The Solomon Effect
Read The Solomon Effect Online
Authors: C. S. Graham
The Solomon Effect
To the Monday Night Wordsmiths—Pam Ahearn, Rexanne Becnel, Elora Fink, Marie Goodwin, Charles Gramlich, and Laura Joh Rowland—with thanks for your encouragement, your wisdom, and your friendship
Engines throbbing, the salvage ship slipped into the secluded cove…
October Guinness stood in the small side yard of her…
No one in the Central Intelligence Agency wanted to be…
Colonel F. Scott McClintock, United States Army, retired, stared through the one-way…
Stefan Baklanov awoke in the grip of a blind terror.
Tobie found the Colonel at his desk, his head bent…
A powerful monument in marble and steel, the Walker Pharmaceuticals…
Jax was at his desk skimming through an article on…
Lieutenant General Gerald T. Boyd was the kind of general Americans…
Tobie was at home, curled up on the sofa with…
The Major pulled into the darkened driveway in the leafy…
The night was hot, the air thick with the scent…
“I’m sorry, Mr. Aldrich,” said the unsmiling young woman behind the…
The massive doors of the airplane hangar rolled open, filling…
The newspaper was the latest edition of the International Herald…
Stefan forced himself to concentrate on putting one foot in…
Burrowing deep into her jacket, Tobie stepped off the flight…
Jax let his gaze travel from Andrei Gorchakove to October…
“You didn’t expect it to really be here, did you?”…
Jax noticed the Kawasaki behind them as they were pulling…
Swinging through the open hatch, Jax felt the thick, dank…
Tobie let out a startled yelp as Jax slammed into…
General Gerald T. Boyd was halfway through his morning workout routine…
The Tatar kept a heavy foot on the gas all…
They rented a beat-up old Lada from a shady outfit…
The Lada coughed. Caught.
“How did he find us here?” whispered October.
The call from Rodriguez came through when Gerald T. Boyd was…
The flight from Kaliningrad to Berlin smelled of raw onions…
Early the next morning, Stefan was crouched down on his…
Serene and sun-kissed, the city of Izmir stretched out in…
The ship-or what was left of it-had been dragged a…
The two men walked along the Reflecting Pool in the…
The ruins of the ancient Greek agora lay on the…
The Heckler and Koch was a massive model 23. The…
Tucking Erkan’s Walther out of sight beneath his sweat-soaked shirt,…
By the time their connecting flight from Munich swooped down…
The farmhouse lay on the edge of a desolate glen,…
The U-Boot Archiv lay on a narrow street not far…
The closer Stefan drew to Yasnaya Polyana, the more skittish…
Crouched in a narrow space between the seat and the…
The Mumbrauer turned out to be a rustic old Gasthaus…
Jax quietly ordered three more Beck’s beers, although Tobie had…
“You didn’t eat much,” said Jax after the big Texan…
Jax floored it, the engine whining as he shifted rapidly…
Vice President T. J. Beckham stood behind his wide, well-polished desk and…
“This isn’t going to work,” said October. Wrapped in one…
As far as Gerald T. Boyd was concerned, remote viewing belonged…
By one o’clock that afternoon, Jax and Tobie were in…
Borz Zakaev kept a heavy foot on the gas as…
Hotel Offredi was built into the side of a dusty,…
They walked together down the narrow set of concrete stairs…
In the sudden silence, Tobie became aware of the fans…
Jax was in their room at the Hotel Offredi, pacing…
“I shouldn’t have let you go by yourself,” said Jax,…
Leon Ginsburg lived in an ancient stone house on a…
The call from Andrei came through about ten minutes later.
Stefan awoke cold and tired and hungry. He’d passed a…
The chopper came down on a grassy helipad beside a…
Stefan dove through the broken archway, his shoulder exploding in…
The two Russians the militia shot down near the creek…
Her name was Dr. Svetlana Bukovsky. A small, slim woman with gray-streaked…
Early that morning, General Gerald Boyd took the train up…
By the time their connecting flight from Berlin touched down…
By the time Rodriguez reached Rock Creek Park, the first…
Like Division Thirteen, the archives of the ODIS lay deep…
General Gerald T. Boyd settled back into the comfortable leather seat…
Dr. Hannah Clark received them on the wraparound porch of her gingerbread-draped…
“Maybe we’ve been going at this all wrong,” said October.
“Take him!” shouted Jax. Dropping to the floor in a…
They were on I-270 headed toward the Virginia state line…
Jax was tying the stem line to a cleat on…
Turning the wheel hard, October slammed the side of the…
Tobie thrust open the gray door and fell into a…
Jax stared through the wavy plastic barrier at the young…
Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia: Saturday 24 October
7:45
A.M.
local time
Engines throbbing, the salvage ship slipped into the secluded
cove by the cold light of a misty Baltic dawn. Stefan Baklanov stood at the
Yalena’s
prow, his hands clamped around the rusted rail, his gaze fixed on the empty docks of the dilapidated shipyard before them. He was sixteen years old and just beginning his fifth month working on the
Yalena,
a lumbering old diesel-powered catamaran. He heard his uncle, the captain, bark an order from the bridge, then felt the deck of the big ship shudder beneath him as the engines slowed. A shiver of excitement tingled up Stefan’s spine, mingled with a stir of unease. He threw a glance over his shoulder at the barge that wallowed in their wake like a dead whale. On the barge’s deck rested the ghostly wreck of a Nazi-era U-boat.
Even in the dim light of dawn, the huge submarine’s long, low silhouette and upthrusting conning tower were unmistakable, its steel hull covered with accretions from
the sixty-plus years it had lain beneath the waters of the sea, a silent tomb to the scores of Germans who’d once sailed her. The sailors were still there—or at least, their bones were still there. Stefan knew because last night he’d taken one of the dive lights and squeezed in through the sub’s popped hatch for a quick look.
His uncle and a couple of the men had already spent hours crawling through the U-boat’s narrow passageways and cramped quarters. Uncle Jasha emerged unusually silent and grim faced, but that only piqued Stefan’s curiosity more.
At first it had been a grand adventure, squeezing through silent portals, gazing in wonder at the funny old glass and brass gauges in the control room and the cook pots still hanging over the galley range. But as the narrow golden beam of his light played over long-abandoned bunks and empty leather boots, Stefan grew more thoughtful.
He’d expected to crawl through a wet, rusted interior smelling of brine and the creatures of the sea. But nothing was wet. With a chill, he suddenly understood: for all these years, the sub’s hull had held. He saw the pair of eyeglasses lying on a table and the trumpet clutched against the desiccated ribcage of the man who’d once played it, and the awful truth of what he was seeing hit him. These men hadn’t died quickly in a fiery explosion. They hadn’t even drowned. They’d suffocated. Slowly.
Stefan had grown up hearing his grandmother’s stories of the Great Patriotic War, of the siege of Stalingrad and the deadly winters of ’forty-two and ’forty-three. He’d imagined the Nazis as demons, as somehow not quite human. He’d never thought of them as the kind of men who might set aside a pair of reading glasses to clutch a beloved musical instrument to their chest as they breathed in their last, dying gasps. Suddenly the narrow passageways and low ceilings seemed to press in on him, stealing his breath until he raced
for the hatch again, not caring how much noise he made or who saw him.
Uncle Jasha had slapped his big hand against the side of Stefan’s head for taking the dive light without asking. But when Stefan started ranting about how what they were doing was wrong—wrong and dangerous, for surely they were tempting the wrath of the ancient gods of the sea—Uncle Jasha had simply laughed and called him sentimental and superstitious. Yet the sense of foreboding lingered, even in the cold light of day.
Now, Stefan sucked in a breath of air tinged by the acrid stench of an old fire smoldering in the shipyard. A shout from one of the
Yalena’
s crewmen drew his head around and he caught the sound of an outboard motor cutting through the stillness. He peered into the mist, past the rocky point where a scattering of stunted, wind-twisted pines grew. It took a moment before he spotted the launch filled with six or eight men that skimmed across the flat pewter water toward the
Yalena.
“Damn,” muttered Uncle Jasha, coming to stand beside Stefan at the rail. A big, barrel-chested man with a salt-stiffened head of dark hair and a full beard, Jasha Baklanov still towered over Stefan by half a foot. For five years now, Uncle Jasha had been the closest thing to a father Stefan had. By turns gruffly affectionate and chillingly stern, Jasha lived by a looser moral code than Stefan’s father. Which probably explained why Uncle Jasha was alive, whereas Stefan’s father was dead.
Stefan glanced up at him. “Who is it? The men from the shipyard? Why are they coming out to meet us?”
Instead of answering, Uncle Jasha rubbed one work-worn hand across his mouth and down over his heavy beard, his nostrils flaring wide. “Get below.”
“But I wanted to—”
“God damn it, boy. Do as you’re told. For once.”
Stefan threw a last look at the approaching launch, then pushed away from the rail.
But he didn’t go below. Heading for the open stairwell, he ducked behind the tattered tarp that covered the lifeboats and their davits and doubled back so that he was some ten or fifteen feet away from the landing where the men would come aboard. Through a slit in the tarp he watched his uncle station himself beside the rail. A Russian bear of a man in a striped sweater and a Greek fisherman’s cap, Jasha Baklanov stood with his legs splayed wide, his fingers combing through the wild disorder of his beard in that way he had whenever he was thoughtful—or troubled.
The whine of the outboard motor drew close, then suddenly died as the launch bumped against the
Yalena
’s hull. Stefan watched the men come aboard—dark-haired, solemn-faced Slavs from the looks of them, with maybe a few Chechens. But the man who walked up to Uncle Jasha was subtly different. Dressed in a black sweater and loose overcoat, he was as dark-haired as the others, but tanned. When he spoke, his accent was strangely clipped, his phraseology awkward, like a man who’d learned his Russian as an adult or in school.
“This wasn’t the plan,” the man said.
Uncle Jasha’s face darkened, and Stefan realized this must be the man who’d hired the
Yalena,
the man Jasha referred to only as “the Major.”
“There were complications,” Uncle Jasha lied. “We needed to move early.”
A tight smile split the Major’s face. “And you didn’t notify us because…?”
Rather than answer, Jasha Baklanov said, “You’ve been watching us.”
“Did you think we wouldn’t?”
From where he crouched behind the tarp, Stefan felt his
heart begin to pound. No, Uncle Jasha hadn’t expected the men who’d hired him to be watching them. How had they done so?
The Major glanced toward the barge and its long, silent burden. Jasha Baklanov said, “The sub’s cargo is intact.”
“Good. Then you won’t mind if my men take a look.” The Major nodded to a couple of his men. Stefan could hear the tramp of their boots as they headed aft. When Stefan brought his attention back to the Major, he understood why the men wore loose overcoats. As he stepped away from Uncle Jasha, the Major’s coat opened to reveal a machine pistol.
At his nod, the rest of the men—except for a big, redheaded Chechen—spread out over the ship in a way that made Stefan nervous. The minutes crawled past. Stefan watched, terrified, as the Major flipped open a sleek cell phone. He said something Stefan couldn’t hear before glancing over at Jasha Baklanov, his eyes narrowing. “One of the sub’s hatches has been blown.”
The man beside the Major lifted his machine pistol so that the muzzle pointed at Uncle Jasha’s chest. Jasha shrugged. “I was curious. What’s the harm? I tell you, what you want is still there.”
Again the Major said something into his cell phone. After a moment, he smiled. “You’re right. It is.” He nodded to the man beside him. “Kill him. Kill them all.”
Stefan sucked in a gasp of air, the betraying sound lost in the rattle of submachine-gun fire. A line of bullets ripped across Jasha Baklanov’s thick torso, his arms flying up, his body jerking repeatedly as a bloody spray filled the air. Stefan had to squeeze his eyes shut and sink his teeth deep into his lower lip to stop himself from crying out.
He heard another sharp, staccato burst of gunfire from somewhere below, followed by another and another. He bit
down harder on his lip, his mouth filling with the metallic taste of his own blood as the killing went on and on.
When the quiet finally came, it sounded eerie, unnatural. Stefan could hear the gentle slop of the waves against the
Yalena’
s sides and the surge of his own blood pulsing through his veins. He had to force himself to open his eyes.
Uncle Jasha lay sprawled on the deck. As Stefan watched, the Major walked over to stand looking down at what was left of the
Yalena’
s captain. In a welling of raw grief and fury, Stefan willed himself to remember each detail of the man’s full face, the thick lips that pulled into another tight smile. “Stupid greedy Russian,” said the Major in his own language, a language that made Stefan shudder.
The Major glanced back at the man still cradling the extended stock of the machine pistol against his shoulder. “Search the ship. Make sure we have everyone.”
Stefan flattened his hands against the cold steel behind him, not daring to breathe as the man brushed past. He was hideously conscious of his rough work boots visible beneath the loose edge of the tarp. When they searched the ship, they would find him. Christ, he thought; all they’d need do is stand still and listen, and surely they’d hear the pounding of his heart.
He watched, shivering, as the Major headed aft, his footfalls echoing on the silent deck. Dropping to his belly, Stefan wiggled out from under the tarp, darted across the deck, and climbed the rail in one frantic scramble. He heard a shout, but he was already pushing off, his body arching effortlessly into a long, flawless dive honed by years of practice. Once, it had been Stefan’s dream to make Russia’s Olympic swim team. Like so much else, that dream had died along with Stefan’s father. But it had left him with the confidence to view the sea as an ally rather than another enemy—although in that, he had reckoned without the cold.
The water was an icy, cutting shock that drove the air from his body and all thought from his brain. Gasping with agony and fear, he surfaced more by habit than by conscious volition. He heard a shout, and dove again as bullets slapped into the water around him.
A pearlescent cave of icy soundless death, the sea cocooned him in crystalline suspension. He stayed down until his lungs burned and his vision dimmed and he knew he had to either risk being shot at again or die. He thrust his head up into the air, his body aching and shuddering as he drew breath. He was so cold his skin burned and his body jerked like a man caught in a hail of bullets. Swinging around, he realized with a new jolt of terror he’d become disoriented in the mist. Was he still headed toward the shore? What if he was swimming out to sea? Or what if—Oh, God—what if he was swimming back toward the
Yalena?
Behind him, the outboard motor coughed to life, the sound magnified and distorted by the softly drifting fog. Kicking hard, Stefan struck out in the opposite direction, toward what he hoped was a rocky point crowned by the dark, twisted silhouettes of wind-tortured pines.