He listened at the door for a few moments, then entered the combination to the door lock and went in, the bag left in the passageway in case one of the electronics techs were there, but the room was deserted. Pacino pulled in the tool bag and shut the self-locking door behind him. The room was little more than a cubbyhole with two padded control seats and walls stacked with electronic equipment racks.
Pacino found the cable he’d fed in from the outside and pulled the cable across the room to the forward bulkhead, cut a hole in that wall and tie-wrapped the cable into the already cable-crowded overhead, then rubbed it with dirt as before. He decided to check the radio room before he fed the cable through; it was deserted as well. He fed in the cable, then looked around ESM for telltale signs of his trip.
Radio was a bigger version of ESM, not a space designed to look pretty or offer comfort. He duplicated his actions from ESM, but instead of running the cable forward, took the cable down to the deck at the forward outboard bulkhead, then drilled a hole in the deck. He fed the cable through the deck to the level below, checked his work again, then left and went to the lower level torpedo room, usually a room booming with activity but now silent since it was doubling as a bunking space. The lights were switched to red to dim the space’s usual glare, and the room resonated with snoring. No one was awake to confront him. He climbed onto the top of the outboard Vortex tube, the metal cold and hard, the space minimal between tube and overhead, and found the cable let down from the deck of the radio room. Slowly he fed the cable forward in the overhead, his back aching as he tied the cable up into the overhead with a thousand other cables, finally climbing back down onto the narrow deckplates at the forward part of the room, turning the cable toward the centerline until he had fed it above a long panel that ran athwartships. He opened the panel cover, reached up into the overhead and pulled the wire down into the interior of the panel. From the outside of the panel, no one could tell he had made this unauthorized alteration. Back inside the panel he found the circuit board he’d been looking for, traced the wiring to a relay panel and hoped the wiring was in accord with the technical manual. He grabbed the wire insulation remover and clipped a power wire going to relay R141 set into the aft wall of the panel, then tested the wire for voltage — it was dead. Pacino stripped the insulation off, crimped on terminals at either end and terminated each end on the screws of a small termination block he pulled out of the tool kit. He pulled the cable he’d wired in, screwing its terminations onto the new terminal block. The work was finished but for tie-wrapping the new cable so it was out of the way. He checked the wiring one last time, satisfied that it looked like it would work.
He wished he could test it, but he’d need another body to hit the switch while he watched the R141 relay, and the relay output would have to be jumped so it wouldn’t feed the circuit further downstream. Testing the circuit would be more risky than its installation. It would have to do as it was. Pacino hoped no one would be going into the panel. He screwed the panel closure devices shut, tucked the bag into his grease-covered poopysuit and hurried back to his stateroom.
Remarkably, no one had seen him.
Now all he could hope for was that he’d never need to use the switch, but that if he did, it would work.
Chapter 28
Thursday, 2 January
Sharef needed Tawkidi’s help getting from bed to his conference table.
“I seem to be getting weaker,” Sharef said.
“The doctor said the broken rib was infected and so was your eye. Hasn’t the medicine been working?”
Sharef didn’t want to answer the question. He felt like his body wanted to shut down and die. Awkward timing.
Rakish Ahmed and General Sihoud entered without knocking.
“Knock before you come into the captain’s stateroom,” Tawkidi snapped at Ahmed, and by implication at Sihoud.
“We’ve come to brief the commodore on the ballast-tank work,” Ahmed said. “We can skip that if you have trouble with our protocol.”
“Continue, Colonel,” Sharef said, wanting to get the briefing over with.
“What we estimated to be a ten-hour job in the tanks is becoming more a sixty-hour job. With rest periods and time for the body to recover from the pressurization we would need six days.”
“We don’t have six—”
“I know. Commodore. That is why I have cut the missile work down to installation of only one Scorpion warhead into tube number one.”
“That leaves only one missile,” Tawkidi pointed out. “Is there enough radiation from a single missile?”
“More than enough,” Ahmed said.
“But there will be no redundancy. If something goes wrong with missile number one there is no backup.”
Ahmed looked at him. “Nothing will go wrong.”
“Where are you now. Colonel?” Sharef said.
“The Scorpion warhead has been rigged into the forward head on the middle level, just outside the door to the ballast tank. The door is cut open but for now is sealed with putty. We entered the tank and drilled into tube one. The high explosive is removed. We are ready to cut the section of tube in the next ballast-tank entry. The cut-out should take the entire ten hours. The third entry will be devoted to insertion of the Scorpion warhead and rewelding on the patch. The missile will be fully tested with the warhead in place, including electronic readbacks from the missile to the weapon-control processor and back.”
Sharef nodded. “Yes, I can see you’ve got a good idea how to finish. But finishing is three-quarters of the work, Colonel. Meanwhile the ship has to proceed at sixty-five clicks to maintain depth control because of the ballast tank. Let me show you what that rate of speed has done for us.”
Tawkidi, on cue, rolled out a polar projection chart showing their great circle route, originally taking them into the North Atlantic. Their position was marked with a heavy dot.
A range circle was drawn around Washington, D.C. The dot looked very close to the range radius.
“As you can see, we are only 200 kilometers from the range circle around Washington, D.C. If we continue at this speed for the thirty hours you’ve said it will take to do your work, that is almost another 2,000 kilometers, putting us into the middle of the Labrador Sea. We will be unable to continue, we will run out of ocean. I have planned this track to keep this mission stealthy, so do not suggest turning south along the U.S. east coast. Such a track would take us into heavy shipping lanes and highly patrolled operational areas, and the range of the Hiroshima missile does not need us to get closer. In addition, Colonel, mission success is based on the Hiroshima coming out of the arctic north, from a bearing the Americans would not suspect as being a threat axis. It will look like a Concorde or supersonic private jet coming over the pole from Europe, if it shows up on radar at all, and we have to assume that the radar cloaking may not be perfect.”
“Commodore, I agree. Do not turn south. You cannot slow down until we can reflood the ballast tank. Turn to the north as you have always intended and proceed up the Davis Strait between Greenland and Canada’s Baffin Island.”
“We will be out of range 1,200 kilometers after the turn to the north. Moreover, the marginal ice zone begins here, north of the Greenland tip. The permanent ice pack is here, well before the range mark. I would say we have a thousand kilometers from the base of the Davis Strait before we run out of open water.”