Arctic Gold

17

Kotenko Dacha Sochi, Russia 0007 hours, GMT + 3

DOWN A DARKENED HALLWAY, then right to a flight of stairs. Lia descended while Akulinin covered her from above, then returned the favor, holding her SIG-Sauer P220 gripped tightly in both hands. The weapon had been threaded to receive a sound suppressor, and the ungainly length of the thing extended beyond the ball of her hands like a police officer’s baton.

“There’s a security camera in the hall in front of you to the left,” Rockman whispered in their ears. “Wait one…”

The broken-off piece of the dragonfly probe still attached to the cable on the pole at the front gate now gave the Art Room a physical connection with the dacha’s security network, with the parked van as a communications relay. Back at Fort Meade, they would be running through a number of camera views, calling up the correct one, and feeding it a twenty-second loop of an empty hallway.

“Okay, Lia,” Rockman said. “The hall is empty and the camera is happy. You’re clear to move.”

Stealthily the two agents turned the corner and walked down the hall. Lia noticed a half sphere of darkened glass mounted on the ceiling-the security cam-and resisted an unprofessional impulse to wave. A few feet farther on, light spilled from beneath a closed door.

Damn…

“We’re at the door to the office,” Lia whispered. “Do you have a camera inside?”

“That’s negative, Lia,” Rockman replied. “It looks like there may be a hookup for another camera on the circuit diagram, but it’s switched off.”

Akulinin tried the doorknob, which turned easily, and gently edged the door open. Beside him, Lia slipped a length of fiber-optic cable through the opening, with the near end attached to her cell phone monitor. Twisting the cable gently between her fingers, she turned the end this way and that, checking out the room’s interior.

A man sat at a computer monitor, his back toward the door. The image resolution was too low to let her read over his shoulder, but he appeared to be about ten feet away, his fingers clattering over a keyboard.

There was no one else in the room within the reach of the fiber-optic viewer, though she did see another of the black hemispheres on the ceiling. Why was the security camera turned off?

Then the answer came to her. The man at the desk was almost certainly Grigor Kotenko, and as the head of one of the more powerful families within the Organizatsiya, he would be afraid not only of outside enemies breaking into his personal fortress but also of traitors among his own people. The camera’s position on the ceiling would have let his own security people see what was on his monitor; switching it off while he was working gave him an extra bit of peace of mind.

It also suggested that Kotenko was more afraid of betrayal from within his own organization than he was of outsiders, an interesting bit of intelligence.

The figure at the desk turned his head just far enough that Lia glimpsed the shaggy corner of his walrus mustache.

“I see Kotenko,” Lia whispered. “Back to the door. I can take him from here.”

“That’s a negative, Lia,” a new voice, Rubens’, replied. “Find another way.”

She bit off a silent expletive. She had the bastard in her sights… the thug who’d given the orders that had ended with Tommy’s death. It would be so easy to take him out. Two taps to the center of mass, a third in the back of the head…

“Lia, Ilya,” Rubens said. “If the op is to succeed, we need Kotenko alive.”

Lia closed her eyes, forcing the muscles of her hands and arms and jaw to relax, bringing herself back from the edge. God, she wanted to kill the man… but Rubens was right. She and Ilya had come here tonight to plant bugs that would give Desk Three an unparalleled window into the Tambov group’s operations. If Kotenko’s people came into the office later and found their boss dead, American intelligence would have to start all over again as some other crime family came to the fore, or as another leader within Tambov-Braslov, perhaps-took over.

In the long run, they could do a lot more damage to the Russian Mafiya-and not just the Tambov group-if Kotenko survived this night.

“Okay,” she whispered. “Ilya, you’re up. Remember, Russian only.”

“Da,” he murmured, and grasping his H &K P9S in both hands, he eased the door open with his shoulder and rolled through.

Lia followed, breaking left and cutting across the room as Akulinin moved right, lunging at Kotenko’s back. Attempting to sneak in quietly invited disaster-a squeak to a floorboard, a flicker of movement glimpsed from the corner of an eye… even a psychic awareness of someone else present in the room. Kotenko heard the movement and began to turn, one hand snapping toward the top drawer of his computer desk, but Akulinin was on him in three swift strides, reversing the pistol in his hand as he moved, grasping it at the meeting of muzzle and sound suppressor, and swinging the butt around from the side, aiming at the base of Kotenko’s skull.

But Kotenko raised his arm, blocking the swing, and for a terrible moment Akulinin and the Mafiya boss struggled in front of the computer desk. Then the office chair scooted out from beneath Kotenko and he fell, heavily. Akulinin’s arm came up, then slashed down, the pistol butt striking the man’s head with a sickening crack.

Lia held her position at the far side of the office, her SIG-Sauer pointed at the half-open door, covering Akulinin as he checked the pulse at Kotenko’s throat, then peeled back one eyelid, then the other.

“He’s out,” Akulinin said in Russian. If the camera was off, there might yet be microphones online. “Breathing’s okay.”

“Gordon!” Lia whispered. “Any response?”

“Negative,” Rockman replied in her ear. By now, the Art Room would have penetrated deep into the dacha’s security network, and would be alerted if an alarm sounded. It was just possible that an open microphone in Kotenko’s office had picked up the sounds of a struggle. If so, guards might be on the way already.

They would have to hurry.

Once he was sure that Kotenko was in no physical danger, Akulinin pulled plastic zip strips from his combat harness and bound the man’s wrists, knees, and ankles. A fistful of facial tissue went into his mouth, with a length of packing tape to secure it awkwardly beneath the brush of his mustache. Another strip of tape went over his eyes. If he regained consciousness in the next few minutes, they didn’t want him seeing what the two intruders were doing.

Lia, meanwhile, pulled out the small induction device that registered the surge in electrical current from any active microphones and swept the room, paying special attention to the camera fixture on the ceiling and to the desk and computer itself. While power was flowing to the computer and its peripherals, of course, it looked like there weren’t any active mikes.

Good. They should have a few minutes then.

“Harashaw,” she said, still speaking Russian just in case Kotenko was faking unconsciousness with an unusual flair for theater. “Room is clear.”

“There’s the safe,” Akulinin said, also in Russian. “Get the door.”

Lia walked to the door and closed it, then snapped off the light. With their LI gear, there was more than enough ambient light through the room’s one large window for them to work. Next, she went to Kotenko’s computer, sat down at the chair, and took a look at the monitor.

The screen saver had come up-a blatantly pornographic image of a bored-looking woman lasciviously entangled with two young men. When Lia moved the mouse, the image was replaced with a screen full of text and several small, inset diagrams.

It looked important. Her Russian was good enough that she could tell it was a technical report about something called Glubahkii Koladeets, or Deep Well, and which was abbreviated elsewhere as “GK- 1,” a term that seemed to refer to a specific place or base. The overall project was called Operatsiya Holodnaya Vayeena… Operation Cold War.

She scanned down the screen quickly, trying to pick up the important bits. Work at GK-1, she saw, had been delayed by the high concentrations of metan something. Metan was “methane,” but what was the following word? It looked like it might transliterate as “clathates,” but she couldn’t pin down the meaning.

Well, they might be able to make something of it back at the Puzzle Palace.

It would have been possible, of course, to flash the entire contents of Kotenko’s hard drive to Fort Meade, or to simply burn a CD of any likely-looking documents. However, there were almost certain to be security measures in place that would, at the very least, alert Kotenko to the fact that files had been copied, if not passwords and fire walls designed to prevent exactly that. They didn’t have the time to track down the man’s computer security system or bypass it, and they couldn’t risk alerting Kotenko that his hard drive had been raided. She did take a moment to photograph the screen with her cell phone camera, being careful to dial the speed down to a thirtieth of a second in order to avoid having large, black scan lines show up across the screen. Then she reached behind the computer tower and yanked out the plug.

The monitor winked out immediately, taking the page of data with it. Kotenko would wake to find the computer off and assume the intruders had pulled the plug just in case it had an open mike.

Next, she pulled a small, plastic case from her equipment pouch. Inside were several hundred minute bugs, each roughly spherical, perhaps a millimeter across, and flat enough to slip through the spaces between the keys on a computer keyboard. She sprinkled them across Kotenko’s keyboard, careful not to allow them to bounce. A few remained stubbornly visible, but she clattered her fingers across the keys, repeatedly hitting several until all of the stragglers vanished down through the cracks.

Next, she looked around along the walls of the room until she found an outlet. When she found one out in the open, she knelt in front of it, swiftly unscrewing the front plate, then pulling the outlet itself free at the end of a length of wires.

She used a small tester to check which wire was which, then took a microrelay and clipped it to the wires, as far back as she could reach. Finally, she stuffed the wires back into place, replaced the outlet and cover, and screwed the plate back on. The whole operation took less than two minutes.

Returning to the keyboard, she softly said, “Gordon, ready to test.”

“Copy, Lia. We have signal.”

“Starting with the letters, then… ah… beh… veh… geh…”

One by one she struck each Cyrillic letter on the keyboard. The tiny sensors worked together to pick up the distinctive sound of each key as it was struck and transmit it to the relay in the wall.

The microphones themselves were sound powered and activated, while the relay drew on the electrical current in the house. The relay, using the electrical wiring of the entire house as an enormous antenna, was powerful enough to transmit each sound to the waiting van; before Llewellyn left the area, he would plant a larger satellite relay on the side of the mountain, where it would continue to receive transmissions from Kotenko’s keyboard and send them on through the satellite uplink to Fort Meade.

There the Tordella Center supercomputers would identify each separate key from the distinct and unique sound it made when struck and reassemble a complete readout of what Kotenko was typing at his workstation fifty-five hundred miles away. The system would let them pick up passwords and activation codes, which in turn would allow them to study and bypass his security systems and, soon, to be able to record his entire hard drive, read all of his mail, and track down every one of his electronic correspondents without ever again coming close to the Black Sea dacha.

With the keyboard bugs online and double-checked, Lia turned her attention to bugging the rest of the office. Another tiny microphone went inside the telephone handset on the desk, while a microcam-hidden inside the barrel of a working ballpoint pen with the lens disguised as a clear plastic clicker-went on the highest bookshelf, positioned so that it gave the Art Room a view of both the computer and the door. Another pen, this one masking a backup relay unit, went into the sofa behind the cushions.

Akulinin, meanwhile, was working at the safe. A flat case with an LED readout was placed just above the combination dial, and as he slowly turned the dial right or left, lights winked on to indicate the fall of tumblers inside. Within a couple of minutes, there was an audible thump and he operated the handle to pull the heavy door open.

“Udacha!” he cried, reaching in and retrieving the lost tool kit. “Success!”

Lia gave him a thumbs-up and began going over the room, checking to see if anything had been left undone or disturbed. Akulinin took the time to write out the combination to the safe, together with the letters P for prava, or “right,” and L for leva, or “left.” He dropped the paper on the floor in front of the open safe before checking through the shelves inside.

There was money, a great deal of it, in three briefcases, in rubles, euros, and U.S. dollars. There were a number of engineering charts and reports, all of which fitted-barely-inside the tool kit. And there were a number of plastic jewel cases, each with a CD cryptically labeled with Cyrillic notations. These went into various pouches in Akulinin’s combat blacks.

A groan from the bound and prone Kotenko warned that he was beginning to come around. After one last, swift check, Lia and Akulinin went to the door. “We’re done,” she whispered.

“Passageway outside is clear,” Rockman told her. “Still no alarm.”

She opened the door. “We’re moving,” she said. “Ready for exfil.”

“Satlink is in place,” Llewellyn told them. “We’ll be waiting at the primary.”

With luck, Kotenko would assume that one of his rivals had broken in and cleaned out his safe. The paper with the safe’s combination could only have one logical explanation-that someone inside Kotenko’s personal retinue, or, just possibly, one of his houseguests, had discovered the combination and given it to the intruders.

That ought to make life inside the dacha interesting for the next few days.

“Lia!” Rockman’s voice called in her head. “You’ve got company!”

The Art Room NSA Headquarters Fort Meade, Maryland 1721 hours EDT

The big display screen in the Art Room showed the layout of the Kotenko dacha as a series of architectural floor plans. Two points of light, one following the other, moved along one of the hallways. On a nearby monitor, ranks of inset windows showed the overhead views of empty rooms and hallways set in pairs, one with the monochromatic image of what someone watching from the security office was seeing, the window next to it showing the real-time image of the same scene.

In one real-time window, Lia and Akulinin, anonymous figures in their combat blacks and LI goggles, could be seen moving through one of the corridors.

And in another, a solitary figure could be seen just coming in from the back deck, a bulky, muscular man built like a professional wrestler. The Deep Black records department had already identified him as Andre Malenkovich, a onetime Moscow street criminal now in Kotenko’s employ as bodyguard and personal assistant.

And Malenkovich had just entered the same hallway now being used by Lia and Akulinin. The computers managing the imaging session had just thrown a third light onto the architectural schematics, showing the bodyguard just one bend in the hallway away. In another few seconds he would round a corner and come face-to-face with the Deep Black insertion team.

“Turn around!” Rockman told Lia and Akulinin. “Back the way you came! There’s a janitor’s closet ten feet behind you! Hurry!”

Malenkovich was almost up to the corner…

Kotenko Dacha Sochi, Russia 0022 hours, GMT + 3

Akulinin reached the closet door and turned the knob. Locked!…

Lia bit off a curse as she turned, pulling her sidearm from its holster. The door to Kotenko’s office was eight feet farther up the hall; keeping her weapon with its heavy sound suppressor trained on the bend in the corridor ahead, she started backing toward it. Akulinin did the same.

“He’s stopped!” Rockman told them. “Two more people just came in from the pool! I think he’s talking to them!”

Which might give them another few seconds. The hallway came to an abrupt end behind them, with the only way out going around the corner and squarely into Malenkovich. They didn’t have time to pick the lock on the closet, but just possibly they could hide in the office. Lia reached the office door first, opened the door, and slipped inside. Akulinin followed.

“He’s around the corner,” Rockman told them. “He’s coming toward the office door!”

Not good. Lia looked around the office. There wasn’t much in the way of places to hide; worse, Kotenko was now awake, struggling against the plastic zip strips binding his wrists and legs and making desperate mmphing noises into his gag. As the two NSA agents reentered the office, though, he went still. He probably couldn’t see anything more than human-shaped shadows against the light spilling in from the hall, but he knew they were there.

And so would the bodyguard in another moment.

“Bad guy is definitely headed for the office,” Rockman warned. “There’s nothing else in that arm of the hallway for him to go to unless he’s looking for a mop.”

“Oknah!” Lia said, lowering and roughening her voice to a growl for Kotenko’s benefit. There was no sense in telling him that one of the intruders was a woman-and possibly letting him begin to connect the dots all the way back to the St. Petersburg warehouse.

Oknah-the office window. It was large and looked west out over the Black Sea. During daylight hours, Kotenko must have a hell of a view.

And right now, that was their only escape route. Akulinin understood her terse exclamation. Lia pulled back the drapes as he holstered his pistol and experimentally hefted the toolbox he was carrying. “Beregeess’!” he warned, and slammed the long metal case squarely into the window like a battering ram.

Like the window upstairs, this one was safety glass, laminated in plastic. There was a loud thud, but the glass barely gave under the blow. Swiftly Lia raised her sound-suppressed SIG-Sauer in a two-handed stance. The weapon coughed sharply as she triggered three rounds in rapid succession into the pane; the glass crazed around three neat impacts, and Akulinin smashed the window again with the tool case.

This time, the glass bulged out, then disintegrated in a spray of rounded fragments. At the same instant, the door swung open and Kotenko’s bodyguard burst into the room, his own weapon already drawn.

Pivoting sharply, her P220 still in a two-handed grip, Lia squeezed off three quick shots into the center of the man’s considerable mass. He howled, staggering backward into the hall, and Lia put two more rounds into him as he collapsed, just to make sure. Outside, in the corridor, a woman screamed.

Akulinin used his gloved hands to peel away some of the remaining glass. Then, stooping, he patted the bound Kotenko on the shoulder. “Dobreh nochee,” he said, grinning, wishing the crime lord a good night. Lia scrambled through the window and Akulinin followed.

They dropped a few feet onto the back deck, where a dozen men and women stared with gaping mouths as the two insect-faced agents clambered through the broken window. Ignoring them, Lia raced to the low stone wall rising at the edge of the deck. Beyond, there was a narrow stretch of ground, and then the hillside dropped steeply away toward the road along the seaside, heavily covered with brush and small trees. Vaulting the wall, she dropped feetfirst over the edge and began sliding rapidly down the hill.

Akulinin followed. As she bumped and rolled through loose earth and leaves, she heard shouts and screams from above, and a sharp-barked command to halt: “Stoy!”

“Dragon!” she cried as she slid, trying desperately to keep from losing control. “Change of plan! Pickup at extraction two!”

“Got it, Lia,” Llewellyn said. “We’re on the way!”

They’d plotted three separate pickup points, allowing for the possibility that they’d have to leave by a different route than the one they’d taken going in. Gunfire cracked from above and behind, and she heard the snap of bullets among the branches above her head.

The trouble was that Llewellyn had the van on the road above the property, while Lia and Akulinin were plunging through brush and loose dirt toward a different road, some fifty yards below Kotenko’s dacha. Llewellyn would have to drive like a maniac to pick up a crossroad two miles to the south, then double back along the seashore to meet them.

And the bad guys were in hot pursuit. Lia heard the deep-throated bark of a German Shepherd and the shouted orders as more guards spilled out onto the deck or began descending after the fleeing Deep Black agents.

The trees were bigger toward the bottom of the slope, a tangle of open woods, with scattered boulders, some as large as a small house, tucked in among the trees. Lia came to a jarring halt as her boots hit a tree trunk; the slope had leveled off enough here for her to stand and begin picking her way down the rest of the hill on foot.

Akulinin reached the road first, dropping to the ground and facing back up the hill with his handgun at the ready. Lia dropped down beside him. Someone above them opened fire with an assault rifle, spraying away wildly on full-auto, but with no clear target. Bullets whined high above their heads or thunked into tree trunks; the two agents held their fire. Even sound-suppressed rounds might give away their position, and in any case, at this range they wouldn’t hit anything save by sheer luck.

They could hear thrashing sounds from above as men crashed down the slope after them. Several bright lights flared among the tree trunks, the shafts of light probing among the branches and brush. Lia nudged Akulinin in the ribs and pointed to the right. Together, the two began moving southeast along the hillside. If that crowd took the straight route down, they’d be on top of Lia and Akulinin in another few moments. Even in the dark, the men might be able to follow the double trail of skid and scuff marks down the slope.

And there were the dogs.

How many pursuers were there? During the circuit with the dragonfly, the Art Room had identified six guards outside-including the dog handlers and including the man at the front gate-but there might be more inside. It was a big place, and Kotenko might easily be paranoid enough to maintain a small personal army up there.

Lia and Akulinin worked their way silently about a hundred yards farther up the road and crossed over to the far side. That gave them a good view of the edge of the woods beneath the cliff, and the guards would have to leave the cover of the trees and come out into the open if they wanted to cross the road.

Behind Lia and Akulinin, a low surf hissed along the beach. The sky was overcast, hiding the moon, but her LI goggles showed the waves in oily tones of green and black. A shame we didn’t bring a getaway boat, she thought. Or a submarine…

“Dragon!” she called. “We’re on the southwest side of the road now, just above the beach.”

“We’re just turning onto the coast road,” Llewellyn replied. “Three kilometers, maybe three and a half…”

Which meant perhaps one or two more minutes. And the flashlights were much closer now, darting and bobbing among the trees at the base of the hill, a hundred yards away. A guard emerged from the shadows, moving along the edge of the road. A second appeared a moment later, tugged along by an enthusiastic dog.

Akulinin braced his pistol, sighting along the barrel. “I could try for a long shot from here,” he said.

“Negative,” Lia told him. “All that’ll do is tell them where we are, and give them a chance to surround us.”

“Damn…” He lowered the weapon. “Those dogs will find us…”

“We’ll worry about that when they get closer.” Lia was angry, and the words came out more harshly than she’d intended.

She was angry at herself, though she was having some trouble identifying just what it was that had made her so mad. They’d done everything right, so far as she could tell, taking the op step-by-step.

But in this kind of work, any operation that ended with shots being fired was a failure, at least on some level. The opposition should never have even known they were there. It was the op on the St. Petersburg waterfront all over again… and the second op in a row for her to end in a firefight. This was getting old very, very fast.

The two men and the dog were closer now… about fifty yards away. They were walking slowly, and the man in front had a flashlight that he was using to examine the bushes and shadowed recesses on both sides of the road. Other men were spreading out in the distance, some going down to the beach, others following the road to the northwest.

And she could hear the crack and snap of still more searchers in the woods directly across the road now, moving unseen among the trees.

“Dragon!” Akulinin whispered. “Any time now would be very good!”

“Another kilometer,” was the reply. “Can you show me a light?”

“Negative!” Lia replied. “We have bad guys right across the road from us, and more coming along the road! If we move, they’ll spot us!”

The tactical situation, she realized, was deteriorating to the impossible. Even if the van arrived right now, there were enough gunmen about to lay down a deadly barrage.

“Listen, Dragon,” Lia said. “I think we need another plan. You can’t come in here without getting killed!”

“Already got a plan, m’lady!” Llewellyn replied. “Sit tight! We’ll have you out of there in a mo’!”

The two walking down the road were twenty yards away. The dog, its nose to the earth, whined, then growled.

“Can I take them now?” Akulinin whispered.

Something dropped out of the night.

Even with the LI goggles, it was hard to see what it was, but it looked like a bird or a bat, and it was swooping low in front of the two guards with a flutter of wings, making both of the men shout and duck.

It took Lia a second to realize what was happening. The dragonfly! Someone back in the Art Room had brought the dragonfly in as a diversion!

At almost the same moment, a vehicle came careening up the road from the southeast, traveling backward at a high rate of speed. Lia could see the taillights glowing brilliantly in her goggles, followed by the sudden flash and glare of the brake lights.

The guard with the flashlight raised his assault rifle.

“Yes!” she told Akulinin. “Now!”

They opened fire together, sending a fusillade of 9mm rounds slamming into the two guards, and both collapsed in a tangle at the side of the road. The dog, its leash trailing behind it, bolted toward them and was in mid-leap when the dragonfly slammed into its back. The animal yelped and turned, snapping at something no longer there. The dragonfly swooped once more…

And then the van was there, the back door open, with Vasily leaning out and waving them on. More men were crashing down through the woods on the other side of the vehicle, and somewhere up the road a burst of automatic weapons fire cracked against the night.

“Don’t forget your tool kit!” Lia called as she dove for the back of the van, lunging in headfirst.

Akulinin didn’t answer as he landed heavily beside her, but she saw that he did, indeed, still have the heavy metal box with him.

“Go! Go! Go!” Vasily was screaming as more gunfire cracked and thundered close by. Lia heard the clang of bullets piercing metal, but Llewellyn, in the driver’s seat, had floored the accelerator and the heavy vehicle peeled rubber as it sped up. Through the open back doors of the van, Lia got a glimpse of running figures on the road well behind them, until Vasily managed to slam both doors shut.

There were bullet holes in the windows of the back door and more in the side of the van, just above their heads. That had been entirely too close…

“Hang on!” Llewellyn called back to them. “Next stop, the Georgian border!”

Lia lay on the floor of the van, trying to slow the galloping pace of her heart.

Behind them, the dragonfly swooped far and high out over the Black Sea before suddenly inverting and plunging at high speed into the water. On the security camera pole at the dacha entrance, the piece of hardware left behind by the probe burned as its magnesium casing ignited, a tiny, hot star at the top of the pole that left nothing behind but a severed length of cable and a charred spot on the wood.

This time, no incriminating hardware would be left behind.