He’d volunteered without ever having heard of Desk Three. And that had proven to be quite a revelation in itself.
The National Security Agency was the largest of America’s intelligence agencies, and the most secretive, the least known. The old joke held that the letters stood for “Never Say Anything” or, more sinister still, for “No Such Agency.” The NSA’s charter had given it two basic missions—creating codes to ensure national security and breaking the codes of other nations. The few people who’d even heard of the organization assumed it handled nothing but SIGINT—signals intelligence—that it was a security-conscious band of mathematicians, programmers, cryptographers, and similar geeks who would never get their hands dirty on an actual black op overseas. That was the sort of thing left to the CIA. . . .
But the Deputy Director of the NSA, William Rubens, had approached him in one of the staff cafeterias last January and asked if he would consider transferring to the Agency’s Desk Three, where both his language skills and his combat training and experience as a Green Beanie were badly needed. Some outpatient surgery to plant a communications device behind his ear, another month at a specialist school at the CIA’s Farm, a quick series of briefings bringing him up to speed on something called Operation Magpie, and he’d found himself on a plane bound for Pulkovo International Airport.
And so far the mission had, indeed, seemed pretty routine. He and Lia had entered the country on separate flights, linked up in a seemingly casual encounter beneath Alexander’s Column in the Palace Square in front of the Hermitage. That night, they’d picked up their special mission equipment where their support team had left it, in a well-hidden drop on the shore of a wooded lake in Primorskiy Park. Yesterday Lia had met with the furtive Sergei Alekseev in an out-of-the-way teahouse off the Nevsky Prospect while Akulinin had provided backup, listening in unobtrusively from a nearby table.
And Alekseev had brought them here.
But now things were turning sour. Akulinin had been supposed to be here forty minutes ago, before Lia and Alekseev even arrived, scoping out the dockyard and the approaches to the warehouse and setting up a satellite dish on top of a nearby building to provide reliable communications with the Art Room. No one had counted on his being stopped by that damned officious traffic inspector demanding to see his papers . . . or the need for him to bribe his way back onto the road.
Anxiously he watched the front of the warehouse, waiting for Lia and Alekseev to emerge. Smears of wet illumination from a couple of streetlights up on Kozhevennaya Liniya cast just enough of a mist-shrouded glow for him to see the main door and a line of loading docks above a parking lot.
Opening his workman’s toolbox, he extracted his weapon—an H&K MP5K PDW—a compact little submachine gun chosen precisely because its fourteen-and-a-half-inch length would fit into a standard tool kit. He opened the folding stock and felt it lock, snapped in a thirty-round magazine, and dragged back the charging lever to chamber a round.
“Come on, come on,” he muttered, half-aloud.
2
DeFrancesa
Operation Magpie
Waterfront, St. Petersburg
0029 hours
LIA USED AN AEROSOL SPRAY from a canister the size of a lipstick to mist over one corner of the metal. She then twisted the cylinder of her flashlight sharply clockwise. The visible beam snapped off, but in its place, the wet corner of the metal took on a magical green-blue luminosity, glowing brightly in the near darkness.
“What is that?” Alekseev asked.
“A solution of sulfonated hydroxybenzoquinoline,” Lia replied, rattling off the tongue twister with practiced ease. “It fluoresces in the presence of beryllium and an ultraviolet light source.” It was all the proof she needed.
“It is as I told you, yes?”
“Yes, it is. You did good, Sergei. Hold the board for me.”
As Alekseev held the crate open, she took a final device from a pouch, a flexible bit of metallic foil the size and thickness of a postage stamp, its surface precisely the same dull gray as the beryllium shipment. Reaching gingerly into the crate, she slapped the rectangle onto the metal at one corner, pressing it hard to activate the sticky side. Then she nodded to Alekseev, and he lowered the loosened slat, working the protruding ends of the staples back into the wood so that it was not evident that the crate had been opened.
She checked her cell phone, this time tuning it to the low-level signal emitted by the tracking device they’d just planted. When she sent a low-frequency RF signal, the microtransponder on the chip caught the pulse and flashed it back, a good, sharp signal.
“Verona, Juliet,” she said, just in case they were reading her back at the Art Room. “We found the shipment. Tracking device is in place, transponder test positive. We’re initiating our E and E.”
Still, nothing but static.
They started for the front of the warehouse.
Akulinin
Operation Magpie
Waterfront, St. Petersburg
0030 hours
The sound of a vehicle engine startled Akulinin. It was coming from behind, moving toward him along the concrete wharf. He turned, crouching low to stay out of sight behind another pile of discarded rust- and rat-infested trash. One . . . no, two cars were approaching, driving up the wharf with their lights off. They raced past, then turned into the trailer-loading area in front of Lia’s warehouse.
Not good. . . .
“Lia!” he called urgently. “Lia! We have company!”
Car doors slammed as men tumbled out into the night. He counted ten, five in each vehicle. It was tough to see in the dim light, but they appeared to be wearing civilian clothing. Reaching into the tool kit again, he fished out a set of OVGN6 binoculars, a compact handheld unit with two eyepieces but only a single light amplifier tube. Switching the unit on, he pressed it to his eyes.
Under LI, details sprang into sharp, close focus.
He could see their weapons. . . .
DeFrancesa
Operation Magpie
Waterfront, St. Petersburg
0030 hours
Lia and Alekseev were halfway back to the warehouse entrance when Akulinin’s warning came through. An instant later, they heard the bang of car doors outside.
“This way!” Lia hissed, tugging at Alekseev’s elbow. She moved off to the right, ducking behind the shelter offered by a stack of wooden crates. It took her a moment to realize that Alekseev hadn’t followed her, that he was still standing in the open with a deer-in-the-headlights look to him.
A hollow boom echoed through the warehouse, followed by the sound of the main door sliding open. An instant later, the lights snapped on, the overhead lights first, then the glare of a powerful spot from the main entrance.
“Stoy!” a voice boomed from behind the light. “Ktah v’ takoi?”
“Nyeh strelyaii!” Alekseev screamed, throwing his hands straight up in the air.
But Lia was already moving, plunging out of the light and into the shadows cast by stacks of crates to her right. She pulled her weapon from its holster, an accurized .45-caliber H&K SOCOM pistol fitted with an under-barrel laser sight and with the muzzle threaded to accept a suppressor. She was already pulling out the sound suppressor and screwing it down tight as more shouting sounded from behind her.
Alekseev, she thought, had been pretty damned quick to surrender, and she wondered if she’d been set up. It was possible. Alekseev was Desk Three’s link to one of the local branches of the Organizatsiya, the Russian mafia.
It was the Organization that Desk Three was up against this time. That radioactive beryllium in the crate back there had come from a nuclear power facility in Rybinsk, stolen by members of the Russian mafia either in or working with the Russian military.
And the word was that the shipment had been sold to the highest bidder—which in this case happened to be the nation of Iran.
Beryllium possesses some interesting properties that make it invaluable within the
nuclear industry. It doesn’t absorb neutrons well, which makes it ideal as a neutron reflector and moderator in atomic piles. More significant, if the sphere of plutonium within a nuclear weapon is surrounded by a beryllium shell, preventing neutrons from escaping, much less plutonium is necessary in order for the weapon to achieve critical mass—and detonation.
“American!” a harsh voice snapped in English, echoing through the warehouse. “You cannot escape! Throw down your weapons and come out!”
Were the attackers mafia enforcers? Police? Or military? She had to find out. Moving silently, staying in the shadows, she worked her way around behind the stacks of warehoused crates, edging closer to the front entrance. There were several other doors to the building as well, she knew from her studies of the structure’s blueprints before her deployment, but she also knew that those would be watched. She would have a better chance where the opposition had already entered the building.
Maybe. . . .
Akulinin
Operation Magpie
Waterfront, St. Petersburg
0031 hours
Akulinin watched as several of the men pushed through the open front door on the southeastern face of the warehouse. Others were spreading out to the left and right, moving to cover other entrances. He could hear shouting coming from inside, in Russian.
Through the light-intensifier binoculars, he could clearly see that the newcomers were wearing civilian clothing, which meant nothing. They might be OMON, MVD, or local militia, or they could even be Russian Army wearing low-profile civvies. The weapons they carried were definitely military-issue assault rifles, however, AK-74s and AKMs.
It was also distinctly possible that they were Organizatsiya enforcers. Alekseev had been a member of one of the major organized-crime groups, the Blues, but when Desk Three approached him, had been willing to help in exchange for asylum for himself and his family.
“Lia?” Akulinin called over the tactical channel. “You reading me?”
“Yeah.” She sounded out of breath. “Who are these guys?”
“Not sure. They’re wearing civvies . . . with military weapons. Are you okay?”
“So far. Stay put. I’m trying to reach the southwest door.”
He swung his night-vision device in that direction. “You’ve got two goons outside,” he told her. “Just waiting.”
“Can you take them down?”
“Not without alerting half of St. Petersburg.” The MP5K did not have a sound suppressor, unlike some of its larger and more cumbersome cousins. Besides, the range to those two sentries was better than seventy yards . . . a hell of a long range to tap someone with that weapon. To make matters worse, a sheet-tin storage shed built just off the corner of the warehouse was partially blocking his view. He couldn’t be sure there were only two men there.
“Copy,” Lia said. “Wait a second. . . .”
The Art Room
NSA Headquarters
Fort Meade, Maryland
1632 hours EDT
“Ghost Blue is now inside of Russian airspace,” Rubens said. He held the telephone handset to his ear while looking up at the big screen above him. The map’s zoom had been pulled back to show the entirety of the St. Petersburg area, from Primorsk on the Gulf of Finland to Kirovsk, twenty-five miles east of the city. At this scale, the white pinpoints marking Lia and Akulinin had merged into a single point on the southern point of Vasilyevsky Island; a new flashing icon had just appeared at the extreme left, moving in across the Gulf of Finland on a heading straight for St. Petersburg.
“Is there any sign of a reaction from the Russians?” Dr. Donna Bing wanted to know.
“Not so far, ma’am,” Rubens replied.
“The President will have to be informed,” the National Security Director said. She sounded angry, and Rubens knew she had cause. Ghost Blue had been built into Magpie from the beginning as a backup in case of unforeseen technical difficulties, but no one had actually expected that option to be put into play.
The big danger was that Bing would use this in her power-play shenanigans against Desk Three. She’d tried it before.
“How long before the plane is over the city?”
“It won’t actually overfly the city, ma’am,” Rubens replied. “It will orbit about ten miles out, out over the Gulf of Finland. That should be close enough for them to pick up our agents’ transmissions. He should be at his loiter point in . . . five more minutes.”
“I don’t like this, Rubens,” Bing told him. “Not one damned bit. We have no business putting a military aircraft that deep into Russian airspace.”
Rubens, always the diplomat, did not point out that the United States had no outwardly legitimate business putting human agents into Russian territory, either . . . or that both Russia and the United States had a very long history of intruding into each other’s territories when they needed to do so.
Of course, both countries had long used all kinds of assets to keep tabs on each other, from human agents to spy satellites to submarines to ELINT and reconnaissance aircraft. Of those various means of gathering intelligence, though, aircraft made the people in Washington the most nervous.
No doubt the shoot-down of Captain Francis Gary Powers’ U-2 over Sverdlovsk in May of 1960 had something to do with that.
“Ghost Blue knows what he’s doing,” Rubens told the National Security Director. “He’ll know if he’s being picked up by the St. Petersburg air defense net, and he has means by which he can evade any hostiles.”
A rather sweeping generalization, that. Rubens wasn’t trying to be misleading, but he was oversimplifying to a rather alarming degree. So very much could go wrong in an op like this one. It was impossible to predict how it would come together.
Or fall apart.
“Your tail is riding on this one, Mr. Rubens,” Bing told him. “Keep me in the loop.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
But Bing had already hung up on him.
He glanced at Rockman as he replaced the handset. “We’d better tell Dean, too.”
Pistol Range
Fort Meade, Maryland
1633 hours EDT
Charlie Dean squeezed the trigger twice in rapid succession, tapping off two rounds, the bangs echoing down the white-painted room. Two shots, two hits . . . squarely at the center of mass and less than two inches apart.
Recovering, he shifted his aim, gripping the pistol firmly in the classic Weaver stance, right hand holding the grip at full extension, finger lightly caressing the trigger, left hand cupping and holding the right. Accuracy in the Weaver stance depended on the interplay of forces as he pushed with the locked right arm and pulled with the supporting left.
Two more shots, two more hits, this time in the target’s head.
“Target left!” a voice growled from beside and slightly behind him. Dean shifted instantly, bending his left elbow slightly to pull his right arm into line with a second target, ten yards beyond and behind the first. Again, two taps at the center of mass, followed by a third . . . and then the slide on his .45 locked open.
Raising the muzzle, he hit the magazine release and dropped the empty magazine, before racking the slide once more to make sure the firing chamber was empty. “Clear!” he called.
Behind him, Gunny Mark Strieber mashed his thumb down on a button, and the two targets, each bearing the head and body of a vaguely human-shaped black silhouette, whined toward the firing line on their overhead tracks.
“Not bad, Marine,” Strieber said. “Not too shabby at all, in fact. A bit of spread on your third group.”
Both of the center-of-mass shots on the second target had struck within the inner kill zone, but they were a good five inches apart. His final shot was low, on the line between head and throat. He’d rushed it.
“Yeah, but he’s still dead, Jim,” Dean replied, parodying a well-known line from an old science fiction show on TV.
Strieber ticked a box off on the clipboard sheet he was holding. “I’ll give
it to you. This time. . . .”
The Fort Meade pistol range was empty at the moment, except for the two of them. Dean set his weapon—a classic Colt .45 1911A1—on the table in front of him, muzzle pointed carefully downrange, along with the empty magazine. He then pulled off his hearing protectors. The devices were decidedly high-tech, with active feedback to block out sharp sounds like gunfire while permitting ordinary speech.
“So do I pass my quals?” Dean asked Strieber.
“You could use some improvement on the OC,” Strieber replied, paging through the sheets on his clipboard. Then he shrugged. “Still, for such an old jarhead, I’d have to say you’re holding together pretty damned well.”
“Ah, you young Marines don’t have a clue.”
“Cry me a river, Grandpap.”
Both Dean and Strieber were former Marines—within the fraternity of the Corps, there was no such thing as an ex-Marine—and that fact alone created a shared camaraderie, even though his experience in the service had left Dean somewhat bitter.
Dean had been one of Desk Three’s field operatives for over a year now. Strieber was employed by the National Security Agency as what was euphemistically known as a military expert consultant—which in his case translated to range boss at the NSA’s Fort Meade training center.
This particular range boss, Dean thought, got a particularly savage enjoyment out of ragging Dean about his age. Some of the comments hit a little too close to the mark sometimes. Dean was in his early fifties, now, and getting through the Fort Meade OC—the obstacle course—had been a major challenge, despite his daily routine of exercise and running.
“Charlie?” a new voice sounded in Dean’s skull. “This is Rockman.”
“What’s up?” Dean asked. Strieber raised his eyebrows but said nothing. He was used to Desk Three operators suddenly breaking into one-sided conversations, apparently with themselves. “I’m not even supposed to be on duty.”
Stephen Coonts' Deep Black: Arctic Gold Page 3