The Moscow Vector c-6

by Robert Ludlum

  She grinned, imagining the likely reaction of the risk-averse CIA bureaucrats if one of their field officers kidnapped a German federal criminal police official. No, Randi decided wryly, grabbing Kessler was not going to fly. Instead, her best bet might be to back off for now. Later she could look for a discreet way to let his superiors know about his criminal conduct. Of course, she would also have to manage that without revealing that she had hacked into one of their high-security computer networks.

  In the meantime, her audio-operations technicians were busy trying to trace that first emergency number Kessler had dialed. So far, they had linked it to a cell phone registered in Switzerland. Where the trail would lead from there was still anyone’s guess.

  A big yellow BVG transit bus roared past with only a handful of passengers on board. Randi looked up, getting her bearings. On her right, to the west, lay the quiet, snow-cloaked forest. On her left, across the road, there were houses and a row of small shops. There were more vehicles moving on this stretch of the avenue—a few private cars and a couple of delivery trucks out making their rounds despite the slowly worsening weather. A block ahead, she could see the surveillance team’s Ford panel van parked between an older Audi and a brand-new Opel station wagon.

  She tapped a button on what looked like a silver iPod hooked to her belt.

  Designed for undercover operations, this iPod actually contained a sophisticated tactical radio set with several secure channels. “Base, this is Lead. I’m coming in.”

  “Understood, Lead,” one of the techs working in the van replied. Suddenly his voice sharpened. “Wait one, Randi. We’re picking up an incoming call to Kessler’s house. Someone’s telling him to be ready to leave, that an extraction unit is on its way!”

  Yes! Randi enthusiastically pounded her clenched right fist into the open palm of her left hand. It was about time. “Okay, Base. Get ready to saddle up.

  When these guys swoop in and scoop Kessler up, we’ll tag along behind to see where they take him.”

  “Got it,” the CIA tech said. Over the radio link, she could hear him awkwardly clambering from the back of the windowless van into the driver’s seat.

  Still walking toward the Ford, Randi switched frequencies to speak directly to the young Berlin Station field officer posted down the street from Kessler’s villa. “Watcher, this is Lead. Did you copy that?”

  Silence.

  She frowned. “Carla, this is Randi. Come in.”

  There was no answer. Only the faint hiss of static over dead airwaves.

  Randi swung round in alarm, feeling a cold chill run down her spine. Something was going wrong. Very wrong. She unzipped her jacket just far enough so that she could draw the 9mm Beretta pistol in her shoulder holster without snagging it on her clothes—in case she needed the weapon out in a hurry.

  At that moment, she saw a black BMW sedan racing down Clayallee at high speed, with its powerful engine revving as it wove in and out around slower-moving cars and trucks. Instinctively, her hand dove inside her jacket, reaching for her pistol. But the speeding car drove on past her surveillance van. She breathed out in relief.

  Then, suddenly, the BMW braked hard. The black sedan slewed around through a tire-squealing, rubber-burning, 180-degree turn, and rocked to a full stop just a few meters away from the parked Ford.

  Three of the BMW’s four doors flew open, and three lean, cold-eyed men jumped out onto the street. They moved rapidly, fanning out in an arc around the CIA-owned van. Each man held a submachine gun —Heckler & Koch MP5SDs equipped with integral noise suppressors —tucked against his shoulder in a shooting stance. Randi’s eyes widened as she recognized the black jumpsuits and dark green, eagle-badge berets worn by Germany’s elite coun-terterrorist unit, GSG-9, Grenzschutzgruppe-9.

  “Oh, shit,” she muttered. One of the area residents or local shopkeepers must have spotted her surveillance team, started getting suspicious, and then called the authorities with a warning. After 9/1I and the horror of the Madrid commuter train massacre, Germany, France, Spain, and others now kept elements of their rapid-reaction forces on permanent alert. Randi quickly took her hand off the butt of the Berretta. There was no point in spooking these heavily armed commandos. If they thought they were going up against terrorists, their nerves and reflexes were sure to be set on a hair-trigger.

  Instead, carefully reaching inside her jacket for her Agency identity card, she started walking even faster, heading straight for the GSG-9 unit. Maybe she could intervene before these overeager German soldiers blew her whole clandestine operation sky-high. Once they rousted her people out onto the sidewalk in full view of every curious onlooker, there would be no way to keep the story off the airwaves. And the local media would have a field day running breathless updates about the foolhardy American intelligence agents caught spying on peaceful German citizens.

  “Lead, this is Base,” one of the two technicians inside the van radioed, sounding rattled. “What should we do?”

  Randi switched back to her primary channel. “Just sit tight, guys. I’m coming. Let me handle this.”

  She was still at least fifty meters away when the three black-clad gunmen suddenly opened fire, shooting without any warning or provocation.

  Their submachine guns stuttered on full automatic, raking the van from back to front at pointblank range. Showers of sparks cascaded high in the air as dozens of 9mm rounds ripped through the vehicle, puncturing metal, shattering fragile electronics gear, and shredding human flesh. Most of the bullets punched straight through and came out on the other side still moving at close to the speed of sound. But enough hit home to turn the interior of the Ford into a blood-drenched slaughterhouse. Through her earphones, Randi heard agonized screams that were mercifully cut short as the hail of submachine gun fire went on and on.

  These must be Renke’s men, she realized in horror. They had not come to rescue Kessler. Instead, they had come to kill those who were keeping watch on him.

  Snarling in rage, Randi drew her Beretta, aimed rapidly at the nearest gunman, and squeezed off two shots. One round missed. The other hit the man high in the chest. But instead of dropping him, the impact only knocked him backward a couple of paces. He grunted, doubled over for a brief moment, and then straightened back up. She could see the hole torn in his clothing, but there was no sign of any blood.

  Christ, she realized suddenly, these bastards are wearing body armor. Her survival instincts kicked in and she threw herself sideways, diving for cover behind a Volvo parked along the side of Clayallee.

  The man turned fast in her direction, bringing his submachine gun up in the same, whirling movement. He fired a long burst, spraying bullets toward the Volvo.

  Lying prone behind the parked car, Randi buried her head in her hands as the Volvo shuddered and rocked above her, hit repeatedly at close range. Bits and pieces of shredded metal, glass, and plastic spun away across the street.

  Ricochets and near misses cracked by low overhead. They tore into other parked vehicles or spun away off the pavement, hurling shards of shattered concrete in all directions. Karsplitting car alarms began going off up and down the avenue, triggered by the barrage of sudden impacts.

  The shooting stopped suddenly.

  Breathing hard, Randi rolled back out onto the sidewalk with her Beretta held out in front of her and ready to fire. She saw two of the black-clad gunmen scrambling back into the BMW. The third had slung his submachine gun across one shoulder and stood hunched over, fiddling with what looked like a small green canvas bag.

  This time, she took careful aim, extending the Beretta in a two-handed marksman’s grip. She waited until her pistol’s sights settled on the third gunman and held steady. Then she squeezed the trigger. The Beretta barked once, recoiling back against her tight grip. Nothing. A miss. Randi’s eyes narrowed, focusing on her target. She steadied the pistol again and took another shot.

  This 9mm round slammed into the gunman’s upper right leg, shattered his femur, and exploded o
ut the other side in a spray of blood and bone fragments. He sat down suddenly, staring in disbelief at his mangled leg. The canvas bag tumbled out of his hands and fell to the street.

  A look of desperation flashed across the wounded man’s face. He lashed out with his left foot, kicking the bag away from him. It spun wildly across the ground and ended up under the bullet-riddled CIA surveillance van.

  Randi heard the crippled gunman shout a panicked warning in what sounded like some kind of guttural Slavic language. Immediately, one of his comrades leaned out of the BMW, grabbed him under the arms, and hauled him inside, leaving a pool of bright red blood smeared across the street.

  Without waiting any longer, the driver of the black sedan hit the gas pedal and peeled out, accelerating back up Clayallee the way thev had come. Pistol in hand, Randi scrambled to her feet. She swung the Beretta through a wild, wide arc, leading the BMW as it flashed past her at well over eighty kilometers an hour. She squeezed the trigger repeatedly, trying to fire as many shots as she could at the fast-moving target.

  One of her rounds smashed the car’s rear window. A second hit punched a hole in the trunk. But the others went wide. Cursing under her breath, she stopped shooting, not willing to risk hitting innocent bystanders by mistake.

  The BMW kept going, heading north along the avenue until at last it disappeared in the gathering twilight.

  For a moment longer, Randi stood staring along the street in sheer disbelief. She felt stunned by the magnitude of this unhesitating and utterly murderous assault on her surveillance team. How in God’s name had this happened? she wondered bitterly. How could Wulf Renke’s men have zeroed in on them with such unerring precision?

  Slowly, she lowered the Beretta and forced herself to flip the safety catch on. It was not easy. Her hands were starting to shake as the wild exhilaration of close combat ebbed away, leaving only sorrow and a deep, abiding anger in its place. Then Randi glanced back over her shoulder at the bullet-shattered Ford van.

  The small canvas bag was just visible. It was lying on its side beside one of the rear wheels.

  A bag, her mind said. Then, a split-second later, her mind corrected itself.

  No, she thought coldly. That’s a bomb—a satchel charge.

  Run, Randi told herself. Run away now! Her mind suddenly in overdrive, she turned and fled, sprinting away from the van as fast as she could move.

  Gun in hand, she raced past stalled cars whose drivers were still staring in shock at the mangled van.

  “Get out! Get out!” she yelled at them in German, gesturing with the Beretta. “There’s a bomb!”

  And then the satchel charge exploded.

  A sudden flash of blinding white light ripped through the darkness behind Randi. Still running flat-out, she hurled herself down, curling up for protection just as the shock wave, roaring outward from the very center of the powerful blast, rolled over her. The massive wall of superheated air bounced her high off the pavement and then tossed her tumbling end over end across the ground. At the same time, a giant fist—the overpressure caused by the blast-seemed to squeeze every ounce of oxygen out of her lungs.

  Slowly, the flaring white light faded. Everything went piteh-black. The world around her vanished as she fell out and away from consciousness.

  She came to only seconds later, lying curled up against the side of a car thrown sideways across the road by the blast. Half deafened, with her ears still ringing, Randi forced herself first to sit up and then to climb back to her feet, wincing unwillingly at the pain from tortured muscles and bruised and bleeding patches of skin.

  All around her on the street, other dazed and injured people were pulling themselves out of vehicles that had been hammered by the shock wave or hit by flving debris. Others, streaked with blood or cradling broken limbs, were stumbling blindly out of their bomb-damaged homes and businesses. The enormous explosion had torn open roofs, toppled chimneys, and shattered Every window facing the street, sending shards of broken glass sleeting through living rooms, kitchens, bedrooms, and storefronts.

  Slowly, Randi turned and stared back at the place where the surveillance van had been.

  The Ford was gone, replaced by an ugly tangle of twisted, burning wreckage. All of the other cars that had been parked within fifty meters of the shattered van now lay canted across Clayallee— crumpled, smashed, and wreathed in billowing orange and flame. Thick black smoke drifted across the road.

  Randi blinked away tears. There was no time now for sorrow, she decided coldly. If she lived long enough, that would have to come later.

  Forcing herself to focus, she quickly checked over her equipment. Her radio was dead, probably wrecked beyond repair when the explosion sent her skittering across the pavement. Well, it doesn’t really matter, she thought bleakly. After all, she had no one left to contact. She spotted her Beretta lying on the sidewalk a few meters away and awkwardly limped over to pick it up.

  Frowning in concentration, Randi carefully examined the pistol. Although the Beretta’s grip and barrel were scraped and scarred, its firing pin, trigger spring, hammer, and slide all appeared undamaged. One side of her mouth twitched upward in a bitter, self-mocking grin. From the look of it, the 9mm weapon was in better shape than she was.

  She hit the magazine release catch, dumped out the half-empty clip, and dropped it into one of her jacket pockets. Then she slapped in a fresh fifteen-round magazine, pulled back on the slide, and lowered the hammer. She was ready.

  Randi slid the pistol back into her shoulder holster and took one last, grim look at the burning wreckage scattered across Clayallee. She could hear police, fire, and ambulance sirens warbling louder and louder as the German authorities began reacting to the disaster.

  It was time to go.

  She turned away and hobbled to the west, pushing deeper in among the trees of the Grunewald forest preserve until she was well out of sight from the road. There, Randi turned north and forced herself into a painful loping run, moving faster and faster among the shadows and the silent, white-cloaked woods.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Main Space Command Center, Near Moscow

  Colonel-General Leonid Averkovich Nesterenko, the tall, dapper commander-in-chief of the Russian Federation’s military space forces, marched briskly down the corridor connecting his quarters with the Operations Control Center. Bright fluorescent lighting overhead and a constant flow of fresh-smelling, cool air from ventilation shafts made it difficult to remember that this massive installation was buried hundreds of meters below ground, shielded from attack by massive slabs of steel-reinforced concrete. Its heavily guarded entrance and exit tunnels were concealed in the dense birch forests north of Moscow.

  The two armed sentries on guard outside the Operations Center stiffened to attention as he approached. Nesterenko ignored them. Ordinarily a stickler for the finer points of formal military courtesy, he was far too pressed for time just now.

  Nesterenko pushed quickly through the door and hurried into the vast chamber beyond. As his eyes adjusted to this huge room’s subdued lighting, he could see row upon row of control consoles. The officers at each console were either busy monitoring the satellite and early warning radar systems in their charge, or conferring quietly via secure communications equipment with colleagues at launch sites, ground stations, and local command posts across Russia.

  At the far end of the Center, an enormous, wall-sized screen showed the world and the key spacecraft and satellites orhiting around it. Bright yellow dotted lines depicted each object’s predicted orbital path, while small green vector arrows indicated their current positions.

  The duty officer, a much shorter, square-jawed man named Baranov, hurried to Nestrenko’s side. “The Americans are maneuvering one of their Lacrosse radar-imaging reconnaissance satellites, sir,” he reported.

  Nestrenko frowned. “Show me.”

  The shorter man turned and snapped an order to one of his subordinates at the nearest control console. “Bring up the
data on Lacrosse-Five.”

  One of the blinking arrows on the huge wall screen changed color, flashing from green to red. At the same time, a new dotted line began slowly di-verging from the satellite’s previously observed orbital track.

  “We detected the burn approximately five minutes ago,” Baranov told him.

  Nestrenko nodded, glowering as he studied Lacrosse-Five’s new predicted course. “What are our American friends up to?” he murmured. He turned back to Baranov. “Show me a close-up of that projected track where it first crosses our borders. And put up overlays showing the locations where we can expect the Americans to gain significantly better reconnaissance capability from this new orbital path.”

  The image on the wall screen flickered and then expanded rapidly, zoom-ing in to focus on a much smaller area —the Ukraine, Belarus, and western Russia. Glowing boxes marked out huge swathes of territory along a diagonal running northeast from Kiev to Moscow and beyond. The assembly areas for the tank and motor rifle divisions slated to invade the Ukraine were right in the middle of one of those boxes.

  “Damn,” Nestrenko muttered. The Lacrosse satellite carried a powerful synthetic aperture radar imaging system, one that could “see” through clouds, dust, and darkness. The ZHUKOV assembly areas were hidden beneath layers of radar-absorbent camouflage netting, but no one could be sure that this experimental material would successfully deflect such close scrutiny.

  “We have a Spider in position,” Baranov reminded him quietly, pointing at another vector arrow blinking on the display. “Our targeting computers predict that it will be in effective range for another thirty minutes.”

  Nestrenko nodded tightly. The Spider was one of Russia’s most secret space weapons systems. Disguised as ordinary civilian-use communications, weather, and navigation satellites, each Spider also contained anti-satellite weapons for use against enemy space platforms in low earth orbit. In theory, such an attack could be carried out covertly. But in practice? If detected, any Russian effort to destroy an American spy satellite could easily be construed as an act of war.