"I'm sure it will check out," Dogin said. "And don't be hard on the Corporal for his enthusiasm, General. This is a great day for the entire team."
The entire team, Orlov rolled the phrase over in his mind. When he was working in the space program, a team was a group of dedicated people working toward a single goal: expanding human capabilities in space. There was a political agenda, but the importance of the work itself made that seem almost trivial. Orlov didn't have a team here. He had several of them, all pulling in opposite directions. There was a group working to get the Center on-line, another group sneaking information to Dogin, and even a team of paranoid in-betweeners headed by Security Director Glinka, desperate to determine which of the other teams they should be supporting. It might very well cost him his command, but Orlov promised himself that this place would work as a team.
"As it happens," Dogin said, "we couldn't have timed the countdown better. There's a Gulfstream jet moving through the South Pacific toward Japan. After refueling in Tokyo, the jet will fly on to Vladivostok. I'll have my assistant send the flight path through to you. I want the Center to monitor the plane's progress. The pilot has instructions to contact you after he lands in Vladivostok, which will be at approximately five o'clock in the morning, local time. When he does, let me know and I'll give you further instructions to radio to him."
"Is this a test of our system?" Orlov asked.
"No, General. The cargo on the Gulfstream is of vital importance to this office."
"In that case, sir," Orlov said, "until everything here has been thoroughly checked, why not let Air Defense handle it? Their Radio and Electronic Technical Forces would be-"
"Extraneous and obtrusive," Dogin said. He smiled. "I want you to follow the plane, General. I'm confident that the Center can handle it. Any and all communications from the aircraft will come to your radio room in code, of course, and any problems or delays will be reported to me directly by you or by Colonel Rossky. Do you have any questions?"
"Several, sir," Orlov admitted, "but I'll log the order and do as you ask." He entered a command, which automatically recorded the date and time, and a window opened in the bottom of the screen. He typed, Minister Dogin orders monitoring of Gulfstream jet bound for Vladivostok. He reread it and hit the Save button. It beeped to show that the save had been successful.
"Thank you, General," said Dogin. "All your questions will be answered in time. Now, good luck with the countdown: I look forward to hearing that the jewel in our intelligence crown is fully operational in less than three hours."
"Yes, sir," Orlov said, "though I wonder. Who's wearing that crown?"
Dogin was still smiling. "I'm disappointed, General. Impertinence doesn't suit you."
"My apologies," Orlov said. "I find it disturbing myself. But I've never been asked to run a mission with incomplete information or untested equipment, nor have I been in a situation where subordinates feel free to break the chain of command."
"We must all grow and change," Dogin said. "Let me remind you of something Stalin said in his speech to the Russian people in July 1941: 'There must be no room in our ranks for whimperers and cowards, for panic-mongers and deserters; our people must know no fear.' You are a courageous and reasonable man, General. Trust me and, I assure you, your faith will be rewarded. "
Dogin pressed a button and his image winked out. Staring at the dark screen, Orlov was not surprised by the rebuke-though Dogin's answer hardly put him at ease. If anything, it caused him to wonder if he had trusted too much in Dogin. He found himself contemplating the World War that had prompted Stalin's speech and to wonder, with alarm he tried hard to suppress, if Minister Dogin somehow imagined Russia to be at war ... and if so, with whom.
TWENTY
Tuesday, 3:03 A.M., Tokyo
Simon "Jet" Lee, Honolulu-born and -raised, resolved to devote his life to police work on August 24, 1967. On that day, at the age of seven, he watched as his fatherwho was a hulking movie extra-acted in a scene with Jack Lord and James MacArthur on their TV series Hawaii Five-0. He wasn't sure whether it -was Lord's intensity or the fact that he was able to manhandle his father that gave him the police bug-though it was the habit of dyeing his hair jet-black, like Lord's, that gave him his nickname.
Whatever the reason, Lee joined the FBI in 1983, graduated third in his class at the Academy, and returned to Honolulu as a fully fledged agent. Twice he'd turned down promotions so he could stay in the field and do what he loved: hunt down bad guys and make the world a cleaner place.
Which was why he was in Tokyo, working undercover as an airline mechanic with the blessings of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces. Raw drugs were going from South America to Hawaii to Japan and, with his partner in Honolulu, Lee was tracking the private planes as they came and went, looking for likely suspects.
The Gulfstream III was a very likely suspect. Lee's partner in Hawaii had tracked the Gulfstream from Co lombia and it was registered to a company that was owned by a baked-goods distributor in New York. Ostensibly, it was carrying ingredients used to make the distributor's specialty, exotic bagels. Awakened in his room at the inn just a five-minute drive from the airport, Lee had called his partner, JSDF Sergeant Ken Sawara, and hurried over.
Lee listened to the tower through his headset as he played around with a JT3D-7 turbofan in a comer of the hangar at the airfield. After two weeks of tinkering with the same engine, he felt he knew it better than anyone at Pratt & Whitney. The Gulfstream touched down and was due for a quick turnaround before heading to Vladivostok.
That made it even more suspicious, Lee thought, since the baked-goods distributor was thought to be tied to the Russian mafia.
Feeling a bit constricted in the bulletproof vest he wore under his white jumpsuit, Lee set down his wrench and walked to the phone on the hangar wall. He felt the lopsided weight of the holstered .38 Smith & Wesson press against his left shoulder as he punched Ken's mobile number into the green phone.
"Ken," he said, "the Gulfstream just landed and is pulling up to hangar two. Meet me there."
Ken Sawara said, "Let me check it out."
"No-"
"But your Japanese is terrible, Jet-
"Your Colombian is worse," said Lee. "See you there. "
It was well before sunrise, and though the airport was not as busy as the one in Honolulu had been over six hours before, at 2:35 P.m. local time, it was busy enough as air traffic converged from the west and the east. Lee knew that many mobsters, men like Aram Vonyev and Dmitri Shovich, liked having their planes land at big public airports rather than at the small strips that government agents found easier to watch. Those two criminals especially liked having their planes come and go during the day, out in the open, where law officers and rival gangsters didn't expect to see them. In Honolulu, as in Mexico City and in Bogota, Colombia, before that, this plane had landed and taken off in bright daylight.
The Gulfstream taxied quickly to the Yaswee Oil truck waiting near the hangar nearest to the runway. Here, as at the other fields, the Gulfstream had its own fuel trucks waiting. Though mobsters had their own reasons for moving goods somewhat out in the open like this, none was so brazen that he wanted to stay on the ground any longer than absolutely necessary.
If the plane followed the pattern-and there was no reason it shouldn't, Lee knew-then after less than fifty minutes on the ground in Tokyo it would be airborne again, its twin Rolls-Royce Spey Mk 511-8 turbofans carrying it to the northwest, into the dark, overcast skies. Soon it would be in Russia, just across the Sea of Japan.
Brushing his longish balck hair from his forehead, Lee pulled a purchase order from his pocket and pretended to read it. He whistled as he walked onto the dark tarmac. He saw the winking lights of the small jet as it rolled toward the hangar for refueling, its tanks nearly empty after the 4,500-mile journey. He watched as the ground crew rolled the hose from the tank, and Lee knew then that the plane was carrying contraband. The crew was working faster, with more serious effi
ciency than usual. They'd been paid off.
From the corner of his eye he saw car headlights. That would be Sawara. As planned, he'd pull off to the side and wait-just in case Lee needed backup. The FBI agent intended to walk up to the plane, tell the crew foreman he was told to check for a faulty fuel switch, and while they took up the issue with the pilot he'd swing inside and have a poke around the cargo.
The Toyota pulled up beside Lee, pacing him. Lee stopped, confused, as he looked down at the driver's-side window. Then the window rolled down, showing Sawara's expressionless face.
"Can I help you?" Lee said to Sawara in Japanese, though with his wide eyes and a severely pinched brow he was actually asking, What the hell are you doing?
In response, Sawara lifted the .38 Special Model 60 revolver from his lap and pointed it at Lee. With speed and instincts that were uncanny, the agent dropped flat to his back on the tarmac an instant before the gun flashed.
Yanking his own .38 from its holster, Lee swung it across his chest and shot out the passenger's side front tire, then rolled to his right as Sawara tried to back away for another shot The bare rim sparked and screamed as he slammed the car into reverse, one hand on the steering wheel, the other still holding the gun out the window. His second shot caught Lee in the right thigh.
The turncoat bastard! Lee thought as he put three bullets through the car door. Each shell entered with a dull clung and Sawara's third and fourth shots flew wild as Lee's bullets struck him. With a moan, the Japanese soldier arched to the left, toward the window, then his forehead drooped against the steering wheel. The car sped up, turning at crazy angles, as the wounded man's foot sat heavily on the pedal. At least it was moving away from him, and Lee watched as it collided with an empty luggage cart. The Toyota rode up on the side of the cart, crunching it down and going nowhere as the tires were lifted off the ground.
Lee's wound felt like a hellish muscle cramp, sunburn-hot to the bone and brutally tight from his thigh to his knee. It was impossible to move his leg without sending a sheet of pain from his heel to his neck. Craning his head around, Lee looked at the plane some two hundred yards away. The underbelly of the fuselage was flashing white and dark from the lights and the ground crew continued their work, though now two men had appeared in the open doorway. Both were dressed in dungarees and sweatshirts and neither man carried a gun. Either they weren't stupid, Lee thought ... or they were.
The two men ducked back into the plane, shouting at one another.
Lee knew that they'd be returning soon, and mustering his will, he flopped onto his belly, got onto his left knee, and climbed to his feet. He winced with pain as he began hopping forward, unable to put weight on his right leg without causing a burst of white light to erupt behind his eyes. As Lee approached, he looked at the ground crew as they watched him. They were working quickly without wanting to appear as though they were hurrying, as if to say they'd taken the money and would do the job, but this wasn't their fight.
It was Lee's fight, however. One he'd been trained for, one from which he wouldn't run. Not when he had his quarry pinned in a plane that was suckling on a fuel tank, unable to go anywhere.
When he was nearly at the nose of the plane, one of the two men reemerged in the cabin door. He was holding a German Walther MP-K submachine gun, and he wasted no time firing a burst at Lee. Having expected that, the FBI agent pushed off on his good leg and dove toward the opposite side of the plane, putting the nose of the aircraft between himself and the gunman. He wondered where airport security was: they had to have heard the gunfire, and he didn't want to believe that they were all on the take like the ground crew and that son of a bitch Sawara.
The shells picked a jagged line in the tarmac to his right, but they were several feet away from where Lee hit the ground. Crawling forward on his elbow, he stretched his arm out to shoot at the nosewheel; that would keep the plane on the ground long enough for someone to look into what was going on. Unless everyone at the airfield, including the security forces, had been paid off.
An instant before Lee fired, a burst erupted from behind him, chewing into his armpit and shoulder.
He hadn't expected that. His arm jerked up and he missed the tire, sending four shots into the wing and fuselage. Then another burst hit him in the right thigh.
He turned and saw the bloodied form of Ken Sawara standing above him.
"You couldn't ... just leave it," Sawara gasped as he dropped to his knees. "You couldn't let me go!"
Putting all his strength into his arm, Lee swung his .38 toward the soldier. "You want to go?" he said, sending a bullet into his forehead. "Go."
As Sawara dropped to his side, Lee turned his face toward the plane. He was struggling for air as he watched the men continue fueling the aircraft. This couldn't be it, he told himself The crimefighter is betrayed by his partner and dies on oil-slick tarmac? No one to see, no sirens in the distance, no one to book the criminals or tend him a hand ... not even a consciencestricken worker?
Simon Lee died feeling like he'd failed, utterly.
A half hour later, the plane took off, bound for Russia. Because of the darkness, no one on the ground or in the aircraft saw the thin stream of black smoke curling from the port engine as the Gulfstream pushed skyward.
TWENTY-ONE
Monday, 12:30 A.M., Washington, D.C.
Over lunch ordered from the commissary, Lowell Coffey, Martha Mackall, and their aides worked in the attorney's wood-paneled office, picking through the legal minefield that was a part of every Striker mission.
Finland's President had approved a multinational Striker landing to examine radiation readings in the gulf, and Coffey's deputy, Andrea Stempel, was on the phone with the Interpol office in Helsinki arranging to get a car and fake visas for three team members to enter Russia. Nearby, on a leather couch, Stempel's assistant, paralegal Jeffrey Dryfoos, went over the wills of the Striker commandos. If the paperwork was not in order, reflecting up-to-date changes in marital status, children, and assets, documents would be faxed to the aircraft for signing and witnessing en route.
Coffey and Mackall themselves were looking at a computer monitor on the desk, drafting the "finding," the lengthy final-draft document that Coffey would need to present to the joint eight-person Senate and Congressional Intelligence Committee before Striker landed. They had already negotiated the kinds of weapons that could be used, exactly what type of operation would be run, the duration, and other constraints. Coffey had been involved with some findings that had gone so far as to specify which radio frequencies could be used and what time, to the minute, the team would exit and enter. After all was said and much was done, approval from the committee to enter Russia did not actually give them the right to do so under international law. But without it, if captured, the Striker team would be disavowed without approval and left to twist in the wind. With it, the U.S. would work quietly through diplomatic channels to arrange for their release.
Down the hall, past the offices of Mike Rodgers and Ann Farris, was Bob Herbert's tidy command center. The narrow, rectangular room consisted of several banks of computers on a small table, with detailed world maps on three walls and a dozen television monitors on the far wall. Most of the time the screens were dark. Now, however, five of them were aglow with satellite images of Russia, Ukraine, and Poland. Old pictures morphed into new ones every .89 seconds.
There was a long-standing debate in intelligence circles about the value of ELINT/SIGINT spies in space as opposed to reliable data gathered from HUMINT personnel on the ground. Ideally, agencies wanted both. They wanted the ability to read the odometer on a jeep from a satellite fifty miles in space, and ears on the ground to report on conversations or meetings held behind closed doors. Satellite spying was clean. There was no chance of getting captured or interrogated, no risk of double agents feeding false information. But it also didn't have the capacity of an intelligence officer on the ground to distinguish between real and false targets.
Satel
lite surveillance for the Pentagon, the CIA, the FBI, and Op-Center was managed by the highly secretive National Reconnaissance Office in the Pentagon. Run by the meticulous Stephen Viens, a college buddy of Matt Stoll, it consisted of banks of television monitors set in ten rows of ten. All of them watched different sectors of the earth, each generating an image every .89 seconds providing a total of sixty-seven live black-and-white images a minute at various levels of magnification. The NRO was also responsible for testing the new AIM-Satellite, first in a series of orbiting audio-imaging monitors designed to provide detailed pictures of submarine and aircraft interiors by reading the sounds and echoes of sounds produced by people and instruments therein.
Three of the NRO's satellites were watching troop movements on the border of Russia and Ukraine, while two kept an eye on forces in Poland. Through a source at the United Nations, Bob Herbert had heard that the Poles were getting antsy with the Russian buildup. Though Warsaw had not yet authorized the mobilization of troops, leaves had been canceled and the activities of Ukrainians living and working in Poland, near the border, were being monitored by Warsaw. Viens agreed with Herbert that Poland deserved watching, and had the photos sent directly to his office, where Op-Center's surveillance analysis team was studying them as they appeared.
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