“No, Arnie. We’re not. But we are the only country that has made it absolutely clear we’re not having those Kilos going to China.”
“I don’t suppose the Chinese Navy will be throwing a party in honor of the US Embassy staff in Beijing either.”
7
The lake was fifty miles wide here, and the Mikhail Lermontov was heading north through the short seas at a steady twenty-five knots. It was mid-afternoon on May 1, and the spring sky was overcast. Deep, dark gray clouds drifted northeast before a steady breeze, a harbinger of the rain that would soon sweep in off the cold Baltic, where it had already slashed through the city streets of Helsinki and St. Petersburg.
“This weather could turn out to be a serious pain in the ass,” said Lieutenant Commander Rick Hunter. He sat huddled with his two companions in the corner of the small bar on deck three, right at the stern of the three-hundred-foot-long blue-and-white tour ship. “Matter of fact, if it rains like I think it’s gonna rain, this little holiday could turn out to be a royal fuck-up. Still, we can’t turn back now.”
His words were carefully chosen to betray nothing to possible eavesdroppers. Rick Hunter was a rare man. He was a SEAL team leader selected from a pack of equally rare men. In him, instructors and commanders had spotted something different. There was a coldness behind his bright blue eyes and Kentucky hardboot manner. They had judged this rugged, country Lieutenant Commander from the Bluegrass as a man others would follow, and who in turn would treat his team’s problems as if they were his alone.
Back at Coronado, and at his home base in Little Creek, Virginia, most everyone had a hell of a soft spot for Rick Hunter. Perhaps not least because of his unwavering eye for a thoroughbred racehorse and finely tuned ear for the Kentucky gossip. Three times in the last four years he’d correctly forecast the winner of the Kentucky Derby. Two of his picks had been favorites, but one had gone in at 20-1. There were young SEALs who believed that Lieutenant Commander Hunter was some kind of a god. His father, old Bart Hunter, bred his own thoroughbreds on an immaculate horse farm out along the Versailles Pike near Lexington, and was not among this particular fan club. He found it a profound mystery that his oldest boy had not the slightest interest in raising horses, as he did, and as his daddy before him had done.
There was no way he could understand the thirty-five-year-old Rick when he told him, as he had told him every year since he was about fifteen, “Dad, it’s too passive. I just can’t spend all year wandering around in a daze looking at baby racehorses, waiting for the Keeneland yearling sales to see if we’re gonna go on eating. I need action. In the horse business I would have considered becoming a jockey. But that’s not possible.”
It sure wasn’t. The six-foot-three-inch Rick Hunter tipped the scales at 215 pounds, and he carried not one ounce of fat. He actually weighed the equivalent of two jockeys, and he had quarters on him like Man O’ War. Rick Hunter had been a swimmer all of his life, a collegiate champion from Vanderbilt University, and he had very nearly made the Olympic trials for the 1988 Games but had dropped out of college suddenly. A year later he was accepted at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis.
His third-generation farmer’s strength, combined with his coordination and dexterity in the water, made him a natural candidate for the SEALs. The fact that he was a deadly accurate marksman, and a man used to exercising authority from a very young age on the two-thousand-acre farm in the Bluegrass, made him a potential team leader right from the start. Rick Hunter disappointed no one. Except maybe Bart.
And now he sat, frowning, staring through the big stern windows at the lowering sky. “Fuck it,” he thought to himself as the Mikhail Lermontov ran smoothly beneath thick gray cloud. “Not much light tonight. Even with the full moon that cloud cover will just about kill it. Another pain in the ass.”
It was not quite the phrasing the young intellect for whom the ship was named would have chosen, but the nineteenth century romantic author of Russia’s first major psychological novel, A Hero of Our Time, did deal principally with the twin demons of frustration and isolation. And Rick Hunter understood all about that.
He and his two colleagues had spent some time in the little ship’s museum, which was devoted to the life of Mikhail Lermontov — all Russian tour ships these days are like cultural theme parks built around the person the ship is named for. The three SEALs had watched the illustrated account of Lermontov’s demise, killed in a duel at the age of only twenty-six. “Shoulda rolled off to the right when he’d fired his one shot,” thought Chief Petty Officer Fred Cernic, “then come right back at him with his knife…low off the ground…leading off his right leg…blade forward…one movement.” Then, aloud, the Chief observed, “He’d probably still be around if he’d been properly taught.”
“Yeah, right,” said Rick. “He’d’a been about two hundred years old.”
The third SEAL was Lieutenant Junior Grade Ray Schaeffer, a lean, dark-haired twenty-eight-year-old native of the Massachusetts seaport of Marblehead, where his family traced their lineage back to the time of the Revolutionary War. There was a Schaeffer pulling one of the oars when the Marbleheaders rowed General Washington to safety from the lost Battle of Long Island to Manhattan. Ray was proud of his heritage. His father was a fishing boat captain, and the family home was a medium-size white Colonial down near the docks. The Schaeffers were a deeply religious Catholic family.
Ray had gone from high school straight to Annapolis. A lifelong seaman, expert navigator, swimmer, and platoon middleweight boxing champion, he had SEAL written all over him. Both he and Rick Hunter were considered destined for high office in this unorthodox branch of the US fighting forces.
All three men were traveling along the Russian waterways on false passports. They kept their given first names to avoid any careless errors but had changed their last names. They mostly kept clear of other passengers, but not in any way that would attract suspicion. In fact the slim, dark-haired divorcée Mrs. Jane Westenholz, and her doe-eyed nineteen-year-old daughter Cathy, had taken quite a shine to Rick and his friends. Mrs. Westenholz was apt to call them Ricky, Freddie, and Ray Darling, as if they were three hairdressers, which sure would have amused Admiral Bergstrom.
Lieutenant Commander Hunter looked at his watch. They were still four hours from the Green Stop, and because the tour boats were not yet on their summer schedules, they were due to arrive at 1930. Tonight they would dock in a grim, damp northern twilight. The Russian tour boat would secure alongside the jetty overnight and allow the passengers to sight-see in the morning, when a barbecue lunch ashore might be possible, weather permitting, before the ship returned to St. Petersburg.
Right now Rick could feel the boat altering course to the west for their scheduled swing around the island of Kizhi, the treasured national historic site. Some boats made a four-hour stop here for tourists to see the three carved eighteenth-century churches and visit other historic wooden buildings in this strange place where time has stood still for three centuries. The Mikhail Lermontov was not stopping at Kizhi, and its detour would be fairly swift, but the island is a unique place and ought not to be missed. Its onion domes adorn every guidebook of the great lake.
The three SEALs pulled on their parkas and baseball caps, paid and tipped the young Russian waiter, and went out on deck to see the island. Fred brought a camera with him, and they all leaned over the port-side rail on the upper deck while the Chief Petty Officer shot pictures. Ray said he didn’t think there was a snowball’s chance in hell that any of the photos would come out because of the poor light. At which point Mrs. Westenholz stepped out on deck wearing a fluorescent scarlet raincoat with bright yellow boots. “You boys shouldn’t be out in the rain, you all could catch severe chills in this awful Russian weather.”