Covert One 6 - The Moscow Vector (39 page)

The gray-eyed man sat there staring straight at him, aiming a pistol squarely at his head.

Suddenly, sooner than any of them had expected, the oncoming GAZ-manufactured jeep came racing around the corner. It was moving fast in a blaze of headlights.

Brandt’s men opened up instantly, firing their submachine guns on full automatic. The stuttering, clattering roar of gunfire shattered the frozen hush of the winter night. Bullets hammered the speeding jeep, punching enormous holes through its chassis and sending pieces of torn metal flying. Its windshield blew inward, shattered into a thousand separate bits by 9mm rounds fired at close range.

Without slowing at all, the bullet-riddled jeep veered sharply off the road and plunged wildly down the wooded slope. Still skidding downhill at high speed, the Hunter slammed into a birch tree with an earsplitting crash, spun away, and then slowly toppled sideways over the edge of a ravine. The pale beam of one headlight lit the overhanging trees and brush for a few seconds longer and then winked out, again leaving the hillside cloaked in absolute darkness.

When the light vanished, Jon and Fiona exchanged horrified glances. Neither of them had any real hope that Kirov could have survived the murderous ambush and crash they had just witnessed.

Brandt waited until the two Americans turned away in sorrow. Still holding his pistol on Smith, he picked up the radio mike. “Fadayev? This is Brandt.

We’re finished here. Listen, get back in your car and come up the hill after us.

I want you to investigate the wreckage of that jeep and to retrieve any documents carried by the driver. See if you can learn the name of the man we just killed. Understand?”

A flat, emotionless voice crackled back across the radio. “I understand.”

Brandt nodded. “Good. When you’re finished, report back to Group headquarters in Moscow. The rest of us will proceed to the monastery.”

He listened for the sniper’s acknowledgment and then signed off.

Tie gray-eyed man looked across the seat at Smith and Fiona. He shrugged. “So much for your friend.” Then he smiled coldly. “And soon we can begin the painful process of finding out just who employs you and how much you have already told them — “

PART FOUR

Baku, Azerbaijan

The wide boulevards and narrow alleys of Baku, the largest and most sophisticated city in the Caucasus region, stretched for miles along the shore of the Caspian Sea. As billions of euros and dollars poured in to finance new oil and natural gas ventures, Baku was more than ever a city of striking contrasts. It was both a bustling, prosperous twenty-first-century boomtown of glittering steel-and-glass skyscrapers, and also an ancient metropolis of mosques, royal palaces, and bazaars set amid a maze of shaded cobblestone lanes.

On a hill rising just outside the walls of the Old City lay the ugly concrete building that housed Azerbaijan’s president and his staff. Scowling Azeri soldiers patrolled the surrounding streets, making sure that visiting oil company representatives and curious tourists looking for the nearby Baku Philhar-monic and the state art museums kept moving along.

Deep inside the Presidential Administration building, one of the household staff emerged from a central elevator. He was pushing a heavy cart piled high with covered dishes. Troubled by what appeared to be a threatening buildup of Russian troops in neighboring Dagestan, the republic’s Defense Council was meeting in emergency session. As the night wore on, the generals and government ministers had ordered food sent in from the kitchen.

Two hard-eyed men in dark suits stepped forward. “Security,” one said.

showing an identity card. “We’ll take that from here. Only authorized personnel go any farther.”

The waiter shrugged wearily. “Just make sure you get their orders right,” he said, handing over a sheet showing the meals requested by each member of the Defense Council. Yawning, he turned back into the elevator.

Once the doors closed, one of the security service officers quickly lifted the lids of the dishes on the cart, comparing them with the list now held in his hand. He stopped once he found the bowl ofpiti, a stew of mutton, chickpeas, fat, and saffron. He turned to his comrade. “This one,” he said quietly.

“Looks delicious,” the other man said with a quick, cynical grin.

“So it does,” the first man agreed. He glanced swiftly up and down the corridor to make sure no one was looking. Satisfied, he took a vial out of his pocket and stirred the liquid it contained into the stew. The vial went back into his coat pocket while his colleague slowly trundled the cart up the corridor. Another HYDRA variant was moving toward its chosen target.

The White House

The outlook of those sitting around the crowded White House Situation Room conference table was unreservedly bleak, President Sam Castilla realized, observing the grim, set faces of his national security team. Most were deeply worried that the United States could soon be facing a serious clash with Russia, but no one felt confident enough in the available information to offer any solid suggestions on how to handle the terrifying diplomatic and military crisis they feared might be rushing toward them.

Basically, the president knew, they were all tired of stumbling around in the dark. Right now all they had were tiny bits and pieces of data —the accelerating wave of mysterious deaths both here in the States and abroad, whispers of intensifying Russian military preparation, and the steady drumbeat of Russian propaganda decrying the “dangerous instability” in countries around its borders. Unfortunately, everyone lacked the broader evidence and analysis needed to tie those bits and pieces into a clear-cut pattern, into something that would convincingly reveal what Dudarev and his generals were really planning. Without that clear blueprint, no one in Europe or elsewhere would be willing to confront Moscow.

Castilla turned to William Wexler, his new national intelligence director.

“Can we alter the orbit of our surviving Lacrosse satellite to obtain good cov-erage over these Russian frontier districts we’re most concerned about?”

“I’m afraid not, Mr. President,” the trim, handsome former senator admitted reluctantly. “Lacrosse-Five was the newer of the two satellites. Lacrosse-Four has been up too long. It just doesn’t have enough maneuvering fuel left to reach the required orbit.”

“So how long will it take to launch a replacement for Lacrosse-Five?”

Castilla asked.

“Too long, sir,” Emily Powell-Hill, his national security adviser, interjected flatly- “The CIA says six weeks, at a minimum. If I had to put serious money on it, though, I would bet that three to five months is probably a more realistic time-frame.”

“Good God,” the president muttered. By that time, the Russians could have marched the troops and tanks they were hunting for all the way to Siberia and back again. He looked across the table at Admiral Stevens Brose, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “What’s your evaluation of the destruction of our satellite. Admiral? Was it an accident—or a deliberate attack to blind us?”

“I don’t know, sir,” the wide, powerfully built Navy officer said carefully.

“Space Command has only been able to conduct a preliminary analysis of the images our early-warning satellites picked up. However, General Collins and his staff report that the explosions they observed onboard the Russian COSMOS-8B vehicle were extremely powerful.”

“Powerful enough to knock out another satellite hundreds of kilometers away?”

“Frankly, I doubt it, Mr. President. Given their different orbits, the odds against so many fragments from COSMOS-8B hitting Lacrosse-Five seem, well, astronomical,” Brose said drily. Then he shrugged. “But I’m only guess-ing. As of this moment, we don’t have the data to prove anything one way or the other.”

Castilla nodded grimly, seething inside. Without proof that the Russians had acted intentionally, the United States had no practical recourse but to write off the suspicious loss of a multibillion-dollar spy satellite. His mouth tightened to a thin, angry line. “What about our KH-series photo-recon satellites?” he demanded.

“We’re already running significant numbers of orbital passes over the target areas,” Emily Powell-Hill replied. “But cloud cover is the big problem. The weather is incredibly bad over most of the Ukraine and the Caucasus right now. Even with our thermal sensors, we’re not able to pick up much detail through the heavy cloud masses blanketing those regions.”

Left unsaid in all of this, Castilla realized gloomily, was the fact that even the best satellite photographs required skilled interpretation and analysis to reveal usable data, and too many of the best U.S. photo interpreters were fatally ill or already dead.

Charles Ouray, the White House chief of staff, spoke up from his end of the table. “Then why not take a stab at aerial reconnaissance? We have radar-equipped aircraft. Can’t we fly them near the Russian border?”

“Physically, yes,” Secretary of State Padgett said abruptly. “Diplomatically, no. With so many of their key political and military leaders dead or dying, the governments of the Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and the other former Soviet republics are increasingly fragile. In the present circumstances, none of them will risk provoking the Kremlin by allowing us to use their airspace for reconnaissance flights. So far, every request we’ve made, through every channel, has been rebuffed.”

Again Castilla nodded. The nightmare scenario he and Fred Klein had been worrying about over the last few days seemed to be moving closer to reality. If the Russians were behind this new disease, as seemed increasingly likely, they were using it very effectively to sow confusion and chaos. The big question was: How far was Dudarev willing to push his present advantage?

Would he be content to weaken the fledgling democracies around Russia? Or did he have something far more ambitious in mind?

The door to the Situation Room opened and an aide, a young, serious woman wearing horn-rimmed glasses, hurried in, moving quickly to where William Wexler sat making notes. She leaned over and whispered something in the intelligence director’s ear. His tanned face turned pale.

“Is there something I should know about, Bill?” Castilla asked sharply.

Wexler cleared his throat, looking uncomfortable. “Quite possibly, Mr.

President,” he admitted. “I’m afraid that the CIA has just lost one of its clandestine action teams, a group of field officers operating in Berlin. The first reports are very sketchy, but it appears that gunmen armed with automatic weapons and explosives ambushed our people on a public street. The head of the CIA’s Berlin Station is on his way there right now, but things look very bad. Very bad, indeed. There don’t appear to be any survivors.”

“Jesus,” Charles Ouray whispered.

“Amen, Charlie,” Castilla said softly. His shoulders bowed slightly, momentarily feeling the weight of more deaths, of more gold stars for the marble memorial wall at CIA headquarters. Then he frowned. First the Lacrosse satellite and now this vicious massacre of American intelligence officers. Were they connected in some way? He turned back to Wexler. “What was this clandestine action team’s mission?”

The national intelligence director looked baffled. “Their mission, Mr.

President?” he repeated uncertainly. He shuffled through the papers in front of him, clearly trying to buy time.

An awkward silence followed. No one else sitting around the Situation Room conference table had much respect for the former senator. At best, they considered him a nonentity. At worst, they viewed him as a liability, as one more bureaucratic obstacle for the already-fettered U.S. intelligence community to overcome.

“I’m not sure I have the details of their assignment,” Wexler admitted at last, reddening in embarrassment. He turned to his aide, the woman who had first brought him the news. “Did Langlev ever relay any of that information to us, Caroline?”

They were tracking a former East German biological weapons scientist, sir,” she said quietly. “A man named Wulf Renke.”

Castilla sat back in his chair, feeling as though he had been pole-axed.

Renke! Good God, he thought in astonishment. Renke was the renegade son of a bitch that Fred Klein’s Moscow-based Covert-One unit suspected of having created the strange illness they were investigating.

Quickly, the president excused himself, put his chief of staff in charge of the meeting, and left the Situation Room. As the door closed behind him, he heard more wrangling break out. He frowned deeplv, but kept walking. Taken as a whole, his national security team was remarkably competent, but their tempers and patience were definitely beginning to fray as they faced the nightmare of being forced to act blindly, without adequate intelligence. And right now, he simply could not afford to spend any more time riding herd on them.

Upstairs in the Oval Office, Castilla picked up one of the phones on his desk and punched in a special number known only to himself.

“Klein, here,” the head of Covert-One said somberly, answering the call on the first ring.

“Have you heard the news from Berlin?”

“I have,” Klein replied grimly. “I’m scanning the first CIA and local police reports right now.”

“And?”

“The link with Wulf Renke is highly significant,” Klein agreed slowly. “As is the extremely violent reaction to the CIA probe.”

“Meaning the Russians are afraid of what we may learn about him?”

Castilla asked.

“Or from him,” Klein pointed out. “If Renke was working safely under lock and key in one of their own Bioaparat facilities, they would have far less reason

to fear our learning that he is still alive and on the loose.”

“You think he’s running his own operation at a laboratory outside Russia?”

“Let’s say that I consider it a very strong possibility,” Klein replied. “I’ve been studying Renke’s file. He strikes me as a man who would never willingly put himself in a position where others held too much power over him. If he is creating a weapon for the Russians, I believe that he will be working for them at a safe distance.”