The Moscow Vector c-6

by Robert Ludlum

  Then he shrugged. This decision was beyond his authority. He stepped forward to the nearest console and picked up a red secure phone. “This is Colonel-General Nestrenko. Patch me through to the Kremlin,” he told the operator on the other end firmly. “I must speak with the president immediately. Inform him that this is a war priority communication.”

  In Orbit

  Four hundred kilometers above the earth’s sun-flecked seas and its great brown, green, and white masses of land, a Russian meteorology satellite officially registered as COSMOS-8B swung through its regular elliptical orbit, moving at twenty-seven thousand kilometers an hour. In reality, the counter-feit satellite was a weapons-carrier code-named Spider Twelve. Now, as it flew high over the coast of Africa, the spacecraft’s high-frequency data-relay antenna began receiving coded transmissions containing new programming for its onboard computers.

  Within sixty seconds of receiving the last transmission, Spider Twelve went active.

  Small altitude rockets fired, spewing small puffs of vapor into space.

  Slowly, the long cylinder-shaped satellite spun through an arc until its blunt nose aimed at a point in space above the earth’s distant curved horizon. When Spider Twelve reached the desired angle, the rockets fired again, arresting its rotation. A relay closed and hatches popped open at the base of the nose.

  Six smaller space vehicles —cone-shaped anti-satellite warheads —drifted out through the hatches and slowed slightly, braked by clusters of tiny maneuvering thrusters firing in a preprogrammed sequence. As they decelerated, the warheads began falling toward the earth, arcing downward through a great curve that would bring them within striking range of that distant, precisely calculated point.

  When the six warheads were several kilometers away, Spider Twelve performed its last programmed act. Self-destruct charges placed at key points throughout the ten-ton satellite exploded in short, sharp, blinding flashes that were bright enough to be picked up by both American and Russian early-warning sensors orbiting high above the globe. The detonations ripped Spider Twelve to pieces, shearing antennas, solar arrays, and puncturing fuel tanks.

  Spewing water vapor and fuel, the tangled wreckage began tumbling through space, shedding smaller fragments as it fell slowly toward the upper fringes of the earth’s atmosphere.

  Covered by the brighter explosions behind them, the six anti-satellite warheads also detonated. Each burst sent a hail of thousands of small, razor-edged pieces of titanium into space. Together, they formed a giant cloud of shrapnel, a deadly cloud flying onward at more than seven kilometers a second.

  Forty-five seconds later, and more than three hundred kilometers down-range, the shrapnel cloud intersected the orbital track of Lacrosse-Five, one of only two U.S. radar-imaging reconnaissance satellites circling the globe.

  Main Space Command Center

  “Our tracking radar confirms multiple shrapnel impacts on Lacrosse-Five,”

  Baranov said jubilantly, listening closely to a report relayed by one of his watch officers. He turned his head toward Nestrenko. “Preliminary damage assessment shows that the American spy satellite has been totally destroyed.”

  The colonel-general nodded calmly. He picked up the red phone again.

  “This is Nestrenko,” he said calmly. “Connect me with the United States Space Command.”

  He looked across at Baranov with a slight smile while waiting for his hot-line call to go through. “I will have to convey my sincere regrets and deepest apologies for the terrible damage accidentally caused by this catastrophic explosion on board one of our COSMOS-class weather satellites.”

  “Do you think the Americans will believe you?”

  Nestrenko shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. What is most important is that they cannot possibly launch a replacement for their wrecked radar spy satellite in time. Soon, very soon, we will no longer be forced to care so much about what the Americans believe. Or what they may do.”

  The White House

  It was still early in the morning when a uniformed Secret Service agent ushered Fred Klein into the president’s den upstairs in the East Wing. The room, full of old books, prints of works by Fredric Remington and Georgia O’Keeffe, and photographs of the rugged New Mexico landscape, was all Castilla’s own —his private refuge from the routine frenzy of the White House’s more public spaces.

  The president himself sat in one of the room’s two large recliners, moodily paging through the morning intelligence brief. A tray nearby held his untouched breakfast. He motioned toward the other chair. “Sit down, Fred.”

  Klein obeved.

  Wearilv, Castilla pushed the pile of papers aside and turned to his old friend. “Has there been any more news from Smith or the others in Moscow?”

  “Not yet,” Klein told him. “But I expect another report in a matter of hours at most.”

  Tire president nodded somberly. “Good. Because I’m going to need as much information as I can get —and I’m going to need it very soon. Certainly within the next forty-eight hours.”

  Klein raised an eyebrow.

  “I’m more and more convinced that whatever the Russians are planning is coining up fast,” Castilla explained. “Which means that our window for heading them off is closing even faster.”

  “Yes, sir,” the head of Covert-One agreed. If the rumors Smith and Fiona Devin had picked up about the accelerating tempo of Russian military preparations were accurate, the U.S. and its allies would already be hard-pressed to react in time.

  “I’m calling a secret meeting with high-level representatives of some of our closest allies,” Castilla told him. “Those who still pack a respectable military punch —the UK, France, Germany, and Japan, for a start. I want us to forge a united response to the Kremlin, a series of concrete measures that will force Dudarev to back down before he pulls the trigger on whatever operation he’s planning.”

  “When?” Klein asked quietly.

  “The morning of February 22,” the president said. “I don’t see how we can afford to wait any longer than that.”

  Klein frowned. “That’s a very tight deadline,” he said at length. “I don’t know that I can promise concrete results by then.”

  Castilla nodded. “I understand. But that’s all the time we have left, Fred.

  Believe me, I’m making the same impossible demands of everyone else. At the NSC meeting last night, I ordered the redirection of every other component of our national intelligence capability—spy satellites, signals intercept stations, and whatever agent networks we still have—onto the same mission.

  When our allies show up in the Oval Office, I need solid and convincing evidence of Russia’s aggressive intentions.”

  “And if we can’t get it for you in time?”

  The president sighed. “Then I’ll go ahead with the meeting anyway, but I won’t kid myself. Without something more than my own fears and a few vague hints of trouble, the odds are very much against anvone else being willing to join us in facing down Moscow.”

  Klein nodded tightly. “I’ll relay the critical time frame to Colonel Smith as soon as I can.”

  “You do that,” Castilla said softly. “I hate like hell to ask you to expose your people to more danger, but I don’t see any alternative.” He broke off, hearing his secure phone ring. He answered it swiftly. “Yes?”

  While Klein watched, the president’s broad, deeply lined face sagged.

  Suddenly he looked years older.

  “When?” Castilla asked, gripping the phone until his knuckles turned white. He listened to the reply, then nodded his head firmly. “I understand, Admiral,” he said quietly.

  The president disconnected and then punched in an internal White House number. “This is Sam Castilla, Charlie,” he said to his chief of staff.

  “Round up the NSC pronto. We have an emergency situation on our hands.”

  Finished, he turned back to Klein. “That was Admiral Brose,” he said. His eyes were tired and discouraged. “He just received
a flash communication from Space Command headquarters out in Colorado. There’s been an explosion in space, and we’ve lost one of our most sophisticated spy satellites— Lacrosse-Five.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  North of Moscow

  It was pitch-black outside by the time Jon Smith and Fiona Devin reached their next destination, a large dacha once owned by Aleksandr Zakarov, the old man who had been the second victim of the suspicious disease outbreak they were investigating. Before he retired, Zakarov had been both an influential member of the ruling Communist Party and the State manager of a heavy industry complex. During the first, wild years of crony capitalism after the Soviet Union imploded, he had earned a substantial fortune by selling off “shares” in the factories under his control.

  The luxurious dacha he had acquired with some of his ill-gotten loot was located over an arduous hour’s drive north of the Outer Ring Road. While grinding slowly along narrow, snow-clogged country lanes through gloomy patches of forest and past tiny villages and abandoned churches, Smith had wondered why on earth Zakarov’s rich widow would choose to live so far outside Moscow—especially during the long, cold, and dark winter months. For most of the city’s wealthy elite, their dachas were chiefly rustic summer retreats, places of escape and relaxation during the sweltering davs and nights so common in July and August. Few of them ever bothered leaving the comforts of the capital once the first snows fell, except perhaps for rare weekends and holidays dedicated to cross-country skiing and other winter sports.

  Within five minutes after they were ushered into her elegantly furnished sitting room, neither Jon nor Fiona wondered very much about why the former Partr boss’s widow lived in rural isolation. Their reluctant hostess was a woman who neither wanted nor enjoyed the company of others. She preferred a life of essential solitude with only the handful of paid servants necessarv to cook, clean, and otherwise cater to her every petty and eccentric whim.

  Madame Irina Zakarova was a tiny woman with a sharp, beaklike nose and small, dark, predatory eyes that seemed always in motion — observing, judging, and then dismissing with contempt. Her narrow, deeply lined face bore the sour, caustic frown of one who never expects much from anyone, and who almost always finds her abysmally low expectations of her fellow humans fully satisfied. With a jaundiced eye, she finished examining Smith’s forged World Health Organization credentials and handed the papers back with an indifferent shrug. “Very well. You may ask your questions, Dr. Strand. I do not promise many useful answers. Franklv, I found the whole matter of my husband’s last illness a great bore.” I ler mouth turned downward even more sharplv. “All those ridiculous doctors and nurses and health ministry officials asking the same dreary questions: What did he eat last? Had he ever been exposed to radiation? What medications was he taking? On and on they went, in a never-ending interrogation. It was all so absurd.”

  “Absurd in what way?” Smith asked carefully.

  “For the simple reason that Aleksandr was a walking catalogue of ill health and bad habits,” Madame Zakarova replied coolly. “He smoked and drank and ate far too much all his life. Anything could have killed him —a heart attack, stroke, some kind of cancer … anything at all. So the fact that his body gave out in the end was hardly a matter of special surprise, or of much real interest, to me. I really don’t understand all the fuss these doctors made over his death.”

  “Others were killed by the same strange illness,” Fiona pointed out tersely.

  “Among them, an innocent little boy who did not share your husband’s bad habits.”

  “Really?” the other woman asked casually. “An otherwise healthy child?”

  Smith nodded, doing his best to hide his own dislike for this cold, remarkably selfish, woman.

  “How odd,” Madame Zakarova said, with yet another emotionally detached shrug. She sighed languidly. “Well, then, I suppose I must do my best to help you, regardless of the inconvenience to myself.”

  Patiently, more patiently than he would have supposed was possible.

  Smith led her through the same set of health-related questions he had already asked the Voronovs. As before, Fiona carefully took down her answers, maddeningly incomplete though they were.

  At last, when the old woman began to show unmistakable signs that her own limited patience was wearing thin, Jon decided it was time to shift his line of questioning to their chief area of interest—the European Center for Population Research and its DNA sampling around Moscow.

  “Thank you for your time, Madame Zarkova. You have been extremely helpful,” Smith lied, sitting back in his chair and beginning to gather up his papers. But then he stopped and sat forward again. “Oh, there is just one other small matter.”

  “Yes?”

  “Our records show that you and your husband participated in a major DNA survey last year,” Smith said casually, mentally crossing his fingers. “Is that correct?”

  “The big genetic study?” The older woman sniffed quietly. “Oh, yes.

  Swabbing out our mouths for perfect strangers in the name of science. A disgusting ritual, if you ask my opinion. But Aleksandr was very excited about the whole grotesque process.” She shook her head in contempt. “My husband was a fool. He actually believed that this so-called Slavic Genesis project would prove one of his own silly pet theories —that we Russians are the pinnacle of European racial and ethnic evolutionary development.”

  Jon forced himself to smile noncommittally, hiding his own elation. He was now sure that the}’ had uncovered an important part of the origins of this deadly disease.

  After he and Fiona Devin finished talking to the Voronovs that morning, they had gone back to their Zamoskvoreche District safe house. Then, while he reviewed his notes and made the careful phone calls necessary to arrange this interview, Fiona had spent several hours on-line digging up whatever she could about the ECPR and its Slavic Genesis project. Since it was too risky for her to contact her regular news sources, the detailed information they needed was hard to come by. Nevertheless, two important pieces of the puzzle had become clear.

  First, although Slavic Genesis was a very large, expensive, and ambitious scientific undertaking, its researchers had collected DNA from just one thousand of the roughly nine million people living in the greater Moscow region.

  For the purposes of evaluating historical shifts in Slavic populations, this sample size was sufficient —especially when comhined with the thousands upon thousands of other samples taken in other countries in Eastern Europe and across the former Soviet republics. But it also meant that this link between seven-year-old Mikhail Voronov and seventy-five-year-old Aleksandr Zakarov was more than the blind operation of random chance. The odds against such a coincidence were something on the order of eightv-one million to one.

  Second, Konstantin Malkovic’s name had popped up vet again. Corporalions and foundations that he controlled provided a substantial share of the ECPR’s funding. Few specifics of the Center’s budget were in the public domain, but Fiona was fairly sure that the billionaire’s money was directly un-derwriting the Slavic Cenesis project.

  Smith grimaced. One potential connection to Konstantin Malkovic, the ambulance from the Saint Cyril Medical Center, might be dismissed as a fluke. Two could not. Malkovic was involved in this conspiracy, along with his pal in the Kremlin, Viktor Dudarev.

  * * *

  In the woods outside the dacha, Oleg Kirov lay propped up behind a log halt-buried in the snow, keeping a careful eye on the deeply rutted track that led up from the nearest country lane. Surplus army-issue night vision goggles turned the surrounding darkness into green-tinted monochromatic day.

  Twenty or so meters behind him, covered in branches and boughs to break up its sharp, boxy silhouette, lay the squat bulk of his CAZ Hunter, a vehicle that was the rough Russian equivalent of the American Jeep Wrangler.

  Kirov had driven to the Zakarov dacha ahead of Smith and Fiona Devin.

  His first task had been to quickly scout the
area for signs of possible danger.

  His second had been to establish this hidden observation post, concealing himself in a spot where he could keep an eve on the most likely approach to the dacha while Jon and Fiona asked their questions. The sides of his mouth turned down. He hoped they would hurry.

  The broad-shouldered Russian shivered, chilled to the bone despite the protection offered by his heavy winter coat, hat, and gloves. The temperature, already below zero, was falling fast as the night wore on.

  He understood his friends’ need to confirm the information the Voronovs had given them, but he had deep misgivings about coming so far outside Moscow. Here in this harsh and forbidding landscape, they were all terribly exposed. There were no convenient crowds to mingle with. There were no handy Metro stations or packed department stores to duck into for evasion and escape. There were just the trees and the snow and a few winding roads that were completely empty once the sun went down.

  Sighing, the Russian focused his gaze on the ear parked next to the front door. Madame Zakarova kept her Mercedes in a heated garage attached to the house. Her infrequent guests were forced to make do with a small patch of icy gravel. Nothing seemed to be stirring near the dark blue Volga sedan he had obtained for the two Americans.

  Then, suddenly, Kirov stiffened. He heard powerful engines echoing among the trees. The sounds were still some distance away, but the) were unmistakably drawing nearer. He rose higher to get a better look and then dropped flat, reaching into his pocket in a tearing hurry.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Smith’s cell phone rang suddenly.