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Night Trap
Gordon Kent
This exhilarating tale of modern espionage and breathtaking flying action introduces a major new thriller-writing talent. With its striking authenticity and remarkable psychological depth, NIGHT TRAP is sure to appeal to fans of Tom Clancy, Stephen Coonts and Dale Brown.
Night Trap follows the career of Alan Craik, a young Intelligence officer in the US Navy, whose relentless investigation into the unexpected death of his own father, a legendary naval pilot, sets him on the trail of a father-and-son team of spies within his own ranks – serving members of the US Navy who have been betraying their country for years, and will risk everything not to be discovered.
GORDON KENT
NIGHT TRAP
Contents
Cover (#u8bd88490-fe81-532d-b45d-a49f105b1666)
Title Page (#u22988d83-efa6-5a7e-a7e1-8543dfedce35)
Dedication (#ua751d8a8-7285-5369-be86-d533e5dcfa6b)
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About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Dedication (#ulink_49100f4c-be9e-5924-9203-b8770e8ad725)
To our shipmates and squadron-mates, who will know the facts from the fictions.
1 (#ulink_d8c219dd-86c4-55ec-bd10-48602dfd65c0)
14 March 1990. 2137 Zulu. Amsterdam.
He was only a small man in a dark raincoat. He wore glasses, speckled now with raindrops. A minor bureaucrat, you would have said. Nobody. Completely forgettable.
He turned into a wet little pocket park and followed the lighted path for twenty meters and then turned away into the darkness on a set of log steps that climbed steeply behind rhododendrons. At the top was room enough for two or three people who could, if they wanted, look at the Amsterdam skyline, or, if they looked down, watch the heads of people on the path below—if there had been any people.
He watched the path. After three minutes, a woman appeared. She had entered from the other direction and was coming slowly along through the pools of light, moving with the rolling caution of pregnancy. He watched her, watched behind her, then slipped down through the wet bushes and was beside her.
The woman, startled, swayed back, then seemed to recognize him and to pull herself in, as if protecting herself or her child. He spoke rapidly, very low; he might have been selling her something useful but not interesting—insurance, perhaps. She chewed her upper lip, messing the too-red lipstick.
Traffic hummed beyond the park, but here in the rain there were only the two of them, and they might as well have been in the privacy of a locked room for all the attention they drew.
The man asks her something. He seems urgent.
She shakes her head.
He says two or three words. His body is stiffer. What has he said: Are you sure? You won’t? We can’t?
She shakes her head more quickly and tries to pull away.
He took his right hand from his raincoat pocket and slashed her throat from side to side, and she fell back on the black asphalt, her red blood pumping out and spreading into a puddle of water that lay like ink.
The man walked away.
Seven minutes later, he was in a taxi. He took a white card from his gray pocket, found a black pen and with it made a mark beside the first of four names on a list. A small minus sign.
2247 Zulu. Mid-Atlantic.
“Spy?”
“Huh? Yes, Rafe?”
“Remember we’re in EMCON, and stay shut down for Christ’s sake until I give the word, got it?”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.”
Alan Craik glanced aside at the SENSO, a senior chief so good at his craft that Alan felt like a kid with him. Alan always wanted to ask him a kid’s questions—How do you know that? How do you do that? How, why, why, but—? He was a kid, he thought miserably, a beginner among men made mature by their skills.
“Goin’ for a ride,” Rafe said. The elaborate casualness, the cowboy intonation, was what Alan didn’t have, at once both real coolness and overdone, flyboy bravado.
Alan’s innards dropped to his socks as the plane roared from the catapult. He should be getting used to it, he thought; why couldn’t he be casual and cool? Was anybody else afraid he was going to be sick? Did anybody else think they were going into the black ocean instead of the night sky?
And would he ever be able to make a carrier takeoff and not think of his warrior father and what a burden it was to be the warrior’s son?
15 March. 0121 Zulu. Near Heathrow.
Where the road makes a bend toward Iver, there is a stone bridge over a little river. At the Iver end of the bridge, if you look to the right, a sign is visible among the branches announcing the private grounds of a fishing club; there is a metal gate.
The unremarkable man in the raincoat and eyeglasses turned down toward this gate, hardly slowing although the path was dark and wet. He produced a key, unlocked the gate, and went through. As he had in Amsterdam, he went up the bank instead of along the path, this time examining the fence with a tiny flashlight and satisfying himself that the old breaks and holes were still there. The lock and the gate, it appeared, were mostly symbolic.
Again, he waited and watched. The sky was dull copper from London’s light on the low clouds; out on the bridge, glowing spheres of mist formed around streetlamps. After six minutes, a silhouette moved slowly to the center of the stone bridge—an overweight man, black among the bare black branches; he leaned over, seemed to study the water but actually looked up and down the fishing length. Then he, too, let himself in at the gate; unlike the small man, he moved uncertainly, and he swore once and then put on a light that he carried covered in his fingers so that only bits of it seemed to fall at his feet. He came along the fisherman’s path, breathing heavily.
The man in the raincoat spoke a name. Fred. Not quite a whisper, hoarse, betraying an accent: Fr-r-red. The other man turned. He was a little frightened. In the soft light from the bridge, he could be seen to have heavy lips and the kind of thick eyelids that look as if they have been weeping.
The man in the raincoat went down to him. He spoke with what seemed to be urgency, one hand extended, the other in his coat pocket. Again, there was a sense of selling something, of persuasion; his head cocked as Fred lowered his eyes; he might almost have been trying to get below Fred’s face, to look up into it. A word was audible, as if it was so important it had been spoken louder, extended: money.
Fred rubbed his fat chin. Both men looked around. Fred looked up at the glowing sky, said something, laughed. Nervous laughter.
The smaller man leaned in again. He repeated the question. Well? Yes or no?
Whatever Fred said, it was barely muttered, certainly not emphatic; but it was enough, and the smaller man smiled, nodded, took Fred’s upper arm and squeezed the muscle, then patted it. Good dog. Fred grinned.
They spoke for another two minutes. Mostly, the small man explained. Fred nodded or muttered understanding. Then abruptly, the smaller man hit Fred on the arm again and walked off.
Eight minutes later, he was standing beside a telephone in the shadow of a closed pub. He lit his tiny flashlight. He took out the white card. He passed over the first name with its minus sign. His pen touched Fred’s name. He made a small plus.
The pen passed down to the third name: Clanwaert.
He checked his watch. Then he dialed a number in Moscow and waited while the long, clumsy connection was made, all that antiquated technology, and a man’s voice answered, and he said, “Tell them, ‘Get ready.’”
0136 Zulu. Mid-Atlantic.
Six thousand feet above the water, buffeting at four hundred and thirty knots, alpha golf seven zero seven was flying search patterns. An aged S-3B hardly younger than her crew, she was getting tired. The men inside were getting bored.
Below, the black Atlantic roiled in a March squall, unseen, silent to the four men in the darkened old aircraft.
The S-3B was searching the mid-Atlantic for a home-bound US battle group. Running opposing-force exercises on the carrier you relieve is an old tradition in the fleet, and no outbound battle group CO wants to be found by the smart-assed flyers of the carrier he is replacing. So AG 707 was the forward scout, trying to find a battle group hidden somewhere between Gibraltar and Cape Hatteras.
“I think you got us way too far south, Spy,” the pilot said now. “Where you think these fuckers are hiding, the South Pole?”
The squadron intelligence officer is often called “Spy”—if he isn’t called worse. Alan Craik was a new Spy—a very junior grade lieutenant, his ensign’s wetness hardly dried behind his ears. The pilot, Rafehausen, didn’t much like him. But he called him “Spy” and not something worse because Craik was the only IO he’d ever known who was willing to crawl into a tired old beast like AG 707 and put in his hours with the grownups.
As the old line went, How is an intel officer like Mister Ed? He can talk but he can’t fly.
But this kid did.
Seven hours in an ejection seat was still torment to him. But there were rewards for Alan Craik, not least the discovery that he was good at the “back end” craft—reading the screens, coaxing discoveries from radar and computer. And there was the reward, to be earned slowly, of being accepted by the flyers.
And by his father.
“Come on, Spy, give us a break.”
Before he could answer, Senior Chief Craw broke in. “He’s doin’ just fine, sir; give him some slack. He’s tryin’ to find the ass on the gnat that lives on a gnat’s ass.”
Rafe groaned. The old aircraft shook itself like a dog and plowed on through the night.
0141 Zulu. Moscow.
Nikkie Geblev the go-getter punched his touchtone phone and cursed Gorbachev the president and Yeltsin the mayor and anybody else responsible for his not living in New York, or maybe LA, and tried for the third time to beat the phone into submission: Get through, you fucker! he wanted to shout at it. Make connections! Be a winner!
Nikkie Geblev was surrounded with electronic gadgets that had begun their existences in Japan and Taiwan and Italy and then had had the luck to be on a truck that had been hijacked in Finland. Nikkie was an entrepreneur. A New Soviet Man. A Eurocapitalist. A crook.
“At last,” he said aloud. He was making money, relaying this call.
He heard it ring at the other end, then be picked up.
“What?” a man’s voice said.
“I’m looking for Peter from Pravda.”
