Arctic Gold

16

Arctic Ice Cap 82° 24' N, 179° 45' E 2135 hours, GMT-12

“POLYNYA, CAPTAIN!” THE EXEC called out. “Thin ice!”

“I see it,” Grenville said, face pressed against the starboard-side periscope. “Sonar! What have you got on the roof?”

“Control, Sonar,” a voice came back over the intercom speaker. “The roof appears flat, Captain. No ridge echoes or keels for at least one hundred yards. Signal Sierra One is remaining steady, bearing one-six-niner, range approximately two hundred yards.”

Dean stood next to the periscope well, watching the TV monitors high up on the port side of the control room, aft of the side-by-side helm and planesman stations forward. A camera mounted on the scope was revealing what the captain was seeing through the eyepiece of the Mk. 18 scope, which was now angled so that it was looking straight up, toward the underside of the “roof,” the layer of ice now twenty yards above them. Details were indistinct, but there was definitely a hazy glow of light up there-sunlight, meaning that the ice over this particular patch of ocean was quite thin.

There were two periscopes, mounted next to each other, port and starboard. The port scope was a Type 2 attack scope; starboard was the Mk. 18, a much more sophisticated instrument with low-light capabilities and built-in cameras. Grenville pulled back from the eyepiece and checked another monitor on a nearby bulkhead, this one showing an almost flat line-a readout of the inverted topology of the ice overhead. For the past few days, the line had looked like an inverted mountain range, but the current display showed a long stretch of flat-and therefore thin-ice. Submariners referred to such thin-iced stretches by their Russian name: polynya.

“Rig ship for surface, ice,” Grenville called.

“Rig ship for surface, ice, aye, aye,” the Diving Officer of the Watch echoed.

“Forward planes to vertical orientation.”

“Forward planes to vertical, aye, aye.” The Ohio’s forward diving planes were mounted to either side of her sail, rather than on her bow as with the newer Seawolf and Virginia boats. Moving them to an up-and-down orientation let them cut through the ice, rather than risking being bent by the impact.

“Okay, gentlemen,” Grenville said. “Down scope! Let’s put her on the roof.”

“Now hear this; now hear this,” the COB, or Chief of the Boat, said over the shipwide intercom. “All hands brace for surface, ice. All hands brace for surface, ice!”

The periscope slid back safely into its well. “Blow main ballast, Mr. Dolby.”

“Blow main ballast, aye, aye, sir,” the diving officer replied.

Dean heard the shrill hiss of water and air venting from ballast tanks, felt the faint surge of elevator movement beneath his feet and in his gut as the Ohio began rising straight up. He felt more than heard the crunch as the top of the sail impacted squarely against the bottom of the ice, felt the Ohio stagger in her movement, then resume her ascent with a slight, crackling shudder.

“Shore party,” the COB called, “break out cold-weather gear and report topside.”

Dean turned to the captain. “Permission to go ashore, sir?”

“Granted. But watch your ass out there.”

Twenty minutes later, Dean was on the ice, trudging toward a forlorn cluster of prefab huts. The air was surprisingly warm, though the wind had a bite to it; the sun was low above the northwestern horizon in this land of the midnight sun, even though it was nearly 2200. The sky was a deep, clear blue. The Ohio’s sail cast long shadows across the ice at his back.

Several Navy SEALs were already at the NOAA base, clad in black dry suits and holding assault rifles with the trigger guards removed, so they could be fired while the SEALs were wearing heavy gloves. Taylor’s SEALs-sixteen of them-had boarded the ASDS hours before, slipping ahead of the Ohio to perform a surface reconnaissance. They’d located a polynya, broken through the ice, and deployed into the NOAA base, determining that it was abandoned. They’d lowered a sonar beacon through the hole in the ice-Signal Sierra One-to guide the Ohio in on the deserted encampment.

Lieutenant Taylor was standing next to a flagstaff planted in the ice outside the main building. The white, blue, and red-barred flag of the Russian Federation fluttered in the stiff breeze above him. Dean watched as the man pulled a diving knife from somewhere under his heavy parka and sawed through the line securing the flag. In an instant, the flag fluttered away on the wind, trailing a loose four feet of line. Another SEAL standing nearby produced an American flag, neatly folded in a triangle. The two men used the remaining rope to secure the flag, then hauled it quickly to the top of the staff and tied it off.

“Well done, Mr. Taylor,” Dean said.

“Thank you sir,” Taylor said. “Our base is secure.”

“And no sign of the enemy?”

“Nothing, sir. No sign of our people, either.”

“I’d still like to have a look.”

The door to the main building was hanging open. Dean stepped inside and immediately made a face. “God, it stinks in here!”

Taylor, behind him, nodded. “Yessir. Too many people in too small a space for too damned long.”

“Like on board the Ohio, huh?”

“Hell, at least everything on the Ohydro has a place and is squared away,” Taylor said, using a nickname that went back to the sub’s service as a boomer. “This is a damned rat’s nest.”

Dean agreed. The hut was cluttered with human debris-clothing hung up to dry, a camera sitting next to a chess game in progress and a plate with half a sandwich. Much of the stench was from a long-untended chemical toilet in the back of the room, but the air was also thick with the mingled stinks of perspiration, wet clothing, oil, stale food, and mildew. Curtains that had divided the sleeping quarters had been ripped down and left on the floor. Radio equipment at the opposite end of the room had been smashed, apparently with rifle butts.

Dean stepped away from the SEALs and tried switching on his personal transmitter. “George, this is Charlie. Do you copy?”

He could hear static behind his ear and a faint, dopplering whistle.

“George, Charlie. Are you there?”

“Reception up here sucks, man,” one of the SEALs told him. “Satellites are too close to the horizon.”

“I guess so.” He would have to transmit from the Ohio’s much larger UHF antenna later. He switched off the unit in his belt and continued exploring the base.

A storeroom in a nearby building was a charnel house, the air thick with the stink of blood. Someone had gone down the passageway, methodically shooting the sled dogs in their kennels. The act appeared random and cruel… until Dean suppressed his anger and thought it through. The Russians evidently had been here on a quick in-and-out to grab the Americans. They hadn’t been able to take the dogs along, so they’d shot them rather than leaving them to starve in their cages or freeze on the open ice.

At the far end of the passageway, near some carefully stored snowmobiles, there was a rusty stain on the floor that looked like more blood. Dean studied it for a moment. It might have splashed out of a nearby cage-there were plenty of bloodstains on the wall above the dead dogs-but it looked more like someone had fallen here, bleeding. The stain streaked across the floor, as though smeared by someone dragging a body, and all of the dogs were inside their cages.

Dean used a tiny digital camera to record everything, including the gruesome contents of the cages and the long smear on the floor. Other supply sheds and buildings scattered about the compound appeared to have been searched but seemed to be intact. Eventually, he returned to the main building.

“Mr. Dean?” Taylor said, holding something up as he stepped into the building. “You might be interested in this.”

Dean accepted the device, which looked like a small transistor radio. There was no tuning knob, however, just a knob for volume and on-off. When he turned it on, he could hear a squeal of atmospherics and, just barely, a voice, though the static was too bad to understand the words.

“Where’d you find this?”

“Jones found it underneath that mattress over there,” Taylor said, pointing. “It may be nothing, but…”

“But the fact that it was hidden makes you wonder, doesn’t it?” Curious, Dean popped a back panel off and looked at the batteries. They were double-As, but the words printed on the casings were spelled out in Cyrillic letters.

So, what was someone on the NOAA expedition doing with a single-channel radio powered by Russian batteries?

Dean could think of only one reasonable answer to the question.

“Let’s check the personal effects,” Dean told the SEALs. “Whose bunk was this?”

Each of the bunks, racked two high in the cramped sleeping area, had a pair of small steel lockers next to it. Methodically, three of the SEALs began going through each, removing the contents and bagging them.

There wasn’t a lot-wallets, personal items such as rings and jewelry, toiletries, packs of cigarettes, sewing kits, socks and underwear, and the like. The radio had been found under one of the bottom bunks, so the owner had kept his personal items in one of two small lockers close by. ID cards in the wallets gave the names of the owners.

Steven Moore, Dean knew from his briefing, was one of the Greenworld documentary filmmakers.

Randy Haines was one of the NOAA meteorologists.

And one of them, Dean knew, was a traitor…

The Art Room NSA Headquarters Fort Meade, Maryland 1515 hours EDT

William Rubens sat at his desk, staring at the computer screen. The e-mail, on a special, secure feed from Men-with Hill, had come through from decryption only moments before. Lightly he touched the screen, as though wondering if the message would vanish.

“Thank God,” he murmured as he began to read the message again. He shook his head. “Thank God…”

Major Richard Delallo recovered and safe, the decoded message read. He ejected into the sea south of Kotka, Finland. He was unconscious when he hit the water, but he was pulled out by Finnish fishermen, who took him back to their village. There was some delay in getting word back to Lakenheath. Major Delallo’s flight suit was sterile for the op, and the fishermen thought he might be Russian. It was several days before they contacted the UK embassy in Helsinki.

Pilots flying covert ops such as Ghost Blue’s always went in sterile-meaning no flags on their flight suits, no name tags, nothing that could identify them as American or British.

Major Delallo will be flown to USNH Bethesda later today. He is suffering from the effects of exposure, hypothermia, and frostbite but is expected to make a complete recovery…

The message was signed Col. Copely, RAF, the name of the vice commander at Lakenheath Air Base.

Rubens sagged back in his chair, letting the relief wash through his body. It wasn’t the political aspect of Delallo’s rescue that was affecting him… but the knowledge that his decision to send Ghost Blue to St. Petersburg had not resulted in someone’s death.

Outwardly, Rubens always maintained a level of control and composure that some thought cold. He didn’t rattle, he didn’t express his worry, and he didn’t apologize for sending good men and women into harm’s way when the situation demanded it. Composure-even coldness-was part of the territory, the price necessary to keep Desk Three running at peak efficiency.

But he’d also seen Delallo’s personnel file-and knew the man had a wife and two daughters, currently living in base housing at Lakenheath.

Rubens made a mental note to make arrangements to have the family flown back to Washington, so they could be with the major as he recovered at the Naval Hospital in Bethesda.

With a mental sigh, Rubens deleted the message, then checked the time.

One operator had been recovered alive… but two more were about to insert at Solchi.

He wondered for a moment if he should go down to the Art Room and supervise the insert personally but then decided against it. He had good people. They knew what they were doing.

And he couldn’t afford to let them know that he was worried. He worked at his desk for almost an hour before deciding to go down anyway.

Kotenko Dacha Sochi, Russia 2310 hours, GMT + 3

The Kotenko dacha was built on the western face of a mountain overlooking the Black Sea. Llewellyn and an assistant named Vasily had driven Lia and Akulinin to a spot on the road above the Kotenko dacha after it got dark. From the hillside below the road, but well above the eastern side of the property, they could look down on the house and its grounds, which were spread out for their inspection, well lit and apparently well guarded. Lia held a set of electronic binoculars to her eyes and studied the scene. “Okay, people,” she said quietly. “Everybody online? Gordon, do you copy?”

“We copy,” the voice of Jeff Rockman said in her ear from a workstation back at Fort Meade. “Good voice. Good picture.”

“Dragon, do you copy?”

“Copy, Lia,” Llewellyn’s voice said an instant later. “We can see and hear just fine.” Llewellyn and Vasily, with the handle Dragon, had parked the van beneath some trees a quarter of a mile up the road and were linked in through the vehicle’s satellite communications suite. Both the team in the van and the runners back in the Art Room could see the scene transmitted from Lia’s binoculars, as well as hear the two of them through the mikes mounted on the collars of their combat blacks.

“Let’s have a closer look at that gate,” Rockman said.

“Here you are.” Lia pressed the zoom function on the camera, and the scene expanded, centering on the main gate where a paved driveway entered the property. A blond man in civilian clothes, but holding an AKM assault rifle, stood guard. Nearby, another armed guard followed the inside of the perimeter wall, a German Shepherd tugging at the leash in his hand. The gate was open and, as Lia watched, a car drove up and stopped beside the guard, who spoke briefly with the driver before waving him through.

A security camera watched it all from a telephone pole beside the driveway.

“I see two dogs,” Akulinin said, peering through his own binoculars. “The other one’s at the far side of the property, above the cliff.”

“We see him,” Rockman said. “Let’s have a look at the party in the back.”

From the hillside above the east side of the mansion, the two agents could see about half of the back deck, which extended from the west side of the house almost all the way to the cliff above the sea. The swimming pool was brightly lit, the blue light shimmering and wavering as it reflected off trees and walls. A dozen people or so were visible, engaged in laughing conversation. Most were casually dressed, though the people sculling in the pool or lounging in the hot tub were nude.

“I don’t see Kotenko,” Lia said. “Gordon, are you getting IDs on these people?”

“The bald guy talking with the tall blond is Vladymir Malyshkin,” Rockman said. “He runs the exploratory division of Gazprom’s oil subsidiary. The guy with thick glasses and his arm around the brunette over by the diving board is Sergei Poroskov, a member of the St. Petersburg Duma, and a major shareholder in Gazprom.” There was a hesitation as Rockman called up more data on his monitor back in the Art Room. “Yeah… all of the men are movers and shakers, either with the Russian government or in the Russian oil and gas industries. The guy skinny-dipping with the two chicks in the pool is CEO of a major construction company.”

“What about the women?” Akulinin asked.

“I think they’re the floor show,” Lia said.

“Kotenko owns a string of gentlemen’s clubs in half a dozen cities,” Rockman said, “and he’s also into producing, um, adult films. Like Lia says, they’re probably part of the entertainment.”

“Well, as long as they’re very entertaining,” Lia said, “and keep it on the back deck, we should have clear sailing inside. Ilya? Break out the dragonfly.”

Akulinin pulled off his backpack and extracted a plastic case the size of an encyclopedia. He opened it, revealing a delicate device, mostly wire and gauze but with a core the size of a pencil. He switched it on and the filmy wings unfolded, quivering in the slight breeze. “How about it, James?” he said. “You have a signal?”

“That’s affirmative,” Llewellyn replied. “We’re good to go.”

“Right then. Here goes.” Akulinin raised his hand and gave the device a gentle shove, lofting it into the air like a paper airplane. The gauze wings caught the breeze and the device soared higher, circling out into the darkness above the dacha with a faint rasping flutter of its wings.

“Okay,” Llewellyn said. “We’ve got good signal, good picture.”

“We have positive control,” Rockman put in.

The flier faded into shadowy invisibility against the night. Lia and Akulinin stayed hunkered down on the dark and brush-covered hillside as the team in the Art Room flew the probe from the other side of the Earth, guided by real-time imagery transmitted from the tiny camera in the dragonfly’s nose.

The Art Room NSA Headquarters Fort Meade, Maryland 1625 hours EDT

Chris Palatino had been hired by the National Security Agency for one reason. He was very good at playing video games.

The winner of the Extreme Gamer competition at the Origins gaming convention two years before, he’d been approached by a recruiter for a defense-related corporation. Only later, after Palatino had passed the security clearances, was the true nature of the job made clear: he would have to move from central Michigan to Laurel, Maryland, and take a job with the NSA. The money was less than he might have made writing software for a major corporation, but money wasn’t Palatino’s major interest.

He called it the gamer’s ultimate fantasy, and he was living it-an overweight twenty-seven-year-old geek getting paid to remote-pilot micro-UAVs on missions halfway around the world.

“Good hands, Chris,” Jeff Rockman told him. Half a dozen members of the Art Room team were standing behind his workstation, watching as Palatino jockied two joysticks on the console before him, eyes fixed on the large flat-screen monitor on the wall in front of him.

“I know, man,” Palatino replied, though his voice had that dreamy, off-in-another-world vagueness it usually acquired when he was on a mission. “Watch and learn, watch and… son of a bitch!”

Fifty-five hundred miles away-measured along a great circle route that skimmed south of the top of Greenland and north of the Shetland Islands-the eight-ounce flier had caught a heavy updraft along the side of the mountain that threatened to sweep it into the trees. Palatino gave the device an extra burst of power, flying into a downdraft and using the descent to pick up speed. A moment later he was clear, skimming above the tree tops toward the mansion.

The UAV had been designed to operate on software modeled on the sculling motions of a fly’s wings. The wings themselves went rigid with the application of a low-voltage trickle of current, twisting and turning to put out some ten beats per second. That was about a twentieth of the beat frequency for a housefly, but these wings were larger in comparison to the size of the body driving them, and included the ability to glide for long distances. Once clear of the downdraft, Palatino canted the wings into a rigid-locked configuration and, twitching gently at one of the joysticks, nudged the device into a gentle glide that carried it across the back deck twenty feet up.

Any of the party guests who chanced to look up might have glimpsed a dark shape reflecting the light from the pool and dismissed it as a large moth or even a bat. The UAV circled the deck area twice as the Art Room team located and counted guests, staff, and guards.

“Okay, Lia,” Rockman said after the second pass. “Still no sign of Kotenko, so he may be inside. We’ve identified twelve guests, five people who are probably staff, and four guards, not counting the two on perimeter patrol with dogs, or the guy at the front gate. It looks like they’re pretty well set out there, not much traffic in and out of the house.”

“Copy that,” Lia’s voice came back over a wall speaker. “Let’s get this over with, okay?” She sounded tense, on edge.

Rockman pointed at the screen. “The security camera is there,” he said. “On top of that pole.”

“I see it; I see it,” Palatino said. “Gimme a sec…”

He flipped the UAV’s wings out of their locked position, and with a soft rattle of sound the device streaked across the roof of the house, angling toward a solitary pole rising just inside the fence encircling the property, not far from the main gate and driveway. Hunched over the controllers, tongue sticking out in an unconscious expression of pure concentration, Palatino brought the tiny UAV to a near hover a foot from the top of the pole, dropping the body into a vertical orientation at the same moment that he extended four wire-slender and hook-tipped legs. An instant later, the device touched the creosote-blackened wood, and the scene displayed on the monitor became still, an extreme close-up of the pole’s weathered wood surface. The flier was now resting on the pole, a few inches behind the target camera.

The NSA possessed the technology to hijack security camera networks anywhere in the world, but doing so required gaining access. Many networks used the Internet for their security cam systems, which made the NSA eavesdropper’s task simplicity itself.

The security cameras at Kotenko’s dacha, however, were on their own, private network, with no outside connections and, apparently, no computers to sort, clean up, or channel the data. That made tapping into the network more difficult. They also used universal cable connections rather than wireless LAN or Ethernet connections and that, too, made stealing the signal harder.

But not impossible.

The camera, a small black box with a sunshade extended over the barrel of the lens, was set up to scan the entrance to the property twenty feet below. On the display, the cable emerged from the back of the camera, ran down the side of the pole a few inches to where it was stapled to the wood, then extended out into the night in the direction of the house.

“Damned primitive crapola,” Palatino muttered. “Haven’t these people heard of wireless networks?”

“That’s okay,” Rockman told him. “That’s why the dragonfly has a sting. Go ahead. Take a bite.”

On the pole behind the camera’s field of view, the remote-operated flier edged a couple of careful sideways steps, bringing it to rest directly above the cable. Targeting brackets appeared on the big wall display, centering on and closing around the cable, and flashing when the device had locked onto the target. There was a tiny whine of servomotors, and a slender needle, like a mosquito’s sucking proboscis, extended down from the device’s head, delicately piercing the cable.

“Okay,” Rockman said, looking at another monitor. “We have a signal.”

At Palatino’s touch, a second needle bit the cable just below the first. A window opened in the lower left-hand portion of the big screen, showing the grainy, low-light black-and-white image currently being transmitted by the camera.

The remote dragonfly probe was now wired into the dacha’s security camera system.

“We’re recording,” another Art Room technician reported.

“Okay,” Rockman said. “Nothing’s happening. Get about a twenty-second loop.”

The seconds passed. “Got it. Ready to repeat.”

“Good. Okay, Lia, Ilya. We’re hooked into the network. You can proceed.”

“Moving,” Lia replied.

Kotenko Dacha Sochi, Russia 2340 hours, GMT + 3

Lia led the way as the two agents scrambled down the slope, making their way toward the dacha property. Both of them wore black head-to-toe, with light-intensifier goggles over their faces, which gave them the look of curious four-limbed insects.

For this op, they were going in semi-sterile, which meant that with one key exception, all of their equipment, everything except their communications implants, anyway, was available through commercial European markets or low-security military sources. The exception was the satchel Lia carried at her hip, which carried the bugging devices they intended to plant inside the dacha.

Once they disposed of those, they would have nothing on their persons that would identify them, if the worst happened, as agents of an American intelligence organization.

They reached the base of the hill and worked their way to a point close to the property entrance. Black figures crouching against black shadows, they waited for long minutes, watching the solitary guard at the gate. He looked bored and not particularly attentive, but Lia wanted to wait for the best opportunity.

“Gordon, are you ready to transmit?”

“We’re ready here, Lia,” Rockman replied. “Waiting on your word.”

“Copy.”

That opportunity came ten minutes later, as the headlights of a car swung across the driveway, illuminating the guard and the open gate in a glare immediately stopped down by the automatic filters inside their LI goggles. The car pulled up alongside the guard, who leaned over to look inside, then stepped back and saluted. The car, a long, black sedan, eased past the guard and onto the drive. “Now,” Lia whispered.

The two figures separated from the shadows and slipped into the clear-cut zone outside the wall, angling toward the gate.

The Art Room NSA Headquarters Fort Meade, Maryland 1654 hours EDT

“Now,” Lia’s voice said from the speaker.

Jeff Rockman looked up at the display on the monitor, which now showed two inset windows, both with identical images from the security camera. On both, the guard at the front gate could be seen standing a few feet from the wall, shifting his weight from foot to foot and managing to look dead bored, even though his face could not be seen.

“Okay,” Jeff said. “Insert the recorded signal.”

There was the faintest flicker of static on the left-hand window, and the image of the guard seemed to jump to one side by about a foot. Several seconds later, a black figure entered the lower edge of the right-hand window, easing between the wall of white-painted stone and the guard’s back, then vanishing. A moment later, a second figure came into view, stealthily slipping behind the less than fully attentive guard.

By physically tapping into the length of cable on the security cam pole, the Art Room had been able to record a twenty-second segment of video, which they were now feeding into the security network while blocking the real-time signal from the camera. Somewhere inside the dacha, a presumably bored security guard was looking at the monitor, which showed absolutely nothing unusual happening outside the front gate. If he’d noticed the static or the shift in the guard’s position, chances were good he’d shrug it off to a fault in the cable… which wouldn’t have been far off the mark.

There were any number of ways to penetrate a secure target such as the Kotenko dacha. The best and simplest, however, was generally through the front gate. The dogs patrolling the perimeter were trained to pick up strange scents and alert their handlers if they detected the trails of intruders coming over the wall… but at the main gate the ground would be a jumble of crisscrossing scent trails, of guards, of automobiles, of guests coming and going. Even if the dogs were well enough trained to alert their handlers that intruders had passed that way, the handlers would probably discount the warning. After all, everyone went through that way.

There were motion sensors and sound detectors along the base inside the wall, but again, the security personnel would be alert to intruders coming over the wall elsewhere around the perimeter, not coming through the main gate where the guard’s scuffings and pacings, the noises from car engines, and the conversations as the guard challenged each arrival all rendered sonic data useless.

As for the lone guard, he was standing on the driveway inside the open gateway, his AKM carelessly slung over his shoulder, his night vision utterly blasted by the headlights of the car that had just passed through. He didn’t see the two figures in black approach the wall behind him, or notice as, one after the other, they slipped silently past his back. He wasn’t paying careful attention to the night around him because after all… that was what dogs and security cameras were for.

Watching from fifty-five hundred miles away, Rockman breathed a sigh of relief. “Okay, Lia,” he said. “You’re off the monitor. You weren’t seen.”

“Okay,” she replied. “We’re approaching the house.”

“The flier is on its way.”

On the pole overlooking the driveway entrance, the UAV broke off an inch-long section of its own head, leaving the piece attached by its two slender probes, then launched itself into the air. With a soft flutter of hard-beating wings, it arrowed through the night and came to rest on the outside sill of a second-floor window.

“I feel like a damned Peeping Tom,” Palatino muttered, shifting the remote device to walking mode and moving it higher until its camera could peer through the glass.

“Yeah, but it’s peeping in the line of duty,” Rockman told him. “Let’s have a look.”

The room beyond the glass was darkened, but the probe’s CCD visual pickups could resolve images in almost total darkness and could operate in the IR as well as visual wavelengths. At the same time, two slender wires, like antennas, extended from above the camera and rested against the glass, picking up faint vibrations.

The room might have been dark, but it was definitely occupied-rather enthusiastically so-by two people sharing a large bed.

“Oops,” Sarah Cassidy said, smirking. “I don’t think we want to go in that way.”

“Go to the next window,” Rockman told Palatino.

The next window was also a bedroom, but this one appeared to be empty. Rockman passed the word to Lia and Akulinin, who were already climbing up a pilaster to reach the second floor.

This part of the dacha had a roof extending out from the second story over a trellis-enclosed porch. The Deep Black insertion team had already made the assumption that the first-floor windows would be protected by some sort of security system but that the second floor might be clear. Targets who were lazy, cheap, or both sometimes left obvious holes in their security. Unfortunately, that was not the case here. Sensors inside the slender body of the flier had already detected the trickle of electrical current through a slender wire inside the closed window. If the window was opened or broken, the current would be interrupted and an alarm would sound. Rockman passed the news to the team.

“We’re on it,” Lia said.

Kotenko Dacha Sochi, Russia 2358 hours, GMT + 3

“We’re on it,” Lia murmured. In one hand she held a small device similar to the unit she’d used to look for security systems at the warehouse door on the St. Petersburg waterfront. The LED readout indicated an electrical current, and as she moved it around the edge of the window, she found the point where the sensor wire on the glass connected, through a metal contact, with a wire inside the window’s frame.

That was the weak point, the point of attack.

The flier clung to the wall a foot away, watching, looking like an odd and science-fictional mingling of large insect with small robot, its wings now folded along the length of its body and hanging off behind like a stiff, gauze cloak.

“This is a guy who takes his security seriously,” Akulinin whispered, double-checking the electrical circuit.

“Any security system can be breached,” Lia replied. “Jeff? We need the drill right here.”

In response, the flier moved to the spot she was indicating with her finger. Again, a slender needle extended from beneath the robot’s head, touching the white-painted frame of the window. There was a faint whine as the drill bit chewed into the wood.

“Okay, Lia,” Rockman’s voice said a moment later. “We have a complete circuit.”

Akulinin tried lifting the window. It appeared to be locked. Extracting a jimmy tool from a thigh pouch, he inserted the flat blade between window and frame at the bottom, gently applying a steady downward pressure. There was a creak, but the window remained shut.

“Shit,” he said. “The damned thing’s locked.”

“Try the direct approach,” Lia suggested.

“Yeah.” He ran a gloved hand over the glass. “It might be damned noisy, though.”

The two listened for a moment. The sounds of laughter floated clearly across from the other side of the house, followed by a loud splash as someone hit the pool. “Laminated glass,” Lia said. “Should be more of a crunch than a crash. Go ahead. Give it a try.”

“You’re the boss.” He reversed the pry, wrapped the handle in a piece of cloth, and slammed the tool into the glass.

The window was plastic-coated and shatterproof, but the glass crazed and yielded under a second, harder blow. The two agents held their position for a moment, listening carefully for a full minute, waiting for some indication that they’d been heard.

Another splash sounded from the rear deck.

The security system wires attached to the inside of the pane were broken, but the needle drilled into the window frame by the robot was now shorting the contact, tricking the system into thinking the circuit was unbroken. Using the cloth to protect his already-gloved hands, Akulinin pushed in the now flexible sheet of fragmented glass, working it in and out until it popped free of the frame.

Replacing the jimmy, Akulinin drew his weapon and wiggled through the opening, headfirst. Lia followed.

“We’re in,” she said. She glanced around the room, verifying that it was, indeed, empty… though rhythmic creakings and moans were coming from the room next door. Her LI headset revealed the space clearly in monotone shades of green. “Tell us where we need to go.”

“Straight ahead,” was Rockman’s reply. “Through the bedroom door and to your left.”

Silently the two agents slipped forward through the darkness.