The lid sailed past the door, rising, arcing, falling… then struck the top of the far row of crates with a boiler factory clatter.
Instantly gunfire erupted inside the echoing cavern of the warehouse, as one of the men with Alekseev opened up with his AKM on full-auto.
“Tudah!” the man with the spotlight screamed, swinging the beam to the northeastern end of the warehouse. He pointed. “Tudah!”
Another Russian joined in, spraying the northern corner of the room, sending up clouds of whirling splinters.
“Stoy!”
“Nyeh shevileetes!”
“Now, Ilya!” Lia called. “Take them out!”
She lunged forward.
Akulinin Operation Magpie Waterfront, St. Petersburg 0034 hours
Gunfire thundered from inside the building. Akulinin had been holding his MP5K on the Russian to the left of the entrance, waiting for Lia’s command. It was an awkward stance. The MP5K was a ridiculously stubby weapon, even with the shoulder stock locked open, and Akulinin was trying to brace it with his left hand on the small handgrip beneath the almost nonexistent barrel. Leaning into the recoil, he tapped the trigger, loosing a three-round burst with a sharp, harsh clatter.
Fifty yards was the upper end of the weapon’s effective range, meaning he had perhaps one chance in two of hitting his target. The range was too great for trying a finesse shot at head or center of mass. Instead he aimed low, with the expectation that muzzle climb would throw at least one or two of the three rounds into the target.
Both of the outside sentries were in the process of turning as he fired, distracted from the sudden gunfire inside. The man on the left seemed to stumble as he turned, then sagged, clutching at his side as he dropped to his knees. Akulinin had already shifted his aim to the man on the right, drawing a bead and triggering another three-round burst.
The man on the right, apparently not hit, went to his partner’s aid. Akulinin took aim again and tapped off two more bursts. The man staggered, slammed backward into the half-open sliding door, and crumpled to the ground. The wounded man on the left slumped into an untidy heap.
“Two down outside the door,” Akulinin reported.
“Check fire!” Lia called. “I’m coming through!”
DeFrancesa Operation Magpie Waterfront, St. Petersburg 0035 hours
For just an instant, every armed man in the warehouse was turned toward the northeast end of the huge room, some of them firing with wild imprecision, weapons blasting away on full rock and roll.
“Prekrazhenii ogeya! Prekrazhenii ogeya!”
From five feet away, Lia put a bullet into the back of the head of the man with the spotlight, her pistol emitting a harsh chuff as it fired. She was so close she didn’t even need to watch for the red blip of laser light marking the impact point.
She fired as she moved, holding the SOCOM pistol two-handed and stiff-armed as she tapped off two more rounds at the first target, then shifted to the man next to him. That man was just beginning to register the fact that the guy with the spotlight had been hit, the front of his skull blossoming in a nasty red burst of blood, bone, and tissue. The second man turned, mouth gaping, hands fumbling at his assault rifle… and pitched backward as two of Lia’s rounds slammed into his throat and upper chest.
Then she was through the open door. Two bodies lay sprawled on the concrete; she leaped over one and bounded across the open parking lot.
“Stoy!” another voice called, not from straight behind, but from behind and to her right. “Slushaisya elee ya budu strelyaht’!”
She kept running.
3
The Art Room NSA Headquarters Fort Meade, Maryland 1636 hours EDT
GUNFIRE, MUFFLED BY DISTANCE, boomed and rattled.
“Now, Ilya! Take them out!”
“Two down outside the door.”
“Check fire! I’m coming through!”
The words emerged from the overhead speaker, and Rubens felt an inward sag of relief. Ghost Blue was picking up Magpie’s transmissions and relaying them through the satellite net to the Art Room.
“Someone’s yelling at her to stop, to obey, or he’ll fire,” Ivan Maslovski said from his console, several stations away. He was one of Desk Three’s Russian specialists, brought in to provide linguistic support for Magpie. “Should I translate?”
One of the advantages of the implanted com system used by Desk Three operatives was that an agent in the field didn’t need to speak the local language. Someone listening in from the Art Room could provide a running translation and even lead the agent through a simple but appropriate response.
“No,” Rubens said, shaking his head. “I think she gets the general idea.”
The big map on the main display screen had been resized again, zooming in on two warehouses, some storage sheds, and the concrete wharf along the river. Lia’s icon was moving south across the open parking and loading zone between the two warehouses; Akulinin was at the corner of the warehouse to the south.
Two new pinpoints of light, red this time, marking presumed hostiles, appeared on the satellite map. The ground sensors placed by Lia during her approach to the warehouse picked up sound and motion over a wide area and transmitted the data back to Fort Meade, where the enormous computational power resident within the Tordella Supercomputer Facility translated raw data into moving points of light on a map.
“Lia! Ilya!” Jeff Rockman said at his console. “Two hostiles, southeast of the big warehouse!”
Sounds of gunfire erupted from the speaker. “I see them,” Akulinin replied. “Lia, drop!…”
Akulinin Operation Magpie Waterfront, St. Petersburg 0036 hours
Akulinin had risen to a half crouch, still holding the tiny MP5K tucked in against his shoulder. Lia, running straight toward him from the main warehouse entrance, was almost between him and the hostiles emerging from between the warehouse and the shed. One of the gunmen opened fire with his AK, the sharp crack-crack-crack echoing across the parking lot. Bullets slammed into sheet metal somewhere above Akulinin’s head.
As he shouted, “Drop!” Lia fell to the pavement in what must have been a painful slide, hugging the ground as the gunmen behind her sprayed rounds above her. Akulinin had a clear shot, now, at one of the Russians as he emerged from between the two buildings at a dead run. With luck, he thought he’d knocked Lia down and didn’t yet know Akulinin was there.
Akulinin tapped the trigger, hitting the man with a three-round burst high in his chest, knocking him backward with a wild flailing of his arms. “Three down!” he called.
Fort Meade, Maryland 1636 hours EDT
Dean climbed into his car, backed out of the parking spot, and all but peeled rubber as he left the pistol range, pulling on to Rochenbach Road and accelerating toward the towering structure visible on the wooded Maryland horizon ahead. He had to show his ID at a gate-even inside the far-flung confines of Fort Meade, security gates and checkpoints kept casual civilians and Army personnel out of the ultra-secure zone set aside for the NSA complex.
In a way, the NSA was the tail wagging the dog. Fort Meade sprawled across over some six thousand acres of the Maryland countryside between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. About nine thousand active-duty military personnel were stationed here, along with about six thousand civilian dependents in base housing, but the NSA employed over thirty thousand civilians. In fact, the Army post at Fort Meade had been scheduled for closure in the 1990s and ultimately had remained active solely to support the NSA’s activities. That huge complex ahead, the large, pale ocher office building, the two black-glass, ultra-modern monoliths behind it, and the tangle of smaller buildings in between, was called the Puzzle Palace, a moniker once applied to the Pentagon but now reserved solely for the NSA’s headquarters.
“Rockman?” Dean called over his radio. “I’m en route. Anything new?”
There was a worrisome pause. Then, “We’re back in touch with them,” Rockman said. Dean felt a surge of relief, but the feeling was overturned almos
t immediately by Rockman’s next words. “She’s in a firefight. Wait one…”
Dean fumed and pressed down harder on the accelerator. He turned left onto Canine Road, which put the towering ten-story monolith of the NSA’s headquarters building on his right, beyond several acres’ worth of parking lots.
A gunfight was the worst possible news. No matter what Hollywood cared to depict in the way of James Bond and other fictional spooks, in Lia and Dean’s line of work, firefights rarely took place. In fact, a firefight could only mean that something had gone seriously and drastically wrong. He hadn’t been briefed on her mission-such operations were kept tightly compartmentalized and shared strictly on a need-to-know basis-but he knew she was in Russia and that her op involved going in, planting something, and leaving again, all without alerting the locals.
If there was shooting, the op had been compromised.
Another turn, and Dean arrived at a parking lot outside a nondescript building sheathed in metal, almost in the shadow of the titanic edifice of the headquarters building itself. Inside was another security check… and an elevator ride, plunging deep into the bedrock beneath the facility, and two more security checkpoints after that, both requiring handprint, voiceprint, and retinal scans.
One curious feature about the NSA facility at Fort Meade: there were no visible room numbers, no corridor names, nothing to help any visitor who didn’t know exactly where he was going.
They didn’t make it easy to access the Art Room.
And with very good reason.
Akulinin Operation Magpie Waterfront, St. Petersburg 0037 hours
The second gunman ducked behind the corner of the shed, then emerged to trigger another burst of full-auto fire at Akulinin. He was almost invisible against shadows unrelieved by the pale light from the lone street lamp on Kozhevennaya. Akulinin waited, aiming at the point where he’d seen him last; two seconds dragged past, and then he saw movement, a dark shape as the Russian half-emerged from cover once again.
Akulinin squeezed the trigger again and the dark mass vanished. “Art Room!” he whispered. “Did I get him?”
“Both targets are down,” Rockman’s voice replied in his head. “They’re not moving. Can’t tell if they’re KIA or not.”
The sensors scattered by Lia around the building early in the op could pick up remarkably faint noises-breathing, footsteps, even heartbeats at a close enough range. The NSA computers would keep painting the targets where the devices sensed them, only letting the icons fade away some minutes after all motion and sound from the target ceased.
They would have to chance it. “C’mon, Lia!”
He kept his weapon trained on the corner of the shed as Lia scrambled to her feet and dashed for cover. As she reached his position, several more armed men began spilling out of the warehouse through the main door.
There was no time for carefully aimed bursts. He thumbed his weapon’s selector switch to full-auto and mashed down the trigger, sending a second-long volley into the gaping door.
One Russian crumpled on the spot as the others pulled back and bullets banged into the sheet-metal sliding door. Then Akulinin’s weapon ran dry, the slide locking open as the final spent cartridge spun away into the darkness and clinked against the wall to his right.
“You okay?” he asked.
Lia nodded. She was rubbing her arm. “A little scraped up…”
“C’mon. Before these clowns get themselves organized!” Taking her elbow, he guided her past a tangle of discarded and rusted machinery, leading her back toward the alley through which he’d approached the waterfront a few minutes before.
“How about it, Jeff?” he asked aloud. They stopped just short of the alley as Akulinin pocketed the empty clip from his weapon and snapped in a fresh magazine. “Anybody waiting for us around the corner?”
“We’re not picking up any movement in the alley or near the car,” Rockman’s voice replied. “Hostiles are coming out of the warehouse now… but cautiously.”
They ducked into the entrance to the alley and made their way northeast, emerging again on Kozhevennaya Liniya. After a careful look up and down the street and at the staring, empty windows of the buildings towering around them, they crossed the street at a casual stroll to the parked white Citroën. Lia climbed into the back while Akulinin slid in behind the wheel.
“Damn!” he said.
“What’s the matter?” Rockman and Lia answered in almost perfect unison.
“My toolbox,” he said, glancing back across the street. “I left it back there.”
“Leave it,” Lia told him. “The opposition is going to be all over that waterfront.”
“What’s left in the tool kit?” Rockman asked.
“The OVGN6,” he said. “Some rope and climbing gear. Some spare mags for the H and K. Some ground sensors.” He hesitated. “And the satcom.”
That last was not good. The AN/PSC-12 com terminal with its two-foot folded satellite dish was a compact and extremely secret unit small enough to be carried in a small briefcase-or a workman’s toolbox. The black box attached to the terminal contained computer chips and encryption codes that the National Security Agency emphatically did not want to fall into unfriendly hands.
Stupid! Akulinin told himself. Careless, sloppy, and stupid!…
“We’ve alerted your support team,” Rockman’s voice said. “They’ll try to make a recovery when things quiet down.”
“What the hell kept you anyway, Ilya?” she demanded as he started the ignition and pulled out into the street.
“Traffic inspector,” Akulinin replied. “He flagged me over just before the Exchange Bridge and demanded to see my papers. The bastard kept me there cooling my heels for half an hour before he finally agreed to accept a five-hundred-ruble fine for my, ah, violation.”
“Five hundred rubles,” Lia said. “About what… twenty dollars at the current rate? I didn’t realize the local cops were such cheap dates.”
Akulinin drove slowly up the road, passing the warehouse that had been the focus of Operation Magpie. A number of shadowy figures were visible in the parking lot… more than he’d seen originally exit the two cars on the wharf. An open-bed truck was parked on the road in front of the warehouse, suggesting that reinforcements had arrived. How many goons had he and Lia been facing, anyway?
He kept his eyes on the road ahead, not looking at them, and they, apparently, didn’t connect passing traffic on the street with their quarry. By deliberately driving at a sedate and unhurried pace toward, then past the hunters, rather than pulling a U-turn in the middle of the street and rushing off in the opposite direction, Akulinin might throw off any would-be pursuit.
It was a bit of tradecraft Akulinin had learned only recently, during his induction into the secret ranks of Desk Three, and he didn’t yet entirely trust the psychology behind it. What if the opposition had people in some of the surrounding buildings, watching the street? What if they’d seen him and Lia emerge from the alley and get into the car? A quick call over a walkie-talkie from a hidden lookout and that whole pack of Russian gunmen could be swarming after them in an instant.
He drove with one hand, the other gripping the MP5K on his lap, out of sight but ready for action.
Several of the men glanced at the Citroën as it cruised past, but there was no other reaction.
“Okay, I guess they didn’t track us,” he said.
“They’re not pros,” Lia said. “All muscle, no brain.”
He set his loaded weapon on the seat beside him, relaxing slightly… but only slightly. “Your fancy duds are in a bag on the floor of the backseat,” he told her.
“I see it.”
For the next several blocks, Akulinin was treated to the sounds of tantalizing rustles, snapping elastic, and shifting movements in the backseat. Determined to maintain a professional bearing, he kept his eyes rigidly on the road, not even checking the rearview mirror.
Professional or not, though, nothing said he couldn’t tr
y to imagine the scene at his back. Lia was an extremely attractive young woman…
Soon Kozhevennaya came to a T at Bol’shoy Prospekt, and Akulinin turned left, then began hunting for the entrance to a parking lot. The cruise ship terminal was just ahead. The atmosphere of their surroundings, he noticed, had changed dramatically, clean, well kept, well lit, and open, where only a few blocks away the decrepit warehouses and abandoned machine shops brooded over fog-shrouded darkness.
St. Petersburg, Akulinin knew, depended these days upon making a good impression on tourists for its economic survival.
Pulling the Citroën into an empty space in the parking lot, Akulinin took a moment to peel off his worker’s coveralls. These went on the floor under the passenger side seat, leaving him in a suitably tacky short-sleeved shirt that fairly shouted “American tourist.” The MP5K, along with Lia’s SOCOM pistol, went under the seat. Pulling a small stack of papers and booklets from the glove box, he stepped out of the car. Lia was transformed, wearing a pale blouse displaying significant cleavage over a short black skirt and heels, with a sweater over her shoulders to keep off the night chill.
Gallantly he held out his elbow. “It’s been a lovely evening out on the town, my dear. Shall we?”
“I don’t go out with Romeos,” she told him, smiling. “At least… not with any old Romeo…”
Together, they started for the building entrance that would take them through to the cruise ship.
Ghost Blue Ten miles west of St. Petersburg 0056 hours
Dick Delallo was holding his F- 22 in a gentle right turn above the Gulf of Finland when the threat receiver lit up and the warning tone sounded over his headset.
“Haunted House, Ghost Blue,” he called. “The Oscar Sierra light is lit. Do you copy?”
“Ghost Blue, Haunted House,” came over his headset. “Copy. You are clear to get out of Dodge. Over.”
“Ah… roger that.” He was already tightening his turn, trying to identify the source of the threat. “On my way back to the barn.”
“Oscar Sierra” was a pilot’s inside joke, using the phonetic alphabet letters for O and S to represent the words “oh, shit.” It meant someone was painting him with a target acquisition radar and that a missile launch could be imminent.
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