In this game, you needed—what was the American expression?—“boots on the ground,” that was it. The Americans would need to put boots on the ground to get at Kotenko and his operation. When they tried it, he would cut them off at the ankles.
Meanwhile, he had work to do. The Duma representative from St. Petersburg and the Gazprom industrialists needed to be convinced that their best interests would be served by a closer alliance with Tambov and what Kotenko could offer them. At the moment, he saw, looking down from the deck, his girls were doing their very best to demonstrate one aspect of Kotenko’s generosity. His guests seemed to be enjoying their visit quite a lot at the moment.
All three visitors were married, and all three had solid reputations as stolid, sober, and principled businessmen of the post-Soviet era, the new Russia. Vladymir Malyshkin, there, looked a little less than stolid at the moment, with a vodka bottle in one hand, Tanya nude on his lap, and Natasha’s bikini briefs draped over his bald pate like a bright green aviator’s cap.
Kotenko trusted that both of the film crews hidden in the house were getting all of this.
In an hour or two, he would go down to the pool and join in the fun. In a few days, at the end of their visit, he would apprise them of some of the other benefits to be found in a closer alliance with Grigor Kotenko—such as the promise that the contents of certain videotapes would not be made public.
In the meantime, he had special instructions to give to Yuri Antonov.
Baffin Bay
73° 54' N, 75° 48' W
0920 hours, GMT–6
Dean sat on the hard, straight-backed seat in the Sea King’s cargo compartment and tried not to think of the next few minutes. He wanted this part of the trip to be over.
His journey had begun two days ago with a flight on board an aging C-2A Greyhound COD out of Lakenheath for an eleven-hundred-mile flight to the deck of the USS Harry S. Truman, cruising the North Atlantic south of Iceland. “COD” stood for “Carrier On-board Delivery,” and the ugly little Greyhound bounced him down onto the carrier’s flight deck in the middle of a rain-swept night.
He was on board just long enough for a meal and a friendly argument with the senior chief assigned to escort him, an argument over the carrier’s name. President Harry S Truman was notorious for not having a period after the S in his name, which the President jokingly had claimed was not an initial but his middle name. According to Senior Chief McMasters, though, most official documents, the Truman Library, the Associated Press Handbook, and, frequently, even Truman’s own signature all used a period . . . as did the carrier’s blue and orange crest on the quarterdeck, with its motto “The Buck Stops Here.”
Dean told McMasters that he was not convinced and was going to need to do some research on the question when he got back to civilization. The good-natured banter helped Dean keep his mind off the inevitable end of his journey.
Within another two hours, the COD had been refueled and he was bouncing once again through a stormy night for another thousand-mile flight to Nuuk/Godthab Airport on the rocky west coast of Greenland. That time, he didn’t even get to deplane—not that there was much to see by the cold, near-Arctic glow of sunrise at 0300, local time.
Then the COD flew him north, far north, up the coast to icebound Thule Air Force Base overlooking Baffin Bay 950 miles north of Nuuk. There he was hustled immediately across the tarmac to a waiting helicopter, an SH-60F Ocean Hawk, for the final leg of his flight.
By this time it was the middle of the night by both his watch and his stomach, both of which were still on GMT, but a dim, gray, and heavily overcast morning according to the light, though McMasters had reminded him that the sun never set at this time of the year north of the Arctic Circle. They packed him onto the helo, which promptly lifted off from Thule and flew a straight-line course almost due west, low above the choppy waters of the bay. Soon the cloud deck lowered even more and it began to rain. The aircraft shuddered with heavy gusts of wind, and lightning flared off to the south.
Just freaking great. . . .
On board the Truman, they’d packed him into a wet suit, over which they’d placed layers of thermal clothing, a parka, a helmet, and a life jacket, creating a fashion statement that made it tough to move and almost impossible to go to the bathroom. Somehow, though, he’d managed over the past several hours, but when the Ocean Hawk’s crew chief began strapping him into the harness, he started having serious doubts.
During his Marine career, Dean had fast-roped out of helicopters numerous times, and more than once he’d taken an unscheduled dip in the drink. This time, though, there could be no room for error.
What was bothering him at the moment was a remembered scene from an old Tom Clancy novel.
As best as Dean could remember it, the hero had been a CIA officer trying to track down a rogue Soviet submarine. At one point in the story, the officer had been lowered from a helicopter down toward the deck of an American submarine somewhere in the Atlantic. When high winds and rough seas—plus the fact that the helicopter was bingo fuel—had forced the helo crew to abort the operation and start winching the hero back up to safety, the officer had hit the safety release on his harness and dropped into the ocean.
That hero had, of course, survived his dunking in the frigid Atlantic waters and gone on to win the day in the finest tradition of literary and cinematic heroes everywhere. The waters beneath the Ocean Hawk this morning, though, were bitterly cold, colder even than the water into which Clancy’s fictional hero had fallen. If Dean hit the freezing water of Baffin Bay, he would have a few minutes at best before hypothermia numbed him into insensibility and he drowned.
The Ocean Hawk was hovering now, and the crew chief slid aside the big side-panel door. Spray from the aircraft’s rotor wash swirled past the cargo compartment, salty and cold.
At least the rain had stopped.
“We’re dipping our tallywacker now!” the crew chief said, shouting into Dean’s ear above the thunder of the helo’s rotors. “Think of it as ringing their doorbell!”
“Yeah!” Dean yelled back. “Or fishing! Fishing for submarines!”
The chief laughed and clapped Dean on the shoulder.
Suspended beneath a length of cable, lowered from the Ocean Hawk’s belly, was a dipping sonar, a device sending out intense pings of sound through the water. Normally, it was used to find lurking submarines underwater, pinpointing them by echolocation. This time, though, as the chief had suggested, it was a pre-arranged signal for the submarine to surface.
Nothing happened for several minutes. Dean, despite his layered Arctic clothing, suppressed a sudden shiver, though whether it had been brought on by the cold or from high-stress anticipation, he couldn’t tell. Then one of the sailors on board the Ocean Hawk pointed out the open door. “There! There she is!”
Dean followed the man’s pointing finger and saw a white rooster tail of spray on the surface several hundred yards away. A dark, slate-gray shape sliced upward through the foam, becoming the squared-off cliff of a submarine’s sail, its forward hydroplanes extending from either side like small wings. As the vessel continued to rise, a second shape emerged from the spray aft of the sail—an Advanced Seal Delivery System, or ASDS, a miniature submarine just sixty-five feet long and riding on the bigger submarine’s afterdeck like a black, torpedo-shaped parasite.
In another moment, the deck appeared, immersed in a broad, V-shaped wake. The SSGN Ohio was 560 feet long overall, with a beam of 42 feet; it was startling how tiny the sail and the ASDS looked by comparison with that dark sea monster’s awesome length and mass.
In another moment, the Ocean Hawk had reeled its dipping sonar back on board and repositioned itself above the surfaced submarine. Dean leaned over, looking down out of the open door, to see the Ohio nested within the disk of the helo’s rotor wash. Men scrambled out of an open deck hatch forward of the sail, and he could see two officers in the tiny, open cockpit on top of the sail, shielding their eyes as they loo
ked up at the Ocean Hawk’s belly. Several of the seamen on the forward deck carried long, slender poles.
“Don’t worry about those poles!” The crew chief shouted to be heard above the roar. “They’re going to reach up with them and hit your cable before you touch the deck! We’ve built up an electrical charge in flight, and if they don’t bleed it off, it could knock you on your ass!”
Dean nodded understanding. He’d seen this maneuver done before at sea, especially during stormy weather.
They were signaling from the deck, waving him on.
“Okay, Mr. Dean!” the crew chief bellowed. “Out you go! Good luck!”
“Thanks for the lift!”
“Don’t worry about the lift! It’s the drop that scares the shit out of me!”
Gripping the cable attached to his harness, Dean stepped into emptiness. Immediately the prop wash caught him, buffeting him back and forth as he dangled, like bait on a fishing line, beneath the hovering Ocean Hawk. The ear protectors on his helmet shut out much of the roar, but it still felt and sounded like being caught inside a wind tunnel. Below him, five men in heavy, olive-drab parkas, bright orange life jackets, and safety lines waited with upturned faces. Two of them jabbed at him with static discharge poles.
Of one thing Dean was certain: he was not going to release the harness and drop into the sea. If the Ocean Hawk’s pilot decided to reel Dean back in, he’d be quite happy to accede to their judgment.
He was starting to drift past the submarine’s hull. He could see one of the men below, however, talking into a headset, and the helicopter’s pilot adjusted, bringing Dean back and gently down. The fear wasn’t as bad as he had thought it would be; somehow, the wind and the pounding of the rotors and the shrill whine of twin high-powered turboshafts and the biting cold all combined to numb the brain and anaesthetize the mind. He dropped lower . . . still lower and then felt gloved hands grabbing hold of his boots and legs and hauling him down to the deck.
“Permission to come aboard!” he shouted as they helped him with his harness.
“Granted!” the chief in charge of the deck party called back. “Welcome aboard!”
In another instant, the cable was reeling away up into the cargo deck of the Ocean Hawk, and the helicopter, dipping its nose, began arrowing away through leaden skies back to the east, toward Thule. One of the sailors guided Dean with a hand on his shoulder aft toward the open hatch in the deck. “Mind your skull, sir,” the man told him. “It’s a tight fit.”
The hatch led down a vertical ladder to the Ohio’s forward torpedo room, where several more sailors waited to receive him. He heard some murmurs among them. “So that’s our spook, is it?” some asked.
“Bond,” another voice replied with mock seriousness. “James Bond. . . .”
“Shaken,” Dean told the watching sailors as he started stripping off life jacket, helmet, and parka and passing them off to waiting hands, “not stirred.” That raised a laugh. Someone draped a blanket over his shoulders. Another man offered him a mug of steaming coffee, which he gratefully accepted. He heard the hatch clang shut overhead and someone speaking over an intercom, saying, “Forward torpedo room hatch secured!” The compartment was surprisingly warm, the air fresh, though carrying the mingled scents of oil, salt, and too many men in a confined space.
A lean, pale blond youngster in khakis and a lieutenant commander’s rank insignia stepped forward. “Welcome aboard the Ohio, Mr. Dean,” he said. “I’m Lieutenant Commander Hartwell, the boat’s exec. If you’ll come with me, please?”
“Now hear this,” a voice sounded over the sub’s 1MC speakers. “Now hear this. Dive! Dive!” An alarm klaxon sounded, a computer-generated version of the classic ah— oogah! of the movies, followed again by the voice calling, “Dive! Dive!”
A modern submarine’s true element was the dark silence of the ocean depths, and no skipper wanted to leave his command exposed on the surface for longer than could possibly be helped. As the exec led Dean aft, he felt the deck tilt slightly beneath his feet as the Ohio returned to her proper realm.
15
Zhemchuzhina Hotel
Sochi, Russia
1712 hours, GMT + 3
LIA AND AKULININ TOUCHED down at Adler-Sochi International Airport in the early afternoon after an uneventful flight from London. They passed through customs with passports listing them as husband and wife, picked up their luggage in the baggage claim, and caught a cab for the long ride up to Sochi. The airport was located in Adler, just five miles from the Georgian border, but Sochi was almost fifteen miles to the northwest, along the E97 highway that ran along the Black Sea coast.
According to the legend provided by GCHQ, they were Mr. and Mrs. Darby, John and Lisa of Mayfair, on holiday to this rather posh resort region on the Black Sea.
They noticed quite a lot of construction on the hillsides south of the city. Their driver was the talkative sort, running on without stop about Sochi having been chosen as the site for the Winter Olympics in 2014. It was, he proclaimed in heavily accented Russian interspersed with even worse English, just the economic boost the city needed, and everyone was soon going to be rich. Lia studied the new construction with a more cynical eye and wondered how deep the Organizatsiya had burrowed into the local landscape.
They checked in at the front desk, argued a bit with the desk clerk over whether their reservation had been for smoking rather than nonsmoking, then went up to their room. As soon as the door was shut, Lia pulled what looked like a compact from her handbag and began walking around the room, studying the tiny LED readout as she passed the device along the walls, over the lamps and TV, across the head of the big king-sized bed, across the big mirror in its ornate frame over the dresser. “Lovely room, John,” she said in a bright voice. “I think the travel agency picked a good one this time.”
“Nice view of the ocean,” Akulinin said from the window. He, too, was carefully scanning the glass doors onto the balcony with something like a small PDA. They continued to exchange uninformative chitchat until they were reasonably sure that there were no hidden listening devices in the room. Their argument at the front desk had been designed to get the desk clerk to make a last-minute change, just in case foreign tourists were automatically dropped into a room wired for sound or video. If they’d found anything, they were prepared—by means of a dead cockroach sealed in a small plastic bottle—to demand yet another room change.
But their room appeared to be electronically, as well as physically, clean.
Of course, the bad old days of the Soviet regime were long gone and tourists were no longer the targets of paranoid suspicion and KGB surveillance. The new and capitalist Russia desperately needed foreign currency and was doing her best to promote a lively tourist trade. The chances were good that no one was spying on the two spies. At least, not here.
Still, many of the old ploys used by the KGB were still employed in the new Russia—especially where business people were concerned. The honey trap was an old favorite. The traveler might come back to his room one evening to find a lovely and willing young woman waiting for him in bed, complete with a story about how she’d bribed a maid to let her in just so she could meet him, or how the people with whom he was working had hired her for his pleasure, or how she’d accidentally ended up in the wrong room. Sound recordings and video footage would then be used to blackmail the traveler. If Russia was no longer as interested as she once was in political or military espionage, industrial espionage was still big business. It was amazing what a business traveler might reveal about a new technical process in order to keep a wife or a boss from seeing a certain compromising and decidedly X-rated video.
And the Organizatsiya was always on the lookout for useful information to sell to the highest bidder or for the payment of a few thousand euros or dollars from a horny and gullible mark. One reason Akulinin and Lia were here posing as a married couple was to make the two of them a less obvious target than the traditional lonely businessman.
“I got weak positives off the wall outlets and the phone jack,” she said. “As usual.” Her detector picked up copper wiring as well as electronic circuits. “But I think we’re clear.”
“I’ve got nothing,” Akulinin said, stepping back inside from the balcony. “It really is a great view, though.”
“We’ll need you to put down your eyes so we can cover your room,” Rockman told them. “And you have a visitor coming up. I just gave him your room number.”
A knock sounded at the door.
Akulinin peered through the spy hole, then opened the door. James Llewellyn walked in.
“Good afternoon,” Llewellyn said with an affable grin. “How’s the old married couple, then?”
“Jet-lagged,” Lia replied. “And in no mood for games.”
“Understood.” He glanced around the room. “We’re secure?”
“Yes.”
“Capital.”
“As secure as we can be, anyway.”
“Yes, well, that’s what keeps the game interesting, don’t you think? You can never be sure.”
“What’s interesting,” Akulinin said with a grimace, “is waiting to hear if you guys ever recovered that tool kit. You said you had a team on it that night, but then we got hustled back to England so quickly we never heard what happened.”
“Ah,” Llewellyn said. “As it happens . . . no.” He set his laptop computer on a desk in one corner of the room and opened it. “But, actually, that’s a bit of good news. Hang on a tick. I think you’ll be interested in what I have here.” He began booting up the computer.
“They weren’t able to recover the damned thing and that’s good news?” Akulinin said. He looked bleak.
“He’s been afraid they’re going to take it out of his paycheck,” Lia put in.
Stephen Coonts' Deep Black: Arctic Gold Page 22