“Alan, you scared me half to death.”
Nixon said nothing; he closed the door and sat down.
He tossed her file folder onto her desk. He was expressionless. but there were little splotches of color dotted about his face.
When he didn’t speak. Rule did.
“You struck out,” she said.
“I didn’t strike out,” Nixon replied, rubbing the bridge of his nose.
“I was thrown out of the game. Kicked out of the ball park. Banned from the sport. I’m lucky the spectators didn’t beat me to death with the chairs.”
Rule slumped.
“Simon didn’t buy it, huh?”
“Simon hardly said a word. The director did all the talking.”
“The director! Jesus, Alan, you didn’t go to the director at this stage.”
“No, I went to Simon. Two minutes into my little presentation, the director walked in. Just a sociable visit.
Simon suggested I start again from the top, for the director’s benefit, just to give him an idea of the sort of analysis the Soviet Office does.”
“The bastard,” Rule said, burying her face in her hands.
“The director’s an amateur.”
“Funny,” Nixon said, “that’s what the director called me.” His voice rose a little, and Rule began to see how angry he was.
“He tore a very wide strip off my hide while Simon Rule watched,” Nixon said, “and I didn’t like it.”
“I’m sorry, Alan, I’m sorry you had to go through that for me.”
“So am I,” he said, standing up, “and believe me, I’m not going to go through that again.” He tapped the file on her desk.
“Lose this, Kate. Cease working on it, and go back to your regular work. If something else comes in on Majorov, add it to your bio on him, but I don’t want to hear about it.”
“Look, Alan.” she said in desperation, “there’s just one other thing. Majorov wasn’t mentioned in any of the digests of the Malakhov interrogations. I don’t think anybody asked about him; there was no reason to, at the time, I guess, and Malakhov obviously didn’t volunteer anything.
Can’t we request that from the interrogation team leader? Can’t we just do that?”
“Listen, Kate,” Nixon fumed.
“Ed Rawls is the best interrogator this service has, and if it isn’t in his reports, then it isn’t in Malakhov’s head.”
So Ed Rawls was leading the team, she thought. That’s probably what he was doing here, making his final report.
Nixon walked to the door.
“I know you’re not going to stop this,” he said angrily.
“I know you’re too much of a goddamned Bolshevik to take a direct order. Well let me tell you this, Kate; if I hear that you’ve spent so much as a minute on this, before, during, or after agency hours; if someone comes to me and says he heard somebody else heard that you made so much as a single request for resources in pursuit of this fantasy, then I’ll not only take the Office away from you. I’ll kick you right out of this directorate, do you hear me? I’ll see you in personnel, doing on-campus recruiting! Do I make myself clear?”
Rule nodded dumbly.
Nixon opened the door and walked out. closing the door behind him.
Rule leaned forward and cradled her head in her arms.
She had flashed on something, then rushed into it too fast; she had let her intuition get the better of her judgment; she had ruined a relationship with her immediate superior that had taken years to build; her name had been brought to the attention of the political hack who was the director and, therefore. God Almighty, and in the worst possible light.
This would go into her personnel package; it would dog her for years. Worst of all, it would give Simon something substantive to use as a crowbar to get her out of the agency, something he had never had until now. She was in a lot of trouble, and she knew it.
But Nixon had been right; she wouldn’t stop. She thought it was too important. She would just have to be careful, but she wouldn’t stop. She picked up the telephone.
“Smith.”
“Martin? Kate Rule.”
He waited a beat.
“Yeah, Kate?”
“Listen, will you copy me on any further sat shots of the Liepaja area?”
A longer beat.
“Listen. Kate, I’m sorry, but I’ve just gotten an exclusion order on you.”
“What?”
“Yeah, not thirty seconds ago.”
She couldn’t believe it.
“To what extent?”
“Scandinavia and the Baltic Basin.”
“At what level?”
“One.”
Shit. The director himself, probably.
“What quoted authority?”
“Snowflower.”
“Snowflower?”
“That’s what it says here.”
“Who or what is Snowflower?”
A long silence.
“I don’t know, Kate.”
Rule flinched. In the Agency, a long silence followed by “I don’t know” meant, “You know better than to ask me that.”
“I’m sorry, Martin. Thanks.”
“I hope you get it sorted out, Kate. I wish I could help.”
“I know you do.” They both hung up.
An exclusion order on a Head of Office? It was unheard of. This was real trouble. She hoped it had only gone to imagery analysis: if the director were mad enough to make it general, she’d be a pariah by noon the next day. She stuck the file in her briefcase. She wanted to get out of there.
She drove home slowly, numb with depression. Once inside the house, she struggled upstairs and threw herself on the bed. Some time later, she woke. There had been a noise. The doorbell? She stumbled down the stairs in the half-darkness, trying to clear her head. The bell rang again, just as she reached for the doorknob. She opened it.
Will Lee stood there, wearing a tuxedo. HELDER watched the needle on the radio compass and kicked the rudder right to correct two degrees. The sub came quickly on course; the enlarged rudder was doing its job. He was less happy with the diving planes. Something would still have to be done about those.
It was the first night drill with the mother sub, under simulated combat conditions, using no lights. He had only the coordinates of the submarine, the radio pulse, beeping erratically, so as not to attract the attention of an alert opposition listener, and, during his final approach, a tiny red light inside the launching chamber of the mother sub.
He watched the compass and listened. Another beep came, and he corrected minutely. Then, in the murky darkness, the little red strobe winked at him. It was situated at the back of the chamber and could only be seen through the open doors, from dead ahead. If he approached at night from as little as five degrees off center, he might strike the sub’s hull, making a very loud noise, or miss the sub entirely.
He throttled back and let the mini sub sink to the floor of the lagoon, then engaged the track drive and tractored up the ramp. He could hear its low whine as the ramp closed behind him and feel the sub lift and move away. Behind him he could hear Sokolov’s breathing, too rapid for his liking. They sat for another four or five minutes in the darkness, still surrounded by water, waiting for the mother sub to move away from the pickup point, then there was a hiss of compressed air, and abruptly, the floodlights of the chamber came on. Helder glanced quickly in his rearview mirror at Sokolov. in time to see her face bathed with sweat. He wished, once again, that he could replace her. that politics didn’t matter. But politics always mattered, no less in the military than in the Party.
As the water level went down in the chamber, Helder could see Majorov through the glass inspection hatch. giving him a thumbs-up sign. He reached up to pop the hatch above him.
“No!” Sokolov said. sharply.
“The chamber is not evacuated entirely.”
He turned and looked at her.
“Don’t quote regulations to me, Sokolov.”
“It is a regulation within my province. Captain.” she said.
“Don’t quote regulations to me in any circumstances,” he said firmly, and held her gaze until she nodded. He spun the pressure wheel, popped the hatch, and stood up.
There were still three feet of water in the chamber, but he had been longing to stretch. Even with the new seat he had insisted upon, the Type Four was still cramped. He hoisted himself through the hatch and sat on top of the sub until the chamber was dry. He saw the pressure wheel spin on the chamber’s hatch, and Majorov stepped in.
“First rate, Helder.” he said. smiling his languid smile.
“You and Sokolov come to the wardroom when you’ve got the kinks out. I’ve some things to tell you.” He stepped back into the sub proper, leaving the hatch open.
Helder, followed by Sokolov, slid down the mini sub hull to the wet steel deck of the launching chamber, and stepped through the hatch. They were immediately replaced in the launching chamber by two maintenance men, who began recharging the mini sub batteries. The Juliet class sub’s forward torpedo room had been replaced by the launching chamber, and as Helder walked through the vessel, he was struck, as always, by how empty it seemed without the forward berths and the torpedo crews. The sub carried only the crew necessary to deploy mini subs and they lived in comparative spaciousness. The captain had an actual cabin, as opposed to the alcove Helder had occupied when commander of the Whiskey, and the wardroom was larger, too. Helder and the sub’s sidpper waited for them at the table, and there was a large-scale nautical chart spread out. When they had been given cups of broth by the cook, the little group was left alone.
“Up until this time,” Majorov said, “you have been training blind. Now it is time for you to know the details of your mission. It is, I am glad to say, fairly straightforward.”
He laid a finger on the chart at the edge nearest Malibu and began moving it toward the coast on the chart.
Helder was not surprised to see that the chart was the coast of Sweden, the Stockholm Archipelago.
“You will enter the approaches to Stockholm, following close upon the Viking ferry from Helsinki, to mingle your sounds with theirs.” Majorov’s finger traced the course of the ferry through the archipelago for about two thirds of the way to Stockholm, then stopped.
“The mother sub will leave the ferry’s course here, in the bay called Tralhavet.”
He pointed to an open body of water amid dozens of surrounding islands.
“Your arrival should be about oh three hundred hours, but the time of day does not make a great deal of difference, since at this time of year there is very little darkness, anyway. There in the bay, the mother sub will rest on the bottom and immediately deploy the Type Four.”
In the instant before Majorov began his next sentence, it suddenly came to Helder that what he was doing was finally, positively real. After his years of training, of exercises and maneuvers, he was now going to perform.
He hung on Majorov’s every word.
“Now, Helder, you will proceed in a southwesterly direction, following the marked route through the islands of the archipelago, past the town of Vaxon, emerging to the south in this larger channel, in more open water. This should be fairly easy. since the channel is buoyed, and the buoys are lit. There should be little traffic at this hour, and you will be able to move close to the surface, using your periscope frequently to find the next channel marker. I stress, though, that you are not to use your periscope constantly, for obvious reasons.” He smiled.
“We have given the Swedes good cause the last couple of years to be periscope-conscious.”
Helder agreed that navigating the channel submerged should pose little problem.
Majorov continued.
“Emerging here, you will turn in a southwesterly direction again, still following the main channel, past the town of Brevik, on your starboard hand, to a point here, in the body of water called the Lilla Vartan.
Here you will deploy your cargo.”
Helder felt a little shiver. Majorov’s finger rested on a spot no more than five kilometers from the center of “Then,” said Majorov, “you will return to the mother sub by the same route. She is to wait for you exactly twenty-four hours, since that is the outer limit of both your batteries’ running time and your oxygen supply. If you have not returned by that time, you will be presumed to have abandoned or to be casualties. As you can see, the total distance you must travel is only twelve kilometers, and at your standard operational speed of three knots, that distance would consume less than three hours of running time, so you would seem to have a very comfortable safety margin. However, that margin would presume an entirely uneventful passage, and that is very unlikely.”
Majorov rose and began to pace as he talked.
“Since the Whiskey-on-the-rocks incident in 1981, the Swedes have been rapidly improving their sub-hunting capabilities. In ‘eighty-one, when they had four of our mini subs penned up in the archipelago, all four escaped, but you must remember that they are better now than then. You must be prepared for the worst conditions, and you must—I repeat, you must—complete the deployment of the buoy, no matter what happens. This buoy is absolutely vital to the success of our mission, and it is one of a Jcind; there is no backup equipment, no chance of a second mission if you fail. Should this buoy not be correctly deployed, the lives of hundreds, perhaps thousands of the cream of the Soviet military will be placed in the greatest jeopardy.”