Blood Covenent, page 9
His office door opened and Jonas Benjamin came through holding another Eyes Only folder for Louis. He set the folder on the center of Louis’s stack and stepped back. Louis glanced up, noting the door had closed behind Jonas. The boy understood the rules. Louis wondered if he understood who thereal enemy was these days. The White House and Capitol Hill were just as lethal as the Kremlin had been in the eighties.
“What’s this about?”
Jonas pulled one of the office chairs close to the desk and explained. “About seven years ago you put a request into the system for any information on a David Kudrik.”
“I did?” replied Louis, not remembering anything. “And it generated an Eyes Only file?”
Jonas nodded.
“That’d be what, 1985 or ’86?” mused Louis.
“It was ’85,” verified Jonas.
Louis glanced at the red-striped folder and then back to the documents he had just signed. Something nagged his memory.
“You look at this?”
“Yes. I mean it was related to Soviet weapons technology,” explained Jonas.
“Bring me up to date.”
“Arzamas-16,” began Jonas. “I don’t even know what that means—”
Louis held up a hand silencing Jonas. The memories flooded back; a cold airplane ride across Soviet airspace to a spot no longer on the map and two men—Jerry and Jim. Jerry had died the year after the Gulf War in Iraq. Nothing remained but a shallow unmarked grave somewhere in the southern deserts between the Saudi, Jordanian, and Iraqi borders. Harper refused to accept the loss of this friend and partner. He was never the same again and resigned a few months later.Wolves amongst sheep— Harper was the most dangerous.
“Okay, I know what we’re talking about. I remember the mission.”
“Some of your boys?” asked Jonas who was certainly younger than any of the boys. Jonas graduated from college two years ago. He was in seventh or eighth grade when Bill Casey organized his little band of mischief-makers.
“Two of the best,” answered Louis. He sighed and flipped open the folder. There were very few who were the best, most of them had died or retired a long time ago. The edge in Louis’s voice suggested the pain was still very close to the surface.
“Harper and Andrews?”
Louis nodded. He looked down at a photograph of a young boy heading off to college. It was a digitized copy, but even it could not hide the age and era.
“That’s the only photo we have of Kudrik.”
Louis kept seeing the wordSAMSON . He found himself back in a bubble room with Arkady Malikov. The smirk and defiance always present, and a man hardly worth the risk assigned to bring him out of Arzamas-16. The scene played through Louis’s memory.
* * * *
Arkady spread his hands. “I don’t know. They rumored that a hundred were made, but the KGB and the military never told us. TheJew had his own joke. I don’t think anyone else ever understood it.”
“Joke?” quizzed Jerry.
“Yes. TheJew, he called itSAMSON .”
* * * *
He leaned forward dreading the file even more. “SAMSON,” he snarled. “No, it can’t be,” he snapped his eyes up demanding, “What’s the intelligence source for this?”
“Israeli MOSSAD,” replied Jonas.
Louis pulled a note pad toward him and wrote in large letters: SAMSON. Below he added: NUCLEAR WEAPON – USSR. “What’s the MOSSAD doing with a picture of Kudrik?”
“His sister got out with her family. They’re Jews and they ran away to Israel, or have been trying to ever since the Wall came down in ’89 and the Soviet Union collapsed.”
Louis rubbed his forehead. It made sense. Russian Jews were showing up everywhere now that the Soviet Union no longer existed and the ability of the central state to impose its will became ever more atrophied. The major evangelical Christian organizations had targeted the Russian State. Campus Crusade for Christ, Youth with a Mission, Jews for Jesus, and the list went on. A Christian alphabet soup of organizations was pouring into the old communist state creating another tidal revolution Bill Casey never imagined. Louis never understood the attraction; perhaps that was why he no longer understood Harper either.
“His sister told the Israelis aboutSAMSON ?” squeaked Louis.
“That’s the funny thing about this.”
Louis shook his head. “Jonas, there’s nothing funny about this. Nothing at all.”
Jonas shrugged. “Okay.”
Louis sighed. “I’m sorry, but this is all coming back to me like a bad dream.”
“Her name is Rachel Denisov and she claimed she visited her brother in 1979.”
Louis clawed at his memory and figured it could be true. “He told her a secret, and this is the funny part.”
“Not funnyha-ha , but funny strange?”
Jonas bobbed his head. “Funny strange. He told herSAMSON was a bomb with a twenty-year fuse, and when it finally went off it would kill many Russians. He went on aboutSAMSON and Dagon.”
“Dagon?”
Jonas shrugged again. “I have no idea. The MOSSAD report didn’t either. I think they pegged it in their files and when someone checked, they sent us what they had.”
Louis wrote DAGON on a third line.
“That’s it?”
“There’s some incidental details, but that’s what she told Israeli Intelligence.” Jonas paused then asked, “So what’s it all about?”
Louis glanced from the Eyes Only folder to Jonas. “One of our nightmares—it appears Arkady Malikov told us the truth in 1985,” he sighed, noticing the other set of documents and felt the Reaper’s cold finger run across his bones. The incoming administration was hardly sympathetic to cold war worries.It’s the economy—stupid! A campaign slogan built on a lie that America had experienced the worst economy in the last fifty years.
“Someone built a suitcase-size nuclear bomb in the fifty kilogram area with a yield in the two to three kiloton region. The Russians have no knowledge of the weapon. They have never appeared on any charts, any documents—anything. There is no record of these weapons ever being placed into the nuclear inventory.”
“So, maybe they don’t exist,” offered Jonas.
Louis nodded. “That’s what we concluded when we finally had a chance to see the nuclear inventories. But now, you come here with a story about the man who was supposed to have built these things, and that makes it two independent sources.”
“So you think they might exist.”
“Malikov used the same name:SAMSON .” Louis flipped through the report and placed his finger on a single sentence. “She called it a bomb—not bombs?”
Louis sat back in his chair and spun it around to stare out the window. His view was a panorama of the Virginian countryside. “A suitcase-size nuclear device is a terrorist weapon.” He began feeling the cold January air. “Perhaps the military was unaware of its development. Perhaps it was some renegade operation.”
“Impossible,” replied Jonas. His international relations degree and what he had studied since being assigned to Louis assured him renegade operations were not possible in the Soviet Union. “These are the Russians! No one builds nuclear bombs without somebody—somewhere—knowing about it.”
Louis rubbed his eyes. Of course Jonas was right. No one built nuclear weapons without somebody knowing about it.He turned back to Jonas and said quietly, “This leaves us with three possibilities.
“First, the bombs never existed. It’s some elaborate fairy tale concocted by Malikov based on some fantasy this Kudrik fellow had. I’ll place that into the category of wishful thinking.”
“Do you think they exist?”
“Yes. Remember, the timeframe when these were developed was the late seventies. Jimmy Carter’s administration was beginning to unravel. Communism was on the move through Africa, Asia, South and Central America. Our economy was still off balance from the oil shock, and many dire predictions were being made about the future. Iran was going to fall soon and Soviets decided to roll into Afghanistan. They were violating every arms control treaty ever signed and the White House was myopic at best,” explained Louis. Blind was a more apt description. He remembered those days as if they were yesterday.
“And you were on the outside,” added Jonas.
“Yes,” nodded Louis. “No one wanted to hear from us spooks that the commies might actually win, or that the White House appointee was a moron. We missed the Shah’s fall. We were caught with our pants down when Brezhnev decided to shoot Afghan rebels and found out armor doesn’t work very well in mountain ranges. We were a mess, and I think people knew it.” Louis settled back and continued.
“Second possibility: the bombs existed, but were never deployed.” He laughed. “Again, a very unlikely scenario. Weapons are made to be deployed. Maybe they’re never used, but they are placed in positions to do the harm.”
“Which means you think it’s possibility number three.”
Louis nodded. He liked the way this boy’s mind worked. “Yes, the bombs were made and deployed. So, Jonas, what would you do if you were the Soviet Union and you wanted to stop the West in a NATO/Warsaw pact confrontation?”
Jonas stared back at his boss. The saliva in his mouth suddenly evaporated as he considered the problem from the other side’s perspective. “A suitcase-sized device is designed to be carried to the target.” His eyes locked with Louis’s.
“Indeed. Go on,” prodded the older man. The nightmare was here.
“In any showdown between East and West they would want to ensure Western Europe could not be supplied from the United States, therefore they would seek to cripple that ability.” Jonas did not like where this led, but he continued down the dark road. “We know they’d need commercial aircraft to accomplish this—Desert Storm taught us that lesson. They already have an offensive submarine force sortie into the North Atlantic, so they’d need to stop the air bridge.”
Louis finished it for him. “So they knock out major civilian and possibly military airfields in Western Europe, and they attack those centers in this country as well. Take out five or six FAA regional centers, O’Hare, JFK, Boston, and maybe five others and they’ve made a real mess.
“But the key—and this is the real key point—no missiles, no bombers, no overt action that can be countered by SAC or NORAD. And they start planning this when Jimmy Carter behaves better than they’d ever expect him too.”
“But it never happened.”
Louis shook his head, “They were never used, and as far as I know, no one ever threatened to use them against us. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist.”
“So what do we do?” asked Jonas.
Louis grunted. He really wished he knew the answer.
PART 2
THE DONKEY’S JAWBONE
Then Samson said, “With the jawbone of a donkey… I have killed a thousand men.”
Judges 15:16
CHAPTER 9
New York City
Saturday, July 3, 1999
10:00 A.M. EDT
Larry Wheeler walked through the hastily assembled command post. His palms were sweaty and his lips dry. He looked around the room at the monitors displaying the object of their attention: a condominium in the stunning sixty-eight story Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue
.
The Tower was noted for its distinctive saw-tooth design and exclusive clientele. The average two-bedroom condo sold for a cool $1.6 million. Perched a few blocks from Central Park and sharing the block with the legendary Tiffany’s, the Trump Tower commands a masterful vista of the Manhattan skyline. Its 266 condominiums cater to New York’s elite.
The crisscrossing escalators embrace a seven-story waterfall and a startling skylight. A cacophony of mirrors bouncing off the rose-colored granite walls and brass stanchions. The boutiques that ring the atrium cater to the residents and the tourist trade. They are always attempting to lure customers with the extraordinary and the unusual.
Larry stared at the nightmarish floor plans before him. He had commandeered a set of offices in the Sony Tower across East 68thStreet. The Tower’s unconventional design posed problems the SWAT team training regimens did not anticipate. Besides, he would need further authority before he brazenly trashed million dollar apartments.
The cell phone on the desk beeped. Larry, never taking his eyes from the floor plans, barked, “Speak.”
On the other end of the phone, an NYPD detective answered, “I got five—maybe six people in there. I suspect they’ve reinforced the entryways with rebar or something, because the metal detector went off the scale when we walked by the front door. I take it you’ve looked at the floor plans?”
Larry glanced down at the desk. “Yeah,” he replied quietly.
“You see, there is three feet of pre-stressed concrete and reinforced steel beam. I don’t think we can blast through the bottom or top with any real assurance of success, much less in the next thirty to forty minutes,” explained the voice.
Larry nodded absently.
“What about through the glass?”
“From the outside!” snapped the voice.
“Yeah,” replied Larry.
“Well in case you hadn’t noticed, this is Fifth Avenue
! We got the Coca Cola Building on one side, the Sony Tower where you’re sitting, and the GM Tower up the way. Not to mention a dozen other buildings with irregular shapes. How do you propose we get a chopper in such a confined space, or were you just gonna drop a couple of guys over the side of the penthouse?” came the sarcastic response.
Larry ran his hand through his hair and wished his old partner Harvey Randall were here. Unfortunately, some things are never forgiven in the Bureau, and the masters at the J. Edgar Hoover Building had banished Harvey to the wilderness in West Yellowstone.
Larry clicked off the phone and turned to the SWAT captain. “What about the windows?”
Captain Buford Rodgers stood with his arms crossed over his black ninja garb with a web belt of impressive looking weapons and tools. He resented the sudden intrusion of a federal officer into his domain. His experience with the Bureau was generally a turf war where their Hostage Rescue Team dictated what tactics thelocals could or could not employ. There always seemed to be some political or diplomatic angle involved, and many times it was difficult to understand who the bad guys really were.
The ninja-clad cop shook his head and pointed to the magnified picture on his monitor. “It looks like they’ve strung chicken wire and screen mesh together across all the windows. Even if we shattered the windows from the outside, we’d still have to cut through the wire and they’d have a free shot at my men. On top of that, those are thermal blankets hanging behind the wire. I doubt we can get a good infrared signature.”
Larry traced the latticework of wire and mesh. His mouth turned sour.
“Besides, what’s so urgent that we can’t gas them out?”
Larry considered the possibility. Anything the NYPD had in its arsenal would be non-lethal and probably clumsy to employ. Larry had no doubt their intake and outflow ducts were covered with some sort of air scrubber. Whatever they tried, it would need to work the first time. “My information indicates these boys are eager to meet Allah, and they want to take us with them.”
He left unsaid the disturbing fact that there were supposed to be ten men—not five or six.
“What would it take to penetrate the glass?” he asked.
Buford worked the keyboard to zoom out the cameras and examine the building. “I can punch all sorts of holes in the glass, but it’s three-quarters of an inch thick, and made of triple thermal panes. Then there are blankets and whatever else behind the blankets we can’t see. Bullets will fly all over the place and probably not hit squat.”
Larry scowled. Buford was real upset about the blankets. “Well, what can you do?” he snapped.
The ninja glowered for a moment, and replied quietly, “We can storm the front door. Use flash bangs, smoke, gas, and automatic weapons, but I make no guarantees.”
Larry pursed his lips and nodded. According to their best estimates, the front door was reinforced and possibly booby-trapped. So far, no one had managed to figure out how to get a fiber optic probe into the condominium.
His phone chirped again. Larry picked it up and glanced at the LED crystal display. Boldly displayed was a legend reading: JEH Building. His masters were calling and they were decidedly nervous. He had talked with them less than thirty minutes ago.
He pressed the SEND key and answered, “Wheeler here.”
“Larry—Lou Feldman. I’ve got Bill Harris and Janet Henry with me. We’ve been looking over the floor plans for Trump Tower,” he began with a rush of words into the speakerphone across the ether to the tiny speaker in Larry’s ear.
Lou Feldman was the Assistant Director In Charge of Terrorism for field operations. He was sitting in a conference room at J. Edgar Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue
in Washington. He spent his days riding a desk and directing agents to various tasks. With the new commitments and missions assigned to the FBI, agents, special or otherwise, had been stretched around the globe. The days of assigning hundreds of men and women to specific cases were over. Feldman spent most of his time imposing the Federal Government’s will on state, local, and foreign governments.
Bill Harris was the Marine Corps military liaison to the FBI’s vaunted Hostage Rescue Team. Larry hoped he could come up with some ideas about breaching the apartment. Harris had little sensitivity when dealing with the locals. He tended to adopt the full frontal assault approach, leveraging firepower and manpower against generally under armed and inexperienced opponents.
Janet Henry was part of a new breed of cyber-cops who had monitored the programs that ferreted out Hassan Jamal from JFK’s passport control cameras. Hassan had entered the country two days ago on a false passport listing him as a Jordanian citizen. He arrived in an expensive Brooks Brother’s suit on a British Airways jumbo jet.
