Kilo Option, page 4
With a growing sense of excitement, Frances activated a computer terminal and brought up the unit’s archival files on that section of the Iranian coast, including the latest information on Iran’s military installations. The satellite photos were standard 100 centimeters square. Matching the number of square kilometers of terrain covered by photos one and two, she printed out a map of Bandar-é Emn Khomeini Navy Base on a sheet of clear plastic 100 centimeters on a side. This she brought back to the worktable and carefully laid it over photograph one, bringing the main features into alignment.
Using the magnifying glass, she studied the position of the single rocket strike against the clear chart overlay. With shaking hands, she moved the overlay to the second photograph and studied the positions of what she could now make out were four smaller strikes.
“Bingo,” she said in triumph. She knew damned well what was going on, even if she didn’t know who was behind the attack, or why.
Someone came in from the outer office. “I thought I’d find you here, darlin’.”
Frances turned as her date, Captain Terrence Reilly, strode across the room, a bemused grin on his rawboned Texas features. He was an American Marine intelligence officer assigned to FRIFINTEL, and Frances, who’d been brought up in an advantaged London neighborhood, found him primitive and devastatingly handsome. Though it was bad politics to mix work and pleasure, especially in an Interpol-type intelligence unit, they’d been lovers for a couple of months. The relationship would not last, Frances knew that, but while it did he was like forbidden candy, which was the best explanation she could give herself because even she didn’t understand why she was doing what she was doing. One thing in his favor was that he was one of the finest intelligence field officers she’d ever worked with.
“Sorry, Terry, but something’s come up,” she said. “Take a look at this.”
“What have you got?” Reilly took the magnifying glass from her and leaned in close to study the photograph and overlay, going over it in minute detail. Next he placed the overlay atop photograph one and studied it as carefully. After a few moments he looked up. “Where is this?”
“The Iranian naval base at Bandar-é Emn.” Frances handed him the NSA flash message.
When he was finished reading it, he studied photos three through eight, then went back and studied one and two again, this time taking a full five minutes.
“There’s no question they hit the oil rigs, but unless I’m dead off the mark, they also mounted an attack on the base,” Frances said.
“You bet your sweet ass they did, darlin’,” Reilly said. “The first strike on the back gate looks like an AGM, maybe a Maverick air-to-surface missile. Everybody out there has them.”
“Could have been a mistake,” Frances played devil’s advocate. “The lights on the ground would be confusing to a pilot.”
“Bullshit, and you know it,” Reilly said mildly. “The three shots on the second photograph are definitely M-72’s.”
“I counted four. It’s the power plant for the base.”
Reilly shrugged. “The attack on the oil rigs was diversionary. Whoever did it wanted someone inside. Could be the Israelis.”
“They would have hit harder. No screwing around. And the attack would have been better organized.”
“Were they going after the subs?”
“Presumably, but there’s no evidence to suggest they were successful, except that the base loses power by the fourth photograph.”
“They used the M-72 rockets to hit the air shafts for the diesels,” Reilly said distantly. He was thinking.
“They made two other rocket strikes to the base’s perimeter, but there’s no other real damage that I can see.”
Reilly focused on her. “Maybe they weren’t there to sabotage anything. Maybe they were after information.”
“Like what?” Frances asked. “Everybody knows that the Iranians own four Russian subs. Even the Iraqis know that.”
“Yeah, but what kinds of weapons are they totin’ these days? Ever wonder about that? Maybe somebody has.”
“Nuclear?” Frances suggested, hardly daring to say the word.
Reilly stared at the satellite images for a long moment. “No way of knowing, unless we could get in there for a look-see.” He turned back to Frances. “But the missiles are for sale. Just because it hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean it won’t.”
“That’s a cheery thought.”
“Yeah, isn’t it. We’d better call Charlie. He’ll have to take a look at this.” Colonel Charles Renaud was the current chief of the mission. He was an intelligence officer with the SDECE, the French secret intelligence service.
“We’re going to have to send an inspection team over there posthaste,” Frances said. “Have Charles set it up. And count me in.” She got her purse and coat and began stuffing the photos and the overlay into her briefcase. “You can make copies of these. They’re in memory.”
“In the meantime?” Reilly asked.
“I’m going down to Washington to see a friend. I’ll call as soon as I get there.”
“Should I be jealous?”
Frances grinned wickedly. “Extremely, darlin’. But if I’m right he’s going to save us a lot of work.”
4
WASHINGTON, D.C.
The man Dana Vining had known as Stewart Mann was gone. She’d watched him cross the lobby, and from a position near the front entry she had watched him drive off in a Yellow cab. She’d even memorized the taxi’s shield number. Insurance, just in case. But it had taken nearly half an hour to rouse herself out of the booth in the coffee shop one level below the atrium lobby. She was very badly frightened.
In the three years she’d worked for Uptown Escorts she’d grown used to the quirky, sometimes bizarre actions of her customers. The service supposedly prescreened the really dangerous types, but her boss, Heidi Kahn, figured a little controlled kink once in a while wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Heidi, who’d founded the service and ran it with a velvet glove, liked to think of herself as a big sister to her seventeen girls. Nothing was taboo, nor was any problem too big or too small to bring to her, day or night. “We’re in the kind of business in which we have to rely on each other,” she told them.
This time, however, Dana figured the jam she was in was too big even for Heidi, because she thought there was a good chance that Stewart Mann had killed the navy lieutenant commander. It made her an accessory before the fact. It was she who had lured Stein up to the room to his death.
It was a very long way back to her student days at NYU, she thought.
She took the broad stairs up to the lobby and crossed to the bank of elevators. Her dress was tight and revealing, but Heidi insisted that none of her girls dress like whores, and none of them did. Although she got a few stares, hotel security paid no attention to her.
The lobby was busy. The cocktail hour was in full swing, the piano bar was packed, and the early pretheater dinner crowd was beginning to show up.
Waiting for an elevator, she looked over her shoulder toward the main entrance and studied the people coming and going. Stewart Mann was not among them, and although she didn’t think he was coming back, she didn’t want to encounter him now. It was his eyes, she told herself. They were dead. Like a vampire’s.
When the elevator came, she hesitated a second, almost turning away, but then she stepped aboard and rode it up to the eighth floor. This was one situation she couldn’t run away from. If Stein was dead, she would have to do something about it, although at the moment she was finding it difficult to think exactly what it was she could or should do.
The corridor was empty, as it had been earlier. Again she hesitated by the elevators, wanting to get the hell out of there. She glanced at her image in the mirror above a table. She looked pale and out of breath.
Steeling herself, she went down the corridor to the room where she’d brought Stein. A DO NOT DISTURB sign had been put out, but there were no indications that anything was amiss.
Making sure she wasn’t being observed, Dana placed her ear to the door and listened for a few moments, but there were no sounds from within.
Christ, what was she doing here? The money was good, but God in heaven, how could it happen like this? How could she have gotten in so deeply?
Using the magnetically encoded key card, she unlocked the door and pushed it open a few inches. The lights were off inside, but in the light from the corridor she could see what appeared to be a towel on the floor. She couldn’t imagine what it was doing there.
Stay or go.
She stepped inside and, holding the door open behind her with one hand, flipped the light switch. The floor lamp by the windows and a lamp on the table in the opposite corner came on.
“Lieutenant Commander,” she called, her voice wanting to catch in her throat. There was no answer.
Stewart Mann was gone, and it was possible that Stein had left as well after whatever business they had together was finished. But for some reason she didn’t believe that.
Allowing the door to close, she stepped the rest of the way into the room, then stopped short. Someone was lying in the bed, covered head to toe with the bedspread.
She stared at the figure for several seconds. There was no movement. No stirring. No breathing.
Moving as if in a dream, Dana went around to the side of the bed and carefully drew the cover back. Tom Stein, his eyes open in death, the right side of his head and neck covered in blood, stared up at her.
She dropped the cover and stepped back, almost tripping over her own feet, stifling a scream that threatened to rise up in her throat. Her heart thumped against her ribs, and her stomach did a slow roll. She could smell something disagreeable, something rotten, but she forced it out of her mind.
Stay or go. She still had the choice.
But Tom Stein hadn’t deserved to die that way.
The telephone was on the nightstand on the other side of the bed. She went around to it, got an outside line, and dialed 911.
Whatever she had become, she could not run away from this one.
5
NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY FORT MEADE, MARYLAND
Bill Lane’s eyes were half closed as he sat back in his chair and watched the slow progression of photographs on the big screen. It looked as if he were sleeping, or about to drift off, but nothing could have been further from the truth.
He was a husky, thick-shouldered man, with dark, well-groomed hair, an honest if sometimes cruel face, and deep penetratingly blue eyes that could turn to ice if he felt he was hearing lies or what he called “bureaucratic bullshit.” At forty-five he was a sharp dresser, his tastes running to British-tailored three-piece suits or Italian silk which draped nicely on his well-proportioned six four bulk.
A Rhodes scholar in comparative political systems, he’d gotten his master’s degree from Harvard, and had joined air force intelligence in time to be kicked out of Vietnam when Saigon fell in ’75. Three years later he’d joined NSA as an analyst and expert on Soviet Russia and the Communist bloc.
Six months ago, he and Tom Hughes, the closest friend he’d ever had, were assigned to work with the CIA and the FBI’s Counter Espionage Division to ferret out a deep-penetration agent who operated somewhere at fairly high levels within the Pentagon. They believed he worked for the Ukrainian KGB, and it was because of him that Lane had killed two men. It was something he wasn’t happy about, though he knew it had been necessary because the mole had already caused the United States at least as much harm as Aldrich Ames had in the eighties. Because of the man we’d almost gotten into a shooting war with Russia. Without Lane’s intervention a lot of people would have lost their lives. That part, along with a number of other things he’d accomplished in twenty-some years, he was happy about.
A lot of years, a lot of water over the dam, he thought, watching the seemingly endless stream of faces on the screen. But he’d done a lot of good and significant work for the NSA and the CIA. Hughes had once paid him the ultimate compliment, telling him that he’d been one of the better front-line soldiers who’d helped win the cold war.
“All right, here they are again,” Hughes said from the console above and behind him.
Lane opened his eyes all the way and focused on the 600-square-foot screen on which was displayed a full-color photograph of a group of men emerging from the front doors of what appeared to be a government building. The situation board, as it was called, dominated the wall of NSA’s Crisis Management Center, facing a semicircular bank of communications and computer consoles rising four tiers above the central pit. The nation’s crises were controlled from this room and those in the CIA, the Pentagon, and the White House.
“What’s the date?”
“Six days ago. The twenty-second,” Hughes said.
“Where?”
“The Council of Ministers building, Kiev.”
Lane looked up at his old friend and grinned. “You never cease to amaze me, Tommy.”
Hughes was a corpulent man, who stood something under five seven and tipped the scales at 275 on a good day, 285 after a long football weekend. He was not good looking: his skin was a mottled red as if his blood pressure was so high he was ready to explode, his eyes were almost always puffy and red-rimmed, and his round, pockmarked nose was almost always stuffed up. But he was as brilliant as he was kind. He’d earned his PhD at Georgetown University with a 4.0 average in Far Eastern Studies and languages (he read, wrote, and spoke eleven fluently). And his wife of twenty years and their six girls, two cats, one dog, and assorted gerbils, birds, and turtles adored him. In his home he could not lift so much as a finger for himself. Lane, who was Uncle Bill and godfather to the kids, knew in his heart that if the girls could eat, drink, and sleep for their father so that he would not have to be bothered with anything so mundane, they would fight among themselves for the honor.
Here it was a different story. As assistant director of NSA’s Russian Division, Hughes did the lion’s share of the work. If Lane, who technically was junior in the division, wanted Hughes to work twenty-seven hours a day, his friend would fit it in without a word of complaint.
Hughes liked to say that the difficult they could do immediately. It was the impossible that sometimes took a little longer.
“We got lucky this time. That’s Lieutenant General Arkadi Sheskin, head of the Russian Federal Intelligence Service’s First Chief Directorate, and Captain General Ivan Aleksei Lukashin, chief of the Ukrainian KGB’s First Directorate, along with some of their staff.”
“The enemies meet, but not on neutral territory,” Lane said, studying the photograph. “But unless I miss my guess there’s an old friend of ours in the back row.”
“I wondered if you were too deep asleep to catch him,” Hughes said. “Enhancing left upper center two hundred fifty percent.”
The camera seemed to zoom in on a section of photograph above and left of center where they could just see the corner of a man’s face, along with his shoulder and his right hand, raised as if he’d spotted the photographer and was trying to cover his face. Because of the extreme enlargement, the picture was grainy.
Lane sat forward. “Clean it up.”
Hughes hit the proper keys and the image cleared somewhat, though not as much as they would have liked, and with the cost of fuzzing out the foreground. “That’s as far as it’ll go with the available data. We could extrapolate.”
“Not necessary. It’s Maslennikov. Question is, what was he doing in Kiev last week when we thought he was here in Washington?”
“And, has our boy returned to our blessed shores, or is he still ensconced in Kiev hobnobbing with the damned and infamous?”
Lane stared at the enhanced photo. “We had no idea that he was gone?”
“None.”
“Which means he went to a lot of trouble to cover his tracks.”
Hughes widened the picture to include the faces of the two generals. “Interesting company he keeps.”
“What’s our source on this photograph?” Lane asked. “Could it have been staged, or doctored?”
“Anything’s possible, but I don’t think it’s likely. This came from Mrs. Katarian.”
Joyce Katarian was the wife of an American businessman who’d worked with the Ukrainians for the past four years helping them redevelop their commercial airplane industry. Involved with a half-dozen relief agencies in Kiev, she had recruited herself two years ago by walking into the US Embassy and demanding to speak with a representative of the CIA. She figured the Ukrainians needed help with a lot of things, including protection from their own government. Her product, though not always as spectacular as this, was dependable.
“They called him back to ask his opinion about something,” Lane said, looking up at Hughes.
“Maybe they sacked him.”
“They didn’t fire him.”
Hughes was skeptical. “What makes you so sure?”
“In the first place, they would have simply put him on a plane back to Kiev with the explanation that his embassy assignment in Washington was at an end,” Lane explained. “In the second place, had they fired him, he wouldn’t show up outside the Council of Ministers building with his boss and his boss’s Russian counterpart.” He looked back at the photograph. “And in the third place, they have to know that we’re getting close to finding their penetration agent, who is probably Maslennikov’s star pupil.”
“Do you think they’re getting set to pull him out of the Pentagon?” Hughes asked.
“Either that or Maslennikov has been given a final assignment for his boy.”
“A lot of ifs, William,” Hughes cautioned. “A lot of long shots. We’re not even sure that Maslennikov is an agent runner, let alone if the mole we’ve been chasing for the past six months is being directed by him.”
“You might be right,” Lane said, staring at the partially obscured figure behind the two generals.
