Duel of Assassins (21 page)

The captain stared at him a long moment, then started back
toward his aide.

“Well?” Marcus asked, falling in step.

“I told you I’d help you, damn you. So let’s do it.”

Moments later Marcus and Ivannenko were settled in the
sternsheets of a little motor launch as Kuzma slalomed out through the anchored
shipping toward the shadowy bulk of the
Gorodovikov.
The Soviet LST, the
captain explained, had just returned from landing operations—part of
Trans-Caucasus Military District exercises—near Batumi, an Azerbaijan enclave
on the Georgian Black Sea coast. They were enjoying a three-day layover in
Istanbul, and most of the officers and crew were on liberty.

As they drew nearer, Marcus was able to resolve the
bargelike silhouette of the Polish-built landing craft into its components. The
long forward sweep of the low-freeboard tank deck was designed to carry eight
BTR-60PB amphibious personnel carriers, which were ramp-launched through bow
doors. At both ends of the low-slung, raked superstructure he now discerned the
stubby fingers of twin 30mm antiaircraft guns and SA-N-5 Grail launching posts.

But what directly concerned Marcus was the giant grasshopper
shape squatting on the platform just forward of the bridge. This was a Ka-25
Hormone helicopter, its drooping, twin coaxial rotors extending several meters
on each side of the deck-wide platform. The Ka-25 was just visiting, Ivannenko
said. Its home and hangar were on a larger Rogov-class landing ship, which was
now steaming back to Sevastopol. During the landing exercises the Ka-25 had
been used mainly for reconnaissance and utility transport, and so had been fitted
with external fuel tanks. These gave it an effective range of over six hundred
kilometers—enough to fly to the Crimea and back. Tonight’s scheduled flight,
however, was one way; they were delivering the chopper back to Sevastopol. With
only the slightest deviation in course, they would be able to drop Marcus in
the immediate vicinity of the
Medtner
, which, according to the last
position Ivannenko had received, was about sixty kilometers south of the
Crimean peninsula.

An hour later, as a jaundiced quarter moon lifted over the
neon-sprinkled Asian hills, the big Ka-25 was thrashing its contra-rotating
rotors five hundred meters above the Bosphorus. Only the pilot seat was
occupied in the side-by-side cockpit. Senior Lieutenant Krikor Hovhannes had just
finished talking to air-traffic control at Yesilköy, which had routinely
forwarded his flight plan to the Turkish NATO airbase at Izmir. The young
Armenian flight officer had been vouched for by Ivannenko: “Krikor hates all
Russians, and wishes you great success tonight.”

Four meters behind Hovhannes, clad in black wetsuit, with
lifejacket, web belt, facemask and fins, Marcus had the main cabin all to
himself—except for the tiny inflatable raft in its carrying case beside him.
The other eleven fold-down seats were unused. And so, officially, was his;
Hovhannes was supposed to be ferrying an empty Ka-25 back to Sevastopol.

As they reached the entrance to the Black Sea, the pilot’s
voice crackled in Marcus’ headset—the only way to commu-nicate above the deafening
racket of the twin turboshafts. With their cruising speed of two hundred
kilometers per hour, Hovhannes estimated arrival at the drop zone in two and a
half hours.

“Now, Major, put in your earplugs and try and get some
sleep. Captain Ivannenko’s orders. Don’t worry. I’ll wake you in plenty of
time.” And incredibly, despite the unholy din, Marcus did find a little
sleep—his first in thirty-six hours, except for the brief nap in the Lufthansa
737.

*

“Major? Time for your evening swim.”

The pilot’s voice wrenched Marcus out of the uterine depths
of unconsciousness, slamming him back into the cramped, shuddering cacophony of
the helicopter.

“Are you awake, Major?”

“Yes, Lieutenant. Thanks.”

Marcus shook the sleep from his mind. Hovhannes was
explaining they were now only a couple of minutes from rendezvous with the
Nikolai
Medtner
.

Marcus peered out the small, square window to his left, saw
moon-flecked waves dimpling a vast blackness, Ursa Major twinkling icily above.
He unbuckled, made his final equipment check, removed the spare headset. From
now on he’d go by the pilot’s hand signals.

Then they were dropping quickly, the swells looming larger
in the lacquering moonlight. On a signal from Hovhannes, Marcus slid the cabin
door aft, sat down in the opening, legs dangling, arms braced against shrieking
windblast. They were hovering at only five or six meters, their landing lights
bathing a surface being whipped into a maelstrom by the downdraft. Marcus knew
it was no easy matter for the pilot to gauge his height in these conditions,
and waited for his “go” signal. An instant later it came: Hovhannes motioned
violently downward with his palm.

Marcus tossed out the raft. As it cleared the helicopter,
its attached static line disconnected, activating its CO
₂
inflation
cartridge. Looping his left forearm through his fins and mask, Marcus grabbed
the diagonal strut of the rear landing gear, slid out and hung suspended a
flailing instant. Then he brought his legs together, swung forward and let go,
clasping his fins blades-up, falling straight and slicing cleanly into the dark
water. By the time he rose to the surface, he had his fins and mask on and
stroked quickly to the welcome vinyl sheen of the inflatable, still hissing and
unfolding to its two-meter length.

Spotlighted from above, Marcus slithered inboard and
activated a tiny battery-powered RDF beacon to help the
Medtner
locate
him. Then, as the Ka-25 lifted and went hammering off to the northwest, he
settled himself in the raft, abruptly alone in vast undulant darkness. By his
watch it was only twenty minutes to nine. He was making excellent time... if he
didn’t spend too long bobbing around in this giant bathtub.

Five minutes passed. He broke out the raft’s flare kit,
swore in disgust. He’d expected a pistol and 26.5mm parachute-flare cartridges,
or even 40mm hand-launched rocket flares. Instead he got what looked like a
toy—a pouch of nine tiny cylinders about the size of double-AA batteries, and a
ballpoint pen-sized launcher. Marcus sighed, fitted one together, fired it off.
It went hissing up into the night, burst seconds later into red lumin-escence
seventy meters overhead, staining the surrounding sea and sky scarlet.

Marcus reverted to the American version of a favorite
Russian oath: “Motherfucker!”

In five seconds the flare was extinguished. But Marcus had
already picked up the soft throb of diesels. He turned around, squinted, saw
navigation lights, a curl of phosphorescent bow wave.

He reached for another flare. This one blossomed
blinding-white, enveloping him in five seconds of stark daylight. Even before
it faded, an approaching searchlight began stabbing the darkness around the
raft. Marcus semaphored his arms till the beam finally foreshortened and
skewered him.

“Forgive me, but I do not welcome you to my ship,” said the
rheumy-eyed, heavily bearded man as he thrust a steaming glass of tea into
Marcus’ hands. “The fact is, you know, you are not really here, and therefore I
am addressing only an apparition, a product of this bottle of old vodka. This is
understood?”

“If you say so,” Marcus replied. He was more interested in a
decidedly non-apparitional plate of salted mackerel now proffered by the
bearded man.

Evgeny Chapayev was master of the “survey ship”
Nikolai
Medtner,
whose two short masts and small aftercastle were bristling with
electronics, indicative of its principal use as an AGI, an
intelligence-gathering auxiliary. Chapayev explained he had scant previous
connection with
Spetsnaz
operations. He was merely obliging his old
friend Ivannenko on Marcus’ behalf. Marcus took this to mean that, like
Ivannenko, the captain was a reluctant participant, but, unlike Ivannenko,
chose not to belabor the point.

Chapayev took another deep pull from a quarterliter of
starka
,
and began to speak of operational details. An hour’s steaming would bring them
twenty kilometers off Yalta, he said. It would be perfectly natural for the
Medtner
to be in those waters, as they were currently helping the Soviet marine science
ship,
Keldish,
search for the wreck of the
Sanspareil
, which,
despite its French name, was an English warship sunk hereabouts in 1854 during
the Crimean War. The
Keldish,
with its forty-million-dollar, high-tech
minisubmarine, was working the deeper waters farther out, while the
Medtner
remained closer inshore with its smaller, more modestly endowed midget
sub.However, Chapayev emphasized, this little submersible would be quite
adequate for conveying Marcus unseen and undetected to the base of the Oreanda
cliffs.

Marcus interrupted. “May I suggest then, Captain, that I
might better use the next hour in becoming familiar with its various
systems—navigation, ballasting, sonar, and so forth?”

“Why? These are not your concern.”

“They’d better be. I’m driving it!”

“Who told you this? Surely not Ivannenko? Warrant Officer
Prilepko will be driving the
Flea
.”

“Excuse me, Captain. But I have a problem with that. You
see, I don’t really know how long this operation will take. If I find a good
place to conceal myself, it could be two days before I get a good shot.”

“Ha! I grant you this may be a problem. But it is not
my
problem. I told Ivannenko I would take you there, no more! In any case, my dear
apparition, you will not need a way back from Oreanda. You will most certainly
be killed.”

Marcus exploded in laughter. “My God, you’re serious!”

“Killed or captured. Ivannenko assures me you will not
hesitate to use your cyanide capsule, when appropriate. This is most essential.
We understand each other?”

And finally they did. Marcus, after all, was in no position
to argue. And the captain was absolutely correct, if one looked at things from
his perspective. It
was
a suicidal mission, and would be so for any
discovered accomplices as well as its perpetrator. Marcus could hardly expect
anyone else to share his own maniacal self-confidence.

So, having agreed to everything, an hour later he followed
Captain Chapayev up on deck. The wind had freshened, the night had cooled and a
silvered quarter-moon now drifted through scudding cloud overhead. Marcus was
introduced to
Michman
(Warrant Officer) Yuri Prilepko, a small,
long-armed sailor with a shaved head and a Popeye squint. The
Michman
was in the process of stripping the tarp off a bulky cylindrical shape
amidships—the midget sub.

Fully exposed, it was about five meters of aqua-blue
fiberglass, teardrop-shaped, with a searchlight in the blunt bow, a tiny,
canopy-enclosed cabin, tapering in the stern to a fin and hydroplanes with a
single propeller. Marcus had never seen anything quite like it, although at
Spetsnaz
“finishing school” on Wrangel Island, he’d ridden several times in an SDV, or
swimmer delivery vehicle, and once in a self-contained DSRV, or deep
submergence rescue vehicle. The fiberglass hull, he knew, would minimize the
acoustic and magnetic signature, and Chapayev had already explained that its
battery-powered electric propulsion allowed it to run silently.

It was the
Blokha
, the
Flea
—the Cyrillic
letters and a stylized cartoon both appeared on its bow. At burst speed of
fifteen knots, Captain Chapayev had said, it could cover the twenty kilometers
to the Yalta coast in an hour and twenty minutes.

Michman
Prilepko climbed down into the forward tandem
seat, Marcus slipped in behind, and the laminated-glass canopy was lowered and
locked. It was a tight squeeze, and Marcus’ seat wasn’t very comfortable, but,
according to the instruction panel, when the cushion was peeled off, the seat
doubled as a hand-pumped water closet. He grinned. It just might come to that,
he thought.

Under a “dry” diving suit he was wearing light body armor.
Beside him was a waterproof “warbag” that had been stowed in the inflatable. In
it were various items generously provided by Ivannenko: climbing gear,
dismantled sniper rifle, AKR sub-machine gun and Makarov pistol, with
ammunition and silencers for all three.

At a thumbs-up from Prilepko, the
Flea
was hoisted by
a derrick, swung outboard from the
Medtner
and lowered into the water
where—to Marcus’ considerable discomfort and slight dismay—the little torpedo
hull began to bounce around almost as violently as Azib’s Peshawar taxi on a
rocky road. But the turbulence ceased an instant later as they were released
from the ship, and a liquid black void closed around them. Marcus became aware
of the steady pulse of the propeller, watched as Prilepko fiddled his joystick
to get the proper trim. They were still sliding downward, but at thirty meters,
Marcus knew, they would level off and be on their way.

It wasn’t exactly the first oceanic mission Marcus had
undertaken with no way out, no escape plan. There was, for instance, the time
he had stripped to his shorts and jumped into the Sausalito marina and swum out
to solicit his first sailboat ride. At that time, as he recalled, he had no
slightest thought of ever paddling back to the dock in defeat. However, he
could
have. Not so here. He was fully committed, unless he tapped Prilepko on the
shoulder sometime in the next hour and called the whole thing off.

Which he would never do. Better a madman than a coward.

Yet oddly, Marcus felt no sense of dread, little foreboding.
He was wondering, with lively curiosity, just
how
he was going to pull
the damn thing off. For he knew somehow he would do it. One way or another, he
always had.