Stephen Coonts' Deep Black: Arctic Gold

by Arctic Gold (epub)

“What about the flight attendant?” Dean asked. “Julie Henshaw?”

  “Pretty much the same as Fischer,” Evans told them. “False-flag recruitment. Someone who called himself ‘Johann Ernst’ contacted her in London. He claimed to be with Europol, and told her a scientist named Spencer was going to be on her next New York to London flight, Spencer was an important suspect in a big anti-terror operation, and that it was important that Ernst’s people be able to track him in London. Sounds like he dazzled her with tales of international intrigue . . . and the promise of a big reward.”

  “Braslov again,” Dean said.

  “Or someone else using the same cover, but I’d bet it was him,” Evans said. “All Henshaw needed to do was get close to one of Spencer’s guards, slip a tiny tracking device into the back of his coat collar, and then alert ‘Ernst’ when the target left the hotel room the next morning.”

  “So what’s happening to them?” Dean asked. “To Fischer and Henshaw, I mean.”

  “Fischer is under arrest for murder and attempted murder, plus criminal trespass and half a dozen firearms violations,” Evans said. “We’re holding Henshaw as a material witness and as a possible accessory to murder and conspiracy to murder, though the government may not be able to make that stick. We may have to release her, though, unless we can find evidence linking her more closely with Braslov.”

  “You won’t find it,” Lia guessed. “These people are pros.”

  “I wonder if you can even prosecute,” Dean added. “If she genuinely thought she was helping the police. . . .”

  “Well, that’s for the courts to decide,” Evans said. “For right now, though . . . it looks like it’s time to talk with your boss.”

  The NSA logo on the big screen had just dissolved, and after a connection prompt, Rubens appeared on the screen, seated at his desk. “Good morning,” he said. “Miss DeFrancesca, Mr. Akulinin . . . I’m glad to see you both safely back.”

  “It’s good to be back, sir,” Akulinin said.

  “It’s a shame,” Rubens said dryly, “that you couldn’t bring all of your equipment out with you.”

  Akulinin winced. “Look, I’m sorry about that, sir,” he said. “Things were kind of hot and—”

  “We will discuss the matter later,” Rubens said, interrupting. “At length.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Mr. Dean, we received the package with Mr. Karr’s effects. You were right. The tracking device is definitely of Russian manufacture.”

  “We’ve been exploring the possibility of going back to Russia,” Lia told him. “Braslov appears to have left London for Yakutsk. Charlie thinks he’s going on to a Russian petroleum-drilling base in the Arctic.”

  “A distinct possibility,” Rubens said. “And you’re quite right. Miss DeFrancesca, and Mr. Akulinin, I am indeed asking you to return to Russia.” He raised a small remote control and pressed a button. His image on the screen was replaced by a satellite photo, looking down on a stretch of beach with dark waters laced with waves, cliffs above white sands, and the sprawl of a large and secluded building behind the cliffs. It looked like the mansion of a country estate, complete with the bright aqua-colored kidney shape of a swimming pool, the much smaller blue circle of a hot tub nearby, a series of gardens on manicured lawns, and rising stables in the back.

  “This,” Rubens told them, “is the private dacha of Grigor Kotenko, just outside of Sochi, on the Black Sea. The place used to belong to a high-ranking member of the Politburo, but Kotenko seems to have acquired it about ten years ago. He uses it several times a month for entertaining important people, but it is currently closed up, with only a small caretaker staff in residence.

  “I want you, Miss DeFrancesca, and you, Mr. Akulinin, to gain covert entrance to that dacha and wire it for sound. In particular, we need some keyboard bugs, so that we can keep tabs on Kotenko’s computer dealings.”

  Keyboard bugs were tiny microphone transmitters, half the size of BB shot, that could be dropped loose inside a computer keyboard. Each key, it turned out, made a unique sound print when struck. With those sounds transmitted to a nearby hidden relay and passed on to Fort Meade by satellite, it was possible for the supercomputers at the Tordella Center to reconstruct, keystroke for keystroke, what was typed into the target computer, including e-mail addresses, contact lists, account information, and passwords.

  “A routine visit by the plumbers, then,” Akulinin said, nodding.

  “Black bag work, yes,” Rubens said. “You’ll be working with Mr. Evans and GCHQ on the details of your insertion, legends, and extraction. We’re booking you on a flight to Sochi Monday.”

  “Well,” Lia said, “back to the salt mines.”

  “Mr. Dean,” Rubens said. “I have something special for you.”

  Dean suppressed a small twinge of disappointment. He’d hoped to be assigned to Lia’s op, but something in Rubens’ voice told him that that wasn’t going to happen. “Yakutsk?”

  “No. But you will need to pack cold-weather gear, I promise you.”

  This did not sound particularly promising to Dean, but he nodded and said, “Right.”

  “You,” Rubens continued, “will be hitching a ride on a submarine in two days.”

  “The NOAA base in the Arctic, then?”

  “Yes. And the Russian base near there as well, if necessary. We want Braslov, Mr. Dean. And even more, we want the Americans being held up there released . . . two in particular, a congressman’s daughter and an NSA technician.”

  “Leave no one behind,” Dean said. “I understand.”

  “Spoken like a true Marine.”

  “Ooh-rah.” He recited the battle cry without emotion.

  He’d always hated the cold. . . .

  14

  Kotenko Dacha

  Sochi, Russia

  1510 hours, GMT + 3

  GRIGOR KOTENKO WATCHED impassively as the man walked into the room, stopped, spread his arms, and stood motionless, waiting. Antonov had been through this many times before, and he knew the routine. Andre, a man-mountain as heavily padded as a Japanese sumo wrestler, emerged from the far corner to check him for wires or hidden weapons. Yuri Antonov had been with the Organizatsiya for fifteen years, but since Victor Mikhaylov’s sudden and untimely death last week, Kotenko was taking no chances. No one entered his presence without a thorough search, even after the metal detectors and X-ray scanners downstairs.

  It wasn’t Mikhaylov’s unknown killers Kotenko feared so much, and it certainly wasn’t the police, most of whom belonged to him. The majority of his security efforts were actually directed against other Russian Mafiya groups, the circling sharks, as he thought of them. The events at the waterfront in St. Petersburg last week had both wounded the local arm of Tambov and reflected the toothsome possibility of weakness. In such a starkly competitive environment as modern Russia, the other gangs could turn on Kotenko’s organization like sharks in a feeding frenzy, maddened by bloodlust.

  Within the shadows of the Russian underworld, the wounded, the weak, the indecisive were shown no mercy.

  “Mr. Antonov,” Kotenko said as Andre straightened up and gave the signal indicating that the visitor was clean. “So good to see you again. What is it you have for me?”

  “Something most interesting, Mr. Kotenko. Ah, one of your people took it from me downstairs. . . .”

  Antonov was a small, nervous individual with a goatee and a receding hairline that gave him a passing resemblance to Vladimir Lenin. He did not, Kotenko knew, have Lenin’s strength of purpose, or his sheer force of will. Antonov did, however, know how to follow orders.

  “Yes, yes,” Kotenko said. “Security, you understand?”

  Dmitry, one of Kotenko’s personal assistants, walked in carrying a capacious metal toolbox. Antonov had brought it with him from St. Petersburg, surrendering it to Kotenko’s trusted people outside for a careful search.

  “This is the box?” Kotenko asked.

  “Yes, sir. We found it clos
e to where one of the assassins was hiding. We believe he forgot it as he fled the scene.”

  Carefully Kotenko took the toolbox and began removing its contents. There wasn’t much . . . a length of climbing rope tightly bundled and tied; some devices obviously designed to slip over a person’s boots or hands with protruding spikes to help him or her climb walls or telephone poles; some cinches, straps, and buckles that likely were rappelling gear; five thirty-round magazines manufactured by Heckler & Koch, loaded with 9mm ammunition. Of more interest was a set of low-light binoculars with a single light-gathering tube, obviously of military manufacture.

  And a communications terminal complete with folded satellite antenna, battery, and encryption box.

  “Have our people in St. Petersburg looked at these?” Kotenko asked, examining the binoculars. They might be worth fifteen thousand rubles on the open market. They were certainly much better than anything in the Russian military’s inventory.

  “Yes, sir,” Antonov said as Kotenko set aside the binoculars and began looking at the satcom gear. “They say it is obviously CIA issue. The communications equipment is something called an AN/PSC-12 com terminal, I’m told. Our friends in China might be quite interested in purchasing it.”

  “Indeed.” Kotenko picked up the encryption device, a black box the size of a pack of cigarettes. He knew little about the technology—one employed others to do the knowing with complicated gadgets like this—but he did understand the price of technology. The satellite terminal itself might be worth some hundreds of thousands of rubles to governments that might from time to time find themselves the target of American intelligence—China, yes, but also Iran, Syria, Pakistan, North Korea, Venezuela . . . oh, the list of America’s enemies was quite long.

  But the true treasure here was this small and seemingly innocuous black box. There would be codes stored within the computer chips inside, codes that would allow the owner of the box to turn it on its makers and listen in on their secret communications.

  And that bit of technology was almost beyond price.

  Almost. Grigor Kotenko made his very comfortable living by acquiring priceless items, putting a price on them, and finding people able and willing to pay. Normally, these days, he trafficked in corporations and in the future of Russian oil and gas production, but he traded in military hardware as well.

  There was also a danger, however. He examined the case of the device closely, searching for any words, logos, or imprints at all. He didn’t expect to find them. . . .

  “Dmitry!”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “This device has been screened for radio emissions?”

  “Yes, sir. There are no transmissions. Everything in the tool kit, and the case itself, is dead.”

  Devices such as this frequently included global positioning trackers and transmitters. Its manufacturers might also have placed very tiny listening devices or other intelligence-gathering sensors inside the case, and there was always the possibility that the tool kit had been deliberately abandoned at the warehouse, in order to lead its owners straight to him. In the world of espionage, nothing was ever quite what it seemed.

  So long as it was not actively transmitting to the Americans, it was probably safe, however.

  Probably . . .

  He set the device back inside the tool kit along with the other items he’d removed, closed it, and signaled to Dmitry.

  “Put this in the safe.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Kotenko’s safe was a heavy walk-in downstairs, with walls three inches thick. If the device did start transmitting, the signals could not possibly penetrate those walls.

  “They checked the box and everything in it for RF transmissions in St. Petersburg, sir,” Antonov said as Dmitry walked out of the room with the tool kit. “The devices all are inert.”

  “I don’t pretend to know how these devices work, Mr. Antonov,” Kotenko said. Turning, he walked toward the large double doors leading out onto the western deck. “But I do know there are devices called transponders that will patiently wait to send out a signal, but which do so only when they receive a signal. Until then, the device could well be, as you say, inert.”

  He pushed open the doors and walked outside, with Antonov and the ever-watchful Andre following behind. It was mid-afternoon, and the westering sun glared from the broad expanse of the Black Sea. Laughter, male and female, sounded from somewhere nearby.

  Kotenko walked to the railing. The back deck overlooked his large pool two stories below, where six of his girls were entertaining two senior officers of Gazprom and a member of the Duma, all of whom had been invited to the Sochi dacha for a working weekend.

  At the moment, it appeared to be most enjoyable work. Swimsuits had been discarded some time ago, and shrill feminine laughter chimed from the patio. Expressionless servants silently came and went with bottles of vodka, the vital lubricant of all Russian business meetings.

  “In any case,” Kotenko continued, watching the pleasant scene below from the railing, “I intend to take no chances. I suspect that the communications equipment is from the American NSA . . . possibly on loan to the CIA, but not necessarily.”

  “The NSA?” Antonov asked. “What is that?”

  “An even larger, more secretive, and more powerful American spy agency than the CIA. The fact that many people have never even heard the name proves how good they are. Did our people carefully check the St. Petersburg shipment for tracking devices planted by the intruders?”

  “Yes, sir. Every square centimeter!”

  “And it was clean?”

  “Some slight radioactivity, but no radio signals of any sort.”

  “Hmm.” Kotenko chewed for a moment on one end of his bushy mustache, thinking hard. “Those . . . intruders on the waterfront,” he said after a moment, “were American. The equipment they carried proved that.” If the break-in at the warehouse had been engineered by one of the rival gangs of the Organizatsiya, they would have been using Russian, German, or Japanese devices . . . or less highly advanced American equipment, the sort of stuff in current use by the American military. That might include the light-intensification binoculars—he was pretty sure that such devices were in common use by American Special Forces like the SEALs and the Army Rangers—but the satellite communications equipment was not in widespread use, he was certain. Not yet.

  CIA? Or NSA?

  The CIA was the organization most likely to carry out covert operations—“black ops” he thought was the American term—in foreign countries. The NSA primarily handled electronic eavesdropping, employing a variety of listening devices both on the ground, in aircraft, and in spy satellites. Still, there were persistent rumors that the NSA also ran covert operations like their CIA brothers.

  In the long run it didn’t matter which organization was behind the operation. He did want to know, however, if only because Grigor Kotenko liked to know exactly who his opponents were. Knowing your enemy, knowing who he was and how he thought and what his strengths and weaknesses were, all was a long part of the path to victory.

  The CIA and their operating methods were well known to people in the Organizatsiya like Sergei Braslov, who’d once been GRU, Russian military intelligence. Some of their successes were known, but so, too, were many of their failures.

  The public knew very little about the NSA, however, and that spoke volumes for their efficiency, as well as for their potential deadliness in the arena of international espionage. A successful spy mission was the one of which no one ever heard.

  Kotenko survived because he took no chances. He prospered because he could see angles other people could not and he had the muscle to take advantage of that.

  In fact, Kotenko had believed for some time that the NSA was trying to get a line on him for intelligence purposes, and the St. Petersburg affair had been arranged to give him the upper hand. He’d recruited a low-level enforcer in his organization—Alekseev—to approach an employee at the American consulate in St. Peters
burg with information on the beryllium shipment to Iran, and then he’d carefully orchestrated the trap at the waterfront warehouse.

  That ambush should have netted a couple of American agents for deep interrogation. Some of the people working for Kotenko had learned the fine art of interrogation with the KGB, in the basement of the infamous Lubyanka Prison in Moscow during the Soviet era. They enjoyed their work and were quite good at what they did. The information they extracted from prisoners could be most valuable.

  And afterward, if there was anything left, the prisoners might prove to be profitable in other ways, either as insurance or for ransom.

  But the ambush had misfired. There’d been at least two Americans, as Alekseev had promised, but they’d arrived at the warehouse separately and the men led by Mikhaylov, concentrating on Alekseev and the woman with him, had missed the second agent. That second agent had been able to help the woman escape from the trap . . . but evidently he’d left behind the tool kit in the chaos of the firefight.

  No matter. Kotenko thought he could still make a handsome profit from the affair.

  “The special Rybinsk shipment at St. Petersburg,” he said after a moment’s thought. “Is it safely away?”

  “Yes, sir,” Antonov told him. “It left for Bandar Abbas two days ago, as scheduled.”

  “Then it’s the Iranians’ problem now. Andre!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Alert the staff. We will be going to first-level security here at the dacha. We may be having . . . visitors.”

  “Immediately, sir.”

  He would also transmit further instructions to Braslov, though he would use Antonov to do so, using a onetime satellite phone, and from a location far removed from the dacha, just to be sure. The enemy might soon be taking an interest in Operation Cold War, as well as in his activities here in Sochi.

  His opponents in this game, whether they were CIA or NSA, were not magical, whatever their reputations might be. They were good, very good, but there were limits to their powers, and to what they were able to pull off with their technology. The Americans were feared, and justly so, for their technological prowess in the military arts, but technology could only take you so far.