by Tom Clancy
“Get yourself together,” she whispered to herself, then slipped the tiny device into the pocket of her slacks, and flushed the toilet.
She was out on the couch with Jack a few minutes later. She wanted to add the tracker before they retired to the bedroom, because Jack was a very light sleeper and she did not think for a second she could get around to his side of the bed and attach the device without him stirring. Right now his iPhone was under the lamp on the end table by him; she just needed him to go to the bathroom or the kitchen or back to the bedroom to change into his warm-ups.
As if on cue, Jack stood. “I’m going to make a nightcap. Can I get you something?”
Her mind raced. What could she request that would keep him busy for a minute?
“What are you having?”
“Maker’s Mark.”
She thought it over. “Do you have any Baileys Irish Cream?”
“Sure do.”
“On ice, please.”
Jack disappeared through the open kitchen door, and Melanie decided this was her moment. She would easily be able to hear him grabbing ice from the refrigerator for their drinks. She knew she would not have to worry about him popping back out into the living room until then.
She vaulted over to the other side of the couch, glanced down to pull the phone off the end table, and then took the FBI tracker from her pocket. With one hand on each device, she attached them together, all the while keeping her eyes on the door to the kitchen.
Thirty seconds. She counted in her head, even though Lipton had explained to her that the device would vibrate gently when the upload was complete.
In the kitchen she heard the opening and closing of cabinets, and the sound of a bottle being placed on the counter.
Come on! She willed the damn transfer to go faster.
Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen . . .
Jack cleared his throat, and it sounded like he was at the kitchen sink.
Twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six . . .
The eleven-o’clock news came on; the first story was about U.S. Navy jets engaging Chinese fighter planes over the Strait of Taiwan.
Melanie looked toward the opening to the kitchen, worried Jack might run out to catch the news if he heard about it.
Thirty. She started to take the device off the phone, but then realized she had not felt the vibration.
Damn it! Melanie forced herself to wait. She had not heard the sound of ice cubes yet, so she told herself Jack would be in the kitchen for a moment more.
The device in her left hand buzzed, and instantly she separated the two gadgets, slipped the FBI tracking drive into her pocket, and reached to put the phone back on the table. As she was placing it there, she stopped herself suddenly.
Had it been up or down?
She could not remember. Shit. She looked at the table and the phone, tried to remember which way it had been lying when she grabbed it. After no more than a second, she flipped it upside down, then placed it back on the table.
Done.
“What are you doing with my phone?”
Melanie jumped as she looked back to the kitchen. Jack stood there with a glass of Baileys in his hand.
“What?” she asked, her voice croaking a little.
“What were you doing to my phone?”
“Oh. Just checking the time.”
Jack stood there, looking at her.
“What?” she asked. Perhaps too defensively, she realized.
“Your phone is right there.” He nodded to the side of the couch where she had been sitting. “Seriously. What’s going on?”
“Going on?” Melanie felt her heartbeat, and she was certain Jack must have heard it.
“Yeah. Why were you looking at my phone?”
The two just stared at each other for several seconds while the news report discussed the air war over Taiwan.
Finally, Melanie said, “Because I want to know if there is someone else.”
“Someone else?”
“Yes. Come on, Jack. You go away on trips all the time, we don’t talk while you’re out of town, you can never say when you are coming back. You can tell me, I’m a big girl. Do you have someone else?”
Jack shook his head slowly. “Of course not. My job . . . my job takes me places suddenly from time to time. It always has. Before last week I hadn’t traveled anywhere in a couple of months.”
Melanie nodded. “I know. It’s stupid. It’s just that this last time, I would have liked to have heard from you.”
Jack sighed. “I’m sorry. I should have made time to call. You’re right.”
Melanie stood and walked across the room to him, embraced him tightly. “I’m just stressed out right now. Hormones. I’m sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry for. I really didn’t know it bothered you.”
Melanie Kraft reached for the glass in his hand and took it. She smiled.
“Did you forget the ice?”
Jack looked at the glass. “The bottle was in the freezer. It’s basically a milk shake as is. Thought that would work.”
Melanie sipped it. “Oh. Yeah, that’s great.”
She turned with her drink to go back to the couch, but Jack stood there for a moment, his eyes on his phone.
He’d known she was suspicious of him, and he’d given her much to be suspicious about. He didn’t like the fact that he’d just caught her checking up on him, but he could not say he didn’t understand it. He let it go, told himself he needed to be careful to keep her happy, and put the matter out of his mind.
—
Valentin Kovalenko sat at the little desk in the furnished rental flat he’d acquired in Washington, D.C. He had just logged in to Cryptogram to let Center know he was in place and ready for instructions, and he was waiting for a reply.
The past two days had been a whirlwind. He’d cleared out of Barcelona, then trained to Madrid and flown from there to Charlotte, North Carolina. He was stressed about his trip to the USA; he knew there were dangers there for him on a par with what he faced in his own country. To combat the shakes he’d developed worrying about passing through U.S. immigration, he’d gotten himself good and drunk on the plane, and he passed through the airport control formalities in a calm, collected stupor.
In Charlotte he rented a car and then drove up the coast to D.C. He spent a night in a hotel, and moved into this basement apartment underneath the front staircase of a brownstone in upscale Dupont Circle.
He had actually been ready to work since noon today, and it was eight p.m. now, but before he even pulled his laptop out of his backpack or turned on his mobile phone he’d attempted to contact an acquaintance at the Russian embassy here. He wasn’t sure if the old SVR colleague was still posted in Washington, so he found a pay phone outside a post office and then called local directory assistance.
The man was not listed under his own name, which was no big surprise, but Kovalenko checked a couple of aliases the man had used on operations abroad, and only then did he accept the fact he would not so easily wend his way out of his obligations with the Center organization by phoning a friend for help.
After a lengthy surveillance detection run he went to the Russian embassy on Wisconsin Avenue, but he did not dare get too close. Instead he remained a block away and watched men and women come and go for an hour. He had not shaved in a week, and this helped him with his disguise, but he knew he needed to limit his exposure here. He did another SDR on his way back to his neighborhood, taking his time to get on and off public transportation.
He’d dropped by a liquor store on 18th Street just around the corner from his place and picked up a bottle of Ketel One and a few beers, returned to his flat, then put the vodka in the freezer and downed the beers.
His afternoon, then, was a complete b
ust, and now he found himself sitting at his computer and waiting on Center to reply.
Green text appeared on the black screen. “You are in position?”
“Yes,” he typed.
“We have an operation for you that is most urgent.”
“Okay.”
“But first we need to discuss your movements today.”
Kovalenko felt a twitch of pain in his heart. No. No way in hell they tracked me. He’d left his phone on his desk in his apartment, and his laptop had not even been unpacked. He’d used no computer, he’d not seen anyone tracking him through his SDRs.
They were bluffing.
“I did exactly as you asked.”
“You went to the Russian embassy.”
The pain in his heart increased; it was just panic, but he fought it. They were still bluffing, he was certain. It would be easy for them to guess he would try to make contact with SVR associates as soon as he got to Washington. He had been a good one hundred yards from the embassy.
“You are guessing,” he wrote, “and you guessed wrong.”
A photograph appeared on his Cryptogram window without warning. It was Kovalenko, surveillance quality, and he was sitting in a small park across from the Russian embassy on Wisconsin Street. Clearly it was taken this afternoon, perhaps from a traffic camera.
Valentin closed his eyes for a moment. They were everywhere.
He stormed into his kitchen and took the bottle of Ketel One out of the freezer. Quickly he grabbed a water glass from his cabinet and poured two fingers of the chilled vodka. He polished off the glass in a few gulps and then filled it again.
A minute later he sat back down at the desk. “What the fuck do you want from me?”
“I want you to obey your directives.”
“And what will you do if I don’t? Send the Saint Petersburg mob after me? Here in America? I don’t think so. You can hack a security camera, but you can’t touch me here.”
There was no response for a long moment. Valentin looked at his computer while he drained the second glass of vodka. Just as he put the glass back on the tiny desk, there was a knock on the door behind him.
Kovalenko bolted upright and spun around. Sweat that had formed on his forehead in the past minutes dripped into his eyes.
He looked down at the Cryptogram window. There was still no response.
And then . . . “Open the door.”
Kovalenko had no weapons; he was not that kind of intelligence officer. He ran into the little kitchen off the living room, and he pulled a long kitchen knife out of a butcher’s block. He returned to the living room, his eyes on the door.
He rushed over to the computer. Typed with shaking hands, “What’s going on?”
“You have a visitor. Open the door or he will break it down.”
Kovalenko peered through the small window next to the door, and he saw nothing but the steps up to street level. He unlocked the door and opened it, his knife low to his side.
He saw the figure now in the darkness, standing next to the garbage can under the stairs up to the brownstone. He was a man, Kovalenko judged from the stature, but he stood as still as a statue, and Valentin could not make out any of his features.
Kovalenko backed into his living room, and the figure moved toward him, came near the doorway, but did not enter the apartment.
From the light of the living room Kovalenko saw a man, perhaps in his late twenties. He was solidly built and fit-looking, with an angular forehead and very pronounced and high cheekbones. He looked to the Russian like some sort of cross between an Asian and an American Indian warrior. Serious and stern, the man wore a black leather jacket, black jeans, and black tennis shoes.
“You are not Center.” Valentin said it as a statement.
“I am Crane,” was the response, and Kovalenko instantly could tell the man was Chinese.
“Crane.” Kovalenko took another half-step back. The man was intimidating as hell; he looked to the Russian like a stone-cold killer, like an animal not fit for civilized society.
Crane unzipped his jacket and opened it. A black automatic pistol was tucked in his waistband. “Put down the knife. If I kill you without sanction, Center will be angry with me. I do not want Center angry.”
Valentin took another half-step back and bumped into the desk. He placed the knife on the desk.
Crane did not reach for his gun, but he clearly wanted it displayed. He spoke in heavily accented English. “We are here, close to you. If Center tells me to kill you, you are dead. Do you understand?”
Kovalenko just nodded.
Crane motioned to the laptop computer on the desk behind the Russian. Valentin turned and looked at it. At that moment a new paragraph appeared on Cryptogram.
“Crane and his men are force multipliers for our operation. If I could realize all my schemes from a computer keyboard, I would do that. But sometimes other measures must be taken. People like you are used. And people like Crane are used.”
Kovalenko looked away from the computer toward Crane, but he was gone. Quickly Kovalenko shut the door and locked it.
He returned to the desk and typed, “Assassins?”
“Crane and his men have their tasks. Making sure you follow directives is one of their tasks.”
Valentin wondered if, all this time, he’d been working for Chinese intelligence.
When he thought it over, some of the pieces fit. But others did not.
He typed, his hands still shaking, “It is one thing to work with the mob in Russia. It is very different to control teams of assassins in the United States. This has nothing to do with industrial espionage.”
The uncharacteristically long pause by Center was disquieting. Valentin wondered if he should have kept these suspicions close to his vest.
“It is all business.”
“Bullshit!” shouted Kovalenko to his apartment, but he did not type this.
When he did not respond, a new line popped up on Cryptogram. “Are you ready to hear your next assignment?”
“Yes,” Kovalenko typed out.
“Good.”
FORTY-EIGHT
He who conquers the sea is all powerful.” It was the motto of the INS Viraat, the Indian aircraft carrier that docked in Da Nang one week to the day after Chairman Su Ke Qiang ordered all foreign warships out of the South China Sea.
The Viraat began its life in 1959 as Britain’s HMS Hermes and sailed under the Union Jack for decades before it was sold to India in the 1980s. No one could argue that the carrier was still cutting-edge, but a recent refitting by the Indian Navy had extended the Viraat’s life a few years, and, new technology or old, it was an important symbol of the Indian nation.
At just under thirty thousand tons, it was significantly less than a third the size of the Nimitz-class Ronald Reagan. There were 1,750 sailors and pilots on board, as well as fourteen Harrier fighter jets, and eight Sea King attack helicopters.
On the second day after the carrier arrived in Da Nang, one of its Sea King helicopters was patrolling in India’s oil exploration zone when it spotted a Chinese Song-class submarine moving to within ramming range of an Indian oil exploration vessel. The sub struck and damaged the ship minutes later, sending the thirty-five civilian crew members of the exploration ship into lifeboats. The Sea King began ferrying the crew to other vessels nearby, but not before calling in the antisubmarine-warfare-capable INS Kamorta, a corvette that had moved into the SCS along with the Viraat. The Kamorta raced to the area and got a radar fix on the Song-class sub.
The Kamorta fired one 213-millimeter rocket from its deck-mounted RBU-6000, a Soviet-designed antisubmarine rocket launcher. The rocket sailed from the horseshoe-shaped launcher, flew through the air for five kilometers, and then dove into the water. It sank to a depth of two hundred
fifty meters but exploded prematurely, inflicting no damage on the sub, which had dived to a depth of three hundred twenty meters.
A second missile also failed to find its target.
The Song-class sub escaped the encounter. But this was the excuse the Chinese were waiting for.
Three hours after the attack on the Chinese submarine, just after dark, the Ningbo, a Chinese guided-missile destroyer on station between Hainan and the Vietnamese coast, went to battle stations. It launched four SS-N-22 missiles, NATO classification Sunburn, a Russian-developed anti-ship missile.
The Sunburns streaked over the water at Mach 2.2, three times faster than the American Harpoon anti-ship missile. The radar and guidance systems in the nose of the weapons kept them on target as they closed on the biggest ship within range.
The Viraat.
As the lightning-fast flying three-hundred-kilogram armor-piercing warheads neared their target, anti-missile defensive SAMs on board the Viraat fired in a desperate attempt to shoot down the Sunburns before impact. Miraculously, the first SAM out of its launch tube struck the first incoming missile just four kilometers from impact, but within moments all three of the remaining SS-N-22s slammed into the starboard-side hull of the big ship, with the second missile striking high enough to send three Sea King helos into the air in a fireball and to destroy two of the Harriers on the deck with the resulting shrapnel.
The carrier did not sink—three three-hundred-kilogram warheads were not enough ordnance to put the thirty-thousand-ton ship on the ocean floor, but the missiles succeeded in effecting a “mission kill”—a naval term for rendering a vessel useless as a war-fighting instrument.
Two hundred forty-six sailors and airmen were killed as well, and the Viraat’s support ships all raced to the aid of the carrier to help put out fires and to pull crew members from the black water.
Two Harrier pilots in the air at the time of the accident found themselves with nowhere to land, as they were too low on fuel to make it to their divert airfields in Vietnam. Both pilots ejected into the ocean and survived, though their aircraft were lost to the waves.