Kilo Option, page 40
“Watch yourself, sir,” the young man said. Like the rest of his SEALs, he was in his twenties, and at the peak of his physical prowess. Lane hated to think what it would be like going up against him and his team. It wouldn’t be pleasant.
“We’re going aboard Baker,” Gilbert radioed his terse message to the Chicago.
“Copy.”
59
MOHAMMAD’S STAR
The sail hatch was closed, Yernin had heard it with his own two ears. But now it was open again. He could smell the sea, and hear the disturbed water between the submarine and the Gorki slamming against the hulls.
He pulled out his gun and stepped around the corner into the sonar room, where he switched off the dim red lights, and lowered the intensity on the display screens, putting himself in relative darkness. He listened for someone to come.
Zamyatin was the last man off the submarine. But he was the only man alive who knew, or at least suspected, that the missiles’ targeting computers had been tampered with.
He looked at the battle clock above the sonar displays. In a little more than ten minutes the high-pressure air directors would fail, the submarine’s ballast tanks would begin to fill, and she would go down. In a little more than five minutes he had to start the missile launch timer.
Maslennikov had been a very good agent runner. His work was precise and to the point, without the knee-jerk political histrionics of so many people in his position. And he’d been careful, something Yernin had always been appreciative of.
“I’ll never leave you hanging, nor will I lead the FBI to your door because of my mistakes, Valeri,” Maslennikov had promised in the beginning. Yernin had cause to remember the exact words. “I expect good things from you. With imagination. Do not let me down.”
But he had let his control officer down. In Richmond, and again in Kuwait. This time would be different.
“Boris Nikoleiavich, is that you?” he called from the darkness.
The submarine lurched and something or someone fell against the bulkhead.
Yernin fired one shot toward the open hatch forward of the control room. The bullet ricocheted off the walls, and high-pressure water suddenly sprayed from a pipe somewhere down the corridor.
Nothing moved. He waited ten seconds, then slipped around the corner into the control room. Everything was in readiness. He could not fail this time because he’d thought of every contingency. Even the Gorki and her crew. With his left hand he reached into his pocket and fingered the detonator. If need be he would send the Gorki to the bottom and take his chances out here in one of the lifeboats. The coasts of Africa and India weren’t that far away. He’d been in worse spots before and had come through.
He approached the forward hatch, flattened himself against the bulkhead, and listened. The only sound was water spraying from a burst pipe.
“Captain Zamyatin, you came for something. What do you want?”
There was no answer.
He darted across the open hatch, hoping to draw the KGB captain’s fire, but there was nothing. Was the man a coward, had he changed his mind?
Someone fired from behind him. The bullet smacked into the bulkhead, centimeters from his head. He fell back, while bringing his gun around, in time to see Zamyatin’s figure outlined in the hatchway. The bastard had climbed down one deck, passed beneath the control room, and come up from behind.
Yernin fired, catching Zamyatin high in the chest, knocking him off his feet. He struggled to get up as Yernin hurried across the control room to him.
“You bastard,” Zamyatin said, the front of his black coveralls wet with blood. “You’ll destroy us all.”
“You’ll never know,” Yernin said indifferently, and he shot the man in the face just above the bridge of his nose.
The master clock in the control room showed that he had a few minutes to spare before he had to start the launch timer. He started aft to one of the officer’s cabins to find an Iranian uniform for Zamyatin when he heard the distinct sounds of gunfire from outside.
He was stopped in his tracks. Was it a mutiny lead by Zamyatin’s people? That was simply inconceivable. Zamyatin was nothing but an aberration, a mistake. Maslennikov picked his people better than that.
Yernin braced himself against the bulkhead as he tried to sort out what he was hearing. There was a lot of gunfire, but from two different kinds of weapons. Were they under attack?
He pulled himself aft, beneath the stream of ice-cold sea water, and then up one level to the sail hatch open to the deck.
The firing came from the Gorki, but it was becoming sporadic now. Nothing was visible from where he stood in the hatchway except the occasional muzzle flash. It sounded to him like whoever had attacked had come over the rail from the weather side, and had pinned down his people crouched in front of the lee rail.
He weighed his options. The radar lookout had not sounded a warning, which meant the attackers could have come from a submarine. It was even possible that the Chicago had detected their presence after all and had followed them out here to this rendezvous.
But they might not have been in time to see the missiles being loaded. If they had, they would have fired on them by now.
The mission was of the utmost importance. There was still time. He would take his chances with the sea.
Yernin pulled a fire ax from its bracket just within the hatchway and, keeping low, darted out on deck and raced to the bow, the footing on the sharply heaving deck treacherous.
He cut the two hawsers, and the bow immediately swung away from the freighter, the rolling motion already easier now that the two ships weren’t bound along their entire lengths.
A fresh burst of gunfire from above made him stop. He crouched in the darkness about a third of the way between the bow and the forward edge of the sail, and listened. No one cried out, no one shouted orders or demands. Two well-disciplined forces were facing each other, and from where he crouched there was no telling what the outcome would be.
He jumped up, sprinted around the lee side of the sail, and made it to the stern, where he cut the two lines up to the Gorki. He tossed the ax overboard and raced back to the open hatch, clawed open one of the life raft lockers, and pulled a canister out. He shoved it overboard on the weather side of the boat; it popped open and began to inflate automatically. The action of the wind and waves would keep the life raft against the hull of the Kilo until he needed it.
Before he went back aboard the submarine he took the detonator out of his pocket, and without hesitation hit the proper buttons. A muffled explosion deep in the bowels of the Gorki rippled the water. A second later a much larger explosion lit up the night sky, fire and debris blowing two hundred feet into the air from amidships, shattering every window in the ship’s superstructure.
MV GORKI
Adams and Karsten were both gone, and now the freighter was definitely down at the bow. Lieutenant Gilbert sat wedged behind a winch trying to make some sense of what happened. His head was spinning and his ears ringing from the explosion.
Three of the bad guys were down, and there was returning fire from only four others. Gilbert had sent Patterson and Lear aft and Mason and Cunningham forward to flank them. It left Adams, Karsten, and Biermeier with Gilbert. Biermeier took a hit in the throat coming over the rail, and had fallen back into the sea. He was dead before he hit the water, there wasn’t much doubt about that.
Then the explosion.
His people were all dead, and he knew it. Something was wrong when only the squad leader survived.
Something crashed below as the stern continued to rise up into the air.
His headset clicked. “Copy?”
“Roger,” Gilbert radioed, surprised he could even talk. He’d been hit in the shoulder, just above his vest, and the bullet had spiraled down into his chest. Every time he breathed it felt as if a pair of scissors were working on his lungs.
“This is the captain, what’s your situation?” Coburn radioed. He sounded strung out.
“The bad guys are down, Skipper. So are my men. I’m the only one left.”
“Are you still aboard that ship?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Get off now. Do you hear me?”
“Aye, aye, Skipper. But no can do. I’m hit and we’re going down.”
“Get out of there, Lieutenant!” Coburn shouted, but the radio signal fell on dead ears as Gilbert slumped over on the canted deck.
MOHAMMAD’S STAR
They were all dead aboard the Gorki. No one could have survived. Yernin hung by the hatchway, fascinated despite himself as the freighter’s stern rose into the night sky. The flames cast blood red reflections across the water, and on the submarine’s superstructure.
Time now to do what he had come for.
He turned and started below when something fell on the deck forward of the sail, near the bow. He stepped back out on deck and looked forward. In spite of the flames from the Gorki, now several hundred meters away, the night was dark and the submarine’s black hull and deck nearly featureless, except for the open loading hatch. He could see nothing.
But he’d heard something.
A black figure rose up over the leeward edge of the deck, like some apparition rising from the sea, pulling itself up by a rope. It straightened up, and turned toward Yernin. It had been a grappling hook he’d heard.
He stepped back involuntarily.
The figure pulled something off its chest, tossed it aside, then pulled off its face mask and head covering.
Yernin was staggered to the bottom of his soul. It was Bill Lane, come like the bogeyman in the night for him. He had the flash of an image that nearly caused him to cry out. He was a small child locked in a tiny black box. He screamed to be let out, the darkness was suffocating. He was going mad.
“Vasha, you bastard,” Lane called out in Russian. “I’ve come for you!”
Lane fired as Yernin suddenly came alive and grappled for his pistol. The shot hit him in the side, above his left hip, slamming him through the hatchway and up against the dogging wheel.
The sharp pain instantly cleared his head. He pulled out his pistol, extended his arm out the hatchway, and fired three shots toward the bow of the submarine.
When there was no answering fire, he took a quick peek forward. Nothing.
For an instant he thought he might have hit Lane, but then he realized that the loading hatch was closed.
The son of a bitch was aboard the submarine.
Mindless of his wound, Yernin turned and rushed back down to the control room.
He held up in the shadows to listen for a few seconds. But except for the water still streaming from an overhead pipe, the submarine was deathly still. The stench of dead bodies was even more ghastly than before.
Yernin hobbled across to the weapons control panel and looked up at the master clock. Only three minutes left and the submarine would begin to sink.
He hit both launch buttons, and his timer circuitry began to count down. The submarine would be on the way to the bottom when the missiles launched. He didn’t know if there was a depth that would be too deep for a successful launch, but he didn’t think the sub would submerge that far in only three minutes.
He looked forward toward the dark bowels of the ship. Lane was somewhere up there, and when the boat went down he would be trapped.
Yernin would have given anything to have it out with the American here and now. But it would have to be enough knowing that Lane would go down with the submarine.
He turned and started toward the hatch; the light for torpedo tube three suddenly changed from green to red indicating that the tube was no longer ready to fire.
Lane! The bastard was in the torpedo room, and was trying to stop the launch.
For a split second Yernin weighed his chances of escape, but he had no choice. He started forward, pulling out his stiletto, because a stray bullet in the torpedo room might damage something vital.
Lane fought his way from the stream of water blasting through open torpedo tube three, and braced himself in front of tube four. The compartment was filled with bodies, but he was mindless of the stench as he worked the manual controls for the other loaded tube.
The lights over the firing panel showed that the missiles were in the countdown mode. With both the outer and inner doors open, the submarine would eventually sink, but the missiles would not be launchable. The tubes had to be pressurized first.
A thump below somewhere aft shook the submarine. It sounded like a small explosion, or as if they’d hit something. Perhaps a piece of debris from the Gorki.
Lane looked up. Besides the water streaming past the missile in the open torpedo tube, he heard another, deeper, more ominous sound, and the submarine started to go down by the bow.
The crazy bastard was submerging the boat! The ballast tanks were filling, and Coburn would think that the mission had failed and would order the Kilo to be killed.
He redoubled his efforts, acutely conscious that he was running out of time.
No one could have survived the explosion aboard the Gorki, and unless Mike Friend, who’d been hit in the head by a piece of debris from the explosion, got some help soon, he would die too.
The dead look in Yernin’s eyes came back to him. The man was beyond evil. He was an emotionless killing machine. Life meant nothing to him. His or anyone else’s.
Lane spun the locking wheel the last two turns and started to ease back the bolts when something sharp raked his left arm and shoulder.
He fell to the side as Yernin slashed the air with his stiletto, missing Lane’s face by a scant half-inch. Before he could recover, Lane grabbed the knife hand and shoved Yernin up against the bulkhead.
“What are the targets?” Lane shouted over the noise of the rushing water.
Yernin tried to shove him away, but Lane kneed him in the groin, and slowly bent the Ukrainian assassin’s knife hand forward.
“Where?” Lane shouted.
Yernin gave a mighty heave, shoving Lane backward, off balance, but dropping his stiletto in the rapidly rising water, which was already over their ankles.
Before Lane could recover, Yernin pulled out his pistol. “Time now for you to die,” he said matter-of-factly. There was no triumph in his eyes, just a flat, dead calmness.
Lane scrambled to the right on his hands and knees as Yernin fired, the bullet splatting in the water.
Shifting his aim, Yernin stepped into the stream of water blasting through the open torpedo door and was spun to the left.
Lane jumped up and slammed Yernin back against the forward bulkhead, the Ukrainian’s head cracking against one of the torpedo tube doors.
The light faded from the man’s eyes and he dropped his gun. His knees buckled beneath him.
Lane shoved him aside, and pulled himself back to torpedo tube four, but now the locking mechanism seemed to be jammed.
The water was up to his knees and still rising as he put his back into it. The locking bolts eased back a quarter of an inch, stopped, and then suddenly slid the rest of the way clear.
Lane was pushed backward as the torpedo door burst open on a jet of water, the green light on the console above switching from green to red. Neither missile would fire.
He turned in time to see Yernin clamber up the ladder into the forward escape trunk.
“No!” he shouted, pulling himself up and splashing through the deepening water to the ladder. The locking wheel spun home, and the ready light winked red. Until Yernin locked himself out of the escape trunk and closed and secured the outer hatch, something he wouldn’t do, Lane was stuck here.
The bastard had won again! The missiles wouldn’t launch, but within minutes the Chicago would fire.
Lane turned and faced aft. Yernin would try again, and keep trying until he was successful. The body count would continue to rise.
He could not allow that to happen. He was the only one who knew the true measure of the man. The only one who knew to what lengths the assassin would go.
He shoved away from the escape trunk ladder and pulled himself hand over hand up the sloping corridor. He put everything out of his mind except escape, except surviving so that he could face Yernin. That thought alone drove him beyond his normal level of endurance, turning him into a machine, not for death like Yernin, but for life.
The water was halfway up his chest when he made it aft and scrambled up the ladder into the escape trunk. It seemed to take forever to close the hatch and start the cycle.
He filled one of the Steinke survival hoods, pulled it over his head, and, when the water had completely filled the trunk, cycled open the outer hatch and started up, inflating his life jacket as he rose.
The water was pitch black, and for an eternity he had no sense of up or down, but finally he broke the surface and seconds later the water all around him erupted in a massive geyser from somewhere far below.
His last conscious thought as his body was tumbled end over end was that the Chicago had fired a torpedo on the submerging Kilo and scored a direct hit.
PART FOUR
60
THE WHITE HOUSE
National Security Agency Director Tom Roswell was in good spirits as he rode in the back of his chauffeured limousine to the White House. He’d explained the high points to Bill Townsend, who’d told him that despite the fact it was a Saturday the president wanted to see him immediately.
His limo pulled up at the west portico where he was met by a staffer who escorted him back to the Oval Office in the executive wing.
The president was speaking with his speechwriter, appointments secretary, media adviser, and national security adviser when Roswell came in. Reasoner gave him a knowing smile.
“All right people, I need a half-hour, no interruptions. Slide everything back,” Reasoner said.
Everyone left except Townsend. The president’s mood was up, if guarded. “Bill’s told me that you have some good news.”
