Marcus had been anticipating a single plow, not a half dozen moving as a team, and this complicated his plan. More drivers. More eyes. More chances to be spotted. Still, this might be their only chance, so he had to act fast.
Arcing farther into the forest to reduce the chance his movements could be spotted, he raced through the deepening snow until he’d reached the end of the convoy and the last of the trucks. Using the scope of the sniper rifle again, he could see the drivers exiting their cabs. Soon, six rather burly men had converged around the felled pine, no doubt discussing what they were going to do to clear it away and get moving again.
Fortunately, they hadn’t thought to trudge over to the tree’s stump. If they had, they’d have known immediately the tree had not been felled by the winds but had been chopped down, and recently. That would put them all on alert. Marcus was certain they each had two-way radios in their cabs and probably mobile phones as well. He had no way of knowing whether state workers or the general public had been alerted to Luganov’s death and the hunt for his killers. But if these men grew suspicious and radioed back with news of something odd in the forest, how long would it take for the dispatcher to contact local authorities and for someone to make the connection?
Marcus peered at the men through his reticle, calculating range to target, wind speed, and air temperature, making minute adjustments to the rifle as he did. But just as his right index finger switched the safety lever to the single-shot position, Marcus caught himself. Blinking hard, he looked up, flipped the switch back to the no-fire position, and lowered the rifle to his side.
He had no right to kill these men and certainly no authority. This was not war. These were not enemy combatants. He was not a sworn officer of the law, and if anyone was guilty of a crime in the last few hours, it was him, not them.
“Mr. President, we have a problem,” McDermott said, putting down his phone.
Andrew Clarke, deep in conversation at the other end of the Situation Room, turned and looked back at his deputy national advisor, annoyance in his eyes. “What is it?” the president asked.
“Could I request, sir, that we all retake our seats?” McDermott said, stalling slightly for time to process the information he’d just learned. “We have new information out of Russia, and it’s . . .”
“It’s what?” the president asked, taking his seat.
“Well, sir, our embassy in Moscow has intercepted encrypted radio traffic between several top Russian military and FSB officials indicating . . .”
McDermott could hardly finish the sentence. He felt light-headed, short of breath. He, too, had to sit down. As he did, the anger on the president’s face faded.
Clarke glanced at Cal Foster, his secretary of defense, and then at Richard Stephens, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, to see if they knew what was coming. It was obvious neither of them did. “Indicating what?” Clarke asked McDermott.
“Mr. President,” McDermott replied, “I need to inform you that Russian president Aleksandr Ivanovich Luganov . . . is dead.”
Marcus watched as two men grabbed chain saws from compartments on the sides of their trucks and fired them up.
The piercing buzz of the two-stroke combustion engines suddenly made it impossible to hear anything else.
This was the break they needed. Marcus raced back to his colleagues and to his relief found that Oleg had done exactly what he’d asked of him and more. Not only was Jenny ready to be transported, but Oleg had packed up the rest of their supplies—including the two remaining bottles of oxygen—and was ready to move out.
Without saying a word, Marcus motioned for Oleg to follow him. Then he grabbed the lines connected to his parachute and began pulling Jenny through the snow.
They moved south, away from the men and their work, until they were parallel to the last snowplow in the line. This was the tricky part. From this distance, and with the saws running, there was no way they could be heard by the drivers.
But if they were seen . . .
“Dead?” asked CIA director Stephens. “That’s impossible.”
“Apparently not, sir,” McDermott said. “We don’t know much at this point. There’s a great deal of confusion. But our people say three facts are emerging.”
“Go on,” the president said.
“Well, sir, the first is that Luganov isn’t simply dead. That is, he didn’t simply die in his sleep. He was assassinated—shot in the head, to be more precise, multiple times, and at point-blank range.”
A buzz filled the room. The president called the group back to order and told McDermott to continue.
“Apparently President Luganov was not the only target. Moscow station says Dmitri Nimkov was shot in similar fashion, and both men died instantly.”
“That’s preposterous,” snapped Secretary of Defense Foster. “The president of the Russian Federation and the head of the FSB, gunned down inside the palace? By whom? Where were their bodyguards? How could anyone get near them? We’re watching that palace by satellite twenty-four hours a day. The place is a fortress. There’s no way someone could get inside there to . . .”
Foster stopped himself, and CIA director Stephens picked up the thought. “Unless it was an inside job.”
“What do you mean?” Clarke asked. “A bodyguard? A disgruntled employee? How would that be possible? Wouldn’t everyone with access to Luganov have been carefully screened and exhaustively vetted, especially on the eve of war?”
“Absolutely,” Foster said. “Which means it would have to have been someone trusted by both men.”
“But why?” the president asked. “And why now?”
“Maybe the goal wasn’t simply to settle a grudge or some personal score but to stop the war,” Stephens said. “Stop Luganov, stop the war.”
“It could also be the beginning of a coup,” the SecDef said to the president and the members of the National Security Council huddled around the table.
The room again grew quiet. Then people remembered that McDermott had a third fact to offer into evidence. All eyes turned to him.
McDermott’s mouth went dry. He reached across the conference table for a tumbler embossed with the seal of the White House and a pitcher of cold water. He poured himself a glass, drank it down, and then poured himself another.
“Right, well, yes,” McDermott began, forcing himself to continue. “From what we’ve learned so far, it was without question an inside job, carried out by someone very much in Luganov’s inner circle—and this is where things get complicated.”
“Why? Who did it?” Clarke pressed, leaning forward in his seat.
“It would appear that the shooter was the man we’re calling the Raven.”
The president gasped. “Our mole?”
McDermott nodded.
“You mean the guy our people were trying to smuggle out of the country?” the president clarified. “The guy the Russians just blew out of the sky?”
McDermott nodded again.
“That’s ludicrous,” Clarke blurted out, now leaning back in his chair. “Impossible—our guy was nowhere near Luganov or the FSB chief. Right?”
For several seconds, the deputy national security advisor said nothing.
“Am I missing something, Mr. McDermott?” Clarke asked. “We’re in the clear on this. Aren’t we?”
17
GORKI-9, THE PRIME MINISTER’S RESIDENCE, 18 KILOMETERS WEST OF MOSCOW
The scream could be heard from every corner of the compound.
So, it seemed, could the sound of chinaware and glass goblets smashing to pieces on the hardwood floor.
An instant later, the French doors to the opulent master suite burst open. Two bodyguards rushed in, followed an instant later by five more, all with guns drawn. They found the remains of two breakfast trays scattered everywhere, and the prime minister cradled in his shrieking wife’s arms. The man’s eyes were wide-open but unblinking and frozen with fear. Blood trickled down his chin.
The lead a
gent wrenched his protectee from the grip of the inconsolable woman. He searched for a pulse but found none. He ordered the man’s personal physician be summoned at once, then began administering CPR and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Another agent grabbed a portable defibrillator. The team tried again and again to shock the PM’s heart back into motion. But it was no use.
Maxim Grigarin, only fifty-six years old, was dead, and the bitter taste on the lead agent’s lips left no doubt as to the cause of death.
The thirteenth prime minister of the Russian Federation had just been poisoned in his own home.
“Now,” Marcus said.
He slapped Oleg on the back, and the Russian bolted across the clearing. When he reached the rear of the last truck, he pressed himself against the salt spreader. A safety light was flashing above his head. Marcus peered through the reticle of the sniper rifle at the men making quick work of the felled tree. None were looking in their direction. Those who weren’t using the chain saws were passing around a bottle of vodka. One was trying to light a cigarette, though in the blowing and drifting snow, he was not having any luck.
Marcus signaled for Oleg to keep watch. Oleg complied, peering around the right side of the truck. When he nodded, Marcus shouldered the rifle, grabbed the lines of the parachute canopy, and sprinted to the rear of the truck, pulling Jenny behind him.
“All clear,” Oleg said breathlessly when Marcus arrived.
“Good, now follow me,” Marcus replied.
He glanced around the left side of the truck. The way the other trucks were angled, they created a barrier that prevented any of the drivers working up front to see them on this side. With their movements shielded from the men, Marcus easily advanced to the driver’s-side door of the rear truck, pulling Jenny across the snow. Oleg was right behind, making sure no one surprised them by coming around the back.
At Marcus’s signal, Oleg opened the door and climbed into the driver’s seat. Marcus hoisted Jenny over his shoulder and handed her up to Oleg. The Russian carefully eased her onto the middle of the bench seat as he backed over to the passenger side, careful to remain crouched down and out of sight.
The truck’s engine was running. So were the windshield wipers and the defroster. Marcus turned these off, wanting snow and ice to build up on the windows to further obscure their movements. Then he slid the rifle and AK-47 along the floor of the cab and stuffed their three rucksacks in a sliver of storage space behind the bench seat.
He was about to climb into the driver’s seat when both of the chain saw motors stopped. A moment later, Marcus heard a nasty, phlegmy cough, and a pair of thick hands grabbed him hard from behind. Instinctively Marcus snapped around and head-butted his attacker. The husky, bearded driver slumped down in the snow, motionless.
Marcus drew a pistol and pivoted toward the front of the truck, ready to fire. But no one was there. He moved to the back edge of the truck. No one else was coming. He ducked under the salt spreader and came to another of the truck’s corners. He took a quick peek. No one was approaching, but he could see that the tree had been cleared from the road and the rest of the drivers were returning to their cabs and preparing to roll.
By the time Marcus returned to the driver’s-side door, Oleg was in a panic. “They keep calling for this guy Misha over the radio, asking him if he’s ready,” Oleg said. “What do we do?”
“Say yes,” Marcus said calmly.
The Raven looked surprised but finally took the microphone of the CB radio, pressed the button, and said, “Da” in as gruff a tone as he could muster.
Next, to Oleg’s visible shock, Marcus bent down, grabbed the unconscious driver, and hoisted him up. With some difficulty, he shoved the man onto the seat beside Jenny. He fished their medical kit from Jenny’s pack, pulled out a syringe, loaded it up with a heavy narcotic, and jabbed the driver in the neck. He wouldn’t be bothering them for several hours, at least.
Oleg said nothing. His face said it all.
The convoy began to move. Marcus pushed everyone over to the right—not that they had much room to spare—and climbed into the driver’s seat and slammed the door. Then he flipped on the windshield wipers and the defroster again and handed his pistol to Oleg.
“Just in case,” he said as he took the wheel and pressed the accelerator.
18
MOSCOW
The Russian Defense Ministry was less than a mile from the Kremlin.
It took Petrovsky’s motorcade just minutes to get there, but he received two calls during the ride. By the time he was finished with the second call, his driver was being waved through the main gates. The armor-plated SUV roared up to a pale-yellow eighteenth-century building shaped like an enormous isosceles triangle. The building had been known for centuries as the Senate, but in modern times these were the offices of the Russian president and his administration.
Petrovsky’s security detail, triple its usual number given the events of the last two hours, rushed him through a side door and up a back elevator to the conference room on the third floor where nearly the entire cabinet had assembled. It was strange to see Luganov’s chair at the head of the table unoccupied. But Petrovsky refused to show any emotion. He took his usual seat, to the right of the president’s and across from three chairs also conspicuously empty that morning.
One belonged to Prime Minister Maxim Grigarin.
The second, to Dmitri Nimkov.
The third, to Oleg Kraskin.
Aside from these, the room was packed, not only with cabinet members but with their chief deputies, sitting behind their bosses in an outer ring of wooden chairs. But all eyes were on Petrovsky, in part because he was the last man to enter, and in part because they knew that it was he—not the president or the prime minister—who had called this emergency meeting.
The defense minister rose and called the meeting to order.
“Gentlemen, I’m afraid this is a tragic day, one that will become known in the annals of Russian history as Black Monday,” he began.
No one made a sound, and as he scanned the eyes of the men gathered around the room, he suddenly realized how closely the secret had been held. No one in this room knew what he was about to say—not all of it, anyway. Not even Nikolay Kropatkin, the deputy director of the FSB, knew everything that had transpired. They all knew something terrible had happened. Many of them had heard rumors of a shoot-out at one of Moscow’s international airports and the closure of all Russian airspace to traffic of any kind. But none of them knew the whole truth.
“There is no easy way to say this, so I will be direct,” Petrovsky continued. “I regret to inform you that early this morning, our beloved president, Aleksandr Ivanovich Luganov, was assassinated, along with FSB chief Dmitri Nimkov.”
There were audible gasps around the room, and Petrovsky paused before continuing.
“Adding to this tragedy is the fact that a foreign conspirator is not to blame. Both men were murdered in cold blood by one of our own—Oleg Stefanovich Kraskin.”
More gasps, now accompanied by angry looks.
“They were shot at point-blank range by the president’s son-in-law, in the president’s private study, in the palace at the Novo-Ogaryovo estate. Kraskin used a handgun fitted with a silencer.”
Several cabinet members stood as Russia’s most senior leaders tried to process the magnitude of the crimes and their disbelief at who had committed them.
“There are many questions to which I have no answers at the moment. Why would Oleg Stefanovich perpetrate such a crime against the motherland? How did he get the weapon? How did he smuggle it into the palace? Why were no bodyguards in the room at the time? This was an unspeakable breach of security protocol, and we must get to the bottom of how it could have occurred. But as troubling as any other question is this: How did Oleg Stefanovich manage to slip away from the palace and get to the airport before his crimes were even noticed? We know this much—he had help. A driver was waiting for him on the tarmac when he arrived at t
he airport. A pilot was waiting with a plane, a Gulfstream IV business jet, fueled and ready for departure.”
Near pandemonium broke out in the cabinet room. The rage and the bloodlust for revenge was palpable, but Petrovsky held up his hand to call for order. When that was not forthcoming, he rapped on the table, again demanding the ministers’ attention.
“Who was helping Oleg Stefanovich?” he asked. “This we do not yet know, but I can inform you that less than thirty minutes ago, the Russian Air Force identified the plane he was using and upon my command shot the plane down outside of St. Petersburg. It is reasonable to believe Kraskin and the criminals assisting him were killed in the explosion, but we are not taking any chances. I have ordered a massive search of the area until the bodies are recovered and positively identified.”
Petrovsky paused again to let his words sink in.
“Now, as incomprehensible as all of this is,” he finally continued, “I’m afraid there is more bad news.”
The room quieted.
“Just minutes ago, on my way here to meet with you, I was informed that our highly esteemed prime minister—indeed, one of my dearest comrades and colleagues—Maxim Grigarin, was found murdered in his bedroom.”
The shock in the eyes of every man around the table was profound.
“We are working under the assumption that Oleg Stefanovich is responsible in some way for this crime, as well, but I assure you a full and intensive investigation is under way.” Petrovsky took a sip of water from a glass on the table in front of him. “Gentlemen, I know you are all devastated at this horrific news. As am I. I know you are grieving, as one must when a nation loses such heroic and irreplaceable leaders—three in one day. But I don’t need to remind you that this body has been entrusted with sober responsibilities by our constitution that we must carry out faithfully for the good of the people and the security of our state.”
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