Stefan turned toward the stairs, stumbling in his exhaustion and fear. No, he would avoid the militia, he decided; avoid the villages, avoid anyone who might betray him to the men who’d murdered Uncle Jasha and the others.
If he kept away from the main roads and villages, it ought to take him four, maybe five days to reach home. Until he’d started working with Uncle Jasha, Stefan had lived with his mother on the outskirts of a small hamlet near Yasnaya Polyana.
He’d grown up there, in a house much like this one, an old German farmhouse with a sweet-smelling hay barn and a pond and a flock of snowy white geese that honked imperiously for their dinner. At the thought, a wave of homesickness swept over him, so intense it brought tears to his eyes. He brushed them away, ashamed of himself.
At Yasnaya Polyana, he’d be safe. He told himself that once he reached home, everything would be all right.
At a small private airstrip near Primorsk, the man Stefan Baklanov knew only as the Major glanced at his watch. The Gulfstream was nearly loaded. In another moment the jet would be on its way and the most important segment of their assignment would be completed. All that remained, now, was to clean up a few loose ends.
Headlights stabbed the darkness and the Major turned. A black Durango braked at the edge of the field. A Chechen named Borz Zakaev climbed out of the car. He was a solidly built man of medium height with the red hair and scattering of freckles one sometimes saw in Chechnya. They were old comrades, Borz and the Major. Years before, they’d fought together in Afghanistan, when the Major had worn the dish-dash and long beard of a mujahideen.
“Did you find the boy’s body?” asked the Major in his stilted Russian.
Borz blew out his breath in frustration and answered him in English. “No. We crisscrossed back and forth across the cove for hours. We searched the shoreline. We even searched the beaches to the west, in case the current carried him around the point. Nothing. The only thing I can figure is that the tide must have taken him out to sea.”
“Or he made it to shore.”
Borz shook his head. “That water can’t be more than fifty degrees. He didn’t make it to shore.”
“Did you check the fishing village just up the road?”
Borz nodded. “Nobody’s seen him. I tell you, he’s dead.”
“And if he’s not? I’m not taking any chances.” The Major reached into his pocket and drew out the identification papers he’d taken from the Yalena’s strongbox. “His name is Stefan Baklanov.”
“Baklanov?”
“That’s right. He’s Captain Baklanov’s nephew. According to the ship’s records, his mother lives in the southeast, near Yasnaya Polyana.” He flipped open the papers to the boy’s picture. In the photograph, Stefan Baklanov was just a skinny kid with big eyes and a shock of dark hair. He didn’t look hard to deal with. “Make copies of this. I want you and your men to cover every road out of the area. Offer a reward. Without his papers, he won’t get far.”
Borz glanced over at the Gulfstream, its cargo now safely stowed aboard. “Does the General know about the kid?”
“Yes.”
Borz swore under his breath.
The Major slapped the side of the jet and stepped back, “I want this kid eliminated and I don’t care what it takes. Either find him dead or make him dead. This operation goes down in a week. If you haven’t found him in forty-eight hours, go to Yasnaya Polyana and take his mother hostage.”
“Yasnaya Polyana? You think he’ll go home?”
“If he’s alive, he’ll go home. Where else can he go?”
6
Algiers Naval Support Activity, New Orleans: Saturday
24 October 6:00 P.M. local time
Tobie found the Colonel at his desk, his head bent over his keyboard. “You wanted to see me, sir?”
He looked up, his eyes crinkling into a smile. A big man, still solid and upright despite his sixty-odd years, he’d spent most of his Army career as a psychologist working in intelligence. He was officially retired now, although he still saw a few VA patients on a volunteer basis, in addition to working with Tobie on the remote viewing project.
“Have a seat, Tobie. I just got clearance to tell you about the target for today’s viewing.”
She slipped into the straight-backed wooden chair on the far side of his desk. Feedback sessions were an important part of a remote viewer’s training. Only, this hadn’t been a training session; it had been a real tasking. She leaned forward, conscious of the same welling of dread she’d always experienced when a teacher started handing back tests. “And?”
“The target was an old World War II U-boat that sank off the coast of Denmark near the end of the war. U-114.”
She drew a quick breath, then another, remembering the claustrophobic fear, the desiccated skulls of long dead men. “Oh, God,” she whispered. “That explains it.”
Then she frowned, recalling the images that followed, the endless stretches of deserted docks and empty warehouses, the barren, windswept trees. The first part of the viewing, obviously, had been right on target. After that, she must have veered seriously off target.
“I’m sorry, Colonel,” she said, sinking back in her chair. “I don’t know what went wrong after those first impressions.”
“What? Oh.” McClintock shook his head. “Nothing went wrong, Tobie. Someone salvaged the U-boat. From what you saw, we think it might have been taken to a shipyard in Russia.”
She studied the Colonel’s tanned, inscrutable face. “Why exactly is the U.S. Navy interested in an old German U-boat? Can you tell me that?”
He nodded. “It’s part of why the base has been on high alert for the past forty-eight hours.”
She listened, her heart racing, while McClintock gave her a quick briefing on the missing U-boat, the shipment of Nazi gold, and its connection to the NSA warnings of an impending terrorist attack on the United States. “I can’t believe the CIA is really going to use what I saw,” she said when he had finished.
He cleared his throat. “There’s been some resistance, of course. But Vice President Beckham is backing us up. The DCI agreed to send one of his men to Kaliningrad.”
She frowned. “Exactly who are they sending?”
“They didn’t say.”
Pushing up, she began to pace the room. “You know what’ll happen, don’t you? This CIA guy will take a quick look around, say it was all a waste of time, and go home.”
“At this point, it’s out of our hands, Tobie. We’ve done our part.”
She swung to face him. “You know how you always had that theory, that one of the reasons remote viewers were never very successful at finding things as opposed to simply describing them is because in the past the viewers were never let out into the field?”
“Y-yes,” he said slowly. “But I don’t think I like where you’re going with this, Tobie.”
She flattened her palms on the surface of the desk and leaned into them. “Colonel, in the past, the military always kept their remote viewers at Fort Meade, and sent other people out into the field. The field guys had to try to interpret what the viewers had seen and it just didn’t work. But what if-”
“No, Tobie.”
She leaned forward. “Please, Colonel.”
“Tobie, I’m not sending you undercover on a CIA mission to Russia.”
“Colonel-”
“You have no experience with this kind of fieldwork.”
“So? I won’t be alone, right? I’ll be working with this guy from the CIA.”
The Colonel sat very still.
She said, “I even speak Russian. Fluently.” It was one of the advantages of growing up with a father in the military and a stepfather in the oil industry-she’d lived everywhere from Dubai to Kuala Lumpur, and developed a knack for learning and remembering languages.