Chapter 10
Undisclosed Location, somewhere off the coast of Russia in the Black Sea
Wednesday
8:00 p.m. Local Time
1:00 p.m. Eastern Time
It had been a very long two days. Michael was tired. Very tired. While, fortunately, the trek south across eastern Kazakhstan and then east across Russian to the Black Sea had been uneventful, unfortunately, it had been very long. Then unloading at night into the “yacht” that was waiting for them had been purely physical labor. He was tired. He’d slept very little in the past thirty hours or so. And to top that off, there had been a bit of weather and the yacht had been rocking terribly, keeping everyone on the edge of motion sickness. Everyone, even the ship’s crew, was fighting the urge to be sick—everyone except for Vladimir. Michael had been amazed how the Russian pilot appeared to be completely unfazed by the meters-high waves and the constantly shifting and rocking boat.
“Bah, this is nothing like landing on carriers in the Northern Pacific,” he had told him.
Michael watched the liquid pop and fizz as he poured a ginger ale from a can over crushed ice in a whiskey tumbler, sans the whiskey. The effervescence and spicy sweet smell tickled his nose and gave him hope. He hoped the drink would ease his stomach. He had put the fatigue out of his mind for the time being. He had been tired many times and had to work through it. This was no different. Working through being tired was part of the job—but the motion sickness! The motion sickness was a whole other thing entirely.
He looked across the room and out the window on the port side of the common area that he’d appropriated as a work space. He cautiously sipped the soft drink, taking some of the cold ice chips into his mouth too. The flavor, fizziness, and cold were instantly gratifying. The next-to-the-top deck area had light brown leather upholstered executive lounge–style furnishings with several four-to-six-person tables and chairs spread about. The room looked like a swanky cruise ship sports bar, with big-screen television monitors on the walls at various locations for optimal viewing. Who knew what Dorman’s motivation was in the décor? Michael had given up trying to understand exactly what went on in Marcus’s head. He just assumed it had been thought through for detailed and specific reasons. Everything Marcus did was a calculated move. He suspected that the man even calculated and scheduled bathroom trips for optimal bowel movements and the like.
The ship continued to rock. Michael’s stomach continued to sit uneasy.
It was raining hard; so hard that he could barely make out the white-capping waves thirty meters out. The weather was slowing them down some, but the captain had assured them that they were on schedule for their rendezvous. He hoped the captain was right and that the weather eased up soon. If the weather didn’t ease up, he thought as he looked forward at the helicopter pad on the yacht, that could really screw things up.
Vladimir’s snoring didn’t seem to bother Michael as much as the sounds of the rocking boat. Something in a cabinet behind the bar was loose and every time the ship rose to bow it would roll back. Every. Single. Goddamned. Time. Then as the ship fell to bow and rose to stern with the waves, whatever it was would roll forward. Again, every. Single. Goddamned. Time. It was annoying as hell and he’d given up trying to find whatever it was that was doing it.
He looked across at his friend stretched across the couch having zero trouble sleeping. Michael took another larger sip of the soft drink he’d poured and took in a few more pieces of the crushed ice. He still swallowed the liquid cautiously, testing how it felt on his stomach. It was actually soothing, so he threw caution to the wind and took a complete swig, truly hoping it didn’t come back up on him soon.
“That’s not bad,” he said softly. The proximity sensor on his eyeglasses triggered a brief second before he heard footsteps on the stairwell. Someone was coming up from the lower deck. He sat the drink down and turned. An icon in his view identified the glasses and wearer approaching and started shaking hands with the device.
“All six warheads are fully capable, Michael,” Xi Singang said through the plastic face shield of his radiation suit. The headgear was fogging over with each of Sing’s exhales. He pulled it over his head and tossed it onto an adjacent table, making more noise than Michael wanted to hear at the moment. Michael glanced at the Russian on the couch, but he still hadn’t budged.
Sing began to remove the lead-lined apron and gloves, dropping them to the table with another, but less noisy, thud. Sweat poured down his face and his dark hair was stuck to his pale forehead. He made a hand gesture at some virtual icon in front of him and then shifted his sunglasses up on his head. Michael made the mental note that the physicist looked like death warmed over. He suspected it was due to motion sickness and being up all night working with the warheads. He hoped that was all it was.
“Have a seat.” Michael motioned with his left hand. “You doing alright?”
“Is that ginger ale?” Sing asked.
“Plenty over there in the refrigerator.” Michael nodded the direction. “Help yourself.”
“Great. I’m hungry, but afraid to eat.” He rummaged through the cabinet behind the bar and then returned with a glass of ice and a can of the soft drink. Michael waited for the man to get settled.
“I know what you mean. I’ll be glad when we clear this weather. So, how’s it going down there?”
“Not bad.” Sing took several long drinks from the glass and then set it down, making a sigh of relief. “Ah, that hits the spot, as we Americans say.”
“I know, right?” he agreed, trying not to sound impatient. The physicist didn’t even look up from the glass and then pulled his glasses back down and appeared to be reading something. He finally looked up and swiped at a virtual icon.
“This was not as hard as I thought it would be. With the documents Vladimir provided, the help from Keenan, our connected friends, and council from my sister in Malan”—she was at the Northwest Nuclear Technology Institute there—“I’ve managed to reengineer how the detonation sequence works. Fortunately, I was trained to convert Russian to Mandarin in an earlier life.”
“Yes, that is fortunate.”
“The circuits we were provided will work adequately. This can be done quickly, I think. Maybe thirty-six hours is possible. I’d rather have seventy-two. And a couple of techs.” Sing paused for another drink. Michael assessed the man, briefly wondering how the nuclear engineer would hold up in a firefight. He had investigated him for Marcus a couple years back. He was a Chinese turncoat, a spy. And, from records he could find, he was also a fairly surprisingly lethal individual, trained in Shaolin-style kung fu and tai chi from very early childhood. He was also quite proficient in building and reassembling nuclear warheads.
“Techs are on the way. Damned weather is holding them up.” He motioned out the window at the rain. “They’re telling me four hours.”
“Four hours until they arrive?” Sing asked.
“Yes.”
“Oh, well, then I might take a nap.”
“Not a bad idea,” Michael agreed. “You are serious about the timeline here? What if the techs don’t make it for some reason?”
“Seventy-two hours, then. Maybe eighty. Eighty-eight as worst case.”
“That soon?” Michael typed the information into an email on a virtual screen in front of him and then he made a similar swiping gesture as Sing just had before. He was keeping actual notes to keep his information straight. This project had a lot of complex moving parts. There were three different countdown clocks in his glasses that continued to tick away.
“I believe so. Like I said, our friends have done most of the heavy work for us. When do we expect to move to our next phase?” Sing asked. “What about the reentry thrusters and heat-shield bodies?”
“Well, that was waiting on you. As soon as you can make the warheads viable and, more importantly, in our control, we’ll move immediately following to the next step of integration. Then, deployment.” Michael looked across the swanky decorations of the room to Vladimir, stretched out on the sofa like a frat boy who had landed there after a night of binge drinking and partying. The Russian turncoat was beginning to snore loud enough to become a distraction. Michael looked at Sing as the physicist poured the last bit from the soda can in front of him.
“Give me that.” Michael held out his hand. Sing slid the empty can across the table. He then crushed the can with his right hand, grinned devilishly as he took aim, and tossed the crushed can across the room at Vladimir’s forehead, hitting him dead center.
“What the hell?!” Vladimir rose up abruptly rubbing at the mark between his eyes, cursing something in Russian that Michael didn’t understand. Sing apparently did and started to chuckle.
“Good shot.” Sing laughed.
“Hey, V, seventy-two hours.”
“Bozhe moi…” Vladimir muttered while rubbing his eyes with his fists still. “All six warheads?”
“Sing?” Michael looked at the physicist.
“Yes. All six,” Sing replied.
“Well, then, Michael, we had best call our friend and start moving on to Phase II.” Vladimir straightened himself out and sat up straight. He took a long inhale and then stood, not even wavering in balance as the ship took a deep roll to the starboard side. “You want to call him, or shall I?”
“I’ll see if he’s available.”
“Then, I will have a smoke.” Vladimir pulled his cigarettes from a pocket somewhere that Michael hadn’t seen. He seemed to just manifest those damned things at will, he thought.
“Not in here, damn it.”
Vladimir just mumbled under his breath some Russian curse that Michael still couldn’t understand again and then he slowly lumbered toward the door leading to the helicopter deck, lighting the cigarette purposefully before being completely outside.
“What did he just say?” Michael asked Sing.
“Basically, that Americans are pussies.” Sing actually laughed out loud.
“That sounds about right.” Michael was still annoyed.
* * *
The avatars of three men—Marcus Dorman, Michael Tarin, and Vladimir Lytokov—all sat at a virtual conference room table. With the active glasses on and in the encrypted channel they might as well have been actually sitting together in a security vault. But in actuality, Dorman was thousands of miles away on the other side of the planet.
“My contact, Georgia, will be joining us any minute now,” Marcus Dorman’s avatar said. “In the meantime, please, gentlemen, what is the news?”
“Six viable. Seventy-two hours,” Vladimir said.
“We’re ready to move on Phase II,” Michael added. “Are the suits ready?”
Suddenly there was a window that appeared in the middle of the table saying that Georgia was waiting in the lobby. Marcus’s avatar tapped the ADMIT button and a fourth avatar appeared in a chair across the table.
“Greetings, gentlemen,” Georgia said with a wave of her avatar’s hand and a slight flicking of the dark locks out of her face with a shake of her virtual head.
“Ms. Stinson, please advise on the status of the suits and the flight prep,” Marcus requested.
“The launch-vehicle tests have all been completed and we can be ready for flight within five days. It looks as if the weather will be good for several days following. The suits are moving more slowly. There was an issue with a seal in the design and they have had to be remanufactured. We are at least three weeks away in that regard,” Georgia repeated.
“Shit,” Michael said under his breath. “That kills our timetable. The longer we sit on this the more likely we are to be found.”
“Can we do it without the suits?” Marcus asked.
“No way in hell,” Michael responded. “You can’t spend more than thirty seconds in the vacuum without being useless and that would be with lots of practice.”
“There is no way to speed up that timeline, Georgia? Money is not a problem if we need more.” Dorman held his virtual hands palms up. “You know that our window is very tight here.”
“Money would not matter right now. We have all we need. This is a matter of redesign, and remanufacturing, and retesting,” she replied. “The pandemics have slowed manufacturing and delivery of many long-lead-time items. In fact, we defaulted to building many of the parts ourselves due to this.”
“So, we’re screwed by the damned supply chain disruption!” Michael slammed a fist into the table. “Schwab is only there for three more weeks. There just isn’t time to wait.”
“We all know that, Michael. Please calm down.” Dorman gestured with his right hand as if to shush a child who was getting rowdy. Michael didn’t appear too happy about that. “Do we have any other options?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Dorman, none from my end,” Georgia said. “I found a couple of old Soviet-era Orlan-D suits for sale by collectors, but I’d be concerned of their viability.”
“Vlad, you’ve been uncharacteristically quiet, my friend.” Dorman turned to the Russian.
“Hahaha, ‘uncharacteristic,’ you say. Maybe. Perhaps at times I’m—how you say…boisterous?” Vladimir almost belly laughed. “Ms. Stinson, get the vehicle and my copilot ready. We will bring our own suits.”
“Vladimir? What the hell are you talking about?” Michael turned to him.
“Yes, my friend, do tell,” Dorman added.
“Michael and I will do what we do.” Vladimir smiled. “We’ll steal them.”
“Steal them?” Dorman exclaimed. “From where? You can’t waltz into NASA and steal them. Besides, their suits are custom jobs. And the security on top of that—”
“Dr. Schwab is wearing an unfitted Orlan cosmonaut suit, is he not?” Vladimir asked rhetorically.
“Um, yes, I suppose he is. So?” Georgia answered.
“Ah, Vladimir, you’re a freakin’ genius!” Michael replied.
“Of course, my friend. That is why you hired me.” The Russian’s avatar showed a very toothy smile.
“Would one of you two clue me in, please?” Dorman was growing impatient and didn’t like being on the outside of information.
“The space tourism company Schwab went through to go to space has them. They use them to train many customers, routinely preparing them for their future space tourism trips. They have many previous-generation Orlan space suits of different varieties on hand they purchased from NPP Zvezda located there in Star City. Schwab had seen to that when he bought the company. We’ll steal them from Schwab and he can file it on his insurance.” Vladimir rubbed at the ever-present stubble on his chin. “The hardest part will be getting in and out of Star City, but going to a private company makes this easier.”
“I’ll just buy them,” Dorman said, not sure about how much press stolen space suits would cause.
“How would we keep it quiet?” Michael asked. “We don’t want to tie you and Schwab together on this either.”
“Marcus, my friend, you might could pay off all the various accountants, clerks, security guards, and so on along the way, but sooner or later, probably sooner, some one of them would talk. That implies loose ends that we’d have to deal with. I don’t like loose ends. There are already too many engineers involved with the rockets and suits,” Vladimir replied.
“We have that contingency planned for.” Marcus grunted. “The ones we can’t buy, well…”
“Yes, yes. Our problem. And we’ll deal with it,” Vladimir said. “We don’t tell Schwab either.”
“But these are just suits.” Marcus shrugged. “I could buy them.”
“No, buying them is no good. A year ago, sure, you could have bought them. With your recent advertisements about not needing space suits to fly in space, now wouldn’t fit. And, after what is about to happen, no. It would be too public. It would implicate you. We need you free to do business. We take them in a way that will never be known they were taken.”
“And that is?” Marcus asked.
“Perhaps they have an accident, yes?” Vladimir replied.
“Yes!” Michael agreed. “With lots of fire and maybe even an explosion.”
“An accident? What type of accident?”
“One that burns the place to the ground and leaves no evidence of what is missing?” Michael restated more simply. “Schwab will be pissed.”
“My thoughts exactly, comrade.” Vladimir’s avatar turned to Marcus sternly. “Get us a fast chopper here on the ship immediately.”