The Sum of All Fears.pdf - Delta Force

Ghosn nodded. The man was right, even if he was a patronizing son-of-a-bitch.
'And the tritium?'
'In those batteries. I've kept them in a cool place. You release the tritium by
heating them. The procedure for recovering the tritium is delicate, but
straightforward.'
'Ah, yes, I know how to do that.' Ghosn remembered such lab experiments from
university.
Fromm handed him a copy of the manual for the first tool. 'Now, we both have new
things to learn so that we can teach the operators.'
***
Captain Dubinin sat in the office of the Master Shipwright of the yard. Known
variously as Shipyard Number 199, Leninskaya Komsomola, or simply Komsomol'sk,
it was the yard at which the Admiral Lunin had been built. Himself a former
submarine commander, the man preferred the title Master Shipwright to
Superintendent and had changed the title on his office door accordingly on
taking the job two years earlier. He was a traditionalist, but also a brilliant
engineer. Today he was a happy man.
'While you were gone, I got hold of something wonderful!'
'What might that be, Admiral?'
'The prototype for a new reactor feed pump. It's big, cumbersome, and a
cast-iron bastard to install and maintain, but it's . . . '
'Quiet?'
'As a thief,' the Admiral said with a smile. 'It reduces the radiated noise of
your current pump by a factor of fifty.'
'Indeed? Who did we steal that from?'
The Master Shipwright laughed at that. 'You don't need to know, Valentin
Borissovich. Now, I have a question for you: I have heard that you did something
very clever ten days ago . . .'
Dubinin smiled. 'Admiral, that is something which I cannot – '
'Yes, you can. I spoke with your squadron commander. Tell me, how close did you
get to USS Nevada?'
'I think it was actually Maine,' Dubinin said. The intelligence types disagreed,
but he went with his instincts. 'About eight thousand meters. We identified him
from a mechanical transient made during an exercise, then I proceeded to stalk
on the basis of a couple of wild guesses – '
'Rubbish! Humility can be overdone, Captain. Go on.'
'And after tracking what we thought was our target, he confirmed it with a hull
transient. I think he came up to conduct a rocket-firing drill. At that point,
given our operational schedule and the tactical situation, I elected to break
contact while it was possible to do so without counter-detection.'
'That was your cleverest move of all,' the Master Shipwright said, pointing a
finger at his guest. 'You could not have decided better, because the next time
you go out, you will be the most quiet submarine we've ever put to sea.'
'They still have the advantage over us,' Dubinin pointed out honestly.
'That is true, but for once the advantage will be less than the difference
between one commander and another, which is as it should be. We both studied
under Marko Ramius. If only he were here to see this!'