When she reached the row of vehicles parked directly behind the Ford, Tracie angled right until out of sight of the entrance and all the dining room’s windows. No one was walking in the lot, and out by the road no cars were turning into the plaza, but either of those situations could change at any moment, so she wasted no time approaching the truck, crouching low to remain hidden from view of those inside the restaurant.
When she reached the tailgate she flipped a small switch located on the bottom of the transmitter and then crouched next to the right rear tire. She placed the device as high up inside the wheel well as she could, feeling around until she thought she’d made solid contact between the magnets and the sheet metal. The antenna protruded straight down, short enough that it would remain out of sight unless the tire needed to be changed, long enough to provide what Tracie thought would be a decent transmitting range.
Just as she was finishing, a young couple exited the restaurant and strolled to the car parked next to the F-150. Tracie stayed on her knees and pretended to check the tire, running her hand along its rubber treads.
The young man watched her for a moment and then said, “Is everything all right? Do you need help?”
Tracie smiled up at him. “Thank you, everything is fine. I thought I might have picked up a nail, but the tire pressure seems to be normal.”
The man returned her smile and then nodded at the Ford. “That is quite a beautiful vehicle. We do not see many American cars around here.”
This is taking too long, Tracie thought. Kozlov could come out at any moment. “It is my baby,” she said with a smile. “Thank you for your kind words.”
The man finally turned away and opened his car door, an occurrence for which Tracie couldn’t have been more grateful. In addition to her concern about Kozlov returning, she couldn’t continue crouching at the rear tire much longer without it becoming clear she didn’t want to stand.
She pushed to her feet and began moving along the side of the truck, still in a half-crouch, as the couple backed out of the parking space next to her. Then she dropped and examined the right front tire until the car had reached the road and accelerated away.
Only then did she rise and retrace her steps to the VAZ.
19
June 13, 1988
6:25 p.m.
Somewhere northwest of Moscow, Russia, USSR
Kozlov returned to the F-150 no more than two minutes after Tracie finished placing the tracking device on his truck. The short amount of time he’d spent inside the restaurant didn’t particularly surprise her; she’d thought all along he would do nothing more than cram down a quick meal and get right back on the road.
But the timing was a little unsettling. She didn’t think he’d taken note of her back at his apartment building when she’d tricked him into stepping outside, so the worst-case scenario of him seeing her at the travel plaza was that she would lose the possibility of approaching him anonymously later, should she need or want to do so.
But if he’d walked outside while she was engaged in illicit activity involving his truck, that could have caused real problems.
Across the parking lot, Kozlov started his engine and began moving toward the exit. Having successfully placed the tracker, Tracie no longer had to be concerned with keeping the vehicle in sight at all times. The transmitter was powerful for its size, and its battery should last plenty long enough for her to determine whether her concerns about Navsegda’s acquisition of an American vehicle were justified or not.
Kozlov reached the road and surprised Tracie again. She expected him to take a left and return to the highway, but instead, he crossed her up and turned right. Then he drove off, moving away from the Leninskoye and deeper into the heavily forested Russian wilderness. The road looked roughly equivalent to a remote county two-lane in the states.
She had briefly considered waiting for a better opportunity to place the tracking device on the F-150—the close call of a couple minutes ago was exactly why—but was now glad she’d taken the risk when she did. Following Kozlov visually on what appeared to be a lightly traveled road would have been stressful and difficult, particularly since it looked like the road snaked into an area that was even more remote.
Tracie once again unzipped the canvas bag. She lifted out a hand-held radio receiver tuned to the frequency of the transmitter she’d placed under Kozlov’s truck. On the front of the receiver was a two-inch by two-inch screen featuring a single blinking red dot.
The tracker was about as simple a device as anything in the CIA’s arsenal. The blinking red dot represented, obviously, the transmitter sending a signal out from the underside of the F-150. The location of the dot on the screen showed only the position of the transmitter in relation to the receiver, not distances or road maps or anything else.
The dot was currently pegged at the top of the screen, meaning the truck was somewhere more or less directly in front of Tracie’s car. If Kozlov were to come to an intersection and turn, say, right, Tracie’s only way of knowing would be to note the position of the dot moving to the right side of the screen as she approached the intersection.
She put the car in gear and moved toward the exit. It had been about two minutes since Kozlov disappeared into the forested hills, and while she was certain the receiver would read the transmitter over a much greater distance than he could already have traveled, there was no reason to put that certainty to the test.
Tracie was tired and hungry and stressed, but none of that mattered.
She would follow Kozlov until he got wherever he was going, and would determine her next course of action then.
***
A couple of times over the next two hours, Tracie rode the VAZ hard, driving faster than necessary—and probably faster than was wise—for the purpose of closing the gap on Kozlov and making visual contact. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust the CIA’s technology, not exactly. She simply preferred to verify with her own eyes the information the radio receiver was giving her as she drove. Once she acquired the red truck visually in the distance, she would then ease off her speed again, letting Kozlov disappear from sight on the winding rural road.
And it was very rural. Tracie knew her quarry was headed more or less in an easterly direction, which would mean Moscow somewhere to the south, far off her right side. But given the lack of cars on the road and the fact that villages and towns were few and far between, if she hadn’t already known they were within thirty or so miles of Russia’s most populous city she would never have guessed it.
By eight-thirty, the VAZ was getting low on fuel and Tracie was again thankful she’d managed to tag the F-150 with a tracking device. She could stop whenever she wanted, fill the tank and get back on the road and not worry about losing Kozlov.
She’d just begun looking for an open gasoline station, cruising into the little town of Yaroslavl, when she glanced down at the tiny screen on her radio receiver and blinked in surprise.
Kozlov had turned. He was no longer ahead of Tracie on the two-lane on which she’d been following him since he left the travel plaza. According to the blinking red dot, he’d turned left onto a crossroad, presumably at the intersection she was now approaching.
Tracie forgot all about getting gas and eased to a halt at a rusted, dented stop sign that looked as though it had been installed at the intersection somewhere around the time of the Russian Revolution. The roads were completely deserted, but still she flipped on her blinker before making the left turn.
She accelerated down the narrow road but kept her speed in check. Her instincts were screaming at her that Kozlov was no longer moving, that this tiny village in the middle of the Russian forest had been his destination ever since making the vehicle exchange.
In less than half a mile she spotted the truck. It was angled nose-in to a parking spot behind a service station that clearly had not been in use in at least twenty years. Kozlov had attempted to park out of sight, but a foot or so of the red cargo bed remained visible to anyone a
pproaching from the south.
If that person was paying attention.
Tracie was paying attention.
Two gas pumps stood crookedly on a crumbling concrete base—one of the pumps missing a nozzle—directly in front of what at one time had been the station’s office. A chain with a rusty padlock had been wound around the handles of the station’s double entry doors, a waste of time and effort since the large window next to the doors had been smashed out. There was no sign of broken glass on the pavement below, so Tracie assumed the damage had been done years ago.
The time was now just before nine p.m. Official sunset would be in about fifteen minutes, but thanks to the shadows cast by the trees lining the road, the darkness had deepened to the point where it was impossible for Tracie to make out any more than the most basic details as she drove past.
Kozlov himself was nowhere to be seen.
She continued beyond the station, thankful for the remoteness of its location. There wasn’t a single home or any other building in sight, and it had been close to fifteen minutes since Tracie had passed another car. Obviously, Navsegda had chosen this location for its isolation, but that isolation benefitted Tracie as well: the lack of activity should make it relatively easy to get a closer look at the truck and the station.
And whatever might be inside.
Once the old service station had disappeared from sight in her rear view mirror, she pulled to the side of the road and stopped the car. This time she shut down the engine. She didn’t bother trying to hide the vehicle. Anyone passing by—including Kozlov or any other Navsegda operative—would assume the VAZ had broken down.
She did, however, lift her equipment bag from the back seat and trudge into the woods, stepping over downed branches and pushing through screens of undergrowth until she’d put twenty feet of forest between herself and the car. Then she dropped the bag in a shallow dip between two large evergreens. Leaving the car in plain sight was one thing; leaving the bag, with all her tools and CIA gear inside the unoccupied vehicle, was another issue entirely.
Satisfied she’d secured the bag sufficiently for the short time she expected to be gone, Tracie returned to the road and began hurrying toward the service station. She kept her head on a swivel, alert for oncoming cars in both directions, but paying particular attention to any traffic approaching from her twelve o’clock. She had no idea how long Kozlov’s business in Yaroslavl was going to take, but was determined not to miss him if he’d changed vehicles again and drove past her moving north.
He didn’t drive past her.
Nobody drove past her.
The area felt abandoned, like some dystopian landscape in a Hollywood disaster movie.
When the old gas station came into view again in the distance, Tracie melted into the woods and continued hiking in its direction, albeit at a much slower pace. She hated to waste the time it took to struggle through the woods but didn’t want to be seen walking toward a Navsegda hideout in the event anyone was paying attention. It seemed unlikely the radical group would have posted sentries—Tracie doubted they had the manpower for that—but she’d encountered stranger things in her career and was determined not to take any chances.
She swung a wide arc, keeping the building in sight off her right side through the screen of underbrush. When she’d reached a point where she could see the entire rear of the station, she began angling toward it slowly.
The first thing she noticed was a second vehicle. This one was a beat-up Czechoslovakian Škoda parked flush against the building’s rear wall. It was much smaller than the F-150 and thus invisible to anyone passing the station on the road out front.
Tracie had assumed Kozlov would not be alone inside the station, and the presence of the car seemed to support that assumption.
A pair of rollup garage bay doors, both closed, their wood warped and waterlogged, indicated that at one time the station had featured two service bays. The only other break in the straight line of concrete blocks forming the rear of the building was an entry door offering secondary access to the office. If that door had been chained shut like the one at the front of the station, Navsegda had cut through and disposed of the chains. The door currently stood propped open.
Tracie eased forward slowly, alert for people but so far seeing none. Something odd caught her attention as she examined the building. All the windows in both of the ancient garage bay doors had been smashed out, exactly as had the windows in front. The damage had probably occurred years ago, if not decades.
But plywood had been nailed over every one of these windows.
And the plywood was new. It had clearly been purchased or scavenged recently and was a much more recent addition to the building than anything else she’d seen in her surveillance.
Well, that’s interesting. It was obvious Kozlov and/or his buddies inside didn’t want any nosy observers peering into the service bays. This immediately made them the focus of her attention.
She backtracked into the woods a dozen or so feet and then moved to the side of the building, where the forest overgrowth reached almost all the way to the cinderblocks. Then she unsnapped her shoulder rig and lifted out her Beretta, holding it in two hands, aimed—for now—at the ground.
She broke cover, moving to the side of the building and flattening herself against it before creeping to the rear corner. She eased her head around it and saw no more activity than she’d observed before, so she took a deep breath and moved quickly, arriving at the rear door in seconds.
Inside she could hear voices. They were discussing money in Russian, one man asking someone, or a group of people, whether they needed any more of it to purchase supplies. Presumably it was Kozlov doing the asking.
“We can always use more cash, eh?” one man answered before laughing gruffly.
That man was immediately cut off by another male voice, his tone one of annoyance.
“No,” the second man said. “We have plenty of money. And now, with the truck, we have everything we need to make a clear and unmistakable statement to the current Soviet leadership regarding the unfortunate direction they have taken our beloved homeland.”
Tracie risked a glimpse into the office, exposing her head just enough to peer around the door opening with one eye.
She saw nobody. The voices were echoing through the service station’s mostly empty interior. Wherever the conversation was tasking place, it was out of sight of the rear access door.
That was good, because what Tracie really wanted was a look inside those service bays with the broken windows that had been sealed shut with plywood. She thought she knew how she was going to get that look, too, and she wasn’t interested in taking the time to work her way through the woods over to that side of the building.
She crossed in front of the open door, edging sideways, her gun aimed inside as she moved, ready to blast away at anyone who challenged her.
No one did. Seconds later she arrived at the pair of closed garage bay doors.
She was completely exposed.
If anyone walked out the open rear office door they would spot her instantly.
She didn’t care. She needed to see inside those service bays.
When she’d examined the garage doors from a distance, it had appeared that whoever nailed the plywood over the window closest the east side of the building had been in a hurry and done a slipshod job, leaving a sliver of maybe half an inch uncovered.
Now that she was up close, she could see that her assessment was spot on, and she pressed her face against the spongy wood of the big door, peering inside.
Her breath caught in her throat.
Four men were clustered in a tight circle inside one of the service bays. One of them was Kozlov. The others Tracie did not recognize.
But that wasn’t what caught her attention and caused her nearly to gasp out loud.
Next to the men, fastened to a series of wooden pallets, was the missing thermonuclear device.
20
June 13,
1988
9:05 p.m.
Yaroslavl, Russia, USSR
The bomb wasn’t on its way to the United States at all. Instead it was sitting here in an ancient gas station somewhere north of Moscow.
It was always possible, of course, that Sovetskiy Soyuz Navsegda still intended to fly the device to the U.S. or ship it by boat, where they would detonate it with the purpose of starting a war and providing their Soviet hardliners with an excuse to seize power and plunge the USSR into the darkness of the Stalin years.
But the fact that Navsegda had made an American truck a part of their plan seemed to indicate something else to Tracie. She didn’t doubt the group’s goal was to spark a war between the world’s two great superpowers, but it was beginning to look as though they had something else in mind, something that would allow them to avoid the risks inherent in shipping a nuclear device halfway around the world and then attempting to smuggle it into the U.S.
Maybe they could accomplish everything they wanted without ever leaving Russia.
It wouldn’t be that difficult, Tracie thought, particularly given the fact that the riskiest part of such an operation was already behind them—stealing the bomb in the first place.
She ran through it in her mind. The radicals steal or purchase an American truck with a bed large enough to carry the tactical nuke.
They load the device onto the back of the truck and then take plenty of photos, being sure to include the “Ford” and/or “F-150” nameplates prominently in every picture.
Then they build a cover to place over the bomb, shielding it from view of police, military and civilians.
After that, they simply drive the truck to the location of their choosing, probably a medium-sized Russian city far enough from Moscow to avoid devastating their capital city, but close enough to terrify everyone in the Soviet Union.
Then they take some more photographs of the truck parked in front of, say a piece of Russian architecture, or a city administrative building, or some other readily identifiable location that would provide maximum bang for their buck, literally.
The Nuclear Option Page 11