Three knocks sounded on the hatch door above his head, followed by a click, and it sprang open a couple of inches before its fall was interrupted by the safety catch.
Johnson reached up, unclipped the door, and lowered it fully. Above him stood Oleg and Katya. Both were slightly out of breath. Behind them was Yaroslav.
“What’s happening?” Johnson asked as he looked up at them.
But Oleg ignored the question. Instead he spoke quickly in a low, urgent tone. “Get these two down there, quickly, before the others come.” He indicated with his hand toward something that was out of Johnson’s line of sight from below.
Johnson guessed what was there. He took two steps up the ladder. Then he saw the motionless bodies of the two Russian policemen.
“Oh shit,” Johnson muttered. His first thought was of the potential consequences of killing two Russian cops on Russian soil. He looked at Katya. It was obviously her who had done it: she had a determined glint in her eye.
Oleg must have caught the nonverbal exchange. “Ask questions later,” he said. “Just get them down there. Quickly.”
He grabbed one of the bodies beneath the armpits and hoisted it toward the hatch opening, then swung the man’s legs down into the cavity. Johnson grabbed the legs while Oleg supported the torso, and slowly they maneuvered the body down onto the sleeping mat. Johnson pushed the corpse to one side, then reached up to repeat the exercise with the other body, which Oleg was already lifting into place.
Johnson was suddenly grateful for the ship owner’s loyalty to Gennady Yezhov and his family. It obviously ran deep. He could have simply turned him and Katya over to Severinov, the FSB officer, and the police and saved himself a world of trouble; but he had chosen to do the opposite.
Johnson took the radios and phones from the policemen’s pockets and belts and removed the batteries and SIM cards. He didn’t want them to be tracked to the ship’s position.
Katya found a couple of cleaning cloths in the changing room and began wiping up the blood that had been smeared across the blue linoleum floor.
“Did you have the suppressor on?” Johnson asked as he climbed up out of the hatch door. He had not heard any gunshots, but his first thought was that Severinov and his FSB colleague on the quay might have.
Katya nodded. “Of course.”
Johnson glanced at his watch. “The other two will be on the ship soon, once they realize something has happened to their men.”
“We’ll have to make a plan,” Oleg said.
“Yes, we need one,” Johnson said. He looked Oleg in the eye. “I appreciate what you are doing.”
“Gennady was my friend, which makes you my friend too,” Oleg said. “And Katya is his daughter. He was a good man. Our loyalty runs deep, my friend. And I hate the authorities here.”
He turned to Yaroslav. “Now, a plan. The FSB officer wants to see our registration documents and the crew list. I have them. We will both go and show them to him on the quayside, and we will tell him that the two police are still searching the ship. Then we will surprise them—we will deal with them.”
Oleg briefly lifted his jacket at the hip, revealing a pistol that was stuffed into his belt.
A slight tremor of alarm went through Johnson. Yes, they were backed into a corner and needed to get out of Russia as quickly as possible. But things were starting to spin out of control. “I don’t think you can afford to kill those two as well. If we’re caught, it will make things even worse.”
Oleg eyeballed him. “What else do you suggest, then?”
“Can you disable them? Incapacitate them? That would give us some options about what to do with them.”
Oleg glanced at Yaroslav. “We will go by instinct,” he said with a note of finality in his voice. “Come on. Let’s go.” He turned back to Johnson and Katya, his black eyes now glittering like quartz crystal. “You two wait here. Watch us through the porthole and get back down into the hiding place if you need to.”
He led the way out of the changing room door, Yaroslav following close behind.
“Let him deal with it his way,” Katya said when they had gone. She folded her arms firmly across her chest. “That is best.”
“Maybe it is best,” Johnson said. “But I am working for American intelligence here. And one of the guys out there is FSB, and the other is ex-KGB. We tend not to go around shooting each other if we can avoid it. Otherwise it tends to lead to serious repercussions. An eye for an eye and all that kind of thing.”
Katya did not reply.
Johnson bent down to peer out of the small porthole window that looked out from the port side of the ship.
The previous time Johnson had checked, two canal employees had been working on the lock, dressed in fluorescent yellow jackets. But they were now nowhere in sight. He assumed that Oleg must have paid them to disappear.
However, Severinov and the FSB officer were still standing on the lock side. Severinov checked his watch, then said something to the FSB officer and pointed at the ship. They were clearly becoming impatient. Severinov then removed a pistol from a holster at his waist and held it in his right hand. This didn’t look good. Were they going to come on board and carry out a gunpoint search for the police officers—and for Johnson?
A minute or so later, Oleg and Yaroslav came into view, striding toward the two men across the concrete surface. Severinov raised the pistol and said something, at which point Oleg, who was holding a few sheets of paper, stopped and threw up his hands. He was clearly objecting to Severinov’s gun.
Severinov eventually relented and lowered the gun, but he kept it in his right hand while they spoke. Oleg then pointed back at the ship and shrugged. Presumably he was referring to the two policemen. He held out the papers in front of Severinov and pointed to something on the sheets while Yaroslav positioned himself slightly behind the FSB man.
Severinov, still holding the gun, peered forward at the papers that Oleg was holding. While he was doing so, Oleg, without warning and without much windup, delivered a short jab with his right fist straight into Severinov’s face and then immediately grabbed Severinov’s right wrist with his left hand, twisting it sharply sideways.
Simultaneously, Yaroslav appeared to swing the side of his hand straight into the FSB man’s neck, somewhere around his Adam’s apple, causing him to buckle to his knees.
As Oleg grappled with Severinov, the oligarch’s gun went off with a crack that echoed around the lock and caused Johnson to jump slightly. But the round must have hummed off harmlessly away from Oleg, because he continued to pressure Severinov’s wrist, eventually causing him to drop the gun.
As soon as the gun dropped, Severinov, whose nose was streaming blood, tried to punch Oleg with his left hand. But Oleg ducked out of the way and followed up with another sharp right-hand blow to Severinov’s solar plexus, at which point Severinov doubled up and fell backward. As he tumbled, Oleg landed another blow somewhere on his face.
Within seconds, both Severinov and the FSB man were on the ground. Oleg delivered another blow to Severinov’s neck area, and the Russian collapsed onto his back. The FSB man was still on his knees, and Yaroslav punched him again in the face, causing him to also topple onto his back.
Oleg jumped on top of Severinov, flipped him over and pinned him to the ground, his hands behind his back. Then he pulled some heavy-duty cable ties from his pocket and lashed Severinov’s hands together, followed by his ankles. Yaroslav performed a similar maneuver on the FSB man.
The speed and ferocity with which the two Russian mariners had acted took Johnson by surprise—not to mention their bravery, given Severinov had been wielding a pistol. They were clearly well trained and well practiced.
Oleg went through both men’s pockets, removing two pistols, phones, wallets, and keys, which he shoved into his jacket pockets.
Next he turned in the direction of the ship’s gangway and beckoned to someone who was out of Johnson’s line of sight. Two other men appeared and together the
four of them picked up Severinov and the FSB man by the legs and under the armpits and carried them out of sight toward the gangway onto the ship.
A few minutes later, the door to the changing room swung open, and the four men and their captives appeared. Severinov and the FSB man were both yelling a string of foulmouthed obscenities in Russian, for which Johnson did not need a translator.
Oleg and his colleagues were by now sweating profusely from their efforts. Yaroslav’s hand was bleeding, had turned purple, and was visibly swollen as a result of the blows he had delivered, but he seemed to register no pain.
They dropped their captives next to each other on the linoleum floor and stood back, breathing heavily.
Severinov rolled over and immediately saw Johnson standing there.
“Ublyudok,” Severinov said. You bastard.
Johnson tried to remain expressionless, although he was sorely tempted to grin at the Russian. It had been barely ten months since the boot had been on the other foot and Johnson had been held captive by Severinov in Kabul.
“You deserve everything you get,” Johnson said to Severinov. “If I was a Russian, I’d doubtless put a bullet in the back of your head now—and you’d deserve that too.”
Johnson paused. There was a question he badly needed to ask Severinov, but doubted he would get an answer. “But given that I’m sparing you the bullet, what I want to know is, why did you kill Varvara Yezhova, and why are you now pursuing this lady?” He indicated toward Katya.
A faint trace of a smirk crossed Severinov’s face, then disappeared again. “Poshël ty.” Piss off.
Johnson shook his head. He had to try.
He turned away and shook Oleg’s hand. “That was a clean job. Well done. Can we discuss what we do with these two?”
Oleg nodded and opened the door onto the deck. The two men stepped outside.
Johnson asked Oleg for the men’s phones, which he handed over. Johnson checked the contents of both, but as he had half expected, there was nothing sensitive stored on them. They had both been careful. Instead, Johnson removed the SIM cards and batteries and threw them all into the lock, together with the radios and phones he had removed from the policemen. That would at least reduce the likelihood of the FSB pinpointing the two men’s whereabouts.
“We need to move immediately and get out of this lock,” Oleg said. “We have already been stationary here for twenty minutes. I radioed to the control center that we had a slight mechanical problem but that it was being fixed. If we stay any longer they will start asking awkward questions because other boats are approaching. Are you sure you don’t want me to put a bullet in their heads and sink them to the bottom of the canal along with the two policemen? It would be the safest thing. In Russia, if you disappear, you disappear. People do not ask many questions, even if the disappeared are police.”
Johnson was sorely tempted to give him the go-ahead, but if he was being given a choice, he couldn’t take that option. He knew that.
“You must do what you must do with the policemen. But personally, I don’t want any more unnecessary deaths. I will tell you what I was thinking of doing.”
Johnson began to detail what he had in mind.
Wednesday, April 9, 2014
Saimaa Canal
Ships on the Saimaa Canal were restricted to a speed of nine kilometers per hour to avoid damage to the banks and infrastructure. Yaroslav pushed the Sanets speed right up to the limit as they finally left Cvetotchnoe lock and forged north toward Ilistoye lock, a little over a mile away and still well within Russian territory.
After a lengthy discussion, Oleg and Johnson agreed on a plan to deal with the dead policemen as well as Severinov and the FSB man, whose identity card showed he was a senior officer named Leonid Pugachov.
About halfway between the two locks, the canal fairway passed through a small lake. Just after they reached the point where the lake broadened and they were out of sight of the locks, Oleg instructed Yaroslav to slow the Sanets to a crawl.
Johnson stood next to a lifeboat at the stern of the ship and watched, his arms folded, as two crewmen strapped heavy steel tubing to the bodies of the Russian policemen and threw them into the water.
Despite further grumbling from Oleg, who was still favoring a bullet in the back of their heads, Johnson had convinced him that for diplomatic reasons, the lives of Severinov and Pugachov should be spared.
Johnson suggested a simple enough plan to deal with them.
Once the policemen’s bodies had sunk out of sight, making it impossible for Severinov and Pugachov to witness what had happened to them, the crew carried the duo up from below deck to the stern of the ship.
Once Severinov and Pugachov were at the stern, the crew untied their arms and legs and threw them both into the water.
There were no backward glances from the crewmen as the pair hit the water; it looked as though they had done it before.
“Are they going to survive in this water?” Johnson asked Oleg. He wanted to seriously inconvenience and delay them, not kill them.
The shipowner shrugged. “If they swim fast, unfortunately they probably will survive. It’s probably three or four degrees above freezing.”
Severinov had let fly with a stream of obscenities, mostly relating to Johnson’s mother and his parentage, as he was deposited into the inky black canal. But he immediately began to swim using a slow crawl stroke toward the lake shore, which was perhaps three hundred yards away. Pugachov looked less confident in the water and thrashed around, deploying a rudimentary doggy paddle.
Johnson could see that, even assuming they made it to the shore, the pair would also need to scramble probably another half a mile, if not more, through the forest before reaching the highway.
But he had already checked with Oleg the likely timings for the Sanets to pass through the remaining locks and the customs post and get over the border.
“The water is very cold,” Oleg said. “They will not be in a good state when they reach the shore and will not be able to move fast. The forest is thick. Don’t worry. We will have plenty of time to get through Ilistoye and Pälli.”
Johnson was reassured, but he still remained worried. His initial instinct had been that Severinov and Pugachov must surely have notified the border authorities that they were pursuing two fugitives who were escaping by ship. But if so, why hadn’t the canal been closed down? Maybe Pugachov hadn’t been sure that Johnson and Katya were on a boat and had either not put the calls in or had not been able to persuade the authorities to close the canal without knowing for certain. He and Severinov had not given the impression at Cvetotchnoe lock that they knew their targets were on the Sanets—they had sent the policemen on board for what seemed like a speculative check.
Meanwhile, the crew set to work to clean up any traces of blood from the deck, the changing room, and the underfloor hiding area.
As the Sanets neared Ilistoye lock, which like Cvetotchnoe was controlled remotely, Johnson and Katya retreated into the hiding place.
They remained there in silence in the dark, the light switched off, as the ship traveled the remaining kilometer and a half to Pälli lock, where the Russian border checkpoint was located. Johnson felt the ship bump slightly on the steep concrete sides of the lock as it entered and then sensed it moving upward as the water level inside the lock slowly rose.
After the Sanets came to rest in the lock, there was silence for at least five minutes. All Johnson could hear was the distant faint rumble of the idling giant diesel engines at the far end of the ship.
Then came the sound of footsteps on deck and voices that grew more distinct.
A creak came from above as the door to the crew changing room was opened. The voices were now loud, the footsteps echoing like irregular drumbeats on the floor above them. Oleg was conducting a tense-sounding discussion with a man who was clearly from the Russian border authority and who was asking a string of questions about the cargo and crew members.
The offic
ial asked to see the crew’s passports. Oleg replied that the documents were upstairs on the bridge, and at that point the door creaked again, and there was the sound of retreating footsteps.
Johnson found it impossible to relax. He could feel his heart hammering in his chest. Every sound was magnified, and every voice seemed a potential threat. The ship remained stationary.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Wednesday, April 9, 2014
Saimaa Canal
The water was only a few degrees above freezing. Severinov knew that because of the sharp involuntary gasp he had given upon hitting the water, the stinging pain from the cold, and his racing heart as he hyperventilated for a minute or so.
He continued to swim, but after a while he could no longer feel his feet or hands. His arms and legs felt incredibly heavy and were barely doing what he was trying to coax them to do.
The cold had penetrated his nose, sinuses, and his temples, which initially felt as though sharp needles were stuck into them but were now just numb.
But the Russian oligarch was a survivor—his instinct for self-preservation was not going to allow him to surrender. He was not a swimmer, but he somehow continued to turn his arms over and pull back in a crawl that was scarcely functional.
It crossed his mind that if he removed his jacket and pants, he might be able to swim more easily, but he knew his numb fingers would prevent him from undoing buttons and zippers and that he might drown while trying to undress. The waterlogged clothing was heavy, but perhaps keeping it on might give him some insulation against the cold. It was easier to keep going.
The distance from where he had been unceremoniously thrown off the stern of the timber ship to the safety of shore felt much farther than it actually was. It took Severinov more than fifteen minutes to complete.
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