The Kremlin's Candidate: A Novel by Jason Matthews (18)

Phase One

The narrow S-shaped Balaklava harbor on the southern coast of the Crimean peninsula was too short to be called a fjord. Protected by craggy headlands topped by the ruins of a Genoese fort built in 1365, the sunbaked little harbor was flanked by empty warehouses and two sleepy restaurants with tables and umbrellas. At the end of the harbor, on the west side, yawned a decrepit concrete adit that was the entrance to the defunct Soviet underground submarine base with a five-hundred-meter channel built under the mountain during the Cold War to shelter Red Fleet submarines from nuclear attack. Clustered on the hills above the east side of the harbor were newer buildings of the town, including the red-tile-roofed Dakkar Resort Hotel with stone balconies overlooking the little jewel harbor. At night, under the riotous Crimean stars, the few city lights glittered on the still water.

Nate and the WOLVERINEs sailed into Balaklava harbor at midnight, on a fifty-two-foot trunk-cabin cruiser with a dark-blue hull and graceful varnished topsides. The leased yacht with two crew from CIA’s Maritime Branch had departed from Varna, Romania, and in two days had navigated the three hundred nautical miles, out of sight of land, directly to Balaklava Bay on the placid Crimean coast of pine-covered peaks and rocky islets. The boat backed into an empty slip at the modest Golden Symbol Yacht Club, too late to check in with the authorities. The next morning, uninterested Ukrainian customs officers recorded the Polish alias passports of the passengers on a coast-wide holiday cruise. Instead of staying aboard the yacht, the passengers booked six rooms at the Dakkar Hotel and spent the rest of the day exploring the little town, climbing the hill to the castle ruins, and taking the organized tour of the underground submarine pens, now a museum. By the end of the day, they had satisfied themselves that there was no coverage of them by local police or regional security services. It had been a consideration that Nate—known by Moscow FSB as a CIA officer—technically was in Russian-controlled Crimea, but he was anonymous in the company of the team.

They ate at the crowded Café Argo, dipping crusty bread into vermillion Georgian beet-salad spread, squeezing lemons over shashlik, sizzling lamb kebabs sprinkled with wild oregano, chased by ice-cold Lvivski beers. The WOLVERINEs were watchful but at ease. Steady nerves, top pros. Nate tried to tamp down his anticipation, the edginess he always felt before an op. He saw Agnes looking at him from down the table, sensing his mood. Tomorrow they would go active, travel to Sevastopol, and break into the warehouse; DIVA had reported the address from Moscow. Nate and the WOLVERINEs had rehearsed how they would tag the crates with quick-plant beacons, and Nate saw how good they were. So good, in fact, that they expanded the original plan. He had bonded with the Poles during the two days of training—Witold and Ryszard, rigidly proper; brainy Jerzy, well, brainy; and gruff Piotr, a Polish version of Gable. Agnes had kept looking at Nate, categorizing him, sizing him up. Now in Balaklava, she appeared calm and collected; perhaps the only sign of pre-op nerves was her habit of twisting a strand of her thick hair around a finger.

An hour later, Nash stood on the darkened balcony of his hotel room before going to bed, looking at the black harbor and the starlight on the hills across the water. Dominika. He would see her soon, if nothing went wrong in the next two days. He played in his head what he would say to her in Istanbul. Gable would be hovering, watching them, his big sheepdog head turned into the wind, sniffing. Jesus, he wanted to hold Dominika in his arms, put his hands on her back, and pull her tight against him. If he did that, Gable would feed him to the lions.

He knew, just knew, however, that Dominika would fly into a rage if he fended her off; she had done so before. She was of the view that she could be a spy and still be in love with her CIA handler, whom she desired. And she did not sympathize one bit with his conundrum that his superiors disapproved of their doing what they both most wanted to do. She would see to it he was not fired. If they loved each other, that should be enough.

If you love me, then nothing else matters, Dominika had told him. Nate resented being in this situation, resented Benford looking over his shoulder all the time, resented Gable’s acuity, resented Dominika’s damn Russian incorrigibility. And tomorrow he and this team would break into a warehouse in broad daylight and futz with antipersonnel explosives designed to blow them up. Chill, what’s the matter with you? he thought. He heard his door latch click and turned to see a sliver of hallway light widen, then go dark again. Someone was in his room. FSB? Had he missed hostile coverage today? Breathe. Heartbeat up. Nate moved quietly off the balcony, reaching for the heavy glass ashtray on the side table. He smelled perfume and his stomach flipped. No way. Agnes came out of the shadow into the bar of starlight slanting across the room. She was wearing a baggy sleep shirt and was barefoot.

“The locks on these doors are ridiculously easy,” she said.

Nate swallowed. “Agnes, what are you doing? Are you all right?” He knew the answer.

“I always am a little nervous before an operation,” she said. “Aren’t you?”

“Nervous about what?” asked Nate.

“Well, not nervous, exactly,” said Agnes, running her fingers through her hair.

“What exactly?” said Nate.

“More like amorous,” she said.

“Amorous?”

“As in horny,” she said, stepping toward him. She touched his cheek.

“Agnes,” said Nate, “this is not a good idea. We have work tomorrow.”

“It will steady our nerves,” she said, trailing her hand down his chest.

“My nerves are fine,” said Nate. Her perfume was citrusy and made his head swim. She was exotic and primal. He could feel the heat of her hand through his shirt, and he felt dizzy. Benford, Gable, Domi, regulations, kicked out of CIA, separated from the Service, the citrus-and-musk bloom of this busty tuning fork named Agnes standing a foot away, breathing on him. His arms involuntarily moved a fraction; he knew that in three seconds he was going to twist his fingers in that mane of hair with the white forelock and crush their mouths together. He could see the rise and fall of her breasts under her shirt; the bottom hem vibrated as her body trembled. Three, two, one. Fuck. Stop. His hands stayed at his sides. Agnes took her hand off his chest, stepped back, and shook her hair.

“I’m thinking about the team, that’s all, about us doing this right,” said Nate.

“So I shall go?” Agnes said.

Nate took her hot hand in his. He didn’t want her to leave mad. The last thing they needed in hostile territory. “You’re incredibly beautiful and sexy. But don’t you think it’s not the right thing?”

“I think it is the right thing,” she said flatly. She turned and slipped out the door without a sound. Jesus, she’s furious.

Nate woke up an hour later, his room pitch-black, the smell of citrus in his nose again. He felt Agnes slip naked under the single sheet, mash her breasts against his chest, and swing a leg over his hip. He registered a soft wetness on his leg. Her skin was feverish, and she breathed into his ear. “I have changed my mind,” she said. The white streak in her hair fell across his face.

The bustling port city of Sevastopol simmered under the Crimean sun. Its eight scalloped inlet harbors were bordered by war memorial parks, pebbly public beaches, and elegant whitewashed mansions. Farther inland, high-rise apartment blocks were squeezed between thoroughfares clogged with traffic. In the largest of the harbors, Sevastopol Bay, were the massive concrete piers of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, a dozen bristling gray hulls moored stern-to. Sevastopol was twelve kilometers from little Balaklava, over the mountains. At noon, Nate and the WOLVERINEs took the Number 9 marshrutka bus from Balaklava harbor to the five-kilometer exchange outside Sevastopol, and then rode the Number 14 city bus to the Omega Beach stop at the bottom of Kruhla Bay. The route had been charted by Headquarters photoanalysts who had “walked” the entire twelve kilometers via digital satellite imagery. The small buses were crowded and Nate shared a seat with Agnes, who that morning looked as if she had ridden a long distance on horseback, which was not entirely inaccurate. As the others dozed in the hot, swaying bus, Agnes pushed her thigh against Nate’s.

“When do I meet your parents?” Agnes said in Russian.

Nate closed his eyes. “Agnes, stop kidding around.” He was experiencing remorse on two levels: Sleeping with Agnes—a member of the team that he was leading, with a sensitive job ahead—was reckless. Sleeping with her weeks before he was going to see Dominika was worse. It had been as if he were observing himself from an opposite corner of the room, unable to control events. Fuck, had he weakened maybe as a way of defying his scolding superiors? Maybe to create some space between him and Domi? Go ahead, he thought, rationalize your ass off. Agnes had been active and insistent, clapping her own hand across her mouth so as not to wake the whole hotel. Wet-lipped, she had held his face in her hands and whispered jestes taka sliczna, you are very beautiful in Polish, without Nate’s knowing what she had said.

Now she was the debauched older woman, with a morning-after glow, having fun. “I never told you I can bake,” she whispered. “What kind of cake do you like?”

“I’m not listening to you,” said Nate. Secretly he was amused and interested. This woman, from her early twenties, had risked everything fighting in the shadows for her country. She was second only to Witold in planning sessions, and it was obvious that he respected her. During training, Benford had once glowered at her, and she had glowered back, earning Benford’s grudging approval. Nate had seen hurt in her eyes only once, when Piotr had teased her about becoming an old maid. She was different, strong willed, and passionate.

“Oh, yes, I feel marvelous this morning,” she said, conversationally. “You’re quite a musician, do you know that?” she said. She pushed sweat-damp hair off the back of her neck and fanned herself with a piece of cardboard.

Nate shook his head. “Let’s concentrate on today. We’re not clear until we’re on the boat tonight and outside the twelve-mile limit.”

“Don’t worry, I’m ready. We are all ready,” Agnes said. She put her hand on his arm. “We will succeed, you will see.”

Nate did indeed see. From the Omega Beach stop, the team walked separately and casually down busy six-lane Mayachina Street, mingling with afternoon shoppers and citizens heading home. Three carried backpacks over their shoulders, the other three carried well-used zippered shopping totes seen in open-air markets. They maintained the same distances from each other that surveillance would take—in effect becoming their own countersurveillance. Halfway down the boulevard they peeled off into three pairs: the first crossed a vacant lot; the second walked through leafy courtyards between apartment blocks; the third ghosted down a dusty lane strewn with garbage. Besides hostile surveillance, they looked for druzhinniki, the pensioners sitting on stools in front of apartment blocks who were the unofficial neighborhood watch. Nate was in hyperdetection mode, senses alert, scanning, listening, smelling. Nothing. Maybe the citizens were all at the beach. Status: Black. Time check. Go.

They converged from three directions on the four gray-metal warehouses, standing in a row on a weed-choked cement apron. The traffic roar on Mayachina a block away was barely audible. The buildings were streaked with rust and the roofs sagged. Hand signals from the flankers indicated there was no one around. A bird chirped and a cricket zinged from the weeds. Nate squatted and took a breath. Too quiet? A thought of ambush flickered in his mind. Would the GRU leave munitions unguarded like this? He processed sounds and looked into the shadows under the far trees. All clear. Witold knelt beside him.

“What is it?” said Witold. The back of his shirt was wet.

“How does it feel to you?” said Nate.

“I know what you mean,” said Witold. “Doing this in daylight is not normal. But we need the light, and the buses stop at nine. The plan is solid.”

“Would they leave rockets and mines unattended?” said Nate.

“Do not forget, these are Russians,” said Witold. “This is the GRU engaged in an illegal operation; they will be determined to keep it secret, especially from the Ukrainian locals.”

“Alarms? Booby traps?” said Nate. DIVA had not reported anything, but she might not have been briefed on such details.

“Jerzy will check the door and look for motion sensors. They have not made the system he cannot defeat,” said Witold. “Ryszard will look out for trip wires.”

Nate signaled, and Jerzy knelt by the dented, tin side door, and ran his fingers around the edges, feeling for protrusions or gaps in the door that could indicate alarm heads on the other side. He shook his head. Nate nodded at Piotr, who picked the tarnished lock with a snake rake and torsion wrench in fifteen seconds, then eased the door open an inch while Jerzy again ran his fingers along the edges. Negative. Piotr eased the door open, leaned inside, then stuck his head back out and waved them forward. Nate clicked his fingers softly and the last pair came from the other side.

The interior of the warehouse was relatively small. A cracked concrete floor was powdery with fine gray dust. Rusty vertical steel beams set in the floor supported the latticework roof joists. “Watch footprints, handprints,” whispered Nate to Witold, pointing to the dusty floor. There were no windows along the walls, but milky light came from two bird-spotted skylights. An angular shape in the center of the warehouse was covered by a dark-green tarp. The crates.

“Don’t touch the tarp,” whispered Ryszard. “It could be wired to a pull fuze.”

Nate nodded. He started to walk around the covered mound, but Ryszard stopped him. “Shine your light along the floor,” he said.

Nate pointed his light—a 250 lumen NEBO SLYDE—in front of him. A double line appeared on the floor—an invisible trip wire and its shadow—running to the closest beam where a black box with a copper cone held by a metal arm was strapped. The cone was like a small megaphone and pointed at the tarp-covered pile.

“SM-70 antipersonnel device” whispered Ryszard. “Eighty tiny steel cubes, twenty-five meter kill zone; they used to put them on the frontier fences.”

“Can you defuse it?” said Nate.

“Have to leave it intact. They’d notice if we disarmed it,” said Ryszard. “We have to work in a live kill zone. Take our time. Don’t fixate on the trip wire. They want you to follow the line and miss a pressure plate concealed somewhere else. Booby trapping the booby trap.”

They slowly peeled the tarp off the crates. The trip wire from the SM-70 disappeared under the near crate. “Don’t lift or move that one,” said Ryszard, pointing.

There were a total of fifteen crates of unpainted pine, with hinged tops, stamped metal draw bolts, and folding metal handles at each end. There were no stenciled markings of any kind to indicate the contents. The lids and bottoms of each crate were reinforced by wooden skids, to facilitate stacking. Nate estimated that eight of the crates were about five feet long—they each looked like a coffin for a child—and would contain the RPG-18 Mukha launchers, and the separate propelled grenades. The remaining seven crates were square and deep with rope handles on the ends. Those would be the mines.

Nate and the WOLVERINEs started working silently, their movements coordinated and efficient. Normally a team of six would be too large for this sort of work, but now it meant they could work faster, dividing the tasks. Based on how well they had performed in training, it had been agreed that as well as beaconing the wooden crates, there would be time to render the mines and rockets inert. The black plastic PMN-4 blast mines, each the size of a holiday fruitcake, but only slightly less lethal, were sabotaged by lifting the plunger caps and snipping the points of the firing pins flush to the Belleville spring plungers. The snipped pins would never contact the detonators for each mine’s main charge of fifty-five grams of high-velocity RDX. The rocket-propelled grenades, nestled in wooden cradles six to a crate, were fixed by the simple expedient of trickling three drops of superglue into each detent hole to freeze the actuator to the secondary rocket motor that guided the round to its target. Surprised PKK gunners would now aim the launchers, pull the triggers, and gape at projectiles that farted out of the tube for three feet and rolled around on the sidewalk, harmless.

Agnes and Witold meanwhile had emptied the contents of the backpacks and laid them in a row on the floor. They were duplicate wooden skids that would be switched to replace the original cleats. Each new skid had been mortised and was filled with two beacons—one a short-range HAMMER proximity beacon, designed for use in dense urban environments, the other a QUICKHATCH geolocation beacon that reported long-range position via GPS satellite. With QUICKHATCH, you could follow a camel across the Sahara from a laptop in Manhattan. With great care, the original skids were unscrewed and the “hot” replacements were fastened in place with silent push screwdrivers. Agnes was a marvel, collecting discarded wood, counting tools, and ensuring the crates were left exactly as they found them by comparing photos she had taken with her cell phone at every stage of the operation. Once verified, the pics would be deleted.

The afternoon sun was dimming, and Nate looked at his watch. He didn’t want to work by flashlight. Witold saw him, smiled, and mouthed “five minutes more.” Nate took a cautious walk around outside, still worried by the prospect of a trap not yet sprung, but the zone around the warehouse was clear, nothing moved. He went back inside and Agnes was waiting near the door, out of earshot of the other WOLVERINEs.

“We are almost finished,” she said, smiling. “Everything went smoothly.”

Nate nodded. “You guys do good work,” said Nate. “Forsyth thinks your team is the best, and so do I.”

Agnes smoothed her hair. “Do you think we leave tonight or tomorrow?” she asked.

“If we get back at a reasonable hour, there’s no reason not to leave tonight, as if we’re taking a moonlight cruise,” said Nate.

“I just wondered if we’d be in the hotel another night,” said Agnes, looking at him with her gray eyes.

“Oh, no,” said Nate, shaking his head. “Don’t start, Agnes.”

“That little boat will be cramped with all of us aboard, no privacy.”

Nate tried to imagine Agnes naked in a narrow upper berth with Piotr snoring in the lower rack. “I thought the start of an operation made you feel this way,” said Nate. “It’s over; we’re finished.”

“Sometimes before a mission, sometimes after,” she said, sighing. “Sometimes during.”

Nate reached out and took her hand. “What am I going to do with you?” he said.

She squeezed his hand. “Do I have to tell you, or can you guess?”

The WOLVERINEs finished their work, leaving the pile of crates as they found them and draping the tarp exactly as it had been, according to digital photos Agnes had taken of the warehouse interior before they started. They blew smudgy footprints away, and raised a cloud of dust that evenly coated crates, tarp, and floor as before. Nate checked Agnes’s photos to verify the scene—she stood close to him, holding the camera, the heat from her body palpable—and they backed out and watched Jerzy relock the door and wipe surfaces clean, not that the Russians would be dusting for prints considering the haphazard way they had cached the munitions.

The swaying bus ride back to Balaklava through the Crimean dusk seemed to take longer. Nate listened for sirens and the sound of motorcycles coming up from behind, and he strained to focus far ahead, at the curves, looking for the striped sawhorses of a roadblock, cars angled across the road. Nothing.

They stayed below to reduce the profile as the cruiser slowly moved away from the pier, down the harbor, past the sea buoy, and into open water. It was night now, the horizon to the west still a little light, the blackness to the east and south impenetrable. The crew signaled Nate when they had gone twelve miles, outside Putin’s territorial waters, and Piotr opened a bottle of Sliwowica, and they stood close together on the afterdeck and drank under the stars. Agnes contrived to bump shoulders with Nate as Ryszard sang “Hej Sokoly,” “Hey Falcons,” from the Polish-Soviet war. The cruiser rolled in the gentle sea swell.

Phase one finished, thought Nate, two and three coming up. Istanbul. Gable. Dominika.