The west room’s occupant took a warm shower, invigorating after the sticky walk from the Falcon. The water fell onto dark thick hair speckled with gray and down over a thick jet black beard, tightly trimmed to his face, then down past a thin muscular frame. He was sixty-three years old and in the best shape of his life, in part thanks to a thirteen-year Siberian prison sentence spent in vigorous exercise. He turned off the water and looked briefly in the mirror, amazed at the youthful face staring back at him. The surgery was intended to change his identity, but had nicely taken away the wear of the years. His thin cheeks were filled in, his pockmarked skin was smooth, his sagging chin was as chiseled as when he’d been thirty. His yellowed crooked teeth were white and even, his flaccid neck was smooth and toned, and his jawline was ruler straight. The grizzled former admiral and war-crimes prisoner was gone and replaced with a rich aristocrat. Alexi Novskoyy was dead — the man in the mirror was named Victor Krivak. He smiled, liking the sound of the new name and how it matched the new reflection.
He donned the tropical suit laid out by Amorn and met his companion in the center living area. The other man was five years younger but looked older. His name had once been Rafael, but now he was known as Sergio. He was the brilliant consulting company president who had rescued Novskoyy — rather, Krivak — from the Siberian prison and brought him into the business. He was a barrel-chested man with thick limbs and a massive neck, though he was several centimeters shorter. He had a gray beard that hid much of his face, and his features were large and coarse, except for his eyes, which darted over the room, missing nothing. His surgery had changed his nose and his formerly large ears and taken away much of the fat he had carried previously, although the laser could do nothing to change his large bone structure.
“You never did tell me how you got the American Navy codes,” Sergio said as they relaxed on the terrace.
“It was easier than expected,” Krivak said quietly. “There was a DynaCorp network architect who had the bad fortune to have a wife and three children. It is amazing what a man can accomplish when he sees a nine-millimeter automatic at the head of his firstborn. I sent him to perform the task of bringing back the code to his house. He brought an obsolete version. It cost him his dog. A second version came back with him, but it had bugs. That cost his wife. The third time the code was current, but the logic-hot on the system — the one that would alert us to changes or security modifications — was not installed correctly.”
Sergio waved his hand. “Don’t tell me any more. I take it that after several attempts all went perfectly.”
“I was afraid we would run out of children, but yes. The next day the police entered the house and found a terrible murder-suicide. Sometimes these computer types lose it and kill their families and then themselves.” Krivak smirked.
After dinner, prostitutes were brought up. The girl couldn’t have been older than fourteen, perhaps even younger. She drew a bath in the spa and led him to it, pulling him into the water so that his back was to her, and her fingers went to work massaging his back muscles. His eyes closed and he grew drowsy, knowing that the girl would not stop for over an hour. As always, he saw things in the moments between consciousness and sleep. The images usually came swiftly, but tonight they swam by slowly, some blurred and misty, others clearer than life, images from the time his name had been Novskoyy. He saw his childhood in Moscow, the ribbon-covered Red Army marshal’s uniform belonging to his father hanging in their bedroom. He returned to the day he graduated from the Marshal Grechko Higher Naval School of Underwater Navigation. The crisp cold day he’d reported aboard his first submarine, a Victor-class. The day when he’d taken his first submarine command, an Akula-class, under the polar icecap. He saw his admiral’s epaulets pinned onto his uniform as he assumed command of the Russian Republic Northern Fleet. Then the terrible days of the disarming of the Rodina, the nuclear weapons unloaded from his ships and stockpiled in a U.N. depot.
He saw the massive hull of the submarine he’d designed himself, SSN Kaliningrad, the biggest and most formidable undersea combatant on the globe. Then the freezing night when he looked out over the submarines of the fleet departing on a mission he’d conceived to right the wrong of Russia’s disarmament. He smelled the smells of the Kaliningrad as he stepped inside the hull for her voyage to the polar icecap, where the ship would be his command platform for a mission of revenge. With eighty nuclear-tipped SS-N-X-27 cruise missiles detonating two-megaton warheads over eighty U.S. eastern seaboard targets, America’s fangs would be removed, and she and Russia could coexist in peace. Russia would stretch out her hand to the Americans and help them rebuild, and in the aftermath of this short surgical war the two nations might even become friends and allies. It would have reshaped history, and the world would have been a better place.
But the Americans proved themselves to be even more cunning and dangerous than he’d suspected. As he was transmitting his go-code to the ships of the fleet at their hold positions, his beloved Kaliningrad was engaged by an American hunter killer submarine, sent secretly under the icecap to kill him. The American captain had been a skillful assassin, and after the torpedoes detonated, the control room of his beloved Kaliningrad flooded with the icy black water of the Arctic. Novskoyy’s only comfort was that the mutual torpedo exchange had to have been fatal to the Americans as well. His numb body succumbed to shock, and after the lights went out he lost consciousness.
He must have been evacuated in the control compartment escape pod, because when he opened his eyes he was in a frigid Arctic shelter surrounded by shipwrecked Americans. Their commander was a gaunt, black-haired grimacing fiend who had hauled him up by the collar to beat him, but changed his mind and let go. The man’s nametag read PACINO. Novskoyy could remember nothing else but the man’s face and name and the hatred he held for him. But it had been too late for revenge. The diesel generator had died and they had all surrendered to the cold, and for a second time the world faded into darkness.
He woke in a hospital and recovered only long enough to be interrogated. He was led from the hospital to the transport plane back to Russia wearing the handcuffs and leg irons of a war criminal. Forty-nine years old and weakened by the cold of the icepack, he would not last long in the harsh Siberian prison’s torture chamber. But there had been no torture. Without a trial he found himself in a large, warm solitary cell looking out over the pine trees of the Siberian woods. There were books. He was allowed to exercise. Thirteen years passed before the door opened to his cell and the strange large man known only as Rafael came to take him away, his ransom paid.
He had made the transition from Russian admiral to war crimes prisoner, and then from war-crimes prisoner to military consultant. Rafael brought him into a company named da Vinci Consulting, a firm attempting an ambitious operation to sink crude oil carriers leaving the oil terminals of Saudi Arabia. The operation would benefit the Hindu Republic of India’s dictator Nipun, but Nipun had demanded a demonstration. It had been Novskoyy’s idea to attack the cruise ship that had been chartered by the U.S. Navy and would leave Port Norfolk escorted by heavy warships, because if they could down a cruise ship among that security, they could certainly sink the unarmed unsuspecting oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman. Nipun had agreed, but ironically the methods they planned to employ in the Middle East would not work against the American fleet. Somehow they had to sink the cruise ship, under escort from an invincible fleet of American warships, and he and Rafael had suffered a dark night when they realized that the task was impossible. Falling back on his navy background, Novskoyy had called for an advanced Ukrainian Severodvinsk nuclear submarine, and soon the mission was accomplished and India paid up. Novskoyy performed the Saudi tanker operation, earning da Vinci billions, and Rafael made him a full partner. Another transition was required of him as he was called to change from brilliant military consultant to absurdly rich businessman, one wealthy enough to buy a Caribbean island and retire.
It was not until later that h
e learned that one of the survivors of the cruise ship venture had been the same man who had threatened to beat him in the Arctic shelter, the captain of the submarine that had ruined the voyage of the Kaliningrad, who had become an admiral and taken command of the U.S. Navy, the bastard named Pacino. Novskoyy had felt a momentary blackness in his mind when he read the man would survive, and he fantasized about sneaking into his hospital room and strangling the bastard. He called up a research clip of the younger man, who now seemed so much older, the former admiral wearing the haunted sunken face of a mental patient. Novskoyy still toyed with the idea of hunting him down and killing him, but business had kept him busy since the Saudi operation.
Despite the billions they’d made from India, Rafael had feared American retaliation for the sinking of the cruise ship. Rafael transferred their money to numbered accounts, then divested the executives of da Vinci Maritime, each of them meeting their separate deaths in arranged accidents. After the entire staff had been liquidated, Rafael had set up an operation to simulate their own deaths, paying two men an absurd amount of money to have surgery to alter their appearances to look like Novskoyy and Rafael. When the first Falcon crashed, he and Rafael had changed their names. Alexi Novskoyy was gone forever and Victor Krivak had taken his place. Rafael became Sergio, still insisting on forsaking a last name.
Sergio, or Rafael, or whatever his real name was, remained a mystery. The man had been born an American but had lived in Europe his whole life, building his corporation until it was a global maritime concern and a consulting organization specializing in intelligence gathering through electronic means. There remained so much about the brilliant entrepreneur that Krivak had yet to learn, but he was a patient man.
They had gone deep underground, evading Interpol and the FBI. Now that the manhunt was derailed by their supposed deaths, Sergio felt comfortable enough to set up a new consulting organization. The new company was named United Electrics, a retro title that would gather little interest. They had a respectable-sized staff of electronics wizards, who, armed with the system codes, had penetrated deeper, to the command-and-control systems’ very core. The information warfare operation had been intense but was paying off, and soon the American Navy had been transformed into a puppet. Krivak could direct her ships like so many toys. If only they had been able to construct such a system fifteen years before, but then, the Americans only began to rely heavily on digital command and-control more recently. Krivak tried to tell himself that the penetration operation was his revenge for Kaliningrad, but he knew that he longed for more. What he truly wanted was to see the face of Pacino as he strangled the life out of the destroyer of his dreams.
The woman finished in the tub and dried him off. On the satin sheets she draped her silky body over him. He shut his eyes and luxuriated in the feel of the girl above him, and when he finished, he pushed her off the bed and dismissed her. Alone again, he faded back into the world between wakefulness and sleep, where the snow fell on his boots on the concrete pier and on his admiral’s epaulets and on his fur collar turned up against the wind as he stood and stared at the breathtaking beauty of the submarine Kaliningrad, the dreams rolling by until the Asian morning sunlight burned through his eyelids.
He rose quickly, energized by the idea that he would soon be back in business. The year of hiding was finally over. He dressed and entered the living room to find his partner, Sergio, standing at the window, smiling at him, seeming more relaxed than he had been in weeks. Krivak sat at the dining table and ate breakfast with Sergio while they read the Hong Kong news and lingered over coffee. When it was time, they adjourned to a cherry-paneled conference room with a massive Indonesian tiger wood table in the center. Krivak sank into a chair upholstered in soft glove leather and looked at his partner.
“When is he due?” His voice was no longer tinged with a Russian accent, his speech coach’s success evident in the British-sounding precision of his words.
“His jet lands in ten minutes. Until his car arrives here, we should prepare.”
Krivak nodded at Sergio, knowing the Chinese admiral was the most difficult client they had ever had.
* * *
Admiral Chu HuaFeng stepped off the jet to the humid Thai air, the crow’s-feet at his eyes wrinkling as he squinted in the sun. He glanced at his subordinates, young fools who thought the Peoples Liberation Army invincible. He had lived long enough to experience bitter defeat as well as combat success, and though his superiors were cut from the same cloth as his staff, he must find a way to protect them. Chu was the commanding admiral of Red China’s fledgling submarine force. He had spent time submerged launching torpedoes in anger at American targets, and he well knew that until every last vessel was on the bottom, the vicious American snakes would fight. And in the upcoming war with India, his fears centered on the U.S. fleet and what they would do. The brilliant consultants from United Electrics had helped with their expensive but valuable intelligence about the sleeping American Navy, but now he needed more. Much more.
The ride to the hotel was slow, the late-morning rush hour filling the streets of Bangkok with traffic, the traffic police under their surgical masks directing the streetlights. He was exhausted by the time he walked into the Oriental Hotel lobby. As he entered the United Electrics conference room in their opulent suite, he immediately felt the worry melt away from him. The larger man. Sergio, had a way of understanding Chu’s fears, and the thin one, Victor Krivak, had a penetrating intellect that solved all technical problems. An hour into the meeting, the food and pleasantries over with, Chu stared hard at the consultant executives.
“What you have been able to achieve so far is admirable, gentlemen, but we must do more. The battle network of the U.S. Navy is in your hands, but you must take command of their automated submerged platform, the Snare. I’ll need it in the Indian Ocean. And I’ll need it to respond to my orders in real time.”
Krivak and Sergio exchanged confused glances. Krivak spoke first.
“Snare? What’s the Snare?
* * *
Sergio shook his head as he stood at the window overlooking the trees of the courtyard far below. “I don’t think I’ve suffered a reprimand like that since grammar school.”
Krivak nodded solemnly. “He was right, Sergio. We should have known about this Snare vessel.”
“Tell me again why our penetration of the U.S. Navy’s command system doesn’t already grant us control of the Snare.”
Krivak glanced over the E-mail from his staff, tasked with entering the Pentagon combat system and surreptitiously retrieving what they could on the Snare. He shook his head. “She’s an independent node, with an onboard carbon processor. A molecular computer that is essentially a reverse-engineered synthetic human brain. She’s programmed — more accurately, educated — and sent on her way, and she responds to orders just as a human commander would.”
“So can’t we just give her orders to do what Chu wants?”
“Apparently not. Think of it being no different than trying to use our system to get the human commander of a carrier air group to launch aircraft and bomb a city — he’d be suspicious and check his orders. Same order of intelligence here. The Americans apparently refused to trust a silicon computer with a nuclear reactor and plasma weapons, and waited until they had a fully operational carbon processor. I am amazed they constructed one so quickly — I had the impression it had been ruled impossible. But what’s important is that the Snare won’t believe orders it considers inappropriate or inconsistent with its education. And the volume of communications traffic it would take to convince her remotely would be detected. No, Sergio, we have to take control of her physically, get inside of her, and to do that and make her take our orders we’ll have to get someone who designed her.”
“Do you really think you can take her over?”
“Sergio, I will have to assemble a team, a very expensive one. You did not overstate the case to Chu when you demanded a billion Euros up front. We will spend ever
y one of them on these engineers. I will be taking a page from your book and go to bail out a brilliant computer engineer from prison, and the money will be useful for his bail. I have also heard of a fired American who worked for DynaCorp, a second-generation Chinese named Wang, who was supposedly working on submarine black projects. He might be our man.”
“When are you leaving?”
“In the morning. We should rest and enjoy the evening, and I will take the Falcon at first light.”
Sergio smiled. “I’ll call the agency and have them send over the women after supper.”
8
A little more than five hundred nautical miles east-northeast of the foamy spot in the sea where Piranha had vanished from the surface, the Atlantic was tossed in the wind of a storm that had rolled off the North American coast two days before. The sky was a leaden dark gray, the sea a darker blue punctuated by whitecaps as the wind whipped the tops of the waves. From horizon to horizon there was nothing but the clouds above, the sea below, and the wind between. No shorelines interrupted the seascape; no merchant ships’ running lights penetrated the drizzle. The clouds opened suddenly, the rain coming down in sheets, the sky darkening further, the raindrops barely visible on the surface of the running waves.
Below the surface of the stormy sea, the waves seemed less majestic. The noise was still a roar, but with the wind gone, it was a more muted sound. Light filtered down into the warm summer waters to a depth of fifty feet, and would have penetrated much deeper had it not been for the dimness brought on by the storm. The waves above could not be made out — the water was not that clear — but there was light to be able to see thirty feet in any direction. At fifty feet, the water’s temperature was still warm, the ocean filled with life, a fisherman’s dream, the light slightly dimmer. Deeper, a hundred feet beneath the waves above, the sound had calmed, the water was darker, the diffuse light from above dying steadily, perhaps only a five-foot radius discernible. At a depth of 150 feet, the ocean became much darker, but the sea life still crowded the environment and the water remained warm. But fifty feet deeper, in the complete darkness of the deeper sea, the water went from the balmy summer temperature suddenly to the refrigerated cold of the deep. This was the layer depth known to oceanographers since a thermometer had been lowered into the sea. The top two hundred feet of the vast Atlantic were stirred by the winds and the waves, the warmth added by the burning sun, the water warm enough to swim without a wet suit. But beneath the layer, as the light went out, the sea’s temperature fell to thirty degrees Fahrenheit, two degrees below the freezing point of freshwater, the salinity allowing the water to get even colder without turning into ice. From here to the ocean bottom two miles further down, the sea was uniformly frigid, the cold keeping much of the ocean’s swimming inhabitants away, the life that could survive the deep cold of a much different variety. At three hundred feet beneath the surface, the light was completely gone, the darkness profound, the same dark of a two-mile-deep mine shaft At this depth the noise from the waves above was gone, the sound bouncing off the layer above and reflecting into the warm water layer. The quiet was interrupted only by the occasional sound of the mournful howling of a whale, which could be 50 miles away or 350. Deeper still, six hundred feet beneath the waves, the weight of the heavy water above made the pressure immense, the force squeezing any surface at two tons over every square foot. Few ocean creatures could take the pressure, making the sea relatively empty. The cold, dark, silent, pressurized water waited.
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