The Skorpion Directive

by David Stone

  “There are spaces, Raymond. Gaps. You are walking on railroad ties, across a trestle, above a deep gorge. Watch your step amidst the spaces. Now, go. Do your work. We will meet again.”

  Kerch

  OFFICE OF THE KERCH PORT CONSTABULARY, MITHRIDATE COURT, THREE P.M. LOCAL TIME

  Captain Bogdan Davit, prefect of the Kerch Constabulary, head of the port police, inspector of customs, commander of the Coast Guard, and the unofficial boss of pretty much anything else worth bossing in the little port town of Kerch, was waiting for them in the third-floor corner office of a slab-sided, bilious-looking concrete bunker across the road from Kerch’s industrial waterfront.

  Dalton and Mandy Pownall, ushered into Captain Davit’s bare-bones office by his secretary—a round, cheerful peach-colored young girl, her hair pulled tight in a stern official bun—got a broad, welcoming smile from Davit. He was a tall, well-muscled blond with eyes the color of glacier ice, wearing his tailor-made sky-blue uniform very well and, although young for the job, carrying the competent air of an infantry captain in a beleaguered outpost. He had, as Dalton recalled, despite his boyish manner, a core of toughness coupled with a sly dark humor, a pragmatic willingness to take events on the fly and people as they came.

  His office had a wall of windows that overlooked the waterfront and the port itself—admittedly, a dreary industrial morass, red-brick silos, tin-roofed warehouses, rust-streaked derricks rising up out of the mist, heaps of coal and iron ore, slag piles steaming in the damp, squalid gypsy freighters and oil tankers slouching by the crumbling quayside, a pall of smoke and rain and coal dust hanging low over it all, and, beyond this grim scene, across the muddy shark-tooth chop of the Kerch Strait, the dun-colored and moody forward slopes of fog-shrouded Russia.

  Davit, still grinning broadly, came around his desk—a short trip, since it was basically a card table—took Mandy’s hand in both of his and kissed her on both cheeks, breathing her in as he did so, then stepping back and smiling down at her with warm appreciation, before turning to Dalton and offering a strong, dry hand.

  “You are both well, I find. I am happy to have you back in my city. Marika”—he turned to the peach-colored girl still hovering at the door—“may we have . . . You will both take tea, I hope? Yes? Perfect! . . . Marika, would you be so good . . . Thank you. Now,” he said, pulling two hard wooden chairs out from against the wall and setting them in front of his desk, “now will you sit, please? And before we talk about what is in front of us—Dobri Levka and his boat, of which I have no news, sadly—and of our own homegrown spy . . . No, no, tea first . . . You must tell me . . . Miss Pownall, if I may, allow me to say you are exquisite today. My men still speak of you with great admiration, and of that terrible night, those poor people in the clinic . . .”

  They talked amiably for a time about the chase the KGB had led them on last winter, from Istanbul across the Black Sea to Kerch, what they had found there, with Captain Davit’s help, in the basement of a clinic. Dalton told Davit what he could of the story, leaving out a few critical details, which Davit understood and did not in any way resent. He himself lived near the cave of the Russian Bear and felt its great bulk looming over everything he cherished.

  “But it ended well, I hope,” he said, still beaming at Mandy, running a sharp cavalier’s eye over her body, from her black boots and tight jeans to her turtleneck and her fine leather jacket.

  “Actually,” said Mandy, smiling back—she loved to be admired, especially by chiseled young Nordic officers in well-cut uniforms—“I think we ought not to say that it has ended at all.”

  Dalton, setting his cup down on a small side table—he loathed tea, but this was the East, and tea was the inevitable drink—leaned forward, folded his hands. Davit, setting his tea down too, sat back quietly in his chair, tenting his fingers, watching Dalton’s face, his expression calm, interested, watchful.

  “I assume, Captain Davit—”

  “Please. I am Bogdan.”

  “Bogdan. That you’ve checked into my situation.”

  Davit smiled—a thin, careful smile.

  “Oh yes,” he said, lifting his hands as if to ward off an evil spirit, smiling broadly. “Be warned! I am on my guard. I have been told to watch out for you, the American servant of Satan himself. That you are . . . a wanted man, an evil rogue, like—what is his name?—Austin Powers, the International Man of Mystery—”

  “You’re not taking the warning very seriously,” said Mandy.

  Davit lifted his tea, sipped it, set it down, his smile fading.

  “I think for myself, Miss Pownall. I have good experience of Mr. Dalton, and of you, so I am not inclined to leap at squeakings of some little mice, am I? I hear from the Israelis that I am to do this or to do that or else rue the day. Kiev also has blustered at me. But Kiev is seven hundred kilometers away. I am here. For me, I dislike being blustered at.”

  He made a gesture at the window, invoking the port, the harbor, the Strait, and what lay beyond.

  “They—over there—the bully Russians, they bluster too and stamp their heavy boots. Last winter, we all froze here in Kerch because they wished to play ducks and drakes with our natural gas. So. Look around my office. Empty as a barn. We burn all our furniture. Keep warm. Russians starve. Ukrainians go on a diet. We survive. No, I will do what is good for Kerch and the Ukraine, not for the Mossad or even for Kiev. The Russians came into my waters and hijacked a boat belonging to one of our townsmen, Mr. Dobri Levka. Your friend, Mr. Dalton, and a fine, generous man, although perhaps not so sober as he could be. They force people from Kerch into rubber boats and tell them to row for their lives. Old people, women, kids. A father has a heart attack, an old woman dies of fear. Now they deny everything and blame it on Dobri. I mention maybe our homegrown spy?”

  “Yes,” said Dalton. “What did you mean?”

  “I mean exactly that. One of our own. A corporal. His name is Pavel Zelov. He is in Kiev now under arrest. I am afraid he is the cause of Mr. Galan’s death. After they took the Blue Nile, I received a call from Mr. Galan, from Venice. He mentioned you as an associate. He was asking for Irina Kuldic—”

  “Is she all right?” asked Mandy, by now quite ready for terrible news. “Nothing happened to her?”

  “No,” said Davit. “She is safe. After we found out about Pavel, we put her in a safe place so nothing could come to her. Do you wish to see her? She is only a few hours away.”

  “No,” said Dalton. “Tell us about this spy.”

  “Yes. Pavel,” he said, his mood darkening. “As I say, I am afraid that he is the cause of Mr. Galan’s death. After I heard about what had happened to Galan—in Vienna?—I required an . . . audit ? A security audit. A process of elimination, of checking personnel logs, e-mail lists, the timing of events . . . We arrested Pavel Zelov a few days later. After some . . . difficulties . . . he admitted he was hired by some Serbian person, he did not know who. But the nature of the contacts are consistent with the way Mr. Kirikoff works . . .” His voice trailed away, and his face lost some light as he went inward. “But there it lies. Zelov is in Kiev, Irina Kuldic is safe, but Mr. Galan is brutally dead, and you are here to avenge. As for me, I am angry. I too am ready to do something about all this whether or not Kiev says okay. So, you—how do you say it—you show me mine and I’ll show you yours?”

  “Something like that,” said Mandy, smiling at Dalton.

  Dalton, still leaning on his forearms, looking into Davit’s eyes. Holding his attention now, he told him about the death of Issadore Galan, the manner of it, the attack on the highway from Sevastopol. Davit began to write rapidly on a notepad as Dalton described the Kamov and the men he had fought, what they found at the compound in Staryi Krim.

  “You will excuse a call,” he said, picking up the phone, waiting a moment, his long fingers drumming on the card-table top. Then there was a rush of Ukrainian, delivered with quiet force. He set the phone down, lifted his hands in an apologetic gesture.


  “Forgive me. You have been badly treated in the Ukraine. I have sent men to . . . mop up ? To Staryi Krim, and to the road beyond it. This Kamov you mention. I have seen it go over—”

  “When?” asked Dalton sharply.

  “Two hours ago. A little less. No markings, brown. It flew slowly over the city and the harbor. I thought it was looking for something. For your car, I now think. It flew over the harbor and hovered low. I was having my lunchtime tea on the roof deck. Then it rose up and went east into Russia, the impudent fellow. There was no way to stop it. We do not have helicopters in Kerch.”

  “Is there any way to find out where it went?”

  Davit smiled broadly, a sharklike grin, drumming his fingertips, a happy little rattle on the tabletop. “But we know where it went. This is a shipping port. Kerch, The City of Industry. We have excellent radar equipment, even a big dish up on the mountain behind us. The coastal hills here are low, the sea flat and wide. When it appeared, without markings, I called over to the harbormaster and asked her to track the flight. I have her chart right here,” he said, holding up a sheet of plotting paper. “It went east southeast for about eighty kilometers and then dropped below our radar screens. We believe it landed here.”

  He laid the paper out in front of Mandy and Dalton, held it flat with his left hand, set his teacup on a corner, and touched a point on the southern coastline of the Russian mainland.

  “This is Anapa. It is a little seaside town, a resort. Many Russians go there for the beaches, the clinics, the mud baths—”

  “Clinics?” asked Mandy, “Like the one Kirikoff was running here in Kerch?”

  “Yes,” said Davit, losing some of his lightness. “Just like. In Anapa, there are many of these sanatoriums, on the beaches and in the town. Many for drunks—Russians drink almost as much as we do—for people recovering from cancer, even for plastic surgery.”

  “Can you . . . Do you have any access to the business records of those clinics? Any kind of description.”

  Davit was looking at Mandy, but his mind was clearly deep in the question. “There are so many. But, yes, there would be—what you call samizdat?”

  “Pamphlets?” asked Mandy. “Brochures?”

  “Yes, we would have those.” He tapped a button on the wall. A heartbeat later, Marika appeared at the door, her cheeks a little red. Dalton realized that she had probably been listening and hoped that Davit noticed it too. “Marika, those clinics in Anapa . . . Can you find some material on all of them? Brochures?”

  She bobbed, turned away, and then reappeared in the doorway, looking uncertain, as if afraid to raise a delicate topic. Davit apparently recognized the look.

  “Yes, Marika, what is it?”

  “Corporal Zelov, sir—”

  “Yes?”

  “He was drinker, remember?”

  “God yes,” said Davit, not in any way delighted to have the matter aired in front of Dalton and Miss Pownall. “And . . . ?”

  She plucked at her hair and then at her uniform blouse. Dalton wondered how close she had been to Corporal Zelov.

  “I . . . I was listening, sir,” she said, her face flaring into scarlet, setting her eyes alight by contrast. “You did not close the door—”

  “We burned it. Last February, Marika. Remember?”

  “Oh yes. So we did. I am sorry. But Pavel—Corporal Zelov—went to a clinic in Anapa. For drunkards. He was there six weeks.”

  “I thought he was seeing his sick mother in Kiev.”

  Marika went from red to snow white, her lower lip trembling, her cornflower blue eyes welling up.

  “Yes. Well, sir, he was afraid you would—”

  Davit, now as pale as Marika, began to erupt in Ukrainian, and Dalton, if only to get the kid out from under Davit’s acid rebuke, cut in, asking her if she knew the name of the clinic. She turned to him with obvious relief, her voice rising into a squeak.

  “No, sir. But Corporal Zelov said it was very big and had a bright red roof. His room even had a view of the water. It was all by itself, far out on the sand. Nothing else for many, many meters.”

  Dalton stood up, glanced out at the harbor, turned back to the girl: “Thank you, Marika. Bogdan, you have patrol craft? Fast cruisers? I recall one that met us after the fishing boat we were chasing last year blew up. Long, steel gray, a big fifty on the bow?”

  “Yes. The Velosia. She is there,” he said, pointing to a ninety-foot-long slate-gray cruiser moored at the quayside studded with swivel guns, a huge radar array, and flying the Ukrainian flag.

  “How fast is she?”

  Davit looked reflexively out at the water—flat and steel gray, under a lowering charcoal sky, rain drifting downward in curtains.

  “She will do forty knots,” he said, realization opening in his face, his eyes widening. “You think Dobri Levka is in Anapa?”

  “Yes,” said Dalton. “But not for long.”

  BY twilight, they were lying a half klick off the Russian coast, well within her territorial waters and therefore illegal as hell. All her running lights out, the Velosia was dark, her sharp destroyer bow slicing with a sibilant hiss through the surface chop hidden inside a bank of fog that had spread itself out across the Russian coastline. To the north, off their starboard bow, the yellow lights of Anapa glimmering faintly through the mist.

  Directly abeam, set out on an isolated sandspit, there was a low, rambling structure, the Bospor Clinik Spa. It was world famous, according to the clumsy translation of the online brochure that Dalton had found on the Internet, “for the certain resurrection of big drunkards and the putting of their feet to the solid ground.” Its sloping red roof was just discernible in the fading light. A few yard lights twinkled in the haze, and a light glowed on the front deck. Other than that, the place looked shuttered and deserted.

  He and Mandy and Davit had studied the floor plan of the place, laid out for their convenience on the website. There was a large parlor, spreading across the entire front of the house, full of comfortable chairs, and a large dining hall on the north side next to a communal kitchen with showers and a bathroom next to it.

  On the second floor, running along the beach side of the spa, were the guest rooms, fifteen of them in a row, each with a little fenced-in balcony overlooking the ocean. Behind the guest rooms, accessed by an internal hallway, was a clinic and some private rooms where patients could consult with their therapists.

  A phone call to the spa, placed by Marika using Mandy’s BlackBerry to disguise the local number, found that the spa was “closed for renovations” and had been for two weeks. The speaker, she reported, was a male, who spoke fluent Russian “but with a strange accent and a lisp. And his voice sounded funny, like he was whispering.”

  “Vukov,” said Dalton.

  DAVIT was standing beside Dalton, both men in jeans and black sweaters, booted and gloved. Both men were staring out at the coastline, Dalton quiet and withdrawn, thinking about what might be happening to Dobri Levka right now or what might already have happened, Davit, vividly alert, humming with energy and a kind of gleeful anticipation like a gundog on a chase.

  “I have three of our patrol boats out there,” he said, indicating the darkening seas. “They have radar. They will stop and search any boat coming out of Anapa. Our own radar tells us that no helicopter or other aircraft has left Anapa since we steamed out of Kerch. We are blockading Holy Mother Russia,” he finished with a flourish, spreading his arms out wide. “Isn’t it wonderful ?”

  “They’ll have radar too. In Anapa.”

  Davit made a dismissive gesture, grinning at Dalton.

  “But they are not military. They are a tourist town. Even if they see us, they will think we are trawlers, poaching their fish in the Kumani Canyon. It is right underneath us. They would never think we Ukrainians would be so crazy as to sail a fleet into their waters.”

  Dalton nodded, distracted, troubled.

  Worried sick, images of Issadore Galan’s body flickering on the screen
at the back of his skull.

  “They may have taken him inland,” he said.

  Davit nodded, put a comforting hand on Dalton’s shoulder.

  “This is true,” he admitted. “But we can do nothing about that. Come. Be cheerful. We are doing what there is for us to do. I have six men ready. Or do you still insist to go ashore alone?”

  “Is it a big town?”

  “No. A few thousand people, spread out along the coast. It is early for the tourists, so most of the beach places will be boarded up. This business here, the Bospor Clinik Spa, it is set apart from the main town. I think you will be okay to approach it. Please. You will take my men?”

  Here he gave Dalton a sidelong look, smiling carefully.

  “Or maybe . . . just me?”

  Dalton turned to look at the young man.

  “If you got caught on shore, what would happen to you?”

  Davit’s face hardened.

  “Maybe better ask what would happen to men who try to catch me. I am sick at heart to rest on my ass and let Russians push us around. Anyway, you know what, my friend? I decide, I am captain of this boat. You are not going at all if you are going in alone. No offense to America and the CIA.”

  “None taken,” said Dalton, smiling into the gathering darkness, his heart lifting at the idea of doing something—anything—to strike back at these people. “Okay. Just us two, then.”

  “Good,” said Davit, whistling to one of his sailors, giving him a quick instruction in Ukrainian. The man lumbered into the darkness, and Dalton could hear an electric pulley begin to whine, a boat being lowered into the water. Davit came back to stand beside him, but this time he was holding a large pistol. He press-checked it and stuffed it into a holster on his belt. He straightened his shoulders, chuffed out a breath, stopped for a moment.

  “Miss Pownall . . . If we do not come back, what would you wish to be done for her?”

  “Mandy knows what to do. She has a video proving that I did not kill Issadore Galan. And another video of the parking lot at Leopoldsberg showing Vukov dropping off Galan’s Saab in the early morning. When they see those, the Mossad will be very happy to come after Kirikoff and Vukov themselves. Mandy knows enough to help the Mossad deal with them. Where is she?”