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“If this had a nuclear warhead been, you would now be dead. Think of it.”

THREE

Next morning, at the Pentagon

Eventually, passenger railroad service was restored. Jeffrey and Ilse spent an uncomfortable night on the train as it crept toward Washington. They carefully folded Jeffrey’s dress uniform jacket, and the jacket of Ilse’s pantsuit, and put them neatly on the overhead rack. Then they used their coats as improvised blankets — the crowded train was chilly, to save energy, since it took power to heat the cars. Jeffrey slept fitfully; sometimes he heard Ilse moan in her sleep. He was tempted to squeeze her hand to try to comfort her, but held back; he remembered her comment in the Empire State Building cocktail lounge, that this was strictly a business trip.

At the Pentagon, at least, Jeffrey and Ilse were able to freshen up and eat breakfast: bacon, actual bacon, and omelets made from real — not powdered — eggs. Now they sat in a waiting area, on a plush leather couch outside the big floor-to-ceiling double doors of a meeting room. The door was guarded by two enlisted marines. Jeffrey eyed the marines’ crisp appearance, their mirror-hard shoeshines and the razor-sharp creases of their fatigues. He surreptitiously tried to smooth the wrinkles on his uniform.

The marines suddenly snapped to attention. Jeffrey instinctively jumped to his feet. Ilse stood up too.

An air force four-star general entered the waiting area. He was built like a football linebacker, and the way he moved made Jeffrey think of a taxiing B-52. He strode into the meeting room without even noticing Jeffrey and Ilse. The man looked very angry.

For a while that was all, and Jeffrey let his mind wander.

“What’s the matter?” Ilse said. “What were you thinking about?”

Jeffrey realized he’d been frowning. “My father… It’s not something I’m proud of.”

“Why? What did he do?”

“It’s nothing he did.”

“I’ll bet it is,” Ilse teased. “What did he do? Peeping Tom? Mafia hit man? Ran a bordello in St. Louis?” After the terrors of last night in New York, her humor sounded lame.

Jeffrey had told Ilse he was from a suburb of St. Louis. That much, he’d told her. “It’s not what he did. The last time we tried to talk, it was awful.”

“You had an argument?”

“No. It would be better if we had. It was more like hard, quiet, seething rage.”

“You or your father?”

“Him. Directed at me. And sarcasm. Biting, subtle, with surgical precision. Enough to make me bleed inside.”

“My God. Why?”

“When I was younger, growing up, I treated my family like crap.”

“How so?”

“I thought they were boring as all hell, and I did nothing to hide it.”

“Come on, Jeffrey. All kids go through that.”

“Not the way I did. I was a real asshole about it.”

“What does your father do for a living?”

“He’s a utility regulator. A career bureaucrat, basically.”

“That does sound pretty dull. Though I suppose it’s become more important nowadays.”

“Yeah. I kinda dumped my family and decided to join the navy. For college, I did Navy ROTC at Purdue. My dad, by then, didn’t try to stop me. But he resented it a lot.”

“How come? He ought to have been proud of you.”

“It was too late for that, by then. When I was a kid, I loved to read about the navy. I was so into the stuff, you know, book reports and things like that at school even, the junior-high guidance counselor once had a talk with my parents.”

“Oh.”

“Of course, that just made me more obstinate. My bedroom was all full of models of ships. Battleships, carriers, sailing ships, landing craft, and every class of sub I could find in the toy stores.”

“But that’s all good, isn’t it? It’s nice to know what you want to be when you grow up.”

“Isn’t it, though? Except I turned my back on my family the whole time. I condescended, like I was better than them. Like I’d found my calling, and it was visionary, and it put me on a higher plane than these tedious middle-class drones. Me, a kid, eight, twelve, sixteen, whenever. Then there were arguments. Sometimes it got ugly.”

“But I still don’t understand, what’s the problem now? Your father should be proud of what you’ve done. You made the right career choice, didn’t you? That’s bloody obvious. Can’t he let bygones alone?”

“Sometimes you push someone so far you kill the love and the trust. Sometimes you gall them so much with silent insolence, there’s no going back afterward.”

“What happened the last time you tried to speak to him?”

“I called him on the phone, from the base, a couple of months ago. He practically blamed me personally for starting the war, for losing the war, because of that nuclear ambush off western Africa where the navy lost all those ships.”

“That’s crazy.”

“No. He’s a smart, clearheaded man. Much more than I gave him credit for, years back. But he’s as disillusioned and scared as everybody else right now, with what’s been happening since the Double Putsch.” The coordinated takeovers in Johannesburg and Berlin. “I think it was his way of getting out his pain at me, with the thing he knew would hurt me most. He said it was like Pearl Harbor all over again, except at sea, and this time we did lose the carriers.”

“But you weren’t even there!”

“He knows that.”

“Can’t you try to talk to him again? The stuff you’ve done, since that phone call anyway, it should make a difference.”

“Right. Except it’s all highly classified. He has no idea what I’ve been up to, and he never will, will he?”

“I guess not. I don’t know what to say.”

“There’s nothing to say. Just try to forget about it. It’s not something I like to talk about.”

Jeffrey looked away from Ilse. There was nothing she could do to help him anyway.

Simultaneously, on Voortrekker, in the Indian Ocean

In the control room Gunther Van Gelder gripped his armrests as Voortrekker wallowed sickeningly at periscope depth, moving very slowly, in a race against time. Minutes before, Voortrekker had launched three dozen Mach 2.5 cruise missiles at Diego Garcia, four hundred miles away, the vital Allied forward bastion in the Indian Ocean. The nuclear carrier USS Ronald Reagan’s aircraft were doggedly hunting Voortrekker now, because of the noisy launch datum Jan ter Horst made. The Reagan was much closer to Voortrekker than Voortrekker was to Diego Garcia, and Reagan’s planes were almost as fast as ter Horst’s missiles.

Van Gelder watched his tactical screens warily and nervously. His sonarmen and fire-control technicians were also on edge. Van Gelder could smell their sweat, feel their inner tension, see their worried faces clearly in the control room’s daytime lighting. Eight brilliant decoys had been running in different directions for half an hour or more. Voortrekker hoped to be lost amid the distraction of the decoys, but Van Gelder had serious doubts, for a simple reason.

Voortrekker had both periscope masts up. Her satellite-communications antenna dish was also raised. This was exceedingly dangerous, despite their low-observable radar-absorbing designs, but ter Horst insisted. Jan ter Horst wanted to watch his handiwork at Diego Garcia unfold live.

“Soon now,” ter Horst said. “You can see the antiair defenses getting more intense.” He leaned closer to the full-color video feed from the satellite, monitoring the target on his main console display. Van Gelder watched identical imagery, windowed on his own screens. Sometimes large waves, outside the hull, buried Voortrekker’s antenna dish, and the picture went blank, then resumed. Even submerged, the ship rolled heavily, recovered, rolled hard the other way.

“Watch your trim,” ter Horst snapped at the helmsman and chief of the boat. “Don’t let her broach!”

The satellite was in high earth orbit, passing overhead. It belonged to a neutral Third World country, but had been built in Germany before the war. When the bird was launched its owners had no idea it carried extra circuitry they didn’t pay for, covertly embedded military data-relay links the Allies wouldn’t try to shoot down or jam, because they wouldn’t know to.

But these satellites had no spy cameras, which would have been too obvious. The uplink feed came instead from an unmanned aerial vehicle, a stealthy recon drone launched by a German class 214 modern diesel sub. The sub lurked north of ter Horst’s target, in support of his mission. The drone kept a close eye on Diego Garcia, from a few thousand meters’ altitude, sending pictures up to the satellite by a focused microwave beam. Voortrekker herself was well to the south of the enemy’s island base, hiding from visual detection beneath thin overcast. She was observing radio silence, just receiving the downlink feed.

Van Gelder forced himself to stay outwardly calm, to keep his men calm. It wasn’t easy. Visibility under the overcast was good. With little warning, low-flying aircraft armed with nuclear depth bombs might spot Voortrekker’s masts at any moment.

The Pentagon

Ilse heard voices from inside the meeting room. The voices were muffled, but Ilse knew people were arguing, shouting. She heard an especially deep, booming voice, which sounded accusing and irritated. Others answered harshly, including at least two women, as tough as the men. The marine guards stood there stoically.

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