Tom Clancy's Op-Center--Dark Zone

by George Galdorisi

  From the far door, Yershov saw Maksim Timoshenko, the Russian Federation’s minister of defense, emerge. He looked directly at Yershov without expression—which was his usual expression—then came around the back of the vehicle. At the same time, a familiar figure eased from the door that his security detail had opened for him. He stood five feet seven and was dressed in a tailored suit the color and sheen of gunmetal. There was no jacket against the crisp late-spring air rolling off the Gulf of Finland. The man wore no tie below a face that seemed almost angelic, almost like a painting he had long-admired, Saint Luke Drawing the Virgin; his button-down white shirt was open at the top. That was a clear statement saying, “I am here so this visit is important, but my presence is also not official.”

  Yershov snapped out a strong salute as Vladimir Putin entered, followed by Timoshenko. The men returned it, followed by shakes, the Russian president clasping the elbow of this man he had never met—this general on whom a great honor was about to be bestowed.

  For why else come all the way to St. Petersburg, except to endorse—without a written order and with full deniability—the course of action Yershov had been urging. Why else come to St. Petersburg except for security, since Timoshenko was in the process of rehabilitating a ministry that he had described as “perilous with leaks, like the roof of Khrushchev’s old country dacha.” Only recently, a pair of Ukrainian spies had been working as translators in Counterterrorism Operations.

  His arm extending, Putin turned Yershov around with a slap on the much taller man’s shoulder, and the minister fell in beside the commander. Then the lieutenant—his presence unacknowledged—guided the men back to Yershov’s office, four sets of heels clacking like the military footfalls in Red Square on May Day, echoing through the corridor and across time, the familiar sounds of men prepared to make new war.…

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Op-Center Headquarters, Fort Belvoir North,

  Springfield, Virginia

  June 2, 1:22 PM

  Douglas Flannery’s voice was emotionally charged as he ended the call with the Russian.

  “Would someone please explain what you had me do?” the ambassador demanded.

  Chase Williams’s look told Dawson that he should continue running the conversation. The operations director put the phone on his knee, wiped his sweaty hand with a handkerchief.

  “Sir, we’ve uncovered information here that the Ukrainians may, in fact, have wanted the Russians to know that they have their eye on the armored column—and, in particular, one of the three expanded bases where they’re stationed.”

  “Why would anyone do something so obviously dangerous?” Flannery asked.

  “That’s what we’re trying to figure out, sir,” Williams said.

  “What—what kind of information?” Flannery asked.

  “A software program, Mr. Ambassador. I can’t say more than that right now,” the director said. It was his call, no one else’s, whether to release secret information.

  “What if you’re wrong?” Flannery said.

  “We found it,” Dawson said. “They surely did. They killed once for more information … they won’t stop there.”

  “They killed Galina for intelligence they think they gleaned … from a computer game?” Flannery said with disbelief.

  “It’s possible,” Dawson said. “Unless they tortured the spies Ms. Petrenko said they uncovered in the Kremlin.”

  “Two pieces of information leading to the same place,” Williams said.

  “Galina … she mentioned that the spies in New York were usually—well, she made it sound as if they were actually cooperative,” Flannery said. “You must be right.”

  “I think our intelligence director could explain Russian cells and their relation to Ukrainian cells better than I could.” Dawson looked over at Paul Bankole. “For our benefit, if nothing else.”

  Bankole wasn’t entirely sure what was going on, but Dawson had given him enough to tee off. “Intelligence cells are like organized crime—sometimes they feel the need to thin the ranks of the opposition. Unless there is a specific trajectory to the assassinations—for instance, to eliminate what we call the ‘bloodline,’ every member of a specific team—this goes back and forth randomly until both sides have had enough.”

  “This certainly smells like bloodline,” Dawson confirmed.

  “Then if we have favorites up or down that particular ladder, they should be alerted,” Bankole said. “Quickly.”

  “Ambassador Flannery?” Williams said. “Do you know others?”

  “I do not,” he said. “My God, all Galina had to do was tell them what I just told them and she would still be alive. Such a waste.”

  “Mr. Ambassador, we don’t know what the big picture is and what else the Russians may be looking for,” Dawson said. “It may also have been a long-simmering turf battle, as Paul indicated.”

  “I don’t mean to sound cold, but that’s in the past,” Williams said. “We have to talk about what happens next. Mr. Ambassador, would you mind staying on the line?”

  “If I can help,” Flannery said flatly.

  “I’m sure you can, thank you,” Williams replied.

  The ambassador’s low, sad monotone threw the room into its own mild depression. Williams leaned over and grabbed a bottle of water, unscrewed the cap, and took a long swallow. His palms were wet but his mouth was dry. Anne was wrong: the world was still off balance.

  “Chase,” Anne said, her tablet cradled in one forearm, “are we opening a general file or adding this to Aaron’s work?”

  “New,” he said.

  That nudged everyone into a higher level of alertness. Williams clearly thought there was a growing threat here. They all did. Only now it was official.

  “There are suddenly a lot of moving parts,” Wright said, looking down at his smartphone. “More than we’ve said.” He waggled the phone and looked at Williams. “I just got an NYPD counterterrorism alert. The wound on the dead woman matches the way an Estonian diplomat was killed last year in Chinatown.”

  While everyone was processing that information, the ambassador spoke.

  “That was Maarten Laht,” Flannery said. “Very outspoken, virulently anti-Putin.”

  “Was that a lone-wolf hit or is there a connection?” Williams asked.

  “The killer was never found,” said the domestic crisis manager. “But—hold on.” Wright was typing on his phone. “Mr. Laht was not a contract killing, as far as we could determine. None of our for-hire sources had heard of it. Forensics on that killing,” he continued typing, reading, “showed traces of—oh boy, what they described as plastic with ‘lacing,’ a substance used to create a brushed-metal appearance on credit cards. One of our contacts in the Ukraine Security Service heard of a Russian who killed, presumably, with a sharpened credit card after a man was found dead in the Nikitsky Botanical Garden in Crimea. Flecks of gold paint were found in the wound. The dead man was a journalist, Stanislav Vovk.”

  “Who, I’m guessing, opposed the Russian invasion,” Dawson said.

  Bankole nodded.

  “So, an assassin, loyal to Putin, killed Laht and now most likely Galina,” Williams said. “What does that get us?”

  “A starting point,” Bankole said. “Our killer is an institutional assassin, someone who watches only certain groups, probably one at a time—so he can also watch his own back against retaliation—and has a great deal of latitude for independent action.”

  “A license to kill,” Dawson said.

  “In a way, yes,” Bankole said. “If this individual has been charged with eliminating Ukrainian assets or impediments—” He paused. “I’m sorry, Mr. Ambassador. I didn’t mean to be impersonal there.”

  “I understand,” Flannery said.

  “My point is, this killer clearly moves around and is probably very knowledgeable about other Russian agents working around the globe,” Bankole said. “He’s going to be like a dog with a bone on this one, looking for anyone w
ho can tell him more. And, once again—quickly.”

  “I want this,” Dawson said suddenly.

  Williams regarded him. “Want what?”

  “New York, the assassin,” Dawson said. “I want to find him.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? As a primary conduit for international or domestic crisis response—”

  “Brian, I wrote that job description,” Williams said, cutting him off.

  Anne scowled at Dawson, who should have known better than to quote the regulations to Williams.

  “Okay,” Dawson said. This time he thought for a moment before speaking. The truth was, this command center was closing in. He didn’t want to sit here and think, he wanted to go to New York and act. Carolina—she’d made him want to run anywhere, and that would pass, but he was eager to be in the field again—any field.

  “Okay…?” Williams pressed.

  “We have to find the point of origin here,” Dawson said, this time more thoughtfully. “We have to see what, if any, American interests beyond our diplomat may be at risk. This killer probably knows every move in the NYPD and FBI playbooks. Let me see if I can surprise him. We may only get RUMINT, but even rumors and gossip will give us something.”

  Williams took only a moment to decide. He could tell that the former Fifth Special Forces Group commander was restlessly eager, but Dawson was also a good man in the field. And Williams would still have Anne and the rest of the team. Op-Center didn’t have many redundancies, but it had great people capable of multitasking.

  “Take Mike,” Williams said.

  Dawson frowned. “We need subtle. Even in civvies, the guy screams ‘soldier on leave.’”

  “Which is exactly what you’ll need in case you find what you’re looking for,” Williams said with a take-it-or-leave-it expression. “And you two have a history.”

  “So does Ukraine and Russia,” Dawson said.

  “I’ll alert him,” Anne said before Dawson could protest further.

  Based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, Mike Volner was the Joint Special Operations Command leader for Op-Center, responsible for organizing and deploying all military operations ordered by Williams.

  Before terminating the connection with Flannery, Dawson asked the ambassador how much longer he would be in his office.

  “I usually leave around six,” he replied.

  “Would you mind, sir, waiting until I contact you?” Dawson asked. He looked at his watch. “I should actually be in your neighborhood about that time.”

  “I’ll do that,” the ambassador replied. “Thank you.”

  Dawson thanked him and killed the connection.

  The operations director left with Anne while Williams reviewed departmental matters and general housekeeping with staff members. As Dawson himself had once put it, “Even in a crisis, the bureaucracy soldiers on.”

  Anne turned to him when they were in the corridor. “Whatever is on your mind, it’s scrambled eggs,” she said.

  “Yeah, there’s a lot going on, but that doesn’t mean I can’t do this without a twenty-nine-year-old 40 Mike-Mike,” the operations director complained.

  The play on Volner’s name was a reference to an M-16 mounted M203 grenade launcher—a slam at the young veteran’s penchant for blunt, some would say, action.

  “Did it occur to you that Chase was doing you a favor?” Anne asked.

  “How?”

  “After we left the Tank, he told me to put Mike and another JSOC team member on standby.”

  “For New York?”

  She nodded. “You bumped Sergeant Moore. He has family in Brooklyn. He won’t be happy.”

  Dawson scowled. “Okay. So I put my foot in that one.”

  “You did,” she agreed. She pointed a finger at her tablet. “Was there anything else? I’ve got to arrange for transportation with the travel office.”

  “No, sorry, thanks,” Dawson said as if they were a compound word. It was a bad habit of his, becoming flustered whenever women were incontrovertibly right. Again.

  “I’ll text you your departure information,” she said.

  Dawson smiled awkwardly and left, just as the others were filing out of Williams’s office. The men were all engaged in pockets of conversation except for his buddy Wright, who was on the phone. He shut the door behind him and gave Dawson a thumbs-up. It was the crisis manager’s usual hail-fellow-well-met departing gesture—but right now it was a lifeline.

  Feeling settled suddenly, Dawson turned and headed for the elevator.

  CHAPTER NINE

  St. Petersburg, Russia

  June 2, 8:33 PM

  The large conference room was wood paneling and marble, oil paintings and vintage globes, overhead lighting that bordered on candlit-amber—a respect for the past without the particular heritage represented by the czars and their abuses.

  The president encouraged Yershov to enter before him, with the defense minister bringing up the rear and shutting the door behind him. Water glasses and crystal decanters had been set before three places at the rectangular burl conference table. Here Vladimir Putin went directly to the head of the table. He extended his arms to both sides and the men all sat in unison. It was a silent display of respect by the officers and of silent command by the leader.

  It gave Yershov an unprecedented thrill. This general who had walked down the aisle at a very young and uncertain age, who had been in combat, who had seen a Soyuz-FG booster rip from its moorings and carry a crew into space—this unsheltered witness to history suddenly felt as if the world revolved around this place, this moment. He had listened over and over to the speech the president had given before Parliament a year earlier, on the seventy-fifth anniversary of Nazi Germany’s military aggression against the Soviet Union. Putin had been speaking for men like Yershov when he said, “NATO is strengthening its aggressive rhetoric and its aggressive actions near our borders. In these conditions, we are duty-bound to pay special attention to solving the task of strengthening the combat readiness of our country.”

  But it was more than Putin’s nationalism, more than his charisma, more than his attitude. Power was not an incident; it was a physical and spiritual quality unlike anything Yershov had ever experienced.

  There were notepads at each seat but no electronics. There were no security cameras in the room. This meeting was not only off the record; it was off the radar. It was a place where concepts like “law-abiding” and “villainous” didn’t exist. There was only “policy,” and that was in the hands of one man.

  The president settled his arms on the table and folded those hands. He looked down at them. “It is good to be home,” he said softly. A slight turn of his head indicated that he was addressing Yershov. “I was born here, you know.”

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  Putin looked down at his hands, then flattened them on the table. “General, I have read all your white papers on Operation Gray Wolf, and I have discussed them with my top advisers. I have decided to postpone the assault phase in favor of a strategically enhanced buildup.”

  The jowly expression of Defense Minister Timoshenko did not change. Yershov stiffened visibly but remained silent.

  Putin continued to stare. He permitted a moment to pass for his order to sink in before continuing.

  “During World War Two, my father was stationed near Leningrad, on the Neva—Maksim, you know he was wounded there.”

  “A very, very brave man, sir,” the defense minister said gravely. “As was your brother, in Leningrad, rest his heroic soul.”

  Putin acknowledged the comment with a barely audible “Thank you,” then turned to Yershov. “My father used to tell a story of how the patrols would march in a circle, within the concealment of trees and boulders, to convince the enemy that the Nevsky Pyatachok region was more heavily defended than it was.” He circled his index finger, pointing down at the tabletop, then grinned. “It’s an old tactic used in Greece, Rome, Persia—but an effective way of avoiding needless conflict
.” Putin looked at Yershov with steady eyes. “Needless,” he repeated. “There must be no hesitation, no backing down when combat is necessary.”

  Putin sat back as if he were relaxing, though there was a stiffness to his movements, like a coiled snake on a cold night.

  “I want to enter a Ukraine that is free of resistance,” he went on. “I want the Russian presence in Sudzha to appear so overwhelming that there will be no need to fight. Yes, yes, we have the tanks, we have the personnel, we have the artillery to go in. But psychology is the war of the future. Through ingenious deployment, around-the-clock activity, visible high spirits among the troops, I want Sudzha to cast a shadow, a dark zone, so absolute that no one would dare to challenge us. Then we move without hindrance. This is not the mutual assured destruction that guided the nuclear age. It is an enemy living with the fear of assured destruction so absolute that our very presence will cause capitulation. War without war, conquest without loss.” He tapped his right temple. “A siege of the mind.”

  “It is a difficult concept for old warriors like us to embrace,” Timoshenko said, speaking directly to Yershov. “But there is wisdom in this approach. Courage.”

  “And éclat,” Putin said with a flourish. “Victory through reputation through intimidation.”

  Yershov understood: that was how Putin had gained power, through daunting object lessons. When the man became president in 1999, foes of every stripe were hammered flat. Imprisoned, murdered. Militarily, he showed no mercy in Syria, in Crimea. Yershov knew that those adventures had come at a heavy cost—national pensions pilfered for funds, foreign sanctions endured—but Russians had suffered many times for the state. He assumed they would do so again.

  Was he wrong?

  “General,” Putin went on—paternally, now—“I need for you to go to Sudzha and make this happen. Keep morale high, eyes on the western horizon. Training must continue as if war were to come at any moment. And, of course, if it does we will be ready to fight it.” Putin looked at the defense minister. “Maksim, have you anything to add?”