Matthew Dunn: Sentinel

Swerving the jeep left and right, Will moved out of the base and onto the mountain road. Shots rang out. Two bullets smashed through the rear window and front windshield, narrowly missing Will’s head. He swerved again just as more bullets slammed into the passenger door. One hundred feet ahead of him were the outskirts of the forest and a bend in the road that would take him out of the paratroopers’ sight. His heart pounded. He was just as concerned about bullets striking the jeep’s tires, fuel tank, or engine as he was about them hitting his body. A sustained burst of gunfire pounded the snow by his vehicle. More rounds rushed through the broken windows, one of them grazing his jacket. Yanking hard down on the steering wheel, he careered left and skidded, desperately trying to maintain control of the vehicle, then he yanked right, and momentarily took his foot off the accelerator. The jeep stayed on the road. Accelerating fast again, he approached the bend. Trees were now around him. He was just a few feet away from cover.

He heard a final volley of automatic gunfire.

You were lucky to get out alive.”

Will thought about Patrick’s comment while looking around the large windowless room. He was sitting by a long oak table in the CIA’s headquarters in Langley. Aside from the table and twelve chairs, the room was bare of any other furniture. Bright ceiling spotlights doused the room with an electric blue light.

Alongside Patrick sat Will’s MI6 controller, Alistair. They were the coheads of the MI6-CIA Task Force. Both officers were immaculately dressed in suits. Though Patrick’s hair was silver and Alistair’s blond, in every other respect they looked physically similar-slender but strong, with faces that showed wisdom, humor, and sadness. Both men were in their fifties but appeared ten years younger.

“Yes, I suppose it was luck. What or who is Sentinel?”

Neither officer replied.

Will smoothed a hand over his smart suit. “Does it make sense?”

They remained silent.

“If it’s classified, let me sign something to get clearance.”

Patrick glanced at Alistair before speaking. “That won’t be necessary.” He returned his attention to Will. “We’ll tell you everything we know, but”-he lifted a thick file that had the inscription SVELTE: ULTRA EYES ONLY, held it for a moment, and dropped it onto the table-“we’d know a lot more if Svelte was still alive.”

Will was about to respond, but Alistair held up a hand and quietly said, “There was no way any of us could have predicted what happened in the base.”

“True, but I should have got to him sooner.”

“Get rid of that thought.” Patrick picked up some papers. “Svelte died through no fault of yours. Thank God you escaped, because matters are escalating fast.”

Alistair leaned forward and pointed at the papers in Patrick’s hand while keeping his gaze fixed on Will. “We’ve got multiple reports from covert intelligence sources and overt diplomatic channels. Political and economic tensions between America and Russia are the highest they’ve been since the Cold War.”

“I thought we were getting along quite nicely.”

“So did the Russian and American premiers, until”-Patrick tossed the papers to one side-“we recently caught some Russian sleeper agents in America and interrogated them. Not to be outdone, the Russians rounded up a handful of our spies whom they’d had under surveillance and put the thumbscrews on them. As a result, some uncomfortable home truths, concerns, and agendas emerged.”

Alistair checked the knot on his Royal Navy tie and leaned back, his eyes still locked on Will. “Collective lies were laid bare.”

Patrick nodded. “Our spies confessed to the Russians that we’re not as keen as we made ourselves out to be for Russia to have a dominant economic role in the WTO, that we’d no intention of removing our tactical nuclear weapons in Europe, that we’d never consider a joint missile defense system with the Russians, and that we’re spying on them as much as we were in the fifties and sixties.”

Alistair smiled, though his look was cold. “And the Russian men and women we spoke to in FBI cells told us that Russia is hell-bent on rebuilding itself into a superpower with a capitalist platform. It doesn’t care whose toes it treads on to achieve that.”

Patrick lifted a glass of water close to his mouth and held it there. “Given time, the diplomats and politicians might be able to smooth over the… misunderstandings to get relations back on track. But we’ve been reliably informed that right now nothing must happen to make the situation worse. The last thing we need is a flash point.”

Glancing around the room, Will thought about Svelte’s dying words. Outside it was daytime, but in here it could have been any time at all. “Does the name Khmelnytsky mean anything to you?”

Patrick answered, “Yes.”

Will looked at the two men. Though Alistair had always been his controller, Will had worked with both men for the first time during his last operation to capture an Iranian general, code name Megiddo. During that time he’d learned that Alistair and Patrick had a deep history of collaboration that had started when they were both young officers: when they had worked with Will’s father, a CIA operative, and witnessed him being captured by Iranian revolutionaries. Their revenge-driven work against those revolutionaries had ensured that both had quickly risen in power to reach their now-unusual positions. The men before him had direct lines to the U.S. and British premiers, in practice did not answer to the heads of the CIA and MI6, and had personally killed many men. Though he rarely showed it, Will liked them, even though they had both made it clear that they viewed him as their most unpredictable and uncontrollable intelligence officer.

Will smiled. “Feel free to stop giving me monosyllabic answers to my questions.”

“Watch your tone.” Alistair glanced at Patrick, who nodded at him, then looked sharply at Will. “When I joined MI6, one of the recruits in the training program was different from the rest of us. He was quiet, kept away from the other students. We found out that he was a former SAS officer, but that’s all we knew about him because two weeks into the course we were told that he was not deemed suitable material for the service and had been instructed to leave the program.”

Alistair took a sip of his tea. Patrick watched Will.

Alistair continued, “Much later, I found out what had really happened. He hadn’t failed the course at all. Instead, he’d been quickly identified by one of the instructors as highly unusual, as someone who could be deployed to help combat the Soviet Union. He was given secret MI6 training, and his identity was kept hidden from all within the service, save the chief and a tiny handful of other senior officers. After excelling in the training program, he was granted intelligence officer status while at the same time being told that officially he didn’t exist.” Alistair was very still. “The chief immediately sent him overseas in deep cover and his remit was to cause damage to the KGB: run agents against them, turn their officers into double agents, disrupt operations against us, and assassinate any Soviet officer who stood in his way. He operated in eastern Berlin, Poland, and the Soviet Union itself; always changing identity, always moving location, always aware that if he was caught he would be tortured and executed. He did this for years and was so successful that the KGB had an entire department dedicated to finding the man they suspected was causing untold damage to their intelligence activities.

“But he was always several steps ahead of them, always maintaining his security, his various covers, trusting no one and making no mistakes. However”-Alistair sighed-“a mistake was made by others. At the end of the Cold War there was a brief moment of euphoria from within the London-based ranks of MI6. That moment was extremely dangerous; it caused secrets to be shared between Great Britain and the reemerging Russia and its new neighboring states, caused many MI6 Soviet agents to wander back to their homeland, their work against the USSR done but their heads now stuffed with dangerous secrets. Of course, the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki was no different from the KGB and contained many of the same personnel who saw little difference between the Soviet Union and Russia. And many of those SVR men still wanted to capture our officer.”