Tom Clancy's Op-Center--Dark Zone

by George Galdorisi

  “A debatable point,” Flannery said with a diplomat’s patience. “Your selective, reductive recap ignores my government’s basic thesis, which is the danger presented by the clash of just such emotional claims. Passion distorts fact, perspective, tramples the compromises that are necessary for our global existence.”

  “A very pretty ideology,” Eisenstein remarked. “You grew up in Oklahoma, yes?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How would you have felt if Santa Anna had defeated General Houston at San Jacinto? Would you not have wanted Texas back?”

  Flannery grinned slightly. “Is this on the record?”

  “Always,” Eisenstein remarked, holding the phone toward the former ambassador.

  “On our farm in Oklahoma, I used to watch the big reapers cut through corn,” Flannery replied. “When I was old enough, my father told me about Okinawa. He was with the Sixth Marine Division. After he described what those landings were like, I never looked at a reaper the same way. Cutting people down that way must be a last resort. Longing for freedom is one thing. Longing for ancestral territory—that’s just not good enough, Mr. Eisenstein.”

  Flannery’s mind flashed back to Galina’s face as she departed—the hard, determined set of her mouth only slightly tempered by something softer in her eyes. He thought, at the time, that it was sadness, but now he wondered if it was fear. Almost as if they were begging him to get her the information she wanted … or to fix the situation by some diplomatic miracle before the machine of war became unstoppable.

  “With respect, sir, I say that those pretty words fit a pretty ideology that has no footing in reality,” Eisenstein said. He glanced to the left and right, where pockets of symposium attendees clustered nearby. “But I am keeping you from others who wish to wring their hands. Thank you for your time.”

  “Thank you for your views,” Flannery said. “I do like to hear them.”

  “That is your job,” the other man replied frankly.

  Eisenstein smiled and turned away, setting the pie on a windowsill as he left. The man was smug, without the background to support it—only the indoctrination of his society and his professional affiliations, which gave heft, if not legitimacy, to his words.

  Communists! Flannery thought. He wondered, abstractly, who the dessert belonged to: the Russian, the York group, or the glazier who made the china. There are too many Eisensteins, he thought dejectedly. Ideas were only as sound as the willingness to field-test them, not ram them down the throat of a population.

  A reporter from the Cuban newspaper Granma turned toward Flannery. The ambassador was delighted when his smartphone sounded the chimes of Big Ben, since he wasn’t in the mood for another Communist just then. It was Galina. He held a finger up to the man, who was approaching, and turned toward the windowsill. The Brick Rockies towered before him—the name his father had coined for Lower Manhattan when his troop ship sailed into the harbor.

  “Hello, Ga—”

  “It is not Galina Petrenko,” a hard voice said at the other end. The voice was not female, and it also was not Ukrainian. It was Russian.

  “I’m listening,” Flannery said, instinctively hunching his shoulders and lowering his voice—an old diplomatic habit.

  “You are American,” the voice said.

  It was a statement, not a question. Flannery did not respond.

  “Galina is dead,” the voice went on bluntly, but not quite casually. “I want to know why you were her last call.”

  The words made no sense, and then suddenly they did, hitting Flannery like a long, slow push against his belly. He was glad that he was already bending. He set his own plate beside Eisenstein’s. It took him a moment to recover his breath and another moment to find his voice. He didn’t use it, yet. He did draw a long, audible breath through his nose to let the caller know that he was still there … and to buy himself another moment.

  The caller knew Galina, or, at least, who she was. Confirmation of her death—her murder—would come soon enough, either from the NYPD or from his own sources. There were other details: the caller had not yet had the time or the opportunity to trace Flannery’s number or he would have addressed him by name—though that trace would be easy to accomplish, since the caller did not bother to ask for his identity. And one thing more. Flannery was accustomed to interpreting nuance in people’s voices. There was an urgency in this one. He assumed it pertained to the tinderbox that Galina was helping to ignite—and that, being Russian, the caller was presumably trying to uncover and suppress.

  Flannery raised his shoulders. “Did you put that question to her?”

  “Be careful,” the voice cautioned. “This is not a conversation.”

  “No, sir, it’s an interrogation, but only if I participate,” Flannery replied. “If I terminate the call—?”

  “I will come for you.”

  “That costs you time.”

  “Not much.”

  “Enough that you did not want to waste it and risked this cold call,” Flannery said. “I wonder if you will risk killing me when you know who I am.”

  The caller was silent now, but only for a moment.

  “You didn’t end the—conversation,” the caller said. “What do you want?”

  “I cannot speak now,” Flannery replied. “I will call this phone in an hour.”

  Flannery knew that it would take anyone except American law enforcement at least that long to trace his private cell-phone number and dispatch personnel to where he lived and worked. It would probably take this individual considerably longer.

  “Take no longer than that,” the caller warned.

  “I understand,” Flannery said in a conciliatory tone—one that came with effort, with practice, with experience in talking to murderous despots and those who represented their interests.

  He ended the call with a push of his thumb. And allowed the sickness he felt to rise.

  Promising the Cuban reporter that he would return, Flannery moved with skillful steps through the crowd, left the reception room, and hurried to his office.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Washington, D.C.

  June 2, 12:53 PM

  “I didn’t think the food was that bad,” Brian Dawson said, adding, “or the company.”

  Carolina Smith grinned as she slid from the booth. “Brian, some of us don’t have government jobs. We work for a living.”

  “Ow.”

  “And some of us love what we do,” she added. “You hated the gallery because of how much time I spent there. No reason to spoil a powerful dynamic now that we’re not together.”

  “‘Powerful dynamic,’” Dawson repeated as he signaled the waitperson. “That’s artworld-speak, putting a layer of gesso on what some of us just call ‘irreconcilable differences.’”

  “Technically, that term only applies when you’re married,” the African-American woman said with a little smile. “At least my work was local. You weren’t happy unless you were infiltrating hostile territory.” She shook her head. “Now you’re in—what did you call it at the Trade Rep’s Christmas party? A rabbit warren. The universe does have its whims and ways.”

  Dawson glowered at the cloth napkin crumpled on the table. Damn her, she was right. In his brain, he was angry at the napkin for being just white cloth and not a flag.

  “It was nice catching up,” Carolina said, “but it reminded me why our assemblage didn’t work.”

  Another art term. Had she always done this and he just hadn’t heard?

  Carolina smiled sweetly as the check arrived. “Thanks for lunch.”

  “Anytime,” he said as she turned and walked away. “I mean that!” he added, but she was already checking her email.

  Dawson was forgotten—again. Dumped by his current boss, dissed by his former “boss,” he wondered why, at a time in life when most people really begin to flower, he could only smell the fertilizer.

  Oh, to be in the field, bribing enemies, gathering intel, and planning the takeov
er of small countries, he thought. He was reaching into his sports jacket for his billfold when his phone beeped. It was a blocked caller. Ordinarily he would let it go to voice mail, but he was in the mood to snap at someone, even if it was a telemarketer. He clicked on Answer, then said nothing.

  “Mr. Dawson?”

  “Yes?” he answered tentatively. It could also be business. Not the president, but no one he wanted to piss off with an opening salvo.

  “My name is Douglas Flannery. I got your number from Deputy Chief of Staff Matt Berry.”

  “I see. Are you his second?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Squash rematch. I killed him on—”

  “Mr. Dawson, I am a former ambassador and I need to speak with you and your colleagues in a secure location as quickly as possible.”

  Dawson quietly thanked the universe and gave the waiter his American Express card as the mental tumblers began to fall into place. Ambassador Douglas Flannery—Ukraine, under the previous administration.

  “I’m about to head back to my office,” Dawson replied. “It should take me a half hour, traffic willing.”

  “I don’t have much more time than that—” There was a heavy sigh at the other end. “Dammit.”

  “What?”

  “A news item. A murder here in New York. He was telling the truth.” There was another sigh. “I can’t say more over an open line. As quickly as possible, please? At the highest levels?”

  “I’m on my way,” the Op-Center operations director replied. “I’ll get everyone I can.”

  “Before a quarter to two, if possible,” the ambassador reminded him.

  Dawson checked his phone. It would be close, but it was doable.

  The operations director phoned Anne as he made his way toward the Lafayette Park side of the restaurant. He felt a familiar rush from loins to chest, the kind he’d experienced often in the Army as Fifth Special Forces Group commander. A feeling that could be summed up in a single word: “Charge!”

  It was also an attitude that had made him a lot of enemies in the service, like the time he was coordinator of the takeover of a small Central Asian country and was almost cashiered for setting himself up as the interim ruler.

  “Annie—I need a meeting of the big boys and girls,” he said, then added, “Threatcon high.”

  “Can you talk?”

  “Negative. I’m about thirty minutes out.”

  “I’ll set it up.”

  Dawson waited impatiently for the valet to bring his vintage Mustang, then turned onto Constitution Avenue NW and took it to U.S. 50 West. As he drove, Dawson asked the car tablet to bring up public data on Ambassador Flannery. He didn’t want to call Matt Berry; if this were a setup, he could be revealing the private number of a White House chieftain, not to mention the fact that they wouldn’t be able to discuss anything substantive, in any case.

  He used the voice function to have the information read to him. He got the biography, a summary of eight years’ service in Kiev—l’affaire espionnage, as his pre-Carolina French girlfriend Marie would have put it, a matter involving a Ukrainian staffer. He looked up the staffer’s name.

  She was dead, found with her throat cut in Manhattan at 12:55. The same time he was on the phone with Flannery. That probably explained the “Dammit.”

  By the time he’d finished his research, Dawson was on I-95 headed toward Richmond.

  With an increasingly heavy, impatient foot, the OD made the trip in just under twenty-five minutes. He was downstairs and walking briskly toward the boss’s office less than a minute after that. Anne was at her post, dependable as the Statue of Liberty.

  “They were already in the tank,” she said. “The director wanted you to see something there when you got back.”

  “I love it when objectives dovetail,” he said in earnest as he blew past.

  Anne fell in, following him without seeming to hurry.

  The Geek Tank was centrally situated in Op-Center’s oblong maze of belowground offices. Anne had once referred to it as “a brain center located where the heart should be”—a comment that, to Dawson’s schooled relationship ears, had carried some personal bitterness. Young experts and a handful of veterans cataloged and analyzed everything from weather patterns to maps so granular that mole hills could be charted; a chemist worked on ways to detect explosives packed in everything from hair weaves to the stuffing for plush animals; a duo known as Remus and Bombulus studied firearms and demotions. It was a busy concern even when there were no emergencies pending.

  The two were allowed entrance by a palm-print reader beside the door and a facial-recognition monitor just above it. Inside, the layout was a smaller version of the Op-Center complex itself. The space was large and open, with low-walled cubicles. These were adorned with images of tech gods like Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, and the occasional World of Warcraft or Warhammer 40K gaming posters. The workers here could discuss international conflict with intellectual cool, but bring up multiplayer online role-playing games versus tabletop miniature war games and you reignited, fittingly, Armageddon-in-progress.

  An Adele song drifted across the room. The desks and occasional card tables were cluttered with pizza boxes, granola-bar wrappers, empty Slurpee and coffee containers, and notations in ink, grease pencil, and, in one spot, dried ketchup applied with a finger. The staff of eighteen eclectically dressed, twenty- and thirtysomethings created an energy here unlike that of any other space at Op-Center and unlike anything Dawson, Williams, or any of the others had experienced in the military. Anne had a thought about that, too, having described the tone here as “cheeky chic.” She was right. The Geek Tank belonged in Op-Center, but outsiders didn’t really belong here.

  The new arrivals made their way to the single glass-enclosed corner office that belonged to Aaron Bleich. He was dressed in Dockers and a Star Trek sweatshirt, which set him apart from the other fanboys, who wore Star Wars attire—the source of another, lesser skirmish among them. A new sign above his door read CAPTAIN KIRK.

  In addition to Chase Williams, James Wright, the domestic crisis manager, was present, along with Duncan Sutherland, the logistics director. Dawson and Wright got along like brothers. Wright was just two years older, and, as Mr. Washington Insider, he had the gift of schmooze that Dawson also possessed. Both were former military—though Wright had hung up his suit because of arthritis, not feather-ruffling—and both were divorced and aggressively single. Sutherland was more of a loner, a street kid from Liverpool who had served in the British Army’s Special Air Service and came to the States after marrying a local lady, a wealthy socialite. He and his wife had their own circle of friends—mostly upscale—in Chevy Chase and Georgetown.

  Williams stood with his arms crossed imperially, like General MacArthur returning to the Corregidor. He looked over as the new arrivals approached. Bleich did not. He was wearing virtual-reality goggles, his head moving this way and that.

  “Sorry about lunch,” Williams said.

  “That’s okay,” Dawson said as he retrieved his phone, checking the time and adding bitterly, under his breath, “I got to hear Carolina’s latest regurgitation.”

  Hearing the comment, Williams remained carefully neutral, but Anne responded with an I-am-woman frown.

  “What have you got, Brian?” the chief asked.

  Dawson checked the time, then brought up the last number. “I’ve got a little over fifteen minutes to call back the former ambassador to Ukraine, Douglas Flannery. He contacted the president’s DCOS and asked to get in touch with us.”

  “Any idea why?” Williams asked, concerned by the sudden proliferation of Ukraine.

  Dawson was busy keying the phone back into Op-Center’s security system. “No, though he became agitated when the news confirmed a murder in New York.”

  Williams and Anne exchanged looks.

  “A Ukrainian woman?” Anne asked.

  “That’s right,” Dawson replied.

&
nbsp; “Call him,” Williams said.

  The boss’s sharp, surprising reaction hurried Dawson along; he redialed the number Flannery had called from and put the call on speaker.

  “You’ve reached the number of Ambassador Douglas Smith.…”

  Dawson redialed. It went straight to voice mail a second time. He swore.

  “Aaron, can you cut into a mobile conversation?” Williams asked.

  “I’d need some time,” the younger man replied, his head moving this way and that behind the goggles.

  “How much time? Minutes?”

  “Enough to make at least a half hour,” Aaron replied.

  “No good,” Williams decided. “Brian, is there a receptionist, someone else you can call there?”

  “I don’t think he wants our involvement known,” Dawson replied.

  “Anne,” Williams said, “let’s get everything we can on the ambassador’s day and his connections cross-referenced with whatever we can find on Galina Petrenko. And let’s get McCord back ASAP. Sutherland, will you—?”

  The thirty-six-year-old Sutherland was already calling the intelligence director.

  “We should take this to my office,” Williams said, uncrossing his arms and moving with a sense of urgency. “Aaron, you keep at it.”

  “Am.”

  “Brian, there’s more you need to know,” Williams said as they shouldered through the Tank.

  Dawson nodded as he redialed a third time.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Kiev, Ukraine

  June 2, 8:45 PM

  ABORT MISSION PROTOCOL: B2

  The fire of the nine Ukrainian troops was swift and accurate. This drill was judged a failure by their accomplice on the ground, with ordnance not present for the mission. Leaving the compound area without having achieved their goal, they would have been met by enemy troops—shock troops who would have no idea how many of the enemy they were facing. It was difficult to tell how many there were in night-vision mode, with the surprised Russian defense forces falling back behind a new addition: an advancing tank brigade.

  “Fall back to the denser tree line!” Major Romanenko shouted. “Team A, cover B.”