Red Ice

by James Phelan

  “Try.”

  “Some questions don’t have answers—especially when it comes to other people’s motivation.”

  Zoe pulled out a silver lighter and lit a slim cigarette. “Or maybe you just don’t want to share?”

  “Maybe she trusted you, Lachlan?” Kate offered. But she made it sound like any trust was misplaced. “Maybe she’d seen your work on the Babich case and thought you’d be a safe bet. Maybe she knew you too well, that you wouldn’t let the story go, no matter how hard it got, so she thought, Why not? He’ll help me, he helps everyone, can’t say no—”

  “Kate…”

  Zoe sat up, like there was a new target in the room. Maybe she was hoping that this would get a rise out of Fox, that some other truth would be revealed in the domestic exchange. Fox turned to Zoe while Kate seethed.

  “I hadn’t met with Katya, if that’s your next question,” Fox said, bringing Zoe’s gaze back to him. “Nor do I know exactly what it was she had to offer.”

  “Some people say Babich, on his way down, will take half the Russian establishment with him,” Zoe said. Her voice became both matter-of-fact and dreamy at the same time, as if she were spelling it out in neon signage. “And all this because of you, the reporter from Australia…”

  “I helped bring him in, that’s all. I wrote a few stories—like Kate said, Katya must have seen my name in some by-lines and knew I’d be interested.”

  “How did you bring Babich in?” Zoe asked, still focused.

  “It’s kind of a long story,” Gammaldi offered. “Not Les Miserables long … more Le Carré long—his recent stuff—”

  “I found a kink and I opened it up,” Fox said, ignoring his friend’s musings. “Babich was a former spook and kept all his intelligence officers around him when he went into the business world. He had seasoned personnel and serious capital to burn. He was good at fostering relationships, and smart enough not to bother those in Putin’s power circle. Eventually I found a way in.”

  Zoe leaned back in her chair. “So,” she said, “the real reason you’re in France was to meet with Katya?”

  “And holiday,” Fox said, looking across at Kate, but she’d gone silent. “And Al’s here because he thought he could singlehandedly eat the local economy out of recession.”

  Gammaldi smiled through a mouthful of cheese loaded on a long baguette and gave a thumbs-up and a wink. “Thank me later.”

  Zoe blew her smoke towards the open front door, took a sip of water and focused on Fox a little harder. “Then why the shotgun, why the car chase, the hiding—who from?”

  “Bad guys.”

  “Babich’s guys?”

  Fox nodded and felt Kate’s uneasiness beside him.

  “Anyone know you’re here?” Zoe asked.

  “Besides you and Inspector Clouseau out there?” Fox replied.

  “I followed you, remember?”

  “I thought I lost you in La Defense?”

  Zoe smiled, stubbed out her cigarette, and ate a slice of fruit. Fox figured maybe the hire car had some kind of LoJack system, like the kind the police used to track stolen cars. He could have driven half-way across Europe and there’d be someone behind a screen somewhere tracking a little dot on a map.

  “No one knows we’re here aside from my boss and the FBI agent who’s in charge of the operation.”

  “You don’t think you need protection here?”

  “We’re off the grid, no one could find—”

  “I found you.”

  “Yeah, well…”

  “If Babich is as connected as you make out,” Zoe said, “his people will find you, yes? Then what? He will have you killed?”

  “There might be reprisals from those loyal to him,” Fox said, leaning forward, “but know this: Babich will not be allowed to harm anyone again. His days of giving orders are well and truly over.”

  25

  MEDITERRANEAN SEA

  Hutchinson came to the surface, gasping for air. He’d landed in a mess, the parachute falling over him. He untangled himself from the lines, rolled onto his back and backstroked away. His eyes burned, his leg was numb, and the muscles all through his shoulders felt strange. Closing his eyes, he floated in the water and caught his breath, letting his adrenaline settle. He kept his movements slow, steady, not wanting to appear like the wounded snack that he was. There would be sharks below, waiting. Hungry.

  Great.

  When he next saw Babich … He had some good ideas about what he’d do. The moment would come none too soon. The aircraft was fast disappearing, soon to be just an invisible speck closing on the horizon. His own descent had been silent but for the wind buffeting his face as he free-fell the first few thousand feet. Once his chute was deployed he’d felt a sense of calm to be floating away from the aircraft and all it contained.

  He tapped the little plastic emergency radio beacon mounted on his life vest as he floated along, out at sea, alone. It said in small stencilled type that it had a water-activated switch. That it was made in China. That was okay, his chute probably was too. What wasn’t? A US-made rescue aircraft, that’s what. Flown and crewed by American servicemen. That’d be a sight. He reached into his shirt pocket, a tight squeeze under his life vest. Took out the painkiller lollipop, unwrapped it and savoured it like a fine cigar. He looked up at the sky and waited. If his message got out, there would be search and rescue crews on their way. If it didn’t … He really didn’t want to think about that. Nothing to do but wait for whatever was coming.

  26

  WASHINGTON, DC

  It was just past 3 am when Bill McCorkell arrived at the headquarters of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). He rubbed the sleep out of his eyes as he sat in a line of about five vehicles awaiting entry at the visitors’ gate. He re-read the message Special Agent Valerie Child, Hutchinson’s second in command, had forwarded through after she’d woken him from a bad dream. It seemed he’d gone from one nightmare to another. The message was the simple distress signal in the form of a text message, picked up from the sat phone Hutchinson had with him: B taken in air. SOS going down, all hands KIA—AH.

  Everyone killed except Hutchinson? And Babich taken in the air? It wasn’t possible. Sure, the Brits and the US had a few aircraft capable of docking with others in flight for emergency rescue, and maybe the Ruskies had something similar sitting in mothballs from better days … But overwhelming another aircraft in flight? A Gulfstream with Navy pilots and armed FBI agents aboard?

  He showed his ID at the gate and parked his Lexus RX 450h close to the building the Umbra task force had been using as a headquarters for the last few months. Housed in the federal western campus on the sprawling grounds at St Elizabeths Hospital, Anacostia, there was an odd feel to this place. The site, established in 1855 as the Government Hospital for the Insane, was now leased by Homeland Security and staffed by intelligence and security desk drivers; still a hospital of sorts. He walked fast to the building, the clear brisk night a good wake-up.

  Valerie had insisted the message had been verified by the National Security Agency (NSA). He’d met her a few times and was more impressed at every turn; she was a smart operator, good under pressure. She wouldn’t have got him out of bed for a drill.

  He noticed her as soon as he entered the building’s security airlock and she looked relieved to see him. He’d served under four presidents as a special assistant for National Security, including three stints as that office’s principal adviser. Now, on the other side of fifty-five and with some greener pastures looming on the retirement horizon, he was winding down, taking more of a back seat. The current West Wing team was good, the best he’d seen, and truth be told the last couple of administrations had worn him out; he knew it was time to move on while he was still capable, still useful. He was now counting down the days and working out of a cubby hole in the EEOB next to the White House, clearing his desk of old business, offering advice when sought, being
called upon in emergencies. Like now.

  “Hutchinson?” was the first thing McCorkell said as he neared earshot.

  “Still hunting for him,” replied Valerie.

  “Don’t DoD life vests have beacons?” he asked as they shook hands.

  “They do, but we’ve got nothing on the grid,” she replied. “He might not have put one on.”

  McCorkell couldn’t imagine Hutchinson bailing out of an aeroplane without grabbing a vest. Then again, it would have been a harrowing, quick decision, death all around him; he may not have been thinking straight. No—he’d had the presence of mind to send out the sat phone message. He’d be out there somewhere, a drop in the sea.

  “Maybe the transponder is malfunctioning,” McCorkell said, rubbing a hand through what was left of his cropped hair.

  “Yeah,” Valerie said. “They’re on it … If it pops up, we’ve got him. SAR crews are closing on the GPS location of where he sent the message; six aircraft and counting. Our guys, NATO, Italian Coast Guard; if they have a plane or a boat and eyes, we’re getting them out there. Call it fifteen minutes to station and then they’ll set up a search grid.”

  “Our aircraft—the Gulfstream?”

  “Dead in the air, still following its flight path, but descending.” She looked strained, he could tell she was thinking about the agents on board. “Navy’s got F18s scrambling out of Naples, they’ll have a visual any second.”

  The F18 pilots would track it now and if it didn’t respond, they’d be forced to shoot it down before it entered the skies over the Italian land mass. The hustle of the joint agency and departmental staff proved they weren’t capitulating.

  “Sorry to call you in the dead of night,” Valerie said, “but you were first on Hutchinson’s ‘break glass in case of emergency’ list.”

  “Well, I guess I should earn my spot,” McCorkell said. Already sixteen bleary-eyed agents and staffers milled about the room, many on phones, their voices more animated than their outward appearance. Every few minutes another one would enter the doors, yawning away the last of their sleepiness. FBI, CIA, NSA, DoD; they all had a role to play in a task force that was meant to be in the process of winding down and closing up shop.

  “Use the desk next to mine,” Valerie offered. He put his jacket over the chair, saw the picture on the desk—Hutchinson with his wife and kid.

  “How can you best use me?” he asked.

  “We need someone to quarterback the play here,” Valerie said. “Make sure the priorities are straight and the workload efficiently spread.”

  He read between the lines: Make sure the multi-agency and military staff play nice.

  “And deal with any overseas brass or station chiefs who slow us down.”

  McCorkell nodded, studied the end wall, made up of a movie-theatre-sized LCD screen not dissimilar to the one in the White House’s Situation Room. One segment showed a map of the Mediterranean with a small blinking dot. The last known GPS point. Right in the middle of nowhere, empty all around.

  The automatic doors hissed open again and a figure with a noticeable limp walked in.

  Bob Bowden. CIA department head—he’d made plenty of friends and a few enemies in the intel community when he was one of the more senior CIA officers to speak out against the creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, seeing it and its offshoots as a threat to the standing of his agency. McCorkell didn’t mind such redundancies when it came to national security, but at the same time he respected men like Bowden, who were vocal and steadfast in their belief in their agencies.

  “Bill?” Bowden said, making a beeline for McCorkell. “What are you doing here?”

  “Hi Bob.” The guy looked awake, he’d give him that. A life used to sleeping on a knife-edge. Didn’t bother with a handshake. “I’m helping out.”

  “Any news on Hutchinson’s location?” he asked Valerie.

  “No, we’ll have eyes over his last known position in ten to fifteen minutes.”

  “Good,” Bowden replied. For the last six months he’d been the lead CIA officer on this task force. McCorkell knew he’d relish control of the op. Didn’t take a crystal ball to conclude that this CIA man would have handled everything differently from the start; a covert action ‘snatch and grab’ rendition of Babich to some place where torture was taught in the schoolyard, a dank cell where the Russian would see out his days as he was bled for information. Bowden was convinced Babich’s case was an integral part of the Global War on Terror and as such beyond legal issue, especially one handled by some mid-level FBI investigator like Hutchinson. No doubt there were others in this very room who felt the same way.

  “We got anything happening out of the normal?”

  “Intelligence traffic has picked up among known Babich loyalists in the Russian political and military contacts,” Valerie replied.

  “Picked up how? Significantly.”

  “Almost tripled.”

  “We haven’t seen that pattern since his arrest.”

  “Yep.”

  Bowden was silent. There were two things that struck McCorkell above all else about the guy: he didn’t trust anybody, and he was a man of action. A veteran from the CIA’s Special Activities Group, he was shunted to a desk a couple of years back after years of directing paramilitary teams in Pakistan to capture or kill top leaders of al-Qaeda. These small teams, designed to carry out surgical strikes on High-Value Targets, were phased out with the last administration and largely replaced with armed Predator and Reaper drones as the potent new weapon against the enemy. While CIA officials continued to pursue the program of specialist boots on the ground as an additional lethal option—every military and intelligence commander wanted to have such capacity because one cannot predict opportunities—McCorkell knew that the kind of pointy-end work Bowden had specialised in was coming to an end. A drone flying at ten thousand feet, armed with Hellfires and piloted by operators sitting at screens here in the States had become the more politically and financially acceptable mode of covert action. Bowden was not so much a dinosaur as a practitioner of what was becoming a lost art: the hands-on field spook.

  “You work on finding Hutch, I’ll take Babich,” Bowden said to Valerie, then looked at Bill, before he limped over to his team.

  “What didn’t you tell him?” McCorkell asked Valerie. She looked at him.

  “So,” Bowden said, turning all his energy on his CIA crew down the far end of the room. “Where’s this son-of-a-bitch Roman Babich?”

  Valerie said quietly to McCorkell, “Well, the dog’s off his leash. How long do you think it’ll take them to find Babich?”

  McCorkell was wondering not so much where Babich was, but what he’d be doing.

  “Not soon enough,” McCorkell said. “But you didn’t answer my question.”

  “One of the intelligence files,” Valerie replied. “He’ll find it soon enough, but I want to find Hutchinson before he freaks and takes our operators away from the SAR effort.”

  “What was the file?”

  Valerie handed him a print-out: NSA call sheet, a phone intercept of a conversation between two parties. Neither named beyond their code-word covers, which meant maybe the NSA knew their IDs or maybe they didn’t.

  “How’d we get the intercept?” McCorkell asked.

  “Echelon hit it a few months back, keywords lighting up that it was Umbra and Babich-related. Been tracking the caller’s voice pattern ever since, but he uses an encrypted cell—”

  “So we’re not getting every call?”

  “Maybe twenty per cent.”

  McCorkell nodded. He knew that the NSA had made good inroads into Russia’s scrambling equipment since acquiring their last-generation encrypted satellite phone from a dead FSB officer in the South Ossetia War of 2008. Clearly their new set-up had improvements. The location of the caller was, “In transit, Ukraine, unknown cell number,” and the receiver was in Moscow with what was designated
as a known landline number. He scanned over all the restricted handling information:

  TOP SECRET—SCI UMBRA TASK FORCE.

  Translated from Russian by #4016 at NSA FM.

  INIT: Subject RED.

  RECIP: Subject MOSCOW BRAVO.

  R: “Get ready to move.”

  MB: (Surprised) “When?”

  R: “Now. Twelve hours—”

  MB: (Louder) “That is too soon!”

  R: “It is what it is. Be prepared for the fallout. You need to

  move before they do.”

  PAUSE, TEN SECONDS.

  MB. “We will be ready.”

  Call ENDS.

  McCorkell looked up from the transcript in his hands. “Twelve hours?”

  “I know. If they were referring to the break-out of Babich, it happened earlier,” Valerie said. “This deadline was for around noon our time, which means…”

  “That maybe they weren’t referring to that…” McCorkell said.

  “Yeah, could be anything,” Valerie agreed. “One thing I know: counter-terrorism intel operators like Bowden get pretty twitchy when they intercept words like fallout.”

  An agent beckoned Valerie over to talk on the phone.

  McCorkell sat down in the chair at his—Hutchinson’s—desk. The intercept was too vague to draw conclusions. What would Babich do now he was free? What kind of orders would roll off his tongue first? Revenge on those who’d brought him in? People like Lachlan Fox. Fox had earned McCorkell’s respect several times over—the guy’s conviction in following the truth through extreme adversity could never be underestimated. McCorkell would give the man any job, he trusted him implicitly. He’d never doubted Fox’s ability to look after himself, but everybody was fallible. It was just a matter of time.

  He watched the dots converge. Could be anything. Looked at his watch. He pulled out his phone and sent Fox a quick text: Hutchinson had trouble in transit. Babich loose. Watch back. Call in asap.