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communications systems. This monster, detonated in space above the American heartland, will create an electronic pulse that can destroy every microchip there. |
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What price all that "one superpower" talk then? |
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Karmann's helmet light illuminates the Device. It lies in the ooze at a potentially troublesome angle, but the onboard computer and gyroscopes, when activated, would correct that. For now the internal systems are powered down for a long subarctic wait. |
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The water is bitterly cold. There is ice on the surface of the bay overhead. Karmann watches the huge, shadowy shape of the Pravda back away, out of the dangerous shallows. The submarine has a draft of almost eight meters on the surface. These are dangerously constricted waters for a Hotel III-class boat. Karmann does not find it ironic that he uses the NATO code name for the Pravda. He has known and worked with Westerners all over the world. |
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This does not endear him to Captain Third Rank Kolodin, who is overage in grade and in command of a thirty-nineyear-old boat ready for the scrap heap. The Pravda was first named the Andrei Vishinsky when it was launched in the 1960s. It was renamed the Yuri Andropov when that former head of the KGB and general secretary of the party died of a case of the sniffles lasting six months. The dissolution of the USSR after the November 1991 coup brought the last name change: Pravda"Truth." |
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Kolodin once loved his boat, but Kolodin, like many senior officers of the armed forces, is now an irrelevant man. His imminent retirement at very low pay makes him a typical Soyuz. The whole boat crew is Soyuz. A royalist flag hangs on the wall of the wardroom. Under other circumstances, Karmann would have laughed at an organization so out of step with the times as Soyuz. But he now knows better. |
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Karmann read in popular novels about "an icy hand closing over one's heart." His weeks on this submarine have re- |
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