Chapter 48
Opening Guns
While others were pulling all-nighters, Gennady Iosifovich Bondarenko was forgetting what sleep was supposed to have been. His teleprinter was running hot with dispatches from Moscow, reading that occupied his time, and not always to his profit. Russia had still not learned to leave people alone when they were doing their jobs, and as a result, his senior communications officer cringed when he came in with new “FLASH” traffic.
“Look,” the general said to his intelligence officer. “What I need is information on what equipment they have, where they are, and how they are postured to move north on us. Their politics and objectives are not as important to me as where they are right now!”
“I expect to have hard information from Moscow momentarily. It will be American satellite coverage, and—”
“God damn it! I remember when we had our own f*cking satellites. What about aerial reconnaissance?”
“The proper aircraft are on their way to us now. We’ll have them flying by tomorrow noon, but do we dare send them over Chinese territory?” Colonel Tolkunov asked.
“Do we dare not to?” CINC-FAR EAST demanded in reply.
“General,” the G-2 said, “the concern is that we would be giving the Chinese a political excuse for the attack.”
“Who said that?”
“Stavka.”
Bondarenko’s head dropped over the map table. He took a breath and closed his eyes for three blissful seconds, but all that achieved was to make him wish for an hour—no, just thirty minutes of sleep. That’s all, he thought, just thirty minutes.
“A political excuse,” the general observed. “You know, Vladimir Konstantinovich, once upon a time, the Germans were sending high-flying reconnaissance aircraft deep into Western Russia, scouting us out prior to their invasion. There was a special squadron of fighters able to reach their altitude, and their regimental commander asked for permission to intercept them. He was relieved of his command on the spot. I suppose he was lucky that he wasn’t shot. He ended up a major ace and a Hero of the Soviet Union before some German fighter got him. You see, Stalin was afraid of provoking Hitler, too!”
“Comrade Colonel?” Heads turned. It was a young sergeant with an armful of large-format photographs.
“Here, quickly!”
The sergeant laid them on the table, obscuring the topographical maps that had occupied the previous four hours. The quality wasn’t good. The imagery had been transmitted over a fax machine instead of a proper photographic printer, but it was good enough for their purposes. There were even inserts, small white boxes with legends typed in, in English, to tell the ignorant what was in the pretty little pictures. The intelligence officer was the first to make sense of it all.
“Here they come,” the colonel breathed. He checked the coordinates and the time indicated in the lower-right corner of the top photo. “That’s a complete tank division, and it’s right”—he turned back to the printed map—“right here, just as we expected. Their marshaling point is Harbin. Well, it had to be. All their rail lines converge there. Their first objective will be Belogorsk.”
“And right up the valley from there,” Bondarenko agreed. “Through this pass, then northwest.” One didn’t need to be a Nobel laureate to predict a line of advance. The terrain was the prime objective condition to which all ambitions and plans had to bend. Bondarenko could read the mind of the enemy commander well enough, because any trained soldier would see the contour lines on the map and analyze them the same way. Flat was better than sloped. Clear was better than wooded. Dry was better than wet. There was a lot of sloped terrain on the border, but it smoothed out, and there were too many valleys inviting speedy advance. With enough troops, he could have made every one of those valleys a deathtrap, but if he’d had enough troops, the Chinese wouldn’t be lined up on his border. They’d be sitting in their own prepared defenses, fearing him. But that was not the shape of the current world for Commander-in-Chief Far East.
The 265th Motor Rifle was a hundred kilometers back from the border. The troops were undergoing frantic gunnery training now, because that would generate the most rapid return for investment. The battalion and regimental officers were in their command posts running map-table exercises, because Bondarenko needed them thinking, not shooting. He had sergeants for that. The good news for Bondarenko was that his soldiers enjoyed shooting live rounds, and their skill levels were improving rapidly. The bad news was that for every trained tank crew he had, the Chinese had over twenty.
“What an ambush we could lay, if we only had the men,” Tolkunov breathed.
“When I was in America, watching them train, I heard a good if-only joke. If only your aunt had balls, then she’d be your uncle, Vladimir Konstantinovich.”
“Quite so, Comrade General.” They both turned back to the maps and the photos.
So, they know what we’re doing,” Qian Kun observed. ”This is not a good development.”
“You can know what a robber will do, but if he has a pistol and you don’t, what difference does it make?” Zhang Han San asked in return. “Comrade Marshal?”
“One cannot hide so large a movement of troops,” Marshal Luo said blandly. “Tactical surprise is always hard to achieve. But we do have strategic surprise.”
“That is true,” Tan Deshi told the Politburo. “The Russians have alerted some of their divisions for movement, but they are all in the west, and days away, and all will approach down this rail line, and our air force can close it, can’t you, Luo?”
“Easily,” the Defense Minister agreed.
“And what of the Americans?” Fang Gan asked. “In that note we just got, they have told us that they regard the Russians as allies. How many times have people underestimated the Americans, Zhang? Including yourself,” he added.
“There are objective conditions which apply even to the Americans, for all their magic,” Luo assured the assembly.
“And in three years we will be selling them oil and gold,” Zhang assured them all in turn. “The Americans have no political memory. They always adapt to the changing shape of the world. In 1949, they drafted the NATO Treaty, which included their bitter enemies in Germany. Look at what they did with Japan, after dropping atomic bombs on them. The only thing we should consider: though few Americans will be deployed, and they will have to take their chances along with everyone else, perhaps we should avoid inflicting too many casualties. We would also do well to treat prisoners and captured civilians gently—the world does have sensibilities we must regard somewhat, I suppose.”
“Comrades,” Fang said, summoning up his courage for one last display of his inner feelings. “We still have the chance to stop this from happening, as Marshal Luo told us some days ago. We are not fully committed until shots are fired. Until then, we can say we were running a defense exercise, and the world will go along with that explanation, for the reasons my friend Zhang has just told us. But once hostilities are begun, the tiger is out of the cage. Men defend what is theirs with tenacity. You will recall that Hitler underestimated the Russians, to his ultimate sorrow. Iran underestimated the Americans just last year, causing disaster for them and the death of their leader. Are we sure that we can prevail in this adventure?” he asked. “Sure? We gamble with the life of our country here. We ought not to forget that.”
“Fang, my old comrade, you are wise and thoughtful as ever,” Zhang responded graciously. “And I know you speak on behalf of our nation and our people, but as we must not underestimate our enemies, so we ought not to underestimate ourselves. We fought the Americans once before, and we gave them the worst military defeat in their history, did we not?”
“Yes, we did surprise them, but in the end we lost a million men, including Mao’s own son. And why? Because we overestimated our own abilities.”
“Not this time, Fang,” Luo assured them all. “Not this time. We will do to the Russians the same thing we did to the Americans at the Yalu River. We will strike with power and surprise. Where they are weak, we will rush through. Where they are strong, we will encircle and surround. In 1950, we were a peasant army with only light weapons. Today,” Luo went on, “we are a fully modern army. We can do things today such as even the Americas could not dream of back then. We will prevail,” the Defense Minister concluded with firm conviction.
“Comrades, do we wish to stop now?” Zhang asked, to focus the debate. “Do we wish to doom our country’s economic and political future? For that is the issue at hand. If we stand still, we risk national death. Who among us wishes to stand still then?”
Predictably no one, not even Qian, moved to pick up that gauntlet. The vote was entirely pro forma, and unanimous. As always, the Politburo achieved collegiality for its own sake. The ministers returned to their various offices. Zhang buttonholed Tan Deshi for several minutes before heading back to his. An hour after that, he dropped in on his friend, Fang Gan.
“You are not cross with me?” Fang asked.
“The voice of caution is something that does not offend me, my old friend,” Zhang said, graciously taking his seat opposite the other’s desk. He could afford to be gracious. He had won.
“I am afraid of this move, Zhang. We did underestimate the Americans in 1950, and it cost us many men.”
“We have the men to spare,” the senior Minister Without Portfolio pointed out. “And it will make Luo feel valuable.”
“As if he needs that.” Fang gestured his displeasure with that strutting martinet.
“Even a dog has his uses,” his visitor pointed out.
“Zhang, what if the Russians are more formidable than you think?”
“I’ve taken care of that. We will create instability in their country in two days, the very day our attack begins.”
“How?”
“You’ll recall we had that failed attempt against Grushavoy’s senior advisor, that Golovko fellow.”
“Yes, and I counseled against that, too,” Fang reminded his visitor.
“And there, perhaps, you were right,” Zhang acknowledged, to smooth his host’s feathers. “But Tan has developed the capability, and what better way to destabilize Russia than to eliminate their president? This we can do, and Tan has his orders.”
“You assassinate a government chief in a foreign land?” Fang asked, surprised at this level of boldness. “What if you fail?”
“We commit an act of war against Russia anyway. What have we to lose by this? Nothing—but there is much to gain.”
“But the political implications ...” Fang breathed.
“What of them?”
“What if they turn the tables on us?”
“You mean attempt to attack Xu personally?” The look on his face provided the real answer to the question: China would be better off without the nonentity. But even Zhang would not say that aloud, even in the privacy of this room. “Tan assures me that our physical security is perfect. Perfect, Fang. There are no foreign intelligence operations of consequence in our country.”
“I suppose every nation says such a thing—right before the roof caves in on them. We’ve done well with our spying in America, for example, and for that our good Comrade Tan is to be congratulated, but arrogance falls before the blow, and such blows are never anticipated. We would do well to remember that.”
Zhang dismissed the thought: “One cannot fear everything.”
“That is true, but to fear nothing is also imprudent.” Fang paused to mend fences. “Zhang, you must think me an old woman.”
That made the other minister smile. “Old woman? No, Fang, you are a comrade of many years’ standing, and one of our most thoughtful thinkers. Why, do you suppose, I brought you onto the Politburo?”
To get my votes, of course, Fang didn’t answer. He had the utmost respect for his senior colleague, but he wasn’t blind to his faults. “For that I am grateful.”
“For that the people ought to be grateful, you are so solicitous to their needs.”
“Well, one must remember the peasants and workers out there. We serve them, after all.” The ideological cant was just perfect for the moment. “This is not an easy job we share.”
“You need to relax a little. Get that girl Ming out there, take her to your bed. You’ve done it before.” It was a weakness both men shared. The tension of the moment abated, as Zhang wished it to.
“Chai sucks better,” Fang replied, with a sly look.
“Then take her to your flat. Buy her some silk drawers. Get her drunk. They all like that.”
“Not a bad idea,” Fang agreed. “It certainly helps me sleep.”
“Then do it by all means! We’ll need our sleep. The next few weeks will be strenuous for us—but more so for our enemies.”
“One thing, Zhang. As you said, we must treat the captives well. One thing the Americans do not forgive rapidly is cruelty to the helpless, as we have seen here in Beijing.”
“Now, they are old women. They do not understand the proper use of strength.”
“Perhaps so, but if we wish to do business with them, as you say, why offend them unnecessarily?”
Zhang sighed and conceded the point, because he knew it to be the smart play. “Very well. I will tell Luo.” He checked his watch. “I must be off. I’ve having dinner with Xu tonight.”
“Give him my best wishes.”
“Of course.” Zhang rose, bowed to his friend, and took his leave. Fang took a minute or so before rising and walking to the door. “Ming,” he called, on opening it. “Come here.” He lingered at the door as the secretary came in, allowing his eyes to linger on Chai. Their eyes met and she winked, adding a tiny feminine smile. Yes, he needed his sleep tonight, and she would help.
“The Politburo meeting ran late this day,” Fang said, settling into his chair and doing his dictation. It took twenty-five minutes, and he dismissed Ming to do her daily transcription. Then he had Chai come in, gave her an order, and dismissed her. In another hour, the working day ended. Fang walked down to his official car, with Chai in trail. Together they rode to his comfortable apartment, and there they got down to business.
Ming met her lover at a new restaurant called the Jade Horse, where the food was better than average.
“You look troubled,” Nomuri observed.
“Busy time at the office,” she explained. “There is big trouble to come.”
“Oh? What sort of trouble?”
“I cannot say,” she demurred. “It will probably not affect your company.”
And Nomuri saw that he’d taken his agent to the next—actually the last—step. She no longer thought about the software on her office computer. He never brought the subject up. Better that it should happen below the visible horizon. Better that she should forget what she was doing. Your conscience doesn’t worry about things you’ve forgotten. After dinner, they walked back to Nomuri’s place, and the CIA officer tried his best to relax her. He was only partially successful, but she was properly appreciative and left him at quarter to eleven. Nomuri had himself a nightcap, a double, and checked to make sure his computer had relayed her almost-daily report. Next week he hoped to have software he could cross-load to hers over the ’Net, so that she’d be transmitting the reports directly out to the recipe network. If Bad Things were happening in Beijing, NEC might call him back to Japan, and he didn’t want SONGBIRD’S reports to stop going to Langley.
As it happened, this one was already there, and it had generated all manner of excitement.
It was enough to make Ed Foley wish he’d lent a STU to Sergey Golovko, but America didn’t give away its communications secrets that readily, and so the report had been redrafted and sent by secure fax to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, then hand-carried to SVR headquarters by a consular officer not associated with the CIA. Of course, now they’d assume that he was a spook, which would cause the Russians to shadow him everywhere he went, and use up trained personnel of the FSS. Business was still business, even in this New World Order.
Golovko, predictably, bounced hard off his high office ceiling.
John Clark got the news over his secure satellite phone. “What the hell?” RAINBOW Six asked, sitting still in his personal car not far from Red Square.
“You heard me,” Ed Foley explained.
“Okay, now what?”
“You’re tight with their special-operations people, right?”
“Somewhat,” Clark allowed. “We’re training them.”
“Well, they might come to you for advice of some sort. You have to know what’s happening.”
“Can I tell Ding?”
“Yes,” the DCI agreed.
“Good. You know, this proves the Chavez Premise.”
“What’s that?” Foley asked.
“He likes to say that international relations is largely composed of one nation f*cking another.”
It was enough to make Foley laugh, five thousand miles and eight time zones away. “Well, our Chinese friends are sure playing rough.”
“How good is the information?”
“It’s Holy Writ, John. Take it to the bank,” Ed assured his distant field officer.
We have some source in Beijing, Clark didn’t observe aloud. “Okay, Ed. If they come to me, I’ll let you know. We cooperate, I presume.”
“Fully,” the DCI assured him. “We’re allies now. Didn’t you see CNN?”
“I thought it was the Sci-Fi Channel.”
“You ain’t the only one. Have a good one, John.”
“You, too, Ed. Bye.” Clark thumbed the END button and went on just to himself: “Holy jumpin’ Jesus.” Then he restarted the car and headed off to his rendezvous with Domingo Chavez.
Ding was at the bar that RAINBOW had adopted during its stay in the Moscow area. The boys congregated in a large corner booth, where they complained about the local beer, but appreciated the clear alcohol preferred by the natives.
“Hey, Mr. C,” Chavez said in greeting.
“Just got a call from Ed on my portable.”
“And?”
“And John Chinaman is planning to start a little war with our hosts, and that’s the good news,” Clark added.
“What the f*ck is the bad news?” Chavez asked, with no small incredulity in his voice.
“Their Ministry of State Security just put a contract out on Eduard Petrovich,” John went on.
“Are they f*ckin’ crazy?” the other CIA officer asked the booth.
“Well, starting a war in Siberia isn’t exactly a rational act. Ed let us in because he thinks the locals might want our help soon. Supposedly they know the local contact for the ChiComms. You have to figure a hot takedown’s going to evolve from this, and we’ve been training their troopies. I figure we might be invited in to watch, but they probably won’t want us to assist.”
“Agreed.”
That’s when General Kirillin came in, with a sergeant at his side. The sergeant stood by the door with his overcoat unbuttoned and his right hand close to the opening. The senior officer spotted Clark and came directly over.
“I don’t have your cell-phone number.”
“What do you want us for today, General?” Clark asked.
“I need for you to come with me. We have to see Chairman Golovko.”
“Do you mind if Domingo comes along?”
“That is fine,” Kirillin replied.
“I’ve talked to Washington recently. How much do you know?” Clark asked his Russian friend.
“Much, but not all. That’s why we need to see Golovko.” Kirillin waved them to the door, where his sergeant was doing his best Doberman imitation.
“Something happening?” Eddie Price asked. No one was guarding his expression, and Price knew how to read faces.
“Tell you when we get back,” Chavez told him. The staff car waiting outside had a chase car with four men in it, and the sergeant/bodyguard accompanying the general was one of the few enlisted men who’d been let into the cross-training that RAINBOW had been running. The Russians, they knew, were coming along very well. It didn’t hurt to draw people hand-selected from an already elite unit.
The cars moved through Moscow traffic with less than the usual regard for traffic and safety laws, then pulled into the main gate at #2 Dzerzhinskiy Square. The elevator was held for them, and they made the top floor in a hurry.
“Thank you for coming so quickly. I assume you’ve spoken with Langley,” Golovko observed.
Clark held up his cell phone.
“The encryption unit is so small?”
“Progress, Chairman,” Clark observed. “I’m told this intelligence information is to be taken seriously.”
“Foleyeva has a fine source in Beijing. I’ve seen some of the ‘take’ from him. It would appear, first, that a deliberate attempt was made on my life, and now another is planned for President Grushavoy. I’ve already notified him. His security people are fully alerted. The Chinese lead agent in Moscow has been identified and is under surveillance. When he receives his instructions, we will arrest him. But we do not know who his contacts are. We assume they are former Spetsnaz people loyal to him, criminals, of course, doing special work for the underworld we’ve grown up here.”
That made sense, John thought. “Some people will do anything for money, Sergey Nikolay’ch. How can we help you?”
“Foley has instructed you to assist? Good of him. Given the nature of how the intelligence came to us, an American observer seems appropriate. For the takedown, we will use police, with cover from General Kirillin’s people. As RAINBOW commander, this will be your task.”
Clark nodded. It wasn’t all that demanding. “Fair enough.”
“We’ll keep you safe,” the general assured him.
“And you expect the Chinese to launch a war on Russia?”
“Within the week,” Golovko nodded.
“The oil and the gold?” Chavez asked.
“So it would seem.”
“Well, that’s life in the big city,” Ding observed.
“We will make them regret this barbaric act,” Kirillin told everyone present.
“That remains to be seen,” Golovko cautioned. He knew what Bondarenko was saying to Stavka.
“And with you guys in NATO, we’re coming to help out?” Clark asked.
“Your President Ryan is a true comrade,” the Russian agreed.
“That means RAINBOW, too, then,” John thought aloud. “We’re all NATO troopers.”
“Ain’t never fought in a real war before,” Chavez thought aloud. But now he was a simulated major, and he might just get drafted into this one. His life insurance, he remembered, was fully paid up.
“It’s not exactly fun, Domingo,” Clark assured him. And I’m getting a little old for this shit.
The Chinese Embassy was under continuous and expert surveillance by a large team of officers from the Russian Federal Security Service. Almost all of them were formerly of the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate. Reconstituted under a new agency’s aegis, they performed the same function as the FBI’s Intelligence Division, and they gave away little to their American counterparts. No fewer than twenty of them were assigned to this task. They comprised all physical types, male and female, prosperous-and impoverished-looking, middle-aged and old—but no really young ones, because this case was too important for inexperienced officers. The vehicles assigned to the task included everything from dump trucks to motorbikes, and every mobile group had at least one radio, of types so advanced that the Russian Army didn’t have them yet.
Kong Deshi emerged from the PRC embassy at seven-forty. He walked to the nearest Metro station and took the escalator down. This was entirely routine. At the same time, another minor consular officer left and headed in a different direction, but the FSS officers didn’t know to watch him. He walked three blocks to the second lamppost on a busy street and, passing it, he pulled a strip of white paper tape from his coat pocket and stuck it vertically on the metal post. Then he walked on to a restaurant and had dinner alone, having fulfilled a mission whose purpose he didn’t know. He was the flagman for the MSS in the embassy, but was not a trained intelligence officer.
Third Secretary Kong rode the train for the proper number of stops and got off, with four FSS officers in trail, another one waiting in the station, and two more at the top of the long escalator to the surface. Along the way, he purchased a newspaper from one of the kiosks on the street. Twice he stopped, once to light a cigarette and the other time to look around as if lost and trying to get his bearings. Both efforts, of course, were to spot a tail, but the FSS people were too numerous, some too near, and the close ones studiously, but not too studiously, looking elsewhere. The truth of the matter, as known to the FBI and the British Security Service as well, is that once a contact is identified, he is as naked and helpless as a newborn in the jungle, as long as those shadowing him are not total fools. These KGB-trained professionals were anything but fools. The only thing they didn’t know was the identity of the flagman, but that, as usual, was something you might never get. The problem there was that you never knew how quickly to get the dead-drop that was about to be made.
The other problem for the control agent, Kong Deshi, was that once the location of the dead-drop was identified, it was as easily watched as the single cloud in an otherwise clear sky. The size of the surveillance troop was just to make sure there wasn’t another drop. And there wasn’t. Kong sat down on the expected bench. Here he violated fieldcraft by acting as though he could read a newspaper in the diminishing light, but as there was a streetlamp close by, it wouldn’t tip off the casual onlooker.
“There,” one of the FSS men observed. Kong’s right hand made the emplacement. Three minutes later, he folded his paper and strolled off, in the same direction he’d been heading. The FSS detail let him go a long way before they moved in.
Again it was done from a van, and again the locksmith was inside and waiting with the custom-made key. Also in the van was a high-end American laptop computer with the onetime cipher pad preprogrammed in, an exact copy of Suvorov/Koniev’s desktop machine in his upscale flat on the ring road. And so, the senior FSS officer on the case thought, their quarry was like a tiger prowling through the jungle with ten unknown rifles aimed at it, powerful, and dangerous, perhaps, but utterly doomed.
The transfer case was delivered. The locksmith popped it open. The contents were unfolded and photocopied, then replaced, and the case was resealed and returned to its spot on the metal plate under the bench. Already a typist was keying in the random letters of the message, and inside of four minutes, the clear-text came up.
“Yob tvoyu mat!” the senior officer observed. “They want him to kill President Grushavoy!”
“What is that?” a junior officer asked. The case-leader just handed over the laptop computer and let him read the screen.
“This is an act of war,” the major breathed. The colonel nodded.
“It is that, Gregoriy.” And the van pulled away. He had to report this, and do it immediately.
Lieutenant Provalov was home when the call came. He grumbled the usual amount as he re-dressed and headed to FSS headquarters. He hadn’t grown to love the Federal Security Service, but he had come to respect it. With such resources, he thought, he could end crime in Moscow entirely, but they didn’t share resources, and they retained the above-the-law arrogance their antecedent agency had once displayed. Perhaps it was necessary. The things they investigated were no less serious than murder, except in scale. Traitors killed not individuals, but entire regions. Treason was a crime that had been taken seriously in his country for centuries, and one that his nation’s long-standing institutional paranoia had always feared as much as it had hated.
They were burning more than the usual amount of midnight oil here, Provalov saw. Yefremov was standing in his office, reading a piece of paper with the sort of blank look on his face that frequently denoted something monstrous.
“Good evening, Pavel Georgiyevich.”
“Lieutenant Provalov. Here.” Yefremov handed over the paper. “Our subject grows ambitious. Or at least his controllers do.”
The militia lieutenant took the page and read it quickly, then returned to the top to give it a slower redigestion.
“When did this happen?”
“Less than an hour ago. What observations do you make?”
“We should arrest him at once!” the cop said predictably.
“I thought you’d say that. But instead we will wait and see whom he contacts. Then we will snatch him up. But first, I want to see the people he notifies.”
“What if he does it from a cell phone or a pay phone?”
“Then we will have the telephone company identify them for us. But I want to see if he has a contact within an important government office. Suvorov had many colleagues where he was in KGB. I want to know which of them have turned mercenary, so that we can root all of them out. The attack on Sergey Nikolay’ch displayed a frightening capability. I want to put an end to it, to scoop that all up, and send them all to a labor camp of strict regime.” The Russian penal system had three levels of camps. Those of “mild” regime were unpleasant. The “medium” ones were places to avoid. But those of “strict” regime were hell on earth. They were particularly useful for getting the recalcitrant to speak of things they preferred to keep quiet about in ordinary circumstances. Yefremov had the ability to control which scale of punishment a man earned. Suvorov already merited death, in Russia, usually delivered by a bullet ... but there were worse things than death.
“The president’s security detail has been warned?”
The FSS officer nodded. “Yes, though that was a tender one. How can we be sure that one of them is not compromised? That nearly happened to the American President last year, you may have heard, and it is a possibility we have to consider. They are all being watched. But Suvorov had few contacts with the Eighth Directorate when he was KGB, and none of the people he knew ever switched over to there.”
“You are sure of that?”
“We finished the cross-check three days ago. We’ve been busy checking records. We even have a list of people Suvorov might call. Sixteen of them, in fact. All of their phones have been tapped, and all are being watched.” But even the FSS didn’t have the manpower to put full surveillance details on those potential suspects. This had become the biggest case in the history of the FSS, and few of the KGB’s investigations had used up this much manpower, even back to Oleg Penkovskiy.
“What about the names Amalrik and Zimyanin?”
“Zimyanin came up in our check, but not the other. Suvorov didn’t know him, but Zimyanin did—they were comrades in Afghanistan—and presumably recruited the other himself. Of the sixteen others, seven are prime suspects, all Spetsnaz, three officers and four non-coms, all of them people who’ve put their talent and training on the open market. Two are in St. Petersburg, and might have been implicated in the elimination of Amalrik and Zimyanin. It would appear that their comradeship was lacking,” Yefremov observed dryly. “So, Provalov, do you have anything to add?”
“No, it would seem that you have covered all likely investigative avenues.”
“Thank you. Since it remains a murder case, you will accompany us when we make the arrest.”
“The American who assisted us ... ?”
“He may come along,” Yefremov said generously. “We’ll show him how we do things here in Russia.”
Reilly was back in the U.S. Embassy on the STU, talking to Washington.
“Holy shit,” the agent observed.
“That about covers it,” Director Murray agreed. “How good’s their presidential-protective detail?”
“Pretty good. As good as the Secret Service? I don’t know what their investigative support is like, but on the physical side, I’d have to say they’re okay.”
“Well, they’ve certainly been warned by now. Whatever they have is going to be perked up a notch or two. When will they do the takedown on this Suvorov guy?”
“Smart move is to sit on it until he makes a move. Figure the Chinese will get the word to him soon—like now, I suppose—and then he’ll make some phone calls. That’s when I’d put the arm on him, and not before.”
“Agreed,” Murray observed. “We want to be kept informed on all this. So, stroke your cop friend, will ya?”
“Yes, sir.” Reilly paused. “This war scare is for real?”
“It looks that way,” Murray confirmed. “We’re ramping up to help them out, but I’m not sure how it’s going to play out. The President’s hoping that the NATO gig will scare them off, but we’re not sure of that either. The Agency’s running in circles trying to figure the PRC out. Aside from that, I don’t know much.”
That surprised Reilly. He’d thought Murray was tight with the President, but supposed now that this information was too compartmentalized.
I’ll take that,” Colonel Aliyev said to the communications officer.
“It’s for the immediate attention of—”
“He needs sleep. To get to him, you must go through me,” the operations officer announced, reading through the dispatches. “This one can wait ... this one I can take care of. Anything else?”
“This one’s from the President!” “President Grushavoy needs a lucid general more than he needs an answer to this, Pasha.” Aliyev could use some sleep, too, but there was a sofa in the room, and its cushions were calling out to him.
“What’s Tolkunov doing?”
“Updating his estimate.”
“Is it getting better in any way?” Comms asked.
“What do you think?” Ops replied.
“Shit.”
“That’s about right, comrade. Know where we can purchase chopsticks for us to eat with?”
“Not while I have my service pistol,” the colonel replied. At nearly two meters in height, he was much too tall to be a tanker or an infantryman. “Make sure he sees these when he wakes. I’ll fix it with Stavka.”
“Good. I’m going to get a few hours, but wake me, not him,” Aliyev told his brother officer.
“Da.”
They were small men in the main. They started arriving at Never, a small railroad town just east of Skovorodino, on day coaches tacked onto the regular rail service on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Getting off, they found officers in uniform directing them to buses. These headed down a road paralleling the railroad right-of-way southeast toward a tunnel drilled ages before in the hills over the diminutive Urkan River. Beside the tunnel was an opening which appeared to the casual viewer to be a siding for service equipment for the railroad. And so it was, but this service tunnel went far into the hillside, and branching off it were many more, all constructed in the 1930s by political prisoners, part of Iosef Stalin’s gulag labor empire. In these man-made caverns were three hundred T-55 tanks, built in the mid-1960s and never used, but rather stored here to defend against an invasion from China, along with a further two hundred BTR-60 wheeled infantry carriers, plus all the other rolling stock for a Soviet-pattern tank division. The post was garrisoned by a force of four hundred conscripts who, like generations before them, served their time servicing the tanks and carriers, mainly moving from one to another, turning over the diesel engines and cleaning the metal surfaces, which was necessary because of water seepage through the stone roof. The “Never Depot,” it was called on classified maps, one of several such places close to the main rail line that went from Moscow to Vladivostok. Cunningly hidden, partially in plain sight, it was one of the aces that General-Colonel Bondarenko had hidden up his sleeve.
As were the men. They were mostly in their thirties, confused, and more than a little angry at having been called away from their homes. However, like good Russians, or indeed good citizens in any land, they got their notices, figured that their country had a need, and it was their country, and so about three-fourths of them went as summoned. Some saw familiar faces from their time in the conscript army of the Soviet Union—these men were mainly from that time—and greeted old friends, or ignored those less happily remembered. Each was given a preprinted card telling him where to go, and so the tank crews and infantry squads formed up, the latter finding their uniforms and light weapons, plus ammunition, waiting in the assigned motor-carrier. The tank crewmen were all small men, about 167 centimeters in height—about five feet six inches to an American—because the interiors of the old Russian tanks did not permit tall men to fit inside.
The tankers returning to the steeds of their youth knew the good and bad points of the T-55s. The engines were made of roughly machined parts and would grind off a full kilogram of metal shavings into the oil sumps during the first few hours of running, but, they all figured, that would have been taken care of by the routine turning-over of the engines in the depot. The tanks were, in fact, in surprisingly good shape, better than the ones they’d used on active duty. This seemed both strange and unsurprising to the returning soldiers, because the Red Army had made little logical sense when they’d been in it, but that, for a Soviet citizen of the 1970s and ’80s, was not unexpected either. Most remembered their service with some fondness, and for the usual reasons, the chance to travel and see new, different things, and the comradeship of men their own age—a time of life in which young men seek out the new and the exciting. The poor food, miserable pay, and strenuous duty were largely forgotten, though exposure to the rolling equipment brought back some of it with the instant memory that accompanied smells and feels from the past. The tanks all had full internal fuel tanks, plus the oil drums affixed to the rear that had made all of the men cringe when thinking about a battlefield—one live round could turn every tank into a pillar of fire, and so that was the fuel you burned off first, just so you could pull the handle to dump the damned things off when the first bullet flew.
Most agreeably of all, those who pressed the start buttons felt and heard the familiar rumble after only a few seconds of cranking. The benign environment of this cavern had been kind to these old, but essentially unused, tanks. They might have been brand new, fresh from the assembly lines of the massive factory at Nizhnyi Tagil, for decades the armory of the Red Army. The one thing that had changed, they all saw, was that the red star was gone from the glacis plate, replaced with an all-too-visible representation of their new white-blue-red flag, which, they all thought, was far too good an aiming point. Finally they were all called away from their vehicles by the young reserve officers, who, they saw, looked a little worried. Then the speeches began, and the reservists found out why.
Damn, isn’t she a lovely one,” the FSS officer said, getting into the car. They’d followed their subject to yet another expensive restaurant, where he’d dined alone, then walked into the bar, and within five minutes fixed upon a woman who’d also arrived alone, pretty in her black, red-striped dress that looked to have been copied from some Italian designer. Suvorov/Koniev was driving back toward his flat with a total of six cars in trail, three of them with light-change switches on their dashboards to alter their visual appearance at night. The cop riding in the number-two car thought that was an especially clever feature.
He was taking his time, not racing his car to show his courage, but instead dazzling the girl with his man-of-the-world demeanor, the investigators thought. The car slowed as it passed one corner, a street with old iron lampposts, then changed direction, if not abruptly, then unexpectedly.
“Shit, he’s going to the park,” the senior FSS guy said, picking up his radio microphone to say this over the air. “He must have spotted a flag somewhere.”
And so he did, but first he dropped off what appeared to be a very disappointed woman, holding some cash in her hand to ease the pain. One of the FSS cars paused to pick her up for questioning, while the others continued their distant pursuit, and five minutes later, it happened. Suvorov/ Koniev parked his car on one side of the park and walked across the darkened grass to the other, looking about as he did so, not noticing the fact that five cars were circling.
“That’s it. He picked it up.” He’d done it skillfully, but that didn’t matter if you knew what to look for. Then he walked back to his car. Two of the cars headed directly over to his flat, and the three in trail just kept going when he pulled in.
He said he felt suddenly ill. I gave him my card,” she told the interrogators. ”He gave me fifty euros for my trouble.” Which was fair payment, she thought, for wasting half an hour of her valuable time.
“Anything else? Did he look ill?”
“He said that the food suddenly disagreed with him. I wondered if he’d gotten cold feet as some men do, but not this one. He is a man of some sophistication. You can always tell.”
“Very well. Thank you, Yelena. If he calls you, please let us know.”
“Certainly.” It had been a totally painless interview, which came as rather a surprise for her, and for that reason she’d cooperated fully, wondering what the hell she’d stumbled into. A criminal of some sort? Drug trafficker, perhaps? If he called her, she’d call these people and to hell with him. Life for a woman of her trade was difficult enough.
He’s on the computer,” an electronics specialist said at FSS headquarters. He read the keystrokes off the keyboard bug they’d planted, and they not only showed up on his screen, but also ran live on a duplicate of the subject desktop system. ”There, there’s the clear-text. He’s got the message.”
There was a minute or so of thoughtful pause, and then he began typing again. He logged onto his e-mail service and started typing up messages. They all said some variant of “contact me as soon as you can,” and that told them what he was up to. A total of four letters had gone out, though one suggested forwarding to one or more others. Then he logged off and shut his computer down.
“Now, let’s see if we can identify his correspondents, shall we?” the senior investigator told his staff. That took all of twenty minutes. What had been routine drudgery was now as exciting as watching the World Cup football final.
The Myasishchev M-5 reconnaissance aircraft lifted off from Taza just before dawn. An odd-looking design with its twin booms, it was a forty-years-too-late Russian version of the venerable Lockheed U-2, able to cruise at seventy thousand feet at a sedate five hundred or so knots and take photographs in large numbers with high resolution. The pilot was an experienced Russian air force major with orders not to stray within ten kilometers of the Chinese border. This was to avoid provoking his country’s potential enemies, and that order was not as easy to execute as it had been to write down in Moscow, because the borders between countries are rarely straight lines. So, the major programmed his autopilot carefully and sat back to monitor his instruments while the camera systems did all the real work. The main instrument he monitored was his threat-receiver, essentially a radio scanner programmed to note the energy of radar transmitters. There were many such transmitters on the border, most of the low- to mid-frequency search types, but then a new one came up. This was on the X-band, and it came from the south, and that meant that a Chinese surface-to-air missile battery was illuminating him with a tracking-and-targeting radar. That got his attention, because although seventy thousand was higher than any commercial aircraft could fly, and higher than many fighters could reach, it was well within the flight envelope of a SAM, as an American named Francis Gary Powers had once discovered over Central Russia. A fighter could outmaneuver most SAMs, but the M-5 was not a fighter and had trouble out-maneuvering clouds on a windless day. And so he kept his eye on the threat-receiver’s dials while his ears registered the shrill beep-beep of the aural alert. The visual display showed that the pulse-repetition rate was in the tracking rather than the lock-up mode. So, a missile was probably not in the air, and the sky was clear enough that he’d probably see the smoke trail that such missiles always left, and today—no, no smoke coming up from the ground. For defensive systems, he had only a primitive chaff dispenser and prayer. Not even a white-noise jammer, the major groused. But there was no sense in worrying. He was ten kilometers inside his own country’s airspace, and whatever SAM systems the Chinese possessed were probably well inside their own borders. It would be a stretch for them to reach him, and he could always turn north and run while punching loose a few kilos of shredded aluminum foil to give the inbound missile something else to chase. As it played out, the mission involved four complete sweeps of the border region, and that required ninety otherwise boring minutes before he reprogrammed the M-5 back to the old fighter base outside Taza.
The ground crew supporting the mission had also been deployed from the Moscow area. As soon as the M-5 rolled to a stop, the film cassettes were unloaded and driven to the portable film lab for development, then forwarded, still wet, to the interpreters. They saw few tanks, but lots of tracks in the ground, and that was all they needed to see.