When Jerry told Stephen Dole about what was happening on the helipad, the man from the RAND Corporation just nodded. “Makes sense,” he said. “When the Glomar II was out here a few years ago, the Russians harassed her like nobody’s business. I wasn’t along on that one. Dave Schoals was—ask him, if you want the gory details. The Russians don’t know exactly where they lost their sub, but they don’t want us anywhere close.”

No one had told Jerry another American ship—let alone another Global Marine ship—had publicly poked around a few years before. He wondered what all else no one had told him, either because people figured he already knew or because they didn’t think he needed to know. He also wondered whether some of what he didn’t know would rear up and bite him in the ass.

Rather resentfully, he thought that a character in a well-written story wouldn’t try to do something so important while being so ignorant. Then he remembered Frodo in The Lord of the Rings. So much for that! In The Lord of the Rings, though, at least people on Frodo’s side hadn’t lied to him about what was going on.

He couldn’t even bitch about that. It was part of the way these people played the game. He did ask, “What kind of cover story did the, uh, Glomar II use for being in the neighborhood?”

“Our outer one: that she was prospecting for manganese nodules,” Steve said. “She didn’t just stop here—that would have made the Russians suspicious.”

“Made them more suspicious, you mean.”

“Made them more suspicious, yes,” the man from the RAND Corporation agreed. “So she made several stops here and there in the North Pacific. And she actually did bring up some manganese nodules. Manfred would pass them out at ocean mining conferences—there are such things. That’s why it makes a good cover story.”

“Who’s Manfred?”

“He really is an ocean mining engineer. Our public face, I guess you’d say. Nice guy. Interesting guy. Immigrant from Germany. He served in U-boats during the war. He and his family went to Chile first, then came to America.”

“How about that?” Jerry said: a pretty safe response to almost anything. He’d had a high school friend whose father had got the family out of East Germany in the early 1950s. Before that, his father had fought on the Eastern Front till he lost half his left foot. They might have sent him back into action even after he did; he limped, but he still got around pretty well. The war ended before they could, though.