“Now there's a fairy tale! How many submarine crews were rescued by this thing? I'll tell you.” He curled his thumb and forefinger in a circle. “Zero. It certainly had the capacity to dive on a sunken sub. The India class could carry two deep submergence recovery vehicles in wells abaft the sail. They could fit onto the rescue hatch of a downed sub, but they weren't there to pull some poor sailor from the bottom of the sea. They were designed for clandestine intelligence gathering and to carry Spetsnaz.”

“Special forces?”

“Sure. When we did some snooping off Sweden, the subs carried armored tracked amphibious vehicles. They could crawl along the sea bottom like big bugs. It was a sweet ship, the India. Fast and very maneuverable.”

“The public literature said two were built?”

“That's correct. We had one in the northern fleet and another in the southern. Sometimes one would join the other for special operations.”

“What happened to them?”

“We lost the Cold War and they were withdrawn from service. They were scheduled for demolition.”

“So they were scrapped?”

The admiral grinned. “Yes, of course.”

Petrov replied with a hike of an eyebrow.

“On paper, anyhow,” the admiral said. “You know, everyone is worried about our nuclear bombs getting in some madman's hands. But while there's been all that talk, we've sold half our conventional weaponry, which can be as deadly under the proper circumstances. Nobody says anything about that.”

“I'm saying something. Where did the India-class subs go?”

“One was scrapped. The other was sold to a private buyer.”

“Do you know his name?”

“Of course, but what difference does it make? He represented a group that was obviously a straw for someone else. There could be many layers in between the buyer and the person who forked over the money.”

“But you have a suspicion about who bought it?”

“I'm pretty sure it stayed within the country. The buyer was an outfit called Volga Industries. They had an office in Moscow, but who knows where their parent companies were? Nobody really cared. They paid in cash.”

Petrov shook his head. “How could someone so easily remove a war machine three hundred and fifty feet long?”

“It's done all the time. All you need is some hard-up officers in the military who haven't been paid in a year. We've got lots of them living on promises. Then you have the collusion of government maggots and it's done. The worst are the former communists.”

“Like us?”

“Tripe! We waved the red flag, but we were never ideological. I know you didn't believe that bull. We did it because it was exciting and somebody else was paying the bill.”

“I'll need some names.”