Tom Clancy's Op-Center--Dark Zone

by George Galdorisi

  “Why prod the big bad bear?” Dawson thought aloud, then answered his own question. “To make them drill, see how they would deploy a counterattack?”

  “I’d do it to tie up their resources defending three bases and not harassing Ukraine,” Duncan told him.

  “Damned dangerous brinkmanship,” Dawson said. “Putin sees that video, he’s likely to use it as a reason to go back to war.”

  “Sometimes what sounds good in a situation room doesn’t jibe with what’s real-world smart,” Anne pointed out.

  Dawson considered this as they filed into the office, Wright giving his close friend a slap on the shoulder, fingers squeezing twice. The gesture was a language unto itself: this one said, “You have the look of a man who’s seen a ghost; we’ll talk later.”

  The time to contact the ambassador had come and gone, but Dawson tried one more time.

  He got through, and immediately put the phone on speaker.

  “Mr. Ambassador,” Dawson said with relief.

  “You are in a secure area?”

  “Yes, sir, with four of our top people, including Director Williams.”

  “Thank you—thank you very much. I will have to talk quietly. We had a symposium on peace in Crimea. Some of the attendees are still here.”

  “They have all been vetted, you know them?” Williams asked.

  “I do. But I cannot go suspecting my friends and colleagues now, even the ones I dislike.”

  To everyone who heard it, the man’s voice sounded tired, beaten. While the rest of the team sat, Anne and Dawson remained standing.

  “You have the floor, sir,” Dawson said.

  There was a sigh. “It’s late. I should be calling—” Flannery stopped, sighed again. “He will have to wait, but I will be brief. A woman was murdered today. She was a Ukrainian intelligence operative. She came to me, asking for my help. She wanted data on the movement of Russian armored columns toward Ukraine.”

  Dawson held up three fingers and turned a thumb down. That eliminated the naval base at Sevastopol as a target.

  “Did she offer any evidence, details?” Dawson asked.

  “All she said was that six armored columns were reportedly going to be involved,” Flannery replied. “She said that her people in the Kremlin had ‘disappeared’—presumably, those who had acquired this information—and she wanted more information from inside the ground forces of the Russian Federation.”

  “Wanted it for whom, exactly?” Williams asked.

  “She didn’t say,” Flannery replied.

  The ambassador had hesitated almost imperceptibly before answering. Everyone noticed.

  “Do you have any thoughts on the ultimate receiver?” Dawson asked.

  “I believe it is paramilitary,” Flannery said.

  “Based on what information?” Dawson asked.

  “I just received a call from the commando leader.”

  Everyone in the room was stunned.

  “Go on,” Williams said.

  “That’s all there is, really,” Flannery told them. “I talked with two men. One spoke English, neither would provide his name. They only repeated the request Galina had made … that I help them. I implored him to give diplomacy a chance. He refused.” Flannery drew a long, shaking breath. “He refused with an anger I heard far too often there … usually from officers who have been restrained from action.”

  It took a moment for everyone to process that information.

  “No phone number? No location?” Wright asked.

  “Blocked,” Flannery replied.

  “Do you have access to the kind of information they wanted?” Williams asked.

  “Not directly, no,” Flannery admitted. “Galina Petrenko was relying on an old—let’s call it a concern I had for her well-being to motivate me.”

  Williams couldn’t help smiling at that. In some form, that approach was older than Mata Hari. And usually effective.

  “After she was murdered,” Flannery went on, “before it was on the news, her killer—I assume it was he—called on her phone and wanted to know why she came to me. He threatened my life if I didn’t reply … seven minutes ago.”

  “I’m guessing he was Russian?” Dawson said.

  “His English was spit-and-polish, Moscow-inflected,” Flannery said.

  “Do you feel safe now? Are you going to call him?”

  “To the former, at the moment I do. To the latter—what do you recommend?”

  All eyes shifted to Williams.

  “Do you want to have a dog in this fight?” the director asked. “If you tell him what he wants to know, you can probably walk away from this. If you don’t—”

  “Jim Wright here,” the domestic crisis manager interjected. “Mr. Ambassador, you said he’s got Galina’s phone. If he called you, it’s unlocked. That probably gives him access to other members of her unit, here and possibly abroad.”

  “She said it was a burner—there may not be anything on it,” Flannery said.

  “Which is why he needs you,” Wright said, “which may—with respect, Chase—which may mean he will want you to use your access to get intel for him.”

  “Flip you,” Dawson said. “Double agent.”

  “I’m no one’s agent,” Flannery said. There was another silence. “I have a missed call,” he said suddenly. “From him.”

  “Mr. Ambassador, we have to believe he will come after you,” Dawson said. “Is there anything you can tell him that wouldn’t give him too much but would keep you safe?”

  Flannery was quiet for a long moment. “He seems a resolute man,” the ambassador said. “Mr. Dawson, Matt Berry at the White House speaks very highly of your organization. Is this situation something you can help me with, officially or not?”

  “‘Or not’ is what we do best,” Dawson replied, only half in jest.

  “Are you asking us to help you?” Williams asked. “Or are you looking for us to help manage this situation?”

  “No good diplomat ever thinks of himself,” Flannery replied. “Personal risk comes with the job.”

  Anne applauded silently.

  “Mr. Dawson, I’m going to call him,” Flannery went on.

  “And say what?” Dawson asked.

  “What diplomats invariably say,” the ambassador replied. “We try to talk nations off the ledge.”

  “This Russian fellow is probably not a statesman,” Williams warned.

  “What else can I do?” Flannery asked. “This mission—it may be a fiction designed to make the Russians paranoid, and it may never be launched. If I tell him the unadorned truth, more people will die needlessly.”

  “If you say nothing, they will die the way Galina did while he looks for information,” Dawson said.

  “Mr. Ambassador,” Williams said, “would you allow us to listen to the call?”

  “Frankly, I was hoping you’d ask,” he said. They heard a chair squeak and roll. “There’s a conference phone in the conference room. I’m going to chase out whoever is in there now. I’ll call back on Mr. Dawson’s phone.”

  “Call back on mine,” Williams said, giving him the number. “If we need to contact you, that will come from Brian.”

  “Very well,” the ambassador said, and clicked off.

  “A conference phone in the conference room,” Anne said. “The world still has pockets of symmetry.”

  “You know, there’s an ugly fit with the game Aaron found,” Wright remarked, scrolling through data on his tablet. “The Fourth Guards Kantemirovskaya Tank Division has just been or is about to be relocated to the base at Sudzha.”

  “Exactly what Galina wanted to know,” Dawson remarked.

  “A life sacrificed for a line of data on a tablet,” Anne said.

  “We need live surveillance of that facility,” Williams said. “More important, the area around it.”

  As if on cue, Paul Bankole entered the office. The forty-eight-year-old international crisis manager was an imposing figure, standing just over six
feet two and walking with a slight limp that gave him a lopsided but powerful tread.

  “Where and when?” he asked.

  Williams acknowledged the veteran’s can-do attitude with a little nod. The director brought him up to date, and Bankole walked to the corner of the room to send a text. As he did, Dawson’s phone beeped. The bald-headed, African-American operations director looked around to make sure everyone was quiet—Bankole indicating that he understood with a nod. Dawson accepted the call.

  “… had something else that needed to be taken care of,” Flannery was saying.

  “Warning others?” the caller asked.

  “I know no others,” the ambassador replied.

  “Galina thought differently.”

  Flannery didn’t take the bait.

  “Very well,” the Russian said. “What do you know?”

  “Only this,” Flannery said. “If you don’t stand down, if you don’t let me intercede on behalf of both sides, a great many people—”

  “Will die, yes,” the Russian said. “Sad, but my concern is much narrower, Mr. Ambassador. What did Galina Petrenko want from you? This is the last time I will ask … over the phone.”

  While they were speaking, Dawson urgently grabbed a notepad from Williams’s desk and wrote something. The director looked at the note, then nodded.

  Dawson texted the contents to Flannery.

  There was a lull in the conversation.

  “Ambassador Flannery?” the caller said. “Your answer.”

  Flannery was silent a moment longer. After what seemed a long, tortured wait that dragged into dinnertime, Dawson heard in a tired, forlorn voice what he had been hoping to hear.

  “Galina asked for information about your armored columns by the border.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  St. Petersburg, Russia

  June 2, 8:15 PM

  Sitting behind his desk in the ornately columned General Staff Building, Western Military District Headquarters, Colonel General Anatoly Yershov was gazing at his computer, watching video of a tank engagement. Born in 1963 in Derbent, on the Caspian Sea, Yershov used to watch silent, black-and-white, 8-mm. combat footage on his home projector. His father was a wounded veteran who owned a general store and used to show the two-hundred-foot reels to children on Sundays, along with cartoons. Strife followed by laughter—it was somehow an apt mix.

  Yershov preferred the war footage. The jerky moves of the camera, the power of the explosions, the black smoke that seemed to throb, the uniforms as dirty as the men, just like when he played with the other boys in the old quarry—

  Of course, death was never shown. Not like the hi-definition video on his computer.

  When he graduated from the Krasnoyarsk Polytechnic Institute in 1985, with a degree in civil engineering, Yershov attended the Kazan Higher Tank Command School and was given a battalion of the Far Eastern Military District. The tall gray-eyed man was outwardly steely, like his tanks; only his wife, Lelya, knew that—also like his tanks—there was a man inside.

  That man sat in the semidarkness now, and was focused. There was a meeting soon to come, a very special one. He tried not to think of that and paid attention to what he was watching. Though he had seen it many times before, he never knew when he might spot something he had missed, some maneuver, some delay or some small unexpected movement of a tank in the Ukrainian command.

  Asymmetrical warfare. The unpredictable nature of those old films was also something that kept him riveted … looking for patterns. Even then, he was an engineer seeking order from chaos.

  The footage was shot on a spring afternoon in 2014, when a Russian tank column engaged a small division of four T-55s and three T-54s commanded by Captain Taras Klimovich, a young warrior nicknamed the Fox for his swift, unpredictable movements.

  Brave but a showoff, Yershov thought, watching the way Klimovich stood in the turret. A molokosos, he thought, using his grandmother’s term for a youth, a “milk sucker.” Although the Ukrainian tanks were old, they were simple and robust—which meant that they were reliable. Their D-10T 100-mm. rifled gun was inferior to most tank guns in the West or in Russia, but it could pump out a half-dozen rounds per minute, and hit a target sixteen thousand meters away.

  “There it is,” Yershov said, leaning forward slightly as he watched the battle unfold. “The disbursement, like a flower opening.”

  The most important advantage for Klimovich and his small division had nothing to do with armor or armament. They knew the terrain and had drilled endlessly in war games that anticipated just what was happening right now. While they remained out of range of the Russian tank column, Klimovich had his seven tanks split up and dashed through the foothills west of Labkovicy, hiding from the presumed Russian air cover that they expected would be following the T-90 column. But there was no air cover: the Russians had a rotary-wing Kamov Ka-137 up as a spotter. The unmanned aerial vehicle was also recording the battle.

  “Textbook,” Yershov said to himself. “Hide if you can. Create multiple targets on terrain familiar to you, not to the enemy.”

  He saw how the lead Russian tanks didn’t move as tentatively as they should have. That was General Novikov’s way. Get there—reach the target, hammer them hard, burn through your reserves to dispirit, kill, and crush them before they could attack you.

  Unfortunately for the Russians, actionable data from their UAV was slowed by the intervening terrain: trees corrupted the signal, and sunlight obscured key portions of the wooded area. Conversely, the Ukrainian tank division had line-of-view contact with their own Altair UAV recently purchased from Germany. Flying fourteen kilometers overhead and two kilometers to the east, well beyond the trees, the Altair—a European version of the American Predator B—had a clear view of the enemy tanks surging west as they emerged from the pine forest on the Russian side of the border.

  And then, as the flylike proxies buzzed overhead, the action commenced on the ground: at twelve thousand meters, the T-90s commenced running down an incline with their gun muzzles depressed below an effective firing angle for fully one hundred seconds. He let a half dozen of the enemy start down the hill before opening fire, to devastating effect.

  The Russian commander watched the video without feeling the sickness he’d felt the first time, seeing his column stricken along its flank. He watched, as he had many times, the Fox’s actions.

  “Once revealed, you force the enemy to divide and deploy, but after you hit them with your first salvo,” Yershov murmured.

  The audio was as distant as the images of destruction. The D-10T rifled gun began spitting out 100-mm. shells that roared toward the Russian tanks at a thousand meters per second. Well within the gun’s effective firing range, spear after spear of charcoal-gray smoke flew from the six tanks like noxious demons, rooted to the metal exterior of the tanks by bright red-yellow flashes. The vehicles hopped and swerved like wounded animals, fully half of them coming to a halt, the other half running with treads impaired, steering impossible. Those tanks that could retreat did. Those that could not lost their young crews to long stays in the Zamkova Correctional Colony.

  “And that, sadly, is how one man falls and another rises.”

  It had been three years since Yershov replaced Colonel General Nikolai Novikov as commander of the Western Military District … three long years to wait for a chance to avenge the shameful rout of the Russian tank command. He would never forget the look on Novikov’s face when he came to assume this post. The general had lost parts of two fingers in the battle when the turret hatch of his tank closed on his hand. He always wore a glove thereafter—though the effect it had was to call attention to the naked hand, the hand that no longer belonged to a warrior.

  Yershov would learn now whether he would get the chance that had wormed through his thoughts for those three years.

  The video was a forceful reminder of overconfidence and failure, both of which, thus far, were foreign to him. He had worked under Novikov in Tactics and Logistics
during the original Crimean incursion, and had written the white papers describing how to fight a modern skirmish—guidelines that Novikov had brashly ignored, woefully underestimating the enemy’s resourcefulness.

  He would have a chance to right that wrong and also to—

  The door of the large office opened quietly and a young senior lieutenant appeared, silhouetted against the darkness.

  “General, the motorcade is arriving.”

  Though the young man spoke quietly, there was palpable excitement in his voice. Yershov acknowledged with a nod and the door was shut. The general rose. He brushed his big hands down the front and sides of the proud olive tunic with red piping. He took his hat from the desk and fixed it under his arm, then walked slowly around the desk. His belly began to burn with uncharacteristic anticipation. This was a moment unlike any other in his life … different from moments in most lives.

  His boot heels thumped softly on the carpet, then loudly as he entered the bright corridor of the two-century-old neoclassical edifice. The lieutenant was waiting for him and fell in behind the general as they continued across the tiled ground-level hall to the main entrance.

  Yershov was at attention, as was the lieutenant behind him, as the Mercedes-Benz S-Class stretch limousine came to a stop between four other vehicles and a noisy police escort. The sedan looked like burnished coal under the bright spotlights of the main entrance. The sleek armored car had solid rubber tires and, above the hood on the passenger side, stood a rigid flag emblazoned with the ancient likeness of a double-headed imperial eagle, the orb and scepter of power in its talons. Unlike many of the older tanks in Yershov’s command, this vehicle could withstand a direct hit from a rocket.

  Unlike many of those tank crews, millions of people in this region of the world wanted the occupant of the state car dead, the general thought.

  Police and men in dark suits leaped from their vehicles and converged on the Mercedes, assault rifles in hand, eyes searching. Most of that was for show—or perhaps for the vanity of the man inside. No one had known about this visit, and very few people would: Yershov only just realized that there was no press, no state photographer. The Kremlin spokesperson, Valentina Zharov, was not present.