The Patriot Paradox

by William Esmont

  He had assumed correctly. A few moments later, the woman behind the counter, a willowy young Parisian, called out in Russian to the three men in the departure lounge. One of the men got up and waddled to the counter. A long guttural exchange had ensued; money changed hands, and five minutes later, Kurt and Amanda were boarding the Cessna with the businessmen.

  On board, after settling into the front of the passenger cabin, they had shared some vodka to celebrate their trip. The others had sequestered themselves in the rear, speaking in boisterous tones.

  Kurt felt a bump. Gear down.

  “Landing gear,” Amanda confirmed.

  “Yep.” He straightened in his seat and checked his seat belt.

  Thirty seconds later, there was a loud chirp and another thunk as the landing gear met the runway. The plane bounced once. Twice. And then all three wheels were firmly planted on the tarmac. They rolled for what seemed like an eternity; Kurt stared out the window. This was his first time in Moscow, and he had a mental picture that he needed to reconcile. The Moscow of his imagination was a gray and dreary place, mostly constructed from images from old movies.

  The plane slowed to a stop near a small terminal, and the light at the front of the cabin was extinguished. A cheer arose from the businessmen in the back, and Kurt and Amanda added their own weak hurrahs.

  Collecting their meager belongings, they exited the aircraft by way of a set of portable stairs. Kurt inhaled, taking in the scent of a new city, as he walked down the stairs. At first whiff, it smelled like any other European city. Maybe a little more diesel, he decided. Then he caught the scent of something different. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but it made him wrinkle his nose.

  Amanda didn’t seem to notice. Come to think of it, she hadn’t said much about her past experiences with Russia. He knew she had been here before, but had no idea for how long or what she had been doing. He decided it didn’t really matter. She had said she didn’t know anyone, didn’t have any contacts, and that he would have to take her at her word.

  “Let me do the talking,” she said under her breath as they approached the terminal entrance.

  In her right hand, she carried her backpack, stuffed with Euros, Pounds, and dollars.

  Either it’ll work, or it won’t. If it doesn’t, then we’ll be thrown in jail and burned up in a few hours when the bomb goes off. He didn’t like the worst case. He hoped it worked.

  Best case, they’ll take the bribe and wave us through. Then all we have to do is find the bomb and somehow deactivate it. He laughed to himself. Long odds.

  They passed through the main portal and a blast of frigid, damp air assaulted them, making them both shiver. Kurt’s impression was that the summer weather in Moscow was pretty close to that of his home in Virginia. Hazy, hot, and humid.

  The arrival lounge contained a long counter along the back wall. It was relatively modern in construction, likely built during the post-communist construction boom of the early 1990s. Before that, he reasoned, there wasn’t much call for international civil aviation.

  Behind the counter, an obese middle-aged man was helping the other travelers. Their passports were arrayed on the counter, and the man was comparing names to paperwork and pounding a hand stamp on each document to record their entry.

  A young woman appeared from a door on the right side of the room and slipped behind the counter. “Da,” she said, waving them over.

  Amanda approached the counter with a purposeful stride and leaned on it with her elbows. He stood slightly to the side and behind, trying to remain as inconspicuous as possible. For the next minute, Amanda and the woman conversed in rapid-fire Russian. The tone started to worry him. It appeared as if the women were arguing. There was an inordinate amount of gesturing and guttural noises. At one point, Amanda turned and pointed over her shoulder at the now-dormant aircraft and shouted what sounded like an expletive, albeit one that certainly didn’t map to anything in the English language.

  Finally, after what seemed an eternity, the woman sighed, and then motioned for Amanda to follow her into the back. Amanda gave Kurt’s hand a quick squeeze. “Let me have your passport.” He handed it to her, and she disappeared around the counter.

  By this point, the other travelers were long-gone. Their agent was hunting and pecking on a shiny new computer terminal. Kurt wandered over to the grimy window overlooking the tarmac and gazed out at the airplane.

  From there, he had a good vantage of the air traffic in and out of the civil field. The thing that most amazed him was the subtle differences in the aircraft from what he was accustomed to in the west. Many of the aircraft looked like they had been copied piece for piece, except for one minor, and sometimes major, detail to give them their own unique personalities.

  The Russians were world-class engineers. Early in the days of the Cold War, they had become masters at copying Western designs, either through outright theft or through studious reverse engineering. Nevertheless, they hadn’t been content to copy. They had learned from their efforts and, in some cases, their designs far exceeded the capabilities of their sources from the west. In general, the Russian aircraft were over-engineered, able to withstand much more abuse than their western counterparts.

  The door squeaked opened behind him. He turned to see Amanda emerge, a faint smile playing on her lips. She gave him a discreet nod, and then turned back to the woman behind her. Another exchange ensued, this one lacking the vitriol of the earlier discussion. The women exchanged brief kisses on their cheeks, and Amanda turned back to him.

  “We’re all set.”

  “That’s it?” Kurt asked with a raised eyebrow.

  “That’s it.” She gave him his passport. “Put this somewhere safe.”

  “The car is out there,” she said, pointing at a heavy metal door on the side of the building.

  “Car?”

  Amanda gave him a sly smile. “Included in the cost of admission.”

  Once again, Kurt was impressed by her endless resourcefulness. Who else could fly into Russia unannounced and waltz through customs, procure a car, and not break a sweat?

  He followed her through the door and back into the heat of the afternoon.

  Thirty-Seven

  Helen was suffering from a serious case of hurry up and wait, and it was pissing her off. With less than two hours until the attack in Moscow, neither she nor Jack had heard from Fish, Mason still hadn’t recovered the data, and to top it all off, Jack had summoned her to his office. If Jack asks me one more time if I’ve heard from Fish, I’m going to fucking scream, she thought as she marched down the hall.

  “I’m sure everything is fine with him,” she had told Jack in her calmest voice the last time he had checked in. “If Fish needs us, he’ll call.” That hadn’t been enough. Jack was on edge like she had never seen before. And the scotch he had been swilling wasn’t helping matters. He was a belligerent drunk, she realized, and it was all directed at her.

  She was concerned about the absence of Fish’s locator beacon. It was unusual, but not unheard of when an agent was deep undercover. The only thing she could hope to control was Mason’s end of the operation—retrieving the data.

  Helen was on the verge of panic. Kurt and Amanda had not been eliminated yet. Not only did it leave them all exposed if the data got out, but it looked bad for both her and Mason. After losing their prey in Paris because of a complete miscalculation on her part, she had put Mason into a holding pattern as she scrambled to determine where they had gone. Now, she was at a complete loss, her frustration raging like an open furnace.

  Her gut told her they were probably on their way to Moscow. At the same time, her intellect told her Amanda was probably trying to contact another resource, someone else she could trust, in western Europe. She took a deep breath and cracked her knuckles. There’s no time.

  She reached Jack’s door. It was closed. She knocked twice, short fast knocks.

  “Come in!” he boomed.

  Steeling herself, Hel
en entered. The first thing she noticed was the blinds. They were drawn. The next thing was the light. The overheads, bluish-white government-issue fluorescents, were off. A green-shaded accountant’s lamp cast a pool of light on Jack’s desk, and a floor lamp lit the far corner. The room seemed particularly gloomy, and it matched her mood perfectly.

  “Come in, Helen. Take a seat,” he said, waving her to a chair.

  She did. She noticed the open bottle of scotch on his desk.

  Jack saw her notice and said, “Want one?”

  Helen shook her head. Not this time. “No thanks.”

  They sat there in silence for a moment until Helen started to get uncomfortable. Jack was staring at her, but he seemed to be looking through her at the same time.

  “Was there something specific you wanted to discuss?” she asked, unable to bear the silence any longer.

  “Yes. There is.”

  Well, tell me then, she thought.

  “Where do I begin?” His voice was low and conspiratorial.

  She held her breath. Something had changed. Something about him—his body language, his eyes. She fixed her eyes on his, trying to read his thoughts.

  Jacked straightened and loosened his tie. “There’s no use beating around the bush here. Fish isn’t in Moscow to assassinate the President.”

  “No?”

  “The Chechens he’s working with, they’re a bit more resourceful than I’ve led you to believe.” Oh shit. Here it comes.

  Have you ever heard of Operation Track and Hold?” he asked.

  It sounded familiar, but she couldn’t place it. “Maybe.”

  “It was started in the early nineties, after the wall fell. The idea was to reduce the amount of nuclear weapons in the former Soviet republics by buying up their supply of fissile material, putting it into storage, and figuring out a way to track it going forward.”

  Helen realized she had heard of a program along those lines, but hadn’t known its name. “Yes. I’ve heard of it. What about it?”

  “The program has been pretty successful. There hasn’t been a single case of an intact nuke getting loose. Oh, there have been a few instances where small amounts of nuclear material, a little bit of uranium or a little bit of plutonium have disappeared, but nothing large enough to cause concern.”

  Helen had heard all of this before. “And?”

  “Well, that’s about to change,” he said with a grim expression.

  Helen was no idiot. She knew exactly where this was going. Chechens. CIA involvement in a program to decommission nukes. Fish. It all added up.

  She opened her mouth to protest, but Jack silenced her with a wave.

  “A year ago, Fish, Mike Vetter, and I came up with an idea. A plan, if you will, to eliminate our Russia problem once and for all. All we needed was a way to do it without looking like it was caused by us.”

  “Let me guess. The Chechens?” Helen was starting to feel sick to her stomach.

  “Yes. We found a way to make a decommissioned SS-20 warhead disappear from the Clean Sweep system. The Soviets were never very good at tracking their weapons. As far as the international monitors can tell, the weapon never existed.”

  “How big is it?” Helen interrupted.

  “Big. A hundred and fifty kilotons.”

  She sat back in her chair and ran her fingers through her hair. She felt short of breath, as if a giant were sitting on her chest. Visions of Moscow in ruins played across her mind’s eye. Jack continued speaking, but she didn’t hear. Why is he telling me this? Why now? Is it because of Fish?

  After a moment, Jack must have realized he had lost her. “Helen?”

  “HELEN!” he yelled. “I need you here with me. Now!”

  She snapped back into the present. Jack looked angry again, his earlier wistfulness only a memory.

  He pointed at his watch. “In a little over two hours, this bomb is going to detonate in downtown Moscow. Once that happens, our job is going to get very interesting, very fast.”

  No kidding.

  She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out. She didn’t know where to start. This was so much bigger than she had ever bargained for. This was murder on a scale she could barely comprehend.

  The next several minutes passed in a flash as Jack described his plan for during and after the attack.

  Thirty-Eight

  “How long?” Kurt asked.

  Amanda checked the time on her cell phone and frowned.

  “Two hours.”

  “Fuck!” he exclaimed. “Goddamn it!” They were sitting still in traffic on the Sheremetyevo access road. A half mile ahead, lights from emergency vehicles flashed. Traffic was stopped in both directions.

  “Can you see anything?” she asked.

  He shifted in his seat. “No. Not a goddamned thing.”

  They had been sitting in the same place for fifteen minutes, waiting for the accident to clear. Moscow traffic was unpredictable on a good day, Amanda had warned as they left the employee lot. On a bad day, it could be impenetrable. This looked like a bad one.

  He wrung his hands, unable to stop thinking about the seconds ticking by. If the bomb went off according to plan, or if someone got an itchy trigger finger and set it off early… well, they were sitting at ground zero. Thinking maybe they could reverse course, find a different way into the center of the city, he checked his rearview mirror. It was impossible. They were hemmed in with concrete barriers on both sides and a never-ending line of cars and trucks to the front and the rear.

  “It’s only six, no, seven miles,” Amanda said, consulting the map on her phone.

  He closed his eyes for a moment and willed himself to relax. He knew she was right. He tried to think of what Mike would do in the same situation. Mike would never have allowed things to get this far out of control in the first place. Mike wouldn’t have gotten himself into this type of situation. Mike had always been a meticulous planner, considering every angle and always having a backup strategy for whatever he did. Even this time.

  Kurt thought back to summer camp in Montana when he was ten. After watching Jurassic Park for the first time, he and Mike had both become rabid dinosaur enthusiasts. Their parents, in a rare act of parental largesse, had decided that the best way to feed their curiosity was to send them on a three-week paleontology dig in the heart of fossil country. Each day at camp, the boys toiled for hours under the hot sun, digging and brushing the hard-packed dirt, searching for fragments of long-extinct animals.

  One day near the end of their final week, Kurt came across a remarkable cache of bone fragments. Being only ten, he decided he wanted to keep some, to take them home.

  When he told Mike of his plan to take the bones, Mike was enthusiastic about the idea, and together they set to figuring out the best way to get the bones out of the pit and into their luggage undetected. At the last minute, Mike changed his mind. “It’s wrong, Kurt,” he explained. “These bones don’t belong to us. We need to tell the scientists.”

  Kurt had thrown a fit. “But I found them! They’re mine!” he whined.

  What happened next was unexpected. Mike, in a voice Kurt had grown to both love and hate over the years, explained why it was wrong to take the fossils. He did it in clear terms that even Kurt’s ten-year-old mind could comprehend. Kurt didn’t like it, not at all, but Mike was able to convince him that it was better to leave the bones where they had found them, to return home empty-handed.

  Three weeks later, on the morning before the first day of school, Mike had asked him, “Do you remember those dinosaur bones we found in Montana?”

  Kurt did. He was still disappointed about not bringing anything back, at caving to his brother’s insistence that they do the right thing.

  “Close your eyes.” Kurt did. He held his breath in anticipation.

  “Go ahead, open them,” Mike said a second later.

  Kurt opened his eyes and saw a shoebox on the bed. Nike. Air Jordans. He placed his hand on the lid, his curiosity
raging.

  His pulse quickened. “Is it…?”

  Mike smiled. “Go ahead.”

  Kurt pulled the lid from the box and there, in his bedroom, were the very same fossils from the dig in Montana—six small slivers of fossilized bone nestled on one of their mother’s dish towels.

  “How?” He looked up. “I thought…”

  Mike just shook his head and smiled. Kurt picked up the largest fragment and held it in his palm. It had heft, and he couldn’t help but imagine the animal that had once roamed the plains of Montana millions of years before.

  “What will Mom and Dad say?”

  “Don’t worry about them. Do you like the fossils?”

  Kurt nodded, unable to contain himself. How Mike had gotten the fossils out and why he didn’t seem troubled by it was beyond Kurt’s comprehension. What was apparent, for the first time, was his brother’s ability to make things happen. Mike could do anything.

  A horn blared behind them, jolting him back to the present. He sniffled. Mike could do anything except stay alive. He hadn’t seen the fossils in years. He assumed they were somewhere in his parents’ house. I’ll have to look for them the next time I’m there… if there is a next time.

  “We’re moving!” Amanda exclaimed. “Look!” She pointed at the emergency lights, which were coming toward them. A moment later, a roll-top truck passed, going the opposite direction. On the back of the truck was a mangled Volkswagen sedan, the loser of the accident that had held them up. A minute later, the traffic jam lurched to life in a peristaltic spasm.

  Amanda ground the car into first and eased forward. “Are you ready for this?”

  Kurt gave her a weak smile and nudged the duffel bag at his feet. “As ready as I can be. You?”

  “Same.”

  They were both silent for the next few minutes. Amanda navigated through the herky-jerky Moscow traffic, looking for their exit. It was farther away than Kurt had expected.