LITMIR.BIZ

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for a couple of days.’

      ‘What if they’re afraid they’ve lost one?’ Ryan ventured.

      ‘No such luck,’ Davenport scoffed. ‘They haven’t lost a boomer since that Golf we lifted off Hawaii, back when you were in high school, Ryan. Ramius is too good a skipper to let that happen.’

      So was Captain Smith of the Titanic, Ryan thought.

      ‘Thanks for the info, Charlie.’ Greer hung up. ‘Looks like you were right, Jack. Nothing to worry about yet. Let’s get that data on Afghanistan in here – and just for the hell of it, we’ll look at Charlie’s pictures of their Northern Fleet when we’re finished.’

      Ten minutes later a messenger arrived with a cart from central files. Greer was the sort who liked to see the raw data himself. This suited Ryan. He’d known of a few analysts who had based their reports on selective data and been cut off at the knees for it by this man. The information on the cart was from a variety of sources, but to Ryan the most significant were tactical radio intercepts from listening posts on the Pakistani border, and, he gathered, from inside Afghanistan itself. The nature and tempo of Soviet operations did not indicate a backing off, as seemed to be suggested by a pair of recent articles in Red Star and some intelligence sources inside the Soviet Union. They spent three hours reviewing the data.

      ‘I think Sir Basil is placing too much stock in political intelligence and too little in what our listening posts are getting in the field. It would not be unprecedented for the Soviets not to let their field commanders know what’s going on in Moscow, of course, but on the whole I do not see a clear picture,’ Ryan concluded.

      The admiral looked at him. ‘I pay you for answers, Jack.’

      ‘Sir, the truth is that Moscow moved in there by mistake. We know that from both military and political intelligence reports. The tenor of the data is pretty clear. From where I sit, I don’t see that they know what they want to do. In a case like this the bureaucratic mind finds it most easy to do nothing. So, their field commanders are told to continue the mission, while the senior Party bosses fumble around looking for a solution and covering their asses for getting into the mess in the first place.’

      ‘Okay, so we know that we don’t know.’

      ‘Yes, sir. I don’t like it either, but saying anything else would be a lie.’

      The admiral snorted. There was a lot of that at Langley, intelligence types giving answers when they didn’t even know the questions. Ryan was still new enough to the game that when he didn’t know, he said so. Greer wondered if that would change in time. He hoped not.

      After lunch a package arrived by messenger from the National Reconnaissance Office. It contained the photographs taken earlier in the day on two successive passes by a KH-11 satellite. They’d be the last such photos for a while because of the restrictions imposed on orbital mechanics and the generally miserable weather on the Kola Peninsula. The first set of visible light shots taken an hour after the FLASH signal had gone out from Moscow showed the fleet at anchor or tied to the docks. On infrared a number of them were glowing brightly from internal heat, indicating that their boilers or gas-turbine engines were operating. The second set of photos had been taken on the next orbital pass at a very low angle.

      Ryan scrutinized the blowups. ‘Wow! Kirov, Moskva, Kiev, three Karas, five Krestas, four Krivaks, eight Udaloys, and five Sovremennys.’

      ‘Search and rescue exercise, eh?’ Greer gave Ryan a hard look. ‘Look at the bottom here. Every fast oiler they have is following them out. That’s most of the striking force of the Northern Fleet right there, and if they need oilers, they figure to be out for a while.’

      ‘Davenport could have been more specific. But we still have their boomers heading back in. No amphibious ships in this photo, just combatants. Only the new ones, too, the ones with range and speed.’

      ‘And the best weapons.’

      ‘Yeah,’ Ryan nodded. ‘And all scrambled in a few hours. Sir, if they had this planned in advance, we’d have known about it. This must have been laid on today. Interesting.’

      ‘You’ve picked up the English habit of understatement, Jack.’ Greer stood up to stretch. ‘I want you to stay over an extra day.’

      ‘Okay sir.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Mind if I phone the wife? I don’t want her to drive out to the airport for a plane I’m not on.’

      ‘Sure, and after you’ve finished that, I want you to go down and see someone at DIA who used to work for me. See how much operational data they’re getting on this sortie. If this is a drill, we’ll know soon enough, and you can still take your Surfing Barbie home tomorrow.’

      It was a Skiing Barbie, but Ryan didn’t say so.

THE SIXTH DAY

       Wednesday, 8 December

      CIA HEADQUARTERS

      Ryan had been to the office of the director of central intelligence several times before to deliver briefings and occasional personal messages from Sir Basil Charleston to his highness, the DCI. It was larger than Greer’s, with a better view of the Potomac Valley, and appeared to have been decorated by a professional in a style compatible with the DCI’s origins. Arthur Moore was a former judge of the Texas State Supreme Court, and the room reflected his southwestern heritage. He and Admiral Greer were sitting on a sofa near the picture windows. Greer waved Ryan over and passed him a folder.

      The folder was made of red plastic and had a snap closure. Its edges were bordered with white tape and the cover had a simple white paper label bearing the legends EYES ONLY Δ and WILLOW. Neither notation was unusual. A computer in the basement of the Langley headquarters selected random names at the touch of a key; this prevented a foreign agent from inferring anything from the name of an operation. Ryan opened the folder and looked first at the index sheet. Evidently there were only three copies of the WILLOW document, each initialled by its owner. This one was initialled by the DCI himself. A CIA document with only three copies was unusual enough that Ryan, whose highest clearance was NEBULA, had never encountered one. From the grave looks of Moore and Greer, he guessed that these were two of the Δ-cleared officers; the other, he assumed, was the deputy director of operations (DDO), another Texan named Robert Ritter.

      Ryan turned the index sheet. The report was a xeroxed copy of something that had been typed on a manual machine, and it had too many strikeovers to have been done by a real secretary. If Nancy Cummings and the other elite executive secretaries had not been allowed to see this … Ryan looked up.

      ‘It’s all right, Jack,’ Greer said. ‘You’ve just been cleared for WILLOW.’

      Ryan sat back, and despite his excitement began to read the document slowly and carefully.

      The agent’s code name was actually CARDINAL. The highest ranking agent-in-place the CIA had ever had, he was the stuff that legends are made of. CARDINAL had been recruited more than twenty years earlier by Oleg Penkovskiy. Another legend – a dead one – Penkovskiy had at the time been a colonel in the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency, a larger and more active counterpart to America’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). His position had given him access to daily information on all facets of the Soviet military, from the Red Army’s command structure to the operational status of intercontinental missiles. The information he smuggled out through his British contact, Greville Wynne, was supremely valuable, and Western countries had come to depend on it – too much. Penkovskiy was discovered during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. It was his data, ordered and delivered under great pressure and haste, that told President Kennedy that Soviet strategic systems were not ready for war. This information enabled the president to back Khrushchev into a corner from which there was no easy exit. The famous blink ascribed to Kennedy’s steady nerves

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