it.
“Guess who, lover boy?” grinned Fred Cernic.
Rick was too tired to respond, too tired even to speak. He grabbed the envelope, opened the door, and fell on top of his bed. The other two walked on to the adjacent cabins, and as they got there, Lieutenant Schaeffer turned to Fred and said, “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”
Chief Petty Officer Cernic turned to face the junior officer, and said, in a barely audible whisper, “You didn’t let anyone down, sir. I’ve known men who’ve been decorated for a lot less.”
8
Fred Cernic was essentially a prisoner in his cabin. He had not been allowed out all morning, and a steward had delivered his lunch of potato soup, rare sirloin steak, beetroot, cheese, black bread, and a pot of coffee. He ate alone, unlike the other two SEALs, who were busy regaling Jane Westenholz and her daughter with a succession of truly majestic lies.
“…And then we met these two Russian farmers along the road there, and they invited us into their house for a glass of homemade vodka…Of course before we knew it, Fred had got ahold of a second bottle and drunk it… started falling about all over the place…In the end we had to lock him up in a barn until he passed out, then Ray and I managed to drag him back here in the small hours. The two Russian farmers were pretty damned good about it.”
“Oh, how perfectly awful,” said Jane. “He seems like such a nice man.”
“Jane, I’m telling you, you wouldn’t recognize him when he gets into the booze. Part of the reason we brought him up here for this little trip was to get him away from the bars at home…never thought he’d manage to find a bottle of homemade vodka right out here in the middle of nowhere.”
“Are you sure he’s okay?”
“Yeah. He’s just sleeping it off right now. Didn’t want any lunch. I guess he’ll be fine by the end of the day… but it might be better if we had dinner separately tonight. I just don’t want him near wine or anything.”
“Oh, yes. I understand, Ricky. And of course I won’t mention anything if we meet later, but I’m glad you told me about it…By the way, did you get my note?”
“Sure did, ma’am. And I appreciate what you wrote about me. Maybe we could get together for a drink later tonight, after we get Fred back to bed.”
Jane Westenholz smiled and touched the SEAL Commander on the back of his hand. “Then,” she said, “you can tell me what you do with your life back home in the States. I think you’ve been a teeny bit secretive about it.”
“It’s pretty damned dreary, Jane,” said the Lieutenant Commander. “But I’ll be real happy to give you the highlights.”
He smiled his big farmboy smile, and he and Ray Schaeffer made their way out of the ship’s dining room. The
Hunter made his way up to the ship’s communications office and asked to send a cable to the United States. “Just to let the folks know we’re okay,” he said, grinning at the dark-haired girl operator who handed him a form. He addressed the cable to Sally Harrison, jotted down the phone number with its 301 area code, and then carefully wrote, “Lovely time. Freddie fine. Rick.”
He handed the form to the girl with a five-dollar bill, and asked her to send it off as soon as possible.
Two hours later, at 0600 Eastern Daylight Time, Lieutenant John Harrison answered the phone in Admiral Morris’s office, six thousand miles away, and wrote down the message he received from Cable and Wireless. He had no clue as to its meaning but had been instructed to call Admiral Morgan immediately, should he receive a cable from “Rick.”
He picked up the direct line to the Admiral, who was in his office, waiting. “Short cable from Rick, sir,” he reported.
“Beautiful,” said the Admiral, putting back the phone. He stood up and punched the air with delight. “Those guys! They just delivered the bacon!” he exclaimed. “I’ll show those Russian pricks they can’t fuck with me!”
Back in Russia, the
Lieutenant Commander Hunter and his men said good-bye to Jane and her daughter as they disembarked. They were met by the driver of an unmarked car, which drove them to the airport. Inside an hour, they were on a Finnair flight to Helsinki and touched down before dark. Jane Westenholz would never know who they were.
The two Tolkach barges were observed by America’s KH-III satellite as they moved slowly north up the Volga. Captain Igor Volkov, master of the articulated double barge, led the way through the channel. His twenty- four-year-old son, Ivan, was at the wheel on the for’ard rudder, nine hundred feet in front of him.
On the evening of April 25 they had arrived at the cement town of Volsk. Its factory chimneys belched yellowish smoke and dust across the sky. The chronic pollution could be seen in the orange glow of the streetlights and was even visible in the photographs Admiral Morris studied in faraway Maryland.
The Tolkach and its six-hundred-foot-long consort stretched for over five hundred yards of the Volga as they moved in stately procession through the heavily industrialized reaches of the river on the approach to the imperial university town of Kazan.
On April 27 they had rolled past Syrzan, a town of old rusty chimneys and sprawling brick factories that looked like a throwback to the early days of the Industrial Revolution. The picture definition was poor because of occasional rain, but the eye of KH-III was good enough. “They’re gonna make Nizhny by May sixth,” George Morris told Arnold Morgan.
Four days later, on May I, at the approximate time the SEALs had been fighting their way through the rain- swept woods of Lake Onega, the giant barges had reached Ulyanovsk, the birthplace of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. It was night as they hove into sight, and Captain Volkov could see the red neon nameplate stark above the new river station. They were not stopping, and he gave a short blast on the ship’s horn as he passed. Scatterings of people stood and gazed out across the sandy shallows into the great black flow of the central stream of the river, where the barges left hardly a ripple.
They were a hundred miles short of Kazan, and these miles would be traversed in wide waterways — up to eighteen miles across — as the Volga turns into a virtual inland sea. At the town of Zaton the barges made a ninety-degree turn for the port of Kazan, which they made in the small hours of May 3. Just beyond there they swung hard left, along the now-narrowing river, and began their nonstop run to Nizhny Novgorod, 250 miles away.
The US satellites charted their progress most days. Late at night George Morris and Arnold Morgan would examine the photographs of the three Kilo class submarines in Red Sormovo and the progress of the Tolkach barges. There was still some scaffold left on Kilo three, but the two American admirals assessed the first two to be almost complete.
All the way along to Nizhny, the Volga is flanked by green rolling hills and woods. Intermittent villages set in the folds of the hills are bright in the morning light, and almost invisible in the misty rain that sweeps through every few days in spring. The eastern shore of the river is flatter than the more hilly Asian bank, but the two diverse green plateaus along the shallow, slow flowing stream of the Volga are a feast of glorious rural landscape. The presence of the giant barges with their military overtones was hideously intrusive.
In the small hours of May 7 Captain Volkov steered around the Strelka and moored alongside the loading quay at the junction of the Volga and the Oka Rivers at Nizhny Novgorod. Both barges made a huge 360-degree turn in the mile-wide waterway and came up in the shadows of a forest of dock cranes. Behind them stood the great Cathedral of Alexander Nevsky. With the dock on their starboard side and the waters of the Oka to port, the barges now faced northeast. They were less then four hundred yards from the three Kilos.
