Countdown (28 page)

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Authors: David Hagberg

BOOK: Countdown
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McGarvey thought about it for a moment, weighing the pros and cons, the risks versus the benefits. He nodded. “When do I leave?”
“You have a noon flight to West Berlin. You'll take a cab across.”
MAKAYEV WAS DRIVING the
Indianapolis
hard to the southwest toward the Strait of Sicily and the Malta Channel which would put them in the eastern Mediterranean.
At speeds near forty knots the submarine was noisy. But as Makayev explained, their first obligation was to get as far away from the hijack site as possible in the shortest of time.
“Sixth Fleet Headquarters obviously knows something is wrong. We've seen that from the messages they sent. They will already have instituted the first elements of their search.”
“But they will not find anything,” Kurshin replied.
“On the contrary, Comrade Colonel, they will of course find the
Zenzero
and the auxiliary boat that we used.”
“That ship is probably at the bottom of the sea by now.”
“No matter, they will find it. But all of that will take time. They cannot believe that their submarine and crew of more than a hundred twenty men has been hijacked.”
Dr. Velikanov had been pressed into service as cook. He had brewed some tea and made sandwiches, and was bringing them forward. He stopped short and nearly dropped the tray he was carrying at the mention of the crew. His reaction was not lost on any of them in the control room.
“There was no other way, Doctor,” Makayev said gently from where he stood with Fedorenko at the chart table.
“They were kids, most of them.”
“I know, but that is past.”
“When you live close to the grave, you can't weep for everyone,” Velikanov said, quoting an old peasant proverb. “Is that what you are saying to me, Nikolai Gerasimovich?”
“Where are they, what have you done with them?”
“They are mostly in their bunks,” Kurshin said from where he still sat at the helm.
Velikanov put the tray down. “We will come very near to Sicily. Let's surface and take rubber rafts ashore. We can go home, leave this boat for the Americans to find.”
“That's not possible.”
“You are the skipper of this vessel, Niki. Please. They were just boys. This could start the nuclear holocaust …”
“I am not the party chairman to give this order, Doctor.”
“No,” Velikanov said sharply, his voice rising. “Nor did the party chairman give such an order. It was the KGB. You know this!”
“Yes it was,” Kurshin said. This was the trouble he had been expecting. He'd hoped it wouldn't come so soon.
“It's Baranov. He's insane. He'll kill us all!”
“Relieve me at this wheel,” Kurshin snapped.
Makayev hesitated a moment, his gaze switching from Velikanov to Kurshin.
“Now,” Kurshin hissed.
Makayev nodded for Fedorenko to take over. He took the starboard wheel. “I have the helm,” he said softly.
Kurshin got up. “How much longer before we're in position?”
“Twenty-five hours, perhaps a little longer,” Makayev replied.
Velikanov was shaking with rage and fear. Spittle ran down the side of his chin.
“You will confine yourself to the galley for the duration, Doctor,” Kurshin told him. “When we return home, no mention will be made of your outburst. You have my promise.”
“Fuck your mother,” Velikanov shrieked, and he leapt forward to the trim tank controls, which would change the submarine's buoyancy and bring her to the surface.
Kurshin pulled out his pistol and fired a single shot, the noise impossibly loud in the confines of the boat, striking Velikanov in the face just below the left eye. His head snapped back, and he was thrown violently to the deck, instantly dead.
Makayev had instinctively stepped back, his right hand going to the pistol in his tunic. Kurshin switched his aim to the captain.
“We're going to calm down now,” he said in a reasonable voice.
Lieutenant Raina, their sonarman, had rushed to the control center hatch, his pistol in hand, a grim look on his face as he surveyed the scene.
“Put your gun down, Lieutenant, and get back to your post,” Kurshin said.
The young man was wracked with indecision.
“The doctor was out of control,” Kurshin explained. “I don't want to kill your captain.”
“Then you would never get to the surface, Comrade Colonel,” Raina replied.
“Better to die here like this, then,” Kurshin said softly. “We have our orders, which I intend carrying out so long as I am alive.”
Makayev had withdrawn his hand from his tunic. “Put your gun down, Aleksandr Ivanovich. The colonel is correct. The doctor could have killed us all. There was no other way.”
Raina stepped back a pace and lowered his pistol.
Kurshin lowered his automatic and holstered it. “Have you detected anything on the surface?” he asked.
“A few ships, mostly small freighters,” Raina replied.
“Any other submarines?”
“No.”
“Good,” Kurshin said. He turned to Makayev. “I would like to talk to you and your missile man in the wardroom.”
Makayev nodded. “Take care of the doctor for me, would you, Aleksandr.”
“Yes, sir.”
The captain hit the comms switch. “Aleksei, are you ready up there?”
“Just about, Captain,” Lieutenant Chobotov said. “I've isolated the Tomahawk's firing circuits. I managed to get one of them on the transfer rack, but I'm going to need help getting her loaded into one of the tubes.”
“Good,” Makayev said. “Come back to the officers' wardroom and we will discuss it.”
“Aye, Skipper.”
The four-engine turboprop-powered ASW (AntiSubmarine Warfare) aircraft came in low, at under fifteen hundred feet, over the
Indianapolis
's last-known position. They had finally been given the go-ahead by Sixth Fleet Headquarters to come off her position-keeping station. Something was definitely wrong, and all the brass were definitely uptight.
Lieutenant Lawrence Weaver had throttled well back so they were doing significantly less than two hundred knots, giving the ship's sophisticated electronic sensing equipment plenty of time to do its job.
In addition to the ASQ-114 computer which instantly analyzed data from the aircraft's radar systems, she also carried infrared sensors and magnetic anomaly detectors that were able to detect a mass of ferrous metal well beneath the surface of the sea—providing conditions were right.
Weaver banked slightly to port as they passed over the spot. Below he could see the Liberian-registered freighter standing by what appeared to be the burned-out remains of a fairly good-sized cabin cruiser. But there was no other boat visible. No submarine. No debris, so far as Weaver had been able to see.
He straightened the aircraft out and banked to starboard making a wide looping turn over the area, the sun well up in the eastern sky.
“What are you showing down there, Al?” he radioed to his ASW man in the rear.
“We've got the freighter and another smaller vessel, maybe a pleasure craft. We're also painting a much smaller boat, perhaps eighteen or twenty feet. Maybe an auxiliary. No machinery noises except from the
Lorrel-E
.”
“How about our Mags?”
“Not a thing, Lieutenant. Looks clean below the surface.”
Weaver glanced at his copilot, Lieutenant Peter Reiland. “All right, we're coming around for another pass. Look sharp on the Mags now. He's gotta be down there somewhere.”
“Roger,” Technical Sergeant Albert McLaren replied.
About a mile and a half out they were lined up again on the
Lorrel-E
and the
Zenzero
. Weaver throttled back a bit more and dropped them another five hundred feet, the big aircraft beginning to mush slightly. But Weaver was a good pilot, he knew what he was doing.
He took a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and clamped it between his teeth without lighting it. He had quit two years ago. Submarines simply didn't disappear off the face of the earth. It was either lying on the bottom, and for one reason or another their equipment wasn't detecting it, or it had bugged out.
Either was unlikely. Why would J. D. Webb do such a thing? There was no reason for it, no reason at all.
They came over the
Lorrel-E
and this time he banked hard to the starboard for another run.
“Not a thing, Lieutenant,” McLaren said. “If she's down there, we're not painting her.”
“That's a roger. We're coming around again, are we ready with our Mark 84?”
“She's loaded and ready for the drop on your mark.”
“We're coming around on it. Stand by.”
The Mark 84 was a Sippican SUS communications buoy. Barely fifteen inches long and only three inches in diameter, it was programmed with a simple message—in this case, ESTABLISH COMMUNICATIONS—and was tossed into the water from a ship or aircraft. As soon as it hit water it would begin transmitting the same message over and over again on pulsed 2.95 kHz and 3.5 kHz tones that a submarine was capable of detecting beneath the surface if she wasn't too far distant.
They came up on the
Lorrel-E
again. “Stand by,” Weaver radioed, steadying out the P-3C. “On my mark … mark!”
“She's off,” McLaren said.
Weaver increased the throttles and the aircraft began to climb as he swung wide to port again. “Stan, contact Gaeta, tell them we've had negative contact on our sensors and have sent down the buoy.”
“Aye, aye, Lieutenant,” Staff Sergeant Stan Raymond, their radio operator, said.
“And listen up, you guys, she still may be down there.”
Captain Stefano Parus smiled as he put down the radiotelephone, his brief conversation with the owners in Athens finished. “She is ours,” he told his first officer, Rupert Brecht.
“I think there is someone else very much interested in that little toy,” Brecht said.
Parus had heard the Orion passing overhead, of course. “Who are they?”
“U.S. Navy.”
“Well, it's too fucking bad. We were here first, and we're claiming our salvage rights.”
“It's not much …”
“Enough,” Parus said, rubbing his hands together. “She's a floating whorehouse. Who knows what we'll find aboard. Diamonds don't melt, and who cares if gold does. We'll scrape it off the deck.”
“Shit.”
“Take her under tow, Mr. Brecht,” Parus ordered. “If she's still too hot, put some water over her, we'll cool her down.”
“We may need to put some pumps aboard.”
“Then do it, and look sharp about it. If those bastards are interested enough to send out a search plane, they'll probably be sending out a surface ship. Won't be able to do much about it if we've got the little bitch in tow.”
CINCMED Admiral Ronald DeLugio—his uniform blouse off, his shirtsleeves rolled up above his thick forearms, and his tie loose—paced the balcony above and behind the communications consoles. He was fuming, and when admirals were mad, especially this one, everyone around was on tenterhooks.
The P-3C on station had come up with nothing. So far there had been no reply from the communications buoy, nor had they detected any large mass of metal beneath the surface.
The
Lorrel-E
had contacted the Italian coast guard, claiming their right of salvage over the
Zenzero,
which they were granted, providing there were no survivors aboard. The
Lorrel-E
claimed there were none.
Admiral DeLugio stopped and turned back to Captain Reid. “I want you to get a message to the skipper of the
Lorrel-E.
Tell him that he is to remain on station with that cruiser until we can get out there to take a look at it. If he refuses, tell him that we will blow his vessel out of the water.”
“Aye, aye, Admiral,” Reid said. “Sir, what if he refuses?”
“Ken, if that sonofabitch moves so much as ten feet, I want his vessel sunk. And that's a direct order.”
Reid raised his eyes. “There would be hell to pay …”
“Don't I know it. What's the ETA for the
Pigeon
on station?”
“Not for another hour yet, sir,” Reid said. “Are you sure about that order, sir?”
“Kenny, we're talking about an attack submarine, nuclear armed, with a crew of one hundred twenty-seven men and
officers. You're damned right I'm sure. J.D. surfaced in response to an SOS from that cruiser, and now he's disappeared. We're going to find out what happened. No one or nothing is going to stand in our way. Clear?”
“Yes, sir,” Reid snapped.

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