Deep Lie (12 page)

“Where is the cart going?” Rule asked.

“It doesn’t make any sense. A guarded gate with nothing but a shale beach on the other side.”

“That’s not what I mean,” Martin said impatiently.

“Look at the weapon the guard has slung. You make it?”

Rule moved the loup to the guard, who was saluting whoever was in the golf cart. His weapon could be seen resting across his back.

“It’s a little fuzzy, but… Jesus, Martin, it looks like an Ingram submachine gun.”

“Could be an Uzi,” Martin said, “but I’ve never seen that sort of suppressor on an Uzi. Looks like a Mac 10 to me. One more thing, then I’m getting out of here.” He pointed to the water, a couple of hundred yards from the gate, an inch or so from the edge of the photograph.

“Have a look at that.”

Rule moved the loup to the spot and stared hard, trying to make some sense of what she saw. There was something on the water, something very small. It seemed to be skimming the surface, creating a wake.

“My father is a fisherman,” Rule said.

“That looks a little like one of his whatchamacallits… a plug. He used to have one that moved along the surface of the water. This looks like that, only bigger. I remember he never caught anything with it.”

“Yeah, it is a little like that,” Martin agreed, “but it’s bigger. It looks to me like the attack periscope of a submarine.”

Rule looked sharply up at him.

“Are you sure?”

Martin laughed.

“Not even a little bit, but look at this.”

He spread some sort of map out on her desk.

“There’s no American, British, Swedish, or Finnish nautical chart for this area, but I found an aeronautical chart. See the square I’ve drawn here? That’s the area covered by the coordinates of the sat shot Our bird is passing from northwest to southeast, so the rectangle of the area is tilted a little. Out here, you’ve got the Baltic, then the Latvian coast, then, just inside the coast, another body of water called Liepaja Ezers, a sort of tidal lagoon, sheltered from the Baltic by this narrow strip of land. There’s a narrow entrance, here, probably natural, but also probably improved to allow shipping to pass through. Maybe they’re moving subs in and out of there.”

Rule stared at the object on the photograph.

“It looks too small to be a periscope,” she said.

“An attack periscope,” Martin said.

“Submarines have a regular scope for general use, but when there’s hostile shipping in the area, they use a much smaller one, one that is less noticeable, that makes less of a wake. I’d say that object is just about the right size for an attack periscope.”

Rule looked around the perimeters of the sat shot

“Have you seen anything on this or any other shot to indicate submarine pens’?”

Martin shook his head.

“Nope. and that makes my identification of that thing as a scope very suspect, unless they’ve just run a sub into the lagoon, submerged for some sort of training exercise. But hell, who knows what they’re up to over there.” He got up and struggled into his jacket “Well, it’s not my job to guess. I just gaze at images. you’re the analyst; you do the analyzing. I’m going home and get some sleep.”

“Thanks, Martin,” Rule said.

“I appreciate your showing this to me before leaving, and thanks, too. for taking the trouble to dig out that aero chart.”

“All part of the service,” Martin said, tossing a wave over his shoulder.

“Just pan of your friendly, C1A curb service.”

Rule sat, staring at the sat shot at the golf cart, at the Ingram, maybe, at the periscope, maybe, at the Mercedes.

Perhaps it was because it was early in the morning and she was fresh; maybe it was a message from outer space; maybe it was that least favorite thing of her superiors, her woman’s intuition; maybe she was crazy; but half a dozen, eight, maybe ten isolated fragments of seemingly useless information popped together in her head, and she had something. It was like having some of the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle spread out before her, and from their accidental juxtaposition, suddenly visualizing the whole scene-and without even looking at the picture on the box.

She got COSMO up and running, called up indices of station reports, started gleaning. She hoped to God the computer input people were caught up with their work. because she’d never find the pieces of paper again, once they’d crossed her desk. She was lucky. She selected incidents from reports as they ran, and dumped them to her printer. She tapped into NEXIS , a computer news service, and extracted a dozen news stories dating back to October 1981. Before lunch, she had them all, the whole skimpy, ridiculous bunch of reports, facts and guesses, and during the morning she never stopped thinking.

It wouldn’t go away, it wouldn’t fragment, it stayed and grew in her mind. She had it, she was sure of it, she believed it.

She grabbed the extracts, the sat shot the air chart, and all the hope she could muster and headed for Alan Nixon’s office. HELDER sat in the uncomfortable, plastic seat and ran through his checklist just once more.

He had been thoroughly over the mini sub with Sokolov, and he had to admit she knew what she was doing when it came to the electronics and the other equipment aboard. It still bothered him that she had no experience of submarines, but, with the way the sub’s controls were laid out, that shouldn’t pose any problem; he could steer and navigate the vessel and deploy the buoy; she would monitor the mechanical, electric, and electronic systems and handle communications. He was thankful that the seating was fore and aft; at least he didn’t have to look directly at the implacable face, the nearly dead eyes all the time. There was a mirror mounted overhead and to his left, but it was awkwardly enough placed not to invite much use. With another crew he might have ordered it relocated, but with Valerie Sokolov, he was thankful for its placement.

She smelled, too. They had not been screwed down in the sub for five minutes before it smelled like a locker room.

He glanced toward the forward ports and took in a divided scene. The lower half of the glass discs was under water, the top half, above. The faces of the maintenance crew gazed back at him. One gave him a thumbs-up sign.

He replied in a like manner.

“Ready to submerge,” he said, as much to himself as to Sokolov.

“Ready,” she said.

It bothered him that she did not refer to him as captain or skipper, but he would not let his annoyance show. She seemed never to speak an unnecessary syllable.

“Diving,” he said. and reached for the rocker switches at the panel to his right. Blow tanks, he said to himself, then threw the switches. There was a rumble and the sub sank quickly.

Level off at two meters, he ordered himself, and his fingers and the sub obeyed him. He was accustomed to giving orders to a crew. He would have to get over that; it took too much time. In an emergency, he wouldn’t want to waste the fraction of a second required to give an order; he wanted just to react. He reached for the throttle—an electrical slide switch, really, but he thought of it as a throttle-and asked it for two knots. Less than his cruising speed of three knots, but sufficient for good control of the vessel.

There was a low whine, and immediately, the sub moved forward and out of the pen. As they cleared the roof of the pens pale sunlight came into the sub, and the red interior lighting seemed unnecessary.

“Switch off inside lights,” he said.

Nothing happened. He turned his head and looked up into the mirror at Sokolov. She seemed to be staring straight ahead.

“Sokolov! Switch off inside lights!” She jerked, looked confused for a moment, then hit the switch.

“Thank you,” he said coldly, “and when I give you an order I want it carried out immediately, do you understand?”

He could nearly feel her flush behind him.

“Yes, sir, I am very sorry.”

He held his course for a couple of minutes, to clear the end of the marina, then, glancing at his chart for a last confirmation of his position, he turned the sub south down the lake and pushed the joystick lightly. Four meters, then six showed on the fathometer. The interior of the vessel grew darker, and the instruments glowed green in the dimness. With a foot he pressed the right rudder, and the sub responded at once. He tried left rudder; the sub turned, then straightened to his touch. The controls were even lighter than on the unmodified version of the sub. He liked that; it increased the sensation of flying under water. He pushed down on the joystick again and sank another two meters. His instruments now showed eight meters of water above him, four below. On the chart the lake deepened as it ran south. He continued to move the sub downward, keeping four meters of water under his keel. The dim light in the cabin faded even more.

“I… I can’t see my control panel,” Sokolov said.

She sounded nervous.

“Well, switch on your bloody panel lights; you should have done that before we sailed.” Good. She needed bringing into line.

“I can’t see the switch for the panel lights,” she said rapidly.

“Haven’t you got a torch back there?” he asked harshly.

There was a rattling noise, and a few seconds later, a bright light reflected off the white inside of the sub’s hull.

“There, I’ve found the switch,” she said, and the torch went off, leaving them in total blackness.

Helder cut the throttle and let the sub sink until it bumped bottom.

“Perfect,” he said.

“Now you’ve blown my night vision. We’ll just sit here until it returns.”

“I’m sorry. Captain,” she said softly.

“I’m very sorry.

I didn’t think.”

Good. Now she was calling him captain, at least, and he hadn’t had to ask her. He yanked back on the stick and pushed the throttle to full ahead. He heard Sokolov gasp as the sub reared back and shot toward the surface. He leveled off at two meters, grinning. He had subdued her, he reckoned; now he had to figure out if she was going to be anything more than a passenger on this mission. rule’s heart slammed systematically into her ribcage as she seated herself across the desk from Alan Nixon. Just as she intuitively knew that she had hold of something very important, she instinctively knew that this meeting might determine whether anything ever came of it. They were very different, she and Nixon. She was trained and experienced at her work, brilliant, even, impulsive, daring. But she had difficulty assessing the political consequences of her actions. Nixon was trained as an executive, not as an analyst; he was politically motivated, and if he did not have her grasp of intelligence analysis, he rarely put a foot wrong when making a request for resources or a recommendation for action. If she could win his interest, now, he would know from whom to get a further hearing and how best to do it.

She took a deep breath and started.

“Alan, I need your help.” An appeal, not an announcement seemed the best approach.

“Of course, Kate. Anything I can do.” Nixon put his feet on the desk and folded his hands across his middle, the most receptive possible attitude. Rule knew from experience.

Then, “Is this about your Majorov?” Trouble. He was already impatient with her about that.

“Partly,” she said, “but much broader. Let me go into some background, here. I know you know all of this stuff,” (like hell he did) “but I need to piece this together as much for my own benefit as for yours, so bear with me.”

Nixon nodded sagely.

“In October 1981. a Soviet Whiskey class submarine ran aground on the Swedish coast, near a sensitive military installation. It made worldwide headlines, you’ll remember, and after that, there was a rash of periscope sightings in various parts of Sweden. A Swedish naval officer having lunch in downtown Stockholm spotted a periscope smack in the middle of the city. at a time when three American warships were visiting there, that sort of thing.”

Nixon’s eyebrows went up.

“Now, this was not an entirely new occurrence; there had been reports of Soviet subs in Swedish waters for years. We assumed they were there to give their crews some hard experience in waters which, if not exactly friendly, were not exactly hostile. They were running at about twenty a year. But since the “Whiskey on the rocks’ incident, they’ve been running at two hundred a year, and some of them have been very peculiar.”

“How so?” Nixon asked, forgetting that he was supposed to know about this.

“First of all, when challenged, the subs have not broken and run the way they used to. As often as not, they’ve pressed further into Swedish territory, even under pursuit.

Second, there have been credible reports, not just of subs, but of frogmen being landed from them and heading away from the sea. Some militiamen have taken shots at them, but have never caught one. But the most peculiar thing about all this is that nobody, not the Swedish government, not their military nor their intelligence, not our military nor our intelligence, has been able to come up with a credible hypothesis of why the Soviets are doing this. Oh, there are lots of theories—everything from training exercises to just fun and games—but none of them really adds up, none of them makes for any reasonable balance between what the Soviets have to gain from all of this and what they have to lose. They have, for instance, already been publicly humiliated in the world’s press when their sub got caught aground in Sweden, but that didn’t stop their incursions. As I mentioned, they have increased tenfold since that incident.”