“Holy shit,” he yelled. “Get down!”
From where he crouched within the shelter of the birch grove at the top of the rise, Rodriguez swore softly under his breath. He’d set up the Vychlop with a clear line of fire. But every time he got the CIA agent lined up in his sights, the girl would move in the way, or the Russian.
He finally had a clear shot and was just squeezing the trigger when all hell broke loose in the cove below. The asshole from Langley hit the deck, and the solid bronze pointed-nose high-penetration bullet that should have blown him to smithereens smacked into the water with a splash that was lost in a shattering roar. The old U-boat heaved out of the water and turned into a fireball. Smoke roiled over the harbor, obscuring visibility.
“Fuck!” said Rodriguez, pushing to his feet. “Now? The fucking sub blows now?”
Moving quickly, he disassembled the Vychlop’s silencer and shoved it in its case. “This place is going to be crawling with militia in minutes,” he said, throwing the rifle in the backseat. “Let’s get out of here.”
22
Tobie let out a startled yelp as Jax slammed into her, knocking her off her feet. She rolled onto her stomach, her arms wrapping around her head as a second explosion ripped from one end of the U-boat’s frame to the other, obliterating it in a huge fireball. She felt a wave of searing heat wash over her. Even from this distance, the percussion was deafening.
“Jesus Christ,” said Jax, stretched out flat beside her. “You all right?”
“I think so.” Fighting to catch her breath, she turned her head to meet his gaze. “What happened?”
“One of the old torpedoes must have blown and set off the rest.”
She ducked her head again as flaming debris began to rain down around them, hissing as it hit the water.
A jagged piece of charred wood landed on Andrei’s back. He thrust it away and scrambled up to take off running back along the docks, only pausing long enough to turn and point a warning finger at Jax. “You stay here.”
Tobie sat back on her heels. She was trembling, her breath coming in fast, wheezing gasps. She knew she was hyperventilating and fought to bring her breathing under control. But it wasn’t easy.
Both the barge and the sub had simply disappeared, leaving an oily sheen on the churning, debris-filled water. Most of that section of the wharf was gone, too, the tugboat flipped on its side and almost completely submerged. Flames engulfed the shattered warehouses, filling the air with black smoke. The twisted remnants of the flatbed truck stood out stark against the flames, the two men inside black, unrecognizable silhouettes.
“My God,” she whispered.
Pushing to his feet, Jax brushed off the front of his jacket, then bent to pick up the file Andrei had dropped.
“What’s in it?” she asked as he flipped through the pages.
“The militia report.” He raised his gaze to the Yalena. The salvage ship was still pitching in the aftermath of the explosion, but she hadn’t been thrown over. “Come on,” he said. “We need to move fast.”
Tobie rose shakily to her feet. “I thought Andrei told us to stay here.”
“Since when do you ever do what you’re told?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she demanded, sprinting down the dock after him.
“I saw the reports filed by your shrink in Wiesbaden. The one that says, ‘Has trouble with authority.’”
She leaped from the dock to the still-pitching deck of the Yalena. “The shrink in Wiesbaden was a stupid ass.”
Jax let his gaze travel around the salvage ship’s dilapidated deck. “I still don’t understand why this wasn’t part of your vision.”
“I don’t have visions. It was a remote viewing session.” Reaching out, she let her hand trail along a tattered tarp that covered the nearest lifeboat davits, and felt an odd terror seize her chest.
“What is it?” he said, watching her.
She shook her head and turned away. “Nothing. What exactly are we looking for?”
“Anything that can lead us to the bad guys. Although at this point, I’d settle for some indication as to what was really on that U-boat.”
“Are you so sure it wasn’t gold?”
“Sure? Hell no. I’m not sure of anything. But in my experience, governments tend to store gold behind things like reinforced iron plates. Not in wooden storage lockers stenciled with words like ‘Attention’ and ‘Danger.’”
A fine cold mist blew off the sea, smelling of brine and pungent smoke and bringing them the distant sound of shouting and the wail of sirens. The morning rain had washed away much of the blood from the deck. But an ugly pattern of splatters and smears were still visible on the bullet-pocked bulkhead and rigging. She said, “You think the people who hired Baklanov are the same people who did this?”
Jax went to hunker down beside the stained, splintered bulkhead. “Maybe. Maybe not.”
Opening the file, he flipped through the militia photographs of the Yalena’s dead crew. Tobie cast one glance at the eight-by-ten shots of blood-soaked, bullet-torn bodies, and turned away to stare out over the smoke-swirled waters of the cove.
He pushed to his feet. “Come on. I want to check the captain’s quarters.”
The captain’s cabin lay at the top of the ship, just beyond the blood-splattered bridge with its bullet-shattered gauges and splintered woodwork. At the hatch leading to the small cabin beyond it, Jax paused and let out a low whistle.
Tobie drew up beside him. The bunk’s mattress had been pulled askew, the drawers yanked from the desk and dumped, clothes strewn across the floor. “Did the militia do this?”
“Some of it, maybe.” He reached over to pick up a wastebasket filled with ashes. “But not this. Looks like whoever killed Baklanov and his crew burned every piece of paper they could get their hands on.”
“But…why?”
“Because if you’ve just committed mass murder, you don’t want to take the time to sort through everything just to find what you’re looking for.”
“Which was…what?”
“Presumably, anything that might lead back to our terrorists.” He handed her Andrei’s file. “Here. Your Russian is a hell of a lot better than mine. Take a look.”
Perching on the edge of the bunk frame, she flipped through page after page of forms, all filled out in a tiny, nearly illegible Cyrillic scrawl. “Jeez. You’d think they’d have typed up the report before sending it to Moscow.”
“This is Kaliningrad, remember? They still store their potatoes in earthen burrows and haul hay to market in horse-drawn carts.”
“Listen to this,” she said, pointing to a cramped paragraph on the next page. “According to the shipyard manager, this isn’t the first German U-boat the Yalena salvaged.”
Jax crouched down to look at a smashed strongbox. “I wonder if the shipyard was planning to buy it.”
“The U-boat?” She glanced up from the report. “But…why?”
“For the steel. Our terrorists might have hired Balkanov to raise the sub for its cargo; as a salvage operator, Baklanov would know that U-boats are valuable in and of themselves, for their pre-1945 steel.”
She ran through the rest of the report, then shook her head. “I get the impression this Captain Baklanov was just planning to unload and store the sub here for a while.”
“Until when?”
“It doesn’t say.”
Andrei’s gruff shout drifted up from below. “Alexander! Get the hell off that ship.”
Jax threw a quick glance through the porthole. “Does the report list the address of this Captain Baklanov?”
Tobie flipped back through the pages.
Andrei shouted again. “Alexander. I told you to stay put!”
“Here it is. The salvage company’s offices are in some place called Zelenogradsk. But Baklanov himself lived in Rybachy. Looks like he had a wife. Anna.”
“That’s good. She might-”
“Alexander!”
“Come on,” said Jax, pulling her to her feet.
“So how are we going to get rid of your buddy Andrei so we can talk to this widow?”
“First of all,” said Jax, heading for the companionway, “Andrei is not my buddy. Secondly, you don’t get rid of an SVR officer. Thirdly, Andrei just lost I don’t know how many militiamen and a stolen Nazi U-boat that Moscow hadn’t gotten around to telling Berlin about, which means he’s going to want to get rid of us.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“It’s not.”