Walker lay next to the man, their eyes locked together, Kozlov’s empty with death.
Limonov tried to run, but pieces of the parking lot kicked up in front of him and he stopped, raised his hands. Limonov’s chest was covered by the red dots of lasers.
Walker shut his eyes and prayed this was the end of the horror.
Soon after he opened them, he sat with his wife and son on a sofa in a luxury Gulfstream jet. The three could not hold one another tight enough, and Walker promised the very serious men on the aircraft with him that he would answer any question, provide any assistance, or reveal any detail to the world that they wanted from him. He’d leave the BVIs and never return; he just didn’t want to have anything to do with the man tied to a chair at the front of the cabin.
Jack Ryan, Jr., sat in front of Andrei Limonov. Limonov might have been able to recognize the President’s son, it happened from time to time, after all, but the Russian wore a blindfold.
He looked white from terror, so Jack decided to play on his fears.
Jack said, “Limonov, you’ve got no choice. You are done.”
Limonov licked his dry lips. “Actually, I do have a choice. To me this is quite simple. I am infinitely more afraid of Valeri Volodin than I am of Jack Ryan.”
Jack was momentarily stunned. Then he realized the man was talking about his father.
He recovered and said, “You misunderstand the situation. We aren’t taking you to the USA. You aren’t going to Guantánamo. You are going home. Back to Moscow.”
Limonov’s chin rose slightly, and Jack thought he detected a tremble in his lip. “I don’t understand.”
“No? I bet you’ll figure it out. We’re going to plop your ass in the middle of Red Square the same morning the news gets out that a top Russian financier with Kremlin ties has been in the BVIs moving eight billion, and you have turned over the account numbers to American Feds.”
“What? Wait, that’s not what happened. I didn’t give you anything!”
Jack leaned forward. “Your boss might own the press in Russia, but he doesn’t own it all over the world. It won’t take any time for Volodin to learn what happened here, or maybe I should say our version of what happened. No matter the circumstances, what do you think he’ll do with you?”
Clark had been listening from across the cabin, but he stepped over for a moment and leaned down, just behind the Russian’s left ear. “No, Limonov, don’t even bother to think, because you can’t imagine it. Volodin has spent decades learning the best ways to exact payback on those who fail him, and I’m pretty certain when he finds out the U.S. has access to his money, he’s going to be a lot more pissed off than he’s ever been.”
Clark said, “Your end will be a fucking horror movie, pal. And your death will be the best thing that ever happened to you in your whole life.”
“No!”
“If you will work with us, give us the accounts and the details of your network, you will be protected. If you don’t… well, like I said, it’s back to Moscow for you. This time next week someone will be digging your eye out with a pair of tongs.”
Limonov just nodded slowly. “Take me to America. I’ll tell you about Volodin’s money.”
Ryan looked to the back of the plane and gave the others a thumbs-up. Nobody was going to Moscow, but the threat had served its purpose.
The USS James Greer (DDG-102) sailed south at twenty-two knots. The ship was rigged for quiet but the relatively high speed negated much of the hard work the engineering department put in to keep the vessel stealthy. The twin screws of the Arleigh Burke — class destroyer were designed to reduce noise, even when under significant power, but at twenty knots, those with ears in the ocean ahead would be able to tell something was coming.
Commander Scott Hagen knew he was taking a calculated risk with his tactics, but he thought it worth the gamble. After days patrolling Lithuanian waters, essentially taking the place of the significant portion of Lithuania’s Navy that had been sunk in a two-and-a-half-hour period earlier in the week, he had finally received approval to patrol out into the open sea. As soon as these orders came through from the Sixth Fleet commander, he sent both of his MH-60 Romeo Sea Hawk helicopters out in front of him to clear the way, and he ordered his engine room to give him the highest speed they could manage without rendering the towed array completely ineffective. Doctrine would have him picking his way a lot more slowly and carefully — as it was, the SQS-53 hull-mounted sonar’s effective range was cut by two-thirds — but Hagen saw tonight’s objective less as a typical sub search and more as a race against time, so he pushed on.
He also had a strong suspicion he knew where danger prowled in the Baltic, and it was dead ahead, out of range of his vessel, at least for a short while longer.
Thirty miles south of the James Greer, the Polish Navy was in a fight right this minute, and although the Poles seemed to think they had the upper hand, as far as Hagen was concerned, they just had a tiger by the tail.
For the first few days of the conflict the Poles had stayed in their own waters, but the northern coast of Poland lived and died on the basis of its Baltic seaports, and ever since the submarine warfare kicked off with the sinking of the Maltese cargo ship Granite, few ships of any type had dared enter the southeastern sector of the Baltic Sea. Seeing the economic imperative of opening their coast back to commerce, the Polish government ordered its navy out to ensure the safety of ship traffic.
They sent a search-and-attack unit — a collection of integrated surface vessels and aircraft with antisubmarine warfare capability — out to comb the waters west of Kaliningrad in search of the Russian submarines. An Orkan-class fast attack boat had been positioned to the east of the rest of the group. Above it, one of Poland’s Mi-14 helos with antisubmarine dipping capability had detected an undersea contact but had not been able to designate it as a threat with any confidence, so the Orkan began moving closer to join the helo in the hunt.
Without warning, a pair of torpedoes were launched from the location of the possible contact, and though the captain of the Orkan managed to avoid one of them with evasive maneuvers, the second inbound Type 53–65 blew his small boat all the way out of the water, killing every last one of the thirty-two on board.
The Poles also had another helo in the area, an SH-2G Super Seasprite. It locked on to the undersea contact, declared it hostile, and dropped a pair of Mark 46 torpedoes into the black water.
A Polish corvette received the data pulled from the integrated targeting system of the Seasprite helicopter, and it launched a pair of its own torpedoes at the target. With four weapons converging simultaneously at one target from two directions, the Kilo had little chance.
The sonar technicians on the James Greer heard the death of the Russian sub in their headsets, and even though they were still some twenty-six miles from the action, it felt like they were right there in the submarine with the doomed men.
While it was natural to empathize with the dying, every one of the sonar technicians on the Greer knew the horrific sounds in their headsets were the sounds of justice. The Russians had started this shit, after all, and they’d killed a lot of innocent people.
Commander Hagen played no part in the celebration. He stood in the CIC quietly while the overhead speakers and the digital dead-reckoning tracer table in front of him gave him the news about the kill of the Russian sub, and he thought about the other undersea threat out there, the second Kilo. In their previous attacks the two enemy vessels had worked in tandem, so he expected it was just a matter of moments before one of the two Oliver Hazard Perry — class frigates in the Polish SAU found out that the other Russian submarine was also here in the sea north of Gdańsk.