by Peter Sasgen
Scott started packing a bag for Washington. Radford’s summons, like everything about him and the SRO, was a mystery. Black ops and a secret budget to carry them out gave Radford enormous power to influence events around the world. Like the Yellow Sea operation. Scott shuddered inwardly. It had been a nightmare. And even though the board of inquiry had exonerated him, it had not erased the uncertainty about his fitness to command a nuke that lingered in the minds of many of his superior officers. Maybe the summons from Radford would change some minds.
Scott finished packing, then looked around to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything. His gaze settled on the door to the spare bedroom, which held boxes filled with the remnants of his former life as a husband. He kept the door closed so he wouldn’t be reminded of it. Yet, it was hard not to be, especially when he heard the couple next door arguing, their fights punctuated by exploding crockery.
Not like the Scotts, he thought. They had always fought their battles in thundering silence.
The memory of the last time he saw Tracy was burned in his brain. Her lovely wide mouth a tight, angry slash, she had held him in a withering gaze, violet eyes dark with anger. To avoid a scene when Rick arrived in his new Corvette to pick her up, she had aimed her cell phone at him like a gun and screamed, “Get out! Get out or I’ll call the police.” When Scott returned the next morning, Tracy was gone.
That night Scott dreamed he was looking through a periscope at a North Korean frigate. Her twin stacks vomited smoke as she swung around and charged. Christ, they’ve spotted us! In a heartbeat the frigate’s bow began to fill the periscope’s field of view. Fear rippled through his guts. Too late now to run for it: He was committed; the SEALs had to be recovered. He had to fire torpedoes, had to save the men, but his orders went unheeded, shouted down by Tracy yelling, “Get out!…Get out!…Get out!”
2
St. Petersburg, Russia
T hick clouds pressed down on the golden spires and gilded domes of the imperial city. A snarl of traffic wormed around Moskovsky Station at the Square of Insurrection, with its tangle of southbound rail lines, trolley buses, and trams. On Nevsky Prospekt the traffic inched past a narrow street, at the dead end of which was a scrubby car repair shop surrounded by rusty Volgas, Moskvichs, and Zhigulis.
Parked out of sight in a lot next to the shop strewn with crumpled fenders and car doors was a burgundy BMW sedan and a gray Volvo station wagon.
Alikhan Zakayev warmed himself at a kerosene heater in an unoccupied bay of the shop. Greasy tools, engines, and dismantled transmissions littered the floor and workbenches. Zakayev, a smallish man, wore a cashmere navy topcoat like a cape over a double-breasted suit. His hooded eyes took in several thickly built, unshaven, menacing-looking men sitting on a bench. One of them stroked a thin black-and-white cat happily kneading his pant leg. Another man toyed with a SIG 220.45 pistol equipped with a laser sight, its red dot coursing over walls, ceiling, and Zakayev’s body.
“Put that away,” Zakayev said.
The SIG disappeared instantly.
Zakayev didn’t like the flamboyant display of arms for which his followers had a penchant much like their penchant for expensive German cars. Zakayev’s taste in cars ran more to Volvo station wagons.
Zakayev touched his pencil-thin mustache and said, “What are you doing?”
A beautiful young girl perched on a stool, her leather miniskirted bottom protected from grease by a clean shop rag, looked up from a thin paperback book. “Reading.”
“You can read later.” Zakayev jerked his head in the direction of a storeroom off the main part of the shop from which a desperate keening sound emerged. “Find out what’s taking so long.”
The girl was very tall and had huge, heavily made-up eyes. She had on dark purple stockings and spike-heeled boots. She strode across the shop on a pair of long, wonderfully shaped legs and, with a handkerchief to her nose and mouth, entered the storeroom only to emerge a moment later.
“He says it is no use,” the girl said from behind the handkerchief.
“No use?”
“See for yourself.”
Zakayev stepped gingerly across the shop floor, avoiding patches of grime and oil. He entered the store room. The strong smell of shit and piss shocked his nostrils, but he ignored it. He couldn’t ignore another smell: burned flesh and hair. A naked man built like a bull hung by his wrists, which were bound with wire, from the hook of a chain fall rigged from a ceiling beam. Mechanics employed the chain fall to lift engines out of cars; now it held what looked like a charred side of beef.
The bull had been badly beaten and his hair and scalp had been burned away, leaving only a blackened skull. Zakayev’s eyes went to the man’s groin, where his genitals had been. What he saw was the charred stump of a penis and carbonized testicles. That he was still alive was a tribute to his physical condition or perhaps all the vodka he drank.
Another man, a huge hairy ape wearing dark glasses and with a black cloth band wound around his head, stepped back from his work. He had on a leather apron over black clothes and in one hand held an acetylene torch, its roaring tapered blue-white flame capable of biting through case-hardened steel.
Sweat glistened like diamonds on the ape’s forehead. He shrugged and thumbed the gas valves closed.
The flame sputtered, popped, died. “You won’t get anything else out of him, General.”
“So it’s the Winter Palace.”
“He swore it. And I believe him.” The ape looped the torch and hoses over a pair of gas tanks lashed to a hand truck. He wiped sweat from his eyes.
Zakayev gazed at the bull—what was left of it—hanging from the hook. The stench was overpowering.
It reminded him of another time, in Chechnya. He and his men had waited all night in a soaking drizzle, hidden in rubble off the main street in Grozny where it intersects the city’s main square and the Sunja Neva.
To their rear was Minutka Square, where refugees came to seek family members and buy food and medicine, and which Russian forces repeatedly attacked with artillery and air strikes. After more than eight years of fighting, thousands of Chechen civilians had been killed there.
The Russian assault unleashed at dusk had left more than two dozen women and children mangled in their own viscera near the market, which had been reduced to a pile of broken sticks and mortar.
Zakayev assumed that Russian Spetsnaz—special forces—would launch a follow-up probe to assess the damage. He looked around at his men, most of whom were young enough to be his sons. Gripping their weapons, eager for revenge, they huddled against the cold. It was a spectral scene: a jagged landscape lit by yellow gas flares from broken pipes, smoke blacker than night roiling skyward.
Nothing moved but a few stray cats and dogs and a homeless old man on crutches seeking shelter.
He heard it first. “Listen.”
A snorting diesel engine. A Russian BTR-80 armored personnel carrier poked its camouflaged boatlike prow around a sharp bend in the road and rocked to a halt. The BTR’s turret, sprouting machine guns, smoothly traversed the killing field. Zakayev silently urged the Russians on. He knew they were wary, especially at night.
Another snort and the BTR inched forward, its big tires throwing off clods of mud. Perhaps these Russians were new arrivals and still fearless or just plain stupid. Whatever, Zakayev got ready. He stripped a plastic bag from an RPG-7 grenade launcher, pulled the safety pin from the conical warhead, and, shouldering the weapon, poked its nose through an opening in the rubble. He took aim on the lumbering vehicle and, as it drew abreast of his hide, squeezed the trigger.
Zakayev ducked behind the wall yet felt the heat from the blast rake his face and hands. Ammunition in the BTR cooked off and sent the Russian three-man crew and seven Spetsnaz sprawling out of the vehicle’s flung open hatches into fierce Chechen small-arms fire.
Zakayev stood over a badly burned Russian soldier, a teenage conscript begging for his mother. The stench of burning diesel
, of scorched flesh, of shit and piss, hung in the night air. The other Russians were dead. How long had this boy been in Chechnya? Zakayev wondered. Not more than a few days, judging by his new cammies and polished boots. But his eyes were already old and filled with fear and pain. Sorrow too. Not for what his comrades had done to the Chechen women and children in Minutka Square, but for his bad luck to have been sent to this living hell of a country. He probably had no idea why the Chechens wanted freedom from Russia. Perhaps he had been thinking of his girlfriend back in Moscow and dreaming about becoming a rock star. But all he could do now was cry, “Mat’, Mat’, Mat’.”
Zakayev shot him in the head.
“Who was he?” she asked.
“Who?”
“The bull.” The girl had on a luxurious black sable coat. The silky pelts caressed her purple-stockinged thighs, which held Zakayev’s attention for a moment. Together in the Volvo, driving away from the repair shop, they looked like successful Russian entrepreneurs on their way to a meeting with foreign venture capitalists. Or a man with his young mistress.
“Nobody.” Zakayev put his eyes back on the road. Traffic was still heavy. Linked metal barricades had been spotted along the prospekts in anticipation of the crowds sure to be drawn to the presidential motorcades sweeping through the city. He changed lanes, made sure the turn signal went ka-pick, ka-pick, ka-pick. An infraction might draw the attention of the militia. Their identity cards would hold up to scrutiny, but he was not eager to test them.
“Ali, tell me.” She twisted around in her seat, peeled off a purple kid glove, and reached over the console to fondle his crotch.
“An FSB officer.”
The girl stopped manipulating him. She slowly took her hand away and faced forward again. “Ali, an FSB officer?” The Russian Federal Security Service—Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, or FSB—
had responsibility for providing security at the summit.
“We weighed the risks,” Zakayev said. “They were acceptable.”
Instinct had told him that the Winter Palace—Russia’s Versailles, recently restored to its former imperial splendor—would be the focus of the upcoming summit meeting between the American and Russian presidents.
“A Chechen woman who works for a St. Petersburg catering service that has a contract to supply meals for the FSB—she told us that one of their men assigned to the press motor pool had access to the summit schedule. She said that sometimes this man didn’t show up for work at the parking lot because he was drunk and that his FSB supervisors didn’t seem to mind because his friends filled in for him.”
“And you took him?”
“Late last night, after he completed his shift. I concluded that if he suddenly disappeared he wouldn’t be missed for days.”
Snow flurries had changed to rain; the wipers zickzicked over the greasy windshield glass.
For more than a month St. Petersburg had been teeming with American and Russian security personnel preparing for the summit. Parts of Dvortsovaya Ploshchad had been sealed off and access to the Hermitage and Winter Palace, former residence of Czar Nicholas II and the Russian imperial family, had been severely restricted. Already a whole section of the city from the Neva south to the Obvodnyy Canal had been sealed off to traffic and pedestrians.
“He told us what we wanted to know about the summit. The schedule. Times and dates. Everything.”
Zakayev had learned that after all the pomp and circumstance attending the American president’s arrival, he and the first lady would be given a tour of the Winter Palace by the Russian president and his wife. They would see personal items from the imperial family on display in the Malachite Room and stroll the White Dining Room, where the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917 from Kerensky’s provisional government. After all the festivities and a state banquet, the real business of the summit would take place in one of Catherine the Great’s private apartments in the Hermitage.
“But, Ali,” said the girl, “eventually they’ll go looking for him.”
“By the time they get themselves organized, it will be too late.”
Zakayev turned onto Nevsky Prospekt and pulled up at the Nevsky Palace Hotel. It was popular with successful European businessmen who liked to show off their mistresses while prowling the lobby or cutting deals in the restaurant over caviar and sturgeon mousse. It was the perfect place for a wanted man like Zakayev to hide in plain sight.
Scott’s eyes went to the two-inch-thick file folder emblazoned with diagonal black stripes and labeled, DIRECTOR—PURPLE.
Karl Radford, standing behind his desk, ignoring regulations that prohibited smoking in government buildings, shifted a cigarette to his left hand so he could pick up the folder with his right. In a husky voice that matched his thick build, he said, “I was told you know Frank Drummond.”
“Rear Admiral Frank Drummond? Yes, sir, I do.”
Radford viewed Scott through a scrim of cigarette smoke. “How well do you know him?”
“He’s an old friend. My patrone. I served two tours under him—as exec on the Nevada, then a shore billet at Net Warfare. He also straightened out a few problems I had a while back…. But then, I assume you already know this.”
Radford nodded.
Scott was on a hair trigger, his instinct for sensing trouble alive. “Why the questions about Frank?”
Radford said, “How well do you know his wife?”
“Very well. She and Frank are two of a kind. Always looking out for the hired help. Vivian’s a wonderful, gracious lady. They never had children, but they’d have made great parents.” What he didn’t add was that long deployments at sea were tough on a marriage—tougher on children who grew up without dads. “They’re certainly devoted.”
Radford, collecting his thoughts, gazed out the window of his office in Crystal City, Alexandria, Virginia, at an unbroken stream of headlights and taillights crawling past the Pentagon on I-395. He watched late arrivals high-stepping through puddles in the parking lot downstairs. Across the Potomac, the tip of the Washington Monument scraped the bottoms of dark clouds filled with more rain. Scott thought the scene mirrored his own mood perfectly.
Radford rounded on Scott and said, “Do you know if Drummond was a homosexual?”
Something caught in Scott’s throat. Had he heard right? Radford saying that Drummond was a homosexual? Was a homosexual?
“Well?” Radford insisted.
“Frank Drummond is not a homosexual,” Scott said firmly.
“How do you know?”
“Because I know the man intimately. I worked with him for years—”
“Doesn’t mean a damn thing. Plenty of men hide it. Men in the Navy.”
“What’s this all about, General? My orders to report to you didn’t say anything about Admiral Drummond.”
Radford lurched back to his desk. He mashed out his cigarette in a thick cut-glass ashtray and, looking down at the twisted, flattened butt, said, “Frank Drummond is dead.”
For a long moment Scott held Radford’s gaze. “Dead? How?”
“Suicide. In Murmansk.”
An ugly picture was forming and Scott refused to believe what he saw.
He and Drummond had been friends for over ten years. They had met when Scott had been ordered to the USS Hampton, an Improved Los Angeles–class SSN, as Drummond’s exec. Drummond had immediately recognized Scott’s exceptional skills as a submariner and had helped push his career along the track to a command of his own. The chemistry between them had been right, and later, when Scott followed Drummond ashore, their professional interests intersected and their friendship and mutual respect deepened. Drummond was there with sound advice and wise counsel when Scott had to endure the pain of a shattered marriage and the near destruction of his career over the Yellow Sea operation.
Scott, numb, disbelieving, got to his feet. His words boomed across Radford’s desk. “Impossible. Frank would never commit suicide. Never.”
Radford opened the purple file. P
arts of pages spiked to the folder were highlighted in yellow marker.
“Three days ago we received a Flash report from our embassy in Moscow. Frank Drummond was found dead in a hotel in Murmansk. Also found dead in his room was a young Russian sailor stationed at the submarine base in Olenya Bay, Kola Peninsula. The FSB report states that the men were”—
Radford put on a pair of black half frame reading glasses and consulted a highlighted page—“found in bed together, naked, each shot in the head. The weapon used, a small-caliber pistol of Russian make, was found in Drummond’s hand.”
“That’s bullshit.”
Radford gave Scott a flinty look over the tops of his glasses. A college professor exasperated by a stubborn but brilliant student. “Read it for yourself.”
It was all there. The Novy Polyarnyy Hotel. Liquor, cigarettes, money. An American officer identified as Rear Admiral Frank Drummond, U.S. Navy. The dead sailor Andre Radchenko, age nineteen, able seaman assigned to the Russian Northern Fleet submarine K-363. The suicide weapon a Russian 5.45mm PSM automatic. Drummond’s body waited at Moscow’s Central Morgue, pending instructions for disposition from the United States Embassy.
The report, compiled by the investigating FSB officer, one Yuri Abakov, had been countersigned by the embassy’s second secretary. Scott was familiar with the FSB, the successor to the old KGB, and its reputation for being inept if not corrupt. But the report was clear-cut and Scott couldn’t see how ineptitude, much less corruption, could have mistaken this apparent suicide for murder. What business Frank Drummond had in Murmansk wasn’t disclosed in the report.
“Does Mrs. Drummond know that Frank is dead?” a shaken Scott asked.
“She was informed yesterday, minus certain, ah, details. She was told that he was killed during an attempted robbery.”
“You spoke with her?”
“Not personally. My deputy. Mrs. Drummond had just returned from London. She’d spent a week with her husband in St. Petersburg, then flew to London to visit friends before returning to the States. She wanted to turn right around and fly back to Moscow, but we persuaded her that that was not the best thing for her to do. I told her that instead I was going to send you to Moscow to escort Drummond’s body back to the States for burial. Since you speak fluent Russian and know your way around over there, she agreed with my decision. She wanted to talk to you but didn’t know where to reach you.”