Red storm rising - By Tom Clancy Page 0,75

isn't she? Paintwork looks a little shabby. Anyway, it all checks with the book; that's a friendly."

"Okay, let's give her a wave." The pilot turned the yoke to the left, taking the Orion directly over the barge-carrier. He waggled his wings slightly as he passed overhead, and two men on the bridge waved back at them. The flyers couldn't pick out the two men tracking them with hand-held SAMs. "Good luck, fella. You might need it."

MV JULIUS FUCIK

"The new paint scheme will make visual spotting difficult, Comrade General," the air-defense officer said quietly. "I saw no air-to-surface missiles attached."

"That will change quickly enough. As soon as our fleet puts to sea, they will load them. Besides, if they identify us as enemy, how far can we run while they call up other aircraft, or simply fly to their base to rearm?" The General watched the aircraft depart. His heart had been in his throat for the whole episode, but now he could walk out to where Kherov stood on the open bridge wing. Only the ship's officers had been issued American-style khaki uniforms.

"My compliments to your language officer. I presume he was speaking English?"

Andreyev laughed jovially, now that the danger was past. "So I am told. The Navy requested a man with his particular skills. He's an intelligence officer, served in America."

"In any case, he succeeded. Now we may approach our objective safely," Kherov said, using the last word relatively.

"It will be good to be on land again, Comrade Captain." The General didn't like being on such a large, unprotected target and would not feel safe until he had solid ground under his feet. At least as an infantryman you had a rifle with which to defend yourself, usually a hole to hide in, and always two legs to run away. Not so on a ship, he had learned. A ship was one large target, and this one was virtually unprotected. Amazing, he thought, that anything would feel worse than being on a transport aircraft. But there he had a parachute. He had no illusions about his ability to swim to land.

SUNNYVALE, CALIFORNIA

"There goes another one," the chief master sergeant said.

It was almost boring now. Never in the colonel's memory had the Soviets had more than six photographic reconnaissance satellites in orbit. There were now ten, plus ten electronic-intelligence gatherers, some launched from the Baikonor Cosmodrome outside Leninsk in the Kazakh S.S.R., the other half from Plesetsk in northern Russia.

"That's an F-type booster, Colonel. Burn time is wrong for the A-type," the sergeant said, looking up from his watch.

This Russian booster was a derivation of the old SS-9 ICBM, and it had only two functions--to launch radar ocean reconnaissance satellites, called RORSATS, that monitored ships at sea and to loft the Soviet antisatellite system. The Americans were watching the launch from a newly launched KH-11 reconnaissance satellite of their own, sweeping over the central region of the USSR. The colonel lifted the phone to Cheyenne Mountain.

USS PHARRIS

I should be sleeping, Morris told himself. I should stockpile sleep, bank it away against the time when I can't have any. But he was too keyed up to sleep.

USS Pharris was steaming figure eights off the mouth of the Delaware River. Thirty miles north, at the piers of Philadelphia, Chester, and Camden, ships of the National Reserve Defense Fleet that had been held in readiness for years were getting ready to sail. Cargo holds were loading with tanks, guns, and crates of explosive ordnance. His air-search radar showed the tracks of numerous troop transports lifting out of Dover Air Force Base. The Military Airlift Command's huge aircraft could ferry the troops across to Germany where they would be mated with their pre-positioned equipment, but when their unit loads of munitions ran out, the resupply would have to be ferried across the way it had always been, in ugly, fat, slow merchant ships--targets. Maybe the merchies weren't so slow anymore, and were larger than before, but there were fewer of them. During his naval career, the American merchant fleet had fallen sharply, even supplemented by these federally funded vessels. Now a submarine could sink one ship and get the benefit it would have achieved in World War II by sinking four or five.

The merchant crews were another problem. Traditionally held in contempt by Navy sailors--a truism in the U.S. Navy was to steer well clear of any merchantman, lest he decide to liven up his day by ramming you--the average age of the crews