Command Authority (44 page)

“Air defense assets?” Conway asked.

Page couldn’t see anything definitive at this distance, but he knew there had to be something out there that could kill him.

But Dre Page knew he had a job to do, and the U.S. taxpayer gave him $38,124 a year to put his life on the line in foreign lands, so he put as much worry out of his mind as possible and said, “Looks clear on the ground. Still no red air to worry about?”

“Negative. Closest threats are seventy miles away in Crimea. It’s clear, blue, and twenty-two here, bro.”

This was helicopter-pilot speak for good flying weather.

“Range to target?” Conway asked.

Page shot the laser rangefinder. “Lasing target. Seven thousand six hundred eighty-one.”

“You good with that range?” Conway asked. It was near max distance. He could move the aircraft closer if Dre felt the engagement necessitated it.

Page said, “Dude, the fighter in me wants to be right on top of them. But the survivor in me kinda likes hiding behind this big fucking brick factory.”

“I heard that, brother. Let’s rock it from here.”

Page transmitted in his headset. “Warlock Zero One, this is Two Six. We are requesting clearance for fires for Hellfire.”

Midas came over the radio instantly: “Black Wolf Two Six, this is Warlock Zero One. I’ve got no Ukrainian air assets in the area. You are cleared hot with Hellfires, over.”

“Roger, cleared hot.”

Conway said, “Let’s do it.”

Page ignored Conway; he knew that Conway’s adrenaline fired him up like this, but Page prided himself on staying cool. “Frito Actual. Black Wolf Two Six. Be advised, we will be weapons release.”

“Roger that, Black Wolf. We are well clear. Negative friendlies at target pos. Get those missile trucks and get the fuck out of here before enemy helos come hunting for you.”

“Roger that.”

Conway slipped his thumb under the guard on the Weapons Fire switch on his cyclic.

He said, “Firing in three, two, one.” He pressed the fire button and sent an air-to-ground missile toward the first of the two huge mobile missile launchers.

“Hellfire blazing,” Conway said, confirming he could see good propulsion on the missile as it raced to the east.

“That’s sixty-five grand, off the rails,” Page said calmly. It was his joke, not Conway’s, because Page was the more relaxed of the two men in combat.

Conway did not wait to watch the impact on the MFD. Instead, he selected a second missile, and fired at the same target as the first. He could have switched between the two targets, but stacking up two back-to-back shots at the same target increased the chances the antimissile features of the battery would be defeated.

The first Hellfire was detected by laser warning receivers set up at the emplacement, and countermeasures were fired into the air. The American warhead was knocked down seventy-five yards away from impact by an automatic missile defense battery that neither Page nor Frito had detected.

But the second Hellfire got through, and detonated above the missile launcher, and even though Conway had been in the process of counting down his third Hellfire launch, he stopped when his MFD whited out.

He thought something was wrong with the system at first, and he began adjusting the monitor.

In his headset he heard, “Two Six, Frito Actual. Good hit, good hit. Multiple secondary detonations. Damn, dude, you really nailed it.”

Just then Page called out next to him: “Holy smokes.”

Conway looked up. Five miles in the distance, a black form was slowly morphing into a mushroom cloud. Several seconds later, a low boom was audible through his headset and the sound of the rotors above him.

It took a moment to get reset, but he fired his third missile to the east.

Just as he did so, a digitized male voice boomed in his and Page’s headsets. “Laser! Laser! Eleven o’clock.”

Page said, “Inbound fire!”

“Rapid release!” Conway said, and he fired another missile, this one at the second BM-30.

Just then Conway pulled right on the cyclic and punched down on the left pedal, turning the craft ninety degrees. He put the aircraft in a nose-down attitude, and the helicopter dove at the gravel road behind the brick factory building.

“Countermeasures,” Page said, and the Kiowa automatically fired flares as it plummeted.

Just a few feet above the ground Black Wolf Two Six leveled out, and raced over a field.

Less than one hundred fifty yards behind, a missile from a shoulder-fired launcher slammed into one of the factory’s three smokestacks, blowing it to bits and sending redbrick shrapnel in all directions.

Conway kept his speed up as a second missile hit the factory behind them. As he looked back over his left shoulder, his ears filled with an excited transmission from Frito team.

“Hell, yeah! Second target destroyed! Another fuckin’ neutron bomb!”

“Roger that,” Page said calmly. Now he looked out the open door on his side. The warning alarms had ceased, but he and Conway were still on the lookout for threats.

Warlock Zero One came over the net now. “Black Wolf, hell of a job, but they know you’re out there. Return to base.”

Conway said, “Roger that. RTB.”

Both young men’s hearts pounded against their body armor as they raced over a larch forest to the northwest. Normally, they did a lot of fist pumping after a successful target engagement, but right now both men were lost in their own thoughts, because they knew they’d just come a hair’s breadth away from death.

J
ohn Clark and his group of operations officers from The Campus had spent every day since their return from Sevastopol photographing people who visited the ninth floor of the Fairmont Grand Hotel.

They had quite an impressive array of characters in their rogues’ gallery, and to put names with the faces, Gavin Biery ran the pictures through facial-recognition software, using databases from the CIA SIPRNet, the Ukrainian Security Service files, and other open-source locations.

Still, none of the team had gotten eyes on Gleb the Scar himself. It was clear that this was by design. The team had staked out all the exits of the hotel in the worry that he had some sort of clandestine access to his penthouse, but after spending a day spread around the neighborhood, watching employee entrances, loading docks, and the rooftop heliport, they came to the conclusion that Gleb wasn’t coming and going. No, he was apparently just sitting.

Clark had moved his operation to yet another safe house. This was a smaller flat, just two blocks away from the Fairmont, and it was owned by a friend of Igor’s. The flat owner had fled the city with his wife and kids when the war started in the east, fearing the Russians would drive all the way to Kiev, and this gave Clark and company a secure safe house with a living room window that afforded them a good view of the Fairmont, and with their photographic equipment they could get decent imagery of those who came and went in the building.

A balcony on the ninth floor was also in view, and on it they could see two armed security officers standing, twenty-four hours a day. The men had scoped Dragunov sniper rifles, as well as binoculars. They looked out over the neighborhood, scanning for any surveillance or threats, but the Campus men had covered all of their apartment windows with black paper, save for a small hole where they could position their cameras.

Clark and his team had swept for bugs here, and found the place to be clean. The FSB didn’t have every apartment in the city under surveillance, of course, and Kryvov’s friend had not been deemed a security target by either the Ukrainians or the Russians.

As secure as the Campus staff felt in their new digs, they felt more and more insecure on the streets of the city. In the past three days several police officers and government officials, and even an SSU spy, had been killed on the streets of Kiev. A pro-national television station’s broadcast had been interrupted by the explosion of a bleach bomb that rendered the air in the studios caustic, and a radio station that had spoken out against Russia’s attack in the east had been set on fire and knocked off the air.

Just before eight p.m., Gavin sat on the sofa in the safe house. In front of him on the coffee table sat several slap-on GPS transmitters with their battery compartments open. He and Clark were changing out the batteries, a dull but necessary task, made a little harder for Clark because he’d had most of the bones in his right hand shattered more than a year earlier.

As they worked in silence, Gavin’s mobile phone rang; he didn’t even look at it before he answered. “Yeah?”

“Hey, Gav, it’s Jack.”

“Ryan! Good to hear from you. How’s everything in jolly ol’ England?”

“Not as jolly as I’d like, to tell you the truth.”

“No? Well, you should see it over here. Riots in the street, assassinations, bombings, spies, mob thugs, you name it.”

There was a pause on the line. “Gerry moved Hendley Associates to D.C.?”

Gavin laughed. “I guess you are out of the loop. We’re in Kiev.”

“Really? I had no idea. What are you doing there?”

“You know. Spy shit.”

“Right. Is everybody safe?”

“Yeah. Got dicey for John, Dom, and Ding the other day, but we’re fine.”

“Well, I need a favor. I have a list of phone numbers, and I was hoping you could trace them.”

“Sure. Send them on.”

A few seconds later, an e-mail appeared on Gavin’s phone. He opened it and thumbed the list of phone numbers up and down.

“Interesting. Most of these are local Kiev numbers. Where did you get them?”

“Off of one of the mob goons in London who tried to kill me today.”

Gavin looked at Clark with wide eyes. Clark saw the look, and he reached out for the phone.

Gavin didn’t hand it over immediately. “Are you serious?”

“’Fraid so. I could use that information as soon as you can get it to me.”

Gavin said, “Sounds like it. I’ll get on this right now. I’ve been playing around inside the network of the local telecom system. I can get you names and addresses of the owners of the phone, but I can also do another neat trick.”

“What’s that?”

“I can backtrack the GPS localizer associated with these numbers. That means I can tell you where each one of these phones has been, physically, for the past thirty days. We call it bread-crumbing.”

“That would be great.”

Clark snapped the fingers of the hand held out for the phone.

Gavin said, “I’ve got someone here who wants to talk to you.”

Ryan mumbled, “I was afraid of that. He’s going to chew me out, isn’t he?”

Gavin Biery said, “Think of it as tough love, kid.”

Clark got on the phone with Ryan, who proceeded to tell him everything about the events of the past day. Clark listened intently, he did not interrupt at all, but once Ryan was finished with his story, the pause on the line told the younger man that the older man was not pleased.

Clark said, “Kid, I swear to God, you manage to get yourself into the shit, don’t you?”

“Well . . . this kind of blew up on me.”

“The second you had even just that twitchy feeling that you were being tailed you should have picked up the damn phone and called me.”

“Well, John, from what Gav just told me, you’ve been a little tied up yourself.”

“That doesn’t get you off the hook on this one. You know I could have had guys and guns around you within a couple of hours. Hell, I know enough old SAS guys there in London I could have had security on you in twenty minutes. You can’t just run solo like that, for crying out loud. You are the President’s son.”

“I know. I thought I was just being paranoid. I didn’t recognize the threat level until it was too late.”

“This Gleb the Scar you mentioned is a personality we are very familiar with over here.”

“Really?”

“Yes. He’s Seven Strong Men, from Saint Petersburg. We think he might be the number-two guy in their organization.”

“Who’s number one?”

“No one knows. But Gleb is over here running proxy ops for FSB.”

Ryan said, “Interesting. The guys who attacked me work for him, and in my work at Castor and Boyle, I uncovered an illegal scheme to defraud one of our clients, and traced it as a payoff by Gazprom, which is the Russian government, to a man with FSB ties named Dmitri Nesterov.”

Clark told Ryan to hold the line while he checked to see if that was a name they had come across in Ukraine. They had not. He then asked his local expert, Igor Kryvov, if he had ever heard the name, but it was new to him as well.

Clark spoke quickly and with complete self-assuredness. “All right, you are obviously in the center of a shit storm over there, so here’s what’s going to happen: I’m sending Ding, Dom, and Sam to you right now, tonight, on the Gulfstream. They will escort you back to the States. If your new friend there has a passport, they can take him as well. If he doesn’t have a passport, we might be able to swing something.”

Ryan hesitated for a moment.

Clark sensed the reticence and said, “Jack, you realize you can’t stay there. Right?”

“John, I know it looks like I’m running a hell of a risk staying over here, but I am in the middle of something I can’t drop. The stakes are too high. I’d appreciate a little muscle to watch my back, only if you can spare it.”

“I’ll have them moving in a half-hour. Are you at least in a secure location now?”

“I am mobile. I left my car at a mall and we took a taxi to a car rental agency, where I picked up a new ride. It’s in my name, so I could be traced, theoretically, but the Seven Strong Men guys on me haven’t shown that they are using much high-tech surveillance just yet. Just to be sure, I’ve done an SDR, and there is no tail.”

Clark replied, “I’d feel better if you’d go back to the States, but for now, I’ll get the plane and the guys to London. In the meantime, we will call you back when Gavin runs the names on the phone data you sent him.”

“Thanks, John.”

—

R
yan and Oxley drove through the countryside north of London while they waited for Gavin to call back. There was no conversation between the two of them. Ox seemed lost in thought, and Ryan was thinking over his next move.

He wanted to talk to Sandy Lamont, but he was not sure he could trust him. It was very possible Lamont had tipped off someone that Ryan was going to Corby. It was possible that Lamont knew about the connection between Castor and Oxley, although why anyone would need to die over it remained a mystery to Ryan.

The more Jack thought about Lamont, the more suspicious he became. He recognized his affable boss had twice warned him against digging deeper into the Gazprom deal, before finally pulling him off the case altogether. Could there have been reasons for this more nefarious than those he’d stated?

Jack knew the only way to find out for sure was to confront him and gauge his reaction.

They stopped at a fast-food restaurant and grabbed takeout, and then parked in the lot behind a busy motor lodge to eat. They had just finished their meal when Jack’s phone chirped.

“Hey, Gavin.”

It was John Clark who spoke first. “Actually, it’s John and Gavin. We’ve got you on speakerphone.”

Gavin spoke next. “Ryan, you’ve got yourself a situation there.”

“Explain.”

“There were twenty-four contacts on the phone that were of possible interest, but I whittled it down to six that needed the full track run on them. Two of the six are personalities we’ve run into over here in Kiev.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Nope,” said Clark. “We’ve spent most of the past week tagging men who’ve met with Gleb the Scar at the Fairmont Grand. These two guys on your hit man’s phone are obviously mob characters. I put them as lieutenants. They’ve been in regular contact with your man Oleg for at least the past month, and spoke to him within the past twenty-four hours while he was there in the UK.”

Gavin picked up from there. “Two more are apparently in the group you put on ice. Their phones stopped moving just after noon today in the town of Corby, and now they are beaming signals in a police station. I backtracked the GPS bread crumbs to several locations, both in the UK and in Ukraine. They aren’t so terribly interesting in and of themselves, but their phones were in the same low-rent hotel the day before yesterday as another phone on the list, and that phone is the most fascinating of all.”

“And why is that?”

John Clark spoke now: “Because the owner of that phone has spent part of the past month in a house in a Moscow suburb. That house is owned by a man named Pavel Lechkov, and although we know he’s Russian, we don’t have anything on him. We tried to find a picture of Lechkov but came up blank, which makes me suspect he might be an intelligence agent.” Clark added, “There’s more, Jack.”

“I’m listening.”

Gavin said, “I bread-crumbed his phone number and tracked it to a couple of hotels in London. But Friday evening he went to a private residence in Islington.”

Jack asked the next question with trepidation. “Friday evening is after I went to Corby to see Ox. Whose place did Lechkov go to in Islington?”

Clark said, “He spent twenty-five minutes at the home of Hugh Castor.”

“Is that right?” Jack mumbled.

Clark said, “Yes. Whether or not he met with Castor, of course, we can’t say. Nevertheless, I’m afraid your employer in London is starting to look like he might be involved—indirectly, at least—in the attack on you.”

Ryan said, “That’s two strikes against him. He’s involved with the Seven Strong Men, and he knew Oxley from a long time back. It seems like this Lechkov paid Castor a visit after I went and met with Oxley, and then Lechkov met with Oleg and the other Seven Strong Men goons and gave them orders to kill Ox.”

Clark said, “Jack, I hope you will agree, this seems like a fine time for you to head back to the U.S.”

Ryan did not agree. “I have someone here in London that I need to talk to. After that, I want to meet with Malcolm Galbraith. He might be able to connect some more dots.”

Clark went silent.

To bolster his argument, Jack said, “John, I’ll be at Stansted when the plane lands, and we’ll fly to Edinburgh. It’s
Edinburgh
. It’s not Kiev or Moscow. Plus I’ll have Ding, Sam, and Dom at my side the whole time. Adara will keep watch on the aircraft and Oxley. All I want to do is go have tea with a billionaire and pick his brain—how much trouble can I get into with that?”

Clark sighed. “I guess we’re about to find out.”