The man raised his voice and now Tracie could make out the words. He was telling Smith in Russian to get out of the truck. Outside the dog was jumping around and whining, obviously excited, and Tracie could picture the scene perfectly.
The guards were now on edge.
The dog had detected a scent.
Tracie concentrated on breathing quietly as she said a quick prayer. Her eyes were wide open and they strained against the darkness even though she knew seeing anything would be impossible.
She followed the progress of the dog as it circled the truck. Listened to one sentry trying to control his excited animal as the other grilled Smith next to the cab. To his credit, Smith was playing his part perfectly, insisting he had no idea what was happening, that his vehicle contained nothing but a delivery of bread and bread products to Kremlyov restaurants and bakeries.
“Goddammit,” the dog handler swore. His voice seemed to be coming from roughly Tracie’s level, rather than from above, where it would be if he were standing. She guessed—hoped—he was shining a flashlight under the rear of the vehicle.
Keeping still was one of the hardest things she’d ever tried to do. Tracie Tanner was hard charging, straightforward, some would say bullheaded. To lie motionless under this kind of extreme stress was more of a challenge than she would ever have imagined.
Without warning, the truck rocked on its frame. The motion wasn’t violent or excessive, just a slight movement she might have missed entirely if her senses hadn’t been on high alert.
Tracie smiled. They might get through this.
“Pasha,” the dog’s handler said in a loud voice. It once again came from above Tracie. She guessed the man had climbed to his feet and was calling to his partner on the other side of the truck.
“What is it?”
“Marx is on top of his game today. He sniffed out a dead squirrel.” The voice faded as the dog handler walked around the front of the truck.
“He is keeping Kremlyov safe from road kill.” The sound of laughter floated through the walls of the truck as the dog continued to strain against its leash.
Come on, come on. If it took too long to wrap this up, the men might begin to wonder about the dog’s continued excitement, or about why a frozen squirrel would be emitting a scent at all.
Now the guards were teasing Smith. “What did you do, come here through the forest? Drive one hundred kilometers per hour? That animal was jammed so tightly under your truck, I doubt it will fall out until it decomposes.”
Smith said something Tracie couldn’t make out, and the men shared a laugh. Then the truck rocked again from what she assumed—and hoped—was Smith climbing back behind the wheel.
The engine revved and then the ZiL-157 began creeping forward. The last thing Tracie heard as they entered the city was the dog handler ridiculing his animal for hunting down a dead squirrel.
* * *
Tracie wasn’t sure how long they drove around after entering Kremlyov, but it was at least thirty minutes. To the best of her knowledge, no westerner had ever entered the city, and although surveillance satellites and aircraft had mapped it as thoroughly as possible from above, finding the correct street address would present a challenge.
They drove up and down inclines and around corners, stopping at traffic lights, the idling engines of other vehicles wafting through the walls of the truck. The sounds of the ZATO were no different than Tracie imagined they would be in D.C. or any other city. There was nothing to indicate she and Smith were interlopers inside one of the most secure and secretive enclaves in the world.
Eventually the air brakes squealed again and the truck pulled to a stop. A moment later Smith shut down the growling engine. Silence descended and then footsteps crunched along the side of the truck.
Smith pounded his fist twice on the side of the cargo box, their agreed-upon “all clear” signal.
Tracie took a deep breath and pulled the handle to release the rear bumper.
The now-familiar CLUNK indicated the bumper had dropped and was hanging by its dual cables. Tracie pushed herself backward in the narrow space, crawling into the dirty gray light of a Russian winter morning.
She dropped to the ground. Refastened the bumper and shrugged her backpack onto her shoulder. Smith was nowhere to be seen but she’d told him to make himself scarce the moment he gave her the signal to exit the truck. If something went wrong, there was no reason to offer the Soviets a two-for-one special on captured operatives. Tracie was determined not to make life that easy for the KGB.
She glanced as much as possible at her surroundings without drawing attention to herself as she walked casually away from the delivery truck. The direction didn’t matter. The goal was to put distance between herself and Ryan Smith, whose assignment now was to make his way out of the city and back to his Moscow safe house.
He had chosen a good location in which to drop off his cargo. The distant sound of traffic told Tracie they weren’t far from the populated portions of Kremlyov, but this spot was quiet and, as far as she could tell, empty. She guessed she wasn’t far from the Mockba River but wasn’t quite sure why she thought that. There would be no sound of running water at this time of year since the river would be frozen solid.
She walked at a rapid pace, but not so fast that it would arouse suspicion, and after fifteen minutes had left the ZiL-157 and Ryan Smith—wherever he was—far behind. Hopefully by now he had returned to the truck and was well on his way out of the ZATO and on to safety.
Kremlyov was just beginning to come to early-morning life. Cars zipped past, most of them old, all of them, unsurprisingly, Soviet-made. The sun had risen but was fighting a losing battle against a low overcast that threatened snow.
Tracie found herself in a semi-residential area, with maybe a dozen nearly identical tiny homes clustered in a small neighborhood far to her south and a series of shops and businesses located where she now stood, near a main highway playing host to most of the traffic.
She wandered into a combination deli/pastry shop and sat at a table. She craved coffee but ordered tea and a biscuit, since Russians were far less enamored of coffee than Americans. Nothing would be more ridiculous than getting caught because she couldn’t forego a cup of coffee and had made herself stand out.
Her order arrived and she sipped her tea while crunching on her biscuit. At the moment she wanted to warm up and get her bearings. The plan was a simple one, at least for now: wait for her target to leave for work and then break into his home. She would search his house from top to bottom. With any luck, she would find what she needed and slip out of the city undetected.
The odds of that happening were slim, but a girl could dream, and that was Tracie’s at the moment.
If it didn’t work out, she would do what she’d always done—figure something else out. She had a backup plan in mind, but it would be risky as hell, and she hoped she wouldn’t be forced to execute it.
Either way, that was a worry for later. One of the first things she’d learned with field work was that there was absolutely no point in worrying what might happen at some point down the line. Things were always changing, variables constantly being introduced, and the only certainty for an operative was that things would change and she would have to adapt.
She sipped her tea and ate her biscuit and allowed the warmth to seep back into her extremities. She’d worn her winter parka, but the crawl space under the truck had been unheated and un-insulated. Even though she’d only been inside it for about an hour, she had been shivering badly by the time she exited. The opportunity to banish the chill was not something to take lightly.
Too soon the tea was gone and the biscuit reduced to a few crumbs on the plate. She pushed herself to her feet and pulled on her coat. It was time to find a quiet spot—the place Smith had chosen to drop her off should work quite nicely—to consult her map and figure out how far she would have to hike to get to her target’s home.
Hopefully the CIA’s sources were at least som
ewhat accurate, because although Kremlyov was a relatively small city, it was still far too big and Tracie far too exposed to go door-to-door searching for the man she needed to find.
11
January 21, 1988
9:20 a.m.
Kremlyov, Russia, USSR
According to Tracie’s intel, the manager of Kremlyov’s Arzamas-16 nuclear plant was a nuclear physicist and administrator named Yuri Ryakhin. An accomplished scientist, Ryakhin had been the facility’s manager for nearly a decade, and had been rewarded for his loyalty to the Soviet cause—and presumably also for his accomplishments—with a private home in a relatively secluded part of the city.
Ryakhin’s housing situation factored prominently into Tracie’s plan, as did the fact that he was an older man and lived alone.
The CIA’s intel on Yuri Ryakhin had been collected almost exclusively through intercepted communications: bugged telephone calls, wiretaps, intercepted mail and the like. The information was as thorough as it could be under the circumstances, but since no one had yet managed what Tracie attempted this morning—entering Kremlyov and getting eyeballs inside the ZATO—everything they had on Ryakhin was all necessarily second or third-hand.
But the home address she had been given was rock-solid. After leaving the pastry shop she looked Ryakhin’s supposed address up on her partial map of Kremlyov and started walking. Ninety minutes later she entered his neighborhood and ten minutes after that she was inside his house.
Perhaps the crime rate was low in Kremlyov, or maybe because he lived inside a city that was hermetically sealed, Yuri Ryakhin felt shielded from the possibility of compromise by a foreign government. But his home was unprotected by any kind of security system, and while he had locked his doors this morning before leaving for work, the locks themselves were almost embarrassingly easy to pick.
Tracie stepped into his small living room and shook her head. He should have known better than to make a break-in so damned easy. The director of a nuclear facility presented a juicy target to foreign intelligence services, especially during a decades-long Cold War.
Apparently he hadn’t gotten the memo, though, and while it was foolish of him, it was fortunate for Tracie. There was no way to avoid exposing herself to the prying eyes of neighbors while picking Ryakhin’s lock, and that exposure had been minimal thanks to the man’s unknowing cooperation.
Tracie felt fairly certain no one had seen her enter. The neighborhood appeared deserted and the thick forest surrounding it had allowed her to maintain concealment while observing the home for any sign of movement.
When thirty minutes passed with no activity, she strode out of the underbrush, consulted a phony work order as if checking the address—the neighborhood appeared empty but why take chances?—and crossed to the front door in seconds. She climbed the steps, defeated the lock and was in.
The first three things she did upon entry were to clear the house, to ascertain the location of the rear door, and then to open a rear window. The structure was empty, as she had been almost certain it would be, and the rear door and window would allow at least the potential for escape in the event she was wrong about the break-in not being observed.
Having protected herself as best she could, it was time to get down to work. The clock was ticking, and while she doubted Ryakhin would return home before the end of the workday, there could be no accounting for the prospect of the man coming down with an illness, or having taken the day off, or for any one of a thousand other possibilities that could lead to a negative operational outcome.
Ryakhin had a home office and it seemed like the logical place to start, so she did. After the ease with which she had accessed the man’s home she was entirely unsurprised to find his desk drawers unlocked. The desk itself was huge, a shiny walnut L-shaped behemoth featuring six drawers and probably thirty square feet of desktop space.
None of the drawers contained anything close to what she was looking for. A quick check convinced Tracie that if Ryakhin had taken any work materials home he hadn’t stored them in his desk.
She conducted a through search of it anyway. This would be her only opportunity inside the home of one of the highest-ranking members of the Soviet Union’s nuclear program, and even if Tracie couldn’t find the specific item she was looking for, there was always the possibility she might stumble across something completely unrelated that could be beneficial to the U.S. intelligence community.
It quickly became apparent that wouldn’t be the case, either.
One drawer was stuffed full of purchase receipts, some going back twenty years, none for anything interesting.
Another contained pens and writing paper and envelopes and Russian stamps. There was a calculator and a telephone book.
One of the larger drawers was stuffed full of pornographic magazines. Some were Russian, some were Czechoslovakian, a few were East German, but the vast majority had been published in the United States.
Tracie raised her eyebrows in surprise and muttered, “Well, well, well, Yuri. Aren’t you a horny little bastard?”
Yuri Ryakhin may have been a staunch Communist, committed to the spread of the Soviet state, but his choice in reading material demonstrated an obvious weakness for big-breasted, blonde American women.
Tracie filed this information away in her mind even as she slid the overstuffed drawer closed. This was the sort of thing that could potentially be exploited in the future. A “random” meeting in Comrade Ryakhin’s favorite drinking establishment with a scantily-clad, amply endowed blonde, a drunken dalliance where Ryakhin spilled a state secret or two, just to impress his new fan, and just like that the CIA might have a new blackmail target, a source of potentially game-changing intelligence.
Of course, if Tracie’s plan came together the way she hoped it would, in all probability Comrade Ryakhin would soon be out of a job. Maybe he would find himself in front of a Russian firing squad. But you never knew how the ball was going to bounce in the world of covert operations, and a potential weakness in the opponent was an opportunity not to be taken lightly.
She finished searching the desk and found nothing further of interest. Glanced around the office. A bookshelf covered the rear wall, filled with what looked like roughly an even split between technical manuals on the subject of nuclear power generation, classical Russian literature, and modern thriller novels.
There wouldn’t be time to rifle through each book, which was what really should be done, so Tracie picked a couple dozen at random, flipped through the pages, and found nothing unusual.
The remainder of the office was a wasteland as far as potential intelligence was concerned. An ancient television sat on a table in the corner, topped by a VCR machine. A rotary-dial telephone had been placed within Ryakhin’s reach on the desk. A few pictures hung on the wall, featuring people Tracie did not recognize. Presumably they were Ryakhin’s relatives and friends.
The office was a washout.
She moved to the man’s bedroom and searched his dresser drawers. Besides uncovering another porn stash—these must be his favorites—sharing space with his socks and underwear, she found nothing of interest.
She rifled through the drawers of his nightstand.
Nothing.
She was rapidly reaching the conclusion that Plan B was going to be necessary, regardless of how much she might want to avoid it.
She moved to his closet and checked through the clothing, searching pockets and looking for anything unusual.
Found nothing.
Spent a couple of minutes tapping on walls and searching for a hidden compartment, feeling ridiculous. This was real-life, not a goddamned spy movie. The notion that a Soviet nuclear expert would hide actionable intelligence inside a secret compartment in his bedroom wall was just silly, and after a short time she stopped, thankful none of her contemporaries were here to see her. If Ryan Smith had looked at her funny after she scraped a frozen squirrel off the pavement, she could only imagine what his reaction would be to
this.
She closed the closet door and dropped to her hands and knees, peering under Ryakhin’s bed.
She searched his bathroom.
Performed a perfunctory search of his kitchen.
The man’s house was useless, exactly as she had expected. But she’d had to wait for Ryakhin to return home from work anyway, so at least she’d spent her time productively even if she hadn’t found anything.
That was what she told herself, anyway.
She checked her watch. Nearly five p.m., Moscow time. Ryakhin should either be preparing to leave work or—if Tracie was lucky—maybe he was even now on his way home.
All she could do was wait for him to arrive.
She didn’t have to wait long.
12
January 21, 1988
5:20 p.m.
Yuri Ryakhin’s home
Kremlyov, Russia, USSR
Tracie was ready when he walked into the house.
A key rattled in the useless lock and then the front door swung open. A burst of bitterly cold air presaged Ryakhin’s arrival by half a second and then the man stepped into his living room.
And Tracie stepped out from behind the door and placed her gun lightly against the side of his head.
“Step forward, please, Comrade,” she said in Russian. She spoke quietly but forcefully.
To his credit, Ryakhin didn’t scream. He didn’t freeze up in terror or drop to his knees and begin babbling for mercy. He simply moved clear of the front door and then Tracie kicked it closed.
“What is this about?” he asked. “If it is money you want, you are welcome to what is in my wallet, but I assure you it will not be anywhere near enough to make this assault worth the legal difficulties you will have when you are apprehended.”
“I don’t want your money, Comrade.”
“Then what?”
“It’s very simple. I want information.”
“Information? What kind of information? What are you talking about?” He raised his hands in frustration and began to turn to face Tracie but stopped in mid-pivot as she shoved the gun much harder against his skull.
Tracie Tanner Thrillers Box Set Page 104