Stephen Coonts' Deep Black: Arctic Gold

by Arctic Gold (epub)

  Well, at least he was off the Art Room’s radar for a precious few moments. Aircraft navigation systems could be thrown off by signals from a field op’s comm unit, hence the injunction to turn off all electronic gear during takeoff and landing. If anyone was going to try something stupid, this would be the time to try it, with the Art Room effectively out of the picture.

  But save for the somewhat too-obvious watchfulness of the FBI guys, everyone in first class appeared to be acting with complete indifference both to him and to Spencer.

  Karr caught the pretty attendant’s glance as she chattered on into her microphone about wing exits and emergency landings, and winked.

  He wondered if he would be able to get a phone number from her before they reached London.

  DeFrancesa

  Operation Magpie

  Waterfront, St. Petersburg

  0024 hours

  Lia DeFrancesca took a moment to run the palm-sized lock scanner along the entire perimeter of the door and around the lock itself, its powerful magnetic field probing for wiring or other signs of hidden electronic devices. The digital readout remained unchanging, indicating the presence of iron and steel but not of electric currents.

  Slipping the scanner into a thigh pocket in her black field ops suit, she produced a set of lock picks and began to work at the ancient padlock securing the door’s hasp.

  “Hurry; hurry,” her partner whispered with fierce urgency. “If we’re found . . .”

  “Patience, Sergei,” she replied. “We don’t want to rush this.”

  She was having more trouble with the rust than with the padlock’s mechanism. With a click, the lock snapped open, and she pulled it off the hasp.

  A foghorn mourned in the damp night air. The warehouse loomed above the waterfront, overlooking Kozhevennaya Liniya to one side, the oily black waters of the southern mouth of the Lena River on the other. A chill and dripping fog shrouded their surroundings, muffling sound. Carefully she edged the sliding door open, but stopped after moving it only a couple of inches.

  “What is it?” her companion asked. “What’s wrong?”

  She didn’t answer immediately, but pocketing the lock tools, she pulled out a cell phone and a length of flexible tubing, as thick as a soda straw. One end of the tubing attached to the cell phone; the other she inserted into the partly opened door to the warehouse, turning the fiber-optic cable this way and that to let her peer around the corners. On the phone’s screen, an image painted in blacks, greens, and yellows shifted and slid with the movements of her hand, giving her an infrared image of what lay beyond the door. She saw large open spaces . . . piles of crates . . . a trash can near the door . . . discarded junk . . . but no glow from warm-blooded humans lying in wait.

  “Okay,” Lia said at last. “It’s clear.”

  Sergei Alekseev rolled the door far enough aside that they could enter. He was scared. Lia could almost smell his fear, could feel it in the way he stared and started at shadows, the way he moved, hunched over and rigid. Replacing the IR viewer, on the ground beside the door she placed a motion sensor, like several dozen button-sized devices she’d already dropped around the area. Only then did she extract a small flashlight and switch it on. “Which way?”

  “Over here,” Alekseev said, pointing. “I think.”

  “You’d better know.”

  “Da. This way.”

  Before moving deeper into the darkness, Lia tried her communicator again. “Verona,” she said aloud. “This is Juliet.”

  A burst of static sounded in her ear, loud enough to make her wince. She thought she heard a voice somewhere behind the audio snow, but couldn’t make out the words.

  It would help if Romeo were here. Where the hell was he, anyway? With a small satellite dish on top of one of the surrounding buildings, they might have a chance of punching through this interference.

  “Verona,” she said again. “Juliet. Initiating Magpie!”

  Again, static.

  Damn. . . .

  The Art Room

  NSA Headquarters

  Fort Meade, Maryland

  1624 hours EDT

  “What do you mean, we’ve lost her?” William Rubens demanded.

  “We’re just getting fragments, sir,” Sarah Cassidy replied from her console. “Her signal is intermittent. It might be the sunspots.”

  Rubens bit back a most unprofessional word. Sunspots. . . .

  Desk Three’s communications system depended upon a necklace of military comm satellites parked in geosynchronous orbit twenty-two thousand miles above the equator. Lia currently was working pretty far north—at sixty degrees north, in fact, the same latitude as the southern tip of Greenland. That meant that in the city of St. Petersburg, the comsats hung low in the southern sky, subject to interference from buildings, transmission lines, and any other horizon-blocking obstacles.

  Add to that the fact that the sun was approaching the most active phase of its regular eleven-year cycle. Increased sunspot activity, solar flares, auroras in the highly charged upper atmosphere in the far north and south . . . it all meant that communications with field operatives could be a bit ragged at times.

  But damn it all! He looked around the huge high-tech chamber known within the NSA as the Art Room, scowling at communications consoles and computer displays and satellite feeds. Hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of technology. What good was it all if it didn’t work? . . .

  “What about her backup?” he demanded.

  “Romeo’s not in position yet,” Sarah told him. She indicated the big screen dominating one wall of the Art Room. It showed a highly detailed intelligence satellite photo of St. Petersburg’s waterfront district, the southern shore of Vasilyevsky Island close against the southern estuary of the Neva River. A winking white point of light marked one of a line of warehouses along the wharf, together with the name “DeFrancesca” in white letters. A second white marker blinked several blocks away, on the Kosaya Liniya, accompanied by the legend “Akulinin.”

  “It’s these buildings, sir,” Jeff Rockman said. He used a laser pointer on the screen, indicating several tall warehouses and skyscrapers across the river on the south bank of the Neva. “They must be blocking her signal.”

  Rubens picked up a microphone. “Romeo. This is Shakespeare.”

  “Copy,” a voice said from an overhead speaker, harsh with static.

  “Where are you?”

  “If you’re in the Art Room, I assume that’s a rhetorical question, sir,” Akulinin replied. But he added, “I’m driving southwest on Kosaya. Just passing Detskaya.”

  Rubens glared at the satellite map on the wall above him, which mirrored Akulinin’s description. Damn it, Lia should have clapped a hold on things until her partner could get into position. Alekseev, their Russian contact, had been too anxious, however, too skittish, and Lia had told the Art Room that she was going in, whether she had backup or not.

  “We think Lia is inside the building. We’re not getting a clear signal. We need you in place to relay her transmissions . . . and to watch for the opposition.”

  “Yes, sir.” Akulinin’s voice was momentarily garbled by static. Then, “I should be there in five minutes.”

  “Make it faster. I don’t like the way this one is playing out.”

  Operation Magpie had been running rough since its inception. A good intelligence op flowed, like a carefully orchestrated ballet. Every operative had a place and a task, a precise and meticulously choreographed passage of a ballet. Of course, many of the dancers didn’t even know they were performing—the local contacts, the informers, the marks, the opposition. The only way to keep them in the dance was for the operatives to stay in complete control of the situation . . . meaning each of them was where he or she was supposed to be when he or she was supposed to be there, leading the unwilling and hopefully clueless participants in the drama through their steps and turns without their ever knowing they were onstage.

  Of course things were bound
to go wrong from time to time, but good operators could ad lib until things were back in control, back in the flow.

  This time around, Rubens thought, someone had lost the beat, and now the situation was fast slipping into chaos.

  The ballet, he thought, was fast on its way to becoming a brawl.

  “What is the current position of Ghost Blue?” Rubens demanded. He didn’t want to use that option, but . . .

  Ghost Blue was an F-22 Raptor deployed hours ago out of Lakenheath. Stealthier than the F-117 Nighthawk, which it was currently in the process of replacing, more reliable than the smaller, robotic F-47C UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles), the F-22 had sophisticated avionics and onboard computer gear that allowed it to serve as an advance platform for ELINT, electronics intelligence, enabling it to pick up transmissions from the ground and relay them back to Fort Meade via the constellation of military comsats.

  “Ninety-six miles west-northwest of St. Petersburg, sir,” James Higgins replied from another console. “Over the Gulf of Finland, tucked in close by the Finnish-Russian border.”

  “Send him in.”

  “Yes, sir.” Higgins hesitated. “Uh, that requires special—”

  “I know what it requires. Send him in.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Ninety-six miles. Ghost Blue would be staying subsonic to maintain his stealth signature, so that was seven and a half minutes’ flight time . . . or a bit less to a point where he would be able to intercept Magpie’s transmissions. Call it seven minutes.

  Of course, this was a flagrant violation of Russian airspace and territorial sovereignty. At the moment, the Raptor was loitering unseen within Finnish airspace, also a violation of territorial boundaries, but not so deadly a sin as moving into Russian territory. St. Petersburg sat like a spider within a far-flung web of radar installations and surface-to-air missile sites, protecting dozens of high-value military installations in and around the city.

  And if anyone could defeat U.S. stealth technology, it was the Russians. In 1999, Yugoslav forces had scored a kill, probably with Russian help, shooting down an F-117 with an SA-3 missile. The pilot had been rescued, but Yugoslav forces had grabbed the wreckage—and almost certainly turned it over to the Russians for study. The Russians, it was well known, were very interested in learning how to defeat American stealth technology.

  Rubens had just kicked up the ante in an already dangerous game.

  He reached for a telephone on the console beside him.

  DeFrancesa

  Operation Magpie

  Waterfront, St. Petersburg

  0025 hours

  Well, they’d warned her she might find herself out of communications with the Art Room. There was nothing Lia could do about it now, however.

  Like all Desk Three field operatives, Lia had a tiny speaker unit implanted in her skull just behind her left ear. The microphone was attached to her black utilities, while the antenna was coiled up in her belt. The system provided safe, clear, secure communications . . . usually. It was a bitch, though, when the technology failed.

  Still, the satellite dish receivers at Fort Meade were a lot better as antennas than the wire in her belt. It was possible that they were receiving her back in the Art Room even if she couldn’t hear them.

  She would have to keep operating on that assumption.

  What she couldn’t rely on was the Art Room warning her of approaching threats.

  She tried raising her backup. “Romeo, this is Juliet.”

  Nothing. And that was worrying. It meant she and Alekseev were on their own.

  Alekseev had moved ahead and was searching the huge chamber now with his own flashlight. She could see stacks of crates, some covered in tarpaulins, looming out of the darkness.

  But one large crate was off by itself, near the back wall of the warehouse. She could see words stenciled in bold, black Cyrillic lettering on the sides: stahnka.

  Machine parts.

  Akulinin

  Operation Magpie

  St. Petersburg

  0026 hours

  Ilya Ilyitch Akulinin peered ahead through fog and cold drizzle, past the monotonous beat of the rented car’s windshield wipers. Kosaya came to a T at Kozhevennaya Liniya, and he turned the ugly little Citroën right.

  That put him in a narrow canyon, with two- and three-story structures, most with façades of either concrete blocks or rusting sheet metal, looming to either side. Lia should be in the third warehouse in the row on the left side of the street; he pulled over to the curb and parked. He didn’t want to get too close.

  Akulinin was new to the National Security Agency and Desk Three. Born in Brooklyn, the son of naturalized Russian immigrants, he’d joined the Army out of high school and served as a Green Beret with the Army Special Forces, where his fluency in Russian had put him in great demand in joint operations with America’s new ally, the Russian Federation. His had been among the first American boots on the ground in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, just prior to the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan.

  Leaving the car, he dropped a button-sized sensor on the street, then walked across the street with casual nonchalance. If anyone was watching, they would see a tall, blond man in laborer’s coveralls, carrying a large toolbox. Reaching a warehouse two down from the one Lia should be in, he stepped into the narrow junk- and garbage-littered space between two buildings and began looking for a way up. There was a ladder—or the remnants of one—but it began halfway up the side of the building. The rest had rusted away, or been stolen long ago.

  Much of St. Petersburg’s infrastructure showed the same advanced state of decay and crumbling collapse. Many of the buildings in this area were abandoned, and scavangers had long since stripped them of copper, lead, brass, and anything else they could pry loose, haul off, and sell.

  He stepped over a pile of garbage and a set of rusted bedsprings. Something large and furry squeaked as it scuttled from beneath an overturned two-legged chair.

  At least, he thought, he shouldn’t have an audience here tonight.

  Except for the rats.

  DeFrancesa

  Operation Magpie

  Waterfront, St. Petersburg

  0027 hours

  Removing yet another small gray case from a pouch on her combat blacks, Lia slipped a plug into her ear and held the device itself out in front of her. Instantly a staccato burst of clicks, harsh as the earlier static, sounded in her ear as numerals appeared on the small LED readout screen.

  “Machine parts, my ass,” she said.

  “It is radioactive, yes?” Alekseev said.

  “It is radioactive, yes.”

  “It is not harmful, I was told,” Alekseev told her. “I was told—”

  “Not harmful unless there’s prolonged exposure,” Lia corrected him. “So let’s get this the hell over with and get out of here. Give me the pry.”

  “Huh? Oh, yes.” He handed her one of the tools he’d been carrying at his belt, a short pry bar. She used it to jimmy up one of the boards on the crate’s top with a sharp squeak of dry wood and bending staples, giving her a peek inside.

  The crate was filled with what looked like thin sheets of metal, dull steel-gray, gleaming in the flash beam. Bingo.

  But just to be sure . . .

  Akulinin

  Operation Magpie

  Waterfront, St. Petersburg

  0027 hours

  Placing some more sensors, Akulinin emerged from the alley on a broad concrete promenade. The fog clung low and close above the black flow of the Neva. A thousand yards across the water lay a Russian Navy shipyard, but he could see no sign of it, not even a fog-shrouded light. Somewhere in the distance, a buoy-mounted bell clanged fitfully with the chop of the water, followed by the lowing of a foghorn.

  Sticking to the shadows next to the line of dilapidated warehouses, he began making his way toward Lia’s position.

  When Ilya Akulinin had left the Army, shortly after his third tour in Afghanistan, he’d been approached by a recru
iter with the the National Security Agency. The NSA was America’s premier eavesdropping agency, and they, too, could use a man with his language skills, experience, and security clearances.

  That had been just three years ago. After six months of training in Georgia and at the CIA’s “Farm” at Camp Peary, near Williamsburg, Virginia, they’d put him at a desk listening to electronic intercepts from Russia . . . for the most part tracking the activities and the shadowy members of Russia’s far-flung criminal underground.

  Crouching beside a rust-clotted cliff of sheet metal, the southwestern wall of an empty warehouse, he paused to check his communications link with the Art Room. “Verona, this is Romeo,” he called softly . . . but the answer came as a harsh burst of static. The surrounding buildings, concrete and metal, must be blocking the signal. He’d thought that perhaps here, directly next to the water, he would have a clean line of sight to a satellite, but evidently there were buildings across the Neva high enough to block the signal. He would need to get up high for a clear line of sight . . . and it would be better if he could deploy a small dish antenna and get a good lock on a comsat.

  He touched his belt, changing frequencies. “Juliet, Juliet,” he called. “Wherefore art thou, Juliet?”

  “Knock it off, Romeo,” was her response. Her voice was scratchy, with a lot of static, but he could hear her well enough. “We’re almost done here.”

  “Where do you want me?”

  “Sit tight. Everything’s cool. Where are you?”

  “On the ground, at the corner of the warehouse southeast of you, about fifty yards from your position.”

  “Stay put. We’ll be done in a second.”

  “Roger that.”

  He waited. The damp breeze off the water made him shiver.

  Akulinin had endured the boredom of a desk job for the next couple of years after his recruitment, until last month when out of the blue they’d asked him to volunteer for a routine but possibly dangerous operation in Russia. After almost two years of listening to recorded voices and filing ream upon electronic ream of reports, of course he’d volunteered.