The Eighth Sister (Charles Jenkins #1)(56)

Kaplan had made a decent living, enough that he could build family homes on the cliffs of the strait for himself and for his two sons and their families, but as he aged, and retirement beckoned, he grew concerned that his sons could not make a living fishing, so much so that he had become reacquainted with valuable contacts from his days in the navy. For the past several years he’d supplemented his dwindling fishing income with money earned from transporting refugees out of Iraq and Syria, and smuggling—weapons and people—American, British, and Israeli special agents. In this regard, he’d become like the Russians. As long as he was paid, he didn’t care about the outcome. Besides, he hated the Russians, a trait he had inherited from his father. He considered smuggling agents who opposed the Russian regime to be a way to even the playing field. And he was paid handsomely to do so, receiving more money for one smuggling run than he could make in a fishing season—but only if he safely delivered his target. Tonight, with each passing minute, that prospect seemed more and more unlikely.

Kaplan circled the coordinates he had been given for his pickup and scanned the ship’s radar—a gift from the Turkish government to improve his fishing. He used the radar to search for transmissions between 9.2 and 9.5 gigahertz, the frequency of the transponder; which was below the frequencies used by the Russian Coast Guard. If he found the transponder signal, he would instruct his sons to lower an LED light beneath the hull of his boat to visually alert his pickup.

He’d been circling in the dense fog for nearly seven minutes without any sign of the transponder on his radar. He told his sons, well-trained in these missions, and the only men he fully trusted, to drop the LED light into the water anyway, hoping to lure the diver to the boat.

The dense fog was both a blessing and a curse. It would make finding a diver more difficult, but it would also make it more difficult for the Russian Coast Guard to find them. If the coast guard did find Kaplan, his excuse was well rehearsed. He would circle as if to drag in his nets, unaware that he had inadvertently drifted into Russian territorial waters. If the Russians did not buy Kaplan’s excuse, the penalty could be the sinking of his ship.

Kaplan again looked at his watch. He would not linger. He would wait exactly thirty minutes, as agreed, not a minute more or less. He would depart at seven o’clock, passenger or no passenger. He had twenty-three more minutes, but he could have twenty-three days. He would not find his package, not without a signal. Without a signal, he was blind, unable to see more than ten or fifteen feet in any direction in this cursed fog, making the chances of visually spotting a diver impossible.

He slowed his boat, stepped from the pilothouse, and turned on the spotlight, moving the beam over the water’s surface. The marine fog continued to plague them, and the light only made it more difficult to see, like turning on a car’s high beams on a foggy road. He kept the beam low to the water to try to cut the glare.

“Do you see anything?” Emir, the older of his two sons, asked.

“No,” Kaplan said.

“And nothing yet on the radar?” Emir asked, keeping his voice low.

“Nothing.”

“How much longer?” Yusuf said. The two boys looked and sounded apprehensive, knowing the potential consequences of being this far into Russian waters, which they had never done before.

Kaplan checked his watch. “Twenty-one minutes,” he said. He walked back into the pilothouse and noticed a blinking green light on his radar screen, initially thinking it the transponder, then quickly realizing the light was closing on his location at a high and unexpected speed.

“Bok!” He rushed to the door. “A boat,” he yelled to his sons. “Closing fast. The Russian Coast Guard. Quickly, drop your nets.”

Kaplan cut his engines and the boys moved with practiced precision, this process well rehearsed. A spotlight appeared over their bow and, from the thickening fog, the outline of a boat materialized like a ghostly apparition. The spotlight blinded Kaplan. He raised an arm to shield his eyes. As the boat moved from his starboard to port side, Kaplan recognized the blue hull with the vertical red, blue, and white stripes on the bow.

The Rubin-class Russian Coast Guard boat fell under the control of the FSB. This must be a high-value target Kaplan sought.

A voice came over a loudspeaker, talking in Russian. Kaplan ignored it.

The voice barked additional orders as the boat slowed, using thrusters to turn the bow and the stern to position it alongside Kaplan’s vessel. Kaplan could understand Russian, when he chose to. Tonight, he did not choose to understand. He’d play his part as the distressed Turkish fisherman with a tangled mess of netting.

He stepped from the pilothouse onto the deck and stood beside his two sons. The voice spoke yet again, telling Kaplan to prepare to be boarded. He looked at his sons, then to the netting. As the Russian skiff lowered and approached, Kaplan lowered fenders over the side of his boat. Moments later, he caught the Russians’ mooring line tossed up to him. His son, Yusuf, caught the second line and they secured the ropes to the cleats on deck. Kaplan lowered an aluminum ladder over the side of his boat and two of the three men climbed aboard—the second man armed with a Kalashnikov rifle slung over his shoulder. This was not normal procedure.

The officer wore a pristine, double-breasted peacoat with the collar turned up to protect his neck against the cold. On deck, he fit his black cap on his head. His face looked prepubescent, far younger than either of Kaplan’s sons. His hands were soft and pink, and without calluses—an officer from the academy, not a man who had lived and worked on a boat. Kaplan knew his type. Officious, he would not deviate from regulations, and he would seek to enforce his authority. Kaplan hoped the man’s inexperience would act against his rigidness.