The Stasi owned him, and over a four-year period spared no expense in his training, both physical and mental. And he responded. He was intelligent, and he was pragmatic enough to know a good thing when he saw it. He was taught hand-to-hand combat, along with mathematics, physics, chemistry, psychology, philosophy, religion, and a host of other subjects. He learned about codes and ciphers, about weapons and weapons systems from handguns to short-range missiles. He learned English and French in total-immersion courses, so that by the end of his four years he could speak well enough to be identified as a citizen, possibly second generation, but of very good breeding and excellent schooling.
Ultimately the Stasi wanted to place Mueller inside the CIA, a plan that even the Service's Russian advisers thought was too ambitious for their East German friends until Mueller received some additional training at the KGB's School One outside of Moscow.
Over eighteen months Mueller learned tradecraft from the pros, from men and women who'd actually been there and returned to teach it, and from the master strategists who knew the inner workings of every intelligence agency in the world. Again no expense was spared on Mueller's training, because the Russians also thought he had great potential.
The final plan was as simple as it was time-consuming.
There was no way for Mueller to be placed directly into the CIAâhe would never be able to pass as an Americanânor was it believed he would survive the intense vetting he would get if he applied off the street. First his reputation had to be built.
A job as a reporter with the Frankfurt am Main newspaper was arranged for him in 1976, and one year later he applied to and was accepted for employment by the West German Secret Service, the
Bundesnachrichtendienst,
or BND. A family (all dead) had been manufactured for him in Stuttgart; schooling records at Heidelberg (Don't remember him, but this is a big school after all); and even military service with the army (Mueller? Certainly, a damned fine soldier) all stood up to the BND's background check. In that period background investigations of new recruits were supervised by Major Karl Schey, who'd been working for the Stasi for eight years.
Mueller fit in well in West Germany, catching infiltrators from the East (a task at which he received help from his Stasi masters), but it was a full ten years before he went to work as a liaison officer to the British Secret Intelligence Service ⦠one step closer to the Americans.
But they had waited too long. It was 1988 by the time he was ready to go to Washington, and the beginning of 1989 by the time he got there, and the Wall was coming down, the entire Soviet sphere of influence unraveling.
He remembered his short six months of shuffling papers on the Russian desk at Langley with confusion. So much was happening at such a frenetic pace that it was impossible to keep up with it all. One memory, however, stood out clearly in his life, and that was his first sight from the air of New York City. He was awestruck. Nothing he'd been taught by his masters, nor anything he'd learned on his own, had prepared him for that sight and the sudden inner vision that the Soviets and certainly the East Germans would lose.
Mueller rose up from between the rough-hewn ceiling
joists and shook the insulation off his back, careful to make no noise. He wanted to rip off his clothes and scratch himself all over. The irritating rock wool fibers had worked their way into his pores, and he was in agony. Instead, he concentrated on his automatic pistol, an old Walther 9mm P-38, checking its action by feel to make sure it wouldn't jam up because of the insulation dust.
Control, his masters had preached. His was superb. Each minute of the ten hours he'd lain up here, motionless, barely daring to breathe, listening to the sounds of the police and Action Service below and the storm outside, he'd waited for just this moment. If there were no longer any masters to be served, he'd decided, there was always revenge.
He worked his way, joist by joist, silently to the rear of the attic where the trapdoor to the pantry behind the kitchen was still open. The cops had crawled up here. There'd been two of them, but they hadn't been very thorough in their search. They'd been put off by the rock wool.
Nothing moved below. Mueller dropped down into the pantry, landing in a crouch, as if he were a cat, and went immediately through the kitchen to the door into the living room.
Neither the pilot nor the other one, named Henri, had stirred. Everything was as Mueller had seen it from above except for a small line of dust that had filtered down from the ceiling onto the stone floor in front of the couch. Mueller stared at it. Once again he'd been lucky that neither man had awoken and spotted it.
Keeping his eye on the two sleeping men, he crossed the narrow living room to the window and looked outside. The storm had subsided a little. From here he could make out the vague form of the helicopter across the field in the lee of the woods. The sky was beginning to grow light in the east. But there was no one else out there.
Turning away from the window he crept back to the
couch and looked down at the sleeping man. His name was Henri Boutet, a sergeant in the SDECE. He looked like a boy, not a government-sponsored bully.
Mueller placed the muzzle of his pistol a half-inch from Boutet's temple and, looking over toward the pilot, fired.
Gisgard reared up from a deep sleep and clawed for his gun beneath his camos as he jumped unsteadily to his feet.
“Arretez!”
Mueller shouted, bringing his gun up.
For a moment it seemed as if Gisgard would ignore the command, but coming fully awake and realizing what was happening, he stepped back, his hands moving away from his tunic.
“Ah, bon,
”Mueller said. “Your friend here is dead. Do you understand this?”
Gisgard nodded hesitantly.
“Good. Now if you do not wish to join him, you will do something for me.”
“What?” Gisgard asked.
“Fly me out of here in your helicopter, of course.”
T
he Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force patrol submarine SS588
Samisho
ran submerged at one hundred fifty feet in the Tatar Strait fifty miles off the Siberian coast. It was in a run-and-drift mode, an American naval tactic in which a submarine would run at ten or fifteen knots for a half-hour, then shut down and drift for a half-hour. It gave the sonar people practice, and if there were any surface ships looking for it, the maneuver sometimes flushed them out, forcing them to make a mistake, revealing their position and interest.
These waters between Sakhalin Island and the Siberian mainland had been a subject of bitter dispute since the First World War when the newly emergent Soviet Union claimed the island and all the waters of the strait for itself. Sakhalin was historically and geologically a part of Japan, a part of the chain of islandsâKyushu, Honshu, Hokkaido, and Karafuto (Sakhalin, as the Russians renamed it)âeven though the Russians may have been the first official visitors to the barren place in the mid-1600s. Since 1945 the Soviet Navy, and now the Russian Federal Navy, constantly patrolled the region. There'd been incidents in which ship-to-ship and air-to-ship weapons launches had occurred, but the Japanese had always backed down.
Let them know we're there, but avoid direct confrontation at all costs.
Samisho
's orders were explicit, yet she carried a full complement of GRX-2 (B) torpedoes and three highly modified Sub-Harpoon antiship missiles.
It was 0700 when Lieutenant Commander Seiji Kiyoda dismounted from the compact exercise machine, his well-muscled body glistening with sweat. At five-feet-three he was short even by Japanese standards, but he looked dangerous, his eyes dark and narrow, his face cruel except when he smiled. He drew some cold water in the tiny stainless-steel sink in his cramped quarters abaft the control center and splashed it on his face. At thirty-eight his body and his mind were as hard as the NS-90 high-tensile steel of which his boat was constructed. Every day he did a strenuous physical workout that at home port at Yokosuka was directed by his
sensei.
Every day he studied the writings of Yukio Mishima, the man of steel, and of
Bushido,
the warrior's code, for which he had another sensei at home. Iron will and a rigid discipline tempered with an appreciation of art and beauty, for beauty's sake alone. It was the old way. The best way. The only way for Japan now that her enemies were beginning to gather.
Chi-jin-yu,
wisdom, benevolence, and courage. They would need all of that in the coming days, Kiyoda thought while sponging the sweat off his body. He was up
to it, and he knew that his crew was. He could only hope for the rest of his countrymen, and especially for the Diet in Tokyo.
Dressed in a crisply starched uniform he crossed the corridor to the wardroom where a steward handed him a cup of
cha,
then went into the combined control room and attack center.
At two hundred fifty feet in length with a surfaced displacement of 2,200 tons, the
Samisho
was not a small boat. Built to the 0+2+ (1) Yuushio-class standards at Kawasaki's shipyards in Kobe, she'd begun service in 1992, and last year she'd been brought back to the yards for a retrofit. Now she was state of the art, an engineering and electronics marvel even by U.S. naval standards. She was a diesel boat, but she was fast, capable of a top speed submerged of more than twenty-five knots and a published diving depth in excess of one thousand feet. Her electronic detection systems and countermeasures by Hitachi were better than anything currently in use by any navy in the world, and her new Fuji electric motors and tunnel drive were as quiet as any nuclear submarine's propulsion system, and much simpler to operate. The
Samisho
could be safely operated, even on war footing, with fifty men and ten officersâless than half the crew needed to run the Los Angeles-class boats, and one-fourth the crew needed for a sub-hunting surface vessel.
His executive officer, Lieutenant Ikuo Minori, was on duty in the attack center with the weapons control officer, Lieutenant Shuichiyo Takasaki, and four enlisted men.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” Kiyoda said, ducking through the hatch.
“Kan-cho
on the conn,” Minori announced crisply. Captain on the conn. “Good morning, sir, You slept well?”
“Very well, thank you,
Ikuo.”
Minori was one of the most intelligent men Kiyoda knew. He'd been number one at his prep school in
Oshima, number one in engineering at Tokyo University, and number one in his class at the Maritime Academy. It was rumored that he would get first crack at the nuclear submarine, the keel of which was being laid in secret at Kobe, when it was finished in 1998. In the meantime he refused other commands, preferring to remain aboard the
Samisho,
as did the other officers and men, all of whom Kiyoda had hand picked, and all of whom shared his belief in
Bushido
and Mishima. They'd formed their own Shield Society.
“Having a combination like that makes one almost wish for a war to test them,” Admiral Higashi, commander of submarine forces, had said to his wife, not daring to say such a thing to anyone else. But he knew he wasn't alone in the opinion.
Kiyoda took his command position starboard of the periscope well and keyed the intercom. “Sonar, conn, what are you showing on the surface?”
A chartlet in color of their area of operation on his CRT showed the boat's course, speed, depth, and position. Currently they were running almost due north at twelve knots. The operations clock showed they were eighteen minutes into this mode.
“Our immediate area is clear,
Kan-cho-dono.
But we're picking up a faint target about sixty thousand meters out.”
“What does it look like?”
“Hard to say for certain, sir, but I'm guessing it's a Russian frigate. Probably a Krivak class.”
“Course and speed?” Kiyoda asked. He recognized the sonarman's voice. It was Tsutomu Nakayama, probably the best in the MSDF. At twenty-five he still had the ears, but he also had experience.
“She's inbound. I'd say twenty knots, maybe a little less.”
“Keep a sharp watch, Tsutomu. We're going up to take a look. If he changes course or speed let me know immediately.”
“Yo-so-ro,
Kan-cho.”
Will do, Captain.
“What's the weather?”
“I'm picking up surface noises. Four to five meter waves.”
Kiyoda released the switch. “Bring the boat to periscope depth.”
“Hai, Kan-cho,
bringing the boat to periscope depth,” Minori replied.
“Reduce speed to five knots, and come left to three-four-zero degrees.” The winds and seas at this time of year came mostly out of the north with a slight westerly component. By turning the boat into the general direction of the wind, a much safer attitude in which to surface than abeam the seas, they would be ready to come up fast if need be. It could save time and lives in an emergency.
“Very well, reducing speed to five knots, coming
tori-kaji
to new course three-four-zero.
Yo-so-ro.”
The problem, as Kiyoda saw it, was that Japan would lose her initiative unless she had control of the sea in the region of the home islands, as well as the sea lanes to and from her vital Middle East oil supplies, and down to the Philippines, East Indies, and Australia, where most of the rest of her natural resources came from. Japan was a manufacturing nation. Her factories produced or died. Any disaster involving her raw materials, no matter how slight, any delay, no matter how brief, would be catastrophic.
For the moment, however, Japan faced two major threats: the first from America, which to this point was being handled diplomatically, and the second from Russia, which was still so beset with internal problems that it was becoming increasingly like a wounded animalâdangerous and unpredictable. The U.S. could shut off Japan's supply lines anytime it chose, but the Russian navy, its ponderous presence always looming just off shore, threatened the actual physical security of the home islands. It was, to Kiyoda's way of thinking, intolerable.
He keyed the intercom. “ECMs, conn, we're on the way up. I want you to scan for any emissions from that
bogie to our north.” ECMs were Electronic Counter Measures, a submarine's electronic defense system.
“Hai, Kan-cho,”
Lieutenant Masaaki Kawara, their ELINTâElectronic Intelligenceâofficer said. “Shall I go active, let him know we're here?”
“Negative,” Kiyoda said. “Just keep your ears open.”
“Hai.”
Among the mast-mounted sensors that could be raised above the surface when the boat was brought to periscope depth was the ZPS-8 surveillance radar antenna. If they illuminated the Russian frigate, their own radar signal would give them away. Instead, they would use a series of directional antennae and a pair of omnidirectional arrays, which would pick up and pinpoint the source of any electronic emissions within fifty nautical miles or more, depending how high out of the water they could be raised.
The new speed and course data showed up on Kiyoda's command screen, and he watched as the depth figures counted backward, a pictorial representation of the boat showing a five-degrees-up bubble. Minori was taking it slow. He was not only intelligent, he was cautious when need be. Submarines were nearly blind on the way up because of the turbulence and noises caused by blowing her ballast tanks.
“Leveling off at two-zero meters,” Minori reported when they reached periscope depth.
The status panel above the periscope well showed all three ELINT masts coming up.
“The boat is steady and level on course and depth,” Minori said. “My board is green.”
“Very well,” Kiyoda said. His intercom buzzed.
“Conn, ECMs. That bogie is talking to someone in our direction,” Lieutenant Kawara reported.
Kiyoda sat forward. “Have we been detected?” He put his tea aside.
“Iie,”
negative, the ECMs officer replied. There was a slim chance that the Russian frigate's search radar would pick out the ELINT masts from the surface clutter and recognize them for what they were.
“Sonar, conn, what are you showing?”
“Nothing else on my screen,
Kan-cho,”
Nakayama said. “Stand by.”
Kiyoda figured he was about to-find what he had come looking for. “Prepare for emergency dive,” he ordered.
Minori didn't miss a beat. “Prepare for emergency dive,
yo-so-ro,
” he said.
“Conn, sonar. That bogie is definitely a Krivak class. She's turned directly toward us and is making turns for full speed.”
Was it a trap? It was as if the Russian bastards had been waiting for them. But it was what he'd come for.
“Estimated time to intercept?” Kiyoda asked.
“Fifty-four minutes,
Kan-cho,”
Lieutenant Takasaki replied instantly, anticipating the request.
It meant that the Russian sub hunter would be in dangerous range soon. But if it wasn't a trap, if the Russians hadn't somehow known that the
Samisho
would be here, then it meant she'd been detected at some point earlier, possibly as she passed through the Soya Strait between Hokkaido and Sakhalin. It was suspected that the Russians had placed submarine detectors on the seabed there.
Minori was watching him.
Kiyoda keyed his intercom. “ECMs, conn. Give me one sweep overhead to thirty miles.”
“Hai,
” Lieutenant Kawara said. A moment later he was back, excited. “It's a Helix, three miles out and inbound, very fast.”
“Bring your masts in,” Kiyoda said calmly, and he looked up at Minori. “Emergency dive. Make your depth two-zero-zero meters.”
“Very well,” Minori replied, his voice and manner as calm as his captain's. “Blow all tanks, flank speed forward, down full deflection. Make your depth two-zero-zero meters.”
“Yo-so-ro.”
The computer-assisted helmsman/planesman repeated the order.
“Sound battle stations,” Kiyoda ordered.
Minori hit the battle stations alarm, and a Klaxon horn sounded throughout the boat.
“Load torpedo tubes one and two. Make ready Harpoon one.”
This time Minori's left eyebrow went up slightly, but he repeated the orders, and one by one each of the boat's battle stations reported readiness.
“Torpedoes one and two ready,” the torpedoman forward said.
“Harpoon one, ready in tube three.”
“Give me a continuous firing solution on the ⦠intruder,” Kiyoda told his weapons control officer.
“Passing four-zero meters,” the dive officer said, but before Minori could reply, the intercom buzzed.