Aggressor

by Nick Cook

  To Ali

  CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  BOOK 1: PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  BOOK 2: CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  EPILOGUE

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I doubt very much if Aggressor would have been written with the support of Ali, our respective families, and our friends. I know for a fact it would not have been written without much tolerance, patience and help from colleagues at Jane’s and JDW, Bruce Richardson, Mark Lucas, and Bill Scott-Kerr. To everyone... thanks.

  BOOK 1: PROLOGUE

  The Russian VIP and his Syrian host paused on the metal gangway. To the Russian the centrifugal compressor didn’t look like much - just angular pieces of metal joined by solid Soviet riveting - but the deafening howl of the gas turbines and the energy which shook the platform told him otherwise.

  He mopped the sweat from his brow and looked to his host, then towards the door. The Syrian Minister of the Interior seemed to take the hint. The militiaman swung the door and gestured the two men outside with a deep, exaggerated bow.

  ‘Congratulations, Minister,’ the Syrian said, the noise of the turbines behind them. ‘It is a masterpiece.’

  Mikhail Koltsov, Russian Minister of Gas-Petrochemical Industrialization, forced a smile.

  He had hoped it would be cooler outside, but it was like an oven. The compressor station lay in a slight depression in the desert. The sun, now at its zenith, reflected off every grain of sand. The temperature had to be rising forty degrees. He wanted nothing more than to board the air-conditioned bus for the return journey to the airport.

  ‘My government was only too glad to be of assistance,’ Koltsov said stiffly.

  The truth was that Russia needed dollars; and the Syrian government, flush with the discovery of vast new natural gas reserves, had plenty of them to spend. But the Al-Hasakah-Latakia pipe-line was a project of which Soviet engineers could be justly proud. It had taken five years to build and there was nothing else like it in the world.

  A gleaming steel duct, two metres wide, pumping gas twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, from Al-Hasakah, a barren heatspot in the furnace of the desert, across four hundred and fifty kilometres of the Al-Jazirah to Latakia, a port on the Mediterranean coast. It surpassed even the technology employed on their Urengoy ‘supergiant’ gas field in Western Siberia.

  Outside the concrete shell of the pumping station, the whine of the two gas turbines was audible, but only just. The engines, each rated at a staggering two hundred and thirty kilonewtons, were adaptations of jet engines normally employed on giant Soviet transport aircraft. It required two such power plants to pump the gas along the pipe-line to the next booster station, one hundred and fifty kilometres to the east, whence it would receive one last injection of energy for the onward journey to Latakia.

  And for once, Moscow had driven a straight cash deal instead of one of those crazy barter arrangements which characterized Soviet export policy in pre-Gorbachev years. This time it was different. Syrian petrodollars, ten thousand million of them, for Soviet engineering expertise. The new capitalism at work.

  Farewell handshakes were exchanged between Koltsov’s eight Soviet colleagues and their hosts.

  The Syrian turned to him with outstretched arms and Koltsov obliged by kissing him in comradely fashion on both cheeks.

  ‘A safe trip to Moscow, God willing,’ the Syrian said.

  ‘Thank you.’

  The Russian looked around gratefully for the bus, spotting it a little way off in the shade of a tin shelter just beyond the perimeter fence. He started walking, the Syrian minister at his side. The thirty-strong party, which included a platoon of heavily armed troops, shuffled along in his wake. He thought of the Syrian transport aircraft sitting on the tarmac at Al-Hasakah, sixty kilometres away. A thirty-minute flight to Damascus and he would be reunited with their Aeroflot jet bound for Russia. His mood lightened. He had had enough of the heat, the dirt, and the flies that had plagued his three-day trip. It was time to go home.

  The door at the front of the bus opened with a hiss of compressed air. Koltsov stepped inside, relieved to feel the air-conditioning chill the sweat on his brow.

  The driver, a headcloth protecting his face from the sun, lolled in his seat with insolent disregard for the VIPs.

  Koltsov waved to his host from his seat by the rear window. But the Interior Minister was preoccupied now with his own departure plans, pushing his minions out of the way to reach his air-conditioned limousine. As the bus pulled away into the desert, the Russian was left staring at the concrete heart and steel arteries of the pumping station.

  At first, Koltsov thought he imagined it, that the heat shimmer was playing tricks upon his eyes. The concrete roof of the compressor station seemed to lift by as much as a meter, then settle, intact, upon the walls of the blockhouse amidst a light cloud of dust.

  He had time only to brace himself against the headrest of his seat for the massive explosion that followed the detonation deep within the bowels of the blockhouse.

  The shock wave radiated outwards, engulfing and igniting everything in its path. The pumping station, the perimeter wire, the shelter, the soldiers, the Syrian delegation, and the limousines fused with the inferno, each fuelling the reaction, each adding to its power.

  The pumping station disintegrated with the destructive force of a small nuclear weapon.

  Shards of glass flew through the bus as the rear window blew in. The minister came up from behind the seat and was knocked backwards by a second shock wave. The bus veered sharply in the grip of a pressure roller, but somehow held the road.

  As they slowed to a stop, the minister looked in the dazed faces of his colleagues. He saw terrible cuts, but they would live.

  Nobody spoke. Eyes were captivated by the flames that leapt into the sky behind them. The sand around the compressor station had been turned to glass.

  Koltsov was aware of noise and movement around the wheels of the bus. He leaned over the edge of the shattered window and saw men armed with assault rifles crawling from the luggage bins. Before he could signal the alarm, the driver was on his feet shouting for them to stay in their seats with a forcefulness out of tune with his earlier lethargy. It was only when the minister saw the automatic pistol in the driver’s hand that he realized why.

  One by one, the stowaways stepped on board. Koltsov counted five, not including the driver. They wore combat fatigues topped by T-shirts, strips of cloth tied across their noses and mouths.

  The first of them spoke sharply in Arabic to the driver, who proceeded to gun the engine and turn the bus off the road, weaving between the boulders and scrub.

  The minister’s curiosity overcame his fear. He fixed his eyes on the one who had barked the commands.

  ‘Who are you?’

  The terrorist swung the muzzle of his rifle in the direction of the voice. ‘We are the Angels of Judgement,’ he said.

  Ulm had rerun the scene maybe a dozen times in his mind. Shabanov had kicked the door down and rolled through the opening. He had been right behind, covering the Russian’s back. The room was small, perhaps only fifteen by twenty feet, but it was smoky from the stun grenade Shabanov had tossed under the door
a few seconds before they’d gone in.

  Shabanov had come up, his automatic sweeping the four corners of the room. Ulm braced himself for a string of shots from the Russian’s weapon, but he was greeted only by the single word: clear. There was no time to stop and rest. They had to go on to the next room. It was unrelenting. He’d always hated house clearing, because it took so long. Airliner work was different. That was over in seconds. Either way. Them or you.

  It was then he saw the figure advancing through the smoke for Shabanov. He pushed the Russian to the floor and fired his Kalashnikov. The figure went down like a target at a funfair duck-shoot.

  When the invigilators burst through the door a moment later he knew he’d fucked it. They raced to the point where the figure had hit the floor, their Russian babbling made doubly unintelligible by the gas masks they wore. They raised the figure until it locked back in the upright position. When the wind lifted the smoke he saw it was a mother carrying a young child. Had they been real, not cardboard, both would have been dead.

  He and Shabanov walked back to the debriefing centre, the Russian full of well-meaning comments about the fog of war and the inevitability of civilian casualties. For Colonel Elliot Ulm, head of the US Air Force’s elite antiterrorist unit, the Pathfinders, the humiliating fact remained: he had shot the wrong target and the Russians were laughing at him behind his back.

  The heat at the training compound was insufferable. Located some hundred and fifty kilometres outside Moscow, it was a vast complex sealed from civilian life, filled with hundreds of different stages and backdrops that had been earmarked by the Soviets as likely arenas for low-intensity conflict. There were whole towns here, buses, airliners, airport buildings, even sections of supertankers and cruise liners. And Spetsnaz practised against them all day in and day out. They were, Ulm had to admit, remarkable troops.

  The woods crackled with the sound of near and distant gunfire. Occasionally, he saw Spetsnaz going about their work, but for the most part, their operations remained stealthy, unseen. The Russians, after all, didn’t want to show him too much. In the New World Order, special operations lay at the heart of a nation’s defence.

  The Romeo Protocol was designed to overcome this natural reticence. The agreement which had brought Ulm here was established to pool the resources of the United States and Russia in the war against terrorism, the new enemy.

  But like the CFE treaty limiting their conventional arms, the Romeo Protocol was an agreement that worked better in theory than reality. It was a politician’s dream and a soldier’s nightmare. For the moment it remained secret, its existence to be acknowledged only after the two sides had been into battle together and one more terrorist outfit had been brought to heel.

  Ulm hated the idea of going into action with Soviet special forces - there was so much that could go wrong. He tried to put it to the back of his mind. He was going home in a few days to prepare for Shabanov’s exchange visit. A month in Russia on little better than K-rations was quite enough.

  They reached the barrack hut that served as the debriefing centre. Shabanov pushed the door open for Ulm and they stepped inside.

  In the gloom of the corridor, Shabanov was greeted by a deferential private, who snapped to attention and passed him a note. He read the message cursorily before stuffing it into a top pocket of his camouflaged tunic.

  ‘Excuse me, I must make a call,’ he said to Ulm. His English was perfect. Active colonels in Spetsnaz were expected to have at least one language under their belts. Shabanov had several.

  As Ulm carried on to the briefing room, Shabanov entered his office. It was a spartan affair, with nothing but the bare essentials: shelves crammed with military textbooks, foreign defence magazines and a lone copy of the Ruhdiydt of Omar Khayyam, a gift from his mother. In the centre of the floor was a utilitarian metal desk, its surface adorned with an in-tray and a telephone.

  He raised the phone and dialled.

  ‘You took your time, Roman Makhmadzhanovich,’ the general said.

  ‘The American and I were doing a little shooting in the woods.’

  . General Aushev grunted. He was in no mood for humour. He told Shabanov about Syria. And then he told him about the Sword.

  ‘You have found him?’

  ‘Someone has come forward with information. An old contact from my Middle East days. Happily, little has changed since those soft-arses in the Central Plenum stopped funding organizations like the PFLP-GC. They are still as divided as ever. My friend is impatient for Ahmed Jibril’s job, it seems. Such betrayal does not come cheap, but it’s up to us to see that every kopek is well spent. This could be the biggest breakthrough in years, Roman Makhmadzhanovich. It couldn’t have come at a better time.’

  ‘Firm intelligence?’ Shabanov asked.

  ‘Not yet, but a time and a meeting place have been established. I’m sending Sinitsky to London. He will buy the information for us and bring it back to Moscow.’

  ‘Sinitsky? Who’s he?’

  ‘You wouldn’t have heard of him. He is an unprepossessing character, but less conspicuous than you.’ The general paused. ‘This is all I have to report.’

  ‘The clock is ticking, Comrade General,’ Shabanov said. ‘We must act quickly.’

  ‘I know, Roman Makhmadzhanovich, I know.’

  The general hung up, leaving Shabanov with the sound of a dead line in his ear.

  It was typical Aushev to pull something from the bag at the eleventh hour. Still in his early fifties, he was considered young to be heading up the 2nd Chief Directorate, a GRU department he had made very much his own. Knowing of his tough reputation, the liberals had tried to remove him on several occasions. But Aushev was too wily to be put out to pasture just yet. And too clean to be implicated in any post-coup purges.

  The radicals were wary of Aushev principally because of his vast knowledge. Almost thirty years in the Army’s intelligence service had made him a very powerful man.

  In times of crisis - and there was little doubt Russia was facing its worst since the Great Patriotic War - it was good to know that he, Shabanov, General Aushev, and men like him were all on the same side.

  CHAPTER 1

  Boris Sinitsky shunned a slight feeling of dizziness when he emerged from the depths of the London Underground into the damp summer’s evening above London’s Hyde Park Corner tube station. It seemed as if he had been breathing a nauseating bouquet of stale sweat and luxuriant perfume the entire day.

  He looked at his watch. His run around the network had taken him an hour. He had not been followed.

  His stomach churned as he recalled the air of the trains, heavy with the aroma of expensive soaps, aftershave, perfumes, and the soiled clothing of the tramp in the seat beside him. The odours had combined in his head, wreaking havoc with his senses.

  He sucked in the cool air of the park and let the nausea subside.

  London was a long way from the 2nd Chief Directorate’s headquarters in Krasnovodsk Street, a narrow, nondescript alleyway in the tree-lined suburbs behind Moscow’s Dynamo football stadium.

  Sinitsky was only too well aware of the importance of his mission. He felt proud to have been entrusted with the secret. His task was to obtain the missing piece of the jigsaw from a man who had cause to volunteer it.

  It was almost dark. Away from the throng his sense of isolation was acute. The case hung heavily in his right hand.

  A newspaper hoarding caught his eye. More unrest predicted back home, and in the old Central Asian republics. The stark words of the headline stiffened his resolve. He walked briskly along the subway that led under Hyde Park corner. Above him he could hear the rumble of traffic as it inched towards Piccadilly and Marble Arch. The lights in the dank, gloomy passageway flickered.

  As he crossed Rotten Row, a few pedestrians passed him, their heads bent low against the drizzle that had begun to fall in the gathering darkness. When he reached the long, rectangular pond he turned left and started counting. One, two...<
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  At the third bench he stopped and put the case down. He looked left and right, but could see no one. Where was his contact? After two minutes, he pulled a pack of Marlboro from his coat, put one in his mouth, and struck a match. The box was damp and the match tore uselessly at the striking paper.

  ‘A lighter is better than matches, I find.’

  Sinitsky looked up to see a man in a raincoat standing before him. His complexion was dark, swarthy. Cheap, flimsy trousers protruded beneath the hem of the coat, making his appearance seem out of step with the bad weather. The Russian looked around him, but could not establish the direction from which the stranger had come.

  The man offered him a light. The tip of the cigarette glowed dimly. Sinitsky shielded it from the drizzle.

  ‘Disposable lighters - cheap, but reliable,’ Sinitsky said. His English, taught well, was strong and fluent.

  The other man looked down at the case. ‘The money...’

  Sinitsky could smell garlic on the-man’s breath and a spicy odour on his clothes. For a moment memories of the claustrophobic carriage and its plethora of odours returned to him.

  Sinitsky shook his head. ‘First, the information.’

  The colonel from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command smiled.

  ‘In the Jebel Al-Baiyada, a mountain range in Southern Lebanon, there is a peak called Ayn An-Nasr, the Eye of the Eagle; in its shadow is the valley where the Sword and his Angels of Judgement have made their camp.’

  ‘What is the valley called?’

  ‘It does not have a name.’

  ‘How will we know it is the right place?’ Sinitsky asked.

  ‘The camp itself is a deserted khan al-qafila...’ He paused, searching for the English. ‘A caravanserai.’

  Sinitsky’s brow furrowed in confusion. ‘Caravanserai?’

  The Arab nodded. ‘An ancient building, a resting place.’

  ‘And the meeting?’ Sinitsky had learned the questions back in Moscow. All he had to do was memorize the answers, as per General Aushev’s instructions.