Wall of Night (28 page)

“Nah, he just took a little convincing. The crew still ashore?”

“Yep. Come on, help me with the LTD. Dickie, Zee, pick a spot and keep your eyes peeled.”

Jurens and Smitty removed the Laser Target Designator from its waterproof case and started assembling it.

Powered by a nickel-cadmium battery and mounted on tripod legs, an LTD is nothing more than a night-vision scope joined with a frequency-adjustable laser, a concept similar to that of a laser sighted rifle: Wherever the laser dot goes, the bullet follows. In the case of an LTD, the laser can be seen only by a missile seeker programmed to search for it.

The team's job was simple: Keep the
Nahrut
“painted” with the electromagnetic bull's-eye so
Columbia's
Harpoons would be able to distinguish her from the other ships at anchor.

Smitty flicked on the battery. “Power's up.”

Jurens put his eye to the scope. Slowly the blackness resolved into a green glow. To his left, the lights of the port reflected off the dark surface of the bay. “Steer me.”

“Twenty degrees left; make it bearing … two-one-zero true.”

Jurens swung the scope around, watching the compass pointer rotate past one-eighty, then two hundred … “Okay, I've got her.” He adjusted the focus knob and
Nahrut
's
port bow came into view. He tracked backward along her forecastle to the midships hatch.

“Okay, Smitty, gimme the dot.”

A red dot appeared in the reticle.

Jurens thumbed the knob, edging the dot downward until it covered the crease where the main deck and exterior bulk-head met. He pulled away from the eyepiece. “I'm set.” He grabbed the SATCOM handset: “Blade, this is Sickle. The band is ready to play. I say again …”

“…The band is ready to play. Over.”

Aboard
Columbia
, Kinsock keyed the handset. “Sickle, Blade, roger. Guests en route. Out.”

Kinsock turned to MacGregor, “Start the firing plan, Jim. Diving Officer, take us to periscope depth, all hands prepare for missile launch.”

NMCC

Cathermeier and Mason left Holystone and drove to the Pentagon.

Finally convinced of not only Mason's suspicions about Martin, but also that the premise of
Columbia's
mission was bogus, Cathermeier wasn't about to let it continue. Whatever else China had up its sleeve was yet to be seen, but by calling off the attack on
Nahrut,
Cathermeier might at least be able to impede their plans.

What he couldn't know was that it was already too late.

The Pentagon's nerve center, the National Military Command Center, is divided into three main areas: the Emergency Conference Room, or ECR, “The Tank,” or the Joint Chiefs secure conference room, and the Current Actions Center, or CAC, a large room filled with communications consoles and computer terminals. Mounted on one wall are three projection screens, one displaying the readiness conditions of various U.S. military theaters, the other two showing maps and satellite feeds.

Cathermeier and Mason walked in and walked directly to the CAC watch officer, an Army major. “What can I do for you, General?”

“Send an ELF to Blade,” Cathermeier replied, referring to Extremely Low Frequency message, a slow but effective method of communicating with submerged submarines. “Have her surface for traffic.”

Nakhodka-Vostochny

With Sunil Dhar bound, gagged, and still unconscious in the corner of the their lay-up, Jurens and his men lay on their bellies at the edge of the blind, Night Owls raised and focused on the mouth of the bay. In the greenish glow Jurens could just make out the light of Ryurik, the village at the tip of the cape and beyond the black line of the horizon.

“Sickle, this is Blade, over.”

Jurens grabbed the handset. “Go ahead Blade.”

“En route. Time to target, seventy seconds. Heads down, over.”

Sconi smiled.
Thanks for your concern,
Archie.
“Roger. Sickle out.”

He powered up the LTD and peered through the eyepiece. The glowing red dot was holding steady on the
Nahrut
's
midships hatch. As a target point, it couldn't be better. After their terminal pop-up, the Harpoons would bore into
Nahrut
at an angle and explode at her waterline, breaking her in two.

Forty seconds passed.

Zee called out, “Target, Skipper!”

“Where away?”

“Bearing one-seven-five. Boy, they're really moving!”

Jurens swiveled his Night Owls around.

Flying at over four hundred knots and skimming a bare six feet over the water's surface, the lead Harpoon appeared out of the fog, barely visible against the night sky. As Jurens watched, the second Harpoon came into view, two seconds behind the first and staggered to the left a few feet.

Two miles from
Nahrut
and passing the tip of the cape, the Harpoons executed their first and only waypoint, turning ten degrees to the northwest and lining up on Nahrut's bearing, their seeker's homing in on the LTD's signal.

One mile and twelve seconds from impact, the lead Harpoon popped up to a height of fifty feet, followed a second later by its mate. Jurens watched, waiting for them to tip over toward
Nahrut,
but they continued flying high and level.

Malfunction
?
he thought.
Come on,
nose over
…

And then they were past
Nahrut
and streaking toward the port.

He snatched up the handset. “Blade this is Sickle, drop-kick! I say again, drop-kick!”

It was too late. Two hundred yards from the wharf, the missiles split, the lead Harpoon turning west toward the port's tank farm, the trailing Harpoon east toward a line of ships sitting at berth.

“Jesus Christ …” Smitty muttered.

In a double bloom of fire, the Harpoons struck home and detonated.

Eight miles away,
Columbia
heard Jurens's call for missile destruct, but Archie Kinsock had his own problems. Fifty seconds after launching the Harpoons, he was descending and turning east toward deeper water when the squawk box crackled: “Conn, Sonar, contact! Probably submerged vessel, close aboard! Bearing zero-four-four. He's right on top of us, Skipper.”

“All stop!” Jurens ordered.

“All stop, aye.”

“Conn, Sonar, torpedo in the water, torpedo in the water! Same bearing!”

Kinsock turned to the diving officer. “All ahead flank, full down on the down planes, come right to course one-nine-zero!”

The DO repeated the order. The helmsman and planesman hunched over their controls.

“Launch noisemaker!” Kinsock ordered.

“Noisemaker away.”

“Fire control, open doors on stern tube and fire snapshot.”

“Snapshot, aye!”

“Sonar, Conn, talk to me.” Kinsock called.

“Torpedo's gone active, sir! It's got us!”

“Conn, aye.”

“Noisemaker away, Skipper.”

“Launch another.”

Coming to full speed,
Columbia
pitched over into a spiraling turn. The deck shuddered as compressed air jettisoned the torpedo from the stern tube. “Torpedo away.”

“Cut the wires.”

“Conn, Sonar, it didn't go for the noisemaker, Skipper. It's coming in!”

“Time?”

“Ten seconds.”

“Launch another noisemaker!”

“Noisemaker away.”

“Conn, Sonar: Five seconds … four …”

Time seemed to slow for Kinsock. Heart pounding in his throat, he looked around the Control Room, taking in the faces of his crew.
If it's gonna happen,
he thought dully,
let it be quick.

He snatched the IMC handset: “All hands brace for shock!”

Kazachinskoye,
Russia

Aside from having to wait six hours—two on the Mongolian side, four on the Russian side—at the border, the crossing went smoothly. There'd been bribes to be paid, forms to be filled out, and officials to wheedle, but watching Skeldon work, Cahil realized the former Ranger had done his homework.

The trip from Ulaanbaatar had taken the rest of the day and part of the night as they traversed the dirt tracts that passed as highways on the Mongolian steppe. They pushed on at a steady forty mph, weaving their way ever northward through the cities of Mandal, Baruunharaa, Darhan, past marshes, peat bogs, and rolling hills. And grasslands—in every direction, as far as Cahil could see.

Now, two hours north of the border, Skeldon pulled off the road outside Kazachinskoye and stopped at an abandoned farmhouse. By Cahil's map, they were eighty miles northwest of Lake Baikal at the southern edge of the Great Siberian Basin, a plateau of taiga forest and crisscrossing rivers.

Skeldon stopped the Yaz beside a ramshackle barn and shut off the engine.

“What're we doing?” Cahil asked. He felt the tickle of fear on the back of his neck.

“We're waiting,” Skeldon replied, a half smile on his lips.

Suddenly, out the truck's window, the brush along the barn began to move, slowly taking the shape of six men in camouflage gear. Cahil saw six pair of eyes staring back at him.

“Our team, I assume,” he whispered.

“Yep. Spooky, ain't they?”

Skeldon restarted the engine and steered the Yaz into the barns, shut off the engine again, but left the headlights on, then got out. “Might as well get out and stretch,” Skeldon said. “From here on, it's straight driving.”

Cahil climbed down. Piles of moldy straw lay stacked along the walls. Dust motes drifted in the Yaz's headlight beams.

Skeldon was talking to one of the men, the leader of the group, Bear guessed. Only slightly surprised, he saw the man was Chinese. He heard Skeldon say the word, “colonel” but could hear nothing more of their conversation.

The other five men, also Chinese, were shrugging off their gear and stacking it in piles. Each of them carried an M-16 assault rifle, and as Cahil stepped closer, he realized the rest of their equipment was also American-issue: From web-belts, to boots, to grenades, every piece was standard U.S. issue.

Just like me and Skeldon,
Cahil thought.
Is that why they were here
?
Were they nothing more than window dressing
?

Once done piling their gear, the commandos stripped off their camouflage clothing, beneath which they wore rough, twill shirts, sweaters, coats, and corduroy pants. Seeing the transformation, Cahil realized that at a distance each of the men could pass for any number of Russia's native peoples: Buryats, Evenks, cross-border Mongols.

The commandos moved efficiently and with a minimum of talk as they lifted open a hatch set in the barn's floor, revealing a root cellar. They set up a line and began hauling up wooden crates.

Helping Skeldon transfer fuel from the jerry cans to the Yaz's tank, Cahil watched from the corner of his eye as they began stacking the crates in the truck's bed. Each bore a U.S. Army stencil. The contents ranged from MREs, to 5.56 mm ammunition, to portable tactical radios.

The commandos closed the cellar door and piled the last three crates into the back of the Yaz. Cahil glanced up and read one of the stencils:

COMPOSITION 4, 12—POUND BLOCKS

STANDARD CHEMICAL DETONATORS, 16 EACH

C-4
plastic explosives,
he thought.
Five crates
…
sixty pounds' worth
;
enough to turn the Sears Tower into a pile of bricks.
He nudged Skeldon and nodded at the crates.

“Mind your business,” Skeldon muttered.

“This is my goddamned business,” Cahil whispered back. “I wanna know—”

“Not now—later.”

With the Commandos in back and Cahil and Skeldon upfront, they pulled out of the barn, back onto the main road, and started north again. The moon was full and bright, the sky sprinkled with stars.

They were well into the Russian steppes now, but unlike the flatlands of Mongolia, the terrain was all trees—millions of square miles of larch, spruce, and conifers stretching in every direction. Stark crescents of snow dotted the hillsides bordering the road, and the Yaz's headlights flashed over ice-filled ruts in the road.

He now understood why the Russians viewed Siberia with equal parts love and fear. It was beautiful, but its vastness was overwhelming. It was no wonder why many of the old Soviet gulags didn't bother with fences—the land itself was the prison.

After a few minutes, Skeldon turned to him. “You need to learn to keep your mouth shut, Kycek. These aren't the kind of people you want to piss off.”

“No kidding. Look, this whole thing is making me nervous. Nobody said anything about a goddamned commando mission. When are you gonna tell me what's going on?”

“You'll know tonight. You can see it for yourself.”

Cahil dozed fitfully until Skeldon woke him just after dawn. “Coffee?”

“Thanks.” Cahil sat up and looked around. Aside from the sunlight, the land looked the same as it had hours before: a sea of trees. “How far have we gone?”

“About a hundred twenty miles.”

“Aren't there any checkpoints, military posts?”

Skeldon laughed. “Out here? Twenty years ago, maybe, but not today. How would they pay for it? You gotta remember, man, Siberia is almost fourteen million square miles. From Moscow to Vladivostok it's six thousand miles. That's twice the width of the U.S. Starting to get the picture?”

“Yeah: It's big.”

“Bigger than big. It can swallow you whole. In some places, if you wander ten miles from civilization, you might as well be on the moon.”

“Sounds like you've spent some time here,” Cahil said.

“Some.”

Time to push a little bit,
Bear thought. If nothing else, he wanted to know Skeldon's story. What had brought him to the middle of Siberia, playing guide for a team of Chinese commandos?

“You're ex-military, huh?” Cahil said.

“What makes you say that?”

“The way you carry yourself. You can take the man outa the military, but you can't take the military out of the man.”

Skeldon gave a half-smile. “I guess. Yeah, I was army.”

“Grunt?”

“What is this, you writing a book?”

“Just trying to pass the time. We got a long drive ahead of us. What're you worried about? You think I'm gonna sell your story to the
National Enquirer
?”

Skeldon laughed. “That'd be something to see.” He looked sideways at Cahil, then shrugged. “I was a Ranger—a Lurp before they got absorbed.”

“Then the boonies don't scare you much. Hell, this place must feel downright comfortable.”

“Better than being in the city, that's for sure.”

“How long were you in?”

“Sixteen years.”

“Why'd you get out? You were only four shy of retirement.”

“They didn't gimme a choice,” Skeldon said, bitterness creeping into his voice. “They booted me with a medical discharge.”

“What happened?”

“We were on a live-fire exercise in Panama City. I caught a sliver of shrapnel in the head. They took it out, said I was fine, but about a month after I left the hospital I started getting these migraines. Hurt so bad I couldn't walk, couldn't see. The docs poked and prodded me for a couple months, tried all these different drugs on me, but nothing helped. About six months after the accident, my wife tells me she's taking the kids and leaving.”

“Why?”

“She said I'd changed,” Skeldon said. “I still remember how she put it: ‘You ain't been right in the head since you got hurt.' I was mean to her, I yelled at the kids, I forget how to do things—simple stuff, like how to get to the grocery store.”

“Was it true?” Cahil asked.

“I guess so. She loved me, so I figured, why would she lie? Friends were telling me the same thing, too, but I didn't see it. By then, the headaches were coming almost every day.”

“The doctors couldn't give you anything?”

“Most of what they gave me left me so doped up I couldn't spell my name. I tried acupuncture, meditation, yoga—all that crap, but nothing worked. The only thing that makes it bearable are these.”

Skeldon reached into his jacket pocket and handed a bottle to Cahil.

It was Percodan, a prescription painkiller. “This is heavy stuff,” Bear said. “Addictive.”

“No shit. It's better than feeling like there's an ice pick jammed into your brain.”

“How many of these do you take a day?”

“Depends on the day. On average, about a dozen. The pain's still there, but those take off the edge. The downside is, they give me pruritus.”

“What's that?”

In response, Skeldon rolled up the sleeve of his field jacket. His forearm was covered in scabbed-over scratches. “Makes me itchy. I scratch in my sleep. I go to bed at night, and when I wake up my sheets are bloody.”

“Jesus. Looks painful.”

“I hardly feel it,” Skeldon said, then grinned. “I ain't much to look at on the beach, though.”

Cahil couldn't help himself; he broke out in laughter, and after a few seconds Skeldon joined in. After a few moments, Cahil said, “I can't believe the army didn't help you.”

“The army washed their hands of me. I get a disability check every month, but that only covers about a week's worth of pills. The way the army sees it, what happened to me is just part of the risk: Sorry son, you got unlucky. Here's a few hundred bucks.”

Now it all made sense, Cahil thought. Everything Skeldon had ever cared about was gone: the army, his wife and children … And all he had to show for it was pain. With nothing else in his life, he'd turned back to the only thing he knew: being a Lurp. Who paid him, and why, was irrelevant.

Cahil felt sorry for him; in other circumstances he might have reached out to help. But in his withdrawal from life, Skeldon had gotten himself involved in something very big and very dangerous.

Bear wondered how much Skeldon knew about his paymasters and their plan. And if he knew, did he care one way or another?

They drove for twelve hours, northeast through Irkutsk and deeper into the Great Siberian Basin along the river Minya. With one eye on the map and one eye on the landmarks, Cahil ticked off villages as they went: Podgar, Yermaki, Korotkova, Sharabora, Andronovka. The land never changed and the trees never thinned, an unbroken blanket of green beneath the sky.

By late afternoon, they'd reached Yakutia's Chono River Basin.

Skeldon left the main road for a winding, dirt tract that took them deeper into the forest.

This area of the Chono Basin was dominated by a vast reservoir system that extended over a hundred miles from Lake Vilyuy in the north and down to Lake Ichoda in the south, where it split into hundreds of smaller rivers that fed the southern half of the basin.

As the sun was dipping toward the horizon, Skeldon pulled off into a small clearing and shut off the engine. He banged his fist on the cab's wall then got out. Cahil followed. One by one the commandos jumped down and began unloading crates from the Yaz.

“This is it,” Skeldon said to Cahil. “Home sweet home.”

“For how long? When are you going to let me in on the big secret?”

“Now's as good a time as any.”

Skeldon walked to where the commandos were working, spoke with the colonel for a few seconds, then gestured for Cahil to follow. After a quick compass check, Skeldon found a trail leading into the forest, and set off.

The grade increased until they were pulling themselves along from tree to tree. After a mile, the slope eased and the trees thinned, revealing an escarpment. “Watch your step,” Skeldon said. “It's a hell of a drop.”

He led Cahil down a trail along the cliff face. Bear glanced over the edge, but could see nothing of what lay below, so thick were the trees. In the distance, he could hear the rush of water. After another hundred yards, the path came to a thumb of rock jutting from the cliff.

“Take a look,” Skeldon said.

Cahil walked to the edge and peered over. A few hundred yards below, a river wound its way through a jagged-walled canyon. “What am I looking for?”

“Look upriver. You'll have to lean out a bit. Here, I gotchya.” Skeldon grabbed the back of Cahil's belt. “Go ahead.”

Cahil hesitated.

“Relax, Stan, I didn't drag your ass across Siberia just so I could drop you off a cliff.”

Cahil planted his feet and slowly leaned outward.

Straddling the mouth of the canyon like a great stone castle was a hydroelectric dam. A mile wide at the top and sloping to a wedge at the bottom, the dam seemed to sprout from the canyon walls. Along its walkway were eight generator towers, each joined to the next by a network of power lines.

“The Chono Dam,” Skeldon said. “Second largest in the world. Five hundred feet tall, just over a mile wide, and a hundred feet thick. Eight hydroelectric generators for a total of fifteen thousand megawatts. The reservoir is twelve miles wide, forty long, and averages about four hundred feet deep. It's like a man-made ocean.”

“Pull me in.” Back on solid ground, Cahil said, “You seem to know a lot about it.”

“I sure as hell hope so.”

Afraid he already knew the answer, Cahil dreaded asking the next question. “Mike, what are we doing here?”

“It's simple: We're gonna blow it up.”