Valeri Ivanovitch Dankelov spent the day at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla, then drove his two-year-old Chevrolet Corsica back to his apartment in Pacific Beach.
It was a small apartment on the second floor, 800-square feet, with two bedrooms, a medium-size living room, and a slim view of the Pacific Ocean between two condominiums across the street. It was about twice the size of the apartment Dankelov had grown up in Leningrad.
Sometimes, he felt like a pebble rattling around in an oversized can, and he hated to admit, even to himself, that he liked it.
Even when Dankelov had left home for Leningrad State University, he had been pressed by people, forced to share accommodations in a boarding house with four roommates. If there was anything he thoroughly and quietly enjoyed about his time in the United States, it was the sense of elbow-room.
He also liked water. Leningrad State University, where he had begun studies in civil engineering, was sited on Vasilevsky Island in the Neva River delta. Peter the Great had imagined the area to be Russia’s version of Venice, but the canals he had begun were later filled in.
It was at the Leningrad State University where Dankelov’s penchant for things mechanical had been wed to a newly discovered love for the sea, especially the Baltic Sea which had always been there for him, and therefore had gone unnoticed. The Soviet Union, in a quest for new sources of energy, was reinforcing study in oceanography and robotics, and Dankelov’s academic abilities and interests did not go unremarked. He was selected for advanced study at Lomonosov University in Moscow. From those days, he most remembered intense intellectual conversations, long walks among the harried pedestrians on Vernadsky Prospekt, and the December 1980 commemoration of John Lennon’s death in the park across from the university.