by Larry Bond
Below the green glowing number, several more numbers appeared latitude, longitude, and an elevation above sea level.
They matched the numbers posted prominently on the wall above the workbench, but both men had long ago memorized them.
In theory, it was possible to obtain a good global positioning system (GPS) fix using the signals transmitted by just three satellites, but first-rate accuracy demanded five. The precise number available depended both on the location of the receiver and the orbits of the twenty-four operational GPS satellites. There were always enough above any observer’s horizon for a decent fix, and often enough for an excellent one.
Another light glowed on the unit.
“Receiving GPS correction data,” Franz reported.
“Very good.” Klaus grinned. “Convey my thanks to the U.S. Coast Guard and all the other companies providing us with such services.”
The younger German matched the older man’s grin. The signals transmitted by the GPS satellites were carefully degraded so that civilian-owned receivers couldn’t match the accuracy of those used by the American armed forces. Differential GPS, or GPS, was a technique used to correct those errors. Software inside base station receivers matched their precisely known location against that supplied by GPS, and transmitted error correction data to mobile receivers within range.
The U.S. Coast Guard and a number of private companies had set up systems of radio beacons across North America — supplying constant error corrections to anyone with the appropriate equipment.
Standard civilian GPS sets could provide a navigation fix accurate to within one hundred meters horizontally and one hundred fifty meters vertically. Using five satellite signals and GPS error correction, those same sets could provide a fix accurate to within one meter.
Satisfied that the device’s GPS sub-system was on-line and working, the two men carefully checked yet another set of lights above the test panel. All were green.
Franz made a notation. “The computer is up and running, Klaus.”
“Good,” the older man grunted. He checked a pair of readouts on the workbench. “The processors are in sync. And the data feed is operational.”
The two German technicians tested several more functions on the panel, then, satisfied, disconnected the device. Then the man called Klaus watched as Franz placed it on a rack against one wall — next to several other pieces of electronics. He allowed the younger man one moment of satisfaction before ordering him back to work.
Caraco had them on a tight schedule.
CHAPTER FIVE
LOOSE ENDS
JUNE 1
Near Bergen, Norway (D MINUS 20)
“Bornestangen light bears three two five.”
Captain Pavel Tumarev grunted in reply, studying the radar scope. The Don radar set was stepped down to its shortest range setting, for maximum detail. Even then, he could see three other ships, one in the channel ahead of him and two others in the outbound channel approaching him, but separated by a goodly distance. Star of the White Sea was in her place, on the starboard side of the crowded channel.
Bergen was one of the busiest ports in Scandinavia — a hub for North Sea oil exploration, fishing, and bulk cargo transport. Norwegian radar stations watched all the merchant traffic and Channel 13 crackled with directions from Bergen traffic control.
Tumarev’s ship had been under positive control since passing Sjerkaget light, but if he collided with something, traffic control wouldn’t take responsibility for it.
“Bornestangen light bears three three zero,” reported the port bearing taker.
“Range to Venten Mountain?” Tumarev asked. There was an edge to his question. The radar operator was supposed to report the range every half minute, but he was late.
“Fifty-three hundred meters.”
His first officer looked up from the chart table. “Navigator recommends immediate turn to three three five degrees.”
“Come left to three three five,” ordered Tumarev. “Watch the current.”
They were on an ebb tide, and it might push them out of the channel if they didn’t pay attention.
Tumarev scanned the bridge, then stepped out on the port bridge wing to watch the ship swing. He sensed someone follow him out and knew it was Dietrich Kleiner, Arrus Export’s “senior representative” on board. A nice enough fellow, Tumarev thought sourly, as long as you didn’t try to talk to him or mess up somehow.
Kleiner had ridden his ship many times, always into Bergen.
He always departed at that port — often without saying so much as a word. When he did speak, he used Russian, but it was clear from more than his name that the man was German.
Tumarev grimaced at his own understatement. Kleiner, he thought, exhibited the same Teutonic craving for precision, lust for power, and contempt for Slavs that had led his damned country into two world wars and ruin.
The German was shorter than the Star’s captain, which was saying something, but stocky instead of just small. He weighed at least ten kilos more, and as far as Tumarev was concerned, it was all mean. He was also younger, in his mid-thirties instead of his fifties, and showed none of the traditional respect due a ship’s master.
Kleiner didn’t make every trip on the Star, praise God, but when he did he was everywhere. He seemed to know how a merchant vessel should be run, and wasn’t shy about telling the captain when he thought Tumarev or his crew were slacking. Losing their Arrus Export charter was the most pleasant thing he promised.
Satisfied they were back on course, Tumarev risked a glance at his unwelcome passenger. The German was watching him with a scowl — almost as though he were disappointed the Russian hadn’t put Star of the White Sea on the rocks.
Tumarev shrugged and went back inside. This close to the end of the fourteen-hundred-mile run from Pechenga, he had more important matters to attend to. Kleiner and his superiors at Arrus Export paid him well to carry their various cargoes out of Russia without asking inconvenient questions. But they didn’t pay him enough to spend all his time worrying about licking their boots.
Although Bergen lay at the end of a twisted forty kilometer channel, it was an excellent deepwater port. Ships of every type and size crowded the harbor — with oil tankers and container ships anchored below the same steep slopes that had once seen Viking longships unloading plunder and Hanseatic League merchantmen taking on mounds of salted fish.
Tumarev followed traffic control’s instructions to Pier 91A and moored Star of the White Sea portside to a weathered concrete pier sheathed with wood and rubber fenders. It was late in the day, nearly 1800 hours, but the captain saw cranes waiting for his ship.
He gave the boatswain his orders.
Almost before shore power was secured, Tumarev saw the hatch covers being removed, with Kleiner standing next to the boatswain like an unwelcome shadow.
The Russian captain lit an American cigarette and, with his ship safely tied up, relaxed for a few moments, curiosity for once eclipsing his natural laziness. He stood in a shadow and tracked Kleiner while the German watched the first jet engine they were carrying being hoisted out of the Star’s hold. The ship had other cargo aboard — mostly dried fish and scrap metal — but his contracts with Arrus were always clear.
Their shipments always got top priority.
Once the first crate was lifted off the ship, Kleiner hurried to the dock and greeted a tall, dour-looking man in a suit’. Tumarev spat to one side. The Norwegian had the look of an inspector or customs official, and he had scant use for either sort.
Like their counterparts in Russia, the local bureaucrats often seemed to exist only to make his life difficult and to skim off a percentage of his already meager profits in tariffs, taxes, and fees.
To his surprise, the Russian sea captain actually saw a thin smile cross Kleiner’s lips as he shook the newcomer’s hand. Then the Norwegian official showed his teeth, too — the kind of greedy smile one often saw on the face of someone about to receive an expec
ted gift.
The German produced a large manila envelope and passed it to the official, then turned away, heading back up the gangplank.
Tumarev, absorbed in the transaction, almost forgot to turn away himself, but he was sure he hadn’t been seen. He was also sure that whatever Arrus Export’s crated jet engines had been listed as on his ship’s manifests, they would appear as something else entirely at their ultimate destination.
Tumarev also noticed that the engines were not being unloaded to the pier. Instead, the cargo handling cranes were swinging them — he could see three of the five crates now — directly into the hold of another ship on the other side of the pier, in 91B. He squinted at the name painted below her superstructure.
Baltic Venturer. She appeared to be both newer than the Star and bigger by half. She was also moored portside to, with her bow out.
Line-handling crews and a tug were already standing by.
The Russian snorted. Evidently, Kleiner’s employers weren’t planning to waste any time in moving their newly transshipped cargo out of Norwegian territorial waters. But then they never did.
Well, it was none of his business, Tumarev reminded himself.
He had a ship to take care of. Left to her own devices, Star of the White Sea would probably take them all to the bottom in a cloud of rust. He tossed his cigarette over the side and went below to remind the engineer about the need to check their starboard fuel pump.
When he came back on deck an hour later, the Baltic Venturer was already underway — steaming back down the narrow, winding channel toward the open North Sea.
FBI Legal Attache Office, U.S. Embassy, Moscow
Spring was slowly giving way to summer all across Moscow — heralded by blue, cloudless skies and longer, hotter days. Red-tinged sunlight streamed through the window in Helen Gray’s fifth-floor office, dancing on dust motes swirling in the warm air.
Colonel Peter Thorn sat in a chair with his back to the window, letting the late afternoon sun relax shoulders that were still stiff from a long day spent in cramped airplane seats and uncomfortable airfield waiting rooms. Covering the thousand miles between Kandalaksha and the Russian capital had required first hopping a military cargo flight to Arkhangelsk, and then waiting for the once-a-day commercial flight south. For now he was content to wait for Helen to finish the phone call she’d received within minutes of their return to the embassy.
He stretched his legs out and accidentally bumped into Alexei Koniev’s feet. “Sorry, Major.”
Koniev chuckled. “Don’t worry about it, Colonel. Rabbits do not complain about their teeming warrens. Why should we be any different?”
Thorn nodded. The MVD officer’s imagery was apt. One person could work comfortably in Helen’s narrow office. Two people might squeeze in for a short time without driving each other crazy. But three was very definitely a crowd. When added to her desk, computer, bookshelves, and filing cabinets bulging with case files, two extra chairs left barely enough room to breathe.
His gaze drifted to the framed pictures on Helen’s walls and desk. One showed her parents, brother, and two sisters. Two familiar faces smiled back at him from another photo — an older man in U.S. Army dress blues and the stars of a major general and a silver-haired woman wearing an elegant evening dress.
Sam and Louisa Farrell.
They were two of the most important people in his own life.
Major General Sam Farrell had been his mentor and commanding officer for most of his years with Delta Force. Thorn knew his old friend had called in every favor he was owed to keep him in the Army after the Teheran raid. Farrell had retired the year before, but he still carried a lot of weight in the special warfare and intelligence communities. And Louisa Farrell had first introduced him to Helen.
Which brought him to the last picture — the one Helen kept prominently displayed on her desk. It was a picture of them together — a picture taken in those heady, happier days when she’d taken her first steps unaided after being wounded. Back in the days when marriage, a life together, had seemed the logical and inevitable next step to both of them.
Thorn shied away from that thought, uncomfortably aware that he didn’t have any pictures of Helen displayed in his own barren office at O.S.I.A or even in his empty town house in the Virginia suburbs. They were all packed away somewhere in envelopes.
He had lived his whole life as a uniformed nomad — always ready to move on to the next post, to the next duty station.
Permanence had never been part of the package. By the time he’d begun to accept the possibility, she was gone — to Moscow and this legal attach assignment.
“Khorosho. Da. Spasibo.” Helen hung up her phone and looked up at her two colleagues.
“So what’s the word?” Thorn asked.
She shrugged. “You want the good news first, or the bad news?”
“The good news.”
Helen nodded toward the phone. “That was Titenko — the deputy head of the organized crime directorate. He finally ran a militia patrol past Grushtin’s dacha earlier this afternoon.”
“And?” Koniev leaned forward.
“He’s there,” she said. “They spotted a brandnew BMW outside.
It’s registered in Grushtin’s name.”
Thorn smiled wryly. “Nice can-especially for a guy whose salary is just a couple of hundred dollars a month.” He straightened up. “So when do we pay Captain Grushtin a visit?”
Helen frowned. “That’s the bad news. Titenko won’t let us move without backup from an SOBR team.”
Thorn mentally paged through the briefing papers he’d read.
SOBR was the Russian-language acronym for the Special Detachments of Rapid Deployment — the MVD’S organized crime SWAT unit.
“The SOBR?” Koniev said impatiently. “For God’s sake, why?
We’re talking about bringing one man in for questioning — not assaulting a drug lord’s mansion!”
Helen shook her head. “General Titenko and the rest of your superiors aren’t so sure about that, Alexei. After reading the report we filed from Kandalaksha, they’ve seized on the heroin angle to explain why Grushtin sabotaged that plane. If he is working for a smuggling syndicate, there’s no telling what kind of firepower he could have hidden in that dacha.”
In theory, Thorn agreed with this Titenko’s caution. Rushing an operation without adequate recon or backup was a good way to get yourself killed. And he could understand why the Russians were so eager to believe the An-32 crash was drug-related. Since returning from Kandalaksha, he’d seen some of the reports crossing Helen’s desk.
Heroin transshipments from Southwest Asia and China through Russia to the West were on the rise. And it would make sense for the smugglers to use Russian Air Force bases as transfer points. With the right officers in their pockets, they wouldn’t find it very difficult to slip large quantities of heroin onto cargo aircraft ferrying in supplies, spare parts, and personnel. As chief of maintenance at Kandalaksha, Nikolai Grushtin was ideally placed to recover such shipments from any number of different hiding places aboard the aircraft arriving at the air base.
Of course, Thorn realized, pinning the blame on the Mafiya also made good political sense. It made the crash an entirely Russian tragedy — turning away any suggestion that the American nuclear arms inspection team might have been the intended target.
Well, he still wasn’t so sure. An air base in the far northern reaches of Russia seemed awfully far from the poppy fields of Afghanistan. And the connection between the heroin they’d found in Colonel Gasparov’s bag and Captain Nikolai Grushtin was still entirely theoretical. As far as he was concerned, it would stay that way until he had a chance to question the Air Force maintenance officer himself.
He cleared his throat. “Okay, so we wait for backup. Just when is this SWAT team available?”
Helen glanced out the window and then checked her watch.
“Not until later tonight — after dark.”
&nbs
p; Outside Moscow
Colonel Peter Thorn crouched low beside the dark BMW parked outside Grushtin’s country home. He risked a cautious glance around the bumper.
Birch trees gleamed silver in the pale light cast by the rising moon.
Patches of shadow flickered in and out of existence as a cool wind stirred the trees. The sky overhead was full of stars.
Moscow’s lights were a distant orange glow on the northern horizon.
They were thirty kilometers south of the city. The dacha itself was just meters away — separated from the rutted dirt lane by an unpainted wood fence and a stretch of weed-choked open ground.
Thorn pulled back into cover.
“Anything?” Helen Gray whispered in his ear.
“Nothing new,” he reported softly. “The lights are on, but the curtains are drawn.”
Koniev appeared out of the darkness, bent low, and dropped to the ground beside them. He unsnapped the holster at his side and drew an automatic pistol — a 5.45mm Makarov PSM. “The SOBR team is almost in place. They will go in first — on my signal.
Are you ready?”
Thorn nodded tightly, aware that his pulse was accelerating.
He glanced again at Koniev’s pistol. His own hands felt empty — too empty. Neither he nor Helen was armed. The Russian authorities frowned on foreigners — even foreigners with military or law enforcement connections — carrying weapons. Koniev had only bent the rules at the An-32 crash site because Helen had been the only woman quartered among hundreds of men. Once they’d come back to Moscow, her sidearm had gone straight back into an embassy lockbox.
The Russian MVD major risked his own look around the BMW’s bumper. He clicked the transmit button on a handheld radio.
“Tri. Dva. ODIN!”
The shadows came alive.
SOBR commandos wearing dark ski masks, jeans, running shoes, and bulky body armor charged out of concealment, covering the short distance from their hiding places to the dacha in seconds. One smashed in the front door with a sledgehammer — covered by two more armed with AKS-74U submachine guns.
