The line from Turkey clicked dead. For a change Admiral Morgan was still holding the phone. “No, he didn’t go back there. He went straight past — right through the harbor, at periscope depth,” he said to the empty room.
He walked to his sprawling maps and charts on the big sloping desk. He switched on the light, pulled out the one of the Black Sea coastlines, and went to work with his dividers, muttering as he considered the maps. “Istanbul to Odessa…375 miles…at fifteen to twenty knots he’s in the next day.”
The admiral then measured the distance from Odessa, across the water to Sevastopol. “Two hundred miles to the southern headland of the Crimean Peninsula. Did Benjamin Adnam make that journey…to meet the captain of Kilo 630?” he asked aloud.
He returned to his desk, thinking deeply. “Let me stand in his shoes. I’m in Sevastopol, the headquarters of the Russian Black Sea Fleet. I intend either to keep an appointment, or find the captain of a Russian diesel-electric submarine. What do I need? I need cash, a ton of it, that’s what I need. And I can’t get it in Odessa or any other Russian city, not without attracting a great amount of attention to myself. Same with Cairo. But I
Admiral Morgan picked up the phone and told the operator to connect him to the CIA immediately. The admiral asked to be put through to the senior duty officer, and told him to get Major Ted Lynch on a secure line to the Director of the National Security Agency.
He slammed down the phone before anyone was tempted to remind him what time it was. He sat back in his chair and waited. The CIA major was on the line inside five minutes. “Admiral, hi, Ted Lynch.”
“Hey, sorry to wake you, but I have a lead you might be able to help with. I think our man may have picked up a very large bundle of cash, probably American dollars, more than 5 million, maybe up to 10 million, in Istanbul on November 26 last year. Any way of getting close to that?”
“Istanbul is a very cosmopolitan place, but they value United States business. They’ll probably cooperate. We’re almost certainly looking for someone in Buyukdere Street, the place is full of international banks — Bankapital, Iktisat Bankasi, Garanti Bank. They are fairly secretive, but we have connections there. And they mostly have branches in New York.
“I doubt if they’ll give us names or anything — but if we ask for an unusual amount of U.S. dollars being picked up that day in cash, like a suitcase full, they’ll probably give us a straight yes or no. We’ll decide where to go from there. I’ll get moving 0200 tomorrow, that’s Monday, right?”
“Hey, thanks, Ted. Good luck, I’ll wait to hear from you, early tomorrow morning. I’m in 0600. G’night, pal.”
“Hey, Arnold, one thing.” The voice of the CIA man rose, trying to stop the admiral from putting down the phone. “I gotta question…you still there?”
“I’m here.”
“Admiral, if I am going to pay a Russian submarine captain a huge bundle of cash to take his submarine out of the Black Sea in early to mid-April, I sure as hell am not going to give it to him in late November.”
“Beautiful call, Ted. You sure as hell are not. You’re probably going to give him twenty grand, earnest money, in November. And then arrange to give him the big payment…maybe five million for himself, which would travel on the submarine with him, and another five million to take care of the crew, which would also be carried on board.”
“Sounds much more like it, Admiral. But there’s no way I could get a trace on a small sum like twenty grand on November 26. What we’re really after is maybe 10 million U.S. dollars, say between April 7 and 13. There’s got to be a record of that somewhere.”
“That’s it, Ted. Second week in April is much more likely. Do what you can. I’m grateful.”
The admiral replaced the receiver, picked it up again, and dialed the Maryland number of Bill Baldridge. The clock on the wall now said 0338. But the Kansas scientist answered swiftly in a reflex action honed by years of coming on watch in the smallest hours of the morning. If he was not alone, he sounded alone. “Yessir, that’s me. Hi, what’s hot?”
“Bill, we are making progress. The Russians recognize their Kilo was probably hired by an operative from an Arab state. They are on our side and you are going to visit a buddy of mine who heads up the office of Naval Intelligence, Vice Admiral Vitaly Rankov. Not till after your stuff in London and Scotland. Then I’m sending you down to the Black Sea, so pack plenty of things. You may be gone for several weeks.
“Meantime the Mossad are seriously on the trail of Adnam. They have traced him to Odessa. He went by sea from Istanbul on a Russian passport. He also had a stamped Turkish visa. I’ll say one thing, that guy has no trouble with documents. Right now it looks like he went on to Sevastopol with a moderate bundle of cash and paid a Russian captain to prepare a mission with his submarine and crew.”
“Steady, Admiral. You can’t just turn up and start bribing Russian Naval officers to pinch a submarine and bamboozle their crew into doing something diabolical that is going to make them the most hunted men in the world.”
“Yes you can, Bill. Find me a Russian captain with little money, and I could offer him enough cash to do anything. Just get in the boat, tell his crew they were going on a secret Navy exercise, and then depart. My terms would be simple…carry out the job, here’s half the money. The rest is in a bank in South America, from where you cannot be extradited. Nor, with a bit of luck, even found.”
“How much are you paying?”
“How about half a million dollars?”
“No chance. He’s gotta live on it for the rest of his life, and his family’s.”
“Okay, three million.”
“Not enough to wreck a big Navy career and leave your homeland forever.”
“Five?”
“Possible.”
“Ten million dollars.”
“Sounds pretty good to me.”
“I’ll make it twenty million, if you like. But I’ll get him. Because my government’s oil money is nothing to me, but it’s everything to him. And to his family. I think we’ve got the answer, Bill. This is how they did it. And I’ll tell you something else. Those new Kilos in the Black Sea have a full complement of torpedoes on board already. Probably twenty. And two of them are nuclear-tipped.”
“Jesus Christ! How do you know?”
“Rankov told me.”
“You mean when that Kilo set sail, Ben Adnam was on board and the killer missiles were already in place.”
“No. I think they picked Ben up somewhere in Turkish waters. He would not have risked security checks inside the Russian Navy base. But the captain knew that Ben had access to a colossal amount of cash. And he knew that the cash was his for the asking. With another half to come when the mission was completed. Payable in some foreign country. The torpedoes were ready though. The Russian captain saw to that. Part of the deal, right?”
“Are the Russians sure the Kilo went through the Bosporus underwater?”
“No. They just know it’s missing, and they know something very fishy is going on. But they realize it may well have gone through the Bosporus because of the drowned sailor on the Greek island. He
“Rankov confirmed that?”
“He did.”
“Will I see you tomorrow before I leave for London?”
“Yes. Come to the office. Early afternoon. We’ll get a final briefing from CNO. Then you can leave straight- away for the airport. Also I would like you to pick up a portable phone scrambler. Do you know how to work it?”
“Yessir, but we’d better run over the operating procedures. Can I hook it up to you from abroad?”
“It’ll work from anywhere. And it’s damned important. We cannot risk
“Okay, sir.”
But Admiral Morgan was already off the line. He was hunched over a chart at his sloping desk with the big light. This time he was poring over a larger-scale map detailing the northern coastline of Turkey, which stretched
