The Russian Bride

by Ed Kovacs

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  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  For Virginia Rose; I can’t repay the countless acts of kindness and love, but I’ll do my best to pass them on.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Sincere thanks to Christopher Graham and Richard Curtis. Michael Homler, Hector DeJean, Kate Davis, a terrific art department, and all the rest of the good folks at SMP have my deep appreciation for their hard work and efforts on behalf of my books.

  Pilots and aviation raconteurs Carl Scholl and Tony Ritzman provided aviation expertise that fit the bill perfectly. I owe them many thanks for their ongoing generosity and support.

  Special thanks to a former U.S. Army defense attaché, who wishes to remain unnamed, for providing background information and insight into the world of military attachés. Col. John B. Alexander, U.S. Army (Ret.), generously shared his knowledge of electromagnetic pulse and directed energy weapons, and pointed me in the proper directions for further research. I’m proud to be able to call John and his lovely, catalyst-of-a-wife Victoria, my dear friends.

  Warren Sessler, a Korean War–decorated hero from the brutal siege of Outpost Harry, helped out with my research in Las Vegas. Warren is just a great guy; he and his beautiful wife, Captain Xiao Sessler, U.S. Army, are true American Profiles in Courage.

  The Phoenix Group, as always, deserves special mention for all of the unsung assistance they afford me behind the scenes.

  I’m fortunate and grateful to have such a terrific, loving family. I not only offer my heartfelt thanks to my wife, children, and other family members for taking such good care of me and being so supportive, but I must also ask their forgiveness for my long absences.

  Very specific and hugely significant thanks go to David Reeves of Bedlam Group in Las Vegas. Serendipity brought our families together, and how grateful I am for that. David is a brilliant, generous soul who was instrumental in contributing astute technical advice, and other input. Thankfully, he’s also a devious genius who enjoys a good Scotch, a fine cigar, and a hot cup of well-brewed coffee; please, David, accept my most humble thanks.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Thanks in advance to my readers for understanding that while most of the locations in this book are real and worth a visit, others are purely fictional.

  The mask-wearing militants who have appeared in eastern Ukraine and taken over government buildings represent the latest face of Russia’s tradition of maskirovka (mas-kir-OAF-ka). It’s a word literally translated as disguise, but Russia has long used it in a broader sense, meaning any military tactic that incorporates camouflage, concealment, deception, disinformation—or any combination thereof.

  —Time, May 23, 2014

  Denial and Deception: (Russian: Maskirovka, Маскировка) is a term which describes a particular type of information operation employed by a government agency, often an intelligence service. This sort of operation both blocks an adversary’s access to accurate information regarding one’s actions or intentions and, simultaneously, convinces said adversary of the accuracy of false information regarding those actions and intentions.

  —Wikipedia

  The Russians have been successful at using sophisticated deceptions for over 600 years.

  —“Todd,” a former U.S. Air Force Intelligence Agency officer

  CHAPTER 1

  The big sky hung low. Charcoal-hued cumulus clouds crowded the airspace above Interstate 80 east of Evanston, Wyoming, like they were moving in for a takedown. The weather made Irene Shanks’s ankles hurt even more than the walking did.

  “Rain coming soon,” said Irene, without even glancing up. At seventy-eight years old, she didn’t need a barometer; the swelling in her joints told her everything she needed to know about the weather forecast. She loosely held the L-rods favored by most dowsers as she hobbled her grid pattern over the hard soil.

  “Will we have to stop?” asked Lily Bain, the pretty, blue-eyed blond woman who had shown up unannounced two days earlier on the doorstep of Irene’s Tucson home with a lucrative proposition to come to the Salt Lake City area for a quick dowsing job.

  “No, this shouldn’t take long at all. Locating buried cables is child’s play for me. Howard, my deceased husband, taught me how to find buried cables over forty years ago.”

  Lily and her partner Dennis had flown Irene first-class to Salt Lake City, put her in a nice hotel to rest, and then set out early this morning for the drive east on the interstate into Wyoming. Irene wasn’t sure exactly where they were now, but back in Tucson she had map-dowsed the couple’s Wyoming property using a pendulum. She had marked an area on a large-scale map they had provided her of a two-acre-sized plot where she felt the buried cable would most likely be found. And since the homemade map contained no reference that identified the actual location, Irene wondered if they were really treasure hunters trying to disguise their true intent.

  They had all arrived from Salt Lake City in a rented four-wheel-drive GMC Yukon about thirty minutes earlier. Irene had set to work quickly and found the area that corresponded with the points she had marked on the map. She was now carefully walking a grid pattern on the desolate, gently sloping land, letting a moisture-laden prestorm breeze rich with ozone blow wayward strands of silver hair into her eyes.

  Irene looked up. The foreground roller-coaster horizon didn’t reveal much perspective; she knew they were close to I-80 and civilization—at least truck-stop civilization—but the view only suggested that they stood in the middle of nowhere. Something nagged at her as she slowly covered more ground; it wasn’t the approaching storm bothering her, but she couldn’t put her finger on it.

  “Can I ask what you two are going to do out here in the boondocks that you’re worried about the location of this cable?” asked Irene.

  “We haven’t decided that exactly,” said Dennis, smiling. At thirty-four years old he stood six feet three, and even with a long-sleeved shirt covering his torso, one could see that he clearly was no stranger to the weight room. The bulk contrasted with a babyish face and pale skin featuring perennially rosy cheeks. His golden hair was combed back and made darker by using some kind of cream or gel. “But since the county has misplaced the maps showing where the cable is located, we want to know where not to dig or build something.”

  “I mean, you’ll have to construct some kind of real road just to drive in here and…”

  “It’s amazing that you dowsed a water well for the Tucson water utility,” said Lily, gently changing the subject. Only in her mid-twenties, Lily was slender, her ghost-white skin freckled out from the nose, and her smile was completely sweet. Irene thought of it as a “cutie-pie smile.” Lily had explained away her slight accent as the result of spending her high school years in Prague, where her businessman father had been working. Lily’s limp, straight hair was not cut fashionably, making Dennis appear to be the vain one of the young couple.

  “But I got a call from the Tucson water company telling me I was wrong,” proteste
d Irene.

  Dennis and Lily suddenly looked aghast. “Wrong?”

  A smile came to Irene’s lips, since she knew she had them going. “The water utility executive told me they drilled on the spot I had marked, and that they found water at exactly one hundred forty-three feet deep, just like I told them. But he said they were getting two hundred and two gallons a minute from the well, not two hundred and one, like I had said.” Nothing wrong with a little bragging from a seventy-eight-year-old, thought Irene.

  Dennis visibly relaxed and, smiling again, flicked his cigarette. “Sounds like your late husband, Howard, taught you well.”

  Suddenly, Irene’s L-rods, made from pot metal similar to coat hangers, pointed sharply to the ground. “Found it. Could you mark it, sweetheart?” Irene asked Lily.

  Irene reached into a nylon pouch slung across her chest, retrieved a small pink plastic surveyor’s flag on a metal rod, and gave it to Lily, who inserted it into the ground under Irene’s L-rods. Irene concentrated her efforts on this area now, and soon a line of pink surveyor’s flags bifurcated part of the property.

  “That’s good enough,” called out Dennis as he crossed toward the Yukon. “You have earned your money, Irene. We can easily determine the path of the cable now. Come here before the rain starts.”

  “I thought you wanted to know how deep it’s buried.”

  “Oh, yes, of course! Sorry.”

  Irene handed her L-rods to Lily and then removed from her pouch a quartz crystal on a silver chain. She stood over one of the pink flags and held out the pendulum in her right hand. “Right for yes, left for no, thank you,” whispered Irene, with her eyes closed. Then in a normal voice she said, “Is the cable buried between one and ten feet deep?”

  Lily watched with obvious interest as the crystal quickly spun left. The young woman squinted, looking more closely, as if trying to catch Irene manipulating the movement of the stone.

  “Is the cable buried between ten and twenty feet deep?”

  This time the crystal spun to the right. “I’m going to go with a hunch,” Irene said to Lily as she grasped the crystal to make it still again. “Is the cable buried at fifteen feet deep?”

  The pendulum spun wildly to the right. “Fifteen feet deep it is, then. Seems awfully deep for a cable,” said Irene, shaking her head as she put the pendulum away.

  “Let’s go. The rain is almost here,” said Lily.

  As Lily gently took Irene’s arm and helped her walk the twenty yards to the SUV, Dennis opened the rear doors, retrieved a large black plastic tarp, and spread it onto the ground next to the rear of the Yukon.

  “Can you stand on the tarp and use your dowsing rods to see if there’s something there?” asked Lily.

  “What am I looking for?”

  “Just tell me if you get any sense of something. This will only take a moment, and then we are finished.”

  Irene thought the request a bit odd, but the size of the tarp was so small, it would indeed only take a moment. She held out the L-rods and slowly stepped onto the black tarp.

  “I know dowsers who can locate crashed airplane sites, dowsers who find gold, silver … and buried treasure.”

  “We just wanted you to find the cable, I promise you that,” assured Dennis.

  She had no real reason to doubt him. But after taking a few short steps, she stopped. “I almost feel like Howard is trying to warn me about—”

  Irene turned to face Lily and saw the sweet young lady holding a handgun that was pointed right at her. There was a black tube attached to the end of the gun barrel, and Irene heard several very soft sounds come from the gun before her world went black as the tarp.

  The seventy-eight-year-old fell perfectly onto the center of the plastic sheet. Her swollen ankles would never bother her again.

  “Did you hear what she said? She said her dead husband was trying to warn her, and that was exactly when I pulled my weapon.”

  “Just a coincidence,” said Dennis, sizing up the fresh corpse, the easy smile gone from his face. “How deep did she say the cable was?”

  “Fifteen feet.”

  “That sounds right. This old babushka must weigh a hundred kilos,” he said disdainfully.

  And with that, Dennis rolled her up into the tarp, and he and Lily grunted as they lifted Irene’s body into the back of the Yukon.

  Dennis closed the doors and then barked commands in Russian into a two-way radio. Lily crossed over to the pink surveyor’s flags and replaced them all with small chunks of broken concrete painted to match the brown earth.

  In less than a minute, a Ford F-350 pickup towing a backhoe on a trailer and carrying three men appeared over a slight rise and drove up to the Yukon.

  “Get the camouflage netting up first,” yelled Dennis, speaking in his native tongue of Russian to the workers. “Dig down to exactly fourteen feet. We work in between passes of the spy satellites.”

  CHAPTER 2

  The Bennings family home sat on a hillock just off narrow and winding Carbon Canyon Road in Chino Hills, California. Chino Hills was once a rustic ranch community in the southwest corner of San Bernardino County that went somewhat upscale with the influx of moneyed Chinese American and Chinese immigrant householders, and it’s part of the smog-choked Los Angeles megalopolis that consumes a good chunk of Southern California. When the traffic gods are smiling, the drive to downtown L.A. only takes forty minutes.

  Thirty-one-year-old Staci Bennings sat in her late father’s airy home office on a pleasant spring morning, but her view out the windows was of a muddy brownish gray pall clinging to the horizon like a judgment that couldn’t be expunged. To be sure, there was blue sky, but Staci would have to crane her neck at least 45 degrees to see it. She appeared to be lost in thought, staring out the windows.

  The home office was decorated with all kinds of aviation memorabilia: models of commercial jets painted in the old TWA paint scheme occupied bookcase shelves; an airline captain’s hat sat next to a U.S. Air Force officer’s hat; and the control wheel from a 747 rested on the desk next to the PC where Staci sat. She shifted her gaze to the computer monitor, clicked on a different Web page, and twisted her troubled countenance into an angry scowl. Tall, slender, and very capable, Staci was the kind of person who usually wore a smile, not a frown; the sour look on her high-cheekboned, elegant face was like a clanging alarm, and her mood was not due to the dirty air tainting the skyline.

  “From the look on your face, this is not good,” said Staci’s mother, Gina, weakly. “I don’t understand what’s going on.”

  Staci clicked on yet another Web page, then locked her gaze on her mother. “It’s called identity theft, Mom. Some thief has hacked your life; the bank accounts are drained, your credit cards are maxed, new credit lines have been opened … I mean, wow, this is not good. I was just thinking about what I need to do first.”

  In frustration, Staci blew air from her mouth upward, causing some of the bangs of her shoulder-length brown hair highlighted with blond to flutter.

  “New credit lines? Oh, my lord…” Gina Bennings put a hand on her chest and swayed slightly.

  “Mom, sit down,” said Staci, springing to her feet and crossing quickly to Gina. She eased her into a chair. “It’s a mess right now, but I can take care of it. Don’t worry, the banks, the credit card companies will make good on the money. I promise.”

  Gina Bennings had been an Italian fashion model thirty-eight years ago when she married her late husband, Tommy, an American citizen and commercial airline pilot. She gave up her catwalk career in Milan to be a wife and mother, giving birth to and raising three children in Southern California. But when her husband and youngest son died in a plane crash four years ago, she snapped. She had a nervous breakdown from which she never fully recovered. She also physically let herself go to seed, and she looked older than her age of sixty. Gina couldn’t even take good care of herself anymore, so Staci had been living with her and attending to her needs while at the same time ste
pping in to help run the family aviation business.

  “We should call Kit.”

  “He’s overseas, Mom. I’ll tell him the next time he calls.”

  “Where is he stationed now?”

  “I’ve told you a hundred times: he’s doing one of those things he can’t talk about.”

  “Kit can help. We need a man in the house. Why doesn’t he move home, anyway?”

  “Don’t worry, I can take care of this,” said Staci, running her hand through her mom’s unkempt gray hair and then giving her a gentle kiss on top of the head.

  “Staci, someone has stolen all of our money. Please call Kit.”

  Staci checked her chronograph: 8:00 A.M. Pacific Time meant it was 7:00 P.M. in Moscow. The timing was probably okay. Kit would be calling in a few hours, anyway, as he did every day without fail since the plane crash that left him as the sole “man of the house.” She knew she was only to call him if there was an emergency, using the encrypted satellite phone, or sat phone, he had given her. As she thought about it, she figured this qualified, even if her brother was involved in some kind of black ops. Having spent several years in the army herself, including a stint in Iraq, she knew better than to ever ask her brother what he really did.

  Staci could take care of the damage control well enough with all of the financial institutions; it would be a time-consuming mess, but she’d do it and do it well. She took no offense at her mom’s insistence on notifying her big brother. A day never went by that Gina didn’t ask Kit to please move back home and live with her and Staci. An extremely close-knit family had been torn apart the day her dad and younger brother died in that crash. Selfishly, a part of Staci would like Kit to come home, too, and help ease the burden of being Gina’s sole caregiver.

  Yes, the view from the window was murky; sometimes you needed help to remember to look up and find the blue sky.