Power Play (34 page)

Tamara met up with her technician within ten minutes of her arrival. He was a thirtyish immigrant from Bulgaria, medium height, with the short-trimmed, curly black hair not unusual among those born close to Turkey’s Black Sea border. His name was Josef, and he’d been in the United States for seven years.

Tamara handed him the printed sheet that gave him the directions, and they walked down to the car rental area, where they picked up a dark-green Ford station wagon booked in the name of Joseph Popescu.

The drive took eight hours, and it was after nine when they drove into the wide, sprawling city of Littleton and checked into the Sheraton Hotel. They’d driven mostly in silence because Tamara had been told the less Josef knew about her mission, the better. She was told to be polite, but remote, to mention nothing of the purpose of her visit. When
she had selected the precise place she wanted, she was simply to give him instructions.

They were not to have breakfast together, or to indulge in unnecessary conversation. So far as she was concerned, Josef was a workman, and he must do his job and then deliver her back to the airport in Omaha. And so they met in the hotel parking lot and took a drive around the town until they located Berry Park.

Tamara got out and took a walk over to the statue of Danny Dietz, scanning her eyes over the surroundings, staring out west to the Rocky Mountains, all the way to the distant Mount Evans, which rises more than fourteen thousand feet, stark against the morning sky.

She took several photographs, made her personal notes, incomprehensible as instructed, and climbed back into the car, telling Josef to drive out of town. She told him to start north on the Santa Fe road, a stretch of which had already been renamed Navy SEAL Danny Phillip Dietz Memorial Highway, to commemorate forever the young warrior whose statue she had just photographed.

From there they were to head west out toward Indian Hills, and Tamara kept her head down as if there may already be dark forces in search of her. She neither noticed nor registered a road sign that told her Buffalo Bill’s grave was very close by.

Tamara was actively uninterested in historic graves. She had been born and raised in the city of Yekaterinburg, which lies 1,130 miles east of Moscow, on the eastern slopes of the Urals. That city of 1 million people is a bright, airy, modern place, constructed like St. Petersburg, with public buildings in fawn-and-white stucco, a place made famous for its graves.

In a Yekaterinburg basement on July 17, 1918, Czar Nicholas II, his wife, Empress Alexandra, their little boy, Alexi, and the four grand duchesses Marie, Olga, Tatiana, and Anastasia were gunned down and then bayoneted by a Bolshevik murder squad. Years later, the actual house was bulldozed on the personal orders of Leonid Brezhnev, but the stain of that bloodbath remains.

The very word
Yekaterinburg
still evokes the memory of that shocking mass slaughter of the Russian royal family, just as Dallas will always be grimly associated with the assassination of President Kennedy. Tamara Burda was well accustomed to using the name of her hometown with care and discretion, because of the graves.

Buffalo Bill’s last resting place, on the western slopes of the Rockies, simply did not register with the brand-new spy from the Urals. She kept low in her seat, watching carefully as they reached the rising ground and the Ford wagon gradually tilted its nose toward America’s most formidable mountain range.

She was watching her GPS and trying to judge when they were sufficiently far above the city, and the trees between her and the distant buildings were sparse and low. Finally, they reached a grassy area with a wide, empty space on the left-hand side of the lonely road.

Tamara immediately ordered Josef to spin around and park facing Littleton, which was now spread out below them, maybe seven miles away. Tamara took out her powerful 8X30 BPC Russian military binoculars of the 1950s, which were rapidly becoming priceless, developed as they were by the Red Army after they captured the world-famous Zeiss-Jena factory in Germany. The victors had taken the optics, technology, and tooling back to Russia and subsequently created the finest long-distance lenses the world had ever seen.

Tamara focused fast and stared down at the ultrasharp image of Littleton’s rooftops. Then she summoned Josef to bring his equipment and start tuning. She handed him the “credit card” and instructed him to locate the correct, available frequency, operating in the bandwidth of a narrow-band jammer—embassy advice suggested somewhere in the range of 250–500 MHz, targeting the proposed electromagnetic spectrum.

She watched Josef, who was operating against the protection of the car, earphones on, right-hand fingers twisting a dial slowly, listening to the frequencies, trying to find his electronic range, searching out the unseen tracks for a future beam to come lasering down off the low mountain and slice into the president’s nuclear football, rendering it silently useless.

It took him about twenty minutes before he looked up and said, “I have a frequency. I’ll write it down for you, and then you should take one of these headsets and transmitters down to that park, and I’ll speak to you from here.”

Tamara nodded, and Josef placed her electronic equipment on the passenger seat. “Switch that on and use the headset. We’ll be about seven miles apart, but I’m higher than the town, and the air is very clear. We have a straight shot between the two transmitters. It should be fine.”

Tamara drove back down the hill toward Berry Park. Once there, she walked back to the statue of Danny Dietz and wore the headset. Immediately,
she heard the voice of Josef:
Testing . . . one-two-three-four . . . Testing . . . one-two-three-four.

She replied as prearranged:
Receiving . . . Receiving loud and clear. Over.
And then she walked back to the Ford wagon and returned to the hill to retrieve Josef. Without another word, they headed north across Denver and picked up Highway 76, the direct route back to Omaha’s airport.

The frequencies were fixed. When the Russian technicians raised those giant antennae on June 28 next year and aimed the jammer’s laser at Berry Park, there was no way the president’s nuclear football could ever work, not until the Russian jammer was turned off.

Tamara knew the frequency number. She knew the GPS numbers for the parking place. And she knew precisely how to get there. As first assignments go, hers had gone without a problem. A vital component of President Markova’s grand plan to humiliate the United States was well and truly in place.

 

The
Koryak
(formerly
Korolev
) was through the Mediterranean and steaming up the Atlantic, having successfully traversed the Strait of Gibraltar, which was, as ever, swept by UK and US radar. No one had approached the five-thousand-ton Russian freighter, still riding high in the water and moving as fast as its twin-shafted turbines would take it.

The
Koryak
gave every appearance of a civilian ship, transmitting no military electronics. Nonetheless, her captain was pleased she had attracted no specific attention and had been ignored by the Spanish coast guard. If no one had bothered her in the strait, the captain considered no one would trouble her as she ran south down the Atlantic, on her forthcoming journey to Central America.

Of course, no nation has rights of arrest and search against any ship traveling in international waters, except in the detection of nuclear materials. Should these be identified, either through the hull or from the satellites, under maritime law, any ship has the right to demand the offending ship stop and be searched.

The manufacture and transportation of nuclear material are everyone’s
business, as the North Koreans found out when a Spanish warship apprehended and captured a cargo of weapons-grade material, plus brand-new missiles, on its way to Saddam Hussein.

If the
Koryak
set off next spring for the Panama Canal, she would steam as a simple Russian merchant ship. On board she would carry the two Russian TELARs and one huge civilian truck transporting a large generator attached to the electronic jammer, essentially a mysterious piece of equipment, likely to bemuse customs officials. The truck would bear the livery of a major French manufacturer of heavy-duty industrial electronic equipment, Lyon Generateur l’Électronique. There would be flawless documentation accompanying the generator, proving it was being delivered to a hospital in Colorado.

Should there be any attempt by a foreign navy, especially American, to intercept and search the ship on its journey from Russia, its officers would find nothing. A false wall was right now being constructed in Severomorsk that would shield the TELARs and the missiles from an examination.

The two nuclear warheads were being encased in heavy lead and would be stored deep in the ship’s hold, constructed to appear like a part of the hull. It was completely unlikely that anything could be detected from the outside to betray the presence of the weapons-grade nuclear material.

The
Koryak
would become a freight-carrying miracle and would display nothing to suggest a Russian warship, which had been built originally to land troops and heavy armored vehicles onto a foreign beach. In its new battle mode, it could only be perceived as an innocent commercial vessel, plying an honest trade through Central America. Certainly not carrying an entire operation designed to wreak absolute havoc with America’s defensive systems and enable a hostile enemy to blast asunder the most important building in the entire Fort Meade surveillance network, probably killing several hundred people in the process.

And that French civilian truck, on its journey north through the United States, well, who would ever suspect the industrial generator on board, with paperwork for the Colorado hospital, was anything but a second-line emergency protector for the sick, ready to kick in if there should ever be a major power outage?

So far as Kapitan Sergei Gromyko was concerned, every possible detail concerning his ship had been thought out. He greatly looked forward to his forthcoming journey across the Caribbean, confident in the proper
standing of his cargo on the high seas. Even the military men aboard, and the scientists and technicians, would be attired in formal Russian merchant navy uniform, with insignia.

Kapitan Gromyko was confident in his senior commanders. After all, he had just passed a serious test, steering his ship through the Strait of Gibraltar. The entire area was notorious for very officious US warships, containing very suspicious US Naval officers, working in cahoots with the Royal Navy, in the rough ocean waters that surround this British overseas territory.

By any standards, Gibraltar remained the gateway to the Mediterranean. It’s been British for more than three hundred years. For generations, ships of the old Soviet Navy that strayed close to the Gibraltar coast en route to the Black Sea could be stopped and questioned. There was still a natural wariness among foreign ships leaving the Med for the Atlantic whenever a US destroyer came rolling over the horizon.

Kapitan Gromyko felt he had run the gauntlet, driving his five-thousand-ton Russian Naval vessel straight through, heavily disguised, and unsuspected by the British and American authorities.

But he was only half right. The
Koryak
was permitted free passage through the strait for one excellent reason: the Americans did not wish to alert the Russians for a New York minute that anything was suspected. But they’d been tracking the
Koryak
all the way from Sevastopol. Big, silent US satellites, whispering through the stratosphere, had recorded her progress through the Bosporus, across the Sea of Marmara, through the Aegean, and into the Mediterranean west of Crete.

Kapitan Gromyko may have believed he was moving unnoticed across southwestern Europe. In fact, he was being tracked more closely than any Russian vessel since the Cold War ended. North in the GIUK Gap, there were alerts sounded in two Los Angeles Class submarines, informing them of the
Koryak
’s speed, course, and last-known.

The
Koryak
was at present steaming over one of the deepest parts of the Atlantic Ocean: the Iberian Basin, west of Portugal. It was eighteen thousand feet from keel to seabed here—that’s almost three and a half miles, straight down. There would be no time between now and when she turned into the Murmansk inlet when
Koryak
was not observed by the eagle eye of the United States Navy.

Another little Russian secret was also being kicked around Chantilly, Virginia, with less reverence than that usually bestowed on the baseball
scores. The satellites had seen and photographed the second missile test as ordered by the North Korean Dr. Chon Nam-sun, and they had tracked it from takeoff, right from the moment when the Iskander-K had hurtled into the skies above the island of Bolshaya Muksalma and then blasted its way across the White Sea, en route to the polar ice cap.

Air Force general Jack Myers had a detailed report in front of him, and the only significance he could see was the missile had taken a very different course, going northeast over water almost all the way and then traveling three or four hundred miles farther than the first Iskander had done. Also, it had not detonated with the same explosive force of the first one. In fact, it did not appear to have detonated at all.

Which meant, so far as Jack Myers was concerned, that this test was strictly about guidance and range. As a member of the US military’s inner circle, the head of the National Reconnaissance Office was well briefed on the possibility that Russia may launch a controlled strike on the United States from the Pacific end of the Panama Canal.

He also understood clearly that the missiles would be newer, faster, and more accurate than other Russian missiles had been in the past. A fast cruise, with a “shaped” nuclear warhead, needed testing. And it was no surprise to the air force general that they were rehearsing, for the second time, the rocket’s performance, flying low over water, and its final-approach target accuracy within sight of its objective.