The Kremlin Conspiracy

by Joel C. Rosenberg

  “Yes, Nikolay Vladimirovich, I have the revised estimates with me,” he said in exasperation. “Tell the president I will transmit them the moment I get into the office.”

  “No, sir, that’s not why I’m calling.”

  “Then why?”

  “Where are you?”

  “Four minutes out. Can it wait?”

  “No, it cannot,” Kropatkin said. “Brace yourself, Mikhail Borisovich.”

  “Whatever for?”

  “The president, sir.”

  “What about him?”

  “I’m afraid he’s dead.”

  “What? That’s impossible.”

  “I just got off the phone with the palace. Aleksandr Ivanovich is dead, as is Dmitri Dmitrovich.”

  “Both of them?” Petrovsky said, sitting bolt upright in the backseat of the bulletproof sedan, its flashing blue lights—and those of the security cars flanking them—illuminating his face in the stormy darkness. “When? How?”

  “It was Oleg Stefanovich—he shot them both at point-blank range,” Kropatkin replied breathlessly. “They were alone in the president’s study. It all happened so quickly. But it appears that he had help. He got to the airport—Domededovo—where someone was waiting with a private plane.”

  “Tell me the police stopped him.”

  “There was a shoot-out, but Oleg was able to get on board a jet and take off. We were tracking it, but they’ve turned off their transponder, and for the moment we’ve lost it.”

  Petrovsky cursed and then ordered the deputy to scramble a dozen MiGs, find the jet, and take it down.

  “Right away, sir,” Kropatkin said. “I’ll give you an update when you arrive. But that’s not all.”

  “Go on.”

  “You need to convene the cabinet. We are about to go to war. The country does not have a president, but we desperately need one. And with all due respect, sir, it should be you.”

  THE WHITE HOUSE SITUATION ROOM, WASHINGTON, D.C.—29 SEPTEMBER

  “We have confirmation, Mr. President.”

  Bill McDermott handed Clarke a printout of a text he’d just received from the Magic Palace. The Gulfstream was safely off the ground. The Raven was on it. The Agency’s people had the thumb drive in their possession, and its contents had been electronically uploaded to the CIA’s mainframe computers. Their analysts were already starting to break down the data.

  The president nodded approvingly. It was the first piece of good news he’d seen in days. But he was still furious with his NSC team. “Why hasn’t the hotline call with Luganov been set up?” he demanded.

  McDermott said he didn’t know what the delay was. Officials in the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon said the problem wasn’t on their end. Their counterparts in Moscow were dragging their feet, and it was not yet clear why.

  Marcus unbuckled his seat belt and headed to the cabin.

  His first priority was to check on Morris. She’d been hit in the right shoulder, Oleg said, and the wound was quite serious. Oleg was doing his best to patch her up. He’d put her in his own seat, which he had fully reclined. He’d managed to finally stanch the bleeding using every cloth he could find on board, from towels to pillowcases. He’d given her several shots of morphine to manage the pain. Then he’d covered her with a blanket and was now telling her stories of his childhood to distract her from how much trouble she was in.

  “Not bad for a government lackey,” Marcus said as he dabbed the perspiration off her face with a washcloth and wiped several strands of hair out of her eyes.

  He leaned close to her cheek and whispered, “You’re going to be okay. I’m going to make sure of it.”

  Morris tried to smile. It was more of a grimace, but it would do.

  Marcus excused himself and went into the restroom. He was no longer wearing the disguise he’d put on at the Ramada. He’d taken that off when he’d changed into the copilot’s uniform. Still, as he looked at his unshaven face in the mirror, he wasn’t happy with what he saw. The disguise was gone. The pain was not.

  He was suddenly hit with a wave of despair. He desperately missed Elena. Closing his eyes, he could still see her sitting in Mr. Grantham’s English class back in the sixth grade. They’d only been eleven. They’d gotten married when in their early twenties. Now he was approaching his forties alone. His hair was going gray at the temples. He had crow’s-feet around his bloodshot, exhausted eyes. He had scrapes and bruises all over his body—and for all his morning runs and evenings at the gym, he’d been surprised how quickly he’d been winded tonight.

  Then again, this little team had made it farther than he’d really thought possible. It was only by the grace of God, he knew, not by any skill of his own. That said, what was next? Was the Lord really going to bring them this far only to let them be blown out of the sky? He reached into his pocket and pulled out the thumb drive Oleg had given him. He stared at it, wondering what treasures it contained. He hoped this had all been worth it. Only time would tell the full value to the American government, and perhaps to NATO, should the Clarke team choose to share any of the fruit of their classified labors. But the mission had cost more than Marcus had wanted to pay. He wasn’t morally opposed to killing bad guys, especially to protect the people and country he loved. But killing anyone took its toll.

  Would it stop the war? He prayed it would. Then again, he knew only too well that if his and Jenny’s involvement with Oleg were discovered, that information alone could trigger a war with Russia anyway. And what if they did die tonight, shot down by an air-to-air missile? It was an ugly thought but a real and rapidly growing possibility, even probability. He wasn’t scared. He knew where he was going when he died. He was pretty sure Jenny was a follower of Christ as well. He would have loved time to talk faith and so many other things with her. But what about Oleg? What would happen to him? Marcus suddenly realized that in everything that had transpired, he’d never thought once about Oleg’s soul. Did the man know the Savior? Had he given his life to Christ? Were his sins forgiven? Had he ever even heard the gospel clearly explained to him?

  Marcus couldn’t remember thinking about such things in the Marines or the Secret Service. He’d done his job and done it to the best of his ability. He’d never second-guessed the morality of the mission. The Taliban were sheer evil. Al Qaeda was worse. Each person he took out had been a clean kill, casualties of a military conflict. Marcus was more than willing to give up his own life to protect his country and her leaders. But the deaths of his wife and son had changed everything. Studying with Pastor Emerson and the vets on Wednesdays back in Lincoln Park had changed him too. These days he thought a great deal about eternity. Why, then, had he not thought of Oleg’s fate? He felt uncertain and ashamed.

  Petrovsky got more bad news the moment he arrived at the Defense Ministry.

  The air force had been scrambled, but the plane carrying Oleg Stefanovich still had not been found. There were just too many planes in the sky at the moment, too much clutter and confusion over Moscow and the western skies. It was like finding a needle in a haystack, he was told.

  He went ballistic. “Get every plane on the ground—now,” he ordered.

  He turned on every TV in his office. Fortunately, news of the assassinations had not yet broken. A quick check of multiple channels confirmed that, but Petrovsky knew the story would not hold for long. He had already called Luganov’s chief of staff and persuaded him to summon the entire cabinet for an emergency meeting at the Kremlin without giving any hint as to the reason. At the same time, he knew Kropatkin—now operating as acting director of the FSB—had made it crystal clear to his men that anyone who leaked this news would be guilty of treason and would be executed without a trial.

  The one person he worried about most was Katya Slatsky, who had been taken to the Kremlin after the debacle at the airport. She had to be isolated indefinitely. If there was one person who could leak the whole thing prematurely and not care in the slightest about the implications, i
t was she. Petrovsky thus ordered Kropatkin to send someone to Luganov’s private chambers at the Kremlin, drug her, and keep her drugged until they could figure out exactly what to do with her. Kropatkin didn’t flinch but vowed to carry out the orders at once.

  Meanwhile, Petrovsky issued written orders for all Russian military forces to cease their exercises and begin withdrawing from the borders of the Baltics and Ukraine. To the outside world, such actions would look entirely consistent with what Luganov had been saying publicly. The inner circle of high government officials, he knew, might believe Petrovsky had orchestrated a coup d’état to stop a war they knew he did not support. He did it anyway. The hours ahead would be chaotic enough. There was no guarantee he would wind up at the top of the Kremlin’s greasy pole, but if there was anything he could do while still alive and in power to defuse the prospect of nuclear war with NATO, he was bound and determined to do it.

  RUSSIAN AIRSPACE—29 SEPTEMBER

  “It’s time,” Marcus said.

  He explained to Morris and Oleg exactly what was happening and how little time they had to decide their fate. As he did, the Gulfstream hit a bit of turbulence. The plane shook for a few moments—worrying an already-rattled Oleg—then stabilized again.

  Just then, Marcus’s satphone rang. He answered it, gave a nine-digit code proving his identity, listened carefully, acknowledged the message, and hung up. He raced back to the cockpit. Seconds later, a series of alarms started sounding and lights began flashing. These had nothing to do with the standard avionics package. The plane’s sophisticated radar system had been installed by technicians at Langley. It was not unlike the ones used by American fighter jets and even Air Force One.

  From the back, Oleg shouted a message from Jenny. “Turn off the autopilot.”

  Marcus did, then flicked a series of other switches and a new radar display flickered to life. Gone were the weather data and the images of the massive snowstorm hitting the northwestern provinces of Russia. Now he was staring at a display showing two blips forty miles back and gaining fast.

  “What’s that?” Oleg demanded, suddenly standing behind Marcus.

  “Go finish getting her ready,” Marcus replied. He didn’t have time for explanations.

  Reluctantly Oleg agreed. The moment he left, Marcus closed the cockpit door. The blips were MiGs. The Global Operations Center at Langley had just called to alert him that they’d intercepted a series of Russian civilian and military communications. On the civilian side, the Kremlin had issued a full ground stop on all flights preparing to take off throughout the Russian Federation. They were requiring all air traffic over the country to land immediately at the nearest airport. On the military side, Russian fighter squadrons throughout the Western Military District were being scrambled and directed to hunt and shoot down any Gulfstream business jets of any description. The Magic Palace had not indicated that the fighter pilots or their weapons systems officers had been given a specific tail number. They had, however, been authorized to use any means necessary to prevent any business jets from leaving Russian airspace.

  Marcus was surprised the Russians had taken this long to issue such an order. He chalked it up to the fog of war and the interruption in the chain of command Oleg had created by taking out the president and the FSB chief. But none of that mattered. Whatever delay there had been, it was over now. The MiGs were up and in hot pursuit.

  He turned the yoke, banking the plane to the north, off the flight plan and away from St. Petersburg and beyond it Helsinki. There was no way he was going to let the Russians force them to land. He and Morris had discussed this in depth when they’d been planning Oleg’s extraction. If they were shot down, so be it. But under no circumstances could they let themselves or this plane and its contents be taken intact.

  The fighter jets were now only thirty-two miles behind. No sooner had Marcus turned off and reset the alarms than they sounded again. He looked again to the enhanced radar screen and saw two more MiGs coming up from a base just south of St. Petersburg. These were only twenty miles out. When the alarms blared yet again, he spotted two more MiGs converging on them from the north, less than fifteen miles out. So that was that. They had no fewer than six fighter jets streaking toward them with orders to keep them from reaching international airspace at all costs. And then the radio began to squawk.

  The first message came from St. Petersburg air traffic control. It was directed to all civilian flights, informing them that Russian airspace was now closed and ordering them to land immediately. Marcus was struck by the fact that Langley had gotten that message to them faster than the Russians themselves. Moments later came the second message, from the lead pilot of one of the Russian fighter jets. He spoke firmly in clear if heavily accented English: obey his orders and follow him to the nearest air force base, or be fired upon. Marcus didn’t hesitate. He took the controls, picked up the intercom, and ordered Oleg and Jenny to cinch their seat belts as tight as they could.

  Then he pushed the yoke forward and began a brutally steep dive. It took mere seconds to plunge from forty-three thousand feet to only twenty thousand feet, and Marcus found his stomach in his throat. The g-forces threatened to knock him out. But he hadn’t lost the MiGs. They were screaming in from every direction, and as he leveled out the G4—now around eighteen thousand feet—he knew they were going to be fired on at any moment.

  Marcus decreased speed and once again turned on the autopilot. Then he unbuckled himself and left the cockpit.

  “You ready?” he asked.

  They both nodded.

  “As we’ll ever be,” Morris managed to say, brave to the last.

  Bill McDermott sat in the Situation Room, next to the president.

  Like his colleagues and Clarke himself, he had tried to hold out hope for his friend and the team he had with him, though he knew it was futile. Now that they’d been found—now that both the Kremlin and the White House were tracking the G4 in real time—there was no way Marcus, Morris, and the Raven were ever going to shake the MiGs. To the contrary, they were about to be blown to kingdom come. McDermott’s eyes were glued to the flat-screen monitors, and he couldn’t look away.

  The largest monitor—the one mounted on the far wall, directly across from the commander in chief—showed the live radar tracking of six fighter planes converging on the Gulfstream. Various digital displays along the bottom of the screen provided rapidly changing data from each of the seven aircraft—altitude, airspeed, direction, and so forth. McDermott had been stunned by the G4’s harrowing twenty-five-thousand-foot plunge, but he was even more disturbed by the bizarre decision to level off at eighteen thousand feet and slow down. Yes, the plane was smack-dab in the middle of a thick band of clouds. But it wasn’t going to matter. It wasn’t going to hide them or make them any less vulnerable. Marcus and Morris certainly knew that, so why weren’t they still diving?

  The Gulfstream wasn’t a fighter jet. It wasn’t built to withstand the extreme pressures of dogfighting. But by diving for St. Petersburg, not banking away from it, and flying low across the deck, they might buy enough time to figure out a way to get out into neutral territory over the Gulf of Finland. However crazy the Russians were, they certainly weren’t going to shoot a G4 out of the sky over one of their most populous cities. Yet the radar track showed none of the moves McDermott would have made in Marcus’s place. Then again, McDermott knew Marcus had never flown a jet. He’d flown Piper Cubs in his twenties. So he was at the mercy of the CIA’s Moscow station chief.

  Jennifer Morris was brilliant and highly respected throughout the intelligence community. And she’d helped Marcus pull off one of the greatest intelligence coups in the history of the Agency. Still, maybe she hadn’t been ready for what came next. He couldn’t say for sure, but one thing he knew: Jenny Morris was about to get his friend—and the best Marine he’d ever had the honor to command—killed.

  The Situation Room was silent. The Pentagon wasn’t feeding them live audio of the Russian pilots
. Nor were they getting any communications from the G4. No one gathered around the conference table and staring at the screens spellbound was saying anything. Not the president. Not the generals. What was there to say?

  Then McDermott saw it. He grabbed one of the remotes off the table in front of him and zoomed in on the image. American radar was picking up an air-to-air missile being fired by the lead MiG-29, followed almost instantaneously by a second one. It took only the blink of an eye, and the G4 disappeared from the screen.

  Everyone knew what had happened. Yet McDermott couldn’t believe it. He kept staring at the screen in silence as the MiGs turned in pairs, presumably returning to their base.

  Then, out of nowhere, the Pentagon patched through the intercepted audio of the Russian pilots after all. They were whooping and hollering and congratulating one another, as were their base controllers and surely their superiors in Moscow.

  And Bill McDermott just sat there, staring at the flickering screen, aghast.

  The missiles had come quick.

  The resulting fireball had been as blinding as it had been enormous. But as Marcus hurtled downward through the thick clouds and frigid night sky—free-falling at terminal velocity with an unopened parachute strapped to his back, Jenny Morris strapped to his front, and Oleg in a separate parachute a few yards to his right—he didn’t feel scared. He wasn’t thinking about the rest of the escape or the aftermath of the tensions between Russia and the West. Nor was he thinking about Elena or Lars, or about his mother or the Garcias or any of his Marine buddies, much less the rest of his life. There’d be plenty of time to think about such things soon enough.

  Right now, in the silence, save the steady hiss of the oxygen flowing into his helmet, a single thought kept echoing in his brain. It wasn’t from Dostoyevsky or Solzhenitsyn. It wasn’t from his mom or even from the Scriptures. It was from Churchill, and for Marcus it captured the moment perfectly.