Philip Kerr - The Five Year Plan (1998)

'Last word. Period.' She added below her breath, but just loud enough for Dave to hear, 'How I could have ever fallen for a crummy narcotics thief, I'll never know.'

'This was never about narcotics,' Dave told her, still smiling, as if he didn't have a care in the world.

'S'right,' said Al. 'We was after cash money on them other boats.'

'You keep out of this,' snapped Kate.

Once again Dave looked for his missing watch. Then he leaned toward the captain lieutenant and coolly lifting the executive officer's forearm read the time on his watch. Like they were old buddies. Not that the Frenchman seemed to mind at all. Then Dave said something to Luzhin that Kate didn't quite hear. Or perhaps didn't understand.

'I regret, I cannot accede to your request,' Luzhin told Kate. 'But I tell you what.' He nodded at Al. 'You can have him, the ugly one. And we'll take the other one with us. That's fair, isn't it? Like the judgment of Solomon, yes? Half each, as it were.' He nodded at one of his sailors. Straightaway the man threw away his cigarette, stepped into the cockpit and restarted the Britannia's engines.

'That's the craziest idea I ever heard,' said Kate. 'If this is the way the French Navy does things--'

This time she caught the look that passed between Dave and the captain lieutenant and thought she could smell a rat. As if Dave had cut some private deal of his own. Maybe even bribed the guy.

'Wait a minute,' she said. 'What's going on here? You French--'

'Who said anything about the French?' shrugged the captain lieutenant, and flicked his cigarette across Kate's shoulder into the water. 'Not me.'

'Well, if you're not the French Navy, then whose damn Navy are you, Mister?'

Instinctively she started to reach for the Glock under her waistband. But the captain lieutenant smiled and caught her wrist in his own strong hand. Still smiling politely, he said, 'Pazhalsta,' and took her gun away.

Chapter TWENTY-FOUR

The Britannia nudged its way toward the sub, gently towing Calgary Stanford's boat alongside. From the control station on top of the conning tower, another officer shouted down to a sailor standing on the foredeck of the sub. The sailor opened a deck hatch and tossed a line to the Britannia. As soon as they were tied off to the sub, the sailors aboard the yacht began to throw the Nike sports bags to the man standing on the foredeck, who dropped them quickly through the hatch.

When Kate turned to look for Jellicoe and Stanford, she saw that another sailor had boarded the Comanche and disarmed the two men. By then it was clear that Dave was in league with the men from the sub. He paid close attention to the loading of the bags and from time to time would make some obviously good-humored remark to the other sailors, in Russian.

'Dammit, you're Russian,' Kate told the captain lieutenant.

'Yes, Russian,' he said grinning back at her. 'So, it's true what they say. The FBI finds out everything in the end.'

When the last bag had been dropped down the sub's open deck hatch, another man came up on deck and greeted Dave as if he was his oldest friend. Then he climbed down the short Jacob's ladder that had been hung over the side of the submarine's black hull, and clambered up onto the Britannia.

Kate noted that even Al looked surprised when the man from the sub embraced Dave fondly. They looked like they were two characters from Tolstoy, she thought.

She could not understand a word of what was said, but it was clear that Al had no knowledge of what was happening. Just as clearly, he was angry. Gritting his teeth, Al moved to take a swing at Dave and then remembered the machine pistol still pointed at the small of his back.

'You double-crossing bastard,' he said. 'We ain't anywhere near the Ercolano's position, are we? You set this up with the Russkies from the very beginning.'

'Now you're getting it,' said Dave.

This time Al hardly cared about the machine pistol. He was strong, but not very quick, and certainly not as quick as Dave, who neatly sidestepped the blow then brought his left hand into Al's side, around the bulletproof vest he was still wearing, and just over the kidney. Al doubled over with pain, leaving Dave a clear shot at his blue jaw, which sent him sprawling onto the deck at Kate's feet.

Dave shook his hand painfully. Looking down at his former partner, he said, 'There's an old Russian saying, that says, roughly translated, you're fucked, pal.'

Einstein Gergiev kissed Dave on the cheek once more and clapped him warmly on the shoulder.

'Kak pazhitaye ti,' said Dave grinning widely. 'Pazdrav lya yem.'

The two men spoke in Russian. Unlike English it is a language in which there are two forms of address: formal and informal. Speaking to the captain lieutenant or any of his men, Dave had used the more formal vi; but now, speaking to Gergiev, he used only the informal ti, the proper form of address for someone you know very well. Such as a man with whom you had shared a prison cell for four years. Dave's accent was nearly faultless.

'We've done it,' he was saying.

'You mean you've done it, Dave. All I had to do was persuade the Northern Fleet commander to lend me a submarine.'

'Is that all?' laughed Dave. 'You're right, that's not very much. Just the loan of a sub.'

'He was very glad to do it. Things were a lot worse than even I had imagined. The Navy in Murmansk owes the local electricity company almost four million dollars in unpaid bills. Last week, they cut off the power supply to three nuclear submarine bases. I'm no nuclear physicist, Dave, but even I can see that the consequences of what these guys at the electricity stations are doing could be disastrous. The prospect of someone providing the Navy with several million dollars of cash in return for preventing nuclear disaster was an offer he could hardly refuse.'

'It's really that bad?'

'For sure. There are dozens of retired submarines awaiting decommissioning, and quite a few of them are leaking like sieves. They need a constant supply of electricity just to keep the pumps going so that the subs don't sink. It's hard enough to decommission an old reactor on land, let alone at the bottom of the White Sea.' Gergiev laughed loudly. 'Under the circumstances I was able to cut us a very generous deal. A very generous deal.'

'What's the percentage?'

'You won't believe it.'

'Einstein, there must be forty million dollars in those bags.'

'That much, eh?'

'At least. So what's the cut?'

'They settled for 30 percent.'

'Thirty percent. That's only twelve million.' Dave looked delighted.

'It's three times what they owe Kolenergo. That's the power authority.' Gergiev shrugged. 'The Russian Navy's desperate for hard currency. Frankly the commander would probably have settled for 25 percent, but well, I was feeling patriotic. And it's not just the Navy either. Just a few weeks ago, Kolenergo cut the power supply for two whole days to the central command of the Strategic Rocket Forces at Plesetsk. Dave, this is the place that controls our ICBMs. They even cut the power to an air traffic control center when the Prime Minister's plane was in the air.' Gergiev laughed. 'Twelve million? Believe me, they'll think it's a bargain. After all, they had nothing to lose and everything to gain.'

'Leaves us maybe twenty-eight million dollars,' breathed Dave. 'That's fourteen million each.'

'Any trouble?'

'Plenty. But it's a long story.'

Gergiev was older than Dave. He wore a Lenin-style beard and mustache and, like the captain lieutenant, he was wearing a grimy blue boilersuit. He looked more of an intellectual -- a university professor, or a medical man -- than someone connected to one of St Petersburg's biggest Mafia gangs. He nodded and said, 'You're right. You can tell me about it later, when we're on our way back to Russia. We'd better be going. The Northern Fleet Sonar Surveillance System reports another submarine in the area.'