by Thomas Waite
“Better than the Passport 44 the DEA was talking about,” he said with dedicated disregard. “Too beamy,” he explained, or thought he had: now Lana looked puzzled. “Too wide,” he explained. “Great for cargo—”
“You would certainly know about that.”
“But slow. I contacted an old boat broker of mine with, let’s say, a demanding clientele. He’s got a Dehler 38 waiting for us.”
“Tell me we’re picking it up somewhere close to the subject.”
“We are, in Pitsunda, Abkhazia.”
“What? We might as well be going to Moscow.” Abkhazia had broken away from Georgia, with Moscow’s wholehearted approval. Predictably, Russia was among the few countries that did recognize the teensy country, which was sandwiched between the two antagonists.
“Not really. Pitsunda’s a little bit beaten and a little bit lawless. But from what I’ve been told it’s really close to where we’re supposed to get that woman and her kid.”
“The Russian shadow falls all over Abkhazia.”
“It wasn’t my call. I just got the boat.”
“Tell me about it.”
“It’s not a race boat but it’s very quick and nimble. Cruising World’s best cruiser in its class. It’ll also have the right look for us. Affluent, but not so pricey that it would be out of line for a sport sailor trying to save his prize from the clutter of rising harbors. It won’t attract too much attention.”
One of Holmes’s runners rushed in: “The deputy director says it’s time to move. He wants you both in his office.”
Holmes stood as they entered. “We double-checked your boat broker,” he said to Don. “He’s solid.”
“I know.”
“We didn’t,” Holmes retorted. “You better be solid, too. I know you’ve done some fine work for the DEA but what you’re getting into now is more important than all the dope deals and FARC intelligence put together. Do not lose Lana, and get that woman and her child out of Russia. Then point that boat west and move out as fast as you can. We can’t help you for the first two hundred miles, and those territorial waters are a bit of a maze. You wouldn’t be the first captain to find himself towed into Russian territory because they found it convenient to do so.”
“Pitsunda, right?” Lana asked. “That’s where we’re getting the boat?”
Holmes nodded, as though he could appreciate her skeptical tone. “I know, it’s dicey, but the Abkhazians are intent on keeping up the façade of being independent of Moscow. It’s a little scary there, but let’s face it, so are some of the people we’ll have in place to keep an eye on you two. They can’t do anything for you once you enter Russian waters, but in Pitsunda and its surrounds, it shouldn’t be too bad.”
Famous last words, Lana couldn’t help but think.
“We’ve got a Sikorsky to fly you out to Andrews. You’ll board a Gulfstream 650. That’s for the first leg. The second will get more interesting. Get some sleep while you can. Once you’re on that boat, you’ll be all eyes all the time.”
“What do you mean, about the second leg getting ‘more interesting?’” she asked.
“It’s all ‘know as you go.’ Sorry,” Holmes said.
Packs of sailing clothing and supplies were waiting onboard the bird. They lifted up over Fort Meade, air space reserved for very few. It was all clear for the two of them and their young pilot.
Don looked green. Only then did Lana remember his uneasiness in the air.
“You going to lose it?” He had on American Airlines on their honeymoon flight to Saint Martin. Repeatedly. Ah, romance.
He shook his head. “I’m okay.”
She handed him an airsickness bag—just in case.
He buried his head in it—then most of his stomach—seconds later.
Lana turned from the revolting display, remembering—with a wrenching roll of her own stomach—how contagious regurgitation could get.
The flight to Andrews at dusk took them over the flooding Potomac. Water had reached the National Mall, and the reflecting pool at the Washington Memorial had disappeared into the larger vat of the rising ocean. Anacostia looked particularly hard-hit. She was glad Tanesa’s family had found refuge with them—for so many reasons.
Andrews, thankfully, was dry. They boarded the Gulfstream, an especially swift jet that should deliver them to their destination in less than eight hours. The pilot and his second would not tell them where they were going, though.
“More ‘know as you go’?” she asked the woman.
A quick nod and the pair disappeared into the cockpit.
Two hours later, unable to sleep, Lana peered into the darkest night knowing the sea was shifting radically thousands of feet below. In the complete blackness that now enveloped them, the watery world could have been reaching to swallow them and the stars.
They landed at a remote airstrip, but not in Abkhazia, or anywhere near Pitsunda. In Turkey, the pilot informed them, saying no more.
She and Don were taken to a hangar where a pair of F-15 fighter jets were waiting: his and hers, as it turned out.
“Why?” Don asked uneasily.
“We’re taking you to the U.S.S. William Jefferson Clinton.”
“An aircraft carrier? We’re landing on an aircraft carrier at night in rising seas?”
“That about nails it,” the new flight commander said.
Don hurled again, sans sickness bag. But at least he wasn’t in the fighter jet . . . yet.
Now he was. Lana waved good-bye. He was off. She was belted in by experienced hands.
At least Emma won’t be orphaned on this leg of the journey, she thought, because what were the odds of both pilots missing the heaving deck of an aircraft carrier and crashing?
Actually, higher than she realized, given the wildly unsettled sea.
The lights on the carrier appeared in the distance as a pinprick on a vast black screen.
That’s it? Lana thought. That’s all?
As they raced nearer, she saw raging whitecaps smashing into the side of the Clinton, sending spray across the deck, storm conditions that had to be on the very margin of safety. Or death, she thought at once.
She squeezed her hands into fists, sweating heavily.
Lana wondered if Don had made it safely aboard. Right then she saw his fighter jet approaching the carrier for a landing.
The wings of the F-15 tilted back and forth, as though the pilot were trying to mirror the wobble of the landing platform itself. Then, at the last moment, the jet’s engines flared brightly and the F-15 aborted the landing, blasting back up to the black sky, presumably for a second chance.
Her pilot said nothing. She imagined his eyes glued to the deck. She squeezed hers shut. The seconds hung with the weight of eternity.
Think about them, she told herself sternly: Galina and Alexandra Bortnik. They’re the ones in real danger.
But she had a hard time believing that because when she peeked out of the cockpit, all she saw was the carrier rolling like a barroom brawler on the waves below.
CHAPTER 22
LANA KNEW VERY LITTLE about landing an F-15 on an aircraft carrier, but she was certain each fighter jet had a hook on its tail that needed to catch on a steel wire stretched across the deck. More than one wire, if she recalled correctly.
She had no time left to worry: the F-15 hit the heaving platform, nose slightly elevated—That’s good, right? So it can catch?—and raced like a dragster down the tilting surface.
Catch, damn it.
The pilot gave his engines full throttle.
She swore, thinking they’d also missed the wires and needed to blast off to avoid ending up in the sea.
But no: turned out it was standard operating procedure in case the pilot missed one of the steel wires. He caught the hook and they came to a stop—incredibly—in less
than two seconds.
If Don doesn’t lose the rest of his lunch, I’ll be amazed.
In what seemed like a blink, she was helped out of the cockpit and rushed off the deck.
She heard the jet with Don approaching, and realized how terribly torn she was between watching his landing and contacting Galina ASAP.
Then she saw seamen unfurling a huge net barricade across the deck.
“What’s that for?” she asked the taciturn pilot who had flown her to the carrier, which was pitching noticeably beneath her feet.
“He lost the nose wheel on his first attempt so he’s got to crash-land it.”
Crash-land it? With Don?
She swore again, but softly this time. Not enough, however, to escape the captain’s attention: “You can say that again,” he muttered.
Lana looked at the netting. She looked at the jets parked, wings up, along the side of the carrier. Tough to imagine the netting stopping a sailboat, much less a fighter jet traveling in excess of two hundred miles per hour.
Before she realized it, she was whisked off the deck to an observation window safely removed from the looming accident, because any way she looked at it, an accident was about to take place.
When Don’s jet hit the deck seconds later, the nose cone scraped across the surface, as if to plow it up. Then it hit the net and stopped almost as quickly as hers had.
A team of sailors carrying ladders and fire-suppression gear descended on the F-15, pulling Don and the pilot out of the cockpit.
“Always a chance of a fuel fire or explosion,” an officer who had just appeared by her side explained nonchalantly.
Don was stumbling, helped by two sailors, one on each arm.
He made it. We’re okay.
“I need the communications room,” she said to the officer.
“We can give you that for ten minutes,” he said, leading her through a doorway to a room filled with communication cubicles. She realized at once that it was no accident that he was standing next to her. “But you’ll be getting onto a boat a lot smaller and faster to get you to your destination.”
“In these seas?” she asked. He nodded. “How far?”
“A little more than fifty nautical miles.”
Nautical miles? It took her a second to remember that they were almost a thousand feet longer than a regular mile. And they had “a little more than fifty” of them to cross? In these seas? she repeated to herself.
“You’ve got to go under the radar,” the officer went on. “There’s no guarantee that will happen, but there’s less of a chance you’ll be noticed in a much smaller boat, especially with all the traffic on coastal waters these days.”
“What about this thing?” She looked about the Clinton.
“We’re in a narrow sliver of international waters to get you this close. Plus, the Abkhazians don’t exactly have much of a navy.”
Lana rushed a message to Galina: “Where are you?” Cutting to the chase.
Galina must have been on edge waiting to hear from her because she fired right back: “I need to get out of here before daybreak.”
“Stay put. We’re coming to get you.”
“How soon? Oleg is very close.”
“Do you think he’s close or know that he is?” Lana asked, worried that he would get his hands on her. Just hours ago, Jensen had tracked Dernov’s data to Sochi, where he presumably had spent the night.
“You and I both know he’s close,” Galina replied. “I need to leave before daylight. Where are you?”
“I can’t say.” She looked at the officer. “How long till daylight?”
He checked his watch. “An hour fifty.”
“We won’t be there by daylight,” she texted Galina, seeing no point in mincing words.
“How long?” Galina asked. Lana could almost hear her impatience. “You must have an idea of how far away I am.”
She pulled up Jensen, who had been the second person she’d planned to contact once aboard the Clinton, and asked him if he had any notion of where Galina was.
“She’s been very quiet,” he reported. “No data streams, but if I had to guess, I’d say she’s north of Sochi, but not too far.”
I could have guessed that.
“What’s the problem?” the officer asked.
She told him.
A young woman’s head popped up from behind a partition. “Whoever you’re communicating with is 110 kilometers north of Sochi in what appears to be a small seaport town. I can’t get a name for it. It might not have one, at least on any map we have.”
“Thank you.” Though it concerned Lana that Galina’s position had been sniffed out so quickly; at least it was by friendly forces.
She turned to Don: “From Pitsunda, how long will it take us to get up there?”
“We’ll be moving fast in these conditions. A half-day’s sail at worst. What’s the latest weather?” he asked the room at large, perhaps hoping for another head to pop up. One did:
“Strong winds, near gale force, till tonight,” a male sailor said, looking up from his computer.
“She won’t wait a half day,” Lana told Don. “She sounds like she expects us to be there in the next ninety minutes.”
“What choice does she have?” he asked.
Lana, more diplomatically, asked Galina that question.
“Can’t say, but I can’t wait,” she replied.
Lana relayed that reply to Don.
“It seems to me she’s got one good option, and that’s to go to sea and head south. She’s already said something about chartering, right?”
Lana nodded.
“I can give her captain coordinates for a rendezvous at sea,” said Don.
“That could look very suspicious,” said the officer who’d been by Lana’s side. “A busy Russian navy might miss that, but satellites are hardly going to.”
“I don’t see any option but to take the risk,” Lana replied. “You said yourself there are lots of boats out there.” She messaged Galina with Don’s suggestion of a rendezvous.
No response came from her.
“Galina? Did you get that message?”
Still nothing.
“Galina? I need to know if you’re okay.”
Good question, Galina thought, shutting down her connection with Lana Elkins. She was worried sick that Oleg might have located her, though the only activity she spied from her perch above the village was the house lights flicking on.
She considered rushing down to the dock just long enough to make contact with a boat captain, but could not bring herself to leave her daughter alone. Neither could she bear waking the sleeping child to another day of leukemia and pain.
Instead, she drove the expensive Porsche SUV into the village of perhaps a dozen run-down homes and a handful of cars and pickups older than she herself was.
Galina parked near the dock and stuffed PP’s cash into her shoulder bag, then shoved the derringer into her pocket so she could grab the gun easily if she had to.
Donning a headscarf out of respect—and dark glasses out of fear—she stepped from the car as a man jumped to the dock off a trawler. She wondered if he’d slept on it. But when she approached him in the dim light, his eyes looked bright, as if they were reflecting the last of the night’s starlight.
He didn’t appear at all surprised by her appearance, asking gruffly who she was, as he might have demanded of anyone else at any other time of day. He sounded like a man who did not suffer distractions easily.
“I need to charter a boat.”
“A fishing boat?” He shook his head, maybe in disbelief, then peered closely at her. “Take off your glasses.” When she hesitated, he removed them so swiftly she had no time to react. “I know you,” he said. “You are the ‘Porn Star Spy.’ I’ve seen naked pictures of yo
u on TV.” He shook his head again, this time in obvious disapproval.
Porn Star Spy. That’s what they’re calling me? Oleg, that son of a bitch. He’d made a mockery of her. She knew it was easy to do: Russians loved their “news” tawdry and tabloid, just like the Brits and Americans.
“Please, listen to me,” she begged. “He was someone I loved. I didn’t know he took those pictures. I never would have done that. He’s horrible.”
She sounded desperate. She was. But even then she knew she’d rather deal with a Muslim man’s indignation—and from what she’d observed yesterday afternoon, this was a Muslim village—than Oleg’s murderous revenge. That the captain had taken offense only over the sex photos, not the spy allegations, had not escaped her notice, so she went on: “But it’s true, I’m a spy trying to stop this Russian criminal from bombing Antarctica. That’s what’s making the oceans rise.”
She glanced at the hull of his trawler; the bottom was now pressed against the top of the dock. The water had risen at least half a foot since last night. Soon there would be no dock.
“Who do you say is doing this to you?” he asked. His gruffness had not eased.
Now she saw that she would have to take the biggest risk of all: “A very rich Russian man. He’s bought influence with the Russian police. He’s doing this to me. He’s afraid of what I can do to him.”
The captain stared at her. He said nothing.
She played her last card—cash—pulling out a fistful of rubles. “If I don’t get out of here, they will kill me and my little girl. She’s in the car. You are a man of faith. I saw you coming from your prayer yesterday. You know what the Russians did to your brothers and sisters in Chechnya. They will do that to me, too. And then they will kill me. Help me, please.”
He eyed the money. “How far?” he asked.
“Out of Russian waters. A rendezvous at sea south of here. I can get the coordinates.”
“Your daughter, they say she’s sick. They say she needs help. That you’re a bad mother.”
“She is sick. She does need help. But not their help.” Galina stared into his eyes. “She needs yours.”