A couple of seconds later, Mary’s phone beeped. She glanced at the incoming message. “BLACKBIRD is clear, Eric’s saying. No sign of any tail,” she reported.
By now the sun had set, and the light was declining rapidly. An enormous neon advertising slogan that hung beneath the dome, Bombardier: Willkommen in Berlin, was highlighted brightly in the gathering gloom, and the headlights of an approaching train shone like beacons along the tracks.
“It’s the S-Bahn platform,” Mary said. “He’ll take an S3.”
Sure enough, two minutes later, the feed showed a yellow-and-red train pulling into the platform with a digital display on the front that was marked S3 Erkner.
BLACKBIRD boarded the train, which accelerated quickly out of the station.
“One stop to Friedrichstrasse,” Mary said. “He’ll be there in a couple of minutes.”
“Good,” Vic said. The van fell silent again as the team waited for the next scene to begin.
It struck Johnson that the sequence playing out in front of him on the video screens resembled one of the Cold War movies he had always enjoyed, not least during his student years in Berlin from 1980 to 1984. Indeed, Friedrichstrasse station was an iconic location at that time, being located in East Berlin but with trains continuing to serve it from West Berlin. As a result, the station itself was a key border crossing point, and various walls and barriers were built inside it to separate the two territories, in effect forming an extension of the Berlin Wall. The border crossing, passport checkpoints, and customs controls had been located at ground level within the complex.
Mary clicked on another thumbnail, this time on the platform at Friedrichstrasse, also covered by an expansive canopy, although less modernist than Hauptbahnhof. A couple of minutes later, the train carrying BLACKBIRD pulled in, and the feed showed him disembarking and walking confidently along the platform and beneath a covered walkway, heading toward the exit and stairs down into Friedrichstrasse, as instructed. There he again disappeared from camera shot.
Mary immediately tapped a message into her phone and dispatched it to Jones in the bogus Berlin taxi, telling him to instruct the driver to start moving to the pickup point where he would collect BLACKBIRD.
There was an instant reply from Jones confirming that the taxi was about to begin its journey.
Mary clicked yet again on one of the thumbnails, and a feed from a camera mounted beneath the rail bridge over Friedrichstrasse appeared. It showed the S-Bahn entrance and exit, sandwiched between a bistro and a clothing shop and looking somewhat dark in the poorly lit area beneath the bridge.
It wasn’t so dark that the video couldn’t pick up the figure of BLACKBIRD, however. The Russian was clearly visible as he strode out of the station, turning immediately left and heading along Friedrichstrasse in the direction of the surveillance van in which Johnson, Vic, and the team were concealed, about 150 yards away.
Once he had emerged from beneath the gloom of the bridge, another camera showed BLACKBIRD as he crossed the street and its tram tracks, dodging between a couple of slow-moving cars, and headed toward the pickup point just outside a Rossmann drugstore on the corner of Friedrichstrasse and Georgenstrasse. There he paused on the sidewalk and turned to face the oncoming traffic, waiting for his taxi pickup. There was no actual stopping area there, but the plan was for the taxi to halt momentarily, allowing BLACKBIRD to jump into the passenger seat, before the driver accelerated away again.
Johnson glanced at Vic, who was watching BLACKBIRD intently, and then turned back to the screen. A yellow tram sped past in front of the camera, blocking the view of BLACKBIRD for a few seconds. Then he came back into view, standing next to several shoppers and tourists who were waiting for an opportunity to cross the road. Behind him was the brick facade of the Friedrichstrasse station.
“Where’s the damned taxi?” Vic asked, his voice raised in pitch. “There’s no sign of it.”
“Must be coming soon,” Mary replied. “Rick confirmed it was on the move.”
Right at that moment, BLACKBIRD jerked sharply backward and fell to the ground on his backside, his arms outstretched and flailing, as if he had been punched hard and sent flying. His body twisted as he fell, and the back of his head cracked onto the concrete sidewalk.
In that moment, Johnson caught a glimpse of a splash of red behind him—it took him less than a second to realize that it was BLACKBIRD’s flesh and a large portion of his internal organs, propelled out through an exit wound in his back. The Russian lay still on the sidewalk, his head at a terrible sideways angle, as the group of people around him jumped back and away from the stricken man, some of them throwing up their hands, visibly panicked.
Both Vic and Mary jumped to their feet.
“Shit,” shouted Vic, stamping his foot on the van floor. “They knew.”
Chapter Five
Friday, March 21, 2014
Berlin
There was no time for recriminations over the death of Colonel Gennady Yezhov, at least, not immediately. That would come later. The first priority was to lay a smoke screen, as thick and fast as possible, and the second to try and work out how and why the meticulously planned operation had gone wrong.
Johnson was surprised that the German media swallowed most of the story that was swiftly peddled by a cooperative senior officer at the Bundespolizei, the federal police, at the request of Rick Jones. The public explanation stated that the man who had been killed on Friedrichstrasse was the victim of a suspected drive-by shooting. It was possibly a business deal that had gone wrong and could have involved drugs, although this was speculation. No identity could be released until the man’s relatives had been informed, and that might take some time, they reported.
Thanks to some quick thinking by Eric, who had managed to remove Yezhov’s false passport and wallet from his jacket while delivering an utterly pointless and very messy CPR and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, the ambulance crew and local police officers who quickly arrived on the scene were unable to obtain any identification.
Jones, in the rear of the fake taxi, had arrived at the scene just after Eric. But he said that upon seeing the body he had instructed the driver to continue, not wanting to become entangled in a difficult situation.
The truth, it later emerged, following forensic tests and measurements carried out on the entry and exit wounds, was that Yezhov had been killed by a single 9x39 mm round. The bullet had almost certainly come from a sniper rifle fired from some height.
The best guess was that the weapon was a VSS Vintorez, often used by Russian Spetsnaz forces on clandestine operations because it fired its rounds at subsonic speeds and was therefore far quieter than some of its high-velocity rivals.
Following further investigations, it became clear that the shot had come from a fifth-floor hotel room window about sixty yards farther down the street, not far from the Deutsche Telekom van. From that distance, the killer could hardly fail—the Vintorez could pierce a thin steel plate at five hundred yards.
The room had been booked in the name of a German, Herman Günther, from Düsseldorf. It took very little time to establish that this was a false identity. Needless to say, there was no trace of the occupant by the time the BND and Bundespolizei arrived at the hotel. Further forensic tests found minute traces of gases, propellant, and other gunshot residue on the carpet, thrown off when the round was fired.
“He was a dead man walking from the moment he left Prague,” Vic said, sitting in a small meeting room in the Pariser Platz CIA station later that evening with Johnson and Neal. “That was planned down to fine margins.” He placed his hands behind his head and rocked back in his seat. “It had Moscow Center’s hallmarks stamped all over it. And I’ve said that to Nicklin-Donovan.”
Moscow Center was the headquarters of the SVR at Yasenevo, a dozen miles southwest of the Russian capital.
“Someone leaked it,” Johnson said.
“Yes—yet again,” Vic said, his face drawn tight. “And I’m going t
o find the bastard.”
“How many people knew?”
Vic shrugged. “Too many. There are the MI6 London people on Mark’s team, including his head of UK controllerate, Will Payne, and his guys here in Berlin, like Rick. Of course, there’s C, Richard Durman. I have no idea whether he has privately told Harriet Miller, the foreign secretary. I suspect so. But either way, too many of the Brits, in my view. There’s all of our team in DC together with Bernice and Louise, of course, and others in London. Plus the small BND team, although we hadn’t given them much detail about the importance of what BLACKBIRD was bringing. Only the logistics.”
Louise Bingham was the US ambassador to the United Kingdom, the latest in a series of increasingly high-flying appointments that she had been given within the State Department, where she was widely viewed as a future secretary of state. Many thought she could go even further, given her well-known close working relationship with the president, who relied on her for guidance in navigating the so-called special relationship with the UK.
“A lot of people knew, Joe,” Vic said. “That’s the bottom line. But they needed to know. We can’t restrict everything.”
“Yes, it’s difficult,” Johnson said. It just wasn’t feasible to cut people in important roles out of information flows. That could spell career suicide.
The shooting had given a dangerous new twist to a case that Johnson had assumed would simply be a question of a debrief to assess whether Yezhov’s material was worth his involvement. He had hoped it would pan out simply because of the personal link to Vic’s brother—anything that might help bring closure to his friend’s private grief would be worth doing.
But now the situation was dramatically more complex. The man he was supposed to help debrief was dead, and whatever secrets about the events of 1986 he had held had been blown away by a sniper’s round on a busy Berlin street. Johnson found himself feeling somewhat redundant. He supposed he might as well head back to Portland.
“So where are you going to start?” Johnson asked. Vic and his team seemed somewhat shell-shocked at what had happened. “From what you’ve said, it seems the leaks have come from joint operations with the Brits.”
Vic and Neal exchanged glances.
“Yes. All of them. We start in London,” Vic said. “That’s my gut feeling.”
“That sounds logical. I guess I’ll book myself on a flight back to Portland, then,” Johnson said. “Good luck. I suspect you’ll need it.”
Vic held up both hands, palms upward. “Whoa. Wait a minute,” he said. “I’d like you to come to London with me and join the debriefing with Mark.”
“Why?” Johnson asked. “How? This is internal for you now, isn’t it? And I told you, I don’t want to get tied up in CIA work.”
“I know that,” Vic said. “But Neal needs to stay here and finish the cleanup operation, and I need someone to support me in the Mark meeting—it’s likely to be a tough one. You know all the background, and you were in the van and saw exactly what happened. You can fly home from London when we’re done. It won’t hold you up for long. Come on, buddy.”
Johnson didn’t reply immediately. He wasn’t surprised at the request. Vic doubtless wanted a close ally with him given the disastrous turn of events with Yezhov. One last briefing. He didn’t want to do it, but in truth, it would probably hold him up for no more than a day. He could live with that.
Johnson nodded his head. “All right. I’ll do you a favor. You’ll owe me a beer, though.”
Friday, March 21, 2014
Tuapse, Russia’s Black Sea Coast
Yuri Severinov used his hand to shelter his eyes from the afternoon sunshine that was reflecting off the white concrete quay of the deep-water oil terminal. He was dwarfed by the ocean-going Suezmax oil tanker Yekaterina Alekseyevna, named after Catherine the Great, that stood next to the quay, its bow soaring more than forty meters above him.
Yekaterina Alekseyevna was one of the oil tankers from Severinov’s own fleet and its cargo of crude oil from Syria was being unloaded for processing at his Krasnodar oil refinery, near to Tuapse on Russia’s Black Sea coast. The multibillionaire oligarch, through his oil company, Besoi Energy, owned and operated the refinery.
He felt his cell phone vibrate in his pocket and removed it to check the incoming message, written in Russian. It was a secure message, for which he needed to use his key.
Operation Redtail has succeeded. I am leaving Moscow soon, will be in contact x
It was the first piece of good news he had received in almost a year.
He read the note twice, and as he did so, he hoped that a little of the tension that had been accumulating over many months would drain from him. Yet it did not. His mood had been so dark and depressed in recent months that even this news seemed to make only a marginal difference.
Severinov turned and strode back along the quay toward the broad gangplank that led up to the deck of the tanker.
For the past ten months, Severinov’s fortunes had taken a sharp turn for the worse following Besoi Energy’s catastrophic and failed bid for a raft of oil and gas assets being sold by the Afghanistan government.
The bid failure had been directly caused by an investigation carried out by the American war crimes investigator Joe Johnson, a former CIA officer with whom Severinov had a bitter history dating back to the 1980s, when they were intelligence officers on opposite sides of the Afghan conflict. The investigation made public details of Severinov’s role in masterminding the destruction of many Afghan villages and towns during the Russian occupation of that country.
The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, had been a long-standing patron of Severinov’s, dating back to their shared background in the KGB when they had both worked together in Soviet-controlled East Germany during the Cold War.
But despite that, the president’s icy blue eyes had showed no hesitation or emotion when penalizing him heavily for the embarrassing oil and gas bid failure and the revelations. Although celebrated in private circles in Russia, the atrocities associated with the Afghan occupation were not something that Putin wanted to be highlighted publicly. Nothing that allowed the world to criticize the Motherland was acceptable.
To Severinov’s greater despair and embarrassment, Johnson’s inquiries had also made public his ancestry. Both his father, Sergo, and his half brother were the bastard sons of former Russian leader Josef Stalin by different women: Severinov’s grandmother and mother respectively.
Both women had been seduced by Stalin, who cared little about the fact that the latter woman was married to his own son.
Severinov had a deep regard for what Stalin had achieved in Russia and in a blinkered fashion ignored all the killings and human rights abuses. But quite apart from his own desire to keep Stalin’s reputation untarnished, the party leadership had forbidden him from disclosing anything that could damage the great leader’s reputation. To have it all out in the open had caused massive problems in Moscow.
The consequence was that Putin had effectively confiscated one third of Besoi Energy’s stakes in three oil and gas fields in western Siberia—the powerhouse of the business—dealing a major blow to Severinov’s cash flow.
And that was the problem: he relied on cash flow from those fields to repay loans obtained from banks to finance other acquisitions, of which there had been many, ranging from oil and gas production in Kazakhstan, a 40 percent stake in a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to China, the Krasnodar refinery where he was now standing, and gas-fired power generation facilities in Thailand, China, and the Philippines.
As a result, Severinov had turned to other short-term measures to generate additional cash flow alongside his main energy operations. He stuck to what he knew best and what had served him well in the past: arms dealing.
Next to the gangplank leading to the tanker’s decks stood four trucks. A gang of dockworkers was busy positioning the trucks and removing tarpaulins that covered their loads so that a crane could lift a series of wooden crates
aboard the tanker.
Yekaterina Alekseyevna—a 270-meter-long monster—was scheduled to sail from the Krasnodar refinery the following morning and head through the Bosporus Strait for Syria, where it would be reloaded with more crude oil. But on its journey, it would have another secondary but highly lucrative load on board: an array of antiaircraft and antitank missiles, rocket-propelled grenades and launchers, assault rifles, including a large number of AK-47s, and mortars. The weaponry was being hidden in one of a series of secret storage areas concealed within the stern of the ship.
A large percentage of the weaponry would be sold to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government for use in the ongoing battle against rebel forces. Russia had long been a supporter of Assad, and Severinov’s ongoing contract was worth about $500 million a year.
But Severinov was potentially doubling his money—and taking a large risk—by also off-loading a significant volume of the arms to the Syrian rebels. These were the opposition forces fighting Assad.
This was a highly lucrative contract but one that he necessarily needed to keep very quiet. If the Russian president got wind of it, the consequences would be doubtless even worse than those incurred from the Afghanistan fiasco. But Severinov felt he had little choice. To repay his bank debt, he needed cash, and the massively depleted returns from his Siberian operations were no longer covering the requirement.
To complicate matters further, the military temperature in the Black Sea had heated up significantly in recent months since the Russian president ordered the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula from the Ukraine. This had been completed in recent weeks, and now there was speculation that international forces, led by the United States, might threaten a military conflagration in the region. There had been news stories speculating that a US aircraft carrier, the USS George H. W. Bush, could enter the Black Sea. If that posed a further threat to Severinov’s refinery operations, flows of crude oil, and arms dealing, his entire business could be sunk. He felt highly nervous about the entire situation.
The Nazi's Son Page 4