The street opened up, and forty yards across the no-man’s-land, he pulled up at the western barriers This was the French sector of the city. Two French soldiers came out.
“Kirk McGarvey. You were expecting me” One of the guards glanced over his shoulder back at the guardhouse. In the semidarkness McGarvey could just make out the form of a man standing there. He nodded. The soldier turned back. “Yes, sir. You are to drive immediately down to Tempelhof Airport. Someone will meet you at Operations Building B”
“Who”
“I don’t know, sir. But welcome back. “Yeah” McGarvey said. “Thanks”
Operations Building B was on the military side of the big airport in the American sector of the city McGarvey was met in front by an Air Force captain who was not wearing a name tag. He had been expected; the call had come from the Wedding Checkpoint. “What’s this all about” McGarvey asked” I couldn’t say, sirthe captain said.
“If you’ll just come with me, we have a Learjet waiting on the apron “Where are we going”
“Naples, sir. And they want you down there on the double” The captain seemed almost afraid to look too closely at McGarvey “Do you have to take a pee or something first, sir”
“It’ll wait.
The morning sun sparkled brightly on the Bay of Naples as the L4ealjet came in over the water for her final approach, the Air Force captain handling the little plane as if it were a toy. As soon as they had touched down and had completed their landing roll, they turned onto a taxiway and headed toward a hangar on the private aviation side of the airport, bypassing customs and immigration. John Trotter and another, much younger, heavier man, also dressed in civilian clothes, were waiting for him inside. By the time McGarvey had walked through the door, the Learjet was already heading over to the fuel pumps. The captain would be taking her immediately back to West Berlin. Trotter was strung out, the other one was clearly impatient. “Did you have any trouble, Kirk” Trotter asked. McGarvey looked pointedly at the other one. “It’s all right” Trotter said. “This is Lieutenant Commander Malcolm Ainslie. Naval Intelligence. He’s in on the entire thing”
“Is it Kurshin again” Trotter nodded. “I think so” He looked toward the stairs at the back of the hangar. “We’ve got a place to talk upstairs.
You’ve got a lot of catching up to do”
“Why here”
“We figured we’d attract less attention out here than in town” Ainslie said. His accent was East Coast, almost British. He seemed competent, but McGarvey could see in his eyes that he was as shook up as Trotter, and very angry. “Geiger is dead”
“Christ” Trotter swore. “Were you blown”
“I don’t think so. But it was KGB. He said they knew he had taken a message” Trotter thought about it a moment, then shook his head. “It doesn’t change anything. We need you here, Kirk” There were a couple of mechanics working on an old Beechcraft, but no one paid them any attention as they went to the upstairs office, where another Naval Intelligence officer was waiting for them. McGarvey was introduced to Lieutenant Frank Newman, who would conduct the briefing. He had been hastily sent out from the Pentagon and had himself arrived only a couple of hours earlier. The same anger McGarvey had seen in Ainslie burned in Newman’s eyes.
“Before we get started” McGarvey said. “Lorraine Abbott is in West Berlin”
“I know” Trotter said. “The Hotel Berlin. Yablonski wasn’t expecting it”
“Our people in Berlin are taking care of it”
Trotter nodded. “They’re watching the hotel” There was something not quite right in Trotter’s answer, but McGarvey did not pursue it. He turned to the other two men. “What’s Kurshin done this time”
“He’s apparently stolen one of our nuclear attack submarines and possibly killed her crew” Newman said. He was a short, very dark man with deep-set eyes and thick eyebrows. He had a six o’clock shadow.
McGarvey whistled, long and low. Whatever Kurshin was or wasn’t, he definitely had balls. “And now the sub is missing”
“Not quite” Ainslie said. “She passed our SOSUS line last night out of the Malta Channel, but then we lost her again. But we do know that she’s now in the eastern Mediterranean “
“Submerged” Ainslie nodded. Newman picked it up from there, leading them from the moment the Indianapolis had surfaced in response to the apparent SOS from the Zenzero, until the Italian pleasure cruiser had been brought back to Gaeta, where Naval Intelligence had taken her apart, coming up with a second, badly damaged Labun canister and the remains of the automatic Morse code transmitter. “The Zenzero was a decoy” McGarvey said. “They would have gotten the Indianapolis’s patrol station schedule from the disk Rand handed over to Kurshin”
“Somehow the bastards got the rest of the canisters aboard, and.”
Newman let it trail off. “Assuming everyone aboard was killed, how many men would it take to operate the submarine” Newman and Ainslie looked at each other. “Many of her systems are automatic, Newman said. “Ten good men could do it, if they didn’t find themselves in a battle situation.
Maybe less”
“Have we picked up any indications that that many Russians had come over in the past few days” McGarvey asked Trotter.
“We’re looking to Rome right now, Kirk. You’ll be flying up there this morning, because we’ve run into a brick wall”
“The Russians have the Indianapolisainslie said angrily. “There’s no longer any doubt about it, nor is there any doubt what they’ve got planned”
“How do we know the Russians have it” McGarvey asked. “John? Was Kurshin spotted”
“No” Trotter said heavily. “Ainslie’s people traced the Zenzero back to a yacht-leasing service here in Naples. The leasing agent was a man named Arturo Ziadora”
“We have him in custody now” Ainslie said. “He finally broke this morning”
“Kirk, we had the Soviet Embassy files sent down here from Rome. Ziadora didn’t know names, only photos, but he positively identified the man who had leased the yacht as Yuri Semenovich Nikandrov”
“Pick him up”
McGarvey said. Trotter shook his head. “The Navy has been told hands off this time. Nikandrov is too important. He’s the number-two rezident out of their embassy, and a special assistant to the Soviet ambassador”
“You want me to talk to him” Trotter nodded. “You have the president’s word on this one. No restraints, Kirk. Do you understand? We must know what they are planning on doing with the Indianapolis.
It’s an act of piracy that could very well start a shooting war. I I “I know what they’re going to do with her” McGarvey said.
“So do we” Ainslie barked. “They’ll try to take her through the Bosporus into the Black Sea. But we’ve got a nasty surprise waiting for them”
“No, McGarvey said. “Not the Black Sea. Farther east.
He looked at Newman. “How much of a crew would they need to set up one of her nuclear missiles and fire it at a landbased target”
“While avoiding detection” Newman asked rhetorically. More than ten men.
Maybe fifteen, or twenty. Navigators, attack center crew, boat drivers, engineers for the reactor, and of course the missile crew” III don’t think Kurshin would have brought that many men with him. But if he did, the answers will be in Rome with Nikandrov”
“They’re going to try for the Black Sea” Ainslie said. “Israel” McGarvey said, stepping over to the desk on which a map of the Mediterranean had been spread out. The Indianapolis’s patrol station off the Italian coast was marked. “What speed is she capable of, submerged”
“The book says thirty knots”
Trotter answered. “More like forty knots” Newman corrected him. “If the Indianapolis broke out from the Malta Channel sometime last night we’re not going to have much time” McGarvey said. He stabbed a finger at the island of Crete. “Can we set up a monitoring post here” Ainslie and Newman had stepped up beside him. “We have
