by Chris Goff
ALSO BY CHRIS GOFF
Raisa Jordan Thrillers
Dark Waters
Birdwatcher’s Mysteries
A Parliament of Owls
A Sacrifice of Buntings
Death Takes a Gander
A Nest in the Ashes
Death of a Songbird
A Rant of Ravens
RED SKY
A RAISA JORDAN THRILLER
CHRIS GOFF
NEW YORK
This is a work of fiction. All of the names, characters, organizations, places, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real or actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 by Chris Goff.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crooked Lane Books, an imprint of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.
Crooked Lane Books and its logo are trademarks of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.
Library of Congress Catalog-in-Publication data available upon request.
ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-68331-126-3
ISBN (ePub): 978-1-68331-127-0
ISBN (Kindle): 978-1-68331-128-7
ISBN (ePDF): 978-1-68331-129-4
Cover design by Craig Polizzotto
www.crookedlanebooks.com
Crooked Lane Books
34 West 27th St., 10th Floor
New York, NY 10001
First edition: June 2017
FOR MARDEE, WHO INSPIRED ME TO KEEP REACHING FOR THE BRASS RING, AND FOR ADDIE, WHO WAS BOOTS ON THE GROUND FOR RESEARCH
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Raisa Jordan stared out across the smoking debris, her gauze mask ineffective against the smell of burning flesh and jet fuel. Small fires still flared in the rubble of People’s Republic Airline Flight 91, and the stench and devastation were overwhelming. Bodies littered the wreckage—some still strapped into seats, others scattered like rag dolls on the scorched earth, some in pieces. Fragments of the plane’s fuselage along with luggage, computers, phones, books, blankets, pillows, and clothing were strewn across the ground for miles.
She shifted her gaze. The midsummer sun hung low on the horizon, partially obscured by clouds and smoke. Occasional rays of sunlight danced across the lush Ukrainian farm fields, touching the wreckage and highlighting colors in the otherwise scorched remains. Near the shell of the aircraft, a yellow handbag waited on the ground to be retrieved. Looking down, her gaze lit on an orange teddy bear propped against a tangle of twisted metal, as if set there by the hands of the child who had carried it on board.
Jordan’s vision blurred. Her tears streamed unchecked.
“Shcho ty tut robysh?”
The sound of the voice jarred her, the words foreign. Getting a hold of herself, she wiped away her tears and turned to find a Ukrainian soldier standing behind her, a captain by his insignia.
“I’m sorry, I don’t speak the language,” she said. “English?”
“Ni. Presa tut ne dopuskayet’sya.”
Jordan got the gist. He didn’t speak English, and he thought she was a member of the press. She pulled down her mask, then lifting the card and lanyard hanging around her neck showed him her credentials. “Vy govorite po-russki?” Do you speak Russian? “Ya ne iz pressy. Ya zdes’ po gosudarstvennym delam.” I’m not press. I’m here on government business.
“Da,” he said, switching languages. He gestured with his rifle for her to move closer and squinted at the badge. “What business does the U.S. Diplomatic Security Service have out here?”
“We had a DSS agent on board this flight, escorting a fugitive from Guangzhou back to the U.S. I’ve been sent here to help identify and recover the bodies.”
While the captain spoke with his supervisor, Jordan contemplated the debris field. It reminded her of pictures of the crash of Malaysia Air Flight 17, with one obvious difference. That had been mayhem. This was organized chaos.
She knew it was bad when David Lory, the DSS regional security officer in Ukraine, sent a Marine contingent to intercept her at Kyiv Boryspil International Airport. She had escorted Mrs. Linwood, the Israeli Ambassador’s wife, from Tel Aviv to participate in a week-long International Women’s Leadership Alliance. Why the Alliance had chosen to host their annual July meeting in a country at war was anyone’s guess, but the plan had suited Jordan. She was to accompany Mrs. Linwood to the Intercontinental Hotel, where the Ukrainians would take over security. Jordan was responsible to be present at night, but during the day, her hours were her own.
That is until Lory had thrown a wrench into the works. Five hours ago, he’d sent the Marines to the airport, along with orders for Jordan to rent a car and set off immediately for Hoholeve.
In route, she’d managed to wrangle a few more details on the assignment. There’d been a plane crash. PR Flight 91 had departed just after 7:00 AM from Guangzhou, China, headed for Krakow. Halfway through the flight, without so much as a mayday, the plane had gone down. Wreckage was strewn across six miles outside a small farming community roughly halfway between Kharkiv and Kyiv.
Within an hour of the crash, the Ukraine head of air accidents and incidents investigation had taken control, declaring himself the international investigation commander, or IIC. His job was to oversee the hundreds of people swarming the scene—everyone from aviation specialists and first responders to the military and media. On his watch, there would be no indelible photographs of dead bodies plastered on the Internet, no looting, and no destruction of evidence.
Growing impatient at being kept waiting so long, Jordan looked at the captain, who was still on comm. “Does he need me to go over there?”
The soldier turned his back to her.
Jordan gazed back at the wreckage, her agitation and impatience growing with the impending twilight. Her time in Kyiv was already limited, and Jordan could little afford the wait. Her original plan had been to head straight for the Kyiv Medical Institute of the Ukrainian Association of Folk Medicine that afternoon. More commonly known as UAFM, it was the school where Alena Petrenko insisted that she’d studied bioenergy healing under the tutelage of Jordan’s father. If it turned out to be true, it was a part of his past Jordan knew nothing about, one that didn’t jibe with what little she knew about her dad.
She didn’t want to believe any of what she’d been told, but if she ever hoped to reconcile the image of her father with the man Alena Petrenko had known, she needed to verify facts. And
she needed to do it quietly. Because—if what Alena Petrenko had told her was true—the revelation not only would bring down an icon but would likely end Jordan’s career.
“What was the agent’s name?” the captain asked, jarring her from her reverie.
“George McClasky.”
The sixty-year-old man and forty-year veteran of the service was a DSS legend. Forced to retire from active duty at age fifty-seven, he still contracted part-time with the agency, helping with highly classified missions. Lory had texted her McClasky’s most recent photo. Tall and beefy, with thinning gray hair, he was more than twice her age and left behind a wife and four kids. Jordan admired both his dedication and his tenacity. Theirs was a profession where the average agent was more like her—someone in their late twenties to early thirties and for the most part unattached. McClasky had not only maxed out his years of service but held onto a thirty-five-year marriage in a profession where relationships were often the first casualty of work.
“And the fugitive he accompanied?”
“Kia Zhen.” A twenty-year-old Chinese American from San Francesco, suspected of gang affiliation and charged with espionage. No photos were currently available. No more specifics forthcoming.
“Tak.” Signing off the radio, the captain waved her forward and nodded toward her credentials. “DSS Special Agent Raisa Jordan, it says you are an assistant regional security officer-I. What does the I stand for?”
“Investigations.” Though mostly on paper and more often routine.
“Well, this one must wait until tomorrow.” He gestured toward the road. “We are closing this area for the night. It will be open again at dawn. Check in with the IIC command center as you leave. Tell them I sent you. Tomorrow you must have an official sticker for your credentials or you won’t be allowed back inside the barricade.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your last name.”
“Melnyk.”
“Thank you, Captain Melnyk.” Jordan nodded at him, then turned back. Making a mental note to give the IIC a picture of McClasky for ID purposes, she cut south, walking along the backside of the fuselage as she made her way toward the car. She figured she might as well cover as much territory as she could while she was here.
Overhead the setting sun colored the clouds a deep red but provided little light on the ground. Heat from the smoldering wreckage kept the chill of the night air at bay. The fires made walking treacherous and slow. She wished now that she’d remembered to put on her duty belt with its flashlight.
Studying the mangled remains, it was hard to imagine what’d happened. While the Malaysia Air flight had been shot down by pro-Russian rebels, Hoholeve was hundreds of kilometers north and west of the war zone. The only logical conclusion to draw was that PR Flight 91 had experienced some type of equipment failure, causing the plane to break apart midair.
Near the skeleton of the plane’s midsection, she nearly stumbled over the bodies of a man and woman, their arms entangled as if holding tightly to each other as they fell from the sky. Near them lay the body of a young woman wearing an oxygen mask.
Jordan fought back another onslaught of tears. The idea that there had been time for passengers and crew to contemplate their fate horrified her. She remembered being in a car accident at the age of sixteen and the fear that gripped her in the moments before the sedan had flipped. She could attest to the fact that in what you perceive to be your final moments, your life flashes before your eyes.
She paid more attention to the wreckage as she neared the end of the mangled piece of fuselage. According to the airline, McClasky and Zhen had been seated in row 30, seats A and C. The seating chart placed them aft of the wings in a two-seat configuration. Based on her assessment of the aircraft, she should be nearing their section of the plane. Still, the odds of finding either man in the gathering darkness were slim.
When the end of the burned-out hull came into view, Jordan picked up her pace. All she wanted right now was to be clear of the devastation. In a few more yards, she would reach a path to the left, leading to the road. Then for the second time that day, her plans were derailed. Near the end of the fuselage, in a row of seats that had landed upright on the ground, sat George McClasky and Kia Zhen. McClasky’s neck was twisted at an unnatural angle, but otherwise he appeared unscathed. She would have recognized him anywhere. His eyes were open, and he seemed watchful of the prisoner shackled into the seat beside him.
Zhen’s corpse was mangled, his face unrecognizable, the features sheared away, leaving a bloody pulp, and his body canted sharply to one side. One of his legs twisted behind the chair at an odd angle, and his right arm dangled from tendons, his fingers brushing earth darkened by his own blood.
“I found them,” she blurted out, her shout triggering an echo that traveled downline from person to person and back again. A flashlight flared at the edge of the road near the press barricade, and Jordan immediately wished she’d stayed quiet. If she wanted to ensure the protection of any classified materials McClasky might be holding, the best thing to do was take them off his body. If she’d kept quiet, she would have had more time to search. Now all she had were seconds.
She knew he would carry documents allowing for Zhen’s transport to the United States, along with his and Zhen’s passports. But Lory had alluded to the fact that McClasky possessed some critical intel pertaining to national security—information he had refused to share with his boots on the ground in mainland China. From what she knew, he’d told his supervisor he couldn’t trust the secured phones and Internet at the station or his contacts in Guangzhou. With the recent security breaches of U.S. corporations and government data by the Chinese, Jordan didn’t blame him. All anyone could hope for now was that he’d written down what he’d heard rather than entrust it to memory.
Jordan did a quick glance around. The closest people to her were several Ukrainian soldiers and the pack of journalists they held at bay near the edge of the road. The nearest soldier was three, maybe four hundred yards away. She estimated she had sixty to seventy seconds before he could reach her.
Flipping open the agent’s jacket, she checked McClasky’s left inside chest pocket first and found two U.S. passports and the travel documents authorizing Zhen’s extradition to the United States. In McClasky’s right inside pocket, she discovered a small top security envelope addressed to the director of the Diplomatic Security Service.
“Shcho ty robysh?” the soldier yelled, running toward her from the road. He spoke in Ukrainian, but taken in context, his meaning was clear. He wanted to know what she was doing.
Holding up her left hand, she shook the passports and travel documents, while using her right hand to stuff the envelope under her waistband at the small of her back.
“I can identify these men,” she explained in Russian.
The soldier started to reach for the papers when the captain she’d spoken to earlier pushed him aside and snatched the documents out of her hand. “What are you yelling about? I thought I told you to leave.”
“These are the men I was searching for.” She pointed to McClasky. “He’s a diplomatic agent in possible possession of sensitive materials.”
The envelope burned against her spine.
“I don’t care. This area is closed,” Captain Melnyk said. “You must come back tomorrow.”
Jordan shook her head. “I can’t leave this man’s body unguarded.”
A bit of an exaggeration given the area was under the protection of the IIC and Ukrainian military, but she preferred to arrange immediate transport if possible.
“There is no other alternative,” the captain insisted.
Jordan stood her ground. “According to the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, the Ukraine may not detain a U.S. citizen protected by diplomatic immunity. Nor may it ever seize U.S. documents or property.”
Captain Melnyk looked incredulous. “Your man is not being detained. He’s dead.”
“It doesn’t matter. Let me make a call, and
I can have a Marine detail here in one hour to transport him back to the U.S. embassy in Kyiv.”
She doubted she would win the battle, but she had to try. She hadn’t been able to check more than McClasky’s jacket pockets.
Crossing her arms, Jordan waited for Melnyk to determine the next course of action. Night had closed in around them, and she was struck by how dark and chilly it had grown. A half-moon hung low in the western sky, its light weak behind heavy cloud cover. In the distance, warm light shone from the windows of a few farmhouses. There were no streetlamps or perimeter lights to illuminate the crash scene, only the glow from the fires burning in the wreckage.
The soldier who had first arrived leaned over and spoke to Melnyk. He in turn shook the paperwork in her face.
“Sergeant Hycha says when he arrived you were searching this man’s pockets. What were you looking for?”
“As I explained, he’s a DSS agent accompanying a fugitive. Any items in his possession are the property of the U.S. government.”
An argument could also be made that the envelope tucked in her waistband should have been turned over to the Ukrainian soldiers, to be delivered to the U.S. State Department through official channels. Six months ago, it was protocol she would have followed, but a lot had happened since then.
Melnyk looked at the paperwork in his hands and then barked something to the sergeant in Ukrainian. As the NCO, or noncommissioned officer, trotted away, the captain turned back to Jordan. “I need to report to the IIC before we proceed further. Before I can do that, I need to find someone skilled in reading English.”
Jordan was quick to volunteer. “I can read English, and I’d be happy to tell you what the paperwork says. It identifies that man as a fugitive of the United States.” She pointed at Zhen. “He was being returned to the United States for prosecution of crimes against the country.”
Melnyk stared at her for a moment, looked at the Chinese American’s broken body, then stepped away and spoke into his radio. After what sounded like a heated discussion, he turned and barked orders to the soldiers still standing around. The men jumped into action, spreading two body bags on the ground.
