“You better have one hell of a pitch,” Dominic said. “Hell, as it stands Gerry took a risk hiring you in the first place. Your dad would have a fit—”
“Let me worry about my dad, Dom.”
“Fine, but if you think Gerry’s just going to hand you a gun and say, ‘Go forth and make the world safe for democracy,’ you got another think coming. If you were to buy the farm, he’d be the one making the call.”
“I know.”
“Good.”
“So,” Jack said, “if I talk to him, you guys’ll back me up?”
“For what it’s worth, sure,” Brian replied. “But this isn’t a democracy, Jack. Assuming he doesn’t shoot down the idea on the spot, he’ll probably run it by Sam.” Sam Granger was The Campus’s Chief of Operations. “I doubt he’s going to ask us.”
Jack nodded. “Probably right. Well, like you said, I’d better make my pitch a damn good one, then.”
14
AUTUMN WAS HERE. You could tell from the wind and the ice pack, which had begun pulling away from the coast to reveal the black water of the Arctic Ocean. It could not be colder without turning to ice, and there was plenty of that still in sight, just to remind one that summer up here was fleeting at best. Mother Nature remained as grim and heartless as ever, even under a sky of crystal blue and a few cotton-ball white clouds.
This place was not unlike his first Navy posting to Polyyarniy twelve years before, just as the Soviet Navy was starting to shut down. Oh, sure, they had a few ships left, most of them tied at the working ports of the Kola Fjord, manned by men who stayed in the Navy because they either had to or had nothing to go home to. There were a few ships with crews composed almost entirely of officers who actually got paid a few times a year. Vitaliy had been among the last men drafted into the former Soviet Navy and, to his astonishment, found himself liking the work.
After the mindless basic training he’d been made a junior starshina, or petty officer, and a bosun’s mate. It had been hard, backbreaking work but satisfying, and it had ended up giving him a useful trade. He’d profited personally from the demise of the Soviet Navy by buying at a discount an old but well-maintained T-4 amphibious landing craft that he’d nominally converted into a passenger craft. Mostly he took scientific parties, exploring the region for obscure reasons beyond his interest, while some were hunters looking to convert a polar bear into an expensive rug.
His charter for the week was waiting for him down the coast at a small fishing village. Two days ago he’d preloaded their equipment—a GAZ truck with all-wheel drive, new tires, and a fresh paint job, equipped with a heavy-duty A-frame, taking delivery from an anonymous driver who, like him, had probably been paid in euros. As any good captain did, Vitaliy had inspected the cargo and had been surprised to find the truck stripped of all identification codes, right down to the one on the engine block. While such a task wasn’t particularly complicated, and neither did it require a mechanic, something told Vitaliy that his charters hadn’t done the work themselves. So they’d come here, bought a GAZ in good condition, paid someone handsomely to strip it, then hired a private charter. Plenty of money to spread around and overly concerned with anonymity. What did that mean?
But there was no point in being too curious. Smart cats knew the danger of curiosity, and he liked to think he was smart enough. The euros would also take care of his memory, something in which his party seemed supremely confident; the leader of the group, clearly of Mediterranean descent, had told Vitaliy to call him Fred. It wasn’t so much an artifice as it was a moniker of convenience, almost a private joke between them, and Fred’s smirk during their initial meeting had confirmed it.
He watched his charter party come aboard and wave at him, and with that done, he signaled to Vanya, his engineer/deckhand, who cast off the lines. Vitaliy started the diesel engines and pulled away from the dock.
Soon enough he was in the fairway and headed out to sea. The black water didn’t exactly beckon, but it was where he and the boat belonged, and