Antonin lay hunched over his panel. Blood gushed from a deep wound in his temple. Borodin was sprawled face-down on the flooded deck, looking lifeless. Keretzky was nowhere in sight.
Someone — he guessed that it was Popov — was standing on the ladder to the sail bridge. He was struggling to open the hatch.
Manilov staggered over to where Borodin lay. He pulled the young man upright, then dragged him toward the ladder.
Popov had the hatch open. A fresh torrent of seawater sloshed in on them.
Manilov shoved Borodin up to Popov. “Take him.” His voice sounded tinny and distant. The explosion had rendered him nearly deaf.
He returned to the control compartment. Antonin was on his feet, bleeding profusely and looking confused. Manilov steered him to the ladder, then shoved him toward the hatch where Popov had stationed himself.
“They’re getting out,” Popov yelled down. “I can see the others escaping from the aft hatch.”
Manilov nodded. At least half his crew, those in the aft compartments, would live. So would those in the forward section who survived the torpedo blast. He had made the right decision.
Twice more he returned, dragging Keretzky and then Chenin, one of the young enlisted men, to the hatch.
He made one more pass, looking for survivors. The compartment was waist deep in seawater. The hull was listing to port, the bow tilting downward. Manilov heard a long, creaking metallic noise, which he knew was a bulkhead giving way.
The Ilia Mourmetz was dying.
In the yellow light, he saw something, a dark round object, floating past him. It was his Russian Navy officer’s cap. Manilov retrieved the cap, gave it a shake, then placed it squarely on his head.
In a thousand dreams, he had lived this moment. He stood as tall as he could in the shifting compartment. He was a Russian naval officer. This was his destiny.
The lights flickered again, then went out, pitching the compartment into blackness. With a final shudder, the Ilia Mourmetz rolled over and began its long descent to the bottom of the sea.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
THE TAKEDOWN
“This is preposterous,” said Fletcher. “You’re telling me that Commander Parsons is not the spy?”
Adam Korchek, on the secure phone in the SCIF, said, “He never was.”
“How long have you known that?”
“Since I arrested him.”
He heard a spluttering noise from Admiral Fletcher’s end of the line. “You’ve got some explaining to do, Mr. Korchek. Without informing me, you went ahead and arrested an innocent man—”
“Knock it off, Admiral. I’m here to take down traitors, not play your silly little military etiquette games.”
A long silent moment followed. Korchek knew he had thoroughly pissed off a senior naval officer. He didn’t care.
When Fletcher again spoke, his voice was strained. “How did you know it wasn’t Parsons?”
“Because the encrypted stuff I found on his computer didn’t originate there. The origin codes, which my software can trace, came from a different computer. It had to have been planted on Parsons’s computer.”
“Are you going to tell me whose computer it came from?”
“Are you sitting down?”
“Go ahead.”
Korchek told him.
Several seconds of silence passed. “Oh, my God,” he heard Fletcher say. “Inform me as soon as he’s in custody.”
“You’ll be the first to know,” Korchek said, and hung up.
From his battered leather briefcase he pulled out the Glock. After he’d checked the pistol, he shoved the clip back into the grip and slipped it into the holster in the small of his back. He could use the ship’s security detail to make the actual arrest, but that wasn’t his style. It would be like inviting someone else to finish off a piece of tail for you.
This was the part of the job that Korchek liked most. After the sleuthing, assembling the myriad pieces of the mosaic, zeroing in on the identity of your subject, then you got to take him down.
This was a big fish, and Korchek hoped the guilty scumbag would put up some resistance. Not a lot, just enough to make it sporting. That was the absolutely best part, when the perp saw that it was over and he tried to make a break. Then you could quite justifiably kick the shit out of him. Within limits, of course.
He waited until the two marine security guards showed up. They were waiting in the passageway outside the SCIF, in full combat gear, carrying their M16A2 carbines. That was all the firepower Korchek wanted for this job.
He had deliberately left the other three team members out of it. The two CIA types, Mosely and Grad, would immediately be on the line to their bosses back in spook headquarters, and the whole operation would then be micromanaged from Virginia. The other FBI agent, Bill Gould, was a trial lawyer by training, and his shtick was to analyze the shit out of everything before he ever made a move. By then the spy could be in Patagonia.
This would be Adam Korchek’s private little coup.
With the marines clumping along in trail, he left the SCIF and ascended to the O-3 level. He knew the area well by now. They passed the sign on the bulkhead that read OFFICERS COUNTRY, and entered the warren of staterooms.
He looked up and down the passageway, then approached the middle stateroom. He heard music — a modern jazz piece — coming from inside.
Korchek slipped the Glock from the holster behind his back. Holding the pistol at the ready, he paused to read the placarded name on the door: COMMANDER O.B. “SPOOK” MORSE, CVBG INTEL OFFICER.
The instant Morse turned the corner in the passageway, he knew. They were already there. They’d gotten inside his room.
A marine stood in the doorway, his back to him. How many were inside? Who was it? That FBI attack dog, Korchek?
For sure it would be Korchek.
Another minute and he would have gotten to the room before them. His pistol — the Beretta nine millimeter — was still in there. Now he was unarmed, no place to go, five hundred miles at sea.
A hunted man.
A spy.
For a fleeting instant he considered hitting the marine from behind. He was a martial arts expert, skilled enough to drop a man with a blow to the base of his skull. Then he’d grab the carbine. Whoever was inside was probably searching the room. With the advantage of surprise, he’d be able to kill them with the M16.
He dismissed the idea. Korchek was not a man to be taken by surprise. He was a cunning predator, waiting for him to do something stupid. Stupid ideas grew out of desperation. If he was to stay alive, he had to stop thinking like a desperate man.
This was the moment that Spook Morse knew would come someday. In his conscious mind he had deceived himself in a dozen ways, rationalizing that he was too intelligent, too careful, too experienced to be found out and captured.
Why had he taken such risks?
When he became acquainted with the cultivated Emirate Air Force colonel, Jamal Al-Fasr, during his assignment to the Fifth Fleet staff, it had seemed a mutually useful association. Al-Fasr would sometimes slip to him items about the Arab countries’ defense initiatives and future weapons acquisitions. In turn, Morse would feed him innocuous tidbits about coalition force dispersal and fleet deployments. Never anything sensitive or highly classified. It was the sort of exchange intelligence officers practiced all the time.
Then, while Morse was still assigned to the fleet post in Bahrain, two events changed his life. The first was his wife’s announcement that she was leaving him for a British RAF squadron leader with whom she’d been having an affair for two years. The second, which occurred almost simultaneously, was the Navy’s decision to pass him over for promotion to captain.