The White Vixen (62 page)

    Cover art by Damonza.
Book trailer video produced by Jim Tindell.

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the red wolf

Jo Ann Geary went back to the United States and resumed her Air Force Special Operations career after the events des
cribed in this book, but she would be called into action again, sent behind the Iron Curtain to hunt down her most dangerous adversary yet, The Red Wolf.

PROLOGUE

Camp David, Maryland

January 1987

The first President of the United States that
Joseph Geary had met was Harry Truman. Geary had no trouble recalling the date:  the sixth of June, 1945, and the place, a reception at the State Department. Geary shook his head now as he recalled how nervous he’d been, twenty-five years of age, just a few years out of Yale and into his career at the Office of Strategic Services. On this night, the first anniversary of D-Day, Geary accompanied his department director to the reception, where everyone was surprised by Truman’s arrival. Less than four months on the job after the tragic death of FDR, the former Missouri haberdasher impressed the young OSS operative with his folksy demeanor, behind which the perceptive agent sensed a stiff resolve. Geary had heard all the talk around Washington, that Truman wasn’t up to the job, was a political appointee by Roosevelt who had barely been on speaking terms with his vice president, all the way back to the campaign the previous fall.

Like many others, Joe Geary wondered whether Truman had the right stuff, but after meeting him that night, he had no doubt. Over the course of the next several years, their paths would cross again. Geary also met Truman’s successor, Dwight Eisenhower, and every president since then. Some he liked pers
onally but not professionally—Kennedy, for instance, a charismatic man but whose philandering was something Geary simply could not approve of, and Carter, who was in way over his head on some things. With others, it was the other way around. Geary respected their professional expertise but could not bring himself to like the men. LBJ and Nixon came immediately to mind. But he had worked for all of them, first in OSS and then in its successor organization, the Central Intelligence Agency.

His forty-plus years in the spy business had led him to this point in time, his last stop. As Deputy Director of Operations, he had been summoned to Camp David by no less than the current resident of the Oval Office, and not through intermediaries. The call earlier that day came to Geary’s own secure phone personally, with the White House operator putting the call through. Once the requisite pops and clicks had sounded to give the electronic equivalent of an All Clear, Geary heard the famous voice, chatting for a few seconds, then asking him to come up to Camp David that evening for a talk. It was not a request that Geary or anyone else would have refused.

“The president will see you now,” a man said. Geary knew him as the assistant chief of staff. Donald Regan, the man’s boss, didn’t normally accompany the president to the Maryland retreat, named by Eisenhower in honor of his grandson. That was fine with Geary, who found Regan to be abrasive and overbearing. Ironically, both Regan and the president had served as lifeguards when they were in their younger days. The word around CIA was that while the future president had spent his time saving people from drowning, his future chief of staff had spent his time watching out for kids pissing in the pool. Geary nodded at the man and went through the opened door.

There was only one man in the room, sitting on a leather couch near the crackling fireplace. He put down the book he’d been leafing through and rose, coming forward to greet his visitor. Once again, Geary was impressed by the man’s physical size, his
ruddy complexion, belying his—what was it now, soon to be seventy-six years? “Joe, come in, nice to see you,” Ronald Reagan said, shaking hands with a strong grip. “How was the weather on the way up?” He motioned Geary to a chair near the couch.

“Not bad, sir, thank you.” Geary had met Reagan shortly after his inauguration six years ago, had briefed him
on several occasions, but usually in the company of the Director of Central Intelligence. William Casey, though, was out of the country at the moment. He was due back next week, which left Geary somewhat surprised that the president had not waited. This lent a sense of urgency to the meeting, although his host didn’t show it.

              “Get you anything? It’s after hours, so the bar’s open.”

“Thank you, sir.
Scotch, neat.”

“Good, good.” The president motioned to the assistant chief, still standing in the doorway. “Bill, tell Ed, Scotch neat for our guest, please. I’ll keep him company.”

While the president made small talk, Geary’s ever-observant eyes took the measure of the man. Wearing a denim shirt, open at the neck, with khaki pants and loafers, Reagan looked more like a successful retired executive than a man still very much active in the world’s toughest job. Geary knew of his exercise habits, his regular visits to the White House gym and his horseback riding and wood-chopping on the ranch out in California. That demanded Geary’s respect; since becoming DDO several years earlier, Geary had barely any time to take a walk at lunch, much less get in regular workouts. He was ten years younger than the man on the couch, but he knew he looked like he was the older man, and not just because he was bald.

Geary was well aware of the stories about Reagan, how he was detached and incurious when it came to the details of shaping policy and managing his staff. There were plenty of people in the government, including some in the White House, who spoke of the president in disparaging terms. Geary had heard the occasional comments at cocktail parties, at meetings, even in foreign capitals. He tended to take those with a grain of salt. Stories were one thing. Geary heard a lot of stories in his job, but you couldn’t discount the value of personal observation. He’d met with Reagan several times, and while he’d known presidents who had a better understanding of the details of one thing or another, none were better than Reagan at seeing the big picture. Geary remembered his meetings with Reagan’s predecessor; Jimmy Carter was truly one of those who not only couldn’t see the forest for the trees, he couldn’t see the trees for the leaves. In the end, Geary was sure, those contrasting
perspectives were the reason why Reagan was here now and Carter had been sent back to his peanut farm in Georgia. 

A steward came in with the drinks and served each of the men. “Thank you, Ed,” the president said with a grin. The steward closed the door behind him on the way out. “Well, Joe, there’s something I wanted to talk to you about, as you may have guessed.”

Geary nodded. CIA had several things going on right now that Reagan might’ve been interested in discussing, but the DDO had tried not to anticipate the president’s thoughts. That turned out to be a good thing.

“You did some good work, helping me get ready for Reykjavik last fall,” Reagan said, his mood instantly more serious. “I was ready for everything they threw at me over there.”

“Thank you, sir,” Geary said. His office had worked hard to assist Casey in putting together a full briefing for the president in advance of his first meeting with the new General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev. The result had been an agreement to reduce the two countries’ nuclear arsenals. “It looks good for INF,” he added. The Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty would hopefully be signed later this year. It was a significant breakthrough in Soviet-American relations.

“It looks good for a lot more than that,” the president said. He took a sip of his drink,
then gazed into the fire. His eyes turned back to Geary. “If we play our cards right, Joe, the Cold War could be over in a few years. Gorbachev wants that and so do I. He understands that the only way his country can survive is to move forward, economically and politically.”

“He’s got a long way to go, sir,” Geary said.

“That he does,” Reagan said, nodding. “I have to tell you, Joe, I was impressed with the man when we met in Iceland. He has some good ideas but he’s got a tough row to hoe over there. I wished him luck.”

“He’ll need it.”

“I intend to keep the pressure on him, Joe, and I told him that. I’m going to Berlin this summer and when I’m there I’m going right to that damn wall and I’ll challenge him to tear it down. What do you think of that?”

Geary took a breath, turning it over. “That will take some guts, Mr. President,” he said finally. “It’s a little bit stronger than ‘
Ich bin ein Berliner.’
”

“Yes, well, Kennedy was there in the middle of this whole thing. We were still playing catch-up in many ways. Now, we’re starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. We can afford to be a little more aggressive, I think.”

“It’s not so much Gorbachev, it’s the people who are running the Party,” Geary said. “They’re the ones who have the most to lose if democracy ever comes to Russia.”

“Exactly.
Gorbachev knows that. He’s walking a real tightrope and we’ve got to keep him on it as long as we can.” Reagan looked at Geary with a penetrating eye. “If he falls and the reactionaries take control, we’ve got some real trouble ahead. If they still had Andropov…”

“Fortunately for us, they don’t,” Geary said, remembering the former KGB chief who had briefly headed the Soviet government upon Brezhnev’s death a few years ago, before his own untimely demise.

Did he detect a little twinkle in Reagan’s eye? “Yes, isn’t it?” the president said. Reagan, of course, was one of a handful of people in the world who knew what had really happened to Andropov. Geary was another. But the less said about that, the better.

“How can I help, Mr. President?”

Reagan reached for a file on a side table, leafed through it briefly, and dropped it on the coffee table in front of Geary. The file had been sealed with red tape, was bordered in red and labeled TOP SECRET. “When I came back from Iceland, I had Bill Casey look into this situation for me. He found out a couple things and brought them to my attention. I got this report the other day and Bill recommended I talk to you about it. He thinks you’re the man for this job.”

“What job is that, Mr. President?”

“We’ve been informed through some back channels that the hard-liners over there are planning to move against Gorbachev. They want to play it safe so it won’t look like a full-scale coup. That would be dangerous. Who knows what would happen? They’re worried that some of their satellites might react to trouble in Moscow by starting trouble of their own. Poland, especially.”

Geary nodded. “Poland could go if there’s turmoil in Moscow
. Others might follow suit—East Germany, Czechoslovakia…”

“If their empire starts breaking up, the hard-liners won’t be able to hold it together without a real risk of bloodshed. If the Poles and the East Germans and the Czechs rise up, Moscow will have to send in the tanks and if there’s real resistance, they risk NATO coming over the hill like the Seventh Cavalry.”

Geary had his doubts about that. He was all too familiar with America’s NATO allies. “With respect, Mr. President, would you authorize that? Would you order American troops into Eastern Europe? With or without NATO support?”

Reagan looked at him with a bit of a smile, but his eyes were narrow. “Well, now, Joe, I might not. Or I just might. We didn’t do anything to help the Czechs in ’68, or the Hungarians in
’56. Maybe this time, we just might do something. That might actually surprise some people. After all, we didn’t do anything even to help our own people when they were taken hostage in Iran, and that was just a few years ago.”

Geary saw the point. “Moscow wouldn’t know for sure. This isn’t ’68 or ’56.”

Reagan’s eyes twinkled. “That’s right. They can’t take that chance, so their idea was to use one man, a very dangerous man it seems, to take out Gorbachev.”

Geary was surprised, but not very. “An assassination plot,” he said. “A hard-liner steps in to save the country when its leader is killed.”

“That’s pretty much the gist of it,” Reagan said. “Apparently they have someone picked out already for this job. Not even the KGB is in on it, which surprised me, but the evidence is pretty convincing.” He pointed at the file on the coffee table. “One rogue agent, highly-trained, operating independently of any control. They call him the Wolf. Your job, Joe, is to find him and deal with him before he can get to Gorbachev. We need to do this because Gorbachev can’t trust his own people right now. He apparently feels he can trust me.” Reagan took a sip of his drink. “This Wolf fellow, he sounds like a pretty tough customer.
Spetsnaz
officer, two tours in Afghanistan. The
mujahedeen
were terrified of him. A crack shot, and he’s an expert in hand-to-hand combat, some sort of martial art I’ve never heard of. Very tough customer indeed.”

Geary looked down at the file. The enormity of the mission started to well up inside him. “Russia’s a damn big country, Mr. President. To find one man, to stay a step ahead of the KGB, that’s a pretty tall order.”