Red Frost

“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.”