Countdown (33 page)

Authors: David Hagberg

BOOK: Countdown

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IT WAS JUST NOON local time when the seven-thousand-ton submarine settled gently to the silty bottom of the Bay of Messini on the south coast of the Greek Peloponnisos. She listed a few degrees to port because of the sloping bottom here.

“We have seventy meters over our keel,” Fedorenko called softly from his position beside Kurshin at the wheel.

“Nicely done,” Captain Makayev said. “Secure the boat from all but essential systems.” He hit the comms switch. “Sonar, what does it look like on the surface?”

“I'm tracking numerous small boats, probably pleasure craft, Captain. They're all over the place up there. It's like a circus.”

“Good,” Makayev said softly.

Kurshin turned and looked at Makayev and Fedorenko. They were both good men, he thought. In the past day and a half, he had developed a respect and trust for their expertise.

It was too bad, he thought, that in the end the reward they were expecting in Moscow would be nothing more than nine ounces. But then, as Baranov had unnecessarily explained, they could not afford to have so many witnesses. Like Dr. Velikanov, one of them sooner or later would say the wrong thing at the wrong time. It could not be allowed.

“We are deep enough here?” he asked Makayev.

“No one will see us from the surface, even from an airplane, even if they were searching here, which I do not expect they are.”

“Are you sure?”

Makayev, like all of them, was tired. They'd been operating without sleep for nearly forty-eight hours since Rome. He was becoming irritable, but his control was marvelous.

He shrugged. “In this business, Comrade Colonel, one can never be sure. But even their ASW aircraft would not be able to detect our presence with their magnetic anomaly equipment, there is too much small-boat traffic on the surface for them to succeed. This is summer, the tourists will be at it all day.”

Fedorenko had been doing something at one of the overhead control panels. He turned around. “They will be concentrating their search in the Aegean by now.”

Kurshin looked at him sharply.

“Gennadi is correct, Comrade Colonel,” Makayev said. “Their SOSUS equipment certainly detected our passage through the Malta Channel. We have already discussed this.”

“They cannot know for certain that their boat has been hijacked.”

Again Makayev shrugged. “It is elementary, I think. They will have found that little Italian cruiser by now â¦ above or below the surface. They will know that something is amiss. They also
know that our fleet is up there. If I were them, I would be thinking very strongly about the Bosporus.”

It was practically the same thing Baranov had told him. But the beauty of the operation was they could not be sure. Nor did Gorbachev or the Politburo know anything. If and when the president used the hotline to call Moscow, he would learn nothing. An investigation would be immediately launched, of course. But by that time the operation would have been completed. Israel would have been ruined as a military power in the region, and Gorbachev himself would fall.

Kurshin got up from his seat at the helm. “We'll load and drop the missile now.”

Makayev glanced up at the chronometer on the bulkhead. “It is twelve hours before our rendezvous. Time now to rest.”

“No,” Kurshin barked. “We'll drop the missile first.” He softened his tone. “In case something happens, Captain. In case the Americans get lucky.”

Both Makayev and Fedorenko looked at him, their stares harsh. Finally Makayev unbent a little. “As you wish,” he said. He turned and hit the comms switch. “Aleksei, are you ready for us?”

“Yes, Captain. I will need at least two men.”

“We're on our way.”

Makayev turned again to his
starpom
. “The colonel and I will attend to our little chore. Make certain that Aleksandr keeps a close watch on his sonar equipment, we do not want any surprises.”

Fedorenko nodded.

“When we are finished we will have something to eat, and then get some rest. We have another long night ahead of us.”

Kurshin followed Makayev into the attack center forward, and then through the hatch and down the ladder into the weapons control center.

Aleksei Chobotov stood just aft of the starboard torpedo tubes. Behind him was the weapons storage and transfer compartment. He had managed to pull one of the Tomahawk missiles out of its storage rack and position it over one of the tube slides.

It was large, much bigger than Kurshin had envisioned. At a
length of twenty-one feet, in the nuclear warhead version, the missile weighed more than four thousand pounds.

“You have finished reprogramming the TERCOM (Terrain Contour Matching) system?” Kurshin asked.

Chobotov's eyes were shining. “If the disk you provided me was accurate, Comrade Colonel, the missile is ready to fire.”

“What is the target?” Makayev asked.

Kurshin ignored the question. “All the seals are back in place?”

“Yes, sir. As long as she doesn't stay in the water too long, it should be all right. Of course there is no way to be certain, but fuck your mother, the Americans build fine equipment.”

“What about the rocket motor?”

“It is actually a turbofan jet, Comrade Colonel, with a solid fuel booster. They will survive.”

“And the nuclear warhead?”

Chobotov involuntarily glanced over at the sleek missile. He shivered. “It is armed.”

“No danger of a radiation leak?”

“None.”

Makayev had stepped past Kurshin. He reached up and tentatively touched the missile's casing. A look of mild surprise crossed his features. “It's warm.”

“I noticed that too, Captain,” Chobotov replied. “But there is no reason for it, except that our hands are perhaps cold.”

Makayev turned back and nodded. “With good reason,” he murmured. He looked at Kurshin, something in his eyes, and then nodded again. “Then let's get the bastard overboard.”

Despite the fact they were working with unfamiliar equipment, Chobotov knew his stuff. He and Kurshin hand guided the missile down onto its loading rack while Makayev operated the hoist controls.

It was automatically slid to a loading gate on the starboard side, where Chobotov switched the loading grapples to the uppermost of the three torpedo tubes, the inner door of which was already open.

The missile slowly slid into place, coming to rest with a soft click, and a whir of machinery as the rack was withdrawn.

Chobotov closed and sealed the door and, back at the auxiliary control board, pressurized the tube.

The comms speaker squawked. “Captain, I have an orange light on Starboard A tube.”

“We're getting set to launch,” Makayev radioed back. “Stand by.”

“Roger.”

Chobotov's right hand hovered over the button for the outer door.

“No chance that the missile's engine will fire?” Kurshin asked.

“No, sir. I switched that circuitry into the passive-locked mode. There is no chance â¦”

Kurshin stood just behind the missile officer. He reached up and shoved the younger man's hand against the button. There was a sudden whoosh of air, and the submarine shuddered very slightly.

Chobotov looked over his shoulder at him.

“There,” Kurshin said. “She is on the bottom just like us.”

ROME

McGarvey was a nonperson as far as the CIA's Rome station was concerned. It was a matter of insulation, Trotter had explained on the drive up from Naples.

“You were never there, Kirk, so no matter what happens there will be no retaliations against our people.”

Trotter had dropped him off at a small hotel in the Aventine District and had gone ahead to the embassy where he made a few phone calls, gathered up the files he needed, and returned in the early afternoon.

McGarvey was tired. He had managed to get a couple hours of rest, but he kept hearing Lorraine Abbott's pleas that he not go ahead with his assignment. She was an idealist, and worse, she did not have all the facts. Nor would she ever. “It's a big nasty world out there,” someone had told him once. “The fact of the matter is, no one really cares whether you live or die. It's up to you to make a difference.”

But he cared, and he expected Lorraine did too. He didn't know, however, if they made a difference or not. Just now he
felt as if he were squandering what little time was left to them. If Kurshin had the submarine he would act quickly. By bottling up the Bosporus the Navy had told the Russians they were suspected. The situation would not last much longer. They were all sitting on a powder keg, and the fuse was short.

From his third-floor window, McGarvey watched Trotter come down the street. He stopped to admire something in a shop window, turned as if he was about to change his mind, then turned again and came directly across the street and entered the hotel.

McGarvey didn't move for a long minute. Traffic was normal below; the pedestrians passing did not seem out of the ordinary. By the time Trotter was at the door, he figured his old friend had come away clean, and he went to let him in.

“The
Indianapolis
has disappeared again,” Trotter said, coming into the small room. He laid his briefcase on the narrow bed as McGarvey closed and locked the door.

“They should have been within range of the Crete SOSUS by now.”

“I know. I just got off the phone with Admiral DeLugio. He flew out from Gaeta to set up a field command post. He wants some answers and damned fast.”

“Can't say as I blame him,” McGarvey said. “What about Nikandrov? What did you bring for me?”

“Good news and bad news,” Trotter said. “It took some doing to come up with what we needed without tipping my hand. Jesse Lipton”âchief of the CIA's Rome stationâ“knows that something big is in the wind, so I had to sidestep him. The skipper of the
Lorrel-E
went public with his salvage claim. The press somehow found out that the Navy had sent out one of its submarine rescue ships and they've put two and two together. Lipton asked me point-blank if I was involved in the mess. I had to lie to him.”

“It's better that he doesn't know,” McGarvey said. “What's the good news?”

“That's not all the bad, yet, Kirk. You're going to have to sit tight here until after dark. Perhaps as late as midnight, maybe even longer.”

“We might not have the time.”

“Nothing we can do about it. The Navy is watching the region. The
Indianapolis
has to be sitting on the bottom somewhere between the Malta Channel and Crete.”

“That's a lot of water, John. And if I remember my geography the Mediterranean drops to fourteen thousand feet in some spots. The
Indianapolis
can't go that deep, can she?”

“The Los Angelesâclass submarines, from what I'm told, have a service depth of around fifteen hundred feet. Beyond two thousand or twenty-five hundred feet her hull would implode from the pressure.”

“So if she's on the bottom somewhere, it's near land.”

“There's a lot of coastline between Malta and Crete. But the Navy is looking.”

“In the meantime what about Nikandrov?”

“That's the rest of the bad news,” Trotter said. “He's holed up at the Soviet Embassy. His normal routine keeps him there usually until around six in the evening when he takes a car to his home in Maglianaâa suburb about five miles south of the city.”

“He can't be lured out into the open sooner?” McGarvey asked.

“Not without alerting Lipton that we're up to something. And if Nikandrov is indeed involved in this mess, he'll be keeping a close watch over his shoulder. The good news is that he's sent his wife and two children away for a holiday to Switzerland. And once he gets to his house he usually stays there.”

“Alone?”

“He has a bodyguard,” Trotter said. He opened his briefcase and took out a file that contained maps of the suburb as well as a dozen or more photographs showing a house that appeared to be located in the middle of a big park, as well as shots of Nikandrov himself, and another much larger man, with thick eyebrows and dark penetrating eyes. “Andrei Nikovich Zalenin. He's Special Service II muscle.”

McGarvey stared at Zalenin's photograph. He looked like a tough sonofabitch. He would be highly trained and highly motivated not only to protect the physical safety of Nikandrov, but
to make sure his charge did not himself go astray. If need be, his orders would include killing Nikandrov rather than allowing him to fall into enemy hands.

“The Nikandrovs apparently settle down very early for Russians. Normally around ten or eleven in the evening. He's up around five in the morning, and back at the embassy no later than six-thirty.”

“A hard worker.”

“Yes,” Trotter said. “I figure the best time for you to get in there would be around midnight, or even a little later. My car is parked two blocks from here. There are some things in the trunk for you. I'll take a cab back to the embassy.”

“What about afterward?” McGarvey asked.

“Depending on what you find, or what the Navy might turn up in the meantime, we'll see.”

“How about Baranov?”

Trotter gave him a hard stare. “It looks as if the president will give the green light. Murphy seems to think he's on the verge because of this
Indianapolis
thing. But we blew some very good resources getting you out of East Berlin. There's a better than even chance that they'll be expecting you. If you go back across, you could be walking into a trap.”

“If I have the green light, John, I'm going ahead with it. In the meantime I want you to pull Lorraine out of West Berlin.”

Trotter shook his head. “I can't, Kirk.”

“Why?” McGarvey shot back.

“I've been told hands off.”

Again there was something wrong with Trotter's answer, something McGarvey couldn't put his finger onâor didn't want to. “Have we got people watching the hotel?”

“Around the clock,” Trotter said.

“What about Lev Potok, and the Israelis?”

A fleeting look of relief crossed Trotter's features. “That's up to Murphy. He's taken it to the president. They're going to have to decide what they're going to tell the Mossad.”

“If it's Kurshin aboard that sub, and we both know it is, he won't be making for the Black Sea. His target has always been En Gedi. The Israelis have to be warned.”

“It's out of my hands, Kirk. Murphy knows the situation and so does the president. It's up to them, not us.”

“What about you in the meantime?” McGarvey asked.

“You're going to have to get out of Italy, immediately. I'll be working out something.”

“Where do we meet when it's over?”

“Here. If the light is on in the window, it's safe. Otherwise we'll meet in the Piazza San Pietro.”

“In front of the Vatican?”

“Right,” Trotter said. “Watch yourself.”