surface of the sea-providing conditions were right.
Weaver banked slightly to port as they passed over the spot. Below he could see the Liberian-registered freighter standing by what appeared to be the burned out remains of a fairly good-sized cabin cruiser. But there was no other boat visible. No submarine. No debris, so far as Weaver had been able to see. He straightened the aircraft out and banked to starboard making a wide looping turn over the area, the sun well up in the eastern sky. “What are you showing down there, Al” he radioed to his ASW man in the rear. “We’ve got the freighter and another smaller vessel, maybe a pleasure craft. We’re also painting a much smaller boat, perhaps eighteen or twenty feet. Maybe an auxiliary. No machinery noises except from the Lorrel-E”
“How about our Mags”
“Not a thing, Lieutenant. Looks clean below the surface. Weaver glanced at his copilot, Lieutenant Peter Reiland. “All right, we’re coming around for another pass. Look sharp on the Mags now. He’s gotta be down there somewhere”
“Roger” Technical Sergeant Albert Mclaren replied. About a mile and a half out they were lined up again on the Lorrel-E and the Zenzero.
Weaver throttled back a bit more and dropped them another five hundred feet, the big aircraft beginning to mush slightly. But Weaver was a good pilot, he knew what he was doing. He took a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and clamped it between his teeth without lighting it. He had quit two years ago. Submarines simply didn’t disappear off the face of the earth. It was either lying on the bottom, and for one reason or another their equipment wasn’t detecting it, or it had bugged out. Either was unlikely. Why would JD. Webb do such a thing? There was no reason for it, no reason at all. They came over the Lorrel-E and this time he banked hard to the starboard for another run. “Not a thing, Lieutenant”
Mclaren said. “If she’s down there, we’re not painting her”
“That’s a roger. We’re coming around again, are we ready with our Mark 84”
“She’s loaded and ready for the drop on your mark”
“We’re coming around on it. Stand by” The Mark 84 was a Sippican SUS communications buoy. Barely fifteen inches long and only three inches in diameter, it was Programmed with a simple message-in this case, ESTABLISH COMMUNICATIONS-and was tossed into the water from a ship or aircraft. As soon as it hit water it would begin transmitting the same message over and over again on pulsed 2.95 khz and 3.5 khz tones that a submarine was capable of detecting beneath the surface if she wasn’t too far distant. They came up on the Lorrel-E again. “Stand by” Weaver radioed, steadying out the P-3C. “On my mark … mark”
“She’s off” Mclaren said. Weaver increased the throttles and the aircraft began to climb as he swung wide to port again. “Stan, contact Gaeta, tell them we’ve had negative contact on our sensors and have sent down the buoy”
“Aye, aye, Lieutenant” Staff Sergeant Stan Raymond, their radio operator, said. “And listen up, you guys, she still may be down there”
Captain Stefano Parus smiled as he Put down the radiotelephone, his brief conversation with the owners in Athens finished. “She is ours”
he told his first officer, Rupert Brecht. “I think there is someone else very much interested in that little toy” Brecht said.
Parus had heard the Orion passing overhead, of course. “Who are they”
“US. Navy”
“Well, it’s too fucking bad. We were here first, and we’re claiming our salvage rights. “It’s not much.”
“Enough” Parus said, rubbing his hands together. “She’s a floating whorehouse. Who knows what we’ll find aboard. Diamonds don’t melt, and who cares if gold does. We’ll scrape it off the deck”
” Shit. “Take her under tow, Mr. Brecht” Parus ordered. “If she’s still too hot, put some water over her, we’ll cool her down. “We may need to put some pumps aboard”
“Then do it, and look sharp about it. If those bastards are interested enough to send out a search plane, they’ll probably be sending out a surface ship. Won’t be able to do much about it if we’ve got the little bitch in tow COMSUBMED OPERATIONS CINCMED Admiral Ronald Delugio — his uniform blouse off, his shirtsleeves rolled up above his thick forearms, and his tie loose-paced the balcony above and behind the communications consoles. He was turning, and when admirals were mad, especially this one, everyone around was on tenterhooks. The P-3C on station had come up with nothing. So far there had been no reply from the communications buoy, nor had they detected any large mass of metal beneath the surface.
The Lorrel-E had contacted the Italian coast guard, claiming their right of salvage over the Zenzero, which they were granted, providing there were no survivors aboard. The Lorrel-E claimed there were none. Admiral Delugio stopped and turned back to Captain Reid. “I want you to get a message to the skipper of the Lorrele. Tell him that he is to remain on station with that cruiser until we can get out there to take a look at it. If he refuses, tell him that we will blow his vessel out of the water”
“Aye, aye, Admiral” Reid said. “Sir, what if he does refuse”
“Ken, if that sonofabitch moves so much as ten feet, I want his vessel sunk. And that’s a direct order”
Reid raised his eyes. “There would be hell to pay “
“Don’t I know it.
What’s the ETA for the Pigeon oi station”
“Not for another hour yet, sir” Reid said. “Are you sum about that order, sir”
“Kenny, we’re talking about an attack submarine, nuclear armed, with a crew of one hundred twenty-seven men and officers. You’re damned right I’m sure. JD. surfaced ii response to an SOS from that cruiser, and now he’s disappeared. We’re going to find out what happened. No one o nothing is going to stand in our way. Clear”
“Yes, sir” Reid snapped.
The afternoon was clear and sunny when the Pan Am flight from Athens touched down at Tegel Airport with a sharp bark of its tires and taxied over to the terminal. McGarvey had known someone was following him from the moment he’d left the Lykabettos safehouse, but he had taken no particular precautions. In fact he had become ohvious about his movements, keeping to the open squares on foot, and finally taking a taxi directly out to Hellinikon Airport. He’d expected to see someone on the flight, an out-of-place face, eyes that were quickly averted as he passed. But if they’d been there, they were very good because he’d spotted no one Walking with the rest of the passengers down the jetway, he was passed through customs without event. At this point he was still traveling under his real name. It would have been too risky, they’d decided, for him to use his Kurshin persona anywhere far from the eastern frontier. The secret services in every Western European country had a file on the Russian KGB colonel. It would have unnecessarily complicated things if he had been spotted using the Russian passport.
Berlin was soon enough. Trotter had promised that he would be kept at arm’s length for everyone’s sake. There would be no shadows, nor any contact on either side of the East-West border. The setup team in East Berlin who had arranged for his weapons and equipment, as well as the apartment and automobile, had already been cut out of the operation.
They had no idea what or who was coming. Nor-had they displayed, according to Trotter, any interest in knowing. They were professionals who understood that in this business unnecessary knowledge could often times prove fatal. The fallout was going to be terrific once Baranov went down. Lesser crises had tumbled presidents and entire governments.
So, who knew he was in Athens? Who knew or suspected that he would be traveling east? It was called “covering your own back door.
” Before he went across he wanted to know who was back there.
But no one had been on his flight, which meant that either a message had been sent ahead, or whoever it was who’d been following him would be showing up on the next flight. Walking across the main entry hall, he checked the incoming flight board. The next flight from Athens, via Rome this time, was due to arrive at 2:15, barely a half hour from now. He took the stairs up to the mezzanine where he got a spot at a stand-up table in the bierstube from which he had a clear line of sight to the exit doors from customs. If a message had been sent ahead, they would easily spot him here. If someone was coming on the next flight, he would spot them.
Sipping his beer he watched the comings and goings below in the main arrivals hall. Most of them were ordinary people, nine-to-fivers, some of them here in West Berlin on business, others with their families here on
