Arctic Gold (2 page)

meaning each of them was where he or she was supposed to be when he or she was supposed to be there, leading the unwilling and hopefully clueless participants in the drama through their steps and turns without their ever knowing they were onstage.

Of course things were bound to go wrong from time to time, but good operators could ad lib until things were back in control, back in the flow.

This time around, Rubens thought, someone had lost the beat, and now the situation was fast slipping into chaos.

The ballet, he thought, was fast on its way to becoming a brawl.

What is the current position of Ghost Blue? Rubens demanded. He didn’t want to use that option, but

Ghost Blue was an F-22 Raptor deployed hours ago out of Lakenheath. Stealthier than the F-117 Nighthawk, which it was currently in the process of replacing, more reliable than the smaller, robotic F-47C UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles), the F-22 had sophisticated avionics and onboard computer gear that allowed it to serve as an advance platform for ELINT, electronics intelligence, enabling it to pick up transmissions from the ground and relay them back to Fort Meade via the constellation of military comsats.

Ninety- six miles west- northwest of St. Petersburg, sir, James Higgins replied from another console. Over the Gulf of Finland, tucked in close by the Finnish- Russian border.

Send him in.

Yes, sir. Higgins hesitated. Uh, that requires special

I know what it requires. Send him in.

Yes, sir.

Ninety- six miles. Ghost Blue would be staying subsonic to maintain his stealth signature, so that was seven and a half minutes’ flight time or a bit less to a point where he would be able to intercept Magpie transmissions. Call it seven minutes.

Of course, this was a flagrant violation of Russian airspace and territorial sovereignty. At the moment, the Raptor was loitering unseen within Finnish airspace, also a violation of territorial boundaries, but not so deadly a sin as moving into Russian territory. St. Petersburg sat like a spider within a far- flung web of radar installations and surface- to- air missile sites, protecting dozens of high- value military installations in and around the city.

And if anyone could defeat U.S. stealth technology, it was the Russians. In 1999, Yugoslav forces had scored a kill, probably with Russian help, shooting down an F-117 with an SA-3 missile. The pilot had been rescued, but Yugoslav forces had grabbed the wreckageand almost certainly turned it over to the Russians for study. The Russians, it was well known, were very

interested in learning how to defeat American stealth technology.

Rubens had just kicked up the ante in an already dangerous game.

He reached for a telephone on the console beside him.

DeFrancesa

Operation Magpie

Waterfront, St. Petersburg

0025 hours

Well, they’d warned her she might find herself out of communications with the Art Room. There was nothing Lia could do about it now, however.

Like all Desk Three field operatives, Lia had a tiny speaker unit implanted in her skull just behind her left ear. The microphone was attached to her black utilities, while the antenna was coiled up in her belt. The system provided safe, clear, secure communications usually. It was a bitch, though, when the technology failed.

Still, the satellite dish receivers at Fort Meade were a lot better as antennas than the wire in her belt. It was possible that they were receiving her back in the Art Room even if she couldn’t hear them.

She would have to keep operating on that assumption.

What she couldn’t rely on was the Art Room warning her of approaching threats.

She tried raising her backup. Romeo, this is Juliet.

Nothing. And that was

worrying. It meant she and Alekseev were on their own.

Alekseev had moved ahead and was searching the huge chamber now with his own flashlight. She could see stacks of crates, some covered in tarpaulins, looming out of the darkness.

But one large crate was off by itself, near the back wall of the warehouse. She could see words stenciled in bold, black Cyrillic lettering on the sides: stahnka

.

Machine parts.

Akulinin

Operation Magpie

St. Petersburg

0026 hours

Ilya Ilyitch Akulinin peered ahead through fog and cold drizzle, past the monotonous beat of the rented car windshield wipers. Kosaya came to a T at Kozhevennaya Liniya

, and he turned the ugly little CitroICn right.

That put him in a narrow canyon, with two- and three- story structures, most with faI\$?ades of either concrete blocks or rusting sheet metal, looming to either side. Lia should be in the third warehouse in the row on the left side of the street; he pulled over to the curb and parked. He didn’t want to get too close.

Akulinin was new to the National Security Agency and Desk Three. Born in Brooklyn, the son of naturalized Russian immigrants, he’d joined the Army out of high school and served as a Green Beret with the Army Special Forces, where his fluency in Russian had put him in great demand in joint operations with America new ally, the Russian Federation. His had been among the first American boots on the ground in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, just prior to the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan.

Leaving the car, he dropped a button- sized sensor on the street, then walked across the street with casual nonchalance. If anyone was watching, they would see a tall, blond man in laborer coveralls, carrying a large toolbox. Reaching a warehouse two down from the one Lia should be in, he stepped into the narrow junk- and garbage- littered space between two buildings and began looking for a way up. There was a ladderor the remnants of onebut it began halfway up the side of the building. The rest had rusted away, or been stolen long ago.

Much of St. Petersburg infrastructure showed the same advanced state of decay and crumbling collapse. Many of the buildings in this area were abandoned, and scavangers had long since stripped them of copper, lead, brass, and anything else they could pry loose, haul off, and sell.

He stepped over a pile of garbage and a set of rusted

bedsprings. Something large and furry squeaked as it scuttled from beneath an overturned two- legged chair.

At least, he thought, he shouldn’t have an audience here tonight.

Except for the rats.

DeFrancesa

Operation Magpie

Waterfront, St. Petersburg

0027 hours

Removing yet another small gray case from a pouch on her combat blacks, Lia slipped a plug into her ear and held the device itself out in front of her. Instantly a staccato burst of clicks, harsh as the earlier static, sounded in her ear as numerals appeared on the small LED readout screen.

Machine parts, my ass, she said.

It is radioactive, yes? Alekseev said.

It is radioactive, yes.

It is not harmful, I was told, Alekseev told her. I was told

Not harmful unless there prolonged exposure, Lia corrected him. So let get this the hell over with and get out of here. Give me the pry.

Huh? Oh, yes. He handed her one of the tools he’d been carrying at his belt, a short pry bar. She used it to jimmy up one of the boards on the crate top with a sharp squeak of dry wood and bending staples, giving her a peek inside.

The crate was filled with what looked like thin sheets of metal, dull steel- gray, gleaming in the flash beam. Bingo

.

But just to be sure

Akulinin

Operation Magpie

Waterfront, St. Petersburg

0027 hours

Placing some more sensors, Akulinin emerged from the alley on a broad concrete promenade. The fog clung low and close above the black flow of the Neva. A thousand yards across the water lay a Russian Navy shipyard, but he could see no sign of it, not even a fog- shrouded light. Somewhere in the distance, a buoy- mounted bell clanged fitfully with the chop of the water, followed by the lowing of a foghorn.

Sticking to the shadows next to the line of dilapidated warehouses, he began making his way toward Lia position.

When Ilya Akulinin had left the Army, shortly after his third tour in Afghanistan, he’d been approached by a recruiter with the the National Security Agency. The NSA was America premier eavesdropping agency, and they, too, could use a man with his language skills, experience, and security clearances.

That had been just three years ago. After six months of training in Georgia and at the CIA Farm at Camp Peary, near Williamsburg, Virginia, they’d put him at a desk listening to electronic intercepts from Russia for the most part tracking the activities and the shadowy members of Russia far- flung criminal underground.

Crouching beside a rust- clotted cliff of sheet metal, the southwestern wall of an empty warehouse, he paused to check his communications link with the Art Room. Verona, this is Romeo, he called softly but the answer came as a harsh burst of static. The surrounding buildings, concrete and metal, must be blocking the signal. He’d thought that perhaps here, directly next to the water,

he would have a clean line of sight to a satellite, but evidently there were buildings across the Neva high enough to block the signal. He would need to get up high for a clear line of sight and it would be better if he could deploy a small dish antenna and get a good lock on a comsat.

He touched his belt, changing frequencies. Juliet, Juliet, he called. Wherefore art thou, Juliet?

Knock it off, Romeo, was her response. Her voice was scratchy, with a lot of static, but he could hear her well enough. We’re almost done here.

Where do you want me?

Sit tight. Everything cool. Where are you?

On the ground, at the corner of the warehouse southeast of you, about fifty yards from your position.

Stay put. We’ll be done in a second.

Roger that.

He waited. The damp breeze off the water made him shiver.

Akulinin had endured the boredom of a desk job for the next couple of years after his recruitment, until last month when out of the blue they’d asked him to volunteer for a routine but possibly dangerous operation in Russia. After almost two years of listening to recorded voices and filing ream upon electronic ream of reports, of course

he’d volunteered.

He’d volunteered without ever having heard of Desk Three. And that had proven to be quite a revelation in itself.

The National Security Agency was the largest of America intelligence agencies, and the most secretive, the least known. The old joke held that the letters stood for Never Say Anything or, more sinister still, for No Such Agency. The NSA charter had given it two basic missionscreating codes to ensure national security and breaking the codes of other nations. The few people who’d even heard of the organization assumed it handled nothing but SIGINTsignals intelligencethat it was a security- conscious band of mathematicians, programmers, cryptographers, and similar geeks who would never get their hands dirty on an actual black op overseas. That

was the sort of thing left to the CIA.

But the Deputy Director of the NSA, William Rubens, had approached him in one of the staff cafeterias last January and asked if he would consider transferring to the Agency Desk Three, where both his language skills and his combat training and experience as a Green Beanie were badly needed. Some outpatient surgery to plant a communications device behind his ear, another month at a specialist school at the CIA Farm, a quick series of briefings bringing him up to speed on something called Operation Magpie, and he’d found himself on a plane bound for Pulkovo International Airport.

And so far the mission had, indeed, seemed pretty routine. He and Lia had entered the country on separate flights, linked up in a seemingly casual encounter beneath Alexander Column in the Palace Square in front of the Hermitage. That night, they’d picked up their special mission equipment where their support team had left it, in a well- hidden drop on the shore of a wooded lake in Primorskiy Park. Yesterday Lia had met with the furtive Sergei Alekseev in an out- of- the- way teahouse off the Nevsky Prospect while Akulinin had provided backup, listening in unobtrusively from a nearby table.

And Alekseev had brought them here.

But now things were turning sour. Akulinin had been supposed to be here forty minutes ago, before Lia and Alekseev even arrived, scoping out the dockyard and the approaches to the warehouse and setting up a satellite dish on top of a nearby building to provide reliable communications with the Art Room. No one had counted on his being stopped by that damned officious traffic inspector

demanding to see his papers or the need for him to bribe his way back onto the road.