Even as he asked the question though, he knew ― for the hundredth time ― that he would. He believed in Krasilnikov's vision for a new Russia and had accepted the premise that suffering in the short term was needed to win a future security. Like Chelyag, his counterpart aboard the Pravda, he'd undergone countless meetings with Karelin before this mission ― and even one interview with Krasilnikov himself. They'd screened him carefully, gauging the depth and the conviction of his belief in Communism.
They knew him, he was convinced, better than he knew himself.
And besides, there was Strelbitski.
Kirill Borisovich Strelbitski was the Revolutsita's political commissar, a civilian assigned to the Revolutsita by Karelin "to maintain the political fervor of the crew." Maintaining political fervor, Dobrynin knew, meant keeping an eye on the Captain. If Dobrynin failed to carry out his orders precisely as they were written, he would be relieved of his command and Strelbitski would take his place, and there was no doubt at all that that mean-eyed, thin-lipped reptile would carry out the orders… and even enjoy doing so. As for Dobrynin, his wife Tanya, in Murmansk, his son fighting with the 12th Red Guards at Voronezh, his daughter, a thirty-year-old doctor working in Moscow, all would be rounded up within the hour. And then…
well, he didn't want to think about the ultimate cost of his defection.
Yes, when the time came, he would give the proper order.
It had been another long, working night. They'd reconvened here, in Room 208 of the Executive Office Building, sitting around a long, highly polished table that gleamed in the morning sunlight spilling through the huge windows along the east wall. It was a lot airier here than in the White House Situation Room, with more light and more space.
Hours before, the Sit Room had proved inadequate for the task, as more and more advisors, aides, and staffers had been brought in to ride herd on what clearly was becoming a crisis of mammoth proportions. This room, its nineteenth-century decor masking a wealth of hidden electronics, television monitors, and computers, was large enough to accommodate sixty people.
Some fifty men and women were gathered here at the moment.
Officially designated the Presidential Crisis Management Group, they weren't managing so much as they were floundering in a veritable sea of information coming through from the worsening Kola situation. At the moment, Admiral Scott had the podium at the front of the room, as he ran down the list of American and British assets in the region… and the possible Russian response.
Admiral Magruder leaned back in his chair, his attention less on Scott ― he'd helped the head of the Joint Chiefs prepare his briefing so he already knew its contents by heart ― than it was on the wall at Scott's back.
There, the richly ornamented wood paneling had been rolled back to reveal a giant computer screen. Run by three VAX computers hidden in the room beyond, a digital information and display system, or DIDS, could project on that screen complex maps, graphic representations of data received from around the world, or displays repeated from the National Military Command Center.
Currently, the screen showed a computer-generated map of the northern half of the Kola Peninsula, the Russian coast as far east as Nosovaya, and most of the Barents Sea. Bear Station was a bright blue racetrack oval north of the Norwegian border, but dozens of other U.S. and NATO assets were displayed as well.
P-3C Orions, big, four-engined ASW aircraft, were patrolling the entire area from Svalbard to Nova Zemlya and south almost to the Murman coast.
Fifteen American attack subs, plus four British Trafalgar-class SSNs, were already in the area, though their exact positions could not be known with certainty. And II MEF was racing northeast just off the Norwegian coast, its ASW air and sea pickets spread across ten thousand square miles.
As many red graphics dotted the map as blue. The forty air bases in the Kola Peninsula were all tagged with data lines indicating that they were on full alert. Fortunately, all of the Russians' Northern Fleet was in port, except for some of their submarines. Over thirty of their subs, however, dotted the waters of the Norwegian and Barents seas… and those were just the ones that had been picked up by Western ASW forces.
During the past ten hours, the British, Norwegian, and American sea and air sub-hunters had been dogging the Russian subs, pressing them, rattling their hulls with active, high-frequency sonar, letting their captains know that the NATO forces knew where they were and could kill them at any time. It was a deadly game. The Russians ― or rather, some Russians ― had already attacked American forces, and no one could say for sure how their subs would act, what their orders were or which side of their country's civil war they'd joined. There'd been one incident already, when a Russian Alfa off Iceland had launched a torpedo at the Bolan, a Perry-class frigate dogging its wake.
The frigate had been blown up and sunk with terrible loss of life in those frigid waters; five minutes later the Alfa had been hit by two Advanced Lightweight Torpedoes dropped from the Bolan's SH-2F Seasprite helicopter and was listed now as a probable kill.
It was beginning.
Admiral Magruder was dead on his feet. He'd been up for most of the past two days, briefing aides, reviewing intelligence updates, even going over computer graphics data with the Crisis Management Group staff. Most of the men and women in the room with him had been keeping similar hours, snatching naps when they could on office sofas, or going home, only to be called back a few hours later by another twist in the ongoing crisis.
His primary duties as a senior military aide attached to the White House consisted of acting as liaison between the White House staff and the Joint Chiefs. Technically, he still worked for the Pentagon ― that "six-sided squirrel cage across the river," as he liked to call it ― but in practice he worked out of an office in the White House basement.
God, but he wanted to go home.
As he studied the array of colored lights on the DIDS map, Magruder felt trapped between two opposing fears, two extremes of government in its relation to the military. On the one hand, there was a tendency by the government, by the various bureaucracies in particular, to waffle this way and that on any given foreign policy question. As a result, all too often a crisis best met either by a decisive application of military force or no military force at all was met instead by half measures and tokens. Then, when American boys had already died, the powers-that-be in Washington frequently lost a clear vision of where they were going ― if they'd ever had one in the first place ― and either froze or changed their mind. Magruder was continually haunted by the possibility that the carrier battle force already at Bear Station might be sacrificed, with anything it might have won thrown away by inaction, indecision, or incompetence. The best example Magruder could think of was the terrorist bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983.
On the other hand, there was a constant tendency by Washington to micromanage, to second-guess commanders in the field while attempting to run military operations from W3, an in-joking reference to the White House West Wing. Carter's step-by-step control of the failed Iran hostage rescue mission in 1980 was an example of this opposite extreme.
The temptation toward this end of the military management spectrum was especially strong with the advent of technology such as the DIDS screen he was studying now. Real-time satellite photography and high-altitude Aurora transmissions, computer links with the NSA and with diplomatic stations around the globe, the sense of you-are-there immediacy provided by CNN, ACN, and the various other news networks all contributed to a feeling of almost Godlike power, anchored, somehow, in this building.