by David Wood
There was no rolling wall of fire like in movies, but the tunnel conducted the resulting overpressure wave like the barrel of a cannon, and when it hit them, it was like being shot out of one. The little tram was bucked off its rails, and caromed back and forth along the tunnel walls until the force of the wave passed. By some miracle, the cars remained upright, though in the darkness, it was hard to tell which way was up. The scorching heat lasted only a moment, but the wind continued for several seconds thereafter, bearing with it a noxious dust cloud. Maddock covered his mouth and nose with a sleeve and took shallow breaths until the worst of it was past.
“Everyone okay?”
A chorus of voices answered back, and then a light flashed on—Bones’ penlight—revealing air that was thick with dust. The beam swept back and forth, illuminating all five of the tram’s passengers, confirming that no major injuries had been sustained. Petrov wore a chagrinned expression.
“You were right,” he said, his voice a hoarse whisper.
“We usually are,” Bones agreed.
“If we had stayed there...”
“Yup.”
They left the useless tram behind and continued up the tunnel, Bones still bearing Leopov in his arms. After about five minutes of walking they reached an open area that was a mirror image of the loading area they had left behind. Beyond the arched entrance was a long, narrow rectangular room with a pair of silver doors—presumably leading to an elevator—in the wall opposite the arch, and another regular wooden door on the side wall to the left, a good hundred feet or so distant. The elevator doors looked as if someone had tried to kick them in—blast damage. Bypassing them, Maddock went to the wooden door and tried the lever handle. It opened, revealing a cramped, and to all appearances, seldom used skeletal metal stairway that ascended two flights to a landing. One more flight continued up from there, but the steps rose up to ceiling level and stopped. There was a sturdy looking metal box with a hand crank protruding from it, mounted to the wall to the right of this final staircase.
Maddock tried rolling the crank. It turned counter-clockwise with little effort, so he kept going in that direction several more turns. He could hear a rattling sound behind the wall, like a bicycle chain turning on a sprocket. After about ten rotations, he glimpsed movement above, and looked up to see that the ceiling had risen a few inches, swinging away on concealed hinges. Faint light was visible through the widening crack.
“I think we found our way out,” he announced to the others, and then redoubled his efforts.
It took a couple minutes, but the trap door finally rose up high enough for them to continue up the stairs. As he ascended, Maddock noted that the barrier consisted of a six-inch thickness of concrete bordered by a metal frame, but it was only when he got above it that he realized that the whole affair was actually a section of sidewalk.
They emerged into a well-lit courtyard, that looked to be a little smaller than a football field, surrounded on all sides by modern-looking structures of glass and concrete. The area was dominated by a large half-circle of lawn. The rest of the courtyard, including the spot where the trap door had opened, was paved with concrete. Café tables were placed along the sidewalk and trees sprouted through here and there.
At the far corner of the concrete arc, about a hundred and fifty feet away and lit up with spotlights was a curious structure. It was a curved, green-tinted screen, about eight feet high, perforated with irregular shapes that weren’t quite discernible at a distance, but which Maddock knew were letters—eight hundred and sixty-five letters, along with four question marks.
It was the Kryptos sculpture, created by artist Jim Sanborn with the help of a since-retired CIA cryptographer, and it contained a four-part encrypted message that, in the nearly ten years since its dedication, had not been completely solved, despite the best efforts of code-breakers both in the government and the civilian world. Maddock, who was a fan of puzzles and unsolved mysteries, had read about the sculpture and its seemingly uncrackable code, but had never seen it up close, mostly because, as it was situated smack in the middle of the George Bush Center for Intelligence, it was off-limits to the public.
“Well, that answers that,” he murmured. “Definitely CIA headquarters.”
Spotlights suddenly flashed on all around the perimeter of the courtyard, transfixing them in blinding light, to the accompaniment of shouted commands to “Freeze!” and “Put your hands up.”
Bones shook his head. “Like there was ever any doubt.”
TWENTY-FIVE
Over the Black Sea—Thirty-six hours later
Maddock flexed the fingers of his gloved right hand, closing them into a fist, opening them, closing them. His grip-strength felt about right, and there was only a twinge of accompanying pain in his biceps.
“How’s it feel?” Bones asked from the seat across the aisle. His voice was weirdly distorted by the oxygen mask that completely covered his face. Maddock was wearing one too, pre-breathing in preparation for the high-altitude parachute jump they would be making in a few minutes.
“Almost like I didn’t get shot,” Maddock replied. “Steroids are awesome.”
“Yeah, until you grow boobs.”
Maddock had been assured that such side-effects were associated with prolonged use of anabolic steroids, not corticosteroids—which was what he had been given—but he didn’t see any point in explaining this to Bones. “Small price to pay, if it means finishing this.”
He didn’t need to explain what he meant by that. Bones knew. Willis knew. It wasn’t something he dared say aloud, even here, thirty-five thousand feet up.
After their initial detainment by CIA security forces, Maddock had succeeded in convincing his interrogator not only of his identity—easily enough verified—but also that they had been working with Bruce Huntley on a special clandestine assignment. The tale he spun had just enough basis in fact to ring true. They had been assisting Huntley with the defection of two Russian nationals—Petrov and Lia—who had been involved in a hunt for Nazi loot and had subsequently been targeted by the Russian mob after making an important discovery. Huntley had put them all up at the safe house, but the Russians had found them, killing Huntley and Leopov, along with the paramilitaries who had been providing security. Maddock and the others had escaped through the tunnel. He conveniently omitted any mention of Gestapo Müller and the Blutfahne.
It was a risky play. If Huntley’s immediate superior in the Directorate of Operations was part of Müller’s conspiracy, then the lie would be immediately exposed. But Maddock didn’t think Huntley’s activities had been carried out with official sanction. Everything he had done, from intercepting Lia’s escape in Finland, to teaming up with the next-gen Nazis in Argentina, had a seat-of-the-pants feel. Rogue ops, off the books and completely deniable.
Either the operations officer in charge believed him, or chose to accept the fiction as a better alternative than digging deeper. Curiously, no one had asked for further explanation about the tunnel they had emerged from.
Once the matter of their operational status had been sorted out, Maddock had been allowed to contact Maxie. He was pleased to learn that the SEAL commander was out of the hospital, and even happier to hear that Alex Vaccaro had regained consciousness. Maxie had arranged for them all to be transferred to the Bethesda Naval Hospital, ostensibly for treatment of their injuries, but mostly to get them out of the CIA’s clutches.
Telesh was of course long gone. His private jet had left from Dulles a mere ninety minutes after the destruction of the Cape Cod on Savile Lane. Maxie was in favor of asking the higher ups to scramble interceptor jets to shoot the plane down, but Maddock had talked him out of it.
“It won’t happen. Even if you could convince SECNAV to authorize action against a civilian plane that poses no immediate threat, someone will get in the way. They’ll call the jets off, or order them to force Telesh to land so they can take him alive.”
He hadn’t mentioned the Blutfahne to Maxie
either, not because he didn’t trust his commander, but rather to give him deniability. If Maxie knew Maddock’s true intention, he would be obligated to sideline him.
The plane’s flight plan showed its final destination as Gelendzhik—Telesh was returning to his dacha, though how long he intended to stay was anyone’s guess.
“You’ve got to send us in,” he had insisted. “I’ve been there. I’ve seen the place.”
This was also a slight distortion of the truth—he had only seen the garage and the exterior of the main house—but it was imperative that he lead the assault.
“We can be in and out before anyone knows what happened,” he went on. “But we have to move fast.”
Maxie had agreed to run the idea up the flagpole. Maddock wasn’t at all surprised when word came down from on high that the operation was a go. Somebody higher up, maybe someone who had been one of Müller’s sworn followers, knew what Telesh had taken and wanted it back.
It wasn’t possible or even practical to keep the Agency out of the loop. They would, in essence, be invading Russia. At best, this was an illegal action, but if they were discovered, even after the fact, it was conceivably an act of war.
The mission was simply to “neutralize the threat posed by the Russian mobster Sergei Yukovitch Telesh.” Their new CIA handler had not explicitly mentioned the Blutfahne, but had only stated that a secondary objective of the mission was to “secure and recover any items of strategic and/or historic value in the possession of the primary target.” Maddock had simply nodded as if in full agreement. If the man even suspected Maddock’s true intent, he and Bones and Willis would have been sidelined.
Late the following afternoon, Maddock and the rest of his platoon—everyone but Professor who despite reporting himself as fully mission capable would not be able to catch up to them in time—were on a plane headed for Incirlik Air Base on the southern coast of Turkey. Because they were traveling east, it was late afternoon the next day when they deplaned. After a short hop to Istanbul, they boarded a McDonnell Douglas DC-10. The jumbo jet was part of the fleet belonging to a major air freight service, and would be making its nightly run to Moscow, but with a slight, insignificant deviation in its flight path that would take it within about forty miles of the Black Sea coast.
As the plane neared the dropzone, the flight crew donned their oxygen masks and depressurized the cabin. Maddock and the other SEALs switched from the plane’s O2 supply to their rebreather units, gathered up their gear, and headed to the rear of the plane. At a signal from the pilot that neutral pressure had been achieved, the jumpmaster lowered the ramp. Maddock felt the slipstream tugging at him, pulling him toward oblivion. The air was frigid, causing beads of condensation to appear on the inside of his mask, but the cold didn’t reach through the thermal coveralls he wore over his neoprene wetsuit.
“Come on,” he muttered. “Let’s get this over with.”
He didn’t necessarily hate “jumping out of a perfectly good airplane.” What he hated was surrendering himself completely to the unpredictable. Mr. Murphy—he of Murphy’s Law fame—had a bad habit of stowing away in the parachute bag, and even though there was a lot Maddock could do to ensure that he made it down in one piece, there was a lot more that was simply out of his control. Dane Maddock hated not being in control.
The jumpmaster gave the signal. Maddock quickly made his way down the ramp and leaped out into nothingness.
Because he was traveling at the same speed as the aircraft, the transition was smooth, with only a little buffeting from the vortices of the slipstream. He could feel his forward motion slowing as the thin air piled up in front of him while gravity drew him inexorably down. He counted to five and then pulled the ripcord handle.
He felt a twinge of pain in his ribs as the chute yanked him out of freefall. He hoped the surgical grade adhesive the doctors had used to glue the bullet wound shut had not just failed. The sensation passed quickly and he put it out of his mind. His chute had deployed correctly, that was the important thing.
He found the GPS receiver clipped to his harness and checked his position relative to the objective. Telesh’s villa was fifty-six kilometers—thirty-five miles—away on a compass heading of forty-two degrees. As the first out, it was his job to navigate toward the target. The Cyalume sticks clipped to his back and helmet would show the others the way.
Their ram-air canopies could achieve a five-to-one glide ratio—more like a hang glider than a parachute—which meant that they traveled five horizontal feet for every one foot of vertical descent. Since he was roughly six and a half miles above the surface of the Black Sea, he would, if Mr. Murphy didn’t put in an appearance, be able to travel about thirty-two miles closer to the objective before splashing down. Close, but still three miles short of the objective. Fortunately, the part of that distance—the final leg—would be on land, so the SEALs would only have to swim a couple miles.
As the noise of the jet receded into the distance, he craned his head around to check the status of his teammates. They were all but invisible in the darkness, but each man had a red Cyalume glowstick clipped to his tactical vest. He counted the lights and breathed his second sigh of relief—fourteen pinpoints of light trailed behind him at staggered intervals, reaching up like a stairway to heaven.
No chute failures. So far, so good.
He spent the next half hour watching his altimeter and GPS, and making gentle corrections to the chute to stay on course. Once below the cloud layer, he turned off his rebreather and pushed the mask up, enjoying a breath of fresh if still chilly air. He could discern the irregular outline of the horizon ahead. To the left and right, he could distinguish city lights but between those isolated islands of humanity, there were broad swaths of darkness. As he drew closer however, and dropped below a thousand feet above sea level, he could distinguish a small pinpoint of light almost directly ahead—Telesh’s dacha.
The water came up fast. Maddock replaced his mask and switched on his rebreather, then flared his chute, slowing his descent just enough to soften the impact with the water. The next instant, he was completely immersed and sinking fast, borne down by the weight of his gear. He didn’t panic, but instead calmly turned the valve on his rebreather unit to fill his buoyancy compensator. This slowed his downward plunge long enough for him to cut loose from his chute, which in turn allowed him to swim free and begin kicking for the surface.
One by one, the rest of the platoon settled into the water. Maddock took a head count to confirm that everyone had made it down safely—they had. Once all the chutes were secured in stuff sacks, they donned swim fins and began the long swim to shore.
Despite his earlier visit, Maddock had not seen Telesh’s property from a distance, but he had reviewed satellite images and knew what to expect. The dacha was situated atop a forested promontory known as Cape Idokopas, which rose some two hundred feet above the sea.
They came ashore on a sandy beach, about a hundred feet from the base of the cape where they cached their swim gear.
Bones rigged the equipment with an incendiary grenade attached to a trip wire—if anyone got too close to the concealed stash—or if, God forbid, they didn’t make it back—the grenade would ignite and burn white hot, turning everything into unrecognizable slag. With their load now significantly lightened, they donned night vision goggles and began the final push to the objective. They carried suppressed AK74 rifles with Czech manufactured 5.45-millimeter rounds. When Russian authorities showed up to investigate the site, they would find no evidence to directly implicate the United States. They would no doubt suspect that an American special warfare unit had carried out the raid, but they would never admit it. Publicly, they would blame Chechen separatists, who would be only too eager to take credit.
Once their mission objectives were accomplished, they would return here, suit up, and get back in the water, swimming out to rendezvous with a waiting SEAL delivery vehicle—a multi-passenger diver propulsion unit—that had been deploye
d from a Turkish Coast Guard vessel earlier in the day and prepositioned several miles off shore.
They moved stealthily into the woods. The incline was steep, but not enough to require climbing equipment, and despite the fact that they were moving at a snail’s pace, it took less than fifteen minutes for them to reach the edge of the clearing where the buildings were situated. In the green-tinted monochrome display of the goggles, the lights of the two-story house blazed through the trees like a sunrise.
Rather than rush the house, they dispersed along the tree line until they had eyes on every side. Aside from the exterior lights, most of the house was dark. There was a faint glow coming from one window in the front, and a brighter light shining from a kitchen window on the north side. No one appeared to be moving in the house, but there were four guards, armed with Kalashnikov rifles, occupying stationary posts on the front and back porches. They were all seated. Two of them were smoking, and all had the bored expressions of men who expected their duty shift to be completely uneventful. The SEALs observed the house for several minutes, but nothing changed.
On Maddock’s command, “Execute!”—whispered into the throat mic connected to his squad radio, four simultaneous shots from suppressed rifles took out the guards.
He winced a little at the muffled reports, not because they were loud enough to be heard from inside the house, but because they accompanied the deaths of four more men. He did not feel any regret at sending them on their way—they were, unquestionably, sworn enemies of everything he held dear.
No, it was the futility of it all.
What the hell am I even doing here?
When he had first dared to test himself and try out for the SEALs, he had known that it would mean plunging into a world of remorseless violence. Unlike his father and most of the naval officers he had grown up around—men who commanded warships and trained for war at a distance—SEAL missions were almost always conducted at very close range. And while the rest of the military largely spent their time preparing for conflicts that only seldom materialized, the SEALs and other special warfare operators stayed busy.
