Ghost Force

by Patrick Robinson

  The one difference was that these modern soldiers of the Republic of Russia would have no need for the bayonets that were used to finish the Czar and his family. There was no need to plunge the steel into the bodies of the oilmen and the Siberian politicians as the guards had done to finish Nicholas, and the Empress Alexandra, the little boy Alexi, and the Grand Duchesses Marie and Olga, and Tatiana and Anastasia.

  The ripping slugs of the clasp-loaded modern AK-47s were a lot more efficient than the old service revolvers of the early twentieth century. Not one of the original nine men who had assembled in this room was breathing.

  And outside the room, there was pandemonium. The Russian Army, which had screamed into Central Avenue from the headquarters just outside the downtown area, had sealed off the entire throughway. Outside the building there were three large Army trucks plus one military ambulance.

  Stretcher parties were running in through the main doors. Everyone working in the building remained at their desks. Armed guards were posted on every door. Huge green screens were erected to shield the main entrance from the public, and they continued to the rear of the trucks. Soldiers with body bags were sprinting down the stairs to the basement. A team of soldiers with ladders, paintbrushes and rollers, cans of paint, and ammonia were descending the steps in single file.

  Everything from the room was being removed, eleven dead bodies, three wounded guards, the big table, carpets, chairs, papers. Everything. Behind the screen outside the door the Army trucks were being loaded, engines revving.

  The first of them, the one containing all of the bodies, was under way less than twenty minutes after the opening burst of fire had cut down Roman Rekuts. It swung out of Central Avenue heading north, directly toward the arctic tundra northeast of the Ural Mountains on the estuary of the Ob River.

  The truck containing the bloodstained carpets and furniture was next, roaring up the snowy street and again heading north. The ambulance was next, then the final truck, containing the screens and a dozen infantrymen in the back to assist with the burning and general destruction of the evidence when finally they reached their destination in the frozen north in the small hours of the morning.

  This was the Russian military at their most thorough. No one would ever know the fate of the nine men who had sought freedom for their homeland of Siberia to trade their oil without the heavy yoke of the Russian government around their necks.

  Perhaps even more sinister, no one would ever know how Moscow found out the meeting was taking place. But, as they say in the Siberian oil industry, even the icicles have ears and the wooden walls have eyes.

  MIDDAY (LOCAL), TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 28

  PRIVATE RESIDENCE OF THE RUSSIAN PRESIDENT

  MOSCOW

  There were just three visitors this morning: the Commander in Chief of the Russian Army, East of the Urals. The head of the FSB, who was rapidly developing a reputation comparable to his many predecessors. And the Russian Energy Minister, Oleg Kuts.

  “Anyone heard anything?” asked the President.

  “Not a word, sir. It seems no one knew who was in the meeting, no one knew what had happened, no one saw the cleanup, and no one’s heard a word since. So far, that is.”

  “Good,” said the President. “Very good. Please congratulate your Commander on a very skillful job, very well executed.”

  “I’ll make a point of it,” said the Russian General, kicking the heels of his jackboots together with an exaggerated, sharp crack.

  “No word from inside the oil industry, I trust?”

  “Nothing, sir,” replied Oleg Kuts. “But that’s understandable, since it seems no one has any idea who was in that room. I don’t suppose anyone will realize they’re missing for another twenty-four hours at least.”

  He turned to the sallow-faced, fortyish head of the FSB. “Your men found out anything?”

  “Not really, sir. Except that at least six of the men in the basement traveled to Yekaterinburg by completely different routes. None of them traveled together, and they used private aircraft and helicopters, cars, and two of them at least finished the journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway, one from the east, one from the west.”

  “A very secret meeting, eh?”

  “Yessir. Highly classified.”

  “We were certainly on the right lines then?”

  “Most definitely, sir.”

  “But in my view this all leads to one inevitable conclusion, gentlemen…we can’t go on doing this sort of thing. And I truly do not know how long we can keep the lid on Siberia. In the end they are going to try again, because the temptation of riches from China is simply too great. And we cannot go on putting people in jail whenever they become too powerful, as we have done in the past, eh?”

  “Or…er…eliminating them, sir.”

  “Exactly so. The fact is, we need to home in on at least one major foreign oil supplier who is not in Siberia. We cannot have all our eggs in that one huge basket.”

  “I know, sir. But these days, everyone who has any oil whatsoever is desperate to hang on to it and reap the reward. Yes, we may have to use our powers of persuasion.”

  The President smiled. “Perhaps, Minister, you should conduct an immediate study…and find a new supplier, with substantial reserves, who might be…shall we say…vulnerable?”

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  Jaan Valuev, for the past six years, had led something of a double life. As the hard-driving boss of OJSC he was the very picture of a New Russian industrialist, a suave, well-tailored chief executive, presiding over the fortunes of an oil giant with income of more than $6 billion a year, annual growth of 17 percent, and 100,000 employees.

  His wife had died four years earlier, and at fifty-two Jaan still lived in the grand mansion on the edge of the city of Surgut where they had brought up their two children. Both boys were now studying engineering at the Urals State Technical University in Yekaterinburg, the alma mater of Russia’s first President, Boris Yeltsin, and his long-suffering wife, Naya.

  This university is the largest east of the Ural Mountains. It once boasted twelve graduates on the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Jaan Valuev was its biggest private benefactor, and unlike all of the other Russian oil chiefs, he also heavily supported social programs in his hometown of Surgut. Generally speaking, Jaan Valuev had been a pillar of Siberian society.

  But there was another side to him. Instead of the traditional lavish dacha on one of the more scenic coastlines of the Black Sea, Jaan preferred western Europe. He owned a spectacular beachfront estate two miles east of the Marbella Club in Andalusia, southern Spain, and kept a permanent $300-a-night suite at the superb Hotel Colon on Cathedral Avenue in the heart of Barcelona.

  He owned an opulent white-fronted Georgian house in The Boltons, off London’s pricey Brompton Road, and a twenty-acre country estate in the hills above the Thameside village of Pangbourne in Berkshire. He had found his way into this glorious English countryside through his great friend, the urbane multimillionaire publisher, hotelier, and soccer fanatic John Madejski, the Chairman of Reading Football Club and owner of the towering modern stadium on the borders of the M4 motorway.

  It was this love of soccer that hurled the two men together. In 2009, upstart little Reading had fought their way into the upper echelons of the English Premier League and ended up playing mighty Barcelona in front of 60,000 people in the European Champions League at the Noucamp Stadium in Spain’s second city.

  And who should emerge that day, almost shyly, as the great new power in the Barcelona club
? The billionaire behind some of the biggest player transfer deals in the history of Spanish football—Jaan Valuev. Barcelona beat Reading 4–1, but the Siberian and the English tycoon became instant pals, and Jaan bought a house just a couple of miles from the imposing Madejski estate in Berkshire.

  By 2010, Jaan Valuev was Chairman of Barcelona FC, following in the footsteps of another Russian oil tycoon, Roman Abramovich, who famously bought and recharged the batteries of Chelsea Football Club, in West London, with close to half a billion dollars, which purchased some of the best players in the world.

  And tonight, Tuesday, September 28, Barcelona were in London, for their European Champions League game against England’s greatest football club, Arsenal, founded in 1883 and a byword for excellence and sportsmanship in a sometimes tarnished world game.

  Barcelona versus the Gunners, in the ultramodern new Emirates Stadium, in the heart of North London. Here was a game to be savored by aficionados all over the world. And 60,000 fans, 8,000 from Spain, were already making their way across London by taxi, bus, and train to watch this clash of titans, the Champions of the Spanish League against the Champions of England’s Premiership.

  Inside the marble halls of the Emirates Stadium, arrangements had been made for a sumptuous VIP dinner at 8:45 p.m., immediately after the game. The Arsenal Chairman would host it, and among his guests would be the Barcelona Chairman, and his buddy John Madejski, who was rumored to be preparing a sensational bid to buy Arsenal Football Club in partnership with Jaan Valuev.

  But these awesome financial shenanigans were all taken in good heart, and the game was under way right on time, with the stadium packed and both teams free of injury. There was only one blight on the big game landscape: Jaan Valuev, whose body was currently lying burned in a mass grave deep in the icy wastes of the arctic tundra in northern Siberia, naturally had not turned up.

  The seat next to John Madejski was empty, and it was still empty when Barcelona scored, and still empty when the teams came in for halftime. The Barcelona Deputy Chairman, Andre di Stefano, was absolutely mystified.

  “I have an e-mail from his secretary, dated yesterday. He was flying in today directly from Yekaterinburg in a private jet owned by Emirates Airlines. I have the flight arrival time, but the airline guys say he never boarded the plane.”

  “Well, where the hell is he?” asked the Reading Chairman.

  “Tell you the truth, we thought you’d probably know.”

  “I haven’t spoken to him since Sunday, and he said he’d see me here for a glass of wine before the kickoff.”

  “So unlike him,” said Andre. “To have informed no one he wasn’t coming. Something must have happened.”

  “Well, it’s close to midnight in Russia,” replied John Madejski. “His office is shut, and I tried his mobile twenty minutes ago and it was switched off…so perhaps he had to fly somewhere else first, and will get here for the second half. That’s a huge business he runs.”

  “I still think it’s totally unlike him to vanish without informing anyone…but…maybe a girlfriend?” di Stefano chuckled.

  “What! Instead of watching the game against Arsenal? No chance,” replied Madejski.

  And the second half kicked off without Jaan Valuev. And Arsenal scored three times to thunderous roars that could have been heard in Piccadilly Circus six underground stops away.

  The game ended and the dinner began, with places rearranged to close the gap left by the absent Siberian soccer chief.

  At the end of the evening, as John Madejski slipped out of the stadium to where his chauffeur, Terry, had the big blue Rolls Bentley waiting, a reporter from the London Daily Telegraph approached the Reading Chairman for a quote about the game. But what he really wanted was a quote about the rumored bid to buy Arsenal.

  John Madejski, of course, was far too wily to fall for that. “It was a wonderful game,” he said. “Played with great spirit. We saw four superb goals and Arsenal deserved it.” As an afterthought he added, “Tell you the truth, it was a little disappointing for me, because Mr. Valuev was unable to get here…and that was a shame. He would have loved it, even though his beloved Barcelona lost.”

  And that was sufficient for the football writer. Not for tonight’s report. That was already filed. But for tomorrow’s follow-up to the biggest game of the season:

  SIBERIAN OIL BILLIONAIRE

  MISSES BARCELONA’S BIG ONE

  Mystery of Jaan Valuev’s

  Arsenal No-Show

  The following report pointed out the reason Jaan missed the game was because of the protracted speculation that he and John Madejski might be scheming to buy Arsenal Football Club.

  They quoted Madejski as saying “Rubbish.” And the Barcelona club as saying they were not privy to all of their Chairman’s travel arrangements. No, they had not heard from him since the defeat in North London.

  Yes, they were quite certain he would be back in the director’s box for the game against Spanish rivals Real Madrid at the Birnabau Stadium in the Spanish capital a week from Saturday.

  1100, FRIDAY, OCTOBER 1

  NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY

  FORT MEADE, MARYLAND

  Lt. Commander Jimmy Ramshawe was in heaven. Or, as near to heaven as an organizational hell such as his own office permitted. A colleague from the National Surveillance Office, just returned from Europe, had dropped him off a pristine copy of yesterday’s London Daily Telegraph.

  This was a fairly regular occurrence up here on the eighth floor behind the massive one-way glass walls of the OPS2B Building. Lt. Commander Ramshawe’s voracious appetite for top foreign newspapers was well known.

  Leaning back in his swivel chair, feet on the desk, he sipped a cup of fresh coffee before reaching for his newspaper and turning to his favorite pages. As it happened there was not much going on in London to interest him, and he kept wandering through the newspaper until he finally landed on the sports pages.

  And one word jumped straight out at him: Siberian . Right in the headline. If the word had been set in smaller type he’d most certainly have missed it.

  But there was no missing this. SIBERIAN OIL BILLIONAIRE .

  “Hallo,” said Jimmy. “One of the late Mr. Masorin’s mates. What’s he done to get himself in with the bloody football players?”

  One minute later: “Christ, the bugger’s vanished. Those Siberians aren’t having much luck lately.”

  On nothing more than pure reflex, he picked up his phone and called Lenny Suchov.

  “Lenny, you seen anything about this Siberian oil guy gone missing?”

  “Funny you should mention that. We just got a highly classified report in from our man up in Noyabrsk pointing out the Chairman of SIBNEFT has vanished—not been seen for two or three days.

  “Our guys think he may have been snatched by agents of Moscow, and put in the slammer, just like they did to poor old Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the biggest Yukos oil shareholder, six years ago.

  “Anyway, how did you find out about it?”

  “I’ve just read it in the London Daily Telegraph. ”

  “Impossible. This has only just broken. It’s not even in the Russian newspapers yet.”

  “Maybe not, but the old Siberian was supposed to be at a football game coupla nights ago in London and he never showed.”

  “A what!”

  “A football game. He’s the Chairman of Barcelona.”

  “Wha
t the hell are you talking about? The missing Siberian is called Sergei Pobozhiy. And he’s supposed to be at SIBNEFT’s northern site office near the oil field in the West Siberian Basin. Not at a football game.”

  “What do’you say his name is?”

  “Sergei Pobozhiy.”

  Jimmy grappled with the London broadsheet. “Well, that’s a different guy. My man’s called Jaan Valuev. He’s the boss of some Russian oil company, but it doesn’t say here which one. Anyway it does say he’s vanished.”

  “Christ, Jimmy, that’s two missing and one dead in the last couple of weeks, all major Siberians…what the hell’s going on?”

  “Beats the hell outta me, old mate.”

  “Okay, I’ll get another couple of field agents on this. Tell you what. I’ll keep you posted. But this isn’t anything military, or to do with national security. Give me a call in an hour, and I’ll tell you where we stand.”

  11:30 A.M., SAME DAY

  MOSCOW

  The President of Russia, a big, burly, sallow-faced former deputy head of the Soviet secret police, the KGB, missed the old sledgehammer rule of the authoritarian Central Government more than most.

  He rubbed along adequately with both houses of the Russian Parliament—the Federation Council and the Duma—but as the elected Head of State he had enormously broad powers, including the appointment of his deputy, the Prime Minister, and all government ministers.

  Some Presidents of the Russian Federation are more approachable than others. This one was very remote, yearning in his heart for the old days of the Politburo, the huge brutal power of the Soviet machine, which could deal with “trouble” instantly and ruthlessly. This President was not really a committee man.

  If anyone had found out what had been perpetrated at the oil summit in Siberia, the President might very well have faced a career-ending onslaught in the Parliament. But this President held power, like so many of his recent predecessors, with an iron grip. The Duma and the Federation Council found out what he wanted them to know.