Under Fire

39

The next afternoon Gavin called, having spent the previous fourteen hours sorting through the bits and pieces he’d cloned from Wellesley’s computer. “John and Gerry are on the line, too.”

“Are you alone, Jack?” asked Gerry.

“I’m with Ysabel, why?”

“That’s fine. You need to be careful who you share this with,” said Clark. “Gavin’s found something — probably a game changer, and not in a good way.”

“Well, hell, now you’ve got me worried. What’s going on?”

Gavin said, “I’ve got a lot more of the hard drive to go through, but what we’re mostly worried about is that text document you found, the one with the strings of numbers. Have you got it in front of you?”

Jack called up the screenshot of the doc he’d taken with his phone. The first one read Hepo5..38GZT.703971mE.4759623mN. “I’m looking at it,” he said.

“I must be a little sleep-deprived to have not seen it right away. I don’t know about the characters before the first decimal point — maybe a location identifier — but the next set of numbers is UTM,” Gavin said, referring to the Universal Transverse Mercator coordinate system.

Jack knew UTM well, though using it had taken some getting used to. UTM was both simpler and more accurate than latitude and longitude, so much so that the U.S. military used a customized version of it, the Military Grid Reference System, or MGRS.

“Yeah, I see what you’re talking about now,” said Jack. “Don’t feel bad, we both missed it. The way it’s grouped is odd.”

38GZT signified the UTM Grid Zone, which divides the earth into sixty zones each measuring six degrees of longitude in width. The rest of the characters denoted the “easting and northing” coordinates specific to the zone.

“Have you mapped them yet?”

“Just the first six,” replied Gavin. “They’re streets in Makhachkala — an apartment on Penza, a house on Ayon, some kind of warehouse by the harbor. Online maps for Makhachkala are either outdated or so Cyrillic-heavy it’s going to take some time.”

Ysabel said, “We know. We’ve switched to paper maps. They’re the only ones that are trustworthy.”

“Do any of these streets mean anything to you, Jack?” asked Gerry.

“No. Or at least I hope not.”

“What’s that mean?” Clark replied.

“One of the keys to Seth’s plan is social media, which means Internet, and the first thing Volodin and Nabiyev are going to do is shut down all the service providers in the whole country. To counter this, Seth’s set up satellite Internet hubs across the city. I don’t know where they are but if these UTM coordinates are them, we’ve got a problem.”

A fatal problem, Jack thought.

“If that’s the case, why haven’t they just raided the addresses and shut down the hubs?” asked Gavin.

“It’s not enough for the coup to fail. The world has to watch it wither by itself, without Volodin dropping the hammer.”

“Makes sense.”

“What did you find out about the document’s file name” — Jack checked his phone — “Khibiny-Borisoglebsk?”

“Both are place names, both in Russia,” replied Gavin. “Khibiny is a mountain range on the Kola Peninsula and Borisoglebsk is both a town in Voronezh oblast and an airbase for Su-25 Frogfoots and Su-24 Fencers.”

“Those are ground attack birds and bombers,” said Clark. “Volodin used both of them in Ukraine and Crimea.”

“What the holy hell is going on?” said Gerry. “Those two places are how far from Makhachkala, thousands of miles—”

“Seventeen hundred miles and eight hundred miles, respectively,” said Gavin. “And Russia’s got airbases a whole lot closer to Dagestan than Borisoglebsk.”

Jack asked, “Do any of the UTM coordinates match up to that or Khibiny?”

“Not so far, but I’ve got twenty more to go.”

Clark replied, “Wellesley could be sending Jack and the others on a wild-goose chase. What choice do they have but to run down each and every one of these coordinates, then sit on them until the coup’s over?”

“It wouldn’t be a problem if we had a few dozen guys and a full week to plan and coordinate it,” said Jack. “We’ve got neither.”

“John, if you’re right about this, then we need to treat everything Jack gathered from Wellesley’s apartment as suspect,” said Gavin. “Worse still, if it’s all a red herring, that means Wellesley knew you were coming, Jack.”

“Don’t say that. I’ve played enough chess with this asshole to last me a lifetime. If Wellesley’s playing us, then we may be back where we started: Somebody else on our side has turned.”

“Who knew you were going to Chirpoy?” asked Clark.

“Everyone but Medzhid and his people.”

“No way the recently departed Anton could have known?” Gerry asked.

“Am I a hundred percent on that? No, but close to it. Listen, we could go round and round with this until our ears are bleeding. It doesn’t matter. John said it: We’ve got to chase down these coordinates. Gavin, how soon will you have them all mapped?”

“Eight hours, give or take.”

“Gerry, how long since you had lunch with Mary Pat Foley?”

“Jack…”

“Buy her a piece of cheesecake and ask her to retask a satellite or two.”

“Is that all?”

“Right now all I’ve got is Google Earth, which is fine for finding a coffee shop but lousy for what we’re talking about. Plus, Spellman’s not keen on calling Langley and pressing the panic button — not this close to the start. He’s already stuck his neck out for Seth and he’s liable to get it chopped off.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Spellman’s bosses don’t know Seth’s working off his dad’s manual, and they don’t know where he got it in the first place. I, uh, forgot to tell you about that last part.”

“Which is what, exactly?” said Gerry.

“Wellesley fed Seth the manual. The guy’s a master manipulator. He did his homework, saw a wound he could salt, and did just that.”

“Oh, shit,” Clark murmured under his breath.

Gerry Hendley said nothing for a long ten seconds.

“Jack, if you ever forget another little detail like that again, I’ll have you planted in a chair faster than you can say ‘WTF.’ You hear me?”

“I hear you, boss.”

“Wellesley’s in Seth’s head,” said Clark.

“Not anymore. I’ll vouch for him.”

“You might come to regret that.”

“Possibly. Bottom line is, if Langley gets wind of all this, the coup is off.”

“Doesn’t sound like a half-bad idea,” said Gerry. “I’m not even sure I want to be complicit in this. I’ll give you sixty seconds to convince me otherwise.”

“Their plan is solid. Period. You always say, trust the guy on the ground. They’re on the ground, and so am I, and we think it’s doable. Whether it will actually succeed I can’t say.”

“You’re losing me, Jack.”

“Then how about this: In all likelihood Wellesley’s out here making policy against the wishes of his own government; if we derail this thing we’ll be doing the same thing with U.S. policy.”

“He’s got a point,” Clark said.

“Too damned good,” Gerry muttered.

Jack said, “Like it or not, we’re neck-deep in it.”

Gerry chuckled. “You know, Jack, I might bench you anyway just for the principle of it. But not today. I’ll give Mary Pat a call. What do you need?”

“First things first. We need eyes overhead Borisoglebsk. We need to know if those Frogfoots and Fencers are still there.”

If the UTM coordinates they’d found on Wellesley’s computer were not only locations within Makhachkala but also the sites of Seth and Spellman’s satellite Internet hubs, then they may have already been marked as air strike targets.

“Say the names again, Jack,” Seth said a few minutes later. “Penza Street…”

Jack checked his notes and recited the locations.

Spellman said, “Yeah, those are all hub sites.”

“Shit!”

Seth bolted from the conference table. His chair bumped against the wall. He paced, running his fingers through his hair. Jack watched him, looking for the slightest crack. Their situation had just gone from raining to pouring.

Seth took a deep breath and let it out. Nodding, he turned back to the table. “Okay, okay… Let’s put it into perspective. We don’t ‘know’ anything, right? We wait until Gavin’s mapped all the coordinates, then we check them against our list.”

“We’re down to three days, Seth,” said Spellman. “If—”

“Yeah, we’re down to three days, so we’re not playing the ‘if’ game. Jack, what else was on Wellesley’s computer?”

“Gavin’s working on it.”

“Have him work faster. What about this airbase? When will we know if the planes are still there or if they’ve been moved, and if they have, where are they?”

“Slow down. Take a breath. You’re giving me a headache.”

“Yeah, sorry,” he replied with a sheepish grin. “Anybody got any Xanax?”

Dom replied, “No Xanax, but I’d be happy to dart you.”

“I was kidding, Dom.”

“I’m not.”

Jack said, “Seth, we’ll hear about Borisoglebsk when we hear about it. It’s out of our hands.”

“Yeah, okay. We should think about getting back into Wellesley’s place, too. Maybe we missed something. In the meantime, we hit the streets. We visit each of those hubs, talk to our people, and see if anyone’s been poking around. If so, we uproot ’em and move ’em.”

By sundown all but one of the sites had been checked. None of the “Hub Captains,” as Seth had dubbed them, had reported any strange activity. Seth was visibly relieved. Jack was growing more worried. The implications of what Gavin had found were starting to sink in.

Surgical or otherwise, if air strikes were launched against the capital’s hub sites, Seth’s plan wouldn’t simply be gutted. It would also mean they’d gravely misread Volodin’s resolve and that the man cared only about seeing the coup fail — organically or militarily, it didn’t matter — and he didn’t care if the whole world watched it happen. Unarmed protesters on Makhachkala’s streets would be targets, terrorists. Anyone involved in orchestrating the insurrection would be put against the wall.

Dom walked into the apartment a half-hour after everyone else and said, “I walked every foot of those docks. Either the UTM coordinate I have is wrong or it’s sitting at the bottom of the harbor.”

“The other ones were dead-on,” Spellman replied. “It doesn’t sound like Wellesley to make that kind of mistake.”

“We’ll know more when Gavin gets back to us. He’ll triple-check all the numbers. By the way, where’s Rebaz?”

“He’s staying the night in his official residence, with his wife, Marta, and Aminat. They’re leaving for Baku in the morning.”

“Good for him,” Ysabel said. “And Miss Balloon Boobs, where is she?”

Spellman laughed, as did Dom and Jack. He said, “That’s not very nice.”

“You’re right, my apologies. Miss Balloon Breasts. Is that better?”

“Much.”

Seth, shaking his head, replied, “Niki has—”

“Does she dot the i with a heart?”

“A smiley face. She has her own place in Derbent. I’ll have you know, she wants to be an actress or a—”

“Pop star,” Ysabel guessed.

“Yep.”

“Imagine that.”

“Rebaz does love his wife, Ysabel, and they’ve got a good marriage. It’s just a different culture here.”

“I’m Iranian. I know about different culture. I’m not judging him, actually. It’s just that he seems to be such a remarkable man; to have him be so banal with his love life is disappointing.”

“Hold on, let me get a dictionary.”

“Shush,” she replied.

“Nobody’s perfect. He’ll be a better leader than Dagestan’s seen in the last hundred years. Listen, if you really feel strongly about it, I’ll talk to him about Niki. Maybe he can convince her to stop using the smiley faces.”

“Funny man.”

Seth reached across and gave her forearm a squeeze. “I’ve missed you, Ysabel.”

“Careful, there, buddy,” Jack said with a grin. “Don’t get handsy.”

“Sorry.”

Ysabel said, “It’s good to see you laugh, Seth.”

“It feels good. So, does this mean we’re friends again?”

Ysabel pursed her lips, thinking. “Not yet, but in time maybe. In the meantime, I should probably get that scorpion out of your bed.”

“Funny girl.” Seth paused, looked down at his hands. “Listen, guys, this ain’t easy for me, but I’m sorry. I’m sorry for it all. I shouldn’t—”

“It’s okay, Seth,” Jack said. He had no doubt Seth meant what he said, but he feared that until the coup was finished his friend would be vulnerable to the win-at-all-costs mind-set that had been driving him for three years.

“No, it’s not, not even close,” Seth replied. “I shouldn’t have used you to flush Wellesley; I almost got you both killed — at Pardis and at the farmhouse. Truth is, I kinda feel like I’ve lost my way. I’ve done things in the past year I never thought I could. After this, I need to do some serious thinking.” He chuckled. “Hell, maybe you guys can even set up some kind of intervention for me — a ‘Hey, Seth, you’ve been a real asshole’ type of thing?”

Both Ysabel and Jack laughed. “Deal,” Jack said.