Echo of War

46

A quarter mile past the harbor’s breakwater, Tanner realized he was in trouble.

The skipjack was sturdy enough and her engine strong enough, but the winds were chaotic, backing and shifting with frightening irregularity. Backlit by flashes of lightning, waves slammed explosively into one another, sending up geysers of foam. Swells stacked up on one another, growing taller as the troughs deepened, until the crests reached a dozen feet or more. Tanner would find himself teetering atop a curling crest with no choice but to let the skipjack nose over into the trough, or gun the throttle and hope he had enough velocity to clear the gap.

Twice, as the skipjack soared from wave top to wave top, Briggs could only watch helplessly as another crest would appear from nowhere and slam into the hull with enough force to knock the wind from his lungs.

Rain and spindrift cascaded over the boat’s vinyl cover, drenching him and finding every gap in the elastic waist skirt. He could hear water sloshing around the boat’s bottom. Without the skirt he would have already capsized.

Tanner sensed that the sea was quartering, the swells lengthening, so he took the opportunity to throttle back and take a compass check. He pulled the sat phone from its Ziploc bag then matched his position against the GPS feed from the Lacrosse. It showed the Barak passing Veli Srakane and heading toward its sister island, Male Srakane. He double-checked his bearings, then throttled up and brought the bow around into the next crest.

Twenty minutes later Tanner was peeping through the spindrift when a double flash of lightning burst across the sky. In the strobe he glimpsed a strip of white sand backed by a line of trees. Another flash and he could make out a curve of the land off the port beam. Male Srakane. He brought the skipjack about to follow the shoreline.

Suddenly a white mastlight appeared off his bow. He let the skipjack drop into a trough then throttled down. He was close enough to the shallows that the waves were stacking, becoming more regular, so he jockeyed the skip-jack ahead, threading his way from trough to trough. After two hundred yards, he throttled up again, climbed the next crest, and snatched a peek.

It was the Barak. She was anchored at the mouth of a crescent-shaped cove enclosed by a pair of sandbars covered in scrub pine. On the Barak’s afterdeck, four figures worked under the glow of a spotlight. Tanner looking for other signs of life aboard, but saw none. Where are you, Susanna? he wondered. She was aboard, he told himself. She had to be. If not, it meant Litzman had already disposed of her.

He pulled the sat phone from his pocket, keyed in a pager message—“Located Barak; pursuing”—and sent it.

According to Oaken, Male Srakane was all but deserted, occupied only by a game warden who lived on the north side of the island. So why had Litzman anchored here? Unless … Unless he’d stashed something here. It would explain his delayed arrival in Trieste. Wary of a search by Trieste customs, had Litzman dropped his cargo here for later recovery?

Tanner turned the skipjack stern first into the breakers then let them drive him into the shallows, putting the sandbar between himself and the Barak. When he felt the keel scrape the sand, he hopped out, grabbed the painter line, and dragged the boat ashore.

He dug a pair of binoculars from the equipment pack Franjo had given him, then ran, hunched over, to the slope of the sandbar, where he dropped onto his belly and crawled to the top. He focused the binoculars on the Barak’s afterdeck.

The four figures had lowered a Zodiac raft into the water beside the stern. As Tanner watched, the last man climbed in. The Zodiac came about and headed toward shore. Briggs backed down the slope and began sprinting inland, using the sandbar as a guide. When it melded with the tree line, he turned again and began picking his way toward the cove.

He heard the whine of the Zodiac’s engine peak, then suddenly die. The trees thinned out, opening onto the beach. Briggs dropped into a crouch and raised the binoculars. At the waterline, the four men were pulling the Zodiac onto the sand. Each was dressed in a black wet suit One of them, easily half a foot taller than the rest, stood to one side and barked silent orders. Litzman. Tanner caught snippets of German on the wind: “Hurry it up … tie that off!”

With Litzman in the lead, the group trudged up the beach and disappeared into the trees. Tanner considered following, but decided against it. He picked his way back along the sandbar and closer to the Zodiac.

After ten minutes the group reappeared dragging what looked like an oversized toboggan made of curved, aluminum piping. Twelve feet long, four wide, and three tall, the sled’s upper rails were fitted with six orange pontoon floats, each the size of a beach ball.

Sitting atop the sled was the crate from Lorient.

Tanner focused the binoculars on the crate, hoping to catch any identifying words or markings. There, stenciled in bold black letters, were four characters: “MK90.” Tanner kept scanning until he found a second grouping: “CAPTOR.”

Oh, God. Litzman’s trip to Lorient now made perfect sense.

During the seventies and eighties, NATO’s plan for a conventional war with Russia in Europe depended on the resupply of ground forces via several ports on the French coast, the main one being Lorient, the Bay of Biscay. Accordingly, the French Navy had turned the coastal town into not only its hub for antisubmarine units, but also its primary depot for ASW weapons.

How exactly Litzman had pulled off the heist only he and the French government knew, but what he’d stolen was known as a Mark 90 CAPTOR, or encapsulated torpedo — essentially an antiship mine on a torpedo body.

CAPTOR was a drop-and-forget weapon that required little preparation beyond a short arming sequence and the calibration of the floats to ensure the sled landed upright on the seabed. Once there, it sat dormant until its rudimentary guidance/sonar system detected the acoustical signature of its target.

With a top speed of forty knots, a range of eight miles, and a four-hundred pound “keel buster” warhead, CAPTOR had been designed to surprise Soviet warships, chase them down, then punch through their heavily armored hulls and sink them.

Against an unarmored ferry like the Aurasina, the CAPTOR would rip through her hull as though it were tissue paper, shatter her keel, and send a shock wave of fire and superheated steam through the ferry’s interior. Whatever remained of the hulk after the explosion would sink within minutes, along with eight hundred people and both canisters of Kestrel — providing they survived intact.

Litzman’s team dragged the sled to the waterline, where they waited, obviously timing the breakers. At the right moment, they shoved the sled into the water, where the breakers lifted it off the sand. As two of them held the sled steady, Litzman and the fourth man grabbed the Zodiac, dragged it into the water, and affixed a tow line to the sled. The group began wading out. When the water was at chest height, each man adjusted a pontoon until the sled was half-submerged.

They climbed into the raft. Litzman jerked the starter cord and the motor sputtered to life. He pointed the bow into the next breaker, revved the throttle, and the Zodiac disappeared over the crest

With only the vague outline of a plan in his head and a hunch about where Litzman was headed, Tanner sprinted back to the skipjack, crawled through the waist skirt, and dug through his pack until he found the chart. Flashlight held in his mouth, he found Male Srakane on the map, then traced his finger westward, into what he guessed was the Aurasina’s general path.

Fundamental to Litzman’s and the SDB’s plan would be ensuring there was no evidence to contradict their Bosnian conspiracy theory, which required the Aurasina’s utter destruction and/or her disappearance. Tanner had a theory about the latter.

Seven miles into the Adriatic he found what he was looking for, the edge of the Kvarner Trench, the spot where the Adriatic and the Mediterranean meet. In the space of a mile, the inland waters plunge into the trench, going from an average depth of eighty feet to over eighteen thousand. The Aurasina’s course would take her over the trench’s northeastern corner. If she went down there, all chance of salvage — and thereby proof of her demise — would be lost.

Unbidden, Tanner found himself thinking of the Kestrel canisters. If by some miracle they survived the explosion, he doubted they would survive the pressure at eighteen thousand feet. Eight thousand pounds per square inch on each canister …

He forced himself back on track. He still had time — not much, but some.

Binoculars in hand, he scrambled up the side of the sandbar. Wind-driven sand stung his face. He wiped his eyes clear of rain and focused the binoculars on the Barak. Litzman and his men were back aboard. Standing on the dive platform, they dragged the sled up and onto the afterdeck, where they began lashing it to the cleats. Litzman checked the lines, nodded his approval. The team dispersed.

Tanner heard the muffled rumble of diesel engines. The water beneath the Barak’s stern boiled white as the propellers turned over. The bow came about and nosed into the breakers. With another growl, her engines pushed her over the next crest and toward the mouth of the cove.

Tanner watched for another two minutes, until certain of her course, then sprinted back to the skipjack, put his shoulder against the hull, and began shoving her toward the water.