Nimitz Class (1997) Page 34

  He returned to his desk, thinking deeply. “Let me stand in his shoes. I’m in Sevastopol, the headquarters of the Russian Black Sea Fleet. I intend either to keep an appointment, or find the captain of a Russian diesel-electric submarine. What do I need? I need cash, a ton of it, that’s what I need. And I can’t get it in Odessa or any other Russian city, not without attracting a great amount of attention to myself. Same with Cairo. But I could have gotten it in Istanbul.”

  Admiral Morgan picked up the phone and told the operator to connect him to the CIA immediately. The admiral asked to be put through to the senior duty officer, and told him to get Major Ted Lynch on a secure line to the Director of the National Security Agency.

  He slammed down the phone before anyone was tempted to remind him what time it was. He sat back in his chair and waited. The CIA major was on the line inside five minutes. “Admiral, hi, Ted Lynch.”

  “Hey, sorry to wake you, but I have a lead you might be able to help with. I think our man may have picked up a very large bundle of cash, probably American dollars, more than 5 million, maybe up to 10 million, in Istanbul on November 26 last year. Any way of getting close to that?”

  “Istanbul is a very cosmopolitan place, but they value United States business. They’ll probably cooperate. We’re almost certainly looking for someone in Buyukdere Street

  , the place is full of international banks—Bankapital, Iktisat Bankasi, Garanti Bank. They are fairly secretive, but we have connections there. And they mostly have branches in New York.

  “I doubt if they’ll give us names or anything—but if we ask for an unusual amount of U.S. dollars being picked up that day in cash, like a suitcase full, they’ll probably give us a straight yes or no. We’ll decide where to go from there. I’ll get moving 0200 tomorrow, that’s Monday, right?”

  “Hey, thanks, Ted. Good luck, I’ll wait to hear from you, early tomorrow morning. I’m in 0600. G’night, pal.”

  “Hey, Arnold, one thing.” The voice of the CIA man rose, trying to stop the admiral from putting down the phone. “I gotta question…you still there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Admiral, if I am going to pay a Russian submarine captain a huge bundle of cash to take his submarine out of the Black Sea in early to mid-April, I sure as hell am not going to give it to him in late November.”

  “Beautiful call, Ted. You sure as hell are not. You’re probably going to give him twenty grand, earnest money, in November. And then arrange to give him the big payment…maybe five million for himself, which would travel on the submarine with him, and another five million to take care of the crew, which would also be carried on board.”

  “Sounds much more like it, Admiral. But there’s no way I could get a trace on a small sum like twenty grand on November 26. What we’re really after is maybe 10 million U.S. dollars, say between April 7 and 13. There’s got to be a record of that somewhere.”

  “That’s it, Ted. Second week in April is much more likely. Do what you can. I’m grateful.”

  The admiral replaced the receiver, picked it up again, and dialed the Maryland number of Bill Baldridge. The clock on the wall now said 0338. But the Kansas scientist answered swiftly in a reflex action honed by years of coming on watch in the smallest hours of the morning. If he was not alone, he sounded alone. “Yessir, that’s me. Hi, what’s hot?”

  “Bill, we are making progress. The Russians recognize their Kilo was probably hired by an operative from an Arab state. They are on our side and you are going to visit a buddy of mine who heads up the office of Naval Intelligence, Vice Admiral Vitaly Rankov. Not till after your stuff in London and Scotland. Then I’m sending you down to the Black Sea, so pack plenty of things. You may be gone for several weeks.

  “Meantime the Mossad are seriously on the trail of Adnam. They have traced him to Odessa. He went by sea from Istanbul on a Russian passport. He also had a stamped Turkish visa. I’ll say one thing, that guy has no trouble with documents. Right now it looks like he went on to Sevastopol with a moderate bundle of cash and paid a Russian captain to prepare a mission with his submarine and crew.”

  “Steady, Admiral. You can’t just turn up and start bribing Russian Naval officers to pinch a submarine and bamboozle their crew into doing something diabolical that is going to make them the most hunted men in the world.”

  “Yes you can, Bill. Find me a Russian captain with little money, and I could offer him enough cash to do anything. Just get in the boat, tell his crew they were going on a secret Navy exercise, and then depart. My terms would be simple…carry out the job, here’s half the money. The rest is in a bank in South America, from where you cannot be extradited. Nor, with a bit of luck, even found.”

  “How much are you paying?”

  “How about half a million dollars?”

  “No chance. He’s gotta live on it for the rest of his life, and his family’s.”

  “Okay, three million.”

  “Not enough to wreck a big Navy career and leave your homeland forever.”

  “Five?”

  “Possible.”

  “Ten million dollars.”

  “Sounds pretty good to me.”

  “I’ll make it twenty million, if you like. But I’ll get him. Because my government’s oil money is nothing to me, but it’s everything to him. And to his family. I think we’ve got the answer, Bill. This is how they did it. And I’ll tell you something else. Those new Kilos in the Black Sea have a full complement of torpedoes on board already. Probably twenty. And two of them are nuclear-tipped.”

  “Jesus Christ! How do you know?”

  “Rankov told me.”

  “You mean when that Kilo set sail, Ben Adnam was on board and the killer missiles were already in place.”

  “No. I think they picked Ben up somewhere in Turkish waters. He would not have risked security checks inside the Russian Navy base. But the captain knew that Ben had access to a colossal amount of cash. And he knew that the cash was his for the asking. With another half to come when the mission was completed. Payable in some foreign country. The torpedoes were ready though. The Russian captain saw to that. Part of the deal, right?”

  “Are the Russians sure the Kilo went through the Bosporus underwater?”

  “No. They just know it’s missing, and they know something very fishy is going on. But they realize it may well have gone through the Bosporus because of the drowned sailor on the Greek island. He was a member of the ship’s company of Kilo 630.”

  “Rankov confirmed that?”

  “He did.”

  “Will I see you tomorrow before I leave for London?”

  “Yes. Come to the office. Early afternoon. We’ll get a final briefing from CNO. Then you can leave straight-away for the airport. Also I would like you to pick up a portable phone scrambler. Do you know how to work it?”

  “Yessir, but we’d better run over the operating procedures. Can I hook it up to you from abroad?”

  “It’ll work from anywhere. And it’s damned important. We cannot risk anyone listening in.”

  “Okay, sir.”

  But Admiral Morgan was already off the line. He was hunched over a chart at his sloping desk with the big light. This time he was poring over a larger-scale map detailing the northern coastline of Turkey, which stretched from the Bulgarian border one hundred miles west of the Bosporus along the seven-hundred-mile coastline which runs east of the Bosporus, out to the old Soviet border at the Georgian city of Batumi.

  He was asking himself the question he always asked himself. “What would I do?”

  The clock ticked on past 0400. Washington slept. Arnold Morgan did not sleep. He lit up a cigar, opened his door, and demanded a cup of coffee.

  Time had no meaning for the admiral, who like many ex-submariners was accustomed to the cocoon of the great underwater ships, which did not distinguish between day and night. Only the watch changes marked the passing of the hours.

  Morgan brandished his cigar theatrically.
“Let me start that again,” he said to the deserted room. “I have just arrived in Sevastopol. I am carrying two big suitcases stuffed with U.S. dollars. I have already given one of them to the captain. The other one will be given to him when I step on board. Now when do I do that?”

  Admiral Arnold Morgan begged the empty walls to bear with him while he gathered his thoughts. Then he said loudly, “Right. Now hold it. What would I not do? What would I not dream of doing, if I was about to illegally board a Russian submarine and steal it? Answer: I’d pick up my second suitcase full of cash, and I’d get the hell out of Russia, and board the sub someplace else.”

  The admiral looked pleased with his inescapable logic. He studied the map, mentally ruling out the seaports down the western coast—those near the mouth of the Danube in Rumania, and others down on the Bulgarian coast which sprawled to the Turkish border. “And I’d stay the hell out of there, too,” he added. “Countries too long under the Soviet fist. Too much suspicion, too many spooks.”

  He looked at the ocean off the northeast coast of Turkey, on the European side. “No good there, either. The real deep water’s too far out. You’d have to run out to meet the submarine, maybe sixty miles off shore. Too far. Too much risk of being stopped by a patrol boat. That’s Turkish water. They might find you, with all that cash, and probably a gun. They might even spot the Russian submarine, way off course, and on the surface. Very bad news.”

  He switched his survey to the other side of the Bosporus, to the east. And he trawled his magnifying glass along the shoreline, stopping suddenly at a seaport on a peninsula. Sinop. The admiral skimmed through his big suite of chart drawers. Pulling one out, he stabbed it with his dividers, took a reading on his steel ruler, and saw with some satisfaction that the peninsula jutted out into very deep water. It was, by miles, the closest point on the entire coast to a possible submarine waiting area. A gentle twenty-five-minute journey to deep water.

  He checked again, then he pulled out a guidebook which told him that Sinop was a shipbuilding and fishing port with fine beaches, a secluded harbor, and many inexpensive hotels. Sinop was accessible by bus, three-hundred-odd miles from Istanbul. It was the birthplace of Diogenes, the cynic philosopher. That settled it. Admiral Morgan was at home among cynics.

  “That’s what I’d do,” he announced solemnly. “I’d make my deal with the Russian captain, drive south down the coast to Georgia, and go by sea to Trabzon. From there I’d take the bus to Sinop. I’d park myself in one of those little hotels with a radio pack, and I’d wait for a signal from my Russian captain.

  “Then I’d slip down to the harbor, and get aboard the deserted thirty-foot yacht I had scoped out, and sail quietly beyond the harbor wall on a little journey about fourteen miles out, using my little GPS to put me at 35.3E, 42.1N. As an experienced submariner I’d get alongside the waiting sub, bang a hole in the yacht’s bilge, grab my suitcase, and board the Kilo real quick. Then I’d take effective command of the Russian submarine through her C.O. as agreed previously with him.”

  Admiral Morgan realized he might not be right, but he liked having a starting point. To his keen eye the little seaport of Sinop had stuck out “like the balls on a Texas longhorn.” That was what he liked, a strong start-point. For the moment, he would assume Sinop was where Commander Ben Adnam had holed up.

  Admiral Morgan would never know how close he was to the truth. And what concerned him, as he marched out of the building toward his car, was the destiny of the submarine after its secret pickup.

  Did it creep back west, running deep in a thousand fathoms, to the yawning northern entrance of the Bosporus? And did Commander Adnam then calmly order his Russian captain to steer left rudder, course two-one-zero, into pitch-black, unknown depths, through the great gap in the underwater cliffs, where no submarine had ever ventured?

  11

  0700 Monday, August 5.

  BILL BALDRIDGE WAS STILL REHEARSING THE UNPRECEDENTED request he was about to make of the Royal Navy as the British Airways Boeing 747 banked over London and turned due west for Heath row. “Oh, good morning, Admiral, I was wondering whether you’d lend me a brand-new Upholder-Class diesel-electric submarine which we will probably wreck in the middle of Istanbul Harbor?”

  No. Too harsh. Perhaps something a little more subtle. How about, “Good morning, Admiral, I wonder if you’d be decent enough to let us borrow one of your submarines for a few weeks. We’ll look after it. By the way, do you keep a salvage squad in Istanbul?”

  His hope that Scott Dunsmore had prepared the way for him before he arrived at Northwood to make what was, by any standards, an outrageous request of the Royal Navy showed that Lieutenant Commander Baldridge had much to learn about the intricacies of inter-Navy politics. The American CNO and Britain’s First Sea Lord could almost operate by telepathy, each perfectly prepared to be edged into something he did not really want to do. Just so long as the favor was returned. Preferably in spades.

  Baldridge arrived at Northwood just before 0900 in FOSM’s personal staff car, which had been sent to meet him. The territory was familiar to him now, and he greeted young Andrew Waites with cheerful informality.

  “Morning, sir,” said the Flag Lieutenant. “Found that Perisher yet?”

  “Not yet, but we’re moving on him.”

  Bill was led immediately into the office of the Flag Officer Submarines (FOSM), and Vice Admiral Sir Peter Elliott stood immediately to greet him. “Lieutenant Commander, glad to see you again. Good flight?”

  “Pretty painless,” he replied. “Everything been moving smoothly since I left?”

  The British admiral chuckled at the junior officer’s jaunty manner and put it down to American spontaneity. “Well, no one in my flotilla has collided, run aground, burned, got lost, or mutinied lately, so I suppose we’re just about winning,” he replied.

  Just then the door opened and Captain Dick Greenwood walked in, late but unflustered. “Morning, sir. Morning, Lieutenant Commander. I have those notes you wanted.”

  “Barrow?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Very well. Now, if Andrew will bring us some coffee, we may as well get down to business. The subject is very complicated, and very important to the United States.”

  He looked over at Bill and added, “I spoke to the First Sea Lord last night, who has had a long conversation with your CNO. In the broadest terms I understand you want to borrow one of our diesel-electric submarines, and transit the Bosporus underwater, which as we all know is illegal. Do I have the general gist of the exercise?”

  Bill Baldridge was relieved not to be obliged to make the speech he had been rehearsing on the aircraft. He said simply, “Yessir, you do.”

  “Then, since I am keenly aware of my own point of view, and that of the Royal Navy, why don’t you outline for me the point of view of the United States, with which I am not quite so familiar?”

  “Certainly, sir. As you know we have now spent almost a month trying to find out what happened to the Thomas Jefferson. And every path we take is leading us to the same conclusion—that the carrier was hit by a torpedo fired from a non-nuclear submarine which belonged to one of the hostile Gulf nations.

  “We do not think they used a submarine from their own inventory, but nonetheless the boat was a Russian Kilo. If our deductions are right, the sub must therefore have come out of the Black Sea, through the Bosporus. And the Turks say they saw nothing. We believe it came through under the surface.”

  “Yes, that all adds up to me. But why do you now want to do the same thing? One of your television shows organized a contest?”

  Bill laughed. “Not yet, sir. That’s probably next. No, the truth is our President is perfectly prepared to order a global hunt for the boat only if someone proves conclusively that it is possible to transit the Bosporus, north to south, underwater. The main trouble being that several dozen people have already told him it cannot be done. By anyone.”

  “Yes, global hunts are apt to become obsessi
onal,” said Admiral Elliott. “And once started they run away with money, and people, on a rather alarming scale. Your President is wise to be cautious.”

  “Yessir. Almost all of his political advisers are urging him not to stray publicly from the ‘accident’ theory. And if we make the Bosporus journey, and there is any kind of a problem, he is going to stick to the only theory he has, and the only one he will ever admit.”

  “Of course,” said the admiral. “Although that might turn out to be rather shortsighted if your Muslim enemy should strike again. The one good thing about losing an aircraft carrier was that it wasn’t two aircraft carriers.”

  “Well, that’s the view of most of our senior Intelligence men, and the submariners, sir. But I guess you see the President’s point of view. In a way, we think he’s being reasonable given the circumstances. He’s just saying that if we want to conduct a massive search operation, costing probably a couple of billion dollars, he wants to know we are working on a premise which is at least possible.”