hard on the phone, cracking the plastic casing apart. He did it again. And again. And again. Then he kicked the shattered remnants through an open runoff drain and into the water.
He still had one more.
He looked up.
Frenchy was there. His face was broad and his skin seemed thick, almost like a rubber mask. His hair was jet black and swooped backward. He was clean-shaven to blend in better with Russian society. Normally, his people had thick beards for Allah.
Frenchy wore a dark, loose-fitting windbreaker jacket over his big body. The night was a little warm for that. His hard eyes stared at Luke.
“Yes?” Frenchy said.
Luke nodded. “Yes.”
Frenchy took a deep drag of his cigarette. He slowly exhaled the smoke. Then he smiled and nodded.
“I am happy.”
“Fast,” Ed Newsam said. He was speaking to no one. This was good because no one would ever be able to hear him.
“Very, very fast.”
He stood in the cockpit, his feet bare, hands on the wheel of a boat shaped like a giant wedge. The boat was long and narrow, with a very long bow. At the stern, there were five big 275-horsepower engines. The boat itself only had two seats.
In America, they would call it a Cigarette boat, or a Go Fast. In the days before satellite tracking, drug traffickers in South Florida used these things to outrun the Coast Guard. This boat wasn’t packed with cocaine, though.
In the nose of the boat, way up at the bow, was a tiny compartment. That compartment was packed with a small amount of TNT.
Ed ran hard in the night, lights off, bouncing over the swells. His engines roared, a huge sound. The wind howled around him. In front of him, maybe three clicks ahead, was the mostly dark coastline of Georgia. Behind him were the bright lights of Sochi. Sochi was enjoying its post-communist, big money heyday. Expensive boats like this were easy to come by.
In fact, behind Ed and running just as hard, was another speedboat.
That boat was driven by a nutty Georgian daredevil named Garry. Ed couldn’t see Garry back there. Garry’s lights were also off. And he couldn’t hear Garry. There was too much noise to hear anything. But he knew Garry was back there. He had to be.
Ed’s life depended on it.
Garry, along with Stone’s crazy Chechen driver, Frenchy, had been provided by Big Daddy Bill Cronin. Big Daddy was CIA, and they weren’t supposed to involve the CIA in this, but they did it anyway. The danger was that the CIA had sprung a leak somewhere.
“Bill Cronin’s paychecks come from CIA,” Don Morris had said. “But the man is a law and a world unto himself. If he gives us operators, they won’t be talkers. There will be no security breaches. I can assure you of that.”
So Garry was back there with Ed’s and Luke’s and everybody’s lives in his hands.
To Ed’s left, the east, there was a long stone seawall, jutting far out into the water. It protected a small port area. He ran the length of it, coming at it on a diagonal. He slowed, just a touch, and made the sharp turn in toward land.
He glanced at the sky, scanning for aircraft.
Nothing. All clear.
That seawall was topped with concrete docks. It ran parallel to land, a hundred meters from the shore. The seawall and the shore formed a narrow pass a thousand meters long. At the far end was the cargo ship, the Yuri Andropov II.
Ed’s job was to punch a hole in it. A hole, maybe a small fire. Enough to cause a distraction, a misdirection. Enough to let Stone and Frenchy sneak onto the boat, release the prisoners, and maybe even scuttle that sub.
The Russians knew the Americans were watching them from the skies. So these docks looked like they had minimal activity. Just an old cargo ship, not too much security, nothing to see here.
But Ed knew there were gun men on those docks. Driving this boat up that pass was going to be running a gauntlet.
He reached the mouth of the pass. He took a deep breath.
“Garry, you better be there.”
He opened the throttle all the way. The engines screamed.
The boat burst forward, even faster than before.
Land raced by on either side of him, the seawall on his left, the shore on his right. But he kept his eyes on the prize. He could see it now, the Andropov, looming far ahead. It was docked perpendicular to him, showing him its whole length.
“Beautiful.”
To his left, men ran along the docks. He saw them as tiny stick figures, moving slow, much too slow.
He ducked way down, already knowing what they would do. An instant later, automatic gunfire ripped up the side of the boat. He felt it more than heard it or saw it. It was altering his course, the thudding impacts of the high-caliber rounds.
The windshield shattered.
The Andropov was coming closer, growing larger.
There was an iron bar on the floor. Ed picked it up. One end had a gripping tool, almost like a hand. He placed this onto the steering wheel. He wedged the far end into a metal slot welded onto the floor.
Old school, but it would do the trick. It would keep the boat going more or less straight ahead.
He glanced up. The Andropov was big now.
It seemed like it was RIGHT THERE.
“Uh-oh, time to go.”
He darted to the right side of the boat, away from the gunfire. He squatted, all the power in his legs, and leapt to his right, over the gunwale. He curled into a ball, like a child doing a cannonball at the local swimming pool.
The boat zoomed away while he was in the air.
Dimly, he had the sensation of falling, falling through the sky. A long time passed. He crashed into the water and for a moment the blackness was all around him. He moved through it like a torpedo, no feeling except the feeling of dark speed.
At first there was a loud roar, and then the muffled sounds of the deep.
For a moment, he thought about floating in the womb, bathed now in warm light. It occurred to him that the beacon light on his life vest had activated. The vest yanked him to the surface, back to the roar and the spray of the boat’s wake.
He gasped for air and dove again. For another few seconds, those gunners were going to be looking for him.
After that…
He bobbed to the surface again. Everything was dark—the night, the water, everything.
For a moment he could not see the boat. Then he spotted it. It was moving fast, dwindling, dwindling. It was tiny in the looming shadow of the freighter.
Ed dove below the surface again, to the safety of the darkness.
Luke leaned on the Lada, pretending to smoke a cigarette. Everybody around here smoked, so he figured it might help his disguise. He had tried it a couple of times before in high school but never caught the hang of it. He liked football better.
He took a drag, held it in his mouth for a few seconds, then let the whole mess blow out again. It tasted like smog. He nearly laughed at himself. If anyone was watching, they would see how ridiculous he looked.
He pitched the lit cigarette into the gutter.
The Lada was parked fifty yards from the security gate of the small port. Frenchy was over there at the gate, asking the guards for directions. There was a small knot of men, silhouettes in the fog, shadows thrown by the yellow lamps, talking and laughing through the gate. Frenchy was kind of a funny guy. He could crack anybody up.
Frenchy was smoking effortlessly. Smoke one down to the nub, pitch it, and light another one. That was Frenchy.
Suddenly