Phantom ah-7 Read online

  Moments later, the sermon ended, and the couple were pronounced man and wife. The pianist and the choir rose to the occasion, the music swelling and filling the tiny little church with magic. The wedding party began its procession back down the aisle toward her, a beaming groom and a stunningly beautiful bride, a smiling Lord Hawke just behind them, and, next, she was relieved to see little Alexei holding hands with the CIA chap, Brock. They were nearing the exit. She knew Brock was armed and took solace in that.

  As the little boy passed by, the Russian thug turned and stared at the child, following him with his eyes until he disappeared. She looked around, a scrim of red desperation creeping around the margins of her consciousness. She had to do something, anything.

  As usual there was a complete human logjam at the church entrance as everyone tried to make their way outside and see the departure of the groom and his new bride. Nell stayed put, craned around in her seat, straining to keep sight of Alexei, but, being small, he was soon swallowed up by the crowd pouring out of the church.

  She stood up, desperate to get to Hawke, warn him about the assassin, find the child, get him into the bulletproofed van. It was hopeless. There was no way she could push through that crowd. She looked toward the front of the church. Surely there was a side door to the outside somewhere up there?

  The center aisle was jammed, a solid wall of people waiting, chatting amiably and patient. So, too, were the aisles on either side of the church. Damn it! Just to her left she could see that there were scattered empty seats appearing now in every row almost all the way to the front.

  Without a second thought, she grabbed her purse, slung it over her shoulder, crouched atop her pew seat, and, leaping forward like a WWI doughboy going up over the tops of the trenches, she began scrambling across the tops of each pew, sure-footed on the tops of the seat backs, moving steadily and with great athleticism toward the front. She could see people staring openmouthed at her in disbelief, but they meant nothing. This wedding was over. She quick-peeked back at the rear of the church.

  The Blue Scorpion was gone.

  Eleven

  Nell Spooner dashed out the left side door of the rectory and into the blinding tropical sunlight. She took a moment to get her bearings, then raced toward the front of the church, around the corner, and out into the rapidly emptying churchyard. A lot of cars had already left, along with all the media, but a considerable number of people were still standing around being sociable.

  Her heart racing, she scanned the yard.

  Clearly the bride and groom had departed and there was a long line of cars, horns honking, snaking through the tall grass toward the highway in their wake. The black van she and Alexei had used to follow his father and the groom was still under the tree where she’d parked it. If only he were safely inside it.

  She stood, composed herself, and made a more deliberate scan of the departing crowd. The big man in black was nowhere in sight. Where was Lord Hawke? She started moving forward, pushing people aside as she ran toward the oak tree, not knowing why but thinking that would be where he would wait for her to find him when she finally emerged from the church.

  Yes! Hawke was there! He was seated on the same bench, talking quietly with the CIA man, Brock, who’d last been seen leaving the church holding the child’s hand. But no Alexei. Where was he? Surely they wouldn’t have just let him The man in black?

  Yes. A large figure behind the wheel of a dark sedan parked about two hundred yards from the oak tree. It was one of the few remaining cars and at least three hundred yards away. But the glare of sunlight off the windshield was so strong she couldn’t make positive identification. Couldn’t see the face at all. Just a hazy silhouette. But every instinct said run for the car. Now.

  She angled for it, circling slightly so she’d approach it from the side and rear. She got within fifty feet of the driver’s-side door and saw that it was him. He had his back to her, elbows up, staring through binoculars at Hawke and Brock.

  She crept up silently in the thick grass.

  He bent down, grabbing something from the floor, pulling it up by the stock.

  A rifle with a large telescopic sight.

  It was then that she caught a glimpse of some movement in the tree beyond, and her heart caught in her throat. Just a small dangling foot, swinging to and fro just above Hawke’s head.

  Alexei was sitting astride the low-hanging branch just above his father’s head. Hawke kept looking up, his arms outstretched, ready to catch the boy should he jump or fall.

  The man jammed the stock of the rifle into his shoulder and welded the gun to his cheek. He put his eye to the scope, raising the barrel upward and into the tree.

  He was going to shoot Alexei!

  “Drop the gun NOW!” she screamed. “Do it now or you’re dead!”

  The man laughed at the sound of her voice. “Go away, little nanny. I’ve got business to do here.”

  She racked the slide on the SIG P226 pistol she’d pulled from her purse as she ran toward the car.

  He froze at the metallic sound, then craned his face around.

  “Fuck. A gun, she says to me. Wot is a nice girl like you doing with a gun?”

  “Drop the rifle, asshole. Now.”

  “Sure, sure, lady, please, is no problem.” He pulled the gun back inside and let it fall to his feet. Then he turned to face her, the smile still on his face. His right hand moving inside his suit jacket as he said, “Just relax, okay. I’m just getting my cigarettes.”

  “Sure you are,” Nell Spooner replied and put a ragged black hole in the middle of his forehead. He pitched forward, dead.

  N ell Spooner expelled a deep sigh of relief, resting her head for a moment against the roof of the car. Then she looked up and headed toward the tree where Hawke and Harry Brock still sat, the little boy happily overhead on his branch, swinging his legs back and forth.

  “Spooner!” he cried out. “Look at me!”

  At the sight of the pistol still hanging loosely at her side, Hawke jumped up and raced to her, putting his hands on her trembling shoulders. She was clearly in a slight state of shock.

  “My God, what happened?” he asked.

  “Man in that dark blue car. Had a rifle. About to take a shot. I shot him first.”

  “A shot? Me?”

  “No, sir. He was aiming at Alexei on the branch above you. You may well have been next, I imagine.”

  Hawke took a deep breath, looked back over at his son, now in the arms of Harry Brock, a gun in one hand, checking the perimeter. Hawke said something unprintable and then gently squeezed her shoulders. “Thank you, Sergeant Spooner, thank you for saving my boy’s life. I had no idea it would come to this so quickly.”

  “The commissioner of Scotland Yard did the right thing in loaning me out, sir. Your fears were well founded. I’ll be more alert now. I won’t let anyone ever get this close again.”

  Hawke looked around. “There may be more of them. Probably not, but I suggest we all get into the van as quickly as possible and get out of here.”

  Hawke added, “Harry, please call 911 and get an ambulance out here. Also the Collier County Police and the FBI.”

  “You’ll find a tattoo on the back of his neck, Agent Brock,” Spooner said. “The Blue Scorpion. It’s a highly organized group of retired KGB officers. All highly trained killers available for a fee. I was involved in a case in London when one of them showed up dead.”

  “Thanks, Nellie,” Brock said, speed-dialing a number on his mobile and flashing his cunning grin. “You sure don’t look like a cop, by the way. You look like Scarlett Johansson. Anybody ever tell you that?”

  Harry, getting no reply, shrugged his shoulders and made his phone calls.

  Sergeant Nell Spooner, who was a member of London’s Trident Operational Command Unit of the Metropolitan Police Service, a team designed to investigate and prevent any gun-related activity within London’s communities, put her service pistol back into her purse. She could fee
l her heart rate slowing for the first time since she’d become aware of the man in the next pew.

  She’d been granted a leave of absence by the Met to take a temporary position. She had been assigned to Six counterterrorist operative Lord Alexander Hawke, specifically to protect his child. Hawke’s child was a known target of Russian agents. As the grandson of Russia’s only modern Tsar, now dead, he posed a political threat to the Kremlin.

  Spooner had walked away from the group at the oak tree and wandered to the edge of a small pond. She needed a little time to collect herself. Her hands were trembling violently, and she stuffed them into the pockets of her rose-colored linen jacket.

  She had never fired a gun in anger before in her life.

  Now she had. It was not a pleasant experience, taking a human life.

  But her young charge, a boy whom she’d come to feel an almost motherly affection for in these few short months, was still alive because of her actions.

  “Spooner!” Alexei said. “Look what I found!”

  He opened his hand.

  It was a tiny blue speck, a fragment of a robin’s egg, a relic of spring.

  Twelve

  At Sea, Aboard K-550 ALEKSANDR NEVSKIY

  “There is a problem, sir,” the Russian submarine’s starpom, or executive officer, said, approaching and saluting his captain. The man, Aleksandr Ivanov-Pavlov, was ramrod straight, inside and out, and it had served him well over the years.

  “Problem, Aleksandr? No! Aboard this vessel? Tell me it’s not true.”

  The Central Command Post (CCP) men and officers nearby smiled at their skipper’s infamous sarcasm. It was one of the reasons they not only respected him, but liked him.

  The captain smiled his famously enigmatic smile, his teeth white in his full salt-and-pepper beard. A career submariner, the oldest-serving skipper in the Russian Navy, the barrel-chested, white-haired Sergei Petrovich Lyachin, had recently been honored with command of the Nevskiy, Russia’s newest nuclear ballistic submarine. It had been a decidedly mixed blessing.

  The new boat had cost a billion dollars. She could dive to a depth of six hundred meters and run at a maximum speed of thirty knots on the surface, twenty-eight knots submerged, all official numbers only, of course. Her real performance parameters were highly classified. In addition to powerful antiship torpedoes, her armament included sixteen Bulava SLBM ballistic missiles and six SS-N-15 cruise missiles. Admiral Vladimir Kuroyedov, commander in chief of the Russian Navy, had described the Nevskiy as the most effective multipurpose submarine in the world.

  Effective, perhaps, but plagued with a cascade of ever more difficult problems and now, according to the XO, it seemed she had yet another.

  Lyachin, an old Cold Warrior, had formerly served in the Northern Fleet for many years. Respected, liked, and not a little feared by his crew, the stern-faced sub driver was commonly referred to as Barya, father.

  Lyachin had recently endured weeks of dry-dock repairs to his malfunctioning ballast controls and dive planes. All of this courtesy of Hugo Chavez’s navy technicians, in a steamy, mosquito-ridden port of La Guaira on the verdant coast of Venezuela. The insects were starting to get on his nerves. Standing on the sub’s conning tower early one evening, he had said to his chief engineer, “Hell, Arkady, you kill one Venezuelan mosquito and ten more come to its funeral.”

  La Guaira was the port city for Caracas, Venezuela. Nevskiy had been in dry dock there while all necessary repairs were effected and the boat’s zampolit, the KGB political officer, attended a series of secret meetings with President Hugo Chavez and his advisers. The Russians and the Venezuelans were planning joint naval exercises for the following spring. Stick a little needle in the American navy’s arrogant balloon, right in their own backyard.

  A fter a miserable three weeks, Captain Lyachin was finally once again where he felt most comfortable, under the water and on patrol in the Caribbean Sea. His mission was to conduct intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions against the Americans. He had also resumed playing cat and mouse with an American Virginia class sub, SSN 775, the USS Texas. He knew the man in command of the Texas, a formidable opponent named Captain Flagg Youngblood. They’d never met, of course, but each man had long enjoyed their underwater confrontations in the oceans of the world.

  Lyachin was privately struggling with a grave secret. It was something so outlandish that he had not even confided his suspicions to his XO. He was beginning to suspect that his sub’s multiplying problems were not simply human error, bad luck, or bad engineering. He thought perhaps his boat was the target of invasive electronic warfare, directed from the nearby American sub Texas. Ever since the infamous Stuxnet takedown of the Iranian centrifuge, he’d worried that one day warships might suffer a similar fate.

  Intel he’d seen indicated three countries were leading in this new techno arms race: Israel, China, and the United States.

  He had done considerable research on the subject for the fleet commander, who then ordered him to host seminars on offensive and defensive electronic warfare at the Naval War College whenever he was land-bound.

  Stuxnet, he told his classes, was a fearsome cyberweapon, first discovered by a security firm based in Belarus. It is like a worm that invades and then spies on and reprograms high-value infrastructures like Iran’s nuclear facilities in Natanz. It is also capable of hiding its pathways and its changes. Many in the military considered it so powerful as to lead to the start of a new worldwide arms race. If you can take down a nuclear power plant, they reasoned, why not a nuclear submarine?

  Lyachin was now beginning to believe that the U.S. Navy had somehow acquired the ability to use just such cyberweapons to influence events aboard his vessel by somehow subverting or overcoming his built-in electronic firewalls.

  Nevskiy was nearly six hundred feet long and a fourth-generation Borei class. At thirty-two thousand tons submerged, she was roughly the size of a World War II aircraft carrier. She was, according to the Russian Admiralty, state of the art. But to Lyachin’s chagrin, she had been besieged with myriad problems in the past months. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin had proudly pronounced her seaworthy prior to the launching at Vladivostok and she’d headed for the Caribbean.

  And that’s when the real trouble started.

  The Nevskiy ’s XO, Lieutenant Aleksandr Ivanov-Pavlov, smiled back at his captain’s wry response to this most recent dose of bad news. He understood the old man’s sense of humor. Or he pretended to, at any rate. Son of a powerful Kremlin insider, young Aleksandr had been learning the political ropes since childhood. His father had been murdered in a KGB power struggle that had left him bereft of two uncles as well.

  It was his close relationship with the Nevskiy ’s captain that engendered free-flowing communications between the boat’s skipper and its 118-man crew, comprising 86 commissioned and warrant officers and 32 noncommissioned officers and sailors.

  Captain Lyachin was seated in his raised black leather command chair in the center of the CCP. His command post was set just forward on the conning tower and aft of the torpedoes, the second compartment in the boat. The CCP, an oval-shaped room, was fairly spacious, but with thirty or so submariners crowded inside, it felt and smelled like a traditional Russian banya, or steam bath. The captain, frustrated in his efforts to quit smoking, lit another cigarette, his tenth.

  To Lyachin’s right sat his helmsman, gripping a wheel the size of a dinner plate that controlled the boat’s aft stabilizers. Next to him was the planesman, who controlled the sub’s hydroplanes. His responsibility was to “steer” the boat up and down while submerged, or remain at any given depth the captain had ordered.

  Arrayed in front of these men was a bank of computer screens showing depth, speed, and course, among other vitally important information. Next to them, the sonar officer, Lieutenant Petrov, monitored his screen, which displayed a flickering cascade of sound. In addition, the compartment had consoles for radar, weapons, electronic countermeasures, and d
amage control, all manned by specialists.

  Petrov suddenly got a hit, but the signal was buried in surface clutter and needed to be washed. He leaned forward and thumbed the switch initiating the ALS, algorithmic processing systems. The ALS would analyze and filter, eliminating any signals not matching his desired target. He kept his eyes focused on the screen, waiting for the results.

  Lyachin sat back in his heavily padded chair and expelled a sigh of frustration. “Tell me, Aleksandr, what fresh hell do we have on our hands now?”

  “Frankly, it doesn’t make any sense,” Ivanov-Pavlov, the XO said. “We are getting repeated power spikes from the reactor. On a regular basis. But we see no indication of anything amiss on any of the monitoring systems, nor cooling, nor do the surges affect normal functions and operations.”

  “Radiation leaks?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Makes no sense,” Lyachin said, scratching his chin. His thoughts turned to his greatest fear, the loss of his boat, not with a bang, but with a bug.

  “No, sir.”

  “Electronic security, Alexei? Has the engineer been able to detect any evidence of a viral infection in any system?”

  The XO thought before he responded. “Unless some traitor among the crew boarded this vessel at La Guaira with a dirty mobile phone up his ass, this boat is still clean.”

  “Inform the engineer that I want another sweep. Stem to stern,” Lyachin said.

  “Yes, Captain, right away.”

  “Fucking hell,” the captain said under his breath. He had a very bad feeling about this. Too many inexplicable things had been going wrong aboard the Nevskiy. He was beginning to believe his own theorem that it wasn’t just bad luck or sloppy engineers. Perhaps, he thought, it was the Texas. Perhaps the American sub he’d been chasing was somehow capable of infiltrating There was a brief burst of metallic static from the speaker above the skipper. “Conn, Sonar, new contact bearing zero-nine-five. Designate contact number Alpha 7–3.”