“People don’t disappoint Boyd and live.”
Washington, D.C.
General Boyd pushed up from the edge of his bed at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel and went to pour himself a drink. He stood for a moment, his gaze on the dark and quiet streets of the city spread out below. Then he reached for his phone and punched in a number.
It rang four times before a colonel named Sam Lee picked it up, his voice slurred by sleep and confusion. “Hello?”
“Lee? Boyd here. I need you to do something for me.”
20
Jax noticed the Kawasaki behind them as they were pulling out of the airport. It might not mean anything-after all, there weren’t that many roads in Kaliningrad, and the rider wasn’t exactly being careful about keeping close to them. Then again, he could be part of Andrei’s escort. Chase riders were no longer as necessary in Russia as they had been in the wild, lawless days after the breakup of the Soviet Union, but they were still common. Jax noticed Andrei casting one or two glances behind, before looking away.
They drove through thick, desolate pine forests interspersed with flat empty fields that lay dark and sodden beneath the leaden sky. Turning sideways in the passenger seat, Andrei shook a cigarette out of his pack and said, “So where exactly did you learn your Russian, Ensign?”
Jax was aware of October casting him a questioning glance, but he only raised his eyebrows. She cleared her throat and said, “I spent a semester in Moscow, when I was nineteen.”
“A semester only? And you learned our language so well? No wonder the CIA finds you useful.”
She wisely let that slide, saying only, “I’ve never been to Kaliningrad Oblast, though.”
Andrei stuck a cigarette between his lips and fumbled in his pocket for his lighter. “Until recently, no one was allowed in Kaliningrad Oblast. It was a closed military area. Kaliningrad is the only ice-free port in Russia, you know.”
“Not to mention the fact that it’s within such easy striking distance of so many European capitals,” said Jax.
Andrei laughed, his eyes narrowing against the smoke as he drew on his cigarette. “That, too. I’m afraid the breakup of the Soviet Union has been hard on Kaliningrad Oblast. Military expenditure used to be the mainstay of the economy, but no longer. And when you add to that the fact that Poland and Lithuania have both closed their borders to us, making the Oblast an exclave…” He shrugged his shoulders again. “Many of the people here have been forced to turn to smuggling, just to survive.”
“And to salvaging U-boats?” said Jax.
“So it would seem.”
He gazed out the window at the ruins of an old brick farmhouse. Beyond it he could see the skeleton of a barn, its rafters etched stark against the white sky and bare except for a couple of giant storks’ nests. They had passed many such abandoned homes-entire villages even-their walls crumbling, a tangle of trees growing up from within the ruins of houses, castles, ancient churches.
“Look, there’s another one,” said Tobie. “Why do I keep seeing all these empty villages and farms?”
Andrei took a deep drag on his cigarette and exhaled slowly. “They are old,” he said. “From before the war.”
“What you’re seeing,” said Jax, “is one of the twentieth century’s dirty little secrets. Until the end of the Second World War, this used to be part of Germany. Then Churchill and Roosevelt gave it to Russia, and Stalin ‘cleansed’ it of its original Prussian inhabitants. The ones who were lucky managed to flee west, ahead of the Red Army. The rest were either shot or sent to slave labor camps in Siberia. Stalin brought in Russians to replace them, but the population today is still under a million-which is less than a third of what it once was. And they’re all Russians.”
He was aware of October staring solemnly as they swept past another overgrown field with a jumble of collapsed walls beyond it. It was one thing to read about “border adjustments,” and something else entirely to look at the ruins of what was once someone’s home.
“I can see you’re shocked, Ensign,” said Andrei, his voice rough. “You think we are butchers. Inhuman. Yet you Americans did it to your Native Indians, just as the Israelis are doing it today to the Moslems and Christians of Palestine. If history teaches us one thing, it is this: ethnic cleansing works.”
They topped a ridge, and the flat, silver waters of the Baltic Sea opened up suddenly before them. In the lee of the slight rise lay a sheltered cove lined with the weathered docks of an old shipyard, its vast wharves stretching out eerily empty beneath the cloud-filled sky. A shabby metal office building stood just below the crest of the hill, fronting a narrow, rutted road that wound down to the row of warehouses lining the docks. Jax could see three blue and white militia vans parked next to a dusty white pickup behind the office.
He felt a disconcerting chill run up his spine. Everything was much as October had drawn it, except that the office and rocky point were on the left, when she’d drawn them to the right.
“It’s backwards,” he whispered, leaning in close to her.
She sat forward, her gaze riveted on the scene below. And he found himself wondering what it must be like, actually seeing in person what she’d previously reached out and touched with her mind. “That happens sometimes,” she said softly. “The brain gets so used to reversing the images we get from our eyes that it sometimes reverses what you ‘see’ in a viewing.”
Andrei frowned. “You’ve seen this place before?”
Jax shook his head. “Only in pictures.”
They turned in through the ratty, ten-foot-high wire fence that ran along the road and surrounded the shipyard complex. A dilapidated guard post stood beside the gate, unmanned now. Behind them, the Kawasaki slowed, then continued on up the road. Jax watched it, his eyes narrowing.
Not a chase rider, after all.
“It’s an old military facility,” Andrei was saying, “privatized after the navy gave it up ten or fifteen years ago. Now it’s used mainly for unloading shipments of frozen chickens and pork from Brazil-and for smuggling, of course.”
The Mercedes bumped and swayed over the rutted road that wound down to the wharves. At the far end of a distant jetty, out in deeper water, Jax could see a large, rusty catamaran that rocked gently with the motion of the waves. Rigged with a lifting boom and giant orange buoys, it was obviously a salvage ship. His Russian was just good enough to enable him to spell out the word Yalena, painted in a fading Cyrillic script along the side.
“Why didn’t you see that?” he said to Tobie in a whisper.
But she just frowned and threw a warning glance at the back of Andrei’s head.
The barge bearing U-114 had been pushed in next to the nearest stretch of wharves that fronted the line of warehouses along the shore. The U-boat was much bigger than Jax had expected, a mammoth hulking thing hundreds of feet long, its once sleek hull rusted and thick with the accretions of sixty years beneath the sea. The small tugboat that had been used to push the barge up to the inner docks was still berthed nearby, beside the rigging for the camouflage netting. As they neared the docks, a small yellow crane at the end of the wharf swung into action, lifting a crate from the sub’s open hatch and depositing it onto the back of a nearby flatbed truck. Jax remembered seeing the crane in Tobie’s drawings, but not the tugboat. Why had she seen some things, he wondered, and not others?
“Pull up here,” Andrei told his driver. With a crunch of gravel, the big Mercedes rolled to a halt behind the nearest warehouse.
“You’re unloading the U-boat?” said October, her expression solemn as she watched the crane swing back toward the submarine’s deck.
A militiaman ran forward to open Andrei’s door and saluted smartly. Andrei tucked a bulky file under one arm and stood. “Until the cargo has been inspected and inventoried, we won’t know what we have.”
Jax thrust open his own door. “And when exactly is Moscow planning to notify Berlin about the sub?”
The cold wind off the sea swirled a fine white dust around them. Andrei smiled. “When we know what we
