CHAPTER 6
D
AY
3âW
EDNESDAY
T
he nearly full moon illuminated the vast inland waterway for miles, its surface silky smooth this early morning.
Yuri Kirov sat at the aft end of an aluminum skiff, guiding it southward. He had swiped the boat and its trailer from the yard of a neighboring beach house. It was early November and the owner, like those of most of the other homes along the seashore, had departed for the season.
Before locking out from the
Neva
, he'd memorized the bottom coordinates from the sub's inertial navigation system. Using the GPS unit in Laura's iPhone, he retraced his path. Yuri glanced at the digital display of the smartphone. He cut the outboard engine.
Yuri lowered the device into the water. It was an odd creation consisting of a kitchen pressure cooker filled with stereo radio components connected to an extension cord.
Yuri submerged the contraption just three meters. Any deeper and the seals he'd fashioned might fail. If the gadget flooded, his efforts would have been for nothing.
It took five minutes to connect the additional gear. He used the battery from Laura's BMW to energize the system. He'd discovered the sedan in the garage.
Yuri checked his wristwatch: 12:59
A.M
. It was time. They should be listening
.
But what if it didn't work? What then?
He ignored his doubts and pressed the Transmit switch on the makeshift microphoneâa hybrid constructed from the telephone handset he'd found. He spoke in English, using a pre-arranged code: “Alpha to Bravo, testing, one two three.”
The hydrophone broadcast into the deep. His voice propagated downward at over fifteen hundred meters per second. He repeated the call eight times at fifteen-second intervals.
Four minutes after the first transmission, a black one-meter-diameter globe surged to the surface in a flurry of bubbles.
* * *
Laura peeked through the curtains, searching for movement on the dimly lit beach below.
Her captor left two hours earlier. Instead of binding her to a dining room chair, he'd used an upholstered chair in the upstairs master bedroom. He lashed her wrists and ankles to the chair's frame with rope.
She could move just enough to maintain circulation in her limbs but not enough to loosen the bounds. For the present, she'd given up trying to escape.
John hadn't bothered with a gag. Instead, a single layer of duct tape sealed her lips. She could grunt muted words but nothing coherent. Even if she could have screamed full throttle, no one was around to hear. He'd made that point to her more than once.
Before heading downstairs, he'd informed Laura that he would be gone for several hours. She had no choice but to wait for his return.
From her second-story perch, Laura could see the moonlit beach through a narrow gap in the draperies. She'd watched him struggle to drag the twelve-foot skiff onto the beach; the man had only one good leg. He launched the runabout and motored into the darkness.
Laura wondered what he was up to, and why was he doing it in the middle of the night?
As Laura sat, occasionally peering through the window, she thought of her husband. He was up to something, too.
But what?
Laura feared Ken as much as she feared her captor, maybe more. Just two weeks earlier, he had shown up at Laura's house unannounced. Reeking of whiskey, Ken knocked Laura to the floor and attacked her with his size 11 Florsheims. He fled before the cops arrived.
Laura vowed that he would never touch her again.
As she peeked through the curtain, Laura again wondered about her captor.
Where did he go?
* * *
“Can you hear me?” asked Yuri Kirov.
“Yes, your signal is five-by-five.”
“Five-by-five here, too.”
Yuri grinned. Direct voice communication had been his goal. He'd just accomplished that taskâspeaking with the submarine's acting commanding officer, Captain Third Rank Stephan Borodin.
The
Neva
bristled with high-tech communication devices, but to use them required the submarine to be under way, not marooned on the bottom.
After signaling with his makeshift hydrophone, requesting deployment of the very low frequency radio antenna buoy, Yuri connected with his shipmates. He accomplished that task by coupling a pair of wires he'd harvested from the stereo set to the buoy's cable; he cut through the armored outer sheath and spliced the wires to an internal VLF radio receiving circuit. He attached the other end of the stereo wires to the telephone handsetânow disconnected from the hydrophone. After the
Neva
's communication officer energized the cable, Yuri could speak with Borodin. It was a crude arrangement but it worked.
“Are the reactors still offline?” Yuri asked.
“Yes. We're still fighting that damn muck. It's as if we sucked in half of the bottom.”
“What about the batteries?”
“Bad. We've got everything powered down, except the radio compartment.”
Yuri knew what that meant: no lights, no heat, and foul air.
Borodin continued, “We've got enough battery power left for a restart. But if that fails, we'll be
profúkat'.
” Down the toilet.
“You're still working on the seawater intakes, right?”
“Of course. Dima and his boys are mining that crud as we speak. Unit One is hopeless. But if we can unplug a condenser, we'll be able to fire up Unit Two.”
“Okay, I understand.” Yuri chose his next words with care. “I'm working on getting us help, but it's going to take a little time.”
He included himself by using the word
us
, even though he'd escaped from the underwater tomb.
“What kind of help?”
“I've made contact with our embassy in Washington.”
“They can't do anything. Or won't, once they know what happened.”
“I won't reveal everything. Only what they need to know.”
“I don't know about that. According to our orders we're supposed to be dead.”
“That's only if we were caught, but the Americans and Canadians are in the dark.”
“What can the embassy do anyway?”
“I don't have any answers for you yet. It's going to take awhile to sort out.”
Yuri refrained from informing Borodin that he'd yet to talk with anyone that could offer help. His cryptic call to the embassy represented a first step in a convoluted and risky process of informing his superiors of the
Neva
's fate.
As a military intelligence officer, Yuri had been schooled in the “dos and don'ts” of operating in North America. Use of the telephone was discouraged. The FBI routinely monitored phone calls to and from the Russian embassy and its consulates. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police scrutinized Russian Federation facilities in Canada. The RCMP was meticulous about that.
When he'd called the embassy, he masqueraded as a U.S. citizen and deliberately spoke in English. An American who used Russian would draw the FBI's instant attention.
“Why are you even bothering with the embassy?” Borodin asked. “I thought you were going to make contact with Petro first.”
“The satphone didn't survive the ascent and I can't risk an unsecure call to the base. The Americans could intercept it.”
“Govnó!”
Shit.
The U.S. National Security Agency monitored virtually every telephone call, fax, e-mail, text, and tweet into or out of the Russian Federation. Trafficking of fissile materials from Russia's not so secure nuclear installations petrified the White House. An audit earlier in the year revealed that fifty-five kilograms of weapons-grade uranium had vanished from a nuclear weapons storage facility at Snezhinsk. Al Qaida, the Islamic State, and other terrorists had standing offers of millions for any loose nukes.
That's why Yuri had to be so careful. Just one slipup could forever condemn his surviving shipmates to the deep.
“What about a surface escape if we run out of time?” Captain Borodin asked.
“You're too deep. I barely made it with my own equipment.”
Yuri did not mention his bout with decompression sickness and his paralyzed leg. It would only make matters worse. Because of his extended bottom time, it had taken longer than planned to make his riseâbut it hadn't been long enough to purge all of the helium from his body.
Trained in deep-diving techniques, Yuri had employed a heliox rebreather system to install and monitor seafloor-based espionage equipmentâand to escape. Only Yuri and one other member of the crew had access to the equipment.
“So the Hydro Suits are still out,” Borodin said.
“I'm sorryâa decompression stop is an absolute must at the
Neva
's depth.”
Like all military submarines, the
Neva
was equipped with individual dive gear that would allow the crew to escape in an emergency. The
Neva
relied on the recently deployed Hydro Suit, which would rocket a sailor to the surface inside a bubble of compressed air.
Borodin said, “If we can't swim out on our own, you remain our only hope.”
“I'm afraid so.”
“Well then, my friend, please hurry. We're running out of time down here.”
* * *
Laura used her upper-body mass to rock the chair from side to side while at the same time leaning forward against the restraints. She was halfway across the bedroom. Her goal was the mirror on the vanity. She'd smash it and use a glass shard to slice away her bounds.
Laura managed to track another foot when she shifted her torso a little too much. The chair teetered on two legs before tipping onto its left side. Laura's head slammed onto the floor.
In spite of the carpet, the impact sent her reeling.
Laura recovered her senses after several minutes and tried righting the heavy chair. She managed to spin in place.
Now what do I do?
Laura's stomach flip-flopped.
Acknowledging defeat, she felt tears well up and nausea caught in her throat. Now he would know that she'd tried to escape.
She closed her eyes and swallowed the bile. With her mouth sealed by tape she feared what might happen if her queasy stomach erupted.
CHAPTER 7
T
wo men met on the top floor of a mammoth building in Moscow's Arbatskaya Square. It was mid-afternoon. They sat facing each other in an office that could have accommodated an infantry platoon at full parade rest. The tall, silver-haired man behind the enormous desk had in fact started his distinguished military career as an infantry junior lieutenant in the Red Army. Some forty years later, he had ascended to its highest rank, Marshall of the Russian Federation. Appointed minister of defense eight months earlier, Ivan Volkov now commanded all Russian military forces.
Minister Volkov's guest served as the chief of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. Cue ball bald and portly, General Rybin ruled over Russia's military intelligence service, the
Glavnoye Razvedovatel'noye Upravlenie
, aka the GRU.
Both men drank coffee imported from the USA. The pleasantries were over.
“What's so urgent?” asked the minister as he set his mug back on the desktop. He retained his flat belly despite the years. “Is it about this
Deep Blue
business?”
Deep Blue was an American Japanese naval war game under way in the western Pacific offshore of Russia's Southern Kuril Islands. Two U.S. Navy carrier strike groups were in play.
“No, sir,” the GRU general said, “it's not Deep Blueâsomething else, a troubling puzzle.”
Minister Volkov tilted his head to the side.
“It started yesterday . . . originated from Washington Station's security office. Apparently, the embassy received a rather peculiar phone call from . . .”
General Rybin spent the next few minutes summarizing the coded cable traffic sent to the GRU's Fifth Directorate. He got to the real news.
“The accident victim's connection to this so-called Vega Institute in Saint Petersburg was what first raised Washington Station's interest.”
Volkov shifted in his chair. The reference to Vega had his complete attention, too.
Vega
was a code word for a Russian espionage operation designed to collect intelligence on the perceived plan of the United States to neutralize Russia as a military rival. Russia's bullying of Ukraine and other neighbors had chilled relations with the West, especially the United States.
Rybin continued. “When we ran the embassy's request through our data banks, that's when the real mystery developed. We entered the crucial word groups from the cableâTomich, Gromeko, Kirovâand then let the computers chew on it for a while.”
The GRU general removed a document from a file folder he held in his lap. “This is what the computer spat out.” He handed the report to his boss.
Minster Volkov scanned the three-page document. When finished he said, “This can't be rightâit must be a coincidence.”
“That was my first reaction as well but I had my staff analyze it. They tell me it's possible.”
Volkov uttered a curse while reaching for the phone.
* * *
Eleven time zones away, Yuri Kirov stood in the doorway of the master bedroom. It was a few minutes past three in the morning. Laura Newman lay on the floor, still lashed to the sideway chair. Her gag remained intact. Exhausted, she slept.
Yuri stepped inside and knelt by the chair. Laura woke, her eyes seemingly expanding to the size of saucers.
With one hand gripping the top of the chair back and the other cupping Laura's shoulder, he rotated the chair until it was upright.
Yuri spent a minute checking her bindings and then left, closing the door.
Too wired to sleep, Yuri retreated to the kitchen where he enjoyed a cup of tea.
Standing by a window that overlooked the still dark beach, he sipped from a mug while considering his tactical situation.
She had tried to free herself.
If she escaped, it wouldn't be long before the authorities captured him. That would mean the end for his shipmates.
One thrust from his dive knife would end the threat.
No, he wasn't ready for thatâat least not yet.
* * *
Defense Minister Volkov and GRU Chief Rybin reconvened their meeting in the minister's office, now late afternoon. The Navy's top officer joined them.
“What do you make of this, Pavel?” asked Volkov.
Admiral of the Fleet Mayakovsky looked up from the GRU report. “Sir, this is most unusual. I'm at a loss for an explanation.”
“But could there be something to it? The report says the names fit the Anaconda profile. It can't be coincidence.”
Anaconda
was a code name.
The sixty-two-year-old naval officer fidgeted in his chair. Tallest of the three, he was plagued by residual pain from a lumbar injury aboard a ship two decades earlier. “Pacific Fleet headquarters briefed me after you called. We've had no direct communication with the submarine for over ten days. That's a concern but it's not unusual, especially for the type of mission it's on. Sometimes they'll go ten, twelve days without checking in.”
“So what is Anaconda?” asked Minister Volkov.
“Retrieval and surveillance mission for the Fleet Intelligence Directorate. The boat assigned to this duty is home-ported at Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy.” Although Anaconda was a GRU mission, operational control of the submarine remained with the Pacific Fleet.
“Retrieval of what?”
“The
Neva
's primary mission was to recover the acoustic recording units and replace them with new ones.”
“For that missile sub base they have . . . what's it called?”
“Bangor. It's near Seattle. The recorders are located in the waterway that their subs pass through to and from the base.”
“But it shouldn't take them a week to do that,” General Rybin said. “You've had submarines in there before.”
“Yes. Under normal protocols, they would have been in and out in no more than four days. But the
Neva
had a second mission.”
“To do what?” asked Volkov.
“It was optional for Anaconda, at the discretion of the captain. If the conditions warranted, he was to attempt installation of sensors near a Canadian torpedo testing station.”
“Where?”
“North of Vancouver. The Nanoose Bay Torpedo Test Range. The Americans and Canadians jointly run the base. The U.S. Navy has been testing its newest torpedo up there. Apparently, it's a radical design; we need to find out just how radical it really is.”
“So what does all this mean?”
“Sir, I think it's likely that the
Neva
hasn't checked in yet because it's busy planting the probes. And if I were the captain, I wouldn't risk any transmission within those confined waterwaysâI'd wait until I was back in the Pacific.”
“Why?” asked the GRU chief.
“The American satellites might pick them up, even a microburst. They wouldn't be able to read the signals, but they'd know something was up in their backyard.”
“Okay,” Minister Volkov said, “let's assume they're still operating on radio silence. What about these names?” He pointed at the briefing paper on his desk. “How do you explain that?”
Admiral Mayakovsky picked up the document and stared at the first page. “That's what is most troubling to me. The reported accident victim, Anatolii Tomich, is, in fact, the same name of
Neva
's captain, just like this says.”
“The other namesâTomich's so-called uncle in Petropavlovsk . . . Gromeko.”
“According to the roster, there is a Mikhail Gromeko aboard. He's the executive officer.”
“And the physician in Seattle supposedly treating Tomich, what about him?”
“There's also a Yuri Kirov aboard; he's the intelligence officer. This doesn't say but he's probably in charge of the probe operation.”
“He is,” confirmed GRU Chief Rybin.
Minister Volkov sighed heavily. “How could anyone outside of this Ministry know the names of three key officers on one of our most secret missions? The person that started all of this phoned the Washington embassy yesterday and used all of these namesâlike a code. Something's wrong.”
“Could the Americans be behind this?” asked General Rybin. “With all that crap they're dumping on us in the Kurils, could they also be screwing with us about the
Neva
? If they somehow found out about its mission . . .”
“How about that, Pavel?” Volkov asked.
“I don't know. None of this makes any sense to me.”
“Well, I think you'd better find out just what's going on. I don't like the smell of this.”
“I understand, sir. This will be my highest priority.”