When I got home, I checked the tide tables in case Scorpion was serious. I came up with the time he might have meant and called Andy. He sounded groggy. Considering it was about two in the morning, that was understandable.
I told him what time to show up at my place so we could go to the docks. He asked, “Anything else I need to bring?”
“If you’ve got one, a gun might not hurt.”
“Right. Okay, I’ll see you in a few hours.”
I set my alarm clock and glumly realized how little sleep I was going to get.
In the morning, I hunted through my closet and found a knife that I’d bought at a show when I was a teenager. It was supposedly an authentic Marine Corps KA-BAR. I remembered that it had had a price to match. I had never used it for anything other than decoration, but I decided to take it. Not that I was planning on spending much time ashore, much less running around with Scorpion and his people, but I figured bringing the knife couldn’t hurt.
I practiced drawing it a few times. The oiled leather handle tasted terrible in my mouth, but it was better than nothing. I put the knife in with my suitcase. I was finishing up with packing when Andy showed up.
We made small talk on the way to the docks. Andy seemed nervous. I was only a little twisted up from the anticipation, but then, I wasn’t under false pretenses.
Scorpion certainly seemed excited. He was all over the boat, going over a final checklist. I showed Andy to the cabin that had been designated as his.
In my own room, I dropped my luggage on the bed. The naval term is usually “rack” but since I hadn’t chintzed out and had actually spent the money for real mattresses, I figured I would call it what it was.
I went back up to see what I could do to help get us moving. There was a fuel truck on the pier filling up the tanks with diesel. I found Scorpion and asked him what route we would be taking.
“Direct.”
“Just a straight line?”
“That’s right.”
I thought about it. I knew the boat carried enough fuel to go up the coast to Newfoundland and then across to Ireland. Mom and Dad had made that trip once, actually. However, with the modifications to the engine and the deeper draft, I didn’t know if we could still do that, let alone go directly from Norfolk.
“What are we going to do about fuel? I don’t think we’re going to have enough.”
“Don’t worry about it. It’s going to be taken care of.”
I would have been comfortable strapping about two dozen fifty-five gallon drums of diesel down to the deck to carry along, but I trusted Scorpion to know what he was talking about.
The truck finished filling up the boat and pulled away. Gene came up to us. “We took on over a thousand gallons.” He grinned. “Heck of a bill for somebody.”
Scorpion went over his checklist a final time and nodded. “I think we’re ready.” He pushed the intercom button. “Mr. Ross, would you come to the bridge please?”
When Andy showed up, we went through the engine starting procedure. Gene went down to the bow to cast off the lines. John did the same at the stern.
“Mr. Canvas, you have the most experience here, you’ll take her out.” I set the throttle ahead and turned the wheel away from the pier. I engaged the bow thruster and used it to help turn. Once we were clear, I advanced the throttle a little further and the boat began to cut a nice little wake.
John went back and raised the stars and stripes flag over the stern. Scorpion picked up a map. “Well, Mr. Ross, where are we going?”
Andy pointed directly ahead. “That way,” he said with a straight face.
We steered for the Thimble Shoal Channel, heading roughly east. It passed over the Bridge Tunnel. I picked up a pair of binoculars that were kept on the bridge and looked out over the water to the south. The Larson house was two or three miles away. Even if it had been closer, I didn’t know what it looked like from the backside, and most likely wouldn’t be able to pick it out at that distance anyway.
“Give it another hour for us to get away from shore, and we’ll start unpacking those crates,” said Scorpion. “Don’t want the prying eyes of the public around.”
Gene and John began pulling the crate of 20 mm ammunition towards the CIWS. Scorpion was at the bridge with the binoculars, checking to make sure we were alone. I looked to the west. The land had disappeared over the horizon.
Scorpion worked with some controls on the CIWS panel and the box began to open up. The lid lifted and the sides folded down flat on the deck. The weapon itself turned ninety degrees on its mount and lifted into position. The whole process had taken about five seconds. I knew that because we’d timed it while in the dry dock.
Andy was up on the bridge with Scorpion. He seemed impressed with our secret weapon. I helped the other two men lay out the belts of 20 mm. We fed it into the magazine of the CIWS. Scorpion activated the loading control.
The magazine is tied in with the barrels of the gun. If you run it slowly, it helps you pull the ammunition into the magazine. It was a little unnerving to see the barrels of the gatling gun rotating, because that was also part of the firing sequence. At least it wasn’t pointed at us.
We got the weapon loaded up. I would have liked to see a test-fire, but we only had one magazine’s worth of ammunition.
Scorpion lowered the CIWS back down and closed the box. The disguise worked perfectly. Gene, John and I went back to get more weapons.
A waterproof metal box had been placed against the aft superstructure. It looked like a large cooler. Into it went one of the Stingers and one of the AT4 launchers.
The rifles and the other launchers were spread out among the gun racks. Andy seemed to be showing a nonchalant attitude, but I knew him well enough to realize that seeing all this weaponry was better than Christmas for him.
The men spent quite a long time loading magazines for the weapons. Not having fingers, I was exempt. When they were done, Scorpion brought out some balloons.
The rifles were brand new and would need to be test fired to make sure the sights were lined up. The M4s were equipped with their standard iron sights. I thought this was odd and commented on it.
Scorpion shrugged. “It would be nice to have some fancy ACOGs or reflex sights, but someone evidently didn’t see fit to spend the coin to get them. I’ll have a talk with my superiors about it.”
At least the Mark 14s came with very nice scopes. They were adjustable from 1x to 6x magnification with an attachable night vision module. At minimum magnification, the scope functioned as regular optical sight, but at higher magnifications, it made the rifle able to hold its own against many true sniper rifles.
After checking the horizon for company, Scorpion began blowing up balloons and tossing them off the back of the boat. I had found some noise canceling earmuffs in one of the crates and passed them out to Gene, John and Scorpion, keeping a pair for myself.
Andy had volunteered to man the bridge, but was watching over his shoulder as the weapons were fired. The M4s that had the M203 launcher attached were a little heavier and bulkier, but not as heavy as the Mark 14s. Part of the reason the military had stopped using the bulky M14 battle rifle for frontline troops was because of its weight, but the same basic design was kept around for long range shooting and redesignated as the Mark 14 EBR. It was great for that.
The M4s seemed to be right on, but the telescopic sights of the other rifles needed some adjustment. Still, it was hard to get them perfect because of the rolling boat and balloons rising and falling on waves.
I figured that all of the mysterious men would be good shots, and they were. Fantastic, really. Being around them made me feel a little safer.
When the weapons were reasonably dialed in, we broke them down for cleaning. I’d never had to clean such things before, but Scorpion told me to take it apart into the smallest pieces I could, wipe them off, wipe on fresh oil, and put them back together.
“How much oil?”
“Well, don’t drown it, but firearms seldom malfunction from being too lubricated.”
It sounded like decent advice to me.
I went to bed that night when the eastern sky was just starting to get reasonably dark. As we traveled further east, the days would be artificially short. Boat lag, I had heard it called. Not as bad as jet lag, but still inescapable. I figured the solution was to get as much sleep as I could.
In the morning, I had a quiet conversation with Andy in his cabin. He was still nervous, but was gaining confidence. He thought that he probably came off as a wimp to the rest of the crew, but it didn’t appear that they suspected him of not being the real Jim Ross.
When I asked him about it, he said his ability to navigate by the stars was real. Besides writing, he had a second hobby as an amateur astronomer. He was a busy guy.
The next few days were slow. There wasn’t anything to do, because the CIA maintenance people had fixed everything that could go wrong. There wasn’t anything to talk about because everyone was so tight lipped. There wasn’t anything to see other than the open ocean, except when a far-off ship would go by, and those distractions were few.
I found myself missing animal crackers. I had forgotten my bag in the glove box of my car. I supposed I would have to see what they had to offer in Russia.
I had been keeping an eye on the fuel levels and the GPS readout of our location. At the rate we were burning fuel, we weren’t going to make it to England, much less Russia. I told Scorpion what I thought. He told me not to worry about it. I did anyway.
One day when we were about halfway there, I was on the bridge sitting in the chair behind the wheel. I glanced at the radar screen and saw that there was a surface contact nearly dead ahead. The radar array was mounted above the bridge, so it could see farther than I could. I gave it a few minutes and the contact didn’t seem to be shifting course.
I grabbed the bridge binoculars and looked out at the horizon. There was a shape of something out there, but it must have been painted a color that bended with the sea and sky, because I couldn’t tell what it was.
I was about to call Scorpion on the intercom when he came up to the bridge. He checked his watch and glanced at the radar.
“I’ve got a visual contact,” I said. “It must be painted battleship grey, though. It’s hard to see.” Suddenly, I put it together. “We’re getting fuel from a Navy ship?”
“Something like that.”
The ship on the horizon continued to come closer. I began to realize how big it was, probably five or six times as large as our boat. Scorpion asked me to reverse course.
I turned the boat around and the supply ship came alongside. The company didn’t do a whole lot of work on Navy Auxiliary supply ships, so I wasn’t familiar with the type. Several cranes for moving supplies lined the tall, grey sides.
The radio crackled to life. “Unidentified craft, identify, over.”
Scorpion picked up the radio. “This is Langley. Authenticate, over.” Langley, Virginia, I knew, was the headquarters of the CIA.
“Code Delta November Oscar Whiskey, over.”
“Code X-ray Kilo Charlie Delta, over.”
“Glad to see you can keep an appointment, Langley, over.”
“You too, Navy, over.”
Scorpion continued to talk to the ship on the radio as I went to help with the fuel hose that was being passed from the ship over to our boat.
Through some winching and physical exertion, we got the hose strung from the ship to our fuel tank. John signaled to Scorpion, who radioed to start the fuel flowing. It pumped a lot faster than the tanker truck back in Norfolk did. In not very long at all, the tank was full and overflowing onto the deck. The pump operator on the ship quickly shut it off.
We gave them the hose back and Scorpion turned us on a course back towards England. I went down to the galley to find a mop to clean up the spilled fuel. The boat may have been taken over by the CIA, but I still wanted to make sure it looked good.
As I mopped, I saw a line of clouds coming up from the west, chasing us. Several hours later, they had caught up to us. The clouds were dark and stacked up like columns. Generally, that means that there’s a squall on the way.
I caught myself thinking that I wouldn’t mind a good storm. We could use the rain. Well, Norfolk could use the rain. The ocean didn’t care.
A couple of hours after that, I decided that we didn’t need a storm after all. I’m no landlubber, but the boat was rolling uncomfortably as I tried to sleep. I decided to go up to the bridge. On the way, I passed the rest of the cabins. All the doors were closed and no lights shone underneath them.
Andy was up there all alone. He held the wheel with a white knuckle grip. Rain pounded on the bridge glass and outside there was nothing but blackness to be seen.
“Sail, thank God you’re here. Am I doing something wrong?”
“Come about to port. I’ll tell you when to stop.” Andy cranked the wheel to the left. As we turned, the waves began to split on the bow, instead of hitting the ship on the beam and rocking us back and forth. When I told Andy to return the rudder to center, there was some gentle fore to aft movement, but that was it.
“I should have thought of that,” he said. “Aren’t we going off course now?”
“Maybe a bit.” I pulled the throttle back until the ship was just keeping up with the waves. “You can still steer a little and work us eastward. When the waves slack off, go back to normal speed and return to course.” I turned down the bridge lights to the dim red night lights. They helped with night vision quite a bit.
“If you get tired, let me know.” The intercom could communicate with just one cabin if the right button was pushed. I checked the radar screen and then I went back below decks.
I slept pretty well for a while, but woke up to the boat rocking again. There was a dim light coming through my porthole. I checked the digital clock on the wall that displayed the local time. It was morning.
I went back up. Scorpion was on the bridge. He nodded as I came in.
“I got up a little early and decided to take over from Jim,” he said.
“Did you have to take the waves off the bow?” I complained.
“It’s not a tight schedule we’re on, but a schedule nonetheless. We don’t have time to wait the storm out.”
The sun must have been up, but it was nowhere to be seen behind the clouds. A layer of fog had also come up. I decided to go back below decks because the bridge was higher above the water and was rocking more than the rest of the boat.
The rain seemed to taper off for a moment and that’s when the hail started. I paused on the stairs. It lasted for several long seconds, but then died down and returned to rain. I continued downwards.
I slid my bed out from the bulkhead and aligned it in a better position to deal with the rocking. I didn’t usually get seasick, and I was going to do everything to keep that from happening now.
I was just about to lay back down when Scorpion called for me. I sighed and went back up. When I got there, Scorpion pointed at the radar screen. It flashed the word ERROR.
“I think the hail might have damaged it. Why don’t you go up and check on it?”
For a second, I thought he was kidding. Then I realized that when you’re in a fog bank and can’t see, having a functioning radar system is a must.
I went down to the gear locker and got a safety strap. It’s a short piece of nylon cord that has a carabiner on both ends. You hook one end to a belt and the other end to something that will hold you. You use them when you think you might be in danger of going overboard.
I went back up and stepped out onto the catwalk around the bridge. The rain was freezing cold and I regretted not taking the time to find a raincoat. I put on the safety harness and clipped the strap to the ladder that went to the roof.
When I got to the top, I clipped the strap to the top rung of the ladder. It was the closest thing I could see that I could hook to. When I turned towards the radar, I could immediately see that it was broken. The dish was bent and had little dents in it. It must have been some hard hail.
I felt a little angry that the CIA would install radar equipment that couldn’t take a few licks, but then, no one had anticipated hail. While I was up there, I checked the other gear. The radio antenna was bent into a C shape. The only way that could have happened is if a piece of hail had landed exactly straight down on the wire antenna and it flexed until it wouldn’t spring back. Sometimes, you have the worst of luck.
I couldn’t reach the antenna to straighten it with the strap holding me down. The boat had been rocking fairly consistently, so I unclipped from the strap and moved carefully across the roof of the bridge. When I got to the antenna, I saw that the base had flexed far enough to crack the metal. As I touched it, the fracture opened wider.
I turned to go back down the ladder. There was a dark shape in the fog. As I watched, it grew larger and larger until it resolved itself as the wide bow of a Very Large Crude Carrier.
A VLCC oil tanker is in the neighborhood of a thousand feet long and too heavy to even joke about getting into a collision with. I didn’t know how in the world we had stumbled into the path of one.
Scorpion had seen it too. The boat heeled over against the waves and the engine began to drive us faster. I grabbed for the safety strap but didn’t have time to hook it to me. I laid down flat on the roof and managed to hook my legs on the base of the broken radar.
I put things together and realized what had gone wrong. We couldn’t see them because our radar was broken, and they couldn’t call us to give a warning because the radio was also broken. Huge ships like that aren’t known for their maneuverability, so it fell to us to get out of the way.
About that time, the tanker’s horn began to sound. Now that was their fault. Had they started blowing it earlier, we may not have been able to tell what direction the sound was coming from in the fog, but we would have at least had a warning much sooner.
Scorpion straightened the boat out and we passed within a few hundred feet of the tanker. On the open ocean, that isn’t very much. A row of sailors in raincoats stood along the railing of the tanker and made rude gestures at us.
I came down from the roof and stepped into the bridge. I was completely soaked and cold, but made my report. “The radar’s out and so is the radio.”
“Well, that explains that,” Scorpion said, gesturing to the tanker. He got on the intercom and called up Gene and John to act as lookouts while I went to put the safety strap away and went to take a hot shower.
As I was going back to my cabin, I saw Andy. He looked rather pale.
“Seasick?” I asked.
“I think so.”
“Don’t throw up on anything important.”
“I won’t. What just happened? I heard a horn.”
I explained briefly and left him to his sickness. It wouldn’t look good to have a supposed sailor get seasick, but it was some heavy sea action we were experiencing. I went up to the bridge a couple of hours later. It seemed like the storm was slacking off and the fog was lifting.
Scorpion was on his own satellite phone talking to someone about getting new radar and radio antennas. He sounded disappointed that it wouldn’t be possible to have someone bring them out to us. We would have to wait until we got to shore.
We landed at Plymouth, England a day or so later. It’s where the Pilgrims left from to go the new world, hence why they named to first boulder they saw Plymouth Rock.
Plymouth was a fairly nice city of perhaps a quarter of a million people. It had a long history, but by the look of the place someone was evidently trying to keep it modern.
Some anonymous man with CIA credentials came up and handed us a box of spare parts. Gene stowed it and came back to help the rest of us with the refueling.
We got underway and headed up the English Channel. I went up on the roof again to install the new antennas. I’m no electrician, but I was able to splice the wires together and get everything working. The old equipment was unceremoniously heaved over the side. The Channel was nice and all, but none of us were willing to keep broken junk on board just to satisfy Greenpeace.
The rest of the cruise was fairly uneventful. We sailed up around Denmark and into the Baltic Sea. The weather was warm and the sun was shining. In a couple more days, we were passing through the Gulf of Finland and coming near Saint Petersburg.
I had done a little reading about the place before coming on the trip. Saint Petersburg is the northernmost city in the world that has more than one million people. While the Soviet Union was still in business it was known at Leningrad. It’s also home to the largest art museum in the world.
We had come far enough north that the sun was having real problems setting at night. It was getting into the evening, but the sun was still overhead. It helped that all the portholes had curtains, but it was still hard to adjust to it. It only made the boat lag worse.
With Saint Petersburg in sight, Scorpion called us all to the bridge. He had a large envelope in his hands. When everyone was present and accounted for, he opened it.
“It’s about time we had the mission briefing,” he said. He dug a picture out of the envelope and held it up.
“This man is Grigori Nikitin. He’s an intelligence asset working for the CIA and has been passing information regarding the Russian black market.”
The man in the picture was fairly average looking with dark hair and a mustache. I thought he looked a little like Stalin, but maybe that was my imagination.
“Does he have a codename?” asked Gene.
“We call him Pike. That’s only Agency-internal, though, so he won’t respond to it.”
Got it, I thought. Don’t call Pike and expect him to come. But that meant I had to remember a name like Grigori Nikitin.
“Nikitin doesn’t like electronics. He’s a little paranoid. All intelligence he collects goes on paper transported by a courier. Things have been getting a little risky lately, so the Agency has decided to offer him a free pass to get out.”
“We’re his ride?” I guessed.
“Right. I don’t know why they don’t just put him on a plane. I assume there’s a good reason, but I wasn’t told what it was. Anyway, we’re going to go meet him and he’ll tell us if he wants out or not.”
“We came all this way and we don’t even know if he wants out?” said Andy. He didn’t sound happy.
“We have a dual purpose here. Nikitin is priority one. The other is discrete contact with the Russian FSB. We have a package for them.”
I had heard of that organization before. I saw Andy nodding, evidently he had, too. FSB stood for Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation. The acronym didn’t match after you translated it. The FSB was the replacement for the infamous KGB after the breakup of the Soviet Union.
Scorpion fielded a few more questions and then the meeting broke up. We came into the harbor at Saint Petersburg and headed for a marina with quite a few luxury yachts present. I noted with some satisfaction that there were very few as big as mine.
Plans had already been made for our arrival. A crew was waiting on us to help tie up the boat. I guessed that there was a dock rental fee, and I assumed that it had been taken care of ahead of time.
Thanks to Scorpion’s pushing, we had made better time through the storm than expected. We had until tomorrow before things started happening. It was decided that John and I would go to the meeting with the harbor security and later meet up with FSB agents to give them their package. Scorpion and Gene would go meet Nikitin. Andy would watch the boat.
I checked the time. There was an eight hour difference between Saint Petersburg and Norfolk. My phone took a moment to interface with the communication satellite and then beam back down to earth across the ocean. Dr. Games answered on the first ring.
“Good morning, Sail. Or is it? Where are you?”
“I’m in Saint Petersburg, Doc. It’s six p.m. here.”
“Glad to hear you made it.”
I lay down on my bed to simulate her couch. “We had a pretty decent storm a couple hundred miles west of the British Isles, but for the most part it was uneventful.” Except for traveling with three secret agents and a Japanese teacher on a boat with a military-grade air defense system mounted to the foredeck.
“Is there anything specific you’d like to talk about? What about that situation you said you were getting into?”
“Well, I can talk about how I feel. I probably shouldn’t go into detail about the situation itself. This isn’t a secure line.” I smiled to myself. They’d make a spy out of me yet.
We talked a bit about how I was nervous. If everything went well, there would be nothing to worry about. But you know what they say about the best laid plans. I was a little less worried about the deal with the police. There probably wouldn’t be a large order placed, and even then, they were just little boats.
After we finished the call, I went to the galley. Everyone else was there playing poker. I thought that they all had brought a surprising amount of United States currency for a trip to Russia.
Since I had some money myself, I sat down. I’m not a great poker player, but it didn’t stop me from trying. I knew Andy wasn’t too bad. I supposed that I would find out about the other three.
We played a few hands in silence. I took one. After a bit, Gene, not normally talkative, said, “What kind of gear do y’all carry?” It took me a moment to make sense out of his drawl.
“I brought along a Five-seveN,” answered John. I knew that he was talking about a high-tech pistol made by FN Herstal in Belgium. It was high capacity and fired armor piercing bullets.
“I’ve been carrying the same 1911 forever,” said Scorpion. He referred the famous Colt .45, a classic American pistol that had seen service with the United States military from World War One all the way until the mid 1980s.
“How about you?” I asked Gene.
“Seeing as how we were going to go to Russia, I decided to bring my MP-443.” That was surprising. It was a 9 mm pistol made for Russian military and law enforcement and was very uncommon to find in other parts of the world.
All eyes turned to Andy, who seemed embarrassed. “I have a Smith & Wesson J-frame.” The rest of us laughed. That was a small revolver that held five rounds of .38 Special. It was reliable and easy to conceal, but was rather low performance and completely different from anything else the rest of us had.
As if he were angry about us laughing at his gun, Andy won the next two hands.