Commander-In-Chief (17 page)

Clark said, “Sure. Just some technical support work for one of our clients. Still, it’s a crazy world. You know how even on a business trip you’ve got to keep your head on straight.”

“I do indeed.” Jack’s mind drifted off his own mission for a moment. The work over here was child’s play compared with most everything he’d done in the field in the past few years. He knew he should appreciate it, and he certainly had when he’d been with Ysabel, but at the moment his mind was with Chavez and Caruso, somewhere out in the field without him there to help them out.

Clark brought Jack back to Luxembourg when he said, “I think I know someone who might be able to help you over there. At the Agency I worked with a woman named Christine Hutton. Hell of a case officer. She got out of the biz a long time ago, she’s got to be fifty-five or sixty now. Anyway, I think she’s a German noblewoman.”

Jack thought he misheard. “Sorry, she’s a what?”

“She left the Agency when she married a German diplomat. He came from nobility, which used to be a big deal in Germany, but now it isn’t terribly useful. Poor guy died of cancer several years back, left everything to his wife. They have a couple of grown kids, but last I heard she was living in the family estate in Bitburg, just over the border from Luxembourg. She is completely out of intel work, has been for a long time, but she might be up for an afternoon of excitement.”

“How do you think she can help?”

“Simple. She’s filthy rich, and it’s old European money.”

Jack understood. “She won’t have any problem getting a meeting with a financial lawyer in Luxembourg City.”

“Right. She’s a down-to-earth girl who married into money but didn’t let it ruin her, so she doesn’t flaunt what she has. Still, I am sure if I called and explained the situation to her, I could get her to
show up at your lawyer’s office putting on all the airs of Catherine the Great.”

“I like it.”

“Obviously, she’ll be going in without any cover at all. You’ll have to pull it off cleanly.”

“That won’t be a problem. We’ll come up with a legit reason for the meet.”

“I’ll get Gavin packed up for the trip over, and then I’ll reach out to Christine.”

T
here was no fanfare to the scene this day at Zapadnaya Litsa Naval Base, only a persistent sleet under overcast skies. Valeri Volodin was not present for the passage of
this
submarine out of Sayda Inlet and into the deeper waters of Kola Bay, although the Severodvinsk-class sub was, like the Borei that left a week earlier, departing on its maiden mission in the service of the Russian Federation.

The
Kazan
was also similar to the
Knyaz Oleg
in that it was the best, most modern vessel of its class, and the Americans and other Western powers thought this
Kazan
, like the big Borei on its way across the Atlantic, was still undergoing sea trials. They had no idea it was operational.

At 111 meters long and 12 meters wide, the
Kazan
wasn’t as impressive as the Borei ballistic missile sub in sheer size, but it had a different role, and this role required it to be smaller and sleeker. The
Kazan
was a nuclear attack submarine, SSGN in the parlance of the U.S. Navy. To call it the most advanced submarine in the
world was no stretch. Like the Borei to its U.S. counterpart Ohio, the Severodvinsk class was more sophisticated and cutting-edge than the comparable U.S. version, the Seawolf.

Powered by a pressurized water reactor, its steam turbine could generate thirty-five knots below the waves and twenty on the surface. It also had a silent speed of twenty knots, and though it wasn’t quite as quiet as the Seawolf, it was far quieter than any nuclear attack sub any Western power had ever come up against.

And far more powerful.

The most potent weapon on the
Kazan
was the P-800 Oniks, a long-range antiship missile that could do Mach 3—a mile every two seconds—and deliver a conventional or nuclear payload out to a range of 327 miles, using an awesome assortment of computerized offensive and defensive measures to do so. There were thirty-two Oniks missiles on board at present, along with two dozen Type 53-65 torpedoes.

With a hull made from low-magnetic steel, the 13,800-ton warship itself was incredibly difficult to detect, but with a bow array, flank arrays, and towed arrays, its own spherical sonar could “see” the water in all directions. This made the vessel a lethal hunter as well as a particularly difficult quarry.

It was a big muscular fighter, a great white shark in the water, and the water it was heading to was rich with prey.

Today marked the beginning of what was expected to be a long patrol for the
Kazan
. Most of its eighty-eight crew members knew little about their mission other than the fact it could last up to three months.

But the captain had his orders. The
Kazan
would sail submerged into the Barents Sea, and from there through the Norwegian Sea and into the North Sea. After that things would get interesting. The
Øresund Strait separating Denmark from Sweden is only two and a half miles wide at its narrowest. The Russian nuclear attack sub would need to negotiate these heavily trafficked and more heavily monitored waters without being detected, using intelligence and supreme stealth to do so.

After the stress of the Øresund Strait, the Baltic Sea would seem as vast as the Atlantic to the sailors of the
Kazan
, but the captain and a select few of the boat’s thirty-two officers knew what they would be doing when they got there. They also knew that, unlike the
Knyaz Oleg
on its way into the two-hundred-mile exclusion zone around America, the
Kazan
’s mission was not merely about the threat of action.

No, the captain of the sub fully expected to engage his enemy in battle.

Russia’s Baltic Fleet, based in Kaliningrad, currently had only two operational attack submarines, older but capable Varshavyankas, called “Kilo class” by NATO forces. But with the arrival of the
Kazan
to the Baltic, the Varshavyankas would have a capable ally.

As soon as the
Kazan
made it to its patrolling zone north of Poland, the Varshavyankas would begin seeking targets and destroying them with torpedoes, following a checklist that came from the Kremlin itself. The
Kazan
would join them with cruise missiles and torpedoes, and together they would intimidate all ships traveling in the waters around Kaliningrad.

After standing for a while in the conning tower, enjoying the stinging impacts of sharp sleet on his face, the captain finally gave the order for his warship to submerge as soon as it was safe for it to do so. Western satellites might have identified the boat in the thirty-five minutes it was out of its hangar this morning, and they might even have been able to deduce it was putting out to sea. But
the experts would only think it was off on sea trials, like the
Knyaz Oleg
before it.

They would learn the truth soon enough, and if the captain did his job correctly, they would know the
Kazan
was in play only when wolf packs of Oniks missiles began screaming toward their targets.

A
fter a nine-hour flight from Baltimore, Ding Chavez and Dominic Caruso arrived in Vilnius, Lithuania, during a mid-morning rain shower. There to meet them at the airport’s fixed-base operator was Herkus Zarkus, a thirty-one-year-old American of Lithuanian descent. Herkus was a technician for the CIA-linked company with a contract to install high-speed Internet service throughout the southern half of Lithuania.

Though Herkus wasn’t a spy himself, he held a security clearance and he had been read in on Ding and Dom’s mission, at least as far as his responsibility in it. He knew it was his job to take the two American contractors wherever they needed to go, both in Vilnius and in the countryside, and make sure their cover as fiber-optic linemen remained sound.

The two Campus operators loaded their bags into a van with the name
DATAPLANET
on the side, and all three men climbed in for
the ride into town from the airport. While Herkus drove he explained that he had served in the U.S. Army with an electronic system maintenance military operational specialty. After working a few years in a support unit for 10th Special Forces Group, he left the service to go back to school for an advanced degree in electrical engineering.

After he graduated he was heavily recruited for the job with DataPlanet, a Maryland-based fiber-optics technology company that worked government contracts around Central Europe installing and upgrading fiber-optic networks. He was surprised that the company pulled out all the stops to get him on board, but as soon as he accepted the position he was let in on the fact DataPlanet actually had an affiliation with the Central Intelligence Agency. Herkus found out he had been head-hunted not only because of his job-related education and work experience, but also because of the security clearances he’d held in the Army.

DataPlanet would have been a nearly perfect CIA front, but it had, in fact, started organically and only later become involved with U.S. intelligence. A CIA officer noticed an opportunity in the company and, over time, developed an informal “relationship” with the owners, themselves former defense contractors with high security clearances. Most of the work the firm did overseas was unrelated to the mission of the U.S. intelligence community, but from time to time CIA and NSA electronic intelligence specialists accompanied men like Herkus Zarkus into the field, using the lineman-technician cover to move virtually anywhere in Central European nations where Russian intelligence had many eyes and ears. And while the company techs and the intelligence operatives actually did install the high-tech networks in houses, towns, and buildings, they also sometimes added a few optional extras to the
nets, allowing electronic surveillance in parts of the world where Agency techs working out of embassies would not have been able to avoid scrutiny by opposition intelligence services.

In this case, it had been explained to the technician that his two “tag-alongs” would not be doing any technical work of an electronic intelligence nature on this op. They would, instead, simply need to go to a number of different locations and take pictures with a special camera.

On the flight over, Dom and Ding had watched an hourlong video that served as a crash course on working as fiber-optic technicians. After this they sat through three more hours of Lithuanian language study, which was effectively nil, but they did learn a couple dozen phrases that might prove useful in a pinch.

Chavez spoke Russian, but here in Lithuania only seven percent of the population spoke Russian daily. That said, Russian was understood by many here, and Ding’s Lithuanian was only what he had on his iPhone translator and what little he’d picked up on the flight over.

Herkus brought the men to his office in the center of town, and here they had coffee and chatted for a while, then he got down to business, showing the men a PowerPoint presentation on the legitimate work they’d be doing here in the region. It was straightforward, and not too terribly technical, because Herkus himself would be with them every step of the way.

They needed to know only the basics so they could act naturally in their covers and get on with the real reason they were over here in the first place.

In the late afternoon they piled back into the DataPlanet van and drove through the city, ending up on the third floor of an old building in the Old Town. This was a CIA safe house. Herkus had
been instructed to drop the men off here and then pick them up for work early the next morning.

•   •   •

D
om and Ding had just gotten their luggage into their rooms when there was a knock at the door. Dom looked through the peephole to see two men wearing blue jeans and insulated jackets.

“Yeah?” he asked through the door.

One of the men answered, “Mary Pat sent me over. You should be getting a text to that effect just about any second.”

Dom checked his phone and saw nothing, but Chavez entered the foyer of the apartment, looking at his phone. “It’s okay. Just got a text from Clark. It’s the CoS.”

Caruso opened the door and let the men in.

“You must be Dom,” one of the men said. He extended a hand. “Pete Branyon. Good to meet you, and welcome to Lithuania or, as we like to call it, tomorrow’s ground zero.”

The CIA chief of station Vilnius, Peter Branyon, entered the room with his security officer, Greg Donlin. After shaking Dom’s hand, he walked toward Chavez. “I’m Pete. Domingo, it’s an honor to meet you.”

“Likewise.”

Branyon said, “When I got the cable that you’d be coming over to help, I was surprised, to say the least. But since you come on the recommendation from the DNI, that’s good enough for me. Mary Pat Foley’s office is all the bona fides I need.”

Branyon and the two newcomers sat down in the small living room, while Donlin stood near the window, keeping one eye on the street outside.

Branyon said, “We swept this apartment for bugs just before
you arrived. We’ll do it every day, just to be sure, but we don’t expect you’ll garner too much attention from the opposition.”

Ding said, “Can you fill us in on the situation?”

“Sure,” Branyon replied. “As I’m sure you know from the news, Valeri Volodin has convinced a sizable portion of his nation that Ukraine is inhabited by Nazis, all Russia’s neighbors want to destroy them, and American spies are running amok here in Lithuania.” He chuckled. “I’m pretty sure none of that is true, but I can promise that third assertion is absolute bullshit. We aren’t running amok, we are barely treading water. We spend all our time trying to keep tabs on Russia’s spies on the ground here, and working to discern Russia’s intentions.”

Ding said, “I’m sure you’ve been told, but we’ve been given an assignment by the DNI. But when we’re not doing that, we’re available to help your station any way we can. Our cover is fiber-optic linemen, so we should have pretty good freedom of movement.”

“Yeah, DataPlanet can get you guys anywhere you need to go. They are one hell of an asset. Me and the rest of my covered case officers can’t go anywhere without doing a lengthy SDR, but DataPlanet is so ubiquitous around here the Russians don’t bother with them.”

Chavez said, “Mary Pat told us your station was a little short-staffed.”

Branyon said, “We were barely able to keep up with our work as it was, then the LNG regasification facility on the coast was blown up. A few days later, the Russian train transport was attacked here in Vilnius. Now we’re up to our eyeballs in problems and marching orders from Langley. Half the world thinks Lithuania is looking like it is going to be the epicenter of the next war.”

“Anything we can do to help out your station?” Dom asked.

“I know you guys have plenty of work to do, but it sure wouldn’t
hurt for us to have a couple more sets of eyes looking out for Little Green Men near the border.”

“Which border?” Dom asked.

“A damn good question. Russia could send sappers in from either the east or the west, since Belarus is to the east and Kaliningrad is to the west. But my main concern is the east. Belarus is friendly with Russia, as I’m sure you guys know, so even though Kaliningrad has a lot of Russian troops on our western border, if there is an invasion Russia would be idiots not to hit from both directions. If you guys are laying cable to the east it will put you in the little villages and on the highways close to the Belarusan border. Just keep an eye out. We have a network of agents in the towns there by the border, but the rules say you guys can’t have any involvement with agents, so I’ll keep working that myself.”

Ding said, “Sorry, Pete, it’s not my place to say, but you are the CoS. Is it really a good idea for you to be traveling near the border?”

Branyon shrugged. “I’m a hell of a good case officer. Just because I’m station chief doesn’t mean I can’t still get out into the populace. I do my SDRs, I move light and low-profile, so I don’t have much to worry about.” He nodded toward Donlin. “Greg here keeps me safe.”

Greg Donlin had barely spoken, but he said, “I keep warning him about the dangers. He keeps overruling.”

Chavez said, “Well, okay, but if you need any help from us involving your PERSEC, just shout.”

Branyon raised an eyebrow. “You guys aren’t carrying weapons, are you?”

“No,” Dom said quickly. “I think my partner is talking about help getting you
away
from a fight.”

Ding nodded. “Yeah, Dom and I aren’t here to go up against Russia’s Army. I guess we’ll just have to leave that to Greg.”

Greg Donlin sighed. “I’ve got a pistol, but I’m an armored division or two short if I have to fight the Russians.”

The men laughed, a moment of gallows humor, nothing more, because if Russia decided it wanted to move into Lithuania, there wasn’t a damn thing anybody sitting in this little living room could do to stop it.