Scott turned her chin up to him so he could look into her eyes. “Alex, it doesn’t have to be complicated.”
“But it will be and I don’t want that now.”
His kiss ended further protest. Her arms linked around his neck and she arched into him. When she pushed away, she allowed his hands to linger around her waist. Moisture glistened on her lips. “Jake, this is no good. That was nice, but wasn’t supposed to happen.”
Perhaps sensing that her comment lacked conviction, she stepped away from Scott and went to the window to look out.
“Is it David Hoffman?” Scott said.
“Not the way you mean it. I’m not in love with him.”
“But he’s in love with you.”
At first she didn’t answer. She turned from the window and, in a low voice, said, “I love this country and the people. I know this will sound melodramatic, but I believe I’m contributing something important by doing what I do to make Russia and the world safer. When Frank arrived in Moscow, I believed that he would help put an end to the nightmare we were facing on the Kola Peninsula. But then he was killed.
“I’m not a crusader nor a politician and I want to help you find Frank’s killer, but I have other responsibilities too. To the people I work for and my colleagues here at the embassy. We’re not always one big happy family, but it’s a tight-knit group.” She turned from the window to face Scott. “Does that make sense?”
“Sure,” Scott said. “Look, I don’t want to cause problems for you. As you said, you have to live with David after I’m gone from Moscow. But I need your help. You were the last person to hear from Frank
— I know, I know, the message was garbled — but there may be something on it that will jog your memory.”
Scott teetered on the brink between fantasy and reality. His experience in intelligence had taught him never to discard a scrap of information no matter how innocuous it seemed. He’d dug through Drummond’s graveyard of old documents and found a link between Frank and Zakayev. Abakov saw a link between Zakayev and Serov. And there was another link between Radchenko, Drummond, and the K-363—which, to Scott, meant there had to be a link to her skipper, Georgi Litvanov.
He remembered something else. First rule of intelligence work: Don’t jump to conclusions. Second rule of intelligence work: Construct a premise. Third rule…something about logic and reason, but they had gone out the window.
“All right,” Alex was saying, “let’s try jogging my memory.”
“Dive the boat!” rasped over the SC1 announcing system.
Georgi Litvanov, in the CCP — Central Command Post — with stopwatch in hand, closely monitored a series of well-orchestrated moves to get the eight thousand-ton-displacement Akula-class nuclear attack submarine underwater as fast as possible. The singsong of orders came in full cry.
“Full dive on planes fore and aft! Make your depth one hundred meters! Both engines half speed ahead!”
Litvanov thumbed the stopwatch, noted the elapsed time, then glanced at the compass repeater. The K-363 was on a northerly course out of Olenya Bay.
Litvanov’s eyes drifted to Starshi Leitenant Karpenko, the young, wide-eyed officer of the deck, who returned Litvanov’s frosty look with a hopeful gaze.
“The Russian Navy will be looking for us, you idiot!” Litvanov bellowed, his words spitting like bullets from a machine gun aimed at Karpenko. “Do you think that we can fool them into believing that we are just travelers passing in the night? No! When I give the order, I want this boat submerged in thirty seconds — not forty-five, not sixty. Do you understand?”
“Kapitan, I—”
“I, I, I,” Litvanov, mocked him. “Are you deaf as well as dumb?”
Karpenko recoiled under the assault in full ear of the crew at stations in the CCP.
A sudden, shocking silence gripped the boat.
Litvanov, his coarse features twisted into a mask of anger, looked around at his officers and crew. At Zakayev and the girl, both tucked into an unused corner of the red-lit CCP, out of the narrow traffic lanes used by the crew.
“The dive took fifty-two seconds. Why? I’ll tell you why. Because you, Karpenko, ordered both engines half speed ahead instead of full speed ahead.”
Karpenko croaked, “Sir, I can explain—”
“Silence!”
The sound of water dripping into the bilges echoed throughout the CCP.
Litvanov lit a cigarette with a sputtering match. After taking a few drags he said to his starpom, or executive officer, Kapitan-Leitenant Konstintin Veroshilov on duty at the diving station, “You will remove Karpenko from the watch bill until he can figure out how to dive this scow in thirty seconds.”
Veroshilov braced. “Yes, Kapitan.”
Litvanov’s gaze returned to Karpenko. “Dismissed!”
Zakayev went below into the K-363’s innards, which stank of unwashed bodies and unflushed heads.
He entered the wardroom where Litvanov was hunched over a bowl of lentil soup, a plate of herring and groats, and a bottle of vodka.
“May I join you, Kapitan?”
Litvanov, shoveling food into his mouth, washing it down with vodka, ordered the messman out of the wardroom. Zakayev took a seat on the leather upholstered banquette opposite Litvanov.
At length Litvanov, not looking up from his food at Zakayev, said, “I know what you are thinking.”
He sent the vodka bottle careening across the table. Zakayev made a one-handed grab before it reached the edge. He uncorked it and filled a glass but didn’t drink.
“The success of this operation hinges on how well the crew performs their duties,” Litvanov went on.
“We can’t afford to make mistakes. Karpenko made a mistake and he has to pay a price. Being humiliated in front of your subordinates helps focus the mind. Our lives and the success of the mission depend on every man doing his job perfectly.”
Zakayev knew that Litvanov was proud and dedicated and had a bedrock belief that adversity tempered a man’s character. Even so, he said, “Your men are volunteers, not conscripts.”
“What of it?”
“They seem on edge. Perhaps you drive them too hard.”
Litvanov pushed his plate and cutlery aside. He lit a cigarette. “On the contrary, my regimen will work wonders. Like you, General, I put a high premium on dedication and sacrifice. You won’t be disappointed. The mission will be successful. I guarantee it.”
Zakayev believed him. He had been introduced to the K-363’s skeleton crew but didn’t introduce the girl, in whom the men had shown only mild curiosity when she came aboard. “Because she’s one of us, the old sailors’ myth that a woman aboard a ship brings bad luck means nothing to them,” Litvanov had quipped.
The K-363’s sailors, some barely out of their teens and with sparse beards, cropped hair, and eager looks, reminded Zakayev of the young men he’d commanded in Chechnya. Too embittered to believe their cause could fail, the sailors had reaffirmed their desire to sacrifice themselves to avenge their families and to destroy the hated Russians. They all drank a toast, after which they saluted Zakayev, nodded politely to the girl, and returned to their duties.
Earlier, Zakayev and the girl had boarded the K-363 where she lay in a deep fjord at the Russian Northern Fleet Submarine Base Olenya Bay, moored to a rotting pier. The fjord, surrounded by low hills covered with scrub and birch, opened onto a dredged channel that emptied into the Barents Sea. At the head of the fjord, not far from the K-363’s berth and lined up like sardines in a tin, twenty rusting obsolete nuclear submarines waited their turn in the breakers’ yard. Zakayev, standing in the dark on the K-363’s rounded, snow-covered hull and looking toward the far shore, could barely identify the bow of an old flooded diesel submarine jutting above the fjord’s oil-coated water at a forty-five-degree angle, not even a buoy to mark its grave.