Tom Clancy Support and Defend

34

The Russian Navy’s Admiral Chabanenko was a modern Udaloy II class antisubmarine warfare destroyer, so the 163 meter long vessel drew a lot of attention from the locals as it dropped anchor in the harbor at the Pacific Nicaraguan port of San Juan del Sur. The ship had just arrived for a three-day call, another stop in a friendly nation during its five-month cruise of the southern Western Hemisphere.

The sailors on board the Admiral Chabanenko could barely contain their excitement at the prospect of liberty call. Even though no one expected much from the sleepy third-world port, the sailors also knew they couldn’t be choosy, and a couple of days of booze, women, fresh food, and terra firma, in that order, sounded good to everyone afforded shore leave. Plus, their money would go further here in Nicaragua than it had in Buenos Aires or even Caracas. The rumors of beers costing only fifteen córdobas — about twenty rubles — sounded particularly inviting to the poorly paid Russian sailors, who would pay a minimum of five times that amount at a European port of call.

An hour before the first of the Admiral Chabanenko crew disembarked for the frivolity ashore, a secure radio call came for the leader of a six-man unit of Russian naval Spetsnaz on board. The first lieutenant had been packing his weekend bag to go ashore with his men, but instead he ran up to the marine operations center to take the call.

As a Spetsnaz commando, the first lieutenant was actually a member of the GRU, military intelligence, so he was not completely surprised to learn the voice on the other end of the radio was a GRU captain lieutenant, but when he was transferred to an FSB general in Moscow to be given orders for an in extremis mission, he was thoroughly shocked. And he was doubly astonished by the orders themselves. He and his men had trained for all manner of operations, but first lieutenant never executed anything like the mission the FSB general ordered him to undertake immediately.

Less than three hours after the radio call came through, the first lieutenant and his five men had dressed in civilian clothes and were rolling duffel bags toward the helipad on the rear of the Admiral Chabanenko. While other sailors still on board watched with curiosity, the Spetsnaz unit climbed aboard the destroyer’s own Kamov Ka-32 helicopter and lifted off into the evening sky over the port of San Juan del Sur.

Their flight to the military air base near Managua took only an hour, and there they were briefed by an FSB officer who had just arrived from Caracas. This briefing took another hour, and then the men were ordered to finish planning their mission and wait for a green light from Moscow.

It was not until four a.m. local time when the green light came, and as soon as first lieutenant knew the mission was a go, he and his team boarded a civilian Cessna Caravan owned by a front company affiliated with Nicaraguan intelligence. They had already stowed all their gear on board, which was not easy, because each man had nearly sixty pounds of kit, so the cabin of the ten-seat plane was packed full of men and material. Still, the aircraft rose into the dark skies over sleeping Managua and banked to the south.

While this was all going on, a second contingent of Russian nationals was on the water, having departed Maracaibo, Venezuela in the late afternoon. These men were Russian intelligence agents, FSB, and they had received a phone call every bit as surprising as the Naval Spetsnaz first lieutenant’s afternoon radio communication.

The FSB operatives in Maracaibo’s orders were to secure a fast yacht and immediately sail across the choppy waters of the Caribbean Sea at best possible sea to the northwest. Their destination was the same as the commandos coming via air from the north; an archipelago in northern Panama called Bocas del Toro.

Neither the GRU commandos nor the FSB operations officers knew that the FSB rezident in Caracas had initiated the entire chain of events the day before. He had been told by friendly officials in Venezuela’s General Counterintelligence Office that the federal police would begin rounding up men and women across the city. It was explained that an American traitor had given the Venezuelan embassy in Washington a list of thirty-three names of CIA agents in Venezuela, in exchange for quick and safe passage out of the United States. Further, the GCIO executive relayed with excitement that the traitor soon intended to pass a second list of names, those of spies working against Venezuela in its embassies abroad.

When the FSB man in Caracas contacted the Russian embassy in Moscow seeking confirmation of this wild story, he was told the FSB had just learned through a highly placed intelligence source in the U.S. government that the American FBI was looking for a National Security Council staff member named Ethan Ross who had just fled the country, possibly after murdering his girlfriend and a pair of FBI agents who had been pursuing him. Also, rumors were circulating that he was on the run with a large digital cache of top-secret documents.

At first the FSB man in Caracas was skeptical; this sounded like some sort of American disinformation campaign. How could one man walk out of Washington with such a treasure trove of intelligence? But the GCIO officer showed Ethan Ross’s list of Venezuelan spies to the FSB rezident, and the Russian knew he was dealing with a real intelligence leak. Although the actual names of the agents weren’t listed — they were given code names — the files described positions held, job titles, relationships with known personalities, and other recognizable aspects, so the agent’s true identities were easy to discern. The Russian immediately recognized some of the positions as legitimate spies for America that the FSB had already identified but left in place.

The rezident was on the phone with Moscow within moments of getting this confirmation, and he was ordered by FSB leadership to pressure the Venezuelans to hand over the entire intelligence scrape as soon as the American was in Caracas. The rezident himself suggested to the GCIO they inject the American with SP-117, a Russian developed “truth serum” drug that would, in theory, anyway, ensure he gave up the password for his data, but the Venezuelans rebuked the Russians, claiming the American would be kept at a safe house in Panama until the arrests were complete and the time was right to bring him into the country.

The FSB knew any American traitor with intelligence on his person of the nature this man allegedly had was a rapidly depreciating asset. The Americans would come after him hard and fast, they would find him in days if not hours, and they would do what they needed to do to close the compromise. The FSB rezident in Caracas conferred urgently over secure comms with Lubyanka, the FSB’s headquarters in Moscow, and the decision was made to obtain the files via active measures. Executing the operation in Panama would be diplomatically preferable to doing it in Venezuela, and fooling the Venezuelans into thinking the Russian commandos sent on the mission were, in fact, Americans, would be better still.

The FSB rezident thought it to be something of a miracle that this decision had been rendered in only twenty-four hours, but by the time the green light came for the Spetsnaz commandos in Managua, one thing was clear: The Russians were coming for Ethan Ross, they wanted the man and his files, and they planned on leaving no trace back to Moscow of their act.

It had been a long and dismal day for Dominic Caruso. He’d avoided a cruel sunburn by staying under the edge of the rainforest canopy tucked inside a large fern, but he felt like he’d come damn close to heat exhaustion during the afternoon. He’d been bitten by ants and mosquitoes and crawled on by spiders and stared at by a sloth and a howler monkey.

And shortly before dusk this evening he’d had an experience that he knew would someday bring laughs from the rest of his team of operatives at The Campus.

A toucan had actually shit on his back from its perch in the oak above him. At the time, a two-man guard patrol had been nearby on the lawn, so Dominic just lay there and took the splatter. When he finally did get a chance to try and wipe it off he saw he was covered in red, as if the bird had been eating a steady diet of wild berries.

Dom would have laughed himself, had he been in the mood. But he wasn’t because through all today’s effort and misery he had yet to see any hint of Ethan Ross.

Just before dusk he did see one man who did not look like he belonged here at the mansion. A small, dark-complexioned individual who wore blue jeans in the ninety-degree heat stood on the veranda for several minutes talking on a mobile phone. Through the binoculars Dom made out short hair and a very young-looking face, and hiding in the brush fifty yards he away put the man at no older than twenty-five.

Dom pulled out a camera and took a few long-range shots, but the distance and the fading light made them all but worthless. After a lengthy phone call small man returned to the cool of the house and shut the door behind him.

Dominic decided to change his position after six hours without any sighting of anyone other than the obvious guard force. He left the majority of his gear in his hide — after pinpointing it with a GPS waypoint, and began moving laterally to the west toward the back of the property.

He found a new temporary hide with a view of the swimming pool and the wraparound balcony at the rear of the house. When he was sure he was well hidden in deep tropical shrubs under the canopy of the rainforest, he pulled out his binoculars and scanned the windows. Unlike in the back, several of the curtains here were open, and he could see one man moving around, back and forth, on the second floor.

Probably another guard, Dom determined, but he liked this position nonetheless and decided to wait until dark when there would be a better view inside the lighted rooms and hallways of the property.

Shortly before ten-thirty in the evening, a breeze picked up and Dom smelled the approach of rain in the air. He decided he’d go back to his original hide site, it had better coverage, and he had a light poncho stored in his backpack he could use in the case of a serious downpour, but just as he put down his binoculars he saw movement on the veranda. Quickly he brought the glass back to his eyes, and he saw a blond-haired man with a wineglass in his hand, standing against the railing and looking out over the swimming pool. He clutched what looked like a closed laptop computer under his arm.

Dom scanned the man up and down. He couldn’t really make out his face because he was standing out of the light. “Is that you, Ross?” he whispered to himself. It was impossible to be certain at eighty yards’ distance, even with the binoculars.

He grabbed his camera and got a few inconclusive shots, then he took more pictures when a female with long and curly black hair came through the French doors behind the blond man. She carried a glass in one hand and a wine bottle in the other. Even at a distance, Dom could detect a wide smile on her face. She hugged the blond-haired man, awkwardly, because her hands were full, and the man just continued looking out over the back of the property like she wasn’t there.

Dom willed the blond-haired man to step back into the light and face in his direction. Eventually a large man in a cream-colored suit and a brown mustache stepped out onto the veranda, and with his gesticulations Dom could tell the man was beckoning the others back indoors. He focused the binoculars on the blond, who finally did turn back to the French doors and step through them while talking to the big man in the cream-colored suit. As he did this, he walked into the light and faced the rainforest on the eastern side of the property. There, eighty yards away and invisible in the darkness beyond the lawn, Dominic Caruso lay under a fern with binoculars to his eyes.

It was Ross.

Softly, Dom said, “Nice to see you again, asshole. You think you’re safe here? You might be safe from Albright, you might even be safe from me. But you aren’t safe from Shayetet Thirteen.”

Ethan Ross disappeared behind the doors and the light on the veranda snapped off.