Tsar

“Know any games?”

“What kind of games?” Hawke asked.

“You know. We could play Twenty Questions.”

“I’d kill you,” Hawke said.

“How about I Spy?” Harry asked. “Ever play that? I spy with my little eye-”

Hawke laughed. “You’re funny, Harry. Really. It’s the only reason I put up with you.”

At that moment, a few hundred yards away, the deep blue sea began to boil. It heaved upward in a frothing white mushroom, as if deep below the surface, some underwater volcano had just blown its top.

“This us?” Harry asked.

“Better be. If it’s not, we’re in deep shit.”

The sleek black prow of a giant nuclear submarine broke the surface at a forty-five-degree angle, water sheeting off its flanks. It was a magnificent sight, Hawke thought, one you never tired of seeing.

It was the old SSBN-640, all right. The USS Benjamin Franklin, commissioned in 1965, Captain Donald Miller commanding. Formerly a fleet ballistic missile sub, she’d been extensively modified to support Navy special operations missions. Her entire ballistic missile section had been removed and turned into living quarters, a space where embarked special operations personnel could rest, train, and plan operations in relative comfort.

Now registered as Kamehameha, she was based at the Royal Dockyard, Bermuda, and permanently attached to the joint U.S.-U.K. intel group known as Red Banner.

57

“Like to begin by welcoming Commander Hawke and Mr. Brock aboard the Kamehameha,” Stokely Jones said. They were in the sub’s SPECWAR wardroom. Stoke stood in front of a blackboard. On the wall beside him were blown-up pictures of the hijacked airship from every possible angle. The men around the table included Hawke and Brock plus two fourteen-man platoons of SEAL counterterrorist commandos.

The hand-picked members of the U.S. Navy’s elite counterterrorist group and hostage-rescue team, SEAL Team Six, had begun training for this mission ten minutes after the president had learned of the hijacking. Training normally consisted of lessons learned from experience. But no one had ever assaulted an airship before.

No one. Ever.

The sub had been steaming submerged for more than an hour since they’d picked up Hawke and Brock. They were positioned directly beneath the airship now, at a depth of two thousand feet, immobile. A tiny video camera mounted on an invisible needle-thin antenna from the sub’s conning tower provided a continuous live feed of the airship. The ship was dark for the most part, very few lights aboard as the sun set and darkness fell.

“The situation is this,” Stoke said, offering a quick summary for the two new arrivals. “We’ve got four hundred terrified passengers aboard this damn zeppelin. We think they’re still being held here, in a large ballroom on the promenade deck. Guarding the hostages are approximately twenty heavily armed terrorists, highly trained members of OMON, the Russian special forces. There is also the possibility that a Russian-American assassin named Strelnikov has brought poison gas aboard the Pushkin, an incapacitating narcotic based on the drug fentanyl, administered accidentally at a lethal dosage level in the Moscow theater siege. Any questions so far?”

“What the hell do they want?” Hawke asked. “The Russians?”

“They want the U.S. and its European allies to butt out of their business, basically. While the new Tsar reclaims all the territory they lost when the Soviet Union dissolved.”

“Have troops crossed any sovereign borders yet?” Hawke wanted to know. Obviously, he hadn’t seen any news in days. No CNN in Energetika.

“Not yet. But the Russian Army’s got ninety divisions massed on the various borders, from the Baltics to East Ukraine. Washington thinks Estonia is where they’ll move first. Close the border bridge over the Narva River to anything but military traffic. Jam the whole country’s Internet there like they did a while back, fake a Russian citizens’ protest and then shoot a few Russian citizens to create a false crisis for the ethnic Russian population living there, start moving tanks and troops across the bridge to ‘rescue’ them.”

“And if the West responds?”

“They start to kill all the airship hostages. Throw them out. One by one, including the wife of the U.S. vice president, until the West backs off. Any more questions?”

“Just one,” Brock said. “How the hell do you guys plan to get those people out of there safely?”

Stoke smiled. He’d known Harry Brock for years. Harry liked to cut to the chase.

“These OMON guys have ordered a no-fly zone, fifty-mile radius around the airship. Any aircraft violates it, they start tossing hostages out the door. Same thing with surface vessels.”

“What altitude is the damn thing?” Hawke asked.

“Hovering at five hundred feet.”

“Stationary?”

“Last time we looked.”

“Look, I’ve been aboard an identical but smaller version of this thing called Tsar. From that underside picture there, it seems there’s an identical circular hatch in the floor of the control pod. Looks like no exterior handle, no access from outside. So, what’s our point of entry?”

“We’ve got a couple of options, including that hatch,” Stoke said, moving his laser pointer. “Here, here, and maybe here.”

“They all look bad,” Brock observed.

There was a lot of eyeball rolling from the SEALs around the table. One of them piped up and said, “I’m sure you have a better idea, sir.”

“Damn right,” Brock said. “And I’ll tell you what it is as soon as I think of it.”

Stokely frowned. “Look. Enough of this shit. We all know this isn’t going to be easy. But we got two things working for us here. One, surprise. They don’t know we’re down here. Not a fucking clue. Two, we got someone inside the ship. We got a hostage aboard with a sat phone.”

“Really?” Hawke said, seeing the first ray of hope. “Someone inside? How’d you pull that off?”

“She was invited,” Stoke said evenly, looking straight at Hawke. “Friend of mine.”

“Oh,” Hawke said, instantly realizing the world of hurt Stokely had to be in. Fancha, his fiancee, that’s who was on the inside. For Stoke, the already incredibly high stakes of this rescue operation were right through the sub’s roof.

It was personal for Stoke, and that was not good.

Hawke checked his watch. The commando team would commence rescue operations in six hours. At midnight. There was no moon, few stars. At least some of the hostages would be asleep. Maybe only a skeleton OMON crew standing guard, if they were really lucky.

Luck? Luck was for losers. They were six hours out, and they didn’t have a goddamn plan.

Hawke needed to talk to Stoke alone, and fast.

58

“Doesn’t feel good, Stoke, none of this,” Hawke said from his perch on the upper bunk, his legs dangling near Stokely stretched out on the bunk directly below.

“No shit, boss.”

They were in Stoke’s tiny cabin, just aft of the forward torpedo room, the only place on the sub where they could find any privacy. Putin had given Hawke a pack of smokes, and he shook one out and lit it now.

“Oh, great. Now you’re smoking,” Stoke said. “Good thinking.”