Peter Sasgen - War Plan Red

The officer showed Abakov three small, scorched automatic weapons lying on a tarp spread out on the top step of the cement staircase.

“Micro Uzis.” Abakov said, poking one with the ball point pen. “Perfect for hosing down a room or an alley, and easily concealed.” The little 9mm submachine guns had twenty-round box magazines and folding wire stocks. “They’re a favorite weapon of the Russian mafiya,” Abakov revealed. He held up two metal objects. “Do you know what these are, Captain?”

“A safety pin and spoon from a grenade.”

“A Czech grenade,” Abakov said. “Rare.”

“Is that what blew up the car?” Alex said.

“More than likely,” Abakov said.

The police officer said something to Abakov that Scott didn’t catch.

“He says,” Abakov explained, “that they found spent cartridge cases around these steps in two sizes, nine-millimeter and twenty-five-caliber. The twenty-fives are probably from a Czech CZ92. Somebody put up a pretty good fight against Serov and his men. The grenade won it for them. We’ll check these spent nine-millimeter cases against the ones we found in St. Petersburg. They’re probably from the same weapon.”

“Then you think Zakayev killed Serov,” Scott said. “And got away.”

Abakov shrugged. “I don’t think we’ll find Zakayev’s corpse here.”

“Can we talk?” said Scott.

“Um, sure,” Alex said over the phone from her office at the embassy in Moscow. “But can you make it quick.”

“Not on the phone,” Scott said, sensing she was not alone in her office. “At Frank’s apartment. Half an hour?”

“I’m pretty busy…. I told you, that’s why I had to getback to Moscow.”

“So you did. If it’s David Hoffman you’re worried about, tell him I’ll explain things to him later.” “Scott, please don’t—”

“Just do it.”

Alex found Scott engrossed in Drummond’s papers, which he was preparing for shipment to the States. He had them laid out in piles on the countertops in the kitchenette. “What’s so damned important that it can’t wait till after work?” she said. “You know I want to help you, but I’ve barely had a chance to decompress from our trip to Murmansk, David’s breathing down my neck, and I’ve got a ton of things to do for him.”

Scott brushed her objections aside with the wave of a hand. “Tell me what Frank said on the voice mail he sent you when he was in Murmansk.”

“Jake, for God’s sake.”

“What did he say?”

Alex frowned. “I told you, nothing. Nothing I could understand. It was garbled, like cell phone calls often are.”

“You must have heard him say something.”

She exhaled heavily. “If you don’t believe me, then listen to it yourself.”

Scott brightened. “You mean that you still have it on your voice mail system?”

“I don’t have it on my system, but all calls to the embassy are stored in the central security archive.” “Can Jack Slaughter find it?”

“I guess so. Ask him.”

“I will.”

“And I’m going back to my office.”

“Wait. If Slaughter can find the message, I want you to listen to it with me.”

“You don’t seem to understand: I work for David Hoffman, not Jake Scott. I can’t get involved in your”—she searched for a word—“scheme.”

“Scheme? You think this is a scheme? Two men are dead—murdered. Three more were killed in a shoot-out in Murmansk. Some one may have stolen fissile materials to make a crude bomb. And you think this is some scheme that I dreamed up?”

She came to him, put a hand on his arm. “Jake, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. It was a poor choice of words.”

His eyes roamed her lovely face as if committing it to memory. He heard her breathing, smelled the musky aroma of her perfume. She kept her eyes down as if immersed in a private reverie. He wondered if she had ever allowed a man into her inner life, and if she had, what kind of man he was.

“Jake, you don’t understand….”

“Tell me.” He slipped an arm around her waist and drew her lightly against him.

“Don’t.” Her breath fluttered across his cheek.

“Don’t what?”

She tried to move away, but he held her. “Don’t complicate things any more than they already arc.”

Scott turned her chin up to him so he could look into her eyes. “Alex, it doesn’t have to be complicated.”

“But it will be and I don’t want that now.”

His kiss ended further protest. Her arms linked around his neck and she arched into him. When she pushed away, she allowed his hands to linger around her waist. Moisture glistened on her lips. “Jake, this is no good. That was nice, but wasn’t supposed to happen.”

Perhaps sensing that her comment lacked conviction, she stepped away from Scott and went to the window to look out.

“Is it David Hoffman?” Scott said.

“Not the way you mean it. I’m not in love with him.”

“But he’s in love with you.”

At first she didn’t answer. She turned from the window and, in a low voice, said, “I love this country and the people. I know this will sound melodramatic, but I believe I’m contributing something important by doing what I do to make Russia and the world safer. When Frank arrived in Moscow, I believed that he would help put an end to the nightmare we were facing on the Kola Peninsula. But then he was killed.

“I’m not a crusader nor a politician and I want to help you find Frank’s killer, but I have other responsibilities too. To the people I work for and my colleagues here at the embassy. We’re not always one big happy family, but it’s a tight-knit group.” She turned from the window to face Scott. “Does that make sense?”

“Sure,” Scott said. “Look, I don’t want to cause problems for you. As you said, you have to live with David after I’m gone from Moscow. But I need your help. You were the last person to hear from Frank — I know, I know, the message was garbled—but there may be something on it that will jog your memory.”

Scott teetered on the brink between fantasy and reality. His experience in intelligence had taught him never to discard a scrap of information no matter how innocuous it seemed. He’d dug through Drummond’s graveyard of old documents and found a link between Frank and Zakayev. Abakov saw a link between Zakayev and Serov. And there was another link between Radchenko, Drummond, and the K-363—which, to Scott, meant there had to be a link to her skipper, Georgi Litvanov.

He remembered something else. First rule of intelligence work: Don’t jump to conclusions. Second rule of intelligence work: Construct a premise. Third rule… something about logic and reason, but they had gone out the window.

“All right,” Alex was saying, “let’s try jogging my memory.”

“Dive the boat!” rasped over the SC1 announcing system.

Georgi Litvanov, in the CCP—Central Command Post—with stopwatch in hand, closely monitored a series of well-orchestrated moves to get the eight thousand-ton-displacement Akula-class nuclear attack submarine underwater as fast as possible. The singsong of orders came in full cry.

“Full dive on planes fore and aft! Make your depth one hundred meters! Both engines half speed ahead!”

Litvanov thumbed the stopwatch, noted the elapsed time, then glanced at the compass repeater. The K- 363 was on a northerly course out of Olenya Bay.

Litvanov’s eyes drifted to Starshi Leitenant Karpenko, the young, wide-eyed officer of the deck, who returned Litvanov’s frosty look with a hopeful gaze.

“The Russian Navy will be looking for us, you idiot!” Litvanov bellowed, his words spitting like bullets from a machine gun aimed at Karpenko. “Do you think that we can fool them into believing that we are just travelers passing in the night? No! When I give the order, I want this boat submerged in thirty seconds—not forty-five, not sixty. Do you understand?”