by Unknown
“My name is Joshua McGowan. I’m a friend of Ron Finn’s.
What’s your name?”
“Where is he?”
She stared at him without blinking. He looked away before he answered.
“He’s dead.”
She remembered Ron Finn clutching his chest and the red stain, and she shuddered.
“Where are we?”
“The Sea of Okhotsk, north of Japan.” Valeria took a deep breath. He wasn’t pressing her with questions and she was relieved. She was not in the mood for another interrogation.
“My name is Valeria Konstantinova. Are you CIA?” His face broke into a smile. She was annoyed that her question amused him, but he had a beautiful smile.
“CIA? No. Not really.”
“What, then?” Valeria demanded
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“I’m with Naval Intelligence.”
“Then you are a spy.”
Josh shrugged. “I guess I am a spy.”
“Why have you done this to me?”
His eyebrows crossed in confusion. “Done what?”
“Why have you brought me to my death?” His eyebrows crossed more and he looked angry.
“I haven’t brought you to your death. I saved you from it.
You’re still alive, aren’t you?”
His anger infuriated her. How could he dare to presume he was doing her a favor?
“If you people had left me alone I would still be safe in that prison and they might have let me out soon.” He laughed again, and his contempt only made her anger grow.
“There’s no way they were ever going to let you out of that prison,” he said. “You were a ward of the State. You were an embarrassment. You should be glad we busted you out.”
“I’m not. I was perfectly happy where I was,” Valeria said, her voice rising with her anger. She wasn’t really happy in that prison, but she found herself arguing for the sake of argument.
“And I suppose I should be happy to be here? Maybe you have a way to get us out of this?”
She indicated the open water around them.
“I’m working on it,” Josh said, his voice growing soft.
She glared at him, then looked away. She was ready for a fight, but he backed down. Now she didn’t know what to think.
Josh felt like an idiot. If there had been a solid wall nearby he would have banged his head against it. How could he be so callous? How could he expect her to speak to him now when he just destroyed any chance of trust in him she might have had?
He came all this way just to blow the whole operation with a half brained comment. So what else was new?
They were drifting into a debris field, what remained of the sailboat floating on the water. Most of it was charred timbers with Change of Heart
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jagged ends. Josh leaned over the side of the raft to push them away before they punched a hole in the only thing that kept them dry. One piece of debris caught his attention and he paddled toward it. It was a cheap styrofoam cooler, melted on one side and marked with black streaks of soot. He leaned over the side as far as he could to reach for it, almost flipping the raft. The cooler bobbed and drifted away. He reached again, just touching it with the tips of his fingers. For that much trouble there’d better be a steak in it.
Finally he hooked his finger in the hole melted in the side and pulled it aboard. Valeria looked as exited as he felt. He yanked off the lid and his excitement fell. The only thing inside was a clear plastic jar of milk with a screw top lid. He opened the jar and sniffed. The rancid smell made him wince.
“Oh man,” Josh said, wrinkling his nose.
It smelled as bad as some of the things he threw out of his refrigerator. As he poured out the spoiled milk, he had an idea. It was a sunny, beautiful morning; it might work. He rinsed out the jar, wiped out the salt water with his shirt, and took off his shoes.
Valeria watched him unlace the shoes, her face an amusing look of bewilderment. He tied one end of each of the laces together, making a long string. With the lid screwed on tight, he tied one end of the string around the lip just below the mouth of the jar.
The other end of the string he tied to a rubber ring on the side of the raft, then tossed the empty jar in the water.
He turned back to Valeria. She was looking at him, a puzzled expression etched on her face, sitting with her knees pulled up to her chest and her arms wrapped around them.
“Are you cold?” Josh said.
He took off his jacket and handed it to her. She covered herself with it like a blanket. Josh glanced at her bare feet. Around her left ankle was a tattoo of two roses. The thorny stems of the roses were twisted together in a braided design that circled her ankle and ended with the two flowers facing each other.
“Interesting tattoo. Where’d you get it?” Valeria glanced at her ankle. She laughed and her whole face 110
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glowed, startling Josh.
“In Shanghai. I got very drunk on cheap Indonesian vodka and someone talked me into it. He-” She cut herself off. She was blushing. Her happy glow faded. “It was a long time ago.” Josh nodded, unsure what she meant. She didn’t seem to want to talk about it. He wanted to ask her what a KGB agent was doing getting drunk in Shanghai, but thought better of it.
They sat quietly for a few minutes before Josh remembered the jar. He looked for it over the side and saw it had worked.
He pulled it back in and showed Valeria. Her wide eyes showed her amazement. The hot sun had condensed the moisture on the inside of the jar while it floated in the cold water. In the bottom of the jar was about half an inch of distilled water.
“Thirsty?” Josh said.
He opened the jar and handed it to her. She gulped it down.
Now if he only had a fishing pole.
Chapter 6
The phone on the nightstand beside the bed rang. Igor Potapemkin woke, but kept his eyes shut, waiting for it to ring again. It did and Anna, his wife, laying in the bed beside him, stirred. He waited for her to answer it, even though he knew it was for him.
A call at that hour could only be for him, and he already guessed what it was about.
Potapemkin was the former Director of the KGB and, although he no longer officially held that post, was still head of the Department of Intelligence in the National Soviet Party. Urgent matters concerning the security of the Party were brought to his attention in every instance, no matter what the hour.
He listened to his wife answer the phone, then rolled over when she said it was for him.
“Da,” he said into the receiver.
“Forgive me for bothering you, Director,” the man on the other end said. It was Virolchik, who seemed to be at the Nominskevich building at all hours of the day and never seemed to have a life away from work. “We have just received a coded communication from Colonel Mironov.” Potapemkin sat up in bed and flicked on the light, squeezing his eyes shut. It was just as he thought.
“Read it to me.”
Virolchik cleared his throat. Potapemkin imagined him standing in the cramped offices, wearing his short wool pants and overstarched white shirt, holding the printout from the Depart-111
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ment of Communications.
“‘Soon it will be time to celebrate. The girl will be in my hands before the end of the week. They will hold parades in my honor. Check your files for J. Mc-, Mu-’”
“McGowan. Yes, I know the file. I have one of my own.
What does he say about this McGowan?”
“Nothing.”
Potapemkin scratched his eyebrow. What was Mironov trying to tell him? How was McGowan involved? He had no idea where McGowan might be or what Mironov had in mind, but he had ways to find out. This might be his chance to kill McGowan, and if he could do it before Mironov, he would get the credit for eliminating a persistent thorn in their side. It occurred to Potapemkin this was exactly what Mironov
wanted from him, but that was just as well. One way or another he had a chance to take out one of their enemies and such an opportunity was never passed up.
“Have my file on McGowan ready for me when I get there.
I will arrive in one hour. And if you can find Mironov’s files on McGowan and Valeria Konstantinova, have them ready for me as well.”
“Yes, sir,” Virolchik replied, and hung up.
Potapemkin dressed and drove to the Nominskevich building in central Moscow in the darkness before dawn. While he drove the quiet city streets, his mind worked like the machinery of a clock. The Russian President and his administration were now accusing the Americans of involvement in the escape of the girl. It was a weak attempt by an administration that showed no backbone, which was further proof they were unable to command a nation. Mironov claimed to be on the verge of securing the girl, which would be a significant personal victory for himself and a major political coup for the Party. Now they had a solid chance to capture one of the most annoying enemies of the Party and expose the west for their unscrupulous spying tactics.
This would win a great deal of favor for the Party and further build its strength to regain power, while it worked to erode the Change of Heart
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mythical esteem of the so-called free market economy the current administration had chosen to base itself upon. There were at least a dozen possibilities facing the Party he could think of off the top of his head, and this made him smile. He would help Mironov get his glory because it would be for the good of the Party. At the same time, he would gain favor for himself, and when the Party took over there would be a position of prominence for him.
Virolchik proved his worth once again. All three files were on Potapemkin’s desk when he arrived and there was a fresh pot of his favorite Chinese tea waiting. He did not know how Virolchik managed to gain access to Mironov’s locked files, and he didn’t ask. It was just a shame he chose not to use his skills in the field.
With a cup of hot tea, Potapemkin sat down to re-examine a file he had once committed to memory.
His own file on McGowan was comparable to Mironov’s except for some details Mironov collected through personal involvement. The file was not extensive, but contained records of one KGB event after another hindered or ruined in some way by the efforts of a single man. None of this was new to him.
McGowan was a graduate of the United States Naval Academy, served a few years aboard one ship or another, then transferred to a Special Forces outfit, where he began his career of interfering with the functioning of his KGB. Filling the next several pages was a list of events with locations and dates and two or three lines of description, including the events following McGowan’s transfer from the Special Forces to a formerly insignificant branch of Naval Intelligence. The most recent entry was more than three years ago, shortly after the downfall of the Soviet Union and the breakup of the KGB. With a pen, Potapemkin jotted the name of Valeria Konstantinova at the end of the list in his own file. Mironov’s file he left blank. No doubt Mironov would have much better information to add when he returned.
What McGowan’s file did not contain was what Potapemkin needed to know most: personal background. As far as he and the KGB knew, Joshua McGowan had no past before he entered the American Naval Academy. This was very frustrating. The 114
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best way to get to an enemy was through someone he cared for.
Joshua McGowan had weaknesses just like anybody else. They just hadn’t been discovered yet.
The file on Konstantinova was even more interesting. Only in her mid-twenties, she was the daughter of the descendant of a relative of Czar Nikolai. Had she been born a hundred years earlier she would have been a princess. Under Soviet rule she was a whore for the KGB.
Konstantinova was one of Mironov’s projects. His material on her was impressive. During her short service she slept with or was a mistress to more than twenty of the most powerful men in the Kremlin at the time. She appeared to be very persuasive.
Mironov’s notes detailed numerous instances where information gained through her was used as leverage against all the men she was assigned to “cover”. Whether or not their actions or words were actually subversive to the Party’s cause, Mironov was able to persuade most to work in the Party’s best interests. The others quietly stepped down and Mironov simply used Konstantinova once again on their replacements as his own wedge to keep them in line.
Using beautiful young women in this manner was a common practice in the KGB. For whatever reason, Konstantinova seemed to be better at it than the others. Potapemkin had his own beliefs as to why.
Today, however, Konstantinova was a serious threat to the security of the Party. Were she to share what she knew with western intelligence agencies, the Party would be set back a hundred years and they might as well all be princesses.
Therefore, it was imperative that she be brought back to the motherland. Somehow, Potapemkin suspected McGowan was the key to all of this. If they could find him, he would take them to her. Then they could kill two birds with one bomb. Potapemkin chuckled as he sipped his tea.
* * * *
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Katherine Filmore did not sleep the entire night. Normally she was a nervous person. Today she was terribly nervous. There was no word from the Monticello. Nothing, not even a Morse code signal. Finally, at 7 a.m., she could wait no longer and got on the phone. Her first call went to Walt.
She had to wait for Sally, Walt’s secretary, to put her through.
When Walt answered, she had to fight her impatience and speak calmly.
“Good morning, Walt. At least I hope it was for you.”
“Not particularly, Katherine, and I don’t expect it to get any better. Josh hasn’t contacted me yet and I suppose you’ve called because he hasn’t contacted you, either.”
“Precisely, Walt. The Monticello was supposed to report to me as soon as it was out of Russian waters. That should have been hours ago.”
She tapped her pen on the pad of paper. This was a difficult situation and it was not getting any better.
“Relax, Katherine. I’m sure there’s a good explanation for this. Remember, you insisted I put Josh on this job, and you know how he is. He was probably celebrating and spilled a beer on the radio. I’m sure when the Monticello reaches port they’ll contact us.”
Katherine’s impatience turned to annoyance.
“Your lack of concern doesn’t fool me, Walt. I know you’re just as worried as I am.”
“You’re right, I am.”
Katherine took a deep breath.
“Thank you for admitting that. Now, what I need is some sort of confirmation that the mission is proceeding and I need to have it now. Somehow we managed to get the President involved and he wants a report from me this morning and I have nothing to give him. I need you to bail me out. I know you’ve got access to a satellite. I want to use it to find the Monticello.” Walt was quiet and she knew the next thing he told her was not going to be good.
“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Katherine. I’ve already put the 116
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satellite in orbit on another job. I can’t move it now to search the Sea of Okhotsk for a ship that’s probably not even there anymore.”
“You’re killing me, here, Walt.”
“I’m sorry I can’t help you, Katherine. I have a suggestion, though. The USS America carrier group is still in the area. They’d be able to make a search in a lot less time than the satellite.”
“Ok, Walt. I’ll consider it.”
She hung up. The carrier group was a good plan. With their radar coverage they could search large chunks of ocean. The problem, of course, was sending a carrier task force into Russian waters. They’d think it was an attack. This mission was important, but it did not warrant starting the next war. She picked up the phone again, this time dialing the Pentagon.
Adm. Adam Camilleri never use
d a secretary. Filmore always liked that about him. Camilleri was the Commander of the U.S.
submarine fleet in the Pacific theater, and he was her best hope to get out of this difficult situation. He liked to hear from her and she decided to use this to her advantage.
“Camilleri,” the admiral said when he answered the phone.
He sounded grumpy. It was already off to a bad start.
“Good morning, Adam,” she said.
The tone of his voice changed instantly.
“Katherine. What a delight to hear your voice so early in the morning.”
“It’s good to hear you, too, Adam. I’m glad I have a chance to call.”
“Ah, I heard about your meeting with the President. What’s that all about?”
Katherine cringed. This was going to be more difficult than she thought.
“Well, it has to do with a certain mission I’ve been assigned.
Which is why I’m calling you.” This wasn’t working the way she hoped. “You see, I’ve misplaced a ship and I was calling to ask your help to find it.”
“Where was this ship supposed to be?” Change of Heart
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“The Sea of Okhotsk.”
“Ooo, that’s bad.”
The pen in Filmore’s hand thumped on the pad. She could tell he was losing interest. She cursed herself for not thinking this out more thoroughly.
“You see the situation I’m in, Adam. I can’t exactly send in a covert search party.”
“But you’d like to know if you can send in a sub.”
“Yes,” Filmore said, holding her breath.
If something happened to those people and they needed help, this might be the only chance they had to get out of there before they were picked up by the Russians and arrested as spies. That would not be good for anybody.
Camilleri was quiet on his end. This was a delicate point and Filmore didn’t want to get pushy.
“I’ve got the Dallas about two hundred miles from that area.
That’s the best I’ve got,” Camilleri said.
“I’ll take it. How soon can you get it there?”
“Eight to ten hours. But to do that they’ll have to give up on their current mission. It might also make them vulnerable,” he said.