“Okay, she’s lost.” Josh stood from his chair. “They’ll take her to the bottom. The destroyers will resume their regular patrolling patterns.”
“The crew on the sub still has to be picked up. We can pinpoint her then, can’t we?”
“True. But those destroyers navigate a pattern across that whole area. Who knows where they are exactly parking her. The crew could wait for the pattern to pass over them before they swim to the top. They could be plucked from the water without too much of an obvious course change or delay.” Josh was becoming uncomfortable with what he was saying. It wasn’t his area, and he didn’t know if he was right. He was just drawing reasonable conclusions from his observations — with the help of ODIS. He was air force, but well versed in naval movements by now. “I do want to ask one question, Admiral.”
“Yes.”
“Is it a threat?”
“That’s what we’re going to find out at Electric Boat.”
George sighed with relief as his commuter flight from New York touched down at Dulles International. He was back in Virginia, where his whole career had started. A sense of anticipation gripped him, and he was eager to see the changes after he reported in. He mulled over the thought of a shower but quickly put it out of his mind. What he had to report was infinitely more important.
The green of spring was sweeping across the landscape and was pleasing to the eye. His cabby jabbered away endlessly as the yellow Prius sped toward CIA headquarters. George tuned him out and tried to imagine the area in the spring when he had traveled there for the first time. It was a fruitless exercise, and he realized that too much time had passed in his life for him to dredge up old, romantic thoughts of his youth. He continued to comfort himself with the expectation of his discharge. They owed it to him, and he desperately wanted to collect, even if it was a couple of months early.
The cab turned into the first security checkpoint before the parking lot.
“This is as far as we can go,” said the driver.
George paid and got out. “Thanks.”
The cab drove away, and he approached the guard in the booth.
“Can I help you?” the guard asked.
“I need to see Dan Archer.”
“Name?”
“Tell him Bluebird.”
The admiral had his own military jet. He and Josh rode comfortably in the back most of the way. They did a lot of small talk, mainly reviewing each other’s career. Sukudo could tell that Josh’s greatest pleasure had been stolen from him, so he offered him the opportunity to pilot the jet. It was a passenger plane, but Josh jumped at the chance. He relieved the copilot, took the controls off autopilot, and flew her the rest of the way to Groton.
The smell of fuel on the airport’s tarmac brought Josh to life. For a moment, he had returned to a familiar arena. It made him walk a little taller and step a little livelier. The sun was dropping over the trees in the west, and the surroundings glowed gold. He had worked in the Houston basement for so long that he had almost forgotten how beautiful sunsets could be. A staff car was waiting, and it whisked them away to Electric Boat.
The admiral had already made the arrangements for their arrival, and they were allowed to bypass the security checkpoints at the boat plant. They pulled in front of a dry-dock housing the USS Seawolf submarine, in for a refit. It was the most advanced hunter/killer submarine that the United States had commissioned to date. Only its mammoth outline was visible in the fading light as the two men approached the warehouse in front of the dock.
The vessel looked ominous. A chill seeped through Josh as he felt engulfed by its black color and belittled by its size. He followed Sukudo up a flight of stairs to the design room, never taking his eyes off the monolith before him.
The design room was large and stuffed with papers. All the lights were off except for two small overhead lamps illuminating a table next to a picture window. Gazing out the window was a crumpled old man scanning the skyline as the city fell to darkness. He stood at the most five foot two. A man who had been taller before, but the rigors of life had buckled him. His face was aged and wrinkled, and his brows almost slid over his eyes. His skin was tough and brown and held a distinct Slavic appearance. He turned to greet Sukudo, and when he spoke, a heavy Russian accent whipped through his speech.
Sukudo shook his hand and make the introductions. “Josh Brand, meet Mikhail Nemokov.”
“Nice to meet you,” Josh said.
“You are the eyeball Kenneth has talked to me about.” His accent was more pronounced when he became slightly excited, which made Josh listen very carefully.
“Ah… yes. Eyeball would be correct.”
“To your credit, he spoke well of you. He doesn’t do that much.” Mikhail cleared some papers off a table to prepare it for their meeting.
“Don’t say too much, Mik. The man will get a swelled head.” Sukudo pulled the pictures of the Saratov from his briefcase. “Here’s what we do know. We don’t know who made her, we don’t know why, and we don’t know what for. Now isn’t that a lot to go on?” Sukudo wanted to keep a good tone in the room.
Mikhail surveyed the photos with great interest. He flipped through them once and then again. Like a child sneaking a candy bar, he absorbed the pictures in a covert manner. He held them up to the light and then under a magnifying glass. When he was finally satisfied, he spoke. “They dumped her in the Barents?”
“Her and a few others.”
He grunted. “That place is a graveyard. They have more secrets down there than submarines. The Kursk was not the first mishap. I did warn them.”
“This was the latest one,” said Sukudo. “What do you think of her?”
“Nice toy.” Mikhail waived it off as if it were nothing.
“What do you mean a toy?” Josh was surprised by his reaction.
“No threat where it is. Can’t help anyone. Can’t hurt anyone sitting in all that cold water.”
“Yeah, but it’s so different from the others. It’s different from anything they have.” Josh wanted the mystery solved, and he wasn’t going to be satisfied until he got some answers.
“You’ve got to understand, Mik, Josh is privy to things that I’m not allowed to see. It’s the nature of his work. He won’t accept that as an answer.” Sukudo chuckled at the men, mainly because they were people who never had to explain anything to anyone unless they wanted to. He could clearly see that Mikhail was uneasy with Josh’s pursuit of the question, but he relented.
“Very well,” he said, taking a deep breath. “This is a pet project of someone in the Soviet Union…”
“You mean Russia.”
“No, I mean the Soviet Union. Russia hasn’t the capital to undertake such ambition. This ship has sat in a covered dock for most of its life. It looks like Typhoon class, but the dimensions are spread out. Was there a name on it?”
“We couldn’t find a match.”
“She died before she could be put into service.” He paused to inspect the photos again. “Metallurgy is their whole problem, you know. Unfortunately, it made them think backward. You could have a top-notch design for a sub, but if the metal was no good, then it would get crushed by the pressure.” Mikael slapped his hands together to accentuate the point. “The larger the ship, the shallower the dive maximums. It’s an obstacle they tried to work around rather than through.”