Rockets' Red Glare (15 page)

* * * * * *

Chapter Twenty-one

That same morning, nine hundred and fifty miles to the north, a heavy rain pelted Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci Airport as TWA flight 802 from New York dropped out of the clouds and touched down on the slick runway.

The time was 11:26
A.M.

Andrew Churcher was one of the first passengers to come through the boarding ramp into the terminal. A shoulder bag containing the client files McKendrick had given him slapped at his side. He ambled along, making small talk with an older couple who had also traveled first class. They were horse people from the auction circuit who, like Andrew, had come to Rome for the International Show at Piazza dei Siena.

Valery Gorodin had traveled coach, and took steps to avoid being detained by those passengers clogging the aisles while removing carry-on items from overhead compartments. Just prior to landing, he had casually moved from the rear of the plane to an empty seat directly behind the first class bulkhead. A position which would enable him to deplane quickly, and resume close surveillance of Andrew Churcher.

Italian military personnel in gray jumpsuits, black berets, and mirror polished boots provided security inside the terminal. Each carried an Uzi slung across the front of his body.

Andrew cleared passport control, and entered the baggage claim area where those meeting passengers were grouped behind a waist-high security
barrier. Some held signs with handwritten names. Almost immediately, Andrew saw the one that read “Churcher.” But the sixteen-hour journey from Houston had a disorienting effect, and he continued walking a few steps before he realized that the uniformed chauffeur standing
inside
the barrier next to the automated baggage carousel was there to meet
him.

The chauffeur’s presence reminded Andrew that this was a Churchco operation, everything prearranged by Elsbeth, Theodor Churcher’s assistant, to exacting specifications. In the past, Andrew would have bristled at the long-distance control exerted by his father. But now that he was gone, Andrew found it surprisingly reassuring.

Andrew raised a hand to the chauffeur who had been standing impassively. The man’s eyes lost their blank expression, and the blue in them twinkled as the casually attired young man approached.

“Welcome to Rome,” the chauffeur said in heavily accented English. “I’m sorry about your father,” he went on uneasily. He wanted to pay his respects, but was hesitant to bring up an unpleasant topic.

“Thanks,” Andrew replied, feeling saddened, and distanced from the stronger emotions that surfaced at the thought of his father having been murdered.

The stocky Italian extended a hand, and, brightening, said, “Fausto.”

“Of course,” Andrew said, shaking it. “You drove for us last year, didn’t you?”

“
Si, si
. And many times for your father before that. He was a very fine man.”

Andrew nodded, wondering—as he did last time—why, unlike the others, Fausto was allowed to wait inside the security barrier for his passenger. A loud buzzer that announced the baggage carousel was being activated pulled Fausto away before Andrew could ask.

Gorodin had been watching from the other side of the carousel. He paced a few steps closer to the security barrier, and lit a cigarette. Then he blew out the match, threw it to the floor, and ground it into the gray terrazzo with his heel. A stream of smoke came from his nostrils as he surveyed the anxious faces that looked past him in search of friends and loved-ones. The crack of match against striker, and the whoosh of sulfur bursting into flame, called his attention to a plainly dressed man, with thick glasses.

After lighting his cigarette, Antonin Kovlek disposed of his match in exactly the same manner as had Gorodin, identifying himself as his contact.

Gorodin’s eyes directed Kovlek’s attention to Andrew. Neither agent openly acknowledged the other. Zeitzev had sent his deputy as a safety precaution, not a welcoming committee. Should Gorodin be delayed by Italian authorities, Kovlek would take up surveillance of Andrew Churcher. If not, he’d keep an eye on Gorodin—Gorodin was GRU.

Fausto carried Andrew’s travel bag and led the way toward a row of customs stations, angling toward the one on the extreme left. The uniformed agent broke into a broad smile the instant he saw them approaching. Fausto winked, and said something in Italian that turned the agent’s smile into a lewd chuckle. Then, further heightening Andrew’s curiosity about Fausto, the customs agent waved them through without even a cursory check of Andrew’s passport or baggage.

They had walked a short distance when one of the Uzi-carrying guards noticed, and stepped forward to challenge them. Before Andrew knew what was happening, Fausto had produced his wallet and opened it with a snap of his wrist that emphasized the inconvenience.

To the guard’s chagrin, he was staring at a brass shield pinned next to official police identification.

Fausto snapped the wallet closed, ticking the tip of the guard’s nose. “Careful!” he barked in Italian. “You lose that, you lose the only thing you have that will get you a promotion.” Then he turned and headed for the glass doors that led outside the terminal.

“So, Fausto, you’re with the police?” Andrew said. He wanted it to sound like a casual observation, but was unable to suppress the wonder in his voice.

“Retired. Twenty-five years on the Questura,” he replied, referring to the detective squad, adding “Twenty-five years of collecting IOUs.”

“The customs agent—that wasn’t a professional courtesy?” Andrew asked, surprised.

Fausto smiled cagily, and shook no. “He cheats on his wife. He got—how you say?—
busted
in a raid on a sex club. I decided he might be useful and kept his name out of the reports.” Fausto chuckled, savoring the memory of it. “He’s been eternally grateful,” he went on, adding philosophically, “Of course, human nature being what it is, gratitude has always been the seed of resentment.” He pulled back his jacket, letting Andrew glimpse the 9mm Baretta that rode on his hip.

The exit door opened automatically.

Fausto led Andrew toward a Maserati
quatroporto
. The black sedan was parked directly in front of the terminal, in a restricted area, beneath an overhang that protected them from the rain.

The Maserati pulled away from the terminal, water spitting from its grooved radials.

Andrew settled back into the soft Italian leather, and stretched out his lanky frame—his body telling him it was night; the brightness, despite the rain, insisting it was day.

Fausto wheeled the big car onto a road that led to the autostrada, and pushed a button on the walnut-paneled console. The electric door locks engaged.

The precise click triggered the memory of a thriller Andrew had once seen. The opening sequence raced through his mind: An airport, a chauffeur with a sign, a businessman, a limousine speeding into the night, fingers pushing buttons. And then, in a frenetic visual barrage—electric door locks activating, the window between passenger and chauffeur ascending, deadly gas filling the rear compartment, the man’s eyes widening with terror, fingers clawing at the glass, body falling back onto the seat unconscious!

At the time, Andrew thought it was a damn clever abduction. Now, he thought about McKendrick’s warning, “Watch your ass son. Russians, professionals.”

Andrew realized he had no proof of anything Fausto had said. He resembled his father’s chauffeur; but that was a year ago, and the memory was vague. Anyone could get a police shield and phony ID, especially a pro. Why hadn’t he been more alert, more vigilant?! Why hadn’t he walked right past Fausto, and taken a taxi? Why
hadn’t
he watched his ass? He hadn’t been in Italy a half hour and already he had screwed up in a way that, at least in the movies, had proved costly. Andrew studied his reflection in the glass that separated him from Fausto, and listened for the hiss of deadly gas.

The Maserati cut through the sheets of rain, turned onto the autostrada, and accelerated smoothly on the glistening concrete ribbon.

Approximately two hundred meters back, Gorodin and Kovlek sat behind the chattering wipers of an aging Fiat, its engine straining to keep up with the high performance vehicle it was tailing.

* * * * * *

Chapter Twenty-two

At approximately the same time that Gorodin and Kovlek were following their target, First Lieutenant Jon Lowell was searching for his.

The time in Tampa, Florida, was 8:17
A.M.

The moment he completed his midnight to eight ASW tour, Lowell had gone directly to K building.

Now, he was hunched over a computer console in a SOSUS research lab set up for use by ASW personnel. The electronics-packed facility was adjacent to the main control room where military technicians, on a rotating twenty-four-hour watch, sat at consoles monitoring satellite and underwater cable transmissions. All pertinent data was sent over a land-based communications net to analysts at the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, then forwarded to the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia.

After shifting his focus to the mystery vessel he had spotted on the satellite photographs, Lowell pulled copies of the twelve hydrotapes that covered the one-hour-forty-eight-minute SOSUS window he’d established. With assistance of Navy Electronics Technician Lew Scofield, Lowell had been searching the tapes for the recording of the ship’s acoustic signature. Once located, it would be computer-compared with all others on file in the sonar library. With any luck, it would match one that had already been identified. Lowell and Scofield had searched ten tapes without finding it.

When Lowell arrived that morning, Sconfield was threading the next to last hydrotape across the sound heads of the big Ampex reel-to-reel machine. He balanced a slowly growing ash on the tip of a cigarette that never left his mouth. Lowell had been working on and off with the lanky midwesterner for over a week, and had never once seen the ever-present ash fall before the technician could tap it into an ashtray.

“Data up, sir,” Scofield announced when he had finished. “We’re looking at fifty-fifty today.”

“Yeah, odds are getting better. Has to be a set of twin screws on one of these.”

“Unless you’re off on the tonnage, sir, and the sig we’re after’s a one banger.”

“No way,” Lowell replied as he settled in at the console. “Ship scales out somewhere between a hundred forty and a hundred fifty thousand tons. That means we’re looking at a tanker or containerized carrier. And either way, something that big has to be pushing twins,” he went on, referring to the propulsion arrangement which gave the big vessels otherwise unattainable maneuverability.

Lowell donned a set of experimental headphones he had been testing. They received their signal by infrared light beam rather than by wire, giving him freedom of movement in the lab. And he had been pleased to discover they were more than able to reproduce a broad range of pure frequencies. He flipped on the tape console that was linked to the big Cray X-MP supercomputers used to process and analyze intelligence data, and began scrutinizing the hydrotape.

His ears filled with the overlapping frequencies of moving ships, sea-life, and the surging Caribbean.

A little over a half hour had passed. Lowell had gotten up from his chair, and was pacing thoughtfully as he listened. Suddenly, he paused in mid-stride, and pressed the earphone to his head.

Scofield was bringing his Zippo to a fresh Marlboro when he saw Lowell’s reaction.

“Low frequency rumble,” Lowell said. He listened for a few more seconds, then nodded emphatically, and sat down at the console. “Yeah, yeah we’re talking power here. Real big plant. Ship’s gotta be in the tonnage range we’re looking for.”

The target was in his sights now. He could feel the competitive intensity building; just as it did in the Viking whenever the hours of tedious searching paid off in the blip of an enemy submarine pinging across his monitor.

“Patch it through the frequency digitizer,” he said to Scofield sharply.

“The what, sir?” Scofield asked uneasily. He was fully conscious of Lowell’s intensity and embarrassed he couldn’t respond.

Lowell flicked him a sideways glance, and smiled. He knew Scofield was relatively new to the job and welcomed the chance to broaden his knowledge. The digitizer was a piece of equipment Lowell had adapted from submarine surveillance technology. He was an outstanding sonar technician until he decided he’d rather hunt than be hunted, and applied to ASW.

“It’s a bunch of chips about that big,” Lowell said, indicating Scofield’s Zippo. “It reduces the sound waves to digitized pulses, cuts negative feedback to zero, and separates them into a dozen frequency ranges. We can listen to each range by itself.”

“Kind of like the graphic equalizer on a stereo.”

Lowell nodded, and stabbed a finger at a row of buttons on the console in front of Scofield. “Give me the high end first,” he said decisively. If he was right, it would be the only frequency range he’d need.

“Yes, sir. And thanks, I’ll remember that,” Scofield said, pushing the button labeled 16/40 kHz, rerouting the hydrotape data through the digitizer that filtered out all but the highest frequencies.

The sound in Lowell’s headphones changed dramatically. The low rumble of the ship’s power plant dropped out, as did the swishing throb of a passing school of barracuda, leaving the high frequency whine of propeller cavitation, the noise made by the ship’s blades carving a hole in the water. The singsong rhythm of the whine he’d isolated was all the proof Lowell needed that the vessel was pushing twin screws.

“That’s the one,” he said triumphantly.

Lowell removed his headphones, scooped up the phone that hung from one side of the console, and punched out Arnsbarger’s number.

The phone rang several times before Arnsbarger lifted his head from the pillow. “Cissy? Cissy, get that will you?” he growled, before realizing that she was in the shower and her son had already left for school. Finally, he crawled out from beneath the bedding and picked it up. “Yeah—” he mumbled in a sleepy voice.

“Rise and shine, big fella!” Lowell hooted.

“Christ,” Arnsbarger replied, wincing. “Won’t be noon for a couple of hours. What the hell’s going on?”

“I nailed her!” Lowell blurted excitedly.

“Great. Glad to hear you’re not a virgin anymore, son. Now if you don’t mind—”

“I’m talking about our mystery ship,” Lowell interrupted, laughing. “We just tracked down her acoustic signature.”

“Oh,” said Arnsbarger, suddenly coming to life. “Way to go. I sure to hell wished it’d taken you a couple of hours longer. On my way.”

In the forty-five minutes it took Arnsbarger to shower, dress, and drive to the base, Lowell and Scofield refined the distinction between frequencies, and digitally isolated the acoustic signature of each of the ship’s propellers.

When Arnsbarger entered, they had already made separate tracks of each cavitation whine, and Lowell was running them through the graphic analyzer.

Two linear patterns moved horizontally across the console’s video screen. Each of the parallel waves peaked and valleyed about a centerline, like an electrocardiogram.

“What do you have up there?” Arnsbarger rasped, looking better than he sounded. “A couple of whales getting it on?”

“Yeah,” Lowell chuckled. “You’re looking at the hottest pair of twin screws this side of Cienfuegos.”

“Separated them out, huh?”

“It was easy. Look at that.”

Lowell tapped the screen, indicating the top signature pattern. It was decidedly more frenetic than the lower.

“Hard to port,” he went on. “Starboard screw is turning almost half again as many revs. Frequency’s more than ten killies lower.”

“Well, let’s find out if that John Hancock has a match,” Arnsbarger replied. “What’re we waiting for, anyway?”

“For your head to clear,” Lowell cracked.

“Ship’ll be a pile of scrap in a Yokohama yard before that happens.”

“So will you if you don’t give it a night off once in a while.”

“You’re starting to sound just like Cissy,” Arnsbarger teased. “But she’s a lot easier to look at. I mean, I could’ve stayed home and heard that.”

“Yeah, but not this,” Lowell replied.

He removed his headphones and tossed them to Arnsbarger, who slipped them on. Then Lowell swiveled to the console’s keyboard and encoded:

LOG:CX-MP/AC:SIG:LIB-COMP:ANA/2-TRK:SRCH

This linked the computer in Lowell’s console to the Cray X-MP in the control room, instructed it to access the acoustic signature library, and run a comparative analysis program on the two-track specimen signature Lowell had prepared.

“Okay. Here we go,” he announced, pushing a button that transmitted the data and started the search and match process.

Operating at speeds in excess of one billion instructions per second, the supercomputer compared the specimen acoustic signature with the hundreds of thousands on file. In the time it took Scofield to stub out a cigarette, pull another from his pack, and light it, the Cray had found a match. The laser printer tied in to Lowell’s computer came to life:

P103612PMAR

ASW PENSACOLA

ACSIG COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS REPORT 71938647

VESSEL IDENTIFIED AS: VLCC KIRA

CLASSIFICATION: SUPERTANKER TWIN SCREWS

DISPLACEMENT: 145,000 TONS

CARGO: 125,000 TONS

MANUFACTURER: MITSUI YARDS YOKOHAMA JAPAN MAY59

MOTHBALLED: PIROS FINLAND DEC68 FEB72

REOUTFITTED: VASIL’YEVSKIY YARDS LENINGRAD USSR

REGISTRY: REPUBLIC OF LIBERIA 26JUL73

OWNER: LEASEHOLD SHIPPING LTD HAVANA CUBA

Lowell tore the page from the printer, and the three men huddled scanning the data.

Arnsbarger whistled.

Scofield nodded in agreement.

Lowell just smiled.

All eyes were on the third line from the bottom. The connection to Boulton’s KIQ directive was strong. They went to the ranking ASW intelligence officer in K building immediately. Within an hour, copies of the acoustic signature report on the
Kira
, the KH-11 recon photographs, and a log listing the sightings of the Soviet submarine that provoked their investigation had been transmitted, via a secure communications link, to Boulton at Langley. In minutes, the best of the CIA’s analytical minds were focused on the
Kira.

* * * * * *