Stephen Coonts: Arctic Gold

And so far the mission had, indeed, seemed pretty routine. He and Lia had entered the country on separate flights, linked up in a seemingly casual encounter beneath Alexander’s Column in the Palace Square in front of the Hermitage. That night, they’d picked up their special mission equipment where their support team had left it, in a well-hidden drop on the shore of a wooded lake in Primorskiy Park. Yesterday Lia had met with the furtive Sergei Alekseev in an out-of-the-way teahouse off the Nevsky Prospect while Akulinin had provided backup, listening in unobtrusively from a nearby table.

And Alekseev had brought them here.

But now things were turning sour. Akulinin had been supposed to be here forty minutes ago, before Lia and Alekseev even arrived, scoping out the dockyard and the approaches to the warehouse and setting up a satellite dish on top of a nearby building to provide reliable communications with the Art Room. No one had counted on his being stopped by that damned officious traffic inspector demanding to see his papers… or the need for him to bribe his way back onto the road.

Anxiously he watched the front of the warehouse, waiting for Lia and Alekseev to emerge. Smears of wet illumination from a couple of streetlights up on Kozhevennaya Liniya cast just enough of a mist-shrouded glow for him to see the main door and a line of loading docks above a parking lot.

Opening his workman’s toolbox, he extracted his weapon-an H &K MP5K PDW-a compact little submachine gun chosen precisely because its fourteen-and-a-half-inch length would fit into a standard tool kit. He opened the folding stock and felt it lock, snapped in a thirty-round magazine, and dragged back the charging lever to chamber a round.

“Come on , come on ,” he muttered, half-aloud.

DeFrancesaOperation MagpieWaterfront, St. Petersburg0029 hours

LIA USED AN AEROSOL SPRAY from a canister the size of a lipstick to mist over one corner of the metal. She then twisted the cylinder of her flashlight sharply clockwise. The visible beam snapped off, but in its place, the wet corner of the metal took on a magical green-blue luminosity, glowing brightly in the near darkness.

“What is that?” Alekseev asked.

“A solution of sulfonated hydroxybenzoquinoline,” Lia replied, rattling off the tongue twister with practiced ease. “It fluoresces in the presence of beryllium and an ultraviolet light source.” It was all the proof she needed.

“It is as I told you, yes?”

“Yes, it is. You did good, Sergei. Hold the board for me.”

As Alekseev held the crate open, she took a final device from a pouch, a flexible bit of metallic foil the size and thickness of a postage stamp, its surface precisely the same dull gray as the beryllium shipment. Reaching gingerly into the crate, she slapped the rectangle onto the metal at one corner, pressing it hard to activate the sticky side. Then she nodded to Alekseev, and he lowered the loosened slat, working the protruding ends of the staples back into the wood so that it was not evident that the crate had been opened.

She checked her cell phone, this time tuning it to the low-level signal emitted by the tracking device they’d just planted. When she sent a low-frequency RF signal, the microtransponder on the chip caught the pulse and flashed it back, a good, sharp signal.

“Verona, Juliet,” she said, just in case they were reading her back at the Art Room. “We found the shipment. Tracking device is in place, transponder test positive. We’re initiating our E and E.”

Still, nothing but static.

They started for the front of the warehouse.

AkulininOperation MagpieWaterfront, St. Petersburg0030 hours

The sound of a vehicle engine startled Akulinin. It was coming from behind, moving toward him along the concrete wharf. He turned, crouching low to stay out of sight behind another pile of discarded rust- and rat-infested trash. One… no, two cars were approaching, driving up the wharf with their lights off. They raced past, then turned into the trailer-loading area in front of Lia’s warehouse.

Not good…

“Lia!” he called urgently. “Lia! We have company!”

Car doors slammed as men tumbled out into the night. He counted ten, five in each vehicle. It was tough to see in the dim light, but they appeared to be wearing civilian clothing. Reaching into the tool kit again, he fished out a set of OVGN6 binoculars, a compact handheld unit with two eyepieces but only a single light amplifier tube. Switching the unit on, he pressed it to his eyes.

Under LI, details sprang into sharp, close focus.

He could see their weapons…

DeFrancesaOperation MagpieWaterfront, St. Petersburg0030 hours

Lia and Alekseev were halfway back to the warehouse entrance when Akulinin’s warning came through. An instant later, they heard the bang of car doors outside.

“This way!” Lia hissed, tugging at Alekseev’s elbow. She moved off to the right, ducking behind the shelter offered by a stack of wooden crates. It took her a moment to realize that Alekseev hadn’t followed her, that he was still standing in the open with a deer-in-the-headlights look to him.

A hollow boom echoed through the warehouse, followed by the sound of the main door sliding open. An instant later, the lights snapped on, the overhead lights first, then the glare of a powerful spot from the main entrance.

“ Stoy! ” a voice boomed from behind the light. “Ktah v’ takoi?”

“ Nyeh strelyaii! ” Alekseev screamed, throwing his hands straight up in the air.

But Lia was already moving, plunging out of the light and into the shadows cast by stacks of crates to her right. She pulled her weapon from its holster, an accurized.45-caliber H &K SOCOM pistol fitted with an under-barrel laser sight and with the muzzle threaded to accept a suppressor. She was already pulling out the sound suppressor and screwing it down tight as more shouting sounded from behind her.

Alekseev, she thought, had been pretty damned quick to surrender, and she wondered if she’d been set up. It was possible. Alekseev was Desk Three’s link to one of the local branches of the Organizatsiya, the Russian mafia.

It was the Organization that Desk Three was up against this time. That radioactive beryllium in the crate back there had come from a nuclear power facility in Rybinsk, stolen by members of the Russian mafia either in or working with the Russian military.

And the word was that the shipment had been sold to the highest bidder-which in this case happened to be the nation of Iran.

Beryllium possesses some interesting properties that make it invaluable within the nuclear industry. It doesn’t absorb neutrons well, which makes it ideal as a neutron reflector and moderator in atomic piles. More significant, if the sphere of plutonium within a nuclear weapon is surrounded by a beryllium shell, preventing neutrons from escaping, much less plutonium is necessary in order for the weapon to achieve critical mass-and detonation.

“American!” a harsh voice snapped in English, echoing through the warehouse. “You cannot escape! Throw down your weapons and come out!”

Were the attackers mafia enforcers? Police? Or military? She had to find out. Moving silently, staying in the shadows, she worked her way around behind the stacks of warehoused crates, edging closer to the front entrance. There were several other doors to the building as well, she knew from her studies of the structure’s blueprints before her deployment, but she also knew that those would be watched. She would have a better chance where the opposition had already entered the building.