The Solomon Effect

by C. S. Graham

“Her command of the language is certainly better than yours ever was,” said Andrei, his gaze still on Tobie. “Tell me, Ensign, did you learn Russian before or after your psychiatric discharge from the Navy?”

  “Before.”

  She said it calmly enough, although Jax knew that psychiatric discharge was a sensitive subject with her. Which was, of course, why Andrei mentioned it. Andrei was very good at finding sore points and pressing on them.

  “That’s the only reason you’re here?”

  Jax said, “What other reason could there be?”

  Rather than answer, Andrei said, “You do realize, of course, that if there ever was any gold on that U-boat, it’s not there anymore?”

  It was common knowledge among Russians that when the militia investigated a robbery, anything the thieves missed, the militia took. Jax said, “It’s not the gold I want. I want the guys who hired that salvage ship in the first place.”

  “You mean, your terrorists?” Andrei blew out a lungful of smoke, his eyes narrowing with what looked like amusement. “I think there’s something on that U-boat you need to see.”

  Jax pushed away from the window. “If you’ll just point us to the local rent-a-car people, we’ll be on our—”

  “You forget; I know you, Jax.” Andrei took a final drag on his cigarette and ground it out on the ashtray beside him. “Which means you go to the shipyard in my car, or you don’t go. It’s that simple.”

  19

  “You didn’t expect it to really be here, did you?” said Tobie, shouting to be heard over the roar of wind and rain. “The U-boat, I mean.”

  They were standing beneath a short overhang at the rear of the terminal, waiting for Andrei to bring up his car. Jax squinted at the angry gray clouds roiling overhead. “Stop gloating.”

  “Why? Gloating is fun.” She cast a quick glance around and lowered her voice. “Can we talk here?”

  “Carefully.”

  “I’ll be careful. Can you tell me why in God’s name the Russians are being so nice and cooperative?”

  “It has nothing to do with being nice, and everything to do with the fact they think we know something they don’t, and they want to find out what that something is.”

  “But you already told them everything.”

  “You don’t actually think Andrei believed me, do you?”

  “Why wouldn’t he?”

  Jax snorted. “The first lesson you need to learn in this business is, Don’t believe anything you’re told.”

  “By anyone?”

  “Anyone. Including your own government.” He thought about it a minute. “Make that, especially your own government.”

  “So how do we know what we’ve been told about this U-boat is true?”

  “We don’t. I was told it’s true. That doesn’t mean it’s not bullshit.”

  “Well, that’s comforting.” She burrowed her cold hands deeper into the pockets of her jacket. “So what’s the second lesson?”

  “The second lesson? Don’t expect anyone to believe anything you tell them.”

  She stared across the parking lot to where Andrei was talking to a guard. “You think that could be why he’s taking us to look at the U-boat? Because he doesn’t think you’ll believe him if he just tells you about it?”

  “Partially.”

  She watched the Russian step off the curb and walk briskly toward them, his leather jacket flaring open to reveal the Makarov pistol in a shoulder holster beneath it. She said, “I don’t think I’d like to cross that guy.”

  “You don’t. Not if you want to live to tell about it. People who cross Andrei have a nasty habit of turning up dead.”

  She was silent for a moment. “You said that to scare me.”

  “Yeah. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Just remember: you’re here as the woo-woo specialist. I do the talking. Understand?”

  She ducked her head and pulled an imaginary forelock. “I’ll try to remember my place, Sahib. You want I should walk three steps behind you, Sahib?”

  A big silver sedan swung in close to the curb and stopped. Gone were the days of Zhigulis and Ladas; Andrei’s car was a shiny new S-Class Mercedes, with a stocky, round-faced driver who looked like he might have come out of the steppes of Asia with the Golden Horde.

  Jax reached to open the door for her. “Just let me do the talking, okay?”

  But she just gave him a wide smile and slid into the car.

  Rodriguez stood with eyes narrowed against the strengthening rain and watched as the target from the CIA ducked into the Mercedes across the street. Beside him, Clay Dixon lowered the visor on his motorcycle helmet and started his Kawasaki 750ii.

  “Salinger and I will stay behind you,” said Rodriguez. “Keep the tail loose. When we figure out what’s going on, then we can decide when and where to make the hit.”

  Dixon nodded.

  Rodriguez waited until the Mercedes pulled out into the light traffic, then stepped back. “Go.”

  Sliding into the passenger seat of the Range Rover, he said to Salinger, “Follow Dixon. But keep your distance.”

  “Who the hell is this Russkie?” said Salinger, dropping in three cars behind the Kawasaki.

  “I don’t know. But whoever he is, he’s damned important. You should have seen the way everyone in the airport was scrambling to do what he told them.”

  “So why’s he with our CIA guy?”

  “Because life is never easy.” Rodriguez unwrapped a new piece of gum and shoved it in his mouth.

  They followed Dixon out of the airport and onto the hopeless excuse for a road that passed as a highway in Kaliningrad.

  “Shit,” he said as the Mercedes turned away from the city, toward the northwest. “The sonofabitch is taking them to the shipyard.”

  Beside him, Salinger grunted. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll trip the booby trap on the U-boat and blow themselves to hell.”

  “What part of ‘life is never easy’ did you miss?”

  “You never know; we might get lucky.”

  Rodriguez laughed. “We might.” He checked his watch, figured out the time difference in Washington, then put in a call to Boyd anyway.

  “What is it?” said the General. His voice was low and icy, but he sounded instantly awake.

  “Things are not going as well as we’d expected. The representative from Washington arrived in Kaliningrad this morning.”

  “I thought someone was dealing with this guy in Berlin.”

  “We haven’t been able to contact our man in Berlin to ascertain exactly what went wrong. It’s not a problem; we’ll deal with him here. There’s just one detail that requires clarification.”

  “Yes?”

  “The representative from Washington has joined up with another individual who flew in from Copenhagen. A woman. You didn’t tell us about her.”

  “I didn’t know about her.”

  “Her name is October Guinness,” said Rodriguez. The information had been easily obtained from the sulky, green-eyed woman with spiked hair and well-developed capitalistic instincts who worked behind the Scandinavian Airlines counter. In the New Russia, anything and everything was for sale.

  “I’ll see what I can find out about her,” said Boyd. “Where are these individuals now?”

  “They were picked up by a Russian escort. An official Russian escort. We’re following them.”

  “I want this guy taken care of by nightfall. Even if you have to take out a few Russians to do it.”

  “Understood,” said Rodriguez, closing his phone with a snap.

  Salinger threw him a quick glance. “We really going to kill the Russians?”

  “Those guys? Not if I can help it. But if we have to…” Rodriquez clipped his phone onto his belt and shrugged. “People don’t disappoint Boyd and live.”

  Washington, D.C.

  General Boyd pushed up from the edge of his bed at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel and went to pour himself a drink. He stood for a moment
, his gaze on the dark and quiet streets of the city spread out below. Then he reached for his phone and punched in a number.

  It rang four times before a colonel named Sam Lee picked it up, his voice slurred by sleep and confusion. “Hello?”

  “Lee? Boyd here. I need you to do something for me.”

  20

  Jax noticed the Kawasaki behind them as they were pulling out of the airport. It might not mean anything—after all, there weren’t that many roads in Kaliningrad, and the rider wasn’t exactly being careful about keeping close to them. Then again, he could be part of Andrei’s escort. Chase riders were no longer as necessary in Russia as they had been in the wild, lawless days after the breakup of the Soviet Union, but they were still common. Jax noticed Andrei casting one or two glances behind, before looking away.

  They drove through thick, desolate pine forests interspersed with flat empty fields that lay dark and sodden beneath the leaden sky. Turning sideways in the passenger seat, Andrei shook a cigarette out of his pack and said, “So where exactly did you learn your Russian, Ensign?”

  Jax was aware of October casting him a questioning glance, but he only raised his eyebrows. She cleared her throat and said, “I spent a semester in Moscow, when I was nineteen.”

  “A semester only? And you learned our language so well? No wonder the CIA finds you useful.”

  She wisely let that slide, saying only, “I’ve never been to Kaliningrad Oblast, though.”

  Andrei stuck a cigarette between his lips and fumbled in his pocket for his lighter. “Until recently, no one was allowed in Kaliningrad Oblast. It was a closed military area. Kaliningrad is the only ice-free port in Russia, you know.”

  “Not to mention the fact that it’s within such easy striking distance of so many European capitals,” said Jax.

  Andrei laughed, his eyes narrowing against the smoke as he drew on his cigarette. “That, too. I’m afraid the breakup of the Soviet Union has been hard on Kaliningrad Oblast. Military expenditure used to be the mainstay of the economy, but no longer. And when you add to that the fact that Poland and Lithuania have both closed their borders to us, making the Oblast an exclave…” He shrugged his shoulders again. “Many of the people here have been forced to turn to smuggling, just to survive.”

  “And to salvaging U-boats?” said Jax.

  “So it would seem.”

  He gazed out the window at the ruins of an old brick farmhouse. Beyond it he could see the skeleton of a barn, its rafters etched stark against the white sky and bare except for a couple of giant storks’ nests. They had passed many such abandoned homes—entire villages even—their walls crumbling, a tangle of trees growing up from within the ruins of houses, castles, ancient churches.

  “Look, there’s another one,” said Tobie. “Why do I keep seeing all these empty villages and farms?”

  Andrei took a deep drag on his cigarette and exhaled slowly. “They are old,” he said. “From before the war.”

  “What you’re seeing,” said Jax, “is one of the twentieth century’s dirty little secrets. Until the end of the Second World War, this used to be part of Germany. Then Churchill and Roosevelt gave it to Russia, and Stalin ‘cleansed’ it of its original Prussian inhabitants. The ones who were lucky managed to flee west, ahead of the Red Army. The rest were either shot or sent to slave labor camps in Siberia. Stalin brought in Russians to replace them, but the population today is still under a million—which is less than a third of what it once was. And they’re all Russians.”

  He was aware of October staring solemnly as they swept past another overgrown field with a jumble of collapsed walls beyond it. It was one thing to read about “border adjustments,” and something else entirely to look at the ruins of what was once someone’s home.

  “I can see you’re shocked, Ensign,” said Andrei, his voice rough. “You think we are butchers. Inhuman. Yet you Americans did it to your Native Indians, just as the Israelis are doing it today to the Moslems and Christians of Palestine. If history teaches us one thing, it is this: ethnic cleansing works.”

  They topped a ridge, and the flat, silver waters of the Baltic Sea opened up suddenly before them. In the lee of the slight rise lay a sheltered cove lined with the weathered docks of an old shipyard, its vast wharves stretching out eerily empty beneath the cloud-filled sky. A shabby metal office building stood just below the crest of the hill, fronting a narrow, rutted road that wound down to the row of warehouses lining the docks. Jax could see three blue and white militia vans parked next to a dusty white pickup behind the office.

  He felt a disconcerting chill run up his spine. Everything was much as October had drawn it, except that the office and rocky point were on the left, when she’d drawn them to the right.

  “It’s backwards,” he whispered, leaning in close to her.

  She sat forward, her gaze riveted on the scene below. And he found himself wondering what it must be like, actually seeing in person what she’d previously reached out and touched with her mind. “That happens sometimes,” she said softly. “The brain gets so used to reversing the images we get from our eyes that it sometimes reverses what you ‘see’ in a viewing.”

  Andrei frowned. “You’ve seen this place before?”

  Jax shook his head. “Only in pictures.”

  They turned in through the ratty, ten-foot-high wire fence that ran along the road and surrounded the shipyard complex. A dilapidated guard post stood beside the gate, unmanned now. Behind them, the Kawasaki slowed, then continued on up the road. Jax watched it, his eyes narrowing.

  Not a chase rider, after all.

  “It’s an old military facility,” Andrei was saying, “privatized after the navy gave it up ten or fifteen years ago. Now it’s used mainly for unloading shipments of frozen chickens and pork from Brazil—and for smuggling, of course.”

  The Mercedes bumped and swayed over the rutted road that wound down to the wharves. At the far end of a distant jetty, out in deeper water, Jax could see a large, rusty catamaran that rocked gently with the motion of the waves. Rigged with a lifting boom and giant orange buoys, it was obviously a salvage ship. His Russian was just good enough to enable him to spell out the word Yalena, painted in a fading Cyrillic script along the side.

  “Why didn’t you see that?” he said to Tobie in a whisper.

  But she just frowned and threw a warning glance at the back of Andrei’s head.

  The barge bearing U-114 had been pushed in next to the nearest stretch of wharves that fronted the line of warehouses along the shore. The U-boat was much bigger than Jax had expected, a mammoth hulking thing hundreds of feet long, its once sleek hull rusted and thick with the accretions of sixty years beneath the sea. The small tugboat that had been used to push the barge up to the inner docks was still berthed nearby, beside the rigging for the camouflage netting. As they neared the docks, a small yellow crane at the end of the wharf swung into action, lifting a crate from the sub’s open hatch and depositing it onto the back of a nearby flatbed truck. Jax remembered seeing the crane in Tobie’s drawings, but not the tugboat. Why had she seen some things, he wondered, and not others?

  “Pull up here,” Andrei told his driver. With a crunch of gravel, the big Mercedes rolled to a halt behind the nearest warehouse.

  “You’re unloading the U-boat?” said October, her expression solemn as she watched the crane swing back toward the submarine’s deck.

  A militiaman ran forward to open Andrei’s door and saluted smartly. Andrei tucked a bulky file under one arm and stood. “Until the cargo has been inspected and inventoried, we won’t know what we have.”

  Jax thrust open his own door. “And when exactly is Moscow planning to notify Berlin about the sub?”

  The cold wind off the sea swirled a fine white dust around them. Andrei smiled. “When we know what we have.”

  The tide was low, the waves splashing against the exposed supports of the pier and filling the air with the scent of salt and seaweed and rust. Cuttin
g between the warehouses, they walked out onto a weathered wharf littered with stacks of barrels and cargo containers, some so oddly shaped they looked as if they must have been especially built to fit beneath the U-boat’s floor plates or in its torpedo tubing. Every one of the containers showed signs of having been ripped open.

  Jax said, “Were any of these broken into before the militia arrived?”

  “A few, yes. But not many.”

  “So what is all this stuff?”

  “So far we’ve found everything from a disassembled Messerschmitt jet fighter to diplomatic mail and technical drawings.”

  “A fighter?” October had been staring at the rusted hull of the old U-boat, its aft section caved in by depth charges. Now she turned. “Why would the Germans have been sending a fighter to Japan?”

  “So the Japanese could copy it,” said Jax, hunkering down to get a closer look at one of the barrels. “Ever hear of Operation Caesar?”

  “No.”

  “It was a project the Nazis started in late 1944 or early ’forty-five. By that point even Hitler had to admit the war was not going well. Someone in Berlin got the idea that if they could prop up the Japanese, then maybe the Allies would be forced to put more effort into the War in the Pacific—and take some of the heat off Europe.”

  “Prop them up how?”

  “The Germans had made some incredible advances in technology during the war—way ahead of where we were at the time. They started sending the Japanese everything from armor-piercing shells to design plans for missile guidance systems and rockets.”

  “I’ve even heard of Hitler shipping out German scientists and engineers,” said Andrei. His eyes crinkled into what might have been a smile. “But I’ve never heard of the Nazis sending Japan any gold.”

  “Not to Japan,” Jax admitted. He pushed to his feet, his gaze shifting to the old U-boat. The submarine’s wooden decking had long since rotted away, leaving a rough, pitted surface. The original ladder on the conning tower was gone, too. Someone had propped a new one in its place.