Ghost Force (6 page)

“Anyway, our man tracked him into the town and saw him go into the SIBNEFT offices, where he stayed for three hours. Our guy sat in his car, just up the street, in a snowstorm, and saw Jaan Valuev leave the same building—he’s the billionaire who runs OJSC, one of the biggest oil companies in Russia. Our man did not see anyone else leave, and he waited until dark at four p.m. But Valuev was picked up by an articulated truck, right across the street.”

“Is all that significant?” asked Jimmy.

“Well, they were in these small SIBNEFT site offices. You know that’s the enormous Siberian Oil Company. We got the biggest man in the business, Jaan Valuev, sneaking in and out of articulated trucks, and the political boss of Western Siberia showing up for just three or four hours. Sounds like a serious powwow to me.”

“You think it has something to do with Masorin?”

“I’ve no doubt they mentioned it. But the Siberian oil establishment is restless at the moment. They’re sick of Moscow, dying to trade more with China, and when two or three very big cheeses start meeting in secret, in the wilds of the western Siberian plains, it’s good to know.”

“I guess it is,” said Jimmy. “And I’m going to record all of this in my files. But I’m not quite sure why.”

“If Russia suddenly attacks its Siberian colonies and causes a World War, you’ll be glad I call you, hah? Glad to know Lenny was still steering you straight!”

“I’m always glad of that, old mate,” replied Jimmy. “Dad’s coming down to Washington for a couple of weeks soon…will you have dinner with us?”

“That would be very nice…good-bye now…how you say? Old mate.”

1530, MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 27
EASTERN FOOTHILLS OF THE URAL MOUNTAINS

The city of Yekaterinburg lies 1,130 miles east of Moscow. It is a city of a million souls, a light, airy, modern place with wide avenues, parks, and gardens, many of its historic public buildings constructed in the same fawn-and-white stucco as those in faraway St. Petersburg.

Some of the more elegant architecture of the old city, dating back to the 1720s, has been preserved; not, however, the Ipatiev house, which stood on a piece of land opposite the cream-and-turquoise tower of the Old Ascension Church. The house is long gone, bulldozed on the orders of Leonid Brezhnev. Today there is just a stark white memorial cross among a copse of trees.

It marks the spot where, on July 17, 1918, Czar Nicholas II, his wife, son, and daughters were slaughtered in the basement of the merchant Ipatiev’s residence, gunned down, bayoneted, and bludgeoned by the secret police squad that guarded them on behalf of the Bolsheviks.

The name Yekaterinburg will always stand as a symbol of those brutal, violent murders, and, as if to make sure no one ever forgets, there stands a statue, right in the middle of Central Avenue, the former Lenin Street, of Yakov Sverdlov, organizer of the killings.

Not a hundred feet from the statue, in another basement, the lower floor of an office building owned by SIBNEFT, there was taking place one of the most secret meetings ever conducted in Yekaterinburg, certainly since the days leading up to the death of Czar Nicholas and his family.

At the head of a long polished oak table sat Roman Rekuts, the towering figure who now virtually ruled western Siberia. At the far end sat Sergei Pobozhiy, the Chairman of SIBNEFT, flanked by his two coconspirators, the billionaire Jaan Valuev from OJSC Surgutneftegas, and the powerful LUKOIL Financial Vice President, Boris Nuriyev.

The First Minister of the Central Siberian Federal District was there, in company with the new Chief Executive of the Russian Far East, who brought his Energy Minister, Mikhail Pavlov.

Roman Rekuts had brought his new deputy with him, and Sergei
Pobozhiy was accompanied by his West Siberian Chief of Operations, the grizzled, beefy ex-drillmaster on the exploration rigs, Anton Katsuba.

Every one of the nine men in the room was Siberian-born. And not one of them failed to be attracted by the prospect of a clean break with Moscow. Of forming a new Republic of Siberia, a free and independent state with its own flag and currency. Even Yekaterinburg had its own flag, a white, green, and black tricolor, and there was talk of a Urals franc.

But the meeting was collectively certain of one sacrosanct rule—they must keep their close ties to Moscow in the oil business, retaining, however, the freedom to trade with their anxious, more affluent industrial neighbors to the south and east, in the People’s Republic of China.

There had been instant camaraderie in the boardroom since the meeting began, as men with similar stated aims pointed out the advantages of freedom to both the corporations and to the people of Siberia. They had begun at 3:00 p.m. and intended to proceed until dinner, which would be taken at the big table, before proceeding with the final draft of their communiqué to Moscow.

The meeting ended early, however, shortly after 4:30, when the double doors to the boardroom were booted open and an armed Soviet-style guard in military uniform bearing no insignia aimed his Kalashnikov straight at the defenseless head of Roman Rekuts and opened fire, pumping three bullets in a dead straight line across his forehead.

In a split second four more guards were in the room. They cut down Sergei Pobozhiy with a hail of bullets to the neck and chest, and blew away Jaan Valuev, who was hit by eight AK-47 bullets to the throat and neck.

Boris Nuriyev stood up and held his hands out in front of him, in the fleeting mini-seconds before he was gunned down with a burst to the chest that caused him to fall forward, bleeding onto the rough draft of their demands to Moscow.

Anton Katsuba, seated in the center of the table opposite the guards, crashed his way under the table and seemed to vanish from everyone’s mind, but the big man made a stupendous comeback, rising out from
under the seats like a rogue elephant and clamping a mighty fist on the windpipe of one of the attackers.

By now he was the only one of the nine left alive, and he grabbed the guard’s rifle and opened fire. No one was ready for this, and he actually killed two and wounded three before he was himself cut down in a hail of bullets from the other six.

The room was a total bloodbath, the carpet awash, the walls splattered. Blood flowed over the table. It was a grotesque insurrection, a near copybook repeat of the events of July 17, 1918, in a subterranean room not so far away from the old Ipatiev basement.

The one difference was that these modern soldiers of the Republic of Russia would have no need for the bayonets that were used to finish the Czar and his family. There was no need to plunge the steel into the bodies of the oilmen and the Siberian politicians as the guards had done to finish Nicholas, and the Empress Alexandra, the little boy Alexi, and the Grand Duchesses Marie and Olga, and Tatiana and Anastasia.

The ripping slugs of the clasp-loaded modern AK-47s were a lot more efficient than the old service revolvers of the early twentieth century. Not one of the original nine men who had assembled in this room was breathing.

And outside the room, there was pandemonium. The Russian Army, which had screamed into Central Avenue from the headquarters just outside the downtown area, had sealed off the entire throughway. Outside the building there were three large Army trucks plus one military ambulance.

Stretcher parties were running in through the main doors. Everyone working in the building remained at their desks. Armed guards were posted on every door. Huge green screens were erected to shield the main entrance from the public, and they continued to the rear of the trucks. Soldiers with body bags were sprinting down the stairs to the basement. A team of soldiers with ladders, paintbrushes and rollers, cans of paint, and ammonia were descending the steps in single file.

Everything from the room was being removed, eleven dead bodies, three wounded guards, the big table, carpets, chairs, papers. Everything. Behind the screen outside the door the Army trucks were being loaded, engines revving.

The first of them, the one containing all of the bodies, was under way less than twenty minutes after the opening burst of fire had cut down Roman Rekuts. It swung out of Central Avenue heading north, directly toward the arctic tundra northeast of the Ural Mountains on the estuary of the Ob River.

The truck containing the bloodstained carpets and furniture was next, roaring up the snowy street and again heading north. The ambulance was next, then the final truck, containing the screens and a dozen infantrymen in the back to assist with the burning and general destruction of the evidence when finally they reached their destination in the frozen north in the small hours of the morning.

This was the Russian military at their most thorough. No one would ever know the fate of the nine men who had sought freedom for their homeland of Siberia to trade their oil without the heavy yoke of the Russian government around their necks.

Perhaps even more sinister, no one would ever know how Moscow found out the meeting was taking place. But, as they say in the Siberian oil industry, even the icicles have ears and the wooden walls have eyes.

MIDDAY (LOCAL), TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 28
PRIVATE RESIDENCE OF THE RUSSIAN PRESIDENT
MOSCOW

There were just three visitors this morning: the Commander in Chief of the Russian Army, East of the Urals. The head of the FSB, who was rapidly developing a reputation comparable to his many predecessors. And the Russian Energy Minister, Oleg Kuts.

“Anyone heard anything?” asked the President.

“Not a word, sir. It seems no one knew who was in the meeting, no one knew what had happened, no one saw the cleanup, and no one’s heard a word since. So far, that is.”

“Good,” said the President. “Very good. Please congratulate your Commander on a very skillful job, very well executed.”

“I’ll make a point of it,” said the Russian General, kicking the heels of his jackboots together with an exaggerated, sharp crack.

“No word from inside the oil industry, I trust?”

“Nothing, sir,” replied Oleg Kuts. “But that’s understandable, since it seems no one has any idea who was in that room. I don’t suppose anyone will realize they’re missing for another twenty-four hours at least.”

He turned to the sallow-faced, fortyish head of the FSB. “Your men found out anything?”

“Not really, sir. Except that at least six of the men in the basement traveled to Yekaterinburg by completely different routes. None of them traveled together, and they used private aircraft and helicopters, cars, and two of them at least finished the journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway, one from the east, one from the west.”

“A very secret meeting, eh?”

“Yessir. Highly classified.”

“We were certainly on the right lines then?”

“Most definitely, sir.”

“But in my view this all leads to one inevitable conclusion, gentlemen…we can’t go on doing this sort of thing. And I truly do not know how long we can keep the lid on Siberia. In the end they are going to try again, because the temptation of riches from China is simply too great. And we cannot go on putting people in jail whenever they become too powerful, as we have done in the past, eh?”

“Or…er…eliminating them, sir.”

“Exactly so. The fact is, we need to home in on at least one major foreign oil supplier who is not in Siberia. We cannot have all our eggs in that one huge basket.”

“I know, sir. But these days, everyone who has any oil whatsoever is desperate to hang on to it and reap the reward. Yes, we may have to use our powers of persuasion.”

The President smiled. “Perhaps, Minister, you should conduct an immediate study…and find a new supplier, with substantial reserves, who might be…shall we say…vulnerable?”

Jaan Valuev, for the past six years, had led something of a double life. As the hard-driving boss of OJSC he was the very picture of a New Russian industrialist, a suave, well-tailored chief executive, presiding over the fortunes of an oil giant with income of more than $6 billion a year, annual growth of 17 percent, and 100,000 employees.

His wife had died four years earlier, and at fifty-two Jaan still lived in the grand mansion on the edge of the city of Surgut where they had brought up their two children. Both boys were now studying engineering at the Urals State Technical University in Yekaterinburg, the alma mater of Russia’s first President, Boris Yeltsin, and his long-suffering wife, Naya.

This university is the largest east of the Ural Mountains. It once boasted twelve graduates on the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Jaan Valuev was its biggest private benefactor, and unlike all of the other Russian oil chiefs, he also heavily supported social programs in his hometown of Surgut. Generally speaking, Jaan Valuev had been a pillar of Siberian society.

But there was another side to him. Instead of the traditional lavish dacha on one of the more scenic coastlines of the Black Sea, Jaan preferred western Europe. He owned a spectacular beachfront estate two miles east of the Marbella Club in Andalusia, southern Spain, and kept a permanent $300-a-night suite at the superb Hotel Colon on Cathedral Avenue in the heart of Barcelona.

He owned an opulent white-fronted Georgian house in The Boltons, off London’s pricey Brompton Road, and a twenty-acre country estate in the hills above the Thameside village of Pangbourne in Berkshire. He had found his way into this glorious English countryside through
his great friend, the urbane multimillionaire publisher, hotelier, and soccer fanatic John Madejski, the Chairman of Reading Football Club and owner of the towering modern stadium on the borders of the M4 motorway.

It was this love of soccer that hurled the two men together. In 2009, upstart little Reading had fought their way into the upper echelons of the English Premier League and ended up playing mighty Barcelona in front of 60,000 people in the European Champions League at the Noucamp Stadium in Spain’s second city.

And who should emerge that day, almost shyly, as the great new power in the Barcelona club? The billionaire behind some of the biggest player transfer deals in the history of Spanish football—Jaan Valuev. Barcelona beat Reading 4–1, but the Siberian and the English tycoon became instant pals, and Jaan bought a house just a couple of miles from the imposing Madejski estate in Berkshire.

By 2010, Jaan Valuev was Chairman of Barcelona FC, following in the footsteps of another Russian oil tycoon, Roman Abramovich, who famously bought and recharged the batteries of Chelsea Football Club, in West London, with close to half a billion dollars, which purchased some of the best players in the world.

And tonight, Tuesday, September 28, Barcelona were in London, for their European Champions League game against England’s greatest football club, Arsenal, founded in 1883 and a byword for excellence and sportsmanship in a sometimes tarnished world game.

Barcelona versus the Gunners, in the ultramodern new Emirates Stadium, in the heart of North London. Here was a game to be savored by aficionados all over the world. And 60,000 fans, 8,000 from Spain, were already making their way across London by taxi, bus, and train to watch this clash of titans, the Champions of the Spanish League against the Champions of England’s Premiership.

Inside the marble halls of the Emirates Stadium, arrangements had been made for a sumptuous VIP dinner at 8:45 p.m., immediately after the game. The Arsenal Chairman would host it, and among his guests would be the Barcelona Chairman, and his buddy John Madejski, who was rumored to be preparing a sensational bid to buy Arsenal Football Club in partnership with Jaan Valuev.

But these awesome financial shenanigans were all taken in good
heart, and the game was under way right on time, with the stadium packed and both teams free of injury. There was only one blight on the big game landscape: Jaan Valuev, whose body was currently lying burned in a mass grave deep in the icy wastes of the arctic tundra in northern Siberia, naturally had not turned up.

The seat next to John Madejski was empty, and it was still empty when Barcelona scored, and still empty when the teams came in for halftime. The Barcelona Deputy Chairman, Andre di Stefano, was absolutely mystified.

“I have an e-mail from his secretary, dated yesterday. He was flying in today directly from Yekaterinburg in a private jet owned by Emirates Airlines. I have the flight arrival time, but the airline guys say he never boarded the plane.”

“Well, where the hell is he?” asked the Reading Chairman.

“Tell you the truth, we thought you’d probably know.”

“I haven’t spoken to him since Sunday, and he said he’d see me here for a glass of wine before the kickoff.”

“So unlike him,” said Andre. “To have informed no one he wasn’t coming. Something must have happened.”

“Well, it’s close to midnight in Russia,” replied John Madejski. “His office is shut, and I tried his mobile twenty minutes ago and it was switched off…so perhaps he had to fly somewhere else first, and will get here for the second half. That’s a huge business he runs.”

“I still think it’s totally unlike him to vanish without informing anyone…but…maybe a girlfriend?” di Stefano chuckled.

“What! Instead of watching the game against Arsenal? No chance,” replied Madejski.

And the second half kicked off without Jaan Valuev. And Arsenal scored three times to thunderous roars that could have been heard in Piccadilly Circus six underground stops away.

The game ended and the dinner began, with places rearranged to close the gap left by the absent Siberian soccer chief.

At the end of the evening, as John Madejski slipped out of the stadium to where his chauffeur, Terry, had the big blue Rolls Bentley waiting, a reporter from the
London Daily Telegraph
approached the Reading Chairman for a quote about the game. But what he really wanted was a quote about the rumored bid to buy Arsenal.

John Madejski, of course, was far too wily to fall for that. “It was a wonderful game,” he said. “Played with great spirit. We saw four superb goals and Arsenal deserved it.” As an afterthought he added, “Tell you the truth, it was a little disappointing for me, because Mr. Valuev was unable to get here…and that was a shame. He would have loved it, even though his beloved Barcelona lost.”

And that was sufficient for the football writer. Not for tonight’s report. That was already filed. But for tomorrow’s follow-up to the biggest game of the season:

SIBERIAN OIL BILLIONAIRE
MISSES BARCELONA’S BIG ONE
Mystery of Jaan Valuev’s
Arsenal No-Show

The following report pointed out the reason Jaan missed the game was because of the protracted speculation that he and John Madejski might be scheming to buy Arsenal Football Club.

They quoted Madejski as saying “Rubbish.” And the Barcelona club as saying they were not privy to all of their Chairman’s travel arrangements. No, they had not heard from him since the defeat in North London.

Yes, they were quite certain he would be back in the director’s box for the game against Spanish rivals Real Madrid at the Birnabau Stadium in the Spanish capital a week from Saturday.

1100, FRIDAY, OCTOBER 1
NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY
FORT MEADE, MARYLAND

Lt. Commander Jimmy Ramshawe was in heaven. Or, as near to heaven as an organizational hell such as his own office permitted. A colleague from the National Surveillance Office, just returned from Europe, had dropped him off a pristine copy of yesterday’s
London Daily Telegraph.

This was a fairly regular occurrence up here on the eighth floor
behind the massive one-way glass walls of the OPS2B Building. Lt. Commander Ramshawe’s voracious appetite for top foreign newspapers was well known.

Leaning back in his swivel chair, feet on the desk, he sipped a cup of fresh coffee before reaching for his newspaper and turning to his favorite pages. As it happened there was not much going on in London to interest him, and he kept wandering through the newspaper until he finally landed on the sports pages.

And one word jumped straight out at him:
Siberian
. Right in the headline. If the word had been set in smaller type he’d most certainly have missed it.

But there was no missing this.
SIBERIAN OIL BILLIONAIRE
.

“Hallo,” said Jimmy. “One of the late Mr. Masorin’s mates. What’s he done to get himself in with the bloody football players?”

One minute later: “Christ, the bugger’s vanished. Those Siberians aren’t having much luck lately.”

On nothing more than pure reflex, he picked up his phone and called Lenny Suchov.

“Lenny, you seen anything about this Siberian oil guy gone missing?”

“Funny you should mention that. We just got a highly classified report in from our man up in Noyabrsk pointing out the Chairman of SIBNEFT has vanished—not been seen for two or three days.

“Our guys think he may have been snatched by agents of Moscow, and put in the slammer, just like they did to poor old Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the biggest Yukos oil shareholder, six years ago.

“Anyway, how did you find out about it?”

“I’ve just read it in the
London Daily Telegraph.
”

“Impossible. This has only just broken. It’s not even in the Russian newspapers yet.”

“Maybe not, but the old Siberian was supposed to be at a football game coupla nights ago in London and he never showed.”

“A what!”

“A football game. He’s the Chairman of Barcelona.”

“What the hell are you talking about? The missing Siberian is called Sergei Pobozhiy. And he’s supposed to be at SIBNEFT’s northern site office near the oil field in the West Siberian Basin. Not at a football game.”

“What do’you say his name is?”

“Sergei Pobozhiy.”

Jimmy grappled with the London broadsheet. “Well, that’s a different guy. My man’s called Jaan Valuev. He’s the boss of some Russian oil company, but it doesn’t say here which one. Anyway it does say he’s vanished.”

“Christ, Jimmy, that’s two missing and one dead in the last couple of weeks, all major Siberians…what the hell’s going on?”

“Beats the hell outta me, old mate.”

“Okay, I’ll get another couple of field agents on this. Tell you what. I’ll keep you posted. But this isn’t anything military, or to do with national security. Give me a call in an hour, and I’ll tell you where we stand.”

11:30 A.M., SAME DAY
MOSCOW

The President of Russia, a big, burly, sallow-faced former deputy head of the Soviet secret police, the KGB, missed the old sledgehammer rule of the authoritarian Central Government more than most.

He rubbed along adequately with both houses of the Russian Parliament—the Federation Council and the Duma—but as the elected Head of State he had enormously broad powers, including the appointment of his deputy, the Prime Minister, and all government ministers.

Some Presidents of the Russian Federation are more approachable than others. This one was very remote, yearning in his heart for the old days of the Politburo, the huge brutal power of the Soviet machine, which could deal with “trouble” instantly and ruthlessly. This President was not really a committee man.

If anyone had found out what had been perpetrated at the oil summit in Siberia, the President might very well have faced a career-ending onslaught in the Parliament. But this President held power, like so many of his recent predecessors, with an iron grip. The Duma and the Federation Council found out what he wanted them to know.

Russia was ruled from this grand suite of offices where the President
now sat, sipping coffee at the head of a highly polished table. With him were just four men, gathered here in the domed rotunda on the second floor of the Senate building, today the ultimate seat of Russian power, situated on the east side of the Kremlin.

The great yellow-and-white, triangular, eighteenth-century neoclassical edifice stands east of Peter the Great’s Arsenal building, alongside the old 1930s Supreme Soviet. It is situated behind the ramparts that flank the Senate Tower, directly behind Lenin’s tomb.

Like the current Russian President, Vladimir Ilych Lenin both lived and worked in the Senate, a measure of history adored by the reigning President. But perhaps the leader in 2010 liked even better the fact that during World War II, this rotunda hosted the Red Army Supreme Command, under Stalin.

The President was relaxed in this cradle of Russian history, feeling as he always did in the rotunda a vast sense of confidence, impregnability, and destiny. The men who depended entirely upon him for their exalted positions and grandiose lifestyles were apt to treasure his every word.

It was almost impossible to imagine the old days, when Politburo members occasionally vanished for incurring the wrath of their Communist Party leader. Almost impossible. Not quite.

The President smiled at those whose undying trust he enjoyed. There was the Prime Minister, Valery Kravchenko, who like himself was a native of St. Petersburg. There was the current head of the FSB, Boris Patrushov; the Energy Minister, Oleg Kuts; the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Oleg Nalyotov, who literally strutted around in his vast authority, pompously occupying the office once held by the great Andrei Gromyko.