The girl didn’t speak but smiled to show she was pleased that she’d passed muster with the captain of the submarine K-363.
Litvanov beckoned they should follow him up a flight of stairs to a makeshift office that had a view from a pair of dirty windows onto the darkened warehouse floor below. Litvanov had laid out black bread, salted herring, and a bottle of vodka on one of the desks.
“You had no trouble finding the place?” Litvanov said.
“No, your instructions were clear,” Zakayev said. “We took an electrobus from the hotel and got off three blocks away.” Zakayev looked around the office at file cabinets and equipment that included modern computers and printers. “How did you come by this place?”
“I do a little business with the owner,” Litvanov said. “He’s always in the market for surplus goods the Northern Fleet has no use for. Particularly titanium and stainless steel. He was in a generous mood and lent his office for our meeting. Eat.”
The girl declined but Zakayev sampled the salted fish and nodded approval. “Your boat is set for departure?”
“Of course, General.” Litvanov paused to light a cigarette. “The schedule is tight. I’ve timed our departure so we won’t run into any vessels patrolling the main channel out of the Tuloma River or around Kil’din Island. Procedures have broken down and the harbor control units don’t keep track of ship arrivals and departures like they used to, but now and then you get a new skipper who goes by the book. Do you follow?”
“Of course. And your crew?”
“Handpicked,” Litvanov said, his voice thick from cigarette smoke, “stripped to only essential personnel. In other words, enough to operate the boat. The crew has trained nonstop for over a week while we’ve sat moored to a dock in Olenya Bay. They’re eager to get under way. They are good men.
All the high-flown lectures they receive about duty, honor, and the Motherland can’t change the fact that life at sea in a submarine is hard, that we have lousy food, live among the unwashed, breathe one another’s farts and smelly feet, and sleep in soggy bunks. And for this privilege we are not paid. But now that will change.”
“Then there is no question that they are fully committed,” Zakayev said.
Litvanov’s face hardened and his eyes narrowed. A boot sole ground his cigarette into the rough floor.
“Are you questioning, General, whether these men, whom I myself have trained, will follow orders?”
“It is not a question of following orders, it’s a question of how dedicated they are to the cause.”
Litvanov, eyes blazing, said, “I, Georgi Litvanov, kapitan third rank of the Russian Navy, commanding officer of the K-363, assure you that each of them is willing to give up his life for the cause. These men come from towns and villages all over Chechnya. There isn’t a man that hasn’t had a family member murdered by the Russians. I don’t have to tell you, General, that if I hadn’t offered them a chance to strike at the heart of Russia, they would have deserted to fight on the ground in Chechnya.”
“And you, Georgi Alexeyevich?”
Litvanov lifted and dropped his shoulders. “What have I to lose? Tell me?” His eyes searched Zakayev’s face. “I have a photograph of my wife and children in their coffins. My cousin sent it to me.
At first I thought it was a cruel joke somebody was playing, and I wish to God it was. I had to beg for leave and even then I was granted only three days. Three days. My cousin had them buried in Sernovodsk, our ancestral village, the same as yours, General. When I got there and saw their graves, I was sick. A pile of rocks—not even a proper marker.”
Litvanov downed vodka and wiped his mouth with a hand, which he then ran over his close-cropped skull. He turned his gaze on the girl. “I serve in the armed forces of a country that killed my family. I thought I had a good job, one of the best Russia could offer. I was blind to what was happening in Chechnya.” He reflected for a long moment, then said, “But now I have the means to strike back—
hard. So, like you, I made a decision and here I am.”
Through all of this the girl said nothing even though Litvanov spoke directly to her because he knew she understood the horror of Russian occupation in Chechnya. And because he had had a daughter her age.
“We all have our reasons,” Zakayev said. His mouth was a thin hard line.
“It’s hard to forget. I go on sometimes.”
Somewhere a rumbling diesel truck, perhaps hauling logs bound for one of the sawmills in Murmansk, made the warehouse tremble.
Zakayev said, “That sailor, Radchenko, and the American. What do you hear?”
Litvanov shoveled salted fish into his mouth and spoke while he chewed. “Nothing. No one at Olenya Bay has asked any questions. Radchenko’s been listed as a deserter. His records, personal effects, everything, went to Northern Fleet Headquarters in Severomorsk. It’s as if he never existed. As for the Amerikanski, I was told the FSB investigators looked around the hotel for less than an hour, then packed up and left town. The michman who discovered what Radchenko was up to is one of my best men.”
A gust of wind off the harbor rattled the office window glazing. The girl shivered and hunched her shoulders.
“The weather will be cold but stay clear for another day or so,” Litvanov said, dislodging a fish bone from his teeth.
“Then it’s time to go. As you said, there are patrol boats.”
Litvanov downed another drink then wrapped the bread and fish in newspaper He threw the waste in a trash bin and stuck the bottle of vodka in his outer coat pocket. “Security at the base is nonexistent, a joke,” he said as he finished up. “A few conscripts with unloaded assault rifles. When they see your uniform, they’ll be so frightened, they’ll piss their pants and wave us right through without asking for identification.”
“And you?” Zakayev said, looking at Litvanov’s grubby outfit.
“They don’t know who I am. They’ll think I’m your civilian driver.” He jerked a thumb at the girl.
“And her, they’ll just ignore because they’ll think she’s—he’s—with you.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, yes. The base commander’s a drunk and has no idea what’s going on under his own nose. They’re all a bunch of drunks. How do you think we walk off with goods to barter? Trust me on that.”
They stood in the alley by the bolted door adjusting to the dark, getting their bearings.
“This way,” Litvanov said.
Suddenly a pair of headlight beams shot into the alley blinding them. Litvanov threw up an arm. Frozen in the hard, brilliant light, it took a moment to react.
“Get down!” He grabbed the girl and they rolled for cover behind the concrete stairs at the entrance to the warehouse as automatic weapons stuttered and bullets snapped overhead, spanged off brick, metal, and wood. In the shattering silence that followed, Zakayev heard empty brass cartridge cases skittering and spinning over ice and stone. And the metallic slap of a round jacking into the chamber of an automatic pistol that he guessed was Litvanov’s.
Zakayev reached back and felt around blindly. The girl raised her head a fraction. “I’m not hurt,” she said. Then: “It’s him. Ivan Serov.”
Muzzle flashes; another burst of gunfire rattled up the alley.
Zakayev raised his head cautiously and recognized the dual nostrils of a BMW grille between the headlights. He guessed there were three shooters lurking behind the car, which was parked about twenty meters away with two wheels on the curb up against the wall of a warehouse. And one of them was Ivan Serov.
He understood now. Despite precautions they had been followed. Serov had set a trap and he had walked right into it: the narrow alley, the seawall, the harbor—a box, a killing ground. They were pinned down and cut off from the parked truck, their only means of escape. The alley was a stage, and the blinding klieg lights made it impossible for the actors to see the audience waiting for the performance to begin.
Another flash and stutter. Chunks of shattered brick and cement rained on Zakayev and the girl.
He was back in Chechnya. Russian guns cracking and popping all around him and his men. The dull thump of a rocket-propelled grenade exploding. The screams of the wounded and dying. The sharp, sweet smell of cordite mixed with the brassy odor of wet blood. His blood oozing from a horrid, searing wound on his hip turning the baked Chechen soil into red mud. They were low on water and ammo. And it was only noon. Hours to go before dark and possible escape into the hills. Litvanov, on his belly behind a large empty packing crate up against the warehouse, growled something that brought Zakayev back to the present.
“General! Who’s out there? What do they want?”
“It’s Ivan Serov and he wants me.”
“Fuck! You said he was dead.”
Zakayev said nothing.
Litvanov, flat on the ground, aimed and shot out a headlight. In response a white-hot muzzle flash bloomed in the narrow space between the car and brick wall of the warehouse. Bullets ravaged masonry, punched through windows and the packing crate, tearing out splinters of brick, glass, and wood.
Still flat and below the line of fire, Litvanov shot out another headlight. The glare they had been looking into dimmed but didn’t go out, and to make a run for the truck was suicidal: They would be perfect targets lit by the beams from the two remaining headlights. The only way out was to kill Serov and his men.
Somewhere in the distance a police car siren started hee-hawing insistently.
“Hear that?” Litvanov growled over his shoulder at Zakayev. It drew another burst of fire from the shooter hunkered between the car and the wall.
Zakayev waited until he saw the man’s outline back lighted from reflections off the BMW’s gleaming finish. He rested his cupped left hand, which steadied his right hand gripping the P7, on the top step.
When he had the man in his sights, he fired twice. The first bullet pierced the BMW’s windshield. The second bullet struck the shooter in the head like a trip-hammer. His body crashed against the car, then sprawled out into the street, weapon clattering after him.
The two remaining shooters crouched behind the car fired wildly, hosing down the street. Zakayev and the girl hugged the ground as bullets ripped overhead.
“Shit!” Litvanov scuttled backward from his hide like a crab until his feet contacted the base of the concrete steps opposite where Zakayev and the girl had taken cover.
More sirens. Somewhere a watchdog barked.
“Ali!” It was Serov. “I’m going to finish our business.” His voice resonated with loathing and resignation.
Zakayev looked around. The truck was too far away. Serov was too close. The police were getting closer.
“Ali? Do you hear me? We can’t sit here all night. I’ll make a deal with you. A mutually beneficial deal.”
Zakayev reached back and grabbed the girl’s arm. “Give it to me.”
“The girl can go free. But not Litvanov. He stays and we finish it.”
“How does he know…?” the girl said.
But Zakayev’s hand closed around the Czech grenade. A URG-86, it had a four-and-a-half-second fuse.
If he did it right, he could skip the grenade over the icy street and under the BMW.
He gave the pistol to the girl. “When I tell you, empty the magazine.”
“Yes.”
“Georgi,” Zakayev called. “Stay down but be ready to run.”
“What are you doing?”
“Do as I say.”
“Ali?”
He nudged the girl. “Now!”
She opened fire, the bullets ricocheting off the car and howling away into the night.
Zakayev pulled the pin on the grenade, released the spoon, and, with a delicate underhand toss around the staircase, sent it skipping across the icy street toward the car.
The pistol’s magazine ran dry. Zakayev hauled the girl down behind the steps as Serov and his man, ignoring the approaching police cars, opened fire with their automatic weapons.
A pinprick of light appeared under the BMW. A split second later the vehicle exploded in a huge ball of flaming gasoline. Red-hot shards of metal pinwheeled into the air and over the tops of the warehouses.
The deafening explosion rocked the confined space they were in. The searing fireball rolling out of the alley forced policemen jumping out of their cars with guns drawn to dive for cover.
Zakayev, ears ringing, staggered to his feet and saw a burning shell of a car and flames licking up the side of the warehouse and curling over the roof parapet where large pieces of burning wreckage had landed. A few feet from where Zakayev stood was a smoldering tire still mounted on an alloy wheel.
More police cars arrived, but the fire that had engulfed buildings on both sides of the alley kept the officers at bay.
Zakayev, Litvanov, and the girl dashed for the truck and piled in.
“We’ll take backstreets and work our way around the harbor,” Litvanov said. “The main streets will soon be blocked off by the police.”
A fire truck screamed by in the opposite direction, then another with police cars following.
Zakayev looked back and saw flames leaping skyward, turning the bottoms of low clouds over the harbor red.
“Anyone behind us?” Litvanov asked.
“We’re clear.”
Litvanov found the intersection he wanted and turned right to head north against the Tuloma River.
Hunched over the wheel, Litvanov blew through his teeth and said, “General, I thought Serov was dead.”
The girl, seated between them, said, “He is now.”
The truck ground north, toward Olenya Bay.
Paul Friedman, the national security advisor, signaled with a subtle toss of his head and thrust of jaw, that the president of the United States was displeased.
Karl Radford entered the Oval Office and slipped into a wing chair beside the president. Friedman sat on a sofa, his knees pressed awkwardly together supporting a bundle of battered folders stamped Top Secret. The only sound in the Oval Office came from a ticking desk clock that had once belonged to Admiral Chester W. Nimitz. An inaugural gift from Radford to the president, a Nimitz admirer, it sat on a Duncan Phyfe end table next to a bust of Nimitz.
Friedman and Radford waited while the president read a document. Radford assumed it was the briefing summary he had prepared at Friedman’s direction the night before. Without looking up, the president, a handsome black man wearing a double-breasted charcoal suit, said, “Good morning, Karl.”