hundred feet at around twelve miles per hour. From the moment the ’chute opens it’s about forty-five seconds before they hit the ground. And barring a gale, they come in within thirty yards of the beam. The guys will not only see them floating down, they’ll hear them thud into the ground.”
“How about radar?”
“With those things hurtling through the air, straight down, from thirty-five thousand feet, the chances of the Russians getting a good fix, before they disappear, are pretty remote. And even if they did, it’d be a bit late to do much about it. On a screen I guess they’d look like meteorites or something.”
“What would they weigh?”
“Around two hundred and fifty pounds each, specially fitted with handles, of course, to make it easy for two guys to carry.”
“Then what? Bury ’em somewhere near the edge of the woods?”
“Exactly. And as soon as the SEALs open ’em up, the first thing they take out are a couple of spades. Then they lock ’em up and bury ’em, all ready for the night when they’ll be back for ’em.”
“I got another problem, John. How are we going to send a military aircraft over Russian airspace without them asking all kinds of questions?”
“That’s pretty simple. With sensible care, there’s nothing to identify a military aircraft from a commercial one, unless they just happen to put up an interceptor for a visual ident. And that’s most unlikely.”
The SEALs Commander walked over to a large globe in the corner of his office and ran a length of a tape measure across the top, edging it into position. “There you are,” he said, tapping the globe. “The polar route from Los Angeles to the Emirates, right on the Gulf. Passes directly down the right-hand side of the lake. We bring in the chief executive of whichever American airline flies that route, and have him file a commercial flight plan with the Russians for that night. No one would think of questioning it. The only difference is, it’ll be a high-altitude echo- enhanced military aircraft making the journey, five miles up there, instead of a regular Boeing.”
“Did I ever mention the fact that you might be a genius?” said Arnold Morgan.
“Not lately,” said Admiral Bergstrom.
“Have they actually tested this system?” said Morgan. “In the desert, and it happened just as you are saying?”
“I have no hard report, but a couple of my guys were out there, and they said it was a goddamned miracle. Those things just came floating in from thirty-five thousand feet and landed right there, just a few yards from the beam.”
“John, old buddy, we got ourselves a plan. That’s the way we’ll go. Where are the guys right now.”
“They’re in a hotel in Helsinki, waiting for the word to move into one of the tour ships across the bay in St. Petersburg. They have excellent papers and passports, as we agreed before.”
“Sounds good. Now, I’ll get the CIA to take care of all of those tour ship bookings. I think we better start those four days after the Tolkach barges actually arrive off the Red Sormovo yards. In theory, they could load and depart right away. Although I don’t think that will happen.”
“Right. I’ll send a veteran chief petty officer into Helsinki, and he can go with two SEALs up the lakes on a ship right away.”
“We need to move fast. They’d better get the canisters made and trucked down here in a couple of days. We’ll load them, and have ’em ready to go that same day. I’ll get the chief on a flight to Helsinki tomorrow morning. We’ll almost certainly have a couple of weeks to spare, but we wanna be ready.”
“One thing, John, are we going to need good timing to get the recce team away from the tour ship and out to the drop zone?”
“Not really. You see we’ll know the exact time they’re scheduled to arrive at the Green Stop before the ship departs. We just need to get the dropper overhead, say, two hours later. That way the guys can just appear to take a walk and set up their beam, and we’ll make sure the aircraft is up there right on time. If he’s late, it just means the guys will have to hang around for an hour. Which doesn’t matter. The thing is, he can’t be early, because he cannot slow down much during his approach through Russian airspace. But I’m not seeing a problem there.”
“No, John, neither am I. The key to this lies in our ability to organize it without a hitch. And then it’s in the hands of the SEALs. By the way, how do we get ’em out? They’re not going back on the ship are they?”
“The recce team will…the ship makes very fast time back, running nonstop at around twenty to twenty-five knots all the way to St. Pete’s. Of course, the strike squad will not return to the ship. We’ll have them out in a small truck, but there will be nothing incriminating about them. Just a small group of tourists trundling around in the land of their forefathers. No problem to anyone. It’s very rural up there. Nothing much for anyone to be sensitive about.”
“Until the charges go off. That might change things a bit.”
“So it might, Arnie, but we’ll be long gone by then.”
“How about afterward? There’s gotta be a fucking uproar, whatever happens.”
“Now that’s your problem. Not mine. I’m here to bang out three little Russian diesel-electrics. And I think I can do it. The uproar will be political. And that’s your beat. We better get the guys at the CIA to work on it.”
“Yeah. Guess so. Somehow we want to be indignant…file some complaint or other…try to sow the seed of doubt in the Russian mind that the whole thing might have been carried out by those Chechens, or a fundamentalist group. We’re not the only country that has a beef with the Moscow government.”
“No, Arnie. We’re not. But we are the only country that has made it absolutely clear we’re not having those Kilos going to China.”
“I don’t suppose the Chinese Navy will be throwing a party in honor of the US Embassy staff in Beijing either.”
7
The lake was fifty miles wide here, and the
“This weather could turn out to be a serious pain in the ass,” said Lieutenant Commander Rick Hunter. He sat huddled with his two companions in the corner of the small bar on deck three, right at the stern of the three- hundred-foot-long blue-and-white tour ship. “Matter of fact, if it rains like I think it’s gonna rain, this little holiday could turn out to be a royal fuck-up. Still, we can’t turn back now.”
His words were carefully chosen to betray nothing to possible eavesdroppers. Rick Hunter was a rare man. He was a SEAL team leader selected from a pack of equally rare men. In him, instructors and commanders had spotted something different. There was a coldness behind his bright blue eyes and Kentucky hardboot manner. They had judged this rugged, country Lieutenant Commander from the Bluegrass as a man others would follow, and who in turn would treat his team’s problems as if they were his alone.
Back at Coronado, and at his home base in Little Creek, Virginia, most everyone had a hell of a soft spot for Rick Hunter. Perhaps not least because of his unwavering eye for a thoroughbred racehorse and finely tuned ear for the Kentucky gossip. Three times in the last four years he’d correctly forecast the winner of the Kentucky Derby. Two of his picks had been favorites, but one had gone in at 20-1. There were young SEALs who believed that Lieutenant Commander Hunter was some kind of a god. His father, old Bart Hunter, bred his own thoroughbreds on an immaculate horse farm out along the Versailles Pike near Lexington, and was not among this particular fan club. He found it a profound mystery that his oldest boy had not the slightest interest in raising horses, as he did, and as his daddy before him had done.
There was no way he could understand the thirty-five-year-old Rick when he told him, as he had told him every year since he was about fifteen, “Dad, it’s too passive. I just can’t spend all year wandering around in a daze looking at baby racehorses, waiting for the Keeneland yearling sales to see if we’re gonna go on eating. I need action. In the horse business I would have considered becoming a jockey. But that’s not possible.”
It sure wasn’t. The six-foot-three-inch Rick Hunter tipped the scales at 215 pounds, and he carried not one
