Overture to Disaster (Post Cold War Political Thriller Trilogy Book 3)

by Chester D. Campbell

  The image of a hapless homicide victim lying in the hallway of an apartment building in Minsk immediately flashed across Yuri's mind. An accident? He hadn't bought it then, and he didn't buy it now.

  What were the odds of that occurring from a random shell detonating as the result of a fire and explosion? Infinitesimal, he thought. But why had the military not questioned it and dug into the matter further?

  As he leafed through the file, the answer became apparent. There were no conclusions anywhere. The investigation had been shunted aside in the midst of the confusion that had engulfed the military following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The report was never completed, apparently never reviewed by any central investigating authority. Likely part of the problem had been a reluctance to delve further into an incident involving the release of chemical agents, with the risk of undesirable publicity at a critical time. The world was already focused on the monstrous nuclear arsenal that bedeviled the commonwealth governments. The last thing they wanted was something else to muddy the international waters.

  Yuri looked for the section dealing with C/B weapons. It was the only part still bearing a "restricted access" notation. He wondered if someone had slipped up and left it in. At any rate, it revealed that there had been four 82mm chemical mortar shells stored in the building. They were loaded with a nerve agent, an organophosphorous compound that was dispersed as a deadly mist on detonation of the rounds. Luckily only one soldier had been a victim of the gas, his body found not far from the building, a look of convulsive terror on his face. Dried vomit was caked on the front of his uniform.

  Yuri noted speculation as to why the chemical troops had found only limited evidence of the release of the nerve agent. Considering the strength and direction of the wind present at the time, the concentration of four exploding shells should have sent a cloud of deadly mist toward the camp where the rest of the battalion was housed. But, again, no conclusions had been drawn.

  Also stored in the destroyed building were several canisters of an experimental neurotoxin, a small-molecular-weight peptide that would affect the brain in a way to produce fear and erratic physical and mental behavior. Again, little evidence of these toxins was found. There was speculation that they might have been consumed by the intense heat of the explosion and fire.

  "Find anything in there to satisfy your curiosity?" Colonel Oskin inquired as Yuri placed the file back on his desk.

  "Some hints. Some speculation. But they drew no conclusions. Just left everything hanging." The hints led to some crucial questions, but he did not think this was the time or the place to begin his search for answers.

  The colonel nodded and gave a shrug of futility. "Not the first problem the army ever left hanging. And not likely the last."

  Zurich , Switzerland

  16

  The sleek white executive jet settled smoothly onto the runway at Zurich's Kloten Airport and taxied to the ramp in front of a private hangar. The tail number identified it as American, but there was no display of the Stars and Stripes as found on many similar jets used frequently for overseas travel. The reason was simple. Its owner, the first passenger to descend to the tarmac, considered himself not a mere American but a citizen of the world. A tall, distinguished looking white-haired man, he moved with the easy grace of born wealth and the confident step of one to whom power came naturally. Bernard Whitehurst was heir to one of the nation's most prestigious family fortunes. He also headed one of the top international banks in New York and was chairman of the influential Foreign Affairs Roundtable.

  Following him down the steps were Laurence Coyne, president and full-time administrator of the Roundtable, and a muscular man named Adam Stern.

  Coyne, a short, stocky man who wore an intense look behind gold-rimmed glasses, had a permanently creased forehead that made him appear always on the verge of displeasure. It wasn't far from the truth. His position required him to deal with the inflated egos of some of the world's richest and most powerful men.

  "Where's the damned car?" he muttered, looking around the ramp in vain. "He was to meet us at planeside. Let me go see what the hell..."

  As Coyne scurried off toward the hangar, Whitehurst turned to the man whose peculiar talents he had called upon many times over the past few years. He chose to refer to Adam Stern by the term "facilitator," since his job was to smooth out the kinks and simplify accomplishment of the Roundtable's often quite complex tasks. But Whitehurst was aware that some of his colleagues had labeled Stern "the enforcer." It wasn't difficult to accept, considering those piercing blue eyes, a pair of impenetrable diamonds totally without warmth.

  "Do you want us to drop you off in Zurich, Adam?" Whitehurst inquired.

  "No, sir. That won't be necessary. You can drop me by the terminal and I'll take a train into town." Dressed casually in an open-collared tan shirt and brown corduroy jacket, he would melt quickly into the ranks of the industrious "Zurchers."

  Whitehurst was privy to all the details of Stern's background in the CIA, where he had been a covert operations specialist. In his mid-forties, Stern had dealt with a conglomeration of groups ranging from Contras to Afghans to Iraqis. It had required a great deal of reorientation to convince him that the old Soviet Union was not the implacable foe he had always believed. Like other savvy Roundtable leaders, Bernard Whitehurst had been doing business with the "Evil Empire" for years. The communist state had proved a profitable customer since the earliest days when American and British bankers had financed Lenin's Bolshevik Revolution. Whitehurst knew that every Soviet ruler from Stalin to Gorbachev was well aware that his supposed colossus could not survive without Western assistance, particularly in the realm of advanced technology, which could be either bought or stolen. But each of them had done an effective job of posturing, worthy of Hollywood, to scare the uninitiated into spending a few billions more here and there on defense, using money borrowed from the same bankers who were also lending to the other side.

  Whitehurst had personally lectured Stern on the Roundtable's politically correct view of the Cold War. The Soviet military was vastly overrated, as witness its inability to subdue a primitive guerrilla force in Afghanistan and the poor showing of its farmed-out equipment and tactics in the Persian Gulf War. There was never any credible threat of a Soviet military strike against the West, Whitehurst insisted. The top communists were not about to bite off the handouts that were feeding them. Gorbachev, good soldier that he was, had fought to the end to preserve the status quo. His big problem lay in his outmoded economy that was sinking of its own dead weight. He had just about worked out a method of holding the union together when that group of dull-witted underlings had staged their amateur coup. Gorbachev still would have succeeded but for the opportunist Yeltsin, who was not part of the leadership loop that had long worked with the Roundtable and its counterparts in Europe and Asia. An international petroleum and minerals cartel was set to provide a large infusion of cash in exchange for rights to Soviet oil and gold mining when Yeltsin abruptly forced Gorbachev out and dissolved the union.

  Over the years it had proved relatively simple to deal with a single governmental entity that exercised complete control over its people. That assured the ability of it's leadership to make whatever kind of deal they desired. Whatever kind of deal would be acceptable to the Roundtable's corporate socialists. Now they were forced to negotiate with fifteen different independent states. A real drag. That was one of the topics for discussion at the annual meeting of the shadowy international group called the Council of Lyon, named for the French town where it was organized years ago, but better known as simply "the Council." Made up of representatives of groups similar to the Roundtable, the Council would meet at a plush, secluded inn on the Vierwaldstattersee, also known as Lake Luzern, which was why Whitehurst and Coyne had flown to Zurich. They were members of the power group behind the Council, cryptically labeled "the Trustees," which would gather in secret following the main meeting for a report on the project in which Adam
Stern was involved.

  "Be sure to find out if the funds have all been transferred as instructed," Whitehurst said as he looked around to see where Coyne had gone.

  Stern gave a slight chuckle, exhibiting a one-sided grin that seemed to indicate any effort at humor would be only half-hearted. "If the money isn't there, I'm sure the General will bring it up before I have the chance."

  "You're probably right."

  "Want me to get you the details on this side operation they're planning?"

  Whitehurst saw Coyne come out of the hangar just as a shiny black Mercedes swung around the building and headed for the aircraft. He frowned. "I'd rather not know the details," he said. "Some fairly drastic measures will likely be required. The sort of thing our friends in the East do rather well. All I need to know is the date and the place, so I can make certain our people are somewhere else at the time."

  Fine for you, Stern thought. My responsibility is to be sure the whole scenario plays out successfully. I want to know every last detail of who will be doing what to whom. If any of the wheels develops a squeak, I intend to be there with an oil can.

  Adam Stern had always been a man with a mission. Over time, the outlines of the mission evolved substantially, but his dedication never lagged. It had all begun with a visit from a CIA recruiter during his senior year at Amherst. That was during the troublesome period just after the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact allies had put the "Prague Spring" in the deep freeze. An enthusiastic young Stern, ready to do battle with the forces of injustice, had promptly penned his name on the application to become a clandestine cold warrior.

  After a decade of shuffling cutouts, arranging dead drops and coping with agents of frequently questionable reliability in various bleak capitals of Eastern Europe, Stern graduated to the more politically sensitive area of covert operations. He proved himself adept at dealing with the principals in a variety of vexatious entanglements ranging from Nicaragua to Afghanistan to the Iran-Iraq muddle. It was during the latter operation, with one of the Trustees involved in a lucrative arms deal, that Adam Stern came to the attention of Bernard Whitehurst. For years the Council had quietly contracted with former FBI or CIA operatives to perform various services of an intelligence nature. Whitehurst saw in Stern a man uniquely qualified to serve as a clandestine liaison, negotiator, investigator and, when necessary, enforcer, or, as he preferred, "facilitator." Laurence Coyne had made the approach and Bernard Whitehurst had sealed the deal.

  Adam Stern caught a train at the rail station beneath the airport terminal building and was at Zurich's downtown Hauptbahnhof station ten minutes later. He took the stairway down to the underground shopping mall and headed for the exit to the Bahnhofstrasse, the city's main street. It was mid-afternoon. He made stops at two banks, where he was ushered into private offices for brief chats with discreet bankers who greeted him by name. Finding everything in order, he strolled back out to the Bahnhofstrasse and began to browse through its expensive shops. He had time to kill and the money to buy, should he take the notion. Stern knew he enjoyed the best of all worlds, a position of great importance to some of the planet's wealthiest and most influential men, a virtually limitless expense account, the opportunity to travel throughout the world and a sense of power akin to that of a Mafia don.

  Stern enjoyed Zurich. Though it was one of the world's top financial centers, a city of obvious affluence, the people were hard-working, down-to-earth types who shunned ostentation. When he stopped at a quaint little cafe for coffee and cake, two conservatively dressed men at the next table nodded politely and resumed their quiet chat over cups of tea. They could easily be presidents of billion-dollar banks who rode to work on the city's blue trams. By contrast, his employers traveled in long black limousines or shiny Rolls Royces and kept themselves mostly to plush private clubs.

  While crossing a picturesque medieval square not far from the Limmat, the river that bisected the city, Stern looked up at the massive clockface of the Peterskirche, a thirteenth-century church. It was 6:45. He headed across the Rathaus Bridge and turned toward the Niederdorf, the city's "red light" district.

  The bar was a dark, noisy den nestled among the area's strip joints and discos, a place where two casually dressed men could meet, have a drink and talk while attracting no more attention than a couple of spotted cows in an Alpine pasture.

  Stern arrived first and chose a corner table that offered the maximum in privacy. He ordered Jack Daniel and water. He was joined shortly by an older man with a pronounced paunch, something occasioned by the loss of a prized perk, an exercise room where he had previously kept fit and trim. Unfortunately, that was not the only loss he had suffered from the tumultuous aftermath to the ill-fated Moscow coup. With a brief handshake, he took his seat and cast a searching gaze about the smoke-shrouded room. Incorrectly interpreting the look, a waiter with a Hitler-style brush of a mustache hurried over to take his order. Vodka.

  "I checked the accounts," said General Valeri Zakharov. "Everything appears to be in order."

  Stern's grin was even more one-sided than usual. He had a perverse sense of humor, the kind that led to snickers during the most intense scenes of a thriller movie. "Have we ever short-changed you, General?" he asked.

  Stern felt sure Zakharov did not feel comfortable dealing with agents of capitalism, though the General undoubtedly acknowledged the necessity of their help. The plan would have been dead in the water without the Americans and their friends in the Council of Lyon.

  "We greatly appreciate what your people are doing for us," the General said. It was more in the nature of a confession than a heartfelt vote of thanks.

  "It isn't charity, you know. We expect it to pay dividends in the future."

  "Ah, yes, the good old American way."

  "Hey," Stern said, arching an eyebrow, "don't knock it if you haven't tried it."

  Others in Russia had tried it, no doubt, but certainly not Valeri Zakharov. Now in his early sixties, the General remained a true disciple of that discredited old communist icon, Vladimir Ilych Lenin. He had joined the secret police, then part of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, around the time of Stalin's death. Soon afterward, it became the Committee for State Security, the KGB. He took his two years of post-graduate training at the Higher Intelligence School near Moscow, then got his indoctrination into the decadence of the West while serving in a number of foreign posts, including the mother church of the capitalist religion, Washington, D.C. Thus well fortified with firsthand knowledge of the enemy, he had shifted over to the First Department of the Second Chief Directorate, charged with pursuing American diplomats in an effort to recruit them as Soviet agents and to neutralize any intelligence activities operated out of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.

  Zakharov was dedicated, skillful and ruthless. Ultimately he had wound up with a promotion to general and assignment as the number two man in the Second Chief Directorate, which had overall responsibility for controlling the Soviet people and foreigners inside the country. But just when he had managed to develop repression into a fine art, perestroika and glasnost had raised their ugly heads to make his job more complicated than that of a two-fingered surgeon. The final blow came with the failure of the coup, which he had ardently supported. It landed him on the street in that most un-Soviet of predicaments, unemployment. But he considered himself lucky that the reformers had decided against show-trials of high-ranking officers, fearing it might get out of hand and degenerate into a purge worthy of Stalin.

  It was one of the anomalies of the situation that his family was safe and doing well. Unfortunately, he did not get to see them often, and then only surreptitiously. His wife lived with their daughter in a large, restored czarist-era house. Their son-in-law had a lucrative business selling Western personal computers, but the General refused to think of the young man as a capitalist. He considered him a modern-day, legalized black marketeer. It was convoluted Marxist dialectic.

  "We're fully supportive of your goals," Stern said in a bus
inesslike tone. "Just make damned sure nothing even hints at a connection with the Roundtable or the Council. And, by the way, you haven't told us your plans for this side operation."

  "I haven't told my own civilian leaders," the General said with a shrug. "Some may be a bit squeamish. I suspect that could be a problem for you, too."

  Stern nodded. "Mr. Whitehurst certainly doesn't want to know. That's fine with me. But I'm talking about yours truly, General. I have a cast iron stomach. We're putting up the money and I've been elected to see that it gets spent where it will get the job done. That means I need the full details."

  Zakharov didn't like the idea of sharing such sensitive information with an outsider. But Stern was right, of course. He was the contact who had provided the letter of credit at Kennedy Airport for Major Romashchuk's venture to Peru. He was the one who had funneled millions into the two Swiss bank accounts. Those who paid the design costs could expect to read the blueprints, Zakharov acknowledged.

  "I suggest you meet Major Romashchuk down in Mexico in a week or so," the General said, twirling the empty glass between his fingers. "He'll be there making arrangements. By that time everything should be set."

  Stern frowned. "Let me know where and when." He signaled the waiter for two refills. "One other thing, General. If I'm going to be working with Romashchuk, I'd like to know a bit more about him."

  "Surely your computers can give you a detailed biography."

  "I don't care about his pedigree. I want to know if he's good at what he does. Anyway, the Roundtable doesn't have access to the CIA's files. I could ask the Director for it, of course, but I doubt it would be wise to call attention to Major Romashchuk at the present time."