THREE AND A HALF MILES offshore from the flat coast north of Sevastopol, the navigation lights of the ancient, twenty-six-foot wooden fishing vessel Lyubimov were comfortably anonymous among the lights of a pack of other small commercial fishing boats strung out along a two-mile stretch of water. On the fourth night after the full moon, the red and green and white lights bobbed in the lazy current that drifted along the coast and the swell was gentle, unremarkable.
Balthasar leaned against a guardrail on the starboard side of the vessel facing northwards, the boat’s prow pointing out towards the Black Sea. A small sail at the stern kept the fishing boat pointing up-wind. Already he sensed that things were moving as they should. But he knew, too, that people had been lost. He felt Anna on the wind and in the salt smell of the sea. He felt her approach. He felt the invisible lines that linked him to her. The darkness was his favoured time. He felt the darkness as much as he felt the light, though neither made any difference to him. For the benefit of the rest of the world, in the pocket of his fisherman’s jacket, he held his orders from Department S that were the proof the world needed. He also kept in the same waterproof package the minutes of meetings that had started at the Forest back in January, the last time he’d seen—or would see—his father, as well as the notes from his briefing sessions with both his father and the GRU boss. The rest of the world needed to see, he thought with amusement. They needed to see because that was their impoverished version of knowledge.
He turned away from the rail and walked along the deck to the wheelhouse. A nineteen-year-old boy was reading a rock magazine in the thin light from the ceiling and listening to the radio.
“We need the channels open now,” Balthasar told him, and he heard the music stop as the boy tuned the radio to the open channel. “Start the engines,” Balthasar told him. “We’ll be heading farther out in a short while.”
This time he walked to the stern of the vessel and heard the steady hum of an engine half a mile away. It was them. But he’d sensed that, too, long before the sound became audible.
The small motorboat nudged alongside the Lyubimov and Balthasar already had the gate open in the guardrail to receive them. There were five of them, two were missing, as he’d known.
Larry lashed the motorboat to the side of the Lyubimov, Taras carried the inert form of Masha into the wheelhouse and laid her on a thin bed, while Anna and Lucy walked to opposite ends of the vessel and leaned against the rails. Anna stood next to him at the stern. They didn’t speak. Behind them they heard Larry ordering the boy to set a course of 180 degrees. Then he took the wheel and they heard the old engines grind up to full throttle.
The Lyubimov pushed through the black swell for another three miles towards the open sea where the lights from the fishing pack were left behind them and finally lost. Nobody spoke. Anna and Balthasar stood at the stern, Lucy and Taras with her now, at the bow, while Larry pulled back the throttle and cut the engines again. The silence was complete. Only Larry’s footsteps as he came out of the wheelhouse broke it briefly before he, too, stopped and scanned the sea.
It seemed a long wait to the tense party, but it was no more than twenty minutes at most. Only Balthasar seemed completely at ease. He didn’t even turn when the submersible emerged four hundred yards off their port bow and wallowed sluggishly in the rolling water. Larry walked back into the wheelhouse and called for him.
“What about the boy?” he said.
The nineteen-year-old was staring at the black shape in astonishment, then fear. He looked at Larry now and decided it was finished with him. Larry’s face was set in grim determination. But Balthasar smiled at the boy and put his hand on Larry’s shoulder.
“We leave him with the motorboat,” he said. “No radio, enough fuel to get to shore. And some money,” he added, and took out another waterproof package from a pocket of the jacket. “You did well,” he said to the terrified boy. “If we hear you’ve kept your mouth shut, in a week you’ll receive the same amount again.”
“We can’t let him go,” Larry said through gritted teeth.
“I already have,” Balthasar said.
Larry started the engines and took the Lyubimov with great care a hundred yards from the submersible and downstream from the current and the swell, while Lucy untied the motorboat and held the lines tightly so that it still kept closely to the sides. Taras carried Masha first into the motorboat then the others climbed in, Larry keeping hold of the boy’s arm tightly. He frisked him to make sure there was no hand-held radio concealed anywhere, found nothing, and cursed under his breath at Balthasar’s methods.
Balthasar descended to the engine room of the Lyubimov, opened the seacocks, and heard the seawater slowly flooding the scuppers and felt it overlap his feet. Then he climbed back up the ladder and down into the motorboat. By the time they reached the submersible the Lyubimov was wallowing low in the water and would disappear altogether in half an hour. On the submersible a hatch was opened and, to the astonishment of everyone, Burt’s bare head appeared.
“Reminds me of Cam Ranh Bay, 1969,” he said cheerfully. “But that time it was the Russians under our ships.”
Anna smiled at him despite her low-level anger. She didn’t believe that Burt had ever been anywhere near Cam Ranh Bay. But Burt’s mythologising of himself was, as ever, for his own personal entertainment. He required nobody to believe it.
Inside the submersible there was room for six, eight maximum. Burt’s presence didn’t exactly help the seating arrangements, but at least he seemed to have realised that it wasn’t de rigueur to smoke on submarines. Balthasar was the last to descend. He pushed the boy away from the submersible and told him not to start the engine for twenty minutes after the sub disappeared.
“Remember what I told you,” he said. And he felt the wave of relief in the boy’s smile. “We’ll look after you well,” he said. Then the hatch was shut and the chambers began to fill with water for the descent.
The sub was based on an old model, but reworked by Cougar’s scientists into a piece of equipment Burt proudly stated was a stage beyond anything any nation possessed. It was designed for infiltrating frogmen onto enemy shores and for small-scale assaults into enemy territory. Data systems took up nearly all the space, there was real-time imagery and advanced sonar, high-precision echo sounders, as well as optronic masts carrying thermal pictures of their surroundings. The sonars could listen up to a thousand miles.
“Even the U.S. Navy has nothing quite like this,” Burt boasted. And then he frowned briefly, like an actor remembering his lines. He said, “The others?” He was looking at Anna now.
“They’re not coming back,” she replied. “And neither is Logan,” she added.
Burt seemed uniquely stumped by this information. But there was nowhere to pace in the confined space and, for once, he had to face an unpleasant situation without covering it with any histrionics.
“How do you know Logan isn’t coming back, Anna?” he said finally.
“Because I saw my shell going into his heart,” she replied brutally.
Burt suddenly looked stunned. He was speechless. His thick, pudgy hands flickered at the fingertips and finally came to rest at his sides as if he was trying to stand at attention. His face was white.
“Why, Burt? It’s the question we’re all asking, not just me. Why did you let it happen? If you’d listened to any of us—any of us—Logan wouldn’t be dead but maybe running one of his own nasty little operations out of harm’s way.” She stared at Burt’s face and saw he couldn’t meet her eyes. His face was losing its paleness and taking on a livid red colour. “Logan is dead because he teamed up with some French intelligence officer from Kiev and his accompanying thugs to kidnap me. Again. A second time, Burt! You let it happen. You endangered all our lives. For what? You’re smart, Burt, but in this you were a fool. Why?”
In the confined space, the only sound was Burt’s harsh breathing. Everyone but Balthasar was staring at him. Finally it was Balthasar who spoke. “Why don’t you just tell them?” he said. “It’s finished now.”
Burt breathed deeply. The others were silent and the anger that flowed from Anna, Larry, and Lucy was as palpable as a monkey wrench. In the sub, descended now to the limits of its operating depth in the blindness of the Black Sea, Burt wrung his hands and his head seemed to sway. Finally he looked up and faced his accusers. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I wanted him to come around to good. I thought I could make him come around to good. I thought if I gave him my trust, he would change. I thought I could make Logan. Logan was my son.”
Before dawn, the submersible entered the dry dock of the Cougar and the ship set course for the Mediterranean.