by JT Brannan
‘I’m not sure,’ said Barrington uneasily as she looked through her binoculars, hoping they’d stopped far enough away to not be seen. ‘But the colonel’s being escorted inside.’
As they watched the disappearing figure of Dementyev and his bodyguard as they stepped over the weeds and the broken rubble, Barrington wondered what was happening with Cole. She’d tried calling him, but there’d been no answer. But, she figured, with him hanging on like a maniac to the bottom of a car doing fifty miles an hour down a snow-encrusted highway, that was probably no surprise. She just hoped that he was going to be okay.
‘It looks like some sort of leisure park that was shelled by the Nazis in World War Two,’ Hart insisted. ‘What the hell could be inside a place like that?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Barrington replied. ‘But I guess we’re going to have to go and find out.’
Hart shuddered. ‘Shit, Julie, I’m not sure I want to go in there.’
Barrington laughed. ‘You scared?’ she teased.
‘Maybe,’ Hart said with a shrug. ‘Ain’t no harm in being scared once in a while.’
‘I guess not,’ Barrington agreed, not sure if she wanted to go inside either. She picked up her phone, speed-dialed a number. ‘Daw,’ she said, ‘where are you?’
‘We’ve got problems,’ came the reply, ‘a couple of SVR cars are on our tail.’
Shit. That was all they needed.
‘Okay,’ Barrington said, ‘do what you can to lose them. Whatever you need to do, do it. Then ditch the van, and get yourselves over to the Aminyevskoye highway as fast as you can. I think we’re going to need your help.’
12
‘Now! Now! Now!’ shouted Chaiprasit as Walgren yanked the wheel suddenly to the left, slamming hard into the wing of one of the police cruisers that had driven up alongside them.
At her command, Devlin kicked open the rear double-doors of the van from his seated position on the cargo-bay floor, and started firing.
Chaiprasit watched in her wing mirror as the tires of the SVR cars behind them were blown out, the windshields scarred from his accurate shots.
The mayhem that resulted was immediate, and devastating. The driver of the first car – with no tires, and no visibility from his windshield, on a highway already made dangerous from the winter snows – span wildly into the crash barrier at the side of the highway; and as that vehicle swept through its first arc, its back-end slammed into the second car, causing that vehicle to climb at high speed over the trunk of the first and flip end-over-end down the road.
One of the police cruisers was down, but there were still two more following – and probably more up ahead – and Chaiprasit knew they weren’t out of danger yet.
‘Good shooting!’ she yelled back to Devlin. ‘Now close those doors and grab hold of something!’
Devlin did as he was told, just as they passed another on-ramp, more cop cars streaming out after them; and that was when Walgren pulled up savagely on the van’s handbrake, balancing the clutch as he whipped the steering wheel around hard.
Chaiprasit heard Devlin go tumbling across the cargo area, cursing like a sailor, even as her own head bounced off the side window and caused her to issue a few choice expletives herself.
And then Walgren – his van now facing the opposite way after the slick handbrake turn – let out the clutch and floored the accelerator, tearing away up the on-ramp the wrong way, tires struggling to gain traction on the icy road.
The drivers of the oncoming police cruisers yanked their steering wheels this way and that as the news van headed toward them at high-speed, unwilling to play Walgren at his game of chicken; a path opened up, and the van raced up the ramp, onto the minor road.
Walgren kept the pedal to the metal as he crashed through a barrier onto the far side of the secondary road, finally meeting traffic going the same way once more. As Chaiprasit and Devlin held on for dear life, he wove in and out of traffic before taking a sharp right onto a snow-covered residential lane.
Despite the conditions, he kept racing, changing streets again and again, until he knew they couldn’t be followed – unless they put up a chopper, which was unlikely given the snow and wind.
‘There,’ Chaiprasit said, but Walgren had already seen it, turning the wheel to direct the van into the covered parking lot on the other side of the street. ‘Mike,’ she called back to Devlin, ‘get ready to move. It’s time to steal another car.’
‘Damn,’ Devlin said with a smile, ‘and I thought I’d left all that shit behind me when I joined the marines.’
They could all break into and hotwire cars, but Devlin was their star car thief, a remnant of his less-than-honest days before a judge had given him the choice of going to jail or joining the military.
‘Ask not what your country can do for you . . .’ Walgren joked as he brought the van to a standstill. ‘Now get out and go find us a car.’
‘Yes sir,’ Devlin answered. ‘Just hold this for me though, will you?’ he said, passing Walgren the sniper rifle. ‘And don’t hurt yourself with it, you hear?’
‘Screw you,’ Walgren said with a smile of his own, but it was too late – Devlin was already gone.
Chaiprasit and Walgren were barely out of the van when they heard an engine, turned and saw a dark blue sedan approaching, the driver’s side window dropping as it stopped next to them.
‘Well, what are you waiting for?’ Devlin asked with a grin from the driver’s seat. ‘Get in.’
13
‘Akvadroma?’ Cole asked over the radio from the back of the CIA vehicle as it sped him from central Athens to the safe house in the Kallithea neighborhood, just outside the city.
He’d not been picked up directly from the airport itself, as he’d wanted to perform some counter-surveillance runs before meeting anyone. He’d also wanted to acclimatize a little. It was over fifty degrees in the pleasant afternoon sun, and – after nearly freezing to death in Moscow, where the mercury hadn’t risen above twenty since he’d been there – it had been like a salve to his exhausted and half-broken body.
‘Yeah,’ came the reply from Barrington, ‘it’s an abandoned waterpark just a few klicks from Yasenevo. Dementyev’s in there now.’
‘Who’s with you?’
‘The whole team, except for Kurt,’ Barrington informed him, ‘he’s looking after the girl, monitoring things from the safe house.’
‘CIA’s Moscow station should be getting in touch with him soon,’ Cole said, ‘to arrange extraction for Galushka.’ It had been a request from dos Santos to James Dorrell, Director of Central Intelligence; Cole wanted her out of the city as quickly as possible, not only for her own safety, but also so that she could be questioned by the experts back in DC.
Dorrell – again at the friendly insistence of Catalina dos Santos – had also agreed to let Cole have access to the agency’s facilities and manpower in Athens. A pair of agents had been able to pick him up, but it was clear that, given the current volatility in the city, the Athens station was extremely busy, and manpower was at a premium. He’d seen evidence of the anger of Athenian citizens as he’d carried out his counter-surveillance runs, observed the massed protestors on street after street, the growing numbers of homeless people begging nearby, the aggressive attitude of the police and military, who were struggling to keep things contained. In the short time Cole had been there, he’d already seen flares set off by protestors, police firing rubber bullets and using hoses on the crowd before they could launch their Molotov cocktails.
It was a chaotic nightmare, and Cole had been pleased when the men had come for him in their car.
There was a meeting tomorrow between Boris Manturov and Alexis Thrakos to discuss Russian ‘assistance’ in the fight against these violent activists, and Cole knew that this might well be a possible flashpoint. The scene at the Maximos Mansion, the residence and office of the Greek prime minister in downtown Athens near Syntagma Square, would surely be a target of protests. Was the plan for
Irina to kill some of these protestors, to turn a protest into a riot?
It was possible, he knew, and he would encourage David Keegan, the Head of Athens Station, to use what influence he had with the Greek protective services to ramp up their security for the event.
‘What’s happening there?’ he asked, getting back to the situation at Akvadroma.
‘We’ve set up surveillance positions, Kurt brought us out some equipment – infrared, thermal, that sort of thing, and Mike and Daw are getting ready to go in for a closer look.’
‘Any idea what the place is?’ Cole pressed. ‘What Dementyev’s doing there?’
‘Not yet,’ Barrington said.
‘Okay, report back to me when Mike and Daw have something more. Keep alert for Dementyev leaving, and be prepared to intercept him and take him to the safe house. If there’s just one car, and one bodyguard, it should be doable.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Barrington confirmed, and Cole severed the connection.
Cole was glad that his team had got away from Yasenevo safely, but wondered about the significance of Akvadroma.
But he trusted his team, and believed that they would soon find out.
14
Clark Mason’s feelings were mixed about his upcoming meetings. On the one hand, he was excited at the prospect of a quick resolution, of the security council passing the US-led motion to invade Iran. On the flip side, that quick resolution was going to be the result of other meetings he was being forced to have prior to that.
The council consisted of fifteen member states – five permanent and ten non-permanent, rotating on a two-year term. The US, UK, France, Russia and China – the victorious nations of World War II – made up the permanent body. The ten other nations represented set geographical regions – African states were currently represented by Ghana, South Africa and Kenya; Asia-Pacific by Vietnam and the Philippines; Latin America and Caribbean by Brazil and Nicaragua; Western Europe and Other by Australia and Norway; and Eastern Europe by Romania. For a resolution to pass, it needed nine out of the fifteen states in favor, with any of the permanent members having the power of veto – meaning that even if the vote was otherwise unanimous, if Russia or China weren’t happy, they could scupper the whole thing.
He could rely on Britain and France for their votes, of course; but for China and Russia, he would have to do a little haggling.
Out of the non-permanent members, six had lost their leaders in the terrorist attacks, and would lend their support – South Africa, Ghana, Brazil, Australia, Norway and Romania. Mason could exert influence over the Philippines – with their national defense so dependent upon the US, President Fernandez would be insane to go against American will here. Mason could also try the same tactics with Vietnam, and probably would. James Langdon, the new British PM, claimed he could help persuade Kenya, which meant the only wild card was Nicaragua. But still, they would have the nine members they needed; and if Mason did a deal with China, then Chang Wubei had promised to help convince that Central American country too.
The dream, of course, would be for complete unanimity, which would legitimize Mason’s war completely, at a stroke removing the bad feelings that had accompanied everyone involved with America’s previous invasion of Iraq.
He’d spent the previous evening at the Lotte New York Palace Hotel, where he’d managed to entertain a young cocktail waitress from the hotel’s own lounge bar. She’d had to be smuggled upstairs to him by his Secret Service detail, but he was sure they didn’t mind; they probably had protocols for that kind of shit stemming back to JFK and maybe beyond. The way he saw it, he’d needed the company to blow off a little steam. It helped him work better, and so was for the good of the country, so how could anyone argue against that? His wife probably wouldn’t be too happy if she found out, but she would put up with it; after all, she was used to it by now. They had once been very much in love, but it was now nothing more than a marriage of convenience for both of them; he needed the familial stability for his public image, and she needed him for his ability to contribute to her ever-expanding list of charities and foundations.
But a part of him did miss her; when the ‘Beast’, his heavily-armored presidential limousine, had driven him through the brightly-lit New York streets, Christmas trees displayed in every store window, colorful decorations hanging from every apartment and office block, he had felt that she should have been there with him. He remembered shopping trips they’d taken in their younger days together, always preferring the dazzle of Christmas in New York to DC. They’d blasted through the biggest stores, eaten in the best restaurants, gone to see the most raved-about shows, and had even ice skated through Central Park.
Five minutes after the nineteen-year-old blond waitress had come into his room, however, all thoughts of his past were gone, and he had only concerned himself with the glorious present.
He shook the images of the girl out of his head and began to concentrate. There was, after all, one hell of a lot to achieve today.
It was the early morning of December twenty-second, and Mason wanted approval for his plans today, so he could get the ball rolling immediately. If successful, his advisors recommended letting the coalition forces have Christmas before moving in, but Mason wasn’t so sure; if he got approval, he was of the opinion to strike while the iron was hot. So what, if letting the grunts have Christmas would improve morale? They were all volunteers, weren’t they? Nobody had forced them to sign up.
Still, first things first, he thought; there was a lot to do before it even got to that stage.
He was currently seated in the consultation room, located next door to the official Security Council Chambers at UN headquarters, waiting for the arrival of Chang Wubei; Mikhail Emelienenko was still en route from Moscow, but would meet with him later that morning. The full council wasn’t scheduled to meet until after lunch, so there was still time.
He wondered about Emelienenko’s absence at yesterday’s general assembly. Was he avoiding Mason, ensuring that their private meeting would be a short one, to force his hand?
Maybe, Mason thought, maybe . . .
And yet there was very little, truth be told, that Mason wouldn’t give the Russian president for his support.
But first he was to meet President Chang, and the US administration’s choice of hotel the previous night was ironic, he considered, given this first guest.
For many years, the Waldorf Astoria had been the hotel of choice for US presidents, but that had changed under the Obama administration. Reasons had not been officially given, but it was widely assumed to be due to the fact that the Waldorf had been taken over by a Chinese company, and there were fears of cyber espionage.
What previous governments would make of his upcoming meeting with Chang Wubei, he had no idea; some would find the deal-making abhorrent, while others would no doubt understand – and even applaud – Mason’s pragmatic approach to the situation.
But the truth was that he was far more nervous about meeting the Russian president than his Chinese counterpart; after all, Wubei’s capital city hadn’t recently been the scene of a citywide shootout and manhunt involving potential foreign agents.
Emelienenko’s had, and Mason was sure that he was going to pay for it.
It was that damned Force One again, he knew. The clever bastards had conned him with the rescue operation; Mark Cole had flown to Moscow before Mason had been made president and been fully read-in on the unit. As such, he’d had to retrospectively approve the mission, as seeing as it was already ongoing. But he’d had no idea it would turn into a shooting match of these proportions. And just when he was about to enter into these most delicate of negotiations with Russia’s president!
Dos Santos had explained Vinson’s claim that Russia were somehow involved in the Iranian affair, but Mason didn’t really see it. After all, where was the evidence?
And, he had to admit, so what if Vinson was right? What if Russian intelligence had helped the Iranian government to orchestrate
the attacks? Was Mason going to recommend an invasion of Russia? That would be an impossibility, a move that would surely lead to nuclear war.
What Vinson and Force One were doing, in Mason’s eyes, was sabotaging everything. If their actions dissuaded Emelienenko from offering his support, he would make sure that each and every member of the covert unit spent their lives in a jail cell.
In fact, he decided, when this whole thing was over – and he was victorious, in an unassailable position in the eyes of the American public, of the world, and it no longer mattered what sordid video recordings were dragged out to soil his name – he would go through with his age-old desire to close down the whole Forest Hills operation. Hell, when Bruce Vinson was arrested and sent to jail, Mason thought he might even take over ownership of the Paradigm Group himself; from what he’d heard, it was quite the little earner.
But, he decided as the double doors of the consultation room opened and Chang Wubei strode through with a wide smile, he could deal with Force One later.
For now, there was business to be done.
15
‘Holy shit, this place gives me the creeps,’ Chaiprasit whispered to Devlin as she observed the twisted metal and concrete construction through her night-vision goggles.
‘Yeah,’ Devlin agreed, ‘me too. Come on, let’s move in a little closer.’
It was after five in the afternoon, and already darkness had settled over the city, the only light in this strange complex coming from reflections on the snow that had fallen between the gaps and holes.
They’d moved in at dusk, keeping to the shadows, careful to avoid being seen. Their colleagues had set up over-watch positions and had rifles covering them, but Chaiprasit knew that the further they moved into the complex, the less protection they would have.
They’d slipped in through a badly-kept chain-link fence under the cover of darkness, and had carefully walked around the perimeter of the structure, using thermal and infrared detectors to try and gauge where Dementyev and his bodyguard had gone. The imagers had picked up heat signatures from a couple of armed security guards, but that was it; and so Chaiprasit and Devlin had found a place to lie low, and just spent an hour observing.