Then the message came. Hold off. Wait. Don't move. Parche was by now just outside the 12-mile limit. But her path in was now sealed-by presidential order. On September 19, while Parche was still en route, Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze had deliv ered a letter to Reagan from Gorbachev. The general secretary had written that he wanted to push the arms negotiations along by meeting with Reagan. He gave two choices of locales, and the United States picked Reykjavik, Iceland, a quiet spot halfway between Washington and Moscow.
The meeting was set for October 11, 1986, a follow-up to the previous year's summit. At that meeting, there had been one sticking point, and that was Star Wars-Gorbachev wanted SDI eliminated. Reagan passionately insisted that SDI was the only way out of the precarious balance built on mutually assured destruction. He believed his lasers in space could forever erase the concept that peace depended on the threat that the United States and the Soviet Union could wipe each other out.
During that last meeting, discussion had often deteriorated into a shouting match, but in the heat of battle, Reagan and Gorbachev came to like and respect one another. In the end, they also came out with a joint statement saying they wanted to work toward a 50 percent reduction in strategic weapons and other arms cuts.
This second act being staged in Reykjavik promised to he the most unpredictable and remarkable superpower meeting ever. Both sides had agreed that rather than scripting everything in advance, they would just clear space for the two leaders to talk. No wonder there were such high hopes for this summit. No wonder Gorbachev unwittingly halted Parche in her tracks with his letter.
On board, the sense of history about to happen was lost on the men. They were certain they would be sent in to finish their task. For them, the summit just meant an uncomfortable and possibly dangerous wait.
"Let's get in, let's get out," one of the men began grumbling over and over to anyone who would listen. After a while, they were all saying it, in one way or another. They were so close to the prize, could almost see it, smell it, but their orders were to pull back, not to touch it.
It was irritating. It was worse than that. 'There was too much time to think, too much time to listen as one warship after another passed nearby. There was too much time to recognize that the president didn't want to be anywhere around if Parche was caught. The men had always known that what they were doing was illegal and that if Parche were ever found or forced to self-destruct, the United States would deny they had ever been there. It was just that now the message was louder than they wanted to hear.
A week passed. Then two. Parche was waiting, and by now, so was the rest of the world. October 11 came. Men crammed into Parche's radio room all day, trying to copy the news on the radio circuits, trying to follow what was going on. But neither they nor anyone on shore were allowed to hear the details. That had been the deal. No reporters, no reports, not until it was all over.
Reagan and Gorbachev were meeting in Hofdi House, an isolated structure on the bleak edge of the North Atlantic. Shultz thought it looked haunted, and Icelanders were convinced that it was. They sat in a small room, Shultz and Shevardnadze, Reagan and Gorbachev, two translators, and two note-takers. There against a single window, looking out onto turbulent and frigid waters that would perhaps ultimately wash over to where Parche sat beneath the Barents, the summit began.
Compromises were offered and concessions were made. Staff negotiators agreed that they could cut ballistic-missile arsenals in half, to roughly 6,000 warheads and 1,600 delivery vehicles on each side, and that they could also slash the number of shorter-range missiles. Reagan and Gorbachev themselves were talking about making these cuts over the next five years, and then eliminating the rest of their nuclear arsenals within five years after that. It was on the table, ten years to a nuke-free world. They were actually talking about the end of the terrors that had existed since the Manhattan Project, talking about forever rendering false Robert J. Oppenheimer's horrifying 1945 prophesy, "I am become death, destroyer of worlds," a quote from the Bhagavad Gita that the physicist intoned after the first atomic bomb had been tested.
Gorbachev still wanted Reagan to give up SDI, or at least limit Star Wars research to the laboratory and to agree to refrain from testing in space for ten years. Reagan wanted to conduct space tests, at least enough of them so that SDI could be deployed in ten years. At that time, he promised, the United States would hand the entire system, all of the technology, over to the Soviets.
Gorbachev wasn't buying it, and Reagan pleaded for resolution. "I have a picture that after ten years you and I come to Iceland and bring the last two missiles in the world and we have the biggest damn party in celebration of it!" He continued, "A meeting in Iceland in ten years: I'll be so old, you won't recognize me. I'll say, `Mikhail?' You'll say, `Ron?' And we'll destroy the last two."
They parried. Gorbachev said he might not be alive in ten years, that he was just entering his "danger period," and that Reagan had passed through his and could now count on making it smoothly to age one hundred.
"I can't live to one hundred worrying that you'll shoot one of those missiles at me," Reagan answered.
The argument went on. Reagan insisted that he had promised the American people he wouldn't give up SDI; Gorbachev insisted that the president would still have SDI even if he confined testing to the lab. Finally Reagan spoke the words that might have sounded like just so much lofty rhetoric in any other context: "It would be fine with me if we eliminated all nuclear weapons."
"We can do that. Let's eliminate them. We can eliminate them," Gorbachev shot back.
This could have been the defining moment. Maybe it should have been. But Hofdi House was living up to its reputation. The men were indeed haunted, by this single impasse.
"It is a question of one word," Reagan said, pleading for Gorbachev to give up his insistence that SDI proceed only in the laboratory.
"It's `laboratory' or good-bye," Gorbachev insisted. The meeting ended on that note.
Outside, a crush of international press was learning how close the two had come to an agreement. Reporters were rushing off to wire the world their postmortems that would declare the summit a failure.
Beneath the water, another wire reached Parche.
Word shot through the sub as a single line was quoted throughout the boat: "You are authorized to penetrate the 12-mile line." Parche was going in.
She was now only six or seven hours away from her mission. Conversation on board turned to other missions, other close calls. It was how the men admitted without admitting how scared they were. They talked about tracking Yankees and the ultra-quiet new Akula and Sierra attack submarines that had come out in the last couple of years. They called the Akula the "Walker sub" because the spy had inspired the Soviet move toward deadly quiet engines. In fact, Soviet technology was moving ahead so fast that more U.S. attack subs were being detected by the Soviet boats they were trying to trail. American subs were also being detected near the Soviet coasts. It was there that the spooks would hear the Soviets react in a burst of messages. The spooks had taken to calling the Soviet detection warning "stutter nine": in their code, eight bursts meant a suspected detection, nine meant one confirmed. The stutter came from repetition. The men talked about all this knowing all the while that on Parche detection was likely to mean self-destruction.