Tiny metal fragments from the depth charge barrel pinged the side of the sunken scow.
An undersea cloud of trash and churned-up silt spread out from the center of the blast. Veils of darkness stretched like clouds of doom across the seafloor, muddying the water and blotting out the streams of sunlight.
From what Remo could tell before the sea went dark, the boat that had dropped the depth charge was the same one Petrovina Bulganin had come from. The woman's useless oxygen hose had stretched along the seafloor and up to the side of the bobbing boat.
He glanced over at her.
Petrovina's boots were clamped to the scow's hold, keeping her upright. But her head was bowed. Her arms floated ghoul-like in the dirty water. She had lapsed into unconsciousness. Asleep, she would last a few seconds longer than if she were flailing awake, but she didn't have much time left. Her heartbeat was already growing thready.
Even worse for Petrovina, a piece of flying shrapnel had cracked her mask. Her helmet was taking in water.
Remo frowned in annoyance. Why did everything bad always happen to him?
Wishing he could find a loophole in his conscience that would allow him to just swim off, he glanced back up.
The sea was still dark, but not entirely. At least not to eyes trained in Sinanju. Where the silt thinned he could just glimpse the outline of a boat's hull. After launching the depth charge, Petrovina's trawler had puttered closer.
Remo zeroed in on the boat through the sea of floating trash. He grabbed a fistful of diving suit in one hand. The dying flutter of Petrovina's struggling heart carried like sonic waves to his hypersensitive ears.
Touching his toes to the scow's rusty hull, Remo flexed his calf muscles. He took off like a fired torpedo, launching straight up at the bobbing boat. The unconscious Russian agent trailed in his wake. A limp, living rag doll in the last gasping moments before death.
THE MEN ON THE TRAWLER had ridden out the explosion gripping chains and rails. The sea had churned, vomiting an enormous bubble of white that rocked the trawler and nearly capsized her. After the waves subsided and the boat began to chug into the spot where Petrovina Bulganin had walked in her diving suit, the former KGB men scrambled over to the edge of the soaking wet deck.
Their matching black suits looked as if they'd been bought off the rack at Woolworth's back in 1977. Three fat ties dangled out over open sea.
Eager eyes searched the field of risen trash and floating fish for human body parts. They were surprised when the part that popped up right next to the boat was not a woman's arm or leg, which was really what they were looking far. It was a man's head. The head was talking to them.
"Do svidaniya," Remo Williams said.
There were three shocked intakes of air. Three meaty hands grabbed simultaneously for shoulder holsters.
Deciding just this once to opt out of the traditional Russian 9 mm handshake, Remo reached up and snagged three fat dangling ties. He yanked, and the men and their guns were dumped overboard.
"I should have known there were Russians in town," Remo griped as the men fell. "A million tons of rotting garbage can't cover the stench of boiled beets and vodka."
As the Russian agents splashed in panic amid the garbage, Remo lifted Petrovina Bulganin from below the surface and tossed her onto the boat. She slapped to the deck with a watery splat.
Another moment and Remo was over the side. He padded barefoot across the deck. His white T-shirt and baggy black chinos clung tight to his body as he bent over Petrovina.
He pulled off her helmet. A shower of seawater poured out, splattering the already soaked deck. Reaching around, Remo massaged her lower spine. With the other hand he worked the heart and lungs. Petrovina's pale face reddened. All at once her eyes shot open. Gasping desperately for air, she turned her head, coughing up water. Bleary-eyed, she twisted toward her savior, still gagging on seawater. "Who are you?" Petrovina demanded as she pushed herself up to a sitting position.
"My name is Mr. Thank-You-For-Saving-My-Life," Remo said. "But you can call me I-Would-Have-Drowned-If-It-Wasn't-For-You."
She hardly heard. Her attention was drawn to the side of the boat where the three former KGB men were pawing through floating trash trying to swim back to their vessel.
A light switched on in her eyes. "Korkusku," she hissed.
"God bless you," Remo said.
Petrovina scarcely noticed him. Scrambling to her feet, she pushed past Remo. Diving boots clomping the deck, she stormed around the cabin to the front of the boat.
She found the head of her SVR detachment sitting calmly in a deck chair.
Vlad Korkusku seemed uninterested in the action that had taken place on the other end of the boat. A pair of headphones was attached to a twenty-year-old Sony Walkman, and the volume turned up so loud that all ears could hear the blaring, scratchy 1950s Moscow Chamber Orchestra version of the Soviet national anthem. He had a copy of the latest People magazine in his hands and was flipping from page to page. Announcing every picture as decadent, he christened each with a glob of fresh spit.
The left rear leg of the big man's deck chair sat squarely on Petrovina's oxygen hose, which still hung useless over the side of the boat.
Petrovina marched up to Korkusku and slapped him so hard across the face that his headphones flew off.
"You tried to kill me!" she yelled.
At first he seemed shocked to see Petrovina Bulganin alive. Almost as surprised to find that she was not alone. He quickly got his bearings, scrambling to his feet.
"What do you mean?" he asked. "Did something go wrong?"
"You deliberately crimped air hose," she snapped.
"Oh," Vlad Korkusku said with hollow innocence. "Is crimp in hose?" He looked straight down at the chair leg.
Beside Petrovina, Remo rolled his eyes. "Couldn't you pretend to look around a little first?" he groused. "Maybe a little look of surprise when you find it? Don't look down at the exact freaking spot where you stuck your chair leg. Cheez, you'd think after seventy years of communism you Russians would actually be good at lying."
Korkusku took a step back. "He is American," he hissed.
Petrovina ignored the words of both men. She shoved Korkusku hard in his meaty chest. She was ludicrously small compared to the big man. Korkusku barely budged.
"Is true you try to suffocate me?" she demanded in English.
The SVR man pulled his eyes off the American. His back stiffened. "No, no," he insisted with great bluster. "Was terrible, completely unscheduled accident."
"What about depth charge?"
"Accident," Viad Korkusku repeated, this time very quickly and very firmly. "We thought we saw phantom killer submarine on sonar, but was actually school of minnow fish." He pointed to Remo. "Do you wish me to kill American spy?"
This time when Petrovina shoved him, her fury was so great that Korkusku stumbled back against his chair.
"Yes, he is American," she snapped, shoving Korkusku again. "But that does not automatically make him spy."
Remo had stripped off his T-shirt and was wringing water out onto the deck. "Actually-" he began.
"And you will not kill him," she continued, shoving Korkusku one last time. "Because if not for him, I would be dead right now. Idiot!"
This time when she pushed him, Vlad Korkusku was not taken by surprise by her wiry strength. Korkusku stood his ground. His flabby face steeled.
"Ridiculous child," he said, sneering contemptuously. "You are the idiot, little girl. Out here playing at game of men."
She heard an angry grunt behind her. When she wheeled around she saw that the three men Remo had thrown into the water had found their way back aboard. Water ran off their drenched polyester suits. Their guns were drawn. Water dribbled out of the barrel of one.
Petrovina spun back to Korkusku. Her wet hair slapped around her neck like angry tentacles. "Have you gone completely mad?" she barked. At this Korkusku laughed bitterly.
"I mad? Little girl, I have s
een the world go insane around me until all that is left is madness." He spit at her feet. "While you were still playing with dolls at your mother's feet, I watched a great nation collapse into anarchy. And now I am this. A baby-sitter to a slip of a girl. This is-as they say-last straw. I will endure no more." He addressed the three men. "Shoot them. Throw their bodies over side."
The three soaking wet men surrounded Remo and Petrovina.
She could see that there would be no reasoning with them. Obviously she had been assigned a group of relics who longed for the glory days of the Cold
War with the West. There was only one option open to her, and it was not one that filled her with much hope. She spun to the American.
"Do something," Petrovina insisted.
Remo was twisting the last drops of water out of his soggy T-shirt. He hadn't been paying close attention.
"Huh?" he said, glancing up. "Oh, yeah." Remo flicked his T-shirt. The end snapped the back of a Russian gunman's hand. The hand skipped, and the Russian fired into the shoulder of his nearest comrade.
As the bleeding man fell in agony to the deck, the other two disappeared. Vlad Korkusku and Petrovina Bulganin weren't quite sure what happened to them until they saw two faraway splashes in the Caribbean.
Korkusku turned to Remo, face growing pale. "I'm in a lazy American mood, so two options," Remo said, pulling his shirt back on. "In the first you put yourself in the water and you get to keep your arms. Guess the second."
Blinking shock, Korkusku headed for the rail. "And take him," Remo said, jabbing a thumb toward the bleeding man who was groaning in agony on the deck. "I hear enough Russian whining at the Olympics."
Korkusku took the man by the ankles. He dragged him over the edge of the deck where they made a single splash.
"You're welcome," Remo said once the men were all playing safely in the surf.
"What?" Petrovina snapped.
"What you said to Bruno the Bear just now. That if it wasn't for me you'd be dead right now. You're welcome."
Petrovina's full lips thinned. "Enough nonsense," she said. "What were you doing down there?" Realizing he had gotten as close as he was going to get to a Russian thank-you when she opted not to shoot him, Remo shook his head tiredly.
"Same thing you were," he sighed. "Looking for subs in all the wrong places."
"You know about submarine?" she asked.
"Know about it. Here to stop it. Unlike your pals there, who seem more keen on stopping you."
He aimed a chin at the water where Vlad Korkusku and his three companions were splashing amid the muck.
"I have met their kind before," she said. "KGB dinosaurs. They do not understand that world has passed them by." Petrovina considered for a moment. "We will work together on this, you and I," she announced. "I cannot do this alone, and it is obvious that you are not as stupid or untrustworthy as the fools who were sent to help me."
"Stop it, I'm blushing," Remo said.
"You will help me stop submarine," she said, adding ominously, "and perhaps help to prevent new eruption of cold-war tensions that could end civilization as we know it."
"Hey, that's swell," Remo said, distracted. He pointed to a distant fishing boat bobbing amid the scows beyond the Mayanan cordon. "Before we do that, can we stop by my boat? I left my best world-saving shoes over there."
Chapter 15
Executive President Blythe Curry-Hume had a name fit for a British lord and the down-to-earth charm of a Mayanan peasant. With appeal that cut across class and political divides, the leader of the Mayana Free People's Party had carried more than sixty percent of the popular vote in the country's last presidential election.
He had slipped onto the Mayanan political stage more than fifteen years earlier, after Mayana had applied for Commonwealth status. His name was made as a voice against Communist-era reforms such as state-controlled industry and price controls. Serendipity put him on the right side of global politics just as the Russian Communist machine and its influence in South America were collapsing.
Curry-Hume was a populist vote grubber. There was no village meeting too small for him to attend, no metropolitan development committee he would refuse to join. As his influence grew, he found himself on university boards, state advisory committees and on dozens of community groups.
In a country the size of Mayana, it was relatively easy to become a household name.
By the time he was finished establishing himself as a man of the people, his fellow Mayanans had practically begged him to run for executive president. No one was surprised at his landslide victory. Least of all, President Curry-Hume.
That was because everything-from his first handshake to his televised victory speech-was part of a meticulously laid-out plan.
If someone were to suggest the lengths to which this professed nonpolitician had gone to attain elected office, they would have been scorned by a disbelieving public. Such was the people's faith in their president. It was a faith constructed on that most flimsy of foundations: personality.
Curry-Hume had charisma by the bushel. When he spoke, it was as if he were speaking directly to every single person in his audience. According to a New Briton newspaper that had supported his candidacy, he could "charm the moon from the sky."
When it was announced that Mayana would host the Globe Summit, the people gave credit to their first-term executive president for drawing attention to their tiny country.
That week, when the people of Mayana learned of the Vaporizer at the same time as the rest of the world, they heaped praise at the feet of their executive president for managing to keep so great a thing secret. When they were told how lucrative the project would be, not just in terms of money to the government treasury but also job creation, the poor of Mayana stood and cheered.
But there was one man in Mayana who wasn't applauding. One man who didn't buy into the concept of citizen politician. One man who knew what a crock it all was.
Finance Minister Carlos Whitehall was fussing at his jacket cuffs as he entered the office suite of Executive President Blythe Curry-Hume.
Phones were ringing off the hook. The entire building was abuzz with excitement. And the man who was truly responsible was getting no credit whatsoever.
The Vaporizer Project had been the brainchild of Finance Minister Whitehall, who had held the same post in the previous administration. The project was initiated under Whitehall, before Executive President Curry-Hume's election. But were the people told the truth? No, of course not.
Oh, if the project had been a failure, Finance Minister Whitehall would have gotten all the blame. And unlike a slippery politician, he wouldn't have been able to wiggle out of it. He was-to his intense irritation-not a charismatic man.
Whitehall wended his way through the bustle of people, stopping before the desk of the executive president's secretary. "Is he in?" he droned unhappily.
The woman glanced up. She had a phone in one hand and was digging through her desk drawer with the other.
"Oh, good morning, Minister," the harried woman said. "He knows about your appointment, but he's in conference now. Would you mind waiting?"
It was insulting to even suggest such a thing. Carlos Whitehall was a cabinet minister after all. On the other hand, he didn't feel like wading back through two floors of crowded hallways to his own offices. Lips twisting to show his annoyance, he took a seat in the waiting area.
He was dismayed to find that he was seated directly across from the official government photographic portrait of Blythe Curry-Hume. He had to put up with that photo everywhere he went in the building. There was even one hanging in his own office.
As usual, the man so beloved by his fellow countrymen failed to impress Finance Minister Whitehall. Certainly the executive president's appearance alone wasn't exceptional. In a country where combined Spanish and English features were common, Curry-Hume seemed to be a bland mix of both. His nose seemed a bit two narrow, and his eyes were almost a too-perfect almond shape. His
features were white, though his skin was dark. It was as if his face had been voted on and selected for its across-the-board appeal.
Sitting in his little corner of the presidential waiting room, Carlos Whitehall realized that this probably went to the very heart of what constituted a successful politician.
"Mr. Curry-Hume will see you now, Minister." Whitehall glanced over. A helpful young presidential assistant was smiling at him. Whitehall harrumphed displeasure at the young man. He allowed the aide to lead him back over past the secretary's desk to the executive president's door.
Two men were just exiting. Whitehall recognized Blythe Curry-Hume's brutish bodyguards. The men were new to the government payroll. The executive president had brought them in from his private life. The men swaggered off through the crowded office suite and out into the hall.
The young aide caught the door just as it was closing, holding it open for the finance minister. Whitehall stepped past him without so much as a nod of thanks.
The door closed with a soft click behind him.
In person, Executive President Blythe Curry-Hume was as bland as his official portrait.
Curry-Hume sat behind his broad desk. The back of his gleaming leather chair touched the edge of the mahogany. Brown eyes stared out the window and into the lush hills above New Briton.
Curry-Hume was the one who had insisted the Vaporizer be built in those hills. The original plan had put it closer to the harbor for convenience. Often in meetings his eyes would slip to the window. Cabinet officers would find him staring wistfully at the miles of hills and jungle overgrowth that separated him from the device. He seemed to take strange comfort in the Vaporizer that went beyond what the device would mean for his country.
Whitehall waited a few seconds before clearing his throat.
"Sit down, Carlos," Curry-Hume said. The president did not turn around. He continued to stare. Finance Minister Whitehall took a seat in front of the president's desk.
"And what is so urgent that the man who has saved Mayana needs to see me?" Curry-Hume asked.
It was an admission only made in private. The world would never know where credit was truly due. "We might have a slight problem," Carlos Whitehall said. "One of the Vaporizer scientists has disappeared. He did not show up for work this morning. When someone was sent to check, they found his apartment in shambles."
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