The American had five folded hundred-dollar bills in his hand. “For you.”
Radchenko felt the tension mounting in his body. He reached for the money even as he realized something was wrong. The American heaved himself off the bed an instant before the door splintered inward off its hinges and two men burst into the room.
A barrage of raindrops exploded against black steel. A filthy morning topside at U.S. Navy Atlantic Fleet Headquarters, Norfolk, Virginia, had the watchstanders’ chins tucked into their sodden peacoats.
Belowdecks, where it was warm and dry, the canned, conditioned air smelled from ozone. Commander Jake Scott waved his executive officer, Commander Manny Rodriguez, into the small stateroom that doubled as his personal quarters and private office aboard the USS Tampa, a Los Angeles–class nuclear attack submarine.
“What’s up, Skipper?” said Rodriguez.
“ComSubLant, that’s what’s up,” Scott said. “The squadron commodore just called. Ellsworth wants to see me.”
“You in trouble?”
“No more than usual.”
“The commodore give you a hint what the boss wants to see you about?” Rodriguez asked.
“Possible change of orders.”
“Hell, Skipper, we already have our orders.”
“Change of orders for me.”
“What?”
The Tampa had just completed a refit and was scheduled to depart Norfolk for sea trials and, later, deployment. Scott had been the Tampa’s commanding officer for over two years and she was his home.
Whatever it was that Ellsworth had in mind for him, the admiral was in for a fight. Especially if it meant giving up command of the Tampa. She was his ship and he didn’t want anyone to take her from him. He thought about Tracy. Someone had taken her from him; now this. No, that wasn’t true: Tracy had left him. Big difference.
There had been all those intelligence-gathering patrols into hostile waters, all those weeks and months away from her. She had complained that he was more intimate with his sub crew than he was with her.
The phone calls had hurt too. Like the one on his first night ashore after a hellish sixty-day patrol off North Korea. He had picked up the phone and heard loud music in the background. A man’s voice said,
“Trace, it’s Rick. Wanna party, wear that red-hot outfit of yours?” “Not tonight,” Scott had said icily.
Click! At least he hadn’t walked in the door and found Rick’s face buried between Tracy’s legs. Why blame her? She just wanted a normal life, not the one he’d given her. He wondered if she had found her new life satisfying, if the things she liked to do in bed excited the guy she was running with now…. He caught himself in time and reeled back from the edge of misery.
Scott stood. “I’m to report to Ellsworth at fifteen hundred.”
“What about the party at the O club?” Rodriguez brayed. “You gonna make it?”
“Better stow it for now.”
Scott looked at all the untouched paperwork piled on the desk, reports and correspondence awaiting his review and signature. What he really wanted to do was shit-can all of it and get back to sea. He took a dirty work jacket down from a hook on the bulkhead. “Take care of my ship, Manny.”
Vice Admiral Carter Ellsworth, commander, Submarines Atlantic, peered through a pair of thick wire-rimmed glasses that magnified his pale blue eyes. The benign look on his face masked a cunning personality. His desk, except for coffee in a fine china cup, had been cleared of papers. Flags, framed photos of the president, the civilian service chiefs, and plaques bearing the names of U.S. submarines were the only items on display in Ellsworth’s spartan office.
“Consider yourself detached from the Tampa,” Ellsworth said without preamble.
Scott felt he’d been gut-punched.
“You’re detached for TDY. Chief of staff has your orders. You can pick them up when you leave, Captain.”
“Captain?” Scott said.
“You’ve been frocked for your new assignment.” Ellsworth tossed Scott a plastic bag containing a pair of silver eagle collar devices. “Meanwhile, see if these fit.”
Scott’s frocking was a mixed blessing. He’d bragged, had even worn as a badge of honor, that he was probably the oldest commander in the Navy, passed over for promotion to captain once and doomed if he was passed over again. But reassignment meant giving up command of the Tampa and he’d worked too hard rehabilitating himself to do that.
“Karl Radford wants to see you,” Ellsworth said. The cup rose to his lips; gold braid on his sleeve sparkled like a bolt of raw electricity.
Scott digested this. Karl Radford, a retired United States Air Force major general, headed the Strategic Reconnaissance Office, a supersecret intelligence agency with intelligence-gathering assets in place world-wide. Scott had always suspected that most—if not all—of the missions he’d conducted at sea had been ordered by the SRO. Perhaps even the one that had almost ended in disaster. And had been hung around his neck.
Ellsworth looked at Scott. He saw a man in his early forties, tall, with dark hair flecked with gray. He had rough-edged good looks and a bearing that indicated he knew how to handle himself in tough situations. “Any idea why he’d want to talk to you?”
Scott shrugged. “No, sir. Do you?”
Ellsworth ignored this and said, “Wrap up whatever you have pending. Radford wants you in Washington day after tomorrow. Any problem with that?”
“Perhaps he’d consider someone else in my place.”
Ellsworth set his jaw. “What are you saying, Scott?”
“That I’d prefer to retain command of the Tampa. Whatever General Radford has in mind for me can’t be more important than what I’m doing now.”
Ellsworth pushed the coffee aside. His pale blue eyes had turned dark. “Let me tell you something, Scott. You’re still hanging by a thread. You’ve had your second chance and admittedly you’ve made the most of it. A lot of men who have been in your position are out of the Navy. Some are selling appliances for Sears; others are reading the want ads.”
Scott felt pressure building at the base of his skull.
Ellsworth plunged ahead. “Those men didn’t deserve a second chance, but you did. I don’t intend to give you another.”
“Admiral, I fought hard for it and I don’t plan to end my career on the beach all used up.”
“Apparantly General Radford agrees. He wouldn’t ask for one of SubLant’s best skippers unless it was damned important. More important than driving subs. He knows your background and all the rest. He wants someone with a brain who knows how to use it. I told him you wouldn’t disappoint him.”
“Thank you.”
“Now let me give you some advice, Scott. A lot of people around here think you’re a hero and that you got the shitty end of the stick—that we brass hats needed a scapegoat and you were it. No need to go over old ground, what’s done is done. But keep this in mind: I know Radford, and he isn’t impressed by heroes. He’ll dice you up if he thinks even for a second that you might customize the orders he gives you. This time try sticking to the rules—his rules, not Jake Scott’s. I don’t think you’d be very successful selling appliances.”
Ellsworth stood. “That about does it. Oh, one more thing. Rodriguez. In your judgment, he’s fully qualified for command?”
Scott stood too. “He is.”
“I’ll be riding the Tampa during her shakedown. See how he handles it. The pressure, I mean.”
Scott put a hand to the base of his skull.
Ellsworth saw Scott to the door and shook his hand in a mechanical fashion. “By the way, it was Radford who wrangled your frocking out of BuPers, not me,” Ellsworth laid a finger beside his nose. “I gather it wasn’t easy.”
Scott finished a beer and wrapped up the remains of Chinese takeout in a brown paper sack. He gazed numbly at a muted CNN female talking head with plastic hair and Chiclet teeth yapping about the president’s upcoming summit meeting with his Russian counterpart in St. Petersburg, city of the czars.
And on Capitol Hill, the Senate majority leader…He punched the power button and she vanished.
Broken noodles, greasy paper bags, and cardboard containers went into a garbage pail. Was garbage picked up on Thursday? Or was that recycling day? He was out of sync with the daily rhythms of life ashore. But his apartment was cheap and close to the base, which was all he cared about. And that his neighbors minded their own business. A Marine Corps colonel two doors away had never spoken a word to him.
Scott started packing a bag for Washington. Radford’s summons, like everything about him and the SRO, was a mystery. Black ops and a secret budget to carry them out gave Radford enormous power to influence events around the world. Like the Yellow Sea operation. Scott shuddered inwardly. It had been a nightmare. And even though the board of inquiry had exonerated him, it had not erased the uncertainty about his fitness to command a nuke that lingered in the minds of many of his superior officers. Maybe the summons from Radford would change some minds.
Scott finished packing, then looked around to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything. His gaze settled on the door to the spare bedroom, which held boxes filled with the remnants of his former life as a husband. He kept the door closed so he wouldn’t be reminded of it. Yet, it was hard not to be, especially when he heard the couple next door arguing, their fights punctuated by exploding crockery.
Not like the Scotts, he thought. They had always fought their battles in thundering silence.
The memory of the last time he saw Tracy was burned in his brain. Her lovely wide mouth a tight, angry slash, she had held him in a withering gaze, violet eyes dark with anger. To avoid a scene when Rick arrived in his new Corvette to pick her up, she had aimed her cell phone at him like a gun and screamed, “Get out! Get out or I’ll call the police.” When Scott returned the next morning, Tracy was gone.
That night Scott dreamed he was looking through a periscope at a North Korean frigate. Her twin stacks vomited smoke as she swung around and charged. Christ, they’ve spotted us! In a heartbeat the frigate’s bow began to fill the periscope’s field of view. Fear rippled through his guts. Too late now to run for it: He was committed; the SEALs had to be recovered. He had to fire torpedoes, had to save the men, but his orders went unheeded, shouted down by Tracy yelling, “Get out!…Get out!…Get out!”
2
St. Petersburg, Russia
T hick clouds pressed down on the golden spires and gilded domes of the imperial city. A snarl of traffic wormed around Moskovsky Station at the Square of Insurrection, with its tangle of southbound rail lines, trolley buses, and trams. On Nevsky Prospekt the traffic inched past a narrow street, at the dead end of which was a scrubby car repair shop surrounded by rusty Volgas, Moskvichs, and Zhigulis.
Parked out of sight in a lot next to the shop strewn with crumpled fenders and car doors was a burgundy BMW sedan and a gray Volvo station wagon.
Alikhan Zakayev warmed himself at a kerosene heater in an unoccupied bay of the shop. Greasy tools, engines, and dismantled transmissions littered the floor and workbenches. Zakayev, a smallish man, wore a cashmere navy topcoat like a cape over a double-breasted suit. His hooded eyes took in several thickly built, unshaven, menacing-looking men sitting on a bench. One of them stroked a thin black-and-white cat happily kneading his pant leg. Another man toyed with a SIG 220.45 pistol equipped with a laser sight, its red dot coursing over walls, ceiling, and Zakayev’s body.
“Put that away,” Zakayev said.
The SIG disappeared instantly.
Zakayev didn’t like the flamboyant display of arms for which his followers had a penchant much like their penchant for expensive German cars. Zakayev’s taste in cars ran more to Volvo station wagons.
Zakayev touched his pencil-thin mustache and said, “What are you doing?”
A beautiful young girl perched on a stool, her leather miniskirted bottom protected from grease by a clean shop rag, looked up from a thin paperback book. “Reading.”
“You can read later.” Zakayev jerked his head in the direction of a storeroom off the main part of the shop from which a desperate keening sound emerged. “Find out what’s taking so long.”
The girl was very tall and had huge, heavily made-up eyes. She had on dark purple stockings and spike-heeled boots. She strode across the shop on a pair of long, wonderfully shaped legs and, with a handkerchief to her nose and mouth, entered the storeroom only to emerge a moment later.
“He says it is no use,” the girl said from behind the handkerchief.
“No use?”
“See for yourself.”
Zakayev stepped gingerly across the shop floor, avoiding patches of grime and oil. He entered the store room. The strong smell of shit and piss shocked his nostrils, but he ignored it. He couldn’t ignore another smell: burned flesh and hair. A naked man built like a bull hung by his wrists, which were bound with wire, from the hook of a chain fall rigged from a ceiling beam. Mechanics employed the chain fall to lift engines out of cars; now it held what looked like a charred side of beef.
The bull had been badly beaten and his hair and scalp had been burned away, leaving only a blackened skull. Zakayev’s eyes went to the man’s groin, where his genitals had been. What he saw was the charred stump of a penis and carbonized testicles. That he was still alive was a tribute to his physical condition or perhaps all the vodka he drank.
Another man, a huge hairy ape wearing dark glasses and with a black cloth band wound around his head, stepped back from his work. He had on a leather apron over black clothes and in one hand held an acetylene torch, its roaring tapered blue-white flame capable of biting through case-hardened steel.
Sweat glistened like diamonds on the ape’s forehead. He shrugged and thumbed the gas valves closed.
The flame sputtered, popped, died. “You won’t get anything else out of him, General.”
“So it’s the Winter Palace.”
“He swore it. And I believe him.” The ape looped the torch and hoses over a pair of gas tanks lashed to a hand truck. He wiped sweat from his eyes.
Zakayev gazed at the bull—what was left of it—hanging from the hook. The stench was overpowering.