Deep Black

by Stephen Coonts; Jim Defelice

  “They would destroy their targets in seconds.”

  “From the time the order was given, three minutes. Four or five minutes between salvos. But no. It is far too risky.”

  “You feel an attack would be suicidal?” said Kurakin.

  “Against our interests. Not suicidal. No, it would succeed. But the consequences.”

  “We need to stop the rebels, and the Chinese from helping them.”

  “Yes. But this—no.”

  Kurakin got up from the long table where he’d been sitting and walked across the room. He paused near the window. Through its glass he could see a line of tourists in the distance near Trinity Tower.

  “No. I was rash,” he told Perovskaya finally. “The rebels have me frustrated, and the Americans block us from dealing with them properly.”

  Perovskaya eyed him warily, clearly sensing that this had been a performance but not sure to what end. It was possible, Kurakin thought, that the defense minister would question others in the government about Kurakin’s sanity. Hopefully those conversations would take their usual belligerent tone—and be remembered.

  “I’m feeling very out of sorts,” added the president. “The election is only a few months off. Democracy is a stressful thing.”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you.”

  “That was it?” asked Perovskaya.

  “Should there be more?”

  When Perovskaya was gone, Kurakin picked up the phone set and dialed into the private line of his security chief.

  “So?” he asked.

  “We can use it. He seemed reluctant at first.”

  “That can be edited out.”

  “In a sneeze.”

  “Make it happen,” said Kurakin. “We will need the tape in a few days.”

  36

  While they waited for Karr at the helicopter, Lia propped herself against the pile of metal in the hold and tried to take a nap. She had her legs tucked up against the helicopter’s sidewall and her jacket beneath her head as a pillow. Her right breast drooped ever so slightly, and Dean could easily imagine it bare.

  Karr sailed into view, a big smile on his face. Dean and Fashona took a few steps away from the helicopter to meet him.

  “Where’s the Princess?” Karr asked.

  “In the Hind sleeping.”

  “Ah, leave her a minute. She needs all the beauty rest she can get.” Karr turned to Fashona. “Raymond, you and the Princess cart the wreckage down to the railroad head as planned. Paul Smith is on his way out to meet you. You know him?”

  “CIA.”

  “The same. Come back with an S-1 pack. We’ll be up checking out the Marines or whatever the hell they are. Did they tell you it’s called Arf?”

  “I think it’s more like Veharkurth,” said Lia, emerging from the Hind.

  “Hey, Sleeping Beauty. Arf sounds better,” said Karr. He turned back to Fashona. “When you bring the Hind up, I don’t want them to see you, OK?”

  “Really? No shit.”

  “I wouldn’t shit you. You’re my favorite turd.”

  “You’re both so clever,” said Lia.

  Within a half hour, the helo had clattered off the runway. Dean and Karr were back in the truck, heading toward Veharkurth, or Arf, as Karr insisted on calling it.

  “What’s an S-1 pack?” Dean asked.

  “Kind of a standard surveillance set of tools kind of thing,” said Karr. “A lot of good toys; you’ll like ’em. Even if you are a Luddite, baby-sitter.”

  “I’m not against technology,” said Dean. “How are they going to get the helicopter close to the air base without being detected?”

  “They’ll figure it out. Stuff kind of comes to you. You know what I mean?”

  “No,” said Dean.

  Karr looked at him and laughed. “You’re a real ball-buster, Charlie Dean.”

  They were still about five miles from Arf on the main road when Karr suddenly pulled off it. He cupped his hand over his ear, obviously listening to a transmission from the Art Room. As he waited, Dean saw a small puff of dust on the horizon.

  Karr said nothing but threw the truck into reverse. He did a one-eighty and headed back south.

  “What’s up?” asked Dean.

  “Gomers are moving on us. There was a crossroad back about a mile, wasn’t there?”

  “Yeah.”

  They sped down the road toward it, fishtailing onto its barely packed surface. Karr charged down the road about five hundred yards, looking for a rise or some other vantage point from which to observe the approaching caravan. He finally spotted what looked like a trail leading to a hill on the right; twenty yards in, it turned into a bog. He jammed the brakes too late to avoid skidding about hub deep in the water but managed somehow to get the truck backed up onto more solid land.

  “Out,” he told Dean, jumping from the truck with the motor still running.

  Dean followed through the water and mud to the rise. By the time he got there, Karr was on his belly, watching the trucks with his binoculars.

  They were close enough that Dean didn’t need the glasses. Twenty-three KAMAZ 5320 6X6s passed, doing about forty miles an hour. The backs were covered and it was impossible to know how many men were in each truck, but it was obvious there were plenty; Dean saw a few hanging off tailgates as the convoy passed.

  “So, what’s that tell us?” asked Karr, turning over when the procession had gone by.

  Dean shrugged. “They’re deploying somewhere. They have no heavy weapons. Twenty-three trucks, could be as many as two dozen guys in a truck. Five hundred men. Two whatever those were at the end, like Land Rovers. Company commanders, maybe.”

  “Good, baby-sitter, right up until the end. You’re thinking in U.S. terms. That’s just about an entire Russian Marine battalion we watched go by. Maybe the whole thing.”

  “Five hundred men is a battalion?” Dean asked.

  “Marine battalions are bigger than the Army battalions,” said Karr.

  “An American battalion is over a thousand guys, and once you start talking about support—”

  “This ain’t America. In theory, the Russian Marine brigades have close to a thousand men, but I don’t know of any force in the country that’s at more than fifty percent strength, so I’m guessing that was the whole shooting match, give or take.”

  “If that was a full battalion, there’d be more support, more gear,” said Dean.

  “Maybe they left their ships home,” said Karr. “We’ll find out soon. Come on, before our truck sinks into the swamp.”

  …

  A second convoy passed them as they drove, this one with only five trucks, all of them much older Zils. Dean told Karr these probably included backup gear and extra supplies for the main group.

  “Could be, baby-sitter,” he said.

  “You ever going to stop calling me that?”

  Karr just laughed. They drove for another two hours before coming to the town where the base was. It was still heavily guarded, and there didn’t seem to be an easy way of looking inside or even examining the perimeter without being seen. The small settlement nearby offered no cover. There was a long stretch of fence near the highway; Dean saw a stake and a ribbon flag and guessed it was a minefield.

  “We’ll have to get the latest satellite download, then wait for Fashona and the Princess,” said Karr. He gunned the truck off the muddy path they’d been on back onto the main highway. “There’s some sort of old building up the road about two miles. Satellite pic shows it’s deserted.”

  “Looks like your satellite’s a little whacked,” said Dean as they approached the building. Two dozen small tents were pitched near the cement-block structure; several campfires burned. “Maybe somebody should go up there and clean the lens.”

  “Could be we’re hallucinating,” said Karr cheerfully. Slowing to a stop, he rolled down the window and gazed at the small city for a moment, then turned off the engine. “Let’s check it out.”

  At
least a dozen men were staring at them. Dean couldn’t see any rifles, but their ragged clothes could easily hide a myriad of weapons.

  “Be a little safer to leave the engine running, don’t you think?” said Dean. “One of us stay in the truck?”

  “Don’t be paranoid.” Karr shut the door behind him nonchalantly.

  Dean pushed out reluctantly, adjusting his pistol under his belt. Two of the men who’d been watching them walked toward Karr as he shambled forward and did his hail-fellow-well-met thing. Dean came around the back of the truck slowly. Something flashed on the left; instinctively he drew out his gun, dropped into a crouch, and yelled a warning.

  In the next second, he realized it was simply a glint of light bouncing off a steel fry pan.

  “Lighten up, baby-sitter,” said Karr.

  He said something to the Russians and they laughed. A few eyed Dean apprehensively, but they seemed to take his suspicion in stride. He slid his pistol back into his belt and tried smiling, but it was a weak effort at best.

  One of the Russians walked up and offered him a drink from a water bottle. Dean, who hadn’t had anything to drink since breakfast, took it.

  And nearly choked on the homemade vodka.

  “Don’t spit it out,” said Karr, pounding him on the back.

  “That’s a big-time insult.”

  “Tastes like gasoline,” managed Dean.

  “White lightning, with a vodka tint,” said Karr. “Never accept a drink in Russia. Once you do, you have to swallow it all and ask for more. Otherwise they’ll think you’re a wimp.”

  The man who had offered the bottle to Dean was now gesturing that he should have more. Dean tried giving him back the bottle, but the man waved him off. Dean tried to insist, but the man waved him away, his expression starting to cloud. Karr saved the situation by grabbing the bottle and taking what looked like a huge swallow, which elicited a happy remark from the Russian. Karr answered and they bantered a bit.

  “Says I’m drinking my weight,” the NSA op explained finally. “At least I think he is. Can’t get the hang of their accents.”

  “Why are they here?”

  “Yeah, good question.” Karr scratched the side of his head. “They’re some sort of gypsies. I think they’re native people who got into some sort of argument with someone a lot more powerful than they are. I’m not going to get deep into it. Here, pretend you’re drinking.”

  “Don’t you think you ought to figure out what the hell they’re up to?”

  “Not good to act too nosy, baby-sitter.” He took the bottom of the bottle and pushed it up, as if urging him to drink.

  “What you do is put your tongue on the opening, choke it off. Let it dribble down your cheek if you want. They won’t notice after a while.”

  “Burn a hole in my tongue.”

  “Better than in your stomach. Keep them amused, OK?”

  “How?”

  “Show ’em your gun. I told them we’d trade it for food, if they can rustle up anything less than a week old. I’m going to mingle.”

  37

  “They’ll take Kurakin out,” said Collins, helpfully keying a picture of the Russian president onto the data screens around the conference table in the White House situation room. “They’d have learned their lesson from the aborted Yeltsin coup, and they’d take him out right away.”

  “Possibly,” conceded Rubens. “I would point out, however, that we have no intercepts on it, and no evidence.”

  “There are no direct intercepts on the coup at all,” she volleyed back—a not-so-subtle suggestion that the NSA wasn’t doing its job.

  Rubens refused to take the bait, continuing to argue that it would be difficult for the plotters to hit Kurakin. “His bodyguards are all exceedingly loyal—most of them either are old friends or are related by blood.”

  “They’ll take him if they can,” said Blanders, the defense secretary. “They’ll use an assault force and, if all else fails, a sniper.”

  “Can we protect him?” asked the president.

  “Should we?” said the defense secretary, making one last play at keeping America on the sidelines. “Should we even try and interfere with the coup at all?”

  Rubens sat back and listened as the others debated the matter. It was clear that the president had already decided to do just that, calculating that above all else the democratic system in Russia must be preserved. He said twice that he neither liked Kurakin nor trusted him—Rubens thought the former wasn’t true, even if the latter was. But President Marcke clearly believed that long-term, democracy in Russia was preferable to a return to dictatorship, especially if it was run by the military.

  Rubens’ gaze met Collins’. She’d aged quite a bit in the last three years, but she was still attractive.

  In two more years she wouldn’t be worth another look.

  Be director of the agency by then.

  “What do you think, William?” asked the president.

  “Kurakin would be a high-priority target,” he said. “They would need a rather large assault team with heavy firepower to get past his bodyguards. As for a sniper …” He gestured with his hands. It was certainly possible. “The best way to protect him is to tip him off to the coup.”

  “If he believes us,” said Marcke.

  “That would be up to him,” said Rubens.

  “Tipping him off is the best way to protect him,” said Collins. “But revealing that we know about the coup will tell the Russians a great deal about our capabilities.”

  Rubens hadn’t expected the note of caution. Obviously she was positioning herself for any contingency—no matter what happened, she would be able to say she’d been right.

  So like her.

  “There are many trade-offs,” said Hadash. “I would recommend telling Kurakin that he’s a target once we’re sure, but leaving out details of our own attack. If we jam the rebels, ID the loyal units, and keep his communications lines open as Mr. Rubens has outlined—if all of that does not ensure his success, then he does not deserve to be president.”

  “Assuming he’s alive for us to tell,” suggested Collins.

  She was baiting him, Rubens finally realized—the agency had humint on a plot they hadn’t shared.

  It could not be very reliable if there were no intercepts. Nonetheless, Rubens saw his best move—his only move: feign some vague understanding of it already.

  “You haven’t briefed the president on the assassin theory,” he told Collins. “Perhaps you’d better.”

  She hesitated ever so briefly. Rubens felt as if he’d won the point, if not the set.

  “As Mr. Rubens hints, it is just a theory,” said Collins. “But a strong one.”

  She detailed humint gathered within the past six hours that indicated a highly trained member of the Russian military had cased out part of Bolso in the Caucasus region last week, examining part of the city where President Kurakin was supposed to have been this week. When Kurakin’s schedule changed, the man disappeared.

  “We call him the Wolf,” Collins added with an unbecoming smirk. “He was involved in the Georgian operation last year and has assassinated two leaders of the southern Islamic movement.”

  Rubens did not know who “Wolf” was, and Collins didn’t pop up an image on the screen. Whether this meant she didn’t know either, or she was deliberately holding back information from him was anyone’s guess.

  He fully suspected the latter.

  “Why didn’t you share this information earlier?” asked Hadash.

  “We just developed it,” said Collins. “And I’m still not convinced it’s significant.”

  “William?” asked Hadash.

  “There are no intercepts to back it up,” said Rubens. He resisted the temptation to add a subtle dig about the CIA not sharing, deciding it was best not to provoke her. “But I agree in principle. It’s very possible.”

  “Where is he?” Hadash asked.

  “We believe Moscow,” said Collins.


  “Desk Three can attempt to find and intercept Wolf as part of the operation,” said Rubens. “If we can get data on him. Still, informing Kurakin is our surest way of protecting him.”

  The secretary of state began to argue that they should go completely public with the information immediately, putting the whole world on notice. Rubens rolled his eyes.

  It was obvious that the president didn’t take that seriously, but he did pay attention when Blanders suggested that the entire country’s electrical grid be disrupted. This could be accomplished largely through a software attack similar to the one planned for the communications networks, but there would have to be a physical attack on at least two parts of the grid. Desk Three did have assets to launch the attack; it controlled two groups of remote F-47C attack planes, which could be fitted with bombs. But Rubens believed shutting down the grid would ultimately hurt the loyal forces more than the plotters.

  “You’d have considerable suffering in the general population,” Hadash said, making the argument for him. That allowed Rubens to speak up with what seemed like a reasoned counterproposal—it could not have been a better setup if it had been scripted.

  “We do have the option for some selective, temporary blackouts, if necessary,” he told the president. “And we will have assets in the air in case it’s deemed necessary.”

  “I envisioned more comprehensive forces,” said Blanders. Having made his last stand, he was now belatedly trying to carve out a piece of the pie for his people. “Delta and some Rangers could be there within twenty-four hours.”

  “Too risky,” said Marcke. “A large force could easily complicate matters.”

  Johnny Bib nudged Rubens’ leg under the table. He was looking at his alphanumeric pager and scribbling furiously on his yellow pad. Rubens tried to look discreetly at the notes but couldn’t make out what Bib was writing.

  “I will choose the moment to inform Kurakin,” said the president. His voice was firm; the decision was irrevocable and it was time to move on. “Billy, I want you to make the assassin a priority. Can you do it, Billy?”

  He’d need Karr and his team and some of the CIA people.

  The CIA people were already in place; they’d have to take point.

  Change the satellite priorities.