Kilo Class

Alek and his friends had salvaged the remains of Pieter and Torbin. The River Police arrived inside forty-five minutes, and the plot seemed to become more obscure.

Colonel Borsov heard the news on his ship’s telephone, and he called Admiral Rankov immediately to inform him that he now had only five people missing, rather than seven. The two crew members were accounted for.

Rankov was truly mystified. In the back of his mind, he had considered the possibility that the two Russians might have murdered the old American men for their money and then taken off. He realized it was a somewhat outlandish thought, but it happened to be the only one he had at present.

Now he lacked even that unpromising lead. And there were yet more questions. Who killed the crew members? And could the aged Americans have had anything to do with the wrecked Kilos? Admiral Rankov was beginning to think not. How could they? The submarine convoy had been parked a mile offshore, and the party from the Midwest was comprised of elderly tourists, not trained frogmen.

The Admiral decided this was a blind alley, but he wondered whether the gallant Colonel Borsov might have been guarding his back when he was so completely certain about the ages and infirmities of the four American men and their nurse. And he made a note to check out the backgrounds of all five missing midwesterners. The Americans might conceivably have blundered in their cover story. But he knew, in his soul, that Arnold Morgan would have spun his tangled web too skillfully for that, and a feeling of despair settled in the pit of his stomach.

He turned his attention back to the papers on his desk. Before him was a somewhat short list of aircraft that had come out of the Arctic and journeyed south, high above the Russian mainland toward Turkey and the Arabian Sea, and the Persian Gulf. Generally, these were commercial aircraft from the West Coast of the USA and Canada that were taking the shortcut across the North Pole to the Middle East. Rankov’s men had turned up eight such flights in the past two months. All of them checked out, and all of them had arrived at their destination as recorded on their flight plan. Except for one.

The list in front of the Russian Admiral showed an American Airlines flight AW294, out of Los Angeles on May 1 (Russian Time), a Boeing 747, according to its flight plan bound for Bahrain international airport right on the Gulf. “Well,” mused the Admiral, “everything went according to plan as far as Russia…they arrived in our airspace on schedule over Murmansk at around 2230—just a few minutes late — and then flew more or less straight down longitude 34 degrees. According to this they were at around thirty-five thousand feet, making 440 knots and never slowed down.

“According to our men on the ground in the Emirates, however, that aircraft was never recorded at Bahrain. And was never scheduled to do so. They did not have a Boeing 747 in there anytime that morning. Not according to the records.”

The Admiral ran his finger farther down the report. “Here we are…American Airlines say they landed in Bahrain on time…the commercial flight was a charter for Arab businessmen…and they can’t understand why the Arabs have no record of it.”

Surprisingly, the Russian agent had also provided a verbatim report of his phone conversation, in which the American official mentioned they couldn’t “give a shit one way or another, since the aircraft is safely back in LA… and why anyone should want to fuck around checking the unbelievably unreliable Middle East airport data beats the hell out of me. Sorry I can’t help more. G’bye.”

“That,” said Admiral Rankov, “is the end of that. The aircraft didn’t even come to Russia. Just flew straight over. We don’t have any rights here. And anyway we’ve no reason to think that Flight AW294 was doing anything more than transporting Arab businessmen. That’s a real dead end…. I suppose it could have been a US aircraft heading for their Air Force base at Dahran, but there’s no chance of getting anything more out of them…still, I’d never be surprised if that bastard Morgan…”

Every time the giant ex-Naval Intelligence officer came up with a possible lead, any lead, he seemed forced to discard it as either too unlikely or just plain impossible. And yet…he still sensed the hand of Arnold Morgan behind all of this. He was not done trying yet. Rankov was developing an uneasy feeling that he was never going to prove anything, that the birds he sought had already flown the coop. Leaving not a feather behind.

On June 24 an initial report came to his office from the Naval Lieutenant Commander in charge of the salvage operation up in the canal. Work was proceeding slowly because barge hulls one and three were deeply embedded in the silted bottom of the waterway. Hull two, however, the back end of the articulated Tolkach, the one that had flipped right over, gave the evidence. The divers had found a succession of eight gaping holes, between four and five feet long, on the starboard side right where the bilge keel joins the underside of the ship. They had been evenly placed, fifty feet apart.

“Neat,” grunted Admiral Rankov, scanning the rest of the report, which he knew before he read it. “Burn marks plainly showing…hull metal taken out with oxyacetylene underwater cutters and forwarded to the old KGB forensic laboratories in Moscow…results not in.”

“And when they do arrive,” murmured the Chief of Russia’s Naval Staff, “They’re going to say, ‘SEMTEX’ and then, ‘Made in Czekoslovakia’…Neat, neater, neatest. Fuck it.”

It was now his duty to inform his superior, the C in C and Deputy Defense Minister, Admiral Karl Rostov, that in strictest confidence, the Navy now knew the barges had been professionally blown and sunk by persons unknown. The question would be, how to present this unpalatable truth to the people? If at all.

Vitaly Rankov understood the Kilo disaster would, in the end, be announced as an accident. He knew it would be picked up by the international media not as major news, but as news nonetheless. He could deal with that. What he could not deal with was his vision of the gloating, complacent face of Admiral Arnold Morgan. “Now then, old pal, you gotta start thinking about beefing up your security…stuff happens…”

“Jesus Christ,” said Admiral Rankov out loud. It was the first time he had ever accepted the distinct possibility that the United States might actually get away with this. Just as they had gotten away with the destruction of the two previous Kilos.

Meanwhile he picked up the telephone and instructed Lieutenant Commander Kazakov to find the pathologist’s report on the deaths of the two Andropov crew members. Their bodies had been flown to St. Petersburg for an autopsy, and Rankov wanted a preliminary view of the precise cause of death.

Lieutenant Commander Kazakov returned in thirty-five minutes with the faxed notes of the examining pathologist. The cause of death was identical for both men — heart failure caused by one single deadly straight incision made between the ribs by a large knife blade, which almost cleaved both hearts in two. One entry was from the front, one from the back. The body that contained the frontal injury, that of the steward Pieter, contained more water in the lungs than the other victim. However, neither man drowned. They were both knifed to death.

“Classic Special Forces,” muttered Admiral Rankov. “Just one wound. No mistakes. Professionals. Professional frogmen I’d guess, spotted by these two comedians from the Andropov, and summarily taken out. Before the killers swam on out to the barges and placed their charges on the hulls.

“Strange how I know so well what must have happened. Even stranger, that I don’t have one shred of evidence for either crime. Just four geriatric Americans, two of whom can barely walk, and all of whom are even beyond the suspicion of a seasoned KGB officer like Colonel Borsov. And they’re missing.”

The Admiral stood up and pushed his thick, wavy, dark hair back in a gesture of exasperation. He walked slowly across the long room, his heels clicking on the marble, like the ticking of a great unseen clock. “I know,” he told his deserted office, “EVERYTHING…and yet, I know NOTHING.”

Rankov was nothing if not a complete professional himself. He called in his two Lieutenant Commanders and ordered them to organize an immediate search of the lakeshore, fields, and woodlands around the area of the Green Stop of the Andropov.

“Might we know what we’re looking for, sir?” asked Kazakov.

“I think we might be looking for five more bodies.”

“The Americans?”

“Uh-huh. I have a feeling this hit squad, which blew the barges, was seen by the two crew members, and possibly by the Americans. It is my opinion that the terrorists may well have taken out all seven people. Authorize search parties to go through the woods immediately adjacent to the lake, and to comb the shore, above and below the surface. Get Navy frogmen in there. If you had just killed four old men and their nurse in the middle of the night,