The Russian Bride

by Ed Kovacs

  Dennis held a small night-vision monocular to his eye as he ran. He followed the booming thunder of the D10 smashing steel and concrete, but he already knew where it was going; he’d memorized the blueprints and waypoints for the attack. He rounded a corner and came upon the dozer as it smashed through another wall.

  “Stop!” yelled Jerry to the driver. “That’s good!”

  Using a gargantuan bulldozer to access the diamonds was kind of an on-steroids version of a smash-and-grab jewelry store heist. Jerry and several thugs lit up the large private vault with portable lights and quickly went to work emptying dozens of slide-out, velvet-lined trays of fine diamonds from a standing cabinet. They dumped the contents of each tray into a black valise on a table as Dennis watched.

  In seconds the job was finished. Dennis stepped forward, closed the valise, and handed it to one of the thugs. “Run fast and get this to Viktor. All of you go with him!”

  Dennis motioned for the dozer operator to come down from the cab. “Follow them!”

  “What about me?” asked Jerry, the inside man.

  “A one-million-dollar bonus. Ride with me in the bulldozer, you can—”

  “Jerry!” called a voice from the darkness.

  As Jerry and Dennis turned, three shots rang out, all hitting Jerry in the chest. Dennis emptied his gun at a dark form, which then fell into a pool of light.

  “You didn’t scratch the last guard, Jerry.”

  Jerry lay on the dust-covered floor, gasping for breath. Dennis stood over him and reloaded his gun. “You could have had a million dollars, my friend.” Dennis then put two rounds into Jerry’s head.

  Dennis climbed into the cab of the idling D10, grabbed the controls, pivoted the beast, and powered it right through a wall.

  * * *

  Kit left the helicopter idling and ducked under the spinning rotor blades as he waved to the men at the blockade just up the street. “Bystro! Idi syuda, speshite!” Kit called out in Russian. Quick, come here! Hurry up!

  Starlight provided the ambient lighting, and the three men from the blockade ran forward in the dimness. As they got close, Kit leveled his Sub-2000 at them. “Stop! Drop your weapons!”

  But one of the men wanted to be a hero and raised his gun.

  The shoot-out was over in a couple of seconds, and all three men lay dead.

  Yulana scrambled over to Kit and looked without compassion at the dead men.

  “Sorry you had to see that,” said Kit.

  “Men such as this came in the middle of the night to take my daughter,” she said coldly. She bent down and grabbed a pistol from a dead man. “Maybe you don’t trust me quite yet, but I think I should have a gun.”

  “All you had to do was ask!” Kit smiled. “Hey, do me a favor, go grab the keys out of that truck. I don’t want Popov’s other rats to drive away before the police arrive. Then wait for me here, okay?”

  Kit ran off toward the Mainichi building. Buzz and Angel were still exchanging small-arms fire with men at the front gate. Then Kit heard an engine whine and could make out the R66 lifting off from inside the compound.

  “Damn!” Kit stopped in his tracks. He aimed carefully and fired three-shot bursts at the rising helicopter. As he reached for the radio on his belt, the D10 bulldozer exploded though an exterior wall of the Mainichi building, sending chunks of concrete, plaster, and grit flying everywhere. The yellow behemoth belched black diesel exhaust as it hurtled across a small grassy area, then crashed through the steel fence and careened onto the street.

  “Buzz, disengage and grab the RT-Seven,” said Kit into the two-way.

  “Roger that!”

  Kit loaded a new magazine without taking his eyes off the bulldozer, and fixed on the blond man in the lighted cab; the man turned on a spotlight and swung the beam, illuminating Kit like a Broadway star delivering a solo.

  “We have cascading blackouts now hitting the city!” crackled Jen’s voice over the radio.

  “I could use a little blackout right now,” mumbled Kit to himself. He fired a burst but missed the spotlight. The blond dozer operator then lifted the huge steel scoop and accelerated.

  Kit turned on his heels and ran like hell. “Get into the copter!” he yelled at Yulana.

  She saw him running forward with the dozer chasing him, so she moved quickly into the cockpit, which sat facing the charging bulldozer.

  Good thing I didn’t shut the bird down! Kit didn’t waste time with the seat belt. As he looked up, the tracked yellow giant, with its steel teeth glistening on the scoop, hurtled closer. Kit twisted the throttle to maximum power as he yanked up the collective.

  The MD 530F lifted straight into the air as the scoop rose high on the D10, trying to catch the helo. The raised scoop of the skittering dozer missed the rising helicopter’s skids by inches.

  Kit pushed the cyclic forward, and the copter tilted forward and accelerated as it found altitude. He’d last seen Popov heading north and so directed the bird northward, pushing it to its limits. Popov’s R66 was a slower aircraft, and Kit scanned the sky for his prey.

  Kit put on his headset and shot Yulana a quick look. “Any idea who the blond guy was?”

  “Yes: a crazy man. Did they get what they came for?” she asked, over the headset.

  “Probably. But unless he has more tricks, Popov can run but he can’t hide.”

  “Vegas PD is rolling up in force to Mainichi. They’re already chasing down men on foot,” said Jen over the radio.

  “Jen, have you hacked into the BRITE radar display from McCarran?” asked Kit.

  “Roger. He’s painting pretty weak, but I have him at your eleven o’clock, heading northeast, crossing Russell Road at Jones Boulevard right now.”

  “Got him!”

  Kit eased the cyclic stick to the left as he closed the gap between him and Popov.

  “The rolling blackouts are heading toward the Strip,” said Jen, over the radio. “What do you think the other target is?”

  “Maybe he’s going there right now.”

  CHAPTER 39

  The electricity was still working on South Las Vegas Boulevard near Agate Avenue. Security lights illuminated the old boarded-up motel compound that secretly functioned as Viktor Popov’s headquarters.

  Next door to the motel was an AT&T facility surrounded by a barbed-wire-topped, ten-foot-high chain-link fence. Huge wooden spools held cabling as thick as your fist and sat stacked in the parking lot, next to parked utility trucks, bucket trucks, and mobile generators mounted on trailers.

  A bone-colored two-story, cement-block, L-shaped building suggested little about the contents inside, although a square, four-story-tall microwave tower rose up from the roof.

  But who notices microwave towers anymore? The whole AT&T complex, in fact, was hard to notice in a city like Las Vegas. So much screams for attention in Sin City, so many glittery, sensual, over-the-top visual distractions assault the senses, that the unassuming easily goes unnoticed.

  Unless you were a communications techie or geek. Or a thief looking to steal some copper or a mobile generator or maybe the Keys to the Kingdom.

  * * *

  Alex Bobrik tried to relax as he sat on an overturned plastic crate in the subterranean room. The constant harmonics of the humming electronics and the soft glow of dozens of LED lights felt soothingly reassuring in a kind of bizarre, postindustrial way. His back ached like crazy from all of the tunnel crawling and now from sitting frozen in place, one hand holding the voltmeter connected to a junction box, the other hand just inches from a metallic red toggle switch on his electronic toaster.

  His assistants sat quietly; there was nothing to say. The unspoken fear for all three people was that something would go wrong and Popov would have them killed. Or something else could go wrong and the American authorities would catch them and put them in prison for a very long time.

  If everything went right, then, well, maybe, they could get back to the safety of Moscow, and their families would b
e left alone. Yes, they were being well paid, but they weren’t here for the money; they were here for the lives of their loved ones, although they had never once spoken about it with one another.

  The voltmeter in Alex’s hand dipped dramatically, and the room went dark. Alex instantly flipped the red toggle switch, and a series of green lights began to appear, first from the toaster, and then from the electronic collar around the fiber-optic trunk, and then from Alex’s and his assistants’ laptops.

  “We’re in! We’ve got it! We’ve got all of it! We have spliced into America’s cerebral cortex!” whispered Alex with considerable elation.

  The toaster and electronic collar were Alex’s inventions, and like a lot of Russian technology, they were crude, rugged, and effective. Popov had approached him three years ago with an offer he couldn’t refuse, so he’d been working eighteen-hour days ever since. The toaster and collar were game-changing technological breakthroughs that might never see the light of day, but so what? He had done it. Before now, it had not been possible to splice into more than one strand of a fiber-optic trunk at a time. His modest equipment had just accessed all thirty thousand of them.

  After only a few seconds, the lights in the room slowly came back on, softer now, since they were powered by the backup generators.

  “Begin the data transfer from the first two fibers to our two fibers,” said Alex.

  His assistants got busy. One of Popov’s shell corporations had long ago leased space on two of the strands on the southern trunk. Data was now being copied, without anyone’s knowledge, from randomly selected fibers to Popov’s leased fibers. It would take the geeks back at Popov’s facility in Moscow about ten minutes to determine what kind of data they were looking at and from which company or institution it came from.

  Ten minutes to check two strands meant one hour to check twelve strands, and there were thirty thousand strands. It might take weeks or months to find all of the dedicated strands of the big banks, the big brokerage houses, the global corporate behemoths, POTUS, and other supersensitive government entities, but chances are they would be found.

  Technicians rarely inspected the room where Alex and his coworkers now sat. Once a month, if that. So with an inspection having just recently been performed, Alex comfortably concluded they could obtain the data from over eight thousand strands in the coming four weeks without fear of interruption.

  And since Popov’s men had the AT&T site under close surveillance, Alex would have plenty of time to pull his gear and retreat back into the tunnel without a trace if an inspection team showed up. Once the inspectors left, the Russians would have to engineer another blackout before they could splice in again.

  The problem with doing so was that any blackout that was location specific to the PIC would result in AT&T reinspecting the facility pronto. But with tonight’s chaos from the e-bomb and the cascading blackouts all over town, AT&T technicians would be busy for many weeks dealing with a host of critical issues elsewhere.

  Although it frightened him to possess such knowledge, Bobrik knew more then he was supposed to know about the deceptions. His lips formed a smile just thinking of the brilliant audacity of the plan: the theft of a half-billion dollars’ worth of diamonds was merely a feint, a smoke screen for the real theft, which was now transpiring unnoticed. What brilliant maskirovka! It made the deceptions employed by Vladimir Putin to annex the Crimea appear clumsy.

  Alex marveled at the possibilities he had just presented to Popov’s hackers. They could not only steal data, they could change data! Or intercept or override communications! Stock market manipulation, anyone? Now that was real power. One was only limited by imagination in terms of what damage could be done by changing data. The economic and intelligence implications were staggering.

  Since there was also a massive amount of garbage data on the thirty thousand lines—from universities, cities and townships, countless state government agencies, entertainment and news organizations—it might take some time for Popov’s Moscow team to hit real pay dirt.

  And although he wasn’t privy to the whole operation, Alex assumed the Mafia kingpin had buyers standing by, ready to shell out billions for certain information. If Popov could sell data that would enable a crooked enterprise to scam $20 billion from Bank of America, well, paying him only $1 billion for the info, plus a 10 percent—$2 billion—commission was a good deal. Or perhaps Popov himself would scam the $20 billion.

  Calculating conservatively, Alex concluded that this deception, in a very short period of time, would make Viktor Popov the richest person in the world.

  * * *

  Georgia Anderson sat at her workstation in the AT&T Global Network Operations Center in Bedminster, New Jersey. The tempo of activity in the massive room seemed normal, but Georgia was right now running down information on something very abnormal. Las Vegas was being rocked by cascading energy blackouts, and that didn’t happen every day.

  She had checked very carefully and was certain there had been no indication that the southern fiber-optic trunk line had been compromised. Since the severing of the northern cable, she and three other employees had been tasked specifically to closely monitor any and all issues related to the southern trunk. She could order the immediate inspection of any PICs in the blackout areas, but the radio traffic she’d monitored suggested that the AT&T crews were already shifting into emergency mode and had their hands full.

  So Georgia Anderson sent an e-mail requesting an inspection of the AT&T facility on South Las Vegas Boulevard, “as time permits.”

  Her brain told her that was the sensible thing to do, since she could see from the log that the building had just recently been inspected, but her gut didn’t like the Vegas event coming on the heels of what happened in Wyoming. There had been nothing in the press or on TV news, but scuttlebutt ran rampant that terrorists had blown the northern trunk. A massive effort to make repairs ASAP was under way, and upper management was supposedly conducting a top-to-bottom reevaluation of how to better secure the fiber-optic trunk lines.

  Georgia thought about that as she tasted her lukewarm hazelnut-flavored coffee. She had lots of ideas about making the thousands of miles of trunk lines more secure, but it would cost big bucks. Meaning her ideas were nonstarters. So she just stared at the huge monitor depicting the map of the entire trunk line and looked for anomalies as she sipped her coffee.

  * * *

  Bobby Chan and Ron Franklin stood in one of the laundry rooms at the Siegel Suites complex on West Tropicana. An open window allowed the sweet smell of hashish to waft into the dirty room, which needed new linoleum, paint, counters, and machines. Other than that, the laundry room was fine.

  JoAnn Lennox, the friend of the front-desk clerk, wore tight stretch pants in spite of being about fifty pounds overweight. Chan wasn’t exactly a poster boy for a weight-reduction program, either, but he tried to hide his obesity behind a sport coat. Lennox flaunted her flab with a come-and-get-it-boys insouciance. Chan and Franklin waited as she studied the 8x10 photo of Staci Bennings.

  “No, never seen her. Cute, though,” she said, exhaling cigarette smoke.

  “So tell us about the blonde in three-fourteen,” said Chan.

  “I try not to smoke in my place, so I step out onto the walkway in front of my unit to light up. Or I’ll sit at the open window and blow the smoke out. Anyway, the blonde smokes, too. She must go outside twenty times a day to have a smoke.”

  “Ever talk to her?”

  “I gave up trying. She’d see me, but look away. Made it clear she didn’t want to talk.”

  “So you never heard her speak?”

  “Well, one time I had my window open and she was smoking and then started to pace a little as she talked into her cell phone. She was talking some kind of gibberish.”

  “Gibberish?”

  “A foreign language.”

  “Russian?”

  “Don’t know. I never had a Russian man.”

  “What about the guy with
her, Gregory?” asked Franklin.

  “Never seen him.”

  “Do they have a routine? You know come and go at certain times? Or could she be hooking, bringing guys into the room?”

  “Nobody goes in and out except her, from what I’ve seen. She don’t look happy, that’s for sure. She leaves the complex three times a day to buy food, that’s it. McDonald’s in the morning, tacos for lunch, In-N-Out Burger for dinner.”

  “All those fast-food joints are within a block of here.”

  JoAnn nodded. “Usually within an hour after she’s brought the food back, she puts a trash bag outside the door.”

  “She leaves it there?”

  “Until the next time she goes down the stairs.”

  “Was there a bag of trash outside her door just now when you came down?” asked Chan.

  “Sure was.”

  CHAPTER 40

  Popov intended to fly over the Strip and skirt to the north of McCarran Airport as he headed east. He didn’t even care that the airspace over the Strip was Class B airspace, the most restricted category. He was flying low, and the R66 was such a small bird, he doubted the McCarran radar had been painting him since he took off from Mainichi Auction House. A van was waiting for him at a large plot of barren land off of Boulder Highway. He would then be ferried to Perkins Field in Overton, Nevada, an uncontrolled public airstrip where the Citation XLS sat fueled and ready. The Citation would fly him into Mexican airspace and embark on a hopscotch journey back to Moscow.

  Moscow would be beautiful this time of year, and the thousands of glittering diamonds that filled the black valise at his side would fetch at least double their U.S. prices in the Russian capital. So the half-billion-dollar heist would actually be a billion-dollar job when all was said and done.

  He liked the word “billion.” He knew that soon, the long overdue distinction would be his: his wealth would be measured in billions. Tens, no hundreds of billions. Popov had never spoken the words, but this deception could easily make him richer than a dozen Bill Gates.

  He flashed angry when he thought of how Bennings had nearly ruined everything with the rigged EMP weapon. And the major must have somehow tracked the device through the GPS guidance signal, which probably required the assistance of Yulana Petkova. Using Bennings had been one of the biggest mistakes in his life, a mistake made just when he was on the threshold of his biggest success, of fantastic riches. Was it self-sabotage on his part? Did he subconsciously choose to work with the American knowing it would bring on disaster? Was he unconsciously trying to punish himself for the thousands of misdeeds that comprised his life of crime and killing?