Stephen Coonts' Deep Black: Arctic Gold

by Arctic Gold (epub)

  Pilots flying covert ops such as Ghost Blue’s always went in sterile—meaning no flags on their flight suits, no name tags, nothing that could identify them as American or British.

  Major Delallo will be flown to USNH Bethesda later today. He is suffering from the effects of exposure, hypothermia, and frostbite but is expected to make a complete recovery. . . .

  The message was signed Col. Copely, RAF, the name of the vice commander at Lakenheath Air Base.

  Rubens sagged back in his chair, letting the relief wash through his body. It wasn’t the political aspect of Delallo’s rescue that was affecting him . . . but the knowledge that his decision to send Ghost Blue to St. Petersburg had not resulted in someone’s death.

  Outwardly, Rubens always maintained a level of control and composure that some thought cold. He didn’t rattle, he didn’t express his worry, and he didn’t apologize for sending good men and women into harm’s way when the situation demanded it. Composure—even coldness—was part of the territory, the price necessary to keep Desk Three running at peak efficiency.

  But he’d also seen Delallo’s personnel file—and knew the man had a wife and two daughters, currently living in base housing at Lakenheath.

  Rubens made a mental note to make arrangements to have the family flown back to Washington, so they could be with the major as he recovered at the Naval Hospital in Bethesda.

  With a mental sigh, Rubens deleted the message, then checked the time.

  One operator had been recovered alive . . . but two more were about to insert at Solchi.

  He wondered for a moment if he should go down to the Art Room and supervise the insert personally but then decided against it. He had good people. They knew what they were doing.

  And he couldn’t afford to let them know that he was worried. He worked at his desk for almost an hour before deciding to go down anyway.

  Kotenko Dacha

  Sochi, Russia

  2310 hours, GMT + 3

  The Kotenko dacha was built on the western face of a mountain overlooking the Black Sea. Llewellyn and an assistant named Vasily had driven Lia and Akulinin to a spot on the road above the Kotenko dacha after it got dark. From the hillside below the road, but well above the eastern side of the property, they could look down on the house and its grounds, which were spread out for their inspection, well lit and apparently well guarded. Lia held a set of electronic binoculars to her eyes and studied the scene. “Okay, people,” she said quietly. “Everybody online? Gordon, do you copy?”

  “We copy,” the voice of Jeff Rockman said in her ear from a workstation back at Fort Meade. “Good voice. Good picture.”

  “Dragon, do you copy?”

  “Copy, Lia,” Llewellyn’s voice said an instant later. “We can see and hear just fine.” Llewellyn and Vasily, with the handle Dragon, had parked the van beneath some trees a quarter of a mile up the road and were linked in through the vehicle’s satellite communications suite. Both the team in the van and the runners back in the Art Room could see the scene transmitted from Lia’s binoculars, as well as hear the two of them through the mikes mounted on the collars of their combat blacks.

  “Let’s have a closer look at that gate,” Rockman said.

  “Here you are.” Lia pressed the zoom function on the camera, and the scene expanded, centering on the main gate where a paved driveway entered the property. A blond man in civilian clothes, but holding an AKM assault rifle, stood guard. Nearby, another armed guard followed the inside of the perimeter wall, a German Shepherd tugging at the leash in his hand. The gate was open and, as Lia watched, a car drove up and stopped beside the guard, who spoke briefly with the driver before waving him through.

  A security camera watched it all from a telephone pole beside the driveway.

  “I see two dogs,” Akulinin said, peering through his own binoculars. “The other one’s at the far side of the property, above the cliff.”

  “We see him,” Rockman said. “Let’s have a look at the party in the back.”

  From the hillside above the east side of the mansion, the two agents could see about half of the back deck, which extended from the west side of the house almost all the way to the cliff above the sea. The swimming pool was brightly lit, the blue light shimmering and wavering as it reflected off trees and walls. A dozen people or so were visible, engaged in laughing conversation. Most were casually dressed, though the people sculling in the pool or lounging in the hot tub were nude.

  “I don’t see Kotenko,” Lia said. “Gordon, are you getting IDs on these people?”

  “The bald guy talking with the tall blond is Vladymir Malyshkin,” Rockman said. “He runs the exploratory division of Gazprom’s oil subsidiary. The guy with thick glasses and his arm around the brunette over by the diving board is Sergei Poroskov, a member of the St. Petersburg Duma, and a major shareholder in Gazprom.” There was a hesitation as Rockman called up more data on his monitor back in the Art Room. “Yeah . . . all of the men are movers and shakers, either with the Russian government or in the Russian oil and gas industries. The guy skinny-dipping with the two chicks in the pool is CEO of a major construction company.”

  “What about the women?” Akulinin asked.

  “I think they’re the floor show,” Lia said.

  “Kotenko owns a string of gentlemen’s clubs in half a dozen cities,” Rockman said, “and he’s also into producing, um, adult films. Like Lia says, they’re probably part of the entertainment.”

  “Well, as long as they’re very entertaining,” Lia said, “and keep it on the back deck, we should have clear sailing inside. Ilya? Break out the dragonfly.”

  Akulinin pulled off his backpack and extracted a plastic case the size of an encyclopedia. He opened it, revealing a delicate device, mostly wire and gauze but with a core the size of a pencil. He switched it on and the filmy wings unfolded, quivering in the slight breeze. “How about it, James?” he said. “You have a signal?”

  “That’s affirmative,” Llewellyn replied. “We’re good to go.”

  “Right then. Here goes.” Akulinin raised his hand and gave the device a gentle shove, lofting it into the air like a paper airplane. The gauze wings caught the breeze and the device soared higher, circling out into the darkness above the dacha with a faint rasping flutter of its wings.

  “Okay,” Llewellyn said. “We’ve got good signal, good picture.”

  “We have positive control,” Rockman put in.

  The flier faded into shadowy invisibility against the night. Lia and Akulinin stayed hunkered down on the dark and brush-covered hillside as the team in the Art Room flew the probe from the other side of the Earth, guided by real-time imagery transmitted from the tiny camera in the dragonfly’s nose.

  The Art Room

  NSA Headquarters

  Fort Meade, Maryland

  1625 hours EDT

  Chris Palatino had been hired by the National Security Agency for one reason. He was very good at playing video games.

  The winner of the Extreme Gamer competition at the Origins gaming convention two years before, he’d been approached by a recruiter for a defense-related corporation. Only later, after Palatino had passed the security clearances, was the true nature of the job made clear: he would have to move from central Michigan to Laurel, Maryland, and take a job with the NSA. The money was less than he might have made writing software for a major corporation, but money wasn’t Palatino’s major interest.

  He called it the gamer’s ultimate fantasy, and he was living it—an overweight twenty-seven-year-old geek getting paid to remote-pilot micro-UAVs on missions halfway around the world.

  “Good hands, Chris,” Jeff Rockman told him. Half a dozen members of the Art Room team were standing behind his workstation, watching as Palatino jockied two joysticks on the console before him, eyes fixed on the large flat-screen monitor on the wall in front of him.

  “I know, man,” Palatino replied, though his voice had that dreamy, off-in-another-world vaguenes
s it usually acquired when he was on a mission. “Watch and learn, watch and . . . son of a bitch!”

  Fifty-five hundred miles away—measured along a great circle route that skimmed south of the top of Greenland and north of the Shetland Islands—the eight-ounce flier had caught a heavy updraft along the side of the mountain that threatened to sweep it into the trees. Palatino gave the device an extra burst of power, flying into a downdraft and using the descent to pick up speed. A moment later he was clear, skimming above the tree tops toward the mansion.

  The UAV had been designed to operate on software modeled on the sculling motions of a fly’s wings. The wings themselves went rigid with the application of a low-voltage trickle of current, twisting and turning to put out some ten beats per second. That was about a twentieth of the beat frequency for a housefly, but these wings were larger in comparison to the size of the body driving them, and included the ability to glide for long distances. Once clear of the downdraft, Palatino canted the wings into a rigid-locked configuration and, twitching gently at one of the joysticks, nudged the device into a gentle glide that carried it across the back deck twenty feet up.

  Any of the party guests who chanced to look up might have glimpsed a dark shape reflecting the light from the pool and dismissed it as a large moth or even a bat. The UAV circled the deck area twice as the Art Room team located and counted guests, staff, and guards.

  “Okay, Lia,” Rockman said after the second pass. “Still no sign of Kotenko, so he may be inside. We’ve identified twelve guests, five people who are probably staff, and four guards, not counting the two on perimeter patrol with dogs, or the guy at the front gate. It looks like they’re pretty well set out there, not much traffic in and out of the house.”

  “Copy that,” Lia’s voice came back over a wall speaker. “Let’s get this over with, okay?” She sounded tense, on edge.

  Rockman pointed at the screen. “The security camera is there,” he said. “On top of that pole.”

  “I see it; I see it,” Palatino said. “Gimme a sec. . . .”

  He flipped the UAV’s wings out of their locked position, and with a soft rattle of sound the device streaked across the roof of the house, angling toward a solitary pole rising just inside the fence encircling the property, not far from the main gate and driveway. Hunched over the controllers, tongue sticking out in an unconscious expression of pure concentration, Palatino brought the tiny UAV to a near hover a foot from the top of the pole, dropping the body into a vertical orientation at the same moment that he extended four wire-slender and hook-tipped legs. An instant later, the device touched the creosote-blackened wood, and the scene displayed on the monitor became still, an extreme close-up of the pole’s weathered wood surface. The flier was now resting on the pole, a few inches behind the target camera.

  The NSA possessed the technology to hijack security camera networks anywhere in the world, but doing so required gaining access. Many networks used the Internet for their security cam systems, which made the NSA eavesdropper’s task simplicity itself.

  The security cameras at Kotenko’s dacha, however, were on their own, private network, with no outside connections and, apparently, no computers to sort, clean up, or channel the data. That made tapping into the network more difficult. They also used universal cable connections rather than wireless LAN or Ethernet connections and that, too, made stealing the signal harder.

  But not impossible.

  The camera, a small black box with a sunshade extended over the barrel of the lens, was set up to scan the entrance to the property twenty feet below. On the display, the cable emerged from the back of the camera, ran down the side of the pole a few inches to where it was stapled to the wood, then extended out into the night in the direction of the house.

  “Damned primitive crapola,” Palatino muttered. “Haven’t these people heard of wireless networks?”

  “That’s okay,” Rockman told him. “That’s why the dragonfly has a sting. Go ahead. Take a bite.”

  On the pole behind the camera’s field of view, the remote-operated flier edged a couple of careful sideways steps, bringing it to rest directly above the cable. Targeting brackets appeared on the big wall display, centering on and closing around the cable, and flashing when the device had locked onto the target. There was a tiny whine of servomotors, and a slender needle, like a mosquito’s sucking proboscis, extended down from the device’s head, delicately piercing the cable.

  “Okay,” Rockman said, looking at another monitor. “We have a signal.”

  At Palatino’s touch, a second needle bit the cable just below the first. A window opened in the lower left-hand portion of the big screen, showing the grainy, low-light black-and-white image currently being transmitted by the camera.

  The remote dragonfly probe was now wired into the dacha’s security camera system.

  “We’re recording,” another Art Room technician reported.

  “Okay,” Rockman said. “Nothing’s happening. Get about a twenty-second loop.”

  The seconds passed. “Got it. Ready to repeat.”

  “Good. Okay, Lia, Ilya. We’re hooked into the network. You can proceed.”

  “Moving,” Lia replied.

  Kotenko Dacha

  Sochi, Russia

  2340 hours, GMT + 3

  Lia led the way as the two agents scrambled down the slope, making their way toward the dacha property. Both of them wore black head-to-toe, with light-intensifier goggles over their faces, which gave them the look of curious four-limbed insects.

  For this op, they were going in semi-sterile, which meant that with one key exception, all of their equipment, everything except their communications implants, anyway, was available through commercial European markets or low-security military sources. The exception was the satchel Lia carried at her hip, which carried the bugging devices they intended to plant inside the dacha.

  Once they disposed of those, they would have nothing on their persons that would identify them, if the worst happened, as agents of an American intelligence organization.

  They reached the base of the hill and worked their way to a point close to the property entrance. Black figures crouching against black shadows, they waited for long minutes, watching the solitary guard at the gate. He looked bored and not particularly attentive, but Lia wanted to wait for the best opportunity.

  “Gordon, are you ready to transmit?”

  “We’re ready here, Lia,” Rockman replied. “Waiting on your word.”

  “Copy.”

  That opportunity came ten minutes later, as the headlights of a car swung across the driveway, illuminating the guard and the open gate in a glare immediately stopped down by the automatic filters inside their LI goggles. The car pulled up alongside the guard, who leaned over to look inside, then stepped back and saluted. The car, a long, black sedan, eased past the guard and onto the drive. “Now,” Lia whispered.

  The two figures separated from the shadows and slipped into the clear-cut zone outside the wall, angling toward the gate.

  The Art Room

  NSA Headquarters

  Fort Meade, Maryland

  1654 hours EDT

  “Now,” Lia’s voice said from the speaker.

  Jeff Rockman looked up at the display on the monitor, which now showed two inset windows, both with identical images from the security camera. On both, the guard at the front gate could be seen standing a few feet from the wall, shifting his weight from foot to foot and managing to look dead bored, even though his face could not be seen.

  “Okay,” Jeff said. “Insert the recorded signal.”

  There was the faintest flicker of static on the left-hand window, and the image of the guard seemed to jump to one side by about a foot. Several seconds later, a black figure entered the lower edge of the right-hand window, easing between the wall of white-painted stone and the guard’s back, then vanishing. A moment later, a second figure came into view, stealthily slipping behind the less than fully attentive guard
.

  By physically tapping into the length of cable on the security cam pole, the Art Room had been able to record a twenty-second segment of video, which they were now feeding into the security network while blocking the real-time signal from the camera. Somewhere inside the dacha, a presumably bored security guard was looking at the monitor, which showed absolutely nothing unusual happening outside the front gate. If he’d noticed the static or the shift in the guard’s position, chances were good he’d shrug it off to a fault in the cable . . . which wouldn’t have been far off the mark.

  There were any number of ways to penetrate a secure target such as the Kotenko dacha. The best and simplest, however, was generally through the front gate. The dogs patrolling the perimeter were trained to pick up strange scents and alert their handlers if they detected the trails of intruders coming over the wall . . . but at the main gate the ground would be a jumble of crisscrossing scent trails, of guards, of automobiles, of guests coming and going. Even if the dogs were well enough trained to alert their handlers that intruders had passed that way, the handlers would probably discount the warning. After all, everyone went through that way.

  There were motion sensors and sound detectors along the base inside the wall, but again, the security personnel would be alert to intruders coming over the wall elsewhere around the perimeter, not coming through the main gate where the guard’s scuffings and pacings, the noises from car engines, and the conversations as the guard challenged each arrival all rendered sonic data useless.

  As for the lone guard, he was standing on the driveway inside the open gateway, his AKM carelessly slung over his shoulder, his night vision utterly blasted by the headlights of the car that had just passed through. He didn’t see the two figures in black approach the wall behind him, or notice as, one after the other, they slipped silently past his back. He wasn’t paying careful attention to the night around him because after all . . . that was what dogs and security cameras were for.