Covert One 6 - The Moscow Vector (11 page)

Fortunately, crossing the frontier had proved uneventful. Now that the Czech Republic was part of the European Union, there were very few active checkpoints between the two countries.

But moving any deeper into Germany or getting a plane back to the States or anywhere else would take a lot more than luck. The murderous ambush on the road to Prague’s airport had cost him both his laptop computer and his carry-on bag. European hotelkeepers and airport security officials alike frowned on people arriving without luggage. More important, he needed new identification. Sooner or later, the Czech authorities would start casting a wider net for the American doctor and army officer who had missed his plane to London and vanished so mysteriously. They might even tie him to the bullet-riddled corpses found near the road to the airport.

Smith spotted a short, bearded man in evening dress and a bright red scarf walking slowly toward the statue. He wore a pair of thick glasses that reflected the dazzling lights silhouetting the Opera House. The newcomer also carried a colorful program for Mozart’s Don Giovanni conspicuously beneath one arm.

Jon moved out to intercept him. “Are you here for the performance?” he asked quietly in German. “They say the maestro is in top form.”

He noticed the little man relax slightly. Maestro was the recognition word Fred Klein had given him when Smith called to arrange this emergency rendezvous.

“So I understand,” the short, bearded man replied. He tapped the program under his arm. “But I prefer Mozart to Weber myself.”

“That’s quite a coincidence,” Smith said pointedly. “So do I.”

The little man smiled tightly. His blue eyes were bright behind the thick lenses of his glasses. “Those of us who love Europe’s greatest composer must stick together, my friend. So take this, with my compliments.” He handed the taller American his Don Giovanni program. Then, without another word, he turned on his heel and walked away, vanishing into the crowds milling around outside the Semper’s arched entrance.

Smith headed in the opposite direction. While on the move, he flipped open the program and found a thick manila envelope clipped to one of the pages. Inside it, he found another American passport, this one made out in the name of John Martin. It bore a current German customs stamp and his picture. The envelope also contained a credit and debit card in the mythical John Martin’s name, a train ticket to Berlin, and a numbered tag from the left luggage kiosk at Dresden’s Neustadt station.

Jon grinned to himself, reassured all over again by this evidence of Fred Klein’s levelheaded thoroughness. He pocketed the various documents, discarded the opera program in a trash bin, and then strode briskly toward the gleaming lights of a nearby tram stop.

Half an hour later, Smith jumped lightly down from the rear door of a yellow electric tram. He was just across from the Neustadt Bahnhof. A pyramid of modern steel girders and glass rose high above the weathered, pollution-stained stone facade of the original railway station. He dodged a pair of taxi-cabs that were crawling along the snow-choked street looking for fares, and entered the almost-deserted station.

At the left luggage kiosk, a sour-faced night clerk took the tag from him, rummaged through the back room, and came grumbling back carrying a brand-new overnight bag and a laptop computer case. Jon signed for them and moved off to the side of the counter to inspect his new acquisitions. The overnight bag contained an assortment of clothing in his sizes, including a warmer black wool coat. Gratefully, he shrugged out of his battered windbreaker and donned the heavier coat. The computer case included both a rugged, high-speed laptop and a portable scanner.

Smith glanced up at the departure board. He had almost an hour before the next train to Berlin was scheduled to leave Dresden. His stomach growled, reminding him that it had been far too many hours since his last meal —a couple of pieces of dry toast and jam at the police station in Prague. He closed both cases, slung them over his shoulder, and walked through the station to a small cafe located near the platforms. A sign in German, French, and English invited patrons to make use of the restaurant’s wireless Internet connection while enjoying coffee, soup, and sandwiches.

He had just enough time to kill two birds with one stone, he thought gratefully. He seated himself at an empty table in the corner and ordered black coffee and a bowl of Kartoffelsuppe, creamy potato soup flavored with marjoram and slices of pork sausage.

Smith waited for the waitress to leave and then powered up the new laptop and scanner. While sipping his coffee, he pulled out the identity card he had retrieved from the corpse of the broken-nosed man in the Divoka Sarka and studied it closely. The name on the ID card meant nothing, he suspected. But in the right hands the photograph might yield useful information.

He flipped open his phone and hit the preset code for Covert-One’s Washington, D.C., headquarters.

“Go ahead, Colonel,” Klein’s calm voice said.

“The RV went off without a hitch,” Smith reported. “I’m at the station waiting for my train now.”

“Good,” the head of Covert-One said quietly. “You’re hooked into the Hotel Askanischer Hof, right on the Ku’damm. You should be able to rest up there inconspicuously for a day or so while we consider how to proceed.”

Smith nodded to himself. The Kurfurstendamm, once the heart of West Berlin, was still a bustling center of commerce and tourism. Even in the winter, it should be easv enough to blend in discreetly with the other travelers who would be thronging the district’s streets and restaurants. “What’s my cover as this John Martin character?” he asked.

“Ostensibly, you’re a pharmaceuticals salesman spending a few days in Berlin after attending a sales conference,” Klein told him. “Think you’ll have any problems fitting into that?”

“Nope,” Smith said confidentlv. “There’s just one more thing for now.”

“Go ahead.”

“I have an image to scan and send you,” Smith said. “A picture of the guy who murdered Valentin Petrenko and who tried to kill me twice. He’s dead now, but his photo might be worth running through various databases.”

“Quite probably, Colonel,” Klein said drily. “Very well. Send it along.

We’ll be standing by.”

Near the Russo-Georgian Border

The isolated town of Alagir sits at the northern end of the Ardon Valley, deep in the rugged foothills of the Caucasus Mountains. Roughly seventy kilometers to the south lies the snow-choked, nine-thousand-foot-high Roki Pass into the disputed Georgian territory of South Ossetia. The mountains themselves, jagged masses of stone, snow, and ice that gleamed palely beneath a rising moon, climb in a solid wall across the entire southern horizon.

Bright arc lights flared across the Alagir railroad yard, turning the black night into an eerie, sharp-edged mimicry of day. Sweating despite the freezing cold, Russian combat engineers clad in winter-pattern camouflage uniforms swarmed around the long freight train crowding the yard. They worked in teams, quickly unchaining the tarpaulin-shrouded shapes of T-72 tanks, self-propelled 122mm howitzers, and wheeled BTR-90 and tracked BMP-2 infantry fighting vehicles that were bolted onto flat cars behind the train’s three

powerful locomotives.

Other troops worked fast to guide the newly unloaded armored vehicles onto ramps leading to a long row of enormous flatbed trucks. These were specialized tank transporters, which would ferry them farther up the cliff-lined valley. Vehicles fitted with snowplows and salt and sand dispensers waited at the head of the convoy, ready to lead the heavily laden trucks up the winding, ice-covered roads into the mountains.

Bundled in his own greatcoat, Colonel-General Vasily Sevalkin, commander of Russia’s Northern Caucasus Military District, stood near his staff car. watching the operation with undisguised satisfaction. He checked his watch and then raised a single gloved hand to signal one of his subordinates, an engineer officer.

The engineer major hurried over, snapped to attention, and saluted.

“Well?” Sevalkin asked.

“We will be finished here in less than an hour, sir,” the major reported crisply.

“Very good,” Sevalkin murmured, pleased to hear his own estimate confirmed. This new convoy of tanks, self-propelled guns, and infantry carriers would be long gone from Alagir before the next American satellite pass. And the freight train itself, now loaded with prefabricated decoy vehicles, would be plainly visible moving through the rail junction near Beslan — to all appearances only another routine shipment of militarv equipment to the Russian forces fighting Chechen rebels west of here.

The Russian general smiled thinly. Soon he would have the arms, ammunition, and men of two full-strength motor-rifle divisions, the 27th Guards and the 56th, securely hidden within striking range of the small Republic of Georgia. Although both divisions were largely equipped with older, second-line tanks and other military hardware, their weapons were far superior to anything that could be mustered by the rag-tag Georgian armed forces just across the border.

With a casual wave, Sevalkin dismissed the major back to his duties and climbed into his car. “Take me to the forward HQ at Vladikavkaz,” he told his driver. Then he sat back against the seat, pondering the likely events of the next several days and weeks. His orders from Moscow for this top-secret deployment claimed it was only a “special mobility and readiness exercise.” The general snorted softly. Only a fool would believe the Kremlin really intended so large a movement of troops and equipment—nearly forty thousand men and more than a thousand armored fighting vehicles —as a simple field maneuver. Certainly not in the middle of the notoriously harsh Caucasian mountain winter, with its howling winds, subzero temperatures, and blinding snowstorms.

No, Sevalkin thought, Dudarev and the others had to be planning something bold, some decisive action that would rock the world back on its heels in wonder. May it come soon, he decided grimly. For too long now, he and others like him had watched in depressed silence while Russia’s strength and influence faded, diminishing with every passing vear. But soon that would all change. When the orders were at last issued to begin restoring his country to its rightful place on the world stage, he and the soldiers under his command would be ready to do their duty.

The White House

Sam Castilla sat at the big ranch-style table made of New Mexico pine that served as his desk, briskly working his way through more than a dozen, multi-page legislative and policy analysis papers marked Urgent. Even with a top-notch White House staff serving as a filter, the amount of paperwork that required his personal attention was staggering. He scrawled a few quick comments on one memo and then turned immediately to the next. His eyes, neck, and shoulders all ached.

One corner of his mouth twisted upward in a wry grin. It was the age-old problem of the presidency. Delegate too much power and responsibility and you wound up derided by the press as a “caretaker chief executive” or tangled up in some damned foolish scandal sparked by overeager subordinates. Try to exercise too much control and you found yourself drowning in a sea of mean-ingless memoranda better handled by a junior clerk—or wasting precious time setting the daily schedule of the White House tennis courts, like poor Jimmy Carter. The trick was to find the right balance. The dilemma was that the right balance was always shifting.

There was a soft rap on the open door of the Oval Office.

Castilla took off his titanium-frame reading glasses. He rubbed briefly at his tired eyes and then looked up. “Yes?”

His executive secretary stood in the doorway. “It’s nearly six o’clock, Mr.

President. And Mr. Klein is here,” she said pointedly, not bothering to hide the look of disapproval on her waspish face. “I’ve put him in your private study, just as you asked.”

Castilla hid a smile. Ms. Pike, his long-suffering personal assistant, took her role as the dragon guarding his schedule seriously—very seriously. She made no secret of the fact that she thought he worked too long, exercised too little, and allowed his limited free time to be wasted by far too many political cronies presuming on old friendships. Like the rest of the White House staff, she was not privy to the Covert-One secret. That was his burden alone. And so, not knowing how else to classify Fred Klein, she lumped the pale, long-nosed spy chief in with the rest of the “good-time Charlie” time-wasters.

“Thank you, Estelle,” he said gravely.

“The First Lady is expecting you for dinner in the residence tonight,” she reminded him sharply. “Promptly at seven.”

Castilla nodded with a slow, easy grin. “Never fear. You can tell Cassie that I’ll be there come hell or high water.”

Estelle Pike sniffed. “I certainly hope so, sir.”

Castilla waited until she left. His smile faded. Then he rose quickly from behind his big desk and strode across the Oval Office to the adjoining study. It was filled with comfortable furniture and crowded bookcases. Like his den upstairs in the White House family quarters, this small room was one of the few that fully reflected his own tastes. A balding, medium-tall man in a rumpled blue suit stood next to the fireplace, admiring one of the several paintings

of the Old West hanging on the study’s walls. He held a battered leather briefcase in one hand.

Hearing the door open, Nathaniel Frederick Klein turned away from his contemplation of a Remington original on loan from the National Gallery. It showed a small, ragged, and weary U.S. Cavalry patrol making a last stand around a dried-up desert waterhole, desperately firing their single-shot, black powder Springfield carbines from behind a rough barricade of their dead horses.

“Seems kind of familiar, doesn’t it?” Castilla said quietly. “Too many hostiles and not enough help.”

“Maybe so, Sam,” the head of Covert-One replied. He shrugged his narrow shoulders. “Then again, nobody rational ever claimed that being the world’s only superpower was going to be easy. Or particularly popular.”

The president grimaced. “True enough. And it beats the alternative. I guess I’d rather we were the decent, but unloved, five-hundred-pound gorilla than the pitied and hapless ninety-eight-pound weakling.” He nodded his head toward a nearby black leather couch. “Go ahead and sit down, Fred.