by JT Brannan
‘I know, my friend,’ the president said, ‘and rest assured, I share your concerns. It has already been decided; full instigation of Project Europe will commence as soon as coalition forces have moved in.’
‘That is good,’ Dementyev said, his body relaxing back onto his bed, his eyes closing, ‘that . . . is . . . good . . .’
And then he was asleep, and Emelienenko looked at his friend and comrade, upset to see him this way.
But he would be as good as his word; he would help pass the UN resolution, and make sure that forces were committed immediately to the Middle East.
And then . . . And then . . .
He disconnected the call, smiling at what lay ahead.
Despite the drain on the manpower of Athens station, because the importance of the mission had been stressed by dos Santos, and therefore by Dorrell, Cole was promised all the help he would need. As such, he had already organized surveillance operations throughout Athens, utilizing agency resources. They were scouting possible targets for the Russian assassin, tracking known Russian agents already operating in Athens, increasing their surveillance of Moscow’s own SVR station here.
He called Forest Hills again, for an update on Hejms. He was still critical, but that meant he was still alive. The team, along with their CIA colleagues, were still looking for a way to get out of Moscow.
‘Any luck with the identity of that Russian agent yet?’ he asked his chief-of-staff, moving on to a different subject.
‘Not yet, Mark,’ Vinson said, ‘Michiko is still working on it. She was observed making contact with two men at Riga International, who have subsequently been identified as officers with the Militārās Izlūkošanas un Drošības Dienests, the Latvian Defense Intelligence and Security Service.’
‘What?’ Cole asked in surprise. ‘Do we know why?’
‘We don’t,’ Vinson said, ‘but our contacts with the MIDD are making enquiries. Anyway, she got on her flight to Vienna, landed there about three hours ago.’
‘And what’s she doing there?’ Cole asked. ‘Is she waiting at the airport?’
‘Yes,’ Vinson confirmed, ‘it doesn’t look like she’s going anywhere, so you can probably still expect her in Athens in the morning, but she did meet another two people.’
‘Go on,’ Cole urged.
‘Members of the Bundesnachrichtendienst, Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service.’
‘They went to meet her in Austria?’ Cole asked, his mind working overtime. ‘Why is she meeting with Latvian and German foreign intelligence?’
‘We don’t know,’ Vinson said, ‘but I can tell you that the people she was meeting – in both countries – were not on duty, and filed no reports about the meetings.’
‘There’s something bad about this whole thing,’ Cole said, knowing that Irina was not just an assassin, but a highly capable deep-cover agent. But what did it all mean?
‘Keep tabs on those other agents, will you?’ Cole asked.
‘We’re already on it,’ Vinson said, ‘although we’re doing it quietly, we don’t want to give ourselves away. Act too early, and we might never find out what’s going on.’
‘Good,’ Cole replied, his tired mind still struggling with the new information.
‘You know, it looks like I owe you an apology,’ Vinson said. ‘I thought this woman was getting into your head, I was afraid that you weren’t keeping things in perspective.’
‘What do you mean?’ Cole asked, perhaps too sharply.
‘I mean, I was worried that you were letting your personal feelings get in the way.’
Cole’s instinct was to shout, to argue, but he stopped himself; he was angry only because his friend might be right. Was he investing too much in this?
But from what Vinson had told him, it looked as if this woman might be an important part of what was going on – and was now perhaps even their only lead.
‘What time is it there?’ Cole asked, changing the subject again. He checked his watch – it was nearly ten at night in Athens, but he was too tired to work out the difference. His body ached like a sonofabitch from that ride to the airport, and he still hadn’t recovered properly. It was a wonder he was still functioning at all, he told himself.
‘Four p.m., give or take,’ Vinson said.
‘Nearly time for the vote.’
‘Yes,’ Vinson agreed, ‘nearly time for the vote. I wonder if our wonderful president has done enough deals and paid off enough people for the resolution to pass without a veto?’’
‘Well,’ Cole said as he turned on a nearby TV and switched it to the news, ‘I guess we’ll soon find out.’
They said their farewells, and Cole turned to the television to watch the build-up to the UN vote on the resolution that would recommend military action against Iran.
It would be an historical day, he thought, one way or another.
The arguments of the official Security Council meeting ranged far and wide as each country put their point forward, but Cole knew that the positions of each of the fifteen leaders had already been established in the multitude of preliminary meetings and back-room deals that had been going on – in some cases for several days – behind closed doors, both in the consultation room next door, and beyond.
But – because the proceedings from the Council chamber were televised worldwide – each and every person around the table had to make sure that they looked good at home, wanted to put on a show for their own public.
Clark Mason once again made an impassioned plea for justice, supported by the members of the council who had themselves lost people in the terrorist attacks; on the other side of the fence, China and Russia made their typical comments about US hegemony and their unwillingness to allow the world’s only superpower to ride roughshod over sovereign nations. Arguments raged between supporters of both sides, but it was not as acrimonious as many of these meetings could sometimes be, Cole noted; there was minimal finger-pointing and table-banging, and nobody got up from the table and walked out in protest, as often happened when tensions and emotions were high.
The delegates met, had a break, met again, and broke again; there were reports of an impasse being reached, some of the leaders retiring to the privacy of the consultation room.
But finally, when the New York night was drawing in and the early morning hours of dawn beckoned in Athens, it looked as if a consensus had been reached at last.
Pham Minh Ngo, President of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and current holder of the Security Council’s rotating presidency, took to the stage shortly before midnight, after twelve hours of negotiations, a thin smile underneath tired eyes.
‘We have reached consensus,’ he announced to the gathered leaders, the news media, and the world at large.
He took a deep breath, steadied himself, and started to read from the prepared notes in front of him.
‘It has been agreed to pass Resolution 2405 (2020), Military Action in Iran, in its entirety,’ he said gravely. ‘In full, the Resolution is as follows . . .’
But Cole just turned the television off, resting his head back on the sofa.
That, he thought, was that.
The entire world was suddenly one step closer to war.
PART THREE
1
‘He’s here,’ Cole received the confirmation as soon as Manturov touched down on the runway, from CIA assets watching the airport.
That meant that Cole’s two key players were now here in Athens – Boris Manturov and Irina Makarova.
Irina Makarova . . .
He now knew the Russian assassin’s full name, after Michiko had finally come through for him with the information earlier that morning, just an hour before the woman had arrived in Athens herself.
There wasn’t a great deal of information, but there was an Irina Makarova – apparently born on 4th September, 1983 in Perm, Russia – registered with the Faculty of Foreign Languages at Moscow State University in the fall of 2001. By spring 2002, however, her name h
ad gone from university records, and Michiko had found it again in a trawl of data from SVR personnel records, dated from about the time of the girl’s withdrawal from university. There was no official file, only a vague reference to her application in documents preserved in the SVR archive. The name – and indeed, any evidence of Irina Makarova’s very existence – was subsequently purged from the files, and no more trace of her identity could be found. It didn’t seem like a lot to go on, but – while her photograph had been removed from her university documentation – Michiko was able to trace the name back to a high school in Nizhny Novgorod. And although, once again, Makarova’s file had been removed from the school archives, Michiko had trawled the social networking sites of her potential classmates, and found several old photographs featuring a girl whose facial characteristics matched the data points of the Russian assassin.
It all followed the pattern of someone recruited into the ‘illegals program’ of Directorate S, and Cole was convinced that his daughter had found the right woman.
But a name was only one thing – he was no closer to understanding her, or knowing what she was up to here in Athens.
Makarova had landed just before three in the morning, and an observation team was immediately assigned to her. Cole wanted to be there himself, but recognized that it might not be a good idea; after all, she knew him, and might be able to pick him out of a crowd.
Hopefully, the CIA team would do a better job.
The bright sunshine was a pleasant change of climate for Boris Manturov, who was glad to be out of Moscow.
It wasn’t just the weather – after all, he’d spent his entire life in Russia, and was more than used to the cold, the ice, and the snow – but it was the situation there.
The mess.
First, weeks ago, there’d been the information he’d stumbled onto about Dementyev and his pet project, then his secretary had been arrested for treason, one of his bodyguards as a foreign spy; then there had been that man on Tverskaya, near the Kremlin, at the Bolshoi – Galushka had been taken and the man had still not been found; and then an attack on SVR headquarters, and then on Akvadroma, and the rescue of the foreign spy. So much death, so much destruction, and Project Europe had still not even properly got under way yet.
He dreaded what was to come, but Emelienenko had been right, he was a part of this now, and there was no backing out. He didn’t agree with his president’s plans, but what was he going to do? Stage a coup against him? What chance would he have of making that work? He had no worthwhile contacts in the military or intelligence services, was not entwined in the system as Emelienenko had been, before his rise to power. Who would follow him, if he instigated a coup? He laughed softly to himself at the idea as he stepped into the limousine that was waiting for him outside Athens International, bodyguards climbing in all around him.
It seemed that the situation here was highly volatile, just as his briefings – and media reports – had led him to expect. He had a police escort surrounding his limousine, and he was glad of it; already, protestors were gathered around the vehicle, shouting and jeering, waving their banners and flags. Tomatoes and eggs hit the car windows as the convoy pulled away, and then something harder – a stone? – and the vehicles accelerated away hard, leaving the angry crowds behind.
Most of the signs had been in Greek, which Manturov couldn’t read, but some had been in English, and one had even been in Russian. Go home, bastard Russians, it had read.
And what, Manturov asked himself, were they angry with him about? Their situation was purely the result of generations of government mismanagement, gross overspending leading to massive debts that they couldn’t even pay the interest on. The Russian government had been good enough to help them with their payments, and this is how the people showed their thanks?
But, he realized, the original protests had been directed against the Greek government, for getting them into this situation in the first place – unemployment was at a record high, the public sector was a mess, austerity measures were hurting everyone and a lot of people weren’t even getting paid for the work they did do. It was no wonder they were angry.
And now that Russia had offered to help keep order, by placing military units here to support the weakened Greek forces, the people saw them as an invading army, as Mafia-style strike-breakers on a national scale. They thought the Russians just wanted to protect their investment, by protecting the government they had poured money into, but which the general public hated with a passion.
Of course, they didn’t know the real reasons for Russia’s desire to place troops here, didn’t even know about her plans to station her Mediterranean fleet here; if they did, Manturov was sure that more would be thrown at his car than tomatoes, eggs and the occasional stone.
Under the old prime minister – poor though he had been at running a successful economy – this meeting with Manturov would not even have been countenanced. The man had been happy to take Russian money, but that was the extent of the relationship. Manturov knew that the meeting today was going to be nothing more than ceremonial; there was precious little bargaining to be done. After all, Emelienenko had promised Alexis Thrakos the Greek leadership, and the Russian president had delivered.
Manturov didn’t agree with Dementyev’s project, thought that it would all end badly for the Russian Federation; but he did see the genius behind it. It had been Dementyev himself who had developed the idea of a double terrorist hit on the West – first the attack on the school and then on the stadium; it had been Dementyev who had then sold it to his old friend, Mohammed Younesi of Iran’s MOIS, had even made the man think it was his own idea. All so that Iran would be blamed; all so that Iran would be invaded by a multinational coalition, a coalition that the previous evening had massively stepped up its aerial bombing campaign in response to the Security Council resolution, in preparation for the land invasion that would be starting any moment now; all so that . . .
It was distasteful, but the genius was undoubtedly there.
By subtly insisting that the previous Greek prime minister attend the memorial in London, Emelienenko had also ensured that Greece received a much more pro-Russian leader in his place, as he already had his man, Alexis Thrakos, waiting in the shadows.
Thrakos owed his position to Russia and now – as Manturov’s convoy whisked him through Athens to the grand Maximos Mansion where his meeting was to take place – it was time for Russia to collect.
2
‘Pete,’ Clark Mason said with a wolfish smile, ‘what’s our current status?’
It was eight a.m. and the first meeting of the day was under way at the White House, a full session of the National Security Council. The United States was officially on a war footing, and information had to be shared, plans implemented.
Pete Olsen stood, and everyone’s attention was immediately drawn to his huge bulk, ramrod posture and the eyes of a man who had seen it all and lived to tell the tale. His entire manner demanded respect, and the NSC members gave it to him without question.
‘Mr. President,’ he said with a nod of his head, ‘ladies and gentlemen. Let me introduce you to Operation DESERT SWORD. This is a combined-arms operation across a coalition of aligned nations – with leadership assumed by US forces – to carry out point one of United Nations Resolution 2405 (2020) – namely, to assist in regime change by rendering the Islamic Republic of Iran unable to defend itself militarily.
‘To date, the nations with whom we are cooperating on this are Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Poland, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, with indirect support from the Gulf States of Oman, Qatar, Kuwait and the UAE, and still more asking to join. We also have access to bases in Turkey, Iraq, Afghanistan and Turkmenistan from which to launch our missions. As you can well imagine, from a logistical perspective, this is quite hard to manage, which is why we have taken the lead and expect other countries to toe the line, so to speak. It’s all about command and control, and if there are too
many cooks, the broth will be well and truly spoiled. So America is the cook, and we just have a lot of people helping us in the kitchen.
‘At this very moment,’ he continued, directing the audience’s attention to the large screen directly behind him, which suddenly flashed on, to show a map of Iran and the surrounding areas, ‘we have coalition aircraft targeting a mix of military and industrial infrastructure.’
He took out a laser pointer and indicated specific targets on the map, showing which units were attacking where.
‘We also have artillery units in position now, taking out radar and other surveillance targets and generally softening up Iranian military units so that resistance will be significantly weakened before we put actual boots on the ground.’
Again, he pointed out where these attacks were taking place and which nations were being used to carry them out.
‘The Fifth Fleet has a Carrier Strike Group and an Expeditionary Strike Group in the Arabian Sea near the mouth of the Gulf, with the Harry S. Truman CSG supporting the Sixth Fleet over on the Mediterranean side. We’ve still got problems from losing the Ford a few months back,’ he commented, referring to the aircraft carrier that was nearly destroyed by a missile deployed by the Chinese under General Wu, ‘and so we’re a bit light on back-up moving in from the Pacific, but we’ve got other units steaming across from the Atlantic theater to fill in.’
The council members watched as the icons lit up on the screen, showing the dispositions of the naval fleets.
‘We’re being assisted by the Royal Navy, of course, and the French have also sent some ships.’ Again, Olsen pointed out these additions on the map.
‘And now we get to the meat and potatoes,’ Olsen said, as he clicked a button and the rest of the icons fell away, digitized graphics of military formations appearing on the Iranian borders in their place. ‘Ground invasion.’
As her friend went on to describe the latest ground strategy, Catalina dos Santos looked across the room at Clark Mason, wondering what to make of the man. He was watching Olsen with rapt attention, obviously excited by the prospect of giving the Iranians what they deserved. It was what he had promised the American people, and he was finally about to deliver, with a get-out-of-jail-free card gifted to him by the UN.