The Nuclear Option

by Allan Leverone

  The VAZ hesitated and then shot into the tiny gap. The truck driver leaned on his air horn at the same time he hit his brakes, the sound of the horn and the screech of the brakes combining for a loud and intimidating close call.

  And then she was through. She yanked the wheel and eased off the gas and the car slid into the turn, rubber squealing on pavement until the VAZ scattered gravel and sand at the edge of the road, finally allowing Tracie to regain control.

  Kozlov was still visible in the distance.

  Tracie breathed deeply. She straightened the wheel and eased down on the gas and followed Sovetskiy Soyuz Navsegda’s money man.

  17

  June 13, 1988

  5:35 p.m.

  Novenkoye, Russia, USSR

  Dimitri Kozlov was tired and stressed. This damned assignment was getting to him. Even though he was only the financial go-between, receiving cash from Navsegda’s wealthy Russian financier and funneling it to the men tasked with achieving tangible mission results, he knew enough about the current operation to know he should be worried.

  A live nuclear device was involved.

  In keeping with Sovetskiy Soyuz Navsegda’s core principle of only giving members enough information to complete their designated portion of an assignment, his knowledge of mission specifics was necessarily limited.

  But he still knew enough to cause insomnia and nightmares. He craved a return to the powerful Soviet governing philosophy he recalled from his youth, knew in his heart his association with Navsegda was right and just, but still…it was difficult to get past the knowledge that the men he was associated with would soon take the lives of thousands of innocent people and destroy millions, maybe even billions, of rubles worth of property.

  Dimitri didn’t know how the other Navsegda members felt, but his knowledge of the coming cataclysm was wreaking havoc with his own life and his own health. In addition to not sleeping, he’d been having trouble eating, concentrating and completing simple tasks. He was willing to risk imprisonment for the ideals Navsegda espoused, but the notion of so many people dying, even if it resulted in a return to the Soviet Union’s former glory, well, that was hard to swallow.

  Dimitri was glad his involvement in the operation would end after tonight. The blood of innocents would still be on his hands, but at least the sick feeling in the pit of his stomach might start to fade over time.

  Maybe.

  Dimitri left the highway and drove toward the designated rendezvous point, a circular turnaround at the end of a long, winding, little-used road in the rural village of Novenkoye. He had completed exchanges in this location in the past and it always caused him unease, even when the exchange took place in the daytime as this one would. Although the turnaround was no more than a couple kilometers away from a small cluster of homes, it had been hacked out of a thick Russian forest and felt as isolated as anywhere Dimitri had ever been.

  It was perfectly suited to illicit meetings.

  After a short distance he turned south and began motoring along a relatively busy road running between the Leningradskoye Highway and the Volga River. The turnoff he needed to make was coming up on the right and would eventually take him over the highway he’d just exited.

  And it was hard to find; he’d missed it more than once and had no desire to do so again.

  He almost did so again.

  At the last second he spotted the turn and hit the brakes hard. The car didn’t exactly screech to a halt, but it slowed quickly, causing the motorist behind him to offer a middle-finger critique of Dimitri’s driving skills as he swerved around Dimitri.

  Dimitri barely took note of the angry man. His heart was pounding, adrenaline coursing through his system as it always did when he was about to make an exchange. This was when his work for Navsegda became real, when the risks he was taking in pursuit of a new Russian Revolution were impossible to ignore or diminish.

  He passed over the Leningradskoye and continued through a neighborhood consisting of industrial-type warehouses sharing space with small homes. At the end of the road he turned right, passed an even smaller neighborhood and then eased left, leaving the few ramshackle houses behind as the road transitioned from pavement to hard-packed dirt.

  It had been days since the last rain, and dust quickly covered his car, rising in a small cloud behind him and rendering his mirrors virtually useless. The entire Red Army could be back there and he would never know.

  A little less than two kilometers later he pulled to the side of the turnaround and eased to a stop. Just ahead, a red American-made pickup truck sat with its engine idling. A pair of Navsegda operatives sat on its open tailgate, smoking cigarettes and chatting as they watched Dimitri approach.

  Dimitri had never seen either man before.

  He left his engine running, as the other men had done, and stepped out of the car. Walked around the front of the Lada and stopped next to the truck, waiting for the men to acknowledge his presence, feeling foolish when they didn’t.

  “Excuse me, comrades,” he said.

  Finally the men turned to face him. They still didn’t answer.

  “I would like to wrap this up if you don’t mind,” he continued. “I still have a lot of driving to do and I would like to finish before it gets too late.”

  One of the men rolled his eyes and Dimitri felt a rush of anger. He knew many of Navsegda’s operational personnel felt a certain amount of resentment against someone like Dimitri, who got involved only superficially in the actual nuts-and-bolts of the new revolution.

  It was unfair. Dimitri had done military service in defense of his country and completed that service with honor. Was it his fault he was older now and less able to perform strenuous physical tasks? Was it his fault he’d made a strong connection with a man like Sergei Marinovich and had been able to parlay that connection into an amount of funding previously unthinkable by those fomenting the new people’s revolution?

  The answer to those questions, he knew was nyet. Neither of those things was his fault, and he was contributing to Navsegda’s mission in at least as significant a way as these two young men, neither of whom looked trustworthy enough, in Dimitri’s opinion, to carry out even the most basic of Navsegda assignments.

  The anger and resentment bubbled up again, stronger this time, and Dimitri said, “I do not know what your problem is, but I suggest you get your asses off my truck right this minute and let me get on with this mission.”

  He knew it was foolish to provoke them when there were two of them and only one of him, and they were probably armed while he was not. He knew if they took offense to his words and were men of a violent bent, they could easily kill him and bury his body somewhere inside this thick, primeval forest and he would never be found.

  But Dimitri was exhausted and stressed and worried, and the tense little ball in the pit of his stomach was pulsing and squirming and making him feel like he might vomit at any moment, and he’d had enough.

  The men didn’t kill him and bury his body in the primeval forest. Dimitri didn’t know for sure they were armed, but if they were they left their weapons hidden. They simply climbed down off the bed of the truck as instructed.

  “Good day, comrades,” he said, watching as both men flicked their cigarettes onto the hard packed dirt and slouched off toward the Lada. The man who’d been sitting closest to Dimitri got behind the wheel, while the other man moved to the passenger side and sat. Then the driver spun the wheel and hit the gas and the car chugged away, lost in an instantly rising cloud as dust covered Dimitri.

  It occurred to him that neither man had spoken during the entire encounter. It was strange and just one more thing that served to make him uneasy.

  He decided being out in this vast emptiness was combining with his discomfort regarding Navsegda’s methods to make him jumpy and paranoid. He needed to get out of here and back to the civilization of Moscow.

  Dimitri lifted the truck’s tailgate and slammed it closed. Then he moved to the cab and slid
behind the wheel. He’d never driven an American vehicle before, and knew it would take a lot longer than the two-and-a-half hour drive he was facing to get comfortable with the fact that the steering wheel and pedals were located on the wrong side of the truck.

  But that was okay. He couldn’t imagine a single plausible scenario where he would ever drive an American car or truck again, so all he had to do was not kill himself and deliver the pickup truck to his Navsegda contacts in one piece. Then he would be finished with the stress of revolution for a while.

  Seeing the men smoking had awakened an almost irresistible urge for a cigarette, so Dimitri pulled the pack out of his shirt pocket and smacked the top of the pack against his palm until he had exposed one of the Belomorkanals enough to pull it out. Then he lit the cigarette and brought it to his lips, breathing in the flavor and savoring it for several seconds before exhaling.

  He should already be moving; every second he wasted smoking a damned cigarette was one second longer it would take before the job was finished and he could relax. But the bite of the Belomorkanal was providing much-needed stress relief, and Dimitri decided five extra minutes in the middle of the job wasn’t such a steep price to pay for a short break from the tension.

  All too soon the cigarette had burned down to a nub. Dimitri grimaced, wanting to light another but knowing to do so would constitute more than a “short break.”

  He tossed the butt out the window and put the truck in gear.

  The dust had mostly settled in the turnaround when Dimitri stirred it up again. He reversed the route he had taken on his way here and was back on the Leningradskoye in minutes.

  18

  June 13, 1988

  5:45 p.m.

  Novenkoye, Russia, USSR

  It wasn’t difficult for Tracie to follow Kozlov once he passed the tiny cluster of houses—shacks, really—huddled together to the right of the narrow road. There was only one way for the man to go, and he seemed to be in a big hurry to get there.

  What was difficult was tailing him without making it obvious she was doing so. With the possible exception of lock-picking, tailing a subject solo without being spotted was probably the thing Tracie Tanner felt the least comfortable doing. She’d hated it when learning the basics almost ten years ago at The Farm, she’d hated doing it in the field ever since, and she was completely unsurprised to discover she still hated it now.

  But she learned to improvise, to avail herself of any possible advantage, no matter how small or unexpected. In this case, that unexpected advantage was the condition of the road.

  After crossing over the Leninskoye, the pavement became less and less well maintained, until now the road consisted entirely of packed dirt. Dust was billowing up behind Kozlov’s vehicle and then hanging in the air, meaning Tracie was able to back off to the point it became unnecessary even to keep eyes on the target at all.

  And the road’s deteriorating condition told her something else as well: wherever he was going, Dimitri Kozlov had almost arrived at his destination. To travel much farther would require a four-wheel-drive vehicle, something the Navsegda man did not have.

  By the time she made the left turn after passing the little cluster of houses set back in the woods to the right, Tracie was moving slowly. She eased around the turn and jerked to a stop at the sight of Kozlov’s taillights flashing and the man pulling to the side of the road behind what looked like a red Ford F-150 pickup. The sight of an American truck here, in the heart of Communist Russia, was so unexpected she just sat for a second, staring.

  But only for a second.

  She threw the VAZ into reverse and backed around the corner until out of sight of the Russian car and the American truck sitting in a turnaround a couple hundred yards away. Then she turned the wheel and continued backing along the narrow access road toward the houses far off in the distance.

  When she’d gone a sufficient distance there seemed to be little risk of the car being seen, she parked it as far off the road as she could, screened by the heavy forest overgrowth. Then she stepped out. She double-timed along the verge until reaching the corner, and then dropped into a crouch and observed the rendezvous in the distance.

  Two men had apparently driven the F-150 to this clandestine meeting. They were younger than Kozlov, and were smoking cigarettes while sitting on the truck’s open tailgate. They appeared to be trying to ignore him as the older man lectured them, punctuating some point he was making by gesturing firmly in their direction with his pointer finger.

  After a moment both men slid off the tailgate and tossed their cigarettes to the ground. If they said anything to Kozlov, Tracie couldn’t tell. They sauntered to Kozlov’s Lada and climbed inside, then spun the car away from the F-150 and accelerated toward Tracie.

  She slipped deeper into the underbrush and waited for them to pass, then broke cover and sprinted for her own car. The purpose of this out-of-the-way meeting was obviously the vehicle swap, and it seemed unlikely Kozlov would sit very long by himself in the middle of nowhere before driving away in the truck.

  And Tracie was determined to follow him when he did.

  Things had just gotten a lot more interesting.

  There didn’t seem to be any obvious connection between the acquisition by Sovetskiy Soyuz Navsegda of an American–made pickup truck and the potential detonation of a thermonuclear device somewhere in the United States. But there was another possibility, one in which the acquisition of the truck would make perfect sense.

  And that possibility was terrifying.

  Tracie arrived at her car at a dead run and leapt into the front seat. Then she hit the gas too hard and her drive wheels spun in the loose dirt. She eased off the accelerator and then the tires made purchase and she moved toward the intersection, forcing herself to drive slowly, even as her every instinct was telling her to jam the pedal to the floor. Even if Kozlov had driven away just as Tracie turned toward her car, it had taken her less than a minute to get moving and there was only one way he could have gone.

  For now.

  She assumed he would head back to the Leninskoye Highway, retracing his arrival route. Her plan was to reacquire a visual on him before he could make it to the highway and disappear.

  She crept to the intersection and blinked in surprise. Kozlov must have spent a couple of minutes by himself inside the F-150’s cab while it sat in the lonely clearing, because he was only now turning off Tracie’s left and moving through the small neighborhood toward the highway.

  Take a breath. Slow down. You’ve got this.

  Tracie waited until the red truck disappeared from view before pulling into the intersection and following. As she made the left turn to pass through the small neighborhood that was roughly fifty percent houses and fifty percent industrial buildings, she could see the truck in the distance ahead, moving steadily toward the highway.

  As expected, Kozlov retraced his route to the Leninskoye, entering the southbound lanes and setting off toward Moscow. Tracie felt the tension begin to ease as she fell in behind him, allowing several cars to fill in the gap and screen her from view.

  The tension returned less than thirty minutes later, however, when Kozlov surprised her by flicking on his turn signal and exiting the highway. Despite the better part of a decade working in and around the Soviet Union, Tracie had only traveled the highway connecting Moscow with Leningrad a handful of times and she had only the vaguest notion of her current location.

  She blew out a breath and followed. At the bottom of the off-ramp, after passing through the tollbooths, Kozlov pulled into a small travel plaza consisting of a gas station and a restaurant that looked like the Russian version of a southwestern American diner. He parked the truck and climbed out of the cab and then disappeared into the eatery.

  Tracie gnawed at the inside of her lower lip as she eased slowly forward. She was hungry but too keyed up to eat. Besides, without anything concrete to gain by it, there was no real reason to risk being seen by the Navsegda member now when it
might become necessary to interact with him later. She would only have one chance to approach him as a stranger.

  There was, however, a reason to risk approaching the truck while Kozlov was inside the restaurant, and Tracie thought this might represent her best chance to do so. Maybe her only chance.

  She rolled across the lot and looked for a parking spot that would make her as inconspicuous as possible when her target left the restaurant. Selecting an empty space near the rear of the lot that gave her a clear view of the building’s entrance, she backed between two larger cars. Both were empty. She considered killing the VAZ’s engine but was worried she might not be able to restart it quickly via hotwire when she needed to.

  So she again left it idling and leaned forward in her seat, eyes fixed on the restaurant’s entrance. It was always possible Kozlov had stopped only to pee and would return immediately, so she waited three minutes. When he didn’t show, she counted one more for good measure and then decided he must have sat down to eat.

  She reached into the back seat and unzipped her canvas equipment bag. Rummaged around in it for a moment before finding the item she wanted. Then she pulled out a small electronic device roughly the size of a baseball that had been sliced in half. A stubby metal antenna protruded from the apex of the device, and a series of small magnets were affixed to the base.

  Tracie re-zipped the bag and then pushed open the car door, stepping into the early evening sunshine. Sunset this time of year didn’t occur until well after nine p.m., but already shadows had begun creeping across the lot from the mammoth trees ringing the travel plaza as the sun began its slide toward the horizon.

  The parking lot was no more than half filled with vehicles, but Tracie took a circuitous route as she made her way toward Kozlov’s truck. She wanted to remain screened as much as possible by cars in the event the Navsegda member had chosen a table near a window and was watching the lot as he ate.