“Good luck,” Dutcher said.
Aboard the Aurasina, Bear was standing at the railing overlooking the vehicle deck when Dutcher called with the update from Tanner. Below, a pair of crewmen were walking from car to car, testing the tie-down straps. Most of the ferry’s decks were deserted, the passengers having retreated to their cabins.
“He’s leaving Losinj now,” Dutcher finished. “Unless Litzman changes course, they should meet near one of the Srakane islands.”
“I’m ready on this end,” Bear said. “I did some scouting. They’ve got two auxiliary machinery rooms; the locks are pretty flimsy. I shouldn’t have a problem slipping in.”
“And then?” Dutcher asked.
“A fire hose in the reduction gear,” Cahil answered. “It’ll either bum out the bearings or shear off a couple torque converters. She’ll be dead in the water.”
“Good enough. Don’t count on hearing from us; with the storm, communication is going to be dicey. Orders or not, two hours from now, work your magic.”
“Will do.”
Cahil disconnected. Behind him, he heard the distinctive click of a gun safety being disengaged. Instinctively, Bear turned on the sat phone’s GPS transponder, detached the antenna, and slid it into his waistband.
“Turn around,” a voice said. “Slowly.”
Cahil did so. Standing before him, a Sauer semiautomatic pistol held at waist level, was Risto Trpkova. Beside him, also armed, was one of his men. “What’s this about?” Cahil asked. “I don’t have very much money—”
“I rarely forget faces. It took some time, but I finally placed yours. Foca, wasn’t it, 1996?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“No?”
“Sorry,” Cahil said with a shrug.
“Then why don’t we go someplace and talk about it,” Trpkova said. “We’ll share memories, talk about old times. Then you can tell me why you’ve been following me, and why I shouldn’t shoot you in the head and dump your body overboard.”
46
A quarter mile past the harbor’s breakwater, Tanner realized he was in trouble.
The skipjack was sturdy enough and her engine strong enough, but the winds were chaotic, backing and shifting with frightening irregularity. Backlit by flashes of lightning, waves slammed explosively into one another, sending up geysers of foam. Swells stacked up on one another, growing taller as the troughs deepened, until the crests reached a dozen feet or more. Tanner would find himself teetering atop a curling crest with no choice but to let the skipjack nose over into the trough, or gun the throttle and hope he had enough velocity to clear the gap.
Twice, as the skipjack soared from wave top to wave top, Briggs could only watch helplessly as another crest would appear from nowhere and slam into the hull with enough force to knock the wind from his lungs.
Rain and spindrift cascaded over the boat’s vinyl cover, drenching him and finding every gap in the elastic waist skirt. He could hear water sloshing around the boat’s bottom. Without the skirt he would have already capsized.
Tanner sensed that the sea was quartering, the swells lengthening, so he took the opportunity to throttle back and take a compass check. He pulled the sat phone from its Ziploc bag then matched his position against the GPS feed from the Lacrosse. It showed the Barak passing Veli Srakane and heading toward its sister island, Male Srakane. He double-checked his bearings, then throttled up and brought the bow around into the next crest.
Twenty minutes later Tanner was peeping through the spindrift when a double flash of lightning burst across the sky. In the strobe he glimpsed a strip of white sand backed by a line of trees. Another flash and he could make out a curve of the land off the port beam. Male Srakane. He brought the skipjack about to follow the shoreline.
Suddenly a white mastlight appeared off his bow. He let the skipjack drop into a trough then throttled down. He was close enough to the shallows that the waves were stacking, becoming more regular, so he jockeyed the skip-jack ahead, threading his way from trough to trough. After two hundred yards, he throttled up again, climbed the next crest, and snatched a peek.
It was the Barak. She was anchored at the mouth of a crescent-shaped cove enclosed by a pair of sandbars covered in scrub pine. On the Barak’s afterdeck, four figures worked under the glow of a spotlight. Tanner looking for other signs of life aboard, but saw none. Where are you, Susanna? he wondered. She was aboard, he told himself. She had to be. If not, it meant Litzman had already disposed of her.
He pulled the sat phone from his pocket, keyed in a pager message—“Located Barak; pursuing”—and sent it.
According to Oaken, Male Srakane was all but deserted, occupied only by a game warden who lived on the north side of the island. So why had Litzman anchored here? Unless … Unless he’d stashed something here. It would explain his delayed arrival in Trieste. Wary of a search by Trieste customs, had Litzman dropped his cargo here for later recovery?
Tanner turned the skipjack stern first into the breakers then let them drive him into the shallows, putting the sandbar between himself and the Barak. When he felt the keel scrape the sand, he hopped out, grabbed the painter line, and dragged the boat ashore.
He dug a pair of binoculars from the equipment pack Franjo had given him, then ran, hunched over, to the slope of the sandbar, where he dropped onto his belly and crawled to the top. He focused the binoculars on the Barak’s afterdeck.
The four figures had lowered a Zodiac raft into the water beside the stern. As Tanner watched, the last man climbed in. The Zodiac came about and headed toward shore. Briggs backed down the slope and began sprinting inland, using the sandbar as a guide. When it melded with the tree line, he turned again and began picking his way toward the cove.
He heard the whine of the Zodiac’s engine peak, then suddenly die. The trees thinned out, opening onto the beach. Briggs dropped into a crouch and raised the binoculars. At the waterline, the four men were pulling the Zodiac onto the sand. Each was dressed in a black wet suit One of them, easily half a foot taller than the rest, stood to one side and barked silent orders. Litzman. Tanner caught snippets of German on the wind: “Hurry it up … tie that off!”
With Litzman in the lead, the group trudged up the beach and disappeared into the trees. Tanner considered following, but decided against it. He picked his way back along the sandbar and closer to the Zodiac.
After ten minutes the group reappeared dragging what looked like an oversized toboggan made of curved, aluminum piping. Twelve feet long, four wide, and three tall, the sled’s upper rails were fitted with six orange pontoon floats, each the size of a beach ball.
Sitting atop the sled was the crate from Lorient.
Tanner focused the binoculars on the crate, hoping to catch any identifying words or markings. There, stenciled in bold black letters, were four characters: “MK90.” Tanner kept scanning until he found a second grouping: “CAPTOR.”
Oh, God. Litzman’s trip to Lorient now made perfect sense.
During the seventies and eighties, NATO’s plan for a conventional war with Russia in Europe depended on the resupply of ground forces via several ports on the French coast, the main one being Lorient, the Bay of Biscay. Accordingly, the French Navy had turned the coastal town into not only its hub for antisubmarine units, but also its primary depot for ASW weapons.