Assassin's Run

by Ward Larsen

Zhukov woke at first light, shortly before the alarm on his phone was set to go off. Sun streamed through the window of the trailer on the edge of the RosAvia complex. It was where the entire corporate contingent lived, a tiny prefabricated neighborhood that had been wheeled in behind trucks, along with two community trailers—one serving as a dining hall, the other a makeshift recreation room. There were thirteen employees in all, aside from Tikhonov, the minimum number of mechanics and technicians necessary to keep a small fleet of ancient MiGs and their attendant equipment running.

  Zhukov found Tikhonov, all too predictably, in the dining trailer behind a massive plate of eggs, sausage, and bread. A half dozen team members were seated at nearby tables, but there was little interaction at such an early hour.

  Spoiled by recent stays in five-star hotels, in both Casablanca and Moscow, Zhukov viewed the cafeteria-grade offerings—which he would have been delighted with as a lieutenant—as thoroughly unappetizing. He went to a pot on a burner and filled a Styrofoam cup with something black and bitter-scented that might have been coffee. He slid into a bench seat across from Tikhonov.

  “We should go into town tonight,” the engineer said through a full mouth.

  Zhukov stared, amused that Tikhonov had the gastronomic resolve to plot dinner while gorging himself at breakfast. He had, however, anticipated the suggestion. It had actually become something of a ritual—on each of Zhukov’s previous visits, he’d taken Tikhonov into Ouarzazate for dinner at the only viable restaurant in town. The place served a decent mutton with apricots, and reasonably good local wine—all of which escaped Tikhonov, who invariably gorged himself silly on the heaviest special available and swilled wine like it was water. On their last outing Zhukov had needed help getting his tablemate in the car when they left. This, at least, was familiar ground for the colonel. No Russian army officer could run a unit effectively without the core skill of managing stumbling drunks. Indeed, without it, there would be no Russian army.

  “Yes, by all means,” he said, “dinner tonight on RosAvia. Now—tell me about the schedule.”

  “Ach, the schedule again. All is going according to plan.”

  “This afternoon’s flight?”

  Tikhonov tapped his wristwatch. “Two o’clock.”

  “What are the proving points?”

  “Test points,” the engineer corrected. “Today we will expand the flight envelope to assure controllability at maximum speed.”

  This drew Zhukov’s interest. “I read that the MiG-21 can fly at twice the speed of sound.”

  Tikhonov laughed out loud, a rich bellow that echoed through the pre-fab building. “Mach 2? Hardly. That is what books will tell you, but these old crates of ours would disintegrate at that speed. One point three, perhaps one-four in a dive.”

  “That’s still fast.”

  “Fast enough to meet the project specifications.”

  “What about the infrared?”

  “We’ve been bench-testing the pod every day, and have undertaken two successful flights using the chase aircraft as a target.”

  “So the system is working?”

  “The results are nominal, no aberrations noted. Which is only to be expected—all the hardware we are using is proven, taken from other airframes. That was an integral part of my proposal from the beginning, to use off-the-shelf technology. If we tried to modify these airframes from a clean sheet of paper, make them do what we want—it would have taken years. The live-fire exercise will be key. I expect it to fully validate our baseline data.”

  “And when will that be?”

  “Barring any setbacks, the day after tomorrow.”

  “You’ve cut the timeline close.”

  “I don’t know why this timeline of yours is so important, but I have done all I can with the resources available. You can’t imagine the technical obstacles that have arisen. The first target drone arrived a month ago, but the air force idiots who shipped it neglected to include the software package. It’s like sending a car without the keys.”

  Zhukov suppressed a twinge of anger. As a career military officer he was not used to those lower in rank speaking their minds. He reminded himself, not for the first time, that dealing with civilians was different.

  “But now everything is ready.”

  “Of course,” Tikhonov said, stuffing half a sausage into his mouth. “Two o’clock this afternoon. Now, be a good colonel and go get me some more coffee.”

  Zhukov stiffened, but before he could lash out the big man broke into a fit of laughter. Tikhonov flapped his hand in the air dismissively, then got up and went for his own coffee. Having had enough of his lead engineer’s antics, Zhukov got up and went outside.

  He walked into the new morning. The air was cool, the high desert at the bottom of its daily thirty-degree temperature swing. He veered away from the RosAvia complex and ended on a hill near a stand of brush. His eyes panned across the distant mountains, and once again he was struck by the divergence of his surroundings in recent days. Most unnerving of all: his uneasy visit to the Kremlin.

  He was increasingly troubled by the path Petrov was carving. Like everyone in the military, Zhukov had watched with detachment over the years as the president shaped a new Russia. He’d begun with a core of former KGB associates from St. Petersburg, the so-called siloviki, then branched out to absorb elements of the mafia and a handful of political elites. From that base, and as the sole arbiter of the nation’s wealth, he had generated over a hundred new billionaires. The lucky winners were chosen exclusively by Petrov, a process guided by one attribute—complete and absolute loyalty.

  In return for that, the oligarchs were granted wide latitude in their operations. Factories, gas fields, and mines fell virtually unregulated. The plundered wealth flowed freely, unhindered by accounting principles or reporting guidelines. Whatever rule of law remained fell to little more than nostalgia for Russia’s chosen few.

  Yet that abandonment of order was not without consequences. The kleptocrats invariably moved their money to Zurich and their families to London, ill-disguised insurance against any fall from the Kremlin’s good graces. They’d all seen it happen before. The warning signs came first in the form of visa bans and travel restrictions. Those who didn’t fall back in line suffered asset clawbacks and disappearing accounts. Trumped-up charges were the final red flag, civil or criminal depending on whose toes had been trod upon and how heavily. At that point, the smart ran west. The unfortunate few who ignored the pattern ended up with one of three fates: work camps, psychiatric institutions, or in the most egregious cases, outright assassination. Czar Petrov, flanked by his princes of the moment, recognized but one law—that of absolute power.

  From his relatively comfortable existence as an army officer, Zhukov had long viewed the regime as most Russians did—an undeniably corrupt bunch, but one that had reignited a long-lost nationalist fervor. For a time there had been collective patience, a belief in the oft-repeated promises that the tide so obviously lifting the oligarchs into the stratosphere would eventually bring along the rest. Yet the drumbeat of new Russian greatness had clearly lost its cadence, faltering under food shortages, deficient medical care, and pension cuts. Further rounds of “reallocation” ran their course, and still Russia waited as the wealth gap between rich and poor became the highest of any developed nation on earth. Now the one-legged economy was teetering as energy prices fell. Unrest was on the rise.

  And there, Zhukov knew, was where he had come into the picture. Petrov had turned to the last untapped resource in Russia, a card that had long been in his hand but one he’d never had the nerve to play. Now the president had taken that course, and with schemes that were nothing short of audacious.

  Crimea was annexed boldly, and no sooner had the Russian standard been raised over Sebastopol than the president’s gang of elites pounced, setting upon her valuable Black Sea ports like jackals to a warm carcass. Spurred on by a surprisingly muddled Western response, Ukraine was next, little green men f
looding across the border to “advise” local rebels—and more importantly, to seize and reallocate vital energy infrastructure. When Russia’s air force was leveraged to further unbalance Syria, the president’s cronies were in tight formation with its squadrons of fighter-bombers. They contracted to expand the port facilities of Tartus with outrageous kickbacks, and went to the head of the queue for new oil and mineral leases.

  A wistful Zhukov turned away from the jagged mountains. The Russian military—his military, the once proud and brave protectors of the Motherland—had fallen to little more than a global thug squad for the ruling kleptocracy. A state-sponsored protection racket. He knew he should have felt bitterness at the degradation of his calling. Could the heroes of Stalingrad, and their brothers who’d overrun Berlin, ever have imagined such manipulation? Regiments of soldiers acting like spies. Avarice usurping honor.

  Zhukov turned and set out toward RosAvia’s little trailer park. As he did so, he yielded to that most Russian of reactions: resignation. Driven by Petrov’s thirst for power, the appropriation of Russia’s military was running headlong into unknown territory. A train that one army colonel could never stop.

  That being the case … Who am I to turn down the chance of heading up a rail line? Perhaps I’ll even be good at it.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Slaton spent the night in small hotel on the east side of Milan, an address that was chic and restful, and likely tested the limits of his CIA credit card. He enjoyed a leisurely breakfast under a patio awning, and later spent thirty minutes on the phone with Christine. Ten more he spent watching a video stream of Davy doing somersaults in the embassy’s grassy courtyard. It was the longest he’d been away from either of them for months.

  At half past eleven he set out for the modest shop in the Brera District where Vittorio both lived and worked. Slaton began with an excursion along Via Montenapoleone. There he saw the designs of Versace and Gucci displayed in windows along the street, and those of Ferrari and Lamborghini cruising between them. It was haughty and ostentatious, and no different from a dozen other streets in a dozen other cities where the beautiful people ran. Not so long ago Slaton had himself been a billionaire, the accidental consequence of a Mossad mission that had imploded to his benefit. At the time that wealth had seemed as empty as it was unearned, and he’d had neither the time nor inclination for spontaneous consumption. That being the case, when the money evaporated as easily as it had come, he felt not a trace of remorse.

  On arriving in Brera he diverted into the municipal park and performed a rudimentary countersurveillance scheme, made easy by rows of hedges and intricate walking paths. He still had no specific cause to be on edge, but old habits were old habits for a reason.

  Having been to Vittorio’s shop twice before, he was familiar with the address, and he made one loop around the building upon arriving. Slaton knocked on the door two seconds before noon. No one appreciated precision like a gunsmith.

  Vittorio opened the door promptly, probably having had the reverse thought. The two shook hands, and the armorer led Slaton down from the first floor living quarters into the basement where he ran his shop. Nothing had changed. It was a small and cramped workspace, a makeshift office in front and a machine shop behind, the two divided by a cheap bamboo partition. The smell of machine oil weighed on the air.

  “It pains me to remind you,” said Vittorio, taking a seat behind his desk, “but I must ask for your complete discretion in anything we discuss. I have recently been reissued a limited license to modify arms, but the carabinieri have been dogging me lately. I show them antique weapons I’ve brought gloriously back to life, and they accuse me of using hacksaws to saw off shotguns for the underworld down south.”

  “Do you?”

  “Certainly not. A die grinder with a diamond cut-off disc gives a far superior product.”

  Slaton grinned as he took a seat across the desk.

  Vittorio began by reaching into a drawer and removing the round in question. It was wrapped in a fresh piece of oilcloth. He set it on the table between them, exposed the bullet, and adjusted a trainable work light. “First I should thank you—you have tested me. It’s good to find a challenge now and again.”

  “And did you come up with an answer?”

  “I will let you be the judge.” Vittorio pointed to the bullet. “The jacket is unlike anything I’ve seen. I could not specifically identify the material—it shows signatures of an advanced alloy, but also retains characteristics of a composite. It appears perfectly machined, but keeps an unusual degree of pliability. I also noted three slightly altered belts that circle the round’s midsection.”

  Slaton looked more closely, and he did see three barely discernible rings. “What would those be for?”

  Vittorio raised a pointed finger to tell Slaton his question had to wait. “Also,” he picked up, “we must consider the damaged tip. Beneath this crushed composite is a reflective wafer which could have few possible utilities. And as I mentioned yesterday, I thought it might be useful to have a look inside.”

  The armorer opened the same drawer and removed a printout of an X-ray image. From a dentist’s office, Slaton mused. Vittorio placed the evidence between them.

  In the ghosted picture Slaton saw electrical circuitry, and, at perfect intervals along the longitudinal axis, what looked like dense ribs of metal. A bright circle near the shank of the round got his attention. “What’s that?” he asked.

  Looking pleased, Vittorio leaned back in his chair. “That, if I am not mistaken, is a battery.”

  Slaton stared at the armorer. Vittorio only stared back in silence, allowing him to work it all out.

  “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” Slaton asked.

  “Don’t tell me you haven’t had your own suspicions. The battery, optics of some kind, the dense masses around the waist. This is something that I fear might put you out of business, my friend. What you have here is a steerable bullet.”

  * * *

  CIA director Thomas Coltrane sat in his office wearing gym attire. Even so clothed, he cut an undeniably dapper figure. He worked out nearly every morning in the headquarters gym, and the regulars there knew better than to interrupt him as he went through his paces—thirty minutes of free weights, followed by cardio. It kept him trim and fit. What few in the building realized, however, was that it was less a matter of self-improvement than an outlet for the stress of his position. Proving the point this morning, and as typically happened at least once a week, events had cut his workout short.

  He used his fingers to comb back damp and mussed silver hair as he stared at two messages on his desk. Both were marked urgent, were highly classified, and had been delivered in tandem as he was loading a squat rack. Now in private, he looked at them in disbelief, not so much for what either contained, but simply because they had arrived in such serendipitous unison. One was an internal flash message, sourced from a recently promoted department head whom he knew quite well—Anna Sorensen. She was in Rome, delving into the matter of a recently assassinated Russian oligarch. That very fact—that she’d gone to Rome to pursue a lead he’d already told her wasn’t worth chasing—struck Coltrane on two fronts. He was pissed she hadn’t taken his advice. He was also impressed by her initiative.

  As it turned out, the second message implied she’d been right. An urgent dispatch from the Israeli ambassador to the United States had been forwarded through the State Department. In spite of that circuitous routing, the Israeli version was nearly identical in content to Sorensen’s report.

  Coltrane picked up the messages, one in each hand, and read them carefully a second time, trying to discern any differences. There were few. Last night, the two intelligence services had independently, and nearly simultaneously, detected an offload from a freighter in the northern Red Sea. Three small boats had taken on crates and run fast ashore to ports along the Saudi coast. Sorensen’s version suggested that two other freighters, one in the Gulf of Aden and another in the
Persian Gulf, were undertaking parallel operations.

  Having seen Sorensen in action, Coltrane knew she was competent. More to the point, he had to admit that her instincts, which he’d discounted only days ago, had proved dead on. Right then the director made his first decision. Anna Sorensen would take the lead on this. His second choice proved more problematic. Israel was already involved, with an apparent threat on their regional doorstep—something they never took lightly. Against that, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Jordan, or even the Gulf Arab states could also be facing some degree of risk. From such a combustible cast of characters, who should he share the information with?

  His problem was mitigated by a quick analysis of the evidence. Odds were, the cargo was nothing more than small arms, or possibly explosives. Of course, other possibilities had to be considered. The worst case was always some manner of WMD. Could the crates contain the precursors of chemical weapons, a makeshift laboratory for biological agents? Even nuclear material? Coltrane thought it unlikely. The sheer quantity of material involved, along with the fact that it was being dispersed to different geographic points, shouted that they were looking at conventional weapons. Even so, it was quite an arsenal.

  “Enough to start a small war,” Coltrane thought aloud in the confines of his office.

  He touched a button to call his deputy into the office, thinking a strategy session was in order. As he did, Coltrane had no idea how prescient his mumblings would prove.

  THIRTY-TWO

  “Something like this,” said Vittorio, with perhaps the trace of a smile, “it might even make me obsolete.”

  Slaton sat motionless, the armorer’s words resounding in his head … a steerable bullet. He’d heard rumblings of it for years, and knew the idea had been experimented with. Now, with the results on the desk in front of him, concept leapt to reality.

  “Is it U.S. or Russian?” he asked, knowing these were the most likely suspects to take the lead on such technology.