The pleasure cruiser was listing ten degrees to port, the twisted remains of her boarding ladder half submerged in the water. She rolled sluggishly in the three to five-foot swells. All of her windows and ports had been blown out by the heat of the fire, and the paint on her hull was mostly burned off down to the waterline. Still, she was surprisingly intact for all of that. Lawson and Tanner tied their small auxiliary to the boarding ladder and scrambled aboard. The hull and bulkheads were still warm to the touch from the fire, but no longer hot.
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”
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”
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
