The Kremlin's Candidate: A Novel by Jason Matthews (12)

Pitch and Roll

Director Alexander Larson owned a Georgian row house on P Street NW in DC, but on the weekends he regularly escaped to his late father-in-law’s five-bedroom ranch house near Edgewater, Maryland, on the banks of Pooles Gut, a narrow tidal creek that emptied into the South River below Annapolis, one of the hundreds of tributaries that made up the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Down the sweeping lawn from the house, there was a fixed pier alongside a paved boat-launching ramp. An extended garage behind the house contained two small boats on trailers: one a twenty-five-foot black rigid inflatable boat (RIB) with a center steering console, a Decca radar mounted on an aluminum frame aft, and two 115 hp Mercury outboards, beasts that could push the RIB along at forty knots. The RIB was used by the DCIA’s protective detail and had a waterproof locker just forward of the steering console in which were stored two .223-caliber Colt M4A1 carbines.

The second vessel at the back of the garage was Larson’s pride and joy: a seventeen-foot Lyman Runabout built in 1961, with a restored lapstrake hull, graceful flared bow, and mahogany spray rails and brightwork. The distinctive angled windshield and the jaunty Lyman pennant on the bow marked the Runabout as a classic, but not as much as the 1955 forest-green, teardrop Johnson Seahorse 25 hp outboard, an antique refurbished to flawless working order, and perfect for running the smooth-riding hull ahead of frequent Chesapeake squalls at twenty knots, or slow trolling for striped bass at nine knots. Two Shimano fishing rods were in beckets along the gunwales with expensive Tekota trolling reels. In a seat locker under the aft banquette were two tackle boxes with lures, jigs, and spoons.

Alex Larson was not a fanatical fisherman, but he enjoyed solitary time out on his boat, and loved preparing striped bass à la Fiorentina, the way he had first tasted it in Rome. His wife did not enjoy going out into the middle of the bay, which could get quite rough and make the round-bottomed Lyman pitch and roll like a floating ninepin, especially in a beam sea at lazy trolling speed. Simon Benford had once reluctantly agreed to go out with Alex, but the plunging and yawing made him green, and he detested handling live bait, so he vowed the next time to stay ashore and drink Larson’s scotch while his friend caught dinner.

At 0600 hours on a crisp fall day, the cloudless eastern sky was going pink as the two agents of DCIA’s protective detail backed both trailers into the green water of the creek. They knew Larson would be walking down from the house in fifteen minutes with a thermos of coffee, a flask of bourbon (which they knew he hid from his security guys), and a roast-beef sandwich wrapped in foil made by his housekeeper. The agents today were Bennett and Scott, each with five years’ experience on the detail and more than ten years’ time in Special Forces. They had examined the undersides of both boats for limpet mines on the keel, checked the lockers on the Lyman, and started the Johnson outboard to let it warm up. Before the Old Man came down from the house, they snapped 30-round magazines into their M4s, charged and snapped the bolts closed, safed the weapons, and put them back into the footlocker. They both additionally carried 17-round, 9mm Glock 17s in Frontier Gunleather CC1 holsters under their sweaters and foul-weather jackets—they knew from experience that once out on the bay, it could get cold and wet in a hurry. They weren’t experienced watermen, but they knew the basics.

Once afloat, Bennett and Scott spun the RIB on a dime, and skimmed ahead along the creek to make sure it was clear, the Lyman sedately following, raising hardly a wake in the early light. No one noticed the man in the pickup truck parked on the side of Waterview Drive watching through the trees as the Lyman chugged down Pooles Gut and out onto the South River.

The RIB was infinitely faster than the Lyman, even when the antique was running with the outboard full-out, so Bennett and Scott pushed the throttles flat and bounced ahead to check for traffic downriver as it opened up onto the vast Chesapeake. One of them would always keep the Lyman in sight, and periodically check the radar display set at ten miles range to keep an eye out for the heavies: the tankers and container ships plowing up the channel to Baltimore. They would then pound back to the DCIA, take station astern in a violent turn that sent spray flying in the early sunlight, and throttle back in his wake, smelling the boss’s pipe smoke even two hundred feet astern. The process of darting ahead, then racing back was repeated as required, especially if an unknown boat—runabout, cabin cruiser, or tacking day sailer—looked as if it would pass close by.

There was only one rule: the RIB had to keep off at least one hundred yards when the DCIA began fishing. The noise of the burbling Merc outboards would scare off finicky stripers in the Gulf Stream for Christ sake, not to mention around Thomas Point Shoal at the mouth of the river, or Bloody Point Bar, five miles across the bay, off the tip of Kent Island on the Eastern Shore. These two spots were Larson’s favorites—productive and not too far from home. He tied on a Slug-Go, a five-inch bone-white plastic worm with a flattened tail that made the lure undulate irresistibly to predatory stripers. He tried the rock ledge around the historic Thomas Point lighthouse: the frivolous hexagonal house on stilts with green shutters and six gables, with the Fresnel light in a pagoda-roofed cupola, like a cherry on a sundae.

No one was home around the ledge; stripers sometimes go deep and suspend, feeding on deep baitfish schools, not unlike some members of Congress, Alex thought, retrieving his lure, setting down his rod on the aft deck, and clambering over the front-seat stanchion to sit behind the wheel, a little tricky with the Lyman’s tipsiness. He cranked up the Johnson with the electric starter, eased the throttle ahead, and waved to the guys in the RIB who, bored stiff and soporific from the rocking of the waves, actually didn’t see the Lyman settle down in the water and swing east to cut across the bay to Kent Island, until the DCIA gave them two shorts and a long on the horn. Embarrassed, they escorted the Lyman across the ship channel, watching for traffic. Larson could estimate where Bloody Point Bar was by taking bearings between the breakwater of the Kent Island Marina and the collapsed seawall off Bloody Point beach. Alex kept his eye on his bearings and about a mile offshore, killed the outboard, stood in the aft deck, balancing easily against the roll, and tried a few casts with a silver spoon. Bennett and Scott in the RIB took station 150 yards upwind of the little Lyman so they’d be drifting down to it instead of away from it.

A typical grimy oyster boat, a Chesapeake deadrise—describing the hard chine or angle of the bottom built for stability—with a plumb bow, forward doghouse, and long open stern, was working closer to the beach, dragging for oysters. The single oysterman was reeling in the sharp-toothed dredge that dislodged the oysters from their beds and scooped them into a steel mesh basket by the bushelfuls. Bennett and Scott didn’t know enough to notice that the oysterman was not emptying his dredge, but rather was just casting up and down the beach without result, about half a mile from the Lyman. Alex Larson didn’t notice either, because he had already hooked a thirty-inch striper that probably went fifteen pounds, and was intent on bringing in another one. Something else. None of them noticed what an instinctive sailor would have marked in the sky by late morning: the weather.

Heated by the sun, moisture from the Gulf of Mexico was rising over the bay into the atmosphere, where it collided with a stream of cold air, eventually spreading out to create the anvil top of a storm cell. As water built up in the thunderhead, it began to rain, and the temperature variants created wind shears of sixty knots, accompanied by thunder and lightning. Neither Alex Larson nor the agents in the RIB recognized that the thunderhead was building into a classic squall. The rest of the sky was blue, and the surface of the bay was riffled by a mild chop. The oyster boat incongruously kept up its nondredging, marginally closer to the Lyman. Then it happened. From the surface of the bay, the black lowering clouds with slanting rain bands were preceded by a sick gust of hot air, followed by the white froth of torrential rain moving across the water like a visible shock wave. The first sheet of horizontal rain and gale-force wind heeled the Lyman over as a tremendous clap of thunder tore the sky apart and a bolt of lightning lanced into the water beside the boat, the shaft surrounded by green plasma. Larson balanced precariously on the runabout, which was rolling from gunwale to gunwale, as he threw on a rain slicker from the locker. The rain stung his face like needles, and the insane wind got up inside the jacket until he could zip it. He dropped his rod on the deck, and he held on to the side rail, deafened by thunder, wondering if the Lyman would roll all the way over to turn turtle. The wind dropped for a beat, then came roaring back stronger than before, shifting ninety degrees, making the Lyman roll so far over that she shipped a bathtub’s worth of slate-gray water. Two more of those and his precious antique would sink from under him. He tried inching toward the forward stanchion to get to the wheel, to start the outboard and get her bow into the wind where she’d settle down and where her nose-up attitude would let the self-bailing bilges get the seawater out of her, but he couldn’t let go. The damn hull was still rolling, and Larson’s face was slapped by sea spray at each downward roll. He looked with amazement as a rubber glove rose out of the foaming water, then another, to grasp the side rail and pull violently down with the next roll. Larson was tilted so far forward that the gunwale banged his knees and he catapulted into the water. The salt stung his eyes—his glasses had flown off—and he felt his clothes and boots filling with water, and he knew he had to shuck off his boots, get out of his slicker, and kick to the surface. Bennett and Scott would be alongside to haul him into the RIB, bail out the Lyman, and tow her home. Instead he felt the rubber glove grasp him by the collar of his rain gear, turn him upside down, and begin pulling him deeper, where the water was colder, and where the stripers eyed the fluorescent lures dangled by men in cockleshell boats up there in the sunlight. Alex Larson did not think of Vladimir Putin as his breath gave out and he swallowed seawater.

Like their protectee, the agents in the RIB saw the squall line too late. They watched from about two hundred yards away as the Lyman was overtaken by a curtain of rain, obscuring it completely. The lightning and thunder were incessant. Scott had already pushed the throttles forward to get the RIB closer to the Lyman to steady her and help their chief. A large wave broke over the snub nose of the unsinkable inflatable, but they still shipped green water that cascaded down the vessel and around the steering console, knocking both of them off their feet. With no one at the wheel, the RIB careened in an insane circle just as the wind shifted ninety degrees and partially lifted the rubber hull, almost flipping it airborne and upside down. Both agents hung on to the straps along the pontoons while the RIB at full power continued to pound into the waves in wild crazy eights. Bennett finally got to the wheel, reduced power, and tried to get his bearings. With the sheeting rain and the spray, visibility was less than twenty feet. With no landmarks, and no shoreline visible, both agents were disoriented and didn’t know where the DCIA’s boat was. They checked the radar and saw a speck that could have been the Lyman and raced to it in the stinging rain to find instead a crab-pot buoy that had broken loose and was bobbing in the waves. They still had no idea which way the Lyman lay—they might as well have been in midocean and racing around could take them farther away. After ten more minutes, the squall passed, and as the last of the fat drops pattered on the rubber hull of the RIB, the sun came out. Half a mile in the distance, the Lyman’s white hull was visible through the water mist that still clung to the surface.

The agents raced up to the Lyman, which was still rolling madly, the fishing rod and reel sliding on the deck. There is nothing as ominous as an empty boat drifting on the water, mute testimony of a soul reclaimed by the sea. As a frantic Bennett radioed the Coast Guard, then called the security-duty office at Headquarters, Scott at full speed started a grid search downwind for any sign of the DCIA, who they knew did not wear a life jacket. They had been out of visual sight of the Lyman for approximately nineteen minutes, and there was no other boat within a mile of them. The foul weather had even driven the oyster boat into harbor. What followed was the usual two days of Coast Guard daylight searches by helicopters and crash boats, concentrating on the lower bay, based on the estimated time of the accident and the prevailing ebb tide. Alex Larson’s body was finally found on the third day, facedown on a sandbar off Race Hog Point on Pone Island, about fifty miles south of Kent Island. The FBI investigated the incident with the Coast Guard, and both concluded that the DCIA had drowned as a result of the boating accident.

When official news of the accident was released, President Putin, against the advice of Anton Gorelikov, called the US president to express his sympathy at the loss of a dedicated professional, a committed public servant, and a man of honor. The Slavic mordancy in Putin’s comments was lost on POTUS, who already was considering candidates to fill the DCIA position. As Gorelikov had presciently predicted, VADM Rowland was on the president’s short list of DCIA nominees. All that toadying to POTUS’s vanity had paid off. She was an outsider, a brainy woman, and someone who believed in diplomatic solutions with coalition partners, rather than resorting to armed conflict at the drop of a hat. He looked to Admiral Rowland to continue the reforms within CIA in diversity, promotion quotas, and, frankly, fewer dirty tricks that only antagonized foreign governments.

At Langley, relevant branches in the Operations Directorate tasked Russian and counterterrorist sources to determine whether there were any known plots to harm the Director. Not even DIVA had heard anything in the Kremlin, and she sent her condolences via a Moscow Station officer to Benford, who was inconsolable.

Simon confided to Forsyth that he suspected the Russians had engineered the boating accident, which was nothing less than a political assassination ordered by Putin. Benford summoned Hearsey to ask him about short-range drones that could be fitted with an explosive payload, or aerosolized biological compounds, or even with a single 2.75-inch rocket. Maybe an infiltrated operator could fly a drone close enough to catch Putin outside during a fishing or hunting trip and avenge the DCIA. Hearsey looked at the floor without saying anything until Forsyth told Benford to stop hallucinating and to concentrate on their more immediate problem: vetting the White House’s three nominee candidates for DCIA, a triumvirate of progressive Washington insiders, none of whom was well-disposed to the Agency.

“Maybe we should reconsider those drones,” said Hearsey, walking out the door.

Three combat swimmers from Spetsnaz Vympel Group 3—a unit based in Moscow and normally used by SVR to execute sensitive “wet work” assignments abroad (beatings, kidnappings, and assassinations)—were not returned to their unit after an unspecified special assignment, but rather were reassigned to a naval infantry unit at the Northern Fleet’s Bolshaya Lopatka naval base above the Arctic Circle, on the Kola Peninsula, seventy kilometers east of the sliver of Norway’s northern border with Russia. The three troopers were given privileges to the officers’ commissary on base, and weekend passes to Murmansk once a month. They knew enough never to mention the Chesapeake Bay, especially since a goateed dandy in the Kremlin had warned them of the consequences of indiscretion. They had no desire to be residents of Upravlenie solovetskogo and Karelo-Murmanskikh ITL, the Directorate of Solovki and Karelia-Murmansk Camps, once Gulags filled by Stalin, but now grim modern district prisons, albeit with the original 1935 plumbing.