by Saul Herzog
She sucked on the cigarette and exhaled. “It all leads back to Zarina,” she said. “If we knew what she’d found, we’d know what Molotov was planning.”
“She was your friend?” Lance said to Tatyana.
“Not so much my friend,” Tatyana said. “She and I had a lot in common. We were in the same boat.”
“What boat?” Lance said.
“She was a woman in over her head,” Tatyana said. “She was scared. And so was I.”
“Could she have been mixed up with the GRU?” Lance said.
“You mean, was she a traitor?”
Lance nodded.
“She was targetted by the Kremlin,” Tatyana said. “They made attempts to turn her, but I don’t think they succeeded. If they had, she’d have sold me out too. And that never happened.”
“Roth thought that if she found out something about Russian invasion plans, she’d have come to you,” Laurel said.
Tatyana nodded. “I think he’s right. And I think that’s what cost her her life.”
“We need to find out what she was doing before they attacked her in Riga,” Lance said.
He looked at Tatyana. Tears were streaming down her face. He turned to Laurel, and the expression on his face told her it was her job to say something.
“Tatyana,” Laurel said.
“Sorry,” Tatyana said. “It’s just… it seems that becoming my friend is a very dangerous decision.”
Laurel got up and put her hand on Tatyana’s shoulder.
“I’ll call Roth,” Lance said, taking his phone from his pocket and stepping over to the window.
“Lance,” Roth said. “Are the girls all right?”
“They’re fine. Your doctor patched them up.”
“Tatyana’s leg?”
“She’ll walk.”
“We’re at a dead-end here,” Lance said. “We’re no closer to knowing what Agata Zarina found out. Like you said, it looks like the Kremlin’s set its sights on Latvia, but we’re just guessing.”
“You remember your friend from the Tenth Space Warning Squadron?”
“Lieutenant Harper,” Lance said.
“I’ve had him hone in on everything we knew about Zarina’s movements before her death. Are Laurel and Tatyana with you?”
“They’re right here.”
“Put me on speaker.”
Lance put Roth on speaker and went back over to the women. Tatyana had stopped crying, and the look on her face almost dared Lance to make fun of her.
“They Keyhole data’s still spotty,” Roth said, “but I had my guy trace as much of Zarina’s movements as he could. I also had the NSA hack into the Latvian national police database.”
“What did they find, Roth?”
“Well,” Roth said, “this all seems to have started when a small Latvian forestry plane went down along the Russian border.”
“Shot down?”
“That’s what Zarina went to find out. She traveled out to the border region and then returned to the capital in a real hurry. When she got back, she reported to her superior, then went home. That night, she was attacked in her apartment.”
“Did she file her report before she was attacked?” Laurel said.
“She did,” Roth said, “but looking at the Latvian database, it appears as if that report has been deleted.”
“Latvia’s an ally,” Lance said. “Why don’t we just call them and ask what the hell’s going on?”
“I’ve been trying to get in touch with the Latvians,” Roth said. “Zarina was in the national security division. Her commanding officer is the man I’ve been trying to contact.”
“And he’s been dodging your calls?” Lance said.
“Looks that way.”
“And he would have had access to Zarina’s report? He could have had it deleted.”
“Right,” Roth said.
“What’s his name?” Lance said.
Roth shuffled through some documents and said, “Kuzis. Alfreds Kuzis.”
Tatyana repeated the name, correcting the pronunciation.
“You know him?” Roth said.
“I’ve heard the name,” Tatyana said. “But I don’t know anything specific about him. He’s an important man in Riga. That’s all I know.”
“Roth,” Lance said, “can Harper scan the border region where the plane went down? See if he can spot signs of anything suspicious on the Russian side of the border?”
“He can try,” Roth said. “Like I said, Russia’s been jamming the KH network.”
“Jamming the UHF signals?” Lance said.
“I know,” Roth said.
“How are we supposed to…”.
“We’re looking at workarounds, Lance.”
Lance muttered under his breath, and Roth said, “What was that?”
“Signal’s cutting out,” Lance said. “Just get Harper to trawl over the area again and get back to us if he finds anything.”
He hung up the phone and looked at Laurel and Tatyana.
“How would you two feel about a trip to Riga?”
60
Kirov was lying face down on a wooden massage bed while not one but two young men in white cotton shorts and shirts dug their fingers and knuckles into the knots in his back. His face was in a leather-cushioned ring, and through the hole in the middle, he could see their feet, in plastic slippers, moving around him.
“Lower,” he said, gasping in agony as they worked their way into the deepest recesses of his muscles.
He watched their feet and wondered, when he faced them, if he’d be able to tell whose feet had been whose.
He was naked, and was about to turn over so they could begin the second portion of their service, when his phone rang.
“Damn it,” he said, grabbing the phone. He saw Prochnow’s name on the screen.
“Christoph, this better be fucking good.”
“It’s not good, sir,” Prochnow said, and Kirov could tell from his voice that he was close to panic.
“What is it?”
“They’re gone, sir.”
“Who’s gone.”
Prochnow hesitated, and Kirov said, “Both of them?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How could that happen?”
“Sir, Roth’s got another asset in Berlin.”
Kirov thought of what would happen to him if the president found out about this and barked into the phone, “I don’t need to tell you that this is a big fucking problem, do I, Christoph?”
“No, you don’t, sir.”
“I should have you killed for this.”
There was a long pause. Kirov looked up at the two men. They were beginning to get started without him, and he watched as one of them stripped out of his shorts.
He didn’t know how he was going to deal with this. It was all Sherbakov’s fault. He’d sent agents to that imbecile’s apartment, but it was empty.
“Can you fix this?” he said weakly to Prochnow.
“I don’t know how, sir.”
“Who took them?”
“A man. He found the tunnels.”
“How is that possible?”
“I went straight from the church to the secret entrance.”
“Why didn’t you take precautions?”
“Sir, you told me the tracking satellites were degraded.”
“Someone might have followed you.”
“No, sir. No one followed me.”
Kirov sighed. This was a problem. This was a big problem. It could cost him his life, and he knew it. He’d known it from the moment Sherbakov made his mistake.
But he had no choice.
If he was going to get out of this alive, the only way was to keep going.
“Did you get a look at the man?” he said to Prochnow.
“I did not, but I think we both know who it was.”
Kirov gritted his teeth. “Yes,” he said, “I think we do.”
He looked at his masseurs. They were playing with each oth
er on the bed, looking at him, oblivious to the disastrous news he’d just received.
He was waiting for Prochnow to beg. He was waiting for him to begin crying, and pleading, and apologizing.
Prochnow wasn’t apologizing. He wasn’t begging for his life. He could see the situation for what it was. Kirov was in as much trouble as he was.
They would both get through this or die together.
“We can’t tell anyone about this,” Kirov said.
“I understand, sir.”
There wasn’t a hint of relief in Prochnow’s voice.
“I’m going to have to keep it from the president.”
“I can be in Riga in a matter of hours, sir.”
“Yes,” Kirov said. “Get to Riga. If there’s any chance of us pulling this thing off now, it will require everything we can throw at it.”
61
Harper was exhausted. He’d received direct orders from Roth to scan the Latvian border with Russia and had been trawling over the region for eight hours straight, but it was useless. The Russian interference with his UHF feed was getting worse and worse. He should have been able to read the headlines in a newspaper, but at times now, his resolution was so bad he could barely tell a lake from a village.
He’d told his superiors he’d be better off switching to civilian satellite feeds, but everyone knew that would be admitting defeat. There was no way those satellites would pick up the movements Roth needed.
Harper rubbed his eyes. He needed to clock off. His relief was supposed to be there by now but still hadn’t shown.
He looked at his watch. Fifteen minutes late.
His hand absently reached for the donuts, but all he found was the sugar at the bottom of the box.
He was about to call his supervisor when a red blip pulsed from Cosmos 2543. Alarm bells started ringing.
Not literally.
Harper was in a heated, steel shipping container in a remote part of North Dakota that had for decades played an over-sized role in America’s system of Cold War defenses.
There were no actual alarm bells.
There were no barracks full of men in boots, ready to hit the ground running.
Apart from a small weapons room and enough weapons for the twenty-four armed personnel stationed at the base, there were no weapons.
The alarm bells were in Harper’s mind.
Because the little red blip he’d just seen, if he wasn’t gravely mistaken, was the equivalent of a twenty-first-century Pearl Harbor.
He began typing on his keyboard to confirm that what he’d just seen wasn’t a glitch, then pinged the KH-11 Keyhole/CRYSTAL satellite.
He got no response.
His heart pounded in his chest.
Was this it?
Was this the moment space became a contested arena. Everyone knew it would happen eventually. There were treaties claiming space would never become a war zone, but they weren’t worth the paper they were written on.
The US military ran on Keyhole, and as soon as the Russians and Chinese developed the capability to challenge them, the temptation would be too great not to do it.
There were four Keyhole satellites, at four opposite poles over the planet, and they were the military’s eyes on the earth’s surface.
When the Pentagon published detailed photographs of a North Korean nuclear plant, or an Iranian launch site, or a Russian aircraft carrier under construction, those photos came from a Keyhole satellite.
While spy planes and drones could later go in for a closer look, the ability to scan the entire surface of the globe existed solely because of the Keyhole constellation.
The network also supplied the US military with its top-level secure communications ability, which handled the encoding for the most sensitive communications, such as strike orders, the targetting of guided weaponry, and the navigation of supersonic aircraft.
And unless Harper was grossly mistaken, one of the four Keyhole satellites had just disappeared from his screen.
He pinged it again. The response should have been near-instantaneous. The speed of light.
Instead, he got something he’d never seen before.
An animated loading spinner, as if he was waiting for a Netflix stream to buffer.
He tried a hard link to the satellite, and the message was rejected.
Then he tried to access the data stream that came from the Keyhole constellation’s combined stream.
He almost fell off his chair. One-quarter of the globe, like the thick slice stretching from the north pole to the south, and from an imaginary line in the Eastern Atlantic to somewhere not too far west of Moscow, was dark.
Basically, the satellite capability over Europe and Africa was down.
He picked up his phone and called the number Levi Roth had given him in case of just this eventuality.
“Hello?” he stammered.
“Lieutenant Harper?” Roth said.
“It’s happened, sir.”
“I see,” Roth said.
“They took out KH-11, sir. The one that Kosmos 2543 has been tracking.”
“That’s Europe and Africa,” Roth said.
“It is, sir.”
“How did they do it?”
“I have no idea, sir.”
“Can you find out?”
“I could redirect the scopes on the two neighboring Keyhole satellites, sir. But that would mean the network was down for two more quadrants of the planet.”
“And if we were to do that, Harper, what would it show us?”
“Debris, sir. Probably nothing more.”
“I see,” Roth said. “In any case, I suppose how they did it isn’t really the issue.”
“No, sir. There are a thousand ways they could have done it. Simply ramming us would have done it.”
“What matters here is that they did it at all.”
“This is the first time we’ve ever been attacked by another nation in space, sir.”
62
The next morning, Lance, Tatyana, and Laurel were on a train to the Latvian capital of Riga. Tatyana’s leg was still badly injured, but she was on antibiotics, and as long as she didn’t do anything too demanding, it would heal.
The train left Berlin Hauptbahnhof before dawn, and they watched the sun rising in the east as the train crossed into Poland.
They sat on seats facing each other, and Laurel said, “What made you come back, Lance?”
Lance shrugged. “Roth said you needed me.”
She nodded. “It’s just, you seemed pretty adamant you were done with all of this last time we spoke.”
“This is different,” Lance said. “This was personal. I’m not here for the government. I’m here because I want to be.”
“Because of us,” Tatyana said, grinning at Laurel.
Lance smiled. He didn’t tell them that someone had been sent by the GRU to kill Sam. They didn’t need to know everything about his reasons for being there.
They had to change trains in Warsaw, and Lance helped Tatyana walk.
“This is the way she came,” Tatyana said as they passed through the concourse.
They boarded the train to Riga and ordered breakfast from a man wheeling a cart along the aisle. Sandwiches with some kind of deli meat and three cups of coffee in paper cups.
About two hours out of Warsaw, the train slowly came to a halt, and Lance got up to see what was going on. They were in open farmland, not far from the border into Latvia, and there was no reason for the train to stop there. It was an intercity express.
He walked down the carriage until he found a conductor, and he said in Polish, “What’s going on?”
“Something’s wrong with the signals on the Latvian side of the border,” the conductor said.
Lance knew enough to know that nothing was ever a coincidence.
A delay on the train spelled one thing.
An ambush.
He hurried back to his seat and told the others to be ready.
“Somethin
g’s up with the track signals ahead,” he said.
All three were armed, and even with Tatyana’s injured leg, they made a formidable fighting team. Any assassin would have his hands full.
Laurel looked at her phone and said, “I don’t think this is directed at our train in particular.”
“What do you mean?”
“The NATO Cyber Defence Center just sent me a notification. The entire Latvian communications network is under massive attack.”
“Massive attack?” Lance said.
“Network distortions on an unprecedented scale,” she said, reading the message, “specifically targetting servers located in Latvia.”
“What kinds of traffic distortions.”
Laurel was reading from her phone. “DDoS attacks, ping floods, botnet swarms.”
“Basically everything,” Lance said.
“It’s right out of a Russian cyberattack manual,” Tatyana said. “The transportation network, the power grid, the banking system, cell phone towers, government websites, news sites, they’re going to go after everything.”
“She’s right,” Laurel said. “Even Latvia’s English-language Wikipedia entries are being hacked.”
“It’s exactly what the Kremlin would do in preparation for an invasion,” Tatyana said.
“That’s exactly what the NATO Cyber Defence Center is saying too,” Laurel said, still reading the message. “Threat of Russian military intervention in Latvia extremely high.”
Lance looked out the window. “When did the attacks begin?”
“Thirty minutes ago. Already ATMs are down. Traffic lights are down. Medical equipment, power grids, news, it’s a mess.”
“This is it,” Tatyana said. “The precursor to a military attack. This is what they’ll use to smokescreen everything else that follows.”
Lance stood up and looked out the window.
“We need to get to Riga,” he said. “We need to get there fast. And this train isn’t going to get us there.”
A few minutes later, the train began moving slowly back in the direction it had come from.
An announcement came over the speaker from the driver saying that the Latvian rail system was experiencing technical difficulties. He apologized and said the train company was offering bus tickets for the final leg of the journey.