Stephen Coonts' Deep Black: Arctic Gold

by Arctic Gold (epub)

  The blow was clumsy. Benford was badly positioned, squeezed in as he was behind the stack of crates, and he’d almost squandered the swing by accidentally striking Larson’s arm first. Still, Benford managed to hit the man squarely enough and hard enough to knock him over, sending him toppling against the crates, a few of which came tumbling down on top of him as he collapsed in a sprawl on the decking. Larson’s face was gushing blood from a broken nose, his hands and legs moving feebly. The dogs went berserk. One husky, easily over a hundred pounds, slammed itself against the chain-link fencing of the kennel.

  Stooping, Benford checked the NOAA officer. Larson was unconscious and bleeding heavily.

  Quickly Benford dropped the bar, peeled off his gloves, and picked up the holster, fumbling with the catch until he could open it and draw Larson’s Beretta. Benford fished the magazine from the satchel, nudged the end into the grip, and slapped it home, dragging the slide back and letting it snap forward, chambering a round.

  Now came the really tough part . . . except that Benford felt surer, more confident, now that he’d taken the first irrevocable step. Holding the weapon in his right hand, he turned so that it would be hidden behind his body. “Richardson!” he screamed. “Richardson! Come here! Something’s happened!”

  No response. Cautiously Benford peeked around the corner of those crates still stacked after Larson’s fall, looking for the other Greenworlder.

  Richardson was not in sight.

  God! Benford was close to screaming with frustration and growing panic. Where had Richardson gone? A moment later, though, the door opened again and Richardson reentered the garage, carrying another armload of frozen meat from the ice locker outside. Benford almost sagged with relief. “Richardson! . . .”

  Richardson heard him, saw Larson on the floor under a spill of heavy crates, and came at a run.

  “Jesus, Harry! What happened?”

  As Richardson pulled one of the crates off of Larson’s twitching form, Benford brought the Beretta up in one smooth motion and squeezed the trigger.

  The explosion of sound momentarily silenced the dogs, but as Richardson toppled backward, they began barking more wildly than ever, the noise so shrill it almost masked the second shot.

  Richardson collapsed in an awkward sprawl.

  His eyes wild, Benford looked from one man to the other, checking the scene, looking for loose ends. Okay . . . this would work. Just one more thing, the final and convincing argument . . .

  He pushed the muzzle of the handgun against his upper arm, trying to position it in such a way that it would miss the bone. He needed a flesh wound as a convincer. He hesitated, though, fearing the pain, fearing even more what would happen if this went wrong.

  Squeezing his eyes tight, he tried to make himself pull the trigger . . . tried . . . failed . . . then tried again. Damn it, he had to do this. . . .

  The third shot came as a complete surprise. Almost, he’d decided to try to get by with the story alone, without the self-inflicted wound, but then his finger slipped and the gun went off. To his surprise, there was little pain, at least at first, but it felt as though someone had just slammed a hammer against his arm. The shock staggered him, and he dropped to his knees.

  Don’t lose it, he told himself. Focus! Focus!

  He had a handkerchief in his pocket. For a moment, he was stumped, needing to wipe down the pistol but suddenly aware that his left arm and hand simply weren’t working. He managed to get the cloth free, however, and wiped the oily surface of the weapon. He doubted anyone would be in a position to check for fingerprints up here, but he wasn’t taking any chances. The gun wiped clean, he dropped it on the floor next to Larson, then pocketed the handkerchief.

  A final check. Larson and Richardson had been arguing about here. Larson had drawn his weapon and shot Richardson twice, killing him. Benford had seen it all happen and had picked up the pry bar . . . from that shelf. Larson had shot at him but only wounded him just as Benford had swung, knocking Larson out.

  Yeah. It all fitted.

  Golytsin hadn’t told him how to carry out the murder, of course, but had stressed that whatever Benford did, he had to make it look as though one of the NOAA officers had killed one of the Greenworlders. Everything, Golytsin had told Benford, depended on his making the scene look convincing.

  Larson was still alive. Benford could hear him trying to breathe through the blood still pouring from his savaged nose. Benford considered hitting Larson again, killing him . . . but decided that would be harder to explain. Then . . . damn! The gun belt! He’d almost missed that detail, almost forgotten. Stooping, he slid the belt under Larson’s torso, immediately wishing he’d remembered to do this before he’d shot himself in the arm.

  Finally, though, the belt was on, and Benford was able to click it shut with one hand. His left arm was starting to hurt now, a dull, throbbing ache, and blood was starting to seep through his parka. It felt like he might have hit the bone after all. He was starting to feel dizzy. Fishing out the handerchief again, he pressed it over the seeping wound.

  Benford took a couple of minutes to collect himself, breathing hard . . . then made his way to the door and banged out into the cold.

  It was snowing harder now as he raced back to the main building.

  “Help! Everyone, help! Murder! Help! . . .”

  11

  City Morgue

  London

  1045 hours GMT

  CHARLIE DEAN FOLLOWED EVANS and the morgue attendant deeper into the chill of the morgue. Fluorescent lights hung overhead, and the green-painted concrete block walls added a depressing air to the place. The attendant walked up to one of the stainless-steel doors in one wall, checked his clipboard, then opened the vault and hauled the steel slab into the room.

  They already had Karr in a black body bag, the zipper halfway open, the man’s eyes staring up at the lighting fixtures overhead. Some cold inner part of Dean was operating on pure automatic, letting him note the wounds—a number of deeply purpled bruises around half a dozen holes in his friend’s chest and upper abdomen, and a terrible gash that had opened the left side of his throat from jaw to collarbone.

  Christ. . . .

  “That’s him,” Dean said simply. He looked up at the attendant. “I’d like to see his effects, too, if I may.”

  The morgue attendant shrugged and nodded. “Sure thing.” He seemed to be nothing so much as bored and . . . was he chewing gum?

  “Friend of yours?” Evans asked as Karr’s body slid soundlessly back into the recesses of the locker.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m sorry. He seemed like a good chap.”

  “What the hell is that?” Dean demanded. “British understatement?”

  “I only met him a few moments before the attack,” Evans said. His mouth twisted unpleasantly. “The two of us were joking about the Boston Tea Party.”

  Dean drew a deep breath. Evans had met him at the airport and driven him into London late last night, putting him up in a hotel a short walk from the Tower of London and just across the river from the bizarre black egg of a building where Tommy Karr had been killed. However much Dean wanted to lash out at someone, it wasn’t Evans’ fault that Tommy was lying dead on a morgue slab.

  “I’m . . . sorry,” Dean said. “Didn’t mean to snap.”

  “Not a problem. I know what it’s like to lose a mate.”

  Yes, I imagine you probably do, Dean thought, but he said nothing. As one of the senior British officers at the Menwith Hill listening station, Evans had been on the front lines of European SIGINT for a good many years. Listening in on other people’s radio and telephone conversations didn’t seem like a dangerous occupation, but over the years there had been all too many incidents.

  People had died. Good people, like Tommy.

  “ ’Ere’s his kit, sir,” the attendant said around the wad of gum. He gestured toward a table with several plastic-wrapped packages on it. “We bagged it and tagged it, like we was told
.”

  “Thank you.” Dean sorted through the packages, wondering what he was looking for. Karr’s shoulder holster and Beretta were in one bag, his wallet, a set of house keys, two pens, some loose change in another, wristwatch and sunglasses in a separate bag. Same for his passport, an airline weapons permit, an FBI ID card, a driver’s license, and a number of pocketed receipts. Karr, Dean knew, never wore jewelry, rings, or other accoutrements unless they were needed for a particular legend on an op. One bag held a small collection of technological odds and ends . . . a cell phone; a fiber-optic lead; what appeared to be a PDA; a couple of button-sized objects that Dean recognized as small, sticky-backed surveillance cameras; the clip-on microphone Karr would have been wearing beneath his shirt collar, a part of his personal communications hookup with the Art Room.

  A few of the tools of the trade.

  His clothing made up a rather larger bundle. Slacks, coiled-up belt, shoes, socks, underwear. Shirt, tie, and jacket, all of them soaked with dark blood.

  Keeping his emotions firmly in check, Dean reached into a jacket pocket and pulled out a PDA identical to the one in the bag on the table. Evans raised his eyebrows but said nothing as Dean switched it on and began passing it over each of the bags of Karr’s effects. Several LEDs lit up as he passed it over the package containing the phone, mike, and cameras.

  “ ’Ere,” the morgue attendant said. “What’s that?”

  Dean didn’t reply but continued moving the PDA above Karr’s things. When Dean passed it over the bag containing the blood-soaked shirt and jacket, the LEDs flashed again. “Hello there,” Dean said, half-aloud. “That’s interesting.”

  “What do you have?” Evans asked.

  “Not sure yet.” Setting the device on the table, Dean pulled the plastic wrapping open, giving him access to the clothing inside. Picking up the device again, he checked, the shirt first and, when nothing happened, began checking the jacket.

  He got a strong signal there . . . strongest at the back of the collar.

  Dean bent closer. This part of the jacket was saturated with blood, but he rolled the collar up, peering closely at it, trying to ignore the sticky-sweet smell. A moment later, he straightened up, holding between thumb and forefinger what appeared to be a black pin with a round head.

  The pin set off the LEDs when he tested it; the jacket now gave no response.

  “Circuit checker?” Evans asked.

  Dean nodded. “Puts out enough of a magnetic field to get a signal back from an electronic circuit. Someone slipped this into Karr’s jacket. He was bugged.”

  “His date from the night before?”

  “I’d put money on it,” Dean replied. He was thinking fast. His talk with Julie on board the British Airways jetliner had been disappointingly unproductive. The young woman had indeed remembered Karr on her last flight but had point-blank refused to admit meeting with him later. That in itself wasn’t suspicious, of course. Even when Dean had flashed an ID badge identifying him as FBI, she’d had no reason to go into intimate details about her having spent the evening with the tall, blond passenger she’d met that afternoon.

  But at some point between his having caught that flight out of JFK and being picked up by a tail near Heathrow, someone had slipped that pin invisibly into the fabric of Karr’s sport coat, inserting it beneath the collar where it could not be seen. The pin, Dean was certain, would prove to be a short-range transponder, a tracking device that allowed someone to follow him through city traffic.

  He was also certain that a microscopic examination of the device would identify it as of Russian manufacture. The KGB had used such devices twenty years ago; presumably the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, Russia’s modern Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR, still did. Desk Three had similar devices, even smaller and more surreptitious.

  Pulling a small specimen bag out of his jacket, Dean deposited the pin and returned it to his pocket. He would take no chances with this piece of evidence being lost.

  “We need to pick up Julie Henshaw,” Dean said. “Flight attendant on British Airways Two-one-one-two, JFK to Heathrow. She was the last person to be with Karr before he left for the GLA building with Spencer.”

  “You think she’s in on this?”

  Dean shrugged. “We know Karr had dinner with her the night before he was killed. We know he walked out of the hotel with three FBI agents and Spencer and there was a car double-parked outside the hotel, waiting for them. They follow them closely, then vanish in downtown London. But a few hours later, three of the people in that car show up at the GLA building with weapons.”

  “She slipped that pin into his clothes?”

  Dean nodded. “Maybe she pretended to adjust his collar, or something.”

  “I’ll pass the word to MI Five then.” He shook his head. “Not sure if we’ll get any action, though. Things have been crazy since the attack.”

  “I can imagine.”

  At the hotel last night, Dean had switched on the TV and found nothing but special news reports on the terrorist attack at the Greater London Authority, complete with endlessly recycled film clips of the huge green banner unfurling from the observation deck overlooking the Thames and several maddeningly jerky and motion-blurred segments from news cameramen in the crowd on the deck itself.

  Desk Three, he knew, was going through all of those film clips frame by frame, hoping to find more clues. So far, though, all they had was the testimonies of some badly shaken eyewitnesses, two dead and one critically wounded tangos, one dead FBI agent, and the body and effects of Tommy Karr.

  Greenworld already was being indicted by commentators on both sides of the Atlantic for embracing assassination as a tool for global activism. Whoever had decided to try to kill Spencer had made a serious mistake; where Greenpeace was notorious for its Gandhi-esque program of peaceful confrontation, Greenworld was now known worldwide as the organization that sent young people armed with Uzis and handguns after politically unpopular scientists.

  What the hell had they been thinking?

  Dean was beginning to suspect that he was seeing some kind of double cross and an intricate game of multiple layers. The Russians had their hand in it, were probably the major players. Sergei Braslov and the presence of the pin-shaped tracking device in Karr’s jacket proved that.

  So what did they have to gain from the attack?

  Dean didn’t know, but he was determined to find out.

  Dean arranged for the packages of Karr’s clothing and other effects to be sent by special courier straight back to Fort Meade. His body would be flown out aboard an Air Force transport to Dover, Delaware. If possible, Dean planned to be on that flight, to accompany Tommy back to the States.

  First, though, Dean had other business here in England. “I think we’re done here,” he told Evans after he’d signed the last form arranging for the flight to Dover.

  “Right then,” Evans said. “Care for a flight up to Yorkshire?”

  “I’m looking forward to it,” Dean told him. “I’ve never been to Menwith Hill.”

  “I hope you like golf in a big way then,” Evans told him with a wry smile.

  He didn’t find out what Evans meant until some hours later.

  Rubens’ Office

  NSA Headquarters

  Fort Meade, Maryland

  0915 hours EDT

  The National Security Agency maintains listening posts all over the world.

  The largest are those at Menwith Hill in Yorkshire, England, and at Pine Gap, in central Australia, but there are many others—at Bad Aibling, Germany; at Misawa Air Base in Japan; at Akrotiri, Cyprus; at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. A world-girdling network of extraordinarily sensitive electronic ears, teasing radio whispers out of the static of the sky and processing them into intelligible data.

  At Point Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost tip of the United States, a station called POW-Main broods over the cold, gray waters and ice floes to the north. Originally part of America’s Distant Early Warning syste
m, or DEW Line, the center had been refurbished in recent years, with part of the base turned over to the NSA for use as a SIGINT-gathering site. Now, instead of watching for the appearance of Russian ICBMs rising above the cold horizon, some of those antennas, at least, were set to gather radio signals emerging from Siberia—most especially from the Russian air bases at Mys Shmidta, Anadyr, and Provideniya.

  There’d been a lot of radio traffic bouncing off the ionosphere lately, and all of it had been duly recorded at POW-Main, then relayed via satellite to Fort Meade. Most was destined for Langley and the Pentagon, but some of it had looked interesting enough for the Desk Three analysts to take a first look. Intelligence coming in from this site was given the distribution code “Powerhouse.”

  Two Powerhouse transcripts had just arrived on Rubens’ desk. One, originally in a Russian Air Force cipher easily decrypted, had come from Mys Shmidta. The other, transmitted in the clear and in English, had come from a tiny and remote climate-monitoring station on the Arctic ice cap. Both intercepts would be routed according to standard protocols, the military intercept to the Pentagon, the other to the State Department, and both to CIA headquarters at Langley. However, there was someone else who he felt should see these.

  What he was about to do was highly irregular . . . and might even be interpreted as a breach of security. The current political situation, however, left him few options.

  Turning to his computer, he began composing an e-mail.

  Menwith Hill Echelon Facility

  Yorkshire, England

  1510 hours GMT

  Two hundred miles north of London, eight miles west of the city of Harrowgate, lies the NSA listening station at Menwith Hill. Dean and Evans had boarded an RAF helicopter, a venerable Westland Wessex Mk. 2, at London City Airport for a bumpy and noisy three-hour flight to what once had been RAF Yeadon and was now Leeds Bradford International Airport. A car and driver had been waiting for them as the helicopter lifted off once more on its way to the big RAF base at Dishworth, farther north.