26.
Black Operations
THERE was no hurry, yet. While the cabin crew got everybody settled in, Colonel von Eich ran down the pre-flight checklist. The VC-137 was taking electrical power from a generator truck that would also allow them to start their engines more easily than internal systems allowed. He checked his watch and hoped everything would go as planned.
Aft, Ryan walked past his normal place, just forward of Ernie Allen’s midships cabin, and took a seat in the back row of the after part of the aircraft. It looked much like part of a real airliner, though the seating was five-across, and this space handled the overflow from the “distinguished visitor” areas forward. Jack picked one on the left side, where the seats were in pairs, while ten or so others entered the cabin and kept as far forward as possible for the smoother ride, as advised by another crew member. The aircraft’s crew chief would be across the aisle to his right instead of in the crew quarters forward. Ryan wished for another man to help, but they couldn’t be too obvious. They had a Soviet officer aboard. That was part of the regular routine, and diverging from it would attract attention. The whole point of this was that everyone would be comfortably secure in the knowledge that everything was exactly as it should be.
Forward, the pilot got to the end of the checklist page.
“Everybody aboard?”
“Yes, sir. Ready to close the doors.”
“Keep an eye on the indicator light for the crew door. It’s been acting funny,” von Eich told the flight engineer.
“A problem?” the Soviet pilot asked from the jump seat. Sudden depressurization is something every flyer takes seriously.
“Every time we check the door it looks fine. Probably a bad relay in the panel, but we haven’t found the sucker yet. I’ve checked the goddamned door-seal myself,” he assured the Russian. “It has to be an electrical fault.”
“Ready to start,” the flight engineer told him next.
“Okay.” The pilot looked to make sure the stairs were away while the flight crew donned their headsets. “All clear left.”
“All clear right,” the copilot said.
“Turning one.” Buttons were pushed, switches were toggled, and the left-outboard engine began to rotate its turbine blades. The needles on several indicator dials started moving and were soon in normal idling range. The generator truck withdrew now that the plane could supply its own electric power.
“Turning four,” the pilot said next. He toggled his microphone to the cabin setting. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is Colonel von Eich. We’re getting the engines started, and we should be moving in about five minutes. Please buckle your seat belts. Those of you who smoke, try to hang in there another few minutes.”
At his seat in the back row, Ryan would have killed for a smoke. The crew chief glanced over to him and smiled. He certainly seemed tough enough to handle it, Jack thought. The chief master sergeant looked to be pushing fifty, but he also looked like a man who could teach manners to an NFL linebacker. He was wearing leather work gloves with the adjustment straps pulled in tight.
“All ready?” Jack asked. There was no danger of being heard. The engine noise was hideous back here.
“Whenever you say, sir.”
“You’ll know when.”
“Hmph,” Gerasimov noted. “Not here yet.” The cargo terminal was closed, and dark except for the security floodlights.
“Should I make a call?” the driver asked.
“No hurry. What—” A uniformed guard waved for them to stop. They’d already come through one checkpoint. “Oh, that’s right. The Americans are getting ready to leave. That must be screwing things up.”
The guard came to the driver’s window and asked for passes. The driver just waved to the back.
“Good evening, Corporal,” Gerasimov said. He held up his identification card. The youngster snapped to attention. “A plane will be here in a few minutes for me. The Americans must be holding things up. Is the security force out?”
“Yes, Comrade Chairman! A full company.”
“While we’re here, why don’t we do a fast inspection? Who is your commander?”
“Major Zarudin, Com—”
“What the hell is—” A lieutenant came over. He got as far as the corporal before he saw who was in the car.
“Lieutenant, where is Major Zarudin?”
“In the control tower, Comrade Chairman. That is the best place to—”
“I’m sure. Get him on your radio and tell him that I am going to inspect the guard perimeter, then I will come to see him and tell him what I think. Drive on,” he told the driver. “Go right.”
“Sheremetyevo Tower, this is niner-seven-one requesting permission to taxi to runway two-five-right,” von Eich said into his microphone.
“Nine-seven-one, permission granted. Turn left onto main taxiway one. Wind is two-eight-one at forty kilometers.”
“Roger, out,” the pilot said. “Okay, let’s get this bird moving.” The copilot advanced the throttles and the aircraft started to roll. On the ground in front of them, a man with two lighted wands gave them unneeded directions to the taxiway—but the Russians always assumed that everyone needed to be told what to do. Von Eich left the parking pad and headed south on taxiway nine, then turned left. The small wheel that controlled the steerable nose-gear was stiff, as always, and the aircraft came around slowly, pushed by the outboard engine. He always took things easy here. The taxiways were so rough that there was always the worry of damaging something. He didn’t want that to happen tonight. It was the best part of a mile to the end of the number-one main taxiway, and the bumps and rolls were enough to make one motion-sick. He finally turned right onto taxiway five.
“The men seem alert,” Vasiliy observed as they crossed runway twenty-five-left. The driver had his lights off and kept to the edge. There was an airplane coming, and both driver and bodyguard were keeping their eyes on that hazard. They didn’t see Gerasimov take the key from his pocket and unlock the handcuffs of an amazed prisoner Filitov. Next the Chairman pulled an automatic pistol from inside his coat.
“Shit—there’s a car there,” Colonel von Eich said. “What the hell is a car doing here?”
“We’ll clear it easy,” the copilot said. “He’s way over on the edge.”
“Great.” The pilot turned right again to the end of the runway. “Fucking Sunday drivers.”
“You’re not going to like this either, Colonel,” the flight engineer said. “I got a light on the rear door again.”
“God damn it!” von Eich swore over the intercom. He flipped his mike to the cabin setting again, but had to adjust his voice before speaking. “Crew chief, check the rear door.”
“Here we go,” the sergeant said. Ryan flipped off his seat belt and moved a few feet as he watched the sergeant work the door handle.
“We got a short in here someplace,” the flight engineer said on the flight deck, forward. “Just lost the aft cabin lights. The breaker just popped and I can’t get it to reset.”
“Maybe it’s a bad breaker?” Colonel von Eich asked.
“I can try a spare,” the engineer said.
“Go ahead. I’ll tell the folks in back why the lights just went out.” It was a lie, but a good enough one, and with everyone buckled in, it wasn’t all that easy to turn around and see the back of the cabin.
“Where’s the Chairman?” Vatutin asked the Lieutenant.
“He’s conducting an inspection—who are you?”
“Colonel Vatutin—this is Colonel Golovko. Where’s the fucking Chairman, you young idiot!”
The Lieutenant sputtered for a few seconds, then pointed.
“Vasiliy,” the Chairman said. It was too bad really. His bodyguard turned to see the muzzle of a pistol. “Your gun, please.”
“But—”
“No time for talking.” He took the gun and pocketed it. Next he handed over the cuffs. “Both of you, and put your hands through the steering wheel.”
The driver was aghast, but both men did as they were told. Vasiliy snapped one ring on his left wrist and reached through the steering wheel to attach the other to the driver. While they did so, Gerasimov detached the receiver from his car’s radiophone and pocketed that.
“The keys?” Gerasimov asked. The driver handed them over with his free left hand. The nearest uniformed guard was a hundred meters away. The airplane was a mere twenty. The Chairman of the Committee for State Security opened the car door himself. He hadn’t done that in months. “Colonel Filitov, will you come with me, please?”
Misha was as surprised as everyone else, but did as he was told. In full view of everyone at the airport—at least, those few who were bothering to watch the routine departure—Gerasimov and Filitov walked toward the VC-137’s red, white, and blue tail. As though on command, the after door opened.
“Let’s hustle, people.” Ryan tossed out a rope ladder.
Filitov’s legs betrayed him. The wind and blast from the jet engines made the ladder flutter like a flag in the breeze, and he couldn’t get both feet on it despite help from Gerasimov.
“My God, look!” Golovko pointed. “Move!”
Vatutin didn’t say anything. He floored his car and flipped on the high-beam lights.
“Trouble,” the crew chief said when he saw the car. There was a man with a rifle running this way, too. “Come on, pop!” he urged the Cardinal of the Kremlin.
“Shit!” Ryan pushed the sergeant aside and jumped down. It was too far, and he landed badly, twisting his right ankle and ripping his pants at his left knee. Jack ignored the pain and leaped to his feet. He took one of Filitov’s shoulders while Gerasimov took the other, and together they got him up the ladder far enough that the sergeant at the door was able to haul him aboard. Gerasimov went next, with Ryan’s help. Then it was Jack’s turn—but he had the same problem Filitov had. His left knee was already stiff, and when he tried to climb up on his sprained ankle, his right leg simply refused to work. He swore loudly enough to be heard over the sound of the engines and tried to do it hand over hand, but he lost his grip and fell to the pavement.
“Stoi, stoi!” somebody with a gun shouted from ten feet away. Jack looked up at the aircraft door.
“Go!” he screamed. “Close the fucking door and go!”
The crew chief did exactly that without a moment’s hesitation. He reached around to pull the door shut, and Jack watched it seat itself in a matter of seconds. Inside, the sergeant lifted the interphone and told the pilot that the door was properly sealed.
“Tower, this is niner-seven-one, rolling now. Out.” The pilot advanced the throttles to takeoff power.
The force of the engine blast hurled all four men—the rifleman had just arrived at the scene, too—right off the end of the icy runway. Jack watched from flat on his belly as the blinking red light atop the aircraft’s tall rudder diminished in the distance, then rose. His last view of it was the glow of the infrared jammers that protected the VC-137 against surface-to-air missiles. He almost started laughing, when he was rolled over and saw a pistol against his face.
“Hello, Sergey,” Ryan said to Colonel Golovko.
“Ready,” the radio told the Archer. He raised a flare pistol and fired a single star-shell round that burst directly over one of the shops.
Everything happened at once. To his left, three Stinger missiles were launched after a long and boring wait. Each streaked toward a guard tower—or more precisely, to the electric heaters inside them. The paired sentries in each had time enough only to see and be surprised by the signal round over the central region of the installation, and only one of the six saw an inbound streak of yellow, too fast to permit a reaction. All three of the missiles hit—they could hardly miss a stationary target—and in each case the six-pound warhead functioned as designed. Less than five seconds after the first round had been fired, the towers were eliminated, and with them also the machine guns that protected the laser facility.
The sentry to the Archer’s front died next. He hadn’t a chance. Forty rifles fired on him at once, with half of the bursts connecting. Next the mortars fired ranging rounds, and the Archer used his radio to adjust the fire onto what he thought was the guards’ barracks.
The sound of automatic-weapons fire cannot be mistaken for anything else. Colonel Bondarenko had just decided that he’d spent enough time communing with a cold though beautiful nature and was walking back to his quarters when the sound stopped him in his tracks. His first thought was that one of the KGB guards had accidentally discharged his weapon, but that impression lasted less than a second. He heard a crack! overhead and looked up to see the star shell, then heard the explosions from the laser site, and as though a switch had been thrown, he changed from a startled man to a professional soldier under attack. The KGB barracks were two hundred meters to his right, and he ran there as fast as he could.
Mortar rounds were falling, he saw. They were falling on the big new machine shop just beyond the barracks. Men were stumbling out the door of the latter when he arrived, and he had to stop and hold up his arms to avoid being shot.
“I am Colonel Bondarenko! Where is your officer?”
“Here!” A lieutenant came out. “What—” Someone had just learned of his mistake. The next mortar round hit the back of the barracks.
“Follow me!” Bondarenko screamed, leading them away from the most obvious target in sight. All around them was the deadly chatter of rifles—Soviet rifles; the Colonel noted at once that he couldn’t use sound to identify who was who. Wonderful! “Form up!”
“What is—”
“We’re under attack, Lieutenant! How many men do you have?”
He turned and counted. Bondarenko did it faster still. There were forty-one, all with rifles, but there were no heavy weapons, and no radios. The machine guns he could do without, but radios were vital.
The dogs, he told himself stupidly, they should have kept the dogs . . .
The tactical situation was appallingly bad, and he knew that it would only get worse. A series of explosions sundered the night.
“The lasers, we must—” the Lieutenant said, but the Colonel grabbed his shoulder.
“We can rebuild the machines,” Bondarenko said urgently, “but we cannot rebuild the scientists. We’re going to get to the apartment building and hold that until relieved. Send a good sergeant to the bachelor quarters and get them to the apartments.”
“No, Comrade Colonel! My orders are to protect the lasers, and I must—”
“I am ordering you to get your men—”
“No!” the Lieutenant screamed back at him.
Bondarenko knocked him down, took his rifle, flipped off the safety, and fired two rounds into his chest. He turned. “Who’s the best sergeant?”
“I am, Colonel,” a young man said shakily.
“I am Colonel Bondarenko, and I am in command!” the officer announced as forcefully as a command from God. “You take four men, get to the bachelor barracks, and bring everyone up the hill to the apartment building. Fast as you can!” The sergeant pointed to four others and ran off. “The rest of you, follow me!” He led them into the falling snow. There wasn’t time for him or them to wonder what awaited. Before they’d gone ten meters, every light in the camp went out.
At the gate of the laser site a GAZ jeep sat, with a heavy machine gun aboard. General Pokryshkin ran from the control building when he heard the explosions, and was stunned to see that only blazing stumps remained of his three guard towers. The commander of the KGB detachment raced down to him on his vehicle.
“We’re under attack,” the officer said unnecessarily.
“Get your men together—right here.” Pokryshkin looked up to see running men. They were dressed in Soviet uniforms, but somehow he knew that they were not Russians. The General climbed into the back of the jeep and brought the machine gun around over the head of the astonished KGB officer. The first time he pressed the trigger nothing happened, and he had to ratchet a round into the chamber. The second time, Pokryshkin had the satisfaction of watching three men fall. The guard force commander needed no further encouragement. He barked rapid orders into his radio. The battle under way degenerated at once into confusion, as it had to—both sides were wearing identical uniforms and using identical weapons. But there were more Afghans than Russians.
Morozov and several of his unmarried friends had stepped outside when they heard the noise. Most of them had military experience, though he did not. It didn’t matter—nobody had the first idea what they should do. Five men came running out of the darkness. They were wearing uniforms and carrying rifles.
“Come! All of you come, follow us!” More weapons started firing close by, and two of the KGB troops went down, one dead, one wounded. He fired back, emptying his rifle in one long burst. There was a scream in the darkness, followed by shouts. Morozov ran inside and called for people to make for the door. The engineers needed little prompting.
“Up the hill,” the sergeant said. “To the apartment block. Fast as you can!” The four KGB troops waved them along, looking for targets, but seeing only flashes. Bullets were flying everywhere now. Another of the troops went down screaming out his last breath, but the sergeant got the one who killed him. When the last engineer left the room, he and a private grabbed the spare rifles and helped their comrade back up the hill.
It was too big a mission for eighty men, the Archer realized too late. Too much ground to cover, too many buildings, but there were many unbelievers running around, and that was why he’d brought his men here. He watched one of them explode a bus with an RPG-7 antitank round. It burst into flames and slid off the road, rolling down the side of the mountain while those inside screamed. Teams of men with explosives went into the buildings. They found machine tools bathed in oil and set their charges quickly, running out before the explosions could begin the fires. The Archer had realized a minute too late which building was the guard barracks, and now that was ablaze as he led his section in to mop up the men who’d been kept there. He was too late, but didn’t know it yet. A stray mortar round had cut the power line that handled all of the site’s lighting, and all of his men were robbed of their night vision by the flashes of their own weapons.
“Well done, Sergeant!” Bondarenko told the boy. He’d already ordered the engineers upstairs. “We’ll set our perimeter around the building. They may force us back. If so, we’ll make our stand on the first floor. The walls are concrete. RPGs can hurt us, but the roof and walls will stop bullets. Pick one man to go inside and find men with military experience. Give them those two rifles. Whenever a man goes down, retrieve his weapon and get it to someone who knows how to use it. I’m going inside for a moment to see if I can get a telephone to work—”
“There’s a radiotelephone in the first-floor office,” the sergeant said. “All the buildings have them.”
“Good! Hold the perimeter, Sergeant. I’ll be back to you in two minutes.” Bondarenko ran inside. The radiotelephone was hanging on a wall hook, and he was relieved to see it was a military type, powered by its own battery. The Colonel shouldered it and ran back outside.
The attackers—who were they? he wondered—had planned their attack poorly. First they had failed to identify the KGB barracks before launching their assault; second, they hadn’t hit the residential area as quickly as they should have. They were moving in now, but they found a line of Border Guards lying in the snow. They were only KGB troops, Bondarenko knew, but they did have basic training, and most of all they knew that there was no place to run. That young sergeant was a good one, he saw. He moved from point to point along the perimeter, not using his weapon but encouraging the men and telling them what to do. The Colonel activated the radio.
“This is Colonel G. I. Bondarenko at Project Bright Star. We are under attack. I repeat, Bright Star is under attack. Any unit on this net respond at once, over.”
“Gennady, this is Pokryshkin at the laser site. We’re in the control building. What is your situation?”
“I’m at the apartments. I have all the civilians we could find inside. I have forty men, and we’re going to try to hold this place. What about help?”
“I’m trying. Gennady, we cannot get you any help from here. Can you hold?”
“Ask me in twenty minutes.”
“Protect my people, Colonel. Protect my people!” Pokryshkin shouted into the microphone.
“To the death, Comrade General. Out.” Bondarenko kept the radio on his back and hefted his rifle. “Sergeant!”
“Here, Colonel!” The young man appeared. “They’re probing now, not really attacking yet—”
“Looking for weaknesses.” Bondarenko got back down to his knees. The air seemed alive with gunfire, but it was not yet concentrated. Above and behind the two, windows were shattering. Bullets pounded into the pre-cast concrete sections that formed the building wall, spraying everyone outside with chips. “Position yourself at the corner opposite this one. You’ll command the north and east walls. I’ll handle these two. Tell your men to fire only when they have targets—”
“Already done, Comrade.”
“Good!” Bondarenko punched the young man on the shoulder. “Don’t fall back until you have to, but tell me if you do. The people in this building are priceless assets. They must survive. Go!” The Colonel watched the sergeant run off. Perhaps the KGB did train some of its people. He ran to this corner of the building.
He now had twenty—no, he counted eighteen men. Their camouflage clothing made them hard to spot. He ran from man to man, his back bowed by the weight of the radio, spacing them out, telling them to husband their rounds. He was just finishing the line on the west side when there came a chorus of human voices from the darkness.
“Here they come!” a private screamed.
“Hold your fire!” the Colonel bellowed.
The running figures appeared as though by magic. One moment the scene was empty of anything but falling snow—the next, there was a line of men firing Kalashnikov rifles from the hip. He let them get to within fifty meters.
“Fire!” He saw ten of them go down in an instant. The rest wavered and stopped, then fell back, leaving two more bodies behind. There was more firing from the opposite side of the building. Bondarenko wondered if the sergeant had held, but that was not in his hands. Some nearby screams told him that his men had taken casualties, too. On checking the line he found that one had made no noise at all. He was down to fifteen men.
The climb-out was routine enough, Colonel von Eich thought. A few feet behind him, the Russian in the jump seat was giving the electrical panel an occasional look.
“How’s the electricity doing?” the pilot asked in some irritation.
“No problem with engine and hydraulic power. Seems to be in the lighting system,” the engineer replied, quietly turning off the tail and wingtip anticollision lights.
“Well ...” The cockpit instrument lights were all on, of course, and there was no additional illumination for the flight crew. “We’ll fix it when we get to Shannon.”
“Colonel.” It was the voice of the crew chief in the pilot’s headset.
“Go ahead,” the engineer said, making sure that the Russian’s headset was not on that channel.
“Go ahead, Sarge.”
“We have our two . . . our two new passengers, sir, but Mr. Ryan—he got left behind, Colonel.”
“Repeat that?” von Eich said.
“He said to move out, sir. Two guys with guns, sir, they—he said to move out, sir,” the crew chief said again.
Von Eich let out a breath. “Okay. How are things back there?”
“I got them in the back row, sir. I don’t think anybody noticed, even, what with the engine noise and all.”
“Keep it that way.”
“Yes, sir. I have Freddie keeping the rest of the passengers forward. The aft can is broke, sir.”
“Pity,” the pilot observed. “Tell ’em to go forward if they gotta go.”
“Right, Colonel.”
“Seventy-five minutes,” the navigator advised.
Christ, Ryan, the pilot thought. I hope you like it there . . .
“I should kill you here and now!” Golovko said.
They were in the Chairman’s car. Ryan found himself facing four very irate KGB officers. The maddest seemed to be the guy in the right-front seat. Gerasimov’s bodyguard, Jack thought, the one who worked close in. He looked like the physical type, and Ryan was glad that there was a seatback separating them. He had a more immediate problem. He looked at Golovko and thought it might be a good idea to calm him down.
“Sergey, that would set off an international incident like you would not believe,” Jack said calmly. The next conversations he heard were in Russian. He couldn’t understand what they were saying, but the emotional content was clear enough. They didn’t know what to do. That suited Ryan just fine.
Clark was walking along a street three blocks from the waterfront when he saw them. It was eleven forty-five. They were right on time, thank God. This part of the city had restaurants and, though he scarcely believed it, some discos. They were walking out of one when he spotted them. Two women, dressed as he’d been told to expect, with a male companion. The bodyguard. Only one, also as per orders. It was an agreeable surprise that so far everything had gone according to plan. Clark counted another dozen or so other people on the sidewalk, some in loud groups, some in quiet couples, many of them weaving from too much drink. But it was a Friday night, and that’s what people all over the world did on Friday night. He maintained visual contact with the three people who concerned him, and closed in.
The bodyguard was a pro. He stayed on their right, keeping his gun hand free. He was ahead of them, but that didn’t keep his head from scanning in all directions. Clark adjusted the scarf on his neck, then reached in his pocket. The pistol was there as he increased his pace to catch up. It wasn’t hard. The two women seemed to be in no hurry as they approached the corner. The older one seemed to be looking around at the city. The buildings looked old, but weren’t. The Second World War had swept through Talinn in two explosive waves, leaving behind nothing but scorched stones. But whoever made such decisions had opted to rebuild the city much as it had been, and the town had a feel very different from the Russian cities Clark had visited before. It made him think of Germany somehow, though he couldn’t imagine why. That was his last frivolous thought of the night. He was now thirty feet behind them, just another man walking home on a cold February night, his face lowered to avoid the wind and a fur hat pulled down over his head. He could hear their voices now, and they were speaking Russian. Time.
“Russkiy,” Clark said with a Moscow accent. “You mean not everyone in this city is an arrogant Balt?”
“This is an old and lovely city, Comrade,” the older woman answered. “Show some respect.”
Here we go ... Clark told himself. He walked forward with the curving steps of a man in his cups.
“Your pardon, lovely lady. Have a good evening,” he said as he passed. He moved around the women and bumped into the bodyguard. “Excuse me, Comrade—” The man found that there was a pistol aimed at his face. “Turn left and go into the alley. Hands out where I can see them, Comrade.”
The shock on the poor bastard’s face was amusing as hell, Clark thought, reminding himself that this was a skilled man with a gun in his pocket. He grabbed the back of the man’s collar and kept him out at arm’s length, with his gun held in tight.
“Mother . . .” Katryn said in quiet alarm.
“Hush and do as I say. Do as this man says.”
“But—”
“Against the wall,” Clark told the man. He kept the gun aimed at the center of the bodyguard’s head while he switched hands, then he chopped hard on the side of his neck with his right hand. The man fell stunned, and Clark put handcuffs on his wrists. Next he gagged him, tied up his ankles, and dragged him to the darkest spot he could find.
“Ladies, if you will come with me, please?”
“What is this?” Katryn asked.
“I don’t know,” her mother admitted. “Your father told me to—”
“Miss, your father has decided that he wants to visit America, and he wants you and your mother to join him,” Clark said in flawless Russian.
Katryn did not reply. The lighting in the alley was very poor, but he could see her face lose all of the color it had. Her mother looked little better.
“But,” the young girl said finally. “But that’s treason ... I don’t believe it.”
“He told me ... he told me to do whatever this man says,” Maria said. “Katryn—we must.”
“But—”
“Katryn,” her mother said. “What will happen to your life if your father defects and you remain behind? What will happen to your friends? What will happen to you? They will use you to get him back, anything they have to do, Katusha ...”
“Time to leave, folks.” Clark took both women by the arm.
“But—” Katryn gestured at the bodyguard.
“He’ll be fine. We don’t kill people. It’s bad for business.” Clark led them back to the street, turning left toward the harbor.
The Major had divided his men into two groups. The smaller one was setting explosive charges on everything they could find. A light pole or a laser, it didn’t matter to them. The large group had cut down most of the KGB troops who’d tried to come here, and was arrayed around the control bunker. It wasn’t actually a bunker, but whoever had made the construction plans for the place had evidently thought that the control room should have the same sort of protection as those at the Leninsk Cosmodrome, or maybe he’d thought that the mountain might someday be subjected to a nuclear airburst attack. Most likely was that someone had decided the manual prescribed this sort of structure for this sort of place. What had resulted was a building with reinforced-concrete walls fully a meter thick. His men had killed the KGB commander and taken his vehicle, with the heavy machine gun, and were pouring fire into the vision slits cut in the structure. In fact, no one used them for looking, and their rounds had long since pounded through the thick glass and were chewing into the room’s computers and control gear.
Inside, General Pokryshkin had taken command by default. He had thirty or so KGB troops, armed only with light weapons and what little ammunition they’d been carrying when the attack had begun. A lieutenant was handling the defense as best he could, while the General was trying to get help by radio.
“It will take an hour,” a regimental commander was saying. “My men are moving out right now!”
“Fast as you can!” Pokryshkin said. “People are dying here.” He’d already thought of helicopters, but in this weather they’d accomplish nothing at all. A helicopter assault would not even have been a gamble, just suicide. He set down the radio and picked up his service automatic. He could hear the noise from the outside. All the site’s equipment was being blown up. He could live with that now. As great a catastrophe as that was, the people mattered more. Nearly a third of his engineers were in the bunker. They’d been finishing up a lengthy conference when the attack began. Had that not been the case, fewer would be here, but those would have been out working on the equipment. At least here they had a chance.
On the other side of the bunker’s concrete walls, the Major was still trying to figure this one out. He’d hardly expected to find this sort of structure. His RPG antitank rounds merely chipped the wall, and aiming them at the narrow slits was difficult in the darkness. His machine-gun rounds could be guided to them with tracers, but that wasn’t good enough.
Find the weak points, he told himself. Take your time and think it out. He ordered his men to maintain a steady rate of fire and started moving around the building. Whoever was inside had his weapons equally dispersed, but buildings like this one always had at least one blind spot . . . The Major merely had to find it.
“What is happening?” his radio squawked.
“We have killed perhaps fifty. The rest are in a bunker and we’re trying to get them, too. What of your target?”
“The apartment building,” the Archer replied. “They’re all in there, and—” The radio transmitted the sound of gunfire. “We will have them soon.”
“Thirty minutes and we must leave, my friend,” the Major said.
“Yes!” The radio went silent.
The Archer was a good man, and a brave one, the Major thought as he examined the bunker’s north face, but with just a week’s formal training he’d be so much more effective ... just a week to codify the things that he was learning on his own . . . and to pass on the lessons that others had shed blood for . . .
There was the place. There was a blind spot.
The last mortar rounds were targeted on the roof of the apartment block. Bondarenko smiled as he watched. Finally the other side had done something really foolish. The 82-millimeter shells didn’t have a chance of breaking through the concrete roof slabs, but if they’d spread them around the building’s periphery he’d have lost many of his men. He was down to ten, two of them wounded. The rifles of the fallen were inside the building now, being fired from the second floor. He counted twenty bodies outside his perimeter, and the attackers—they were Afghans, he was sure of that now—were milling about beyond his vision, trying to decide what to do. For the first time Bondarenko felt that they just might survive after all. The General had radioed to say that a motorized regiment was on the way down the road from Nurek, and though he shuddered to think what it would be like driving BTR infantry carriers over snow-covered mountain roads, the loss of a few infantry squads was as nothing compared to the corporate expertise that he was trying to protect now.
The incoming rifle fire was sporadic now, just harassment fire while they decided what to do next. With more people he’d try a counterattack, just to throw them off balance, but the Colonel was tied to his post. He couldn’t risk it, not with a mere squad left to cover two sides of the building.
Do I pull back now? The longer I can keep them away from the building, the better, but should I do my withdrawal now? His thoughts wavered at that decision. Inside the building his troops would have far better protection, but he’d lose the ability to control them when each man was separated from the next by the interior walls. If they pulled inside and withdrew to the upper floors, they’d allow the Afghan sappers to drop the building with explosive charges—no, that was the counsel of despair. Bondarenko listened to the scattered rifle shots that punctuated the sounds of wounded and dying men and couldn’t make up his mind.
Two hundred meters away, the Archer was about to do that for him. Mistaking the casualties he’d taken here to mean that this part of the building was the most heavily defended, he was leading what was left of his men to the other side. It required five minutes to do so, while those he left behind kept up a steady drumbeat of fire into the Russian perimeter. Out of mortar rounds, out of RPG projectiles, the only thing left to him besides rifles were a few grenades and six satchel charges. All around him fires blazed into the night, separate orange-red flames reaching upward to melt the falling snow. He heard the cries of his own wounded as he formed up the fifty men he had left. They’d attack as one mass, behind the leader who’d brought them here. The Archer flipped the safety off his AK-47, and remembered the first three men he’d killed with it.
Bondarenko’s head snapped around when he heard the screams from the other side of the building. He turned back and saw that nothing was happening. It was time to do something, and he hoped that it was the right thing:
“Everyone back to the building. Move!” Two of his remaining ten were wounded, and each had to be helped. It took over a minute as the night shattered yet again with volleys of rifle fire. Bondarenko took five and ran down the building’s main first-floor corridor and out the other side.
He couldn’t tell if there’d been a breakthrough, or if the men here were also falling back—again he had to hold fire because both sides were identically uniformed. Then one of those running toward the building fired, and the Colonel went to one knee and dropped him with a five-round burst. More appeared, and he nearly fired until he heard their shouts.
“Nashi, nashi!” He counted eight. The last of them was the sergeant, wounded in both legs.
“Too many, we couldn’t—”
“Get inside,” Bondarenko told him. “Can you still fight?”
“Fuck, yes!” Both men looked around. They couldn’t fight from the individual rooms. They’d have to make their stand in the corridors and stairwells.
“Help is on the way. A regiment is coming down from Nurek if we can hold on!” Bondarenko told his men. He didn’t tell them how long it was supposed to take. It was the first good news in over half an hour. Two civilians came downstairs. Both carried rifles.
“You need help?” Morozov asked. He’d avoided military service, but he had just learned that a rifle wasn’t all that hard to use.
“How are things up there?” Bondarenko asked.
“My section chief is dead. I took this from him. Many people are hurt, and the rest are as terrified as I am.”
“Stay with the sergeant,” the Colonel told him. “Keep your head, Comrade Engineer, and we may yet live through this. Help’s on the way.”
“I hope the bastards hurry.” Morozov helped the sergeant—who was even younger than the engineer—go to the far end of the corridor.
Bondarenko put half of his men at the stairwell and the other half by the elevators. It was quiet again. They could hear the jabbering of voices outside, but the shooting had died down for the moment.
“Down the ladder. Carefully,” Clark said. “There’s a crossmember at the bottom. You can stand on that.”
Maria looked with disgust at the slimy wood, doing as she was told like a person in a dream. Her daughter followed. Clark went last, stepped around them, and got into the boat. He untied the ropes and moved the boat by hand underneath where the women were standing. It was a three-foot drop.
“One at a time. You first, Katryn. Step down slowly and I’ll catch you.” She did so, her knees wobbling with doubt and fear. Clark grabbed her ankle and pulled it toward him. She fell into the boat as elegantly as a sack of beans. Maria came next. He gave the same instructions, and she followed them, but Katryn tried to help, and in doing so moved the boat. Maria lost her grip and fell into the water with a scream.
“What is that?” someone called from the landside end of the pier.
Clark ignored it, grabbing the woman’s splashing hands and pulling her aboard. She was gasping from the cold, but there wasn’t much Clark could do about that. He heard the sound of running feet along the pier as he turned on the boat’s electric motor and headed straight out.
“Stoi!” a voice called. It was a cop, Clark realized, it would have to be a damned cop. He turned to see the glimmer of a flashlight. It couldn’t reach the boat, but it was fixed on the wake he’d left behind. Clark lifted his radio.
“Uncle Joe, this is Willy. On the way. The sun is out!”
“They may have been spotted,” the communications officer told Mancuso.
“Great.” The Captain went forward. “Goodman, come right to zero-eight-five. Move her in toward the coast at ten knots.”
“Conn, sonar, contact bearing two-nine-six. Diesel engine,” Jones’s voice announced. “Twin screws.”
“Will be KGB patrol frigate—Grisha, probably,” Ramius said. “Routine patrol.”
Mancuso didn’t say anything, but he pointed to the fire-control tracking party. They’d work up a position on the seaward target while Dallas moved into the coast at periscope depth, keeping her radio antenna up.
“Nine-seven-one, this is Velikiye Luki Center. Turn right to new course one-zero-four,” the Russian voice told Colonel von Eich. The pilot squeezed the microphone trigger on his wheel.
“Say again, Luki. Over.”
“Nine-seven-one, you are ordered to turn right to new heading one-zero-four and return to Moscow. Over.”
“Ah, thank you, Luki, negative, we are proceeding on a heading of two-eight-six as per our flight plan. Over.”
“Nine-seven-one, you are ordered to return to Moscow!” the controller insisted.
“Roger. Thank you. Out.” Von Eich looked down to see that his autopilot was on the proper heading, then resumed his outside scanning for other aircraft.
“But you are not turning back,” the Russian said over the intercom.
“No.” Von Eich turned to look at the man. “We didn’t leave anything behind that I know of.” Well ...
“But they ordered you—”
“Son, I am in command of this aircraft, and my orders are to fly to Shannon,” the pilot explained.
“But—” The Russian unsnapped his straps and started to stand up.
“Sit down!” the pilot ordered. “Nobody leaves my flight deck without my permission, mister! You are a guest on my airplane, and you’ll goddamned well do what I say!” Damn, it was supposed to be easier than this! He gestured to the engineer, who toggled off another switch. That shut off all the cabin lights in the aircraft. The VC-137 was now totally blacked out. Von Eich keyed his radio again. “Luki, this is niner-seven-one. We have some electrical problems aboard. I don’t want to make any radical course changes until we have them figured out. Do you copy? Over.”
“What is your problem?” the controller asked. The pilot wondered what he’d been told as he gave out the next set of lies.
“Luki, we don’t know just yet. We’re losing electrical power. All our lights have gone bad. The bird is blacked out at the moment, say again we are running without lights. I’m a little worried, and I don’t need any distractions right now.” That bought him two minutes of silence, and twenty miles of westward progress.
“Nine-seven-one, I have notified Moscow of your problems. They advise that you return at once. They will clear you for an emergency approach,” the controller offered.
“Roger, thank you, Luki, but I don’t want to risk a course change right now, if you know what I mean. We’re working to fix the problem. Please stand by. Will advise. Out.” Colonel von Eich checked the clock in his instrument panel. Thirty more minutes to the coast.
“What?” Major Zarudin asked. “Who got on the airplane?”
“Chairman Gerasimov and an arrested enemy spy,” Vatutin said.
“On an American airplane? You tell me that the Chairman is defecting on an American airplane!” The officer commanding the airport security detail had taken charge of the situation, as his orders allowed him to do. He found that he had two colonels, a lieutenant colonel, a driver, and an American in the office he used here—along with the craziest damned story he’d ever heard. “I must call for instructions.”
“I am senior to you!” Golovko said.
“You are not senior to my commander!” Zarudin pointed out as he reached for the phone. He’d been able to have the air traffic controllers try to recall the American plane, but it had not come as a surprise to his visitors that it had decided not to turn.
Ryan sat perfectly still, barely breathing, not even moving his head. He told himself that as long as they didn’t get too excited he would be completely safe. Golovko was too smart to do anything crazy. He knew who Jack was, and he knew what would happen if an accredited member of a diplomatic mission to his country was so much as scratched. Ryan had been scratched, of course. His ankle hurt like hell, and his knee was oozing blood, but he’d done that to himself. Golovko glared at him from five feet away. Ryan didn’t return the look. He swallowed his fear and tried to look exactly as harmless as he was right now.
“Where’s his family?” Vatutin asked.
“They flew to Talinn yesterday,” Vasiliy answered lamely. “She wanted to see some friends . . .”
Time was running out for everyone. Bondarenko’s men were down to less than half a magazine each. Two more were dead from grenades that had been tossed in. The Colonel had watched a private leap on one, ripped to shreds to save his comrades. The boy’s blood covered the tile floor like paint. Six Afghans were piled up at the door. It had been like this at Stalingrad, the Colonel told himself. No one excelled the Russian soldier at house-to-house fighting. How far away was that motorized regiment? An hour was such a short period of time. Half a movie, a television show, a pleasant night’s stroll . . . such a short time, unless people were shooting at you. Then every second stretched before your eyes, and the hands of your watch seemed frozen, and the only thing that went fast was your heart. It was only his second experience with close combat. He’d been decorated after the first, and he wondered if he’d be buried after the second. But he couldn’t let that happen. On the floors above him were several hundred people, engineers and scientists, their wives and their children, all of whose lives rested on his ability to hold the Afghan invaders off for less than an hour.
Go away, he wished at them. Do you think that we wanted to come and be shot at in that miserable rockpile you call a country? If you want to kill those who are responsible, why don’t you go to Moscow? But that wasn’t the way things were in war, was it? The politicians never seemed to come close enough to see what they had wrought. They never really knew what they did, and now the bastards had nuclear-tipped missiles. They had the power to kill millions, but they didn’t even have the courage to see the horror on a simple, old-fashioned battlefield.
The nonsense you think at times like this! he raged at himself.
He’d failed. His men had trusted him with command, and he’d failed them, the Archer told himself. He looked around at the bodies in the snow and each seemed to accuse him. He could kill individuals, could pluck aircraft from the sky, but he’d never learned how to lead a large body of men. Was this Allah’s curse on him for torturing the Russian flyers? No! There were still enemies to kill. He gestured to his men to enter the building through several broken, ground-floor windows.
The Major was leading from the front, as the mudjaheddin expected. He had gotten ten of them right up to the side of the bunker, then led them along the wall toward the main door, covered by fire from the rest of his company. It was going well, he thought. He’d lost five men, but that was not very many for a mission like this . . . Thank you for all the training you gave me, my Russian friends ...
The main door was steel. He personally set a pair of satchel charges at both lower corners and set the fuses before crawling back around the corner. Russian rifles blazed over his head, but those inside the building didn’t know where he was. That would change. He set the charges, pulled the fuse cords, and dashed back around the corner.
Pokryshkin cringed as he heard it happen. He turned to see the heavy steel door flying across the room and smashing into a control console. The KGB Lieutenant was killed instantly by the blast, and as Pokryshkin’s men raced to cover the breach in the wall, three more explosive packs flew in. There was nowhere to run. The Border Guards kept firing, killing one of the attackers at the door, but then the charges went off.
It was a strangely hollow sound, the Major thought. The force of the explosions was contained by the stout concrete walls. He led his men in a second later. Electrical circuits were sparking, and fires would soon begin in earnest, but everyone he could see inside was down. His men moved swiftly from one to another, seizing weapons and killing those merely unconscious. The Major saw a Russian officer with general’s stars. The man was bleeding from his nose and ears, trying to bring up his pistol when the Major cut him down. In another minute they were all dead. The building was rapidly filling with thick, acrid smoke. He ordered his men out.
“We’re finished here,” he said into his radio. There was no answer. “Are you there?”
The Archer was against a wall next to a half-open door. His radio was switched off. Just outside his room was a soldier, facing down the corridor. It was time. The freedom fighter threw the door aside with the barrel of his rifle and shot the Russian before the man had had a chance to turn. He screamed a command, and five other men emerged from their rooms, but two were killed before they got a chance to shoot. He looked up and down the corridor and saw nothing but gun flashes and half-hidden silhouettes.
Fifty meters away, Bondarenko reacted to the new threat. He shouted an order for his men to stay under cover, and then with murderous precision, the Colonel identified and engaged the targets moving in the open, identified by the emergency lighting in the corridor. The corridor was exactly like a shooting gallery, and he got two men with as many bursts. Another ran toward him, screaming something unintelligible and firing his weapon in a single extended burst. Bondarenko’s shots missed, to his amazement, but someone else got him. There was more shooting, and the sound of it reverberating off the concrete walls completely deafened everyone. Then, he saw, there was only one man left. The Colonel watched two more of his men fall, and the last Afghan chipped concrete only centimeters from his face. Bondarenko’s eyes stung from it, and the right side of his face recoiled at the sudden pain. The Colonel pulled back from the line of fire, flipped his weapon to full automatic, took a deep breath, and jumped into the corridor. The man was less than ten meters away.
The moment stretched into eternity as both men brought their weapons to bear. He saw the man’s eyes. It was a young face there, immediately below the emergency light, but the eyes . . . the rage there, the hatred, nearly stopped the Colonel’s heart. But Bondarenko was a soldier before all things. The Afghan’s first shot missed. His did not.
The Archer felt shock, but not pain in his chest as he fell. His brain sent a message to his hands to bring the weapon to the left, but they ignored the command and dropped it. He fell in stages, first to his knees, then on his back, and at last he was staring up at a ceiling. It was finally over. Then the man stood by his side. It was not a cruel face, the Archer thought. It was the enemy, and it was an infidel, but he was a man, too, wasn’t he? There was curiosity there. He wants to know who I am, the Archer told him with his last breath.
“Allahu akhbar!” God is great.
Yes, I suppose He is, Bondarenko told the corpse. He knew the phrase well enough. Is that why you came? He saw that the man had a radio. It started to make noise, and the Colonel bent down to grab it.
“Are you there?” the radio asked a moment later. The question was in Pashtu, but the answer was delivered in Russian.
“It is all finished here,” Bondarenko said.
The Major looked at his radio for a moment, then blew his whistle to assemble what was left of his men. The Archer’s company knew the way to the assembly point, but all that mattered now was getting home. He counted his men. He’d lost eleven and had six wounded. With luck he’d get to the border before the snow stopped. Five minutes later his men were heading off the mountain.
“Secure the area!” Bondarenko told his remaining six men. “Collect weapons and get them handed out.” It was probably over, he thought, but “over” would not truly come until that motor-rifle regiment got here.
“Morozov!” he called next. The engineer appeared a moment later.
“Yes, Colonel?”
“Is there a physician upstairs?”
“Yes, several—I’ll get one.”
The Colonel found that he was sweating. The building still held some warmth. He dropped the field radio off his back and was stunned to see that two bullets had hit it—and even more surprised to see blood on one of the straps. He’d been hit and hadn’t known it. The sergeant came over and looked at it.
“Just a scratch, Comrade, like those on my legs.”
“Help me off with this coat, will you?” Bondarenko shrugged out of the knee-length greatcoat, exposing his uniform blouse. With his right hand he reached inside, while his left removed the ribbon that designated the Red Banner. This he pinned to the young man’s collar. “You deserve better, Sergeant, but this is all I can do for the present.”
“Up ’scope!” Mancuso used the search periscope now, with its light-amplifying equipment. “Still nothing . . .” He turned to look west. “Uh-oh, I got a masthead light at two-seven-zero—”
“That’s our sonar contact,” Lieutenant Goodman noted unnecessarily.
“Sonar, conn, do you have an ident on the contact?” Mancuso asked.
“Negative,” Jones replied. “We’re getting reverbs from the ice, sir. Acoustic conditions are pretty bad. It’s twin screw and diesel, but no ident.”
Mancuso turned on the ’scope television camera. Ramius needed only one look at the picture. “Grisha.”
Mancuso looked at the tracking party. “Solution?”
“Yes, but it’s a little shaky,” the weapons officer replied. “The ice isn’t going to help,” he added. What he meant was that the Mark 48 torpedo in surface-attack mode could be confused by floating ice. He paused for a moment. “Sir, if that’s a Grisha, how come no radar?”
“New contact! Conn, sonar, new contact bearing zero-eight-six—sounds like our friend, sir,” Jones called. “Something else near that bearing, high-speed screw . . . definitely something new there, sir, call it zero-eight-three.”
“Up two feet,” Mancuso told the quartermaster. The periscope came up. “I see him, just on the horizon . . . call it three miles. There’s a light behind them!” He slapped the handles up and the ’scope went down at once. “Let’s get there fast. All ahead two-thirds.”
“All ahead two-thirds, aye.” The helmsman dialed up the engine order.
The navigator plotted the position of the inbound boat and ticked off the yards.
Clark was looking back toward the shore. There was a light sweeping left and right across the water. Who was it? He didn’t know if the local cops had boats, but there had to be a detachment of KGB Border Guards: they had their own little navy, and their own little air force. But how alert were they on a Friday night? Probably better than they were when that German kid decided to fly into Moscow . . . right through this sector, Clark remembered. This area’s probably pretty alert . . . where are you, Dallas? He lifted his radio.
“Uncle Joe, this is Willy. The sun is rising, and we’re far from home.”
“He says he’s close, sir,” communications reported.
“ ’Gator?” Mancuso asked.
The navigator looked up from his table. “I gave him fifteen knots. We should be within five hundred yards now.”
“All ahead one-third,” the Captain ordered. “Up ’scope!” The oiled steel tube hissed up again—all the way up.
“Captain, I got a radar emitter astern, bearing two-six-eight. It’s a Don-2,” the ESM technician said.
“Conn, sonar, both the hostile contacts have increased speed. Blade count looks like twenty knots and coming up on the Grisha, sir,” Jones said. “Confirm target ident is Grisha-class. Easterly contact still unknown, one screw, probably a gas engine, doing turns for twenty or so.”
“Range about six thousand yards,” the fire-control party said next.
“This is the fun part,” Mancuso observed. “I have them. Bearing—mark!”
“Zero-nine-one.”
“Range.” Mancuso squeezed the trigger for the ’scope’s laser-rangefinder. “Mark!”
“Six hundred yards.”
“Nice call, ’Gator. Solution on the Grisha?” he asked fire control.
“Set for tubes two and four. Outer doors are still closed, sir.”
“Keep ’em that way.” Mancuso went to the bridge trunk’s lower hatch. “XO, you have the conn. I’m going to do the recovery myself. Let’s get it done.”
“All stop,” the executive officer said. Mancuso opened the hatch and went up the ladder to the bridge. The lower hatch was closed behind him. He heard the water rushing around him in the sail, then the splashes of surface waves. The intercom told him he could open the bridge hatch. Mancuso spun the locking wheel and heaved against the heavy steel cover. He was rewarded with a faceful of cold, oily saltwater, but ignored it and got to the bridge.
He looked aft first. There was the Grisha, its masthead light low on the horizon. Next he looked forward and pulled the flashlight from his hip pocket. He aimed directly at the raft and tapped out the Morse letter D.
“A light, a light!” Maria said. Clark turned back forward, saw it, and steered for it. Then he saw something else.
The patrol boat behind Clark was a good two miles off, its searchlight looking in the wrong place. The Captain turned west to see the other contact. Mancuso knew in a distant sort of way that Grishas carried searchlights, but had allowed himself to disregard the fact. After all, why should searchlights concern a submarine? When she’s on the surface, the Captain told himself. The ship was still too far away to see him, light or not, but that would change in a hurry. He watched it sweep the surface aft of his submarine, and realized too late that they probably had Dallas on radar now.
“Over here, Clark, move your ass!” he screamed across the water, swinging the light left and right. The next thirty seconds seemed to last into the following month. Then it was there.
“Help the ladies,” the man said. He held the raft against the submarine’s sail with his motor. Dallas was still moving, had to be to maintain this precarious depth, not quite surfaced, not quite dived. The first one felt and moved like a young girl, the skipper thought as he brought her aboard. The second one was wet and shivering. Clark waited a moment, setting a small box atop the motor. Mancuso wondered how it stayed balanced there until he realized that it was either magnetic or glued somehow.
“Down the ladder,” Mancuso told the ladies.
Clark scrambled aboard and said something—probably the same thing—in Russian. To Mancuso he spoke in English. “Five minutes before it blows.”
The women were already halfway down. Clark went behind them, and finally Mancuso, with a last look at the raft. The last thing he saw was the harbor patrol boat, now heading directly toward him. He dropped down and pulled the hatch behind himself. Then he punched the intercom button. “Take her down and move the boat!”
The bottom hatch opened underneath them all, and he heard the executive officer. “Make your depth ninety feet, all ahead two-thirds, left full rudder!”
A petty officer met the ladies at the bottom of the bridge tube. The astonishment on his face would have been funny at any other time. Clark took them by the arm and led them forward to his stateroom. Mancuso went aft.
“I have the conn,” he announced.
“Captain has the conn,” the XO agreed. “ESM says they got some VHF radio traffic, close in, probably the Grisha talking to the other one.”
“Helm, come to new course three-five-zero. Let’s get her under the ice. They probably know we’re here—well, they know something’s here. ’Gator, how’s the chart look?”
“We’ll have to turn soon,” the navigator warned. “Shoal water in eight thousand yards. Recommend come to new course two-nine-one.” Mancuso ordered the change at once.
“Depth now eight-five feet, leveling out,” the diving officer said. “Speed eighteen knots.” A small bark of sound announced the destruction of the raft and its motor.
“Okay, people, now all we have to do is leave,” Mancuso told his Attack Center crew. A high-pitched snap of sound told them that this would not be easy.
“Conn, sonar, we’re being pinged. That’s a Grisha death-ray,” Jones said, using the slang term for the Russian set. “Might have us.”
“Under the ice now,” the navigator said.
“Range to target?”
“Just under four thousand yards,” the weapons officer replied. “Set for tubes two and four.”
The problem was, they couldn’t shoot. Dallas was inside Russian territorial waters, and even if the Grisha shot at them, shooting back wasn’t self-defense, but an act of war. Mancuso looked at the chart. He had thirty feet of water under his keel, and a bare twenty over his sail—minus the thickness of the ice...
“Marko?” the Captain asked.
“They will request instructions first,” Ramius judged. “The more time they have, the better chance they will shoot.”
“Okay. All ahead full,” Mancuso ordered. At thirty knots he’d be in international waters in ten minutes.
“Grisha is passing abeam on the portside,” Jones said. Mancuso went forward to the sonar room.
“What’s happening?” the Captain asked.
“The high-frequency stuff works pretty good in the ice. He’s searchlighting back and forth. He knows something’s here, but not exactly where yet.”
Mancuso lifted a phone. “Five-inch room, launch two noisemakers.”
A pair of bubble-making decoys was ejected from the portside of the submarine.
“Good, Mancuso,” Ramius observed. “His sonar will fix on those. He cannot maneuver well with the ice.”
“We’ll know for sure in the next minute.” Just as he said it, the submarine was rocked by explosions aft. A very feminine scream echoed through the forward portion of the submarine.
“All ahead flank!” the Captain called aft.
“The decoys,” Ramius said. “Surprising that he fired so quickly...
“Losing sonar performance, skipper,” Jones said as the screen went blank with flow noise. Mancuso and Ramius went aft. The navigator had their course track marked on the chart.
“Uh-oh, we have to transit this place right here where the ice stops. How much you want to bet he knows it?” Mancuso looked up. They were still being pinged, and he still couldn’t shoot back. And that Grisha might get lucky.
“Radio—Mancuso, let me speak on radio!” Ramius said.
“We don’t do things that way—” Mancuso said. American doctrine was to evade, never to let them be sure there was a submarine there at all.
“I know that. But we are not American submarine, Captain Mancuso, we are Soviet submarine,” Ramius suggested. Bart Mancuso nodded. He’d never played this card before.
“Take her to antenna depth!”
A radio technician dialed in the Soviet guard frequency, and the slender VHF antenna was raised as soon as the submarine cleared the ice. The periscope went up, too.
“There he is. Angle on the bow, zero. Down ’scope!”
“Radar contact bearing two-eight-one,” the speaker proclaimed.
The Captain of the Grisha was coming off a week’s patrolling on the Baltic Sea, six hours late, and had been looking forward to four days off. Then first came a radio transmission from the Talinn harbor police about a strange craft seen leaving the docks, followed by something from the KGB, then a small explosion near the harbor police boat, next several sonar contacts. The twenty-nine-year-old senior lieutenant with all of three months in command had made his estimate of the situation and fired at what his sonar operator called a positive submarine contact. Now he was wondering if he’d made a mistake, and how ghastly it might be. All he knew was that he had not the smallest idea what was happening, but if he were chasing a submarine, it would be heading west.
And now he had a radar contact forward. The speaker for the guard radio frequency started chattering.
“Cease fire, you idiot!” a metallic voice screamed at him three times.
“Identify!” the Grisha’s commander replied.
“This is Novosibürsk Komsomolets! What the hell do you think you’re doing firing live ammunition in a practice exercise! You identify!”
The young officer stared at his microphone and swore. Novosibürsk Komsomolets was a special-ops boat based at Kronshtadt, always playing Spetznaz games . . .
“This is Krepkiy.”
“Thank you. We will discuss this episode the day after tomorrow. Out!”
The Captain looked around at the bridge crew. “What exercise ... ?”
“Too bad,” Marko said as he replaced the microphone. “He reacted well. Now he will take several minutes to call his base, and . . .”
“And that’s all we need. And they still don’t know what happened.” Mancuso turned. “ ’Gator, shortest way out?”
“Recommend two-seven-five, distance is eleven thousand yards.”
At thirty-four knots, the remaining distance was covered quickly. Ten minutes later the submarine was back in international waters. The anticlimax was remarkable for all those in the control room. Mancuso changed course for deeper water and ordered speed reduced to one-third, then went back to sonar.
“That should be that,” he announced.
“Sir, what was this all about?” Jones asked.
“Well, I don’t know that I can tell you.”
“What’s her name?” From his seat Jones could see into the passageway.
“I don’t even know that myself. But I’ll find out.” Mancuso went across the passageway and knocked on the door of Clark’s stateroom.
“Who is it?”
“Guess,” Mancuso said. Clark opened the door. The Captain saw a young woman in presentable clothes, but wet feet. Then an older woman appeared from the head. She was dressed in the khaki shirt and pants of Dallas’ chief engineer, though she carried her own things, which were wet. These she handed to Mancuso with a phrase of Russian.
“She wants you to have them cleaned, skipper,” Clark translated, and started laughing. “These are our new guests. Mrs. Gerasimov, and her daughter, Katryn.”
“What’s so special about them?” Mancuso asked.
“My father is head of KGB!” Katryn said.
The Captain managed not to drop the clothes.
“We got company,” the copilot said. They were coming in from the right side, the strobe lights of what had to be a pair of fighter planes. “Closing fast.”
“Twenty minutes to the coast,” the navigator reported. The pilot had long since spotted it.
“Shit!” the pilot snapped. The fighters missed his aircraft by less than two hundred yards of vertical separation, little more in horizontal. A moment later, the VC-137 bounced through their wake turbulence.
“Engure Control, this is U.S. Air Force flight niner-seven-one. We just had a near miss. What the hell is going on down there?”
“Let me speak to the Soviet officer!” the voice answered. It didn’t sound like a controller.
“I speak for this aircraft,” Colonel von Eich replied. “We are cruising on a heading of two-eight-six, flight level eleven thousand six hundred meters. We are on a correctly filed flight plan, in a designated air corridor, and we have electrical problems. We don’t need to have some hardrock fighter jocks playing tag with us—this is an American aircraft with a diplomatic mission aboard. You want to start World War Three or something? Over!”
“Nine-seven-one, you are ordered to turn back!”
“Negative! We have electrical problems and cannot repeat cannot comply. This airplane is flying without lights, and those crazy MiG drivers damned near rammed us! Are you trying to kill us, over!”
“You have kidnapped a Soviet citizen and you must return to Moscow!”
“Repeat that last,” von Eich requested.
But the Captain couldn’t. A fighter ground-intercept officer, he’d been rushed to Engure, the last air-traffic-control point within Soviet borders, quickly briefed by a local KGB officer, and told to force the American aircraft to turn back. He should not have said what he had just said in the clear.
“You must stop the aircraft!” the KGB General shouted.
“Simple, then. I order my MiGs to shoot it down!” the Captain replied in kind. “Do you give me the order, Comrade General?”
“I do not have the authority. You have to make it stop.”
“It cannot be done. We can shoot it down, but we cannot make it stop.”
“Do you wish to be shot?” the General asked.
“Where the hell is it now?” the Foxbat pilot asked his wingman. They’d only seen it once, and that for a single ghastly instant. They could track the intruder—except that it was leaving, and wasn’t really an intruder, they both knew—on radar, and kill it with radar-guided missiles, but to close on the target in darkness . . . Even in the relatively clear night, the target was running without lights, and trying to find it meant running the risk of what American fighter pilots jokingly called a Fox-Four: midair collision, a quick and spectacular death for all involved.
“Hammer Lead, this is Toolbox. You are ordered to close on the target and force it to turn,” the controller said. “Target is now at your twelve o’clock and level, range three thousand meters.”
“I know that,” the pilot said to himself. He had the airliner on radar, but he did not have it visually, and his radar could not track precisely enough to warn him of an imminent collision. He also had to worry about the other MiG on his wing.
“Stay back,” he ordered his wingman. “I’ll handle this alone.” He advanced his throttles slightly and moved the stick a hair to the right. The MiG-25 was heavy and sluggish, not a very maneuverable fighter. He had a pair of air-to-air missiles hanging from each wing, and all he had to do to stop this aircraft was . . . But instead of ordering him to do something he was trained to do, some jackass of a KGB officer was—
There. He didn’t so much see the aircraft, but saw something ahead disappear. Ah! He pulled back on the stick to gain a few hundred meters of altitude and . . . yes! He could pick the Boeing out against the sea. Slowly and carefully, he moved forward until he was abeam of the target and two hundred meters higher.
“I got lights on the right side,” the copilot said. “Fighter, but I don’t know what kind.”
“If you were him, what would you do?” von Eich asked.
“Defect!” Or shoot us down . . .
Behind them in the jump seat, the Russian pilot, whose only job was to talk Russian in case of an emergency, was strapped down in his seat and had not the first idea what to do. He’d been cut out of the radio conversations and had only intercom now. Moscow wanted them to turn the aircraft back. He didn’t know why, but—but what? he asked himself.
“Here he comes, sliding over toward us.”
As carefully as he could, the MiG pilot maneuvered his fighter to the left. He wanted to get over the Boeing’s cockpit, from which position he could gently reduce altitude and force it downward. To do this required as much skill as he could muster, and the pilot could only pray that the American was equally adept. He positioned himself so that he could see . . . but—
The MiG-25 was designed as an interceptor, and the cockpit gave the pilot very restricted visibility. He could no longer see the airplane with which he was flying formation. He looked ahead. The shore was only a few kilometers away. Even if he were able to make the American reduce altitude, he’d be over the Baltic before it would matter to anyone. The pilot pulled back on his stick and climbed off to the right. Once clear, he reversed course.
“Toolbox, this is Hammer Lead,” he reported. “The American will not change course. I tried, but I will not collide with his airplane without orders.”
The controller had watched the two radar blips merge on his scope, and was now amazed that his heart hadn’t stopped. What the hell was going on? This was an American plane. They couldn’t force it to stop, and if there were an accident, who would be blamed for it? He made his decision.
“Return to base. Out.”
“You will pay for this!” the KGB General promised the ground-intercept officer. He was wrong.
“Thank God,” von Eich said as they passed over the coastline. He called up the chief cabin steward next. “How are the folks in back?”
“Mainly asleep. They must have had a big party tonight. When are we getting the electricity back?”
“Flight engineer,” the pilot said, “they want to know about the electrical problems.”
“Looks like it was a bad breaker, sir. I think . . . Yeah, I fixed it.”
The pilot looked out his window. The wingtip lights were back on, as were the cabin lights, except in back. Passing Ventspils, they turned left to a new heading two-five-nine. He let out a long breath. Two and a half hours to Shannon. “Some coffee would be nice,” he thought aloud.
Golovko hung up the phone and spat out a few words that Jack didn’t understand exactly, though their message seemed rather clear.
“Sergey, could I clean my knee up?”
“What exactly have you done, Ryan?” the KGB officer asked.
“I fell out of the airplane and the bastards left without me. I want to be taken to my embassy, but first, my knee hurts.”
Golovko and Vatutin stared at each other and both wondered several things. What had actually happened? What would happen to them? What to do with Ryan?
“Who do we even call?” Golovko asked.