Tom Clancy - Executive Orders

RED OCTOBER, GOLOVKO thought, then he looked up at the high ceiling of his office. "Ivan Emmetovich, you clever bastard. Zvo tvoyu maht!"

The curse was spoken in quiet admiration. From the first moment he'd met Ryan, he'd underestimated him. and even with all the contacts, direct and indirect, that had followed, he had to admit, he'd never stopped doing it. So that was how he'd compromised Gerasimov! And in so doing, he'd saved Russia, perhaps—but a country was supposed to be saved from within, not without. Some secrets were supposed to be kept forever, because they protected everyone equally. This was such a secret. It would embarrass both countries now. For the Russians, it was the loss of a valuable national asset through high treason—worse still, something their intelligence organs had not discovered, which was quite incredible on reflection, but the cover stories had been good ones, and the loss of two hunter submarines in the same operation had made the affair something that the Soviet navy had every desire to forget—and so they hadn't looked far beyond the cover story.

Sergey Nikolay'ch knew the second part better than the first. Ryan had forestalled a coup d'etat. Golovko supposed that Ryan might as easily have told him what was happening and left it to the Soviet Union's internal organs—but, no. Intelligence services turned everything to their advantage, and Ryan would have been mad not to have done so here. Gerasimov must have sung like a canary—he knew the Western aphorism—and given up everything he'd known; Ames, for one, had been identified that way, he was sure, and Ames had been a virtual diamond mine for KGB.

And you always told yourself that Ivan Emmetovich was a gifted amateur, Golovko thought.

But even his professional admiration was tempered. Russia might soon need help. How could she go for that help to someone who, it would now be known, had tampered with his country's internal politics like a puppeteer? That realization was worth another oath, not spoken in admiration of anything.

PUBLIC WATERWAYS ARE free for the passage of all, and so the Navy couldn't do anything more than prevent the charter boat from getting too close to the Eight-Ten Dock. Soon it was joined by another, then more still, until a total of eleven cameras were pointing at the covered graving dock, now empty with the demise of most of America's missile submarines, and also empty of another which had briefly lived there, not American, or so the story went.

It was possible to access the Navy's personnel records via computer, and some were doing that right now, checking for former crewmen of USS Dallas. An early-morning call to CoMSuuPAC concerning his tenure as commanding officer of Dallas got no farther than his public affairs officer, who was well-schooled in no-commenting sensitive inquiries. Today he'd get more than his fair share. So would others.

"THIS IS RON Jones."

"This is Tom Donner at NEC News."

"That's nice," Jonesy said diffidently. "I watch CNN myself."

"Well, maybe you want to watch our show tonight. I'd like to talk to you about—"

"I read the Times this morning. It's delivered up here. No comment," he added.

"But—"

"But, yes, I used to be a submariner, and they call us the Silent Service. Besides, that was a long time ago. I run my own business now. Married, kids, the whole nine yards, y'know?"

"You were lead sonar man aboard USS Dallas when—"

"Mr. Donner, I signed a secrecy agreement when I left the Navy. I don't talk about the things we did, okay?" It was his first encounter with a reporter, and it was living up to everything he'd ever been told to expect.

"Then all you have to do is tell us that it never happened."

"That what never happened?" Jones asked.

"The defection of a Russian sub named Red October."

"You know the craziest thing I ever heard as a sonar man?"

"What's that?"

"Elvis." He hung up. Then he called Pearl Harbor.

WITH DAYLIGHT, THE TV trucks rolled through Winchester, Virginia, rather like the Civil War armies that had exchanged possession of the town over forty times.

He didn't actually own the house. It could not even be said that CIA did. The land title was in the name of a paper corporation, in turn owned by a foundation whose directors were obscure, but since real-property ownership in America is a matter of public record, and since all corporations and foundations were also, that data would be run down in less than two days, despite the tag on the files which told the clerks in the county courthouse to be creatively incompetent in finding the documents.

The reporters who showed up had still photos and taped file footage of Nikolay Gerasimov, and long lenses were set up on tripods to aim at the windows, a quarter mile away, past a few grazing horses which made for a nice touch on the story: CIA TREATS RUSSIAN SPYMASTER LIKE VISITING KING.

The two security guards at the house were going ape, calling Langley for instructions, but the CIA's public affairs office—itself rather an odd institution—didn't have a clue on this one, other than falling back on the stance that this was private property (whether or not that was legally correct under the circumstances was something CIA's lawyers were checking out) and that, therefore, the reporters couldn't trespass.

It had been years since he'd had much to laugh about. Sure, there had been the occasional light moment, but this was something so special that he'd never even considered its possibility. He'd always thought himself an expert on America. Gerasimov had run numerous spy operations against the "Main Enemy," as the United States had once been called in the nonexistent country he'd once served, but he admitted to himself that you had to come here and live here for a few years to understand how incomprehensible America was, how nothing made sense, how literally anything could happen, and the madder it was, the more likely it seemed. No imagination was sufficient to predict what would happen in a day, much less a year. And here was the proof of it.

Poor Ryan, he thought, standing by the window and sipping his coffee. In his country—for him it would always be the Soviet Union—this would never have happened. A few uniformed guards and a hard look would have driven people off, or if the look alone didn't, then there were other options. But not in America, where the media had all the freedom of a wolf in the Siberian pines—he nearly laughed at that thought, too. In America, wolves were a protected species. Didn't these fools know that wolves killed people?

"Perhaps they will go away," Maria said, appearing at his side.

"I think not."

"Then we must stay inside until they do," his wife said, terrified at the development.

He shook his head. "No, Maria."

"But what if they send us back?"

"They won't. They can't. One doesn't do that with defectors. It's a rule," he explained. "We never sent Philby, or Burgess, or MacLean back—drunks and degenerates. Oh, no, we protected them, bought them their liquor, and let them diddle with their perversions, because that's the rule." He finished his coffee and walked back to the kitchen to put the cup and saucer in the dishwasher. He looked at it with a grimace. His apartment in Moscow and his dacha in the Lenin Hills—probably renamed since his departure—hadn't had an appliance like that one. He'd had servants to do such things. No more. In America convenience was a substitute for power, and comfort the substitute for status.

Servants. It could all have been his. The status, the servants, the power. The Soviet Union could still have been a great nation, respected and admired across the world. He would have become General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He could then have initiated the needed reforms to clear out the corruption and get the country moving again. He would probably have made a full rapprochement with the West, and made a peace, but a peace of equals it would have been, not a total collapse. He'd never been an ideologue, after all, though poor old Alexandrov had thought him so, since Gerasi-mov had always been a Party man—well, what else could you be in a one-party state? Especially if you knew that destiny had selected you for power.