by Rachel Grant
“It doesn’t work that way. And I can’t run without you. I’m your bodyguard. Your body has to be with me, so I can guard it.”
“Then don’t run.”
“But I need to. And sunrise on the beach is my favorite time to run. It’s even low tide, so we’ll have plenty of shoreline. C’mon, Undine. Don’t you want me to keep in shape?”
She groaned. “You’re really going to make me do this.”
“I’ll let you cop a feel of my ass.”
She shook her head and laughed. “Do you seriously expect me to go to the gym afterward?”
“Yes. But after that I’ll take you to the restaurant for breakfast. You can get a cinnamon roll. With frosting.”
“What if I just go to the restaurant and get a cinnamon roll, while you maintain your magnificent shape?”
“No way. We’re stuck together.” He nudged her onto her back and slipped his hands around both of her wrists, pulling them above her head. He leaned down and nuzzled her neck some more. “Please, sweetheart? I usually get up at five thirty for my workout, but I waited until after six to wake you. I’m considerate that way. Don’t you think my consideration should be rewarded?”
“Five thirty? Willingly? That’s inhuman.”
“It takes time to maintain this shape. Hours. Every day. Which means I get up early.”
She wanted to pout, but the way he kept teasing her neck with his lips made it impossible. She groaned and said, “Fine. We can go for a run.”
He kissed her, a soft brush of his lips against hers. “You won’t regret this, sweetheart.”
“I already do.”
The morning run wasn’t the most awful thing in the world. She actually liked running, just not before seven in the morning. The sky lightened as they ran along the Pacific Ocean, and eventually the sun peeked over the rocky hills that lined the beach. Out of deference to her, Luke maintained a pace that had to be aggravatingly slow for him, considering how smoothly his body ate the distance.
He wasn’t kidding about his dedication to fitness, or the amount of time it took from his day. After the run they went to the gym, which was next to the general store, not far from her old cabin, and he did a “short” hour-long workout.
“You do this every day?” she asked as she watched him lift weights. She’d participated in the CrossFit-style workout for the first twenty minutes, but after her AMRAPs were done she decided to sit out the rest of the class. She was good for the day considering they’d started with a three-mile run.
“I try, but I don’t always have time for the run.”
Watching Luke exercise was something of an aphrodisiac, and she mentally cursed him for putting the brakes on their fun last night. Surely she could handle a little no-strings action?
But if she were being honest, she couldn’t.
Meaning he was right again, damn him.
Workout complete, Luke took her to breakfast as promised, and she undermined her virtuousness in running by ordering a giant meal. She set down her fork after having cleaned her plate. Full to bursting, she wanted to go back to the cabin and take a nap, but figured she should be pragmatic. “While we’re in town, let’s stop by the museum and check on the electrolytic reduction on the metal case.”
“Good idea. I want to stop by the Coast Guard and see if they’ll send out a patrol boat during our next dive. Since our dive won’t be for the Navy, this won’t be an official request, but I think Parker will be on board with the idea.”
“Okay. I like the idea of the boat having backup even more than having Parker available as a secondary diver.”
At the museum, Undine was happy to see Annie, the tribal member who’d helped her set up the electrolytic reduction tank, was working at the admissions counter. Annie greeted her with a big smile. “I’ve been dying to take a look at what’s in the tank, but the water is so clouded with rust, it’s hidden.”
“Can you take a break now?” Undine asked.
“Give me a minute and one of the docents can spell me.”
Undine and Luke browsed the gift shop while the woman went to track down someone to take over the counter. A green shawl with a Coast Salish hummingbird motif caught her eye. She was completely broke, but it was beautiful and she could wear it in the cabin instead of setting the thermostat at eighty and making poor Luke wear nothing but exercise shorts. Although, she liked it when Luke wore nothing but shorts…
She set it back on the shelf. She really couldn’t afford any extras right now. She still had to figure out how she was going to pay Luke back for the wetsuit.
“That’ll bring out the green in your eyes,” Luke said.
“My eyes are brown, not green.”
“Your eyes have a lot of green in them. Especially when you’re in the water, or wearing pale green shades, like that one.” He plucked the shawl from the shelf and went to the checkout counter.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Bribing you.”
“Bribing me?”
“I’m going to give this to you tomorrow morning when I wake you at five thirty so we can go for a run.”
“You aren’t really going to do that.”
“I am. And you’ll agree because you want this shawl more than sleep.”
“There are few things I want more than sleep. You’ve denied me one of them, and I can promise, that shawl, much as I like it, isn’t another.”
“Six o’clock, then.”
“Six o’clock, and I get the shawl?” She paused to consider. “Okay. But no gym.”
“Oh no. If I’m buying you the shawl I get a run and gym time.”
“There’s something seriously wrong with you if you like working out that much.”
He flashed a grin. “And yet you love the results.”
Yes. Yes, she did.
Annie returned with a docent, and he purchased the item then handed it to Undine. “Don’t worry, I’ll still parade shirtless around the cabin if you want.”
“I want,” she said, utterly shameless. But not shawlless. She opened the package and pulled out the soft cloth.
Luke took it from her hands and draped it around her shoulders. “Yep. Beautiful.” His mouth brushed against hers.
“Uh, you ready to go check out the conservation lab?” Annie asked with laughter in her voice. “Or can I convince you to buy Undine one of our silk scarves? They’re a little pricier, but gorgeous.”
“If you want to go jogging the day after tomorrow, I’m going to require silk,” Undine said.
“I’ve set a dangerous precedent, haven’t I?” Luke asked.
“Yep.” She took his hand and headed for the front door. “Let’s go see how your boon is doing.”
In the museum conservation facility across the parking lot, Annie unplugged the power supply to the reduction tank, then Undine removed the negative and positive leads. She donned rubber gloves before dipping her hands into the opaque brown water in the medium-sized fish tank. Her hands closed on the case, and she paused. She loved this part of lab work, the big reveal.
Slowly, she lifted out the metal object, and Annie gasped and said in an excited tone, “The sides look almost new.”
Brown water dripped off the much-cleaner metal case. Annie was right, the flat surfaces had cleaned well. Undine turned the case in different angles to allow the water to drain as she examined it. “There’s still too much oxidation on the hinges, clasps, and seam to open it. They probably used a different metal alloy—one that was more prone to corrosion. But we can rinse it off and take a look at the top and bottom.”
“Wow. It’s so much better, though. I really doubted there was solid metal beneath all that rust,” Annie said.
“The US Navy made things to last back in the sixties,” Undine said. “This case was built like a safe.”
She carried it over to the deep lab sink and set it inside, then turned on the faucet. The rust-colored water soon ran clear from what Undine guessed was a solid-steel case. Annie s
tood on one side and Luke the other as the flat surface cleared.
“Something is etched on the front,” Annie said.
Undine had noticed the markings when she first pulled the case from the tank, and now directed the spray on the etching. “Letters under a star.”
“Undine, are you sure this came from Wrasse?” Luke asked.
She shrugged. “What else could it be from?” She looked closer at the faint marking inside the star and gasped, understanding Luke’s question.
“CCCP?” Annie asked. “What does that stand for?”
“It’s not English,” Luke said. “It’s Cyrillic.” He pointed to the star. “And barely visible in the middle of that star, is a hammer and sickle.”
Chapter Eighteen
Yuri had pushed himself and his team to the limit to clear M-357’s tube. The Soviets had been so uncreative, giving their subs numbers instead of names. They should have let Tom Clancy name them. Red October, now there was a name. Yuri had taken to calling the Soviet vessel Magnum, which worked both for the M and the 357. His little pet name for his not-so-little pet project.
He’d located the torpedo tube the night before last, but by the time he had it, he didn’t have enough bottom time to grab the contents. He’d been forced to resort to sabotaging Ray’s boat, in case Gray and Sevick glimpsed Magnum during their dive. He’d hoped they wouldn’t surface and be able to share their tale, but knowing the SEAL’s skills, he’d hedged his bet by giving them something else to find. Hopefully they’d been too distracted by Wrasse’s crumpled nose to have ventured west of the US wreck.
Gray had to have freaked out, but Sevick had lived up to his reputation. Yuri would have shot them when they were on the beach at Wadaah, but the Coast Guard had shown up before he could get a decent line of sight. He wasn’t a sniper. Odds were, he’d have missed.
After they’d shared their story with the Coast Guard, there’d hardly been a reason to kill them. Plus Yuri’d had to get his ass back out on the water as soon as the sun set to clean out the tube. Two nights in a row, he’d been forced to make two dives without a sufficient surface interval in between. But it couldn’t be helped.
Now his joints ached. He’d fitted himself with an oxygen tank, like he had emphysema and would take it easy all day, letting his nephews pilot the boat and take care of him.
They’d wanted to spend the day celebrating with vodka. At times the boys could be complete dumb fucks. The twins were irritated by the need to take turns venturing into town, but it was imperative that they not be noticed, and a pair of Ukrainian boys showing up drunk in the dry community would certainly be noticed. As it was, Yuri couldn’t set foot in the general store or any of the restaurants. Even with the beard, he was liable to be recognized. He was dependent on his nephews bringing him groceries.
Plus, it was too soon to celebrate. They still needed the keys.
They would have to dive again. But not tonight. No. Yuri needed to recover, and the dumb fucks had had too much to drink before Yuri could stop them. He’d dumped the vodka overboard and they were sobering up. They’d lay low, anchor the boat off the coast at Sekiu, and Yuri would breathe his oxygen.
Tomorrow night, he’d dive again. He’d find the key. Then he’d take his vengeance on Mother Russia and every country that turned their backs on the plight of his people.
“Cyrillic?” Annie asked. “What does CCCP stand for?”
“It’s the Russian initials for USSR.” Luke turned to Undine. “Is there any chance Wrasse was on a secret mission? That it wasn’t really being brought out to the Pacific for SINKEX?”
“None. We’d have been warned if we were likely to come across anything top secret on the sub. And if it had been on a secret mission, the effort to find her would have been mammoth in 1962. After all, she went down in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Navy would never have hired a contractor to set up the dive. Yuri wouldn’t have gotten near this project.”
He nodded, agreeing with her logic. He studied the corrosion around the seam of the case and along the hinges. What the hell was inside? They couldn’t risk forcing it open when they had the means to remove the corrosion. “We need to get this back in the tank and finish the electrolysis.” To Annie, he said, “You can’t tell anyone about this. No one can know that this case is here.”
“The curator knows,” Annie said. “He’s the one who agreed Undine could use the tank.”
“That’s fine. Make sure he tells no one. Until we know what this means, this has become classified.”
“We need to call Curt,” Undine said.
Luke nodded. He placed a hand on her forearm. “I’m sorry, honey, but you and I need to dive again today. This morning.”
She paled. “Today?”
“Yes. Time is critical. If there’s something else down there—something Soviet—we can’t waste time. It’s probably what Yuri’s been looking for, and he may already have found it. We need to know what we’re dealing with ASAP. You and I can do another quick bounce, get answers, then let the Navy take over. It’ll probably be our last dive.” He winced. Poor wording, but it was true. The Navy would send specialists if they found what Luke suspected they would.
“Plus, if we go immediately, there won’t be an opportunity to sabotage the boat or our equipment,” he continued. “Yuri won’t expect us to dive today. No one does. I need you, Undine. No one else in Neah Bay has the skills to do this dive with me, and I can’t do this alone.”
A hundred different emotions flashed across her face, each one a variation of fear. “How ironic,” she said with a weak smile.
He grunted out a laugh. “Yeah. But here we are. I need you to take me down. I was a SEAL. I’m here. I have the skills needed. I can’t ignore what could well be a national security issue. We can have answers in less than two hours.”
“Where will we get a boat?”
“We’ll do this one simple. A speedboat. No pure oxygen for decompression. We can get Curt Dominick to ask the Coast Guard to send out a patrol boat. Because of the safety regs, this can’t be a government dive, so we can’t use a Coast Guard vessel—this’ll be at our own risk. But that doesn’t mean they won’t stand by after receiving a little pressure from the US attorney general. So what do you say, will you dive with me?”
She squared her shoulders and nodded.
He hadn’t doubted her answer, but the fortitude she showed in giving it impressed the hell out of him. But then, almost everything she did impressed him. He kissed her, a quick hard press of his mouth to hers. “Thank you.”
“Call Curt. I’m going to photograph the case, then get it back in the tank.”
Luke already had his phone out and found Curt’s private cell number in the contacts list. The AG answered immediately and wasted no time with pleasantries. “What’s going on, Sevick?”
“The FBI needs to track down Yuri Kravchenko’s boat. We’ve reason to believe he’s looking for something Soviet near where Wrasse sank.” As he explained the find to Curt, Undine emailed the man photos of the case with a close-up of the etching.
After Curt viewed the pictures, he cleared his throat. “I can’t ask you or Undine to dive on the wreck. I need to go through channels. My process would take time.”
“I know that, sir. Which is why I asked my civilian friend Undine if she could take a vacation day and go for a swim with me. She said yes.”
“She’s a fighter, our Undine.” There was affection in the AG’s voice.
My Undine.
Luke kept his gaze on her as she cleaned out the reduction tank. Was he really going to be able to walk away from her when this was all over? He was no longer certain.
“We’ll be swimming two miles out in the strait. It might be nice if the Coast Guard could do a drive-by. Maybe hang out, even. Nothing official, mind you. Maybe a routine patrol?”
“I’ll make sure of it. What time?”
Luke glanced at his watch. He needed at least an hour to line up a boat. He had
no doubt Ray would be willing to skipper. “Two hours. High noon.”
“Got it. I’ll call you when it’s confirmed. Thank you, Luke.”
“Just doing my job, sir.”
“Once a SEAL, always a SEAL?”
“Something like that.” He hung up. His heart pumped with excitement. When he was a SEAL, he lived for the next op. He’d had a long break, but this was it. The next op. Complete with national security on the line. He loved his job with NOAA, and yet he hadn’t realized how much he’d missed the adrenaline-fueled action of serving his country as a SEAL.
Who would have thought Undine Gray’s desperate plea seven days ago would lead to running a mission in search of a Soviet connection?
Steely calm settled over Undine before she even slipped into the cold water. This was no longer about her personal fears, or even an SMCA violation. She knew in her gut exactly what they’d find when they reached the bottom. Wrasse’s crumpled nose had been the first clue. And taking immediate action to confirm her suspicions was more important than her, than Luke, probably more important than anything she’d ever done in her life. She wouldn’t let Luke down.
Again they descended with speed, pulling themselves down along the anchor line. Her arms ached from the morning workout. Luke’s muscles must be screaming, but he descended with ease.
At the bottom, they didn’t waste time with leash lines. They had dive computers to guide them and too big an area to cover. They could only hope what they were looking for had been conveniently exposed by Yuri.
They were down to four minutes left at depth when Luke spotted a ridge of sediment that indicated an area had been cleared. He jetted in that direction, and Undine followed, shining her spotlight on the floor. She reached the clearing and felt a pulse of adrenaline. The area had been cleared by a cable trencher, probably less than twenty-four hours ago. They might have seen this yesterday if they’d ventured into this area, but they’d been exploring Wrasse and stopped when they saw her crumpled nose.
This wasn’t Wrasse.
No, this was the conning tower and hull of a small Cold War-era Soviet submarine.
