From there, it was a twelve-mile drive over winding roads through rolling Yorkshire cow pastures and farmland, passing through tiny English towns along the way with names such as Otley, Farnley, Bland Hill, and, Dean’s favorite, Pool-in-Wharfedale. They were driving north on the B6451 and were just topping a rise at the intersection with Bedlam Lane when the Menwith Hill Echelon Facility first came into view.
Golf balls. Titanic golf balls . . .
The place looked utterly alien, completely otherworldly set among the gentle green hills of Yorkshire. Dean had shrugged off Evans’ comment about golf earlier but got the joke now. The immense dimpled white spheres were simply radomes, lightweight shells that masked the dish antennas within, protecting them from the weather and preventing casual observers outside from knowing exactly where the antennas happened to be pointed. Two identical structures, a big one and a little one both painted gray, crowned the south wing of the HQ support building at Fort Meade just above Herczog Road, and there was a solitary white one on the ground half a mile away, not far from the HQ satellite uplink facility. But here the huge white golf balls grew in abundant profusion, appearing, then vanishing again behind folds in the moor, then rising once again. Dean counted twenty-five of the things, the largest well over one hundred feet across, but there might have been more. He’d seen photographs of the place and thought he’d known what to expect, but the reality was absolutely breathtaking.
Technically, Menwith Hill was an RAF base, but in fact the 560-acre complex had been taken over by the NSA in 1966. Also known as NSA field station F83, it was home to the GCHQ, the British counterpart of the NSA, and a number of Brits, like Evans, worked there. By far the largest population at the base, however, was American, most of them civilians—mathematicians, engineers, computer programmers, technicians, linguists, and analysts—with the NSA.
Desk Three, Dean knew, maintained a suite of offices here, somewhere within the vast warren of underground chambers and facilities hidden beneath the looming white golf balls.
Past a long stretch of chain-link fence topped by curls of razor wire and patrolled by armed men with dogs, they turned right into the sandbagged main gate, where unsmiling British soldiers scrutinized their IDs, checked files displayed on computer monitors, and made phone calls to the main security office before finally waving them through. They passed two more security checkpoints on their way to the underground part of the facility, with backscatter X-ray scans, handprint readers, and, finally, retinal scans. Only then did they receive badges. Security here was at least as tight as it was back at Fort Meade.
Ilya Akulinin and Lia DeFrancesca were already there, waiting for them in a basement conference room.
“Dean!” Lia cried, jumping up from her chair and rushing to meet him.
Her presence startled him. He’d known he would be meeting them here but hadn’t been told they’d already been brought out of Russia. He was torn by pleasure at the sight of her . . . and the sudden memory of what he needed to tell her.
Dean took her in his arms and squeezed her close. “Hello, Lia.” God, she smelled good, felt good. . . .
She pulled back, sensing something in his mood, and searched his face. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
He glanced at Akulinin, who was standing nearby, uncertain. Dean didn’t know the new kid very well, but he’d been in the field with Lia, and that counted for something.
“Do you two need some time alone?” Evans asked.
“No,” Dean said, deciding. “It’s just . . . Lia, I have some bad news. Tommy is dead.”
Her eyes widened. “No. . . .”
“There was a protest yesterday at a conference in London where he was escorting an American scientist. We think the Russians—possibly the Russian mob—infiltrated the protestors and started a riot in order to carry out an assassination. Tommy saved the scientist, but . . .”
“The Russian mob?” Lia repeated. “Why—”
“Who’s Tommy?” Akulinin asked.
“Another Desk Three agent,” Dean told him. “And a friend.”
“God. I’m sorry to hear that.” Akulinin came closer, reaching out to put a hand on Lia’s shoulder. “Were you guys close?”
Dean felt a stab of jealousy as the kid touched her. Totally irrational, he knew, but totally human as well. He swallowed it.
“We were friends,” Lia said, pulling back a step to face Akulinin. Tears glistened in her eyes. “We worked together in the field quite a few times.” Grief was already hardening in her face into something else, Dean noted. Determination. And anger.
“Well,” Akulinin said, “that just sucks rocks.”
Lia ignored the comment. “Why would the Russian mafia want to kill Tommy?”
“We’re not sure they did,” Dean told her. “Like I said, they were trying to kill an American scientist, a Dr. Spencer. He was a Department of Energy climatologist speaking on global warming. There’d been some death threats, I gather, and Rubens assigned Tommy to help escort him to London and back.”
“That makes no sense. Since when did Desk Three begin providing bodyguard service? Why not a U.S. marshal? Or the FBI?”
“I don’t know.”
“And what does the Russian mob have to do with global warming, anyway?”
“We think the Russian mafia is trying to discredit Greenworld, and maybe some of the other environmental groups as well,” Evans put in. “Greenpeace. The Sierra Club. The Russian MVD might be trying to make them look like terrorist groups.”
“We don’t know why,” Dean added. “Yet.”
“Not Tommy . . . ,” Lia said, shaking her head. She moved back into Dean’s embrace. “Not Tommy . . .”
“Maybe these two should have some time alone,” Akulinin told Evans.
“Sure,” the British agent said. “C’mon. I’ll buy you coffee.”
“They have coffee in England?”
“Menwith Hill,” Evans replied, opening the door, “is not England.”
Hours later, Lia and Dean lay in each other’s arms, in bed. After a light dinner at the station’s cafeteria, Evans had escorted them to three adjoining rooms in the base housing block reserved for short-term visitors to Menwith Hill, but Lia had come to Dean’s room as soon as Evans had said good night and departed.
It had been such a long time. . . .
Their lovemaking had carried an urgent, almost desperate edge to it, however. Lia did not want to believe that Tommy was gone.
She’d not cried. She would not cry, though she admitted to herself that she might, later. For now, she needed to know every detail of Tommy Karr’s death.
“I honestly don’t know that much,” Dean told her, his face just visible in the darkness next to hers. “Rubens called me while I was at Friendship, waiting for a flight out to meet you in Russia. Apparently it’s all over the news here, but I haven’t had a chance to catch it.”
“I wonder which mafia group was behind it,” she said.
“We could call the Art Room, easily enough.”
She thought about the mikes and transmitters, currently switched off and discarded with their clothing on the other side of the room. “No,” she decided, snuggling closer. “Tomorrow.”
Restlessly his hand caressed her bare hip. “Evans has scheduled a briefing for us tomorrow morning,” he told her. “Maybe we’ll learn more then.”
“Assuming they know anything back at the Puzzle Palace,” she replied. “I’m wondering if it’s the Tambov group, though. We’re pretty sure that’s who we were up against in St. Petersburg. They’re coming down a lot more aggressively than in the past. Big schemes. Wild, high-risk, high-gain operations . . . like selling radiation shielding to Iran.”
“I went through a briefing on the Russian mob the other day,” Dean said. “The protestors who killed Tommy were working with a Russian MVD colonel named Braslov. And he’s been linked with the Tambov organization.” He looked at her in the dark. “Are you thinking your op and Tommy’s were up
against the same people?”
“It could be. I don’t see the connection, but it could be.”
“Selling beryllium plating to Iran’s nuclear program and assassinating climate scientists. I don’t see a link.” He thought for a moment. “Of course, what has Washington in a dither right now is the fact that the Tambov group is also supposedly trying to corner Russia’s petroleum industry. There’s a lot of oil and natural gas prospecting going on in Siberia right now . . . and speculation about untapped energy reserves in the Arctic.” He broke off, silent for a moment. She could almost hear him gnawing on the problem.
“Maybe that’s the link,” he said after a moment. “The Russians have been trying to stake a claim to half of the Arctic Ocean since 2007, claiming their territorial waters extend all the way to the North Pole. Greenworld and the other environmentalist groups would raise one hell of a stink if the Russians started sinking oil wells and building pipelines up there.”
“True,” Lia said. “But the Russians wouldn’t be able to do that. Put oil wells in the Arctic, I mean.”
“Why not? It’d be simpler than building an offshore drilling platform. Just build your tower, drill through the ice, then extend your cutting head through water and into the sea floor, just like they do in the Gulf of Mexico or the North Sea.”
“No, Dean. Absolutely impossible.”
“Why?”
“Because the Arctic ice is moving, dummy,” she told him, smiling to rob the words of their sting. Then she realized he probably couldn’t see the smile, so she let her hand glide down his torso, gently stroking him. “It drifts with wind and current. I don’t know how fast, but the whole ice cap moves. Build an oil rig on the ice, send the drill head down to the sea floor . . . and in a few days or weeks or whatever . . . snap! ”
“Oh. Yeah. I think I remember reading about that somewhere.”
“If the Russians want to look for oil in the Arctic Ocean, they’re going to have to wait for the ice cap to melt.”
He chuckled. “You think global warming is that bad?”
“The ice cap is getting smaller and thinner every year,” she told him. “Last I heard, if things proceed at the same rate they’ve been going over the past couple of decades, all of the Arctic ice will be gone—it’ll all be open ocean—by 2060.”
“Huh. I had no idea.”
“Most people don’t. The whole global-warming thing has become so politicized that it’s tough to know what’s real and what’s hype.”
“The Russians are known for thinking pretty far out into the future,” Dean said, thoughtful. “I could see them planning for when they could build conventional offshore drilling rigs after the ice is gone. Still, fifty-some years? That’s kind of a long shot. And right now no one can agree if global warming is real or just a temporary fad, if humans are causing it or it’s part of a natural cycle. I can’t see the mafia gambling on something like that.”
“And they wouldn’t give a damn about the environmentalists half a century out, either,” Lia said. “If the mafia is behind it, that suggests a short-term goal as well. Those guys don’t wait fifty years for a return on their investment, you know?”
“Even governments don’t think that far ahead,” Dean admitted. “So what’s the answer, do you think?”
She sighed. “I don’t know. The Art Room said Ilya and I were going to be on hold for a while. There’s some sort of political crisis on back at the Palace. You know anything about it?”
“Not much. An F-22 was shot down over the Gulf of Finland in support of your op. Did you hear about that?”
“A little. Did they find the pilot?”
“Not that I’ve heard. But the scuttlebutt at Fort Meade was that Desk Three might get into trouble for losing an F-22 instead of a UAV.”
“‘Scuttlebutt’?”
“Sorry. Marine and Navy slang. Means rumor or gossip.”
“I like it. Damn, the Russian op just went to hell, didn’t it?”
“They didn’t tell me much. What happened?”
“Our contact turned on us. There was an ambush . . . and a firefight. Ilya lost his kit, including some rather sensitive black ops gear.”
“Shit!”
“There’s a sanitizing team in there now, trying to recover it. The two of us got clear of the operational area, then almost got picked up by the MVD.” She shook her head slightly. “I’ve had the . . . I don’t know, the feeling that we’ve been set up right along, that the opposition was always a step or two ahead of us the whole way.”
“I can’t imagine the Russian mafia deliberately playing games with the NSA,” Dean said. “I mean . . . they’re just criminals.”
“Yeah, and it’s dangerous to underestimate them, Charlie,” she told him. “A lot of them were KGB and GRU before the Communists lost power. They had some pretty specialized knowledge and equipment, and it all went to the highest bidder.”
“Kind of like all the jokes about out-of-work Russian nuclear scientists. ‘Will sell nuclear secrets for food.’”
“Exactly. And the gang leaders themselves, even if they’re not tied in with Russian intelligence or the military, well, they had to be damned tough and smart, and they had to have some pretty good connections just to survive under the Soviets, to say nothing of building an underground criminal empire. They’re also . . . I don’t know how to say it. Less constrained than the Soviet government was.”
“How do you mean?”
“The Soviet government had a nuclear arsenal big enough to wipe out the planet.”
“So did we.”
“Right. But neither we nor the Soviets used that arsenal, because no one can win a nuclear war. Okay?”
“There were a few people who thought we could,” Dean put in. “But MAD—Mutual Assured Destruction—worked as a deterrent, sure.”
“The Soviets were as careful as we were to make sure nukes didn’t get into the wrong hands, because if they screwed up, it would come back to bite them in the ass.”
“Okay. . . .”
“Don’t you see? The Russian mafia doesn’t care! Oh, they don’t want to see the world blown to bits. That would be bad for business. But they don’t have the obligation to provide for their country’s welfare that the Soviets had. You can see that in the way the mobs are strangling the Russian economy today. Capitalism doesn’t stand a chance so long as the mobs are bleeding businesses over there dry.”
“So . . . you’re saying the mafia is more likely to do crazy stuff.”
“Exactly. During the Cold War, we were worried about Soviet adventurism, about all those times they played brinksmanship games and created international crises. The Cuban Missile Crisis. The invasion of Czechoslovakia. The invasion of Afghanistan. Those were the times when things were dangerous, when the missiles might have flown. The Tambov Gang, the Blues, all the other Russian mobs . . . all they want is money, power, and to come out on top of the heap. If Colombian drug lords get their very own submarine, if a reactor melts down in the Urals and wipes out a city, if Iran gets a nuclear weapon and obliterates Israel, what’s it to them? They may not even care if Russia’s economy tanks, because they’ve been going international lately in a big way. Ask Ilya about the Mafiya in Brighton sometime.”
“Brighton?”
“He’s American. His parents were immigrants. Brighton Beach is near Brooklyn, in New York, and it’s where a lot of Russian émigrés settled. They call it Little Odessa. For ten, fifteen years, the Mafiya has been moving in there, big-time. They’re everywhere.”
“Somehow, I never thought of Desk Three as being crime fighters,” Dean said.
“In some ways the Russian mobs are as much of a threat as al-Qaeda,” she told him. “Maybe more.”
“Are you sure you’re not just making it personal?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. I can hear the anger in your voice. Like you want to go back over there and kill them all. For Tommy.”
“No,” she
told him. “I am going back . . . one way or another. But when I do, it will be for me.”
She drew him closer then, trying to lose herself in his arms. “C’mere, Marine,” she told him. “I’m going to scuttle your butt. Again.”
12
Menwith Hill Echelon Facility
Yorkshire, England
0930 hours GMT
THE NEXT MORNING, DEAN and Lia were in Menwith’s Deep Centre, a high-tech underground chamber that was the equivalent of the National Security Agency’s Black Chamber or the Art Room. After having breakfast with the two Americans in Menwith Hill’s cafeteria, Evans had led them through several checkpoints and down into the sanctum sanctorum, a steel-and-concrete-reinforced cavern that, its designers believed, would have withstood a near-direct hit on the surface eighty meters above by a fair-sized nuclear weapon.
The facility had much in common with the Art Room, Dean decided, right down to the banks of computer workstations and consoles and the ranks of monitors, though the large screen dominating one wall was absent.
Echelon II was the code name for the current NSA/GCHQ program to collect electronic signals out of the air worldwide, process them, and send them on for analyses. Menwith Hill, in particular, was tasked with eavesdropping on all of Europe, as far east as the Urals.
Local legend had it that Menwith Echelon scooped up all radio, telephone, fax, and Internet communications in Europe . . . but then, local legend also had it that the NSA was studying little gray aliens held within the underground complex, which supposedly was an English version of the notorious American Area 51 in Nevada. Exactly how much of Europe’s electronic gossip was actually recorded was, of course, a closely guarded secret.
But there were no aliens so far as Dean could discover.
“I’d like you two to meet someone,” Evans told them, leading them to a particular cubicle in a room filled with cubicles off the main control room. An attractive young woman stepped out to join them. “Charlie, Lia, this is Carolyn Howorth—‘CJ’ to her friends. She’s one of our best linguists down here.”
Stephen Coonts' Deep Black: Arctic Gold Page 17
