Andrei frowned. “You’ve seen this place before?”
Jax shook his head. “Only in pictures.”
They turned in through the ratty, ten-foot-high wire fence that ran along the road and surrounded the shipyard complex. A dilapidated guard post stood beside the gate, unmanned now. Behind them, the Kawasaki slowed, then continued on up the road. Jax watched it, his eyes narrowing.
Not a chase rider, after all.
“It’s an old military facility,” Andrei was saying, “privatized after the navy gave it up ten or fifteen years ago. Now it’s used mainly for unloading shipments of frozen chickens and pork from Brazil-and for smuggling, of course.”
The Mercedes bumped and swayed over the rutted road that wound down to the wharves. At the far end of a distant jetty, out in deeper water, Jax could see a large, rusty catamaran that rocked gently with the motion of the waves. Rigged with a lifting boom and giant orange buoys, it was obviously a salvage ship. His Russian was just good enough to enable him to spell out the word Yalena, painted in a fading Cyrillic script along the side.
“Why didn’t you see that?” he said to Tobie in a whisper.
But she just frowned and threw a warning glance at the back of Andrei’s head.
The barge bearing U-114 had been pushed in next to the nearest stretch of wharves that fronted the line of warehouses along the shore. The U-boat was much bigger than Jax had expected, a mammoth hulking thing hundreds of feet long, its once sleek hull rusted and thick with the accretions of sixty years beneath the sea. The small tugboat that had been used to push the barge up to the inner docks was still berthed nearby, beside the rigging for the camouflage netting. As they neared the docks, a small yellow crane at the end of the wharf swung into action, lifting a crate from the sub’s open hatch and depositing it onto the back of a nearby flatbed truck. Jax remembered seeing the crane in Tobie’s drawings, but not the tugboat. Why had she seen some things, he wondered, and not others?
“Pull up here,” Andrei told his driver. With a crunch of gravel, the big Mercedes rolled to a halt behind the nearest warehouse.
“You’re unloading the U-boat?” said October, her expression solemn as she watched the crane swing back toward the submarine’s deck.
A militiaman ran forward to open Andrei’s door and saluted smartly. Andrei tucked a bulky file under one arm and stood. “Until the cargo has been inspected and inventoried, we won’t know what we have.”
Jax thrust open his own door. “And when exactly is Moscow planning to notify Berlin about the sub?”
The cold wind off the sea swirled a fine white dust around them. Andrei smiled. “When we know what we have.”
The tide was low, the waves splashing against the exposed supports of the pier and filling the air with the scent of salt and seaweed and rust. Cutting between the warehouses, they walked out onto a weathered wharf littered with stacks of barrels and cargo containers, some so oddly shaped they looked as if they must have been especially built to fit beneath the U-boat’s floor plates or in its torpedo tubing. Every one of the containers showed signs of having been ripped open.
Jax said, “Were any of these broken into before the militia arrived?”
“A few, yes. But not many.”
“So what is all this stuff?”
“So far we’ve found everything from a disassembled Messerschmitt jet fighter to diplomatic mail and technical drawings.”
“A fighter?” October had been staring at the rusted hull of the old U-boat, its aft section caved in by depth charges. Now she turned. “Why would the Germans have been sending a fighter to Japan?”
“So the Japanese could copy it,” said Jax, hunkering down to get a closer look at one of the barrels. “Ever hear of Operation Caesar?”
“No.”
“It was a project the Nazis started in late 1944 or early ’forty-five. By that point even Hitler had to admit the war was not going well. Someone in Berlin got the idea that if they could prop up the Japanese, then maybe the Allies would be forced to put more effort into the War in the Pacific-and take some of the heat off Europe.”
“Prop them up how?”
“The Germans had made some incredible advances in technology during the war-way ahead of where we were at the time. They started sending the Japanese everything from armor-piercing shells to design plans for missile guidance systems and rockets.”
“I’ve even heard of Hitler shipping out German scientists and engineers,” said Andrei. His eyes crinkled into what might have been a smile. “But I’ve never heard of the Nazis sending Japan any gold.”
“Not to Japan,” Jax admitted. He pushed to his feet, his gaze shifting to the old U-boat. The submarine’s wooden decking had long since rotted away, leaving a rough, pitted surface. The original ladder on the conning tower was gone, too. Someone had propped a new one in its place.
“Come,” said Andrei, leaping the distance to the U-boat’s deck. “I think you’ll find this interesting.”
Jax jumped after him, then turned to hold out his hand to October.
“That’s okay,” she said, her face held oddly tight. “I think I’ll wait here.”
“What’s the matter? Claustrophobic?”
She looked down, her attention all for the task of buttoning her jacket against the sharp wind. “Not exactly. Just…take my advice and watch where you step.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’ll see.”
“What do we do now?” said Dixon, drawing the Kawasaki up beside the Range Rover.
They were parked in the shadows cast by a copse of beech at the crest of the hill. Looping the loose strap of his binoculars around the fist of one hand, Rodriguez watched the Russian and their target drop through the conning tower’s open hatch. Then he swung to focus on the girl.
She was small and slim and young, probably no more than twenty-four or-five. As he watched, she hunched her shoulders and shivered, as if she were cold-or afraid.
He had a VSSK Vychlop sniper rifle with an integrated bipod and silencer in a case on the floor of the backseat. The 12.7mm VSSK had been developed by the Russian Design Bureau at the special request of the FSB. Designed for counter-terror and high-profile anti-crime operations, it offered silent firing and superior penetration. Even at this range, he could blow her to pieces with a single shot and be long gone before anyone below figured out what had happened.
On the downside, the hit would not only leave their main target-Alexander-alive, it would also warn him.
“We watch,” said Rodriguez, shifting his gaze back to the U-boat.
“We should have blown the fucking sub when we had the chance,” said Salinger for something like the tenth time.
“It’ll blow,” said Rodriguez. “It’ll blow.”
21
Swinging through the open hatch, Jax felt the thick, dank air of the U-boat close around him. He set his jaw and slid down the aluminum ladder to land with a light thump beside what he realized too late was the grinning, mummified skull of a long-dead German submariner.
“Jesus Christ!” he yelped, hopping to one side and making a grab for the ladder to keep his balance. “What the hell is he doing still here?”
Andrei shrugged. “Moscow’s supposed to be sending over a team of anthropologists. They told us to leave the bodies alone.”
Jax studied the cadaver’s sunken body cavity, the tattered uniform, the dark, leathery flesh stretched across the cheekbones and clawlike fingers. “I could have landed on him.”
Andrei’s eyes creased with quiet amusement. “The Ensign did warn you to watch your step.”
Jax turned in a tight circle, his gaze taking in the control room’s jumble of ducts and valves, hand wheels and switches, gauges and wires. The militia had rigged up a string of electric lights that ran toward the bow, casting ghostly shadows around the tight compartment. He could hear a faint hammering coming from the bow, the vibrations reverberating down the length of the hull.