Temple of Spies

by Ian Kharitonov

  “Cowards die many times before their deaths, Pavel. And traitors are the worst kind of cowards. They live in constant fear.”

  “You got it all wrong, Gene. If I tipped the FSB off, then why would I warn you about the killer? Come on, it doesn’t make sense.”

  “You set me up. You wanted to get me and my brother both killed. Cut the act, Judas. You’re lucky I’m the one who came knocking on your door this morning. When your Chekist friends figure out that their assassin is dead, heads will roll. And first of all, it’ll be your head—literally. Your limbs and torso will be dumped somewhere else.”

  Netto blanched. Denying his treachery became pointless.

  “Dear God … What am I going to do?” he mumbled.

  “For starters, tell me how you got mixed up with them. While you’re at it, get down to work. To save your skin, you must recover all of the data from this tablet.”

  Sokolov handed him the device he’d taken off Song.

  Netto whimpered. “Your wish is my command. Please, don’t hurt me. I swear I can acquit myself.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  Netto connected the tablet to his workstation and hit the keyboard, typing commands in a terminal window.

  “They snatched me as I was walking home,” he began, detailing his horrific experience inside Lefortovo Prison.

  As Sokolov listened to the story, his contempt for FSB tactics reached a new level. But although he could rationalize the motives of Netto’s betrayal, Sokolov would never be able to forgive his former friend.

  “There. I retrieved your guy’s Darkmail credentials. Seems like he deleted his email conversations regularly, but there are several messages in the trash which he failed to wipe out. I’ve restored them. The sent mail is written in Korean, but there’s one incoming message he received from Minski. It says: Everything’s OK. The merchandise will ship on schedule.”

  “Are you sure it’s from him? I don’t see his name.”

  “I’ve been sending weekly reports to this very address. Minski keeps me on a short leash. I couldn’t even pack my bags and run—he’d find me anywhere. You don’t know what a bastard he is.”

  “I do,” Sokolov said. “He’s a hoodlum blinded by greed. His ambition to climb to the top of the Chekist hierarchy makes him bite off more than he can chew. And I got the perfect bait for him. Or rather, he thinks that you have it. And you’ll give it to him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s desperate to pull off a coup. He won’t be able to resist the Oltersdorf secrets. Why don’t you yank his chain?”

  “How?”

  “You’ll send him an email. Instead of the Oltersdorf pages, it will contain a virus. I want you to hack into his computer and plunder the entire contents of the hard drive. Then you’ll need to find a needle in a haystack.”

  “Such as?”

  “Any mention of Operation Temple. Especially, anything in regard to transportation. The railroad is the most secure and reliable link between Russia and the North Korea. The Kremlin has invested heavily to revamp the North Korean railway system. I want to know which train they’re using for cargo delivery. Is it doable?”

  Netto shrugged. “Why the hell not. It’s not the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant in Iran that you’re asking me to penetrate.”

  “I wouldn’t take no for an answer. But what if you’re targeting the wrong machine?”

  “I can find a backdoor to the entire government server if necessary. I’ll use Minski’s system to infiltrate his contacts and keep looking until I hit the right result. Most of the FSB officials I’ve met are complacent idiots when it comes to network security. They don’t believe that a classified data leak could happen to them in their own backyard. Yeah, I’ll do it, Gene. I can write the required malware. As things stand, I’m finished. But if I steal some of Minski’s secrets, maybe I’ll have the insurance I need against him.”

  The FSB had welcomed scum like Snowden with open arms. The irony of putting them on the receiving end of a cyberattack wasn’t lost on Sokolov.

  “Get started.”

  “I’m on it. Whether it turns out to be a train, an airplane, or a dog sled crossing into North Korea, I promise I’ll pinpoint it for you.”

  Netto spent the better part of the next hour hammering the keys as he tweaked the Trojan source code.

  “When he opens this message, the worm will give me full access to his desktop. It can replicate and spread around his network, infecting hundreds of other PCs.” Netto launched a Windows virtual machine and showed Sokolov how the malicious code worked step by step. “All right, it’s your call. I’m one keystroke away from sending the email.”

  “Do it.”

  Emphatically, Netto jabbed the Enter key with his index finger.

  The response came a few anxious seconds later.

  Upon reading the message, Minski had opened the attachment immediately.

  Lines of code ran across the screen.

  “Hook, line, and sinker,” Netto said. “I’m scanning his drives right now.”

  The worm had been running for thirty minutes when Netto let out a low whistle.

  “Jackpot.”

  “You found something?”

  “Oh yeah! I hit pay dirt in one of his hidden folders. A huge collection of gay porn, including some potentially scandalous stuff with Minski himself.”

  “Don’t try my patience while I’m still being nice to you.”

  Once a snake, always a snake, thought Sokolov. No matter how much he despised Minski, he’d never stoop to dirty-laundry blackmail. Netto, on the other hand, had no qualms about using the FSB man’s own methods against him. Sokolov wondered how eager Netto had been to stab him in the back on Minski’s demand. The two of them were of the same ilk. Sokolov decided that soiling his hands to teach Netto a lesson wasn’t even worth it. As punishment, he’d let the snitch and the handler fight it out between themselves, going at each other’s throats.

  Sokolov kept a close eye on the computer monitor, making sure he never gave Netto another chance to double-cross him.

  Netto selected multiple files from the growing list of search results.

  “And … here it is. A few hundred pages’ worth of technical documentation.”

  Several windows popped up on the display as Netto opened the PDF files side by side. He scrolled through the pages quickly.

  Three documents in particular caught Sokolov’s attention.

  The first file provided a full description of the nuclear explosive device.

  Next came the specifications of a Soviet-built M62 diesel-electric locomotive.

  The last document listed the itinerary of a 56-car freight train traveling to the North Korean sea port of Rason.

  17

  Through the helicopter window, Sokolov studied the rugged terrain first discovered by his ancestors.

  In the 1580s, an 800-man-strong Cossack force had conquered the Siberian Kingdom, presenting it to the Moscow Czar as a gift. The Cossack explorers had endowed Russia with a land of riches. For centuries to come, Siberia would provide a source of limitless wealth, from gold, silver, gemstones and sable, to crude oil and natural gas.

  No other empire had expanded as peacefully as Russia under the rule of the benevolent Christian czars. Siberia had seen the rise of the Russian Empire and its fall.

  Alexander Kolchak, Russia’s last legitimate ruler, had been murdered in Siberia, his dead body dumped under the ice of the Angara River flowing from Lake Baikal. The last Czar, Nicholas II and his family had endured captivity in the Siberian town of Tobolsk before their slaughter.

  Sokolov remembered the argument he’d had with his brother.

  “Everyone betrayed the Czar,” Constantine had said. “The generals, the aides, the Russian elite. They all watched idly as the Imperial Family was killed. Everyone, including the Russian people. They’d done nothing to protect their monarch from the massacre. And by the time the killing reached their own families, it
was already too late. Unless the Russian nation repents of the horrifying regicide allowed by their forefathers, this country will remain cursed forever.”

  “Fair enough. The blood of the Romanovs is on their hands. But unlike Nicholas II, the previous Emperors had known how to deal with their own entourage. The generals who betrayed him were the ones he’d handpicked. He had only himself to blame. He failed as a leader. He was the anointed sovereign, and yet he abdicated. Instead of having the traitors hanged, he’d chosen to become their victim. In the country’s darkest hour, how could he surrender the monarch’s duty? He doomed himself and he doomed Russia.”

  The beheaded country had plunged into civil war. Siberia had bled. No other part of Russia had suffered such annihilation. A hellish carnival of death had swept across the Siberian plains, reaping human lives by the millions. Ravaging Siberia through war, mass murder, and epidemic typhus, the Bolsheviks had drowned the once-prosperous land in blood. And from that slush of gore and lice, they’d raised the archipelago—nay, a continent—of the Gulag.

  Trains had linked the gulag system together, allowing it to function, transferring millions of people to the communist prison camps. The railroads had become subsidiary to the gulags. Unsurprisingly, the director of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky, had also headed the Soviet Transport Commissariat, a position subsequently taken by Lazar Kaganovich, Stalin’s chief henchman.

  The entire Soviet economy had relied on slave labor, with the victims fortifying the rule of their oppressors. Under communism, the mind-boggling construction projects had doubled as death camps. The workers had fallen dead building factories, power plants and railroads, with new waves of inmates just like themselves laying bricks and rails over their frozen bones before perishing as well. The Bolsheviks had wasted human life in pursuit of their goals which, once reached, they had found useless, such as the Baikal-Amur Mainline. A new railway network running parallel to the Trans-Siberian Railway, it had failed to serve any practical purpose beyond its six-figure death toll. Intended as a show of Bolshevik superiority, it had remained unfinished for seven decades, losing in every respect to the Trans-Siberian Railway built under the Czar whom the Bolsheviks had killed.

  Stretching over 5,000 miles, completed from 1891 to 1916, the great Trans-Siberian Railway still acted as the main travel route across Eurasia. It had a maximum transit capacity of 120 million tons of cargo per year, and dozens of freight trains coursed it daily.

  But on the designated day of the nuclear blast, there had been only one train running to North Korea. Number 4001.

  Trans-Siberian trains traveled at an average of 30 km/h, hitting top speeds of 50 km/h. According to Sokolov’s calculations, no other train could have picked up the nuclear device, which had likely been delivered from the blowout site by aircraft. The timing of the heist had been planned to perfection. He’d also noticed that thirteen passenger trains had been delayed for up to seventeen hours, the timetables adjusted to create a safety buffer around No. 4001, giving it a clear path all the way to the Khasan-Rason border link.

  Sokolov didn’t believe in coincidences, but educated guesswork could only get him so far. A recon flyover would determine whether he was right. He was inside an EMERCOM Kamov Ka-32A11BC search-and-rescue chopper, trying to locate and identify the North Korean train. Originally designed for Arctic anti-submarine warfare, the Kamov boasted great maneuverability thanks to its coaxial rotors. A thermoelectric de-icing system made it ideal for operating in Siberian conditions.

  The railroad snaked through the frozen Siberian tundra. It was forsaken territory. Nothing but permafrost and tree-covered hills as far as the eye could see. The desolate wasteland expanded a thousand kilometers east of Lake Baikal. During the previous three hours, Sokolov had encountered no signs of civilization. Only the lifeless remains of a few decaying villages stood in the vicinity of the railroad.

  “Approaching target coordinates,” Zubov announced. “I’ve got visual contact.”

  When Sokolov spotted the train with his own eyes, there was no more room for doubt.

  The drab-green-colored 2M62 power unit was hauling a string of fifty-six freight cars, but only twenty-seven of those were standard boxcars. The rest of the train consisted of cylindrical tank cars, each filled with fifty cubic meters of liquefied natural gas.

  With the pipeline to North Korea still years away from completion, Russian gas exports relied on transporting LNG tanks by rail.

  Number 4001 was traveling with an escort. A private train followed it close behind. Another M62 locomotive pulling five passenger carriages. The middle car had an image painted on its side. An icon of the Mother of God. It was a chapel car, Sokolov realized, one of the many used by the Moscow Patriarchate.

  Sokolov joined Zubov and Mischenko in the cockpit.

  “What on earth is this?” Mischenko asked in the pilot’s seat. “Some sort of a mobile church?”

  “Yeah, but that’s a false front. I bet it’s heavily armored and jam-packed with communications equipment. These trains are traveling in the typical formation favored by North Korean defense forces. Their Train Escort Division usually operates a group of three trains. The main train is followed by the train carrying the security staff. There should also be a scout train—a single locomotive running ten minutes ahead to check the safety of the rail tracks.”

  “So, one of the cars has a nuclear bomb on board?” Zubov asked.

  “Let’s find out. Yuri, bring us within range.”

  Mischenko tilted the stick, easing the chopper to an altitude of two hundred meters.

  Sokolov spoke into the mic of the 450-Watt, six-horn loudhailer system.

  “Attention! This is EMERCOM of Russia. You are requested to stop immediately for inspection. I repeat, stop immediately. Failure to comply will result in the use of deadly force.”

  The freight train didn’t look like slowing down. As the helicopter circled toward the church train to deliver Sokolov’s final warning, a hail of machine-gun fire erupted from the windows of the passenger cars.

  Bullets punctured the fuselage, punching holes in the chopper’s outer skin.

  Mischenko yanked the controls. The Ka-32 banked sharply, gaining altitude.

  “That was close!” Mischenko said.

  “Deadly force? So much for your bluff, Gene. Perhaps you should have talked to them in Korean instead,” Zubov quipped.

  “It was worth a try. We’ve got them dead to rights now.”

  “What’s your plan? Don’t tell me you’re going to hijack the freight train!”

  “No, I’m not that crazy. I wouldn’t think about hijacking a train guarded by an army of goons and loaded with enough LNG to blow up a city,” Sokolov said. “I’m going to derail it.”

  Zubov and Mischenko exchanged quizzical glances.

  “But it has to be done now, while we’re in the middle of the tundra,” Sokolov explained. “The window of opportunity is too small. Stopping these bastards will come at the cost of radioactive pollution, so we can’t allow them to reach populated areas like Khabarovsk or Vladivostok.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  His team-mates trusted him with their lives unconditionally.

  The Ka-32 hit its cruising speed of 230 km/h. Three minutes later, it gained on the scout train, which was running in advance just like Sokolov had predicted.

  “What’s the lowest altitude you can hover at?” Sokolov asked Mischenko.

  “Twenty-five meters.”

  “Gonna try your luck with another public announcement?” Zubov mused.

  “Almost. Neither of you guessed the correct answer but Yuri came closer. It’s the scout train that I’m going to hijack.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “I wish I were. Weather conditions?”

  “Minus twenty-five degrees Celsius. Wind gusts up to nine meters per second, north-north-west,” Zubov replied.

  “Could be worse,” Sokolov said as he went aft.

  He zipped up his
parka, adjusted the fur-lined hood, and put on a pair of leather gloves and ski goggles. Then he grabbed a standard-issue AK rifle and slung over his shoulder. He recalled the story Constantine had told him. Like the nuclear bomb, the famed Kalashnikov rifle had been stolen by the Soviets from Germany. At the end of the Second World War, the Red Army had seized the legendary weapons developer Hugo Schmeisser with ten thousand pages of his research. Alongside fifteen other captive German engineers, he’d been forced to complete his work on a new submachine gun, now known as the AK-47. As the prototype neared production, communist propaganda would have suffered a terrible blow if the involvement of Schmeisser’s group of German specialists had ever become known. Thus the lie had originated. The design of the rifle had been attributed to some illiterate peasant named Mikhail Kalashnikov, who’d shamelessly claimed it as his own. The man had been a fraud his entire life. In effect, the AK owed its reliability to German quality triumphing over Soviet manufacture. And reliability in the harshest environments was exactly what Sokolov wanted.

  Sokolov lacked the Navy SEAL training to rappel from the chopper, Hollywood style, but thankfully he wouldn’t need to pull off such a stunt. Instead, he had the luxury of a rescue basket which came as part of the Kamov’s firefighting equipment. The rescue basket had a rigid frame capable of holding two passengers. Resembling a window-cleaning cradle, it was utilized for the rooftop evacuation of victims from burning high-rise buildings.

  He slid open the port side door. An icy gust blew a flurry of snowflakes inside. Twenty-five meters below, the scout train charged along the tracks. Mischenko was keeping the chopper level with the driver’s cabin of the locomotive.

  Sokolov latched the rescue basket’s lifting harness on to the hook of the electric winch and pushed it clear. The cable hoist suspended it from the side of the helicopter.

  Sokolov stepped onto the platform of the rescue basket, climbed in and sat down, holding on to the rigid frame. He pressed a switch and the electric motor whirred, lowering the basket. It descended at a rate of two meters per second, swaying and bobbing, edging closer to the locomotive. The wind howled, picking up flurries of snow whipped up by the helicopter’s thumping rotors. Flying parallel to the scout train, Mischenko maneuvered the chopper with surgical precision.