The Kremlin Strike

Thirty-Two

Using his neural link, Patrick McLanahan opened a secure channel to Martindale. The head of Scion was flying back to Washington aboard one of his private executive jets. He answered immediately. Thanks to a solid satellite connection, his image was only slightly distorted. “Yes, General?”

“Remember that Russian heavy-lift rocket that exploded in flight?” Patrick asked.

Martindale nodded. “Quite clearly.” He frowned. “We’ve never been able to pin down what its payload could have been. Analysts for the Defense Intelligence have speculated it might have been another weapons module, or perhaps a refueling station and docking structure for Elektron spaceplanes.”

Patrick shook his head. “They’re wrong. Dead wrong.” He looked intently at the older man. “Because I’m pretty sure I’ve figured out what that Energia was really carrying. And if I’m right, Moscow must be sweating bullets to get a replacement into orbit ASAP.”

“You have my attention, General,” Martindale said dryly. “What was aboard that Russian spacecraft?”

“The station’s main power generator.”

Martindale stared at him. “How is that possible? The energy requirements for that Russian plasma rail gun alone must be—”

“I’ve run the numbers.” Patrick pulled up his calculations and displayed them in an inset box. “Assuming they have reasonable battery and supercapacitor storage aboard Mars One, the Russians could divert electricity from those solar arrays to recharge their weapons. That would be incredibly inefficient… but it fits the tactical pattern I’ve observed.”

Martindale listened closely while he explained his reasoning. When Patrick was finished, he asked, “Could there be some other reason the Russians don’t fire the rail gun when their station is in Earth’s shadow?”

“None,” Patrick said decisively. “When the solar panels aren’t producing electricity, Mars One has to rely on its backup batteries. And that’s the only time when there isn’t any surplus power available to recharge the rail gun or the lasers. So the station’s crew tops them up in sunlight and then rides out the darkness without engaging any targets.”

Slowly, Martindale nodded his understanding. Then he frowned. “If that’s true, I don’t understand Gryzlov’s decision to start this war now. Why not wait until Mars One had a replacement generator online?”

Patrick shrugged. “Something about Brad and Boomer’s reconnaissance flight spooked the cosmonauts aboard Mars One into opening fire. And after the balloon went up, Gryzlov must have figured it was better to hit us hard and fast.”

“That he’s certainly done,” Martindale agreed grimly. There were no longer any functioning U.S. military reconnaissance satellites in low Earth orbit. Nor were there any non-Russian civilian imaging satellites left alive: Mars One had systematically destroyed them all. “How long do you think it would take the Russians to construct another generator from scratch?”

“Without knowing more about its type — whether it’s truly a working fusion power plant or simply a more conventional fission reactor — I can’t even make an educated guess,” Patrick admitted. “But I doubt that’s what Gryzlov has in mind.” He looked Martindale straight in the eyes. “No, sir. My bet is that he’ll cannibalize whatever components he can from those already built for a second Mars-class station. If so, a replacement reactor could already be on its way to the launchpad.”

“Now there’s a piece of intelligence we need rather badly, General,” the older man told him.

Patrick nodded bleakly. “Unfortunately, without our satellites, we’re operating in the dark. We’ve got no way to see if Gryzlov’s getting ready to launch more spacecraft from Plesetsk or Vostochny.”

“Not entirely,” Martindale mused. “While technological eyes in orbit are useful, so are human eyes on the ground. Remember, we still have a Scion team inside Russia.”

Patrick frowned. “It would take a miracle for any of our people to penetrate the security barriers Gryzlov has wrapped around those launch sites,” he argued.

“Indeed it would,” Martindale agreed. “Fortunately, I don’t believe miracles will be necessary. Our agents shouldn’t need to go anywhere near Plesetsk or Vostochny.” He smiled. “Even the tightest security net has a weak spot somewhere, General. And in this case, I think we’ll find it’s around five feet wide… and several thousand miles long.”

Panting, Brad McLanahan struggled to climb the slippery bank of yet another sluggish stream. Every step was agony. His right leg was almost completely useless now. He couldn’t put more than a fraction of his weight on it, forcing him to rely almost entirely on his left. “I must look like a damned crab,” he muttered. “Always moving at an angle.”

Abruptly, a section of the muddy slope slid out from under him and he toppled over. Desperately, he twisted sideways to avoid coming down on his right shoulder and damaging it further. With one hand immobilized in a sling and the other clinging to his boots, there was no way he could break the fall. Instead, he took the full brunt of the impact on his left side.

Pain flared through Brad’s whole body — shooting through every nerve ending in a blaze of fire. He bit down on a scream. For a long moment, he lay dazed, half in and half out of the shallow stream… waiting for the pain to fade even a little. Finally, it eased off, not much, but enough so that he could breathe. “Okay, that really fucking hurt,” he growled, tasting blood where he’d bitten his tongue.

Exhausted, he stayed down for a while longer. Maybe he’d gone far enough for the day, he thought tiredly. Maybe he should just rest here and try to recover some of his strength. Yeah, that would be a smart move, McLanahan, his mind sneered. Like falling asleep flat on his ass in a muddy, mosquito-infested quagmire would magically make him feel better…

“Fine,” Brad groused. “I’m going.”

Wearily, he tossed his boots higher up onto dry land, rolled over, and started crawling up the bank — digging the fingers of his left hand deep into the moist soil for leverage. It took several minutes of strenuous effort just to reach firmer ground.

Finally, he made it.

Determined now not to give in to the fatigue and hunger and pain that threatened to overwhelm him, Brad scrubbed off some of the dried mud coating his feet and then hauled his boots back on. Steeling himself against another flash of agony from his injured shoulder and knee, he dragged himself back to his feet using the low-hanging branches of a small birch tree. He stood hunched over for several more minutes, breathing in shallow gasps.

At last, feeling a little better, Brad hobbled onward, holding on to branches and tree trunks to steady himself. The ground sloped upward through a tangle of trees and underbrush. After what seemed an eternity, he reached the top of the ridge and stopped dead in his tracks. He’d come right to the edge of the woods. Before him stretched a wide, grassy valley. Far off to the east, he could see the faint outline of another dirt road running north and south. In the west, the sun hung low on the horizon, casting long shadows across the open ground.

He stared out across the valley. Somewhere deep inside his drained mind, a tiny spark of hope flickered to life. Awkwardly, he tugged the satellite phone out of his survival pouch and turned it on. After a few seconds, the tiny screen lit up.

Brad stared down at the GPS coordinates it displayed. Slowly, a grin spread across his taut, pain-filled face. “I made it,” he whispered, scarcely able to believe it could be true. “I damned well made it.”

Gingerly, he slumped to the ground. A few quick key presses sent a coded text reporting his arrival to the Scion communications center back in the States.

Their reply came back almost immediately. Stripped to its essentials, the message was clear: FIND A CONCEALED POSITION NEARBY. MAKE CONTACT AGAIN AT 2200 HOURS TOMORROW AND STAND BY.

Scion field agent Samantha Kerr entered a security code on a door down the hall from the office Marcus Cartwright used in his Klaus Wernicke persona, waited for the lock to disengage, and went inside. Thanks to the racks of computer hardware stacked floor to ceiling, the windowless room beyond the door looked much smaller than it was. There was just enough space for a small desk, a chair, and a large wastebasket full to overflowing with crumpled disposable coffee cups and takeout containers.

A young man in a wrinkled, short-sleeved shirt and jeans looked up when she came in. “Hey, Sam.”

She nodded toward his keyboard. “How’s it going?”

“Good… and bad.”

Sam waited patiently for him to explain further.

Zach Orlov sometimes found it difficult to communicate with people outside his highly specialized field, especially when he was deeply immersed in a complicated task. But his other skills more than made up for these occasional lapses. From his émigré parents, Orlov had picked up a fluent grasp of the Russian language in all its permutations. Highly intelligent and focused, he’d spent his teenage years hacking every computer network he could gain access to — though not with any serious criminal intent, more out of a perverse blend of insatiable curiosity and sheer boredom with regular school. In fact, if Scion hadn’t recruited him, Sam was fairly certain he’d have ended up behind bars… or working for the National Security Agency.

“I can get inside the main Russian Railways network, no problem,” he said. “Their basic security sucks.”

Sam nodded. Russian Railways was a state-owned company set up to control both the infrastructure and the operation of the nation’s freight and passenger rail services. “That sounds promising.”

Orlov shrugged. “Sure, if we were interested in payroll data. Or corporate e-mails and financial reports.” He jerked a thumb at his monitor. “But somebody’s installed a whole new security firewall for anything to do with specific freight-train cargo manifests. And it’s good. Really good. As in ‘touch this and go straight to a Lubyanka basement interrogation cell’ good.”

“Do not pass Go. Do not collect two hundred dollars. Do lose your fingernails and collect one bullet in the back of the skull,” Sam murmured.

“You got it,” he agreed sourly.

“Is that firewall Q Directorate work?” she asked.

“Probably,” he agreed. His shoulders slumped slightly. “Anyway, I can’t crack it. Not without blowing our whole operation here sky-high. And probably not even then.”

Sam frowned. Their orders from Martindale were to look for signs of unusual freight traffic between the launch complexes at Vostochny and Plesetsk and the cities known to house Russian nuclear research institutes and production facilities — among them Moscow, Novosibirsk’s Akademgorodok, Dubna, Podolsk, Sarov, Obninsk, and Dmitrovgrad. But how could they do that without access to the detailed records of what any particular train was carrying? Especially since the cargo they were hunting was supposed to be small enough to fit on just one or two freight cars.

Ordinarily, faced with this kind of roadblock, she’d have treated it as a human intelligence problem. Given enough time, it was usually possible to find the weak link in any security system. There was almost always someone on the inside who a resourceful agent could trick, bribe, or threaten into revealing the necessary passwords or codes. Unfortunately, time was exactly what she did not have in this case.

“What’s behind this new firewall?” Sam asked curiously. “All freight operations?”

Orlov shook his head. “Just the manifests for anything even remotely considered national-security-related cargo.” He looked up at her. “Russian Railways has around a million employees. Clearing everyone who handles any kind of freight for these new security measures would have been a total nightmare.”

Sam tapped a finger against her chin, thinking hard. “So you can still pull up the company’s signal and traffic logs, right?”

He nodded. “Sure.”

Russian Railways prided itself on a centralized control system covering more than 70 percent of the nation’s rail lines. Every train moving along those lines generated an automatic, computer-generated report whenever it rolled through a station or a control signal.

“Then take a look at traffic reports from the Northern Railway toward Plesetsk, and the Trans-Siberian Railway toward Vostochny,” Sam said. “Over, say, the past week or ten days.”

Orlov raised an eyebrow. “You realize those are two of the busiest rail lines in the whole country? Over that kind of time frame, we’re talking about several hundred separate freight trains at a minimum. What am I supposed to look for?”

“Filter out everything carrying normal commercial freight,” Sam suggested. “And look for a train that’s moving through the system faster than normal. From what Mr. Martindale said, the Russians should be in a real hurry to get their replacement reactor to one of those two launch sites.”

“Can do.” The young man turned back to his computer and began entering commands — instructing his machine to conduct a search of Russian Railways’ signal and traffic logs within her suggested parameters. Within moments, crowded lines of text started scrolling across his screen.

Watching Orlov work, Sam stayed quiet. When it came to zeroing in on useful bits of intelligence in an ocean of otherwise irrelevant data, he was a wizard.

Minutes passed. At last, he swung back to her with a frustrated look. “I’ve got nothing. I mean, yeah, there are trains with some kind of defense-related cargo aboard heading to both Plesetsk and Vostochny from several of the cities with nuclear facilities, but none of them seem to have any kind of special priority.”

“Well, that’s… interesting,” Sam said slowly. Were they looking for a special reactor shipment that simply did not exist? Martindale’s guesses had seemed reasonable to her, but no one in the intelligence game could count on every stab in the dark striking home.

She had already started considering the wording of what she knew would be a very unwelcome negative report when another possibility struck her. What if the FSB was playing a double game here? There were two ways to hide something important from prying eyes. The first, represented by the added layer of cybersecurity for military-related freight, was to conceal it behind a screen of armed guards and traps. But there was another way, she realized. If you were bold enough, you could also hide a secret in plain sight — like planting a stolen diamond in a crystal chandelier.

Suddenly excited, Sam put a hand on Orlov’s shoulder. “Hold on a minute, Zach. Run that search again. Only this time, drop the filter for commercial freight.”

“Playing a hunch?”

She nodded.

While he worked his way through the much larger pool of railroad signals and traffic reports turned up by this new search, Sam mentally crossed her fingers. Her nerves felt stretched to the breaking point. Given the tight security Gryzlov had thrown around the whole Mars Project, this was their only possible way in. She and the rest of Cartwright’s Scion team had no other way to find out if the Russians really had lost the reactor slated for their Mars One space station… and if so, when its replacement might be launched.

“I’ll be damned,” Orlov said abruptly.

Startled, she leaned closer. “You found something?”

“Yeah,” he told her. “A coal train headed east out of Novosibirsk on the Trans-Siberian Railway.”

In and of itself, there was nothing mysterious about a coal train, Sam knew. There were several major mines in the Novosibirsk region. “So?”

Orlov grinned up at her. “Ever hear of a coal train that seems to have been awarded the highest possible priority — with all other traffic cleared out of its path? This thing hasn’t hit a red light since it left Novosibirsk. I mean, not one. Every signal it comes to is green.”

Got you, Sam thought triumphantly. Coal was a nonperishable bulk commodity. There was no reason to grant a genuine freight train loaded with coal any special traffic authorization. “Where is this train now?” she demanded.

“It just cleared the station at Ulan-Ude, south of Lake Baikal,” Orlov said. “And based on its average speed since departing Novosibirsk, I figure it’ll reach the Vostochny launch complex within the next forty-eight hours.”