Seas of Crisis

Their mean and emotionless faces gave the appearance of street gang members, ones who’d had the individuality beaten out of them by a merciless mental and physical thrashing that left these, the survivors, tougher and more ruthless for it. What distinguished each were their ethnic features, body types, and hair color, blond or brown or frizzy red or glossy jet black.

One man at the front of the room stood up. Jeffrey thought he bore a close resemblance, in bearing and attitude as well as in his build and appearance, to a youngish Leonid Brezhnev, the reactionary Communist Party General Secretary who led the USSR during its violent repression of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the genocidal invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

“Sergey Kurzin,” this strange apparition said to Jeffrey, shaking his hand. “A pleasure to meet you, Commodore.” His English was unaccented. He said he grew up in Chicago.

Jeffrey glanced around the briefing room. “You have quite an outfit here, Colonel.” Then Jeffrey saw Commander Nyurba approaching. He too looked different, like he really was a serving officer in the Russian Federation’s armed forces.

“Don’t mind us, Commodore,” Nyurba said. “We need to stay in character.”

“Where are the rest of your team?”

“I decided to send them by squads to eat,” Kurzin stated, “or to use our exercise equipment, since you were even longer than I expected reading your orders.”

“Can we get started now?”

“After I talk to you and Commander Nyurba in private.”

Jeffrey eyed Bell, Harley, and Meltzer. “Introduce yourselves around to… to our new friends in the meantime.”

“Boy, this is weird,” Meltzer said under his breath.

“I know it,” Bell responded. “These guys look like Spetsnaz or something.” Spetsnaz were Soviet-era special forces sabotage and assassination troops, which continued to exist under the Russian Federation with different roles. “Like they’d slit our throats if we gave them half a chance.”

“They would do so quickly and silently, I assure you,” Kurzin said. He wasn’t smiling.

He led Jeffrey and Nyurba past the battle management center, full of mission-planning and communications consoles, some of them manned, and over to a compartment whose watertight hatch said “SMALL ARMS LOCKER. CAUTION: EXPLOSIVES AND PYROTECHNICS.” Kurzin undogged the heavy hatch and flipped on a light switch, and they went inside. A narrow aisle led down the center. The compartment was filled with safes, locked storage cabinets, and racks on both sides of the aisle holding many dozens of wicked-looking Russian assault rifles — each shrink-wrapped in clear plastic. Kurzin shut the hatch behind them.

He saw Jeffrey’s curiosity. “Nikonov AN-Ninety-fours. Nicknamed Abakans. Successor to the AK-Forty-sevens and AK-Seventy-fours. Russian elite units use them. Beside the usual one-shot and full-auto selector modes, they fire special two-round bursts at a cyclic rate of eighteen hundred rounds per minute. That’s almost three times as fast as an M-Sixteen. More accurate, too, trust me. These have time-shifted recoil action, so the user doesn’t even feel the gun go off until after the pair of bullets leave the barrel. Both slugs hit the same spot at a hundred yards or more, one a thirtieth of a second behind the other. Great way to tear through body armor. Extreme lethality.”

“These are real? I mean, made in Russia?” They were all a solid gun-metal gray, including the fiberglass- polymer folding stock and fore-grip — Jeffrey saw none of the wooden or brown-colored plastic parts as on the venerable AK-47.

“We have ways of obtaining the genuine article.”

“What about ammo?”

“Caliber is five-point-four-five millimeters, slightly narrower than the NATO standard five-point-five-six bullet. They take sixty-round box magazines, short but thick, rounds stacked four in a row. Those, we have foreign- made.”

“Won’t that be a giveaway?”

“A metallurgical analysis will show that the bullets and shells were produced at a munitions plant in Germany.”

“So that the raiders will seem to have come from there. Okay, I follow that, but how did you get the ammunition from Germany?”

“You don’t need to know. You don’t want to.”

Kurzin switched into rapid-fire Russian, bombarding Jeffrey with it, catching him off guard.

Jeffrey tried to keep up, stammering.

Kurzin cursed in Russian, then turned, enraged, to Nyurba.

“ ’Vy skazaki chto on byl gotovy!” You said he was ready!

“Grazhdanin, ya dumal chto on byl gotovy.” Sir, I thought he was ready.

Kurzin reverted to English. “Forget it. This is hopeless. You’ll need to go back to Challenger until the next rendezvous, and work with Commodore Fuller much more.”

“Yes, sir,” Nyurba said.

“What’s the problem here?” Jeffrey asked, trying to reassert his authority.

“Commodore, don’t pull rank on me,” Kurzin said in a sharp, nasty way. His eyes showed cold fury. “Have you any idea what you’ll be up against?” He didn’t let Jeffrey answer. “For purposes of this mission, Commander Nyurba and I are your training officers. Your rank means nothing. Nothing. Your readiness is all that matters. All. Your Russian stinks, you’ll have to do a lot better than that. And I saw you blink, you were flustered. Unacceptable!”

“But—”

“Do not talk back to me. If you let on just once during this mission about what you really think inside, how you really feel, you’ve screwed the pooch big-time. My men will have risked their lives, given their lives, for nothing.”

“Now wait a minute, Colonel.”

“No, you wait a minute.” Kurzin moved in close and loomed over Jeffrey. “What did I just tell you?” he said in a loud, angry voice.

“That I’m in training.”

“Christ Almighty, don’t you realize the Russians will be recording every word you say? Running it through stress analyzers? They’ll have hidden video cameras everywhere. Every facial inflection, the way you inhale, the way you fidget, they’ll be watched again and again by a team of the FSB’s best experts!”

“Why can’t I just bring a translator?”

“Because the whole act hinges on your personal command presence, your prestige, your image as Axis nemesis, your tactical nuclear warrior’s worldwide fame. An aide, an assistant, a translator, in this context they’d dilute your impact. You must go alone. The President made that decision.”

“Won’t the Russians have translators?”

“Of course, you fool! Do you think that for one moment you can trust them? Who will they be loyal to?”

“The Russians.”

“Whom you’re supposed to confront as an enemy, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Whom you’re supposed to think have just tried to nuke the United States, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Role-play it out. You’re nowhere there yet. Thank God you’ve got ten days more to work on your part.”

“All right,” Jeffrey conceded. “Lay it on as thick as you need to.”

“Don’t worry, I will, and I don’t need your permission.”

Jeffrey was starting to think that he was in boot camp, lower than dirt — in some bizarre through-the- looking-glass netherworld of lies embedded in other lies. That’s an accurate summary.