Countdown (37 page)
Authors: David Hagberg
“Yes,” Trotter broke in. “The target is their nuclear research facility at En Gedi. A lot of civilians could be killed.”
No one else in the room except for Trotter and McGarvey knew the real nature of En Gedi, and Potok glanced at him gratefully.
“Have your SEALS standing by just over the horizon, Admiral,” McGarvey said. “This fight belongs to me and Potok.”
“No,” DeLugio said.
Potok looked at him. “Either I have your word, Admiral, or my Air Force will make a first strike before you could move. We can be on top of that ship within eight minutes.”
DeLugio was shaking his head. “This KGB officer of yours is not alone. He's at least got his crew from the submarine, and most likely a small crew that brought the
Stephos
out for the pickup.”
Stephos
out for the pickup.”
“Probably not,” McGarvey said.
“What are you talking about?” DeLugio demanded.
“It's Kurshin. He has the habit of killing his own people once they have served their purpose.”
“Jesus.”
“How long will it take you to get us out there, Admiral?” McGarvey asked.
“I'll get us there,” Potok said. “We have three missile boats shadowing the
Stephos
. They're just over the horizon. We'll fly to Limassol, and from there by chopper out to our boats.”
Stephos
. They're just over the horizon. We'll fly to Limassol, and from there by chopper out to our boats.”
“It's our missile, goddamnit,” DeLugio argued. “Neither of you knows anything about it. If it's armed, will you be able to disarm it?”
“He's right,” McGarvey said after a beat.
“Me,” Lieutenant Newman said. “That's why they sent me.”
“All right,” McGarvey agreed.
“And me,” Ainslie said, stepping forward.
McGarvey's eyes narrowed.
“My job is naval intelligence, and I did get us this far. Let me do my job.”
“What's the real reason?”
Ainslie's lip curled. “I'm an ambitious officer, McGarvey. I want to be there when you find out that you're wrong.”
“Can you shoot?”
“I'm an expert.”
McGarvey glanced at Potok, who shrugged. “You're on,” he said. “Just don't get in my way.”
“I'm calling in the SEALS,” DeLugio said. “They'll be on standby status.”
“But well off, Admiral,” McGarvey cautioned. “If that missile explodes, it's not going to be very healthy around there. What about one of our submarines?”
“Twelve hours at least,” DeLugio said.
“Then you'd better wish us luck.”
“ARE YOU JUST ABOUT FINISHED?” Kurshin asked the two KGB officers in the dimly lit forward machinery space.
Rimyans, one of the divers, looked up, his dark eyes piglike in his broad face. “We have the engine room to go. It'll be another half hour, perhaps longer.”
The other officer, Viktor Georgevich Budanov, reached up out of the bilge hatch for a screwdriver. He looked at Kurshin. “What's the matter, Comrade Colonel, are you getting nervous?”
“No,” Kurshin replied, controlling his temper. It was just 9:00
P.M. Only a couple of more hours and these bastards would be dead.
P.M. Only a couple of more hours and these bastards would be dead.
“Well, fuck your mother, but I'm nervous. We've got enough plastique here to sink an aircraft carrier, and sometimes I get a little twitchy, if you know what I mean.” Budanov laughed.
The
Stephos
's engines suddenly changed pitch, and the boat shuddered as she slowed down. Kurshin glanced over his shoulder toward the ladder up. They were probably just about on station. Soon now, he told himself.
Stephos
's engines suddenly changed pitch, and the boat shuddered as she slowed down. Kurshin glanced over his shoulder toward the ladder up. They were probably just about on station. Soon now, he told himself.
“Get on with it then,” he said, turning back to the other two. “We're abandoning this ship around eleven o'clock. I want everyone in my cabin a few minutes ahead of time.”
“Why?” Rimyans barked.
Again he controlled his temper. They had followed their orders and had killed Captain Makayev and his crew, but ever since that incident their attitudes toward him had changed dramatically. Only Grechko had remained civil. They no longer trusted him. And with good reason.
“Moscow is not so far from here, Comrade Lieutenant. I would suggest you keep that in mind.”
Rimyans flinched, but he didn't back down much. “You have our fullest cooperation, Comrade Colonel.”
“I want nothing more from you,” Kurshin snapped, and he turned on his heel and left.
The ship was starting to roll slightly as she slowed to a complete stop. On deck he took the ladder up to the bridge. One of the other divers, Nikolai Pavlovich Sokolov, was the only one there. He was a thick bear of a man, with shoulders that bulged out of his jumpsuit.
“Why have we stopped?” Kurshin asked.
“We're just about on station,” Sokolov said languidly. He wore a Makarov automatic pistol at his hip, and his AK74 was propped up against the helmsman's seat. “There is a countercurrent here that will drift us into position within the next hour or so.”
“Who told you to do this?”
“Captain Grechko, naturally.”
Kurshin stared coldly at him for several long seconds. “Where is he?”
Sokolov shrugged. “Below somewhere with Anatoli. Having something to eat, I think.”
Kurshin glanced out the forward windows. In the distance to the east he thought he might be seeing the dim glow of the city of Jeble. But unlike European cities, most Arab communities were relatively dark.
“Stay here,” he told the KGB officer. “When we're on station let me know.”
“Those are my orders,” Sokolov said.
“Yes,” Kurshin said, forcing a smile to his lips. “See to it that you keep a sharp watch.” He left the bridge and, below, went back to the galley. No one was there, nor was the main saloon occupied.
Something was going on. He could suddenly feel it thick in the air. Pulling his Graz Buyra from its holster, he screwed the silencer tube onto the end of the barrel again and switched the safety off as he moved silently forward on the balls of his feet to his cabin door.
A light shone from beneath the door, and he thought he could hear someone murmuring something inside. The voices were too low and indistinct however for him to make any sense of what was being said. But the fact that they were in his cabin was indictment enough.
Holding his gun out of sight behind him, he opened the door and stepped inside. Grechko and Akensov were intently studying the chart on the low coffee table. They both looked up, guiltily, Grechko's eyes flicking for just an instant to the life jacket locker above the door.
So they had discovered the Labun canister, and they knew what he was planning, Kurshin thought. It was just as well.
“We were just going over the chart,” Grechko said.
“It's not far now,” Kurshin said, smiling. He closed the door.
“How are Leonid and Viktor doing with the explosive charges?”
“They'll be another half hour.”
“Good, I'll be glad to get off this toy boat ⦔ Grechko stopped in mid-sentence, something he'd seen in Kurshin's eyes reflected in his own.
“You know, don't you?” Kurshin said. “It's too bad.”
Grechko suddenly reached for his pistol, but he was too slow. Kurshin brought his big weapon around and fired one shot, catching Grechko in the face, driving him backward against the couch. Akensov started to roll left, but Kurshin calmly switched aim and fired a second shot, this one catching the KGB officer in the side of his head just below his left ear, shattering his jaw and exploding inside his brain. He was dead before he hit the floor.
Neither of them had cried out, nor would the sounds of his two shots have carried very far outside the cabin. He didn't think there was much danger that the others knew what had happened here. Not yet.
For several long seconds he stood stock still as he weighed his new options. Again he was getting a bad feeling that somehow McGarvey was watching him, somehow, as impossible as it seemed, McGarvey was somewhere very near. The man was coming.
He looked at his watch. Barely five minutes had passed since Rimyans had told him they would be another half hour getting the explosive charges in place. They would be occupied for at least twenty-five minutes. No reason for them to come topside.
He went out of his cabin and hurried back up on deck. The ship was dark. They had been running without lights for the past two hours. Holding the big gun in his right hand, he climbed awkwardly up the outside ladder to the bridge deck.
Sokolov was studying the readouts on the satellite navigation unit above the helm. He turned around when Kurshin came in. The instant he saw the gun he realized what was about to happen and he dove for the Kalashnikov rifle. Like the others, he was too late.
Kurshin fired one shot, this one catching the KGB officer in the forehead just above the bridge of his nose. The back of his head exploded in a mass of blood and bone, and he was flung against the bulkhead.
Now there were only two of them left. For the moment they were useful. But only for the moment.
Holstering his gun, he went into the radio room where it took
him a full minute rummaging around in the drawers and cabinet to come up with a flashlight and a small screwdriver.
him a full minute rummaging around in the drawers and cabinet to come up with a flashlight and a small screwdriver.
Outside, he hurried down to the main deck, listened for a second to make certain that Rimyans and Budanov were not coming up, and then went around the port side to the foredeck, where he ducked beneath the false crates.
He had to hold the flashlight in the crook of his neck while he removed the screws from the missile's forward access panel. When he had it off he reached inside and very carefully eased the timer away from its circuit board, and shined the light on it. The liquid crystal display showed 168 minutes, 8 seconds before firing: just midnight. Using the screwdriver to turn the reset button, he cycled the mechanism to 48 minutes exactly. The missile was now set to fire at ten o'clock.
Replacing the timer with its circuit board, he quickly slid the access panel back in place and tightened the screws. When he was finished, he tossed the screwdriver aside, switched off the flashlight, and ducked back out onto the foredeck.
Still nothing moved. The ship, for all intents and purposes, was dead in the water.
Working carefully and methodically, acutely conscious now of the ticking clock, he began removing the straps that held the false crates in place. As each of the lightweight wooden boxes came free, exposing a section of the missile and its launching ramp, he tossed it overboard.
The work was not difficult, though the crates were bulky and the ship was rolling a little more than before. Even so, by the time he was finished he was sweating heavily.
Again he stopped to check his watch. It was coming up on 9:30. Rimyans and Budanov would be just about finished by now.
He yanked his pistol out of its holster, checked the safety, entered the midship's hatch, crossed the main saloon, and at the ladder into the hold and engine spaces paused for just a moment. He thought he could hear them talking below. Careful to make absolutely no sounds, he went down the ladder, and at the bottom crept aft to the engine room door, which was open.
Rimyans, his back to the door, was saying something to Budanov, who was just crawling out from behind one of the big turbocharged diesel engines.
“Yes, Comrade Colonel, we are finally done,” Budanov said, spotting him.
“Thank you,” Kurshin said with a polite smile, and he shot Rimyans in the back of the head, driving him up against the desalinator panel.
Budanov cried out as he desperately tried to reach his own pistol, but Kurshin fired a second shot, this one taking the man's jaw off, and he crumpled in a heap and lay still in a pool of his own blood and shattered teeth.
Now he was finally alone. Exactly the way he had wanted it.
Back up on the foredeck he hurriedly removed the three straps holding the missile onto the launch ramp, and then the waterproof plugs covering the turbojet's air intake and exhaust.
Standing back, he flipped the switch on the portable electrical panel that Grechko's people had set up, and the Tomahawk's launch ramp began to rise up from the deck.
They made good time through the light chop, the heavily silenced one-hundred-horsepower Johnson outboard pushing the big rubber raft at thirty knots.
It seemed to McGarvey that it had taken them days to get to this point, yet it had been only hours. They had been flown aboard an Israeli Air Force C-130 to the British base outside Limassol on the south-central coast of Cyprus, where they had transferred to a Sikorsky SH-3D Sea King helicopter for the 150-mile run up the coast and then across the open water toward the Syrian coast.
They had transferred by sling down to the deck of one of the Israeli gunboats standing by; the transfer had taken nearly a half hour. Potok and McGarvey had gone first. By the time Ainslie and Newman were down, the gunboat skipper had finished his hasty briefing.
The
Stephos
was about twenty miles out, and drifting slowly east on the current. She was showing no electronic emissions, and the latest U-2 overflight had detected no lights. In fact, the U-2 would have missed her completely except for the infrared radiation coming from her diesel exhausts.
Stephos
was about twenty miles out, and drifting slowly east on the current. She was showing no electronic emissions, and the latest U-2 overflight had detected no lights. In fact, the U-2 would have missed her completely except for the infrared radiation coming from her diesel exhausts.
The Israelis supplied them with suppressed nine-millimeter automatics, stun grenades, night vision goggles and helmets, as well as tactical communications radios. In addition they carried a single 50mm sniper rifle and night-spotting scope with one hundred rounds of ammunition.
“There could be twenty men aboard,” the gunboat commander had told them. “And you can damn well bet they're highly trained and motivated. They'd have to be to come this far.”
“I don't want your people making a move until we say so, or until you've lost all communications with us, is that understood?” McGarvey had said.
The skipper had glanced at Potok, who nodded. “You've got it.”
In the rubber raft, their radios clicked once. “Copy?”
“Affirmative,” Potok spoke softly into his radio. They were speaking in English because of McGarvey and the others.
“You should be about a mile out. She's lying five degrees off your starboard bow.”
“I've got it,” McGarvey said, suddenly picking out the silhouette of the
Stephos.
Something seemed odd ⦠out of place.
Stephos.
Something seemed odd ⦠out of place.
“We have it,” Potok radioed softly.
Then McGarvey understood what he was seeing. “My God,” he said. He looked at Potok. “The missile is up in the firing position.”
“You're right ⦔ Newman started to say, when they all heard the unmistakable sound of automatic weapons fire from the ship.
“That's a Kalashnikov,” Potok shouted, and he opened the Johnson's throttle to the stops, the rubber raft surging ahead on a burst of speed.
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