Croder had warned me about that. Whoever we send out to meet Brekhov, it would be logical to think that there will indeed be more for him to do, a very great deal more.
'All right,' I told Kinsley. My eyes were still sore from the heat of the fire and my hair still smelled of smoke and I kept on seeing Brekhov with his head like that. But given enough incentive I'd feel mission-ready again.
'We're not sure yet,' Kinsley said, 'when we-' then he broke off as one of the technicians started talking.
'What we're going to hear is the actual tape recorded at the time of the incident. Then we'll listen to a tape taken from the file on routine audio-surveillance in the Murmansk area.' He wiped his thin red nose and looked at Croder.
'Very good.'
I turned my chair round the other way and leaned my arms on its back; I hadn't slept on the flight out to Berlin or the flight home and there was the whole night still heavy on me.
The man slipped the tape into the deck and set it to play. There was silence for five or six seconds and then some kind of background interference; then two voices began speaking in Russian, in between intervals of what sounded like grid hum.
I have a weak signal on No. 12.
The technician spoke in the intervals. 'That's one of their sonobuoy monitoring stations.'
And we have another signal on No.. 3. Stronger.
Canyon triangulate?
The background hummed.
Yes. We have a velocity of 15 knots. The position is 17-E on the east grid.
'They'll be watching these readings on a computer screen,' the technician said, and wiped his nose again. It had been freezing outside when I'd got here.
It's moving out of range on No. 12. The course is 119 degrees.
How close is it to my No. 4 battery?
Less than half a kilometre, and closing on it.
How fast?
I don't know. Wait.
There was a long silence except for the hum.
'He's getting some trouble here. He's either picking up a stray bleep from a different sensor field, or the computer's asking for more data.'
The other technician, a man with a humped back and grey smoked glasses, said to nobody: 'We're not sure whether they've got a Magnetic Anomaly Detector.'
'If they have,' the CIA man said, 'they got it from us.' I thought it was meant to be a joke but no one laughed.
All right. All right. It's now 760 metres from your No. 4 battery. Course is now 121°, position 17-F.
It's isolated?
Yes. I have a kill ready.
Silence again.
The ambassador moved heavily to the door and went out. No one looked anywhere but at the tape-deck.
Confirm you have a kill ready.
I confirm.
Other sounds came in now, with voices in the distant background.
Keep me advised.
Something like a minute went by and there was nothing we could hear that told us anything. Croder glanced across at the CIA chief, who was sitting with his elbows on the desk and his face between his fists, stretching the skin into furrows. He was watching the tape-deck; he didn't catch Croder's glance.
I didn't know the figures involved in that area: the depth or salinity or current or the cruise speed of a torpedo.
Advise me. Did I make a hit? Did I make a hit?
The voice was excited now.
Wait.
Croder took out his cigarette-case and lit one of those black-tipped things he smoked, but he didn't look away from the tape-deck.
No. You did not make a hit.
Advise me.
Wait.
The hump-backed technician drew in his breath suddenly and turned to Croder. 'Can I have one of those?'
He lit up and turned away from the desk, so as not to watch the tape-deck.
New position: 17-G on the east grid. 540 metres from your No. 4 battery. Profile is broadside on. You have a kill.
Keep me advised.
We had to wait again. The CIA man had closed his eyes now, his fists kneading his face into a loose mask. Croder glanced towards the door and away again. The silence drew out.
Advise me. Did we make a hit? Did we make a hit?
The grid hummed. There were other sounds, vague and intermittent, and a quick beeping began. It lasted a minute, maybe more.
The hump-back had turned round to watch the tape-deck.
Confirm. You made a hit. I repeat: You made a hit.
The thin technician used his handkerchief again.
'We made modifications to this model so we could extract parameters from the speech waveform. That gives us a better speech recognition performance. What's happening is that the variable electronic filter is moving to higher and higher frequencies while the stylus is moving parallel to the axis of the drum. What we're getting from this pattern are the dimensions of time, frequency and amplification.'
The voice was almost continuous on this second tape..No. 5 sonobuoy responding. Object at 43-A. Speed of movement constant. Approach to No. 6 sonobuoy at steady 68 degrees with appropriate response. Transducers running in No. 1 bay.
Tape gap.
All configurations are normal. Bathythermograph average is 42°. Total east grid surveillance is now ten buoys.
Tape gap.
I'm now triangulating on S-35. It's 12-B on the east grid, course 76°. Depth now 70 metres.
'S-35 is one of their diesel subs,' the technician with the cold said. He let the tape run on for another two or three minutes and then the CIA chief asked him to shut it down. He took his face out of his hands and got up and went out of the room, coming back with the ambassador.
'So tell us,' he said to the technicians.
The hump-back prodded his cigarette out. 'All we can say for sure is that the voice on the second tape is the same as the one on the first tape that was doing the advising. He's one of their sonar operators. The other man of course was in charge of a torpedo battery.'
The CIA chief dug his hands into his pockets, putting his head back, speaking to the ceiling. 'That was the actual attack on the Cetacea we were listening to? The actual sinking?'
'Yes.'
'Bastards. Bastards'
No one broke the silence for a while. It was a silence for the one hundred and five crew of the SSN Cetacea, missing on patrol.
Croder said quietly to the technicians: 'What you're saying, then, is that the voice of the man advising is genuine — a genuine naval officer working the sonar unit.'
'Right. Look at this spectrogram. Identical patterns in every single speech mode. Same man.'
'And from this we can assume,' the CIA chief said in a flat tone, 'that the tape you people just brought back from Murmansk is a genuine recording of the incident. Is that right?'
'Not quite,' Croder said. 'On the face of it, we don't really doubt that it's genuine. This is because our agent in Murmansk has been installed there as a sleeper for nearly five years, and has been sending back the most valuable material. He realized the enormous significance of this particular run of tape, and had it duplicated. He then signalled us and told us he was sending it by courier.'
I watched the two technicians for a moment. They weren't just boffins: they must have been security-screened on the highest level.
'We know, of course, that the Soviets will deny the whole thing and say that we've faked this tape ourselves. Our answer to that is that the voice on the recent tape tallies precisely with one of the voices the CIA has been recording as a routine acoustic surveillance operation for a very long time. There's a second point. If anyone — meaning, I don't doubt, the Soviets — faked this tape and deliberately allowed us to get hold of it, then we can say with absolute certainty that they had to persuade or order an actual naval officer to speak on that new tape, acting out the despatch of those torpedoes. They-'
'Why in hell would they want to do that?' Ambassador Morrison asked him.