Frank smiled and completed the sequence. “Uncle Baki used to take me out in his sailboat, years ago. I won’t make a mess on your deck, I promise.”
The man sighed and nodded, waving Frank inside. Clambering aboard and ducking into the cabin, Frank came face to face with a young, strapping Turk looking at him with deep suspicion. “This is my son, Alif,” Mehmet said. “We were going to spend a few days on shore. The fishing is terrible right now.”
Mehmet sounded tired, and Frank felt bad that he was putting the old man in a spot. Nonetheless, he put his suitcase down, opened it, and withdrew an envelope filled with lira. “I’m sorry. This will help, I hope.”
Mehmet reached out and took the envelope in his weathered, calloused hand, weighing it. “It will,” he said, eyes wider now. “Where?”
“Three miles off Foros. I’ll swim the rest.”
Alif and Mehmet traded looks. “You’re going to swim the Black Sea in winter?” Alif asked.
Frank smiled. “Technically, it’s spring. But yes. We don’t want to get you in trouble. Three miles is enough. I’ll be fine.”
Actually, Frank was pretty pissed he had to do it, but at least his suitcase was a Mrs. Stevens special, totally waterproof and buoyant. That, combined with a special wetsuit she’d developed, would get him to shore. Thankfully, Mehmet and Alif simply shrugged and showed him to a bunk, promising to set off in the morning. Frank settled in and within a half hour was sound asleep.
He awoke to the sounds of seagulls and a battered diesel engine, and saw that someone had left him some bread, sardines, and cheese on the table. It wasn’t flapjacks and bacon, but there was tea on the small stove as well, and it filled his stomach. They spent the day heading north-northeast, Frank acting as lookout and checking their position on Mehmet’s battered maps. Thankfully, most Black Sea traffic was well to the west, between Istanbul and the ports of Odessa and Sevastopol, and there were no sightings other than a few large commercial barges.
By nightfall, they were about fifty kilometers out, and Frank went around the boat to douse the lights, unscrewing lightbulbs in a few cases. Alif seemed as though he would complain, but all it took was a look to silence him. He was young and strong, sure, but Frank had faced a lot more in life than a fisherman’s son could imagine. He also asked Mehmet to cut his speed, to muffle any noise that would carry across the water, and calculated their position by the flame of a cigarette lighter.
Finally, at 2 a.m., Frank could see a very faint light off in the distance. His navigation told him it was Foros, a small resort town about thirty miles away from the bustling Crimean port of Sevastopol. There would be security there, certainly — many Party higher-ups had dachas in and around the town. But there was also a small army of proletarian workers and peasants who supplied those same dachas and lived around Sevastopol in decidedly less luxurious accommodation.
The fisherman and his son, they could blow your cover, one of the late MGB men said inside Frank’s head — he was still sorting out who was who and couldn’t place it. Eliminate them and send the boat off on a random course.
“What?” Frank muttered quietly.
Concur. Operational security is paramount. If Beria gets a whiff of you in Russia, no one will be safe, General Mark Davis, U.S. Army, added. No loose ends.
Frank’s brow furrowed and he thought for several long moments about the advice he was getting — unsolicited advice, which in and of itself had been unusual but was becoming more common. Rare enough that a U.S. military expert and a Soviet goon would agree on anything, but this…?
Shaking his head, Frank put the voices aside, changed into his wetsuit — a stretchy thing that made him suddenly aware of a growing middle-age paunch despite his P.T. regimen — and stuffed everything into his suitcase, tightly sealing it. There would be no “eliminations” today.
“Head back due south and keep your lights doused and your speed low for at least an hour,” Frank warned Mahmet. “Let’s get you home in one piece.”
The old man nodded and, to Frank’s surprise, extended his hand. “Go with God.” Frank shook and turned to Alif, but the younger Turk simply scowled. Shrugging, Frank left the little cabin, lowered his suitcase gently into the water, and then clambered down the side of the boat until he could slip in without making a splash.
For a moment, Frank watched the fishing boat turn and head back while he clung to his suitcase, wondering for the millionth time in his life how he’d gotten himself to that particular moment, this time as a mote of a person bobbing in the Black Sea. But then a chill struck him; the wetsuit was doing its job, but the sea was cold regardless. He started swimming for a point just to the right of Foros, hoping it would take him to the secluded bit of shoreline he’d identified earlier from surveillance photos in his briefing packet.
The suitcase made for easy going, to Frank’s surprise. He flung his body over it and used his legs to kick, and managed to make good time. There was one nerve-racking point when Frank saw a light leaving Foros and heading out to sea — a fishing boat getting an early start or a patrol boat, he couldn’t tell — but thankfully it headed east instead of west, and Frank waited in the water until it was well out of sight. By then, he could see the hills of the Crimean peninsula rising over the horizon, and could pick his spots better. Sadly, he was further west than he’d expected, but was able to change course without too much difficulty. The coastline was rocky and, to his annoyance, covered only in short trees and scrub. Nonetheless, he found his tiny cove and slowly hauled his suitcase to shore at around 4:30 a.m. More than anything, he wanted to build a fire and warm up, but had to settle for dry clothes out of the suitcase instead. He stashed the wetsuit under a large rock in an out-of-the way corner, then slowly trudged his way up the hill toward the main road, passing within sight of a handful of large houses. No lights, though, which was a very good sign.
By dawn, he was walking into Foros itself, a pretty little town with a beautiful old hillside church that had, somehow, managed not to get bulldozed by the Soviets. Instead, it had been turned into a tourist trap and snack bar. Frank wished it had been open — he was hungry as hell — but instead made his way to the nearest bus stop without being observed. Soon, he was joined by a handful of other workers, most of whom seemed to know each other. Nobody remarked on his presence, though. Frank hoped it was because Foros was used to tourists, rather than someone making note of him so they could snitch later.
An old diesel bus rumbled up the road toward the bus stop, screeching to a halt with a symphony of squealing and grinding. Frank paid the fare—Look bored and tired, one of his voices whispered in the background — and settled into a seat in the back third of the bus, near a window. He wanted to drift off to sleep, which would’ve been a good look for a tired worker on an early bus, but the need to watch his back kept him somewhat alert.
Any one of these people could be an MGB agent. Develop an attack plan to take out this entire bus if need be, the voice of U.S. General Mark Davis said. All of them.
Frank sat up sharply, causing the man next to him to start. “Sorry,” Frank said in Russian, recovering quickly. “Thought I forgot something.” His fellow passenger scowled, but settled back into his two-day-old copy of Pravda as the bus rolled out of Foros, leaving Frank to his business, just like his voices.
The problem was, those voices had never really been in conversation with him before. They responded to what Frank saw, or a problem he faced, but never engaged with his idle thoughts, like simply reminding himself to stay awake. Outside stimuli had been needed, like an imminent attack or a problem that demanded his full attention. This was new, to some degree, wasn’t it? But then, Frank tried to reason, they did offer up opinions at times, and those opinions would sometimes contradict one another. There certainly were times when it seemed as though the voices had some sort of thought behind them, especially as the years wore on. They argued, even, or at least seemed to.