Nimitz Class

Everything seems desperately sad but essentially normal. Admiral Rankov gets crosser every day. I heard him yelling down the phone to someone yesterday.”

At this point Lieutenant Sapronov did a deep imitation of a fairytale giant’s voice, and continued: “‘There’s nothing fucking normal about this. Nothing!! Do you hear me?’ I guess the guy on the other end nearly had a heart attack. But we still didn’t get anything new.”

Bill laughed. He liked Russians, as almost everyone does who meets them. They are usually very frank and open, with a good sense of fun, and an unfailing irreverence about authority, once they get loosened up. He and the lieutenant enjoyed a good breakfast of kolbasa, the smoked sausage native to the Ukraine, with scrambled eggs, toasted lavash bread, and Russian coffee, which Bill thought was not a whole lot different from that at Chock Full o’Nuts.

Afterward they sat on deck in the morning sun, sipped vody Lagidze, the cold Russian mineral water mixed with various syrups, and watched the fast-approaching coastline of the Crimean Peninsula. Right after 1230, the Babochka cut its engines for the run into the short bay of Sevastopol, and Bill was on the jetty before 1300. Admiral Vitaly Rankov was there to greet him. The towering exSoviet international oarsman, whose eyes were as gray as the Baltic Sea, and whose handshake resembled that of a mechanical digger, was an imposing figure.

“Welcome, Lieutenant Commander,” he rumbled in a deep bass voice, which Bill thought would probably have done justice to the role of Sparafucile in Rigoletto. “I know you are one of Admiral Morgan’s staff. I know Arnold well, and I do not envy you. He is a terrible man!” Admiral Rankov joked as they walked along the dockside. They came to a group of newly built offices that resembled those on a New York construction site. Admiral Rankov and his staff occupied about six of the wooden structures during the weeks he was working with the High Command of the Black Sea Fleet. Every step he took in his office made the place shudder, every door he closed threatened to bring down the ceiling. Bill thought the floor might give way altogether when he banged his huge fist on the desk for emphasis. This was a man, he thought, who belonged in the vast, vaulted stone halls of the Kremlin, where Admiral Morgan felt he would most assuredly end up.

“Right, Lieutenant Commander,” he said, once he had attended to his more urgent messages. “I instructed Yuri to give you a little background on our progress, but if there is anything you particularly want to know, please feel free to ask me. By the way, we still have no hard evidence about the fate of the Kilo.”

“Well, sir,” said Bill, “I think the main purpose of my visit is to try and discover whether any suspicious- looking character from the Middle East was seen around here at all. You see, we think someone bribed your captain with a huge sum of money. Someone must have seen him.”

“Yes,” replied Rankov. “Arnold Morgan told me what you have worked out, and I’m just beginning to think you may be right. What other explanation can there be? We can’t find the wreck. The drowned sailor who was a member of that ship’s company? Found off the coast of Greece? The Kilo must have got out. But it’s still very difficult for us to find out how. This place is crawling with people from the Middle East. The Iranians have a fucking office here!”

“How about the Iraqis?”

“No office. But they’re not strangers. They want to buy two or three Kilos, but right now they have no money to spare, and we’re giving no credit to anyone, however good their credit might be. Right now it’s — how you say it? — cash on the drum.”

“Barrel,” said Bill.

“Right. Cash on the barrel. The Iraqis have been arms customers of ours for a long time, as you know. But if they can’t pay, we can’t supply. Things here are very bad financially. And we just don’t have the backup to go around giving away submarines for which we might get paid, sometime. Also you Americans have things wrapped up pretty tight now. We’d rather be your friends, and we don’t much want to do anything which will endanger that friendship.”

“No submarines for a mad dog like Iraq?”

“Lieutenant Commander, I have to be straight. If anyone comes in here waving a billion dollars for submarines, we will supply. We don’t care if they’re Chinese, Arabs, Persians, or even Eskimos.”

“We have noticed that,” said Bill, grimly.

“You don’t know what it’s like to have your backs to the wall over money,” said Rankov. “For a big nation like ours, it’s a dreadful thing. And it’s been happening here for almost the whole of the twentieth century. And it’s still happening now we’re in the twenty-first.”

“Yes, I suppose so. But would you have noticed a stranger who looked like he came from an Arab nation hanging around here at the time, early April?”

“Well, I certainly would not, because I was not here at the time. But I do not think anyone else would either. There are just too many people who would fit that description. Anyway, I do not think your man would just have been hanging around. He could not have got in through the gates, not without being brought in by a Russian official or at least a serving officer.

“Quite honestly, I’m inclined to agree with Arnold Morgan. I think his rendezvous was arranged. And he bought the captain with a massive amount of money, and then that captain fooled the crew into going on a secret exercise on behalf of the Russian Navy. Nothing else fits.”

“Who was the captain?”

“A very well-respected Russian officer. A native Ukrainian, as so many of our submarine commanders are. Captain Georgy Kokoshin. He’s very experienced without being brilliant. Man of about forty-two. Married to a much younger woman, Natalya. They have two young children, six and eight, both boys. The family lives on the edge of the city in one of those new high-rises. We’ve been checking there on and off for over three months now. Ever since the submarine was reported lost. But everything seems normal. Mrs. Kokoshin was very, very upset over the death of her husband.”

“When did you last check?”

“I believe I had a report in on Tuesday morning. The children were at school as usual.”

“No new cars, new clothes, nothing extravagant?”

“Nothing.”

“Did you search their apartment? Ransack it from top to bottom?”

“No. We did not. Captain Kokoshin was a senior Russian commanding officer, presumed dead. He was very popular, and no one wanted to treat his widow as a criminal. In some respects we are in a similar position to yourselves. You do not wish to admit your carrier was hit by an enemy. We do not wish to admit we have mislaid a submarine and its crew. If we start harassing the wives of the officers, word will get around that something is wrong.”

“Yes. I guess so. Have you done any checks at all on any of the families of the other senior officers?”

“All of them. We found nothing.”

“And the Kilo sent no signal whatsoever once she had cleared the port of Sevastopol?”

“Nothing.”

“Well, would you mind if I have a look around? Could you just show me the area where the submarine was moored, let me see where the captain and some of his officers lived? I have to make a report about this visit to Admiral Morgan.”

“Certainly. I will show you what you wish to see, as I promised Arnold Morgan.”

It was a short walk to the submarine area. When they arrived Lieutenant Sapronov was awaiting them, standing in front of a Kilo, identical, Bill supposed, to the one he believed had hit the Jefferson.

“This is where she lived, Hull 630. This is where she was last seen. This is where she sailed from, at first light, on the morning of April 12.” Admiral Rankov spoke as a man who has gone over the ground many times.

Before him Bill could see another slightly shabby, black-painted submarine, similar in size to Unseen, which he had visited four days previously. The Kilo looked a bit basic compared to some of the modern American designs, but he knew she ran deathly quiet beneath the surface, probably quieter than the U.S. boats, and he knew that her torpedoes were both accurate and lethal.

He stared up at three of her masts, jutting out from her long, slim sail. And he imagined in his mind, the dull, familiar clunk of the big SAET-60 exiting the tube, the whine of the engine as the underwater missile raced straight