And there would be nothing left of Svetlana Anna.
While she waited for the timer to roll down, the sweat rolling down her forehead, she tried to think about her happiest memory. It was the communal farm where she lived with her aunt and uncle when she was a little girl. They had owned an adorable Siberian Husky puppy named Baku, and Anna had delighted in playing with him. Baku, all his life, had had this unusual and funny bark, sort of a high-pitched rough-raow sound, that she would imitate and bark back at him, which would make him smile and bounce on his front paws and bark even louder at her. She’d been inseparable from Baku all through school and college, but Baku had gotten old and one summer day he stopped eating and just lay on his bed, whining. Anna wouldn’t leave his side, putting blankets down next to him to try to keep him company during the night, and the last night, while she held him, his whining gave way to wheezing, and finally, the wheezing got quieter and shallower, and Baku breathed his last. As Anna remembered, a tear leaked out of her eye.
The timer of the bomb ran out. There was a loud click, and then Anna’s vision was filled with a blindingly bright light that faded to a deep black, but oddly, the blackness had a texture to it, almost as if it were made of dark thunderclouds, and the clouds were rotating around her and seemed to form a sort of tunnel, and a lightness grew at the center of the tunnel, at what seemed a tremendous distance, until the light grew brighter and warmer and then the strangest thing happened.
Svetlana Anna could hear a noise.
It was a happy noise.
Rough-raow, the sound came. Rough-raow!
It was Baku!
The memory of that trip was so vivid, it seemed like it happened yesterday, despite it having been over a month ago.
“Can I get you a drink, ma’am?”
“After a day like this? I think a vodka martini with a twist, chilled and up,” CIA Director Margo Allende said to the steward.
The Gulfstream SS-12A jet had lifted off from Ronald Reagan International at 1800, climbing swiftly east-northeast toward the Atlantic.
She looked across the aisle at Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Rob Catardi, who had asked for an old fashioned. The steward came by with a tray and handed her a drink, then set down Catardi’s.
“Do you think this has any chance of success?” she asked Catardi.
Catardi shrugged. “Who knows what the crazy Russians will do at any moment,” he said. “I’m just surprised they accepted your invitation.”
She nodded, then opened her tablet computer and scanned through the intelligence updates. The Status-6 torpedoes were late being loaded onto Belgorod. The intel brief suspected that there were technical problems with them, and the shipyard at Sevmash had recalled them for modifications. But Allende knew the truth, that CIA’s assets within the shipyard had been sabotaging the torpedoes. Unfortunately, the Status-6 units had been placed under more rigid security — perhaps someone suspecting sabotage — and the units left Sevmash fully functional.
Meanwhile, the submarine USS New Jersey was being prepared for its run north to linger outside the Kola Peninsula submarine bases, to trail the Belgorod, and if need be, put it on the bottom. The raging debate was how to provide the new submarine with a crew, since her crew had spent three years building her, with only a few weeks of sea trials, and were considered incapable of a top-secret special operation.
In other news, the previous project submarine USS Vermont was considered a wreck after a disastrous fire in the forward compartment while in drydock, and plans were being drawn up to mate Vermont’s aft compartment to the new USS Massachusetts’ forward compartment, restoring the Vermont to operational status in six months or less. Vermont would be renamed, according to the article, since it was soon to be half Massachusetts. The Navy announced plans to rename it to be the USS New England, in honor of the two states forming her hull. That left the aft portion of the former Massachusetts, to be mated to a repaired Vermont front end, and which so far hadn’t been renamed. American Party Senator Michaela Everett had floated the idea of naming the submarine the USS Michael A. Pacino. Allende smiled at that, wondering what Pacino would think of that. He’d probably hate it, she thought, smiling to herself.
After the drinks were carried away, she and Catardi were served a light dinner. Allende took a sleeping pill, downing it with a sparkling water, put on a sleeping mask, leaned her leather seat far back, and tried to sleep. It was insane, she thought, how when she needed to sleep, sleep evaded her. But when she needed to stay awake? She could sleep ten hours.
Finally she fell into an uneasy slumber, seeing the imagined scene of the chalet and the Russians they’d be meeting, and in the craziness of the dream, she, Rob and the two Russians were trying to decide how to get rid of a dead body.
She finally woke when shaken gently awake by the steward. “We’re descending into Geneva, ma’am,” he said.
Catardi looked at her with amusement. “You talked in your sleep,” he said, smirking. “Probably not the best thing for the CIA director to be sleep-talking.”
“Oh God, what did I say?” she asked.
“You kept saying ‘Michael, I have the body.’ There are several interpretations one could make of that,” he laughed.
Allende rubbed her forehead. “Now I have a headache.”
They landed gently at Cointrin Geneva Airport, taxied to the general aviation building, and climbed out. On the tarmac, a black SUV waited. The steward loaded their luggage in the back and handed Allende a heavy parka. “May as well have this with you in the car, ma’am. It will be chilly on the way to the chalet.”
The drive to the chalet went quickly, although it was a hundred kilometers from the airport, through a winding mountain road. At the higher altitude, the ground became snow-covered, blinding from the glare of the morning sunshine.
Eventually they arrived at the chalet, a huge log affair overlooking a wide and deep valley. The roof and grounds were under several feet of snow, and the air was crisp and cold. The front door opened and a hostess smiled and invited them in, taking their coats while the driver brought in their luggage. Allende looked at her overnight bag, thinking that if this went the way she hoped, she’d never need it, and they could return to the airport that same day.
“Are the other guests here yet?” Allende asked.
“They phoned from the road, ma’am,” the hostess said. “You can set up in the living room if you’d like. We’ve had a fire built for you, per your request.”
“No conference room?” Catardi asked Allende.
Allende shook her head. “I figured the less formal this meeting, the better.”
The hostess served coffee and set up a tea service on the coffee table for the Russians, with two bottles of Jewel of Russia vodka and four glasses. Allende could hear noise from the foyer, the arrival of the Russians.
They walked into the room then, the tall, slender and well-built figure of the SVR Chairman Lana Lilya and behind her, Vice Admiral Pavel Zhabin, the chief of staff and first deputy commander of the Russian Navy, technically their number three man, but the deputy commander, Mikhail Myshkin, had died the week before and the chief commander of the Navy, Admiral Anatoly Stanislav, was fighting pancreatic cancer — unsuccessfully — and had just been admitted to hospice care in Moscow. With Stanislav sick and Myshkin dead, Zhabin was by default the commanding admiral of the Russian Navy. If Admiral Zhabin was Catardi’s equivalent, SVR Chairman Lana Lilya, as head of the foreign intelligence service, was Allende’s.