table with slightly more force than necessary. He turned to Bradley Tiltfelt. “If you might excuse us, I have matters I need to discuss with my staff before our next meeting.”
“Of course,” Tiltfelt said promptly, shooting Tombstone a furious look. “May I have someone escort you back to your quarters? The ship is a maze if you’re not used to it.”
“Very kind.” The Turkish representative bowed slightly, carefully watching Tombstone. “We will see you at eleven o’clock.”
The Turkish entourage departed, flanked by the Marines ostensibly assigned as their escorts. That had been Tiltfelt’s one concession to security during a heated discussion over the dangers of having the delegations on board. The other delegations were provided with escorts only as requested to guide them through the maze of the ship’s passageways as a demonstration of trust and goodwill.
As the door closed behind the Turkish entourage and the low murmur of voices rose again in the conference room, Tiltfelt turned to Tombstone.
“Fuck this up, and you’ll be retired within twenty-four hours. I promise it.”
Yuri Kursk waited until the rest of the room was chuckling appreciatively at a mildly ribald joke told by the Turkish representative.
He slipped quietly out of the door to the conference room, and headed aft on the ship, walking purposefully.
Six frames down, he turned left and moved over to the starboard passageway. He nodded to the sailors he met walking past, maintaining a purposeful look on his face. One stopped, hesitating as though to ask him if he were lost, but Yuri brushed quickly by. Seventy feet later, he was at his destination. This was the only dangerous portion of the mission, for he had no ready explanation for his presence outside Tombstone Magruder’s quarters. He could always say he was lost, and indeed that explanation might hold up. The aircraft carrier was massive, far bigger than he had imagined it from studying its technical specs. Translating the one million square feet of living space into an actual map of this vessel was an entirely different matter.
Still, by watching the frame numbers engraved on metal strips on top of the main support members of the hull, he’d found his way to it with relatively little difficulty.
Now, if he could get his bearings…
The diagrams had shown a separate suite for VIPs on board the carrier, and it had been their estimation that that was where Tombstone Magruder would be berthed.
He walked past his target door, and cast a quick glance at it. He smiled?the Americans made things childishly easy sometimes. Posted in the small metal frame on the doorjamb was Admiral Magruder’s business card.
Yuri kept walking, careful to maintain his pace. He stepped over a knee-knocker and moved past the next frame, still looking for any hatch that showed the slightest possibility of granting him access to the compartment next to Admiral Magruder’s cabin.
He found it. The metal plate indicated it was a teletype repair facility. Yuri tried the handle. It turned. He pushed the door open.
At some time, the space must have served for repairing teletypes, but those days had long since past. Now it was a miscellaneous storage area, cluttered with mops and buckets and the normal equipment used for cleaning compartments.
Perfect. In fact, it could not have been more ideal.
Yuri closed the hatch behind him before he turned on the light to the compartment. He maneuvered between the buckets and wringers to the back wall. If he could only be certain?no, this must be it. He’d seen nothing else that looked like it might do. And there was certainly not enough space between what he’d estimated to be the end of the admiral’s cabin and this compartment for there to be any problem.
Yuri knelt and dug in his briefcase for a moment, then extracted a harmless-looking radio. He adjusted the dials on it, then moved aside some cleaning supplies on a shelf and placed the radio behind them.
So easy. So simple, and easy enough when the foolishly open, trusting nature of the Americans labeled each compartment so clearly.
Yuri straightened, brushed a tiny bit of lint from his pants, turned off the lights, and left the compartment.
As he stepped out into the passageway, he glanced right and left. A young sailor?a female one, he noticed bemusedly?approached him and eyed him oddly. “You need some cleaning gear, sir?” she asked politely. There was an undercurrent of suspicion in her voice.
Yuri spread his hands out in front of him as if he were harmless, deepening his accent slightly. It was odd how that always worked to his advantage. Americans instinctively believed that anyone with a foreign accent was stupid. “I am lost, I think.”
He pointed back toward the hatch. “Those numbers?my room?”
The expression on the young sailor’s face cleared. Visitors getting lost on a carrier was a common occurrence, and the long-suffering permanent inhabitants of the aircraft carrier quickly learned to recognize the mixture of chagrin and embarrassment that went with asking for directions.
“What were those numbers, sir?”
Yuri handed her a scrawled piece of paper, the one that the admiral’s Chief of Staff had given him.
“Here’s the problem.” She pointed to the first digit in the group. “You’re on the wrong deck?the floor, I mean.”
She pointed down and spoke a little louder. “One floor down, you see.”
“Ah, I understand.” He looked up and down the passageway. “But where are the stairs?”
Her suspicions completely vanquished, the young sailor smiled. “If you’ll follow me, sir, I’ll take you straight there.”
“You are too kind.”
Yuri fell into step behind her.
If the device did as its makers claimed, then the bomb would accomplish two purposes. First, since it was set to go off at three o’clock in the morning, it would undoubtedly catch Admiral Magruder in his room. The shrapnel from the shape charge should kill the man. Yuri glanced up at the overhead, smiling as he realized exactly where he was.
Additionally, the upward force of the blast should cause some damage to the deck. In fact, if his estimation were correct, they were now directly below the waist catapult. It would not take much damage to sever the steam lines that ran to the catapult launch shuttle or warp it beyond immediate repair.
At any rate, sometime within the next twenty-four hours, the USS Jefferson would find herself decapitated and severely restricted in her ability to launch aircraft.
Yuri hoped it would be enough.
“Sorry I’ve kept you waiting?let’s get on with it,” Magruder said as he strode into the room. It was a relief to be back among his own kind, other sailors and officers. He felt uncomfortable in his stiff dress uniform surrounded by the other officers in their comfortable working uniforms.
Tombstone turned to the senior Intelligence Officer. “What have you got for me?”
Lab Rat looked grim. “It’s possible,” he said bluntly. “Based on the Falcon’s flight profile, I can’t rule out the possibility that it has a vastly more capable power plant than we suspect.”
He held up one cautionary finger. “I have no hard data to support that, Admiral, but it’s worth briefing all the squadrons on the possibility. They might want to take another look at their tactics against it.”
Tombstone nodded. He was sure that a wealth of technical detail underlay Lab Rat’s warning, and equally certain that he didn’t need to hear it. If Lab Rat said that a warning was warranted, then so be it.
“Anything else I need to know?”
Lab Rat glanced around the room. “Not here, Admiral. If you will step into SCIE-“
Tombstone shot him a surprised look. He followed the Intelligence Officer to the back of the conference room and into the highly secure intelligence spaces located directly off the TFCC. “What gives?”
Lab Rat took a deep breath. “More speculation, Admiral. I’m short of proof on a lot of things these days. But
