After breakfast I went to Sick Bay to check on Korjev. The Marine sentry in front of his door didn’t say anything, but the doctor told me the Russian was resting comfortably after taking a pain pill in the wee hours. His vital signs were good.
I told the doctor about my scuffle a few days ago in Sweden and the fact my right hand was still sore. A corpsman x-rayed it, I waited a bit, then the doctor called me in and showed me the x-ray. “See this line on this bone behind the middle knuckle? Green-twig fracture. Avoid heavy lifting.”
“I always try to do that.”
“If you must slug someone, use your elbow or aim at soft tissue. I always use a kidney punch myself.”
“I’ll try to remember.”
“Want some pills?”
“Doesn’t hurt that bad.” Actually, I didn’t want to get addicted to anything—drugs, tobacco, booze, sex, money, anything, excepting of course breathing, eating, and sleeping. Maybe I should take vows and become a monk.
Grafton was hanging out in the Flag Ops spaces, reading and writing messages to the folks back in the good old U.S. of A. After all, he was the director of a big important government agency even when he was taking a Mediterranean cruise.
On the aft end of the flight deck some Marines were having fun shooting at tin cars they tossed into the ship’s wake. The ship wasn’t going very fast, so the cans didn’t get sucked under immediately.
The jarheads knew a sucker when they saw one; I was invited to try my hand with an assault rifle. The sergeant in charge praised my marksmanship, which led to an invitation to wager a little money on my skill. When we quit, I owed him eight and a half bucks. I gave him ten euros and told him to have a beer on me his next time in port.
At noon, the ship went to flight quarters. The sailors and Marines had big important things to do. I went to lunch.
Later that afternoon I sat in Sick Bay in front of a laptop computer that was recording Grafton’s conversation with Korjev. The two of them were in the little hospital room, and the sentry was at the door. I was wearing a set of earphones so that I could hear the conversation in real time.
Before I began my stint on the computer, I had listened to Grafton’s conversation last night. After I had had a few moments to think about it, I said to the admiral, “This guy says he doesn’t know shit. What are you going to do with him?”
Jake Grafton shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s up to him.”
“If he doesn’t want to defect and spill what he knows, if anything, seems to me your options are to throw him overboard or give him a free chopper ride to the beach.”
“That’s about it,” Grafton agreed.
“Or you could put him on a chopper and let him rappel down onto Catherine the Great.”
“What’s your take on all this, Tommy?” Grafton asked.
That comment startled me. Grafton was the brains and I was the muscle. Or the action hero, depending on your point of view. After another moment to exercise my limited IQ, I said, “We don’t have any hard evidence that Yegan Korjev did anything except leave Capri without paying his harbor bill. Maybe he didn’t even do that, but left a credit card with the harbormaster.”
Jake Grafton ran his hand through his thinning hair.
“Admiral, we don’t know anything. We don’t know if he was involved in the Estonia gig, the money river, nor do we know why the Russians sent all that money all over Europe and America.”
“That’s right.”
“We don’t know jack shit,” I said, summing up.
Grafton grunted.
That inspired me to keep talking. “Someone wants Korjev dead. Maybe because they can make him a sacrificial goat, or perhaps because he does know something, in fact, knows too much. That Pavlychev dude was supposed to kill him. Someone told him to do it. Yet he didn’t get it done. That failure couldn’t be fake: nobody gets into a shootout to wound the supposed victim and get himself killed. That failure may be our first break.”
Grafton gathered himself. “Tommy, you seem to think that some one person issues all the orders. That’s probably not the case. Think multiple people with multiple agendas. That’s usually the way the world works. Look at America.”
I couldn’t argue with that.
So here I sat, with the earphones on and Grafton in with Yegan Korjev.
“How are you feeling this afternoon?” Grafton.
“Sore.”
“The doctors tell me you will probably make a complete recovery. Your lung is recovering nicely, your shoulder will heal, there is no sign of infection… All in all, you are indeed fortunate.”
“Ah, yes.” Korjev. “Fortunate. Lucky. What do you Americans say, ‘Shit-house luck?’ ”
“That’s the phrase.”
“So what ship is this?”
“USS Hornet, a helicopter assault ship. She carries a Marine Expeditionary Unit, an MEU. American taxpayers paid for Hornet.”
“Why is this ship in the Mediterranean?”
“She is here to support our allies and help keep the peace in this corner of the world.”
“Did the thought ever occur to you that this ship, and others like it, may be part of the problem?”
“That depends upon your viewpoint,” Jake Grafton replied. “One person’s problem is another person’s solution.”
“Russia’s viewpoint is the only viewpoint that matters in Russia. The Kremlin is the center of the Russian universe. You Americans think it is Washington, the French know it is Paris, the British London, the Israelis Jerusalem… Those cities are their mountaintops from which they view the world.”
“And that gets us where?”
Yegan Korjev shrugged, then winced. “You figure it out.”
Grafton took his time answering. “Billions of dollars of fake money—oh, some of it might be real, but certainly not even a large fraction—flowed to the West through that tiny branch bank in Tallinn. Not to buy goods or services: I reject that. Money as acid, to corrode the ties that cement people together.”
“I can tell you nothing,” Korjev said with a grimace, “that you don’t already know. Go think about what you know and stop bothering me.”
“I want you to think about this,” Jake Grafton said. “I suspect you know more than you have told me, a lot more. Unless you are willing to share some truth, not nebulous geopolitical fog, your future is uncertain. I don’t know whether or not you care. Perhaps you are ready to die. Someone has already tried to help you on your way—and you know who that is, not I. Perhaps this someone would still like to ease you into eternity.”
Grafton paused, watching the expression on Korjev’s face, which was stony. “The United States Navy will see that you have medical care to get on your feet, but our hospitality is not bottomless. You must decide where you go from here.”
Grafton rose from his chair, opened the door and passed through, leaving the door open behind him. A doctor and corpsman entered. Jake heard the doctor say, “Good afternoon, sir. It’s time for you to get up, walk a little bit. Would you like to go to the head?”
That evening I transcribed Grafton’s two interviews with Korjev, which didn’t take long. The admiral had loaned Grafton a small office in the flag spaces with a desk, two chairs and plenty of plugs for our computers. I had finished the transcript and was listening to the interviews again while I read along, ensuring I got every word correctly, when Grafton entered the space. He dropped into the one empty chair.
When I finished my chore and printed off the transcript, I handed it to him. He gave me a multipage message.
The folks in Langley were getting some results. The first was a report on the passengers who had been aboard Catherine the Great. The first mini-bio was of Ava Silva, age seventy-two, professor at NYU. She had studied under Saul Alinsky and was one of his disciples. She was considered the most radical member of NYU’s faculty. A list of her publications was attached.
I put down the message to consult my memory. Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, published in 1971, was the bible for the radical left. I remembered reading it for a political science course in college, and hadn’t been impressed. Dedicated to Lucifer, the book championed political ammorality. The electorate were sheep, Alinsky believed, to be herded, lied to, and manipulated so that the radical few could “change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be”…if I recall correctly.
The book was a crackpot vision of mankind and civilization, in my opinion, right down there in the sewer with Mein Kampf by Adolph Hitler, whose tactics for taking over a democratic state Alinsky had used as for model. Although Alinsky made his bows to the values of democracy, he urged political action by whatever means to achieve the radicals’ goals. The question, he said, was always, “Does this particular end justify this particular means?” That was the question he put to the person trying to decide if he was justified in lying, manipulating, cheating, and slandering to get what he and his fellow believers wanted. Of course, the answer was and is always yes. Yes, yes, yes. Folks, let’s welcome Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Chairman Mao, and Fidel Castro to the stage.
Lucifer… Satan. The Devil.
I read on. Ava’s mate, Ricardo Silva, was a capitalist all right, a principal in a hedge fund with a personal fortune estimated as $800 million. His hedge fund managed over fifty billion in assets. Through various shell charities, he had helped fund the Central American migrant caravans that rode up through Mexico to the U. S. border. He was a good friend and business associate of the late Anton Hunt, a multi-billionaire radical whom I had had a minor role in sending on his way to reside with Lucifer just last year. Ah, yes, Mr. Hunt. Adios, asshole.
Brian Smith was a British solicitor from Birmingham, known for politics and views somewhere to the left of Lenin and Chairman Mao. He firmly believed that Western civilization was rotten to the core and must be destroyed so that a socialist dictatorship could rise from the ashes to save mankind.
Geoff MacDonald, Smith’s lover, was also a radical, one whose advocacy of a violent revolution had been too much even for the dons at Oxford. They quietly sent him on his way after questions were asked in Parliament about just where the permissible outer boundaries of free speech were in academia.
The German couple were avowed Communists, as were the couple from Eastern Europe. The implosion of Communism and the old Soviet Union had not caused them a moment of doubt or introspection. Like all fanatics, their faith in their worldview was absolute.
After the summaries were five photos without captions. I studied them. In the best one, shot obviously with a telephoto lens in late afternoon, Korjev and the late Anton Hunt were conferring around a table with mountains in the background. I suspected the photo was shot in Davos, Switzerland. There were four other photos, all apparently snapped at the same time as the first, which showed armed guards around the two men and only partial faces.
I tossed the message on the desk. Jake Grafton couldn’t sit still. He was wandering aimlessly around the little office, looking at everything and seeing nothing.
He’s working himself up to something, I thought.
Finally, he flung himself down in the chair, stretched out and stared at his shoes. After a minute of that, he looked at me without turning his head.
“Korjev knows things we want to know,” he said.
“No doubt,” I agreed, and looked again at the best photo of our favorite Russian with Anton Hunt, God rot his soul.
“We’re taking him to the States,” Grafton said.
“Have you gotten White House approval? A blessing, a drop or two of holy water?”
“No.”
“Discussed this with the National Security Adviser? The Director of National Intelligence? Anyone?”
“No.”
My eyebrows rose a mite. I’ve had a lot of practice controlling my face, but this was the biggest leap I had seen Grafton make in our peripatetic professional association.
“The Navy’s encrypted messages are read all over the earth,” Grafton explained. “One suspects the CIA’s are too. I would rather leave the listeners in the dark for a while.”
“The powers that be may have your ass for this, Admiral.”
“If they want it, they can have it. That’s always been the case.” He snatched up the message about Catherine’s passengers and the transcript I had prepared, opened the door and strode out.
Later that night we went to see Yegan Korjev in Sick Bay. He was sitting in a chair watching the ship’s television, some movie about a superhero who wore a mask and skin-tight costume. He was unshaven, with his few strands of gray hair sticking out at weird angles, wearing a hospital gown.
Grafton sent the Marine sentry out of the room and closed the door behind him.
“Mr. Korjev, I have decided to take you to the United States. The doctors say you are physically capable of making the trip. We leave early in the morning.”
Korjev eyed Grafton from under bushy eyebrows. “Do I have a choice?”
“Yes. You can go under your own power, or we can sedate you and take you in a strait jacket strapped to a gurney. If you go sedated, you sleep the whole way. Which would you prefer?”
“This is a kidnapping,” he growled.
Grafton shrugged. “Someday you can sue me, if you’re still alive.”
“When we get there, what am I going to do in the great United States?”
“You’re going to do a brain dump. You’re going to tell me everything you’ve learned or experienced since you got out of diapers.”