Clive Cussler: Mirage

Yuri Borodin had been imprisoned here for just a few weeks. While the man ate like a bear, drank like, well, like a Russian, and exercised every third leap year, he was still in pretty good shape for a man of fifty-five. But the guards could have done anything to him in that time. For all Juan knew, he’d find a broken and shattered man in Yuri’s cell, or, worse, Yuri’d already been executed and his ashes added to the mound outside.

No matter what he found, Cabrillo’s six-minute deadline was carved in stone.

He went to work on the last of the mortar, committed now beyond all shadow of a doubt. When he was done, he got his lock picks ready, the last trick to come from his cache, and kicked his way through the cement blocks. They tumbled to the floor in a chalky heap, and Juan dove through headfirst.

“Yuri,” he called in a stage whisper when he got to his feet.

He was in a long corridor with at least twenty cell doors. At the far end he could see where the hallway bent ninety degrees. From his study of the construction diagrams, he knew there was another door just around the corner and, beyond that, stairs that rose to the prison’s first floor. It was like Hannibal Lecter’s cellblock without the creepy acrylic wall.

“Who’s there?” a voice he recognized from their years of dealings called back just as faintly.

Juan went to the door where he thought Yuri was being held and drew back the observation slit. The cell was empty.

“To your left,” Yuri said.

Juan drew back that slit, and there in front of him was Admiral Yuri Borodin, former commandant of the naval base in Vladivostok. It had been at Borodin’s shipyard that the Oregon had been refitted and the sophisticated weapons systems integrated after the original ship had outlived her usefulness and was nearly scrapped. The fitting of her revolutionary magnetohydrodynamic engines had been carried out at another shipyard Yuri controlled. Both jobs had neared a combined cost of one hundred million dollars, but with Juan’s former boss at the CIA giving him the go-ahead to convert the Oregon into what she was today, financing had not been an issue.

Borodin’s normal helmet of bronze hair lay limp along the sides of his open face, and his skin had an unnaturally sallow mien, but he still had the alert dark eyes of the canny fox he was. They hadn’t broken him yet, not by a mile.

He had a look of wary confusion as he regarded the man before him, as if he recognized him but couldn’t place him. Then his face split into a big toothy grin. “Chairman Juan Cabrillo,” he exclaimed loudly before moderating his voice to a whisper again. “Of all the prisons in all the towns in all the world, why am I not surprised you are in this one?”

“Proverbial bad penny,” Cabrillo said deadpan.

Borodin reached through the observation slit to rub Juan’s head. “What have you done to yourself?”

“Making myself pretty just for you.” Juan started working the lock picks.

“Who sent you?”

“Misha.” Captain Mikhail Kasporov was Borodin’s longtime assistant and aide-de-camp.

“God bless the boy.” A sudden dark thought occurred to him. “To rescue me or kill me?”

Juan glanced up from the lock, which he almost had open. “Does your paranoia know no bounds? To rescue you, you idiot.”

“Ah, he is a good boy. And as for my paranoia, Mr. Chairman of the Corporation, a look at my present surroundings shows that I was not paranoid enough. So what is new, my friend?”

“Let’s see. The civil war in the Sudan is winding down. The Dodgers again have no pitching staff. And I think half the Kardashians are getting married while the other half are divorcing. Oh, and once again you’ve managed to anger the wrong guy.”

On his ruthless rise to power within the Russian Navy, backed by hard-right political cronies, the mercurial Admiral Pytor Kenin had left a trail of destruction in his wake — careers ruined and, in one instance, a rival’s suspicious death. Now that he was one of the youngest fleet admirals in the country’s history, rumors abounded that he would soon turn to politics under the guiding wing of Vladimir Putin.

Yuri Borodin had become one of Kenin’s enemies, though he was too well positioned among the general staff to be dismissed outright and had been arrested on trumped-up charges and sent to this prison to await trial — a trial that he would most likely never survive to see. A company Kenin controlled ran the prison on behalf of the government in a public/private cooperative much like the ones that gave rise to the oligarchs in the days after communism’s demise. His death could be easily arranged and would likely happen after the initial flap over his arrest died down.

That Borodin was corrupt was an open secret, but singling him out was like arresting only a single user in an overcrowded crack house. Corruption in the Russian military was as much a part of the culture as itchy uniforms and lousy food.

“And you do this out of the goodness of your heart?”

“Of course,” Cabrillo said. “And about a tenth of your net worth.”

“Bah. My Misha is a good boy, but he is a lousy negotiator. You love me like a brother for what I did to that oversized scow of yours. We had good times, you and me, while the men at my shipyard turned your tabby cat into a lion. To honor those memories alone you should rescue me for free.”

Juan countered, “I could have charged double, and Mikhail would have paid because even he doesn’t know all your Swiss bank account numbers.” With that, he twisted the picks and sprang the lock.

The first thing Yuri Borodin did was grasp Cabrillo in a big bear hug and kiss him on both cheeks. “You are a saint amongst men.”

“Get off me, you crazy Russian,” Juan said lightly as he extricated himself from Yuri’s grip. “We’re not out of this yet.”

Borodin turned serious. “There is a great deal we need to talk about. The timing of my arrest was not coincidental.”

“Not now. Let’s go.”

They crawled back into Cabrillo’s cell. Juan took up the microburst transmitter, set a mental timer in his head, and activated both. He then keyed the plastic explosives he’d earlier molded to the prison’s exterior wall a good distance from his rabbit hole. The blast was muted by the intervening cinder blocks but could still be felt in every corner of the large facility. The guards would be swinging into action almost immediately.

Juan ducked down to enter the claustrophobic space between the prison’s inner and outer walls. He turned back to Borodin. “No matter what happens, just stay with me.”

Yuri nodded grimly, his normal bonhomie replaced with real concern for his fate.

They moved laterally along the cramped space and had to squeeze by pipes that rose through the floor. These were part of the passive ammonia cooling system that kept what little heat maintained by the prison from melting the permafrost on which it was built. The air thickened with the burned chemical stench of the explosives as they neared the breach through the outer foundation.

The C-4 had blown a ragged hole through the concrete slab about the size of a manhole cover. Chunks of smashed cement shifted under his feet as Cabrillo boosted himself through the opening. On the far side he found himself standing in a moat that encircled the prison’s basement level. This dead space acted as a thermal buffer to again prevent the building’s latent heat from melting the frozen ground.

Twelve feet overhead were panels that hid the moat from the surface. The panels had dozens of holes punched through them so that air could circulate freely and were supported by metal scaffolding. Clots of snow jammed some of the holes, and some drifted down on the men as a result of the blast.