I’ll be more alert now. I won’t let anyone ever get this close again.”
Hawke looked around. “There may be more of them. Probably not, but I suggest we all get into the van as quickly as possible and get out of here.”
Hawke added, “Harry, please call 911 and get an ambulance out here. Also the Collier County Police and the FBI.”
“You’ll find a tattoo on the back of his neck, Agent Brock,” Spooner said. “The Blue Scorpion. It’s a highly organized group of retired KGB officers. All highly trained killers available for a fee. I was involved in a case in London when one of them showed up dead.”
“Thanks, Nellie,” Brock said, speed-dialing a number on his mobile and flashing his cunning grin. “You sure don’t look like a cop, by the way. You look like Scarlett Johansson. Anybody ever tell you that?”
Harry, getting no reply, shrugged his shoulders and made his phone calls.
Sergeant Nell Spooner, who was a member of London’s Trident Operational Command Unit of the Metropolitan Police Service, a team designed to investigate and prevent any gun-related activity within London’s communities, put her service pistol back into her purse. She could feel her heart rate slowing for the first time since she’d become aware of the man in the next pew.
She’d been granted a leave of absence by the Met to take a temporary position. She had been assigned to Six counterterrorist operative Lord Alexander Hawke, specifically to protect his child. Hawke’s child was a known target of Russian agents. As the grandson of Russia’s only modern Tsar, now dead, he posed a political threat to the Kremlin.
Spooner had walked away from the group at the oak tree and wandered to the edge of a small pond. She needed a little time to collect herself. Her hands were trembling violently, and she stuffed them into the pockets of her rose-colored linen jacket.
She had never fired a gun in anger before in her life.
Now she had. It was not a pleasant experience, taking a human life.
But her young charge, a boy whom she’d come to feel an almost motherly affection for in these few short months, was still alive because of her actions.
“Spooner!” Alexei said. “Look what I found!”
He opened his hand.
It was a tiny blue speck, a fragment of a robin’s egg, a relic of spring.
Twelve
At Sea, Aboard K-550 ALEKSANDR NEVSKIY
“There is a problem, sir,” the Russian submarine’s starpom, or executive officer, said, approaching and saluting his captain. The man, Aleksandr Ivanov-Pavlov, was ramrod straight, inside and out, and it had served him well over the years.
“Problem, Aleksandr? No! Aboard this vessel? Tell me it’s not true.”
The Central Command Post (CCP) men and officers nearby smiled at their skipper’s infamous sarcasm. It was one of the reasons they not only respected him, but liked him.
The captain smiled his famously enigmatic smile, his teeth white in his full salt-and-pepper beard. A career submariner, the oldest-serving skipper in the Russian Navy, the barrel-chested, white-haired Sergei Petrovich Lyachin, had recently been honored with command of the Nevskiy, Russia’s newest nuclear ballistic submarine. It had been a decidedly mixed blessing.
The new boat had cost a billion dollars. She could dive to a depth of six hundred meters and run at a maximum speed of thirty knots on the surface, twenty-eight knots submerged, all official numbers only, of course. Her real performance parameters were highly classified. In addition to powerful antiship torpedoes, her armament included sixteen Bulava SLBM ballistic missiles and six SS-N-15 cruise missiles. Admiral Vladimir Kuroyedov, commander in chief of the Russian Navy, had described the Nevskiy as the most effective multipurpose submarine in the world.
Effective, perhaps, but plagued with a cascade of ever more difficult problems and now, according to the XO, it seemed she had yet another.
Lyachin, an old Cold Warrior, had formerly served in the Northern Fleet for many years. Respected, liked, and not a little feared by his crew, the stern-faced sub driver was commonly referred to as Barya, father.
Lyachin had recently endured weeks of dry-dock repairs to his malfunctioning ballast controls and dive planes. All of this courtesy of Hugo Chavez’s navy technicians, in a steamy, mosquito-ridden port of La Guaira on the verdant coast of Venezuela. The insects were starting to get on his nerves. Standing on the sub’s conning tower early one evening, he had said to his chief engineer, “Hell, Arkady, you kill one Venezuelan mosquito and ten more come to its funeral.”
La Guaira was the port city for Caracas, Venezuela. Nevskiy had been in dry dock there while all necessary repairs were effected and the boat’s zampolit, the KGB political officer, attended a series of secret meetings with President Hugo Chavez and his advisers. The Russians and the Venezuelans were planning joint naval exercises for the following spring. Stick a little needle in the American navy’s arrogant balloon, right in their own backyard.
A fter a miserable three weeks, Captain Lyachin was finally once again where he felt most comfortable, under the water and on patrol in the Caribbean Sea. His mission was to conduct intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions against the Americans. He had also resumed playing cat and mouse with an American Virginia class sub, SSN 775, the USS Texas. He knew the man in command of the Texas, a formidable opponent named Captain Flagg Youngblood. They’d never met, of course, but each man had long enjoyed their underwater confrontations in the oceans of the world.
Lyachin was privately struggling with a grave secret. It was something so outlandish that he had not even confided his suspicions to his XO. He was beginning to suspect that his sub’s multiplying problems were not simply human error, bad luck, or bad engineering. He thought perhaps his boat was the target of invasive electronic warfare, directed from the nearby American sub Texas. Ever since the infamous Stuxnet takedown of the Iranian centrifuge, he’d worried that one day warships might suffer a similar fate.
Intel he’d seen indicated three countries were leading in this new techno arms race: Israel, China, and the United States.
He had done considerable research on the subject for the fleet commander, who then ordered him to host seminars on offensive and defensive electronic warfare at the Naval War College whenever he was land- bound.
Stuxnet, he told his classes, was a fearsome cyberweapon, first discovered by a security firm based in Belarus. It is like a worm that invades and then spies on and reprograms high-value infrastructures like Iran’s nuclear facilities in Natanz. It is also capable of hiding its pathways and its changes. Many in the military considered it so powerful as to lead to the start of a new worldwide arms race. If you can take down a nuclear power plant, they reasoned, why not a nuclear submarine?
Lyachin was now beginning to believe that the U.S. Navy had somehow acquired the ability to use just such cyberweapons to influence events aboard his vessel by somehow subverting or overcoming his built-in electronic firewalls.
Nevskiy was nearly six hundred feet long and a fourth-generation Borei class. At thirty-two thousand tons submerged, she was roughly the size of a World War II aircraft carrier. She was, according to the Russian Admiralty, state of the art. But to Lyachin’s chagrin, she had been besieged with myriad problems in the past months. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin had proudly pronounced her seaworthy prior to the launching at Vladivostok and she’d headed for the Caribbean.
And that’s when the real trouble started.
The Nevskiy ’s XO, Lieutenant Aleksandr Ivanov-Pavlov, smiled back at his captain’s wry response to this most recent dose of bad news. He understood the old man’s sense of humor. Or he pretended to, at any rate. Son of a powerful Kremlin insider, young Aleksandr had been learning the political ropes since childhood. His father had been murdered in a KGB power struggle that had left him bereft of two uncles as well.
It was his close relationship with the Nevskiy ’s captain that engendered free-flowing communications
