Arctic Gold

2

DeFrancesa Operation Magpie Waterfront, St. Petersburg 0029 hours

LIA USED AN AEROSOL SPRAY from a canister the size of a lipstick to mist over one corner of the metal. She then twisted the cylinder of her flashlight sharply clockwise. The visible beam snapped off, but in its place, the wet corner of the metal took on a magical green-blue luminosity, glowing brightly in the near darkness.

“What is that?” Alekseev asked.

“A solution of sulfonated hydroxybenzoquinoline,” Lia replied, rattling off the tongue twister with practiced ease. “It fluoresces in the presence of beryllium and an ultraviolet light source.” It was all the proof she needed.

“It is as I told you, yes?”

“Yes, it is. You did good, Sergei. Hold the board for me.”

As Alekseev held the crate open, she took a final device from a pouch, a flexible bit of metallic foil the size and thickness of a postage stamp, its surface precisely the same dull gray as the beryllium shipment. Reaching gingerly into the crate, she slapped the rectangle onto the metal at one corner, pressing it hard to activate the sticky side. Then she nodded to Alekseev, and he lowered the loosened slat, working the protruding ends of the staples back into the wood so that it was not evident that the crate had been opened.

She checked her cell phone, this time tuning it to the low-level signal emitted by the tracking device they’d just planted. When she sent a low-frequency RF signal, the microtransponder on the chip caught the pulse and flashed it back, a good, sharp signal.

“Verona, Juliet,” she said, just in case they were reading her back at the Art Room. “We found the shipment. Tracking device is in place, transponder test positive. We’re initiating our E and E.”

Still, nothing but static.

They started for the front of the warehouse.

Akulinin Operation Magpie Waterfront, St. Petersburg 0030 hours

The sound of a vehicle engine startled Akulinin. It was coming from behind, moving toward him along the concrete wharf. He turned, crouching low to stay out of sight behind another pile of discarded rust- and rat-infested trash. One… no, two cars were approaching, driving up the wharf with their lights off. They raced past, then turned into the trailer-loading area in front of Lia’s warehouse.

Not good…

“Lia!” he called urgently. “Lia! We have company!”

Car doors slammed as men tumbled out into the night. He counted ten, five in each vehicle. It was tough to see in the dim light, but they appeared to be wearing civilian clothing. Reaching into the tool kit again, he fished out a set of OVGN6 binoculars, a compact handheld unit with two eyepieces but only a single light amplifier tube. Switching the unit on, he pressed it to his eyes.

Under LI, details sprang into sharp, close focus.

He could see their weapons…

DeFrancesa Operation Magpie Waterfront, St. Petersburg 0030 hours

Lia and Alekseev were halfway back to the warehouse entrance when Akulinin’s warning came through. An instant later, they heard the bang of car doors outside.

“This way!” Lia hissed, tugging at Alekseev’s elbow. She moved off to the right, ducking behind the shelter offered by a stack of wooden crates. It took her a moment to realize that Alekseev hadn’t followed her, that he was still standing in the open with a deer-in-the-headlights look to him.

A hollow boom echoed through the warehouse, followed by the sound of the main door sliding open. An instant later, the lights snapped on, the overhead lights first, then the glare of a powerful spot from the main entrance.

“Stoy!” a voice boomed from behind the light. “Ktah v’ takoi?”

“Nyeh strelyaii!” Alekseev screamed, throwing his hands straight up in the air.

But Lia was already moving, plunging out of the light and into the shadows cast by stacks of crates to her right. She pulled her weapon from its holster, an accurized.45-caliber H &K SOCOM pistol fitted with an under-barrel laser sight and with the muzzle threaded to accept a suppressor. She was already pulling out the sound suppressor and screwing it down tight as more shouting sounded from behind her.

Alekseev, she thought, had been pretty damned quick to surrender, and she wondered if she’d been set up. It was possible. Alekseev was Desk Three’s link to one of the local branches of the Organizatsiya, the Russian mafia.

It was the Organization that Desk Three was up against this time. That radioactive beryllium in the crate back there had come from a nuclear power facility in Rybinsk, stolen by members of the Russian mafia either in or working with the Russian military.

And the word was that the shipment had been sold to the highest bidder-which in this case happened to be the nation of Iran.

Beryllium possesses some interesting properties that make it invaluable within the nuclear industry. It doesn’t absorb neutrons well, which makes it ideal as a neutron reflector and moderator in atomic piles. More significant, if the sphere of plutonium within a nuclear weapon is surrounded by a beryllium shell, preventing neutrons from escaping, much less plutonium is necessary in order for the weapon to achieve critical mass-and detonation.

“American!” a harsh voice snapped in English, echoing through the warehouse. “You cannot escape! Throw down your weapons and come out!”

Were the attackers mafia enforcers? Police? Or military? She had to find out. Moving silently, staying in the shadows, she worked her way around behind the stacks of warehoused crates, edging closer to the front entrance. There were several other doors to the building as well, she knew from her studies of the structure’s blueprints before her deployment, but she also knew that those would be watched. She would have a better chance where the opposition had already entered the building.

Maybe…

Akulinin Operation Magpie Waterfront, St. Petersburg 0031 hours

Akulinin watched as several of the men pushed through the open front door on the southeastern face of the warehouse. Others were spreading out to the left and right, moving to cover other entrances. He could hear shouting coming from inside, in Russian.

Through the light-intensifier binoculars, he could clearly see that the newcomers were wearing civilian clothing, which meant nothing. They might be OMON, MVD, or local militia, or they could even be Russian Army wearing low-profile civvies. The weapons they carried were definitely military-issue assault rifles, however, AK-74s and AKMs.

It was also distinctly possible that they were Organizatsiya enforcers. Alekseev had been a member of one of the major organized-crime groups, the Blues, but when Desk Three approached him, had been willing to help in exchange for asylum for himself and his family.

“Lia?” Akulinin called over the tactical channel. “You reading me?”

“Yeah.” She sounded out of breath. “Who are these guys?”

“Not sure. They’re wearing civvies… with military weapons. Are you okay?”

“So far. Stay put. I’m trying to reach the southwest door.”

He swung his night-vision device in that direction. “You’ve got two goons outside,” he told her. “Just waiting.”

“Can you take them down?”

“Not without alerting half of St. Petersburg.” The MP5K did not have a sound suppressor, unlike some of its larger and more cumbersome cousins. Besides, the range to those two sentries was better than seventy yards… a hell of a long range to tap someone with that weapon. To make matters worse, a sheet-tin storage shed built just off the corner of the warehouse was partially blocking his view. He couldn’t be sure there were only two men there.

“Copy,” Lia said. “Wait a second…”

The Art Room NSA Headquarters Fort Meade, Maryland 1632 hours EDT

“Ghost Blue is now inside of Russian airspace,” Rubens said. He held the telephone handset to his ear while looking up at the big screen above him. The map’s zoom had been pulled back to show the entirety of the St. Petersburg area, from Primorsk on the Gulf of Finland to Kirovsk, twenty-five miles east of the city. At this scale, the white pinpoints marking Lia and Akulinin had merged into a single point on the southern point of Vasilyevsky Island; a new flashing icon had just appeared at the extreme left, moving in across the Gulf of Finland on a heading straight for St. Petersburg.

“Is there any sign of a reaction from the Russians?” Dr. Donna Bing wanted to know.

“Not so far, ma’am,” Rubens replied.

“The President will have to be informed,” the National Security Director said. She sounded angry, and Rubens knew she had cause. Ghost Blue had been built into Magpie from the beginning as a backup in case of unforeseen technical difficulties, but no one had actually expected that option to be put into play.

The big danger was that Bing would use this in her power-play shenanigans against Desk Three. She’d tried it before.

“How long before the plane is over the city?”

“It won’t actually overfly the city, ma’am,” Rubens replied. “It will orbit about ten miles out, out over the Gulf of Finland. That should be close enough for them to pick up our agents’ transmissions. He should be at his loiter point in… five more minutes.”

“I don’t like this, Rubens,” Bing told him. “Not one damned bit. We have no business putting a military aircraft that deep into Russian airspace.”

Rubens, always the diplomat, did not point out that the United States had no outwardly legitimate business putting human agents into Russian territory, either… or that both Russia and the United States had a very long history of intruding into each other’s territories when they needed to do so.

Of course, both countries had long used all kinds of assets to keep tabs on each other, from human agents to spy satellites to submarines to ELINT and reconnaissance aircraft. Of those various means of gathering intelligence, though, aircraft made the people in Washington the most nervous.

No doubt the shoot-down of Captain Francis Gary Powers’ U-2 over Sverdlovsk in May of 1960 had something to do with that.

“Ghost Blue knows what he’s doing,” Rubens told the National Security Director. “He’ll know if he’s being picked up by the St. Petersburg air defense net, and he has means by which he can evade any hostiles.”

A rather sweeping generalization, that. Rubens wasn’t trying to be misleading, but he was oversimplifying to a rather alarming degree. So very much could go wrong in an op like this one. It was impossible to predict how it would come together.

Or fall apart.

“Your tail is riding on this one, Mr. Rubens,” Bing told him. “Keep me in the loop.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

But Bing had already hung up on him.

He glanced at Rockman as he replaced the handset. “We’d better tell Dean, too.”

Pistol Range Fort Meade, Maryland 1633 hours EDT

Charlie Dean squeezed the trigger twice in rapid succession, tapping off two rounds, the bangs echoing down the white-painted room. Two shots, two hits… squarely at the center of mass and less than two inches apart.

Recovering, he shifted his aim, gripping the pistol firmly in the classic Weaver stance, right hand holding the grip at full extension, finger lightly caressing the trigger, left hand cupping and holding the right. Accuracy in the Weaver stance depended on the interplay of forces as he pushed with the locked right arm and pulled with the supporting left.

Two more shots, two more hits, this time in the target’s head.

“Target left!” a voice growled from beside and slightly behind him. Dean shifted instantly, bending his left elbow slightly to pull his right arm into line with a second target, ten yards beyond and behind the first. Again, two taps at the center of mass, followed by a third… and then the slide on his.45 locked open.

Raising the muzzle, he hit the magazine release and dropped the empty magazine, before racking the slide once more to make sure the firing chamber was empty. “Clear!” he called.

Behind him, Gunny Mark Strieber mashed his thumb down on a button, and the two targets, each bearing the head and body of a vaguely human-shaped black silhouette, whined toward the firing line on their overhead tracks.

“Not bad, Marine,” Strieber said. “Not too shabby at all, in fact. A bit of spread on your third group.”

Both of the center-of-mass shots on the second target had struck within the inner kill zone, but they were a good five inches apart. His final shot was low, on the line between head and throat. He’d rushed it.

“Yeah, but he’s still dead, Jim,” Dean replied, parodying a well-known line from an old science fiction show on TV.

Strieber ticked a box off on the clipboard sheet he was holding. “I’ll give it to you. This time…”

The Fort Meade pistol range was empty at the moment, except for the two of them. Dean set his weapon-a classic Colt.45 1911A1-on the table in front of him, muzzle pointed carefully downrange, along with the empty magazine. He then pulled off his hearing protectors. The devices were decidedly high-tech, with active feedback to block out sharp sounds like gunfire while permitting ordinary speech.

“So do I pass my quals?” Dean asked Strieber.

“You could use some improvement on the OC,” Strieber replied, paging through the sheets on his clipboard. Then he shrugged. “Still, for such an old jarhead, I’d have to say you’re holding together pretty damned well.”

“Ah, you young Marines don’t have a clue.”

“Cry me a river, Grandpap.”

Both Dean and Strieber were former Marines-within the fraternity of the Corps, there was no such thing as an ex-Marine-and that fact alone created a shared camaraderie, even though his experience in the service had left Dean somewhat bitter.

Dean had been one of Desk Three’s field operatives for over a year now. Strieber was employed by the National Security Agency as what was euphemistically known as a military expert consultant-which in his case translated to range boss at the NSA’s Fort Meade training center.

This particular range boss, Dean thought, got a particularly savage enjoyment out of ragging Dean about his age. Some of the comments hit a little too close to the mark sometimes. Dean was in his early fifties, now, and getting through the Fort Meade OC-the obstacle course-had been a major challenge, despite his daily routine of exercise and running.

“Charlie?” a new voice sounded in Dean’s skull. “This is Rockman.”

“What’s up?” Dean asked. Strieber raised his eyebrows but said nothing. He was used to Desk Three operators suddenly breaking into one-sided conversations, apparently with themselves. “I’m not even supposed to be on duty.”

“The DD told me to let you know,” Rockman said from the Art Room. “We’ve got a… situation here.”

“What kind of-”

Dean stopped, forcing down the sudden upwelling of cold fear. While Desk Three would be engaged in any number of ongoing operations on any given day, there were two well into their active phases that were of particular interest to Dean because both involved very dear friends. Right now, Tommy Karr would be somewhere out over the North Atlantic, helping escort some high-level government scientist or other to a conference in London. And Lia…

“Lia,” he said. “Is she okay?”

“You’d better get down here, Charlie. She’s out of contact. She may be in trouble.”

Dean bit off an unpleasant word, then forced himself to relax. Lia was a superb agent, well capable of handling herself in almost any situation imaginable.

But he didn’t like it. He’d argued point-blank with Rubens when he’d found out Lia was going to Russia. The new guy being paired with her was too new, too inexperienced. Dean wanted to go instead.

But Rubens had pointed out that Dean’s yearly quals were due and that there wasn’t time to wait while he worked his way through the battery of tests, physical drill, and proficiency exams. Damn the bureaucrats, anyway…

“Excuse me, Gunny. The master’s voice.”

“I hear you, Marine,” Streiber said, gathering up Dean’s equipment. “Go. I’ll check your gear out.”

“Thanks.”

“Semper fi, Charlie,” the former Marine said, his voice grave. He must, Dean thought, have read something in Dean’s voice, or in his eyes.

“Yeah. Semper fi.”

He hurried toward the door.

DeFrancesa Operation Magpie Waterfront, St. Petersburg 0034 hours

Lia hunkered down in the darkness between two walls of crates, watching and listening. From here, she could just glimpse several armed men moving past the opening to her hidey-hole, could hear more shouting in Russian.

She didn’t speak the language, beyond a few rough-and-ready tourist survival phrases like “Good morning” and “Where is the women’s restroom?” and she didn’t have her communications link with the Art Room for a running translation. Still, it sounded like they were demanding something of Alekseev, and it sounded like Alekseev was talking, talking all too willingly.

The fact that one of the newcomers had already identified her as an American told her that the mission had been compromised, quite likely by Alekseev. Two people breaking into a warehouse on a St. Petersburg waterfront? With crime and looting as bad as they were in the city, how would the newcomers know foreigners were involved, much less Americans?

No, someone had talked. And she was pretty damned sure she knew who.

Keeping low, she found a side passageway through the labyrinth of crates, one taking her closer to the main door. Emerging from the warren, she crept over to the southeastern wall of the warehouse, keeping to the shadows. She could see one of the bad guys now, twenty feet away, standing with his back to the open door. He was visible to her in profile, holding an AKM in his right hand, gesticulating with the left as he shouted something to the others. “Gdeh ona? Skarei! Skarei!”

She studied him carefully. He had a distinctive face, scarred and weathered, with a cruel mouth revealing blackened teeth when he shouted.

A garbage can sat just this side of the open door, next to a clutter of janitorial tools-a push broom, a rusty bucket and a mop, a pile of filthy rags. She thought she’d noticed the can when she’d peeked in through the fiber-optic surveillance device.

The garbage can was overflowing with trash, its round, handled lid perched atop the pile precariously. She edged along the wall, moving closer.

“Ilya?” she called softly, giving the name its correct pronunciation, with the accent on the second syllable. “Ilya, do you copy?”

“I hear you.”

“I’m close to the main door… on the southeastern wall. Is anyone outside?”

“Yeah. Two goons with AK-74s. They’re standing to either side, their backs to the wall.”

“Can you take them?”

She heard a long pause as he studied the situation. “Yeah. They’re about fifty yards away.”

“Don’t do anything until I tell you to.”

“You’re the boss.”

Yeah. I’m the boss. And if I get out of this alive, I‘m going to have a hell of a time explaining to my boss…

Rising from her crouch, she moved toward the garbage can…

Ghost Blue Two miles north of Ostrov Kotlin 0034 hours

Major Richard K. Delallo eased back on the Raptor’s throttle, bringing the powerful twin Pratt & Whitney F-119-PW-100 thrust vectoring turbofans back to a purring near idle. According to his navigational display, he’d just passed the island of Kotlin, with its naval base at Kronshtadt, to his right. At fifty thousand feet, dense fog carpeted the waters of the Finland Gulf beneath him. He could just make out the diffuse glow of city lights beneath the fog ahead, eerily peaceful and quiet. Overhead, auroras flamed and shifted like pale, utterly silent ghosts.

His radio and radar receivers, however, showed a much busier picture. Pulkovo Airport was loudest, with traffic control radars banging away to the southeast, but he could distinguish the thready pulse of military search radars as well.

Nearest and most worrying was the big Kronshtadt SAM-2 site on Kotlin, just eleven miles away, but there were several naval bases in and around St. Petersburg itself, all on the lookout for exactly this sort of incursion.

No one was targeting him, though, and none of the signals suggested they’d picked up Delallo’s Raptor. The F-22’s actual radar cross section was highly classified but was widely assumed to be somewhat smaller than that of a sparrow.

He put the Raptor into a gentle, banking turn right and switched his receivers to the highly classified frequencies used by NSA operatives on the ground.

A man’s voice came through. “… about fifty yards away.”

“Don’t do anything until I tell you to.” That was a different voice, a woman’s voice.

“You’re the boss.”

Delallo opened the com feed channel to Fort Meade.

DeFrancesa Operation Magpie Waterfront, St. Petersburg 0034 hours

Lia’s biggest advantage at the moment was that damned light the bad guys were waving around. It was a handheld spotlight with a pistol grip, and a civilian with an AKM slung over his shoulder was using it to try to penetrate the shadows deeper inside the warehouse. Any dark adaptation these people had possessed when they’d entered the building had been shot to hell by now. Lia was still in deep shadow in her combat blacks, though she would have to emerge into the glare of the overhead lights to reach the door.

The two Russians were less than ten feet away now, their backs to her. Beyond, she saw Alekseev and two more Russians. She could hear the shouts and crashes of yet more Russians moving through the labyrinth of crates.

Silently she stepped up to the garbage can, grabbed the lid by the rim, and hefted it. Moving back a few feet, she gauged the distance to another pile of warehoused crates on the far side of the main door, pulled her arm back, and flung the round lid hard, whirling it like an underhanded Frisbee.

The lid sailed past the door, rising, arcing, falling… then struck the top of the far row of crates with a boiler factory clatter.

Instantly gunfire erupted inside the echoing cavern of the warehouse, as one of the men with Alekseev opened up with his AKM on full-auto.

“Tudah!” the man with the spotlight screamed, swinging the beam to the northeastern end of the warehouse. He pointed. “Tudah!”

Another Russian joined in, spraying the northern corner of the room, sending up clouds of whirling splinters.

“Stoy!”

“Nyeh shevileetes!”

“Now, Ilya!” Lia called. “Take them out!”

She lunged forward.

Akulinin Operation Magpie Waterfront, St. Petersburg 0034 hours

Gunfire thundered from inside the building. Akulinin had been holding his MP5K on the Russian to the left of the entrance, waiting for Lia’s command. It was an awkward stance. The MP5K was a ridiculously stubby weapon, even with the shoulder stock locked open, and Akulinin was trying to brace it with his left hand on the small handgrip beneath the almost nonexistent barrel. Leaning into the recoil, he tapped the trigger, loosing a three-round burst with a sharp, harsh clatter.

Fifty yards was the upper end of the weapon’s effective range, meaning he had perhaps one chance in two of hitting his target. The range was too great for trying a finesse shot at head or center of mass. Instead he aimed low, with the expectation that muzzle climb would throw at least one or two of the three rounds into the target.

Both of the outside sentries were in the process of turning as he fired, distracted from the sudden gunfire inside. The man on the left seemed to stumble as he turned, then sagged, clutching at his side as he dropped to his knees. Akulinin had already shifted his aim to the man on the right, drawing a bead and triggering another three-round burst.

The man on the right, apparently not hit, went to his partner’s aid. Akulinin took aim again and tapped off two more bursts. The man staggered, slammed backward into the half-open sliding door, and crumpled to the ground. The wounded man on the left slumped into an untidy heap.

“Two down outside the door,” Akulinin reported.

“Check fire!” Lia called. “I’m coming through!”

DeFrancesa Operation Magpie Waterfront, St. Petersburg 0035 hours

For just an instant, every armed man in the warehouse was turned toward the northeast end of the huge room, some of them firing with wild imprecision, weapons blasting away on full rock and roll.

“Prekrazhenii ogeya! Prekrazhenii ogeya!”

From five feet away, Lia put a bullet into the back of the head of the man with the spotlight, her pistol emitting a harsh chuff as it fired. She was so close she didn’t even need to watch for the red blip of laser light marking the impact point.

She fired as she moved, holding the SOCOM pistol two-handed and stiff-armed as she tapped off two more rounds at the first target, then shifted to the man next to him. That man was just beginning to register the fact that the guy with the spotlight had been hit, the front of his skull blossoming in a nasty red burst of blood, bone, and tissue. The second man turned, mouth gaping, hands fumbling at his assault rifle… and pitched backward as two of Lia’s rounds slammed into his throat and upper chest.

Then she was through the open door. Two bodies lay sprawled on the concrete; she leaped over one and bounded across the open parking lot.

“Stoy!” another voice called, not from straight behind, but from behind and to her right. “Slushaisya elee ya budu strelyaht’!”

She kept running.