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‘Forty-two metres.’
A deep dive after two years in solitary. But she would manage. ‘Your divers better be good,’ she said.
He didn’t answer, and besides, she already guessed they’d be the best.
Chapter Two (#udf8a0755-e809-586a-bcc2-80cc42d1292a)
As it turned out, Sergei was going to be one of the divers. Unorthodox by any military standards, let alone Russian ones, but she sensed this man was a maverick. He must have delivered good results in the past, or else his wings would have been clipped by now.
The inside of the old Antonov AN140 military transport plane was noisy, uncomfortable and cold. The loud thrum of the twin propellers muffled all communication. At least she’d been given a parka coat and a warm Ushanka fur hat with earmuffs. The bench was hard, the hull khaki-painted metal covered with elastic webbing. It meant there was always something to grab on to.
The diving equipment lying on the heavily scuffed aluminium deck was well used but also well maintained. She inspected it, shouting one or two questions above the din at Sergei when she wasn’t absolutely sure about something.
Four other divers sat in the aircraft hold, wetsuits under their coats, neoprene dive hoods up. None of them spoke. No jokes, no banter, no engagement with her. They each carried a blue and grey plastic assault rifle, which she presumed would work when wet, though not necessarily in water. That was what their spear guns were for. There were two motorised sleds, the same size as motorbikes. When Sergei left the compartment for a while, she moved towards one of the sled control consoles, to see how it worked.
‘Don’t touch!’ one of the divers barked.
‘Show me the controls, just in case.’
Another diver – she reckoned the leader after Sergei – spoke to her slowly. He had a voice that had seen a million cigarettes, and clearly didn’t appreciate her presence on the mission.
‘There is no “in case”. We will get you to the submarine, get your skinny ass inside the tube. Hope you like tight holes as much as we do.’ No smile.
‘I’m Plan B, aren’t I? You had someone else in mind. One of your own.’
‘You are Plan F,’ he said, no longer looking at her.
Nothing she said would make any difference. Only how she acted underwater. She continued examining the assembled equipment. Along with what looked like welding equipment, there was something else on the floor: a gold-coloured cylinder a foot long and four inches thick. It looked heavy. She had no idea what it was, and decided not to waste her breath asking.
Last, she checked her dive gear. A single, thin tank strapped to a harness that also had pockets she could inflate to keep her buoyancy neutral no matter the depth. A skinny stab jacket. She’d never seen one so pared-down. She looked around for a diver’s weight belt – the other half of buoyancy control – but there wasn’t one, and she noticed the other divers weren’t wearing them either. If she got separated from the sled, that would make a controlled ascent difficult. No, make that impossible. Perhaps that was the point. Asking these men about it would only make her standing with them worse.
Sergei reappeared and signalled her to follow him. They walked towards the plane’s fore-section, a small chamber just before the cockpit, where Bransk, Katya, the colonel and the brown-haired lieutenant all leant on a white table. Once Sergei and Nadia entered, it was pretty snug. At least it was quieter, and the seats were cushioned. Sergei unfolded a map and pointed to a location ten miles offshore, marked with a red cross.
‘I don’t see an airport,’ Nadia said.
‘Are you afraid of heights?’
Crap! They were going to para-dive into the sea. That’s why all the equipment was so streamlined. She shook her head, as much in disbelief as in resignation.
He placed another smaller piece of paper on top, a line drawing of the sub shown from three different angles. He pointed again. He had long, agile fingers. They moved fluidly like a pianist’s. Nadia had a thing about hands. Partly why she’d let him hold her mouth closed earlier. She refocused on what he was showing her.
‘We’ll cut off the bow cap of torpedo tube number three, here. It’s already flooded because they went to high alert when the sub was taken.’
Katya spoke in a pissed-off voice. ‘Which was how, exactly?’
Sergei ignored the question. ‘You will remove your tank and make your way through the tube. There will be a line around your waist. If you get stuck, you give three hard pulls, and we drag you out.’
And how would she give three hard pulls in such a confined space? Her hands would be forward. She doubted she’d be able to reach back once inside the tube. Trapped like a worm. Added to that, they would seal her in to prevent flooding the torpedo room when she breached the inner hatch.
‘You’ll have lights on your mask, and a camera. We can see what you see, but we can’t talk to you.’ He held up a thin canister with a mouthpiece attached. ‘This will give you ten good breaths at that depth. No more.’
Sergei outlined the complete plan. She would secure the torpedo room. There was a computer workstation there. She had to insert a USB key into it. A cyber-virus. It would wreak havoc with the sub’s systems – lighting, aircon, engines. Most importantly, the weapons launch and guidance software would be erased. It would be the distraction Sergei needed; otherwise he’d be killed as soon as he tried to enter the sub.
Once she uploaded the virus, Sergei and two others would enter via the conning tower, though he didn’t explain how. Sergei had an identical black USB key – the antivirus. He went over the plan a second time. Both times he was vague about what would happen to the terrorists. But something had been bugging Nadia since the outset.
‘Why me?’ she asked.
He pointed at the torpedo tube at the front of the sub.
Her size. Although a man could get into the tube, and even be launched by it, only someone very small could move around and manipulate controls inside, and lift their head to see what they were doing – hence the elaborate measurement foreplay earlier. But still… ‘Not enough of a reason,’ she said, because for Russian military, it wasn’t.
Sergei nodded to the colonel, whose name she still didn’t know, and likely never would.
‘Three additional reasons,’ he said. His voice was higher-pitched than Sergei’s, but sharp, used to command, the type of guy who knew the rules backwards and could dice you with them if you didn’t do as ordered. ‘First, you are all Black Ops. We cannot risk this leaking out. Imagine the headlines. Any one of you leaks anything, we’ll bury you for ever. And if you are captured or killed, we will disavow you.’
It figured. Best of both worlds.
But he had a point. Nadia imagined the headlines: Terrorists seize nuclear sub, a dozen warheads at their disposal. The political wound would cut deep, even if resolved overnight. Putin would lose face. Heads like this particular colonel’s would roll.
‘Second, your performance in the Rose affair had already come to our notice. You are resourceful, not afraid to kill, not afraid to sacrifice.’
So, her antics back in the Scillies were now a matter of record. She’d like to see those files.
‘The third reason…is your father.’
Her heart skipped a beat. ‘What?’
The young colonel cast her a searching look. ‘He was Spetsnaz, but he also wrote pamphlets under a pseudonym. The Black Cossack. He wrote a manifesto on why the Crimea should remain Ukrainian, not Russian. He foresaw the future. His writing is still quoted today, but now with his real name: Lakshev. Your name. So if you are captured…’
She stared at him. Though he’d tried to suppress it, when he’d used the male form of the family name, the acid in his tone had come through loud and clear. Had he known her father? Unlikely – too young.
The colonel gave her a searching look. ‘You didn’t know?’ he said.
She shook her head. Her father had never mentioned it. They’d lived in Uspekh, not that far from Ukraine geographically. She remembered he used to write, but he’d kept it all in a locked drawer. My secret diary, he’d once told her. And after his death, her mother had burned it all. So, if they really were Ukrainian freedom fighters – or even Ukrainian Secret Service – maybe her name would cut some ice. But it seemed like a long shot. It was her turn to search the colonel’s face. There was something else, something he wasn’t telling her. But clearly he’d finished.
Of course there was the real reason. She was expendable. Just released from a secret prison. No one would mourn her except Katya. But she had no intention of dying on her first day of freedom. She sat up, gripped the edges of the sub layout schematic and spoke to Sergei.
‘I’m going to go through the plan again. You will correct me on the tiniest detail I get wrong.’
He nodded, a faint smile lifting the corners of his mouth. Her eyes hovered for a moment on those coarse seafarer’s lips, then she cleared her throat, and began.
***
The toilet was cramped even for her. But outside there were too many people. Too much contact after solitary. She’d wanted to see Katya, then try to find Jake, either to make love with him, or to slap him really hard, probably both; she hadn’t decided the order yet.
It was three days before her birthday. She studied her reflection in the mirror, the short dark hair, her grey eyes. Not much to work with. Prison had changed her. The softness Jake had known was gone. Maybe she’d lost her looks, or whatever Jake had found interesting in her. He might not want to see her. Two years. Two fucking years. He’d have found someone else. One of his exes – Lorne or Elise – might have reclaimed him. A hundred other girls.
It’s not fair, Katya had said earlier on the plane. Damned right. But they were Russian. History had stripped the belief in fairness from the gene pool a long time ago. What had her father said a thousand times? Make the choice right. Especially when you don’t have one.
She came back out and signalled to Katya that she wanted a private word, which in this case meant shouting to each other in the noisy corridor between the fore-section and the main hold. She told her about Jake, whom Katya had met briefly on the cargo ship that had turned into a bloodbath.
‘I’m so happy you found someone during that awful time.’
‘If I don’t –’
‘You will.’
‘If I don’t… I want you to meet with Jake. He deserves to know…’ To know what? She’d leave it up to Katya, who was better with words.
‘All right, Nad. But you will come back. You’re strong, like Papasha.’ And then Katya clearly realised what she’d just said – because one day their father hadn’t come back.
They went back to the cabin. Sergei got up and knocked on the cockpit door. It opened. He talked to the pilot, and Nadia glimpsed the stormy weather outside, another factor stacking up against them.
Sergei came back in. ‘Twenty minutes,’ he said. ‘Suit up.’
She grabbed the thin cylinder of compressed air that might just sustain her long enough to reach the interlocks on the torpedo tube’s inner hatch. She had a feeling someone would be waiting for her on the other side. Armed, naturally.
‘I’ll need a knife,’ she said to Sergei as they entered the bay where the other divers were assembling everything, including voluminous grey parachutes for the sleds. She’d never jumped out of a plane before.
‘Absolutely,’ he said. He handed her a small, short, stubby one, flat-bladed at the top, with a sharpened edge. It looked useful in many ways, except as a serious weapon.
As she strapped it in its sheath to her inner thigh – so it would be out of the way inside the torpedo tube – she recalled Jake’s obsession with diving knives. She wished he was there, but was also glad he wasn’t, as she didn’t need any distractions right now.
Some of the fear dropped out of her, displaced by adrenaline. She imagined Jake watching. He’d laugh, tell her to look on the bright side: she was going to dive a nuclear sub, an opportunity many wreck divers would relish. She smiled, and as she stripped down to her underwear, still thinking of Jake, Sergei’s eyes hooked hers. She swallowed, turned away from him and squeezed into her wetsuit. Evidently she hadn’t lost all her looks. One of the other divers tossed her a thin belt, heavier than it looked, and she fixed it around her waist.
But she remembered what was down beneath the waves. Armed terrorists intent on stealing nuclear weapons. They’d shoot her on sight. The colonel had said she’d been resourceful, ready and able to kill. She hadn’t thought much about it in the past two years, assuming neither the need nor opportunity would arise. But two years in solitary had hardened her. Maybe it would come easier next time.
She sat kitted up, the regulator from the main tank fastened to her chest. She was perched on the front of a movable skid next to Sergei. She’d thought it was noisy before, but now the Arctic wind roared just a few metres away from her, through the open cargo door at the back of the plane. Six hours ago she’d fallen in love with white puffy clouds above London. Now she was going to fling herself into dark storm clouds that would lash her with rain as she freefell.
Of all the crazy things she’d done in her life, nothing matched this. She watched the red light to the left of the open hatch, and listened to the countdown. Breathe normally, Sergei had said. Fat chance. The countdown grew louder. Tri – Dva – Odin. The light turned green.
The skid rolled towards open space.
Nadia held her breath.
Chapter Three (#udf8a0755-e809-586a-bcc2-80cc42d1292a)
Falling out of a plane at night, above a raging sea, lived up to its reputation. Sergei had said the chute would open after ten seconds, long enough to get below the wake from the propellers but not drift too far from the drop zone. But Nadia couldn’t count. She was too busy trying to catch her breath as the wind tore at her mouth.
Goggles protected her eyes, though she could barely see anything as she plummeted through gun-metal-grey clouds. She bit down on an urge to scream, panic rising from her heart up into her throat. Freefalling. It was so damned dark. The sea was racing towards her, but all she saw below was blackness. A cloudy night, no stars, no moon. Must have been eight seconds by now. Nine. Ten. She braced herself for the chute opening.
Nothing.
Where was Sergei? He’d been right beside her on the plane. He was heavier. He’d be below her, wouldn’t he? Or did everyone fall at the same rate? She couldn’t remember. He could be above her if his chute had opened. She looked up. Nothing, just the wind howling in her ears through her neoprene dive hood. How high had they been? How long before she’d hit the water?
At this speed her harness with its air tank would snap her back in two on impact. She had no emergency cord to operate the chute. He’d said it wouldn’t fail. The chute would open. Fifteen seconds now, for sure. Another five and she’d be splattered on the wave-tops. Sergei, where the fuck…
He slammed into her from behind, then spun her around as effortlessly as if they were trapeze artists in that sweet spot where gravity blinks. But they were plunging at terminal velocity, close to two hundred kilometres an hour. His face loomed close, but he was looking down at her chest. He hit her. No, he thumped the buckle to release the failed chute. She slipped away from him. Shit! She lunged for one of his shoulder straps, grabbed it, tugged herself towards him, flailing in the wind like a rag doll. They twisted in mid-air, no longer falling feet first. He looped an arm around her, pulled her close to him, yanked something, and then Nadia realised how the end of a bullwhip felt when it was cracked.
It winded her, but Sergei’s arm pressed her against him, locking them together. Her left hand clung to his harness strap; the other gripped the back of his tank. Finally he looked at her. And smiled. He fucking smiled. Cool bastard. He mouthed something. Then something else. Two. One. She took an urgent breath.
The surface of the sea whacked into her, pounded her feet, ripped off her goggles. The rushing wind was replaced by the soft, numbing sounds of the undersea that she’d loved since her first dive in the Volga at the age of eight. But it was cold, bloody cold. She fumbled for the regulator pinned to her chest, exhaled once to flush out the water, then breathed in. Air – the only thing that really mattered underwater.
Eyes still closed, she fished inside her jacket pocket for her dive mask, donned it, tilted her head back and breathed out through her nose to clear the mask of seawater, equalising pressure in her nose and ears at the same time. She opened her eyes and blinked hard to rinse out the stinging salt water. Sergei was attaching his fins, a torch in his hand.
She unfastened the fins strapped tight around her calves, slipped them on, then found her own halogen lamp. At least the seawater inside her wetsuit had warmed a little from her body heat. Sergei shone a cone of light down into the gloom. He put his hand in the beam and gave her the OK signal. She did the same, careful not to shine it anywhere near his face and render him temporarily night-blind. His smile had gone.
To business.
She checked her depth on the dive computer attached to her left wrist. Fifteen metres. The swell from the roiling waves above swayed her gently, rocking her. But she knew they must be off-course due to the late opening of her chute. The drop had been carefully calculated – vertical height, wind strength and direction, sea state – and now they might be up to half a mile in the wrong place. Sergei showed his hand in the light, fingers spread open, palm down. Stay. Of course. The others had sleds. Let them come to us.
But waiting meant thinking. About Sergei? No, don’t go there. Jake? Ditto. The job. Fanatical-but-smart killers below. Probably executed the crew already. The question that had dogged her in the Scillies came back to her. Was she ready to kill?
She’d killed for the first time there. Drowned a man – a lot harder than pulling a trigger. She’d done it to save Jake and the others, though it had been too late to save Ben. And she’d shot another. No hesitation that time, because the bastard had just killed a bunch of innocents and had raped her years earlier. But there was no one down below she cared for or hated. Yet it came down to this. There was a line. Before the Scillies she’d been on one side of it. Now she was on the other. Her father’s side.
So, yes, she could kill.
A dull buzzing interrupted her thoughts. Sergei was staring behind her. She finned to spin around and saw a light, then two. The sleds, two divers apiece, one on top, one hanging at the side. They didn’t slow down. A sled approached, and she finned to get a head start, and then grabbed the sled’s rail as it passed. Sergei was on the sled in front. He glanced back once to check she was aboard, then both sleds accelerated to make up for lost time. They stayed at fifteen metres for a good ten minutes, then she felt the pressure on her ears increase, and cleared them – they were descending.
They hit thirty-five metres and levelled off. Still she saw nothing, but the sleds both slowed, and then she saw why. The forward light picked up the huge black tail fin of the Borei Class nuclear sub, like the fin of a shark, which happened to be the nickname for this class of sub. Sergei’s sled circled behind, his forward beam illuminating the massive propeller. She tried to gauge how long each blade was. Maybe three metres.
Sergei took point again, and fired a flare that fizzed forward like a lazy yellow firework. The sub was one hundred and seventy metres long, only slightly shorter than its predecessor, the Typhoon. But seeing it, positioned at one end while the flare swept forward over its dark beauty, was something else. The flare continued its arc over the conning tower, all the way to the prow, her destination. The light faded and plunged them back into darkness save for the sled’s lights. But the after-image was etched onto her retinas. Russian subs didn’t really go in for names, they were usually referred to as Projects and given a number, but Sergei had told her this one was the Yuri Gagarin. He’d have been proud.
Yet shark was the right label, too. Subs like the Yuri were the ultimate predator, patrolling the oceans, undetectable yet carrying Armageddon on their backs, a dozen missiles, any one of which could obliterate a major city, incinerating hundreds of thousands of people in a heartbeat. They had to stop its warheads falling into the wrong hands.
They picked up speed, the sleds’ beams angled downwards, two ellipses of light tracing the narrow walkway on the foredeck. Both sleds slowed as they reached the missile hatches, a dozen lined up in neat pairs. One was open.
Sergei descended from the sled to the deck, and peered inside with his torch. Nadia wanted to take a look, but the sled driver’s hand clasped around hers, welding it to the sled’s rail. Sergei could clearly see something, but she had no way of knowing what. He rejoined his sled, and both sleds surged forward. She glanced down as she passed the open tube, but could see nothing there, not even the telltale white and red cone of the missile itself. She felt a shiver. It looked as if at least one warhead was already missing.
They arrived at the conning tower, its antennae bending in the current, a sturdy metal ladder running down the outside. She wondered how Sergei and the other two were going to board the sub through the conning tower. They tethered their sled to the tower, and as her sled continued its journey, she glanced back, watching Sergei and the others setting up some equipment. She realised two things. The first was that they could easily be killed as soon as they entered the sub. The second was that she didn’t want that to happen, not to Sergei at any rate. She turned her gaze forwards.
The foredeck began to narrow in the beam of light, until it reached the sleek prow of one of Russia’s finest. As they drifted down to the torpedo hatches, she realised she couldn’t see the sea floor. Which didn’t make sense. The sled driver evidently had the same concern. He circled the sled while the second diver fired up a flare, then let it drop. It fell for a full minute before it was lost in the depths. Shit.
The driver gunned the motor and they levelled off on the starboard side with nothing beneath them but a yawning abyss. He fired a flare horizontally, along the sub’s hull, and she watched, unbelieving. Nearly half the sub was hanging over an underwater cliff.
Had Sergei known? Clearly his men hadn’t. The driver prodded the sled’s keypad, presumably sending a message to Sergei, then did an about-turn back to the torpedo tubes. She checked her dive computer. Forty-two metres. Her head felt a little groggy due to the inevitable narcosis, as if she’d downed two vodkas. The adrenaline would more than compensate. But as she stared at the enormous sub right in front of her, she wondered what it would take to tip it into the abyss.
The other two divers had backpacks like hers, but with larger twin tanks, as they would remain outside in the water. She checked the sled. Her spare tank, for the return journey, was fixed to its underside. Now the operation became tricky.
The driver keyed a command into the sled’s control pad, dismounted, and left it hovering in one spot, despite the constant slow current. She was impressed – she hadn’t known such underwater navtech existed. He then unhooked some gear, finned to the sealed torpedo tube, lit an underwater burner, and began burning through the tube’s bow cap. The blue flame was shrouded by a torrent of expanding bubbles heading for the surface. The other diver fixed a small camera and head torch to Nadia’s head. Then he hooked a lanyard around her neck, attached to the thin breathing cylinder that should keep her alive long enough to get to the other end of the tube.
Something nagged her brain about the plan. Something was wrong. But the trouble with narcosis was that it made it hard to think. One of the golden rules of diving – plan the dive, and dive the plan – was there for exactly that purpose, to stop you changing your mind at depth, when you were no longer thinking clearly. While she was diving on air, because she’d be going inside the torpedo tube on her small canister of air, the other two would be on a Nitrox mixture in order to stay outside longer. So, they should be thinking clearly, no narcosis at this depth. They didn’t seem bothered. Maybe it was just her. Still it nagged, like an unscratchable itch inside her skull.
The driver was halfway through cutting the bow cap off. The other diver fixed the modified Glock to her inner left arm. Once she’d defeated the interlock, she’d open the inner door. Water would flush her into the torpedo room, surprising anyone there. She’d have about two seconds to spot anyone, draw her weapon, and shoot them.
The sled driver was almost through. The bow cap was heavy. It would fall into the abyss. She gazed down while the other diver began unfastening the stab jacket straps holding her air tank on. She’d have to switch to the small cylinder any second. Dammit! What was it? What was she missing? She was positive they were about to make a fatal mistake.
She mentally went through the steps again: cut off the bow cap; lay it on the seabed floor, because it’s heavy. Prepare Nadia. She goes in. Pick up the plate again, then, using the sled for buoyancy, reseal the cap in position like a plug, so the torpedo room doesn’t flood when she opens the inner hatch… But the conditions had changed. She stared downwards. There was no sea floor. And half the sub was hanging over a cliff. It wouldn’t take much to tip the sub over…
