The Emperor's Revenge (Oregon Files 11)

“I had nothing to do with that. My posting is nine thousand kilometers away.”

“Are you saying you disagree with your country’s policy toward Ukraine?”

Zakharin knew that to answer was a trap. He remained silent.

“No matter. That’s not why I’m here. My name is Sergey Golov and I would like to know why you gave someone the code to disable the weapons on a ship under my command.”

Zakharin sat up. “You’re the captain of the Achilles?” Immediately, he realized he’d made a terrible mistake in revealing any information about the yacht.

Golov’s eyes lit up. “Ah, so it was you.”

“My naval base was compromised,” Zakharin quickly sputtered. “I didn’t tell them anything. They accessed our files.”

“So you know who did this?”

“Yes, and I was trying to contact Mr. Antonovich to warn him, but he’s so reclusive, I couldn’t reach him.”

“No, you didn’t. If you don’t want to die right here, you’re going to have to stop lying to me. My ship was nearly destroyed because of your incompetence.”

Zakharin silently cursed himself. Being at the mercy of yet another ship captain was humiliating. As an admiral, he should be on the other side of this kind of interrogation.

“Fine,” he said. “I don’t know the real name of the man who took that code, but he has his own ship, one that we modified in the same shipyard where Mr. Antonovich refitted the Achilles. It’s called the Oregon.”

“Was he a tall blond man?”

“Yes.”

Golov’s eyes flicked to the Indian and then back to Zakharin. “Do you have the files on this ship?”

“No, they were destroyed.”

“But you know the specifications, don’t you?”

Zakharin nodded. “What do you want to know?”

Golov’s eyes gleamed as if he were peering at the world’s largest diamond. He set down a phone on the coffee table and pressed the button to start a voice recording.

“Tell me everything.”

FORTY-ONE

Max would never forget the sight of the Jim suit’s light being snuffed out by the collapsing ship. He had frantically radioed Juan, but his calls went unanswered. He and Linda watched helplessly as Juan valiantly tried to follow the swinging container to safety, but something mus

t have been wrong with his thrusters and he sunk instead. Their last view of the Jim suit was when the Narwhal’s hull came crashing down on the seabed in a cloud of silt, its black keel pointing toward the surface.

They circled the Narwhal in Nomad while the crane hoisted the container on board the Oregon. News came down that the container had made it in one piece, and the column, though marred and cracked, was intact. Max told Eric to take charge of examining it, while he continued scouring the shipwreck for any signs that Juan might still be alive.

“Do you think there’s any chance the suit survived the impact?” Linda asked. “Maybe under the wreckage?”

“The Jim suit was already under a lot of pressure at this depth,” Max said. “With a thousand tons of steel on top of him . . .” He didn’t complete the sentence, letting the implications hang in the air.

Their best hope was that Juan had been pushed clear of the wreckage. Max goosed the thrusters, and Nomad edged along the side of the Narwhal with a soft whine of the impellers. All of their lights were focused on the seafloor.

With the emergency buoyancy system, the Jim suit should have floated to the surface by now.

Linda called up to Hali. “Oregon, has the Chairman been spotted?”

“Nothing on the radio beacon, Nomad. We’ve got people on all sides of the ship looking for his light. It’s pretty dark up here, but no one has seen it yet. We did haul in his umbilical. It was sheared off. That must mean he’s still down there. What’s his oxygen situation?”