The man grunted. “Yeah, that’s great. But now let’s get down to business.” Morozov’s eyes narrowed as he leaned slightly forward.
“Okay, Volodymyr. What have you got?”
“The air refueling tanker has been set up. Our people got onto the network early this morning. It was just about like you said. We got a receipt message from Torrejon, and it has all been confirmed.”
“Yes ... okay ... that is good,” Morozov said. But he knew there was more. He could tell by the look in Volodymyr’s eyes.
“And ... ? Is that all?”
“No,” Volodymyr said. “We are having a little problem with the girl.”
Morozov glared and waited while stuffing a Marlboro between his dry lips.
“It goes like this. One morning last week, everything is cool. Clyde and Nadine have her safe and sound in the cabin. I went there myself. Everything looks good. I check things over. Have a little talk with them. Everything was under control.
“Two days later, they call and say she is sick or something. Won’t eat. Sweats a lot. Throws up stuff in her sleep. Refuses to get up and walk around. You know. Typical sick hostage crap.”
Just then a young waitress came up to their booth and pulled out a pencil and ticket pad. Morozov pushed his coffee mug over so that she could pour him a cup, then shook his head when she offered a menu. She left quickly. The two men waited until she was out of earshot before they continued their conversation.
“Yeah, yeah, so what’s the story?” Morozov asked in an irritated voice as he took a small sip from his coffee. “You didn’t call me out here to tell me she’s got the twenty-four hour flu. So what’s going on?”
“Don’t really know. Which is the main problem.”
Morozov put his coffee aside and looked up.
“I called out there this morning,” the man continued. “Got no answer. Called every fifteen minutes for the past three hours. No one is home.”
Morozov swore under his breath. “You idiot! You stupid fool! You better not have screwed this thing up, my friend, or I’ll cut off your hands and feed them to my dogs!
“What do you mean that no one is there!? Didn’t they have their instructions? They were supposed to keep her at the cabin! You’d better find out what’s going on! And you better not bring me bad news.”
The man didn’t blink as he stared at Morozov.
“May 1 remind you, Comrade Morozov,” he sneered, “the man and his wife were your idea. Not mine. So you crap all over the place, then send me in to clean up the mess. I don’t think so. So don’t be telling me how to do my job.
“Now, I’ve sent some people out there to take a look. They’ll be in position in another hour or so. I’m certain the girl is still there. I’m sure that there is some explanation. The phones are down. They had a bad storm. Whatever, she’s got to be there. Unless you think she took out both of your people. Chopped them to pieces with a butter knife or something. Possible, but not very likely.
“So let’s not overreact just for the thrill of a good panic. It seems like we’ve done that before.”
Morozov stared silently at the man and grunted. The man stood up. “I’ll be talking to you,” he said as he threw a twenty dollar bill on the table and left. Morozov took another sip at his coffee, then picked up the money and slipped it into his shirt pocket. He pulled out two fives from his own wallet and left them on the table. Then he followed the man out the front door.
Outside the coffee shop, Morozov watched the back of the man’s head as he made his way through the maze of plastic tables and morning shoppers that werc beginning to crowd into the food court. The man soon disappeared in the throng. Morozov then turned in the opposite direction and walked back toward the same doorway in which he had entered the mall. He put on his overcoat as he walked quickly back out to his car.
It was cold. The freezing rain had turned to a light snow, and the temperature had dropped into the twenties. Ivan Morozov studied the sky for a moment as he stood by the side of his car. It wasn’t flying weather. Low clouds and fog hung over the trees, and the visibility looked to be less than a mile. He had noticed that there weren’t many B-1s that had taken off from the base this morning. He understood why. It was a lousy day to be in the air.
Morozov shivered from the cold, then ducked into his car and started it up. Pulling out of the mall parking lot, he headed back to the hotel. As he drove, he kept the heater turned off. The interior of the car began to fog over. From time to time, he would reach up and clear a round spot on his windshield with the back of his hand, wiping away just enough condensation so that he could see to drive. By the time he pulled into the empty parking lot that surrounded his hotel, his windows were completely fogged over. He parked in the far corner, thirty yards away from the next closest car. He rolled to a stop, but kept his engine running.
Reaching under his seat, he pulled out a tiny laptop computer. As he opened the lid, the pale gray screen came to life. “PASSWORD” was flashing in bold letters.
Morozov typed very carefully, very slowly, using only one finger to enter the twelve digit password. He knew that a single error would instantly trigger the computer’s self-destruct program. And all it would take was one simple mistake. So he punched the keys very deliberately.
After typing in the twelve numbers, Morozov reviewed them in his mind, then hit “Enter.” The screen immediately went blank. His heart skipped a beat. For just an instant he thought he might have blown it. Then a white cursor appeared and began to flash on the left side of the screen. Morozov breathed a quick sigh of relief.
He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out the twenty dollar bill that had been left at the table. Turning it over in his hands, he found the serial number that was printed on one side. He reached down and typed in the first digit.
The screen began to roll and tumble with a random mixture of letters and numbers. After several seconds of this, the letter “T” appeared at the top of the screen. Then the cursor returned once again.
Morozov typed in the second digit of the serial number from the twenty dollar bill. Again the screen rolled with a maze of numbers and letters. Again, after several seconds, another letter appeared on the top of the screen, next to the original letter “T”.
And so it went. After a few minutes, Morozov had a complete message. It was very simple.
TUESDAY 23,1415 Z -PlAN CHB- GO
It was the final approval for their mission. On Tuesday morning, at 1415 Zulu time, they would be taking off.
Morozov studied the message, then deleted it from the screen. He looked at his watch and did some mental calculations. In less than twenty-four hours, he and Richard Ammon would be in the air on a one-way flight to Russia in a B-1 bomber, the most sophisticated aircraft on earth.
Now there was only one thing left to do.
Reaching down, he plugged the computer’s AC adapter into the cigarette lighter, which connected him to a maze of secret electrical equipment in the trunk of his car. Typing quickly, he wrote his response.
“In receipt of message. Plan Change B. 23/1415. We are ready and now in position. The timing will work. Proceed as per plan.”
He quickly reviewed his acknowledgment of the message, then hit the “F6” key.
The computer screen went momentarily blank before “SENDING MESSAGE” appeared on his screen.
He held very still and listened very closely. He could barely hear the tiny electrical motors in the trunk of his car as they moved the eighteen-inch satellite dish around on its thin steel mounts. The laptop computer interfaced with the Global Positioning System, which was also hidden in the car trunk, to determine his exact location, then used that information to move the miniature dish around to align it with the Ukrainian satellite that spun 21,000 miles overhead. Once the dish was in sync with the satellite, it sent a one second data burst to test the connection. After receiving the test data, the Ukrainian satellite responded back to Morozov’s system with a one second burst of
its own. Not until then did Morozov’s computer send up his message, which was then bounced off another satellite before being beamed down to a station in Kiev.
Morozov shut the lid on the computer and turned off his car. Walking to his motel room, he glanced once again at his watch. Eleven o’clock. Not much else to do now, but wait. Tomorrow would come soon enough.
He entered his room and nodded to the diner man, who frowned, then immediately left. Morozov fell down on his bed. Ten minutes later, he was fast asleep.
Ninety seconds after Morozov sent up his signal, the Cray super-computer onboard the K-23 satellite had finished its final computations and downloaded the information to the National Reconnaissance Organization center in western Virginia. It had a good fix on the source of the data transmission. The target area that the computer came up with was much less than twenty feet square. Twenty minutes after that, a military C-21 transport took off from Andrews Air Force Base, just outside of Washington, D.G, enroute to Wichita, Kansas.
The door exploded open as seven armed and helmeted men burst like lightning into the dimly lit room. Morozov awoke with a start, then instantly rolled off his bed and went for his gun. Ammon stood at the bathroom doorway without moving.
“Get down on the floor!” someone screamed. “Get your freaking face down on the floor!”
In a daze, Morozov reached for the 9mm which was stuffed under his left armpit. But before he could even get his hand around its beveled grip, he found himself sailing backward and crashing into the wall. Three men were instantly on top of him, pushing him to the floor and smothering him with their weight. A thick, black hood was immediately pulled down over his face. And then he felt the jabbing pain of the needle as it was shoved deeply into the meat of his thigh.
Six feet away, Richard Ammon found himself in an identical position, covered with black-uniformed bodies and pressed unmercifully onto the floor. He also felt the sharp sting of the needle and almost immediately passed away into a deep and foggy sleep.
As the two men stopped struggling and drifted away, a husky voice spoke into a cellular phone. “We’ve got them,” he said without introduction. “Yeah, they’re both alive. No shots were fired. We’re bringing him in.”
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BOOK TWO
Simply put, it comes down to this.
You have to drop steel on the target.
TWENTY-FIVE
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WICHITA, KANSAS
RICHARD AMMON WAS ALONE. HE LAY ON HIS BACK ON A HARD MATTRESS, staring at a bare cement ceiling. It was dark and cold and very quiet. His mind was swimming, he couldn’t think, and it hurt to focus his eyes. His tongue felt numb and swollen and his mouth was thick and dry. His arms felt like heavy weights and there was a soft buzzing in the back of his head. It would take another twenty minutes for his kidneys to completely wash the heavy sedative from his blood. Not until then would his arms quit tingling and the feeling move back into his legs.
He closed his eyes and smelled the urine and cleanser as he tried to figure out where he was. With a painful strain, he rolled over, pushed his feet onto the floor, and sat up. Looking around him, his heart sank. He was in a prison cell. A dank, dark, cold prison cell. He rubbed his eyes and glanced around the room, taking in the stainless steel toilet and tiny wash basin, the cement bed and the shiny, flat, metal plate that served as a mirror. He studied the huge steel door, with its tiny slot to pass through plates of food, and the windowless, gray cement walls.
And then it hit him. And as he remembered, he took a quick breath, paralyzed for a moment in fear.
Morozov had sworn he would kill her. He could hear his cold voice and could see the green eyes.
“If this mission fails, for whatever reason, Jesse will certainly die.”
Ammon’s heart raced. Pushing himself up, he stumbled to the door. Pressing his face against the tiny, grate-covered window, he peered out into the hall. Nothing. He couldn’t see a thing. He stopped and listened. Nothing. Not a sound. He called through the window. No one was there. He glanced at his watch. It was gone. How long had he been here? How much did they know? He called out through the window once again.
“Is anyone there?” He listened as his voice echoed down the empty, steel hallway. He called again. No response. Far off in the distance, he could hear a fan turning, an eerie and lonely sound.
Thirty yards away, at the end of the hallway and behind two thick, double-locked doors, three guards sat behind a bulletproof window and watched on their remote controlled monitor as Ammon pushed his face against his prison cell door. One of them immediately picked up the phone.
“Yeah, he’s awake. No, not more than a minute ago. Yes ... yes.... Okay, we’ll be waiting.” He placed the receiver back in its cradle and motioned to one of the other guards.
“Open her up. They’re on their way down.” Another guard pushed a series of codes on a computer keypad, and they listened to the quiet buzz as the internal locks inside the first door retracted into the cold steel.
Ammon swallowed hard to fight down the panic. Morozov would kill her! He was running out of time!
He stumbled back to the bed, fell onto the corner and pressed his eyes with his fists. A mighty shiver ran the length of his body. Folding his arms across his chest, he rubbed his biceps until the skin burned.
Like a cold slap of thunder, the sudden clang of a metal door sounded from the end of the hallway. He looked up and listened and waited. Footsteps approached from the far end of the hall. He sat on the edge of the bed. His own door buzzed and then clicked as the internal locks rolled open.
For the first time in weeks, a flicker of life burned in Ammon’s eyes. He pushed himself to his feet as Lieutenant Colonel Oliver Tray walked into the musty cell.
Ammon stumbled forward. “Tray! They got Jesse,” he muttered through a thick tongue and chattering teeth. “They got Jesse. Please, you’ve got to help me!”
Oliver Tray grabbed Ammon by the arms and turned him back to the bed. “Richard, it’s okay. It’s okay. We got her.”
Ammon slumped onto the mattress and looked into Oliver’s face with unbelieving eyes.
“I swear to you, she’s going to be okay,” Tray assured him.
Ammon’s eyes glistened. He wiped his hands across his face and through his short hair. Was it really over? He just couldn’t believe it. He looked up at Tray, pleading. Oliver read the pain in his eyes. Kneeling in front of his friend, he said slowly, “Richard, listen to me. We got her. I wouldn’t lie to you. Everything is going to be fine. We brought her in a couple days ago, and I swear to you, she’s doing just fine.”
Ammon dropped his eyes to the floor, then buried his face in his hands. She was alive! She was okay! He was so grateful. Words could never explain. It was enough. It was all that he needed. He would ask for nothing ever again.
Three hallways over, in a cell of his own, Ivan Morozov was still suffering from a heavy and continuous dose of Pentothil. He was proving to be a good patient, very receptive to the mind-intrusive drug. He was talking up a storm, spilling his guts, seemingly willing to reveal every classified thing he had ever known. The Air Force intelligence officer was having a hard time keeping him focused, keeping him on track and off of the superfluous details of long-past intelligence operations. But Colonel Fullbright, who was supervising the whole interrogation, kept prodding him on, pushing the intelligence officer to keep the prisoner on the matter at hand.
By the time the interrogation was over, Colonel Fullbright’s face was as gray as an old tombstone. It was an incredible operation! An absolutely incredible plan! Whoever had conceived the whole thing, well... just think of it... attack Russia with a stolen U.S. bomber—at the height of a bitterly renewed Cold War. With U.S. bombs exploding all over Russia, who could expect them not to retaliate? And in the midst of the missiles and anger, who would even remember the war with the Ukrai
ne?
Fullbright shivered again as he considered what might have been.
And they had nearly made it work. They were within hours of completing their plan.
Fullbright leaned against the cell wall and stared at Morozov, who was now in a deep sleep. He stood for a very long time, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, deep in thought. And as he stood there, watching Morozov sleeping, an idea emerged in his mind.
They could use him, this slimeball Morozov. They could use him.
It was a very promising thought. No, more than that, it was a downright brilliant idea. It was bold and daring and the potential pay-off was hard to comprehend. However, it was peppered with danger, and there wasn’t much time.
But still....
Turning to the Army physician, he asked, “How much will our patient remember, once we bring him around?”
The doctor looked up, expressionless. “How much do you want him to remember?”
“How ‘bout nothing. Let’s bring him around in the morning, thinking that he just fell asleep watching television. Can that be done?”
“Easy as making a pancake.”
Fullbright smiled. Morozov would never even know! Never have any idea. Not a clue, until it was already too late.
Turning toward the cell door, Fullbright called out over his shoulder. “Okay, do it,” he commanded the doctor, then quickly walked out.
He glanced at his watch. Time. Time. He needed more time. He had to talk with Milton Blake. And Oliver Tray. And Ammon... . What about Ammon? He was the key.
Col Fullbright left Morozov in his cell, under the watchful eye of two guards and the Army physician. He nearly trotted down the hallway to where the sheriff, a willowy man in a brown uniform and gray cowboy hat, was waiting. The sheriff followed Fullbright down a barren corridor, through another set of guarded, double doors, down a wood-paneled hallway, and into a tiny office where two of Fullbright’s staff sat, unsure of why they were there or what they should do.
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