Like their protectee, the agents in the RIB saw the squall line too late. They watched from about two hundred yards away as the Lyman was overtaken by a curtain of rain, obscuring it completely. The lightning and thunder were incessant. Scott had already pushed the throttles forward to get the RIB closer to the Lyman to steady her and help their chief. A large wave broke over the snub nose of the unsinkable inflatable, but they still shipped green water that cascaded down the vessel and around the steering console, knocking both of them off their feet. With no one at the wheel, the RIB careened in an insane circle just as the wind shifted ninety degrees and partially lifted the rubber hull, almost flipping it airborne and upside down. Both agents hung on to the straps along the pontoons while the RIB at full power continued to pound into the waves in wild crazy eights. Bennett finally got to the wheel, reduced power, and tried to get his bearings. With the sheeting rain and the spray, visibility was less than twenty feet. With no landmarks, and no shoreline visible, both agents were disoriented and didn’t know where the DCIA’s boat was. They checked the radar and saw a speck that could have been the Lyman and raced to it in the stinging rain to find instead a crab-pot buoy that had broken loose and was bobbing in the waves. They still had no idea which way the Lyman lay—they might as well have been in midocean and racing around could take them farther away. After ten more minutes, the squall passed, and as the last of the fat drops pattered on the rubber hull of the RIB, the sun came out. Half a mile in the distance, the Lyman’s white hull was visible through the water mist that still clung to the surface.
The agents raced up to the Lyman, which was still rolling madly, the fishing rod and reel sliding on the deck. There is nothing as ominous as an empty boat drifting on the water, mute testimony of a soul reclaimed by the sea. As a frantic Bennett radioed the Coast Guard, then called the security-duty office at Headquarters, Scott at full speed started a grid search downwind for any sign of the DCIA, who they knew did not wear a life jacket. They had been out of visual sight of the Lyman for approximately nineteen minutes, and there was no other boat within a mile of them. The foul weather had even driven the oyster boat into harbor. What followed was the usual two days of Coast Guard daylight searches by helicopters and crash boats, concentrating on the lower bay, based on the estimated time of the accident and the prevailing ebb tide. Alex Larson’s body was finally found on the third day, facedown on a sandbar off Race Hog Point on Pone Island, about fifty miles south of Kent Island. The FBI investigated the incident with the Coast Guard, and both concluded that the DCIA had drowned as a result of the boating accident.
When official news of the accident was released, President Putin, against the advice of Anton Gorelikov, called the US president to express his sympathy at the loss of a dedicated professional, a committed public servant, and a man of honor. The Slavic mordancy in Putin’s comments was lost on POTUS, who already was considering candidates to fill the DCIA position. As Gorelikov had presciently predicted, VADM Rowland was on the president’s short list of DCIA nominees. All that toadying to POTUS’s vanity had paid off. She was an outsider, a brainy woman, and someone who believed in diplomatic solutions with coalition partners, rather than resorting to armed conflict at the drop of a hat. He looked to Admiral Rowland to continue the reforms within CIA in diversity, promotion quotas, and, frankly, fewer dirty tricks that only antagonized foreign governments.
At Langley, relevant branches in the Operations Directorate tasked Russian and counterterrorist sources to determine whether there were any known plots to harm the Director. Not even DIVA had heard anything in the Kremlin, and she sent her condolences via a Moscow Station officer to Benford, who was inconsolable.
Simon confided to Forsyth that he suspected the Russians had engineered the boating accident, which was nothing less than a political assassination ordered by Putin. Benford summoned Hearsey to ask him about short-range drones that could be fitted with an explosive payload, or aerosolized biological compounds, or even with a single 2.75-inch rocket. Maybe an infiltrated operator could fly a drone close enough to catch Putin outside during a fishing or hunting trip and avenge the DCIA. Hearsey looked at the floor without saying anything until Forsyth told Benford to stop hallucinating and to concentrate on their more immediate problem: vetting the White House’s three nominee candidates for DCIA, a triumvirate of progressive Washington insiders, none of whom was well-disposed to the Agency.
“Maybe we should reconsider those drones,” said Hearsey, walking out the door.
Three combat swimmers from Spetsnaz Vympel Group 3—a unit based in Moscow and normally used by SVR to execute sensitive “wet work” assignments abroad (beatings, kidnappings, and assassinations)—were not returned to their unit after an unspecified special assignment, but rather were reassigned to a naval infantry unit at the Northern Fleet’s Bolshaya Lopatka naval base above the Arctic Circle, on the Kola Peninsula, seventy kilometers east of the sliver of Norway’s northern border with Russia. The three troopers were given privileges to the officers’ commissary on base, and weekend passes to Murmansk once a month. They knew enough never to mention the Chesapeake Bay, especially since a goateed dandy in the Kremlin had warned them of the consequences of indiscretion. They had no desire to be residents of Upravlenie solovetskogo and Karelo-Murmanskikh ITL, the Directorate of Solovki and Karelia-Murmansk Camps, once Gulags filled by Stalin, but now grim modern district prisons, albeit with the original 1935 plumbing.
STRIPED BASS À LA FIORENTINA
Sauté fish fillets in butter and oil until golden. Set aside. In a saucepan, sauté whole peeled tomatoes, anchovies, chopped garlic, chopped cilantro, capers, a splash of balsamic vinegar, and thinly sliced potatoes until potatoes are soft and sauce is thickened. Serve fish on a bed of sauce.
12
Merit to the Fatherland
The drowning death of DCIA Alex Larson devastated the CIA workforce, and the turnout of silent, numb employees at the service in front of the memorial wall of stars chiseled into the marble, representing CIA officers lost in the line of duty, was so large that the front lobby overflowed and hundreds of attendees had to watch on closed-circuit screens set up in the cafeteria. Simon Benford was convinced that the Kremlin had engineered the DCIA’s death, and continued tasking operational desks to canvass assets for any indication of Russian complicity in the matter.