Kilo Class (1998)

by Patrick Robinson

  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.

  “Strange how I know so well what must have happened. Even stranger, that I don’t have one shred of evidence for either crime. Just four geriatric Americans, two of whom can barely walk, and all of whom are even beyond the suspicion of a seasoned KGB officer like Colonel Borsov. And they’re missing.”

  The Admiral stood up and pushed his thick, wavy, dark hair back in a gesture of exasperation. He walked slowly across the long room, his heels clicking on the marble, like the ticking of a great unseen clock. “I know,” he told his deserted office, “EVERYTHING…and yet, I know NOTHING.”

  Rankov was nothing if not a complete professional himself. He called in his two Lieutenant Commanders and ordered them to organize an immediate search of the lakeshore, fields, and woodlands around the area of the Green Stop of the Andropov.

  “Might we know what we’re looking for, sir?” asked Kazakov.

  “I think we might be looking for five more bodies.”

  “The Americans?”

  “Uh-huh. I have a feeling this hit squad, which blew the barges, was seen by the two crew members, and possibly by the Americans. It is my opinion that the terrorists may well have taken out all seven people. Authorize search parties to go through the woods immediately adjacent to the lake, and to comb the shore, above and below the surface. Get Navy frogmen in there. If you had just killed four old men and their nurse in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, and you were right next to a large lake, my guess is you’d dump the bodies in the water, weighted down somehow. But tell them to check the woods anyhow.”

  Within three hours, a wide search was under way along the area of the Green Stop. Tour ships were moved on, the area along the shoreline was cordoned off, all along the dirt road and back into the woods. The River Police Commandant, working in conjunction with two Commanders from the Northern Fleet who had arrived by helicopter, decreed that a line should be marked off parallel to the dirt road, deep in the woods, more than a quarter of a mile from the shore.

  The police chief objected, since the woodlands were twelve miles long and they were looking at a two-mile stretch. “With five bodies to drag into the undergrowth, they’re not going in there more than a hundred yards at most,” he said. “You draw that line a quarter of a mile in and we’re looking at a search area of one and one-half million square yards. With a hundred men, that’s fifteen thousand square yards each. But we only have a hundred in total, because fifty of our men are working along the water. Therefore we have each of our land searchers taking care of thirty thousand square yards, all of it covered in bracken, dead leaves, trees, and bushes. We’ll be here till Christmas.”

  “If we don’t crack this, we might end up somewhere for a lot longer,” replied the Commander. “Let’s just keep going until someone tells us to stop, ‘the classic old Communist way.’”

  The police Commandant laughed. “You’re in charge,” he said. “A quarter of a mile it is. Let’s get in the woods. You want metal detectors used?”

  “Not searching for bodies. Just rakes, forks, and sharp sticks. I think in pairs is most efficient.”

  “Yessir.”

  Nine days later they had found precisely nothing. Which was scarcely surprising, since the searchers were, even at their nearest point, more than seven thousand miles from the still-breathing bodies of the missing Americans. Not to mention, still three-quarters of a mile from the deeply buried, booby-trapped SEALs canisters, each of which had anyway been thoughtfully metal-stamped by Admirals Morgan and Bergstrom, MADE IN THE UKRAINE.

  Admiral Rankov was almost disappointed. He had talked himself into believing they might actually find the Americans dead. But every instinct he possessed told him the missing Americans were the hit squad that blew out the Kilos. And those same instincts were telling him he was never going to find one shred of positive proof to shed one ray of light on the catastrophe.

  The next question was: should he hand this entire investi
gation over to the Military Agency in Moscow, which specialized in terrorism? He would have done so without hesitation had he considered any nation had a motive. But there was only one nation that fitted into that category. And the Special Forces, which operate in deadly secret behind the Stars and Stripes, did not count as terrorists. These were the US Army Rangers, or US Navy SEALs, and either one of them was way beyond the reach of any Russian reprisal, short of a shooting war.

  Admiral Vitaly Rankov had never felt more powerless. There could be no admission from the Kremlin of what he knew had happened. No possible confession from his already beleaguered government that Special Forces from the USA had attacked his country, way inside the borders. No disclosure that the old Iron Curtain was now made, essentially, of gossamer.

  And he cursed the ground upon which Arnold Morgan walked.

  It had been a Black Operation. And Admiral Rankov knew that Black Operations were designed to leave no footprints. That had been the case when the two Kilos vanished in the North Atlantic. And it was most certainly the case now. The Chinese had not as yet caused a huge fuss, but they wanted their $300 million back.