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Chapter 1:
     
    The Kostov
     
     
    Captain Third Rank Vladimir Markov yawned as
he watched the sun melt on the horizon. It was breathtakingly
beautiful as the ball of orange was consumed into the bright blue
water of the Indian Ocean. Forty-nine sunsets in a row, all exactly
like the last. He was sick of it.
    “ Only eleven more sunsets until we
head to Jakarta, Pavel Mikhailovich,” the Captain said to the
helmsman of the ship, who wholeheartedly agreed. The crew loved the
Indonesian port city for a myriad of reasons.
    Every 60 days they would put into Jakarta for
a week to refuel and take on supplies. The Indonesian government
was friendly to Moscow going back as far as the 1950s and was well
supplied with Russian-made weapons. This allowed the ship a wide
berth in Jakarta with few questions asked. During port visits, the
ship’s research labs would be closed, sealed off limits, and barred
by armed Russian Federal Security Service (formerly known as the
KGB) guards.
    The 270-foot long research vessel (R/V) Akademik Kostov was part of the Russian Defense Ministry’s
deep-water research department and as such was a naval auxiliary.
Painted white and liberally streaked with rust, she was easily
mistaken for an old freighter that had seen better days. Still,
with most of the once proud Russian Navy swaying abandoned at their
docks, Vladimir was happy to get the time at sea—even if he was
driving a bug mobile.
    For most of the past year, the ship sailed
lazily along the length of the 2,600 kilometer-long Sunda Trench
that stretched from Myanmar to Sumatra. The trench, at over
25,000-feet deep was one of the longest stretches of hyper-deep
water in the world. The fact that you could go days in some parts
of the trench and not see another vessel in the area only helped
matters. Officially, the Kostov’s mission was in studying
giant amphipods that lived in the trench while performing
deep-water ocean bed studies. However, the vessel’s true purpose
was to house a top-secret Bio Safety Level 4 scientific research
laboratory.
    Referred to by the code name Vozrozhdeniya
II after the former top-secret Soviet bio war facility
abandoned years ago in Uzbekistan, Markov knew only that it held
the worst of the worst of experimental weaponized bugs. Stuff too
lethal to risk working on in the Motherland, even in the remotest
parts of Siberia.
    “ Have you heard from Professor
Arkady so far today?” He asked the helmsman.
    “ No, Captain,” the sailor said,
“And I don’t want to,” he added with a smile on his pockmarked
face.
    Markov knew the feeling. The ship’s crew
included 16 naval personnel who actually operated the vessel, some
civilian oceanographers who provided the official cover, four
machine-gun toting guards from the FSB, and the three Defense
Ministry scientists. On port calls, everyone but the FSB guards and
the scientists could leave the ship. It was Moscow’s orders, not
his, but it definitely made the bug doctors and their cavemen
guards abrasive. It didn’t help that Professor Arkady had the
personal relationship skills of a dead fish and the breath to prove
it.
    The phone rang on the wall of the bridge and
Markov reached for it. Made of heavy plastic back in the good old
Communist days, its weight was comforting to him in a nostalgic
way.
    “ Bridge,” he barked into the
receiver.
    “ This is Pasha,” he heard from the
other end. The man was one of the civilian oceanographers, “I was
back here having a smoke, and there are two small boats off our
stern, coming up very fast.”
    Alarm bells went off in the back of Markov’s
brain, “What kind of boats?”
    “ Little rubber ones, with a bunch
of monkeys in them,” he said, falling back on the oft-used Russian
insult for Asians. “They are throwing lines over the back of the
boat! Pirates!” he screamed into the phone before it went
dead.
    “ Sound the alarm,” Markov ordered
the helmsman, “and start making evasive maneuvers.”