Eng nodded and left, Xiang shut the door.
Bian was convulsing. His back was arched, his head rolling from side to side. Xiang walked over and grabbed Bian’s head to still it. “We’ve got him, Bian,” he whispered. “You went through this for nothing. All this pain—for nothing. Remember that.”
Bian rasped, “My daughter … ”
“What’s that?”
“Leave her alone.”
Despite his frailty, the man had held up well. “Very well,” he said. “She’ll be unharmed.”
Xiang started toward the door.
“Sir?” the interrogator called. “What should we do with him?”
Xiang saw the electrodes still attached to Bian’s feet. “Give him the full treatment.”
“But, with his heart … it will kill him.”
Xiang shrugged. “The price of fatherhood.”
Miyun Reservoir, North of Beijing
As Xiang and his team were racing toward the Bamboo Garden, Tanner was climbing a hillside north of the Miyun Reservoir. Behind him, the moonlight reflected off the water’s surface.
He was on the last leg of a journey that had begun six hours before at Ritan Park, where he’d flagged down a taxi and asked to be driven to Taishiyun, a village northeast of the reservoir. Once there, he strolled the town’s hutongs until dusk, when he hired another taxi to the reservoir.
“You want wait?” the driver asked as he dropped Tanner off.
“No, thanks. I have friends picking me up in about an hour.”
“You wait in the dark?”
“I want to photograph the sunset. I’ll be okay, thanks.”
The driver shrugged and pedaled away.
As darkness fell, Tanner hunkered down in the underbrush and waited until the last few visitors left the beach and drove away. At nine p.m., a local PSB car rolled by, shined its lights along the trees, then kept going.
Once it disappeared around the corner, Tanner started moving.
He reached the top of the slope and paused to catch his breath.
Fifty feet ahead lay the barbed-wire fence of the air base’s perimeter. As Hsiao had described it, the air base was only large enough to accommodate helicopters, with three landing pads and a cluster of hangars and maintenance buildings. Hashing blue-green lights outlined each pad.
Following Hsiao’s directions, he followed the fence until he came to a rusted steel sign hanging from one of the posts. In Mandarin, it read WARNING: GOVERNMENT FACILITY. STAY OUT.
The bottom three rings securing the fence to the post were missing. He pushed the mesh inward and ducked through.
Forty minutes later, having dodged three truck-mounted patrols, Tanner lay on his belly in the shadows along a storage shed. Across the road stood a hangar; the placard above the door read “Shiyi”—the number eleven in Mandarin.
Stacked against the outer wall were a line of wooden crates, several of them reaching to within a few feet of the roof’s overhang. Astonished as he was at the lapse in security, Tanner was only too glad to take advantage of it.
So far Hsiao’s information was proving out. Tanner was glad: It felt good to have an ally. Though he wasn’t ready to put his life in the young soldier’s hands, Hsiao’s stock had just gone up.
He lay still for another fifteen minutes. Two patrol trucks came and went, but the road was devoid of foot traffic.
He got up and sprinted across the road. He mounted the first crate, chinned himself to the next one, then crawled onto the roof and shimmied forward until he reached the skylight. It was unlocked.
He lifted it open, peeked inside, then slipped through feet first.
The climb down through the girders took less than a minute.
In the center of the hangar stood Hsiao’s MI-8 Hip helicopter. At nearly twenty feet tall and sixty feet in length, it rose over him like an olive green monster. Its rotors drooped a few feet over his head.
He crouched down, opened his rucksack, and withdrew a liter-size bottle filled with a brown liquid straight from the CIA’s “Cookbook o’ Skullduggery,” as Oaken called it.
The recipe had called for ingredients ranging from ground, match heads to acetone, to mineral spirits. Having no clue about the theory behind the process, Briggs could only rely on Oaken’s directions as he spent most of the afternoon measuring and mixing the various parts until they became what he now had in the bottle.
According to Langley’s Science and Tech gurus, the compound would remain stable until heat—such as from a helicopter’s turboshaft exhaust stack—was applied to it, at which time it would begin deteriorating molecule by molecule. Just as sunlight through a prism is divided into its various wavelengths, so too would the compound systematically break down into a unique chemical signature.
As Tanner crouched on the hangar floor, two hundred miles above him a Keyhole “Prism Forte” satellite was aligning its ISA, or Infrared Spectrometer Array, to look for the chemical signature of his compound. When the Hip lifted off, the ISA would lock onto the trail, then pass it to the Keyhole’s main camera, which would track it to the camp.
With the bottle and a paintbrush tucked under one arm, Tanner climbed onto the Hip’s weapons rack. He popped the bottle’s top, nearly gagged at the smell, then squirted some onto the exhaust stack and began spreading it on.
Fifteen minutes later he’d covered the stack with four coats of the compound, each of which went on the color of molasses but dried clear—and mercifully odorless—within minutes.
He climbed down, repacked his rucksack, and headed for the ladder.
At the Bamboo Garden, Xiang’s team was tearing apart Tanner’s hotel room. The mattress, bedcovers, and wall hangings lay strewn on the floor.
“Nothing, sir,” one of the searchers reported.
“Bag up all his personal belongings and take them back to headquarters,” Xiang ordered. “I want everything checked again.”
“What now?” Eng asked. “He could be anywhere.”
“Circulate his photo to all the PSB and PAP stations in the city. He’ll turn up. In the meantime, tell the perimeter team to pull back. He may still come to us.”
Xiang flipped open Colson’s file and studied the passport photo. Something about the man’s face looked familiar. I know you, don’t I? Xiang thought.
52
Chono Dam, Russia
Separated from Dutcher and the others by thousands of miles, and with no way of telling them about Skeldon’s plans for the dam, Cahil was wracking his brain for options.
The scope of China’s plan was mind-boggling. Knowing Moscow’s reaction to an invasion of Siberia would be to immediately dispatch reinforcements to Yakutia, Sakha, and Irkutsk, China had decided to create a geographical roadblock of stunning proportions.
Trapped behind the Chono Dam lay a system of waterways and lakes roughly a fifth the size of the Great Lakes. Once released, the flood would roar down the narrow Chono River gorge and into the Central Siberian Plateau, gaining momentum and speed as its force was multiplied by not only the flatness of the land itself, but by the major rivers that crisscrossed it: the Nyuya, the Lena, the Vitim, the Ineyke—all would merge into a juggernaut of water rushing south toward a four hundred-mile stretch of the Trans-Siberia Railway—Moscow’s primary means of getting reinforcements into Siberia.
The flood would slowly dissipate as Siberia’s web of minor rivers and tributaries absorbed the deluge, but that would take weeks, during which the Federation would be faced with not only one of the greatest disasters in Russian history, but also an entrenched enemy force.
Whether Skeldon knew that the dam was just a cog in a larger plan, Cahil didn’t know, but certainly he didn’t understand their presence here was integral to the drama to come.
Cahil wasn’t sure how it would happen, but as the effects of the disaster were fully realized, word would reach Moscow: Bodies were found near the dam—two Caucasian and six Chinese—al
l wearing U.S. Army uniforms and carrying U.S.-issue equipment. The heavy-handedness of the revelation would be lost in the ensuing outrage. The United States would be accused of not only being in cahoots with China, but also of unleashing the disaster that had crippled Moscow’s ability to repel the invaders.
The morning after Skeldon showed him the dam, they awoke before dawn, had a quick breakfast of MRE chipped beef on toast and hiked into the forest, heading roughly northeast.
After an hour, Skeldon stopped before a wooded slope, glanced around, then started pacing off distances. Cahil realized he was following a mental map.
Skeldon stopped, walked to a section of the slope, then got down on his knees and parted a clump of bushes. He rummaged around for a moment, then wriggled backward, dragging a rock the size of a manhole cover. He pushed it aside and turned to Cahil. “Come on.”
“Come on where?”
“You’ll see. Just follow me and stay close.”
Skeldon dropped to his belly and crawled into the bushes. Cahil followed.
A few feet into the undergrowth Cahil came to an opening in the rock. As Skeldon’s feet disappeared inside, Cahil clicked on his flashlight and wriggled after him. The tunnel continued for ten feet, then widened into a cave tall enough for them to stand in.
“What is this place?” Cahil asked.
“A side tunnel. This used to be part of a silver mine. It’s been abandoned for about sixty years.”
“How’d you find it?”
Skeldon grinned, his face appearing skeletal in the flashlight beam. “Like you said, I’ve spent a fair amount of time over here. Come on, we’ve got about a mile to go.”
Before Cahil could ask any questions, Skeldon started down the tunnel, his flashlight bouncing off the rock walls.
The floor was flat and well worn. Occasionally Cahil’s beam would pick out the stub of a candle or a pick hammer nestled in a crag in the wall. After twenty minutes, the tunnel began a series of turns, snaking east and then west as the floor began to slope downward. The air grew cooler.
“You’re not claustrophobic, are you?” Skeldon called over his shoulder.
“Nah,” Cahil replied. But the day is young. He could feel the press of thousands of tons of rock above him. He suppressed a shiver and kept walking.
Finally the tunnel opened into a cavern about the size of a basketball court. Stalactites glistening with water drooped from the ceiling, reaching in some places nearly to the floor. Skeldon led him to the far wall and shined his flashlight along its base. Bored into the rock at forty-five-degree angles were six evenly spaced holes, each about the diameter of a telephone pole.
“You made these?” Cahil asked.
Skeldon nodded. “Yep. It was a pain in the ass to get the depth right.”
“What—”
“Shhh! Listen.” Skeldon pressed his ear to the wall. He gestured for Cahil to do the same. At first Cahil heard nothing. Then, faintly, he could make out the distant rush of water.
“That’s the river,” Cahil said.
“Yep. Only about twelve feet of rock between us and the dam’s footings.”
“When did you drill the holes?”
“Last year.”
Last year, Bear thought. My God …
The Chinese had planned their operation down to the finest detail. Cahil now had the answer to one of his lingering questions: How they were planning to destroy the dam. These six bore holes, each packed with a portion of the C4 the commandos had loaded aboard the Yaz, would work as shaped charges. Detonated simultaneously, the charges would fracture the dam’s base, sending a shock wave of cracks upward and outward. From there, the weight of the reservoir’s water would do the rest.
Moscow
The strain was beginning to show on Bulganin, Nochenko thought.
It was understandable, of course: Less than ten days in office and the new president was facing a spate of crises: an angry and aggressive China; a major far-eastern port razed to the ground; and a U.S. battle group steaming ominously toward the Siberian coast.
Bulganin’s eyes were red-rimmed and his hair jutted from his head at wild angles. Behind Bulganin, the ever-present Pyotr stared fixedly at the far wall.
Like the mausoleum guards, Nochenko thought. Bloody thug.
Bulganin pointed at the wall clock. “Where are they? I summoned them over an hour ago!”
It had only been twenty minutes, Nochenko knew, but he thought better than to argue the point. “Don’t worry, Vlad, they’re—”
The intercom on Bulganin’s desk buzzed; he punched it. “Yes!”
“Marshal Beskrovny and—”
“Send them in.”
The four men that made up Bulganin’s National Security Council strode into the office and stopped in a semicircle before his desk: Premier Andrei Svetlyn, Foreign Minister Dmitry Kagorin, Defense Minister Marshal Victor Beskrovny, and Director of the SVR, Sergei Fedorin.
All but Beskrovny were recent appointees. Until ten days ago Kagorin and Svetlyn had both been serving as deputies for the men Bulganin summarily dismissed upon taking office. Whether they kept their new posts depended, Nochenko knew, on how well they served as conduits for Bulganin’s decrees. In discussing their promotion with Nochenko, Bulganin had fallen short of admitting he was looking for “yes men,” calling them instead “loyal servants.”
A forty-year veteran of the Russian army, Marshal Beskrovny had served as either Defense Minister or Chief of the General Staff for both Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, and was a popular figure among the people. Beskrovny was, in Bulganin’s words, a “true herb of the Motherland.”
Sergei Fedorin was the wild card. In the final days before the election the SVR director had helped Bulganin’s cause by publicly recognizing his lead in the polls. As was expected, Bulganin had reciprocated by letting Fedorin stay on. For now.
“Beware the spies,” Bulganin had told Nochenko, quoting yet another Stalinism. “Their eyes are sharp, their hearts black, their knives always ready.”
Bulganin glowered at his cabinet, letting them squirm for a few moments. “Let’s hear it. Kagorin, what do we know about this Chinese absurdity?”
“Beijing is declining all our attempts to communicate,” the foreign minister answered. “As it stands, their deadline will expire in twenty hours.”
“Any sign of what they plan to do then?” asked Nochenko.
Marshal Beskrovny answered. “Aside from a slight increase in their command structure’s alert status, nothing has changed. Across the board, there’s no movement of military units.”
“Fedorin? You agree?”
“I do,” the SVR director replied. “If they’re planning a military response, it won’t come quickly. They don’t have the units in place to do anything significant.”
“More Chinese inscrutability,” Bulganin said. “All bark, no bite. Very well, let the deadline pass. I won’t be dictated to by those little bastards! If they think they can bully me into taking the blame for those mishaps, they are mistaken. What of the U.S. carrier group, Marshal?”
“If it maintains its current course it will be off our coast in three days. According to their Pentagon, the group is on routine maneuvers—”
“That’s a lie.”
“If so, their purpose is plain: They’re hoping the show of power will calm Beijing’s fire a bit.”
“Very kind of them, but we don’t need help handling the Chinese. I want to be kept informed, Marshal, do you understand? Every hour, I want to know what the group is up to.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now: Nakhodka-Vostochny—what happened? What’s the extent of the damage?”
“Severe,” Beskrovny replied. “First reports describe the port as ‘flattened.’”
“Flattened? Flattened! What does that mean? What could do such a thing?”
“Mr. President,” Nochenko answered, “relief crews have just arrived on scene, so
it will be a while before we start getting firsthand accounts from survivors. But, as I understand it, the port does handle a lot of petroleum products.”
Bulganin glanced at Marshal Beskrovny. “Is this true?”
“Yes, sir. A petroleum-related accident might explain the damage, but Ivan’s right: We won’t know anything until the crews have a chance to—”
Bulganin’s intercom buzzed. “Yes?”
“Mr. President, I have an urgent call for Marshal Beskrovny.”
“Transfer it in.”
When the phone trilled, Beskrovny picked it up, listened for a full minute, then said, “How certain are you, General? Who confirmed it? I see … yes, of course. We need to be sure. If there’s a mistake—” Beskrovny went silent again, then said, “Very well, I’ll be back to you shortly.”
“What?” Bulganin asked.
“That was the Far East District Commander in Vladivostok. One the relief workers found a … device that looked out of place, so he reported it.”
“What kind of device?” Ivan Nochenko asked.
Beskrovny hesitated. “It’s been identified as what’s called an LTD—a laser target designator. They’re used to guide missiles onto targets.”
“What!” Bulganin roared. “How—”
Nochenko cut him off: “What else, Marshal?”
“The device is standard U.S. military issue.”
“American?” Bulganin murmured, the muscles in his jaw bunching. “The Americans did this?”
“We don’t know that, Mr. President,” Beskrovny replied.
“Then explain the presence of the device.”
“I can’t. Not yet.”
“Do we posses any of these … LTDs?”
“No, sir.”
“Any reason why one should be in the port?” Bulganin pressed.
“No, sir.”
“Would a missile attack explain the devastation?”
“It might. It would depend on—”
“This LTD—it’s operated by ground troops?”
“Yes, sir, but—”
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