Stephen Coonts: Arctic Gold

Maybe…

AkulininOperation MagpieWaterfront, St. Petersburg0031 hours

Akulinin watched as several of the men pushed through the open front door on the southeastern face of the warehouse. Others were spreading out to the left and right, moving to cover other entrances. He could hear shouting coming from inside, in Russian.

Through the light-intensifier binoculars, he could clearly see that the newcomers were wearing civilian clothing, which meant nothing. They might be OMON, MVD, or local militia, or they could even be Russian Army wearing low-profile civvies. The weapons they carried were definitely military-issue assault rifles, however, AK-74s and AKMs.

It was also distinctly possible that they were Organizatsiya enforcers. Alekseev had been a member of one of the major organized-crime groups, the Blues, but when Desk Three approached him, had been willing to help in exchange for asylum for himself and his family.

“Lia?” Akulinin called over the tactical channel. “You reading me?”

“Yeah.” She sounded out of breath. “Who are these guys?”

“Not sure. They’re wearing civvies… with military weapons. Are you okay?”

“So far. Stay put. I’m trying to reach the southwest door.”

He swung his night-vision device in that direction. “You’ve got two goons outside,” he told her. “Just waiting.”

“Can you take them down?”

“Not without alerting half of St. Petersburg.” The MP5K did not have a sound suppressor, unlike some of its larger and more cumbersome cousins. Besides, the range to those two sentries was better than seventy yards… a hell of a long range to tap someone with that weapon. To make matters worse, a sheet-tin storage shed built just off the corner of the warehouse was partially blocking his view. He couldn’t be sure there were only two men there.

“Copy,” Lia said. “Wait a second…”

The Art RoomNSA HeadquartersFort Meade, Maryland1632 hours EDT

“Ghost Blue is now inside of Russian airspace,” Rubens said. He held the telephone handset to his ear while looking up at the big screen above him. The map’s zoom had been pulled back to show the entirety of the St. Petersburg area, from Primorsk on the Gulf of Finland to Kirovsk, twenty-five miles east of the city. At this scale, the white pinpoints marking Lia and Akulinin had merged into a single point on the southern point of Vasilyevsky Island; a new flashing icon had just appeared at the extreme left, moving in across the Gulf of Finland on a heading straight for St. Petersburg.

“Is there any sign of a reaction from the Russians?” Dr. Donna Bing wanted to know.

“Not so far, ma’am,” Rubens replied.

“The President will have to be informed,” the National Security Director said. She sounded angry, and Rubens knew she had cause. Ghost Blue had been built into Magpie from the beginning as a backup in case of unforeseen technical difficulties, but no one had actually expected that option to be put into play.

The big danger was that Bing would use this in her power-play shenanigans against Desk Three. She’d tried it before.

“How long before the plane is over the city?”

“It won’t actually overfly the city, ma’am,” Rubens replied. “It will orbit about ten miles out, out over the Gulf of Finland. That should be close enough for them to pick up our agents’ transmissions. He should be at his loiter point in… five more minutes.”

“I don’t like this, Rubens,” Bing told him. “Not one damned bit. We have no business putting a military aircraft that deep into Russian airspace.”

Rubens, always the diplomat, did not point out that the United States had no outwardly legitimate business putting human agents into Russian territory, either… or that both Russia and the United States had a very long history of intruding into each other’s territories when they needed to do so.

Of course, both countries had long used all kinds of assets to keep tabs on each other, from human agents to spy satellites to submarines to ELINT and reconnaissance aircraft. Of those various means of gathering intelligence, though, aircraft made the people in Washington the most nervous.

No doubt the shoot-down of Captain Francis Gary Powers’ U-2 over Sverdlovsk in May of 1960 had something to do with that.

“Ghost Blue knows what he’s doing,” Rubens told the National Security Director. “He’ll know if he’s being picked up by the St. Petersburg air defense net, and he has means by which he can evade any hostiles.”

A rather sweeping generalization, that. Rubens wasn’t trying to be misleading, but he was oversimplifying to a rather alarming degree. So very much could go wrong in an op like this one. It was impossible to predict how it would come together.

Or fall apart.

“Your tail is riding on this one, Mr. Rubens,” Bing told him. “Keep me in the loop.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

But Bing had already hung up on him.

He glanced at Rockman as he replaced the handset. “We’d better tell Dean, too.”

Pistol RangeFort Meade, Maryland1633 hours EDT

Charlie Dean squeezed the trigger twice in rapid succession, tapping off two rounds, the bangs echoing down the white-painted room. Two shots, two hits… squarely at the center of mass and less than two inches apart.

Recovering, he shifted his aim, gripping the pistol firmly in the classic Weaver stance, right hand holding the grip at full extension, finger lightly caressing the trigger, left hand cupping and holding the right. Accuracy in the Weaver stance depended on the interplay of forces as he pushed with the locked right arm and pulled with the supporting left.

Two more shots, two more hits, this time in the target’s head.

“Target left!” a voice growled from beside and slightly behind him. Dean shifted instantly, bending his left elbow slightly to pull his right arm into line with a second target, ten yards beyond and behind the first. Again, two taps at the center of mass, followed by a third… and then the slide on his.45 locked open.

Raising the muzzle, he hit the magazine release and dropped the empty magazine, before racking the slide once more to make sure the firing chamber was empty. “Clear!” he called.

Behind him, Gunny Mark Strieber mashed his thumb down on a button, and the two targets, each bearing the head and body of a vaguely human-shaped black silhouette, whined toward the firing line on their overhead tracks.

“Not bad, Marine,” Strieber said. “Not too shabby at all, in fact. A bit of spread on your third group.”

Both of the center-of-mass shots on the second target had struck within the inner kill zone, but they were a good five inches apart. His final shot was low, on the line between head and throat. He’d rushed it.

“Yeah, but he’s still dead, Jim,” Dean replied, parodying a well-known line from an old science fiction show on TV.

Strieber ticked a box off on the clipboard sheet he was holding. “I’ll give it to you. This time…”

The Fort Meade pistol range was empty at the moment, except for the two of them. Dean set his weapon-a classic Colt.45 1911A1-on the table in front of him, muzzle pointed carefully downrange, along with the empty magazine. He then pulled off his hearing protectors. The devices were decidedly high-tech, with active feedback to block out sharp sounds like gunfire while permitting ordinary speech.

“So do I pass my quals?” Dean asked Strieber.

“You could use some improvement on the OC,” Strieber replied, paging through the sheets on his clipboard. Then he shrugged. “Still, for such an old jarhead, I’d have to say you’re holding together pretty damned well.”