Devil's Fortress, page 13
Looking alarmed, Wade Vucovich leaned forward. Flynn remembered that he’d grown up on a farm before joining the military. “Can we pass the word to our own government about this?” he asked, almost hesitantly. “Maybe get them to put pressure on the Russians to back off before Voronin pulls the trigger on whatever he’s got planned?”
Fox sighed. “Unfortunately not. All we have to go on is this one set of sadly uninformative satellite photos and a considerable amount of conjecture. Generating serious action by Washington would take a great deal more hard evidence than we are ever likely to be able to produce—at least in time to matter.”
Flynn knew the older man was right. After all, the need to act directly and swiftly against threats—circumventing bureaucratic inertia—had been a driving force behind the creation of the Quartet Directorate in the first place. “Which makes it even more important than ever that we nail that son of a bitch Voronin ASAP,” he realized. Then he grimaced. “But to be honest, Br’er Fox, as of right now, I can’t see a hope in hell of ever being able to covertly penetrate the sensors and defenses around the Raven’s Nest. Not and get close enough to take an effective shot at Voronin.”
“That brings me to the second piece of critical intelligence provided by Four’s asset,” Fox said quietly. “Voronin is no longer using his country estate. It seems your attack frightened him sufficiently to shift his residence.”
“To where?”
In answer, the older man tapped the remote control, replacing the satellite image of Voronin’s suspected bioweapons lab with a photo of a huge, bronze-colored skyscraper. Along with several others of similar size, the 1,100-foot-tall ultramodern structure loomed over Moscow. “According to our information, he’s moved here. To the Mercury City Tower in the city’s International Business Center.”
“Which is where the Raven Syndicate has its main corporate offices,” Flynn remembered.
“The organization occupies three full floors,” Fox confirmed. “Starting on the forty-third floor, about two-thirds of the way up.”
Flynn stared at the image of the massive skyscraper. Every aspect of his mission planning process had just been upended in the blink of an eye. As difficult as it would have been to get to Voronin when the oligarch was sheltering behind the defenses of his country estate, would going after him inside a vast honeycomb of steel and concrete be any easier? “How solid is this intelligence?” he asked Fox.
“Very solid,” the older man assured him. “According to our source, Voronin has moved his personal chef and several prized pieces of his art collection to the Mercury Center Tower over the past few days.”
Van Horn nodded. “That fits.” She frowned. “Our boy Pavel is all about the finer things in life. Well, those, plus mass murder.”
Flynn understood what she meant. The Quartet Directorate’s profile of the Russian showed him to be highly educated and able to move easily among the globe’s wealthy, cultured elites. Initially groomed by Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR, to be a deep-cover spy in the West, he’d been educated at the Philips Exeter Academy, one of America’s oldest and most prestigious prep schools. He was then sent as an undergraduate to Oxford. After that, he returned to the US where he earned an MBA from Harvard Business School. What his polished background didn’t reveal was that Voronin was also a ruthless psychopath, one perfectly willing to cause the deaths of tens of millions to advance his interests and those of his native country.
“This International Business Center place is pretty much in the heart of Moscow, right?” he asked Fox. “Close to the river?”
The other man nodded. He opened a satellite view of the Russian capital’s downtown area. Then he scrolled a cursor to highlight the tight cluster of skyscrapers that made up its newly developed financial core. A red dot blinked on the exact location of the Mercury City Tower.
Flynn studied the map in silence, and then he shook his head in disbelief. “So Voronin’s parked himself forty-plus stories off the ground . . . right in the center of this uber high-end business district? A district that’s chockful of Russia’s richest and most powerful corporate leaders and politicians, all of whom have their own security personnel and bodyguards? One that’s also just a block away from Moscow’s brand-new city hall? And which, to top it all off, is less than three miles from Russia’s Ministry of Defense and the Kremlin itself?”
Cooke whistled softly under his breath. “Not exactly an easy target.”
“Not hardly,” Flynn agreed. He turned back to Fox. “How much intel do we have on this building’s layout and security systems?”
“Virtually none at the moment,” the older man said with regret. “Essentially just what’s publicly available on the internet. Which, I’m afraid, boils down to a few articles on its design and construction, a handful of sample luxury apartment floor plans, and a few glossy PR photos touting some of the tower’s public spaces. Worse yet, we have absolutely no useful information concerning the three floors owned by the Raven Syndicate.”
“Swell.” Flynn took a short, sharp breath and let it out. “Effectively, then, we just got knocked back to square one on this op. Hell, maybe even farther back than that because, as of right now, this whole situation we’re up against looks like a disaster just waiting to unfold.”
“The task has certainly become even more complicated and dangerous,” Fox acknowledged. “You know that no one will think the worse of you or your team if you want to reevaluate the feasibility of this mission, Nick―”
Flynn held up a hand to stop the older man right there. “I didn’t say we were quitting, Br’er Fox,” he said. “I just don’t plan on going off half-cocked this time.” He glanced around the table at Van Horn, Cooke, and the others. “As of this moment, intelligence gathering is our top priority.” They nodded.
“That’s going to take boots on the ground,” Van Horn pointed out. “Inside Moscow.”
Flynn sighed. “Not exactly a place I really had on my bucket list for a repeat visit so soon, but you’re right.”
Fox cleared his throat. “Unfortunately, infiltrating back into Russia could prove somewhat more difficult than in the recent past,” he warned. He toggled the remote, throwing another set of photographs up onto the screen. Taken from a CCTV camera feed, these pictures were grainier and lacked the sharp definition of the other images they’d been studying. They showed Laura Van Horn in the two disguises—as an immaculately attired blonde in sunglasses and as a dowdy, heavyset middle-aged woman—that she’d used to scout the Leningradsky rail station.
Flynn was quiet for a moment. “Where did you get these?” he asked finally.
“From my counterparts in central Europe and the Baltic states,” Fox replied. “They confirm these photos were sent to all Russian border crossings several days ago—only two days after you aborted your attempt to reconnoiter the Raven’s Nest. Instructions were attached to consider this person,” he nodded at the images of Van Horn, “as an armed and highly dangerous member of a known terrorist group. Moscow labeled her arrest and interrogation ‘maksimal’no vozmozhnogo prioriteta,’ ‘of the highest possible priority.’”
Staring at the screen, Flynn felt the hairs on the back of his neck go up. Somehow, the Russians had fingered Laura as a target within hours of her visit to the train station. “Christ, those bastards were practically breathing right down our necks.”
Van Horn took a deep breath and touched him gently on the arm. “Good thing you kept us moving fast, then.” The rest of the team nodded somberly.
“I’ve had our best photo interpreters analyze these images,” Fox continued. He looked across the table at Van Horn. “They concur it’s unlikely that the Russians will be able to positively identify you.”
“Glad to hear it,” she quipped. “Because I kind of like my face the way it is now. Plastic surgery would be a bore.”
“But―” Fox continued.
“Send me in then,” Cooke interrupted. “I’m pretty damned sure nobody in Moscow has my picture.” He smiled tightly. “Because if they did, I’d already be dead.”
That drew murmurs of agreement from the rest of the team. Cooke was a veteran of the U.S. Army’s ultra-secret Task Force Orange. Over the years, he’d operated clandestinely in different hostile countries—collecting vital local intelligence for U.S. Special Forces operations.
“Do you have something in mind, Shannon?” Flynn asked.
The Virginian’s fingers drummed lightly on the tabletop. “Right now, the Russian border security goons are undoubtedly twitchy as all hell,” he noted. “But I figure that’s bound to ease up in a week or two.”
Flynn knew he was probably right about that. The longer military and security forces were kept on high alert, the more fatigued, less efficient, and less observant they generally grew. It was just human nature, and there was no real way around the problem—short of handing their duties over to robots and artificial intelligences, a course that carried its own set of distinct complications.
“If you give me time to work up a solid new cover, I’ll slip in and see what I can dig up on the scene,” Cooke proposed.
Reluctantly, Flynn signaled his assent. Sending the other man into Russia for a close reconnaissance of the Mercury City Tower was better than sitting on their asses doing nothing. But short of Cooke somehow scoring a personal tour of the Raven Syndicate’s corporate headquarters, including an in-depth briefing on its security systems—which seemed about as likely as Voronin deciding to give up everything to become a Trappist monk—they were still going to fall well short of having enough hard intel to craft a solid, survivable plan. And that was a problem.
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
high-altitude flight test center,
west of volgograd, russia
some weeks later
Under the early morning summer sun, fields of ripening wheat spread from horizon to horizon before ultimately disappearing into the heat haze. Small clusters of buildings and barns dotted the landscape. Each was a farming village where life had not changed much in decades. Unpaved roads spoked outward from every little settlement, meandering lazily around low hills, along the rims of erosion-carved ravines, and across dry, tree-lined creek beds.
A single surfaced road ran straight through this isolated rural area. It came to an end at a large fenced-in military complex. A guard shack manned by soldiers barred entry to unauthorized visitors. Long low cement-block buildings—subdivided into offices, barracks, workshops, and storerooms—lined one side of the facility. The rest of the compound was open ground, a vast field of short-cropped wild grass turning brown in the scorching summer heat.
Several green, canvas-sided military trucks and a red-painted fire engine were parked near the center of the compound. They formed a rough circle around a huge, undulating sphere of clear polyethylene film. Less than a thousandth of an inch thick, this sphere was slowly expanding, swelling as it inflated. A flexible hose connected it to one of the trucks. Pumps whirred, feeding hydrogen to the massive balloon through this hose.
Within thirty minutes, although it was still only a fraction of its ultimate size, the balloon had achieved enough buoyancy to bob skyward. Composite fiber cables tightened, tethering it to the ground as it grew even bigger. Flight control equipment, communications gear, ballast, and the other components of its one-ton payload were mounted on a frame attached to the base of the still-expanding envelope.
A Russian air force captain stared upward at the inflated balloon as it tugged harder against the tethers holding it captive. His eyes narrowed, judging the proper moment. Finally satisfied, he spoke into a hand-held radio. “Cease fueling and detach,” he ordered.
Immediately, the truck-mounted pump shut off. Seconds later, now empty of hydrogen, the long flexible hose disconnected from the half-inflated balloon and dropped to the ground.
“Go for launch,” the captain reported. He took one final look around his ground crew. One by one the technicians gave him a thumbs-up signal. “Launch!” he commanded. His crewmen obeyed instantly and yanked hard on their release controls. With simultaneous sharp pops, the tethers still attached to the balloon broke loose and fell away.
Freed now, the rippling teardrop-shaped envelope soared higher, hauling its payload off the ground. It gained altitude with astonishing speed, and as the balloon climbed into thinner and thinner air, the hydrogen gas inside expanded enormously. By the time it reached the stratosphere’s lower edge, the envelope blossomed into a huge, elongated sphere more than seventy meters in diameter. Within minutes, it was just a tiny bright dot silhouetted against the immense blue dome of the sky—discernible only because of the sunlight twinkling off its translucent film surface.
Flanked by a gaggle of uniformed air force officers and ringed by his bodyguards, Pavel Voronin stood watching the launch with intense interest. Now he glanced toward the highest-ranking officer, a colonel named Fyodor Kardashev. “Most impressive, Colonel.” His head turned skyward again, following the glowing speck as it drifted eastward on the prevailing wind. “What is the maximum altitude planned for this flight?”
“Thirty thousand meters,” Kardashev replied. “Close to one hundred thousand feet as the Americans measure it.”
“And you can actually steer this machine, even without engines or propellers?”
The colonel nodded. “To a remarkable extent, our atmosphere shares many similarities with the earth’s oceans,” he said. “Depending on the altitude, currents of air flow at varying speeds and in different directions. So, just as a sailing ship can change course by trimming its sails, we can command the balloon to gain or lose altitude—shifting between separate air currents to control its course and speed over the ground.”
Voronin shaded his eyes. The balloon, so massive when seen up close, was now almost invisible. “What is the vehicle’s flight duration? How long can it stay aloft?”
“This design? Up to twelve days, given reasonable weather,” Kardashev said.
Voronin nodded. Although he’d been briefed earlier on the capabilities of Russia’s military high-altitude balloons, seeing a launch for himself went a long way to confirming the practicality of his plans. It had been worth coping with the burdensome restrictions imposed by his security team for safety’s sake, including hastily rerouted flights and sudden vehicle changes that had added hours to this trip outside Moscow.
“Very well, Colonel,” he said. “As I said, I’m extremely impressed by your operations here. I’m convinced that your unit’s equipment and special expertise are precisely what my project needs.”
Kardashev clasped his hands behind his back. “Your interest gratifies me, Mr. Voronin,” he said, choosing his words with evident care. “However, let me be blunt. I cannot place my design teams or training staff at your disposal without an explicit order from the General Staff, one confirmed in writing by President Zhdanov himself. I hope you understand this.”
Voronin smiled pleasantly, concealing his irritation. Word about the unfortunate fate of other Russian military men caught up in the Raven Syndicate’s covert operations had obviously leaked out. To mask Russia’s involvement in the most recent of these, several of those officers had been falsely accused of treason and then summarily executed. Kardashev had no intention of risking the same fate. Given the circumstances, he supposed that he couldn’t fault the colonel for being cautious. But he still despised the idea of having to go running, hat in hand, to the Kremlin at every significant stage of VELES. He’d grown used to those involved in his plans obeying his orders without hesitation. Learning that was no longer the case was a humiliating reminder of his diminished status.
“Of course, I understand, Colonel,” Voronin lied. He needed Kardashev’s specialized equipment and expertise. If he had to crawl for now to get them, so be it. “I’ll contact the president immediately. You’ll have the authorization you need within a matter of days at most.”
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
moscow
later that day
A decaying, five-story brick apartment building overlooked an entrance to the International Business Center, the one closest to the bronze-colored edifice of the Mercury City Tower. The contrast between the older building’s rusting iron balconies and flaking, discolored walls and the gleaming office and residential tower just across the street could not have been starker. The low-rise apartment building was an eyesore—an ugly throwback to when this section of the city had been a bleak, cheerless factory district. That was before Moscow’s newly enriched corruptocrats and ambitious politicians swept in with their grand schemes for urban renewal. The factories were gone three decades later, bulldozed and dynamited into oblivion. And in their place had come skyscrapers filled with banks, investment firms, gourmet restaurants, and luxury flats.
But somehow, through an odd twist of fate, this rundown block of apartments had survived the mania for redevelopment. Generations of lowly assembly-line workers, their wives, and children had spent their lives inside its ugly walls, often with two or three families crammed cheek-by-jowl into a single small set of rooms. Now, however, more than half the apartments were vacant, judged unsafe even under Russia’s notoriously lax health standards.
There were plans on file to tear the building down. But they were on hold, a victim both of Russia’s slowing economy and bureaucratic inertia. In the meantime, a handful of primarily elderly tenants moved like ghosts through narrow, dingy hallways lit dimly, if at all, by flickering, low-wattage bulbs. Broken risers and missing banisters marked stairwells that smelled powerfully of mold and old garbage.
Four flights up, Shannon Cooke perched on an overturned crate in the darkness of an abandoned apartment. To deter squatters and vandals, sheets of plywood shuttered its windows. He’d drilled a small hole in the board covering the nearest opening, a hole just large enough to slot in the lens of a miniature video camera. Wirelessly connected to his tablet computer, it filmed the main barrier-guarded entrance to the Mercury City Tower’s underground parking garage. Right now, it showed the normal flow of late afternoon Moscow traffic. Cars, small trucks, buses, and yellow taxi cabs streamed slowly east and west along the broad avenue outside.
