Berry had briefed Trevor Harward before leaving Op-Center. Williams and his team had just reviewed and approved the change of plan suggested by Mike Volner, and Anne had finally confirmed all the necessary arrangements in Turkey. Kaan Hamzaçebi had not been happy with the idea of going ashore so deep in Russian-held territory, but an extra five thousand U.S. dollars assuaged those concerns.
Harward had expressed the same concerns as Hamzaçebi, but then Berry had expected that. If he said “light,” the NSA automatically said “dark.” The call had been on speaker, so the others knew where Op-Center stood. The president would be informed, with all the red flags Harward could muster. If this went south, it was all on Chase Williams.
Williams had seemed unconcerned and sent everyone home.
Dawson picked at his Wisconsin Salad, which was a few vegetables on top and a lot of cheese below. “I still don’t understand,” he said. “My head’s full of what-ifs, and I can’t stop chewing on them. What if the Russians attack in Ukrainian territory? What if the Ukrainians attack in Russian territory? What if the Ukrainians attack our guys? What if the Russians do? What if our team is captured by Putin’s troops? What if our guys shoot and kill Russians?”
“All of that? It’s out of your control now, Brian,” Berry said. “The apparatus is in motion.”
“Yeah,” Dawson said. “And a bunch of those turning gears have my initials on them. Lives depend on how it all comes together.”
“You saved a life yesterday, about this time. Can’t you feel good about that?”
“I should, but that was yesterday. I’m concerned about tomorrow.”
“Understood, but the pros are in the field, they’ve got the ball,” Berry said. “It’s on them now.”
Dawson shook his head. “I can’t be that detached. You learned to be when you were a divorce attorney, I understand that. But when I was with Fifth Special Forces, I was B-Team leader for a reason: someone else had to make that go call. I always wanted a little more time to work it out.”
“Like with Carolina?” Berry asked.
“Did I tell you I saw her today?”
“You didn’t have to. It’s all over your face.”
“Oh. Yeah, I couldn’t pull that plug, either.”
The men ate in silence for a moment.
“With me, it’s more than detachment,” Berry said. “Even when I had my law office, I tried to find the pluses.”
“Pluses? In emotional upset?”
“It’s a divorce, Brian. Someone is always gonna be hurt. I tried to make it a controlled crash. I was part attorney, part shrink, part confessor. And it was interesting work. What’s the song—you look at life from both sides?”
“Joni Mitchell, ‘Both Sides Now,’” Dawson said.
“Well, in one hour you’re for the man, the next hour you’re for the woman, and once I was for the kids of a cabinet member. That put me on track to where I am today. It was quite a kaleidoscope. I’m only sorry I missed out on gay divorces.”
“Why?” Dawson asked.
“First generation, history being made.”
Dawson sipped his Bud Light. “Is that what I was, Matt?”
“What do you mean?”
“A kaleidoscope, a weekly psychedelic display?”
“No—it was daily, as you may recall,” Berry said around a mouthful of a side of Frito pie.
“Screw you.”
“At its height, twice daily,” Berry pointed out.
Dawson scowled. “It was a shitty time—”
“Was. It’s been over for nearly two years and look how your face just soured. Christ, it melted.”
“Can’t help it,” Dawson said. “I’m having trouble getting past the fact that she’s happier with that Australian rancher than she was with me.”
“I told you then and I’ll repeat it now,” Berry said. “You pick at that scab and it’ll never heal. Anyway, don’t look at it as having lost a wife,” Berry went on, smiling broadly. “You gained a friend.”
Dawson made a face. “You needed a squash partner who was six four and built like you.”
“You’re hurting my feelings,” Berry drawled.
Dawson continued to fork at the grated cheese. “My point, when I still had one, is that you liked that work and you like this work. Maybe you thrive on confrontation—and don’t take this personally—when the stakes are on someone else. Spouses, Chase Williams—
“It’s possible,” Berry admitted. “I like going to horse races at Laurel Park, too, as long as I don’t place any bets. Maybe you just get too involved in this stuff.”
Dawson made a circling motion with his finger. “Return to where I mentioned the lives that are at stake. When I think back, you know when I was happy? Flipping burgers at a fast-food joint when I was a teenager. Every now and then I had to slide over and drop fries in the oil, then back to the grill. Task—done. Task—done. Nothing stayed with you except the smell of the grease.”
“So? Go back to cooking burgers. It’s a brave new world, Brian, where people with top security clearance make strawberry shakes and kids without a college degree hack the FBI from a table you just served.”
Dawson finished his salad and nursed his beer. Heather came over to make sure everything was all right.
“Fine, cuz,” Matt said. “Brian’s just being introspective.”
“Well, order dessert or introspect at the bar,” she said. “Louis needs the tips.”
“We’ll have the check, thanks,” Berry said. “I have my kung-fu class at eight.”
Dawson smiled up at Heather as she walked away. It was too bad she was married. He could have helped screw up another woman’s life. He looked back across the table.
“I do admire your initiative, Matt,” Dawson said. “All I want to do is go home and watch a ball game.”
“That’s okay, too,” Berry said. “As long as you’re happy.”
“Right,” Dawson said. “That’s the missing part.”
Berry regarded him for a long moment. “What’s the missing part here? What’s got you so down? And don’t tell me it’s women.”
“No,” he said. “They’re a low-level buzz, like tinnitus.”
“Then what? There have been risky missions before, potentially more dangerous than this.”
“True,” Dawson said. “But however I look at those gears you mentioned, the moving parts in this operation, they all mesh just one way.”
“And that is?”
Dawson said, “Lose-lose.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Op-Center Headquarters, Fort Belvoir North,
Springfield, Virginia
June 3, 8:33 PM
There was one person who didn’t take Chase Williams’s advice.
Williams and Anne had gone home shortly after the rest of the team. They didn’t want to leave, but they knew they had to be fresh for the arrival of the JSOC team in Turkey. Neither knew how much sleep they would actually get, or if they would even try, or if they would be able to stay away from the command center. But just being out of the subterranean network of offices, away from machine-cooled, forced air, away from the anxiety that naturally permeated the corridors, would do them good. Both were reachable at all times on any number of secure lines and devices, and they could be back at the office quickly. In the old days, under Paul Hood, there had been a night command, fully staffed; now there were only monitors to get in touch with Williams, Anne, and the others. Being under the radar had its fiscal downside.
Roger McCord, however, had decided not to leave. There were too many missing pieces in Crimea, pieces he felt were out there if he looked in the proper places.
“You’re the intelligence director,” he told himself as he sifted through data from national and international assets. “You shouldn’t have blind spots.”
Especially when the goddamn target had given them part of a road map: the virtual end-game. And a potentially related attack on Bionic Hill, he thought.
Th
e problem was, this team—and it had to be one, however small—had covered their movements well before anyone knew they were there. And missing names, destinations, materiel—what was called the “negative space” in the narrative—wasn’t small. Op-Center didn’t know whether that video showed the entirety of the plan or only the access point. Was there a second part? Was biological or nuclear material involved?
Or is this just a band of patriots looking to jumpstart a Reconquista using sheer brass? It was hardly unprecedented. That act itself was named largely for the bold moves made in the eleventh century by the Spanish hero Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar—El Cid, the Lord—against invaders from Africa. The superior, entrenched Moorish forces were driven back in part by a noble leader, in part by an aroused population. That was how a knight, not a prince or a king, became the national hero of Spain.
A century later, the same template played out in Russia, as Prince Alexander Nevsky united warring princedoms to battle Teutonic invaders. His peasant army beat back the heavily armored knights on horseback, defeating them on the frozen surface of Lake Peipus.
It was not impossible that someone in Ukraine was proud, patriotic, and vain enough to attempt the same thing, either from the safety of Kiev or at the head of an élite paramilitary squad. Every generation has its brash hero, from William Barret Travis at the Alamo, who drew the first recorded line in the sand, to Chase Williams’s own personal hero, the ungovernable General MacArthur, who vowed, “I shall return,” and did, McCord thought. Ukraine has a heroic void, and this would be the time to fill it.
Especially given the news that, after emptying its first sovereign fund to pay for its adventures and make up for chronically low oil and natural-gas prices, Moscow was tapping the second and last of its financial cushions. The National Wealth Fund reserves were supposed to be for emergencies, not to fill budgetary shortfalls. Burning through funds at its current rate, by the end of 2019 the totality of Russia’s federal resources would be five hundred billion rubles scattered throughout a variety of banks and institutions. At the current rate of exchange, that was significantly below eight million dollars. With a declining ruble, Russia would be broke. While Putin might be willing to play brinkmanship, the world couldn’t allow that: a bankrupt Moscow would leave the nation effectively in the hands of the military and the black market, with widespread destabilization on the border of China. The Kremlin would expect, and rightly, some kind of Crimean resolution to be forced on Kiev long before that happened.
Armageddon is headed our way, full tilt, because you can’t find a bunch of foolhardy Ukrainians, McCord thought with frustration. He was frustrated about that and he was frustrated because he was getting tired. But he was like a dog with a bone. There had to be something.
He looked at a current satellite map of the region, which displayed the new Russian base and the old Ukrainian forests.
Somewhere there is a bottleneck, McCord thought. To get to one of the two army bases, to come at Sudzha or, possibly, Voronezh from the west, there has to be one route that’s most advantageous. And he couldn’t entirely rule out the naval base at Sevastopol. He would not rule it out.
But the search for a chokepoint was a dead end. As with D-Day, or Hannibal and his elephants, or George Washington crossing the Delaware to attack the Hessians at Trenton, the attack might come from an unexpected place at an unanticipated hour and with unconventional firepower.
Maybe that whole damn virtual-reality program is a red herring and they’re going to piss on the naval base from drones.
McCord sat back angrily in his swivel chair. The history courses in the PhD program in International Affairs had been loaded with successful surprise attacks. His own experiences as company commander in Fallujah and as a battalion exec in Ramadi had reinforced his understanding that, while it was occurring, history was about a complete lack of understanding and perspective. Context came later. The trick was imagining a context with sufficient antecedent and wisdom to predict what was going to happen.
And then it was still just that: profiling and prediction.
McCord was unhappy, and he became increasingly so as the night grew old. There was an axiom in the intelligence community: Something is out there, you’re just not seeing it.
What had he overlooked? There were Ukrainian heroes, there were traitors, there were all stops in between. Where to focus what few hours were left?
None of the algorithms worked. Nothing. He tried Havrylo Koval with any military personnel. He looked for Koval in surveillance footage from Bionic Hill. He found him, but never with anyone. He searched for the deployment of 2B14 Podnos in 2014, for any Russian retreats where they might have been abandoned. He checked for stolen inventory, but Russia was a sieve for black-market armaments. All he found was lists of the materiel they had.
Agents. Double agents.
Kiev hadn’t been forthcoming about who was in the field. They surely had them; they simply didn’t trust NATO enough to share. Not until the organization, and the United States, did more to openly provide them with infantry arms and heavy ordnance.
Someone is behind this, McCord thought. Someone is drilling. Someone will be in the field, may already be in the field. That was what Bankole and Volner were going to find out. Someone in my position should at least be able to provide goddamn direction!
He started with a proposition he had visited earlier, that the attack on Bionic Hill was meant to disguise whatever drilling had been going on there, destroy any evidence, and arouse local passions. The Russians might have targeted it if they knew the team was drilling there—but more likely with a fire and barred exits, or, even more likely than that, with an assassination like those they’d already committed. Bionic Hill was also a campus, for God’s sake. Anyone could have had access.
Eliminate the Russians and you have Ukrainians. The question was which Ukrainains.
The ones who were already there, he thought. Suppose they were the ones who did this?
They might go to ground until the investigation was through. But then there was a risk, however slight, that they’d be caught, transportation centers shut down. They would likely blow the walls down and immediately head to their target zone while the training was still fresh.
Or one would. The others would have gone ahead, lest the trigger man was captured.
That made sense. It was how Special Forces deployed: they didn’t drill, then take a week off, then go ahead and attack a high-risk target. They left almost at once.
Assuming that Sudzha was the target, how would they have moved forward? McCord wondered.
An airdrop was unlikely: the Russians would be watching for that, and it would be easy to detect. Separate vehicles by road? Very possible. Train? Also possible. They would have trained with the weapons they would be using so they would be utterly familiar. The question was, would they be carrying those weapons or would they have been shipped ahead? Shipped ahead, they could abort if the cache were uncovered. Carrying them, they would be forced to fight.
The big drawback to vehicular traffic was that everyone in the front seat was visible to security cameras, and every security camera had infrared illuminators for night traffic. The United States had given Kiev this and facial-recognition software to watch for politicians, military figures, and journalists who were known to have Russian sympathies. The so-called chicken-wire net—Ukrainian officials were fond of branding enemies—had nabbed a number of troublemakers who, in the United States, would have been defended by the ACLU or some other rights group. That was not a consideration in Ukraine, not to the extent it was here.
Trains and buses were covered. The only time anyone was visible was at the terminals.
That only leaves me with several hundred possi—
He sat up suddenly.
Maybe not.
Having one of Aaron’s people hack the e-ticket train and bus database in Kiev was unlikely to turn up anything. A careful operative would have purchased tickets in advance, for cash, on site. They wo
uldn’t have trusted an outsider: it had to be someone in the know, someone who was trusted. One of them.
Maybe all of the travelers went to the station at some point, individually, McCord thought. Maybe one or more had been there hours before, maybe made a point of “missing” a train they never intended to catch as a reason to hang around, watch for potential trouble such as police or military personnel. McCord didn’t think they would go to their final destination separately; it would be too dangerous to communicate by cell phone, and it was essential that they stay in touch in the event of a change of plans.
But … there was one thing they couldn’t cover.
Someone would likely have gone there at some point, days or weeks before, to see where the security cameras were in order to know how to avoid them. Yet to spot the cameras this person might first have been caught by one or more of them. And, somewhere during a long trip east from Kiev, that same individual might have gotten out to stretch. And certainly to depart. Was it possible to avoid every camera along the way?
McCord contacted a source on the graveyard shift with the National Police of Ukraine in Kiev. Elena Reva was a computer specialist who collected one hundred dollars weekly from the CIA. Since 2014, Op-Center had thrown in another fifty. The woman was neutral in war but not in finance.
McCord asked for, and got, the daily code to access stored and current footage from the rail line.
He didn’t bother looking at any of it. He ran it through Op-Center’s sophisticated digital analyzer, looking for faces that appeared repeatedly. The expected ones showed up: engineers and conductors, commuters who got on and off within an hour or two of Kiev. There were tourists who came and left Kiev days apart.
But then there was someone who stood out. Someone who was clearly casing the station, because he had no luggage, nothing to read, and came and went within an hour. This same someone—nearly eighty-percent possibility—showed up today at one of the easternmost stops on the rail line: the city of Sumy.
Tom Clancy's Op-Center--Dark Zone Page 20
