in the middle of nowhere, and you were right next to a large lake, my guess is you’d dump the bodies in the water, weighted down somehow. But tell them to check the woods anyhow.”
Within three hours, a wide search was under way along the area of the Green Stop. Tour ships were moved on, the area along the shoreline was cordoned off, all along the dirt road and back into the woods. The River Police Commandant, working in conjunction with two Commanders from the Northern Fleet who had arrived by helicopter, decreed that a line should be marked off parallel to the dirt road, deep in the woods, more than a quarter of a mile from the shore.
The police chief objected, since the woodlands were twelve miles long and they were looking at a two-mile stretch. “With five bodies to drag into the undergrowth, they’re not going in there more than a hundred yards at most,” he said. “You draw that line a quarter of a mile in and we’re looking at a search area of one and one-half million square yards. With a hundred men, that’s fifteen thousand square yards each. But we only have a hundred in total, because fifty of our men are working along the water. Therefore we have each of our land searchers taking care of thirty thousand square yards, all of it covered in bracken, dead leaves, trees, and bushes. We’ll be here till Christmas.”
“If we don’t crack this, we might end up somewhere for a lot longer,” replied the Commander. “Let’s just keep going until someone tells us to stop, ‘the classic old Communist way.’”
The police Commandant laughed. “You’re in charge,” he said. “A quarter of a mile it is. Let’s get in the woods. You want metal detectors used?”
“Not searching for bodies. Just rakes, forks, and sharp sticks. I think in pairs is most efficient.”
“Yessir.”
Nine days later they had found precisely nothing. Which was scarcely surprising, since the searchers were, even at their nearest point, more than seven thousand miles from the still-breathing bodies of the missing Americans. Not to mention, still three-quarters of a mile from the deeply buried, booby-trapped SEALs canisters, each of which had anyway been thoughtfully metal-stamped by Admirals Morgan and Bergstrom, MADE IN THE UKRAINE.
Admiral Rankov was almost disappointed. He had talked himself into believing they might actually find the Americans dead. But every instinct he possessed told him the missing Americans
The next question was: should he hand this entire investigation over to the Military Agency in Moscow, which specialized in terrorism? He would have done so without hesitation had he considered any nation had a motive. But there was only one nation that fitted into that category. And the Special Forces, which operate in deadly secret behind the Stars and Stripes, did not count as terrorists. These were the US Army Rangers, or US Navy SEALs, and either one of them was way beyond the reach of any Russian reprisal, short of a shooting war.
Admiral Vitaly Rankov had never felt more powerless. There could be no admission from the Kremlin of what he knew had happened. No possible confession from his already beleaguered government that Special Forces from the USA had attacked his country, way inside the borders. No disclosure that the old Iron Curtain was now made, essentially, of gossamer.
And he cursed the ground upon which Arnold Morgan walked.
It had been a Black Operation. And Admiral Rankov knew that Black Operations were designed to leave no footprints. That had been the case when the two Kilos vanished in the North Atlantic. And it was most certainly the case now. The Chinese had not as yet caused a huge fuss, but they wanted their $300 million back.
The Russian Admiral was a loyal member of the Naval high command, and he cared deeply about the service in which he had worked for all of his life. If the Chinese pulled out now, he knew it would cause shocking hardship in every corner of the Russian shipbuilding industry, and indeed among the Navy personnel.
The priority, he believed, was to save the order from Beijing for the unfinished aircraft carrier in the Ukraine, and to come up with a foolproof scheme to deliver the final two Kilos to China. With some luck, he thought, we might even get them to hold over the $300 million, maybe even roll over the order for more Kilos. “Just as long as I can come up with a method of delivering them,” he thought. “Without that fucker Morgan and his bandits sinking them first.”
He sat alone in his office, gazing at a large map of the Northern Oceans, those to the south of the floating Arctic wasteland that flows around the North Pole. He looked again at the unfathomable areas where the surface waves rolled over a twelve-thousand-foot depth. And he checked his calendar for the weeks when the ice would be at its northern summer limits. Then he looked at the availability of the largest nuclear submarines this world has ever seen, which were built, he thought proudly, in the old Soviet Union…their own massive platform for sea- launched, intercontinental, ballistic missiles…no one, not even the USA, would monkey around with one of these. They could operate under the ice if necessary, a thousand feet below the surface, and were capable of smashing through ice ten feet thick.
Admiral Rankov gazed with some satisfaction at the map, thinking about…his twenty-one-thousand-ton colossus of the underwater world, which packs the punch of nearly forty torpedoes and antisubmarine missiles. Powered by two massive nuclear reactors, it can run swiftly beneath the waves at almost thirty knots.
“Just let him try,” growled Admiral Rankov. “Just let him fucking well try.”
10
More than three hundred relatives and friends attended a memorial service for Dr. Kate Goodwin at St. Francis Church, Brewster, yesterday. Dr. Goodwin was one of twenty-nine Americans presumed dead after the Woods Hole research ship
—
The sharply worded message summoning Admiral Zhang Yushu back to Beijing had an unusual urgency about it. The regular helicopter flight from the Navy’s Southern Fleet Headquarters at Zhanjiang up to Canton, and then a commercial flight north, would not be fast enough.
Which was why the Commander in Chief of the People’s Liberation Army-Navy, in company with his South Sea Fleet Commander, Vice Admiral Zu Jicai, had commandeered one of his Navy’s 700 aircraft to use as a taxi, and was presently ensconced in a TU-16 Badger making five hundred knots forty thousand feet over the Changjiang Lowlands. Neither of the two senior officers had any idea why they had been summoned to the capital, but the meeting they were scheduled to attend was set to start at noon, and it was now 0700. They were eight hundred miles due south of Beijing, and the converted bomber was flying directly above the central reaches of the Yangtse, where the great river threads its way through a sprawling network of inland lakes, dams, gorges, and canals. Down below the Yangtse flowed muddily eastward beneath dark gray clouds, its water slashed by a torrential downpour.
“What d’you think, sir? The submarines?” asked Admiral Zu.
The C in C was thoughtful. “No, Jicai. I don’t. When all of this started we had seven Kilos trying to make it back to China. Five of them have been destroyed, and the other two are not yet ready to leave Russia. I can’t think of any possible development as urgent as this obviously is.”
“Well, if that’s the case, it must have something to do with Taiwan. It seems to me, always Taiwan when the politicians get anxious.”
“That is true. But I’m not sure what this is all about…still, we’ll know soon enough.”
“What happened about the submarine money?” asked Admiral Zu. “Are the Russians cooperating.”
“Not much choice for them,” said Admiral Zhang. “They could hardly expect us to forfeit a three-hundred- million-dollar deposit on three Kilos that somehow fell off their own barges right in the middle of Russia.”
“Did we ask for cash back?”
“No, we just agreed to roll the money over for the final two…meaning we pay three hundred million dollars
