Arctic Gold

by Stephen Coonts

  He chuckled. “You think global warming is that bad?”

  “The ice cap is getting smaller and thinner every year,” she told him. “Last I heard, if things proceed at the same rate they’ve been going over the past couple of decades, all of the Arctic ice will be gone-it’ll all be open ocean-by 2060.”

  “Huh. I had no idea.”

  “Most people don’t. The whole global-warming thing has become so politicized that it’s tough to know what’s real and what’s hype.”

  “The Russians are known for thinking pretty far out into the future,” Dean said, thoughtful. “I could see them planning for when they could build conventional offshore drilling rigs after the ice is gone. Still, fifty-some years? That’s kind of a long shot. And right now no one can agree if global warming is real or just a temporary fad, if humans are causing it or it’s part of a natural cycle. I can’t see the mafia gambling on something like that.”

  “And they wouldn’t give a damn about the environmentalists half a century out, either,” Lia said. “If the mafia is behind it, that suggests a short-term goal as well. Those guys don’t wait fifty years for a return on their investment, you know?”

  “Even governments don’t think that far ahead,” Dean admitted. “So what’s the answer, do you think?”

  She sighed. “I don’t know. The Art Room said Ilya and I were going to be on hold for a while. There’s some sort of political crisis on back at the Palace. You know anything about it?”

  “Not much. An F-22 was shot down over the Gulf of Finland in support of your op. Did you hear about that?”

  “A little. Did they find the pilot?”

  “Not that I’ve heard. But the scuttlebutt at Fort Meade was that Desk Three might get into trouble for losing an F-22 instead of a UAV.”

  “‘Scuttlebutt’?”

  “Sorry. Marine and Navy slang. Means rumor or gossip.”

  “I like it. Damn, the Russian op just went to hell, didn’t it?”

  “They didn’t tell me much. What happened?”

  “Our contact turned on us. There was an ambush… and a firefight. Ilya lost his kit, including some rather sensitive black ops gear.”

  “Shit!”

  “There’s a sanitizing team in there now, trying to recover it. The two of us got clear of the operational area, then almost got picked up by the MVD.” She shook her head slightly. “I’ve had the… I don’t know, the feeling that we’ve been set up right along, that the opposition was always a step or two ahead of us the whole way.”

  “I can’t imagine the Russian mafia deliberately playing games with the NSA,” Dean said. “I mean… they’re just criminals.”

  “Yeah, and it’s dangerous to underestimate them, Charlie,” she told him. “A lot of them were KGB and GRU before the Communists lost power. They had some pretty specialized knowledge and equipment, and it all went to the highest bidder.”

  “Kind of like all the jokes about out-of-work Russian nuclear scientists. ‘Will sell nuclear secrets for food.’”

  “Exactly. And the gang leaders themselves, even if they’re not tied in with Russian intelligence or the military, well, they had to be damned tough and smart, and they had to have some pretty good connections just to survive under the Soviets, to say nothing of building an underground criminal empire. They’re also… I don’t know how to say it. Less constrained than the Soviet government was.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “The Soviet government had a nuclear arsenal big enough to wipe out the planet.”

  “So did we.”

  “Right. But neither we nor the Soviets used that arsenal, because no one can win a nuclear war. Okay?”

  “There were a few people who thought we could,” Dean put in. “But MAD-Mutual Assured Destruction-worked as a deterrent, sure.”

  “The Soviets were as careful as we were to make sure nukes didn’t get into the wrong hands, because if they screwed up, it would come back to bite them in the ass.”

  “Okay…”

  “Don’t you see? The Russian mafia doesn’t care! Oh, they don’t want to see the world blown to bits. That would be bad for business. But they don’t have the obligation to provide for their country’s welfare that the Soviets had. You can see that in the way the mobs are strangling the Russian economy today. Capitalism doesn’t stand a chance so long as the mobs are bleeding businesses over there dry.”

  “So… you’re saying the mafia is more likely to do crazy stuff.”

  “Exactly. During the Cold War, we were worried about Soviet adventurism, about all those times they played brinksmanship games and created international crises. The Cuban Missile Crisis. The invasion of Czechoslovakia. The invasion of Afghanistan. Those were the times when things were dangerous, when the missiles might have flown. The Tambov Gang, the Blues, all the other Russian mobs… all they want is money, power, and to come out on top of the heap. If Colombian drug lords get their very own submarine, if a reactor melts down in the Urals and wipes out a city, if Iran gets a nuclear weapon and obliterates Israel, what’s it to them? They may not even care if Russia’s economy tanks, because they’ve been going international lately in a big way. Ask Ilya about the Mafiya in Brighton sometime.”

  “Brighton?”

  “He’s American. His parents were immigrants. Brighton Beach is near Brooklyn, in New York, and it’s where a lot of Russian émigrés settled. They call it Little Odessa. For ten, fifteen years, the Mafiya has been moving in there, big-time. They’re everywhere.”

  “Somehow, I never thought of Desk Three as being crime fighters,” Dean said.

  “In some ways the Russian mobs are as much of a threat as al-Qaeda,” she told him. “Maybe more.”

  “Are you sure you’re not just making it personal?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know. I can hear the anger in your voice. Like you want to go back over there and kill them all. For Tommy.”

  “No,” she told him. “I am going back… one way or another. But when I do, it will be for me.”

  She drew him closer then, trying to lose herself in his arms. “C’mere, Marine,” she told him. “I’m going to scuttle your butt. Again.”

  12

  Menwith Hill Echelon Facility Yorkshire, England 0930 hours GMT

  THE NEXT MORNING, DEAN and Lia were in Menwith’s Deep Centre, a high-tech underground chamber that was the equivalent of the National Security Agency’s Black Chamber or the Art Room. After having breakfast with the two Americans in Menwith Hill’s cafeteria, Evans had led them through several checkpoints and down into the sanctum sanctorum, a steel-and-concrete-reinforced cavern that, its designers believed, would have withstood a near-direct hit on the surface eighty meters above by a fair-sized nuclear weapon.

  The facility had much in common with the Art Room, Dean decided, right down to the banks of computer workstations and consoles and the ranks of monitors, though the large screen dominating one wall was absent.

  Echelon II was the code name for the current NSA/GCHQ program to collect electronic signals out of the air worldwide, process them, and send them on for analyses. Menwith Hill, in particular, was tasked with eavesdropping on all of Europe, as far east as the Urals.

  Local legend had it that Menwith Echelon scooped up all radio, telephone, fax, and Internet communications in Europe… but then, local legend also had it that the NSA was studying little gray aliens held within the underground complex, which supposedly was an English version of the notorious American Area 51 in Nevada. Exactly how much of Europe’s electronic gossip was actually recorded was, of course, a closely guarded secret.

  But there were no aliens so far as Dean could discover.

  “I’d like you two to meet someone,” Evans told them, leading them to a particular cubicle in a room filled with cubicles off the main control room. An attractive young woman stepped out to join them. “Charlie, Lia, this is Carolyn Howorth-‘CJ’ to her friends. She’s one of our best linguists d
own here.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Dean said, shaking her hand. “What language?”

  “Russian, at the moment,” she told him.

  “She’s heading up our Russian desk right now,” Evans said. “But she’s also our best Japanese linguist.”

  That told Dean something about Menwith’s electronic reach. Apparently they weren’t limited to Europe after all.

  “We’ve been putting together some intercepts from the other day,” she told him. “Randy here thought you should hear this.”

  She led them back into her cubicle and entered a string of characters into her workstation. “This is from four days ago,” she said. “A satellite phone exchange, apparently originating from within a few meters of the GLA building a few minutes after the riot in which your friend was killed broke out. The conversation was encrypted, but we’ve known this particular encryption key for some time.”

  “Rodina,” a voice said from a speaker.

  Carolyn translated. “‘Motherland.’We think that was a code word, identifying the speaker.”

  Another voice replied, also in Russian, as Carolyn provided a running translation.

  “‘We’re watching BBC Two. Excellent work.’

  “‘One of our agents still lives. I cannot get a clear shot, however.’

  “‘She knows nothing. We don’t want to reveal your presence. That might tell the opposition too much.’

  “‘That was my thought… Perhaps it is time to activate Cold War. The two… incidents should take place close together, for maximum effect.’

  “‘We agree. A ticket and new identity papers are waiting for you at the embassy. You fly out tonight.’

  “‘Good. Until tonight, then.’”

  The connection was broken.

  “Braslov,” Dean said. “The fourth man in the car that tailed Tommy from Heathrow.”

  “We think so,” Carolyn agreed. “We’ve recorded some other communications previously with voiceprints that match this one, and which we suspected were Sergei Braslov. We can’t prove it yet, but we believe that he’s our man.”

  “Who is he speaking with?”

  “Grigor Kotenko.”

  “Ah,” Dean said. “The Tambov Gang.”

  “At the time of this conversation,” Carolyn told them, “Kotenko was at his personal dacha on the Black Sea. We have quite an extensive voice-intercept file on him now.”

  “The agent he mentions,” Dean said. “That must be the woman Tommy shot during the GLA attack. What was her name?”

  “Yvonne Fischer,” Evans said. “We have her under close arrest at Barts-that’s St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, back in London. She hasn’t regained consciousness as yet. Still listed as critical.”

  “Sounds like the bad guys aren’t concerned about her giving us anything useful.”

  “That would be a typical op for GRU or KGB back in the bad old Soviet days,” Lia put in. “Use some poor schmuck you recruit off the street, don’t tell him jack, program him to do a dirty deed that can’t be traced back to you.”

  “Might’ve been a false-flag recruitment,” Dean said. False-flag was spook-speak for recruiting agents by convincing them that you worked for someone else, someone of whom they approved.

  “Any idea where Braslov is now?”

  “We know he caught an Aeroflot flight out of Heathrow that night. Pulkovo.”

  “St. Petersburg,” Lia said.

  “And there he caught a Sakha Avia flight out of Pulkovo to Yakutsk.”

  “Yakutsk? That’s out in the middle of Siberia.”

  “Right the first time,” Carolyn said. “Unfortunately, we have no one on the ground there and Misawa hasn’t picked up any relevant intercepts, as yet.” Misawa was an NSA listening station in Japan, one of the largest Echelon bases, in fact, in the world. “We think he had another destination after that, but we don’t know where.”

  “What is that ‘Cold War’ Braslov mentioned?” Dean asked. “The way he said it, it sounded like a secret operation of some kind.”

  “We may have another piece of that puzzle,” Carolyn told them. She typed at her keyboard for a moment, queuing up another intercept. “This came out of Misawa four days ago, about four hours after the GLA attack. After picking up the intercept from Kotenko, we put an electronic tracer on him that would flag any call with that particular encryption key. Here it is.”

  “Rodina,” a voice said, Kotenko’s.

  Another voice responded in Russian. “‘Well, it’s been a long time, Grigor,’” Carolyn translated. “‘We thought you’d forgotten us.’

  “‘Never, my friend. You are far too important for our plans. Cold War has commenced.’

  “‘Has it, then? That’s good news.’

  “‘Osprey is on his way to you. He should be there within-’”

  A blast of static interrupted the conversation.

  “We can’t make out what came next,” Carolyn said. “Communications have been erratic of late, and the speaker’s location is at an extremely high latitude. What we have is only a fragment.”

  “Osprey,” Dean said. He looked at Evans. “Braslov, do you think?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “So who is Kotenko speaking with?”

  For answer, Carolyn typed at her keyboard again, bringing up a file on her screen. A photograph showed a ruggedly good-looking man, blue-eyed, blond-haired. Dean could just make out a piece of a tattoo on his chest.

  “Another Russian mafioso?” he asked.

  “His name,” Carolyn told him, “is Feodor Golytsin. Formerly Soviet Navy-specifically their submarine services. He was court-martialed in 1986 for speaking out against Soviet military policies in Afghanistan. He spent four years in a gulag, where, yes, we believe he made connections with the Organizatsiya. However, in 1995 he took a job with Gazprom.”

  “Gazprom?” Dean asked. “That’s natural gas?”

  “Gazprom,” Carolyn told him, “is the largest natural gas company in Russia… and by some measures the third-largest corporation in the world. With its oil-producing subsidiary Gazprom Neft, it’s also the third-largest producer of petroleum in the world, after Saudi Arabia and Iran. It started off under the Soviets as a state-owned subsidiary, of course, but has been operating as an independent corporation since the mid-nineties. Today, a dozen Eastern European nations all depend on Gazprom for natural gas. The European Union gets twenty-five percent of its natural gas from them.”

  “But there are concerns that the Russian Mafiya is trying to take over the Russian petroleum industry,” Dean said. “So if what you say is true, that means Gazprom.”

  “There’ve been a number of corruption scandals involving Gazprom in the past. Our Russian desk believes that Golytsin is part of what we think of as a Mafiya beachhead within the corporation.”

  “An ex-submariner,” Dean mused. “That suggests some interesting possibilities.”

  Arctic oil exploration would almost certainly require submarines.

  He was beginning to think he knew where Braslov had gone out of Yakutsk.

  Executive Cafe K Street NW, Washington, D.C. 1225 hours EDT

  It was two days after his unsatisfactory interview with Wehrum.

  Rubens sat at a small table set up outside of a popular Washington sidewalk café, waiting for Barbara. She was late. She’d promised to meet him for lunch at noon, but so far only strangers had passed on the sidewalk or on the other side of the street, through McPherson Square.

  He enjoyed watching people, and the table gave him the perfect vantage point. A few had been quite exotic-including one silver-goateed individual with a black and red cape streaming from his shoulders, plus any number of people in saris, turbans, caftans, or other foreign dress. Washington was truly the international city, with Embassy Row only a few blocks to the north, and hordes of international tourists descending on the Mall, the White House, and the monuments. It was a gorgeous spring day, and the tourists were certainly out in force.
<
br />   The White House was an easy six blocks away, down Vermont Avenue and past Lafayette Square. He wondered what was keeping her… then decided the question was nonsense. He knew what Barbara’s schedule was like these days. And he expected that the e-mail he’d sent her yesterday afternoon had stirred things up a bit there.

  There she was, cutting across McPherson Square and breaking into a near jog across K Street, as fast as her platform heels would permit her. Barbara Stahl was an attractive woman in her forties, with PhDs in both international studies and economics. She was the senior Russian specialist currently serving on the National Security Council.

  He stood up as she neared the table. “Hello, Barbara.”

  “Hi, Bill. Sorry I’m late.”

  “Not at all. Waiter!”

  “Get for yourself, not me. I have to get right back.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Coffee, perhaps?”

  “Thank you.” She took a seat. “Things are not so quietly going nuts back there. Full-blown crisis mode. But I did need to see you.”

  He sat down opposite her. The waiter came up and Rubens ordered coffee for the two of them. “Your e sounded stressed.”

  “Mm. And your e-mail has stirred up a hornet’s nest.”

  “I was afraid it might.”

  “I’m not on the eyes list for Powerhouse intercepts,” she told him. “Why the hell did you do it? Damn it, Bill, are you begging to get canned?”

  “It’s not that bad.”

  “Not that bad? Twenty years in federal prison and up to half a million dollars in fines? You don’t call that bad?”

  “As Deputy Director of the NSA, I have some leeway,” he told her. “Not a lot, but some.”

  “Are you saying you make the rules, so you can break them?”

  “No. But I reviewed your security clearances and made sure you were cleared for Powerhouse-level documents before I sent that e.”

  “If Dr. Bing finds out, she could have those clearances revoked. And God only knows what they’ll do to you.”

  “Barbara, overclassification of sensitive material is as dangerous in this job as underclassifying it, maybe more so. The whole point of intelligence is making sure the people who need to see something actually do see it. You won’t get in trouble with your boss over your level of security; trust me on this. As for me, well, they can play those games with me later. Right now, it is important, imperative, that the President knows what’s going on up in the Arctic. Those intercepts went to Langley, but I don’t trust them to see the whole picture. Or to put it into the pickle.”