Commander Wan lifted his head, tugging against his IV line, attempting to get out of the bed.
“Must call,” he said. “Crew… destroy…”
Anderson and Cho each took a shoulder and guided him gently back to the pillow.
“Burned,” he said, thrashing his head back and forth. “Save crew!
Chief Cho gave an excited nod. “Wait, wait… I think I know this one… I always thought it was funny…
Commander Wan’s heart rate rose and he began to thrash harder.
“Captain…” Anderson said.
“Right.” Rapoza took his notes and walked toward the door. “I need to make a call. This is a little above my pay grade.”
“Sir,” Lieutenant Anderson whispered before he made it into the passageway. “Are we still heading toward the distress signal?”
Rapoza thought for a moment, and then shook his head.
“I think this guy
“Do you think there are people alive down there?” Anderson shivered again. “On a submarine?”
“Down there, yes,” Rapoza said. “Alive… I don’t know. But I think we’re going to find out.”
CIA case officers Leigh Murphy and Vlora Cafaro habitually kept an eye open for surveillance. Being aware of one’s surroundings was part and parcel of PERSEC — personal security — for spies, and for anyone else, for that matter.
They’d done no full-blown surveillance-detection run on the way to the bar. They had no need to arrive in the black — that is, without a tail. Everyone at the embassy, and likely everyone on Elbasanit Street, knew they went to the Illyrian Saloon at least three nights a week after dinner. Sure, it was predictable, but there were only so many good bars within walking distance of the embassy. The Illyrian was only four blocks away, on the other side of the Air Albania stadium. They were just two women going to unwind after work, not spies doing spooky spy shit.
And they were young and invincible.
Murphy saw the tall man in the gray fedora when she left the Serendipity restaurant on her way to meet Vlora at the bar, around the corner at the southern edge of the upscale Blloku district. Eating alone was a natural depressant, and there was nothing about the man to make him stand out on a dark street where most everyone wore some kind of hat against the cold spring evening.
He’d been out front, loitering by a newsstand on the corner. Vlora had seen him, too. Both women were trained observers, and both had noted he was tall, good-looking, and probably Chinese. Neither woman mentioned him to the other, and both promptly forgot about him when they entered the warm bosom of the bar.
Vlora hadn’t eaten, and ordered kebabs. She sat across the small wooden table in a dark corner of the bar and bobbed her head to the live band while she ate, her long black hair piled high on her head with a yellow pencil. Murphy drank her Korca Bjonde and listened to the music.
Wood-planked walls and parquet flooring dampened the chatter and clink of voices and bottles, but conversation was difficult to hear over the music, so both women were content to sit and take in the vibe of the place for the first hour, unwinding from a long, and in Murphy’s case, excruciating, day. It took a couple of drinks for them to become lubricated enough that they didn’t mind that they’d be stricken with bar-voice the next day from shouting over the din at each other all night just to carry on a conversation.
The band tonight was playing a damn good cover of “Welcome Home (Sanitarium)” by Metallica, and the guy on lead guitar looked the part of an ancient warrior with his massive, coal-black beard that reached the middle of his chest and a crested bronze helmet that should have been guarding the hot gates of Thermopylae. The waitress, who was always giving patrons some little tidbit of Albanian history, had pointed out when she brought Leigh Murphy’s fourth bottle of Korca that the Illyrian tribe of Albani had been mentioned in the works of Ptolemy. Albanians took great pride in their Illyrian warrior heritage, as did many Balkan peoples — and the walls of the saloon showed it. Murphy had been here so many times she knew all the trivia by heart. She liked the bellicose motif — bronze helmets, short swords, broad-chested men with spears. When she was growing up in Boston, her middle school PE teacher had called her pugnacious. She’d gone home and looked the word up on Encarta on her dad’s new home computer, and decided that, yes, she was indeed pugnacious, and happy to be so. Maybe that was why she liked Albania so much — and why she put up with an asshole chief of station like Fredrick Rask.
Vlora finished her kebabs and twirled her glass of plum rakia while she stared transfixed at the band.
