Red Frost

“Maybe they’re embarrassed,” Alvarez suggested. “They just beached a one-hundred-million-dollar boat on foreign soil.”

“Where the hell is HazMat?” Shambliss said, looking at the sky to the southeast. There were no aircraft in sight.

“They’ve got more gear and people to deal with,” Starkey said. Based in Bremerton, the Navy’s regional HazMat unit transported an entire mobile field hospital, operating rooms, decontamination equipment, isolation chambers, mortuary and personnel to handle catastrophic medical emergencies. Washington’s only civilian HazMat unit was part of the state patrol and stationed in Tacoma, 150 miles away.

Munsinger’s excited voice crackled in their headsets. “I’m going to try the bridge hatch,” he announced.

A second later a puff of much thicker smoke erupted from the sail, like a wet blanket lifted from a ridgetop signal fire.

“The hatch wasn’t dogged from the inside,” the captain reported. “We’ve got clear access.”

“SEAL leader, this is ENR,” Starkey barked into his mike. “Do not enter subject vessel. Repeat, do not attempt to enter the vessel. Close the hatch and pull back, get out of the smoke if you possibly can. We’re on our way.”

To his crew, he said, “Break out the Nomex….”

With or without HazMat, they had a job to do.

Shambliss, Deal, Howe and Alvarez ripped into the ballistic nylon duffels and started yanking out gear on the double. Commander Starkey did the same. He kicked off his shoes and slipped stocking feet into the legs of his fire suit. He stepped into the attached lug boots, rammed his arms through the sleeves, then zipped up the front closure to his chin. After pulling the drawstring hood tight around his weather-seamed face and unshaved cheeks, he donned a super-high-intensity headlamp. He hung the full-face air mask from the Nomex suit’s left shoulder tab and, after checking the pressure gauge, strapped the attached miniair tank to his left hip. The suit’s heavy gauntlets, also fire-retardant Nomex, were securely Velcroed to the insides of the sleeves.

In their fire armor, the team finished transferring the backpack extinguishers, the cases of electronic gear and hand- and battery-operated power tools to the carts. The much more restrictive antiradiation suits were loaded on, too, in case things suddenly went even further south. With five strong men pushing, the heavily laden hand trucks moved easily along the runway. When they reached the end of the asphalt and the wheels bumped onto the loose gravel path that led to the end of the Hook, the going got difficult. Three SEALs shouldered their weapons and ran over to give them a hand. With four to a cart, they were able to half carry the trucks and gear.

“Looks like the smoke’s starting to get thinner,” Alvarez said as they neared the sub’s bow. His lean face bulged from the pressure of the tight-fitting Nomex hood. “Maybe the crew put it out or it burned itself out.”

When no one responded to the speculation, he took the hint and kept quiet. It was nervous talk. And pointless. Whatever was happening inside, they were going to be in the middle of it shortly.

When they were in the lee of the ship, the enormous raised black bow blocked out most of the sky. Crush damage to the forward keel was considerable. It was impossible to tell whether the interior hull had been damaged. As they stepped up beside the hull, the ground trembled underfoot.

Reuben Starkey had learned Russian at the military language school in Monterrey, California. He had visited the Severodvinsk shipyard as an official observer, and had guzzled vodka with Russian submariners, designers and builders. As the ENR’s expert in Russian technology, he knew what had to be on board, and what might be on board. His wife, Sandy, and their three kids were in Silverdale, one hundred miles away, on the far side of the Olympics and the Hood Canal. Whatever happened here, even if it was thermonuclear, they would be safe. He took comfort from that, and he was thankful he’d made the time to kiss them all and say goodbye.

The SEALs on deck deployed rope ladders, and Starkey and the others began to climb them. Commandos on the ground hooked up other dangling lines to the assortment of ENR gear, and the men above hoisted it up, hand over hand.

The deck angle seemed even steeper when Starkey was actually standing on it. SEALs had already rigged safety cables to the sail. The vibration was tremendous, as was the noise. Starkey found it disorienting to look downward aft and see the wash deck half-submerged.

He tore his gaze from the white water roaring behind. He proceeded with one hand on the safety line to the sail’s fixed ladder, then started up. The Coast Guard helicopter hovered above him at about one thousand feet. As he swung a leg over the sail’s rim, he looked back, across the air strip at the cop cars and fire trucks. Seven stories high, he could see the camera flashes going off along the line of backed-up civilian traffic. Rubbernecking idiots, he thought.

The smoke had definitely thinned out some by the time Starkey hopped down to the bridge deck. He wasn’t just sweating inside the fire suit. He was lubed, head to foot.

Munsinger’s round, tanned face was speckled with soot; it was on his teeth when he smiled and nodded a greeting. In a gloved hand he held his machine pistol pointed in the air, the ejector port resting against his meaty shoulder. Two other SEALs stood on the bridge like statues, aiming their stubby weapons at the closed hatch.

“Still no response?” Starkey asked into the mike so he could be heard over the ambient roar. The smoke had a definite electrical tang to it.

Munsinger shook his head and said, “Maybe they’re playing possum.”

One by one, in rapid order, the other ENR guys piled over the sail’s rim. Then Starkey ordered lines dropped to the wash deck so they could haul up their dry chemical fire extinguishers and other gear. With five of them pulling, it took no more than three minutes to raise the cylinders and gear bags to the bridge. When Starkey put on his air mask, the rest of his team followed suit. They turned on their compressed-air tanks, switched on the headlamps and pulled on gauntlets. That done, they helped one another shrug into the straps of the backpack fire extinguishers. They then armed one another’s extinguishers by pulling the safety pins and cranking down the levers that punctured the CO2 propellant cartridges.

“Open it,” Starkey told the SEALs.

When the hatch cover fell back to the deck, it released another puff of smoke, only much less black. With the hatch open, a warning klaxon could be heard belowdecks, its shrill pulsation barely audible over the engine and prop roar. The SEALs retreated a yard or so, still covering the entrance.

As the smoke continued to rise, Starkey lifted his mask, leaned over the hatch and shouted down in Russian through a cupped hand, “You are about to be boarded by the U.S. Navy. This is a rescue operation. Do not resist. We’re here to help you.”

If anybody heard him, they didn’t answer.

If anybody answered, he didn’t hear them.

As Starkey straightened, Howe passed him the hand-held NIFTI—navy infrared thermal imager—and power pack.

“We sweep before you go down,” Munsinger said as he stepped forward. “Make sure any hostiles are pacified. It’s procedure.”

“Blow it out your ass, Munsinger,” Starkey said. “The situation can’t wait for a sweep. We’ve got to put out the fire and shut down propulsion, ASAP.”

“SEALs will take the point, then.”

“Without canned air, you’d last maybe three minutes before you passed out. Stand clear, Captain. Do it now.”

Reuben Starkey pulled his air mask over his face and descended into the column of smoke.

CHAPTER FOUR

Highway 112, ten miles west of Port Angeles,

7:05 a.m. PDT

Clallam County Deputy Sheriff Hiram Turnbull hunkered down beside the roadside ditch. The drainage channel was overgrown, but the bright red soles of a pair of short rubber boots were visible sticking up out of the weeds. He gently pushed the grass aside with the tip of his baton. There were legs in the boots, in jeans. The rest of the body was out of sight, head down in the ditch.

A quarter mile north of Highway 112, a squadron of Navy fighter jets screamed over the strait, flying very low just off the coastline.

On any other day, finding a corpse in a ditch would have been a big deal.

Not on this day.

“Was it a hit-and-run?”

Turnbull rose from the crouch and turned to face the speaker. He towered over the dried-up little guy in the leather porkpie hat who had reported the body. The concerned senior citizen wore a white goatee and a red plaid shirt, and carried a leashed, plaid-caped Chihuahua in the crook of his arm.

“Can’t tell yet,” Turnbull answered. “Why don’t you stand back a bit, sir? Or better yet, take a seat in the back of the squad car while I do what I have to do.” The sheriff’s cruiser stood parked in the middle of the two-lane highway’s westbound side, its roof beacon flashing. Turnbull opened the rear door and gestured for the man to get in.

“Am I a suspect, Officer?”

“Sir, I don’t want you or your dog stepping on anything, or getting clipped from behind by a log truck. It’s for your own safety. When I’m done looking over the scene, we’ll talk.” After the old guy sat down and swung in his legs, he shut the door.

Turnbull hurriedly pulled on latex gloves, then, baton in hand, skidded down the side of the ditch fifteen feet from where the body lay. The drainage gulch was waist deep; he couldn’t see the bottom for all the weeds and blackberry brambles. When he hit bottom, icy cold, flowing water surged over his shoe tops.

“Shit!” he said, remembering the hip boots he kept stowed in his cruiser’s trunk, boots he’d forgotten to put on.

Sweeping aside the undergrowth with his baton so he could see where he was stepping, the deputy worked his way down the narrow channel. There was enough water running to wash away any light debris that had fallen in with the body. As he got close to the corpse, he smelled something nasty. Parting the weeds with the club, he stared down at the seat of the victim’s pants. The poor bastard had lost bowel control shortly before or at the moment of death. Turnbull tapped the befouled jeans’ back pockets with his baton. There was no wallet in either one. From the narrowness of the hips and width of the back, the subject appeared to be male. The head wasn’t visible and the arms were pinned under the torso.

There were no obvious injuries that he could see.

“Shit!” Turnbull said again. He was going to have to turn the body over. He sucked in a breath, held it, then bent deeper into the weeds. Because of the angle and the absence of rigor, the victim wasn’t easy to roll. For a second after Turnbull had done the deed, he couldn’t figure out what the hell he was looking at. Then his brain connected the dots. It wasn’t a silently screaming mouth. The weight of the head hanging down made the horrible red gash under the chin gape six inches wide. The dead man’s throat was cut from ear to ear all the way to the backbone.

Well, that just fucks me royal, Turnbull thought as he straightened.

The deputy sheriff kicked himself for not turning his car around when he heard the first sketchy report about a ship grounding on the Hook. Now it was too late. He couldn’t bag out on an obvious murder in order to get in on even more exciting duty back in Port Angeles. There was nobody coming to back him up out here, either. All available police, fire and ambulance units had converged on the Hook. He was going to have to sit parked on Highway 112 for who knew how long before a supervisor arrived to sign off on the scene and an ambulance hauled away the body.

Turnbull climbed out of the ditch. Tossing down his baton, he leaned over and grabbed the body by the ankles, then he muscled it partway up the slope, dropping the heels onto the road. He wasn’t worried about muddying a crime scene for Clallam County CSI.

There wasn’t any such animal.

After wiping his latex gloves and his baton on the grass, he opened the cruiser’s rear door. “Come on out, sir,” he said. “Have a look at this guy for me.”

With the bulgy-eyed Chihuahua nestled on his arm, the old man squinted down in horror at all the blood. It was caked up solid in the nostrils; it coated the staring eyeballs. “Sweet Jesus,” he murmured. “His head’s practically cut off.”

“Do you know him?”

“I think so. No, I know so. His last name’s Rudolph. He lives over near Freshwater Bay.”

That was a good four miles away. Rudolph was wearing rubber boots, not jogging shoes.

“What’s he doing out here on the highway?”

“How should I know?” the old guy said, crinkling up his nose as he caught a whiff of what Rudolph was sitting on. “Never seen him on foot. He drives one of those new four-door pickups. Japanese-made rig.”

“Color?”

“Gray or light blue.”

“Do you know his address?”

“I don’t know the street or the number, but I think I can find the house if we head over there.”

“Get back in the car, please. Watch your head.”

Technically, Turnbull wasn’t supposed to leave the crime scene unattended, but under the circumstances he knew no one was going swing by and check on him. The victim’s front pockets were turned out. His wallet, watch and ring were already gone. There was nothing to steal but the corpse itself. Turnbull took a yellow plastic tarp from the trunk and securely covered the body to keep crows from pecking apart the face. He festooned the ditch weeds with crime-scene tape, then set out some road flares.

Satisfied with the job, he got in the cruiser and with lights still flashing but siren off he headed west. The radio was jumping with reports from the Hook. Navy personnel were on the ground. A full platoon of SEALs, evidently. The old guy ride-along didn’t understand the chatter. It was all code numbers and jargon.

It sounded like a Steven Seagal movie.

And Turnbull was missing it.

He mashed down the accelerator and the big V-8 laid thirty feet of smoking rubber on the asphalt.

Deputy sheriffing in Clallam County was life in the slow lane. Peeling drunk drivers off telephone poles. Breaking up teenage parties on the beach. Domestic-violence complaints in shabby trailer parks. A case like this roadside body dump would normally have made Turnbull’s year, if not his decade. But in comparison to the sub grounding it was nothing. It was worse than nothing.

It was shit.

Following the old guy’s directions after they got to Freshwater Bay, Turnbull pulled into the driveway of a modest single-story house set back in a grove of fir trees. “Wait here,” he told his passenger as he shut off the engine.

The recycle bins on the concrete front porch were full of empty beer and liquor bottles. He knocked on the screen. He could hear music playing; it sounded like Shania Twain. After a minute or two a short, stout woman opened the door. She was Native American, either Makah tribe or Jamestown S’klallam. It was hard to guess her age. There were creases at the corners of her eyes, but her hair was still stone-black. He had some real bad news for her. This was the worst part of his job.

“Good morning, ma’am,” Turnbull said. “Is this the home of a Mr. Rudolph? Are you his wife?”

“No, I do housework for him once a week. He isn’t married anymore. His wife left him almost a year ago.”

“Is Mr. Rudolph here?”

“No. What is this about, Deputy?”

Turnbull ignored her question. “When did you last see him?”

“He wasn’t home when I got here this morning. I just let myself in. He might have gone fishing. His truck’s gone. I didn’t look in the garage for his boat trailer.”

“Do you know the make of truck?”

“Toyota Tundra. Four-wheel. Four-door. It’s gray. You still haven’t said what this is about.”

“There’s been a fatality out on the highway,” he told her. “There isn’t any ID but it could be your employer.”

“Oh, no,” the woman said, sagging back visibly shaken. “Was it an accident?”

“It doesn’t look like it.”

“A robbery, then? You said his ID was gone. There should have been ID in his truck. Registration, insurance and all that.”

“We need to identify the person who was killed, ma’am,” Turnbull said. “Would you mind coming with me and having a quick look?”

“I do mind,” the woman said, “but I owe it to Bill, if it’s him. He’s been real lonely since his wife left. He likes meeting people. He’s always picking up hitchhikers. I don’t know how many times I’ve warned him—this place ain’t like it used to be. Let me shut off my CD.”

While he waited for her, the A-6s roared overhead again.

“Those jets are driving me crazy,” the woman said. “They keep flying back and forth. What are they doing? Is it a Homeland Security exercise?”

“Something like that.”

Turnbull didn’t feel like explaining it to her. The way things were working out, the sub would be towed off the Hook before he got to see it. He wasn’t just missing the chance to be a 9/11-type hero, maybe get his picture on TV. He could already imagine his fellow deputies and the Port Angeles cops laughing their heads off at how he got stuck ten miles outside of town while they had ringside seats for the biggest crisis ever to hit the West Coast.

Ribbing he was going to have to swallow for the rest of his life.

CHAPTER FIVE

Stony Man Farm, Virginia,

10:10 a.m. EDT

For the second time in less than half an hour, Brognola said goodbye to the President of the United States. There had been further developments at the White House end of the secure direct line. Stunning developments. The big Fed hung up the phone and reentered the command center. The Coast Guard chopper’s live video feed showed the last of the fire-suited ENR team disappearing down the smoky hole. “What did I miss?” he asked. “Did they blow the hatch?”

“Didn’t have to,” Kurtzman said. “It wasn’t sealed from the inside.”

The head Fed scowled. “Did some Russians jump ship after it beached?”

“There’s no sign of that from satellite, Hal,” Kurtzman said. “No reports from land of exiting crew, either.”

“So you’re telling me they undogged the hatch from inside, like they were getting ready to abandon ship, like they knew it was going to crash, but then they didn’t bail after it ran aground?”

“That kind of impact could have incapacitated or killed the entire crew.”

“I’m sorry, Bear, I can’t buy that scenario,” Kissinger said. “The ship surfaced a couple miles offshore. All they had to do was power down and hoist a white flag. Which begs the question, did the crew ground the ship on purpose, and if they didn’t, why did they let it happen?”

“All we’ve got is a big fat pile of loose ends here,” Brognola told them. “We haven’t determined why the sub entered U.S. waters in the first place.”

“At this point, it doesn’t appear to have had hostile intent,” Delahunt said.

“I have something here I think you should all see,” Tokaido said. He tapped his keyboard and transferred the image on his workstation flat-panel LCD to one of the wallscreens. “I’ve gone over the spy-in-the-sky data second by second,” he said, “working backward from the instant the sub surfaced off Port Angeles. There’s no evidence that it surfaced before that. DOD satellites would have caught it for sure. They would have caught it optically. So, I’ve been looking for anomalies in UDAR laser surface refraction, temperature gradients, sonar signature, anything that would give us a directional vector seaward.”

“And?” Kurtzman said.

“Zip, vis-à-vis the sub. At a certain point using these analytical techniques, we hit old Heisenberg—the software filters start distorting the evidence, making its reliability suspect and therefore worthless. That’s the point I’ve reached.”

“So we’ve got nothing?” Kissinger said.

“Not quite,” Tokaido said, tapping the keys. “Check this out.”

A coastal map of the U.S. side of the strait appeared on the screen, overlayed by a faint green distance grid-work. The map scale was such that the Hook was visible in silhouette at the bottom left. Tokaido tapped on his keyboard again. “This is a real-time-sequence run-through,” he told them. “Estimated object speeds are in the bottom right screen.”

Three fine, parallel, brilliant orange-colored lines suddenly appeared well offshore. They grew longer and longer as they headed straight for land.

“Wakes,” Kissinger said.

“High speed, shallow running,” Brognola said. “Was it a torpedo launch?”

“They aren’t torpedoes,” Kurtzman said. “Or if they were, they didn’t detonate.”

“Jet Skis?” Delahunt said.

“Damn, they’re wave skimmers!” Kissinger exclaimed. “Superfast water assault vehicles. Like riding a Tomahawk missile bareback. They’ve got a Graphic User Interface, touch-screen controls. Our versions are two-man. SEALs use them.”

“And the Russian equivalent to our SEALs is Spetsnaz,” Wethers stated.

“Right,” Kissinger said.

“Where was the skimmer launch point relative to Port Angeles?” Brognola asked.

“About ten miles west,” Tokaido said.

“And landfall?”

“Freshwater Bay. It’s mixed rural and residential. Sparse population.”

“Any reports of a beach landing there?”

“Not yet, but things are very confused on the ground. At the moment 911 emergency lines are jammed.”

“How long before the sub’s grounding did the skimmers reach land?” Kurtzman asked.

“Looks like the wakes hit the beach twenty-three minutes prior,” Tokaido said.

In an explosion of pent-up frustration, Brognola demanded, “Are we under attack? If so, by whom? And by what? We have to come up with answers, people.”

The outburst was met by an uncomfortable silence.

Then Delahunt said, “We haven’t been able to ID the ship, Hal. The configuration isn’t part of the existing archive. It has elements of two previous designs, the Alfa and the Akula, and other elements that are unique to itself. Hunt and I have assembled a list of all the architects and engineers known to have worked on those programs. It spans almost forty years.”

“A penetration like this, however it was accomplished, requires new technology,” Kissinger said. “This is way beyond Akula.”

“How long have the Russians had it?”

“A long time,” Kissinger said. “My guess is it would take a decade or more to actually design and build a ship around it. The question is, how did they manage to hide an entirely new class of vessel from our inspectors? How many more are there? Where are they?”

“And why are they letting the cat out of the bag now?” Kurtzman added.

“DOD is going to have a field day tearing that sub apart,” Wethers said.

“Bear, do we know where it came from?” Brognola said.

“We know where it didn’t come from. It didn’t sail out of any of the previously identified naval shipyards or sub bases in the last twenty-four months. The construction site is equally a black hole.”

“Why aren’t we already at DEFCON 1?” Delahunt asked.

“The President has ordered our missiles retargeted and ready for launch,” Brognola replied, “but he is holding back the go-code. He has reason to believe that if this is an attack, it wasn’t coordinated by the Russian government or its armed forces.”

“Because they’re still denying it’s their ship?” Wethers said incredulously.

“No, Hunt, because the Russian government and military have just given the President complete access to their most sensitive internal-security material and to crack black-ops units already in the field,” Brognola said. “That’s what the last call from the White House was about. It appears that today’s events may be part of an isolated conspiracy on the fringes of the Russian military establishment. If that’s the case, the Russian politicians and generals want to root it out as badly as we do. As an act of good faith, they haven’t reprogrammed their launch codes or prepped their missiles. And they’ve invited us to participate in the ground action, on their home soil.”