Hard Cover

by Adrian Magson

  Maxim swallowed. Oh, no. ‘You mean a black flight?’

  Denis made a stifled noise. ‘God, how I wish you hadn’t said that. But yes, one of those.’

  Maxim’s head was whirling. He’d heard about black flights. The guys at the base talked about them all the time. Ultra-secret security and military in nature, they were the stuff of films and novels, and were rumoured to fly from remote locations that weren’t on any map, slipping across borders without leaving a trace and dropping men and equipment in places that never appeared in the news until something went bang, by which time the men were long gone. ‘So what should I do?’

  ‘Do? You do nothing, you imbecile. Forget you ever saw it, hope the pilot didn’t hear your call, or if he did, wasn’t so pissed off he’ll report it to his spook superiors and have you thrown in jail; hope your dopey civilian supervisor forgets you mentioned it and that nobody else sees the report you filed because if they do you’ll be getting a visit from somebody unpleasant. And from this moment on, learn to keep your head down. Black flights are called that for a very good reason: nobody is supposed to see them, and if they do they’re supposed to keep their mouths shut. Now, get yourself back down here as soon as you can where your talents will be exploited to the full by a grateful military establishment who will work you to the bone for little reward. Good night!’

  The connection went dead. Maxim put the phone down and sat looking at his reflection in the monitor, which had gone into sleep mode. Boy, he’d never heard Denis sound so mad before. What the hell had he done?

  He flicked the keyboard to wake up the screen. And there it was, still moving; the same code, now tracking further north than ever.

  He turned off the screen and logged out. He had to get out of here now and take Denis’s advice. He could always explain away logging off later than he should have done by saying he’d been sick; too much cheap food and beer. Tomorrow morning he’d ask for a transfer back to his home base. They’d probably be glad to see the back of him, Gretsky the Fat most of all.

  He signed out of the building’s rear staff entrance and pulled the door closed behind him, waiting for the click of the lock and wondering where he could get a drink. Even this late there would be something open. He needed something a little stronger than beer … maybe vodka or whisky, something to deaden the fears suddenly whirling around in his brain. Black flights? God, how stupid have I been …

  He turned to walk across the narrow service road to the parking lot and found a car parked right outside the entrance.

  Two men were standing alongside it. They were looking at him.

  As he went to walk round the car, one of the men stepped out in front of him and blocked his way. A scuff of noise at his back and he sensed the other man moving in behind him to block his retreat.

  ‘Maxim Datsyuk?’

  ‘Yes.’ Maxim’s gut flipped and he felt sick. This was bad. Very bad.

  ‘We’d like to talk with you. Get in the car.’

  FORTY-SIX

  Chesnokoy stared fixedly at the screen of the tracking monitor, waiting for a signal to come through and confirm that they were heading the right way. He forced himself to sit back and be patient as the Ansat rotors thumped out their familiar beat overhead, and he felt himself finally beginning to relax. Action at last.

  There were worse places to be than the cabin of a military helicopter heading out into the dark; at least it meant he was doing something instead of sitting around.

  After the seemingly never-ending torture of having had to wait all day to get the helicopter checked over for critical damage and the new team to arrive, night had fallen and they’d been able to get back in the air. As he kept reminding himself, they were under strict orders to fly only under cover of dark, and to stay well away from the attentions of the regional air-defence systems around Saint Petersburg. Meeting a Sukhoi fighter jet with the pilot’s finger on the trigger would be an ignominious ending he preferred not to encounter. And he had too much to do to want to end things now.

  The first thing on the list was to locate the targets once again, to deal with them and place a check in the box that said mission accomplished. The sooner he got the signal telling him where they were, and was able to give the order for the pilot to go in, the happier he would be.

  Deep down, however, he knew it probably wouldn’t be that simple. Uppermost in his mind all day had been the man who had attacked them at the lake and taken out half his team; the man who had come out of nowhere and caught them with their pants down and almost taken down the helicopter in the process.

  As the pilot had explained with frightening and furious clarity once he’d inspected the damage, one of the bullets had come perilously close to wrecking the rear rotor assembly, impacting against the housing and sending splinters into the main drive. Chesnokoy had no idea what that meant in technical terms, but was realistic enough to know that the pilot’s anger came from having seen a similar outcome before and knowing it could have been catastrophic.

  He stared at the men around him. With Kruglov and Ignatyev seriously out of action, he was now going to have to rely on Georgi Gorin, sitting next to him, and the four new arrivals he’d picked up at the abandoned military base near Puskino north of Saint Petersburg. He didn’t know them, didn’t recall their first names and didn’t really care; they were there to do a job. As long as they obeyed orders and could use the weapons they’d brought with them, he expected nothing more of them.

  Their nominated lead was a tall, dark-skinned man with piercing eyes. He’d given his name as Kasbek. Chesnokoy figured he was a Chechen, like the man alongside him, Kelim. He’d worked with Chechen Muslims before many times and had nothing against them as soldiers. They fought well and died hard and he could respect that. Politically they were crazy and uncontrollable, in his view, but that wasn’t his problem. He couldn’t remember the names of the other two men; only that they were native Russians from around Saint Petersburg and hadn’t spoken all day, seemingly content to clean their weapons, over and over, as if it were a sacred ritual. That suited him just fine. Good soldiers didn’t have to talk, just fight.

  That thought brought him back inevitably to the mystery attacker. What was the name of the younger of the two targets? Gurov. That was it; a former KGB man. But did he have the skills to have done the damage he’d caused? Somehow he didn’t think so. He couldn’t say why, only that some instinct told him the man who’d laid the fire trap on the water, who’d used a Molotov to disrupt their approach and pretty much kicked their arses back into the helicopter, was military trained to a high degree. KGB men learned to fight, he knew that, and many were former military men. But the attack down at the lake had been spontaneous, quickly planned, controlled and effective. And that pointed to somebody who’d done it before – and in the recent past.

  Damn, he could almost admire the tactics used, even if he did want to kill the man so badly it gave him a headache.

  His cell phone buzzed in his chest pocket. He took it out. It was Simoyan calling from Moscow.

  ‘I have information that might prove interesting,’ the gruff voice intoned. ‘Two men went missing yesterday at a location west of Lake Onega. They were watching a foreign diplomat at the time.’

  ‘Perhaps they got lost in the woods,’ Chesnokoy replied. What the hell did this have to do with anything? He had enough on his plate without—

  ‘Hardly. They were actually with him at the time. The diplomat has since returned to Saint Petersburg.’

  ‘Who were the men?’ It might have been better to ask who the diplomat was, but he had a feeling it wasn’t the case of a man in a fancy suit suddenly going rogue and disposing of his FSB watchers.

  ‘Good ones. Extremely good. I’ve used them before. They weren’t the kind to get lost.’

  ‘So what’s the connection with us?’

  ‘We believe the diplomat was planning to meet up with your two targets.’

  Chesnokoy acknowledged the information and signed
off, a sudden leaden lump in his chest. Damn it, he’d been right: there was somebody else out there. Somebody capable of taking out two good men. If they hadn’t made contact with Simoyan, it could only mean they were dead.

  He saw the navigator waving an arm, signalling him to put on the comms headset.

  ‘What are we doing exactly?’ the man asked, when Chesnokoy pushed in the jack plug. ‘We’re flying into a black soup here, with a dense weather pattern right ahead of us. An area this size we can’t see anything on the ground unless we know where to look.’

  Based on the last known position of the targets, Chesnokoy had given them the same heading towards the lake. But that wasn’t where he expected to find them. If they had any sense they’d be long gone by now and trying to hide.

  ‘When I know, so will you,’ he replied, and waved the tracking monitor. ‘Until then, keep going.’ Rain or no rain, he thought; this is not over until I see the bodies.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  ‘They should have made contact by now.’ Tzorekov was in a black mood, made worse by the discovery of the tracking device at the power plant along with a flat tyre.

  ‘They will do so soon, I’m sure,’ said Gurov. He was trying everything he could think of to penetrate the cloud of pessimism that had descended on Tzorekov. The tracker hadn’t helped, found while scraping caked mud away from the axles. It had been placed underneath the car’s body, tucked out of sight from a casual inspection. The combined discoveries had made Tzorekov voice the possibility that this venture might be fatally flawed.

  Immediately the tyre was in place, they had packed up and driven hard to get clear of the area. The older man had said little on the way, huddled in the passenger seat and staring out of the window as if he might see whoever had placed the tracker on the car descending on them across the vast area of treelined hills either side of the road.

  Even now, having eaten, his mood was grim and withdrawn as if retreating from the harsh reality that seemed to be rearing up before him.

  They were seated in a small bar-restaurant at a hunting lodge some sixty kilometres north-west of the abandoned power plant. Seeing the sign, Gurov had insisted they take the opportunity to eat a meal while they could. Tzorekov had shrugged, showing little interest. The menu was limited but the food edible and filling. Washed down with local beer, it should have been enough to make any man feel that there was hope in the air.

  But it hadn’t worked.

  ‘You know that, do you?’ Tzorekov muttered. ‘I wish I had your confidence.’

  The ‘they’ in question was actually one person, a man named Valentin Roykovski, Putin’s former driver and long-time link between the former KGB colleagues. The last contact from Roykovski had been five days ago, when they had begun their long journey here. Roykovski had been firm then in his assurances that a meeting would be possible, even probable. If they could be in position, he’d suggested, for when Putin’s engagements in the south came to an end, he would make sure a time and location was provided as soon as he knew the details.

  Since then, silence. Two calls to Roykovski’s home number, risky though that had been, had elicited no response.

  ‘We should have checked the car before now,’ Tzorekov added quietly. ‘It was an unforgiveable lapse for which I blame myself.’

  ‘Not so,’ replied Gurov. ‘It was my responsibility – I should have expected it. Somehow they managed to intercept us and plant the device.’

  ‘How would they have known precisely when we were coming? We’ve been very careful about communications – and we’ve been with the car the whole time.’

  Gurov shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about that, but … maybe something we did alerted them to our plans. You know we’ve been under occasional surveillance, so they might have chosen that moment to see us leaving. But placing the tracker? I don’t know.’

  ‘Are you sure it wasn’t when you heard the alarm go off back at the power plant?’

  Gurov shook his head and pushed his plate away. ‘Absolutely. The device was caked in mud and grit from the road; it had been there at least two days.’

  ‘At the airport, then? There has been nowhere else.’

  ‘Maybe. I must confess I didn’t think they would latch onto us that quickly. I’m sorry.’

  Tzorekov reached out to touch the younger man’s hand. ‘Arkasha, you mustn’t blame yourself. This trip was bound to be full of hazards, we both knew that. This has come a little early, I admit – but now we know about it and can prepare ourselves. If anybody wishes to launch a direct attack on us, they will find themselves blowing an old power plant to pieces.’ He grunted with the first smile he’d given in a long time. ‘At least that will save the state some money, eh?’

  Gurov opened his mouth to say something, but Tzorekov held up a hand. He was looking at a small television screen on the wall behind the bar. It was broadcasting a news bulletin from Moscow, the picture showing a plane arriving at Domodedovo International Airport. It cut away to show a familiar pale figure flanked by security men and aides, walking towards a clutch of reporters, held in place by security police, the air alive with the flash of cameras.

  President Vladimir Putin, arriving back in Moscow from Kurtz.

  Tzorekov said nothing, but his face was studied in concentration. He watched as the strap line summarised the scene, describing Putin’s return and his intention of going directly into the city centre for a meeting with his ministers over the sanctions currently being applied against Russia and Russian businessmen by the United States and European Union.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ said Gurov softly. ‘It can’t be. What’s he doing?’

  But Tzorekov shook his head. ‘Patience, Arkasha. Patience. These things are never simple. There are formalities he has to go through, you know that. The world stage is watching. But we will see. We will see.’ He sat back, nodding confidently, but there was no mistaking the way his face had drained of colour on seeing the broadcast. ‘This is just disinformation. That’s all.’

  But Gurov wasn’t listening. He had stiffened in his chair and was looking past Tzorekov’s shoulder towards the entrance.

  A man had stepped through the door and was looking directly at them.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  I already knew what I was going to do when I caught up with the Touareg. The plan wasn’t ideal but it was the best of the alternatives on offer. It meant breaking my usual operating procedures, but I couldn’t see any other choice. There was too much to lose if I didn’t get this right.

  I’d followed the co-ordinates given to Lindsay by the Pathfinders, which led to a small restaurant off the road close to another site advertising hunting and fishing. It was strictly a weekend kind of place, with garish lights and advertising hoardings for Baltika beer showing through the rain, and lots of parking. It was the first eating place of its kind I’d seen for a long while. Rough and ready it might be, but when you can’t get steak, burger is a luxury.

  I counted a car and two pickups out front, but no Touareg.

  ‘You sure about the co-ordinates?’ I asked Lindsay, scanning the area through the scope. ‘I can’t see the vehicle.’ I was a hundred yards back on the side of the road with the lights off. I didn’t want to go in until I had to, and scaring off Tzorekov was definitely not part of my plan. Neither was getting shot by Gurov if he was feeling jumpy and keeping his eye out for followers.

  ‘Checked and double-checked,’ Lindsay replied. ‘The signal’s loud and clear. I have a small structure on-screen but no identifying tags. The satellite image I have is a couple of days old and looks like a bar or a small store. There’s some parking out back, perhaps for deliveries and employees, and I have a track leading away at the rear towards a small lake.’

  ‘Good to know. Where does it go after that?’ I was hoping there was another way out of here.

  A slight hesitation, then: ‘I’m zooming in … now. The track goes past the lake and into the forest. Could be a logging tra
il; there are open areas a few miles on that look like controlled clearance sites, then … yes, the track meets up with another road about five miles away which heads east towards another large lake. I don’t have a clear sight of the track’s condition, though; you might be facing a rough ride.’

  I got out of the pickup, the Grach in my coat pocket. ‘I’m going in for a closer look. Keep an eye out for that helicopter, will you? Give me a shout if they look like joining in.’

  ‘Copy that, Watchman. Good luck.’

  I locked the pickup and crossed the road into the parking lot. It was mostly gravel and hard core, puddled with rainwater and patches of mud. Close to the building, which was a single-storey wooden construction, they had painted rough white lines for parking. I was beginning to think I had lucked out and that the second tracker had also been found and dumped, when I stepped round the corner of the building and hit pay dirt.

  One Touareg, parked in the shadows.

  It was hidden from the road, which was good, but from the air it would show up clearly to anybody looking down. A static target.

  I stood for a moment, reconsidering my plan. Making contact with a person I’m shadowing can be a risky business. The line of work I’m in usually means the people involved are on the edge of something risky, like the intelligence field or special operations. It makes them wary of everybody around them, being confident that they can get by without some guy riding shotgun, otherwise they’d have asked for it in the first place. Since they’re not expecting me – and usually they’re not – having me pitch up out of nowhere can look all kinds of suspicious. They either respond with concern or annoyance, mostly at their having failed to detect my presence, or even some hostility. Explaining to them that my job is all about me remaining invisible doesn’t always help; they mostly like to think they can cope just fine.