“The DD told me to let you know,” Rockman said from the Art Room. “We’ve got a . . . situation here.”
“What kind of—”
Dean stopped, forcing down the sudden upwelling of cold fear. While Desk Three would be engaged in any number of ongoing operations on any given day, there were two well into their active phases that were of particular interest to Dean because both involved very dear friends. Right now, Tommy Karr would be somewhere out over the North Atlantic, helping escort some high-level government scientist or other to a conference in London. And Lia . . .
“Lia,” he said. “Is she okay?”
“You’d better get down here, Charlie. She’s out of contact. She may be in trouble.”
Dean bit off an unpleasant word, then forced himself to relax. Lia was a superb agent, well capable of handling herself in almost any situation imaginable.
But he didn’t like it. He’d argued point-blank with Rubens when he’d found out Lia was going to Russia. The new guy being paired with her was too new, too inexperienced. Dean wanted to go instead.
But Rubens had pointed out that Dean’s yearly quals were due and that there wasn’t time to wait while he worked his way through the battery of tests, physical drill, and proficiency exams. Damn the bureaucrats, anyway. . . .
“Excuse me, Gunny. The master’s voice.”
“I hear you, Marine,” Streiber said, gathering up Dean’s equipment. “Go. I’ll check your gear out.”
“Thanks.”
“Semper fi, Charlie,” the former Marine said, his voice grave. He must, Dean thought, have read something in Dean’s voice, or in his eyes.
“Yeah. Semper fi.”
He hurried toward the door.
DeFrancesa
Operation Magpie
Waterfront, St. Petersburg
0034 hours
Lia hunkered down in the darkness between two walls of crates, watching and listening. From here, she could just glimpse several armed men moving past the opening to her hidey-hole, could hear more shouting in Russian.
She didn’t speak the language, beyond a few rough-and-ready tourist survival phrases like “Good morning” and “Where is the women’s restroom?” and she didn’t have her communications link with the Art Room for a running translation. Still, it sounded like they were demanding something of Alekseev, and it sounded like Alekseev was talking, talking all too willingly.
The fact that one of the newcomers had already identified her as an American told her that the mission had been compromised, quite likely by Alekseev. Two people breaking into a warehouse on a St. Petersburg waterfront? With crime and looting as bad as they were in the city, how would the newcomers know foreigners were involved, much less Americans?
No, someone had talked. And she was pretty damned sure she knew who.
Keeping low, she found a side passageway through the labyrinth of crates, one taking her closer to the main door. Emerging from the warren, she crept over to the southeastern wall of the warehouse, keeping to the shadows. She could see one of the bad guys now, twenty feet away, standing with his back to the open door. He was visible to her in profile, holding an AKM in his right hand, gesticulating with the left as he shouted something to the others. “Gdeh ona? Skarei! Skarei!”
She studied him carefully. He had a distinctive face, scarred and weathered, with a cruel mouth revealing blackened teeth when he shouted.
A garbage can sat just this side of the open door, next to a clutter of janitorial tools—a push broom, a rusty bucket and a mop, a pile of filthy rags. She thought she’d noticed the can when she’d peeked in through the fiber-optic surveillance device.
The garbage can was overflowing with trash, its round, handled lid perched atop the pile precariously. She edged along the wall, moving closer.
“Ilya?” she called softly, giving the name its correct pronunciation, with the accent on the second syllable. “Ilya, do you copy?”
“I hear you.”
“I’m close to the main door . . . on the southeastern wall. Is anyone outside?”
“Yeah. Two goons with AK-74s. They’re standing to either side, their backs to the wall.”
“Can you take them?”
She heard a long pause as he studied the situation. “Yeah. They’re about fifty yards away.”
“Don’t do anything until I tell you to.”
“You’re the boss.”
Yeah. I’m the boss. And if I get out of this alive, I‘m going to have a hell of a time explaining to my boss . . . .
Rising from her crouch, she moved toward the garbage can. . . .
Ghost Blue
Two miles north of Ostrov Kotlin
0034 hours
Major Richard K. Delallo eased back on the Raptor’s throttle, bringing the powerful twin Pratt & Whitney F-119-PW-100 thrust vectoring turbofans back to a purring near idle. According to his navigational display, he’d just passed the island of Kotlin, with its naval base at Kronshtadt, to his right. At fifty thousand feet, dense fog carpeted the waters of the Finland Gulf beneath him. He could just make out the diffuse glow of city lights beneath the fog ahead, eerily peaceful and quiet. Overhead, auroras flamed and shifted like pale, utterly silent ghosts.
His radio and radar receivers, however, showed a much busier picture. Pulkovo Airport was loudest, with traffic control radars banging away to the southeast, but he could distinguish the thready pulse of military search radars as well.
Nearest and most worrying was the big Kronshtadt SAM-2 site on Kotlin, just eleven miles away, but there were several naval bases in and around St. Petersburg itself, all on the lookout for exactly this sort of incursion.
No one was targeting him, though, and none of the signals suggested they’d picked up Delallo’s Raptor. The F-22’s actual radar cross section was highly classified but was widely assumed to be somewhat smaller than that of a sparrow.
He put the Raptor into a gentle, banking turn right and switched his receivers to the highly classified frequencies used by NSA operatives on the ground.
A man’s voice came through. “. . . about fifty yards away.”
“Don’t do anything until I tell you to.” That was a different voice, a woman’s voice.
“You’re the boss.”
Delallo opened the com feed channel to Fort Meade.
DeFrancesa
Operation Magpie
Waterfront, St. Petersburg
0034 hours
Lia’s biggest advantage at the moment was that damned light the bad guys were waving around. It was a handheld spotlight with a pistol grip, and a civilian with an AKM slung over his shoulder was using it to try to penetrate the shadows deeper inside the warehouse. Any dark adaptation these people had possessed when they’d entered the building had been shot to hell by now. Lia was still in deep shadow in her combat blacks, though she would have to emerge into the glare of the overhead lights to reach the door.
The two Russians were less than ten feet away now, their backs to her. Beyond, she saw Alekseev and two more Russians. She could hear the shouts and crashes of yet more Russians moving through the labyrinth of crates.
Silently she stepped up to the garbage can, grabbed the lid by the rim, and hefted it. Moving back a few feet, she gauged the distance to another pile of warehoused crates on the far side of the main door, pulled her arm back, and flung the round lid hard, whirling it like an underhanded Frisbee.
The lid sailed past the door, rising, arcing, falling . . . then struck the top of the far row of crates with a boiler factory clatter.
Instantly gunfire erupted inside the echoing cavern of the warehouse, as one of the men with Alekseev opened up with his AKM on full-auto.
“Tudah!” the man with the spotlight screamed, swinging the beam to the northeastern end of the warehouse. He pointed. “Tudah!”
Another Russian joined in, spraying the northern corner of the room, sending up clouds of whirling splinters.
“Stoy!”
&
nbsp; “Nyeh shevileetes!”
“Now, Ilya!” Lia called. “Take them out!”
She lunged forward.
Akulinin
Operation Magpie
Waterfront, St. Petersburg
0034 hours
Gunfire thundered from inside the building. Akulinin had been holding his MP5K on the Russian to the left of the entrance, waiting for Lia’s command. It was an awkward stance. The MP5K was a ridiculously stubby weapon, even with the shoulder stock locked open, and Akulinin was trying to brace it with his left hand on the small handgrip beneath the almost nonexistent barrel. Leaning into the recoil, he tapped the trigger, loosing a three-round burst with a sharp, harsh clatter.
Fifty yards was the upper end of the weapon’s effective range, meaning he had perhaps one chance in two of hitting his target. The range was too great for trying a finesse shot at head or center of mass. Instead he aimed low, with the expectation that muzzle climb would throw at least one or two of the three rounds into the target.
Both of the outside sentries were in the process of turning as he fired, distracted from the sudden gunfire inside. The man on the left seemed to stumble as he turned, then sagged, clutching at his side as he dropped to his knees. Akulinin had already shifted his aim to the man on the right, drawing a bead and triggering another three-round burst.
The man on the right, apparently not hit, went to his partner’s aid. Akulinin took aim again and tapped off two more bursts. The man staggered, slammed backward into the half-open sliding door, and crumpled to the ground. The wounded man on the left slumped into an untidy heap.
“Two down outside the door,” Akulinin reported.
“Check fire!” Lia called. “I’m coming through!”
DeFrancesa
Operation Magpie
Waterfront, St. Petersburg
0035 hours
For just an instant, every armed man in the warehouse was turned toward the northeast end of the huge room, some of them firing with wild imprecision, weapons blasting away on full rock and roll.
“Prekrazhenii ogeya! Prekrazhenii ogeya!”
From five feet away, Lia put a bullet into the back of the head of the man with the spotlight, her pistol emitting a harsh chuff as it fired. She was so close she didn’t even need to watch for the red blip of laser light marking the impact point.
She fired as she moved, holding the SOCOM pistol two-handed and stiff-armed as she tapped off two more rounds at the first target, then shifted to the man next to him. That man was just beginning to register the fact that the guy with the spotlight had been hit, the front of his skull blossoming in a nasty red burst of blood, bone, and tissue. The second man turned, mouth gaping, hands fumbling at his assault rifle . . . and pitched backward as two of Lia’s rounds slammed into his throat and upper chest.
Then she was through the open door. Two bodies lay sprawled on the concrete; she leaped over one and bounded across the open parking lot.
“Stoy!” another voice called, not from straight behind, but from behind and to her right. “Slushaisya elee ya budu strelyaht’!”
She kept running.
3
The Art Room
NSA Headquarters
Fort Meade, Maryland
1636 hours EDT
GUNFIRE, MUFFLED BY DISTANCE, boomed and rattled.
“Now, Ilya! Take them out!”
“Two down outside the door.”
“Check fire! I’m coming through!”
The words emerged from the overhead speaker, and Rubens felt an inward sag of relief. Ghost Blue was picking up Magpie’s transmissions and relaying them through the satellite net to the Art Room.
“Someone’s yelling at her to stop, to obey, or he’ll fire,” Ivan Maslovski said from his console, several stations away. He was one of Desk Three’s Russian specialists, brought in to provide linguistic support for Magpie. “Should I translate?”
One of the advantages of the implanted com system used by Desk Three operatives was that an agent in the field didn’t need to speak the local language. Someone listening in from the Art Room could provide a running translation and even lead the agent through a simple but appropriate response.
“No,” Rubens said, shaking his head. “I think she gets the general idea.”
The big map on the main display screen had been resized again, zooming in on two warehouses, some storage sheds, and the concrete wharf along the river. Lia’s icon was moving south across the open parking and loading zone between the two warehouses; Akulinin was at the corner of the warehouse to the south.
Two new pinpoints of light, red this time, marking presumed hostiles, appeared on the satellite map. The ground sensors placed by Lia during her approach to the warehouse picked up sound and motion over a wide area and transmitted the data back to Fort Meade, where the enormous computational power resident within the Tordella Supercomputer Facility translated raw data into moving points of light on a map.
“Lia! Ilya!” Jeff Rockman said at his console. “Two hostiles, southeast of the big warehouse!”
Sounds of gunfire erupted from the speaker. “I see them,” Akulinin replied. “Lia, drop! . . .”
Akulinin
Operation Magpie
Waterfront, St. Petersburg
0036 hours
Akulinin had risen to a half crouch, still holding the tiny MP5K tucked in against his shoulder. Lia, running straight toward him from the main warehouse entrance, was almost between him and the hostiles emerging from between the warehouse and the shed. One of the gunmen opened fire with his AK, the sharp crack-crack-crack echoing across the parking lot. Bullets slammed into sheet metal somewhere above Akulinin’s head.
As he shouted, “Drop!” Lia fell to the pavement in what must have been a painful slide, hugging the ground as the gunmen behind her sprayed rounds above her. Akulinin had a clear shot, now, at one of the Russians as he emerged from between the two buildings at a dead run. With luck, he thought he’d knocked Lia down and didn’t yet know Akulinin was there.
Akulinin tapped the trigger, hitting the man with a three-round burst high in his chest, knocking him backward with a wild flailing of his arms. “Three down!” he called.
Fort Meade, Maryland
1636 hours EDT
Dean climbed into his car, backed out of the parking spot, and all but peeled rubber as he left the pistol range, pulling on to Rochenbach Road and accelerating toward the towering structure visible on the wooded Maryland horizon ahead. He had to show his ID at a gate—even inside the far-flung confines of Fort Meade, security gates and checkpoints kept casual civilians and Army personnel out of the ultra-secure zone set aside for the NSA complex.
In a way, the NSA was the tail wagging the dog. Fort Meade sprawled across over some six thousand acres of the Maryland countryside between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. About nine thousand active-duty military personnel were stationed here, along with about six thousand civilian dependents in base housing, but the NSA employed over thirty thousand civilians. In fact, the Army post at Fort Meade had been scheduled for closure in the 1990s and ultimately had remained active solely to support the NSA’s activities. That huge complex ahead, the large, pale ocher office building, the two black-glass, ultra-modern monoliths behind it, and the tangle of smaller buildings in between, was called the Puzzle Palace, a moniker once applied to the Pentagon but now reserved solely for the NSA’s headquarters.
“Rockman?” Dean called over his radio. “I’m en route. Anything new?”
There was a worrisome pause. Then, “We’re back in touch with them,” Rockman said. Dean felt a surge of relief, but the feeling was overturned almost immediately by Rockman’s next words. “She’s in a firefight. Wait one . . .”
Dean fumed and pressed down harder on the accelerator. He turned left onto Canine Road, which put the towering ten-story monolith of the NSA’s headquarters building on his right, beyond several acres’ worth of parking lots.
A gunfight
was the worst possible news. No matter what Hollywood cared to depict in the way of James Bond and other fictional spooks, in Lia and Dean’s line of work, firefights rarely took place. In fact, a firefight could only mean that something had gone seriously and drastically wrong. He hadn’t been briefed on her mission—such operations were kept tightly compartmentalized and shared strictly on a need-to-know basis—but he knew she was in Russia and that her op involved going in, planting something, and leaving again, all without alerting the locals.
If there was shooting, the op had been compromised.
Another turn, and Dean arrived at a parking lot outside a nondescript building sheathed in metal, almost in the shadow of the titanic edifice of the headquarters building itself. Inside was another security check . . . and an elevator ride, plunging deep into the bedrock beneath the facility, and two more security checkpoints after that, both requiring handprint, voiceprint, and retinal scans.
One curious feature about the NSA facility at Fort Meade: there were no visible room numbers, no corridor names, nothing to help any visitor who didn’t know exactly where he was going.
They didn’t make it easy to access the Art Room.
And with very good reason.
Akulinin
Operation Magpie
Waterfront, St. Petersburg
0037 hours
The second gunman ducked behind the corner of the shed, then emerged to trigger another burst of full-auto fire at Akulinin. He was almost invisible against shadows unrelieved by the pale light from the lone street lamp on Kozhevennaya. Akulinin waited, aiming at the point where he’d seen him last; two seconds dragged past, and then he saw movement, a dark shape as the Russian half-emerged from cover once again.
Akulinin squeezed the trigger again and the dark mass vanished. “Art Room!” he whispered. “Did I get him?”
“Both targets are down,” Rockman’s voice replied in his head. “They’re not moving. Can’t tell if they’re KIA or not.”
The sensors scattered by Lia around the building early in the op could pick up remarkably faint noises—breathing, footsteps, even heartbeats at a close enough range. The NSA computers would keep painting the targets where the devices sensed them, only letting the icons fade away some minutes after all motion and sound from the target ceased.
Stephen Coonts' Deep Black: Arctic Gold Page 4