A beanbag round would have been a useful addition to his kit, Dean thought ruefully. They were riot-control projectiles consisting of soft, weighted bags that hit hard enough to knock down a man but not injure him seriously.
It was way too late to second-guess his decisions, however. He would have to make this one up as he went along. He had to slow down to navigate a treacherous part of the deck partly blocked by fallen rails and decking from the collapsed bridge wing. As he reached the forward end of the Lebedev’s superstructure, gunfire barked, the rounds snapping past his head.
He returned fire, sending a hyper-lethal grenade into a knot of Russian naval infantry crouched behind and beside a deck funnel. The blast ripped the funnel aside and scattered the men like tenpins. Ahead, a kind of wooden box, man-tall and lined with fluttering sheets of blue plastic, rose at the starboard railing. And as he approached, a man stepped from inside.
Dean had expected Braslov, who was supposed to be out here somewhere, but this man was a stranger. He wore civilian clothing, but with a military parka and with a ramrod bearing that shouted military at Dean.
He was standing behind the woman, his arm locked around her throat and a Makarov pistol pressed against her temple.
“Do not speak. You will drop that rather formidable weapon,” the man said. “Now.”
At least the guy hadn’t added a melodramatic “or the girl dies.” Instead, he nodded as Dean placed the grenade launcher on the deck.
“Good. Now kick it over the side.”
Which meant he couldn’t dive for it if he saw an opening for Hollywood-style heroics. Reluctantly he put his boot on the weapon’s heavy barrel and shoved it hard enough to send it skittering into the gunwale. Carefully the Russian used his foot to slide it over the top. Dean heard the lonely splash when it hit far below.
“You will hold your arms out from your body, please. And turn around . . . slowly. Good. Now remove the combat harness and throw it over the side as well.”
Dean did as he was ordered. He could see the fear in the woman’s eyes, but she stood calmly, not struggling or panicking.
He recognized her now. Rubens had transmitted a file photo of Katharine McMillan, the NSA agent who’d been sent up to the Arctic as a loaner to the CIA. It had taken Dean a moment to connect that photo—of a calm-looking woman wearing lipstick, eye makeup, and neatly styled hair—with this person, scared, dirty, her hair uncombed, salt-matted, and windblown.
“Your radio,” the Russian said. “I see the mike at your throat. Lose it. Over the side. I warn you, do not speak.”
A few tugs were sufficient to pull both the microphone and the earpiece out of his hood. He wondered if the SEALs had overheard the Russian giving him orders and decided they had not. The microphone was sound-powered and needed a very close voice, his own, to activate. Sounds of gunfire were crackling from the stern of the ship; they were probably pretty busy back there in any case.
“You are . . . what?” the man said, his brow furrowed as he looked Dean up and down. “Not a Navy SEAL, surely. You are much too old.” He looked at McMillan, then back to Dean. “Might you be one of this young woman’s associates, then?”
“Actually,” Dean said, reaching for a lie, “I’m empowered to negotiate for her release. What is it you want?”
“No, no, no,” the man said, shaking his head and waggling the Makarov for emphasis. “You’ve got it all wrong, my friend. First you negotiate; then you send in the commandos, after the negotiations break down. You don’t do it the other way around. It looks bad, and the insurance adjustors ask difficult questions. What is your name?”
“Charlie Dean.” There was no point in playing games.
“And you are . . . what, Charlie Dean? CIA?”
“Something like that. The question remains, what is it you want? Holding this woman won’t help you. Killing me won’t help you. But perhaps I can find a way to end this . . . standoff to our mutual advantage.”
The man chuckled. “Actually, Mr. Dean, as I see it, there is no ‘standoff,’ as you put it.” He waggled the pistol again. “I have the cards in my hand, and they appear to be a full house.” He brought the pistol back to McMillan’s temple, just as Dean had begun calculating his odds if he were to try a sudden lunge. If he could catch the Russian when the pistol was pointed somewhere else, pin the arm, wrestle him down . . .
“You,” the Russian continued, all lightness gone from his voice now, “will come with us. Actually, I was thinking of killing you, but it seems to me that holding two American intelligence agents might be to my advantage. I know some . . . people who might pay quite well for access to your memories.”
Dean raised his hands, palms out. “Take me, then. Two of us would be trouble. Believe me.”
“No. I quite like the young lady’s company. I considered bringing along her CIA companion, but decided he was too young and strong to be worth the risk. You, however, are old. I believe I can handle you, and the girl as well.”
Dean laughed at the brazenness of the statement but added a bitter, “You son of a bitch,” to the chuckle.
“Exactly. You will precede us down the ladder. Now.”
Dean did as he was told. The structure hanging from the side of the Lebedev was a wood, plastic, and canvas shelter around a ladder extending all the way to the ship’s waterline. At the bottom was a kind of flat pier, attached to the ship’s side but hinged so that it moved up and down with the lapping of the waves.
Moored to the side of the pier was something large and rounded, painted a bright yellow and with Cyrillic lettering here and there on the hull. A circular hatch on a raised combing gave access to the thing’s interior.
It took Dean a moment to realize what he was looking at. “Jesus!” he said. “A submarine!”
“Exactly,” the Russian said, descending the ladder right behind McMillan. “Permit me to show you just what it is we’ve been doing in this godforsaken wasteland. I think you will be impressed.” He waved the pistol again. “Open the hatch and climb inside. No tricks, or I will shoot the woman.”
Reluctantly, Dean stooped to obey the command.
21
The Art Room
NSA Headquarters
Fort Meade, Maryland
1841 hours EDT
“NIKOS-1 IS COMING OVER the Lebedev’s horizon now,” Marie Telach reported. “We’ve got the target ship onscreen.”
This time, the satellite would pass almost directly over the Lebedev, giving the observers in the Art Room the closest possible look at what was going on in the ship. Jeff Rockman entered keyboard commands that swung the spysat’s cameras up to focus on the approaching vessel, zooming in for a closer look.
Rubens studied the images with care. Fourteen minutes had passed since the last satellite had orbited over the Area of Operations. Anything could have happened in that time.
“Do we have comm pickup yet?”
“Coming through now, sir,” Telach reported.
“Three-one, One-one!” an urgent voice called, just intelligible through hissing static. “Get your people onto the bridge. The rest of you, start herding the tangos forward!”
“One-one, Four-three! We have resistance from the bow. Looks like two, maybe three November Indias behind the wreckage of that capstan!”
“Four-three! Take them down!”
“Copy that.”
November Indias—“NI,” for “naval infantry,” the Russian equivalent of Marines. And “tango” was SEAL shorthand for terrorists, in this case a generic term for the enemy. From the sound of things, the SEALs in general had the upper hand, though there obviously were still pockets of resistance. As the satellite drew closer and closer to a point directly over the Lebedev, the details of the action unfolding on her deck became clearer.
The scene was a computer-enhanced blend of optical and IR imaging. Rubens could see individual SEALs and Russians on the huge ship’s deck now. Heat sources inside the superstructure were vague, dark gray blurs, b
ut the people in the open were easily distinguished, right down to details of uniforms and weapons.
“Can we raise Dean?” Rubens asked.
“We have a channel,” Rockman told him. “We can try.”
Establishing a direct channel to Dean had posed a serious technical challenge for the Art Room, one that had never been fully resolved. Dean’s usual communications gear and bone implant receiver were useless without a clear satellite connection accessible through an antenna coiled up in his belt, so the only way to reach him was through the SEAL tactical comm net.
And using that net for private chitchat ran the risk of jamming up the SEALs’ tactical communications in the middle of a firefight—something the SEAL CO would not appreciate.
But it was important that the Art Room let Dean know some key information about the Russian operation, information uncovered by Lia and Ilya in Sochi and added to day by day as the National Security Agency’s master eavesdroppers continued to look over Kotenko’s shoulder as he typed out e-mails and messages on his home computer.
And they would have only a brief window of opportunity as the NIKOS satellite passed overhead—two minutes at most.
“Sparrow, this is Bird Watcher,” Marie Telach was saying from her workstation. “Sparrow, Bird Watcher.”
Sparrow was Dean’s code name for this op. Bird Watcher, obviously enough, was the Art Room.
Static hissed in response.
“Sparrow, Bird Watcher.”
“Bird Watcher, clear this channel!” a new voice said, sharp and demanding.
Rubens picked up a microphone and held it to his mouth. “This is Bird Watcher,” he said. “We need to get a message to—”
“Bird Watcher, this is Sierra Echo One-one,” the voice said. “Your pet spook disobeyed orders and has gone MIA. Now clear the fucking channel!”
Rubens replaced the microphone. Sierra Echo One-one would be the call sign for the SEAL element commander, Lieutenant Taylor. Dean was missing?
“There!” Rockman said, pointing at the big screen. “That must be him!”
The satellite was now looking directly down on the Lebedev’s forward deck from the zenith. The watchers in the Art Room could see three figures now standing on some sort of platform extending from the ship’s side off the starboard bow. It looked like a mooring platform for a small boat against the larger ship’s waterline, and there appeared to be an oval hull tied up alongside, bobbing in the water. One figure was standing close beside the Lebedev’s hull, and even at the resolution of an image captured from space, the object in his hand was obviously a small pistol. The other two figures appeared to be unarmed, one a woman, one a man. The man had just opened a circular hatch on top of the oval hull and was now climbing down inside.
Rockman continued jockeying the satellite’s camera array, keeping the scene on the monitor locked on the mooring platform.
Rubens picked up the microphone again. “One-one, this is Bird Watcher. Dean is being taken on board a small submarine off the ship’s starboard bow!”
“Bird Watcher, this is Overwatch,” another voice said. “Clear the channel. You are jeopardizing the operation!”
Rubens scowled. Overwatch was the handle for the Special Operations Command HQ team overseeing the SEAL op in the Arctic. The airwaves over the ice suddenly felt uncomfortably crowded.
It would be a mistake to keep pushing, Rubens decided. The opportunity to communicate with the SEALs would come again, if he didn’t force the issue now. Right now, the SEALs had their plate full trying to take down a ship full of Russian marines, and Desk Three would not be helping things by screwing up their communications channels.
“Sir!” Telach called from her station. “We’ve got something new developing!”
“What is it?”
A monitor above her workstation showed the view from another satellite, this one looking down on a barren coastline, ocean surf on a gravel beach, and a long, obviously military airstrip. Two jet aircraft were lifting off from the runway, afterburners flaring. Two more military jets were in the process of taxiing to begin their takeoff roll.
“It’s Mys Shmidta,” Telach said. “Four MiG-35s are taking off from the base there. Two MiG-31s apparently took off ten minutes ago. They’re all headed north . . . toward the Lebedev.”
“We’re getting heavy radio traffic from Wrangle Island,” a communications technician reported. “Sounds like they’ve put a Midas in the air, too.”
It had only been a matter of time, of course, before the Russians responded to the assault on the Lebedev with military force. Rubens had hoped, however, that they would be a little less efficient, a little slower on the uptake. He did some fast calculations.
The MiG-31 Foxhound was strictly an interceptor, with no weapons that would be of use against targets on the ground. It was also limited in range to less than seven hundred miles—which was why the Russians were scrambling a Midas, the NATO code name for an Ilyushin Il-78 tanker.
The Foxhounds would simply be escorts for the real muscle, the MiG-35 Fulcrum-Fs. The Fulcrum-F was one of their best strike fighters, with movable forward canards giving exceptional maneuverability, and a maximum speed of Mach 2.2 . . . say 1500 miles per hour. They wouldn’t push that hard for very long, not without causing some seriously dangerous stress to engine and airframe. Mys Shmidta was about nine hundred miles south of the Lebedev; the Fulcrum-F’s combat radius was well over twice that.
So make it nine hundred miles at Mach 2. . . .
The SEALs had perhaps forty minutes before some very nasty company arrived.
Mir 1
Arctic Ice Cap
82° 34' N, 177° 26' E
1042 hours, GMT–12
It was a tight fit down the submarine’s hatch. Dean eased himself through and stepped back from the ladder as McMillan’s legs dropped into view, following him down. A moment later, the Russian joined them, moving to the far side of the narrow compartment so that he could keep them both covered with his Makarov.
“This is one of your civilian Mir submarines,” Dean said, looking around. The overhead was low and cluttered with pipes and bundles of plastic-coated cables. At the forward end, a pair of bubble windows looked out and down into the ocean depths. “Adapted for deep-sea oil work?”
“Very good.”
“They were using these things to take tourists down to the sea floor at the North Pole a year or two ago,” McMillan said. “The Russians have had a lot of experience with the technology.”
Their captor had pulled a small radio from his parka and was speaking into it urgently in Russian.
“Who is this guy?” Dean asked her. He had the feeling he’d seen the man before—in a file photo, perhaps.
“Feodor Golytsin,” she replied. “He’s some kind of bigwig with Gazprom.”
That was it. Dean remembered his briefing with Carolyn, the pretty English woman at Menwith Hill.
“Right,” he said. “He used to be a sub driver during the Soviet days, and then got promoted to admiral and given a shore billet. He got into trouble with Moscow and ended up in a gulag for three years.”
Golytsin put the radio away. “You seem to know a lot about me, Mr. Dean.”
“A little bird told me.” Dean shrugged. “Actually, we have quite a sizable file on you. If anything happens to us, there will not be any place on this planet where you can hide.”
It was a bluff but a reasonable one. People throughout the world, Dean knew, tended to have an inflated fear of the CIA and other American intelligence agencies and what they could actually do. He was hoping to play on that fear.
“I’m not too worried about that, Mr. Dean. Sufficient money can buy some very good hiding places. Look at Osama bin Laden.”
Pointing with the pistol, Golytsin herded them back and away from the minisub’s control panel. Reaching over, he began flipping switches in a particular pattern. Dean felt the ventilator system kick on, blowing cold air into the compartment, and felt a faint shudd
er through the deck as the power system came to life.
Dean watched the switches being thrown, trying to memorize their positions and order as they clicked on. He had a pretty good idea by now of where Golytsin intended to take them. If he and McMillan were to have a chance in hell of getting out, he would need to learn to pilot one of these things, on the fly and with only a single demonstration.
“So what are we waiting for, Admiral?” Dean said. He wondered if using the man’s former rank would help forge a psychological bind he could use. A long shot, to be sure, but right now Dean was willing to try anything.
The deck shifted beneath their feet as the submarine suddenly rocked from side to side. Golytsin looked up and smiled. “For that.” Footsteps rang through the compartment from overhead. Someone was clambering around on top of the Mir. With a clang, the topside hatch opened, and a pair of BDU-clad legs appeared coming down the ladder. The newcomer pulled the hatch shut above him, then joined the three of them in the now extremely cramped control room.
Dean recognized this man’s face immediately. Sergei Braslov. Former Soviet Army, GRU, MVD, and, more recently, and as Johann Ernst, co-founder of the militant environmental group Greenworld. He, too, held a 9mm Makarov pistol in his hand.
Braslov said something to Golytsin in Russian, and the other man replied with a shrug and two words, “Da, gaspodin!” He turned and took his place at the controls of the little submarine.
Dean was trying to get a feel for the social dynamics here. He’d been thinking of Golytsin as the guy in charge of the Russian Operation Cold War, but if he’d just called Braslov gaspodin, meaning “sir” . . .
And there was that photograph of Braslov on a beach with Grigor Kotenko, who was very high indeed in the hierarchy of the Tambov group, the St. Petersburg branch of the Russian Mafiya.
Things were falling into place now. Braslov was the plumber, the fixer who made Kotenko’s orders materialize. Golytsin was a high-ranking executive in Gazprom, a company targeted for takeover by the Russian mob. He’d served a short term in the Siberian gulag, just long enough to make some key contacts with prominent members of the Organizatsiya; when Golytsin reached out to push a power control forward, his sleeve fell back far enough to reveal some blue tattooing at his wrist . . . and tattoos, especially blue ones, were marks of Mafiya membership. When Golytsin had been freed, Kotenko or other high-ranking mob bosses might have made sure he got a position with Gazprom.
Stephen Coonts' Deep Black: Arctic Gold Page 32
