Echo of War

by Grant Blackwood

  Gaines dialed the number, waited, then said, “Uh, yeah, Bud Gaines for Sylvia … Albrecht.” Ten seconds passed, then he said, “Yes, ma’am. Yes, he is, hold on.”

  Tanner exchanged the yoke for the phone. “Sylvia, Bud’s got a problem and so do we. If we fix his, he’ll fix ours,” Briggs said, then explained the situation. “Can you make it happen?”

  Sylvia snorted. “If he can get you to the Barak, I’ll pay it off myself. Hell, yes, I can make it happen. Put him back on.”

  Tanner held the phone up to Gaines’s ear, and he listened for a moment, muttered a string of uh-huhs and yes, ma’ams, then finally said, “Whatever you say. I’ll get him there; you have my word.”

  Tanner took the phone back. “Done?”

  “Done,” Sylvia said.

  “I’ll call you when I’m on the ground. I’ll need steering to the Barak.”

  Tanner disconnected and glanced at Gaines. “You’ll be back in Houma before the week is out.”

  Gaines shook his head in disbelief. “I’ll be damned. Hold on to something, I’m gonna try to pick up some speed.”

  45

  Claiming a hydraulic malfunction in his landing gear, Gaines got clearance by Rijeka control to either go around for a second pass or to proceed to Losinj for an emergency landing. Gaines opted for the latter.

  As they descended to two thousand feet and crossed the coast into the Kvarner Gulf, rain began peppering the windows. The wind increased, and into the Adriatic Tanner could see storm clouds roiling over the ocean. Here and there, lightning lanced downward, connecting sky and water.

  The Adriatic Coast is one of the better kept tourist areas outside of Europe. With a climate rivaling that of the Caribbean and landscape to match, Croatia’s coastline is sprinkled with thousands of islands and reef-rimmed atolls ranging in size from three hundred square miles—Cres-Losinj—to tree-covered sandbars no longer than a football field.

  Unije, the island toward which Litzman and the Barak seemed to be heading, is only one of twenty-five in the Cres-Losinj archipelago. Its northern tip begins ten miles from Rijek, extends fifty-five miles southwest into the Kvamer Gulf, and ends at Ilovik Island.

  Twenty miles out from Losinj’s airstrip, Gaines changed frequencies, checked in with the tower, and happily reported his malfunction cured. He circled over Ilovik, banked in a tight circle, and began descending toward the airstrip near Mali Losinj, the island’s main city.

  Five minutes later they set down on the tarmac and taxied toward a groundsman in a yellow rain slicker waving red wands, who directed them to a tie-down beside the main hangar. Once Gaines had the engine shut down, the man jogged up with a pair of wheel chocks. Tanner opened the door and climbed out. A wind gust tore at his face, filling his eyes with salt mist. He sputtered and squinted his eyes.

  “Nice landing, Gaines,” the groundsman yelled over the rush in Croat-accented English.

  “Damn straight!” Gaines shouted back.

  “You’re lucky. Another ten minutes and they were going to shut us down.”

  Tanner and Gaines knelt down to help secure the Cessna. The wings shuddered with the wind and rain sluiced off the leading edges like miniature waterfalls.

  “How is it out there?” Tanner asked the man.

  “Where?”

  Tanner jerked his thumb toward the ocean, and the man said, “Nasty. Seas running about two meters, wind gusts to eighty kilometers.”

  Six-foot waves and fifty-mile-per-hour winds, Tanner thought. He said to Gaines, “Where’s the boat?”

  “Gimme your phone.”

  The taxi dropped them at the Mali Losinj Yacht Club. The harbormaster’s shack and adjoining restaurant and bar were dark, closed early because of the storm. Beyond the gate Tanner could see slip after slip filled with sailboats and motor yachts, all battened down and tied tightly to their moorings. Over the rush of the wind he could hear the squeaking of rubber bumpers grinding against the pilings.

  Five minutes after they arrived, Briggs heard the puttering of a small engine. A man on a Piaggio scooter swerved into the parking lot and skidded to a stop beside them. The driver got off, flipped open the kickstand, slid back his hood, and grabbed Gaines in a bear hug.

  “Filmore, dobra veccer!”

  “How’ve you been, Franjo?”

  “Never better! You said you had an emergency?”

  Gaines began speaking in rapid-fire Croat, gesturing to Tanner several times. Franjo asked a few questions, squinted at Tanner, then shrugged and said, “We’ll see. He can take a look, at least.”

  Franjo opened the gate and the three of them walked along the planking until they reached a slip containing a twelve-foot mastless skipjack painted in battleship gray. The gunwales, gnarled by sea rot, had been covered in multiple layers of marine lacquer, and the hull showed several patched holes. A circa 1950s outboard motor jutted from the stern.

  It wasn’t exactly what Tanner had in mind.

  As though sensing his reservation, Franjo said, “Don’t be fooled. She’s fast and sturdy.”

  “How fast and how sturdy?”

  “Fifteen knots.”

  “In this weather?”

  “Eight. She’s got a keel stabilizer, though. Unless you broadside her, she won’t tip on you.”

  Tanner thought about it. In this rain, he’d be bailing before he got out of the harbor. “Do you have a cover?”

  “Of course, with a waist skirt. Like kayaks, you know? You’ll be snug and dry. All the equipment you’ll need, too.”

  “How much?” Briggs asked.

  “No offense intended, but somehow I am thinking I won’t be getting her back. Three thousand—U.S.”

  It was outrageous, but Tanner didn’t hesitate. “Done. Bud, it’ll have to be on your tab.”

  Gaines hesitated for a moment, then shrugged. “Sure. I’m sure our lady friend is good for it.”

  Franjo said, “Wonderful! Congratulations. How soon do you need—”

  “Now,” Tanner said.

  As Franjo and Bud scrambled to prepare the skipjack, Tanner found shelter under the eaves of the harbormaster’s shack and called Langley. “I’m on my way. Where’s the Barak?”

  “Passing Unije,” Dutcher said.

  Oaken added, “There’s only two other islands before she reaches you: Male Srakane and Veli Srakane, both tiny, mostly uninhabited. The second one’s got a game warden, but not much else.”

  Why there? Tanner thought. What was Litzman up to? “I’ll find them. What’s his ETA?”

  “If he keeps going, another hour.”

  Dutcher broke in. “Briggs, turn on your GPS so we can track you.”

  Tanner reached up, depressed the phone’s antenna, and gave it a turn. “Done. Where’s the Aurasina?”

  “Just passing Premantura on the Istrian tip. Thirty miles north of you.”

  “Speed?”

  “Fourteen knots. Her captain’s pushing hard to stay ahead of the storm.”

  Fourteen knots … just over two hours. No more time. “If you don’t hear from me or see the Barak disappear off the radar screen within two hours, assume I didn’t get it done. Tell Bear to stop the Aurasina.”

  “Good luck,” Dutcher said.

  Aboard the Aurasina, Bear was standing at the railing overlooking the vehicle deck when Dutcher called with the update from Tanner. Below, a pair of crewmen were walking from car to car, testing the tie-down straps. Most of the ferry’s decks were deserted, the passengers having retreated to their cabins.

  “He’s leaving Losinj now,” Dutcher finished. “Unless Litzman changes course, they should meet near one of the Srakane islands.”

  “I’m ready on this end,” Bear said. “I did some scouting. They’ve got two auxiliary machinery rooms; the locks are pretty flimsy. I shouldn’t have a problem slipping in.”

  “And then?” Dutcher asked.

  “A fire hose in the reduction gear
,” Cahil answered. “It’ll either bum out the bearings or shear off a couple torque converters. She’ll be dead in the water.”

  “Good enough. Don’t count on hearing from us; with the storm, communication is going to be dicey. Orders or not, two hours from now, work your magic.”

  “Will do.”

  Cahil disconnected. Behind him, he heard the distinctive click of a gun safety being disengaged. Instinctively, Bear turned on the sat phone’s GPS transponder, detached the antenna, and slid it into his waistband.

  “Turn around,” a voice said. “Slowly.”

  Cahil did so. Standing before him, a Sauer semiautomatic pistol held at waist level, was Risto Trpkova. Beside him, also armed, was one of his men. “What’s this about?” Cahil asked. “I don’t have very much money—”

  “I rarely forget faces. It took some time, but I finally placed yours. Foca, wasn’t it, 1996?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “No?”

  “Sorry,” Cahil said with a shrug.

  “Then why don’t we go someplace and talk about it,” Trpkova said. “We’ll share memories, talk about old times. Then you can tell me why you’ve been following me, and why I shouldn’t shoot you in the head and dump your body overboard.”

  46

  Adriatic, Near Male Srakane

  A quarter mile past the harbor’s breakwater, Tanner realized he was in trouble.

  The skipjack was sturdy enough and her engine strong enough, but the winds were chaotic, backing and shifting with frightening irregularity. Backlit by flashes of lightning, waves slammed explosively into one another, sending up geysers of foam. Swells stacked up on one another, growing taller as the troughs deepened, until the crests reached a dozen feet or more. Tanner would find himself teetering atop a curling crest with no choice but to let the skipjack nose over into the trough, or gun the throttle and hope he had enough velocity to clear the gap.

  Twice, as the skipjack soared from wave top to wave top, Briggs could only watch helplessly as another crest would appear from nowhere and slam into the hull with enough force to knock the wind from his lungs.

  Rain and spindrift cascaded over the boat’s vinyl cover, drenching him and finding every gap in the elastic waist skirt. He could hear water sloshing around the boat’s bottom. Without the skirt he would have already capsized.

  Tanner sensed that the sea was quartering, the swells lengthening, so he took the opportunity to throttle back and take a compass check. He pulled the sat phone from its Ziploc bag then matched his position against the GPS feed from the Lacrosse. It showed the Barak passing Veli Srakane and heading toward its sister island, Male Srakane. He double-checked his bearings, then throttled up and brought the bow around into the next crest.

  Twenty minutes later Tanner was peeping through the spindrift when a double flash of lightning burst across the sky. In the strobe he glimpsed a strip of white sand backed by a line of trees. Another flash and he could make out a curve of the land off the port beam. Male Srakane. He brought the skipjack about to follow the shoreline.

  Suddenly a white mastlight appeared off his bow. He let the skipjack drop into a trough then throttled down. He was close enough to the shallows that the waves were stacking, becoming more regular, so he jockeyed the skip-jack ahead, threading his way from trough to trough. After two hundred yards, he throttled up again, climbed the next crest, and snatched a peek.

  It was the Barak. She was anchored at the mouth of a crescent-shaped cove enclosed by a pair of sandbars covered in scrub pine. On the Barak’s afterdeck, four figures worked under the glow of a spotlight. Tanner looking for other signs of life aboard, but saw none. Where are you, Susanna? he wondered. She was aboard, he told himself. She had to be. If not, it meant Litzman had already disposed of her.

  He pulled the sat phone from his pocket, keyed in a pager message—“Located Barak; pursuing”—and sent it.

  According to Oaken, Male Srakane was all but deserted, occupied only by a game warden who lived on the north side of the island. So why had Litzman anchored here? Unless … Unless he’d stashed something here. It would explain his delayed arrival in Trieste. Wary of a search by Trieste customs, had Litzman dropped his cargo here for later recovery?

  Tanner turned the skipjack stern first into the breakers then let them drive him into the shallows, putting the sandbar between himself and the Barak. When he felt the keel scrape the sand, he hopped out, grabbed the painter line, and dragged the boat ashore.

  He dug a pair of binoculars from the equipment pack Franjo had given him, then ran, hunched over, to the slope of the sandbar, where he dropped onto his belly and crawled to the top. He focused the binoculars on the Barak’s afterdeck.

  The four figures had lowered a Zodiac raft into the water beside the stern. As Tanner watched, the last man climbed in. The Zodiac came about and headed toward shore. Briggs backed down the slope and began sprinting inland, using the sandbar as a guide. When it melded with the tree line, he turned again and began picking his way toward the cove.

  He heard the whine of the Zodiac’s engine peak, then suddenly die. The trees thinned out, opening onto the beach. Briggs dropped into a crouch and raised the binoculars. At the waterline, the four men were pulling the Zodiac onto the sand. Each was dressed in a black wet suit One of them, easily half a foot taller than the rest, stood to one side and barked silent orders. Litzman. Tanner caught snippets of German on the wind: “Hurry it up … tie that off!”

  With Litzman in the lead, the group trudged up the beach and disappeared into the trees. Tanner considered following, but decided against it. He picked his way back along the sandbar and closer to the Zodiac.

  After ten minutes the group reappeared dragging what looked like an oversized toboggan made of curved, aluminum piping. Twelve feet long, four wide, and three tall, the sled’s upper rails were fitted with six orange pontoon floats, each the size of a beach ball.

  Sitting atop the sled was the crate from Lorient.

  Tanner focused the binoculars on the crate, hoping to catch any identifying words or markings. There, stenciled in bold black letters, were four characters: “MK90.” Tanner kept scanning until he found a second grouping: “CAPTOR.”

  Oh, God. Litzman’s trip to Lorient now made perfect sense.

  During the seventies and eighties, NATO’s plan for a conventional war with Russia in Europe depended on the resupply of ground forces via several ports on the French coast, the main one being Lorient, the Bay of Biscay. Accordingly, the French Navy had turned the coastal town into not only its hub for antisubmarine units, but also its primary depot for ASW weapons.

  How exactly Litzman had pulled off the heist only he and the French government knew, but what he’d stolen was known as a Mark 90 CAPTOR, or encapsulated torpedo—essentially an antiship mine on a torpedo body.

  CAPTOR was a drop-and-forget weapon that required little preparation beyond a short arming sequence and the calibration of the floats to ensure the sled landed upright on the seabed. Once there, it sat dormant until its rudimentary guidance/sonar system detected the acoustical signature of its target.

  With a top speed of forty knots, a range of eight miles, and a four-hundred pound “keel buster” warhead, CAPTOR had been designed to surprise Soviet warships, chase them down, then punch through their heavily armored hulls and sink them.

  Against an unarmored ferry like the Aurasina, the CAPTOR would rip through her hull as though it were tissue paper, shatter her keel, and send a shock wave of fire and superheated steam through the ferry’s interior. Whatever remained of the hulk after the explosion would sink within minutes, along with eight hundred people and both canisters of Kestrel—providing they survived intact.

  Litzman’s team dragged the sled to the waterline, where they waited, obviously timing the breakers. At the right moment, they shoved the sled into the water, where the breakers lifted it off the sand. As two of them held t
he sled steady, Litzman and the fourth man grabbed the Zodiac, dragged it into the water, and affixed a tow line to the sled. The group began wading out. When the water was at chest height, each man adjusted a pontoon until the sled was half-submerged.

  They climbed into the raft. Litzman jerked the starter cord and the motor sputtered to life. He pointed the bow into the next breaker, revved the throttle, and the Zodiac disappeared over the crest

  With only the vague outline of a plan in his head and a hunch about where Litzman was headed, Tanner sprinted back to the skipjack, crawled through the waist skirt, and dug through his pack until he found the chart. Flashlight held in his mouth, he found Male Srakane on the map, then traced his finger westward, into what he guessed was the Aurasina’s general path.

  Fundamental to Litzman’s and the SDB’s plan would be ensuring there was no evidence to contradict their Bosnian conspiracy theory, which required the Aurasina’s utter destruction and/or her disappearance. Tanner had a theory about the latter.

  Seven miles into the Adriatic he found what he was looking for, the edge of the Kvarner Trench, the spot where the Adriatic and the Mediterranean meet. In the space of a mile, the inland waters plunge into the trench, going from an average depth of eighty feet to over eighteen thousand. The Aurasina’s course would take her over the trench’s northeastern corner. If she went down there, all chance of salvage—and thereby proof of her demise—would be lost.

  Unbidden, Tanner found himself thinking of the Kestrel canisters. If by some miracle they survived the explosion, he doubted they would survive the pressure at eighteen thousand feet. Eight thousand pounds per square inch on each canister …

  He forced himself back on track. He still had time—not much, but some.

  Binoculars in hand, he scrambled up the side of the sandbar. Wind-driven sand stung his face. He wiped his eyes clear of rain and focused the binoculars on the Barak. Litzman and his men were back aboard. Standing on the dive platform, they dragged the sled up and onto the afterdeck, where they began lashing it to the cleats. Litzman checked the lines, nodded his approval. The team dispersed.