Mirage tof-9

by Clive Cussler

  Cabrillo shifted his angle to see the driver standing on the stoop. He could only see a sliver of the man and just a hint of the color of the flowers he carried. And then he took a second glance at the truck. The name under the painted bouquet: EMPIRE FLORISTS.

  The connections came as fast as the synapses in his brain could fire. Vermont was the Green Mountain State. It was its neighbor, New York, that carried the Empire nickname. No way would a florist deliver this far out of state. They would have called a local business to drop off a bouquet of whatever the customer requested. Someone coming all the way from New York wasn’t here to deliver flowers. Pytor Kenin’s name popped into his head, and he knew that if Kenin used local talent to kill the world’s foremost expert on Nikola Tesla, they would be based out of Brighton Beach, New York, aka Little Odessa.

  “Wes!” Cabrillo shouted, turning to see that Tennyson was already reaching for the front door. “No!”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Tennyson started to pull on the heavy brass handle when the door burst against his face as the florist kicked it in from the outside. The professor fell backward onto the floor only seconds before the muted buzz of a machine pistol on full automatic filled the parlor followed by two muted blasts from Cabrillo’s silenced FN pistol that sent the phony florist reeling into a bed of rosebushes.

  Tennyson’s fall had saved him. He had dropped to the floor below the volley that sprayed the air above him. Cabrillo cursed himself for being two seconds too late to stop the attack on the professor, yet he was thankful that Tennyson did not appear to have stopped a bullet. He barely had time to tell him to play dead.

  In the eerie silence that followed, Cabrillo heard two men speaking in Russian as they rushed across the backyard and into the kitchen. When they reached the parlor, it was empty but for Tennyson’s body and a small yellow carpet of scattered daffodils. Only the shattered front door showed any sign of splattered crimson. Unknown to the men, Cabrillo was hiding behind coats in the hall closet as he stared through a crack in the door.

  “That him?” one of the killers asked.

  His accomplice nodded. “Right here. Vermont driver’s license issued to Wesley Tennyson.”

  In the closet, Cabrillo held his breath, hoping that Tennyson was savvy enough to play a good corpse. The only hitch was, there was no blood on him.

  As if suddenly thinking of something, one of the killers stood and looked out the doorway. “Where’s Vladimir?”

  “He probably went to the van to get the gas cans to burn the house.”

  “I can see through the van’s windshield. He’s not in it.”

  “I’ll check the front,” the man standing in the doorway muttered. “You go upstairs and search the bedrooms. I’ll take the downstairs after I find Vladimir.”

  “Don’t forget to turn on the gas on the stove.”

  The man stepped out in front of the house while his co-conspirator climbed the stairs.

  He only took five steps past the front door when he spied Vladimir’s remains lying in a bed of roses, his dead eyes staring into the sun. He whirled around and ran back into the house, shouting his colleague’s name. As soon as he burst into the entryway, he saw a man sitting on a nearby divan. Surprise cost him the three microseconds Cabrillo needed to put a bullet in his forehead precisely between the eyes.

  Too late, the man on the stairs realized something was wrong. Cabrillo fired a second time, and a red hole appeared in the Russian’s neck.

  Cabrillo looked down on the body that had fallen across Tennyson’s feet. Then he hoisted the corpse and dropped it on top of the other. Only then did he kneel beside Tennyson.

  “Are you all right, Professor?”

  Tennyson raised his head and stared into Cabrillo’s eyes. “No, I’m not all right. I lead a quiet, dignified life, and within five minutes I have three dead men in my flower bed and entryway. What am I going to tell the police?”

  “Not to worry. Have you got a wheelbarrow?”

  “I have one in the tool shed.”

  “May I borrow it?”

  Tennyson looked at him. “What for?”

  “I’m going to haul the bodies out to the van and hide them. Do you have any ideas for a nice secluded area?”

  Tennyson thought a moment. “There’s an old gravel pit that’s filled with water. Sport divers don’t go into it because of chemicals left over when it was abandoned.”

  “Where can I find it?”

  “About ten miles south of town. It’s rough going. It runs through a thick wooded area. The road to it hasn’t been used for thirty years.”

  “Sounds perfect,” said Cabrillo. He handed Tennyson the keys to his car. “You lead me to the gravel pit as soon as you pack.”

  “Pack?”

  “Yes, pack. Your life isn’t worth two cents if you stay here. My corporation owns a nice little condo on the island of Antigua. You can go there and relax on the beach until I let you know it’s safe and there will be no more attempts on your life.”

  Tennyson asked the obvious question: “Why do these people want to kill me?”

  “You know too much about Tesla.”

  Without further talk, Cabrillo loaded the van with the cadavers while Tennyson quickly threw clothes and a shaving kit into a suitcase.

  It took forty minutes to drive the ten miles. Cabrillo took the lead, followed by Tennyson in his rented Porsche. The professor honked the horn once for a right turn and twice for a left. Once they left the main road for a barely visible dirt track through the woodlands, their speed dropped to fifteen miles an hour. Three times they were forced to stop and heave dead branches off the old road. Finally, they reached the abandoned gravel pit.

  Old rusting equipment lay scattered around the edge of the pit. Battered and rotted wooden buildings were all that were left of the offices and crew’s mess hall. Cabrillo stepped from the van and stared over the lip of the pit. The water looked yellowish brown and smelled like sulfur. He could only guess how deep the water was and hope it was enough to cover the van.

  He put a rock on the accelerator, shifted the transmission into drive, and watched as the van jerked forward, dropped over the brink, and impacted the water with a formless splash and slowly sank into the watery ooze.

  Then Cabrillo sat on a large rock, deep in thought, as he waited for the van to sink out of sight. He knew who hired the assassins and why, yet there were other questions.

  Amateurs, he said to himself. Why did Pytor Kenin send a trio of amateurs?

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  When the mast rose out of the sea like a shark’s telltale fin, it barely cut through the water and left no trail of churned oceanic phosphorus, no presence other than a tiny blip undetectable to all but the most trained observers. Leviathan showed itself yet remained hidden in its watery realm.

  Forty feet below this thin stalk of metal lay one of the most devastating weapons ever devised by man. Named Akula, or shark, this class of Russian fast-attack submarine was a true predator of the sea. Measuring more than a football field in length and displacing some twelve thousand tons when submerged, the hunter/killer boasted multiple torpedo tubes, rocket launchers, and a sonar suite that could detect the minutest sound over vast distances. She carried a crew of seventy-three led by one Kapitan Anton Patronov.

  Patronov was so fair-haired and pale-skinned that he almost appeared albino, and with an upturned nose that looked like the double barrels of a shotgun, he was considered porcine as well. His wet lips were overly large, and he had a cauliflower ear from his days as a boxer in the old Soviet naval academy. He wasn’t particularly tall, but had wide shoulders that sloped up to a bullet head that he kept trimmed in a half-inch buzz of pure white hair. What he lacked in mannish charm he made up for in capability and utter ruthlessness. He’d turned down promotions twice so that he could stay at sea, and because many years ago he was the youngest sub captain in modern Russian history, he had more experience as a submariner than anyone else in the Navy.


  Patronov was just stepping from his cubicle-sized cabin when the flash traffic came off the comm line. Over the Tannoy came the cry, “Captain to the shack. Secure transmission for your eyes only.”

  “Clear the way,” he growled as he made his way aft to the radio room. He possessed a low, rasping voice with a dark inflection that commanded instant respect. Seamen and officers alike pressed themselves against the tight companionway walls to ease his passage.

  The radio shack was a confined space made more hospitable to electronics than man. Yet somehow two young techs were shoehorned into the room, one with headphones draped around his neck while the other sat back as far as the confines would allow and translated the burst transmission.

  “We had an Ohio on the plot,” Patronov said as he entered the space. “Tell me this is more important.”

  The Akula had been trailing an Ohio-class submarine, one of the legs of America’s defensive triad of nuclear deterrent, when she was called to the surface by a ULF summons for immediate data download. “It’s in code,” the radioman said without meeting his captain’s glare. He held the flimsy paper over his shoulder in hopes it would be snatched away and his culpability in ending the sub chase was at an end.

  “Damn.” Patronov ripped the thin piece of paper out of the sailor’s hand, snapped it so he could inspect the type, and cursed again. “Kenin. He’s been the pain in my ass since the academy.”

  “Sir?” It was obvious from his tone that the young radio operator hadn’t expected such disrespect from his captain for the fleet’s commanding admiral.

  “Relax, Pavel. When the time comes for them to pin captain’s bars on your shoulders, you will curse my name ten times worse than I curse my first commander.”

  “Yes, sir. I mean, no, sir. I mean…” The young radioman wisely stopped talking and kept his stare riveted on his equipment. The second radio operator swiveled in his chair and asked, “Will we reacquire the Americans?”

  Patronov shot him a look that twisted the tech back in his seat so that he too stared at the radios. “It took us a week of searching the first time,” he said as he left the room. “It will probably take me that long just to decrypt this damn message.”

  It took him the better part of an hour to decode the page-length missive. Because this was a private communiqué between the two men and not an official order, he had to use a private codebook that Kenin had given only to his most loyal followers. Patronov knew that such a book was in the possession of senior captain Sergei Karpov. Karpov was currently on deployment aboard a Typhoon-class missile boat with a complement of twenty nuclear-tipped ICBMs. Patronov knew Sergei well and knew that if Kenin ever ordered a secret launch, Karpov would press the button as fast and as hard as he could.

  Truth told, Patronov admitted, so would he.

  With China ascending as a world leader and America no longer willing to fulfill its role as a superpower, a void was opening that a man like Admiral Kenin could exploit. The dragon and eagle would eventually fight it out in some form, but it would be the bear that would emerge victorious.

  Patronov read through the decrypted message for a second time before hitting the comm button on his desk that connected him to the bridge. “Emergency order. XO to the captain’s cabin. Helm, make your course two three-five. Course to be corrected later when plot is resolved. Speed all ahead full. The American boomer is no longer a target. Repeat, the American is no longer a target.”

  Seven seconds later, the sub’s executive officer, her second-in-command, knocked on Patronov’s cabin door.

  “Enter.”

  Paulus Renko stepped through the door and stood as stiff as a ramrod until his captain waved him into a chair. The younger man was the opposite of Patronov physically. He was as handsome as a model on a recruiting poster, a hairsbreadth shy of the maximum height allowance on a submarine, and had a fencer’s lean build, with broad shoulders and a tapered waist and hips.

  Patronov eyed him for a moment, his ugly countenance giving away nothing. He sighed as if reaching a weighty decision. “I’ve been tasked with telling you, Commander Renko, that you will never deploy as an executive officer ever again.”

  Renko’s blue eyes widened in shock and his mouth gaped.

  “Admiral Kenin has communicated to me that following this mission you will have a boat of your own.” Patronov stood and struck his hand across the small desk that took up a quarter of his cabin’s floor space. “Congratulations.”

  Renko’s face went from ashen fear to flushed jubilation in the blink of an eye. He shook his captain’s hand, his grin widening until he could no longer contain himself, and he whooped aloud.

  “I can’t believe this,” he said when he could finally speak. “I didn’t know I was even up for promotion.”

  “You weren’t,” Patronov said as he retook his seat. His chilly tone cooled the room by twenty degrees, and Renko’s smile turned a little sickly.

  He fumbled back into his chair. “Sir?”

  “Let me tell you a story,” Patronov said in a disarming tone as if the frostiness of the past few seconds had never happened. “Eighteen months ago, before you joined this crew, we were tasked to act as a dive platform on a salvage job. It took place close to the eastern seaboard of the United States, though not in her territorial waters. We were on-station for a week, and the divers recovered items of a technical nature from a sunken ship.” He forestalled his subordinate’s obvious question by adding, “Admiral Kenin never cleared me, so I have no idea what they took off the derelict. All I know is, the wreck was about a hundred years old, and Kenin felt the reward justified the risk of discovery by America’s Coast Guard or Navy.

  “I just got a message from the Admiral that he’s learned that another group is showing unusual interest in the derelict and may dive on it soon.”

  “Who is this group?”

  “American mercenaries,” Patronov said with obvious distaste. “It was decided the first time we were there not to destroy the wreck so we wouldn’t draw attention to it. Now Kenin wants us to blow it off the bottom with a couple of torpedoes. To do that, I need your authorization as XO to fire live shots as per procedure.”

  “And if I go along with this, I get promoted?”

  “Quid pro quo.”

  Renko rubbed his lantern jaw. “I take it neither this act nor the original dives were authorized by the Navy High Command?”

  “I’m sure a few know about it, those closest to Admiral Kenin, but, no, this operation is strictly off the books.”

  “What about the mercenaries?”

  “According to Kenin’s source, they aren’t capable of detecting us, let alone fighting us. We’ll sneak in low and slow, pop two USET-80s into the wreck, and be gone before they know we were there. If they happen to have divers on the bottom, well, that’s just bad luck for them. So what do you say, Paulus, do you want to be a captain at the age of thirty-one? That would, by the way, give you a two-year head start on breaking my service record.”

  Renko stood and reached across the desk to shake his captain’s hand. “I’m your man, sir.”

  “Very good, alert the torpedo room that we will be loading two tubes with the antisubmarine fish. We have a good three days’ sailing to get into position, but I want them prepped down there.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Patronov jotted some coordinates onto a piece of scratch paper. “That’s the GPS location for the wrecked ship. Refine and plot our new course. Remain at full speed.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.” Renko pivoted on his heel and left the cabin.

  Patronov could tell his subaltern was excited about his future prospects, but, then again, all deals with the devil promised much. It wasn’t until much later you learn the costs.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “You are the very picture of boredom,” Max said, stepping off the elevator at the rear of the op center.

  Cabrillo settled his coffee cup into a holder built into the Kirk Chair, the central command pla
tform in the middle of the electronics-packed, low-ceilinged space. On the main view screen was a murky video feed coming up from a tethered probe poking around the bottom of the Atlantic nearly three hundred feet down. Details were hard to come by as the unmanned submersible ran its cameras over the hull of an unidentified ship.

  “Got that right,” he replied. “Twenty-two wrecks checked and twenty-two consecutive goose eggs.”

  “So what are we looking at?” Max asked as he crossed the room with a plate of food in his hand. He set it next to Cabrillo’s elbow. “Fish tacos, by the way. Fresh pico de gallo, but the chef hid a ghost chili in there, so watch yourself.”

  “Thanks. I’m starved.” Cabrillo ate half of a taco in a single bite, managing to not ruin his shirt when the shell inevitably collapsed. “What we are seeing, if my five days of experience has taught me anything, is a Boston long-liner that sank in 1960 or so.”

  “Not our target?”

  “Not even close. Do you know how many wrecks there are off the East Coast?”

  “About thirty-five hundred,” Max replied. “And most of them are clustered between Richmond, Virginia, and Cape Cod. Less than a quarter of them are identified. Which leaves us searching a lot of haystacks for a single needle.”

  “You are the paragon of the understatement.”

  In the days since Cabrillo’s return to the ship after his ill-fated meeting with Wesley Tennyson, the Oregon had been scouring the seafloor with side-scan sonar looking for the mysterious mine tender that the professor said had been modified by Nikola Tesla. Murph and Stone had worked out the search parameters and overlaid it with a grid of shipwrecks in the region. There was good news. Since these waters were so heavily fished, all bottom obstructions, like boulders, outcroppings, and sunken ships, were clearly marked, though rarely identified by name.

  That left them with forty possible candidates to explore with their remotely operated vehicle, named Little Geek after a similar-looking ROV from the movie The Abyss. They could safely ignore wooden-hulled ships and natural rock formations by first verifying each target with a magnetometer to detect the presence of metal. Once they did have a steel-hulled wreck, it was a laborious process of lowering the suitcase-sized robot through the moon pool to the bottom and visually inspecting each wreck. Identification was more difficult because many of the vessels were festooned with nets torn off fishing trawlers as they plied the seas. Nets that not only obscured the wrecks but made it easy for an ROV to get trapped.