by Tom Clancy
After he’d defeated all but two of the pins, he replaced the rake pick in his mouth, then took the half-diamond pick, slid it into place in the lock, and slowly manipulated the last two pins, pushing them down from back to front.
With a satisfying click that he hoped had not made much noise inside the flat, the tension wrench turned on the open cylinder and the bolt opened on the door.
Quickly John placed everything back in his pocket and drew his pistol.
He pushed open the door and slid into the kitchen of the tiny flat. Past this he found himself looking into a darkened and tiny living room. A couch, a tiny coffee table, a television set, an eating table with several liquor bottles on it. Big Oleg Kovalenko sat in a chair at the window looking outside through dirty blinds, his back to the room.
In English Clark said, “How much time before they know I’m here?”
Kovalenko started, stood from the chair, and turned around. His hands were empty, otherwise Clark would have pumped a .45-caliber round into his fat belly.
The big Russian grabbed at his chest, his heart pounding after he was startled, but soon he sat back down. “I do not know. Did they see you enter?”
“No.”
“Then do not worry. You have more than enough time to kill me.”
Clark lowered the pistol and looked around. This place wasn’t even as nice as Manfred Kromm’s little flat. Shit, the American thought. So little thanks for all our years of service to our countries. This old Russian spy, the old East German spy Kromm, and John Clark, himself an old American spy.
Three fucking peas in a pod.
“I’m not going to kill you.” Clark nodded toward the empty vodka bottles. “You don’t look like you need any help.”
Kovalenko thought this over. “Then you want information?”
Now Clark shrugged. “I know you met Paul Laska in London. I know your son, Valentin, is involved as well.”
“Valentin follows orders from his leaders, as do you. As did I. He has nothing personal against you.”
“Who are those guys out there in the park?”
Kovalenko said, “They were sent by Laska, I think, in order to capture you. They work for the French detective Fabrice Bertrand-Morel. My son is back in London, his part in this affair was political, and it was benign, he had nothing to do with men chasing after you.” The old Russian nodded toward the gun low in Clark’s right hand. “I would be surprised if my boy has ever touched a gun.” He chuckled. “He is so fucking civilized.”
“So are you in contact with the men in the street?”
“In contact? No. They came here. They told me about you. Told me you would come here, but they would protect me. I knew nothing of you before yesterday. I only set up the meeting between Valentin and Pavel. Sorry … Paul. I was not told what was discussed.”
“Laska worked for the KGB in Czechoslovakia.” Clark said it as a statement.
Kovalenko did not deny it. He only said, “Pavel Laska has been an enemy of every state he has ever lived in.”
But John did not render judgment on Laska. The American ex–CIA man knew that the ruthless KGB could have destroyed the spirit of a young Paul Laska, turned him into something not of his own choosing.
The Cold War was littered with broken men.
Oleg said, “I am going to make myself a drink if you promise you won’t shoot me in the back.” Clark waved him toward his bottles and the big Russian lumbered over to the table. “Would you like something?”
“No.”
Kovalenko said, “So what have you learned from me? Nothing. Go back home. You will have a new president in a few weeks. He will protect you.”
Clark did not say it, but he wasn’t looking for protection from Jack Ryan. Quite the opposite. He needed to protect Ryan from exposure to him, to The Campus.
Kovalenko stood at his table and poured himself a tall straight vodka into a water glass. He walked back over to the chair with the bottle and the glass in his hands.
“I want to talk to your son.”
“I can call his office at the embassy in London. But I doubt he’d call me back.” Kovalenko swigged half the glass and put the bottle down on the windowsill, rattling the blinds in the process. “You would have better luck calling him yourself.”
The Russian seemed, to Clark, like he was telling the truth. He did not have much of a relationship with his son, and his son definitely was not here. Could Clark get to him in London, somehow?
He’d have to try. Coming to Moscow to bleed Oleg Kovalenko for information had been a dry hole.
Clark slipped his gun in his pocket. “I’ll leave you with your vodka. If you do talk to your boy, tell him I would like a word. Just a friendly conversation. He’ll be hearing from me.”
The American turned to leave through the kitchen, but the Russian pensioner called after him. “Sure you won’t join me for a drink? It will warm you from the cold.”
“Nyet,” John said as he reached the door.
“Maybe we could talk about old times.”
Clark’s hand stopped on the door latch. He turned, walked back into the living room.
Oleg cracked a little smile. “I do not get many visitors. I can’t be choosy, can I?”
Clark’s eyes sharpened as he scanned the room quickly.
“What?”
His eyes stopped scanning, locked onto the vodka bottle on the windowsill. It pressed against the blinds, closing them.
A signal to the men in the park. “Son of a bitch!” Clark shouted, and he shot back through the kitchen, out the door, and up the hallway.
He heard noises in the stairwell, the chirping of a walkie-talkie and the slapping, echoing footfalls of two men. John ran to the top of the stairs and grabbed a heavy, round metal ashtray/garbage can that had been positioned there. He laid the cylinder on its side at the edge of the top stair, waited until the sounds of the men told him they were just around the corner below, and then he kicked the metal can. He just caught a glimpse of the first man turning at the landing; he wore a heavy black coat and carried a small black pistol and a radio. John drew his pistol and adopted a combat stance at the top of the stairs.
The metal garbage can picked up speed as it bounced down the stairs. As the men turned onto the flight just below Clark, the can bounced head high and banged into them, sending both men crashing to the tile floor. One man dropped his pistol, but the other retained his weapon and tried to aim it up the stairwell at the man standing above them.
John fired a single round. The .45-caliber bullet burned a red crease into the man’s left cheek.
“Drop it!” Clark shouted in English.
The man on the tile floor below did as he was told. Along with his partner he raised his hands into the air as he lay there.
Even with the silencer on his SIG Sauer .45 the echo of Clark’s pistol in the stairwell was painfully loud, and he had no doubt residents would be on the phone to the police in seconds. He descended to the landing and stepped between the two men, keeping his pistol trained on them all the while. He liberated them of their guns and their walkie-talkies and their mobile phones. One of the men cursed Clark in French, but he kept his hands in the air while doing so, and John ignored him. John did not say another word to the men before continuing down the stairs.
He exited the back door of the apartment building a minute later, and here he dumped the men’s equipment in a trash can.
He thought, for a fleeting hopeful moment, that he was in the clear, but a white panel truck passed by on the opposite side of the road, and then it slammed on its brakes. Four men leapt out, there were eight lanes of afternoon traffic between John and the four, but they began running through the cars, heading right for him.
John broke into a run. His original objective had been the Pushkinskaya Metro station. But the men were on his heels, not fifty yards back, and they were a lot faster than he. The underground station would slow his escape—he would never make it on a train before they caught h
im. He ran across busy Tverskaya Street, eight lanes of traffic that he had to negotiate like a violent dance.
On the other side of the street he chanced a glance behind him. The four men were joined by two more in the street. The six hunters were only twenty-five yards back now.
They were going to catch him, it was quickly becoming apparent. There were too many men, they were too well trained, too well coordinated, and, he had to admit, they were too motherfucking young and fit for him to outrun them all across Moscow.
He could not get away from them, but he could, with a little cunning and guile, “game” his capture.
John picked up the pace now, trying to put a little space between himself and the six behind. As he did so, he pulled the prepaid phone he’d purchased the day before from his coat pocket.
The phone had an “auto answer” key that set the device to pick up automatically any incoming call after two rings. He enabled this feature with a few taps of his thumb, and then he turned down a side street that ran perpendicular to Pushkin Square. It was little more than an alley, but Clark saw what he was looking for. A municipal garbage truck rolled slowly in the opposite direction after just loading up with refuse from a dumpster outside the McDonald’s. John took his phone, looked down at the number on the screen, and then hurled it into the back of the truck just as it made a left behind the McDonald’s.
Then Clark turned into the doors of the restaurant as the men chasing him turned the corner behind.
John shot through the door, ran past smiling employees asking if they could help him, and pushed through a crowd that pushed him back.
He tried to escape through a side entrance but a black sedan screeched to a halt there, and two men in black sunglasses and heavy coats emerged from the backseat.
Clark ducked back into the restaurant and then headed toward the kitchen.
This Pushkin Square McDonald’s was the largest McDonald’s in the world. It could serve nine hundred customers simultaneously, and Clark got the impression they were having a busy afternoon rush. Finally he managed to make his way through the crowd and into the kitchen.
In an office beyond, Clark lifted the phone and dialed the number he’d just memorized. “Come on! Come on!”
After two rings, he heard a click and knew the call had been put through.
At that moment the six armed hunters appeared in the doorway to the office.
Clark spoke loudly into the phone: “Fabrice Bertrand-Morel, Paul Laska, and Valentin Kovalenko of the SVR.” He said it again as the men closed on him, then he hung up the phone.
The biggest man of the crew lifted his handgun high over his head, then brought it down hard onto the bridge of John Clark’s nose.
And then everything went black.
Clark awoke tied to a chair in a dark room without windows. His face hurt, his nose hurt, and his nostrils seemed to be full of bloody gauze.
He spit blood on the floor.
There was only one reason he was still alive. His phone call had confused them. Now these men, their boss, and their employer would all be scrambling to figure out whom he had communicated with. If they killed him now, after he’d passed the information on, it would do them no good.
Now they might beat him to get him to reveal his contact, but at least they would not put a bullet in his brain.
Not yet, anyway.
70
The Baikonur Cosmodrome, located north of the Syr Darya River in the steppes of the former Soviet satellite state of Kazakhstan, is both the oldest and the largest spaceport on earth. The entire grounds of the facility are roughly a circle some fifty miles in diameter, containing dozens of buildings, launch pads, hardened silos, processing facilities, tracking stations, launch control buildings, roads, an airfield, and a train station. The nearby town of Baikonur has its own airport and another rail station is nearby in Tyuratam.
The first rocket launch pad was built here in the 1950s at the start of the Cold War, and from here in Baikonur, Yuri Gagarin launched to become the first man in space. The commercial space industry would not exist for another thirty years, but today Baikonur is Russia’s main hub of private commercial space operations. They rent the property out from Kazakhstan, paying not in dollars or rubles or euros, but in military equipment.
Georgi Safronov had been walking the halls, standing on the pads, driving trucks across the steppes here for nearly twenty years. He was the face of the new Russia when it came to outer space, not unlike Gagarin himself representing Russia’s space operations a half-century earlier.
On his first day back at Baikonur, the day before the planned launching of the first of three Dnepr rockets in quick succession, forty-five-year-old Georgi Safronov sat in his temporary office in the LCC, the launch control center, situated some five miles west of the three launch silos devoted to Dnepr launches at Baikonur. The Dnepr area, though it encompassed dozens of square miles of territory, was actually quite small when compared with the launch facilities for the Soyuz, Proton, and Rokot systems in other parts of the Cosmodrome.
Georgi looked out his second-floor window at a light snowfall that obscured his view of the launch sites in the distance. Somewhere out there three silos already contained hundred-foot-tall headless rockets, but soon they would have their heads, and those three frozen concrete holes out there would become the most important and most feared place on earth.
A knock on the door to his office pulled his eyes away from the snowy vista.
Aleksandr Verbov, Safronov’s director of launch operations, leaned in the doorway. “Sorry, Georgi, the Americans from Intelsat are here. Since I can’t take them to the control room, I told them I would see if you were busy.”
“I would love to meet my American customers.”
Safronov stood as six Americans entered the small office. He smiled graciously, shaking their hands and speaking to them one at a time. They were here to monitor the launch of their communications satellite, but in fact their payload container containing their equipment would be switched out for a container presently sitting under guard in a train car a few miles from the Cosmodrome.
As he shook hands and exchanged pleasantries, he knew that these five men and one woman would be dead very soon. They were infidels, and their death was inconsequential, but he could not help thinking nevertheless that the woman was quite pretty.
Georgi damned his weakness. He knew his flesh would be rewarded in the afterlife. He told himself this and he smiled into the attractive communications executive’s eyes and moved on to the next American, a short, fat, bearded man with a Ph.D. in something irrelevant.
Soon the Americans were out of his office and he returned to his desk, knowing the process would be repeated by the Japanese customers and the British clients. The LCC was officially off-limits to foreigners, but Safronov had allowed the representatives from his customers’ companies some access to the second-floor offices.
Throughout the day he took full command of the preparations of the rockets. There were other people who could handle this, Georgi was president of the company after all, but Safronov explained away his personal attention by saying this was the first Dnepr multi-launch in history, with a trio of launches during a planned window of only thirty-six hours, and he wanted to make sure everything went according to plan. This could, he argued, help them attract more clients in the future if multiple companies needed their equipment launched in a specific time window. The Dnepr rockets did have the ability to take more than one satellite into space at a time, with all equipment loaded into the same Space Head Module, but this was only helpful if the customers all wanted the same orbit. The three-launch schedule for the next two days would send satellites to the south and to the north.
Or so everyone thought.
No one really raised an eyebrow at Safronov’s hands-on approach, as Georgi was a hands-on leader as well as an expert on the Dnepr system.
But no one knew that his expertise would rely on work he had done over a decade earlier
.
When the R-36 ballistic missile left service in the end of the 1980s, 308 missiles remained in the Soviet Union’s inventory.
Safronov’s company began refitting them for space launch operations under contract from the Russian government in the late nineties, but at the time the U.S. Space Shuttle Program was in full gear, and America had plans for more space vehicles on the horizon.
Safronov worried that his company could not make the Dnepr system profitable with commercial space launches alone, so he concocted other plans for their use.
One of the ideas Safronov put forth and explored for years was the idea that a Dnepr-1 rocket could be used as a maritime lifesaving device. He postulated that if, say, a ship was sinking off the coast of Antarctica, a launch of a rocket in Kazakhstan could send a pod carrying three thousand pounds up to twelve thousand miles away in under an hour, with an accuracy of under two kilometers. Other payloads could be sent to other parts of the globe in emergency situations, an admittedly expensive but unparalleled airmail service of sorts.
He knew it sounded fanciful, so he spent months with teams of scientists working out the telemetry physics of his idea, and he had developed computer models.
Ultimately his plans went nowhere, especially after U.S. shuttle launches ceased and then only restarted slowly after the loss of the Space Shuttle Challenger.
But a few months earlier, as soon as he returned from his meeting with General Ijaz, Safronov dusted off his old computer discs and put a team together to rework the mechanics of sending Dnepr vehicles into high atmosphere instead of low orbit, and then dropping them down to a particular location, parachuting a pod to earth.
His team thought it was hypothetical, but they did their job, and Safronov had the computer models and executable commands secretly loaded into the software now in use at the LCC.
He took a quick call from Assembly and Integration: the three satellites were now out of the clean room and had been placed in the payload containers and fitted into the Space Head Modules, the nose of the actual spacecraft that would, as far as the owners of the satellites knew, put their equipment into earth orbit. These spacecraft would now be taken out to the silos in transporter-erectors, large crane-trucks that would mate them to the launch vehicles, the huge three-stage rockets that already waited in their silos. It was a several-hours-long process that would not end until late in the evening, and much of the staff would be out of the LCC to oversee or just spectate at the launch sites.
