I then consulted Hathoot again, in search of enlightenment.
“Why’s he running the ship so hard?” I asked of the man I had initially underrated.
“Fear. He was there, you will recall, when the Russians assaulted The Isle of the Tsar. Those troops were put down by helicopters. Those choppers were Navy rather than Army. If the Lindy gets stopped, then the jig’s up. No gold, no ship, no job, and maybe even the gulag for our Captain Kessler. As you know, he’s no fool. He’s running for U.S. waters.”
I nodded at the injured man grimly. We could stay with the ship all the way to the mouth of Providence Bay, now only three hours away, or a bit less. But we could not last for long out in the open ocean. The Bering Sea was a brutal monster of high running swells, cross winds, and currents. Even with extra tanks we could not make it half way across the Strait. And we could not run at the Lindy’s pace in the heavy seas. Not for very long.
“How do we get him to slow down and let us aboard?” I tested Hathoot, hoping for some brilliant response I had not thought of.
He ruminated, closing his eyes again. I checked the boys, lying under the tarp. Both had fallen asleep.
“Ah, the innocence of youth,” I declared before covering them with the tarp.
It was a bit warmer under the canvas cover. They would be okay, as long as we could cook up some new scheme before hitting the open Bering Sea.
North, in the direction we were going, great clouds were building in the distance. At least every other day, since my exposure to the geographic area, inclement weather of some sort moved in or out. I had heard, on my way to Nome, that fishing the seas off Alaska was the most dangerous job in the world. I had thought that the reason had to be based upon the equipment the fishermen used. Now, I knew that the real reason was the horrid weather itself. The Bering Sea was an inhospitable slice of ocean. It had icy waters, terrible and frequent storms, a shallow bottom basin, and huge amounts of water constantly squeezed between jutting landmasses. Those waters were always in motion, driven by storm waves of long fetch and never-ending tides.
“We have to find a way of getting on the ship. We can do nothing out here, but wait.” Hathoot forced out the words and then fell back against the rubber surface, his eyes closing again.
The last of our morphine was only going to hold the purser for a few more hours. Out in the open ocean we would be running with salt water bounding over the gunwales. We’d also have to deal with high winds, unless I was wrong about the looming weather front. Zodiacs did poorly in high winds. The Hypalon rubber bottoms of the boats were flat. Any air that got underneath, if strong enough, would flip them like a coin.
I scanned the craggy shores we were flying past. The deserted rock vistas of the Providence Bay coastline were starkly beautiful. They were also totally uninhabitable. Even if they provided any haven whatsoever, it would take no time at all for the Churkin’s choppers to find us. And that would be it. There was to be no landing on any Russian shore. Even death on the high seas was preferable to what I had seen at the underground gulag.
I was never going to be one of those lost souls with large, dead eyes looking at the bottom of sewer pipes for the remainder of my short life. I was making that decision for everyone else aboard the Zodiac, too, which Filipe continued to drive with a strong sure hand. I never saw him look over to the nearby ship, where his wife, or girlfriend, Gloria, stared from the rail.
Filipe was a tough customer, as a worker and loyal employee, but he would be only a small asset in any kind of hand-to-hand combat. I did not want to consider that eventuality, however. As I wearied a bit, he motioned me toward him, as if he knew what passed through my mind. I crabbed along the Zodiac’s flooring to where he stood. With one foot he moved a small plastic container toward me. I grabbed it, pushed the levered handle out of the way, and then popped the top off.
The insulated case was filled with sandwiches wrapped in plastic. I grinned up at the man, handing a sandwich up to his outstretched hand, then unwrapped one for myself.
“Peanut Butter and Jelly, that’s all I put in my Belly” was a memorable childhood jingle that returned to me instantly. Strawberry jelly. The taste was the taste of home. I ate mine in four large bites and then ate another one. I had not realized that I was running on empty.
Filipe tapped me with his foot. I moved to deliver another sandwich, but that was not his purpose. I followed his pointing finger. A case of bottled Evian water lay under the edge of a small tarp near the back of the boat. I pulled two out, handed one up, then drained my own. I breathed deeply, tossing the empty bottle over the transom like a discarded hand grenade.
“Take that, you Russian scum,” I intoned, to nobody at all.
I lay back against the canvas covers. I did not want to focus on the ship lest I see Marlys, or any of them. It was hard to meet their eyes with no hope in sight. There was really nothing to be done. It seemed we were hurtling downriver above Niagara Falls. We could not yet hear the falls up ahead, but we all knew it was there, eager to devour us.
I jammed the radio ear-piece tightly inside my ear. I clutched the radio in my right hand. With the wind striking me frontally and with the concentrated rays of the Arctic sun beating down, I could not keep my eyes open. Instantly, I fell into a deep sleep, hoping not to dream of the waiting icy nightmare ahead, called The Bering Sea.
A hand pressing my ankle awakened me. Hathoot was gripping it. I checked my watch. Almost three hours had passed. The Zodiac droned on. The ship ran at full speed not a hundred yards to our starboard side. I checked under the tarp. Both boys stared back out at me. I gave them the quintessentially American thumbs-up sign and then joined Hathoot, whose pain had returned. His bullet wound needed flushing, bandaging, and then a lengthy round of antibiotics. To do that job properly, I had little or nothing.
“Call them,” he told me, cupping his hands to be heard over the sound of the outboard.
It was time to reconnect. As usual, the Lebanese was right.
“Number one, are you there?” I asked.
“I’m here,” she responded, instantly.
“We’re coming to the end of the bay. Have you got Don or Dutch handy?”
I waited for a moment.
“I’ve got Andre here,” the Basque replied.
“Indy, it’s me,” Don said.
It was good to hear the man’s distinctive voice, and it was better to think of him as safe.
“We’re in trouble over here,” I belabored the obvious.
“Ya think!” he replied, then laughed with the Basque.
I concluded that they were just a bit too jaded by the spy business to which I had introduced them. Our situation in the Zodiac was not dire, but it soon would be. The dark mass gathering at the horizon when I had fallen asleep was now almost dead ahead. It was blowing from the north, so it would be pushing large swells in front of it.
“We’re having a meeting of the Mouseketeers in a few minutes,” Don advised me.
“Okay, keep me posted,” I answered.
They were going to put their heads together, although I could not think of one rational course of action that might help us. At a loss, I distributed sandwiches to the boys under the tarp. Hathoot refused one. His lack of appetite was due to the morphine. So I gave him water instead. He didn’t want to drink it, but I made him. Dehydration was already evident in the lines across his face and in the torpor of his movements.
Minutes later we passed out of the bay and into the Bering Sea. It proved to be everything I had feared. The wind was the worst. We wouldn’t be able to keep up with the ship for long. Filipe dropped off the throttle, backed the boat down near idle, then crossed over the Lindy’s port wake. He gunned the outboard until we were back on plane and running near full speed. I was amazed to find that the Zodiac was running in relatively smooth water. The Lindy’s stern was only a few yards from us! We were
running right atop the prop wash of her big double screws.
It seemed a wildly dangerous place to be, yet it allowed us to keep pace with the ship. Filipe had to play with the throttle constantly, as the tremendous force of the moving waters changed direction repeatedly. I was relieved that there was no wind, but I knew our respite was only temporary. It was many hours to United States waters, and we’d exhaust our fuel long before we ever reached that safe harbor.
I could see no ship of any kind. No helicopters, although that was deceptive. Helicopters could fly extremely high, even out of hearing range, while still keeping us under surveillance. Nothing could be done about the Churkin or her choppers; nothing that Kessler was not already doing, anyway. We bobbed and weaved in the wake of the Lindy, our allies meeting in Don’s room to consider our fate. The Zodiac was on a perilous journey.
Either our friends would somehow rescue us or the five of us would die together.
CHAPTER FIFTY:
Crossing the Rubicon
The ship’s fantail had been abandoned in the Lindy’s pell-mell run for the open sea. After a while, heads reappeared over the high lip of its solid steel railing.
“Indy, how are you doin’ down there?” I heard Don yell into his radio.
I responded as best I could. The ship was throwing up such a jumbled wake that Filipe had everything he could do to hold us in close. The swells of the Bering Sea had grown to thirty feet or more. The wind howled past, even in the lee created by the large vessel’s passage before us.
Both boys and Hathoot were sick. Vomit was strewn everywhere. Small bits of sandwich bread invaded every part of the Zodiac’s deck. None of us could have stayed within the craft’s great rubber tubes without holding fast to the multiple ropes tied to rungs all around its interior.
“I guess you can see,” I said in return.
I was not ill, but I was worried to death. I wanted to say more, but Don and Dutch, standing together, both pointed at the same time. Their fingers were extended at an angle high in the air, over our stern. I traced their trajectory.
A Russian helicopter hovered a hundred yards behind us, holding at about fifty feet above the highest passing swells.
“How far to U.S. waters?” I said into the radio.
If the helicopter was from the heavy cruiser, and it could really be from nowhere else, I thought, then the Russian ship had to be within forty miles of us, give or take a few miles. With dual turbines running at flank speed, it would be gaining fast. The Lindy’s speed had not varied, but its shape was too rounded to make more than twenty-five miles per hour. Its hull had been designed for multiple uses. It was built for going close in to shorelines and breaking thin ice. Its purpose was not to outrun other marine vessels. On the other hand, the Churkin was expressly built to do exactly that.
I had wanted the Mouseketeers to come up with some plan to stop or slow the ship. I no longer wanted that. If we stopped dead in the water, then the cruiser would overtake us in Russian waters before we could get aboard, and before the Lindy could return to maximum speed.
“Forty-eight miles,” Don reported, over the radio.
I calculated as best I could. We were making twenty-two to twenty-three miles an hour, or maybe a bit more. The heavy cruiser would be running at around thirty-three to thirty four knots, possibly a little less due to the high swells, but then we were running in a trough once again. Thirty-three knots converted to thirty-eight miles per hour. Maybe a tad more. We might make U.S. waters in a bit over two hours. The Russian ship would also arrive there at about the same time.
Plenty of variables were in play, but a good bookie would put our chances at no better than fifty-fifty. Plus, territorial limits were fairly interpretive at sea. The Russians might not honor admiralty rules. I guessed the cruiser’s captain to be an honorable man, but I had pushed him close to any limits he might have had. Of that I was certain.
The helicopter swooped in closer. So close that we could hear the roar of its great main rotor. The pilot of the craft was taking some risk. The ocean was not much of problem. The swells were slow, when compared to his capability to maneuver, but the wind made close-in work very tricky.
I examined the chopper. It did not require much scrutiny, however. It was a Mi-28. NATO forces called it the “Havoc,” and that nickname told anybody all they needed to know. It had two kinds of anti-tank missiles. And a turret-mounted chain gun that was fully armored, not that that made any difference to us.
Finding the ugly raptor of death far out over the ocean was a big surprise. It was not, after all, a Navy helicopter. It was not one of the choppers that had airlifted in the commandos to The Isle of the Tsar. Just as I was puzzling over why that combat aircraft had made no threatening gestures toward the ship, it fired a series of rounds from its nose turret. Bullets flew in a golden stream off to the Lindys starboard. The sound was deafening, the roar of some huge metal machine running murderously amok for what seemed like a lot longer than a few seconds.
On the fantail, Don and Dutch had both ducked down behind the metal railing. Its thin steel offered no protection at all from the armor piercing ammo the Havoc was firing.
“Whom are they shooting at?” Don stammered over the radio.
It was a good question. The bridge was three hundred feet forward. Why was the helicopter shooting from the rear, along the starboard side of the hull? If I had been the pilot, I would have positioned my chopper off the bow, then fired on a diagonal or perpendicular to the ship’s movement. That threat would have been entirely obvious and the Captain of the ship would have gotten a clear signal that would be impossible to misinterpret.
Then it dawned on me. The helicopter was not from the cruiser. It was from somewhere outside Provideniya. It had to be. They were trying to get our Zodiac to lay to. The pilot was on the radio with forces in Provideniya. Only they knew about the Zodiac and the passengers it held. The cruiser was not likely to know, not unless they were a whole lot better at communications between services than I knew to be the case. The Mi-28 was fast, protected, well-armed, and highly maneuverable. But it was, with its two low-thermal turbines, terrible on fuel consumption. The chopper was a long way from where it had taken off.
Filipe stared at me, his features white and drawn. I knew he was not seasick. The chopper could kill us all so quickly and effectively that Don and Dutch witnessing such an event would have little memory of what had happened to us. I shook my head slowly at Filipe. He continued in his attempts to control the Zodiac’s wild gyrations. I hung on.
It took ten minutes and three more expenditures of chain gun rounds for the chopper to give up. After enduring such intensity, I was perspiring profusely when it finally banked and headed back for the Chukotka Peninsula.
I exchanged smiles with Filipe. The boys and Hathoot were beyond caring about such things, their motion sickness so severe. We then ran uninterrupted for almost two full hours. At two hours exactly on the Breguet’s face, our ship stopped. Our shock was total.
Filipe ran the Zodiac right into the stern of the ship. The inflatable struck, then veered off to one side. There the wind caught us. We literally flew through the air, landing in a trough between two huge swells, with the Lindy coasting away over the back of our stern. The outboard died with the impact of our strike.
Filipe struggled to restart it. We had all been saved because of how hard we had all been hanging on to the ropes. It was difficult to believe that no one had gone overboard.
The outboard finally started. If I had not been holding tight to the interior lines, I would have knelt to God and thanked Him for the Mercury Marine Company.
I calculated that we had reached U.S. waters, but could not understand why that had caused Kessler to shut his engines completely. His huge diesels were not even running at idle. The sea was rough. It was very dangerous to be exposed to a storm at sea without power. Don and Dutch had retreated from th
e fantail with the multiple firings of the chopper’s chain gun. They had not returned. I pulled out my small radio.
“Don, what’s going on? This is Indy.”
I waited. Filipe ran the Zodiac up to the access hatch on the port side.
We did not have long to wait. The door swung open. Benito propped it wide, until the wind caught it and plastered it against the side of the hull. She motioned for us to come aboard. I looked up the length of the hull to see if anyone was hanging over the railings. I could see no one. I pulled the O’Donnely boy out, then Ivan. I helped them through the door from the bobbing Zodiac. Benito hoisted them aboard like the large children they appeared to be. I cupped my hands and yelled.
“Nobody can see them. Get them down to the bilge. Dutch knows where.”
She nodded at me, as if she knew the whole plan intimately.
Filipe eased the Zodiac out from the Lindy and then made a large circular approach. On the outside of that run I looked up at the ship, shocked to see the Mouseketeer flag atop the mast. What did that mean? Why was it flying now, with everything we had gone through? Then we were backing into the hull of the ship just below the door. Filipe guessed that we would not be able to get Hathoot up over the big rubber tubes and in through the hatch. The rear of the Zodiac was lower, so both he and I could stand on the flat deck to hoist him up, which is what we did.
Don appeared at the entrance, helping Benito get the small, heavy man aboard.
“Get him to the infirmary,” I ordered Benito. “I’ll be right down there.”
My eyes went up and over Felipe to fasten on the form of a large, fast-moving ship. The cruiser had found us. I motioned to Filipe with my right hand. He came aboard.
Gloria materialized from nowhere to hug him tightly. The Zodiac was tied to the bottom rung of the hatch, which hung open. How, I pondered, would we ever get the inflatable aboard? With the Russian Cruiser now heaving off our port bow, we had bigger problems than saving an inflatable.
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