Deep Black (27 page)

57

Alexsandr Kurakin studied his suit in the full-length mirror, examining the way his cuffs fell, adjusting and readjusting
his tie. Then he leaned forward, making sure that his thick hair was precisely in place. If he was vain about anything connected
to his appearance, it was his hair, still admirably thick at fifty-eight. He found a few errant strands and worked them into
place with his fingers.

As a young man, Kurakin had been fairly handsome. Now he was perhaps “more distinguished than pretty”—to use the words of
an Italian magazine that had profiled him recently—but he could still cut a charismatic figure on television.

He would prove so once again this evening. By then, this suit would be stained, most likely with blood. His hair would be
disheveled. But everything would be accomplished.

Not everything, not nearly. The Americans would be angry about losing their spy satellites, even though Perovskaya and his
aborted coup would be blamed. Kurakin would face reprisals, even after persuading the American president that it was Perovskaya’s
plan all along. There would be a storm, certainly; the only question was how severe.

The Russian congress—well, they would rage furiously, but they were already impotent, and in assuming martial law he would
depose them anyway. The military would fall behind him, following the initial confusion. The units that had been moved on
Perovskaya’s authority would, unfortunately, suffer some consequences—but then, their leaders were not particularly loyal
to begin with, which was why he had chosen them. Another storm, but only a brief one.

And then, the deluge. But under his control. Martial law would sweep away the obstacles. First, the rebels in the south would
be dealt with. The Chinese would stand aside or be punished severely. They would see this and probably not even have to be
threatened.

He needed a military victory to seal his position, and so defeating the rebels—or at least plausibly claiming to—was critical.
And then, quickly, perhaps even simultaneously, the next step. The forces that had made Russia a chaotic asylum for thieves,
gangsters, and lunatics would be crushed without mercy. The criminals would be dealt with summarily. Russian society would
be restored.

After that? Democracy? Too far in the future to tell.

He had hopes. He was still an optimist at heart, an old believer.

Kurakin stepped back from the mirror. There was a knock on the door—his bodyguards. It was time.

58

Johnny Bib kept twenty-three voices in his head. Exactly twenty-three. Twenty-three was a beautiful number, a prime with mystical
qualities and associations. There were twenty-three ages of man, twenty-three major rules of life, twenty-three important
places in the world. Eleven was a good number, and seventeen, and as far as his personal preferences went, Johnny had always
felt something for 103. But twenty-three was sublime.

One of the voices told him now that he was wrong about the coup. He heard it quite clearly as Rubens and the CIA people on
the conference call debated whether the movements they had observed meant the coup was under way or still in its preparatory
stages. Clearly, as Rubens argued, it was the latter; the intercepts made that clear. Johnny was about to cite the statistics
to back up his superior when the voice broke into his thoughts and told him he was wrong.

He was shocked. Rarely did he get anything wrong. He sat silently in his seat and waited for an explanation, but the voice
did not offer one.

Where was the error?

The voice didn’t say.

“Where was it?” Johnny asked.

Realizing he’d spoken out loud, he glanced up immediately, looking to see if anyone had noticed. He could not tell anyone
about the voices, since they would not understand, Rubens especially; they would think him more than usually eccentric, even
for the NSA.

Every pore in Johnny’s body opened. Sweat flooded into his clothes. His shirt was so wet he glanced down to make sure the
pinstripes weren’t bleeding into his skin.

But no one seemed to have noticed.

“Latest, Johnny?” asked Rubens.

“I—”

“You mentioned a possible time window for the attempt on Kurakin, based on the driving distances and one of the intercepted
schedules.”

Rubens was prompting him. Johnny liked Rubens; he was one of his few intellectual equals at the agency and obviously was trying
to help him now.

He couldn’t let Rubens make a mistake.

“It’s wrong,” said Johnny finally.

“What?” said Rubens.

“Wrong.”

“Perovskaya, the defense minister—you had new information about him?” asked Rubens.

Johnny nodded his head, though he wasn’t covered by a video camera and no one could see him. The intercepts seemed to point
to Perovskaya. He was in contact with three of the obviously rebelling military units. There was additional traffic, not yet
decrypted, between his secretary and two other units, as well as an order from his office to a key Moscow infantry unit allowing
extra leave. Johnny had told Rubens all of this before the secure conference call.

Wrong, said the voice again.

Where?

The voice wouldn’t respond.

“Johnny, are you with us?” asked Rubens.

Johnny began to nod.

“OK,” said Rubens. “Keep at it. Brott, any updates on the Air Force?”

Johnny listened for a few seconds to the force analysis, then abruptly took off his headset and left the Art Room. He had
to find his error, with or without the voice’s help.

59

The first thing Dean noticed about the CIA officers was that they smelled like they hadn’t taken showers in about a month.
They were dressed almost identically in dark blue suits. Creases checkered the clothes like bizarre spiderwebs. Both seemed
to have tried shaving a day or so ago, with mixed results.

Using an apartment several blocks from the Kremlin as a command post, the two men were coordinating eight surveillance teams
trying to find an assassin believed to be targeting Russian president Alexsandr Kurakin. Two of the teams were currently inside
the Kremlin.

Dean shared the common Western misperception that the Kremlin was a single building; in fact, it was a complex of roughly
ninety acres that included a number of Russian government buildings as well as old cathedrals and ancient palaces, many of
which were open to tourists. The president’s office, formerly in the Senate, had been moved the year before to the Arsenal,
displacing the Kremlin guards; it was off-limits and equipped with a variety of devices to disrupt surveillance and eavesdropping,
including a copper skin inside the president’s suite that made it almost impossible to place a conventional bug or fly there.

Nonetheless, the CIA could track Kurakin’s position to within a few feet, even within his office suite, by using a variety
of sensors, both preplaced and handheld. (“Handheld” simply meant that the devices were mobile and placed into position for
a specific task; in this case it included a van’s worth of equipment that homed in on microwave frequencies.) The NSA had
penetrated the computer that kept the president’s appointments calendar, which was not in code or cipher. But knowing where
he was and would go was not the same as being able to protect him. While it was not difficult to get inside the Kremlin, getting
close to the Russian president was at least as hard as it would be to get close to the American president.

“We’ll know when they get him. That’s the only thing I guarantee,” said the officer-in-charge, Al Austin. He had flaming red
hair and a sardonic, almost demonic, laugh. His breath smelled of coffee that had been made a week before and continually
reheated. “They want us to catch his bullet. It’s a friggin’ joke.”

Austin was exaggerating his assignment for sarcastic effect, but not by much. They were to detect any “actual physical threat”
against Kurakin and pass the information back to the Art Room, from which it would then go to the White House and back to
Kurakin.

“Why don’t we just have the post office mail him a letter?” said Dan Foreman, the other agent. He was bent over a laptop screen
on the floor; three other CPUs were piled nearby. Four twenty-inch flat screens and one that had to be at least thirty-six
inches were arranged on a low table against the wall. The large one showed a grid map with position markers on it; the others
had a variety of data and, in one case, a video image. A satellite dish sat next to the window, nestled among thick cables
that ran to the roof above.

“How do we know they want to kill him?” asked Dean.

“We don’t,” said Austin. “Who’re you?”

Dean told him he was on temporary assignment for the NSA and had been shanghaied.

“Welcome to the friggin’ club,” said Austin. “We’ll have a little ceremony later where we prick our thumbs and mix our blood.”

“If I were going to kill the president, I’d use a Secret Service agent,” said Dean.

“No shit,” said Freeman. “But if you have a way of infiltrating Kurakin’s bodyguards, let us know. We’ve tried. Believe me.
Bastards won’t even have a drink.”

“They’re almost all related to him. The two who are with him all the time are cousins he grew up with,” said Lia. “I doubt
they’d give him up.”

“Nah. Anybody’s going to kill him, they’ll
Oswald
him,” said Austin.

“Meaning what?” asked Dean.

“Sniper. Oswald—Lee Harvey. Get it?” Austin shook his head. “Jeez, Lia, your boyfriend’s slow.”

“I thought she was queer,” said Foreman.

“That’s just what she told you to get you off her back,” said Austin. “Probably the nicest letdown you ever got.”

“What’s the intelligence on the sniper?” asked Lia.

“Intelligence? There is none,” said Austin. “Talk to your friggin’ boss. This is his show.”

“We can check his route, places he’s going to be,” said Dean.

“I see the agency continues to maintain its high IQ standards,” said Austin. “How high can you count, Charlie Dean?”

“He uses both hands, which is twice as many as you do,” said Lia.

“Yeah, one of ’em’s always occupied,” said Foreman.

“I used to be a sniper,” said Dean.

“Yeah, I once studied law,” said Austin. “Look, Lia, you guys want to help, spell Foreman on the sit map, OK? He needs some
sleep. I do, too.”

“I hadn’t realized you were a couple,” she said.

“You’re just sharper than a pickax today,” said Austin. “Excuse me while I take a shower.”

The grid map on the large CIA flat screen was a dedicated locator map tracking the Russian president and IDing, when possible,
those around him. The information was correlated from a number of inputs that were being routed into a satellite in geosynchronous
orbit and then downloaded into a pair of satellite dishes the size of television receivers on the roof. Under other circumstances
the information would have been sent to the CIA “bunker” inside the Moscow embassy, but since the Russians knew about the
bunker it was likely they would take steps to isolate it when the coup started.

The Russians also knew about the satellite, and so there were two contingency plans in case its transmissions were blocked.
One involved an elaborate routing system through secondary satellites and telephone lines; the other, even more desperate,
called for a special balloon launch from the Zamoskvoreche district. The fact that the balloon would fly over the Church of
the Resurrection added nothing to the odds in favor of success.

Additional signal intelligence interpretation was being handled back in Crypto City and provided on an as-needed basis.

“All we have to worry about is what happens outside the Kremlin,” she told Dean. “Inside is moot—unless we’re part of his
security team we’ll never be close enough to detect something before it happens.”

“So we look for the sniper.”

“Yes,” she told Dean. “They already have.”

“You think they know what they’re doing?”

Her answer was to pound the keyboard of one of the laptops. A map of the city appeared with several dotted lines in yellow.

“He has a meeting at the new Education Building down here at two P.M. These are his likely routes. After that, he’s supposed
to go to a senior citizen housing project for a dedication. He’ll be there at five.”

“What’s it look like?” asked Dean.

She pounded the keys again. A 3-D view appeared on the screen. Dean leaned down to look at it, brushing lightly against her
arm. She didn’t react; neither did he.

“That would be a pretty good place for an ambush,” he said.

“Where would the sniper be?”

“I’d have to see it in person.”

“Let’s go there,” said Lia.

“I thought we were going to watch their gear.”

“Bullshit on that. I guarantee they’ve had more sleep in the past forty-eight hours than we’ve had in a week.” She went to
the door of the bathroom, listening for a moment before pushing in. Dean, who was standing behind her, saw Austin sitting
naked on the toilet bowl.

“Hey!” he said.

“We’re going to check the housing site for snipers. We’ll be back.”

“Shit!”

“Yeah, I can smell it from here.”

60

Malachi had flight control of the second plane in the two-plane element, wingman to Train’s lead. They flew a sucked echelon,
a formation that had Malachi’s F-47C riding a sixty-degree angle off Train’s tail. Their altitudes were offset as well; Malachi
tracked 5,000 feet higher than Train, who was at 35,000 feet. Their indicated airspeed was pegged at 580 knots, a bit under
Mach 1.

The two MiGs approached from the southwest at high speed. According to the RWR, they hadn’t spotted the two Birds—but they
had a perfect intercept plotted out.

Interesting coincidence.

“We’ll bracket,” said Train.

“Roger that.”

“Intercept in zero ninety seconds.”

“Roger that.”

Malachi leaned forward in his seat, heart thumping so loudly it could have set the beat for Fat Joe. Their formation was aggressive—arguably
too aggressive for manned fighters since it limited defensive maneuvering and made it easier to cull off one of the fighters,
usually the wingman. But the unmanned planes were designed to be aggressive. The formation allowed them to concentrate their
attack in a variety of ways, most of which a pilot in a teen jet—an F-15, for example—would have salivated over.

The top screen of Malachi’s cockpit area showed the enemy planes coming toward them, rendering them as red double triangles.
The screen had a yellow bar and letters at the top, telling the pilot that his Sidewinder AIM-9 M missiles were ready. Just
as in a “real” plane, the all-aspect Sidewinder would growl when it sniffed the MiG in the air ahead. Either Whacker or the
pilot could make the call on when to fire the missile; in this case it was Malachi’s decision.

Malachi felt the muscles in his forearm and fingers starting to freeze on him. He glanced sideways toward Train and for some
reason was reassured by the veteran pilot’s quizzical stare.

“Break,” said Train.

Malachi leaned on his stick a little too hard, then got befuddled by the transmission delays. The plane dropped two thousand
feet as he backed off, and now he started to fall behind it—the nose of the small robot pointed too far east, then too far
west as he found himself wallowing through the turn. He was a far better pilot than this—far better—but he lost his concentration
and then his target; if it weren’t for the dedicated sitrep or bird’s-eye-view screen sitting between the two flying stations,
he might have lost himself as well.

He wasn’t that far from where he was supposed to be. He started to nudge back on the stick, and the enemy plane came across
the top edge of his screen. The Sidewinder growled, but Malachi hesitated. The target pipper included a distance-to- target
reading that told him he was 3.5 miles away, which was at the far end of the Sidewinder’s range.

He was gaining on the MiG. If he could hold off a few seconds he’d have him.

“Fire Fox Two,” Train called his shot on the lead plane. Fox Two was a heat-seeking missile.

Train added something else, but Malachi lost it as the MiG he was attacking jerked to his right, aware that he was being hunted.
Malachi went to follow but lost the MiG as it started a series of zigging turns—though it was extremely maneuverable, the
slight time lag in the control system made it impossible for the F-47 to stay with the MiG. Instead, Malachi backed off his
throttle, waiting for the MiG to commit to a real turn. That was stock MiG strategy—use his plane’s extreme maneuverability
to cut inside his pursuer, ending up behind him in what would have looked like a swirling ribbon if the movements were painted
on the sky.

Rather than following him, Malachi would aim at the point where he came out of the turn, hoping to nail him there. A larger
plane, of course, would never be able to make that sharp a cut. The MiG moved left, then right, then left, committing itself.
Malachi went for the gas—“Fire Fox Two,” said Train.

A second later, the lead plane’s missile flashed into the side of Malachi’s screen and merged with the tailpipe of the other
plane.

“Splash two MiGs,” said Riddler from the back.

“Fuck,” said Malachi as the screen blanked. The simulation over, he put his head over the back of the seat.

“You took way too long,” said Train, who had swiveled to the side.

Malachi nodded. “Yeah.”

“You had trouble on the bracket,” said Whacker. “You went at it too hot and you got sucked into a pursuit. There’s too much
lag in the controls. That second is a killer. Use your missiles. You could even have launched the AIM-9 when the MiG first
started to cut. At that point I think you would have gotten him.”

“He would have gone to flares and stuff.”

“Yeah, but you would’ve had a shot.”

“I sucked,” admitted Malachi. “I got the jitters when we picked them up.”

Train stood up. “All right, guys. Take five. Germany should be ready for us soon. You OK, Reese?”

“Yup.”

Train had the option of flying both planes in a combat intercept; the computer would actually take the wingman position, following
a prescribed routine based on Train’s movements as well as those of the bandits and a tactical library. But Malachi had shown
a million times that he could beat the computer.

A million times in simulations, that is.

“Malachi, you all right?”

“Major, I’m kick-ass OK,” he said. “Just need a quick kick from Speedball and I’m set.”

“Speedball?”

“Music group,” said Malachi, taking the MP3 player from his pocket. “Only on break. I promise.”