Under Fire

by Tom Clancy

  • • •

  DOM WALKED into the apartment a half-hour after everyone else and said, “I walked every foot of those docks. Either the UTM coordinate I have is wrong or it’s sitting at the bottom of the harbor.”

  “The other ones were dead-on,” Spellman replied. “It doesn’t sound like Wellesley to make that kind of mistake.”

  “We’ll know more when Gavin gets back to us. He’ll triple-check all the numbers. By the way, where’s Rebaz?”

  “He’s staying the night in his official residence, with his wife, Marta, and Aminat. They’re leaving for Baku in the morning.”

  “Good for him,” Ysabel said. “And Miss Balloon Boobs, where is she?”

  Spellman laughed, as did Dom and Jack. He said, “That’s not very nice.”

  “You’re right, my apologies. Miss Balloon Breasts. Is that better?”

  “Much.”

  Seth, shaking his head, replied, “Niki has—”

  “Does she dot the i with a heart?”

  “A smiley face. She has her own place in Derbent. I’ll have you know, she wants to be an actress or a—”

  “Pop star,” Ysabel guessed.

  “Yep.”

  “Imagine that.”

  “Rebaz does love his wife, Ysabel, and they’ve got a good marriage. It’s just a different culture here.”

  “I’m Iranian. I know about different culture. I’m not judging him, actually. It’s just that he seems to be such a remarkable man; to have him be so banal with his love life is disappointing.”

  “Hold on, let me get a dictionary.”

  “Shush,” she replied.

  “Nobody’s perfect. He’ll be a better leader than Dagestan’s seen in the last hundred years. Listen, if you really feel strongly about it, I’ll talk to him about Niki. Maybe he can convince her to stop using the smiley faces.”

  “Funny man.”

  Seth reached across and gave her forearm a squeeze. “I’ve missed you, Ysabel.”

  “Careful, there, buddy,” Jack said with a grin. “Don’t get handsy.”

  “Sorry.”

  Ysabel said, “It’s good to see you laugh, Seth.”

  “It feels good. So, does this mean we’re friends again?”

  Ysabel pursed her lips, thinking. “Not yet, but in time maybe. In the meantime, I should probably get that scorpion out of your bed.”

  “Funny girl.” Seth paused, looked down at his hands. “Listen, guys, this ain’t easy for me, but I’m sorry. I’m sorry for it all. I shouldn’t—”

  “It’s okay, Seth,” Jack said. He had no doubt Seth meant what he said, but he feared that until the coup was finished his friend would be vulnerable to the win-at-all-costs mind-set that had been driving him for three years.

  “No, it’s not, not even close,” Seth replied. “I shouldn’t have used you to flush Wellesley; I almost got you both killed—at Pardis and at the farmhouse. Truth is, I kinda feel like I’ve lost my way. I’ve done things in the past year I never thought I could. After this, I need to do some serious thinking.” He chuckled. “Hell, maybe you guys can even set up some kind of intervention for me—a ‘Hey, Seth, you’ve been a real asshole’ type of thing?”

  Both Ysabel and Jack laughed. “Deal,” Jack said.

  Makhachkala

  JACK AWOKE to the sound of rain pattering on their bedroom window. He got up and peeked through the curtain. It was still dark out and the streetlights were reflected in the puddles. He started getting dressed.

  “Where are you going?” Ysabel asked groggily.

  “To get coffee.”

  “Fabulous idea.”

  He walked out to the main room. Seth and Spellman were sitting at the conference table with a carafe of coffee between them. Newspapers were spread across the table before them and one of the wall televisions was tuned to a morning news show, the volume muted. President Nabiyev was displayed in the inset box beside the presenter’s head.

  Spellman looked up, gave him a wave, then returned to his paper.

  “Morning, Jack,” Seth said.

  Jack poured himself a cup of coffee. “What’s going on?”

  “Matt and I decided to break the story a day early.”

  “What story?”

  “It seems President Nabiyev has been selling city contracts to the highest bidder, then using the kickback money to buy up land outside Sulak.”

  “Is all that true?”

  “Every word of it,” Spellman replied.

  “And it’ll get worse as the day goes on,” said Seth. “Turns out Nabiyev didn’t even pay for the land, but instead used Dagestan’s version of eminent domain to oust the owners. The kickback money is hidden in an account in Liechtenstein. To top it off, he was planning to sell the land back to the government at triple the going price.”

  “So this is your catalyst,” said Jack. “This is what puts the people on the streets.”

  “More or less. Medzhid will step forward, share the people’s outrage and disappointment, promise a full investigation, and tell them they deserve better from their leadership. From there the message will turn to freedom, national pride, the right to be heard, and so on. By this time tomorrow the story will have gone from worthless swampland in Sulak to the future of Dagestan.”

  Seth said these things in such a blasé way that Jack wondered whether his friend truly believed them or whether they were simply a propaganda tool, red meat for the masses he himself had primed. He hoped it was the former. And if it wasn’t, what then? While the “means to an end” ideology was one he’d never been entirely comfortable with, he knew all too well that the real world wasn’t all roses and puppies. If the stakes were high enough, were any methods justifiable? Who set those thresholds, and was morality scalable?

  Questions like this made Jack happy he hadn’t even the slightest trace of political ambition. Then again, neither had his dad, and look what that got him.

  Jack’s phone vibrated. It was a text from Gavin. HAVE INFO.

  He took Ysabel a cup of coffee and then she joined them at the table. Jack dialed Gavin and put him on speakerphone. “We’re all here.”

  “On this end also,” Gerry said. “The BBC’s talking about President Nabiyev. Is that your doing, Seth?”

  “His own, actually,” Spellman replied. “The story was going to get out eventually. We just massaged the timeline a bit. It’s high time for him to go.”

  Jack said, “What have you got for us?”

  “We’re still waiting on the overhead shots,” said Clark. “She’s working on it, but the retasking is a bit more complicated these days.”

  “Who’s ‘she’?” asked Spellman. “Never mind. I don’t want to know.”

  “As for the UTM coordinates,” Gavin said, “I’ve got them all mapped. All but five of them are in the city. I’m sending you all a Dropbox link right now.”

  Seth and Spellman crowded together before Spellman’s laptop and started comparing the coordinates with their hub sites.

  “Jack, I think Wellesley’s Chirpoy apartment went dead. I installed a key-logger program on the main computer after you left. About an hour ago I got a flurry of activity—burst e-mail traffic, their landline forwarder pushing out a backlog of calls . . . that kind of stuff, like somebody had sent some kind of cyber ‘bug-out’ signal.”

  “Or a ‘go’ signal,” Ysabel replied.

  “That seems more likely,” Clark agreed.

  “Anyway, after that all six computers jumped on the apartment’s broadband for about forty seconds, then, poof, lights out. I managed to snag some of the residual outbound messages before that happened, so I’ll see if I can make anything of it.”

  “Wellesley’s pulled up stakes and moved,” Clark said. “He knows the Nabiyev story means you’ve started prepping.”

 
“The question is, Where’s he gone?” said Gerry.

  And what will be his first countermove? Jack thought.

  • • •

  “THEY’RE ALL THERE,” Seth said. “Every damn one of our hubs nailed down to a square meter. How the hell did they get this?”

  “How many are there?” asked Jack.

  “Twenty-six.”

  Jack opened Ysabel’s MacBook and clicked on the Dropbox link Gavin had sent them. The map popped up, an overhead full-color view of Makhachkala covered in red dots labeled with their corresponding UTM coordinates. Ysabel and Dom watched over Jack’s shoulder as he zoomed and panned the map.

  “There’s a total of thirty-two locations, but only twenty-six hubs,” said Ysabel. “What are these other six? Do you guys have anything there?”

  “No,” said Spellman.

  “Did you ever?”

  He shook his head. “Four of those are in the Tarki-Taus west of the city. There’s nothing up there but some hiking trails and a maintenance road. The fifth location is the one you couldn’t find at the harbor, Dom.”

  “Yeah, I saw that. It’s in the exact place I looked the first time. What about the sixth?”

  “It’s downtown somewhere, a building I don’t recognize.”

  “Then these six are mistakes or red herrings,” said Ysabel. She stared hard at the screen for a few moments, then said, “Jack, can you show me a list of the coordinates next to the map?”

  “Sure.”

  He brought up the list, then split-screened it with the map. She traced her index finger over the screen, matching up locations and numbers. “This is interesting. Take a look.”

  She turned the laptop so everyone could see.

  “The six spare locations have different coordinates . . .” She highlighted the ones in question:

  Hepo5..38GZT.703971mE.4759623mN

  Gaxy4..38GZT.703971mE.4759623mN

  Gefo9..38GZT.703971mE.4759623mN

  Xole8..38GZT.703971mE.4759623mN

  Byma1.38GZT.703971mE.4759623mN

  Hevu9,,38GZT.703971mE.4759623mN

  “I don’t see it,” said Seth. “Different how?”

  “Look at Hepo Five. See the double decimal points after it? The first four have that notation, the next one, Byma One—your site at the harbor, Dom—has a single decimal, and Hevu Nine has double commas.”

  “Input errors. Typos,” Seth said. “Doesn’t mean anything.”

  “I’m not convinced.”

  “Suit yourself. It still doesn’t answer the real question, though. How the hell did Wellesley find out about the hubs?”

  “Who else knows about them?” asked Jack.

  “All of them? Just us at this table. Matt and I were real careful about compartmentalization. I mean, yeah, each hub captain knows what he or she is running, but they don’t know there are others—or at least how many more there are and their locations.”

  “Do you run diagnostic tests on them?”

  “About once a week,” Spellman replied, “but it’s just a blind-burst transmission that lasts all of two seconds.”

  Dom said, “How’ve you been keeping track of all this?”

  “Nothing online, if that’s what you’re asking. It’s all hand-to-hand between me and Seth, with password-protected flash drives. I always know where mine is.”

  “Same here,” said Seth. “When we visit the hubs we don’t use the same schedule or route, and we make damned sure we haven’t picked up any tails. I’m telling you, our op sec is solid.”

  “Then I don’t know what to tell you,” Jack replied. “The truth is, right now it doesn’t matter how Wellesley knows about them, it matters what he’s got planned for them.”

  “We need to know about those planes,” Spellman said.

  • • •

  THEY SPLIT UP: Spellman and Dom went to find the unidentified building downtown while Jack and Ysabel took one of Medzhid’s Suburbans into the Tarki-Taus.

  By the time they reached the outskirts of Makhachkala, the rain was falling in sheets and slashing at the windshield while the wipers struggled to keep up. As they left the paved road for a gravel one, Jack switched the Suburban into four-wheel drive. The road narrowed and steepened into a series of switchbacks that wound up the northern flank of the escarpment before finally opening onto a maintenance road that ran north along a ridge overlooking the city.

  The trees on either side of them swayed in the wind. Branches seemed to reach out, their tips scraping over the Suburban’s roof.

  Through the trees Jack caught glimpses of the city, still lit up by streetlights in the gloom. In the distance the Caspian Sea lay shrouded in fog.

  “These are closer to mountains than they are to hills,” Ysabel said.

  “How far does this road go?”

  “We’re at the far southern end, so . . . about six miles.”

  “What’s our first spot?”

  “Hepo Five.”

  They’d decided the UTM’s alphanumeric prefixes were indeed randomly generated place names. The building Dom and Spellman were checking out was Hevu9.

  “It should be a half-mile in front of us.”

  They covered the distance at a near walking pace as the gravel beneath the Suburban’s tires became more and more waterlogged.

  “Just up here, on the right.”

  Jack braked to a stop. Ysabel rolled down her window. The interior filled with the sound of rain. Beside them, just over the edge of the road, was a treeless, flattened rectangle of earth roughly the size of a semi-truck. The far end looked down over the city.

  “Those stumps look freshly cut,” Ysabel said.

  “Stay here.”

  Jack pulled up the hood of his poncho, climbed out, and walked into the clearing. The dirt was rutted with bulldozer tracks half full of water. He walked the perimeter, looking for anything that might explain the clearing’s purpose. There was nothing.

  He went back to the Suburban.

  “Well?”

  “It’s just a flat patch of earth.”

  “It’s more than that,” Ysabel replied. “We just have to figure out what.”

  They continued on to the remainder of the sites—Gaxy4, Gefo9, and Xole8—and found each one the same as the first: razed clearings overlooking Makhachkala. They were spread down the ridgeline at one-mile intervals, give or take a few yards.

  “Well, I’m sure as hell not going to try to keep track of the code names,” Jack said. “My brain is too full as it is.”

  “How about ‘Ridge Sites’?” Ysabel offered.

  “Works for me.”

  Jack’s phone rang. He put it on speaker. “Dom, what’s up?”

  “Nothing. We checked Hevu Nine—”

  “We’ve decided we’re not using those names anymore,” said Ysabel.

  “Thank God. Anyway, it’s a two-story brick building on Lena Road; it looks like an old schoolhouse. There’s a realtor’s sign on the front. The doors are padlocked and the windows are boarded up. Want us to break in?”

  “No, let’s check out the realtor first.”

  “We’re going to head back to Byma One—sorry, the docks—to check it out again. Meet you back at the apartment.”

  Frustrated, Jack and Ysabel drove up and down the maintenance road, half hoping they might spot someone nosing around the ridge sites. After an hour they gave up and headed back down into Makhachkala.

  Despite the rain, the city seemed busier, the streets and sidewalks full of cars and pedestrians. Coffee shops and restaurants were packed. Jack sensed an undercurrent of agitation in gestures and body language. Patrons were clustered around tables, leaning in as they spoke to one another.

  Ysabel said, “Do you feel it?”

  “Yes.”

  Seth and Spellman’s corruption story
about President Nabiyev was gaining traction.

  • • •

  BACK AT THE TORTORETO they found Medzhid seated on the couch, talking quietly with one of his assistants, Yana, whom Medzhid had promoted after Albina’s death. The minister looked up and gave them a curt nod.

  “He’s got his game face on,” Jack whispered to Ysabel.

  “I don’t blame him.”

  Medzhid gestured them over. “Thank you for what you said yesterday, Jack. You were right: I was asleep. But I’m awake now.”

  “Good.”

  Ysabel asked, “Marta and Aminat?”

  “Safe in Baku. Whatever happens here in the coming days, they will be safe. I only hope they have a home to come back to. By the way, Aminat told me to give you a message.”

  “What?”

  “And I quote: ‘You better be taking your Keflex, mister.’”

  Jack smiled. “Tell her I am. No oozing pus.”

  Dom and Spellman walked into the apartment, and the four of them settled around the conference table to compare notes.

  “Where’s Seth?” asked Jack.

  “Driving around, taking the pulse of the city,” Spellman replied. “Medzhid’s starting our PR push later this morning. We pull the trigger in forty-eight hours. How did you guys fare?”

  Jack explained what they’d found in the hills.

  “How fresh were the sites?” asked Dom.

  “No more than three weeks, I’d guess.”

  “Those are some pretty precise intervals,” said Spellman. “Can’t be an accident. I’ll do some digging and see if there are any construction projects planned up there. As for the Lena Road building, we called the realtor. According to her, the building’s already been leased. She just forgot to put up the ‘Sold’ sign. The buyer—she wouldn’t give us a name—is due to move in this week.”

  “Well, we know who it is. Wellesley,” said Ysabel.

  “Matt, call Gavin with the particulars. Hacking a realtor’s computer should be a nice change of pace for him. How’d you do with the docks?”