Countdown km-2

by David Hagberg

  The ship stank of burned diesel fuel, wood, fabric, and paint. Water dripped everywhere.

  “I don’t know what that Greek skipper wants with this wreck” Tanner said as they made their way aft to the broad opening into the saloon.

  “There’s nothing left to salvage. The hull itself is probably warped beyond repair” The afternoon sun slanted into the interior of the ship.

  All the wood paneling had been burned off the bulkheads, exposing the bare aluminum. The furniture was mostly ashes, and the deck had buckled upward in some spots at least eight inches.

  A half a mile to their south the Hormone-B helicopter was hovering a few hundred feet above the water. Tanner, who was a much smaller man than Lawson (slightly built men were assigned DSRV duty), looked over his shoulder. “I wonder how much those bastards know”

  “Probably about as much as we do at this moment” Lawson replied. “Not a whole hell of a lot” They went into the saloon.

  “I’ll check the flooding below” Lawson said. They could hear the steady roar Of the gasoline-driven dewatering pumps below and smell the exhaust. “Right” Tanner said, stepping carefully through the debris forward to the galley, radio room, and owner’s stateroom, all of them mostly gutted.

  There was nothing here. The crew Of the Lorrel-E had already been aboard and they’d reported finding no bodies. So what the hell had happened to the crew? Tanner asked himself.

  Turning, he went back into the saloon and was about to call Lawson when he spotted something half buried in the debris of what had probably been a long couch built over an airconditioning duct.

  He shoved aside the burned fabric and wooden frame, and then had to bend back a section of the ductwork to expose a small metal cylinder, perhaps a couple of inches in diameter and no more than eight or ten inches long. Whatever it was, it didn’t belong here. It had apparently survived the intense heat because it had been protected by the bulk of the couch and the ductwork itself. Tanner picked it out of the debris and brushing it off took it outside onto the afterdeck where there was more light.

  Some lettering was stamped into the side of the cylinder it took him a minute to clean enough of the dirt away to read what it said, and his blood suddenly ran cold. “Jesus Christ” he swore softly. “Oh, Jesus Tanner spun on his heel. “Lawson” he shouted. “Tom, topside … on the double, man”

  COMSUBMED OPERATIONS

  Reid handed the encrypted phone to Admiral Delugio.

  “It’s Wells. He sounds … shook up” Now that the Soviet guided missile cruiser had shown up, Operations was alive with activity. Wells had sent out a helo, to which the Russians had made absolutely no response, so far. But they were walking a tight wire every time American and Soviet naval forces were this close together. Now, with a missing attack submarine on their hands, the Pentagon was nervous. “What’s the problem, Charlie” Delugio asked. “Is it the Russians”

  “No, Admiral, they’re behaving themselves” Wells said. Delugio could hear that the man was definitely shaken. “Take it easy. Now, what’s going on out there”

  “I think we’ve got very big trouble, sir”

  “I’m listening” Delugio said, his jaw tightening. “I sent my exec and my DSRV driver over to the Zenzero. They just got back. Randy …

  Lieutenant Tanner … found something aboard. In the main saloon. “Go ahead”

  “It’s a cylinder small, thick-walled. There are markings. Christ, Admiral, the cylinder came from the Army’s proving grounds in Dugway”

  Something clutched at Delugio’s gut. “Any idea what it contained”

  “Yes, sir. Labun. It’s a nerve gas. The cylinder is empty “

  Delugio closed his eyes. “Run it out for me, Charlie. All the way”

  “Terrorists, Admiral. I think the Indianapolis has been hijacked by terrorists”

  EAST BERLIN

  More than any other city in the world, the capital study in of the failing German Democratic Republic was a stark contrasts. In many respects it was very much like the Berlin before the war, yet there was an Eastern Bloc drabness to the streets and squat buildings. The three-hundred-foot-wide boulevard, Unter den Linden, had been completely rebuilt from the rubble and was the showcase of Eastern Europe It was colossal by any standard; along it a monstrous television tower with restaurant and observation deck rose high above the citykarl Marx Allee, Marx Engels Square, and Leninplatz (all roads led to Leninplatz) were shining and brand-new, filled with activity. Trolley cars ran on polished tracks. Bratwursts were wrapped in paper, not plastic. And there was absolutely no litter anywhere.

  But East Berlin was a city of relative darkness. From almost anywhere in or around the city, you could see the night glow of West Berlin.

  A couple of blocks off any modern street or square (and there weren’t many of them) you were plunged backward forty-five years, to buildings that still carried the scars of the war. Windows bricked or boarded up.

  Narrow cobblestone streets. Machine gun holes in stone walls…

  McGarvey, using his Kurshin identification, crossed into the eastern sector of Berlin on the Friedrichstrasse a few minutes after 6:00 in the evening.

  On the American side the officials were distantly polite, but on the DDR side, the soldiers were almost obsequious. His bag was not searched. The cabbie dropped him off at the Palast Hotel, then turned and headed immediately back to the western sector. Inside, McGarvey had a drink at the bar, then headed on foot around the huge Alexanderplatz, where behind the Sparkasse-the savings bank-he found the little two-door Fiat Trotter had promised would be waiting for him, the keys in the tailpipe.

  He had driven directly over to the working-class district of Prenzlauder Berg, parking the car on the street in front of a very shabby apartment block.

  The flat that had been set up for him was on the third floor and looked down on the narrow street. It was well stocked with food, drink, and Russian-made clothing that was his size. A very old black-and-white television set squatted heavily on a small table next to the window, the antenna cable snaking through the window frame up to an aerial on the roof.

  Changing clothes and grabbing a quick bite to eat, McGarvey left the apartment a little after 10:00, taking the Leninallee directly out of the city, a few miles to the east, before turning south toward the Grosser Miiggelsee. As he drove, traffic light and in some areas nonexistent at this hour, he lit a Russian cigarette from a pack he’d found in the apartment.

  It was half cardboard filter and tasted terrible, but it was Kurshin’s brand It would be a full forty-eight hours before he came this way again. They had figured it would be too dangerous for him to bring his own weapon across the border, and there was no gun in the apartment. Two days and nights, however, was too long to wait, unarmed. Too many things could go wrong. He came down through Tierpark and Lichtenberg, past the huge Pioneer Palace that the Russians had built not so long ago, crossing the Spree River once into Treptow and again toward K6penick along the southern shore of the big lake. This far from the city, the night was very dark, although still to the northwest he could make out the glow on the horizon that was West Berlin, and almost directly west he watched as a jetliner came in for a landing at East Berlin’s Schenefeld Airport. He was alone now. This time absolutely alone. There would be no help for him from any of the East German networks that the Agency maintained, nor would he be able to run for the American Embassy on the Neustadtische Kirschstrasse. He would be denied. At this point he was no longer an American citizen. He was a Russian. The Americans and West Germans would shoot him if he tried to force his way back, and the Russians and East Germans would certainly arrest him if they discovered he was an impostor. But the prize was definitely worth the risk. Baranov was coming. And for that man McGarvey’s hate burned like a supernova in his gut. It was a constant that he had lived with for nearly two years.

  The K6penick highway branched off, the larger road heading into the town, the much smaller road running north a few miles to the lake.
The forest was thick here, the pine trees crowding in on the narrow highway.

  McGarvey slowed down. Somewhere in the woods to the east he thought he could see lights, but then he lost them. He figured it was probably a house along the lakeshore. Baranov’s retreat was directly across the lake, perhaps a mile and a half or two, yet already McGarvey was getting the old feeling of the man’s presence. Baranov was a force, there was no denying that.

  Near the water’s edge the paved road ended in a gravel lane that ran completely around the lake. McGarvey stopped his car, switched off the headlights, and got out. There was absolutely no sound here, except for the Fiat’s idling engine, and his own footfalls on the gravel. He walked a few yards away from the car to a spot where he could see the lake through a break in the woods.

  Across the water he could see the lights of a few houses on the north shore, but nothing moved on the lake. Thursday night he would take the boat halfway across, don the oxygen rebreathing equipment that was waiting for him, and swim the rest of the way underwater to the shore below Baranov’s house.

  He turned after a minute or two and looked back the way he had come. He was not being followed. Lorraine was safely back in West Berlin … or she was as safe as she could be anywhere. She would not have come across. She had not followed him this time. She had given him her word.

  He believed her … or he hoped he did.

  Back in his car he drove without lights another half mile, finding the driveway back down to the small cabin and boathouse on the lake that Trotter had described for him. He turned the car around in the narrow driveway, so that it was pointed back up toward the lake road, then got out and hurried down to the boathouse, where he held up in the darkness for a moment.

  There was no one here. The night was still. Not even a wind rustled in the trees or rippled the surface of the lake. Using the key Trotter had supplied him, he unlocked the boathouse and slipped inside. Immediately he could smell gasoline, rotting wood, and something else. Something old and musty.

  He switched on his penlight. A small motorboat floated in its slip, tied to the narrow walkway. A wooden garage door covered the opening to the lake. There was virtually no possibility that his light would be seen by anyone on the north shore; nevertheless he moved quickly. Stepping down into the boat he found the two weapons wrapped in plastic and stuffed in the bilge, along with another package that contained the Russian-made rebreathing equipment. Plulling out the Graz Buyra, he loaded it, screwed the Kevlar silencer tube on the end of the stubby barrel, and cycled a round into the firing chamber. No matter what happened now, he told himself as he relocked the boathouse and hurried back up to his car, he would not be caught here in the eastern zone with his back against the wall.

  WEST BERLIN

  Lorraine Abbott had gone to the telephone three times with the intention of calling Roland Murphy in Washington and demanding that McGarvey be pulled off this ridiculous assignment. Each time, however, something stayed her hand. it was late. Well after midnight. She sat smoking a cigarette by the window, looking down at the traffic on the Ku’damm. Berlin, like any large city, never slept. The Ku’damm was the busiest of all streets in the western zone. Here were the cabarets and nightclubs, the shops and boutiques, and the sex stores and theaters.

  Absolutely anything could be had on the Ku’damm. Except, she thought bitterly, salvation. But the fact of the matter was she had somehow fallen in love with a murderer. All of her rationalizations that he was no different from a soldier killing on orders in time of war had completely broken down for her. She was left, then, with the crazy idea that somehow she could change him. If she could stop him this time, there might not be another. His past, she figured, she could live with.

  it was his future … their future that she could not imagine.

  She had been a pragmatist all of her life. Except for her science, most of her creativity seemed to have been stifled, especially in her relationships with people … with men. She had always been the odd lot out in school. She was goodlooking, she understood this with no vanity, and yet she’d been told on more than one occasion that she was unapproachable. “You’re an intellectual snob” Lawrence Givens, her former fiance, had said to her a year ago. “Does it bother you’” she’d shot back. “Not particularly. Because you and I are cut out of the same cloth. You’re a good physicist and you know it. Just as I know that I’m a damned good surgeon”

  “But” Weren’t there almost always buts?

  “But I’m also a man. You might try being a woman. At least once in a while”

  “Go to hell” she’d replied good-naturedly, but the comment had stung, all the more so for its truth. Larry was a snob, and she didn’t like that aspect of his personality. For an instant she had looked into a mirror and had seen that she was a snob as well. With McGarvey she felt like a woman all of a sudden. The story she had told him about the palm reader when she was a little girl was mostly a lie, but it had seemed right at the moment she’d told him. In a way it was a justification to herself for being with him. Now she was frightened. Not only for him, but of him, and most of all she was frightened for herself, because she had no idea where she was going. He was a murderer. But if she forced her way into helping him she could very well be the cause of his death.

  She was a scientist, trained in analytical thinking. But this time she had no way out, so in the end she had been incapable of doing anything.

  Someone knocked at her door, and she looked up, her cigarette hand stopped in midair. “Who is it” she called out, getting up and stubbing out the cigarette.

  “We’re from the consulate, Doctor Abbott” a man said. “There is a message for you from Mr. McGarvey. It’s most urgent. “Oh, God” she cried, and she rushed to the door where she hurriedly undid the security chain and twisted the deadbolt. The door was suddenly pushed open, shoving her backward nearly off her feet. She got the impression of two very large men barging into the room, their guns drawn, and then something was pressed against her face, the smell cloying in its sweetness, and she was drifting.

  WASHINGTON

  Director of Central Intelligence Roland Murphy was on his way home when the telephone in his limousine burred softly. He reached forward tiredly and picked it up. “Yes”

  “Eagle one calls. Authentication is alpha-alpha-seven-zero-niner.

  Murphy’s gut tightened. Eagle one was the president. The use of an authentication code meant a situation of extreme importance was in progress. “Hold” Murphy said, fumbling with the leather bound code book.

  He found the proper date and cycle. The code matched”

  Zebra-two-seven, he gave the counter code, and the connection was broken.

  He powered down the Lexan dividing window. His bodyguard, Preston Luney, riding shotgun, turned around. “Sir”

  “Get me over to the White House, Preston. On the double. West gate”

  They were just crossing the river on the Key Bridge. His driver jammed his foot to the floor and the big Cadillac shot forward past the slower moving traffic, squealing tires as he turned sharply onto the Whitehurst Freeway. The president had so far withheld his authorization for McGarvey to hit Baranov. By now everything would be in place in East Berlin. Had something gone wrong? It was possible that McGarvey had been discovered in the eastern zone. The Russians, of course, would make a big stink of it. Big enough, he wondered, for the president to go to such extraordinary measures of using a coding system that had been designed to alert key people in time of war? He didn’t think so. Not that. Not yet. But what then? He had a bad feeling that the coming hours were going to be anything but pleasant. They were admitted without delay through the west gate a few minutes later. It was just 8,00 Pm.

  Murphy’s bodyguard went with him up the stairs and into the West Hall where they were met by one of the president’s Secret Service people who took them without a word to the elevator just off Center Hall, and punched the down button. “Is he in the situation room” Murphy asked.

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bsp; “Yes, sir” the Secret Service agent said, his jaw set. In the sub-basement they were met by two more Secret Service people, who escorted Murphy across to the bombproof door, which opened immediately for him, and he stepped inside, the door closing with a heavy thump of finality. Luney waited in the anteroom. The president was seated at the end of the long conference table, in shirtsleeves, his tie loose. To his left were Secretary of State James Baldwin, his dapper vest and suitcoat properly buttoned; and Director of the National Security Agency Sterling Miller, his leonine head bent over a thick report he was studying intently. Across from the president were Joint Chief Admiral Stewart O’Malley, in uniform, and his JC. Vice Admiral, Taylor Barnes. At the far end of the room two Air Force officers manned the communications and display consoles.

  Murphy got the definite impression that they were in crisis here. It only bothered him that he’d heard nothing all day. We’ve got ourselves a hell of a problem this time, Roand” the president said, looking up.

  Murphy slipped into his seat across the table. “What has happened”

  “Apparently someone has snatched one of our nuclear submarines”

  The DCI was stunned into silence. His first thought was Baranov and Kurshin. But God in heaven, how was such a thing possible?

  “My reaction exactly” the president said heavily. He glanced at Admiral O’Malley. “Give him the short version, Stewart”

  “At 0300 Zulu yesterday morning, our attack submarine Indianapolis detected what she took to be a weak SOS signal from an Italian-registered pleasure vessel about one hundred miles off Sixth Fleet Headquarters at Gaeta. That was the last word we got from her. She simply disappeared without a trace … until thirty minutes ago”