gangway using a deck crane. He wore his winter greatcoat and formal hat and Navy blue dress uniform — including four gold rings that COB removed from Finch’s jacket to sew on his sleeves that already bore three. Jeffrey was led aft by the icebreaker’s weather-beaten master, a gaunt part-Asian man, fiftyish, whose fingers and teeth were stained by nicotine from cheap Russian cigarettes of which he thoroughly reeked. Now, he didn’t smoke; the Yak’s refueling had just been completed.
Looking over the icebreaker’s side, Jeffrey saw the crane stowing the brow.
The pilot, a no-nonsense, thirtysomething very fit Slav, strapped Jeffrey into the trainee seat, giving him a flight helmet. He climbed into the rear seat and lowered the cockpit canopy. Engine noises rose from idling whines to bone-shaking roars. The aircraft jumped into the sky, carrying external fuel tanks instead of bombs or missiles — but it did have a nose gun.
The Yak-38 hit five hundred knots. After a blur of Laptev Sea icebergs and white caps and surf, then a stretch of desolate tundra, Jeffrey looked down and around at a crazy-quilt patchwork of untouched taiga forest, winding rivers and tributaries, repulsive overindustrialization, and open-pit strip mining. The pilot helped Jeffrey listen to a news update that Meredov relayed to the plane. Drunken looting and panicky riots had broken out in crowded downtown Moscow. With no government explanation forthcoming for the paralyzing fireworks in the sky, with police unable to mobilize and blazes burning unchecked, anarchists and hooligans seized the chance to unleash years of pent-up rage. The frenzied mob-rule lawlessness and violence rapidly spread. As paranoid as ever of interference from abroad, Russians lynched Westerners at random, and stoned embassies indiscriminately.
Chapter 28
In minutes the Yak landed at a base in the foothills of the snowcapped Cherskiy Mountain Range. A group of naval officers stood there to meet Jeffrey, led by a tall and bearlike figure, easily recognized from his photos, the unsmiling Elmar Meredov.
Meredov loped toward the Yak idling on the airstrip, trailed by his senior staff including a translator. He welcomed Jeffrey curtly, cautiously. Jeffrey insisted on carrying his overnight bag, hugging it in his lap in the van that took everyone on a short ride through the base. He chided himself immediately: the gesture with the bag was meant to establish antagonism and distance, but it was coming across as plain defensive. He sat there in stern silence, and no one else spoke a word.
A ceremonial honor guard of naval infantry, holding rifles with gleaming fixed bayonets, very smartly snapped to attention flanking the last part of the road to the headquarters building. Jeffrey wasn’t sure if this was a courtesy to him, or a show of force, or both. A platoon of Army Spetsnaz troops arrived by helicopter a minute after the Yak, and followed the van in two trucks. They grimly established close-in perimeter security — terrorists, rogues, insurgents, or assassins could be anywhere in this crisis of unknown, imponderable dimensions. Again Jeffrey wondered. Was this a precaution, needed from the Russians’ perspective to protect him and Meredov? Or was it to confine him, while Russia and the U.S. followed a path toward atomic war?
In Meredov’s office, Jeffrey eyed the meter-long model of a NATO code-name Typhoon displayed on a bookcase. He reminded himself that Meredov once walked the decks of such a sub as assistant captain. During nuclear deterrent patrols, he’d been ready if ordered to help unleash wholesale Armageddon on America.
Jeffrey loosened up, for the first time in hours, when Meredov showed him a photo of his wife and their three grown sons. Meredov’s pleasure at displaying his family to a professional peer — Jeffrey — was clearly genuine, and infectious.
Other physical tokens of that experience festooned Meredov’s uniform jacket. Russian practice was to give a separate medal for each award of the same decoration; the man’s chest held rows of them. Jeffrey recognized five copies of the Medal for Courage, but he didn’t know what most of the others meant. He was glad he’d worn his dress uniform with his own medals, including the five-pointed bronze medallion of the Medal of Honor on a ribbon around his neck.
Obliged to reciprocate, Jeffrey pulled out his wallet, showing Meredov pictures of his parents, and of his two older sisters with their husbands and kids. Meredov admired them, with apparent sincerity. He also admired Jeffrey’s Medal, and, seeing the fourth ring on his sleeves, congratulated him on his recent promotion. He complimented Jeffrey on his Russian. Meredov didn’t speak En-glish, beyond a few basic phrases learned from TV.
Meredov seemed to read his thoughts, which Jeffrey found unsettling. Meredov suddenly turned dour. “Come into my conference room, Captain Fuller. Let us get down to the urgent business, shall we?”
Maybe he didn’t feel nervous inside after all. Maybe Meredov was incapable, at this point in his life within such an alien culture as Russia, of ever being made nervous. Jeffrey realized that he’d already shrewdly, smoothly, seized the mental edge. This concerned Jeffrey in a bigger context. Why was he playing, so soon, for such an edge? It made sense, given the political risks to his career, for Meredov to begrudge the role of unwilling back-door emissary — but even so he ought to want to tone down conflict, not raise it, for his own country’s sake.
He also appeared to be very good at donning different masks from one moment to the next. Jeffrey wondered which of these personas was the real Meredov. Then it occurred to him that this might be the wrong point of view. Maybe they were all parts of the real him? If so, he was a complicated guy, unpredictable to someone who didn’t know him well, a tough customer to deal with.
And Meredov had another advantage in this strange, developing confrontation. His best weapon was probably to tell the simple, honest truth as he saw it. Jeffrey, in contrast, had to constantly lie.
Nyurba’s Skat, still going all out, began to run low on fuel. They reached the harbor, Ambarchik, at the Kolyma’s outlet to the sea. Nyurba, smeared with gore, talked to the fueling-pier workers. He scrawled an illegible signature on the requisition forms. They hurried, but the transfer of thousands of liters of gas via hoses used valuable time. The Skat took off again, heading east along the shore, passing promontories with lighthouses, and cliffs. They aimed for narrow Malyy Chaunskiy Strait, between the mainland and big Ayon Island, leading into huge Chaunskaya Bay, fifty miles from the Pevek naval base.
“Sir,” the Army Ranger shouted, “we’re being called on the radio.” The Skat was so old that the control cabin’s soundproofing didn’t work very well. The whining drone of the engines and props made conversation difficult.
“Don’t transmit!” Nyurba ordered hoarsely. “Who’s calling?”
“I don’t know what their call sign means.”
“How’s reception?”
“One by one.” Poor signal strength, poor message clarity.
“Don’t transmit.”
“Hydrophones can still track us,” the SEAL Chief corrected sardonically. Nyurba was none too happy at the reminder. He had another worry as the Skat’s engines continued to strain: How long before they broke down and the group was stranded?
Meredov’s conference room was windowless, shielded against electronic eavesdropping. He didn’t seem too concerned about that, since he left the thick door from his office open. He took the seat at the head of the table, so
