“They’ll sail tomorrow night.”
“I’ve been assured by the dockworkers that the device is ready,” Gogol said.
“How the Colombians ever thought I would allow them to buy a surplus submarine to haul cocaine to America is beyond me. Escobar seems capable enough, but the U.S. Navy would be on him five minutes after he left South America. It takes years to properly train a crew to evade American sonar. These fools actually think they’ve mastered their boat in just three months.”
“If you recall, Admiral, originally they wanted just a week of instruction before they took possession of the boat.”
“I do recall. They wouldn’t even have known how to get her out of dry dock. Like I said, they’re fools. It’s better this way. The cartel will make their final payment to me just before the sub sails, and then when it dives to a depth of two hundred feet, the ballast intakes will jam open and it will sink to the bottom of the Pacific. No witnesses, and no blowback from the cartel. So tell me, Viktor, why did you call?”
“We have a problem,” Gogol said in such a way that Kenin leaned forward.
“Go on.”
“Borodin has escaped.”
Kenin went from contentment to rage as though a switch had been thrown. “What? How did this happen?”
“A new prisoner was brought in, part of a routine transfer. It appears that this man was an impostor sent to free Borodin. He somehow smuggled in explosives. They blasted their way out of the prison and had a helicopter waiting to pick them up.”
Rage couldn’t describe the emotions welling up from the void in his chest where normal men had a heart. “Go on,” he said with his teeth tightly clenched.
“The prison launched their own chopper in pursuit and shot down the first aircraft. When they investigated, they discovered that the helicopter was remotely piloted. There was no sign of Borodin or the fake prisoner. When they backtracked, they discovered a set of snowmobile tracks heading north. The last anyone heard from them was during the pursuit.”
“What do you mean the last anyone heard from them?”
“Sir, this happened three hours ago. There has been no word from the flight crew. Another chopper has been searching, but there’s been no sign. They fear it either crashed or was shot down over water and sank.”
Pytor Kenin hadn’t achieved the rank of admiral or created for himself a private army within Russia’s military without being both bold and ruthless, and never was he at a loss for decisions. “The guards who let the prisoner smuggle in explosives, I want them jailed immediately. Put them in general population, and let the inmates mete out our justice on them. I want the warden replaced immediately, and I want that man in my office when I return to Moscow.”
“Yes, sir,” Gogol replied.
Kenin went on. “We have to assume Borodin made it aboard some waiting ship. Track all known vessels that were in the area, where they came from, who owns them, everything.”
“Yes, sir.”
“If Borodin’s alive, that puts the Mirage Project at risk. He has no proof of anything, so it will just be his word. We need to ensure that he can’t find proof. Do you understand?”
“I believe so, Admiral.”
“I want every loose end, no matter how tenuous, eliminated.”
“Do we inform the Chinese?”
“Absolutely not. We can contain this. We need just a few days. Then we will hold our demonstration, and after that it’s up to them.” Kenin allowed himself to settle back into his seat as the car crossed the defunct base and headed to the prefab house he had been staying in whenever he visited the Colombians. They were paying him thirty million dollars for the sub and the training of its crew, the least he could do is give them some face time every once in a while. As soon as the Tango departed, the dry dock would be towed back to Vladivostok and the prefab home dismantled and returned there as well.
“Viktor, one more thing.”
“Sir?”
“The next time you have news of this importance, do not ask me questions about how training went. It wastes my time.”
“Yes, Admiral. I am sorry, sir.”
“Don’t be sorry, just don’t do it again.” Kenin had another thought. “I assume Borodin’s rescue was arranged by his little bootlick, Misha Kasporov. See to it that he dies as well.”
“That order went out as soon as I heard about the escape. He’d already gone to ground, but we’ll find him.”
“There’s hope for you yet.”
CHAPTER SIX
In the end, Eric Stone’s odd knowledge of regional Central Asian airports proved ineffectual. Cabrillo wasn’t headed to the reasonably stable nation of Kazakhstan but rather to its more rough-and-tumble neighbor to the south. Uzbekistan had an abysmal human rights record, no freedom of the press, and when the nation’s large cotton harvest — its principal cash crop — was ready to be brought in from the fields, forced labor was often employed. While it was not as corrupt as other former Soviet states in this part of the world, given a choice, Cabrillo would have been happy to avoid coming here.
According to Eric Stone’s research, Karl Petrovski had been forty-two when he died in a hit-and-run accident and was a respected hydrologist with degrees from both Moscow University and the Berlin Institute of Technology. His most recent employment had been with the government of Uzbekistan, copying the success Kazakhstan was starting to show in reversing the devastation wrought by the Soviets and their ill-conceived irrigation projects of the 1940s and ’50s.
Prior to the Soviet intervention, the Aral Sea had been one of the world’s largest, with an area greater than lakes Huron and Ontario combined. The Aral supported a vibrant fishing and tourist industry and was the lifeblood of the region. In an effort to boost cotton production in the surrounding deserts, the Soviet engineers diverted water from the two rivers that fed the Aral, the Amu and Syr, into massive canal networks, most of which leaked more than half the water forced through them. By the 1960s the lake level began to drop dramatically.
The Soviets knew that this would be the result of their engineering, but a centrally planned government gave short shrift to the environmental impacts of their scheme. A half century later, the Aral Sea, which meant “the Sea of Islands,” had so shriveled it was now several separate bodies of brackish water that could scarcely support life. In fact, its current salinity was three times that of the world’s oceans. The once great fishing fleets now stood rusted and abandoned upon a barren desert. The shrinking of the Aral Sea changed local weather patterns, heating the air and diminishing seasonal rainfalls. Dust, salt, and pesticide runoff from the cotton fields further poisoned the land until all that remained was a vista as desolate as the moon.
The one bright spot in the sad history of the area was that the Kazakh government was working to redirect water back into the North Aral Sea in an attempt to revitalize the lake. Already, the lakeshore was creeping back toward the main port city of Aralsk from a maximum distance of some sixty miles. Commercial fishing was beginning to return, and microclimate changes were occurring that saw an increase in rain.
In a belated attempt to emulate their northern neighbors, the Uzbeks were now looking at the feasibility of a similar scheme. Karl Petrovski had been a member of the team that first saw success in Kazakhstan and had been working for the past year to duplicate that success once again.
Cabrillo doubted Petrovski’s work in this field was what had gotten him killed. It was something either connected to Nikola Tesla, which seemed unlikely, or to the mysterious eerie boat, which no amount of research had unearthed even a hint of.
