Course of Action: Out of Harm's WayAny Time, Any Place

by Lindsay McKenna

  “As you know,” Haggarty continued grimly, “relations between Russia and its former satellite state have hit an all-time low as a result of disagreements over how much the Ukraine should pay for the oil and natural gas passing through its territory.”

  Anna nodded, obviously still trying to take all this in. “The Ukrainians shut down the pipelines in 2006, and the Russians threatened to invade,” she said slowly. “The situation calmed for a while, but recent disputes have gone all the way to the international court in Stockholm for resolution.”

  “Correct.”

  Duke recognized the expression in the colonel’s steel-gray eyes. He should. He’d seen it often enough. Usually just before Haggarty sent a contingent of his troops into harm’s way.

  Christ! They were going to send her after this Varno!

  “Sir...”

  Haggarty held up a hand to cut off his instinctive protest. The colonel’s gaze remained locked on Anna.

  “Those disputes are why the Ukraine has turned to the U.S. for assistance. They don’t want to authorize a covert Russian operation in their country, but neither can they risk the loss of the Soyuz pipeline. As a result, we intend to insert a small team to verify the intel and, if possible, take Varno down. You know the area, can speak the local dialect. We want you to be part of that team.”

  She didn’t hesitate. “Of course. When do I leave?”

  “Immediately.”

  “Sir!”

  Duke leaned forward, blocking Anna from the colonel’s line of sight.

  “The Carpathians aren’t as high as the Alps but they’re every bit as rugged and damned near inaccessible in places. More to the point, this Varno is a known killer. You can’t send an untrained civilian without...”

  “Excuse me?” With an icy look at Duke, Anna reinserted herself in the mix. “I’m hardly untrained. And I’m familiar with both the area and the language.”

  Haggarty signaled his agreement with both sides of the argument. “We’re counting on that knowledge, but we appreciate the risks involved. That’s why I’m sending Sergeant Carmichael in with you.”

  She opened her mouth, then shut it as the colonel’s gaze shifted and drilled into his subordinate.

  “If you’re not still hurting. The truth, Carmichael. You back to one hundred percent?”

  It didn’t occur to Duke to lie. He’d spent too many years in special ops, where survival could and often did depend as much on endurance as on war-fighting skill. He wouldn’t risk his life or those of his men by minimizing risks. He did, however, put an air-commando spin on his response.

  “I’m ninety-eight percent, sir. On a civilian scale, that translates to...”

  “A hundred and ninety-eight percent,” the colonel finished dryly. He kept his steely gaze trained on Duke’s for another moment. “Are you up to a mission like this?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right, you’ve convinced me. Besides which, I talked to the docs before we put this op together.”

  “I figured as much, sir.”

  “They said the brutal exercise regimen you’ve designed for yourself has done more to strengthen and heal that hip than any physical therapist ever could. So I’m good with you and Ms. Solkov going in together. If she is.”

  Two pairs of eyes turned to Anna. One was narrow and gray and rock-hard. The other blue and almost as unyielding. It took her all of three seconds to decide. To quote one her babushka’s many sayings, better the wolf you can see than the hungry pack lurking in the woods.

  “I’m good.”

  A curt nod signaled his approval. All brisk business now, he outlined.

  “The code name for this mission is Operation Condor. A CIA team is in the air as we speak. You’ll rendezvous with them in Florida for in-depth briefings, then we’ll put you on a transport to England. The 352nd special ops group at RAF Mildenhall will exercise tactical control of the mission. They’ll provide logistical support, conduct the insertion and maintain twenty-four-hour command and control while you’re in country.”

  “Roger that, sir.”

  He paused, looked from Duke to Anna and back again. “I don’t have to tell either of you how dangerous this mission is. Or the political implications of the U.S. conducting a covert operation in a nation that Russia still considers part of its orbit. The White House wants daily updates.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Chapter 2

  It seemed to Anna that the next few hours sped by with the speed of light. One minute she was throwing a few things into a carryall and rushing back to base ops. The next, she was climbing aboard the C-21 and being whisked back to USAF Special Operations Command Headquarters with Colonel Haggarty and Sergeant Duke Carmichael.

  She stepped off the plane into the muggy afternoon heat of the Florida Panhandle. USAF Special Ops Command was headquartered at Hurlburt Air Force Base, once an auxiliary training field of the much larger Eglin Air Force Base some fifteen miles away. Together, the two bases ate up more than 800 square miles of Northern Florida.

  It was at Eglin that Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle secretly assembled B-25 bomber crews in 1942. After intensive training in simulated carrier deck take-offs, low-level and night flying, over-water navigation and low-altitude bombing, the B-25s were later launched from U.S. aircraft carriers in the Pacific and conducted the first attack of the war on the Japanese homeland.

  And it was Hurlburt that eventually became home to the first air-commando group, which won historical fame by providing fighter cover, air strikes and airlift for Wingate’s Raiders, then operating behind the lines in Burma during WWII. Called the “Burma Bridge Busters” the air commandos earned a reputation for unorthodox air fighters and formed an aerial lifeline to Wingate’s Raiders that was never broken.

  Hurlburt AFB had gone through many iterations in its mission and assigned units since that day, but it never lost its association with Special Forces. Air commandos had operated in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Bosnia and Somalia, and provided humanitarian relief to disaster-stricken peoples in every corner of the globe. And, as Anna knew well, they were the spearhead of the global war on terrorism. Units assigned to USAF Special Ops Command had racked up one of the highest casualty rates in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  She couldn’t help letting her gaze roam Duke Carmichael’s tall, muscular frame as he hefted their bags and led the way to the Jeep waiting at the edge of the ramp. He walked with only a slight limp, but she knew he’d been wounded in the vicious firefight that had left so many dead and earned Carmichael the Air Force Cross. Seriously wounded, judging by Colonel Haggarty’s demand to know if he was up to this mission.

  She struggled with a moment of doubt about her swift agreement that Carmichael be included in this little team. Was he honestly good to go, or had his assertion that he was fit merely been the macho bragging of a special ops type who couldn’t admit any weakness?

  * * *

  She got the answer to that question some five hours later. Four of those were spent locked in a classified briefing room, being fed updates from various intelligence sources about the activities of the shadowy, faceless terrorist known as Nikolai Varno. Their initial briefer was a tall, balding CIA analyst Anna knew only by reputation. From all reports, Terry Johnson was good at his job but his briefing style was dry and flat-toned. Not that he needed to inject drama. The subject matter provided that.

  “We suspect Varno was involved in the 2004 Belsan massacre,” he said, flashing up a series of grim photos.

  The Belsan massacre had happened several years before Anna was recruited by the Defense Intelligence Agency, but she knew the details. It began when a group of armed Chechen separatists entered a school and took over a thousand hostages, almost eight hundred of them children. They demanded recognition of Chechnya as a separate nation at the UN and immediate withdrawal of Russian forces in that state. The siege ended three days later, when Russian security forces used tanks, incendiary rockets and assault weapons to attack the school.
Over three hundred hostages died in the assault, almost two hundred of them children. Hundreds more were injured.

  The stark photos Terry Johnson flashed up on the screen showed mangled, bloody bodies lying everywhere. As often as Anna had studied reports of the brutal massacre, it still had the power to make her seriously question the human race’s chances of survival.

  “We also know Varno helped mastermind the 2010 Moscow subway bombing,” Johnson continued.

  Anna was more familiar with this attack. It had happened shortly after she joined the DIA. She and her fellow analysts had spent long hours and days and weeks sifting through intelligence feeds from the attack, desperately hoping the knowledge they gleaned of the terrorists’ methodology would prevent a similar incident in the U.S. Although she could have recited most of the details by heart, she listened intently as the briefer laid them out.

  “In this instance, the attack was perpetrated by two female suicide bombers. One was identified as the widow of a terrorist killed by Russian forces the previous year. The other was a twenty-nine-year-old schoolteacher whose brother was supposedly linked to the Chechen separatist movement. The attack was carried out at the height of the morning rush hour, when an estimated half a million people were in the subway system. The bombing killed at least forty people, and injured a hundred more.”

  More photos, more devastation. The thought of going up against the perpetrator of such evil sent a shiver rippling down Anna’s spine. She glanced at Carmichael, saw him staring at the screen with his jaw tight.

  He’d pulled an embassy tour in Moscow some years back, she remembered from his career brief. He must have had friends, acquaintances, who used the subway.

  “Intelligence suggests Varno may now be targeting the Russian oil and natural gas pipelines that feed Europe.”

  A map of Europe flashed up on the screen. There was Mother Russia, not the great lumbering bear it had been during the years of the Soviet Union, but still big and powerful enough to cast its shadow over its former satellite states. Those states now formed a buffer between Russia’s western border and her European neighbors—from Estonia in the far north, through Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Belarus, Hungary and Romania, to the Ukraine in the south.

  Approximately the size of Texas, the Ukraine straddled the Black Sea. It was a country with a wide variance in topographical characteristics: the fertile grasslands of the Steppes in the north; the mountains in the east and west; the fifteen-hundred-mile-long Dnieper River, Europe’s third longest, flowing all the way across the country to empty into the Black Sea; the marshy delta of the Danube.

  Given its strategic location as a gateway to Europe, the Ukraine had become a major conduit for the Russian oil and natural gas that fed Europe. The pipelines dropped from oil fields in Russia’s frozen north, traveled south for thousands of miles and spidered across the Ukraine.

  Anna knew those red lines represented more than just a conduit for natural resources. They were Europe’s lifelines. Not only was natural gas a major source of residential and commercial heat, but it was also used in the manufacture of everything from fertilizers and plastics to pharmaceuticals and fabrics. Any disruption to the flow of a major line could have devastating economic and political consequences, which was no doubt why Varno was targeting it. That, and the catastrophic loss of life that could result from a major explosion.

  “For a number of reasons,” Johnson continued, tracing one of the spider legs with a laser pointer, “the Ukrainian antiterrorism division believes Varno’s target may be the Soyuz line.”

  Anna leaned forward, her brows knotted in concentration as she studied the Soyuz route. It bisected the Ukraine from east to west. A spur dropped down to Odessa, the country’s major seaport on the Black Sea. And there, close to the Ukraine’s border with Romania, the Soyuz skirted the mountains her grandmother had grown up in.

  Where Varno was now believed to be operating.

  Intent on the rumpled brown that represented the mountains, Anna didn’t realize Johnson had wrapped up this portion of his presentation until he snapped the lights on. Startled, she saw they’d been at it for almost four hours. A glance at the clock on the briefing room wall showed it was now past 7:00 p.m.

  “We’ll take an hour break,” the CIA analyst announced. “Stretch your legs, chow down on the sandwiches in the other room. Then my counterpart from field ops will detail your cover for this mission. After that, you’ll board a transport for the flight over to RAF Mildenhall.”

  Anna pushed away from the table, bumping elbows with Duke in the process. “Sorry.”

  “No problem. I’ll see you back here in an hour.”

  “Aren’t you going to grab a sandwich?”

  “I’ve been sitting too long. The base gym’s right across the street. I’m going to work out some kinks before we get on the plane for England.”

  He hefted the gear bag he’d hurriedly packed before leaving Colorado and started for the door.

  “Wait, I’ll go with you.”

  Anna wasn’t an exercise fanatic but she hit the gym more or less regularly. All right, mostly less. She hadn’t anticipated having any time to exercise during this mission, but she’d stuffed several tank tops and a cherry-red exercise suit in her duffel, thinking the drawstring pants and lightweight jacket would be good for the flight to England. Military transports weren’t known for their comfort or convenience.

  “We’ve got a long flight ahead,” she said when Carmichael raised a politely skeptical brow. “I might as well work out a few kinks, too.”

  * * *

  When they walked into the ultramodern facility, they were greeted with the familiar scents of rubber mats, the antiseptic used to wipe down the equipment and the acrid tang of perspiration. The display of sweaty, gleaming muscle power, however, was very different from what Anna normally encountered back at her own gym. Of necessity, military personnel were required to maintain a higher level of physical fitness than their civilian counterparts. Since Hurlburt was home to USAF Special Ops, the military at this base took fitness to an entirely different plane.

  So, apparently, did Duke Carmichael. He’d emerged from the men’s locker room before Anna came out of the women’s. She spotted him in the weights area, bending and stretching and twisting at the waist to loosen up. His black lycra shorts encased hard, muscled thighs. Below the shorts, his legs were dusted with hair the same tawny gold as that on his arms. His sleeveless, wick-away gym shirt was silvery gray and stretched across what looked to Anna like a half acre of chest.

  She couldn’t help but note the tattoo that circled his upper arm. It looked like a snake, coiled and ready to strike. The tat didn’t show when he was in uniform. She would have noticed it before. She certainly noticed it now, as she headed for one of the fifteen or so stair-steppers lined up on one side of the aerobic workout area. Each came with its own TV screen. She turned hers off, wanting to process the details of the briefings she’d just had. To her profound annoyance, both her attention and her glance kept wandering to the weights area.

  Carmichael was doing curls. He’d straddled a bench and planted an elbow on one knee. His head was bent and his face a study in fierce concentration as he slowly, rhythmically raised and lowered his arm. He must have been using a forty-or fifty-pound dumbbell. His biceps bulged each time he raised the weight, stretched hard and sleek each time he lowered it.

  Okay. All right. Anna might not particularly care for the man’s cocky grin or the lazy twang he turned on and off like a faucet, but she could appreciate a prime male specimen when she saw one. And Carmichael was most definitely prime!

  When he progressed from one-armed curls to squats, she found herself pumping the stair-stepper harder and faster. Although he didn’t favor either hip, she knew the up-and-down exercise had to pull at his still-healing wound. His jaw locked tighter with each squat. The tendons in his neck corded. Sweat glistened on his shoulders and arrowed down the front of his shirt.

  For some reason,
the sight of Carmichael pushing himself to the limits of his endurance drove her, as well. As if she had to prove she was up for this mission, to herself as much to him. She pumped harder. Stepped faster. Within moments, her breath rasped and her lungs screamed for air.

  Wiggling out her exercise suit jacket, she draped it over a handle. The air-conditioned gym air raised goose bumps on arms and back left bare by her scoop-necked tank. The bumps went away fast as the damned stair-stepper became an instrument of torture.

  Anna wanted to sob with relief when she hit the end of her programmed workout and went into cool-down mode. Three minutes later, she almost fell off the machine. Her legs felt like wet rags. Gasping, she staggered toward the locker rooms. She had less than eight minutes to shower, change and hotfoot it back across the street.

  She felt rather than saw Carmichael come up behind her. Amusement and what she chose to interpret as a touch of admiration colored the drawl that drifted over her shoulder.

  “I saw you givin’ those stairs a run for their money. You look a little wobbly right now, though. Need some help soaping down?”

  She didn’t bother to answer. Nor did she do more than flick him a cool glance when she emerged from the locker room and found him waiting to escort her back across the street.

  A soft Florida dusk had gathered during their brief sojourn in the gym. Anna drew in the heavy, sea-tinged air, thinking how different it was from the thin, crisp Colorado air she’d breathed mere hours ago. Different, too, from the mountain air she’d be sucking in once she and Carmichael landed in the Ukraine.

  With their departure looming closer by the minute, she wavered between impatience to board the transport and nagging worry at how she and Carmichael would function as a team once they landed in the Ukraine. That worry exploded into disbelief when she learned the cover devised for the mission.