Mirage

CHAPTER FIVE

The boat was rigged for ultraquiet. They were fifteen miles off California, and there was an American Coast Guard cutter cruising lazily on its way south to San Diego. The cutter was less than four miles away, and while the submarine wasn’t actively pinging with her sonar, her crew couldn’t afford being detected. Though they were in international waters, the presence of a diesel-powered attack submarine so close to the American coast would bring a swift and deadly response.

While the cutter herself didn’t have much in the way of armaments to take out the Tango-class submarine, they could dog the sub using their sonar until a strike aircraft could be called in from any number of naval air stations. They had come too far to blow it this late in the mission. If it meant an hour or two delay to lurk quietly under the surface until the cutter was out of range, so be it. Patience and silence were the two cardinal virtues of a submariner.

The trip north had taken them more than a week, most of that time spent well outside normal shipping routes and running at snorkel depth so the boat’s three diesel engines could draw air. Only when sonar reported a nearby ship, usually one headed inbound from Asia as they came abreast of ports along the U.S. and Mexican west coasts, would they retract the snorkel and dive out of sight.

While normally crewed by seventeen officers and sixty-one seamen, this particular sub had only two dozen men aboard, and the captain couldn’t have been prouder of them.

“Sonar, sit-rep,” he whispered. He was standing behind the man hunched over the antiquated passive sonar system.

The sailor slipped off the one headphone he’d had plastered to his right ear. “The cutter’s still moving away at eight knots. I put him at five miles distant.”

In relative terms, five miles was a tricky distance. It was only a five-minute drive by car or it was a two-hour walk. At sea, with sound able to travel so far through the vastness, five miles could be considered shouting distance.

“Any indication he’s towing an array of his own?”

“No, sir,” the sailor whispered back. “If he was, he’d cut his engines to drift. Otherwise, he couldn’t hear anything over his own propellers.”

The man suddenly tightened the headphone to his skull once again. It was as if speaking of it made it happen. “Captain! His screws just went silent. He’s drifting!”

The captain placed a restraining hand on the younger man’s shoulders. “Steady, son. He can’t hear us if we don’t make a sound.”

The boy looked sheepish. “Yes, sir.”

“We’re nothing but a three-hundred-foot-long quiet spot in the ocean. Nothing to hear here. Just move along.”

The captain looked across the confined conn. The low-ceilinged room was as claustrophobic as a crypt, and with the red battle lights glowing, the men appeared demonic. In the center of the space the periscope hung from the ceiling like a metallic stalactite. Around it were clustered the helm station, the engineering monitoring space, the captain’s chair, and several other workstations. The sub was so old that all its readouts were on analog displays and simple dials, not unlike those of a World War II — era boat. The air was somewhat chilly, and with the sub running off her batteries, amps weren’t squandered on extra heating. And yet several men still had sweat on their faces. The tension was palpable.

“The cutter is still drifting, Captain.”

“That’s okay, lad. Let him drift. He has no idea we’re here.”

They had been running ultraquiet for the better part of an hour since first detecting and identifying the cutter from a database of acoustic signals stored on magnetic tapes — another piece of antiquated technology that illustrated the Tango-class’s ’70s roots. So when an internal alarm sounded, it was especially shrill and piercing.

The seaman closest to the alarm held true to his training. Most men would have remained frozen for a few crucial seconds as their brain processed the source of the intrusive noise, but he moved with the speed of a cat and hit a toggle that muted the klaxon. Half of the red battle lamps began to pulse as a visual cue that an emergency was under way.

Time seemed suspended as the men exchanged nervous glances. They now faced two dangers: one, the American cutter that had been listening for sounds in the abyss with a towed sonar array that could pick up the slightest anomalous noise — one Cold War story told of how a Soviet sub had been tracked for its entire four-thousand-mile journey because one crewman popped his gum whenever he was alone — and, two, whatever the boat’s sensors had detected was life-threatening enough to warrant a tripped alarm.

The answer to that second danger came moments later when a wisp of smoke coiled from one of the overhead ventilators. Even as the crew turned to watch, that wisp became a white, opaque torrent.

More than drowning, submariners feared fire.

And it was obvious that the boat was burning.

The captain’s gaze swept the bridge, pausing for only the briefest moment on one particular figure before moving on. There would be no help there. He focused on his executive officer. “XO, lock down that fire no matter what it takes. Silence must be maintained.”

“Sir,” the man said, and rushed forward where the smoke seemed to be thickest.

“Sonar, sit-rep?” the captain asked with studied disinterest. He needed to show his crew there was no need to panic. Inside, his guts felt oily.

“Contact still drifting,” the sonarman replied, one hand pressing the headphone so tightly, his fingers had gone white.

“Did he hear us?”

“He heard, all right. He just doesn’t know what he heard.”

“If you were him, what would you do?”

“Sir?”

“Answer me. If you were listening on his passive array and heard that alarm, what would you do?”

“Um,” the sailor hesitated.

“Simple question. Tell me. What would you do?”

“I would turn my ship to our bearing and tow the array once again, hoping to pick up another transient emission.”

The captain knew the correct answer, the one his young sonarman had given, but his instincts told him to abandon the bridge and follow his XO. The fire was the immediate emergency. The American cutter was secondary. And yet training dictated otherwise. He must remain on the bridge. It was a good leader’s ability to acknowledge the disconnect between instinct and training that kept crews alive. The most immediate threat to the sub wasn’t the fire at all. It remained the Coast Guard vessel.

He waited with the rest of his men, his eyes glued to the big clock over the planesman’s station. The cutter continued to drift and listen on her passive array.

At the six-minute mark, he let out a little of the breath he felt he’d been holding since the alarm sounded. At seven minutes, he exhaled the rest.

“I think he’s missed us, boys,” he whispered.

Just then, the XO returned.

“Sir, it was a small grease fire in the galley. Nothing’s been damaged.”

“Captain, the cutter’s engines just came back online. She’s gaining seaway.”

“Is she turning?”

The wait seemed endless, but the young sailor suddenly turned to look at his captain, a big grin splitting his face. “She’s headed due south and is already up to eight knots.”

“Well done, everyone,” the captain said in an almost normal tone of voice. He looked over at the stoic face of Admiral Pytor Kenin. He wasn’t sure what to expect, so he was pleasantly surprised that the man gave him a grudging nod of respect.

Kenin had been leaning against a bulkhead and suddenly pushed himself erect and called out, “Evolution complete.”

The red battle lights clicked off, and overhead lamps bathed the sub’s control room in stark white light. Technicians who’d been unseen moments before entered the space to check on equipment, while the sailors manning the various stations got up from their seats. Their bodies were as exhausted and tensed up as if this had been a real encounter and not a training exercise. And yet there was a feeling of self-satisfaction among them for a job well done.

“Congratulations, Captain Escobar,” Kenin said when he reached the man’s side, a hand extended for a shake. He spoke English, the only language the two men shared.

“For a moment I thought we had failed,” Jesus Escobar admitted. “A most inopportune time for a simulated fire.”

“A good sub captain can handle one crisis at a time; the great ones can handle more.”

Escobar allowed himself a smile at the compliment.

Kenin continued, “This completes your training, Captain. You and your men are ready to put to sea.”

“The cartel will be pleased to hear that. They’ve spent a great deal of money on this venture, and it is now time that our new toy be put to use.”

“Didn’t you tell me when you arrived here at Sakhalin that you would need just two runs up to California from Colombia for your cartel to turn a profit?”

“Yes,” Escobar replied, smoothing down his dark mustache. “With just a skeleton crew and enough fuel for the trip up and back, we can load several hundred tons of cocaine into this boat.”

“You’ve proven to me that you will manage much more than two runs, my friend.” Kenin threw an arm around Escobar’s shoulder, which emphasized the physical difference between the two. Where the Colombian narco-trafficker was built like most submariners, five foot six and lean of muscle, the Russian admiral brushed the ceiling at six foot three. He was a typical bear of a man, solidly built and possessing an iron constitution. “Tonight I will hold a celebration in honor of you and your men and the three long months you’ve trained here. Tomorrow you will sleep that off, and tomorrow night, under cover of darkness, we will release your boat from the floating dry dock and you will head home.”

“You do us an honor, Admiral.”

“Debrief your men, Captain, and I will see you later.”

Kenin turned to climb the ladder up into the Tango’s sail, where one of his men waited to open the outer hatch. The simulation had lasted for nearly five hours, and Kenin was desperate for some fresh air, but he would have to wait a while longer. The 300-foot sub lay in the bowels of a fully enclosed floating dry dock nearly three times its size, which itself was docked at a near-derelict Navy station that Kenin used as his own private domain. He dropped down an exterior ladder and crossed a movable ramp to a catwalk that ran the length of the dry dock. The cavernous space smelled of the sea on which the Tango floated, oil, and rust. Powerful lights on the ceiling could do little to dispel the gloom.

He walked with a long-legged, hurried stride, as was his custom, and reached a flight of stairs that would take him to an exterior hatch. It was only when he passed through that door and stepped onto the open deck that he filled his lungs with air. The sun had long since set, and the breeze was freshening. The temperature stood at about forty degrees, and he knew from experience that once winter hit, minus forty would be the norm.

Another ramp led to the old Navy pier. The dock was failing concrete and frost-heaved pavement with gnarls of weeds growing wherever the cracks allowed. Obscuring his view landward were dilapidated warehouses whose paint had long been scoured off by the winds that shrieked down from Siberia. A car was waiting for him, its driver standing erect at the first sign of Kenin’s emergence from the dock.

The man saluted smartly and opened the rear door. Kenin slid into the rich leather seat and immediately pulled his encrypted cell phone from his pocket. There was no signal inside the sub, and he’d missed a dozen calls. For now he’d return just one, from his aide-de-camp, Commander Viktor Gogol.

“Gogol, it’s Kenin.”

“Admiral, how did it go?”

“They’ll sail tomorrow night.”

“I’ve been assured by the dockworkers that the device is ready,” Gogol said.

“How the Colombians ever thought I would allow them to buy a surplus submarine to haul cocaine to America is beyond me. Escobar seems capable enough, but the U.S. Navy would be on him five minutes after he left South America. It takes years to properly train a crew to evade American sonar. These fools actually think they’ve mastered their boat in just three months.”

“If you recall, Admiral, originally they wanted just a week of instruction before they took possession of the boat.”

“I do recall. They wouldn’t even have known how to get her out of dry dock. Like I said, they’re fools. It’s better this way. The cartel will make their final payment to me just before the sub sails, and then when it dives to a depth of two hundred feet, the ballast intakes will jam open and it will sink to the bottom of the Pacific. No witnesses, and no blowback from the cartel. So tell me, Viktor, why did you call?”

“We have a problem,” Gogol said in such a way that Kenin leaned forward.

“Go on.”

“Borodin has escaped.”

Kenin went from contentment to rage as though a switch had been thrown. “What? How did this happen?”

“A new prisoner was brought in, part of a routine transfer. It appears that this man was an impostor sent to free Borodin. He somehow smuggled in explosives. They blasted their way out of the prison and had a helicopter waiting to pick them up.”

Rage couldn’t describe the emotions welling up from the void in his chest where normal men had a heart. “Go on,” he said with his teeth tightly clenched.

“The prison launched their own chopper in pursuit and shot down the first aircraft. When they investigated, they discovered that the helicopter was remotely piloted. There was no sign of Borodin or the fake prisoner. When they backtracked, they discovered a set of snowmobile tracks heading north. The last anyone heard from them was during the pursuit.”

“What do you mean the last anyone heard from them?”

“Sir, this happened three hours ago. There has been no word from the flight crew. Another chopper has been searching, but there’s been no sign. They fear it either crashed or was shot down over water and sank.”

Pytor Kenin hadn’t achieved the rank of admiral or created for himself a private army within Russia’s military without being both bold and ruthless, and never was he at a loss for decisions. “The guards who let the prisoner smuggle in explosives, I want them jailed immediately. Put them in general population, and let the inmates mete out our justice on them. I want the warden replaced immediately, and I want that man in my office when I return to Moscow.”

“Yes, sir,” Gogol replied.

Kenin went on. “We have to assume Borodin made it aboard some waiting ship. Track all known vessels that were in the area, where they came from, who owns them, everything.”

“Yes, sir.”

“If Borodin’s alive, that puts the Mirage Project at risk. He has no proof of anything, so it will just be his word. We need to ensure that he can’t find proof. Do you understand?”

“I believe so, Admiral.”

“I want every loose end, no matter how tenuous, eliminated.”

“Do we inform the Chinese?”

“Absolutely not. We can contain this. We need just a few days. Then we will hold our demonstration, and after that it’s up to them.” Kenin allowed himself to settle back into his seat as the car crossed the defunct base and headed to the prefab house he had been staying in whenever he visited the Colombians. They were paying him thirty million dollars for the sub and the training of its crew, the least he could do is give them some face time every once in a while. As soon as the Tango departed, the dry dock would be towed back to Vladivostok and the prefab home dismantled and returned there as well.

“Viktor, one more thing.”

“Sir?”

“The next time you have news of this importance, do not ask me questions about how training went. It wastes my time.”

“Yes, Admiral. I am sorry, sir.”

“Don’t be sorry, just don’t do it again.” Kenin had another thought. “I assume Borodin’s rescue was arranged by his little bootlick, Misha Kasporov. See to it that he dies as well.”

“That order went out as soon as I heard about the escape. He’d already gone to ground, but we’ll find him.”

“There’s hope for you yet.”