The Seventh Angel

“I wish I was. Even a good sized growler could do a number on us, if we hit it the wrong way.”

“What about that killer radar?” Ann asked. “No sparrow shall fall, and all that crap. You can see the ice with that, right?”

“We’re in EMCON,” the man said. “Stealth mode. The SPY radar could probably see most of the ice, but it would give away our position. We’re running without it.”

“So how do we avoid hitting one of those baby icebergs?” Sheldon asked.

“We’ve got lookouts posted,” the Navy man said. “They’re watching the water in front of the ship. If they see anything off the bow, they tell the bridge and we turn to avoid it. We should be okay.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Ann said. ‘But didn’t the Titanic have lookouts posted too? That particular method of ice avoidance didn’t work out too well for those guys, as I recall.”

“You’ve got a point there,” the Navy man said. “But we have two advantages over the Titanic. Our watertight integrity systems and damage control technology are about a century more advanced.”

“Fine,” Ann said. “What’s the other advantage?”

The man laughed again. “We know we’re not unsinkable,” he said. “So we’re a lot more careful.”

“That’s comforting,” Ann said. “Now, we just…”

“Just a sec,” the man said. “I’m getting a call from the bridge.”

He paused for a couple of seconds, and then said, “Boat deck, aye!”

He snapped his fingers. “Peters! Shut off the deck lights. Everybody! Lights off— now!”

The amber lamps went off abruptly, plunging the deck into total darkness.

The Sailor spoke again. “Bridge — Boat deck, all lights are out. We are dark.”

“What’s going on?” Sheldon asked softly.

“Jets,” the Navy man said. “CIC can’t get a lock on the Bogies without lighting off our radar, but our Electronic Warfare guys are tracking emissions from at least four Zaslon S-800’s.”

“What does that mean?” Ann asked.

“It means there are at least four MiG-31 fighter jets out there, probably flying the edge of the ice pack to check for uninvited party guests.”

“Like us,” Sheldon said.

“Yeah,” the man said softly. “Like us. So we’re running quiet and dark, and generally hoping that they don’t detect us. There’s a good chance that they won’t. We’re pretty damned stealthy when we shut down all the toys.”

Ann stared up into the night sky, trying vainly to spot something moving against the backdrop of stars. “What happens if they find us?” she asked.

“Depends on who they belong to,” the Sailor said. “If they’re out of mainland Russia, they’ll more than likely just report our position back to their base. That will stir up some shit, because the Russians don’t like us up here, but it’ll be mostly be political. We probably won’t get shot at.”

“What if they’re not from mainland Russia?” Sheldon asked.

“Then they’re out of the Yelizovo air base on Kamchatka,” the man said. “Which means that they belong to our pal, Mr. Zhukov. If it’s those guys, they’ll shoot us between the eyes about ten seconds after they find out we’re here.”

“This is insane,” Ann said. “We’re dodging icebergs in the dark, and playing hide and seek with freaking fighter jets. What are we going to do for an encore? Juggle chainsaws?”

The Sailor chuckled. “You know what they say. It’s not just a job. It’s an adventure.”

“I’m not joking,” Ann snapped. “What the hell are we doing here? We’re practically asking to get killed.”

“This is what we do,” the man said. “This is our job. We’re kind of like Secret Service agents. We step in front of the bullet, so that our country doesn’t have to.”

“That’s crap,” Ann said. “That whole military-ethos/warrior-Zen thing is nothing but a load of self- aggrandizing macho bullshit.”

“It’s not bullshit, ma’am,” the Sailor said. “We’ve got a trigger-happy lunatic threatening to incinerate the Western United States. If he manages to unleash ten percent of the firepower at his command, he’ll kill more people than every war in history combined. Our job is to stop him any way we can. Even with our lives.”

The man sighed. “We don’t want to die, Ms. Roark. We want to go home to our families. We want to drink beer, and watch football on television, and barbecue hotdogs, and play catch in the back yard with our kids. But we will step into the path of the bullet, if that’s what it takes to stop the bad guys. Like I said — it’s what we do.”

Ann was about to reply, when the man spoke again. “Just a sec. The bridge is talking to me.”

After a few seconds, he said, “Bridge — Boat deck, resume operations, aye.”

He cleared his throat. “The Bogies have passed us by,” he said. “Peters, get the lights back on.”

The amber lamps came back to life. They seemed almost painfully bright after the long minutes of total darkness.

“Alright,” the Sailor said. “The bridge says we’re in position. Let’s get R2D2 in the water, and see if he can find a submarine.”

CHAPTER 43

U.S. NAVAL HOSPITAL

YOKOSUKA, JAPAN

TUESDAY; 05 MARCH

1855 hours (6:55 PM)

TIME ZONE +9 ‘INDIA’

“Ya zamyors…”

The old man’s voice was barely more than a whisper, but it snapped Agent DuBrul instantly back to alertness. His head came up and his body posture stiffened. The chair had lulled him into drowsiness. He stood up and took a quick step to the side of the hospital bed.

Swaddled in the green hospital sheets, Oleg Grigoriev looked like a poor job of embalming. His eyes were sunken, and his once swarthy skin was thin and papery. The iron-hard Soviet Sergeant had all but disappeared now, leaving in his place this dwindling husk of his former self.

The old man’s face had become a mirror. Gazing into its unsettling depths, David DuBrul saw the reflection of his own mortality. For the first time, he could truly imagine his own death. And for the first time, he knew in his heart that it was not an intellectual abstraction. It was a real thing. A true thing.

At some point in the future — whether an hour from now, or fifty years from now — he would draw his very last breath. When he released that final purchase of air, his life would flow out with it, expelled from its frail human vessel to mingle with the atoms of the universe. And David DuBrul would cease to exist.

He hoped that it wouldn’t be like this, that he wouldn’t die like this poor old Russian — failing by slow and painful inches in an unfamiliar bed, in a building full of strangers.

“Ya zamyors,” Grigoriev whispered again.

DuBrul nodded. “You’re cold?” He took a folded blanket from a side table, and spread it over the patient.

“Is that better?” He spoke in English. His Russian was fluent, but he knew that Grigoriev’s English was at least as good. And he did not want to speak to this man in his mother language.

From a standpoint of spy craft, the decision was not a good one. According to the book, if you had the language skills, you followed the subject into whatever dialect he was most comfortable using. It was easier that way to establish trust, which made your subject more likely to speak freely. Also, the need for mental translation made most people select their words carefully when speaking in a foreign tongue. Within the easy flow of their primary language, they tended to blurt out things might never be revealed under the more deliberate syntax of another tongue.