But she made do, using a coin she found in the parking lot as a makeshift screwdriver to loosen the license plate screws, which were moderately rusted on three of the four cars. The only exception was the old lady’s Trabant, and Tracie silently offered thanks to the woman for taking such good care of her vehicle.
She worked as quickly as she could, and not just because of the tactical nuke. If anyone saw her covered in blood and acting suspiciously in the parking lot, it wouldn’t be long before the police were called, and once that happened she knew Detective Kuznetsov would be hot on their heels. As far as she could tell, though, the lot remained free of people the entire time she worked.
After completing the automotive housekeeping, she fired up the Lada and hit the street. A lot had gone wrong over the last twelve hours or so, but she was grateful she’d escaped Detective Kuznetsov during business hours on a Tuesday morning, when there would be plenty of cars from which to choose.
Thirty minutes later she ditched the Lada three blocks from her safe house and walked the rest of the way. Typically she liked to park farther away than that when dumping a stolen vehicle, but typically she wasn’t covered in blood and suffering from an obvious head injury.
She decided in this case the shorter walk was worth the potential risk. She would move the car later, after she’d cleaned up. Right now it was imperative she talk to Aaron Stallings and fill him in on what she’d learned.
What had started out as a precarious situation was teetering on becoming a desperate one, if it hadn’t already.
***
June 14, 1988
10:25 a.m.
CIA safe house
Moscow, Russia, USSR
“Goddammit, Tanner, this has to stop!”
Tracie had known Stallings would not be happy to hear from her. He never seemed overly enthusiastic about the prospect, but given the time difference between Moscow and Washington, she knew this call in particular would wind him up. She smiled and waited for him to finish his rant.
“Do you have any idea what time it is here, for chrissakes? How am I supposed to function if I have to get up in the middle of the night to babysit you?”
“Let me take those questions one at a time,” she said calmly. “Yes, I know what time it is where you are. It’s three twenty-five in the morning. And I’m sure you have a busy schedule tomorrow, which is why I wouldn’t have interrupted your beauty sleep if it weren’t critically important.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Stallings grumbled. “Hold on a second while I move to my office.”
Tracie waited as the CIA director presumably slipped out of bed and padded down his second-floor hallway, entered his home office and closed the door. The secure satellite connection wasn’t clear enough to hear any of it in real-time, but she pictured it in her mind, and just as she envisioned him sitting down at his desk, he transmitted again. “Okay. What’s so important it couldn’t wait three hours?”
“First of all,” she said, “thank you for sleeping with the sat phone next to your bed. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get you.”
“Our little chats mean just that much to me,” Stallings said, his voice dripping with sarcasm.
The comment caught Tracie off guard and she laughed. “Please pass along my apologies to your wife for waking her.”
“You didn’t. She learned to sleep through my commotion at least thirty years ago, but I appreciate the thought. Now, can we please get down to business so I might be able to catch a few more winks before I have to get up and face the sharks that are the D.C. politicians today?”
“Sure,” Tracie said. “I’ll get right to the point. I found the nuke.”
“I assume you mean you got a line on its location inside the states or on its way over here.”
“No sir, that’s not what I mean.”
“Explain.”
“It’s still in Russia. It never left the country. I saw it with my own eyes yesterday inside an abandoned gas station not thirty miles north of Moscow.”
Tracie paused and gave Stallings a moment to absorb what she’d just said. She waited for the barrage of questions she assumed would follow.
But there was no barrage. He digested the information and then slowly said, “Of course.”
“Sir?”
“Of course it’s still in Russia. Sovetskiy Soyuz Navsegda can accomplish their goals just as easily by detonating the device inside their own country as outside it. And exploding it inside Russia saves them the risk and expense of trying to ship it undetected to the states.”
“That was exactly my line of thinking,” Tracie said, marveling at her boss’s powers of perception regarding foreign intelligence matters. She had given him completely unexpected intel, and in less than a minute—after being awakened from a deep sleep in the middle of the night—he’d deciphered its implications.
Aaron Stallings was by far the most difficult man she’d ever worked with; no one else was even close. But his suitability for his job was undeniable. It went a long way toward explaining the fact that he had held his position at the CIA for decades, through Republican and Democrat administrations alike.
That and the fact he probably had dirt hidden away on every person of prominence to come through D.C. in the last forty years.
“You said the device is hidden inside an abandoned gas station, correct?”
“It was as of yesterday,” Tracie answered. “But I had a little car accident trying to get back here and I lost half a day. I can’t say for sure whether it’s still there now or not.”
“A car accident?” Stallings said.
“Yes. It drew the attention of a particularly nosy Russian cop. But that doesn’t matter right now, aside from the time it cost me. He’s no longer an issue.”
“You killed a Russian cop?”
Tracie grinned. “No, sir, he alive. I imagine he has a massive headache right now, but he’s very much alive.”
Stallings grunted and then fell silent again. Tracie could almost hear the gears turning inside his head.
After a moment he said, “Was the nuke loaded onto a vehicle when you saw it?”
“No,” Tracie said. “But it probably is by now. I found the bomb by following the truck I believe Navsegda is going to use to transport it to their selected detonation site.”
“It’s an American-made truck, isn’t it?”
She blinked in surprise. “Yes, it’s a Ford pickup. How the hell did you know that?”
“It makes perfect sense,” Stallings said. “It explains why Navsegda has been holding onto the device instead of using it right away. I assumed they were busy trying to smuggle it into the United States, but that wasn’t it at all. They were simply waiting to acquire an American vehicle.
“And they needed an American truck,” he continued slowly, reasoning through it as he spoke, “because it is critical for their purposes that they manage to blame the United States for the explosion and the deaths of so many Russian citizens.”
A shorter silence followed and then he said, “They’re going to take plenty of photographs of the bomb sitting in the back of the Ford truck, undoubtedly with a prominent, very recognizable building in the background. There will be nothing left of the truck after the detonation, obviously, so they’ll need a visual reference to stoke panic among the citizenry if they’re going to have any chance of accomplishing their goal of regime change.”
“That was my feeling, too,” Tracie said. “But there’s something that doesn’t add up.”
“What is it?”
“How could anyone believe the United States bombed a Russian city if the only evidence is a photo of the device sitting in the back of an American-made truck? If the U.S. was going to blast a Russian city with a tactical nuke, the last thing they would do is advertise that fact by sticking it in the back of a truck that’s so hard to come by in this part of the world it took Navsegda the better part of a month to do it.”
“You’re looking at it too rationally.”
/> “Excuse me? I don’t follow.”
“Think about it,” Stallings said patiently. “A mid-sized Russian city—or worse, a large Russian city—gets victimized by a nuclear blast, say in the range of five to six megatons, which is the most bang you can reasonably expect to get out of a device that can fit in the back of a pickup truck.”
“That’s plenty big,” Tracie said.
“Plenty big for what Navsegda wants. The device goes off and now the population is spooked, panicked, they don’t understand what’s happening. They’re not even going to consider the possibility that Russians might have killed all those people and put many thousands more in danger from radiation poisoning.”
“They’re going to want to blame their most hated enemies,” Tracie said, finally following Stallings’ line of reasoning.
“Even more than wanting to believe it,” Stallings said, “they’re not going to be able to consider any other possibility. It will be their first instinct. All Navsegda will need is for one or more of their photos to end up on the front page of Pravda—and you can bet they’ve developed the contacts to ensure that happens—and inside of a day, two things will happen. What do you suppose those two things are?”
“Popular support will crystallize behind a retaliatory strike against the United States,” Tracie said.
“Exactly. That’s the first. Tell me the second.”
Tracie answered almost instantly. “The fury of the citizenry will be directed straight at the people they believe allowed the attack by their hated enemy to occur: Gorbachev and his minions.”
“You got it. Over time, of course, if cooler heads were allowed to prevail, it would become obvious to everyone the United States hadn’t nuked a Russian city. But retaliation would occur within days, perhaps hours, well before anyone listened to any of those cooler heads.
“As I said, it makes perfect sense,” Stallings continued, “and I’m kicking myself that I didn’t consider that possibility sooner.”
“Sir, you couldn’t be expected to—”
“Of course I could be,” he interrupted. “That is exactly the point of my job. But none of that matters now. You need to get eyes on that nuke again, and as quickly as possible. I’ll notify the president immediately, and he can initiate contact with General Secretary Gorbachev regarding the situation. Then I’ll rally the troops, get our other assets in the area headed toward you, so you’re not dealing with this situation all by yourself.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“You’re welcome. But obviously backup won’t get there overnight. Our presence in country has taken a devastating hit in the past year with the assassinations of so many of our people, so there will be a paper-thin margin for error. It’s not like we’ll be able to overwhelm Navsegda with numbers.”
“I know. I’ll get to work tracking down the nuke right away, and once I find it again I’ll notify you of its location. The I’ll keep it under surveillance until more of our people make it to the area.”
She didn’t say anything else, because she knew they were both thinking the same thing anyway: what if Sovetskiy Soyuz Navsegda decided to detonate their nuke before the cavalry had time to arrive?
37
June 14, 1988
11:10 a.m.
CIA safe house
Moscow, Russia, USSR
Tracie craved sleep.
Her eyes were heavy and stinging, her limbs wooden, her legs felt like she was walking in quicksand as she limped about the safe house. And there were a million uncertainties about her current situation but of one thing she had no doubt: she would not get that sleep.
Not yet, anyway, and maybe not for a while.
Replacing her weapons would be no problem. Hidden behind a removable wall in the bedroom of the safe house was a cache of American as well as Russian-manufactured rifles, pistols, combat knives and other espionage necessities, including a replacement tracker receiver she would use to relocate the F-150 carrying the tactical nuke.
Hopefully.
Her concern, and it was a legitimate one, was that the tiny transmitter she’d secured to the undercarriage of the Ford truck was battery-powered. As such, its viability was limited by the batteries’ lifespan. Typically that lifespan was no more than twenty-four to thirty-six hours.
Sometimes it was less.
Sometimes it was a lot less.
It was imperative that she resupply herself and get to work locating the truck absolutely as soon as possible, but even given the time crunch, she knew she had to care for her head wound. Sleep she could do without, but she couldn’t afford to allow the gash in her skull to become infected.
If it hadn’t already.
She padded into the bathroom and undressed, pulling her blouse over her head as carefully as she could but still wincing in pain as the blood-caked cotton grazed the sutures. In the mirror she examined the handiwork of the anonymous emergency room doctor inside Semashko City Hospital who’d stitched her up while she was still unconscious. She didn’t think the jagged roadmap of sutures would win her many beauty pageants, but it looked as though the doctor had done a reasonably competent job.
She ran warm, soapy water over a washcloth and dabbed it against her injury. The pain radiated outward in all directions each time she did touched it. She worked slowly, patiently, loosening the dried blood by degrees until all that remained was skin and sutures.
It looked ugly. Red and raw, a serrated line meandering up the side of her head. Eventually her hair would grow back, covering the scar and rendering it invisible, but for now Tracie thought she looked like the Bride of Frankenstein’s ugly sister.
Once satisfied she’d removed all the crusted blood she stepped into the shower. Scrubbed herself top to bottom, spending even more time cleaning her injury despite the pain. When she’d finished she started over and moved bottom to top. She worked as quickly as possible while still being thorough. She doubted she’d ever appreciated a shower more.
Then she dried off and dressed, marveling at just how rejuvenating it felt to be clean. She still didn’t quite feel human, given the lack of sleep and the pain thudding through her head and her ankle, but better. Much better.
She shook some ibuprofen into her hand and downed it with water, then removed the false wall in the bedroom closet that opened into the CIA’s mini-armory. Her shoulder holster was long gone, so she would be forced to do without until she could get stateside. There were a couple stored in among the weapons, but both were too big for someone her size.
She replaced her Berettas; one into her waistband at the small of her back and a second into an ankle holster she found that she was able to make fit, more or less. Same with a combat knife for her other ankle.
Kuznetsov’s Makarov she tossed into a plastic bin after ejecting the magazine and clearing the chamber.
Once resupplied, Tracie felt whole again for the first time since waking up in the hospital in Rostov. She dug around the equipment until locating the spare tracker receiver and batteries. Then she backed out of the mini-armory, replaced the false wall and moved into the kitchen.
She installed the batteries in the receiver and powered it up, realizing she was holding her breath but unable to stop herself from doing so. If the transmitter on the F-150 had already died, she would be back to square one. Her only option in that case would be to drive to Dimitri Kozlov’s Moscow apartment building, kidnap him and then torture him until he gave up the location of the nuke.
Assuming he even knew where it was, which was unlikely.
And even if he did know, the process would take time she did not have.
After a moment the tracker receiver finished booting up and its tiny screen sprang to life. The red dot began blinking and Tracie blew out a relieved breath. She could still track down the nuke as long as the batteries in the transmitter didn’t die in the time it took to catch up with Navsegda.
Tracie made a sandwich and wolfed it down, barely paying attention to what was in it. She washed th
e food down with water and then wandered into the bedroom, slipping into a hooded sweatshirt featuring the logo of the Moscow Aviation Institute. The sweatshirt was dark-colored, which should help camouflage her at night, but more importantly its hood would serve to cover most of her shaved head and her injury.
Then she checked herself out in the mirror.
Grimaced.
She looked like a twelve-year-old waif who’d gotten lost on her way home from school and then mugged, but it was the best she could do without wasting a lot of precious time.
In the living room closet was a hook on which the agency kept keys to their legally registered cars. Typically, anywhere from three to five keys were hanging on the hook, each tagged with a description of the car it belonged to, as well as the vehicle’s current location in Moscow.
The safe house was down to one.
Tracie grabbed it and stuffed it into her jeans. She would worry about informing Stallings the house needed to be restocked later, assuming she didn’t die in a nuclear blast in the meantime.
She placed her tracker receiver in a shoulder bag along with a few other tools she thought she might need.
Then she tossed in a few candy bars and water bottles.
Then she walked out of the safe house and hiked to her car.
She was on the road before noon.
38
June 14, 1988
2:20 p.m.
A113 Highway
Northwest Russia, USSR
The problem with the tracker Tracie had placed on the F-150 was that it was extremely rudimentary. Its range was extraordinary for such a small device, but the fact of the matter was that if Navsegda had moved the truck more than twenty or, at most, twenty-five miles from where it had been parked last night, the tracking signal would in all probability have been lost.
Meaning, of course, the nuke would have been lost.
And Tracie would have no idea where to begin looking for it.
But she’d been pleased—and a little surprised—to discover upon powering up the replacement tracker that she was still receiving a signal.
The Nuclear Option Page 19