‘He needs to get to the base!’ Carrie opened her medical bag to give him a shot of morphine. Suddenly, alarm spread across Vitruk’s face and without warning he hurled himself against Carrie, bringing her down. Her face was pressed hard into the ice, cold stinging her skin, Vitruk’s weight on top of her. She heard a high shrill whine of wind that at first sounded like a gust kicking up surface snow. But it was the fuel tank of their helicopter exploding. A fireball rose into the air, throwing a hot cloud of aviation vapor over them, and a plume of thick black choking smoke, laced with orange flame, that faded and was taken by the wind. When Vitruk finally let her up, she turned to her surviving patient, but didn’t have to check his heartbeat to know that he too was dead.
Four soldiers stood up, readied weapons, adjusted snowshoes, and set off to find Rake on the wasteland of cold that stretched out endlessly in front of them.
Rake concentrated on Carrie. From where he stood, he could see that she was alive and seemed uninjured, scrambling away from the crashed helicopter. Then came the fuel-tank blast which hid her in smoke. Then it cleared and he watched her get up. She put her glove to her face in what looked like a regular frostbite check after skin contact with ice. She examined a patient. Carrie was doing what she did best, being fine, being with the wounded.
Then Rake saw four men moving towards him like sentinels, meaning that he was exposed and they knew where he was. He had to get himself into cover.
All he had was a Makarov 9mm pistol and a Vityaz automatic rifle with no reputation for accuracy. Its two-hundred-meter outer range was about where the enemy was now. The rest of the equipment lay scattered on the hillside behind him.
To surrender would be suicide. Russia needed to display his dead body. To his left stood the ice wall he had identified earlier. Over the winter, ice walls grow like snowballs gathering soft snow. Their origins are iceberg slither that appears above the water. Then in gale after gale, water and debris flung against them make them bigger each time. Rake had seen ice walls in many shapes. This one looked low and long, no more than four feet high, but it could extend fifty feet down towards the seabed. He judged it to be at least six-feet wide which was enough to stop a high-velocity small-arms bullet. If he could get there, he might be able to take all four men before another helicopter came close. As he ran towards it, he saw the flash of a shot. It went very wide, probably out of range. That was good. It meant his enemy was angry and impatient.
More gunfire chipped off the top of the wall, spraying ice pellets towards him. He made it to cover and lying flat, elbows embedded in snow, he tried to line up a shot. The wind was erratic and he hadn’t sighted the weapon for the cold. His target was moving too quickly, but if he could not make a kill now, it would mean close-quarter fighting. They weren’t far away, but they had separated and were approaching from both sides. Even he wasn’t good enough to take them all. He didn’t know a man who could.
Rake did not pull the trigger. His finger was not even inside the trigger guard. But bullets tore into one soldier’s face, destroying the head and sending out webs of blood as he fell to the ground. A second soldier, although thirty yards away, died in exactly the same way. A sniper’s shot. The two surviving soldiers ran towards him, firing at the same time. Their bullets smashed uselessly into the wall. A third soldier was hit in the legs, his screams shrill and haunting like those of any young men suddenly wounded.
Rake heard the low-pitched whine of a snowmobile coming fast from the east. The fourth soldier flattened himself on the ground.
In camouflage, Arctic white, the snowmobile was military issue. From the tone, it would have carried a 1,000-cc engine, and could be moving at sixty, maybe seventy miles an hour, slowing to navigate an ice hazard, then speeding up again. The driver looped around checking each of his targets and signaling Rake to keep the fourth soldier covered. Rake tensed, trigger poised, but the Russian surrendered. The driver took his weapons, stood him up and pointed for him to walk back to his people. The soldier obeyed. Whoever this was, he was alone; he didn’t want prisoners, but he didn’t kill for the sake of it.
The snowmobile approached and Rake saw the driver was encased in the full skin of a polar bear. It would have weighed more than fifty pounds, but Don Ondola carried it with no more effort than an overcoat. The last time Rake had seen Ondola he was in court and Rake stood as character witness. There wasn’t a lot to say when a man got drunk, killed his wife, and raped his daughter, although that last one wasn’t even on the charge sheet. Ondola might be the finest outdoorsman in Alaska. He might have saved Rake’s life the day Tuuq left him to die in Uelen. But drink is drink, murder is murder, and the law’s the law. He had asked Rake only one favor and that was send him the polar-bear hide in prison.
Ondola pulled up next to Rake, got down, and lifted the skin. His face was thin, skin stretched and creased with a grin. ‘They said I could find you out here,’ he said, as if bumping into Rake in the village. ‘How you doing, Rake?’ A gloomy mist swept along the ground. Lights from the Russian troops were blurred, and the beams of floodlamps splayed and bounced off the whiteness.
Cluttered with gear, filled with appreciation, Rake embraced him. ‘So, you brought the marines across from the mainland?’ he asked.
Ondola nodded. ‘They’re on standby. They’ve been told to stay put.’
A siren started up from near the crashed Russian wreckage. Both men watched through binoculars. A medical helicopter hovered inches above the ice. Two bodies were lifted on board. Carrie climbed up, followed by the commander and others. The door slid shut and the aircraft turned quickly and flew nose-down, low and fast, towards the Russian base.
Rake and Ondola didn’t have long. The Russians would come for them again, with more men and aircraft.
‘You heading across there?’ asked Ondola.
‘Those are my orders unless they sent you here to tell me different.’
‘They didn’t send me, Rake.’ Ondola fidgeted with his weapon. ‘I split. I’m not going back to prison.’
‘You’ll be running all your life.’ Many times, Rake had tried reasoning with Ondola, but his brain wasn’t wired like that.
This time, Ondola pre-empted him. ‘Up here,’ he flattened his hand on his head, ‘I don’t think straight and I do bad things. Only place I’m any good is out here in the wild.’ His mind might be tortured, but his face was calm and, given what he had just done, he seemed untroubled. ‘I heard Akna’s over there, with a baby.’
‘She is.’ Rake scanned the landscape.
‘I’ll get you there,’ said Ondola.
Rake glanced at the snowmobile. ‘No chance with this.’
‘No. They’d cut us down. I brought more skins.’
The best camouflage on the ice was animal skin, seal, walrus, polar bear. No synthetic material matched it. Ondola took a collapsible sled from the back of the vehicle.
‘Go back,’ said Rake. ‘It’s not worth it.’
‘I need to see Akna. Tell her I’m sorry.’
The ice was harsh, shimmering, with shades of contrasting gray, white, and darkness. It reminded him of a burning hot desert in Iraq. ‘They sent Nikki to get me,’ said Rake.
‘Nikki Tuuq? Is he out here?’
‘Yes. Somewhere. I saw him with Timo.’
Ondola pulled a magazine from his weapon as if checking it. ‘How is Timo?’ he asked softly. Timo was Akna’s half-brother. Ondola had raised him like his own son until the night he killed Akna’s mother.
‘Timo’s fine. Henry’s watching over him now.’
‘Henry wants me dead.’
They lifted the skins onto the sled. Rake wanted to say more, to persuade Ondola to serve his time so he could walk free and try to get better. But not here. Not now. And besides, Ondola’s mind was set.
‘Can I beat Nikki Tuuq?’ asked Rake.
‘You can’t,’ said Ondola. ‘Not alone. Nikki’s too good. You’ll need my help.’
TWENTY-NINE
&nbs
p; The British Ambassador’s residence, Washington, DC
Stephanie stepped across the checkered black and white tiled floor of her residence, suddenly filled with nostalgia. By God, she had held some strained meetings here, lavish parties too, but nothing compared to what was about to unfold. She weaved through ornate gold pillars and headed to the dining room, stopping abruptly at the entrance.
Harry had called her moments after Carrie’s helicopter went down. She was replying to Sergey Grizlov’s message that asked her to get back to him as soon as possible. It wasn’t his usual number. She dialed, but it rang out. No reply. No voicemail.
Then Harry’s call interrupted. He had received information connected to Vitruk from the Japanese intelligence community. It was complicated. They must meet, and he needed a secure place to operate, somewhere to coordinate private, government, home, and foreign intelligence, completely off the books if need be. They had swapped suggestions. Harry’s apartment was fine for a visit, but it wouldn’t work for what was needed now. His office was in an unsecured office block in Crystal City, near the Pentagon, where many defense companies were based. The Pentagon, the White House, and any other government property would be impossible because of government control. Securing and sweeping a hotel suite would take too long. Harry suggested Stephanie’s place, the British Ambassador’s residence, which she immediately queried: ‘You said off the books. This is British government property.’
‘British books ain’t American books,’ Harry said, and Stephanie had agreed.
From his time in the military and on Congressional committees, Harry’s contacts in the global defense world were second to none. He was trusted, known to return favors and to keep his word. Stephanie spoke to Slater who, to her surprise, immediately gave her the go-ahead.
Now, standing in the doorway of her elegant dining room, Stephanie was amazed at how quickly Harry had turned this museum piece area into something resembling the planning center of a military boot camp. The long graceful table, usually set for thirty, was covered in maps, diagrams, phones, and laptops. Four men worked around the table, wearing ID passes around their necks. Two marker boards hung on either side of the tall marble mantelpiece, one with calculations, the other with a list of countries with red, green, and white crosses next to them. ‘We’re trying to build up support,’ said Harry as he weaved round the table towards her. ‘The more intel we muster, the safer it will be.’
‘Explain,’ she said impatiently. ‘And keep it simple.’ Stephanie still had no idea what ‘it’ was, except it had come via the Japanese.
‘You were right, Steph, on the Cuban missile crisis comparison. If this intel is correct, Moscow is making a similar play, except this time using Asia as the theater of confrontation.’
A flush of anxiety hit Stephanie as she thought of Grizlov’s message. Was he warning her? Was it the first step in a negotiation? If so, why didn’t he pick up? Back in the Sixties, she hadn’t even been born. But her father rarely stopped talking about the thirteen days when the world came to the brink of nuclear war. One of her first memories was him carrying her down to the basement of his scrappy used-car showroom to acquaint her with his bomb shelter and shelves of provisions.
Harry flattened his hand on a map on the table which showed East Asia, running from the east coast of India to Hawaii. ‘The Japanese have a long-time intelligence asset at the Sinuiju border crossing between North Korea and China,’ he said.
‘You mean an agent, a spy?’
‘Yes, I do. And a couple of hours after the Bering Strait kicked off, three sports utility vehicles, a black BMW, a white Toyota, and a gray Chinese-made Chana, followed by a white Kia truck, passed through that border. The convoy’s VIP status meant that no papers were needed. Identities, even the number of passengers, were not logged. The vehicle windows were blackened. But the Japanese asset managed to look through the surveillance video. He found what I regard as intelligence gold dust.’
Questions tumbled through Stephanie’s mind, but she held them back. She was crying out for the top line, but this was how Harry operated. He built blocks of evidence so that his conclusion would not be questioned. North Korea was a dynastic dictatorship, a buffer state between authoritarian China and democratic South Korea, that controlled the thoughts and movements of twenty-five million people, ran labor camps for tens of thousands, executed people with abandon, and had dodged just about every international sanction to develop a nuclear weapons system. Whether it would work or not was anybody’s guess. But the bombs were there, and the Trump presidency had brought things to crisis point. North Korea was China’s ally. But the big question was: why was Harry telling her and not his own people?
Harry continued, ‘For a few seconds, as the BMW pulled away onto that bridge into North Korea, the driver’s window came down and a cigarette butt was dropped onto the road. The hand that held it was white. The agent enhanced the pixels enough to ascertain that in the front passenger seat was another Caucasian, about fifty, with spectacles, his head slightly turned towards the camera. Defense Intelligence Headquarters in Tokyo identified the passenger as Dmitri Alverov, aged fifty-two, designer of ballistic missile re-entry vehicles. Alverov works at the Moscow Institute of Thermal Technology and has been photographed twice in Votkinsk, the factory eight hundred miles east of Moscow where the Topol-M missile is made. This is Russia’s most lethal long-range ballistic missile. It’s not Alverov’s first visit to North Korea. He was there from October 7th to 18th last year when he visited the Toksong nuclear weapons facility, which is three hundred miles north-east of Pyongyang.’
Harry pointed to it on the map, tracing a route down from the North Korea–China border to the capital Pyongyang and then looping up again to the nuclear site at Toksong, reminding Stephanie how Russia, China, North and South Korea, and Japan all got crushed together in this part of the world. The Sunuiju crossing lay at the south-west end of the border. She shifted her finger to the north-east, inadvertently brushing Harry’s hand. ‘Why didn’t they bring it in here?’ she asked. ‘The direct crossing between Russia and North Korea. No need to involve China.’
‘That’s only a rail crossing. Vitruk would need the flexibility of road transport, which is why he sought Chinese help.’
‘On Alverov’s first crossing, was the vehicle window up or down?’
‘We missed him at the border, but why?’
‘They could have thrown out the cigarette butt anywhere. They have ashtrays in the vehicle. So why bring the window down here, where they know they’re being watched? Were nuclear scientists being absent-minded? God forbid! Or did they want us to know they were going through? And if they did, why?’
‘And, of course, you have a theory.’
‘Yes, if we run with our Cuban missile analogy. Kennedy knew the Russian naval ships were on their way to Cuba and that was the beginning of the negotiations. If Moscow wants a deal, far better to start talking now than when the missile has been readied for launch. Unless, of course, it’s a bluff.’
‘No.’ Harry shook his head. ‘They couldn’t bluff on something like this.’
She tapped the China side of the border. ‘Isn’t this the Shenyang Military District?’
‘It is,’ said Harry. ‘Run by the same General Bu Zishan whom Vitruk lavishly entertained last year.’
‘And would he need Beijing’s authorization to let the Russian team through?’
‘No. He has a lot of independence.’
‘Would Vitruk need authorization?’
‘Alverov and the Institute of Thermal Technology are in the Volga Military District. The commander there is a rival to Vitruk and an ally of Sergey Grizlov. So, yes; my guess is that Vitruk would need to reach out, beyond his arc of control.’
Which meant that Vitruk’s operation must have been sanctioned by Lagutov; not just Little Diomede, but, if Harry’s intel was right, ratcheting it all the way to nuclear confrontation. The timing of Grizlov’s message suggested this was the case. Step
hanie checked her phone to see if he had messaged again. Nothing. ‘Grizlov tried to contact me.’
‘I know.’
And how the hell did he know that? He must be plugged directly into the highest classification of signals intelligence. ‘Explain, please.’ Stephanie shifted her weight and looked him straight in the eye. ‘No, forget that. First give me your overall conclusion as to what you think is going on.’
‘If we were not dealing with the Bering Strait crisis—’
‘But we are—’ Stephanie began.
Harry cut her off. ‘If we were not, my analysis would be that a rogue Russian team was showing North Korea how to build a long-range missile that can avoid US counter-measures. But since, as you say, we are, I have to assume that an authorized Russian team is assembling a missile in North Korea with the intention of launching it against the United States, or at least threatening to.’
‘Hence the Cuban comparison.’
‘Install your missiles with a proxy, then negotiate away the American missiles in Europe.’
‘The Soviet missiles never got to Cuba. The Topol-M is already in North Korea.’
‘That’s why I needed to talk to you first. The transition, Steph, in particular the acrimony between Holland and Swain, is leaking like a gas can peppered with gunshot. Holland’s people brief against Swain, Swain’s against Holland. Ten thousand experienced staffers are clearing their desks at State and Defense alone, all looking for new jobs. We cannot afford to share this through the usual channels.’
She understood where he was coming from, but it wouldn’t work. Harry was always the impatient wild card that tore up the rule book. Sensible Stephanie reined him in.
‘No,’ she said, dialing Prusak. ‘You need to brief the President.’
‘Didn’t you hear me, Steph? I’m not briefing because it will leak. And how to explain the source of my intel? What reputation do I have? A failed congressman from a rival party who quit because he couldn’t hold his drink and keep his marriage together?’
Man on Ice Page 16
