Overkill pr-1

by James Barrington

  ‘So now what?’ Kemp fired the question at Richter, but Simpson fielded it.

  ‘From JARIC’s point of view, I think that’s it. I don’t think there’s anything more to be gained from analysis of these films. We’ve identified the fact that the hill has vanished. What we now have to do is find out how the Russians managed it, and why the Americans don’t want to tell us about it. And that’s our job.’

  Babushka Restaurant, Central Moscow

  John Rigby had been an agency professional for a long time, and had easily spotted the tail as he left the American Embassy on Novinskij bulvar, but he had made no attempt to shake it. A golden rule for any covert operative is never to shake a tail, because doing that identifies the person being followed as a professional, which immediately blows his cover as a covert agent. A professional who believes he is being followed will simply proceed about his lawful business or, if he was actually en route for some kind of nefarious activity, abandon his plans and do something completely innocent and legal. John Rigby was just going out for lunch, so he ignored the man in the dark blue VAZ as he looked for a parking space.

  The Babushka Restaurant just off Nikitskaja ulitsa was small and intimate, and a popular lunchtime venue for foreign diplomats and newsmen. Rigby was a regular there, and nodded to several acquaintances as he hung his overcoat on the end peg just inside the restaurant doorway. Rather than join any of the people he knew, Rigby selected a small table for two in the far corner. He sat with his back to the wall, facing the restaurant entrance, ordered his meal and then buried himself in a two-day-old copy of the Wall Street Journal.

  Despite his apparent absorption in his paper, Rigby was paying close attention to the comings and goings at the restaurant, and particularly to the area near the coat rack. Ever since the last message from RAVEN he had been making himself even more visible than before, eating three meals a day in various Moscow restaurants, taking walks in Gorky Park, shopping in GUM or just wandering the Moscow streets. His duodenal ulcer had been complaining ever since this routine had started, and he was beginning to lose sleep as well.

  As he ate the rather plain meal and drank the glass of milk that was all he could tolerate without reaching for his bottle of pills, Rigby wondered if Langley was right. Initially he had been instructed to make absolutely no attempt to identify RAVEN, for fear of alarming him, but since finding the message in his car, Langley had been frantic to get any indication of the identity of the disaffected Russian. Rigby had spent hours memorizing the faces of the most senior officers in the GRU and the SVR plus, where photographs existed, those of their principal assistants, friends and associates. That hadn’t helped identify RAVEN, although Rigby had detected certain liaisons of which CIA Moscow had not previously been aware.

  At every meal, and every time he went out anywhere, Rigby had tried, as surreptitiously as possible, to be aware of anyone who approached him, his overcoat – which he invariably took off in every bar and restaurant he visited – or his car. To date, his vigilance had yielded absolutely nothing, because RAVEN had simply failed to make contact.

  Rigby drank the last of his milk, and then went into the toilet at the back of the restaurant. When he returned to his table, he called for the bill, paid it, and collected his coat. He glanced carefully around the restaurant before he left, but paid no particular attention to the grey-haired man sitting alone at the far corner of the bar, head buried in his newspaper, which was perhaps unfortunate. The man’s face would have been almost as familiar to Rigby as his own, and if he had identified him, the CIA’s search for source RAVEN would have been over.

  It wasn’t until he was outside in the street and walking away from the restaurant that his probing fingers detected the small cylindrical object in his overcoat pocket. Rigby returned immediately to the restaurant, and looked closely at everyone there, even checking the restroom. As he turned to leave for the second time, he noticed that the bar stool in the far corner was unoccupied, the newspaper and an empty glass sitting innocently on the bar top.

  Kutuzovskij prospekt, Moscow

  ‘Hullo?’ Genady Arkenko said as he picked up the telephone.

  The voice at the other end didn’t bother with introductions, just passed the message. ‘Phase Two has been truncated. Implement Option Two Alpha immediately.’

  Genady Arkenko repeated the message and put down the telephone. Then he removed a single page from a large notepad and placed it on a piece of hardboard, which he had already confirmed would not register the impression of anything written on it, sat down and composed a short message in block capitals. He walked over to the radio, took a one-time pad from a locked drawer, sat down again at the table and encoded the message.

  The radio set Dmitri Trushenko had provided included a squirt or burst transmitter – a device which allowed messages to be compressed to a fraction of their proper length, transmitted, and then recorded and expanded by the receiving equipment. Arkenko initialized the system, and input the encrypted message into the transmitter’s tape recorder using a Morse key. Then he re-recorded the message on to the second, high-speed tape deck. When he pressed the transmit key, the red ‘transmit’ light illuminated for less than a quarter of a second, barely time enough for any detection equipment to register the transmission, and nowhere near long enough for any kind of fix or triangulation to be obtained.

  In the corner of the room, tucked behind a bookcase, was a small paper shredder. Arkenko took the page from the one-time pad, and the sheet of notepaper he had used to compose the message, and fed them both through the machine. Then he opened the shredder’s receptacle, removed the thin strips of paper, took them over to the fireplace and burned them. Finally, he used the master erase function on both the tape recorders in the radio installation to obliterate the two copies of the message he had sent.

  Six minutes after he had received the telephone call, no trace of the message he had relayed could be found anywhere in the room. Genady Arkenko was a very careful man.

  Cambridgeshire and London

  In the XJ6 on the way back to London, Simpson sat silent most of the time, which Richter ascribed to perhaps one glass of wine too many at lunch – certainly he had tossed Richter the keys as they had made their way back to the car park. However, as the Jaguar approached the northern suburbs Simpson seemed to rouse himself. ‘Conclusions?’ he asked.

  ‘At the moment I haven’t got any,’ Richter replied, ‘but I think I’m beginning to see what’s going on. More importantly, I can understand why my CIA source was telling me that the problem had two components, and that I was looking at the wrong one.’

  ‘Go on,’ Simpson nodded.

  ‘Since we got involved with this, we’ve been looking for things on films. We looked at the hill on the KH–12 films, and at the hole where the hill used to be on the Blackbird footage. In fact, I think the hill’s irrelevant. What’s important is how the Russians destroyed it – that’s the second component of the problem, and that’s what my source was trying to tell me.’

  Simpson mulled over this for a few minutes. ‘What are your intentions now?’ he asked.

  ‘Research. Shifting that much earth had to cause a bang, so the first thing I’m going to do is check the seismic records. Then I’m going to have to think about it.’

  Simpson nodded. ‘Don’t think for too long. I’m getting a bad feeling about all this, and I think it’s time we started taking some action.’

  Anton Kirov

  The Anton Kirov had made good time. The transit through the Bosphorus had been completed by early afternoon and by 1500 local time the ship was crossing the Marmara Denizi, the short stretch of water between Istanbul and the Dardanelles. Captain Bondarev was sitting down to a late lunch in his cabin when Zavorin knocked briefly and entered. ‘Valeri,’ he said, ‘there has been a slight change of plan.’

  ‘Yes?’ Bondarev put down his fork and looked up.

  Colonel Zavorin smiled. ‘Nothing too drastic. We have been ordered not to cal
l at Piraeus. Moscow wants us to make best speed across the Aegean and the Mediterranean, and our first port of call will probably now be Tunis.’

  Bondarev grunted. ‘Did our lords and masters say why?’

  ‘No, but I presume that our arrival time in Gibraltar has been brought forward.’

  Bondarev grunted again. He wasn’t fond of Piraeus, but he was finding it increasingly irksome being a ship’s captain who was not allowed to take any decisions. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I will make the signals.’

  Le Moulin au Pouchon , St Médard, near Manciet, Midi-Pyrénées, France

  Unusually, there were three emails containing encrypted messages for Hassan Abbas to decode that afternoon. All from a German address, they had actually originated in Moscow, sent from Dmitri Trushenko’s spacious office at the Ministry. As a minister, Trushenko was entitled to a single unmonitored telephone line with international access. All the other office lines went through one or more switchboards where, Trushenko was quite certain, either or both the SVR and the GRU – and maybe even the CIA and SIS – had placed taps.

  The secure line was checked for bugs daily, and he was certain it was safe. Early in his term at the Ministry, Trushenko had telephoned a trusted colleague and, with his agreement and – for the safety of both men – with witnesses present at both ends of the line, the two men had engaged in a pre-scripted conversation so blatantly traitorous that no monitoring organization could have failed to take immediate action. Nothing had happened. Nobody had kicked in his door in the early hours of the morning, or frog-marched him out of the Ministry to the cells at the Lubyanka. He had repeated the exercise a couple of times a year ever since then, with precisely the same absence of results.

  The line was intended to allow ministers to converse frankly with colleagues without fear of being overheard and subsequently forced to listen to taped statements that they should never have made. Trushenko used the line sparingly for telephone calls, partly because he was supremely conscious of the security implications of the operation in which he was involved, but mainly because he was essentially a loner and not much given to chatting with colleagues.

  However, virtually every day he connected his laptop to the telephone socket next to his desk, because that enabled him to send and receive email messages with as much security as was possible in Moscow. And with Podstava now approaching its final stages, close liaison with the ragheads, as Trushenko dismissively termed them, was essential.

  The first two emails Abbas decoded were simple enough. One confirmed that the last device – the London weapon – was as good as finished and would be ready to leave the factory in Russia the following evening. The second advised him that the route of the small freighter carrying the demonstration device had been changed so that the ship would arrive in Gibraltar earlier than had originally been planned. Abbas read them, opened a spreadsheet on his computer and input the dates and times. Then he spent some time composing and encrypting an email for Sadoun Khamil which relayed the same information to him.

  It would have been easy enough for Dmitri Trushenko to have sent copies of his emails simultaneously to Khamil, but from the start the leaders of al-Qaeda had insisted that the liaison with the Russians would be handled solely by Hassan Abbas, to avoid any possibility of compromising any other members of the organization.

  The third email was the most interesting, and Abbas read it several times before composing his message to Khamil. Trushenko had couched his information in guarded terms, but his analysis of the implications of the over-flight by the American spy-plane was thorough. When he’d received the first brief message which simply stated that an over-flight had taken place, it had been immediately obvious to Abbas, as it had been to Trushenko, that some kind of a leak must have occurred. Trushenko’s considered opinion now was that this leak was an irritant, nothing more, because the operation was so nearly complete, with only two weapons still left to be positioned, and after some thought Abbas was inclined to agree.

  In fact, from the point of view of al-Qaeda, everything they required was already in place, so whether the London weapon was successfully delivered or not made little or no difference to them.

  Hammersmith, London

  When Richter got back to the office, he jotted down some dates on a piece of paper. Then he called the Registry and requested the Seismic Activity file and the Moscow Station activity files.

  When they arrived, Richter went back through each for two months, and read all the subsequent reports. Then he checked the dates he had noted against one of the seismic reports, and then he knew why the Blackbird had flown, and why it had been so important for the Americans to take pictures of a hill that wasn’t there any more. The only things Richter didn’t know were how the Russians had done it, and what their next move was likely to be. The answer to the first question he might be able to find out by research, but the second Richter could only guess at. And his guess frightened him.

  Richter made a long telephone call to a contact at the Ministry of Defence, then he called Simpson on the direct line and told him he was coming up.

  Office of the Director of Operations (Clandestine Services), Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

  Clifford Masters, Director of the CIA’s Intelligence Division, knocked and walked into the office. ‘We’ve heard from RAVEN again,’ he began without preamble.

  Hicks looked interested. ‘About time. The same transmission method?’

  ‘Yes,’ Masters replied. ‘And again it wasn’t a film, just a short note in a film canister. It was passed to John Rigby in a Moscow restaurant at lunchtime today, in broad daylight.’

  ‘Did he see who delivered it?’ Hicks asked.

  ‘No,’ Masters shook his head. ‘As usual, Rigby hung up his overcoat when he arrived, and tried to identify anyone who went anywhere near it. He saw no known opposition personnel in the restaurant, and only left the table to go to the john – he says he was away for less than five minutes – but when he left the restaurant he found the film canister in his overcoat pocket. He went straight back inside, but saw nobody he recognized.’

  ‘Well,’ Hicks said. ‘At least we know that RAVEN is still alive and operational, which has to be good news. What was the message?’

  Masters opened the file he was carrying and extracted a sheet of paper. ‘We’ve had the Russian translated, and double-checked. Like all of RAVEN’s messages it’s very brief and cryptic. It contains a single word and two short sentences. The single word is Pripiska.’

  Hicks looked blank, and Masters nodded. ‘Yes, this puzzled our analysts as well. It’s actually a slang term dating back to the bad old days of the collective farms and Ten-Year Plans. It means the falsification of records and other documentation to do with agricultural and industrial production. In those days, cooking the books was about the only way the farms and factories could meet the targets and quotas specified by Moscow.’

  ‘And the sentences?’

  Masters looked at Hicks before replying. ‘They translate as “Last component enters west on 9th. Implementation date 11th.” And that,’ he added, ‘is exactly seven days away.’

  Hammersmith, London

  ‘I think I’ve worked it out,’ Richter said.

  Simpson nodded encouragingly and looked at his watch. ‘Make it snappy. There’s an extraordinary meeting of the Joint Intelligence Committee in under an hour, which means I’ve got to leave here in exactly twenty minutes.’

  ‘OK,’ Richter said. ‘I’ll give you the short version.’ Simpson motioned him to a seat. Since the beginning of the investigation, their relationship had improved considerably. Richter still couldn’t say that he actually liked the man because he didn’t, but at least they weren’t sniping at each other quite as much as before. ‘Why,’ Richter asked, as he sat down, ‘is there an extraordinary meeting of the JIC? And why so late in the day?’ Richter had checked his watch, and it was already nearly five.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Simpson
said, ‘but I’ll let you know if it has any bearing on this.’

  ‘Thanks. Right, I think I’ve worked out when they moved the hill. The last KH–12 film that JARIC received prior to the Blackbird’s flight was taken a month ago, and they didn’t receive any further films at all from the KH–12 for eight days, and they’ve still had no further pictures of the area round the hill. I believe that the films shot by the Keyhole satellite showed something so unusual that the Americans decided a “command failure” was necessary. Again I don’t know, but logic suggests that this was the placement of a device in or on the hill.’

  ‘Device?’ said Simpson. ‘You obviously mean some sort of a bomb.’

  ‘I do mean some sort of a bomb,’ Richter agreed, ‘but I don’t know what sort, except that it’s something totally new. I’ll explain later why it has to be new. The Blackbird flew last week, so whatever happened out there on the tundra had to have taken place between four weeks ago and last week, and most likely closer to four weeks ago.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Simpson, then shook his head. ‘I’m not thinking straight,’ he said. ‘It had to be three to four weeks because of the lead-time needed to mount the Blackbird flight.’

  ‘Exactly. Just sorting out the logistics of getting a plane out of mothballs at Beale and across the pond probably took at least a week.’ Richter held up the Seismic Activity file. ‘I went back two months in this, just to make sure, but there was nothing significant reported from anywhere in the Eurasian landmass throughout that period, but on the second of last month there was—’

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ Simpson interrupted. ‘Let me guess. A major explosion was detected in the Bolshezemel’skaya Tundra.’ Richter nodded. ‘So?’

  ‘That was the easy bit. The seismic record shows that the Russians detonated a medium-size nuclear weapon way out in the tundra. What doesn’t make too much sense is the rest of the data. The Seismic Activity pack usually only contains traces from the seismograph recorders plus a summary about the likely source from one of the scientists, but this incident generated a number of highly technical little notes from the boffins at Aldermaston.’