Threat Level Alpha

by Leo J. Maloney

  Maybe when they were all gathered in the warehouse.

  What happened next happened fast: the door exploded inward and Pavel’s pistol came alive in his hand, firing into the opening. However, there was no one there.

  He held his fire, counting his remaining rounds in his head.

  Without warning, two large figures threw themselves into the kitchen. Pavel aimed as he fired. He was glad to hear one of the men cry out, and then there were multiple flashes in front of him.

  It took a second for him to register them as muzzle flashes. And another fraction of a second to register the sound of multiple reports. And only then did he register the burning sensation in his chest.

  Pavel realized that he was on the ground, his chest on fire. He tried to fire his weapon but realized that it was no longer in his hand.

  Then there were more figures in the room.

  He tried to reach for his pistol but he wasn’t sure if his hand was obeying his commands. Then the fire in his chest was gone and Pavel realized he was now cold.

  He heard a weapon cock, and then a voice in Chechen-accented Russian said, “Don’t bother, this one is finished.”

  * * * *

  Alex rode her motorcycle into the garage at Zeta headquarters.

  More training, she thought, shaking her head in frustration.

  And to top it off, she had to break in a new hand-to-hand combat instructor. She had been training for months on weapons, martial arts, and explosives as well as general physical training in everything from swimming (with an emphasis on endurance) to running to rock climbing. There were also individual “seminars” on basic spy craft—tailing someone undetected as well as spotting a tail, using dead drops, navigating strange terrain without a GPS device, and even more prosaic but useful skills like pickpocketing and basic hacking.

  Alex knew that her father had received his initial training in the CIA facility known as “The Farm.” There, the curriculum had been formal.

  However, at Zeta, the training was different. Challenging, yes. Exhausting, often. Yet it was anything but formal.

  The fact was that Alex was the first “new” recruit in Zeta Division. All of the other agents were either ex-military or ex-CIA, or both. Alex, on the other hand, had basically joined out of high school.

  And yet Alex had excelled in most of her training. That was part of the problem. Despite being the youngest agent, she was competitive with other agents in most areas and really shone in some, like marksmanship. And she had made real contributions to the Zeta Division in the last two years.

  However, she had yet to receive her own undercover mission. And she had yet to work undercover.

  Alex knew that she should be grateful to her father and Diana Bloch for the trust they had placed in her. And Diana had taken a great personal interest in her training, assigning staff to her seminars and reviewing her performance. But Alex was itching to get out of the classroom. She wanted to do more. And she knew she was ready.

  First, however, she had to endure another one of Diana Bloch’s endless training sessions.

  “Hello Alex,” she heard as she entered the gym.

  Waiting for her on the practice mats was someone she recognized.

  “Commander Schmitt,” Alex said.

  “You can call me Alicia. I’m retired and I don’t think my rank means anything in this building,” the woman said with a polite smile. “Nice to see you, how is your father?”

  “Fine, he’s on a mission right now,” Alex said.

  Alex guessed that Alicia Schmitt was somewhere between 35 and 40. A former naval commander, Alex and her father had run into Schmitt when she was still in the military.

  “Diana recruited you?” Alex asked.

  “Yes, and apparently my first duty is to evaluate your progress in hand-to-hand combat,” Schmitt said.

  Alex searched her memory for a few seconds and said, “I thought you were a pilot, that you flew fighters.”

  “I am. I also have some training in martial arts. Why don’t we begin? I only have you for an hour. We can catch up later.”

  “I’ll put on my sweats and—”Alex said.

  “No, we’ll begin now.”

  Alex shrugged and stepped onto the mats.

  “Come at me and try to strike me,” Schmitt said.

  “Um, don’t we bow first?”

  “This isn’t a dojo. And neither is the field,” Schmitt said. “There, your opponents won’t bow. They won’t shake your hands after. They will simply try to kill you. It’s not polite, but it’s honest in its own way.”

  Okay, Alex said. If that’s how you want to play it. She launched into a classic Krav Maga assault. She came in fast and brought up her left elbow as a feint. Her real attack came from her right knee.

  What happened next happened almost too fast for Alex to follow. Schmitt sidestepped the elbow, and focused on the knee attack—as if she knew it was coming. Then, Schmitt was leaning into her and the next thing Alex knew she was on her back on the mat.

  “Okay, why don’t you try that again,” Schmitt said.

  This time, Alex decided not to do anything fancy. She simply charged, throwing a series of traditional punches, straight out of the boxing playbook.

  This time, Schmitt seemed almost amused, and a moment later Alex was laid out on her back again.

  “Again,” Schmitt said.

  Now Alex was angry and decided to wipe Schmitt’s grin off her face. This time, she brought out the big guns. She flew at Schmitt, employed a karate attack, using a kata that had been her go-to move against tough sparing partners.

  This time, Schmitt was forced to parry Alex’s strikes. Keeping her on the defensive, Alex nearly landed a blow. She felt satisfaction at that.

  And then she was once again on her back, looking at the ceiling.

  Schmitt helped her up and said, “Okay, you’ve had some training. Now, let me see how you handle attacks.”

  For her first attack, Schmitt simply rushed Alex. It was a classic street fighting tactic and Alex was determined to meet it head on. She planted her right foot behind and kept her weight forward as she swung out with a hand blow.

  She was face down on the mat.

  And then again.

  And again.

  Her frustration level was high when she got up for the third time.

  “Like I said, it’s clear you have some training. And I see you fight like your father,” Schmitt said.

  “I’ll take that as a compliment,” Alex said, catching her breath. She was annoyed to see that Schmitt was breathing normally.

  “I didn’t mean it as a compliment. You father isn’t a particularly disciplined fighter,” Schmitt said.

  “I think we both subscribe to the whatever works school of thought there,” Alex shot back.

  “Well, you can’t afford to think like that. And you certainly can’t afford to fight like that,” Schmitt said. “After all, nothing you just did worked.”

  “Clearly, you have more training than me. I’ll work harder,” Alex said.

  “That is part of your problem,” Schmitt said, her face softening. “I’ll call it your Morgan problem. This isn’t something you can just power through. You can’t afford to try harder than your opponent, you have to be smarter. Let me put it another way, you need to fight like a girl.”

  “What?! What does that have to do with anything?” Alex said, defensiveness coming up in her voice. “Every instructor I have had has said that gender has nothing to do with ability.”

  “Then every instructor you have had is full of crap. It’s true that if you are built like a man, you can fight like one and your gender won’t matter. But like most women, you are built nothing like a man.” Schmitt studied her. “You are maybe 130 pounds, and strong for your size, but you are not built like a one hundred and seventy-
five or two hundred pound man. Up until now, you’ve been told that size doesn’t matter. Let me tell you something: size matters a great deal. In a fight between two people with the same level of skill and training, the larger fighter will win every time.”

  “I’ve seen smaller people take down much larger opponents,” Alex said.

  “And in every case, it was because the smaller fighter was smarter, had better training, and better sense of balance. Now look at me. I’m smaller than you. Can you guess how many fights I have lost in real combat situations?”

  Alex sized Schmitt up. She was thin, lithe, with the body you’d expect from a fighter pilot, not a hand-to-hand combat expert. “Based on what you just did to me, I’d say not many.”

  “Close. I’ve lost exactly zero fights in the field,” Schmitt said. “And do you know how you can tell?”

  Alex knew where this was going. “Because you are still alive?”

  “Exactly. Now when we were sparring you let me hit you, even leaned into a couple of blows to reduce their impact. Classic fighting techniques, but in the field, all that goes out the window. No matter how good you are, or how well trained, you don’t want to let a two hundred and twenty pound trained killer land a blow on you. You might be able to shake it off, but if you can’t, you won’t have time to regret your choices.”

  “The key is that you never fight power with power, because most of the time in the field you’ll be facing bigger and stronger opponents. That’s why, for women like you and me, we’re going to start with Judo. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the best style for using a bigger opponent’s size and power against him. Once you have the basics down, we can mix it up and put your other training to work.”

  “Okay, where do we start?” Alex said.

  Chapter 5

  Valery Dobrynin returned to his small apartment with the newspaper. The news was old already—nothing he hadn’t seen online except for some local reports. Yet buying and reading the paper had become part of his routine.

  And for Dobrynin, routine was all. It had been that way for years now, even more so since he had helped that American and his daughter. Until then, he had been an irritant to the current administration of the KGB. Russia and the world had changed a great deal since he had been an active agent, and the new guard didn’t trust old hands like him.

  Yet he was too much trouble to kill. After all, he still had a few friends and a few tricks left. So they had let him be, choosing to see him as an embarrassing reminder of past sins.

  However, that had all changed after an incident in Siberia. Dobrynin had done the right thing, and that had been a mistake. Now, he had angered people both in the army and at KGB headquarters.

  That had forced him into hiding. He had assumed a new identity and moved into this one-room apartment. It was a small existence, far from the intrigue of his time at the KGB, but it kept him alive.

  The one risk he took was staying in Leningrad—which he still could not bring himself to call it St. Petersburg as the young people did. Living here was no doubt foolish. If he were smart, he would be spending the rest of his days in a little dacha in the Urals, fishing each day for his dinner.

  The only problem was that he hated fishing. The monotony of it drove him mad. And even if he was no longer part of the machinery that drove Mother Russia, in Leningrad he felt like part of it. There, he could still hear the great machine’s hum.

  Living there might shorten his life, but Dobrynin decided he was too old to become smart now.

  The kettle whistled and he picked it up, but before he could pour the hot water, he heard a noise at his door.

  Footsteps.

  He reached for the PSM pistol he kept holstered at all times, and drew the weapon. He considered fetching the larger Tokarev he kept at his bedside but decided against it. In close quarters, the PSM would be fine.

  He approached the door from the side and checked the peephole. There was no one there. That confirmed what he had thought—the sound he’d heard was footsteps walking away.

  Opening the door, Dobrynin saw that indeed no one was there—or still there. However, there was a manila envelope at his feet.

  Back inside, he opened the envelope and found a copy of a report that said Chechen separatists had raided a small storage facility in the Caucasus Mountains and his heart sank.

  Nothing is so bad that it can’t get much worse, his babushka had often said. And it had been true more times that Dobrynin could count.

  The report said that two Red Army soldiers had been killed but nothing of value had been taken. However, he knew that wasn’t true.

  “Idiots,” he said out loud. Idiots for having it, and idiots for losing it, he thought.

  His instinct was to make a full report to KGB headquarters. The problem was that he would get nowhere near headquarters. And he knew nothing he said would be acted upon by the new administration—who had worked so hard to erase the past.

  And even if they did listen, he doubted they would believe what he told them. Dobrynin hardly believed it, and he had been there when it was happening.

  The Russian uttered a single word to himself, spitting it out simultaneously as a curse, a prayer, and a plan.

  “Morgan…”

  * * * *

  Jenny greeted Dan Morgan with a hug, and the kind of kiss that they couldn’t share when Alex was present but enjoyed more and more now that their daughter had moved into her own apartment.

  “How was the mission?” Jenny asked.

  Morgan shrugged. “A success.”

  She pulled away and gave him a quick once-over, apparently satisfied that he was all in one piece.

  After years of secrecy, Jenny knew what Morgan did for a living, but that didn’t mean she needed to know the kind of detail that would just worry her needlessly.

  “And how is Peter?” Jenny said.

  “Very good. He’s on his way to a beach in Manila by now,” Morgan said.

  “I guess he deserves a vacation too,” Jenny said.

  “Not as much as you,” Morgan said, kissing her again. He considered suggesting some alone time to Jenny before they left, but he had promised her this vacation and didn’t want to start it by blowing their schedule.

  “Do you need any help with the—” Jenny began.

  Morgan waved his hand.

  “It’s all taken care of,” he said.

  “Do you want me to make any reservations?” she asked.

  “I did it,” Morgan said.

  “What about—“

  “I took care of everything. All you have to do is get in the car,” he said smiling. He understood that, as with most things at home, Jenny took care of all of their travel plans: airline tickets, car rentals, dinner reservations, and even sitters for their German Shepherd Neika.

  Because of the unpredictability of Dan’s work, both his classic muscle car business and his real work for the CIA and then for Zeta Division, she had just taken on most of those duties. And that was why Morgan had wanted to give her one vacation in which she didn’t have to think about anything. It was also, he realized, the first vacation longer than a long weekend that they had taken without Alex. Though he had made the plans with Jenny in mind, he realized that he was looking forward to this trip as well.

  A few minutes later, Dan had loaded their bags into his car and pulled away, heading for Zeta Division headquarters.

  “Just this one stop,” he said.

  Jenny squeezed his thigh. “It’s fine, honey.”

  He pulled into the underground parking lot at headquarters. They really would be quick. He just wanted to check on his and Shepard’s special project. It had been months since Mexico, and he had been determined to wait until it was finished to inspect it. Shepard was doing him a favor—multiple favors actually. He was not only personally overseeing the project, but he was keeping
it quiet.

  And that was pretty hard when you worked for an international spy agency.

  Morgan was surprised when Diana Bloch greeted them personally.

  “Morgan,” she said, giving him a curt nod.

  Then he saw something he had never see Bloch do before: she smiled broadly and warmly.

  “Hi Jenny,” she said. “How are you?”

  “Just fine Diana, and you?”

  Diana gestured in Morgan’s direction. “Fine, but they keep me busy around here.”

  Jenny let out a knowing chuckle.

  Morgan had to process what was going on here. First, Bloch had just smiled. And then had shared some kind of private joke with Jenny.

  The world had just turned upside down. It was downright…unsettling.

  Turning her attention to him, Bloch said. “Good work on your mission,” she said. “Very good work.”

  Now he was getting praise from Bloch.

  “And Shepard is very happy with the new tech you brought back. When he hands it over to our friends in government I think your country will owe you a debt.”

  Morgan simply said, “It was my job.”

  “Now I presume you are here to see the results of that other project you and Shepard have been working on,” Bloch said.

  Morgan made sure his face didn’t betray his surprise.

  “I wouldn’t be much of a spymaster if I didn’t know what was going on under my own roof,” she said. Then she led the way to the elevator, “I’ll join you.”

  The elevator stopped when it reached the lowest level of Zeta Division. ‘The Basement’ held O’Neal’s computer servers and related tech, as well as Lincoln Shepard’s various engineering labs and fabrication equipment.

  It also held a special bay where Shepard worked on the vehicles used by Zeta agents. At the moment it held only a single car.

  “1968 Mustang GT,” Bloch said. “I always preferred the 1964s, if only for the styling.”