The Seventh Angel - Страница 8

“This has been going on for a while, sir,” General Gilmore said. “It’s a problem in all branches of the Russian military, but it’s especially bad in their Navy. The crime rate among their officers is spiraling out of control, and it’s even worse among their enlisted sailors. Extortion, theft, robbery, you name it. Sailors are stealing parts and supplies from their own ships and submarines, and selling them to feed their families.”

The president looked at his national security advisor. “So the deteriorating state of the Russian military could make it vulnerable to destabilization?”

Brenthoven nodded. “That’s a possibility, sir.”

“It’s a very real possibility,” General Gilmore said. “Not so much in places like Moscow, or Vladivostok. The Russians pour a lot more effort and resources into maintaining their military units stationed in high-visibility areas. But some of the obscure bases in Siberia, the Urals, and Kamchatka get little or nothing these days. When people get hungry enough, and desperate enough, the system starts to break down.”

“This is the twenty-first century,” said the White House chief of staff. “Russia may not be the great Soviet Empire any more, but it’s still a major industrial nation. Conditions can’t possibly be as bad as all that.”

“Yes they can,” the secretary of homeland security said quietly. “Look at how quickly and utterly our own infrastructures broke down when Hurricane Katrina wiped out New Orleans. Evacuation systems failed; communications failed; emergency relief efforts were overwhelmed; police officers deserted their posts. Hell, in some parishes, the police were looting and shooting right alongside the nut jobs and the criminals.”

She shook her head. “We tell ourselves that we’re beyond such things, but we’re not. The fabric of civilization is much thinner and more fragile than we’d like to believe. And, if the system can break down in the most powerful and prosperous nation on the planet, it can certainly happen to the Russians.”

The president stared at the video screen — the Russian nuclear missile submarines superimposed over the map of the Kamchatka peninsula. “Do we have any reason, beyond oblique hints by Mr. Grigoriev, to suspect a legitimate connection between China and the Governor of Kamchatka?”

“What little evidence we have is almost entirely circumstantial,” the national security advisor said. “But the medical team at the embassy in Manila pulled a half-dozen 5.8mm military rounds out of Oleg Grigoriev. Ballistic analysis tells us that the bullets were fired from a short-barreled Type 95 assault rifle, the same configuration favored by the Special Operations Forces of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.” Brenthoven closed his leather-bound notebook and tucked it into the pocket of his jacket. “That doesn’t prove that the shooters were Chinese military, but it certainly seems to fit the scenario. If Grigoriev is telling the truth, it makes sense that the Chinese would try to shut him up.”

The president scanned the faces of the people gathered around the table. “We’re smelling a lot of smoke, but I don’t see any fire. I’m not saying that it’s not there, but I can’t see it yet. If one of you can connect the dots on this Kamchatka-China thing, now is the time to speak up.”

No one spoke.

“Okay,” the president said. “Keep on this, Greg. Maybe it’s nothing, but I’m not ready to make that call yet.” He nodded to the analyst. “Let’s move on. What’s next?”

The analyst keyed his remote, and the pictures on the video screen were replaced by an image of a small submarine hanging from a launch and recovery crane on the fantail of a white-hulled oceanographic research ship. “Mr. President, this is the deepwater submersible Nereus…”

The president sighed. Submarines. Why did it always have to be submarines?

CHAPTER 6

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

NORTHERN PACIFIC OCEAN (SOUTH OF THE ALEUTIAN ISLANDS)

TUESDAY; 26 FEBRUARY

0947 hours (9:47 AM)

TIME ZONE -10 ‘WHISKEY’

“How much oxygen have they got left?” The voice came from one of the half-dozen or so khaki-clad men and women milling around near the ship’s boat deck. Ann Roark made a point of ignoring them as she worked through the list of pre-launch procedures to get Mouse ready to go into the water.

Some of the onlookers were probably chiefs and some of them were probably officers, but Ann couldn’t tell the difference. It had been a man’s voice, but beyond that, Ann didn’t make any effort to figure out which of the Navy types had spoken. As far as she was concerned, they were all pretty much interchangeable.

The pattern was fairly set now; one of the uniforms would toss out some variation of that question every minute or so, always delivered in hushed tones, and always unanswered. “Do you think they’ve still got air?” “Are they alive?” “How did it happen?” “How bad is the damage?” “Why aren’t they communicating?”

The Navy types weren’t really talking to Ann. They probably weren’t even talking to each other. The whispered questions seemed to be a kind of conversational defense mechanism. By recycling the same unanswerable queries, it was somehow possible to imagine that the crew of the Nereus was still alive. When the questions stopped, the mental images began to filter in: two men and one woman lying dead in the darkened confines of the tiny submarine.

Ann didn’t indulge in the useless string of unanswerable questions. She had her own mindless litany: a statement, not a question. “This is not supposed to be a rescue,” she said through her teeth. Her breath came out like smoke in the cold Alaskan air. “This is not supposed to be a rescue. This is not supposed to be a freaking rescue!” She had repeated those words to herself at least fifty times, as though blind repetition could alter the situation.

She moved carefully as she worked. There was frost on the deck, and she didn’t want to slip and fall on her ass in front of all these Navy yahoos. They’d laugh about that for forty years, wouldn’t they?

Mouse hung from the heavy steel arm of the boat davit, swinging gently from the cable that was ordinarily used to raise and lower the ship’s two Rigid-Hulled Inflatable Boats. The robot was bright yellow, disk-shaped, and about seven feet in diameter. A pair of large multi-jointed manipulator arms protruded from the leading edge of the disk, and three pump-jet propulsion pods were mounted to the trailing edge in a triangular formation. The forward end of the robot was arrayed with clusters of camera lenses, sonar transducers, and other sensors.

The curve of the machine’s yellow carapace was stamped with the words NORTON DEEP WATER SYSTEMS, and the streamlined black ‘N’ of the Norton corporate logo. It was the company’s mark of ownership, there for all the world to see. For all of Ann’s personal sense of ownership, Mouse belonged to Norton, not to her.

She unscrewed a waterproof pressure cap from the ventral data port, and plugged a length of fiber-optic into the narrow connecting jack beneath. She plugged the other end of the cable into a hand-held test module about the size of a brick, and began to punch buttons and watch the results on the built-in digital display. The readouts were all in hexadecimal, but Mouse was Ann’s baby. She knew every status code by heart.

Officially, the machine’s name was Multi-purpose Autonomous Underwater System Mark-I. Usually, that was shortened to M-A-U-S, or Mouse. By classification, it was an Unmanned Underwater Vehicle, not a robot. The United States Navy didn’t care for the word robot, with its science fiction movie connotations. Consequently, that word was never officially used, and even unofficial use of the R-word was discouraged. The machine was either referred to as Mouse, or by one of several more generic designations: the unit, the package, the system, the equipment, or even the UUV. Never the robot.

To Ann, the controversy over that one word was a perfect example of the warped logic at the heart of the military value system. Military types had no problem launching missiles at people they’d never even met, but they practically wet their pants if you called a piece of equipment by the wrong name.

Ann’s coworker, Sheldon Miggs, attributed that particular fixation to improved communications. According to Sheldon, standardizing the names for equipment, tactics, and supplies went a long way toward making sure that someone didn’t launch the wrong missile at the wrong time, shoot the wrong target, or pour the wrong kind of chemical extinguishing agent onto a raging fire. When Sheldon told it, the whole thing made a certain twisted degree of sense. Then again, Sheldon bought off on too much of that whole ‘defense of freedom’ shtick. To him, these military types represented something heroic. Ann saw them for what they really were — robots in starched uniforms, responding to programs written by greedy politicians and the military industrial complex.

And that, come to think of it, might explain why the Navy didn’t care for the R-word. Maybe they didn’t like the competition — one group of robots to another.

Screw the Navy. Not one of their acceptable terms came as close to describing Mouse’s nature and abilities as the dreaded R-word. Mouse was a robot, and Ann was damned well going to call it a robot.