“Yes, Admiral. I would also like to speak with you in private for a moment.”
Meredov sighed and stood.
“Excuse me, please, Captain. My regrets.”
“Who’s Balakirev?”
“Rear Admiral Balakirev is my counterpart in Anadyr, covering the coast and waters around the Bering Strait.” Meredov spoke into the conference phone. “I am stepping from the room. I am muting the phone, and will return shortly.”
When Meredov left the conference room, Irina beckoned for him to follow. Puzzled, he went to her office across the hall.
She closed the door. “There’s something you need to see.”
“Yes?”
“Regarding the computer analysis, Admiral.”
“Go on. Quickly.”
She placed a false-color image, a computer printout, on her desk. He examined it. “These are the spires in the strait?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What are these red and orange dots and blobs?”
“Echo returns from the ships’ and sonobuoy’s active sonars, that our supercomputer eked from all the data Anadyr sent us.”
The fuzzy colors traced the shape of a submarine in profile.
“So there was a hostile contact. It did just sit still and wait out the depth charges…. It used some sort of very effective out-of-phase ping cancellation to conceal itself.”
Malinkova nodded. “That’s what the computer center says.”
“Can they identify the class of submarine?”
“Its dimensions as revealed by the dots indicate a length of about one-hundred-ten meters, and a beam close to twelve meters.”
“That eliminates most possibilities.”
“Yes, sir. The wide diameter of the hull is key, when combined with its length as a fast-attack. It can only be USS Seawolf, USS Connecticut, or USS Challenger. And our intelligence reports say that Seawolf and Connecticut are on the other side of the world, operating near South Africa.”
“So it was in fact Captain Fuller’s ship that Balakirev’s forces pinned down temporarily?”
“Yes, sir. It appears quite certain.”
“Does he know this?”
“Rear Admiral Balakirev? No, sir. I thought you should see this first, as soon as the analysis was ready.”
Meredov started to think out loud. “And the depth charging was almost two weeks ago.”
“Yes, sir.”
“What’s the distance from the Bering Strait to where Challenger first made contact with us by radio?”
“Less than two thousand miles, sir, even allowing for an indirect route.”
Meredov did the arithmetic in his head. “So if she were moving constantly, she’d have made an average speed of less than seven knots.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why would a vessel who’s maximum quiet speed is at least twenty-five knots move so slowly for such a long time?”
“I don’t know, Admiral. It does seem odd, unless she had some mission in our waters.”
“I won’t mention this to Captain Fuller right away, because I don’t want him on his guard before I’m ready to corner him with his own words. His being in the Laptev Sea when the missiles launched is awfully convenient. Too convenient.”
“You think it wasn’t coincidence, sir?”
“Who fired the decoy that pretended to be Challenger?”
“The real Challenger, maybe? But why?”
“I can think of several reasons, and I don’t like any of them…. All right. Very good work, Irina. Express my thanks to the analysts. Inform Vladivostok immediately by secure line, but beyond that, you and the computer center are to say nothing about this to anyone…. Something here doesn’t make sense. Something here doesn’t make any sense at all.”
Meredov folded the sheet, and put it in his jacket pocket.
When the Skat neared the Malyy Chaunskiy Strait and marshy Ayon Island, Nyurba removed the Red Cross flags, to alter the Skat’s disguise. He told the SEAL to steer north, into the open East Siberian Sea, away from Pevek. The swells were mild; the hovercraft barely lost speed. Still making fifty knots, but running low on fuel again, they reached the long-planned rendezvous point, according to the inertial navigation readout.
“All stop on propulsion engines. Full power to lift fan.”
They coasted to a halt, bobbing gently on the air cushion. He ordered two men to throw hand grenades over the sides, in groups of four, as if they were trying to kill escaping combat swimmers — a subterfuge meant for any snooping hydrophones or watching aircraft. The men hurled the grenades as far as they could, to not damage the lift skirts. Each raised a spout when it detonated. The water was one hundred thirty feet deep. The grenades were the prearranged signal for Carter. Nyurba waited.
It’s been five days. So many things could’ve gone wrong.
And if Carter is compromised, then so is Challenger—and Commodore Fuller, ashore by now, is trapped in a fabric of lies.
Suddenly, a dozen divers broke the surface at the bow, pulling coffinlike pressure-proof capsules, with built-in backboards and oxygen masks for bringing wounded through cold seawater into a submarine. Nyurba rushed to help the divers load the twelve worst stretcher cases. The divers said that Captain Harley had ordered both superstructure lockout chambers, and the trunk inside the sail, all to be used at once to save time; the top of the sail was only thirty feet beneath the surface.
After a nerve-wracking wait, the divers came back, their capsules empty. Ten more wounded were shuttled into Carter, along with the bodies of two commandos who’d, sadly, died on the ride in the Skat. Then waterproof equipment bags went, filled with digital cameras, top-secret manuals from the bunkers, and Nyurba’s hard-won pollution data and environmental samples.
The fit passengers buddy-breathed with divers, pure oxygen easing their lungs, suppressing the worst of their coughing.
The hovercraft’s crew might have somehow been useful alive, but not anymore. Nyurba shot them with his reloaded PRI. If executing prisoners is a war crime, let Russia blame Germany. The chief turned the Skat southwest, back toward the Kolyma as a ruse. Using duct tape, they fixed the rudders to hold that course. They shoved the throttles forward and taped them there. Before the Skat — horribly noisy outside — could gain speed, they jumped overboard. Buddy-breathing with two SEALs, they locked into Carter’s sail trunk, ready to decontaminate.
Chapter 29
My apologies,” Meredov said as he reentered his conference room. He unmuted the phone. “Vladivostok, I have returned.”
“What’s going on with the Hot Line?” Jeffrey pressed.
“My aide is finding out. She’ll let us know. The Kremlin was very hard hit by the twin electromagnetic pulses.”
Jeffrey had achieved his initial goals for the meeting, delivered his pointed queries and table-thumping messages, and introduced the premise of a next-generation missile shield. But he wasn’t supposed to work this as a lone wolf. And the artificial midnight deadline, meant to squeeze Moscow, was also putting a squeeze on him. Would the Kremlin, de facto, call that bluff, just by quietly, gradually running out the deadline?
“At least patch me through to my president.”
“Preparations are still being made,” that grumpy voice said over the speakerphone from Vladivostok.
While this could be true, it was also an age-old Russian excuse to stall, for their own inscrutable reasons. An uncomfortable Jeffrey saw that, in effect, they were holding him incommunicado. What’s going on behind my back, that even Meredov doesn’t know about? He let Meredov make the next move.