Vitaly Rankov understood the Kilo disaster would, in the end, be announced as an accident. He knew it would be picked up by the international media not as major news, but as news nonetheless. He could deal with that. What he could not deal with was his vision of the gloating, complacent face of Admiral Arnold Morgan. “Now then, old pal, you gotta start thinking about beefing up your security…stuff happens…”
“Jesus Christ,” said Admiral Rankov out loud. It was the first time he had ever accepted the distinct possibility that the United States might actually get away with this. Just as they had gotten away with the destruction of the two previous Kilos.
Meanwhile he picked up the telephone and instructed Lieutenant Commander Kazakov to find the pathologist’s report on the deaths of the two Andropov crew members. Their bodies had been flown to St. Petersburg for an autopsy, and Rankov wanted a preliminary view of the precise cause of death.
Lieutenant Commander Kazakov returned in thirty-five minutes with the faxed notes of the examining pathologist. The cause of death was identical for both men — heart failure caused by one single deadly straight incision made between the ribs by a large knife blade, which almost cleaved both hearts in two. One entry was from the front, one from the back. The body that contained the frontal injury, that of the steward Pieter, contained more water in the lungs than the other victim. However, neither man drowned. They were both knifed to death.
“Classic Special Forces,” muttered Admiral Rankov. “Just one wound. No mistakes. Professionals. Professional frogmen I’d guess, spotted by these two comedians from the Andropov, and summarily taken out. Before the killers swam on out to the barges and placed their charges on the hulls.
“Strange how I know so well what must have happened. Even stranger, that I don’t have one shred of evidence for either crime. Just four geriatric Americans, two of whom can barely walk, and all of whom are even beyond the suspicion of a seasoned KGB officer like Colonel Borsov. And they’re missing.”
The Admiral stood up and pushed his thick, wavy, dark hair back in a gesture of exasperation. He walked slowly across the long room, his heels clicking on the marble, like the ticking of a great unseen clock. “I know,” he told his deserted office, “EVERYTHING…and yet, I know NOTHING.”
Rankov was nothing if not a complete professional himself. He called in his two Lieutenant Commanders and ordered them to organize an immediate search of the lakeshore, fields, and woodlands around the area of the Green Stop of the Andropov.
“Might we know what we’re looking for, sir?” asked Kazakov.
“I think we might be looking for five more bodies.”
“The Americans?”
“Uh-huh. I have a feeling this hit squad, which blew the barges, was seen by the two crew members, and possibly by the Americans. It is my opinion that the terrorists may well have taken out all seven people. Authorize search parties to go through the woods immediately adjacent to the lake, and to comb the shore, above and below the surface. Get Navy frogmen in there. If you had just killed four old men and their nurse in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, and you were right next to a large lake, my guess is you’d dump the bodies in the water, weighted down somehow. But tell them to check the woods anyhow.”
Within three hours, a wide search was under way along the area of the Green Stop. Tour ships were moved on, the area along the shoreline was cordoned off, all along the dirt road and back into the woods. The River Police Commandant, working in conjunction with two Commanders from the Northern Fleet who had arrived by helicopter, decreed that a line should be marked off parallel to the dirt road, deep in the woods, more than a quarter of a mile from the shore.
The police chief objected, since the woodlands were twelve miles long and they were looking at a two-mile stretch. “With five bodies to drag into the undergrowth, they’re not going in there more than a hundred yards at most,” he said. “You draw that line a quarter of a mile in and we’re looking at a search area of one and one-half million square yards. With a hundred men, that’s fifteen thousand square yards each. But we only have a hundred in total, because fifty of our men are working along the water. Therefore we have each of our land searchers taking care of thirty thousand square yards, all of it covered in bracken, dead leaves, trees, and bushes. We’ll be here till Christmas.”
“If we don’t crack this, we might end up somewhere for a lot longer,” replied the Commander. “Let’s just keep going until someone tells us to stop, ‘the classic old Communist way.’”
The police Commandant laughed. “You’re in charge,” he said. “A quarter of a mile it is. Let’s get in the woods. You want metal detectors used?”
“Not searching for bodies. Just rakes, forks, and sharp sticks. I think in pairs is most efficient.”
“Yessir.”
Nine days later they had found precisely nothing. Which was scarcely surprising, since the searchers were, even at their nearest point, more than seven thousand miles from the still-breathing bodies of the missing Americans. Not to mention, still three-quarters of a mile from the deeply buried, booby-trapped SEALs canisters, each of which had anyway been thoughtfully metal-stamped by Admirals Morgan and Bergstrom, MADE IN THE UKRAINE.
Admiral Rankov was almost disappointed. He had talked himself into believing they might actually find the Americans dead. But every instinct he possessed told him the missing Americans were the hit squad that blew out the Kilos. And those same instincts were telling him he was never going to find one shred of positive proof to shed one ray of light on the catastrophe.
The next question was: should he hand this entire investigation over to the Military Agency in Moscow, which specialized in terrorism? He would have done so without hesitation had he considered any nation had a motive. But there was only one nation that fitted into that category. And the Special Forces, which operate in deadly secret behind the Stars and Stripes, did not count as terrorists. These were the US Army Rangers, or US Navy SEALs, and either one of them was way beyond the reach of any Russian reprisal, short of a shooting war.
Admiral Vitaly Rankov had never felt more powerless. There could be no admission from the Kremlin of what he knew had happened. No possible confession from his already beleaguered government that Special Forces from the USA had attacked his country, way inside the borders. No disclosure that the old Iron Curtain was now made, essentially, of gossamer.
And he cursed the ground upon which Arnold Morgan walked.
It had been a Black Operation. And Admiral Rankov knew that Black Operations were designed to leave no footprints. That had been the case when the two Kilos vanished in the North Atlantic. And it was most certainly the case now. The Chinese had not as yet caused a huge fuss, but they wanted their $300 million back.
The Russian Admiral was a loyal member of the Naval high command, and he cared deeply about the service in which he had worked for all of his life. If the Chinese pulled out now, he knew it would cause shocking hardship in every corner of the Russian shipbuilding industry, and indeed among the Navy personnel.
The priority, he believed, was to save the order from Beijing for the unfinished aircraft carrier in the Ukraine, and to come up with a foolproof scheme to deliver the final two Kilos to China. With some luck, he thought, we might even get them to hold over the $300 million, maybe even roll over the order for more Kilos. “Just as long as I can come up with a method of delivering them,” he thought. “Without that fucker Morgan and his bandits sinking them first.”