"You want help, you get help," Barnes said.  "We'll have a Sentry operating over Invincible at dawn tomorrow, and if you move her inshore we can maintain that round the clock.  I'll throw in a wing of F-16s if you want."

"What do you want in return, Max?" Foster asked.  Nobody called him Claire.

"The way I see this, you have Saratoga's air wing sitting around doing nothing.  Okay, by Saturday I'll have five hundred tactical fighters deployed from Dover to Loring.  My boys don't know much about antiship stuff.  They'll have to learn in a hurry.  I want you to send your kids to work with mine, and I also want your Tomcats.  I like the fighter-missile combination.  Let one squadron work out of Iceland, the other out of New England to track the Bears Ivan's starting to send our way.  I'll sweeten that.  If you want, we'll send some tankers to Lajes to help keep Kennedy's birds flying."

"Blackie?" Foster asked.

"Deal," Blackburn nodded.  "The only thing that bothers me is that Invincible doesn't have all that much ASW capacity."

"So we get more," Stanford said.  "Admiral, what say we take Tarawa out of Little Creek, team her with New Jersey's group, with a dozen ASW choppers aboard and seven or eight Harriers?"

"I like it," Harris said quickly.  "Then we have two baby carriers with a noteworthy striking force right in front of their groups, Kennedy playing stalking tiger to their east, and a few hundred tactical fighters to the west.  They have to come into a three-way box.  This actually gives us more ASW patrolling capacity than we'd have otherwise."

"Can Kennedy handle her mission alone out there?" Hilton asked.

"Depend on it," Blackburn replied.  "We can kill anyone, maybe any two of these four groups in an hour.  The ones nearest shore will be your job, Max."

"How long did you two characters rehearse this?" General Maxwell, commandant of the marine corps, asked the operations officer.  Everyone chuckled.

The Red October

Chief Engineer Melekhin cleared the reactor compartment before beginning the check for the leak.  Ramius and Petrov were there also, plus the engineering duty officers and one of the young lieutenants, Svyadov.  Three of the officers carried Geiger counters.

The reactor room was quite large.  It had to be to accommodate the massive, barrel-shaped steel vessel.  The object was warm to the touch despite being inactive.  Automatic radiation detectors were in every corner of the room, each surrounded by a red circle.  More were hanging on the fore and aft bulkheads.  Of all the compartments on the submarine, this was the cleanest.  The deck and bulkheads were spotless white-painted steel.  The reason was obvious:  the smallest leak of reactor coolant had to be instantly visible even if all the detectors failed.