“More,” she said, slapping the inside of his legs until Andrew responded. Then she bent, and reached up between his thighs and grabbed his scrotum, handling it roughly as if looking for something concealed inside.
“Bend over.”
Andrew flinched at the squeek and snap of surgical rubber behind him, and hesitated. His heart pounded in his chest. “Look, I don’t know what you think I—”
“Bend!” she shouted. She grabbed the back of his neck and forced him to bend at the waist, then crouched behind him. She grasped his buttocks with her thick fingers, and spread them wide, hard, hurting him.
“You have drugs?”
“No. I told you before that I—” he yelped as she stabbed a gloved forefinger up inside him.
In the adjacent room, Gorodin turned away from the one-way mirror. “You think he’s convinced?” he asked the policeman who had flagged Andrew down.
“I can’t imagine he’ll think he’s having too easy a time of it after that,” the policeman snickered.
“If he does,” Gorodin said slyly, “I’m sure the notion will be dispelled by morning.” He glanced back to the one-way mirror.
Andrew was dressing — in record time. When he finished, the pig-eyed policewoman grasped his arm tightly, led him from the room, and down a corridor lined with detention cells.
He wanted to protest that his rights were being violated, and demand to talk to someone at the U.S. Embassy; but he knew that would end his mission.
She opened one of the solid steel doors and shoved him through it. He stumbled forward into the cell, kept his balance, and turned to the door as it clanged shut, shouting, “Hey?! Hey, how long am I going to be in this—” He let the sentence trail off when he saw the other prisoner — a slight young man with matted hair, and pale, gaunt face — huddled in a corner, trying to keep warm.
His forehead and right cheek were badly bruised; he had a cut across the bridge of his prominent nose; and one of his eyeglass lenses had been shattered.
Andrew saw the fear in his eyes — then he felt his own.
Chapter Forty-three
Lieutenant Jon Lowell stood at the Kira’s rail with the bottle of slivovitz, staring blankly into the dark sea, envisioning Arnsbarger drowning. The incident had traumatized Lowell, and he was frozen to the spot. The crewmen who had joined him on deck were shouting “Men overboard! Men overboard!” in Russian, and were dashing to life preservers and searchlights.
Rublyov arrived on the run, joining the group at the rail. “What has happened here?” he demanded.
Lowell stared at him blankly for a long moment, then held up the half-empty bottle, and blurted, “One of your men brought this to our cabin — wanted to share it. He and Arnsbarger got into it pretty good — got into politics — into an argument — I tried to stop them — shoved me aside — went outside to settle it. They went over just as I got here. I tried, I—” He groaned, and threw up his hands in frustration.
Though the story was a fabrication, the emotions were real, and Lowell knew they gave it veracity.
Rublyov nodded pensively, examining the bottle. He knew seamen kept their private stock concealed, which meant the only way Lowell could have acquired it was as he said. He glanced to the others solicitously.
“He was trying to help them back up when we got here,” one replied in Russian.
“They fell before we could do anything,” said another. The rest nodded in silent confirmation.
Lowell had no idea what they were saying. His eyes flicked between them apprehensively. He concealed his relief when Rublyov said, “I’m sorry, Lieutenant. These things happen.”
The Kira circled the area for more than an hour, her crew sweeping the powerful searchlights over the choppy waters.
Finally, Rublyov ordered, “Abandon search, resume course.”
“What do you mean?” Lowell replied. “They’ve got to be out there somewhere.” He protested because he thought it was expected. But all along he knew they wouldn’t be found. He knew Arnsbarger would never let that Russian seaman get to the surface to be rescued.
Thirty-six hours had passed since the Finback contacted ASW Pensacola, and confirmed the Kira’s destination as the Gulf of Mexico. At the time, the USS Carl Vinson, a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, was in the Caribbean off the coast of Nicaragua, 530 miles southwest of the sub’s position in the Yucatan Channel. Under ASW direction, the carrier changed course and steamed north toward the Gulf at thirty knots — more than ten knots faster than the Kira’s top speed — and was now 175 miles off the supertanker’s stern.
The Kira had maintained its heading for Gulf oil fields, and was 615 miles southwest of Pensacola, as expected — well out of range for land-based helicopter rendezvous, hence the need for carrier interface.
One of the Vinson’s radar operators was tracking the Kira on the SPS-10/surface system. The other had the long-range SPS-48/air locked on to a U.S. Navy F-14A Tomcat. The Grumman swing wing fighter had taken off from Pensacola forty-seven minutes earlier, at exactly 5:00 A.M., and now was eighty miles starboard of the carrier, streaking through the darkness at 910 mph.
“Five-thirty to touchdown,” the flight officer announced.
DCI Jake Boulton throttled back the Tomcat’s twin turbofans. The computerized flight control system automatically adjusted the wing sweep to cruise mode. Boulton radioed the Vinson, and got an immediate CTL from Primary Flight Control. He lowered the F-14A’s flaps, and minutes later he had the “meatball” in the center lens, and the nose on the line of blue chasers strobing in the darkness far below, and the Tomcat was in the groove. The screaming fighter came over the fantail at a steep angle, lights flaring in the mist, and slammed into the carrier’s deck at 140 mph. The tail hook caught the second arrester cable, and the Tomcat jerked to a dead stop, 1.3 seconds after her wheels first ticked the rubber-streaked armor.
The air boss nodded, impressed. “Whoever’s on that stick knows his stuff.”
Only three people aboard the Vinson knew the pilot’s identity, and why the carrier had been redeployed: the captain; the communications officer, who received the ASW directive with Langley’s cryptonym KUBARK; and, as the directive specified, the “best chopper pilot aboard.”
The time was 6:07 A.M. when Boulton popped the Tomcat’s canopy.
“Nice flying, sir,” the flight officer said.
“Thanks. Like to keep my hand in,” Boulton replied, snapping off a salute. He climbed down the ladder that the green-sweatered handling crew had just hooked onto the cockpit, and sprinted across the flight deck to a waiting helicopter.
The rotors of the Navy Sikorsky SH-3H Sea King were already whirling as Boulton went up the steps. A crewman pulled the door closed after him. The whomp accelerated to a crisp whisk. The twenty-thousand-pound chopper lifted her tail, then rose at a sideways angle into the first rays of daylight.
An hour and seventeen minutes later, the sun had crept over the horizon, and the Sea King was starboard of the Kira, and closing fast.
“Target dead ahead, sir,” the pilot reported.
“Captain said you were his top gun,” Boulton said.
“Captain never lies, sir,” the pilot said, smiling.
“Let’s find out.”
The pilot put the Sea King into a sweeping turn and came astern of the tanker, making his approach from behind and above the broad superstructure. This put the expanse of deck, and one-hundred-eighty degrees of unencumbered sky in front of the chopper should an abort be necessary. Then, hovering forward of the bridge, the pilot picked a spot on the cluttered deck and started the precarious descent.