Stephen Coonts' Deep Black: Arctic Gold

by Arctic Gold (epub)

  “Sunny Weather picked up a tail when they left the hotel at Heathrow,” Telach told Rubens. “That was about two hours ago. Agent Karr managed to transmit high-res images of the driver and three passengers. We ran them through the Vault and, well, this is what popped up.”

  Rubens clicked on the top file, opening it on his screen. There were a number of photographs inside, most of them obviously candids, a long PDF file with pages of text, and a brief video. Among the photos were the full-face and side images of police mug shots.

  “‘Jacques Mallet,’” he said, reading the introduction of the text file. “‘French. Joined Greenpeace in 1993. Arrested by the Sureté, ’94, for trespassing during protests outside a French nuke submarine base . . . and again in ’95 for trespassing at Muruoa.’” The French had conducted hundreds of nuclear weapons tests at Muruoa, in French Polynesia, over a thirty-year period that ended, finally, in 1996. Greenpeace had been active in protesting those tests.

  He kept reading. “‘Co-founded Greenworld in 2005 after a split with the Greenpeace committee. . . .’”

  There was more, lots more, but he clicked to the second file. “‘Yvonne Fischer. English. Greenpeace in ’98. Arrested in 2001 for her part in the protests at Menwith Hill. Greenworld, ’06.’” One surveillance photo showed her perched precariously atop a chain-link fence, waving a Greenpeace flag. Several of the huge, white golf ball radomes of Menwith Hill were visible in the landscape behind her.

  He clicked again. “‘Kurt Berger. Germany. Recruited straight into Greenworld, 2007. No police record, but surveillance photos have placed him repeatedly with hard-core Greenworld agents.’” Click. “And . . . ‘Sergei Braslov. Russian.’” His eyebrows arched high on his forehead. “Well, well, well. . . .”

  “I thought you’d be interested in Braslov, sir,” Telach said.

  “Soviet Army in the eighties,” Rubens said, skimming the PDF file’s intro. “Rank of major. Served in Afghanistan, wounded twice, won the Order of Lenin . . . as well as the Order for Service to the Homeland in the Armed Forces, Second Class. In ’87, he moved to the GRU . . . more awards and decorations, promotion to colonel . . . then transferred to the MVD in ’91.”

  Rubens stared at the file for a long moment, his forefinger tapping absently on the mouse as he scanned through the document. “It says he joined Greenpeace in December of ’98. . . .” He glanced at Telach’s face, waiting patiently in the other window on the screen. “But under the name Johann Ernst. False ID and papers.”

  “We think he was a plant, sir,” Telach said.

  “Of course. An agent provocateur. Why else would a high-ranking member of the Russian Federation’s Ministry of Internal Affairs join an international organization like Greenpeace?”

  The Soviets might be gone, but the dark labyrinth of Russian power politics continued to churn as it had since the days of the czars.

  Greenpeace International, so far as Rubens was concerned, was a gadfly, though a well-meaning one. They’d racked up some impressive environmentalist victories worldwide . . . in the campaign to reduce unnecessary whaling, for instance. If they were an annoyance for the industrial West, however, with their protests against nuclear power and industrial pollution, they were doubly so within the borders of the former Soviet Union. There, the nation’s disintegration had left a festering morass of environmental problems—toxic waste spills and dumps, radioactive zones, dying seas and rivers, and abandoned rust-belt factory complexes, a situation driven to crisis proportions by a fast-disintegrating infrastructure, the breakdown of authority, local wars, and rampant corruption.

  Greenpeace International had opened an office in Moscow in 1989. Since that time, Greenpeace Russia had conducted a number of protests within the country—against the resumption of nuclear testing on Novaya Zemlya, against a pipeline near Lake Baikal, against the illegal timber trade with Finland. With a long tradition of nonviolent protest and confrontation, the organization had for almost twenty years struggled to call world attention to the fast-worsening environmental situation within the Russian Federation.

  And they’d scored some important successes with their David-and-Goliath tactics. For the most part, however, the Russian authorities maintained the same gray, grim, and stolidly monolithic presentation of absolute control as their Soviet predecessors. News reports and photos only rarely made it out of the country or had much of an impact among native Russians.

  In 2006, some of the more radical elements within Greenpeace had split off to form a new group.

  Greenworld was smaller than Greenpeace, more secretive, more elusive, but at the same time, more confrontational. During the past couple of years, they’d staged several massive protests in Great Britain, Belgium, and Russia, grabbing a lot of media attention with flashy banners, hurled rocks and bottles, and mass arrests. Where Greenpeace insisted on using purely nonviolent means to get its message across, Greenworld was not quite so fastidious. Several of its members had been arrested for sabotaging an oil refinery in England, and in 2007 the car-bomb death of a German industrialist had been blamed on the group, though no arrests had been made. The NSA had been maintaining a file on the group, which appeared ready and willing to use terrorist tactics, unlike its parent organization.

  One week ago, a routine NSA electronic intercept had picked up a blogger’s page that talked about assassinating Dr. Spencer at the Environmental Symposium in London. The blogger was a London teenager . . . but the kid had a police record. He’d been arrested for his part in the Men-with Hill affair and, five years later, had joined Greenworld.

  The tidbit had been passed up the bureaucratic totem pole inside the Washington Beltway and ultimately trickled back down to Rubens’ desk. The State Department was taking seriously the possibility that Greenworld was going to try to kill Spencer.

  As a result, Rubens had initiated Operation Sunny Weather, assigning Tommy Karr to the FBI team escorting Spencer to London and back.

  “Braslov,” Rubens said, reading further, “was one of Greenworld’s founders?”

  “We think so, sir,” Telach told him. “We don’t have much intelligence on Greenworld’s inner workings, but we know that ‘Johann Ernst’ was a close associate with Peter Strauss and Emily Lockyear, who were the official founders.”

  “And here he is tailing Sunny Weather.” Rubens considered this for a moment. “Have you passed this tidbit on to Karr yet?”

  She shook her head. “No, sir.”

  “Let him know who he’s dealing with. I—” Rubens stopped in mid-sentence. “Uh-oh.”

  “Sir?”

  Rubens had been leafing through the electronic pages of Braslov’s file. He’d come to a photo of the man, grainy and poorly focused, obviously a surveillance photo taken of Braslov at long range, but clear enough to show a ragged scar on the left side of his face. He appeared to be standing on a beach, laughing. With him were a pretty, bare-breasted blonde in red bikini briefs and an older man with a bushy mustache. Both men wore swim trunks and short-sleeved shirts, both shirts open enough to reveal a number of tattoos on their torsos as well as their upper arms.

  “Who is this?” Rubens asked, clicking and dragging a square over the second man. “Do we have a positive ID?”

  Telach’s eyes shifted as she studied her own monitor, then typed in a command at her desk. A new window opened on Rubens’ display, filling up with text and photos.

  “Yes, sir. Grigor Kotenko.”

  “That,” Rubens said slowly, nodding, “is what I was afraid of. And these tattoos on Braslov’s chest?”

  Telach nodded. “I ran those through the Vault as well. It’s difficult to make out details, of course. But it looks like both men are sporting eight-pointed stars on their chests in blue ink.”

  Mafiya, then . . . the Organizatsiya. The Russian mafia made extensive use of tattoos to convey a wealth of data about a person’s rank, reliability, and criminal history. Often the tattoos were acquired in prison or within the Russian gulag, where the
rubber heels of shoes were melted down and mixed with soot and urine to produce a characteristic blue ink. The eight-pointed star indicated a very high rank within certain Mafiya groups.

  This was not good. Not good at all.

  The Green Room

  NSA Headquarters

  Fort Meade, Maryland

  0912 hours EDT

  Individual rooms and corridors within the Puzzle Palace might not be outwardly named or numbered, but human nature being what it was, unofficial names continued to arise as needed. The Art Room was one such necessity; the Green Room was another, one of a hotel’s worth of meeting rooms, briefing rooms, and auditoriums where face-to-face business within Crypto City could be conducted.

  Dean took a seat at a long oval table that was already fairly well occupied. The walls—painted a pale shade of hospital green, hence the name—were hung with photographs of presidents and NSA directors past and present, and an American flag and a flag bearing the NSA seal flanked a large flat-panel wall screen at the head of the room.

  He didn’t like these gatherings. Once, Rubens had tried to keep them small and informal. Things went a lot faster that way. Cleaner. More efficient. Lately, though, these sessions had begun resembling the dog-and-pony shows put on at the Pentagon, with staffers, officers, and assistants all trying to grab face time with the Deputy Director. There was even an Air Force general at the table this morning, a man named Blakeslee, who was a Pentagon liaison because of the presence of the F-22 in Operation Magpie. Several of the people present, Dean knew, were lawyers, there solely to present opinions on any legal risks the Agency might be facing.

  Black ops, espionage, electronic eavesdropping. Hell, everything Desk Three did was illegal in one sense of the word or another. What was the point of having lawyers at a briefing, for Christ’s sake?

  A number of low-voiced conversations were taking place as people continued trickling into the Green Room and taking their seats. Voices in the chamber took on an oddly muffled quality. Like similar spaces within the CIA headquarters at Langley and in the Pentagon subbasements, the room was electronically isolated from the outside, with armor plating thick enough to shield the occupants from a near miss by a small tactical nuke.

  “Before we begin,” Rubens said, standing at the head of the table, “I have some news. We’ve confirmed that Ghost Blue went down in the Gulf of Finland last night as a result of enemy action. We believe the pilot ejected, but so far, search efforts have been unsuccessful. We’re continuing the search through the daylight hours over there, of course, but as of oh–three hundred this morning, the pilot has been logged as missing, presumed dead.”

  Dean leaned back in his chair, a sigh escaping as he sagged. Damn . . .

  “Has there been any word from the Russians?” Greg Paulson asked. He was chief of staff for the current Director of the NSA and would be especially sensitive to possible political repercussions.

  “I gather a protest was filed this morning with our embassy in Moscow,” Rubens told him. “I’ll be going in to talk with . . . people about the situation later this afternoon.”

  “People,” Dean thought, meant either the National Security Advisor or the President himself. There would be brutal questions, perhaps a formal investigation. Dean did not envy his boss.

  “We can always blame UFOs again,” John Jacobin, one of the lawyers, pointed out.

  There was a subdued chuckle from several of the men and women seated at the table. More than once, going back to the years of the Cold War, NSA and CIA incursions over Russian territory had been spotted but remained unidentified. The long-running popular mania over supposed alien spacecraft in the airspace of both the United States and Russia had on several occasions proven surprisingly useful.

  “We don’t yet know if the opposition got a good look at our aircraft,” Rubens said mildly. “It’s not really important, one way or another.”

  But Dean knew it was important. A critical failure on an intelligence op inside Russia would inevitably spawn serious interagency trouble down the line. The CIA, especially, didn’t like the fact that the NSA was trespassing on what it considered its turf, its particular area of responsibility. Hell, they’d been trying to shut down Desk Three or get it transferred to their Directorate of Operations ever since its inception.

  “What is important,” Rubens continued, “is that we secure our people over there, get them out safe, resolve Operation Magpie, and follow through with Operation Blue Jay. Miss DeFrancesca has provided us with a vital link between Magpie and Blue Jay. We need to take advantage of this before the trail goes cold.” He nodded to one of the men at the table. “Mr. Ryder, if you please?”

  Tom Ryder was the designated briefing officer for the morning’s meeting, a small and fussy analyst from the Russian Section. He stood up, took his place behind a lectern at the front of the room, and used a handheld remote to bring up an image on the large flat-panel screen on the wall behind him.

  The man’s face was shown full-front and profile, with numbers and Cyrillic lettering on a board in front of him. Two more photos showed what appeared to be surveillance photos of the same man—on a street corner and at a table in a restaurant. The face was lined and heavily scarred. The photo taken in the restaurant showed him with his mouth open, displaying black and uneven teeth.

  Ryder cleared his throat, then launched into his presentation without preamble. “Victor Mikhaylov,” he said. “Agent DeFrancesca positively identified him as the leader of the gunmen at the warehouse. Mikhaylov, we believe, is the number-one enforcer for this man, Grigor Kotenko.”

  Kotenko’s photographs replaced those of Mikhaylov. Where Mikhaylov had the look of a street rat, a thug, Kotenko looked smoother, more urbane, a businessman, perhaps, or a lawyer, with a thick walrus mustache and a cold-eyed squint.

  “This guy’s a real piece of work,” Ryder said. “When he was eighteen, he was sent to a gulag for armed robbery, kidnapping, and rape. While there, he made some important contacts within the Leningrad criminal underworld, and when he got out four years later—with the help of a wealthy uncle in the Organizatsiya—he went to work for Vladimir Kumarin as an enforcer. We believe he was the triggerman in a particularly brutal murder—of Peter Talbot, an American hotel entrepreneur who was shot ten times at point-blank range on a metro platform . . . while surrounded by six hired bodyguards, no less. Seems Talbot had refused to ‘share’ his partnership in a new hotel chain over there.

  “Since then, however, Kotenko has gone from enforcement to administration, working his way all the way up to the top echelons of the Tambov organization. After Kumarin’s arrest by Moscow officials in 2007, Kotenko may have moved up to the number-two or -three position in the gang’s leadership, though reports indicate that Kumarin is still running things from prison.

  “So if Kotenko is involved, it means we’re dealing with the Tambov Gang.”

  “This is the so-called Russian mafia you’re talking about?” an Air Force colonel in Blakeslee’s entourage asked.

  “One branch of it, sir,” Ryder replied. “And there’s nothing ‘so-called’ about it. The Russian Mafiya is an extraordinarily large and complex organization made up of many groups, some in alliance, some mutually hostile, all more or less in competition with one another.

  “The Tambov Gang was formed in 1988 by two men from the Tambov Oblast, Vladimir Kumarin and Valery Ledovskikh. They started out by providing protection to businessmen in what was then Leningrad. Today, the Tambov Gang is the most powerful organized-crime element in St. Petersburg, numbering at least six hundred hard-core members, and thousands of occasionals. They are known to control outright over one hundred of the city’s industrial enterprises, including the Petersburg Fuel Company, which maintains a monopoly on all fuel bought and sold within the city. Their membership roster includes members of both the state Duma and the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly.”

  “Nice to have friends in high places,” Dean murmured.

  Ryder ignore
d the interruption. “Desk Three became concerned with Kotenko’s activities when one of our sources reported that he had sold some five hundred kilograms of beryllium sheeting to an agent of the Iranian government. The beryllium sheets had been discarded by a nuclear reactor facility at Rybinsk, and were mildly radioactive when they were stolen. Reportedly, they were destined for a freighter of Liberian registry, which would have taken them to Bandar ’Abbas.

  “Currently, Desk Three is running two distinct operations in Russia aimed at the Tambov Gang—designated Magpie and Blue Jay. Magpie was intended to track the stolen beryllium to Iran. Our agents would plant a small transponder chip on one of the sheets—a device the size of a postage stamp, colored and textured to be indistinguishable from the beryllium itself. It would have given us some insight, we hoped, into the Iranian nuclear program . . . especially insofar as their attempt to manufacture fission weapons is concerned.

  “Yesterday, our agents succeeded in planting the tracker. However, they were discovered, and we don’t yet know if the opposition has found the tracking device, or if they’ve guessed what we were up to.

  “Grigor Kotenko, we believe, is behind not only the beryllium sale to Iran but another major Tambov operation . . . which is the target of Operation Blue Jay. We have learned that they are attempting to gain control over Russia’s oil and natural gas industries.”

  “Just a minute,” General Blakeslee said, interrupting. “Where’s the Russian government in all this? Where’s the military?”

  “That, General, is part of the problem.” Ryder held up his hands, clasping them together with fingers intertwined. “Government and organized crime are like this. Over there, the Organizatsiya is how things get done. It was that way under the Soviets. It was probably that way under the czars. It’s much, much worse now. As for the military . . . many of the Organizatsiya’s members are ex-military or -KGB. A lot of military personnel were cut loose when the Soviet government fell, remember. As a result, there’s a kind of oldboy network in modern Russia that includes the military, the government, and the organized-crime syndicates. We believe that over eighty percent of all Russian businesses either are controlled outright by organized crime or, at the very least, pay a cripplingly large percentage of their profits to the syndicates for ‘protection.’