“LZ dead ahead. One hundred feet, fifty knots,” the flight engineer drawled out.
Smith let go of the strap and sat up straighter. His right foot nudged the bag wedged under his seat, making sure that it was still in easy reach. It contained an assortment of clothing, weapons, and other equipment drawn from U.S.
Special Operations Command caches stored at Aviano. He glanced up and saw Kirov and Fiona making their own preparations for landing. The silver-haired Russian gave him a quick thumbs-up.
Guided by constant chatter from his crew, the Pave Low pilot edged slowly forward and brought his big helicopter safely into their landing zone, a wide clearing in the woods. The ridge running south toward the ECPR compound rose off on the left, a dark mass against the paler, moonlit sky. The wheels thumped down. Immediately, the engine noise began fading, descending rapidly from a shrill, howling roar, to a deepening whine, and then to absolute dead silence. The rotors slowed and stopped turning.
The helicopter crew had orders to wait here until Smith or one of the others called for a pickup. But the six Air Force officers and enlisted men aboard the big MH-53J were also under strict orders to sit tight and do nothing else. Once their feet touched the ground, the improvised Covert-One team would be completely on its own. If they met with disaster while breaking into the ECPR labs, this mission had to be completely deniable by the U.S. government.
Smith unbuckled his seat belt with a feeling of intense relief. It wasn’t that he minded hazardous, nap-of-the-earth flying so much, he told himself, it was just that he preferred having his fate in his own hands. He bent down and tugged the heavy duffel bag out onto the metal deck. Fiona Devin and Kirov followed suit. Together, they slung the bags over their shoulders, trotted down the ramp, and moved off to the east, heading straight across the clearing and into the deeper darkness among the trees.
Jon led the way, pushing up the gentle slope at a fast walk until they were well away from the helicopter. Near the top of the ridge, they entered another clearing, this one much smaller. A little heap of roughly hewn stones, mostly covered by moss and bracken, lay in the center of the clearing. Were those tumbled stones all that remained of an ancient shrine? he wondered. This was an old, old land, fought over for thousands of years by the Umbrians, Etruscans, Romans, Goths, Lombards, and other peoples. Their ruins and tombs dotted the landscape, buried in some places by new towns and cities, swallowed up by forests and ivy in others. Seen by moonlight, the small open space glowed eerily.
“This will do,” Smith whispered to the others. “We’ll change into our gear here, before moving closer to the Center.” He lowered his duffel bag to the ground and knelt to unzip it. Swiftly, he started tugging out articles of clothing and equipment and handing them out to his companions.
Shivering in the cold night air, the three shifted out of the ordinary street clothes and shoes they had been wearing, rapidly donning dark-colored sweaters and jeans. Camouflage sticks blackened their faces and foreheads.
Comfortable hiking boots and thick leather gloves gave better protection and traction for their feet and hands. Night-vision goggles offered them the ability to see in the dark once the moon went down. Padded cases stuffed inside the duffel bags contained a collection of high-tech digital cameras, lightweight tactical radios, laser-surveillance equipment, bolt-cutters, and other tools.
“No body armor?” Kirov asked, pulling an assault vest studded with equipment pouches out of his duffel. He slipped both arms through the vest and zipped it up, checking the fit.
Smith shook his head. “Nope. Armor’s too heavy and too bulky for what we’re supposed to do. If possible, we want to get inside the Center, find out what the hell’s going on in there, and then get out without being spotted. But if we have to run, we’re going to want to run fast.”
“And if someone starts shooting at us?” Kirov asked drily. “What then?”
“Try very hard not to get hit,” Jon advised, with a quick grin. He handed the Russian a 9mm Makarov pistol and three spare magazines, then took a SIG-Sauer sidearm for himself, along with extra ammunition. Both men slung Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns across their backs. Spare thirty-round clips went into pouches on their vests.
Fiona Devin slid a lightweight Glock 19 pistol into the holster belted around her waist and then stood back, watching the two men finish checking their weapons. “That’s quite an arsenal you requested from Fred Klein, Colonel,” she said with a slight, impish smile. “Didn’t you just tell Oleg we were here to walk softly?”
Smith nodded. “Yep.” He patted the pistol at his side. “But frankly, I’m getting tired of being outgunned. This time, if someone starts shooting at us, I want enough firepower along to hit back hard and fast.”
* * *
Groves of age-bent olive trees and ancient vineyards surrounded the European Center for Population Research, running right up to the edge of the fifty-meter-wide clear space maintained all the way around its chain-link perimeter fence. Most of the compound’s modern steel-and-glass buildings were totally dark this late at night. The sole exception was a large laboratory set apart from the rest. Lights glowed behind the blinds on every window. And bright white arc lights and television cameras mounted on its flat roof covered every square centimeter of the approaches to the lab. Between the cameras and the complete absence of any cover, no one could hope to get across the fence and up close without being spotted first.
About one hundred meters from the lab, a slender woman wearing black from head-to-foot lay prone in a shallow drainage ditch bordering one of the old vineyards. Camouflage netting studded with leaves and twigs broke up her silhouette and concealed the pair of image-intensifer binoculars she focused on the building. Even in the silver moonlight, she was effectively invisible from more than a few meters away. Once the moon slid behind the horizon, the only wax anyone else would ever spot her was by walking right through her camouflaged hide.
Suddenly the black-clad woman stiffened, alerted by soft, dry, rustling sounds coming from somewhere behind her. Moving with extreme caution to avoid making any noise herself, she swung around and propped up her binoculars on the edge of the ditch, intently surveying the shadow-filled vineyard for any signs of movement. She held her breath, waiting.
There. One of the shadows changed shape, gradually becoming a man crouching near a row of bare and gray vines that had been pruned back to lie dormant for the winter. Seconds later, another man flitted across the vineyard and joined the first. Then a third figure appeared. This one was a woman.
She focused the binoculars, first on one man’s face and then on the other.
One of her eyebrows rose in utter disbelief. “Well, well, well … look who the cat dragged in,” Randi Russell murmured coolly to herself.
Sighing, she put down the binoculars and then slowly and carefully stood up, abandoning her concealed position. She kept her hands away from her sides, palms out. Startled by her sudden appearance, the three people crouching among the vines swiveled in her direction. The two men drew their pistols with lightning-speed.
“Please try not to kill me, Jon,” she said quietly. “It’s not like you have a surplus of friends as it is.”
* * *
Stunned, Smith eased off the trigger. “Randi?” he said in amazement.
“What the hell are you doing here?’
The slender CIA officer came closer, emerging from the darkness. She crouched down beside them with a grimly amused expression on her smooth, good-looking face. “Since I was here first, it seems to me that should be my question … not yours.”
Almost against his will, Jon grinned back at her. She had a point. He shrugged. “Fair enough.”
He thought fast, trying to come up with a plausible story, one that Randi could choose to believe. She was the sister of his dead fiancee, and an old friend to whom he owed his life several times over, but she also worked for the CIAwhich meant she was not privy to the closely held Covert-One secret.
Unt
il that changed, he was forced to find ever more inventive ways to dodge her awkward questions.
“Some people high up in the Pentagon have asked me to track down the origin of this mysterious disease,” Jon said at last. “The one that’s been killing our intelligence analysts and key leaders in the former Soviet republics. We’re sure now that the illness is man-made, a sort of genetically targeted assassination weapon.”
“But why you exactly?” Randi demanded.
“Because I was the one first approached by a Russian scientist, a colleague of mine, at a medical conference in Prague,” Smith told her. Quicklv, he briefed her on Valentin Petrenko’s claims and the murderous attack used to silence him. “When I passed the word back to Washington, they sent me to Moscow to check out his story, figuring that I had the contacts and the expertise to nail down the facts.”
Randi nodded reluctantlv. “That almost makes sense, Jon,” she admitted.
She looked skeptically at Kirov, whom she had gotten to know years before while working as a field officer in Moscow. “I assume this is where Major General Kirov of the Russian Federal Security Service comes in?”
The big, silver-haired man shook his head with a smile. “It’s just plain Oleg Kirov these days, Ms. Russell. I’m retired.”
Randi snorted. “Yeah, I just bet you are.” She waved a hand at the submachine gun slung across his back. “Most pensioners don’t go wandering around the Italian countryside at night while armed to the teeth.”
“Oleg has been working with me,” Smith explained. “As a sort of private consultant.”
“So who is this?” Randi asked pointedly, nodding toward Fiona Devin.
“Your secretary?”
Jon winced, seeing Fiona stiffen angrily. “Ms. Devin is a freelance journalist based in Moscow,” he said quickly. “She was already investigating the first disease outbreak when I arrived.”
“A journalist?” Randi said in disbelief. She shook her head. “Let me get this straight, Jon you actually brought a reporter along on a covert mission?
Don’t you think that’s earning this whole Pentagon media-embedding program a bit too far?”
“I am not exactly here as journalist,” Fiona said coldly, speaking for the first time. The trace of her Irish accent was stronger now. “Not anymore.”
“Meaning what?” Randi demanded.
Smith filled her in on the various attempts made by Erich Brandt, acting for Konstantin Malkovic, to kill them. He ended by telling her about the orders issued by the Kremlin for their immediate arrest. “In the circumstances, Oleg and I thought she should stick with us,” he finished lamely, realizing how improbable that all sounded.
There was a moment’s silence.
At last Randi threw up her hands. She stared hard at Jon. “Am I really supposed to believe this cockamamie story of yours?”
“As wild as it sounds, it is the truth,” he said stoutly, glad that the darkness hid his red face. Well, at least part of the truth, he told his abraded conscience silently.
“So I guess the three of you just waltzed out of Moscow, right under the noses of half the militia and the FSB?” Randi asked sardonically.
“I have friends in shipping,” Kirov said calmly.
“Right,” the CIA officer said drily. She looked all three of them up and down, clearly noting all of their weapons and other equipment. “And these friends of yours… in shipping … just happened to be able to provide you with all this nifty hardware?”
Smith grinned at her. “Not quite. That was my part. Remember, I have friends in the Air Force.”
“Naturally.” Randi sighed, apparently accepting defeat, at least temporar-ily. “Okay, Jon. I give up. You three are just the pure, accidental heroes you claim to be.”
“Then perhaps it’s your turn to tell us what you’re doing out here in the dark, Ms. Russell,” Fiona Devin suggested coolly.
For a second, Randi bristled. Then, surprisingly, she smiled. “My what big teeth you have, Ms. Devin.” She shrugged. “It’s pretty simple, actually. You’re hunting for the source of this genetically aimed biological weapon. Well, I’m hunting the man who undoubtedly created it.”
“Wulf Renke,” Smith said quietly.
“That’s the guy,” Randi agreed flatly. She ran through the long and bloody trail that had led her all the way from Baghdad to Berlin, and then, finally, here to Orvieto. “I had to guess at the end,” she admitted. “The phone network we were tracing went dead before my technical experts could nail down any specific locations. But when I did some research on my own, this place popped out as the best fit for Renke in Umbria. There are other medical research facilities around, but the KCPR seemed a natural plenty of money, plenty of scientists from all parts of Europe working together, and all the top-of-the-line equipment his black little heart could desire.”
“So you hopped a flight down here?”
“To Rome, and then up here by car,” the CIA officer confirmed. “I’ve been in position since early this afternoon.”
Smith heard a strained note in her voice, one that he had been noticing for a while. “You keep saying ‘I,’ Randi,” he commented. “Where’s the rest ot our team?”
“There is no team,” she said grimly. “Just me. And nobody at Langlev or anywhere else knows where I am right now. Al least I hope not.”
Now it was Smith’s turn to be surprised. “You’re working without a net?
Without any Agency support? Why?”
Randi grimaced. “Because Renke, or maybe this Malkovic bastard you mentioned, has a mole somewhere high up, someone who’s been feeding him everything I’ve learned.” Her mouth tightened to a thin, angry line. “Playing by the rules has cost the lives of three good people already. So now I’m not taking any more chances.”
Smith, Fiona, and Kirov nodded slowly, understanding both her reasoning and her fury. Betrayal by someone in your own ranks was the ultimate nightmare for every intelligence agent.
“We should join forces, Ms. Russell,” Kirov told her quietly. “It is unorthodox, I admit, but when we are faced by such dangerous enemies, working together is only common sense. And time is very short. We cannot waste any more of it arguing among ourselves.”
Jon and Fiona nodded in agreement.
Randi stared at them for a long, painful moment. Then she nodded slowly.
“All right, you people have a deal.” Her mouth twisted into a wry smile. “After all, this isn’t exactly the first time Jon and I have stumbled across each other in the field.”
“No, it isn’t,” Smith said quietly.
“Perhaps you’re fated to be together,” Fiona Devin suggested, with just a hint of mischief in her voice.
Randi snorted softly. “Oh, sure. Jon and I are a regular dynamic duo the Mutt and Jeff of the espionage business.”
Smith wisely decided to keep his mouth shut. This was one of those wonderful moments when anything he said was bound to land him in hot water.
Or maybe even boiling water, he thought warily, eyeing the tight-lipped expression on Randi’s face.
But then she shook herself back to the present. “You’d better come and see what we’re up against. Because, believe me, whatever you heroes have in mind is not going to be easy.”
Chapter Forty-Seven
General Staff Command Bunker, Outside Moscow
A large display map of Russia and its neighbors occupied one concrete wall of the elaborate command center buried far below the surface of the earth. Symbols scattered across the map showed the current position and readiness of the major military units slated for ZHUKOV. The room itself was filled with rows of consoles, each equipped with the latest secure communications to allow staff officers to maintain constant contact with the troop commanders in the field.
Russian President Viktor Dudarev stood at the back of the room watching as the array of generals, colonels, and majors moved unhurriedly through the intricate work of bringing his long-held plans ever closer to reality.
One of the last yellow symbolsdepicting the two divisions assembled secretly in the snow-bound Caucasus Mountainsturned green.
“Colonel-General Sevalkin reports that his command is in position,” Major Piotr Kirichenko, his military aide, murmured. “All ZHUKOV ground forces are now deployed to their final pre-war bivouacs. The senior commanders will begin briefing their regimental and battalion leaders in twelve hours.”
Dudarev nodded in satisfaction. The decision to hold back those operational briefings until practically the last possible moment had been his, one intended to prevent leaks that could jeopardize ZHUKOV’s success. He glanced at Kirichenko. “Are there any signs of a reaction among our targets?”
The younger man shook his head. “No, sir. Intelligence confirms that the Ukrainian and other armies are still in their peacetime quarters, with absolutely no sign of any higher alert status.”
“What about the Americans or NATO?”
Kirichenko frowned slightly. “We are picking up fragmentary signs that American aircraft squadrons at bases in Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom may have been ordered to higher readiness, but there is no indication of any significant movement of those planes toward our frontiers.”
Dudarev turned to the stocky, gray-haired man standing behind him. He raised an eyebrow. “Well, Alexei?”
“So far the Americans have been denied any permission to move aircraft eastward,” Ivanov confirmed. “The European governments have their heads well down in the sand. Each is waiting to see what, if anything, Castilla can prove about our intentions.”
“And he will find it very difficult to prove anything from an intensive care ward,” the Russian president said with a cold smile. “In the meantime, let us hope that the Europeans continue to choose wisely over the next twenty-four hours. By the time they wake up to the new balance of power on this continent, it will be far too late.”
Near Orvieto
“See the problem, Jon?” Randi murmured. They were lying next to each other in her camouflaged hiding place overlooking the brightly lit ECPR
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