Mirage (Oregon Files 9)

Tennyson thought a moment. “There’s an old gravel pit that’s filled with water. Sport divers don’t go into it because of chemicals left over when it was abandoned.”

“Where can I find it?”

“About ten miles south of town. It’s rough going. It runs through a thick wooded area. The road to it hasn’t been used for thirty years.”

“Sounds perfect,” said Cabrillo. He handed Tennyson the keys to his car. “You lead me to the gravel pit as soon as you pack.”

“Pack?”

“Yes, pack. Your life isn’t worth two cents if you stay here. My corporation owns a nice little condo on the island of Antigua. You can go there and relax on the beach until I let you know it’s safe and there will be no more attempts on your life.”

Tennyson asked the obvious question: “Why do these people want to kill me?”

“You know too much about Tesla.”

Without further talk, Cabrillo loaded the van with the cadavers while Tennyson quickly threw clothes and a shaving kit into a suitcase.

It took forty minutes to drive the ten miles. Cabrillo took the lead, followed by Tennyson in his rented Porsche. The professor honked the horn once for a right turn and twice for a left. Once they left the main road for a barely visible dirt track through the woodlands, their speed dropped to fifteen miles an hour. Three times they were forced to stop and heave dead branches off the old road. Finally, they reached the abandoned gravel pit.

Old rusting equipment lay scattered around the edge of the pit. Battered and rotted wooden buildings were all that were left of the offices and crew’s mess hall. Cabrillo stepped from the van and stared over the lip of the pit. The water looked yellowish brown and smelled like sulfur. He could only guess how deep the water was and hope it was enough to cover the van.

He put a rock on the accelerator, shifted the transmission into drive, and watched as the van jerked forward, dropped over the brink, and impacted the water with a formless splash and slowly sank into the watery ooze.

Then Cabrillo sat on a large rock, deep in thought, as he waited for the van to sink out of sight. He knew who hired the assassins and why, yet there were other questions.

Amateurs, he said to himself. Why did Pytor Kenin send a trio of amateurs?

When the mast rose out of the sea like a shark’s telltale fin, it barely cut through the water and left no trail of churned oceanic phosphorus, no presence other than a tiny blip undetectable to all but the most trained observers. Leviathan showed itself yet remained hidden in its watery realm.

Forty feet below this thin stalk of metal lay one of the most devastating weapons ever devised by man. Named Akula, or shark, this class of Russian fast-attack submarine was a true predator of the sea. Measuring more than a football field in length and displacing some twelve thousand tons when submerged, the hunter/killer boasted multiple torpedo tubes, rocket launchers, and a sonar suite that could detect the minutest sound over vast distances. She carried a crew of seventy-three led by one Kapitan Anton Patronov.

Patronov was so fair-haired and pale-skinned that he almost appeared albino, and with an upturned nose that looked like the double barrels of a shotgun, he was considered porcine as well. His wet lips were overly large, and he had a cauliflower ear from his days as a boxer in the old Soviet naval academy. He wasn’t particularly tall, but had wide shoulders that sloped up to a bullet head that he kept trimmed in a half-inch buzz of pure white hair. What he lacked in mannish charm he made up for in capability and utter ruthlessness. He’d turned down promotions twice so that he could stay at sea, and because many years ago he was the youngest sub captain in modern Russian history, he had more experience as a submariner than anyone else in the Navy.

Patronov was just stepping from his cubicle-sized cabin when the flash traffic came off the comm line. Over the Tannoy came the cry, “Captain to the shack. Secure transmission for your eyes only.”

“Clear the way,” he growled as he made his way aft to the radio room. He possessed a low, rasping voice with a dark inflection that commanded instant respect. Seamen and officers alike pressed themselves against the tight companionway walls to ease his passage.

The radio shack was a confined space made more hospitable to electronics than man. Yet somehow two young techs were shoehorned into the room, one with headphones draped around his neck while the other sat back as far as the confines would allow and translated the burst transmission.

“We had an Ohio on the plot,” Patronov said as he entered the space. “Tell me this is more important.”

The Akula had been trailing an Ohio-class submarine, one of the legs of America’s defensive triad of nuclear deterrent, when she was called to the surface by a ULF summons for immediate data download. “It’s in code,” the radioman said without meeting his captain’s glare. He held the flimsy paper over his shoulder in hopes it would be snatched away and his culpability in ending the sub chase was at an end.

“Damn.” Patronov ripped the thin piece of paper out of the sailor’s hand, snapped it so he could inspect the type, and cursed again. “Kenin. He’s been the pain in my ass since the academy.”

“Sir?” It was obvious from his tone that the young radio operator hadn’t expected such disrespect from his captain for the fleet’s commanding admiral.

“Relax, Pavel. When the time comes for them to pin captain’s bars on your shoulders, you will curse my name ten times worse than I curse my first commander.”

“Yes, sir. I mean, no, sir. I mean . . .” The young radioman wisely stopped talking and kept his stare riveted on his equipment. The second radio operator swiveled in his chair and asked, “Will we reacquire the Americans?”

Patronov shot him a look that twisted the tech back in his seat so that he too stared at the radios. “It took us a week of searching the first time,” he said as he left the room. “It will probably take me that long just to decrypt this damn

message.”

It took him the better part of an hour to decode the page-length missive. Because this was a private communiqué between the two men and not an official order, he had to use a private codebook that Kenin had given only to his most loyal followers. Patronov knew that such a book was in the possession of senior captain Sergei Karpov. Karpov was currently on deployment aboard a Typhoon-class missile boat with a complement of twenty nuclear-tipped ICBMs. Patronov knew Sergei well and knew that if Kenin ever ordered a secret launch, Karpov would press the button as fast and as hard as he could.

Truth told, Patronov admitted, so would he.