Peter Sasgen - War Plan Red

“You spend a lot of time at sea in subs if you want command. I was exec on two boats, then CO of the Chicago and Tampa.”

“Now I’m impressed,” Alex said.

“Tracy sure as hell wasn’t.”

“So, what’s she like?”

How to describe a woman he had lived with for fourteen years? He wanted to say that she was a beautiful satin bitch. He remembered that Tracy’s voracious need for emotional support had drained him dry. So had her fits of manic jealousy and bouts of deep depression. Their breakup had been shattering. Coming as it had on the heels of his mission in the Yellow Sea, it had left him feeling alienated and cold.

Alex reached across the table and put a hand on his. The contact seared his flesh. “Sounds as if she didn’t like sharing you with that sub.” She took her hand away and returned his penetrating gaze with one of her own.

“So, what were you doing running around under the ocean in your sub?” Alex said after their dinner, which arrived on a silver cart accompanied by four waiters and a sommelier, had been served.

“Gathering intelligence,” Scott said.

“Spying on the Russians?”

“Not always.”

“It sounds dangerous,” she said, looking up at Scott from her salmon and pastry kulebiaka. “Tell me about it.” Her intensity made it hard for him to refuse.

“We went to extraordinary lengths to get what we were after. We took some terrible risks, had some close calls, and…well, sometimes things didn’t work out.” And sometimes men get killed, he could have added, but didn’t. And when the Navy had to have a scapegoat, he was it. From the start he’d been against a mission into the northern Yellow Sea between China and North Korea. The Yellow Sea was too damn shallow for sub ops, and, like the NKs, the Chinese considered it their private lake. So why send a submarine into the Yellow Sea on a virtual suicide mission where the Chinese and NKs had been waiting to set loose their antisub forces like a pack of wild dogs against a trapped hare?

“What kind of intelligence did you snatch from under the noses of the people you spied on?”

“Arcane technical stuff that would bore you.”

“What you mean is that you can’t talk about it.” “I’ve already told you too much.”

“Maybe you haven’t told me enough,” she said cryptically.

He put down his fork and touched his mouth with a stiff linen napkin. “What exactly do you mean?”

“Jake, think about it. You and Frank are cut from the same cloth. You both were involved in intelligence work; it’s what you do. Is it possible that Frank, posing as a liaison officer with Earth Safe, was actually working for the CIA or someone else and was in Murmansk to gather intelligence and instead ended up dead?”

“Frank would never serve two masters—never let himself be used in that way.” As soon as Scott said that, he realized how wrong he was. Like Scott, Drummond had worked for the SRO before and had been working for them when he was murdered. It would have been easy enough for Drummond to slip into a role that would give him access to what was at one time some of the most inaccessible submarine bases in the world. But for what reason? There was little the SRO and CIA didn’t already know about the once-mighty Russian sub force and its now crumbling bases on the Kola Peninsula and in the Far East. So why send Drummond to Russia when Alex Thorne and the Norwegians were capable of handling the cleanup work on their own? Scott didn’t have an answer.

“I keep asking myself why someone would kill Frank,” Scott said. “He was an American naval officer, not a professional spy.”

She made an explosive sound. “You met Yuri Abakov. To some people in Russia, there’s no difference.”

After dinner, bundled up against Moscow’s cold, they strolled a mostly deserted Ulitsa Petrovka. Scott said, “Tell me about Frank’s files stored in the chancery.”

“What’s to tell? Individuals, even those who are assigned to the embassy on a temporary basis, are provided with В-level secure storage for sensitive materials. They’re kept in the same underground vault as the embassy’s А-level top-secret materials are, but in a different area. Frank was assigned a lockup and had access twenty-four hours a day. Jack Slaughter is chief of security. He also handles the comm center and the embassy’s voice mail net. Did you meet him?”

“Stretzlof introduced us,” Scott said. “I told Slaughter that I had orders to round up Frank’s papers and ship them out via diplomatic pouch. He seemed eager to help out.”

“That’s Slaughter.”

Scott suddenly stopped walking. “And you say that we can access the В-level lockup twenty-four hours a day?”

“Yes,” she said, turning around, walking back to him.

“Then, let’s go,” Scott said, and hailed a taxi.

Alex led Scott through the embassy’s elaborate security apparatus, consisting of retinal screening devices and voice recognition monitors at В level, far below the streets of Moscow. The duty officer accompanied them to the lockup area, where Scott took custody of a metal box filled with Drummond’s papers. Once they were settled in a conference room, the duty officer closed the door and departed after making sure that he had displayed the Occupied sign outside.

Scott noticed the room’s oddly shaped sound suppressing wall and ceiling tiles, which greatly attenuated their voices and imparted a palpable sense of claustrophobia. Filtered air hissed from a ceiling fixture. It was like being aboard the Tampa.

“Are you cold?” Scott asked.

Alex lifted and dropped her shoulders, hugged herself with both arms. “No, just wired.”

Her mood of expectancy had affected Scott too. “Then let’s get to work.”

Drummond’s papers, reports, and CD-ROMs had been carefully organized. Most of the material bore a Confidential or Secret heading.

“Should I be looking at this stuff?” Alex said. “I don’t have a clearance for Secret, only Confidential.” “Never mind that; does any of it look familiar?”

Alex read a document. “Yes, some of it. This one, for instance, pretty much covers the time line we had established to search the Kola Peninsula for loose fissile materials. I don’t think you’re going to find anything in here that will be useful.”

“First rule of intelligence work: Don’t jump to conclusions,” Scott said.

“It’s also the first rule of science.”

“Then, follow the rules.” Most of the material made no sense to Scott, but he knew it would be easy to overlook something important. “It’s like looking through the periscope of a submarine: Things you think aren’t there sometimes are. Believe me, I know.”

The evening quickly ran its course. And though the conference table was a storm of papers, notes, and CD-ROMs containing only dry technical information on the storage and handling of fissile materials, Scott refused to admit defeat.

“Will you be using the conference room all night, Dr. Thorne?” said the duty officer when he called from his station at midnight.

Alex sucked a paper cut on her finger. “No, Hank, we’re about to wrap up. Give us another fifteen minutes.”

She gave Scott a look and said, “Face it. We’re on a wild-goose chase.”

There was a rap on the door and it opened. A man with dark blond hair and dressed casually in jeans, penny loafers, and a flannel shirt entered the conference room without bothering to ask permission.

“Hello, David,” Alex said pleasantly, trying hard not to show that she was annoyed by his intrusion. “Have you met Captain Scott? Jake, this is David Hoffman, my boss. David’s head of the embassy’s department of energy—the DOE office.”

Hoffman, his face a mask, ignored Scott. “Where’ve you been, Alex? I haven’t seen you for a couple of days.”