by JT Brannan
The US strategy – perhaps the only plan that had a chance of working without the casualty rate getting out of hand – had required the cooperation of Turkmenistan, a nation that had previously remained neutral throughout many Middle Eastern conflicts. Now she was opening her doors for the coalition, and dos Santos couldn’t help but wonder why. It was clear that President Emelienenko had been influential in convincing President Hudaybergenov, and that was something that worried dos Santos a great deal. What had Mason promised the Russian president? He had been noticeably quiet when Ukraine had voted to cede some of its powers to Moscow in a very questionable plebiscite. Others had criticized the endeavor as undemocratic and a result of Russia’s hybrid-war model of cyber warfare and propaganda through media manipulation, but Clark Mason had not said a word in protest. Indeed, his comment that ‘this is a matter for the Ukrainian and Russian people, not for the United States’, was seen as a gross dereliction of responsibility in some circles; but with his subsequent victory at the security council, it was soon forgotten.
But dos Santos hadn’t forgotten, and was worried that Ukraine was only the tip of the iceberg. Clark Mason was a man that couldn’t be trusted; he should never have become president, she was sure of that much, as was everyone else at Force One.
Vinson had been particularly suspicious when he’d heard that Mason had been asking about the Moscow mission after the security council meeting had ended; the president had wanted a detailed report on what had happened, and where everyone was. They’d had to tell him, of course, although Vinson had later declared that – had he been there – he wouldn’t have provided the man with everything. But what was done was done, and Mason was now up-to-date on Force One operations. It was his right as president, commander-in-chief and member of the Force One leadership panel, after all, and – while she didn’t really like him knowing as much as he knew – the fact was that he had to know. That was how the entire system worked.
But, as she watched the eagerness in his eyes as the battle plans were explained in excruciating detail, she wondered whether Vinson might not have been right in his desire to conceal things from him.
There were so many things happening that dos Santos had a constant headache. There was the invasion of Iran, of course; but then there was this whole business with Ukraine which would, under any other circumstances, have been extremely newsworthy; a worrying increase in military cooperation between Russia and Belarus that was, likewise, also being overlooked; there was the CIA-led extraction of the Force One team from Moscow, including the near-fatally wounded Jake Navarone and Kurt Hejms; and there was also that Russian assassin in Athens, where Boris Manturov and the new Greek prime minister were meeting, and where Cole was lying in wait, trying to find out just what in the hell was going on.
It had been hoped that Navarone had some valuable information, perhaps even details on this mysterious Project Europe that kept being mentioned; but the latest reports indicated that he was in a near-vegetized condition, ruined both physically and mentally. When he did speak, it was in Russian, mumbling and confused.
Their only hope, the way dos Santos saw it, was for Cole to turn up some more information. But – she checked her watch – if it was nearly nine o’clock in the morning in DC, then it would be three in the afternoon in Athens, and there had still been no word from him.
And as she turned her attention back to the large screen behind Olsen, which displayed the plans of the upcoming onslaught in the Middle East, she prayed that Cole managed to find something quickly.
3
Cole had resisted the temptation to follow Irina Makarova himself, for the same reason that he had exercised extreme caution back at Sheremetyevo – if she saw him, she might well recognize him.
Instead, he was content to run things from the safe house. There were six agents watching Makarova, four split between two cars and the other pair on foot. Cole would have liked more manpower, but there were another couple of agents surveilling Boris Manturov and his protective detail and – given the widespread crowd violence threatening to overrun the city – resources just didn’t cover it.
There were two techies with him at the safe house helping to monitor the equipment, and Cole was happy to accept the offer of coffee when one of them made his way to the kitchen.
The agents were equipped with high quality radios and decent recording equipment and – between their verbal updates and the live footage transmitted to the monitors in the safe house’s living room – Cole had been given quite a good idea of her movements about Athens. The thing was, he was having a hard time putting together the pieces.
She had been followed to a café where she’d met with a man and a woman, the identities of whom the CIA – along with Michiko back in Forest Hills – were trying to discover. She had been handed an envelope, but it was not known what was inside.
She had then wandered the streets of Athens almost at random, before reaching Syntagma Square, the scene of some of the worst rioting of the past few weeks and the home of protestors for several years now. It faced the monumental façade of the Greek Parliament building, and ministers were constantly harangued as they went to and from work.
Cole wasn’t quite sure what the point of her presence there was but – from the way that she didn’t hide her face, or make any effort to avoid the news cameras or the photo journalists, or the widespread CCTV – Cole had to assume that the purpose was simply to be seen.
And why, he asked himself, would an assassin want to be seen?
Only, he decided in the end, if being seen was part of the plan, if her identity – or at least her assumed identity – was, at some stage, supposed to be discovered.
Her assumed identity was – as far as he was aware – still that of Kristīne Ozoliņš, citizen of Latvia. A woman who had met members of both Latvian and German intelligence en route here.
Cole thought back to those other meetings, thought again how strange it was that they had been so obvious, so out in the open; and once more, he got the impression that being seen with those people was an integral part of the plan.
Was it some sort of disinformation program, designed to plant false leads, throw the intelligence agencies off the scent of what was really going on?
Or was Makarova here to kill somebody, and the idea was to implicate Latvian and German intelligence somehow?
And if that was the case, then why?
He looked away from the monitors as the guy came back in the room with a tray of coffees. Cole took his and was about to thank the man when he stopped cold, the cup hovering in midair.
A noise . . .
What the hell . . .?
‘Get down!’ Cole yelled, dropping his coffee and knocking the tray flying as he tackled the man to the floor, just as the apartment door exploded inwards. Cole’s head shook with the impact, and it felt as if all the air in the room had been sucked away, drawing the breath from his body and leaving him momentarily stunned.
He could already hear the raucous noise of automatic gunfire raking the room, and the screams of the second techie as the rounds cut him down where he’d been sitting, shocked, by the bank of monitors near the shuttered window.
‘Stay down,’ he whispered to the man he’d knocked to the floor, his own equilibrium recovering quickly as he jumped up and – seeing the shadowy images of gunmen emerging through the smoke and debris from the doorway – raced across the room, bullets chasing him all the way.
He got to the kitchen, looking for a way out. There were windows, but the attackers would be here before he had the chance to open them and climb out; besides which, there was an agent still alive in the living room, and he had to do what he could to get him out of there.
There was the sound of rapid movement, of more gunshots, a short squeal of pain, and Cole knew the second agent was dead too.
Cole opened the nearest drawer, looking for a weapon, but was faced only with a set of wooden place mats; opened another, and found what he was looking for.
But then a click-clacking sound caught his attention and he looked down at the tiled floor to see a grenade rolling toward him; he recognized it as a flashbang, a device that would combine blinding light with deafening noise to stun and disorient him. Its fuse was only one or two seconds, and it had already been traveling toward him for . . .
His body reacted as he was still thinking, running toward it and catching it flush with a hard soccer kick that sent it straight back out the doorway into the living room. He covered his eyes and ears as best he could as the stun grenade exploded, racing back to grab the sharp, seven-inch kitchen knife from the drawer that he’d spotted just moments before.
He rushed back to the doorway, saw a dark figure approaching and drove the knife straight into the man’s gut; not wasting any time, he whipped the knife out, blood covering his hand and arm, and turned out of the doorway into the smoke and confusion of the living room.
He saw another figure through the smoke to his right and slipped to the side, slicing hard with the knife at the disoriented man. The blade passed through the side of his neck, and there was a rough, harsh gurgling noise as the figure dropped to the floor, blood spraying into the smoke.
Cole sensed a weapon coming around toward him and turned, catching hold of the barrel of an assault rifle, deflecting it to one side as the owner opened fire. Cole felt the hot rush of air from the rounds searing the skin of his leg as the magazine unloaded into the floor, even as he thrust the knife upward, the tip piercing under the man’s jaw, the blade slicing upward through the tongue and into the man’s throat.
Cole tried to pull it free as he saw the next gunman through the clearing smoke, but couldn’t move it, wedged tight as it was in the ripped cartilage and ruptured tissue of the man’s neck. He left it there as the dead body dropped to the floor, watching as the fourth man lifted his assault rifle into the aim, the barrel swinging his way.
Cole ducked low as the man opened fire, felt the rounds above him as he forward-rolled over the body of the dead CIA techie, bloody and spread-eagled across the living room floor.
The man tried to readjust his aim, but the assault rifle’s barrel was too long to move down quickly enough, and Cole was moving too fast, and then Cole was there at his feet before he knew what was happening, coming up and grabbing the weapon, twisting it in the man’s hands until the barrel was up under his chin. The gunman tried to force the barrel away, but Cole fired a sharp knee up into his groin and the man’s grip weakened, and Cole used this momentary distraction to pull the trigger; the single round fired upward underneath the gunman’s chin, passed vertically up through his head and blasted the skullcap clean off, eyes exploding outward as blood and tissue showered the room around him.
Cole immediately took full control of the weapon, tracking it around the room for more targets but finding none. He moved swiftly to the ruined door, pausing briefly to check for noise or shadow before turning out quickly into the corridor, looking for more gunmen.
Left, then right; the coast was clear, for now at least, and Cole slipped back inside the apartment.
He surveyed the carnage – one of the CIA technicians was slumped over the monitors while the other was sprawled across the floor, while four more ruined bodies were scattered haphazardly around the apartment. The entire place was covered in slippery, coppery blood and wisps of smoke still hung in the air.
He checked the bodies for some form of identification, but came up blank; they were professionals in every sense of the word.
Cole got on the radio to report the attack to David Keegan at the US Embassy, home to CIA’s Athens Station, keeping the information short and terse.
‘How the hell did they know about that place?’ Keegan asked in his Texan drawl.
‘I don’t know, but we need to get in contact with the other agents, warn them. Where’s Makarova now?’ Cole asked, trying to get images up on the monitors but failing; they’d been too damaged in the assault, and were now useless.
‘We . . . we don’t know,’ Keegan said. ‘Just before you contacted me, two of the surveillance pairs called in to say they’d lost contact with the other pair, the ones that had been following her on foot. We can’t get in touch with them, and we don’t know where the woman has gone.’
‘Shit,’ Cole said, the world crashing down around him.
‘Wait,’ Keegan said, and Cole could hear him talking to someone on another line. ‘Not good news,’ he said a few moments later, his voice both angry and saddened at the same time. ‘Our agents moved in, to where the foot team had been . . . Found them both in an alleyway, their throats slit . . . And we have no idea where that damn bitch is.’
Damn it, Cole thought. Someone had sold them down the river, and when this whole thing was over, he was damned well going to find out who.
But first things first.
He had to find Irina Makarova, before it was too late.
4
Julie Barrington was sitting uncomfortably in the specially converted cargo area of the old bus, monitoring the condition of Jake Navarone and Kurt Hejms, alongside Sean Drake, a CIA doctor from Moscow Station.
The coach, made up in the livery of the Russia Tour Company, was traveling along the E105 highway, north to St Petersburg and – beyond that – the Finnish border.
Although a front company for the CIA, the tour operator was quite genuine, and was three-quarters full with tourists from Moscow, on their way to see Helsinki. Daw, Mike, Ken and Gary were all sitting upstairs with them, mixed in with the rest of the travelers, their Russian identification papers in perfect order. The driver was a CIA officer and a former Secret Service agent, well-trained and experienced in defensive driving skills, and there were two other experienced officers onboard, making sure that the extraction went according to plan. Two other cars followed the route with them, looking out for any problems and ready to assist if needed.
The tour bus had been used to get people out of Russia several times in the past, and barely drew any attention at the international borders it crossed. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands of others like it, and there was nothing about it to arouse suspicion. A full inspection – with all of the luggage hauled out – would perhaps raise questions as to why there wasn’t as much space underneath as the external dimensions would suggest, but that had never happened yet, and the CIA had been running this route for years. A really persistent investigator might also wonder why the coach had to stop for fuel more often than the norm, and might then discover that the coach lacked the second gas tank that was standard for this particular model.
The section under the seating – occupying half of the luggage area, plus the space saved by removal of the second gas tank – was very cramped, but it served its purpose well.
Kurt Hejms was unconscious, sedated by the CIA to make the journey bearable. He had lost a lot of blood, and was still on a drip as they traveled. It was still touch and go, but Drake thought that – given his robust physical condition – there was a good chance that he would make it. But Barrington wanted to be there with him, just in case; as the team leader for the Moscow mission, she felt ultimately responsible and wanted to be with him in case he took a turn for the worse. She didn’t know what she would be able to do if that situation did arise, but she did know that she would rather be down here with him, however cramped and uncomfortable it was, than upstairs, not knowing what was happening.
Another reason for her presence in the secret compartment was Jake Navarone, who presented a different problem entirely. Barrington didn’t know what had happened to him in Akvadroma, but it was clear that the man had suffered a complete psychological breakdown. It would have been better for him to be sedated for the journey like Hejms, but the doctor had been worried about the reaction that a strong sedative might have with all of the other drugs in his system.
Now all Navarone could do was sit there, rocking back and forth, mumbling to himself in semi-coherent Russian; his eyes, which were mostly closed, would somet
imes fly open, and Barrington was frightened by the sight of them, as if he had seen things, experienced things, that had driven him over the edge of sanity. Sometimes he would cry out, and Barrington would worry that the tourists above might hear; but she decided that, with the great rattle of the diesel engine right next to them, his cries lacked the strength to travel beyond the small compartment.
All Barrington could think of to do was to hold him close, like a child, to provide him with the warmth of human contact, a sense of protection. At first he had rebelled, but – as the journey wore on – he had begun to relax, to sink deeper into Barrington’s embrace.
She checked her watch, saw that they’d been on the road for five hours already, perhaps only halfway into their journey to St. Petersburg, which was itself only about half the distance to Helsinki. She should probably get some sleep, she realized, and yet she couldn’t bring herself to close her eyes, to let herself go. If something happened . . .
Navarone twitched in her arms, his eyes opening wide as he started to mumble louder. ‘Varshavskaya!’ he said sharply, and Barrington was surprised by the clarity of the voice, the highly-charged feeling behind it. ‘Ubiystvo!’ he exclaimed urgently, eyes lost in the distance. ‘Varshavskaya!’
And then he was still again, resting back in her arms, eyes closed.
It was the first time he had said anything that was truly understandable. Warsaw, he’d said. Assassination. Warsaw.
Why had he said it? What did he know?
Suddenly, she lurched sideways as the coach moved sharply; she cradled Navarone’s head, as Drake leaned forward to secure Hejms’ drip.