The Seventh Angel (40 page)

“
Depends on who they belong to,” the Sailor said. “If they’re out of mainland Russia, they’ll more than likely just report our position back to their base. That will stir up some shit, because the Russians don’t like us up here, but it’ll be mostly be political. We probably won’t get shot at.”

“
What if they’re
not
from mainland Russia?” Sheldon asked.

“
Then they’re out of the Yelizovo air base on Kamchatka,” the man said. “Which means that they belong to our pal, Mr. Zhukov. If it’s
those
guys, they’ll shoot us between the eyes about ten seconds after they find out we’re here.”

“
This is insane,” Ann said. “We’re dodging icebergs in the dark, and playing hide and seek with freaking fighter jets. What are we going to do for an encore? Juggle chainsaws?”

The Sailor chuckled. “You know what they say. It’s not just a job. It’s an adventure.”

“
I’m not joking,” Ann snapped. “What the hell are we doing here? We’re practically asking to get killed.”

“
This is what we
do
,” the man said. “This is our job. We’re kind of like Secret Service agents. We step in front of the bullet, so that our country doesn’t have to.”

“
That’s crap,” Ann said. “That whole military-ethos/warrior-Zen thing is nothing but a load of self-aggrandizing macho bullshit.”

“
It’s not bullshit, ma’am,” the Sailor said. “We’ve got a trigger-happy lunatic threatening to incinerate the Western United States. If he manages to unleash ten percent of the firepower at his command, he’ll kill more people than every war in history combined. Our job is to stop him any way we can. Even with our lives.”

The man sighed. “We don’t want to die, Ms. Roark. We want to go home to our families. We want to drink beer, and watch football on television, and barbecue hotdogs, and play catch in the back yard with our kids. But we
will
step into the path of the bullet, if that’s what it takes to stop the bad guys. Like I said—it’s what we do.”

Ann was about to reply, when the man spoke again. “Just a sec. The bridge is talking to me.”

After a few seconds, he said, “Bridge—Boat deck, resume operations, aye.”

He cleared his throat. “The Bogies have passed us by,” he said. “Peters, get the lights back on.”

The amber lamps came back to life. They seemed almost painfully bright after the long minutes of total darkness.

“
Alright,” the Sailor said. “The bridge says we’re in position. Let’s get
R2D2
in the water, and see if he can find a submarine.”

U.S. NAVAL HOSPITAL

YOKOSUKA, JAPAN

TUESDAY; 05 MARCH

1855 hours (6:55 PM)

TIME ZONE +9 ‘INDIA’

“
Ya zamyors…”

The old man’s voice was barely more than a whisper, but it snapped Agent DuBrul instantly back to alertness. His head came up and his body posture stiffened. The chair had lulled him into drowsiness. He stood up and took a quick step to the side of the hospital bed.

Swaddled in the green hospital sheets, Oleg Grigoriev looked like a poor job of embalming. His eyes were sunken, and his once swarthy skin was thin and papery. The iron-hard Soviet Sergeant had all but disappeared now, leaving in his place this dwindling husk of his former self.

The old man’s face had become a mirror. Gazing into its unsettling depths, David DuBrul saw the reflection of his own mortality. For the first time, he could truly imagine his own death. And for the first time, he knew in his heart that it was not an intellectual abstraction. It was a real thing. A true thing.

At some point in the future—whether an hour from now, or fifty years from now—he would draw his very last breath. When he released that final purchase of air, his life would flow out with it, expelled from its frail human vessel to mingle with the atoms of the universe. And David DuBrul would cease to exist.

He hoped that it wouldn’t be like this, that he wouldn’t die like this poor old Russian—failing by slow and painful inches in an unfamiliar bed, in a building full of strangers.

“
Ya zamyors,” Grigoriev whispered again.

DuBrul nodded. “You’re cold?” He took a folded blanket from a side table, and spread it over the patient.

“
Is that better?” He spoke in English. His Russian was fluent, but he knew that Grigoriev’s English was at least as good. And he did not want to speak to this man in his mother language.

From a standpoint of spy craft, the decision was not a good one. According to the book, if you had the language skills, you followed the subject into whatever dialect he was most comfortable using. It was easier that way to establish trust, which made your subject more likely to speak freely. Also, the need for mental translation made most people select their words carefully when speaking in a foreign tongue. Within the easy flow of their primary language, they tended to blurt out things might never be revealed under the more deliberate syntax of another tongue.

DuBrul didn’t care. He wanted the information in this man’s head. He needed it. But he would not speak in the language of the old man’s friends and loved ones in order to draw it out. He would not smile, and pretend to be a friend. The old man deserved better than that.

Grigoriev blinked several times, and struggled visibly to focus his eyes. “U vas est’ karta?”

DuBrul reached for a folder on a bedside table. “Yes,” he said. “I have a map.”

The DIA agents had hoped that this moment might come, and they’d prepared for it with a map of Kamchatka and the Sea of Okhotsk mounted to a sheet of foam core poster board. It weighed only a few ounces, but was stiff enough for easy manipulation by weakened fingers.

DuBrul held the map over the bed, within easy reach of the patient. The lines of latitude and longitude were clearly marked, and the place names had oversized labels, Russian above English.

The old man raised a shaky hand, and pointed one trembling finger toward a spot on the map, in the northeastern quadrant of the Sea of Okhotsk. DuBrul recognized the location from which K-506 had launched the first missile attack. He drew a small circle on the map using a felt tipped pen.

“
Zdes’,” Grigoriev whispered. “Here. Zashishennaja pozicija.”

Agent DuBrul recognized the term. Zashishennaja pozicija translated loosely into ‘protected position.’ It was the Russian equivalent of the word defilade: a position fortified against attack by geographic barriers. Hills, ravines, that sort of thing.

DuBrul repeated the words. “Zashishennaja pozicija. I think I understand. These are the coordinates the submarine can shoot from, is that right? These are the places where explosives have been set to blow holes in the ice pack?”

“
Da,” the old man whispered. “Strelyat. To shoot from …”

“
How many zashishennaja pozicija are there?” DuBrul asked. “How many places can K-506 shoot through the ice?”

The old man’s hand dropped back to the sheets. He closed his eyes and breathed heavily for nearly a minute. At last, his eyelids fluttered open again. “Pyat,” he hissed.

DuBrul nodded again. Five.

Grigoriev lifted his finger to the chart again. His hand shook so badly that it took a few seconds to settle down. “Zdes’,” he breathed.

DuBrul circled the spot on the map.

Grigoriev’s palsied finger moved a few inches and touched the map again. “Zdes’.”

DuBrul marked the new spot with another circle. Again the finger moved, and DuBrul drew a fourth circle.

A shudder passed through the old man’s body and his hand fell away from the chart. The heart monitor mounted to the wall near his bed began beeping rapidly. The cardiac trace on the screen blinked from green to red.

DuBrul turned away from the patient. “Doctor?”

He raised his voice. “Doctor? Get in here!”

The door flew open, and Dr. Hogan covered the distance to the bed in two quick strides. He glanced at the monitor, and then looked over his shoulder. “Get a crash cart in here, now!”

Another shudder wracked Oleg Grigoriev’s body. His eyes seemed to roll back in their sockets, and a ribbon of foamy saliva rolled from the corner of his mouth.

A nurse and a pair of Hospital Corpsmen rushed in, pushing a cart full of medical equipment.

DuBrul backed away, to give them room to work, but the patient’s eyes suddenly locked on his face. “Here,” the old man croaked. “Come … here …”

Agent DuBrul edged past the nurse to the side of the bed. “I’m here.”

The nurse started to object, but Dr. Hogan shook his head.

Grigoriev wheezed. “Karta …”

“
Right here,” DuBrul said. He held up the map.

Grigoriev’s finger rose with agonizing slowness. It brushed a spot near the southern end of the sea. “Zashishennaja … ,” he muttered. “… pozicijaaaa …”

A final spasm contorted the man’s body, and then he lay still. The heart monitor emitted a continuous whine.

DuBrul marked the last spot, and backed away from the bed. He stood with the map clutched in his hand, watching the medical team work feverishly over their patient. He made no move to interfere, but he could see that they were wasting their time. The tough old Sergeant was gone.

Long minutes later, as the frantic resuscitation attempts began to wind down, DuBrul looked at the map. His five hastily-drawn circles marked the places that Grigoriev had indicated. The locations from which K-506 could detonate pre-positioned explosives, and blow shooting holes in the ice cover.

The northeastern position had already been used; DuBrul was sure of that, leaving four spots from which the submarine could shower its targets with nuclear weapons.

The circles he had scrawled were inexact. He knew that. The old Russian had been too weak and too shaky to indicate the positions with precision. And if—by some miracle—he had managed to identify precisely the correct points, the area enclosed by each circle would still encompass many square miles of ice.

DuBrul and Ross had understood in advance that using the map would yield imprecise results. But after the Russian’s previous collapse, it had seemed unlikely that Grigoriev would recover enough strength to pass detailed verbal information, like map coordinates. So they had agreed on a setup that would permit the patient to communicate by pointing.

Instead of precise navigational coordinates, they had approximate locations, with built-in margins of error. Not exactly ideal, but—outside of James Bond movies—intelligence information was rarely absolute.

With a few jabs of his finger, Grigoriev had reduced the search area from over a half a million square miles, to a few hundred square miles. The area of uncertainty had just shrunk by a factor of two thousand, or maybe even three thousand. As far as DuBrul was concerned, that was pretty damned good work. It was a lot better than they usually managed.

He tucked the map under his arm and walked to the door, signaling to the Marine guard to follow him. The medical team had abandoned their attempt to revive the patient. They were taking last minute readings and making final chart entries—following the procedures required to certify the time of death.

Agent DuBrul paused to look back at Oleg Grigoriev one last time. “Spaciba,” he said softly. “Thank you, old warrior. Go with God.”

WHITE HOUSE

WASHINGTON, DC

TUESDAY; 05 MARCH

9:46 AM EST

President Chandler leaned against the railing of the Truman Balcony, and looked across the south lawn to the crowd of protesters gathered on the Ellipse. The District of Columbia was experiencing its last hard cold snap of the year. The temperature was hovering just above freezing, and there were two inches of snow on the ground. But the protesters didn’t care. Their shoes had trampled the Ellipse so thoroughly that the snow had been churned into muddy brown slush.

The Secret Service was now estimating the head count at thirty-thousand, and the mob was still growing. Or—more correctly—the
mobs
were still growing. There were several groups down there. The
Peace-At-All-Costs
lobby was rubbing shoulders with the
Nuke-the-Bastards-Now
gang, and the fundamentalist
This-is-the-Wrath-of-God
faction was marching beside the
America-Must-Rule-the-World-for-its-Own-Good
cult.

Those weren’t the real names of the organizations represented here, of course, but their platforms were nearly all that silly, and that simplistic. Most of them couldn’t find Kamchatka on a map, and probably fewer than one out of twenty could spell the name of the country that had suddenly inflamed their passions. But they all knew exactly where the president had gone wrong in managing this crisis, and they all knew exactly how to fix it.

The answer is simple—
lay down our arms and live in peace with other nations
. The answer is simple—
blow those sons-of-bitches to kingdom come
. The answer is simple—
outlaw all foreign trade and shut off all foreign aid. Let the commies and the ragheads try to get along without American dollars.
The answer is simple—
fill in the blank here …