The Lone Patriot

by JT Brannan

  But she knew it wasn’t over yet.

  Because they still had to get out of Russia.

  15

  Before he even opened his eyes, Cole knew where he was.

  A hospital.

  He could feel the hard mattress beneath him, the needles embedded in his arms, could hear the low swoosh of the pumps, the electronic whirr of the machines that monitored him, the quiet tones of nurses talking outside.

  What had happened? He remembered Makarova attacking with her knife, not going for the American ambassador as he’d thought, but for her own prime minister instead; he remembered throwing the tray, the only thing he had to hand, and then the knife from the table; saw vividly, in his mind’s eye, the blade passing through the side of Makarova’s beautiful, unblemished face; remembered running toward her, another knife in his hand . . . And then he remembered nothing.

  He took in an inventory of his own body, tensing each muscle in turn; there was little pain, and he knew he must be on a catalog of drugs, but when he got to his right side, he found he couldn’t contract the muscles there, that even through the drugs, there was a certain amount of pain.

  Had he been shot?

  The thought stirred his memory, and he remembered the sound of gunfire before he fell, before blacking out.

  He finally started to open his eyes, to take in the world around him; stopped with them only half-open as he saw the outline of a man sitting next to his bed.

  ‘Good morning, Mark.’

  There was no point pretending that he was still unconscious; whoever was watching him knew he was awake, and so he opened his eyes fully.

  The figure next to the bed was David Keegan, Head of Athens Station.

  ‘Morning, David,’ Cole answered groggily, his mouth dry, his lips parched. ‘How long have I been out?’

  ‘Thirty-six hours.’

  ‘It’s the twenty-fifth?’

  Keegan nodded. ‘Yeah. Merry Christmas.’

  Cole stifled a laugh. ‘Yeah, you too.’ He looked around the room. ‘Where the hell am I, anyway?’

  ‘You’re in a private facility, in the mountains about a hundred klicks northwest of Athens.’

  ‘You brought me here?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Keegan said, ‘I tried to pull all sorts of strings to get you out of city. In the end, we just had to kidnap you on your way to Athens General.’

  ‘Kidnap me?’

  ‘Uh huh,’ Keegan confirmed. ‘Believe me, you wouldn’t have wanted to stay in Athens. Too many people would be trying to kill you there.’

  Cole nodded in understanding. ‘So who knows I’m here?’

  ‘Me,’ Keegan said, ‘and Bruce Vinson.’

  ‘Nobody’s told Mason, have they?’

  ‘Why, you don’t trust him?’ Keegan said with a knowing smile.

  ‘Do you?’ Cole asked in return.

  ‘Not as far as I could throw him,’ Keegan agreed. ‘So, no, Mason does not know where you are.’

  ‘Water?’ Cole asked, and Keegan stood up, poured him a glass from a table in the corner, and held it up to Cole’s lips for him to drink.

  The sensation of the cool liquid in his mouth was wonderful, and Cole pooled it around, trying to get some moisture back into it.

  ‘So what happened?’ Cole asked when his throat and mouth weren’t quite so dry.

  ‘I’m not sure you’re in any condition to hear it.’

  ‘Try me.’ Cole shifted in his bed, so that he could better see the CIA chief.

  Keegan smiled thinly. ‘Okay. You were shot by a Greek policeman. Luckily his aim wasn’t terribly good, he hit you in the side but it was in and out, the bullet passed through without hitting any major organs. Your muscle and tissue is a bit messed up and you have a cracked rib, but – all in all – I’d say you were pretty lucky.’

  ‘Not as lucky as not being shot in the first place though.’

  Keegan chuckled. ‘I guess not,’ he agreed.

  ‘Makarova?’ Cole asked next.

  ‘In custody,’ Keegan said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Here in Greece for the time being, although – because of the new deal with the Russians, and the fact that her target was Manturov, she’s being extradited to Moscow.’

  Cole tried to laugh, but it came out as more of a cough. ‘That’s great,’ he said. ‘A Russian assassin being extradited back to the country which gave her the job in the first place. What’s the betting that she’s going to somehow make a miraculous “escape”?’

  ‘I certainly wouldn’t bet against it,’ Keegan said.

  ‘Have we officially ID’d her as Makarova?’

  Keegan shook his head. ‘No, we can’t do that. All we have is circumstantial, nobody’s going to buy the Russian assassin card, we can’t really prove it, not yet anyway. And by the time we can, she’ll be in Russia.’

  ‘So who do people think she is?’

  ‘They’ve traced her identity as far as Kristīne Ozoliņš, a Latvian citizen. There are no more details as yet, only rumors in the press that this woman might be linked to the Latvian Defense Intelligence and Security Service.’

  ‘So the Russians tried to kill their own prime minister, and then blame the Latvians?’

  ‘Looks that way,’ Keegan said.

  Why did Dementyev want Manturov dead? Was it because he objected to Project Europe? Cole remembered Veronika Galushka telling him how the prime minister had been upset when he’d found out about the project.

  But why this elaborate scheme? Why not just kill him in Russia? Cole knew that there must be something more to it.

  Keegan gave him some more water, and another thought occurred to him. ‘What about Barrington and the others?’ he asked quickly. Damn, how could he have forgotten?

  A dark look came over Keegan’s face, and Cole knew that the news wasn’t good.

  ‘Julie is still alive,’ Keegan said, and Cole knew he was beginning with the good news. ‘And she’s got Jake Navarone with her.’

  Cole felt a flood of relief at the mention of his friend and ally, the reason they had gone to Moscow in the first place. ‘Where are they?’ he asked.

  ‘Still in Russia,’ Keegan said, ‘they’re at the US Consulate General in St. Petersburg until we can figure out a way to bring them home safely.’

  ‘The others?’ Cole asked with trepidation.

  Keegan shook his head sadly. ‘The entire team were wiped out,’ he said, ‘along with a whole bunch of CIA officers who were with them.’ He paused, letting the news sink in. ‘I’m sorry,’ he offered finally.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Cole, his voice thick. ‘Me too.’

  He was quiet for a considerable amount of time, wondering how things could have got so out of hand. Someone had to have given the Russians that information, he knew; and that ‘someone’ was, in all likelihood, their own president.

  The thought made him sick to his stomach, but he knew the time wasn’t right to think of revenge; that would come later, he promised himself.

  Mason would have traded the lives of his own covert soldiers in exchange for Russian support of his Iranian invasion plans, Cole was sure of it.

  ‘What’s happening in Iran?’ he asked the CIA chief while he was thinking of the subject.

  ‘It’s not good,’ Keegan told him.

  ‘The invasion’s started already?’

  ‘Yesterday,’ Keegan confirmed. ‘Christmas Eve.’

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘Yeah, the troops were over the moon about it.’

  ‘I can imagine. So what’s gone wrong?’

  ‘They’re already bogged down,’ Keegan said, ‘the weather’s even worse than we feared, real Arctic stuff, and the Iranians didn’t get caught off guard as badly as we’d hoped.’

  ‘We’re losing?’ Cole asked incredulously.

  ‘Not losing,’ Keegan said, ‘but we suffered heavy losses yesterday, especially around Sanandaj. First estimates from the field are over two hundred dead from our side, mix of Americ
ans and Brits, in that single battle. That’s more than were killed at the first and second battles of Fallujah combined, and it isn’t even over yet. They’re talking about nearly a thousand injured too.’

  ‘And that’s the first day,’ Cole said, shaking his head. ‘What are they going to do?’

  ‘Throw more troops into the mix,’ Keegan said, ‘accept more nations into the coalition. The UK and Poland are already sending more men across as we speak.’

  ‘How many Iranians?’ Cole asked.

  ‘Killed so far?’ Keegan asked. Cole nodded, and Keegan shrugged his shoulders. ‘Hard to say, things are pretty damned chaotic there, but we’re hammering them at a ratio of about ten to one, figure about two thousand Iranian fatalities so far.’

  Cole nodded as he thought. It was bad, but with a ratio like that, it was still winnable. It was just going to be a lot more brutal and bloody than anyone had wanted, and he wondered how long the public would keep its stomach for it.

  ‘Has Jake said anything?’ Cole asked, changing the subject.

  ‘Not really,’ Keegan said, and he saw the disappointment in Cole’s eyes. ‘Mark,’ he continued, ‘you have to understand, he’s been in captivity for weeks now, months. They’ve . . . done things to him that have left him changed . . . different. We might be able to get him back, but for now at least, he’s not the same man you once knew.’

  ‘He hasn’t said anything of value?’ Cole persisted, restraining his anger, his hatred, of the Russians, for what they had done to his friend.

  ‘Only one thing that Julie was able to understand,’ Keegan said after a moment’s thought. ‘Something about an assassination in Warsaw.’

  Cole picked his head up from his pillow, eyes on Keegan’s. ‘He said what?’

  ‘It was in Russian,’ Keegan explained. ‘Everything he says is in Russian. But he said, “Warsaw. Assassination. Warsaw.” And that was it, the best we’ve managed to get out of him.’

  ‘Emelienenko’s going to visit Warsaw, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes,’ Keegan said. ‘Tomorrow. Full state visit.’

  ‘The target?’

  ‘We don’t even know if what Jake says is true,’ Keegan argued. ‘His mind’s so jumbled, we can’t trust anything at the moment.’

  He knew Keegan was probably right; and yet Jake had thought it so important that he’d overcome whatever barrier was in his way, and expressed those words, just those three words, clearly.

  The question Cole had to ask himself was, why?

  ‘If Manturov was the target in Athens,’ Cole thought out loud, ‘could Emelienenko be the target in Warsaw?’

  ‘But why?’ Keegan asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Cole said. ‘Maybe Dementyev wants everyone out of the way, maybe he plans to launch a coup or something?’

  ‘Sounds unlikely to me.’

  ‘Me, too. But I guess there’s only one way to find out.’

  ‘You can’t seriously be considering –’

  But Cole was already moving, disconnecting the drips from his body. ‘I am,’ he said. ‘It’s the only clue we’ve got.’ He raised himself up, swung his legs slowly out of bed and winced. ‘So just tell the doctor to get me some damn painkillers,’ he told the CIA chief, ‘and book me a plane ticket for Warsaw.’

  PART FOUR

  1

  Mikhail Emelienenko stood underneath the gigantic, pillared entranceway of the colossal Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw’s post-war midtown district, blinking as the news cameras flashed all around him.

  There was a cold wind, and a light dusting of snow, and – with January only a couple of days away now – he knew the worst of winter was still yet to come. Still, he reflected, it looked pretty for the cameras.

  He was stood at the top of the wide stairs, news crews from around the world gathered at the bottom in a huge swarm, extending into the street beyond. The President of the Republic of Poland, Józef Rojek, stood to one side of him, while the country’s prime minister, Andrzej Konorski, stood to the other.

  He had already been hosted at the presidential palace, and had seen the reconstructed Old Town, the snow-clad gardens of Łazienki Park, and the ‘Polish Versailles’ of Wilanów Palace. Rojek had been a gracious host – especially given the announcement Emelienenko had made the day before – and the Russian leader was almost starting to feel bad about the final parts of Dementyev’s plan.

  Thinking about plans, Emelienenko was still annoyed that things had gone wrong in Athens. Makarova had failed, and Boris Manturov was still alive. He knew the plan didn’t necessarily call for the man’s death – just the attempt of an assassination would be enough – but it still irked him. Manturov didn’t fully support the project, he knew, and Emelienenko would have been happier with him out of the way.

  But the international investigation was still carrying on apace – yesterday morning, it had been confirmed that Kristīne Ozoliņš was, as suspected, a member of the Latvian MIDD; and then in the evening, her movements in Vienna had been revealed, her meeting with the German Bundesnachrichtendienst, the Federal Intelligence Service. Rumors were flying left, right and center, which was just how Emelienenko liked it.

  Emelienenko had also made a statement of his own, just the previous morning – the announcement that the president of Belarus, Alexei Krinitsky, had agreed for the two nations to come together as the Greater Russian Federation. They would be unified once again, borders opened, government shared, a continuation, an expansion, of the Union State of Russia and Belarus that had been started under President Lukashenko twenty years before.

  The Greater Russian Federation, Emelienenko announced – with Krinitsky by his side at the Kremlin – was to be a peaceful partnership, of no threat to the EU, the United States, or NATO. There was military amalgamation, of course, but the priority was political and economic unification.

  Ukraine, it was announced, had also formally requested membership of the Federation which was – as Emelienenko stressed – open to any nation which wanted to join.

  There was international condemnation, of course, many observers seeing the new federation as nothing more than an attempt to return Russia to its glory days at the helm of the USSR. The only voice that failed to object to the unification was – surprising to the world, but not to Emelienenko – the President of the United States, Clark Mason. As per their deal, he kept his comments about the matter entirely neutral. The American policy was hands-off, Mason stressed that it was internal business between the countries involved, and was none of America’s business. He also, to the surprise of many, pledged his commitment to the Mutual Defense Treaty, as did China; and both countries had promised to look into a rewording of the paperwork, to now include the Greater Russian Federation.

  This took a lot of pressure off Emelienenko, but it wasn’t just the support of the US president; the fallout was also lessened – just as Emelienenko and Dementyev had known it would be – due to everyone’s focus on the troubles in Iran.

  The coalition had a thousand combat troops dead already, with four times that removed, injured, from the battlefield, and they were barely a quarter of the way across the country.

  The second front, from Afghanistan, was due to commence today, and Emelienenko knew that the result would be the same there. Iran was just too hard to invade. The coalition would win eventually, of course, but at what cost?

  Meanwhile, Emelienenko was free to pursue his own agenda, almost unhindered.

  He smiled inwardly, even in the face of the cold wind and lightly falling snow of the Polish capital.

  Dementyev was on the mend, out of hospital now and convalescing at home; Makarova would also be getting extradited back to Russia in the next day or two, and it wouldn’t be long until she was free. He shuddered as he thought of the horrific mark that the American agent’s knife had made on her perfect features, pledged that he would find that man and make him suffer for ruining so exquisite a visage.

  And soon – so very soon – the f
inal pieces of the jigsaw would be put in place, and the purpose of Project Europe would be obvious to all.

  ‘Could you repeat that, please?’ he asked the reporter from Die Zeit.

  ‘I said, is there any truth in the rumors of Poland being invited to join this new Greater Russian Federation? Is that why you’re here?’

  Emelienenko laughed good-naturedly. ‘No,’ he said, ‘there is no truth in those rumors whatsoever. Poland is a member of the EU, of NATO, and I respect that. I was merely aware that my announcement yesterday might cause worries here, and I arranged my meeting with the government representatives for this particular date in order to reassure them, personally, of our peaceful intentions.’

  ‘We are a proud, independent, sovereign nation,’ President Rojek said, ‘and we will remain so. But I appreciate this gesture of goodwill from President Emelienenko, and I am sure that we will continue to coexist alongside one another quite happily.’

  ‘But Mr. Rojek,’ asked a lady from America’s CNN, ‘aren’t you in the slightest bit worried that – with Kaliningrad, Belarus and Ukraine part of this new Federation – you’ll now have a border with Russia of nearly twelve hundred kilometers? Given your past, this could arguably give cause for concern.’

  ‘Those days are over,’ Rojek said, ‘they are in the past. As President Emelienenko rightly said, we are a part of the European Union, and NATO. We have nothing to worry about.’ He smiled widely at the reporters. ‘And now, if you’ll excuse us,’ he said, ‘we have a schedule to keep. Thank you.’

  The reporters continued to bark questions and snap pictures, but they were fended off by local police, armed guards from Poland’s Bureau of Government Protection and Russia’s Presidential Security Service watching closely.

  Yes, thought Emelienenko as he checked his watch, there was a schedule to keep – Rojek’s was just different from his own.

  And, as everyone would soon realize, it was only his own that mattered.

  2

  Ivan Gorchakov – the man who was still known by his comrades in Bureau III of the Polish Foreign Intelligence Agency as Bronisław Ostrawski – looked through the crosshairs of his Accuracy International AWM .338 Lapua Magnum rifle, the target clear through his scope despite the weather.