Sleeping Bear

by Connor Sullivan

  Macy asked, “Director Connelly, you stated that the two deceased Canadian citizens had in their possession the same type of Russian technology as found on the crashed jet?”

  “Yes.”

  “But we don’t know if the other individuals who took Emily Gale were American, Canadian, or even Russian? We don’t really know anything about them.”

  “We know that at least two of the individuals who took Emily Gale were Canadian citizens and that the vehicles they were using to transport her to Jack Wade were registered to a third Canadian citizen, Ned Voigt. We have not been able to locate Ned Voigt but we are working on it. As for the others, you are correct; they could be anyone—Canadian, Russian, or American—but I’d put my money on Russian.”

  “If they were Russian operators, just like the ones on the plane,” Macy said, “could these Canadians be working with them? Could they be some sort of sleeper cell?”

  “All options are on the table, but we haven’t been able to verify that.”

  “This stinks like shit,” Bridgewater said. “What else does the FBI know?”

  Connelly let out a long exasperated breath. “We can confirm that the survivor of the plane crash, Robert Gaines, was kidnapped outside the FBI offices at 9:24 a.m., Alaskan time. Surveillance cameras caught the abduction and can confirm that at least nine men in two black vans took Robert Gaines in Anchorage this morning and drove off. One of those vehicles has been identified as the burned-out van in Whittier, the other van has been found south of Anchorage on a dirt road next to the ocean. Burned as well.”

  “What does the press know?” asked Nagle.

  “They’re reporting the incident in Eagle and the plane crash. We’re withholding information until we know more.”

  “All right, thank you, Director Connelly,” Bowman said, and turned to Carter. “Your turn, Director Carter. I want to go back to the contents of Robert Gaines’s recording. Surely, you’ll be able to clear some of this up for us, starting with a name that Robert Gaines mentioned.” He started flipping through his notes. “Viktor Sokolov. Do you mind telling us who that is?”

  Carter leaned forward in her chair. “General Viktor Aleksandrovich Sokolov is a chief within the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR. Our intelligence sources believe he leads the SVR’s Line S, their Illegals Directorate. He runs spies for the Russian Federation as well as all their black work and is believed to be one of the principal decision makers for nearly all Russian covert operations abroad. You’ve all heard of Litvinenko, Politkovskaya, or Golubev? Any big assassination linked with Russia most definitely has Sokolov’s prints on it.”

  “Wait a minute,” Nagle interjected. “Is this the same guy close to Putin?”

  “Yes, Sokolov is usually credited as the puppet master behind Putin’s rise to power; they are very close.”

  Carter’s attention went to Morgan Fray, who rubbed his bald head as he read the file in front of him. “What the hell is a Vympel?”

  Carter was about to respond when the man in the military uniform next to Bridgewater spoke up. “A Vympel is a clandestine Russian Spetsnaz unit that specializes in high-level assassinations and black work. They’re Russian-trained operators very similar to the CIA’s paramilitary and work under the direction of the FSB and the SVR.”

  Carter finally figured out where she recognized the man in uniform and cursed herself for not recognizing him right away. It was the newly appointed JSOC commander, Scott R. Spear, a former Navy SEAL DEVGRU commander who had recently been named to lead the Joint Special Operations Command. Spear was a legend in the SEAL Teams and had been an obvious choice to lead JSOC.

  “General Sokolov created the Vympel Group during his KGB years and we believe he still runs an elite Vympel unit that works under the jurisdiction of the SVR,” Carter said.

  “I don’t get it,” Nagle noted. “How would Robert Gaines know all this? How does he know it was Sokolov and his Vympels who kidnapped his daughters? Does Robert Gaines have history with Sokolov?”

  Carter chose her words carefully. “Yes, Robert Gaines does have a history with General Sokolov.”

  Nagle glanced down at his notes. “Does it have to do with the Striker program?”

  “What is the Striker program?” asked Macy.

  “And what the hell is a sharashka?” Bowman interjected.

  Carter could see all the men hunched over their transcripts of Robert’s distress call to JBER. She knew she needed to tread softly here on forward if McGavran’s plan was going to be successful.

  “And what the hell is in that briefcase?” Nagle asked, pointing at the steel briefcase containing the OVERDRIVE case file.

  Before Carter could field any of the questions, Fray’s secure BlackBerry chimed. “POTUS has just landed in DC. Secret Service has alerted me that he’s just boarded Marine One and is currently en route to the White House. We can expect him on the South Lawn in ten minutes.”

  Thank God, Carter thought. “I suggest we take this downstairs to the Situation Room and wait until the president gets here.”

  “Why?” snapped Nagle.

  Carter patted the OVERDRIVE case file. “Because I don’t trust the security of the Cabinet Room, and what I am about to divulge is highly compartmented and cannot be subjected to leaks of any kind.”

  Chapter 50

  WHITE HOUSE

  SITUATION ROOM

  TWELVE MINUTES LATER, President William McClintock entered the Situation Room and took his seat at the head of the table. At thirty-nine years old, McClintock was the youngest ever person to serve in the United States’ highest office. A former marine and senator from Ohio, William McClintock secured his presidency by connecting to the American people in a truthful and brutally honest manner. Gone was the chaos of the last administration, gone were their lies and deceit.

  McClintock had run on transparency and youthful determination to get the country back on track, to be a force for good abroad and at home.

  After the president told everyone to sit, he took in the room, eyes giving away nothing. “I spoke with FBI deputy director Smith on the way over here and I listened to the recording—how certain can we be that these were Russian agents acting on United States soil?” The question was directed at DNI Nagle.

  Nagle cleared his throat. “Sir, the evidence is overwhelming. Using NSA facial recognition software linked to Interpol, we’ve been able to identify two of the deceased. Both of them are known Russian operators who’ve been photographed by Mossad around the time of high-level assassinations in Europe and the Middle East. They’ve also been linked to Russian operations in Syria.”

  McClintock steepled his fingers so the tips rested under his chin. “As of now, we believe that these men were attempting to kidnap this Robert Gaines?”

  Connelly spoke up. “Yes, sir. And we believe that they succeeded in kidnapping his daughters.” Connelly briefed the president on what had happened in Eagle, as well as recounting what the FBI discovered on Middleton Island and confirming Robert Gaines’s identity. “Director Carter has made the necessary arrangements to get Robert Gaines to DC.”

  “Why?” asked the president, looking at Carter.

  Carter cleared her throat. “Sir, the situation surrounding Robert Gaines is a delicate one. It will be the responsibility of my agency to vet and investigate his claims in person. Due to his sensitive history, and the stakes surrounding this situation, I will interview him personally.”

  The president didn’t say anything for a long moment, then looked down at his intelligence report. “Director Carter, I understand that you’ve had a long and illustrious career at the CIA. You probably know secrets that we at this table probably couldn’t comprehend. But to understand this whole situation properly, I am going to have to ask you to tell us everything you know about Robert Gaines and this General Sokolov.”

  Carter moved her hand off the briefcase, retrieved the keys from her pocket, and took out the OVERDRIVE case file. “I’ll start with the S
triker program, sir.” Carter cleared her throat again. “In 1981, at the beginning of the Reagan administration, the Central Intelligence Agency received viable intelligence from both assets and agents behind the Iron Curtain that the Soviets had been, and currently were, taking Westerners—Americans—into the Soviet Union and performing medical experiments on them at secret instillations known as sharashkas.

  “From what we know, the Soviets were trying to create the perfect soldier as well as have the captured Americans teach potential Soviet spies the nuances of American life so they could later come to the United States and spy for the Soviets under total disguise. While the latter has never been confirmed, the former has.

  “When my old boss, Prescott McGavran, former Moscow Chief of Station, obtained that information through three valuable assets on the ground—scientists who had been prisoners at one of these rumored sharashkas—he immediately sought the guidance of William J. Casey, the man chosen by Reagan to lead the CIA.

  “As you can imagine, Casey was disturbed by the intelligence, and looking to revamp the CIA after its tumultuous years in the seventies, he wanted to make his mark and rebuild our covert paramilitary so we could stand a chance against our enemies abroad. I don’t have to tell you, Mr. President, what Reagan was up against in the 1980s with Iran, the Soviet Union, and the Middle East. Terrorism was flourishing and the United States was getting crushed. So Casey and Reagan’s inner circle created the National Security Planning Group, or NSPG, thus giving presidential authority to implement and oversee covert action against terrorist organizations.”

  “This was the birth child of Reagan’s preemptive neutralization program?” SecDef Macy asked.

  “Yes,” Carter replied. “Reagan’s assassination program. His covert hidden hand. Officially, the program wasn’t installed until April 3, 1984, when President Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 138, authorizing the CIA to develop capabilities for the preemptive neutralization of anti-American terrorist groups that plan, support, or conduct hostile terrorist acts against US citizens, interests, and property overseas. But while not made legal until 1984, the CIA had already begun training and implementing our assassins abroad years before that.”

  The president said, “And I take it that Striker was part of his preemptive neutralization program and this Robert Gaines was one of these assassins?”

  “Yes, sir. The Striker program was formed in late 1981 and was headed by Prescott McGavran and myself. We took our orders straight from Casey and the NSPG. In the beginning, Striker was a covert intelligence gathering operation with the goal of finding the medical sharashka in question, which became known to us as Post 866.”

  “And General Viktor Sokolov? What does Gaines have to do with him?”

  “Gaines was already a CIA paramilitary operator when he came on my radar. He was one of the original Delta Force boys who caught the attention of Bill Casey and Prescott McGavran. Gaines was an unconventional warfare expert, an elite commando who was chosen with a group of others to be taught the ins and outs of spycraft at the Farm. He excelled with languages, he blended in everywhere, and after succeeding in various clandestine missions abroad, he was selected to be our man on the ground in Moscow starting in 1983, under the guise of a lowly state diplomat. In the four years that Prescott McGavran and I ran Robert Gaines, he started a family and carried out numerous operations before it all came to a head in 1985 when Robert made contact with a high-level Soviet scientist. The scientist claimed he could give us information on Post 866 and the man who ran it, KGB general Viktor Aleksandrovich Sokolov, the then chief of the KGB’s Department S.”

  Carter paused, collecting her thoughts, then went on, “This scientist, code-named BLUEMAN, almost led us to Post 866, giving us invaluable information along the way about what was going on inside, as detailed in this case file”—she tapped the stack of papers—“code-named OVERDRIVE.

  “BLUEMAN wanted a deal; he’d give us information and the location of Post 866 in exchange for the CIA helping his family defect to the West. Unfortunately, that never occurred. In late 1986, we’d set BLUEMAN up with a tracking beacon as he was flown back to the sharashka, but we lost the signal somewhere over the Kamchatka Peninsula. A day later, Evgeny Sokolov, General Sokolov’s son, a rising star in the KGB—and also the cofounder of the KGB’s Vympel Group—was seen dumping the body of BLUEMAN on the street outside the United States Embassy in Moscow and flipping off our security cameras. It was a ‘fuck you’ to our country, agents, and our program. When Robert Gaines tried getting BLUEMAN’s family out of the USSR later that day, they had already disappeared.”

  Carter explained that Reagan, Casey, and the NSPG gave the green light for the Striker program to kill or capture Evgeny Sokolov, claiming his actions fell under Directive 138. Gaines and McGavran found him hiding in Helsinki and took him to a CIA black site in Poland. The interrogation techniques that were carried out on Evgeny Sokolov weren’t enough to get all the information they wanted. After days of this information extraction, General Sokolov reached out to the CIA and offered an exchange. BLUEMAN’s family for Evgeny Sokolov.

  “The NSPG was against the trade from the start,” Carter said. “Evgeny Sokolov was too valuable to us, but Gaines told McGavran to convince them otherwise. Gaines had made a promise to BLUEMAN that he would protect his family and bring them to the West. A week later, on the Finnish-Soviet border, the exchange was made.

  “On the way to the exchange, I received intelligence of a potential KGB hit on Robert Gaines’s family while they were in hiding under CIA protection in Paris. It was my decision to send a backup team to protect them. It was also my decision not to alert Robert to the threat on his family before the exchange was made. I wanted him focused on the task at hand.”

  A long silence followed, and then the president broke it. “What happened?”

  “It was a foggy day that was ripe for an ambush, sir. As we released Evgeny Sokolov and he made his way across the border bridge to his countrymen, BLUEMAN’s wife and two girls made their way to us. When they were just feet away, the Soviets took them out. Robert was first to the bodies. As the Soviets retreated safely with Evgeny in their possession, we found that BLUEMAN’s family had photographs pinned to their coats—pictures of Robert Gaines’s family—his wife, his two young girls.

  “At the same time, General Sokolov was carrying out the hit on Gaines’s family personally. He shot Robert’s wife, Irina, and had almost succeeded in killing his young daughters before my action team was able to chase him off. Irina Gaines died from a traumatic head wound five days later, stateside.”

  The room went graveyard quiet. Carter went on: “After Irina died, Robert wanted answers. He blamed me for not alerting him about the threat to his family. While Gaines was being debriefed in Washington, he’d begged Director Casey to let him seek retribution, but Casey felt Gaines was too emotionally compromised. He ordered Gaines to remain in DC while he sent McGavran and myself back to Moscow to continue the Striker program. Days after we returned, we received word that Robert had left his daughters in Washington with a family friend and disappeared. Two weeks later, in January of 1987, bodies of known KGB members that were close to the Sokolovs started showing up dead all over Moscow. It didn’t take a genius to figure out who was behind the assassinations. During ‘bloody January’ as we have come to call it, nearly twenty bodies showed up in the snowy Moscow streets. They were well-orchestrated, professional assassinations. I knew Robert was behind it, I just didn’t know that my boss, Prescott McGavran, was helping him.

  “On January 25, 1987, the Soviets confirmed that Evgeny Sokolov was found dead at his family’s dacha in the Khimki Forest outside of Moscow and the body of Robert Gaines was found in a river five miles away… Casey called us back to DC at once. During our debriefing, Prescott McGavran admitted to helping Robert Gaines with the assassinations.

  “Reagan ordered the Striker program to be shut down indefinitely and for the OVERDRIVE case file
to be destroyed. Everything that we worked on was gone. Instead of firing McGavran, he was given a desk job at Langley, and I was sent back to resume my role as deputy chief of station, Moscow. Until four hours ago, I had always assumed Robert Gaines was dead, and that his children were raised by family friends.”

  “So Robert Gaines did kill Evgeny Sokolov?” the president asked.

  “The Soviets claimed Gaines tortured Evgeny to death. But we never saw Evgeny’s body, so we could never confirm it.”

  “And what about Gaines’s body, what was the Soviet’s excuse for not handing it over to us?”

  “The KGB said Gaines’s body ‘disappeared’ before it got to Moscow.”

  “Who hid Gaines?” Nagle asked. “Who got him his new identity?”

  “Prescott McGavran. He admitted it to me before I got here. Gaines survived somehow, but I don’t know the full story.”

  “Jesus Christ,” General Bridgewater breathed.

  “You said the OVERDRIVE case file was destroyed. If that is true, what the hell is this?” Chief of Staff Fray asked, pointing at the stack of papers in front of Carter.

  Carter explained to the group that McGavran had made a copy. And that from his position in the Office of Russian and European Analysis at Langley, he’d continued his search for Post 866—that he had been updating OVERDRIVE by himself, without the oversight of the CIA for more than thirty years. “And that is what I wish to explain next.”

  Carter opened the OVERDRIVE case file to the pages that McGavran had marked for her in the SCIF and began telling the most powerful men in the United States what it contained.

  Thirty minutes later, when she’d concluded with the contents in the case file, President William McClintock stood up from his chair so fast it rolled back and hit the wall behind him. He paced around the Situation Room and then pointed a finger at Carter. “So this suspected location of the sharashka, this Site X, it’s in an old Soviet missile silo?”

  “Yes, sir. In the late sixties, the CIA obtained the locations and schematics of various nuclear silos in the USSR. This was one of them.”