Stephen Coonts' Deep Black: Arctic Gold

by Arctic Gold (epub)

  They would have to chance it. “C’mon, Lia!”

  He kept his weapon trained on the corner of the shed as Lia scrambled to her feet and dashed for cover. As she reached his position, several more armed men began spilling out of the warehouse through the main door.

  There was no time for carefully aimed bursts. He thumbed his weapon’s selector switch to full-auto and mashed down the trigger, sending a second-long volley into the gaping door.

  One Russian crumpled on the spot as the others pulled back and bullets banged into the sheet-metal sliding door. Then Akulinin’s weapon ran dry, the slide locking open as the final spent cartridge spun away into the darkness and clinked against the wall to his right.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  Lia nodded. She was rubbing her arm. “A little scraped up. . . .”

  “C’mon. Before these clowns get themselves organized!” Taking her elbow, he guided her past a tangle of discarded and rusted machinery, leading her back toward the alley through which he’d approached the waterfront a few minutes before.

  “How about it, Jeff?” he asked aloud. They stopped just short of the alley as Akulinin pocketed the empty clip from his weapon and snapped in a fresh magazine. “Anybody waiting for us around the corner?”

  “We’re not picking up any movement in the alley or near the car,” Rockman’s voice replied. “Hostiles are coming out of the warehouse now . . . but cautiously.”

  They ducked into the entrance to the alley and made their way northeast, emerging again on Kozhevennaya Liniya. After a careful look up and down the street and at the staring, empty windows of the buildings towering around them, they crossed the street at a casual stroll to the parked white Citroën. Lia climbed into the back while Akulinin slid in behind the wheel.

  “Damn!” he said.

  “What’s the matter?” Rockman and Lia answered in almost perfect unison.

  “My toolbox,” he said, glancing back across the street. “I left it back there.”

  “Leave it,” Lia told him. “The opposition is going to be all over that waterfront.”

  “What’s left in the tool kit?” Rockman asked.

  “The OVGN6,” he said. “Some rope and climbing gear. Some spare mags for the H and K. Some ground sensors.” He hesitated. “And the satcom.”

  That last was not good. The AN/PSC-12 com terminal with its two-foot folded satellite dish was a compact and extremely secret unit small enough to be carried in a small briefcase—or a workman’s toolbox. The black box attached to the terminal contained computer chips and encryption codes that the National Security Agency emphatically did not want to fall into unfriendly hands.

  Stupid! Akulinin told himself. Careless, sloppy, and stupid! . . .

  “We’ve alerted your support team,” Rockman’s voice said. “They’ll try to make a recovery when things quiet down.”

  “What the hell kept you anyway, Ilya?” she demanded as he started the ignition and pulled out into the street.

  “Traffic inspector,” Akulinin replied. “He flagged me over just before the Exchange Bridge and demanded to see my papers. The bastard kept me there cooling my heels for half an hour before he finally agreed to accept a five-hundred-ruble fine for my, ah, violation.”

  “Five hundred rubles,” Lia said. “About what . . . twenty dollars at the current rate? I didn’t realize the local cops were such cheap dates.”

  Akulinin drove slowly up the road, passing the warehouse that had been the focus of Operation Magpie. A number of shadowy figures were visible in the parking lot . . . more than he’d seen originally exit the two cars on the wharf. An open-bed truck was parked on the road in front of the warehouse, suggesting that reinforcements had arrived. How many goons had he and Lia been facing, anyway?

  He kept his eyes on the road ahead, not looking at them, and they, apparently, didn’t connect passing traffic on the street with their quarry. By deliberately driving at a sedate and unhurried pace toward, then past the hunters, rather than pulling a U-turn in the middle of the street and rushing off in the opposite direction, Akulinin might throw off any would-be pursuit.

  It was a bit of tradecraft Akulinin had learned only recently, during his induction into the secret ranks of Desk Three, and he didn’t yet entirely trust the psychology behind it. What if the opposition had people in some of the surrounding buildings, watching the street? What if they’d seen him and Lia emerge from the alley and get into the car? A quick call over a walkie-talkie from a hidden lookout and that whole pack of Russian gunmen could be swarming after them in an instant.

  He drove with one hand, the other gripping the MP5K on his lap, out of sight but ready for action.

  Several of the men glanced at the Citroën as it cruised past, but there was no other reaction.

  “Okay, I guess they didn’t track us,” he said.

  “They’re not pros,” Lia said. “All muscle, no brain.”

  He set his loaded weapon on the seat beside him, relaxing slightly . . . but only slightly. “Your fancy duds are in a bag on the floor of the backseat,” he told her.

  “I see it.”

  For the next several blocks, Akulinin was treated to the sounds of tantalizing rustles, snapping elastic, and shifting movements in the backseat. Determined to maintain a professional bearing, he kept his eyes rigidly on the road, not even checking the rearview mirror.

  Professional or not, though, nothing said he couldn’t try to imagine the scene at his back. Lia was an extremely attractive young woman. . . .

  Soon Kozhevennaya came to a T at Bol’shoy Prospekt, and Akulinin turned left, then began hunting for the entrance to a parking lot. The cruise ship terminal was just ahead. The atmosphere of their surroundings, he noticed, had changed dramatically, clean, well kept, well lit, and open, where only a few blocks away the decrepit warehouses and abandoned machine shops brooded over fog-shrouded darkness.

  St. Petersburg, Akulinin knew, depended these days upon making a good impression on tourists for its economic survival.

  Pulling the Citroën into an empty space in the parking lot, Akulinin took a moment to peel off his worker’s coveralls. These went on the floor under the passenger side seat, leaving him in a suitably tacky short-sleeved shirt that fairly shouted “American tourist.” The MP5K, along with Lia’s SOCOM pistol, went under the seat. Pulling a small stack of papers and booklets from the glove box, he stepped out of the car. Lia was transformed, wearing a pale blouse displaying significant cleavage over a short black skirt and heels, with a sweater over her shoulders to keep off the night chill.

  Gallantly he held out his elbow. “It’s been a lovely evening out on the town, my dear. Shall we?”

  “I don’t go out with Romeos,” she told him, smiling. “At least . . . not with any old Romeo. . . .”

  Together, they started for the building entrance that would take them through to the cruise ship.

  Ghost Blue

  Ten miles west of St. Petersburg

  0056 hours

  Dick Delallo was holding his F-22 in a gentle right turn above the Gulf of Finland when the threat receiver lit up and the warning tone sounded over his headset.

  “Haunted House, Ghost Blue,” he called. “The Oscar Sierra light is lit. Do you copy?”

  “Ghost Blue, Haunted House,” came over his headset. “Copy. You are clear to get out of Dodge. Over.”

  “Ah . . . roger that.” He was already tightening his turn, trying to identify the source of the threat. “On my way back to the barn.”

  “Oscar Sierra” was a pilot’s inside joke, using the phonetic alphabet letters for O and S to represent the words “oh, shit.” It meant someone was painting him with a target acquisition radar and that a missile launch could be imminent.

  The signal from the threat radar, though, was weak and intermittent. The frequency suggested that he’d been briefly painted by the acquisition radar code-named Spoon Rest by NATO, which meant they were trying to target him with an SA-2 Guideline
.

  Guideline was the NATO reporting name for the Lavochkin OKB S-75 surface-to-air missile—ancient by the standards of modern military technology but still deadly. Gary Powers’ U-2 had been downed over Sverdlovsk in 1960 by a barrage of fourteen SA-2 missiles, a barrage that had also managed to take out a MiG-19 trying for an intercept.

  Just because Delallo was being painted didn’t mean the Russian radar operator could see him. In fact, the operator probably didn’t. The whole point of stealth technology was to prevent the energy of the threat radar from returning to the emitting dish, rendering it blind. Still, the pucker factor for Major Dick Delallo was rising.

  Operation Magpie

  Waterfront, St. Petersburg

  0058 hours

  Akulinin and Lia walked up a low concrete ramp toward the entrance to the cruise ship wharf. The ship, the North Star Line’s St. Petersburg 2, was tied up on the pier just beyond the high chain-link security fence, her lights ablaze stem to stern, like beacons promising refuge and safety.

  To get to that promise, they needed to go through the security checkpoint and customs. A pair of Russian MVD police eyed them suspiciously as they approached.

  “Good evening!” Akulinin called in his most jovial dumb tourist’s voice. “Some fog out tonight, huh?”

  One of the men pointed his weapon, an AKM, at Akulinin’s chest. “You stop, please,” the man said in thickly accented English. “Passports.”

  Akulinin and Lia both handed their passports over.

  The guard grunted as he looked at the stamps, then added, “Your other papers. ID. All.”

  When these were produced, the guard went through them with microscopic attention while the other watched the two with a sullen expression.

  “Your papers not in order,” the first said after an interminable examination.

  “Why?” Akulinin said, putting on his best naïve-American expression of surprise and confusion. “What’s the matter?”

  “Our papers were perfectly in order before,” Lia said. “What the hell is going on?”

  “Papers not in order,” the Russian said, his broad Slavic features betraying no emotion. “You come with us.”

  “We’re alerting Mercutio,” Rockman’s voice said in Akulinin’s ear . . . and presumably in Lia’s as well. “Stall them.”

  Stall them, Akulinin thought. Right. Maybe I should do a little soft-shoe? . . .

  “Mercutio”—Romeo’s best friend in Romeo and Juliet—was running Magpie’s support operation in St. Petersburg, the stage crew behind the scenes who let Lia and Akulinin play their roles. The support team was on board the cruise ship, which was serving as a kind of impromptu safe house for the op.

  Of course, in the original Romeo and Juliet Mercutio had been killed in a duel.

  Akulinin hoped to hell it wasn’t going to come to that.

  Ghost Blue

  Twelve miles west of St. Petersburg

  0058 hours

  Major Dellalo pushed the throttle forward as he brought the stick back, sending the F-22 higher and yet higher into the thin, cold air. The SA-2 Guideline had a range of about thirty miles and a ceiling of sixty thousand feet. Thirty miles from the SA-2 site on the western end of Kotlin Island would reach to the far end of St. Petersburg to the east and halfway back to the Finnish border to the west.

  His F-22 had two advantages if the Russians could actually see his plane and target it—speed and altitude. The top speed of the F-22 Raptor was classified, of course, but his baby could crowd Mach 2.5 and have knots to spare. Her service ceiling was sixty-five thousand feet.

  It should be possible to get above a Guideline’s reach, and while he couldn’t outrun one—the SA-2 had a velocity of about Mach 3—the speed of his Raptor would make it nearly impossible to catch if the missile was launched from a stern position.

  His major disadvantage at the moment was the fact that Kotlin Island, with its SAM base, lay only eight miles ahead, and perfectly blocked his route back to international airspace out over the Baltic Sea. If they wanted to, they would get at least one clear shot at him.

  How had they spotted him? His radar screen showed a number of targets in the immediate vicinity, all at lower altitudes. Most of them were civilian aircraft, but a few had the characteristic signatures of Russian military aircraft. A JOINTSTAR E-3 Sentry AWACS over the North Sea was feeding him data on possible threats. There were two radar returns that worried him in particular . . . streaking in over Vikulova, from the south. The Sentry was identifying them as MiG-31s.

  His threat receiver lit up again, and this time it stayed lit and he heard a high-pitched warble in his ears, which meant that the threat radar had switched to a high PRF tracking mode. So the Russians did see him, after all.

  “Haunted House, Haunted House, Ghost Blue,” he called. “Oscar Sierra, repeat, Oscar Sierra. They have a lock.”

  “Copy that, Ghost Blue.”

  He suppressed a momentary flash of anger. It would be nice if “Haunted House,” the radio handle for the op controllers at Fort Meade, had something constructive to say.

  The warning tone wailed away incessantly. A launch, a dim flash of light in the gloom immediately below . . .

  By lowering a wing he could see the exhaust plume of the missile climbing through the fog, its exhaust illuminating the white haze below. A second missile rose close behind the first, followed by a third.

  He was still climbing, passing through fifty-four thousand feet.

  It was time to go balls to the wall. He slammed the Raptor’s throttles full forward, angling his thrust to increase his rate of climb.

  Behind and below, the missiles began angling toward their high-flying target.

  The question for tomorrow, Dick Delallo thought, was how did the Russians see this stealth aircraft? The pressing question of the moment, however, was how to avoid being shot down.

  The Art Room

  NSA Headquarters

  Fort Meade, Maryland

  1658 hours EDT

  Charlie Dean walked past an Army sentry at the door and stepped at last into the Art Room, his glance taking in the dozens of technicians and communications specialists huddled over consoles around the room, the numerous monitors, and the huge central display on the back wall. Currently the main display showed a satellite map of a large city, but he couldn’t tell, offhand, which city it was. A river snaked in from the right, then split to flow to either side of a large triangular island. Major highways were highlighted with yellow or white lines.

  Two time readouts glowed in the upper right corner. It was 1658 hours Eastern Daylight Time; wherever Lia was at the moment, it was just before one in the morning.

  Radio chatter sounded from speakers overhead.

  “Haunted House, Haunted House, Ghost Blue. Oscar Sierra, repeat, Oscar Sierra. They have a lock.”

  “Copy that, Ghost Blue.”

  William Rubens looked up as Charlie Dean walked in. “They’re okay,” he told Dean without preamble. “ She’s okay.”

  “Good to hear it,” Dean replied, keeping his voice neutral. Rubens knew that he and Lia were close, but neither of them wished to say so aloud.

  Dean was afraid that someday someone higher up the bureaucratic chain of command would declare that his and Lia’s relationship was somehow unprofessional. In the modern, Orwellian world, the illogical, whimsical boundaries of political and sexual correctness could be redrawn overnight.

  “Jeff said they were in a shoot-out?”

  Rubens nodded. “Things went bad. We think our contact was a dangle.”

  The word was tradecraft slang for someone deliberately exposed to a hostile intelligence service in order to lure that service’s agents into a trap or a compromising position.

  “For? . . .”

  “Not now, Dean,” Rubens said, his voice brusque. “We’ve still got a . . . situation.”

  Dean almost asked if the situation involved Lia but managed not to say anything. He knew Rubens well enough to know
the Deputy Director would fill him in when—and if—he needed to know.

  “Launch! Launch,” an anonymous voice said over the speaker. Dean could hear the stress behind the words. “I’ve got three missiles coming up, probably Guidelines. Maneuvering . . .”

  Dean understood Rubens’ curtness better now. If an NSA asset—in this instance meaning an aircraft somewhere over the Gulf of Finland off of St. Petersburg—was being shot at, that was a serious situation indeed. The bad old days of the Cold War were long gone, but that didn’t mean there weren’t occasional problems with America’s new ally the Russian Federation. In the global arena, more often than not, Russia still reverted to her old role as America’s adversary. In fact, in some ways it was tougher now. In the Cold War, at least, you knew the Russians were the enemy. Nowadays, they were nominal allies in the War on Terror, as long as their cooperation didn’t interfere with their own agenda, such as dominance of the former Soviet republics, or the struggle for influence in the Middle East, or the developing international crisis in the Arctic . . .

  Jeff Rockman was looking up at the big screen. Dean watched him a moment, then walked over to the coffee mess tucked away against one wall. He returned a moment later with two cups full. He set one on Rockman’s workstation desk.

  “Hey, Charlie. Thanks.”

  “Who’s shooting at whom?” Dean asked, looking up at the display. It was, at the moment, singularly unhelpful, showing a swath of satellite-revealed sea and land from Estonia to Finland. A white icon labeled “Akulinin and DeFrancesca” was blinking on the waterfront in St. Petersburg. Another, marked “Ghost Blue,” was drifting slowly north a few miles off the coast of Kotlin Island.

  Rockman glanced at him, then back at the board. “The Russkies just popped three SAMs at our comm relay aircraft. It’s getting a little tight over there.”