He first needed to sort out the money problem. His government had made a $300 million down payment on the three Kilos. A further $300 million was due on completion of sea trials in the Barents Sea this summer, and the final $300 million upon their arrival in Chinese waters. The Russians were not going to be overjoyed at paying that first $300 million back. But those were terms the Chinese Navy must demand. Only when that hurdle had been safely negotiated would Admiral Zhang feel he was safe in making further demands for heavy Russian warship escorts for the final two Kilos — all the way back to Shanghai.
Meanwhile there were he knew many of his peers who thought the Russian diesel-electrics were much more trouble than they could possibly be worth. In Beijing, the project would now hang in the balance. If the cautious elder statesmen prevailed, Arnold Morgan would be proved right. “If you slam ’em hard enough, and seriously enough, the Chinese will probably back right down, and just accept we’re not going to let ’em have those submarines.”
Admiral Zhang knew, perhaps above all other men, precisely how hard they had in fact been slammed. And, like Admiral Rankov, he knew, beyond personal doubt, which nation had done the slamming.
In the days that followed, Admiral Rankov worked tirelessly in pursuit of an American mistake. He thought he was onto something when his investigators discovered five executives of a Florida citrus fruit company had entered Russia on a commercial jet through St. Petersburg, and had apparently not left on the date specified on their entry visas.
He did not know that the five Americans had left on a mysterious fishing boat on the very night of their entry, in the small hours, out of the little port of Kurgolovo, on a remote headland eighty miles east of the city. In time their passports and visas would be used by five other Americans, who between them knew nothing about growing fruit.
It came to light that the five Americans had indeed left Russia, twenty-four hours late, on a private corporate jet from St. Petersburg to London. There were no other US citizens in the last couple of months who had overstayed their welcome, or were otherwise unaccounted for.
It was not until June 19 that something came to light involving the missing Americans. Apparently four men from the Minneapolis area, and a woman from Chicago, had disappeared from a tour ship, the Yuri Andropov, in the northern reaches of Lake Onega. Furthermore they had gone missing two evenings before the barges had been blitzed in the canal. Rankov discovered this through the US embassy in Moscow as a result of a formal complaint filed by the State Department.
It was a classic Arnold Morgan preemptive strike, putting the Russians on the defensive over something that was ostensibly their fault. The State Department complaint caused huge consternation among the shipping tour operators, but such incidents are always played down, to prevent the notoriously edgy US vacationers from canceling en masse.
None of this fooled Vitaly Rankov, who sensed the hand of Admiral Morgan. He immediately summoned the ex-KGB man, Colonel Borsov, to his cavernous office in the Kremlin.
The senior executive from the Andropov was more than helpful. He had met and spoken to the Americans, indeed he had discovered them missing and had ordered the search of their suites.
“What kind of men were they?” asked the head of the Russian Navy.
“Old.”
“Old? How old?”
“Very old.”
“Like what? Sixty? Ninety?”
“Well, sir, I’d say one of them, Mr. Andrews, was close to eighty. He walked with a cane, very slowly. Mr. Maklov was older, must have been eighty, did not walk well at all, but he was a nice man. The other two were a little younger, but not much, both in their mid-seventies. It’s a complete mystery to me what happened to them.”
“How close did you get to them?”
“As close as I am to you, sir.”
“No doubt in your mind they were that old?”
“Absolutely none, sir. They were that old. I saw them often, twice a day at meals, once up in their sitting area, a few times in the bar.”
“Did they look like they might be good swimmers?” Rankov said, smiling.
“SWIMMERS! No, sir. They were old men, perhaps having the final vacation of their lives. They all had ancestors from Russia.”
“How about the fifth person in the party?”
“Oh, she was their nurse. Edith Dubranin. A woman of over fifty, certainly. Looked after them, told me she was from Chicago, worked in a big hospital there for many years.”
“Do you think there was a possibility they might have been terrorists?”
“TERRORISTS? I wouldn’t think so. Two of them could scarcely walk across the deck.”
“Any theories about what might have happened to them?”
“No. None, sir. And we had a further mystery…two of our staff went missing on that voyage, in the same place, on our Green Stop on Lake Onega. These were young men — Pieter, the steward in the very busy stern coffee bar, and Torbin, the head waiter. They had gone out in a small boat and have never been seen since.”
The crisp, factual replies of Colonel Borsov pleased Admiral Rankov. He had to accept the description of the Americans, and he willingly accepted the word of the Andropov’s senior executive that he would keep him posted the moment he heard anything about any of the missing seven.
He walked the Colonel out to the street, and on his way back along the stark, military corridors he found himself piecing together the incontrovertible coincidences of the events on the Andropov on the night of June 10 and the events less than 135 miles away up the Belomorski Canal, twenty-nine hours later. He had little choice but to accept the word of a former officer in the KGB that the elderly Americans could not have committed such a crime.
As for the steward and the waiter, both Russian citizens who had worked for the shipping line for over four years and who were well known to many people in the tour boat business…well, Vitaly Rankov did not suspect them of treason against the State. Nonetheless, he would have them investigated.
Two days later, on June 22, a steward from another tour ship anchored at the Green Stop found the Andropov’s missing inflatable outboard. He was driving an identical boat and carrying six American ladies on a short tour of the lake, when he saw the white engine reflect the bright sunlight, about five feet below the surface, visible from the water, but not from the land. He swerved in close, and saw a name on the crushed rubber hull, too deep to read, but possible to grab with an anchor hook.
The steward decided to drop off his paying passengers and return with couple of crew members to conduct a salvage operation, and recover what looked like an expensive outboard and inflatable hull.
They set off after 11 PM, the sharp-eyed wine steward, Alek, assisted by the main dining room waiter, Nikolai, and the engineer, Anton, made their way quietly through the shallows near the shore in one of the ship’s gray Zodiac inflatables. They were searching for the submerged shape of a 150 horsepower outboard engine similar to their own.
The three young Russians were armed with three sacks and a couple of large boat hooks. They planned to raise the engine, hide it in the hold of their tour ship, the Aleksandr Pushkin, and then get it home to St. Petersburg. They could dry it out, Anton could recondition it, and then sell it for possibly as much as $4,000—a sizable sum of money in Russia for young men earning less than $60 a week.
The trouble was Alek had not marked the spot with a landmark on the shore, and it was taking a long time. But at least it was still light. Finally, at fifteen minutes before midnight, Nikolai spotted the white engine bright beneath the clear water right in the shadow of the reeds. Alek maneuvered them in close, and the other two locked the boat hooks onto the engine and heaved. The engine was sitting in about five feet of water and started to move, but not enough. It kept weighting itself back down to the bottom. “The damn thing’s attached to a boat,” said Anton. “One of us may have to go over the side and free it up — we’ll never pull the whole lot off the bottom.”
“Get
going, then,” said Alek. “I’m in charge of the boat, and Nikolai’s the biggest and strongest of us…he’s got to pull the engine in…I bet it weighs a ton.”
The six-foot-three-inch Anton grumbled a bit, kicked off his boots, removed his shirt, socks, and trousers, and eased himself over the side into the cold water. He took a deep breath and somersaulted down to the white engine, spotting the problem instantly. The metal point of the casing below the propeller had gone through the wooden floor of the Zodiac and jammed as it fell.
Anton surfaced and told Nikolai to pull the engine to an upright position so he could free it. Then he went back under and pushed the engine clear of the thin wooden decking. By the time he surfaced, Alek and Nikolai were pulling it on board.
With the weight of the engine now removed, the deck and the rubberized hull began to slowly float upward. Anton, hanging onto their own boat, kicked it away and slammed his foot down to keep his balance. As he did he let out a yell of revulsion. “SHIT! I’m treading on a dead dog or something…pull me out…”
Alek laughed. “It’s just weeds. Lake water is full of plants and stuff,” he said.
“Forget weeds,” replied Anton. “I was treading on something furry and dead…horrible.”
“Well, I’ll show you what you were treading on,” said Nikolai, plunging his eight-foot boat hook into the water, and casting around for a “catch.” “Here, help me pull this up.”
Both men heaved again, and they felt whatever it was squelch free of the thick bottom silt. It was big, bigger than a dog and it turned turtle as it rose like a long muddy log. Except this log had eyes, white staring eyes, which peered out of the thick mud covering the face and hair.
It was a slimy, oozing carcass from hell, decorated with a small gaping red scar, about two inches long, set like a thin hideous line of combat medals to the left of the central area of the chest.
Anton thought he might throw up, so he let go of the boat hook and turned away. But Nikolai was made of sterner stuff and he peered down into the water, making out the shape of another log on the bottom, this one with a distinctive blue cast.
He seized the other boat hook and dragged it around below the surface until it grabbed. Then he heaved a second body out of the mud, but this one did not roll. It came up cleaner, with the muddy side downward, and the discolored back of a denim jacket clung tightly to the corpse.
The peculiar aspect was, it too was decorated with an identical stark, thin red slit, but this one was about halfway down the back, on the left side of the body.
It was as if in life the cadavers had fought some kind of a monstrous duel with long hunting knives.
Or, alternately, had run into a skilled killer, who wielded a blade with the precision of an open-heart surgeon.
Alek and his friends had salvaged the remains of Pieter and Torbin. The River Police arrived inside forty-five minutes, and the plot seemed to become more obscure.
Colonel Borsov heard the news on his ship’s telephone, and he called Admiral Rankov immediately to inform him that he now had only five people missing, rather than seven. The two crew members were accounted for.
Rankov was truly mystified. In the back of his mind, he had considered the possibility that the two Russians might have murdered the old American men for their money and then taken off. He realized it was a somewhat outlandish thought, but it happened to be the only one he had at present.
Now he lacked even that unpromising lead. And there were yet more questions. Who killed the crew members? And could the aged Americans have had anything to do with the wrecked Kilos? Admiral Rankov was beginning to think not. How could they? The submarine convoy had been parked a mile offshore, and the party from the Midwest was comprised of elderly tourists, not trained frogmen.
The Admiral decided this was a blind alley, but he wondered whether the gallant Colonel Borsov might have been guarding his back when he was so completely certain about the ages and infirmities of the four American men and their nurse. And he made a note to check out the backgrounds of all five missing midwesterners. The Americans might conceivably have blundered in their cover story. But he knew, in his soul, that Arnold Morgan would have spun his tangled web too skillfully for that, and a feeling of despair settled in the pit of his stomach.
He turned his attention back to the papers on his desk. Before him was a somewhat short list of aircraft that had come out of the Arctic and journeyed south, high above the Russian mainland toward Turkey and the Arabian Sea, and the Persian Gulf. Generally, these were commercial aircraft from the West Coast of the USA and Canada that were taking the shortcut across the North Pole to the Middle East. Rankov’s men had turned up eight such flights in the past two months. All of them checked out, and all of them had arrived at their destination as recorded on their flight plan. Except for one.
The list in front of the Russian Admiral showed an American Airlines flight AW294, out of Los Angeles on May 1 (Russian Time), a Boeing 747, according to its flight plan bound for Bahrain international airport right on the Gulf. “Well,” mused the Admiral, “everything went according to plan as far as Russia…they arrived in our airspace on schedule over Murmansk at around 2230—just a few minutes late — and then flew more or less straight down longitude 34 degrees. According to this they were at around thirty-five thousand feet, making 440 knots and never slowed down.
“According to our men on the ground in the Emirates, however, that aircraft was never recorded at Bahrain. And was never scheduled to do so. They did not have a Boeing 747 in there anytime that morning. Not according to the records.”
The Admiral ran his finger farther down the report. “Here we are…American Airlines say they landed in Bahrain on time…the commercial flight was a charter for Arab businessmen…and they can’t understand why the Arabs have no record of it.”
Surprisingly, the Russian agent had also provided a verbatim report of his phone conversation, in which the American official mentioned they couldn’t “give a shit one way or another, since the aircraft is safely back in LA…and why anyone should want to fuck around checking the unbelievably unreliable Middle East airport data beats the hell out of me. Sorry I can’t help more. G’bye.”
“That,” said Admiral Rankov, “is the end of that. The aircraft didn’t even come to Russia. Just flew straight over. We don’t have any rights here. And anyway we’ve no reason to think that Flight AW294 was doing anything more than transporting Arab businessmen. That’s a real dead end…. I suppose it could have been a US aircraft heading for their Air Force base at Dahran, but there’s no chance of getting anything more out of them…still, I’d never be surprised if that bastard Morgan…”
Every time the giant ex-Naval Intelligence officer came up with a possible lead, any lead, he seemed forced to discard it as either too unlikely or just plain impossible. And yet…he still sensed the hand of Arnold Morgan behind all of this. He was not done trying yet. Rankov was developing an uneasy feeling that he was never going to prove anything, that the birds he sought had already flown the coop. Leaving not a feather behind.
On June 24 an initial report came to his office from the Naval Lieutenant Commander in charge of the salvage operation up in the canal. Work was proceeding slowly because barge hulls one and three were deeply embedded in the silted bottom of the waterway. Hull two, however, the back end of the articulated Tolkach, the one that had flipped right over, gave the evidence. The divers had found a succession of eight gaping holes, between four and five feet long, on the starboard side right where the bilge keel joins the underside of the ship. They had been evenly placed, fifty feet apart.
“Neat,” grunted Admiral Rankov, scanning the rest of the report, which he knew before he read it. “Burn marks plainly showing…hull metal taken out with oxyacetylene underwater cutters and forwarded to the old KGB forensic laboratories in Moscow…results not in.”
“And when they do arrive,” murmured the Chief of Russia’s Naval Staff, “They’re going to say, ‘SEMTEX’
and then, ‘Made in Czekoslovakia’…Neat, neater, neatest. Fuck it.”
It was now his duty to inform his superior, the C in C and Deputy Defense Minister, Admiral Karl Rostov, that in strictest confidence, the Navy now knew the barges had been professionally blown and sunk by persons unknown. The question would be, how to present this unpalatable truth to the people? If at all.
Vitaly Rankov understood the Kilo disaster would, in the end, be announced as an accident. He knew it would be picked up by the international media not as major news, but as news nonetheless. He could deal with that. What he could not deal with was his vision of the gloating, complacent face of Admiral Arnold Morgan. “Now then, old pal, you gotta start thinking about beefing up your security…stuff happens…”
“Jesus Christ,” said Admiral Rankov out loud. It was the first time he had ever accepted the distinct possibility that the United States might actually get away with this. Just as they had gotten away with the destruction of the two previous Kilos.
Meanwhile he picked up the telephone and instructed Lieutenant Commander Kazakov to find the pathologist’s report on the deaths of the two Andropov crew members. Their bodies had been flown to St. Petersburg for an autopsy, and Rankov wanted a preliminary view of the precise cause of death.
Lieutenant Commander Kazakov returned in thirty-five minutes with the faxed notes of the examining pathologist. The cause of death was identical for both men — heart failure caused by one single deadly straight incision made between the ribs by a large knife blade, which almost cleaved both hearts in two. One entry was from the front, one from the back. The body that contained the frontal injury, that of the steward Pieter, contained more water in the lungs than the other victim. However, neither man drowned. They were both knifed to death.
“Classic Special Forces,” muttered Admiral Rankov. “Just one wound. No mistakes. Professionals. Professional frogmen I’d guess, spotted by these two comedians from the Andropov, and summarily taken out. Before the killers swam on out to the barges and placed their charges on the hulls.
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