Soar (13 page)

The secretary paused to draw a breath. “So you won’t be the first to do this sort of thing, Major. Nor the last.”

Maybe not. But the original plan was out the window. They’d be dodging the Chinese now—and they couldn’t risk a chopper extraction. Not with Deputy Assistant Secretary of Energy Tracy Wei-Liu in tow. Ritzik cursed silently. Now, because of Wei-Liu, every step of the op was going to have to be viewed through a political prism. Every move now had to be seen as a potential headline in
The Washington Post.

SECRET U.S. UNIT CAUGHT,
DISPLAYED AS SPIES, by chinese

UNITED NATIONS SECRETARY GENERAL
DEPLORES U.S. SPY INCURSION

PRESIDENT TO FACE SPECIAL PROSECUTOR
IN CHINAGATE SPY SCANDAL

The political aspects meant Ritzik would now be doing a lot of improvising. Which made him extremely nervous. Improvisation got people killed.

But Ritzik didn’t say any of that. Instead, he said, “Except we won’t be doing any swimming, Mr. Secretary.”

He turned to Wei-Liu. “We’ll be using parachutes during the course of our mission, Miss Wei-Liu.” Ritzik paused, then flat-out lied: “I hope that doesn’t trouble you, ma’am.”

Unfortunately, it didn’t trouble her at all. “That’s all right, Major. I’ve jumped out of a plane.”

He was astonished. “You
have?”

“Yes.” She smiled at his obvious discomfort, and a tinge of pride crept into her voice.

In spite of himself, Ritzik noted for the record that it was a lovely smile. “How many jumps do you have under your belt, ma’am?”

“One, Major. On my thirtieth birthday. From five thousand feet. Floating down from a mile in the sky was the thrill of a lifetime.”

“I’m glad you thought so,” Ritzik said coldly, “because I’m about to increase your thrill factor by about five.”

She looked at him quizzically. “Five what, Major?”

“Five miles, Miss Wei-Liu, five long, freezing, windy, oxygen-deprived, dangerous miles.”

Ritzik’s words were followed by a long silence. Wei-Liu panned slowly, noting Rockman’s impassive face and Wirth’s tacitly encouraging expression. “It would seem the major’s made me an offer I can’t refuse,” she finally said.

“A
SSALAMU ALAYKIM,
my brother.” Talgat Umarov wrapped Mike Ritzik in a tight bear hug and kissed him thrice on the cheek, heedless that he was blocking the bottom of the Lufthansa stairway and unmindful of the scant dozen disembarking passengers and the knot of ground personnel waiting to service the aircraft.

“Assalamu alaykim,
Talgat.” Ritzik replied, happy to be breathing the cool, jet-fuel-tinged air after the nine-hour flight. “It’s great to see you again.”

“No—the pleasure is mine, I assure you.” The Kazakh officer beamed.

Ritzik stepped aside. “Allow me to introduce Miss Tracy Wei-Liu. Miss Wei-Liu is traveling with me.”

Umarov cocked his head at Ritzik’s obscure introduction. Then he bent slightly at the waist, pressed Wei-Liu’s right hand between his own two hands, and pumped it once, up and down, formally.
“Assalamu alaykim,
honorable Miss Wei-Liu. I welcome you to Almaty in the name of Kazakhstan Republikasy.”

“Thank you, Colonel.”

The back of Umarov’s palm slapped air. “It is nothing.”
He was an uncommonly big man for a Kazakh, barrel-chested, round-faced, and sloe-eyed, with a wispy, drooping mustache, an obvious direct descendant of Genghis Khan’s Mongol warriors. He towered over the two Americans in his starched Russian camouflage fatigues, scuffed jump boots, and pistol belt and Tokarev in its flapped holster.

Umarov snatched Wei-Liu’s carry-on out of her grasp and tucked it securely under his arm. “You have your baggage receipts?” he asked her.

“I do.” Wei-Liu pulled a ticket folder from her handbag.

Umarov took the document, turned, handed it off to a jug-eared teenager of a soldier, and machine-gunned five seconds of rapid-fire Kazakh. “Taken care of,” he said. “Now you will follow me, my friends.” Without waiting for a reply, the Kazakh led the way across the floodlit apron toward a squat, dented olive-drab 4x4 with Cyrillic military markings.

Wei-Liu followed self-consciously, thinking she probably looked like some tourist. Which she wasn’t. In fact, she was a veteran. She’d been a member of more than a dozen U.S. delegations. She’d visited Moscow and Beijing, Paris, London, and Brussels in her capacity as a top-ranking American nuclear nonproliferation official. Before that, as a senior fellow at the RAND Corporation, she had attended more than two dozen scientific conferences in places as varied as Budapest, Kiev, Oslo, and Tel Aviv. In the winter of 1998, as a consultant to CBS’s
60 Minutes II
news magazine, she’d been the first American scientist allowed inside Krasnoyarsk-26, the former Soviet Union’s gargantuan secret underground nuclear city. There, buried deep beneath central Siberia, Moscow had, from 1950 on, manufactured tons of weapons-grade plutonium.

But from her undergraduate days at Princeton to her graduate work at MIT, her tenure at the Lawrence
Livermore laboratory, RAND, and even DOE, all of Wei-Liu’s work had been … abstract. Until now.

That was the difference. Until twenty-six hours ago, she’d always lived in an academic universe, examining galaxies of conjecturals, theoreticals, and hypotheticals. But twenty-six hours ago, she’d been dropped into a frightening parallel universe, where all the what-ifs became jarringly, terrifyingly, real. People would die. She might, too. She’d always been able to deal intellectually with the consequences of thermonuclear war because the scenarios were abstract and the numbers surreal. She could calculate radiation exposure and ground-blast effects coolly on a spreadsheet because that’s what they were: numbers on a spreadsheet.

This was different. She was about to experience warfare on an intensely personal basis, and she wondered whether or not she could handle it, and how it would affect the rest of her life. She was already experiencing the consequences. Time, suddenly, had become a blur. Memory had become selective. Wei-Liu had gotten drunk—once—as a teenager. Over the past twenty-six hours she felt as if she’d experienced many of the same symptoms. She didn’t remember being driven to her home so she could pack a few items. But Talgat Umarov had her baggage-claim check, so she must have packed. She didn’t remember being photographed for a new passport, either. But there it was, in her purse, with visas for Germany, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan stamped in it.

She’d sat on the flight to Frankfurt in a stupor. She had hardly spoken to Ritzik. Well, there was a reason for that: he was remote, withdrawn, distant. Zoning, she’d felt, in his own thoughts. She was uneasy with him, too, and had trouble making small talk. It didn’t help that he had been very specific that he wasn’t going to talk about his job, her job,
the past few hours’ events, or their impending business in public. So, in the first few minutes of the flight she tried broaching one or two safe subjects, like the weather, and Washington’s perpetual gridlock, and the problems of traveling in the post-9/11 security milieu. But after a few seconds of inane monologue she lapsed into embarrassed silence in much the way she did on the infrequent but always uncomfortable blind dates well-meaning friends arranged for her.

In any case it hadn’t mattered: within half an hour after they’d departed Dulles, Ritzik was asleep. And he didn’t wake up until they were on the ground in Frankfurt. He’d pulled the same damn routine on their flight to Almaty, while she’d sat wide-awake, unable to get any rest.

It was, she thought, bizarre how crises brought disparate personalities together. No one in her household spoke Chinese. She’d grown up in Westwood, a fashionable, upperclass Los Angeles neighborhood that adjoined the UCLA campus. She’d gone to Catholic schools. Her father, Henry, was a third-generation American, a senior partner at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher, & Flom, a huge downtown law firm, where he represented multinational corporations. Her mother, Sybil, was a Shaker Heights aristocrat with a Harvard Ph.D. who taught art history at Marymount College. Not a single one of Wei-Liu’s friends or classmates had entered the military. For young men and women of her upperclass background, it wasn’t seen as a viable option.

Ritzik was from a different planet—West Point. She had no idea how to read the man. He was bright—that was obvious—and attractive, in a compact sort of way. But who he was and what he did were totally foreign to her. Because, when you came right down to it, he killed people for a living. Equally astonishing, he spoke about his vocation without apology or euphemisms. Ritzik didn’t talk about
“neutralizing,” or “getting rid of the bad guys,” or any other politically correct term. Back in the national security adviser’s office he’d said point-blank he was going to kill the terrorists—kill every one of them—in order to give her the opportunity to do her job and render the MADM safe.

Later, on the plane, watching him sleep, she realized that what had shocked her most was that she’d found his bluntness reassuring.

“W
E WILL WAIT
for the others on the military side of the field.” Talgat Umarov’s thick accent interrupted Wei-Liu’s thoughts. The Kazakh said, “I have shashlik and fresh cucumber for you and good hot sweet tea that will drain the pain of your long trip away.”

“Frankly,” Ritzik said, “before you feed us, Talgat, I figure Miss Wei-Liu would like to freshen up a bit. I know I’d like to get out of these clothes.” He fingered his blue suit and wrinkled shirt as if they were contaminated. “I’ve been in them for two days now and I’m beginning to get pretty ripe.”

The Kazakh’s face fell as he turned to Wei-Liu. “I am apologetic for my behavior, Miss Wei-Liu. You have been traveling long and hard. I am pleased to offer you my meager hospitality.”

“I am sure it is anything but meager, Colonel,” Wei-Liu said.

“This Miss Wei-Liu is a seasoned diplomat, I see.” The Kazakh roared with laughter. “So she must work for your State Department.” When he did not receive a direct answer, he punched Ritzik’s upper arm hard enough to make it numb. “No matter. We have uniforms that will suit you—and even hot water, too. You will look good as a Kazakh officer, my brother. Maybe it will fit so well, you will decide to stay, God willing.”

“Are you asking me to defect, Talgat?”

“There is always that hope, God willing.” The Kazakh laughed. “My brother-in-law has a cousin who has an unmarried sister-in-law who is a beautiful gem of a woman. I have seen her and can vouch for it. She would bear you many sons, Michael. You would make a good life here.”

Ritzik’s face flushed. “I am grateful for the offer,” he said. “But I am married to my job.”

“As am I,” Umarov said. “As are all soldiers. Still, if there is time perhaps we will pay my brother-in-law’s cousin’s sister-in-law’s parents a visit anyway.” Umarov opened the front passenger door of the vehicle and held it for Wei-Liu.
“Marhamet
—please, miss.”

Wei-Liu climbed in. “Thank you, Colonel.”

“It is nothing.” He slapped the door shut behind her, walked around the flat hood, and slid behind the wheel. He waited until Ritzik climbed in, then stepped on the starter button.

Ritzik said, “How’s the baby?” He glanced toward Wei-Liu. “Talgat and his wife, Kadisha, just had a son.”

“Congratulations. What’s his name?”

“Thank you. He is fine. His name is Aibek. And I hope that you will see him, God willing.”

“I do, too—if there’s time.”

“I understand.” The Kazakh twisted in his seat. “Rowdy Yates told me on the phone you will be just passing through, Mike.”

“Sort of.”

“If there is anything I can do…”

“Believe me, Talgat, I’ll let you know.”

“Rowdy said you will need a civilian aircraft to practice on.”

“A Yak-42. I do—it is critical. For a day or two.”

“Critical. So.” The Kazakh licked his lower lip. “Ah,
yes—I understand now—to rehearse takedowns.” His tone turned eager. “Is there an incident? I have heard nothing, Mike. If there is an incident, I would like to be able to come and observe.”

“There’s no incident,” Ritzik said quickly. “Something else. It’s complicated.” He looked toward the glass front of the terminal building three hundred feet away. “Let’s drive, Talgat. I don’t want to be talking where anybody can see us.”

“I understand.” The Kazakh rubbed his palms together, put the vehicle in gear, popped the clutch, and sped off across the concrete apron and turned onto a taxiway running parallel to the long, single runway. “Security first—what you and Rowdy call SEC-OP.”

“OPSEC, Talgat.” Ritzik corrected. “OPSEC. Operational security.”

“OPSEC.” The Kazakh steered precariously off the taxiway, heading away from the terminal on rough concrete, until he pulled around the far side of a huge hangar, then came to a screeching stop in the dark space between two floodlit areas. “Now we cannot be seen or heard, Mike,” he said. He turned in his seat. “I gather you are traveling with this beautiful woman for a reason?”

Ritzik chose to ignore the question completely. “Talgat, Rowdy didn’t fill you in completely about our visit.”

The colonel’s face clouded over. “Ah?”

“He couldn’t, Talgat. He was on an open line.”

“OPSEC.” The Kazakh’s sunny expression returned. “I understand, Mike.”

“So here’s what’s going to happen: we’re bringing in a C-5—a big transporter—tonight, not the Hercules we’ve been using on our other visits. The plane will arrive at zero three fifty-five, two and a half hours before the first commercial flight departs; three hours before the first incoming flight. I’ll need the airport lights shut down between zero
three-fifty and zero four forty-five, because we’ll be working under total blackout conditions. We’re bringing our own security force, because we’re going to have to cordon off that warehouse of yours.”