Ghost Force (4 page)

“I just hope the nation is bloody grateful, that’s all,” he said as he walked in the sunlight toward the blue-painted seat by the pond where he always met Leonid Suchov, perhaps the most brilliant double agent the West ever had.

He smiled when he thought of Lenny. A stocky little bear of a man, who walked lightly on the balls of his feet, Lenny hardly ever stopped smiling, and would slide a knife between your ribs as soon as look at you. Which was the principal reason he was still alive and not buried somewhere in the bowels of Lubyanka. Even Lenny had lost count of the KGB agents he had somehow eluded. Or worse.

Lenny was Rumanian by birth, but lost both of his parents, schoolteachers in Bucharest, when he was twelve. Typecast as dissidents, they were grabbed by KGB thugs and never seen again. Lenny, however, had a major talent to go with his profound hatred of the Communist Party, Moscow, the Iron Curtain, and everything to do with that monstrous regime.

Lenny was a champion wrestler. Never quite good enough to win an Olympic medal himself, he became a world-class coach and was part of the team that helped steer the great Vasile Andrei to the Greco-Roman heavyweight gold medal for Rumania at the Los Angeles Games in 1984.

For aficionados, the name Andrei still brings curt, knowing nods of respect. In each of his four bouts in L.A., the mighty Rumanian defeated his opponent in less than four and a half minutes, an almost unprecedented feat of strength and skill.

And Lenny was right there heading up the coaching squad. The only difference was, the others went home to Rumania, whereas Lenny Suchov was spirited out of the Olympic village and then flown in a United States Navy helicopter to Vandenberg Air Force Base north of Santa Barbara, and thence to Washington.

His disappearance was of course a huge embarrassment to the Rumanian Olympic authorities, and exquisitely so to staff members of the KGB, who had recruited Leonid many years before as a full-fledged spy, passing information directly from any Western city in which the Rumanian wrestling team competed.

They were not, of course, to know the jolly little wrestling giant, with the handshake like a mechanical digger, had been working diligently on behalf of the CIA for twenty years. And his eminence in Rumanian and Soviet sports circles afforded him untold privileges at the tables of the most powerful party officials behind the Iron Curtain.

He inflicted untold damage on all the Eastern European secret po
lice services, exposing their agents, their networks, their radio bands, codes, addresses, and phone numbers to the CIA field chiefs. He was directly responsible for at least fifty assassinations conducted by the CIA in those brutal days of the Cold War.

And to each victim he drank a silent toast to Emile and Anna Suchov, his far-lost parents. And no one ever suspected him. As a matter of fact, neither the Soviets nor the Rumanians suspected him, even after he had defected in Los Angeles.

They even issued a statement confirming that Leonid Suchov had left the Rumanian Olympic organization in order to marry an American and take up a private coaching career with one of the major American universities. They expressed their gratitude for all that he had done, and wished him well in the future.

Meanwhile, back at CIA headquarters the beloved wrestling coach from Bucharest was installed as deputy head of the Russian desk, at one of the biggest salaries ever paid to a former agent.

And here he was at last, moving swiftly around the pond, light on his feet, a big smile of greeting across his swarthy features.

Christ, he still walks like a pooftah,
thought Jimmy.
But I’d bloody hate to remind him.

“Jimmy Ramshawe! Where you been?” Lenny’s smile lit up the entire memorial garden.

“Stuck at that factory in Maryland,” he replied. “Trying to earn an honest living.”

“There’s no honesty in our line of business,” said the Rumanian. “You know that. I know that. We just gotta stay cheerful, hah?”

Jimmy grinned. “By the way, my dad sends his best,” he said, producing the first white lie of the day. Admiral Ramshawe was very fond of Lenny, having known him for several years, since the Sydney Olympics, when both men were official guests of the Australian government, Lenny for infinitely more sinister reasons than Ramshawe senior.

“Okay, Jimmy, now you tell me what you need. As if I don’t know. You wanna talk about the late Mikhallo Masorin, right?”

“How the hell did you know?”

“Mostly because I guess by now you have worked out the Russians took him out, not the Americans, eh?”

“How do you know that?”

“Jimmy…this is my business. You didn’t believe that heart attack nonsense, did you? Right at the beginning?”

“Well, no. But only because Admiral Morgan told me he didn’t believe it either.”

“Phew! That Admiral. He’s something, right? Doesn’t miss a trick.”

“Really, Lenny, I’ve come to ask if you have any idea why they wanted him dead?”

“They’ve wanted him dead for months and months, Jimmy. I’m surprised he lived so long.”

“You are?”

“Of course. To them he is one of the most dangerous men in the entire country, a perceived enemy of the state, a threat to the Moscow government.”

“You mean some kind of a traitor?”

“No. Some kind of a patriot…come on, let’s walk for a while. I don’t like static conversations. Someone might be listening.”

Both men stood up and walked slowly to the edge of the pond. “Jimmy, do you have any idea how important the oil industry is to Russia?”

“Well, I know it’s pretty big.”

“Jimmy, Russia holds the world’s largest natural gas reserves, and it’s the second largest oil exporter on Earth. Only Saudi Arabia can pump more crude onto the world market. The World Bank thinks Russia’s oil and gas sector accounts for twenty-five percent of GDP while employing only one percent of the population. Russia has proven oil reserves of more than sixty billion barrels. That’s three million a day for sixty years.”

“Beautiful. But what’s that got to do with poor old Mikhallo being hit by a poisoned dart from a bloody blowpipe?”

“Everything. Because darn near every barrel of that oil is in Siberia. And old Mikhallo is effectively the boss of the western end of Siberia where nearly all of it is. In the West Siberian Basin just east of the Urals, that’s Mikhallo’s land.

“And out there they think he’s God, and he’s sick to death of the enormous taxation levied by Moscow on what he calls
his
people’s oil. He’s sick of Moscow, period. And he’s sick of the price gouging, the
way Moscow wants all the oil cheap, cheaper, and cheapest. Worse yet, the major oil companies and the other political leaders in Siberia also thought Masorin was God.

“And Russia lives in fear that a man like him will one day rise up and take it all away, and the country will collapse economically. And remember, Siberia has another ready market right on their doorstep, China. And Beijing will pay much more generously for the product. Moscow faces ruin if these Siberian bosses, both oil and political, cannot be brought into line.”

“Lenny, those are what you might call bloody high stakes.”

“Jimmy, those are the highest stakes on this planet. And I’m assuming you understand the pipeline problems?”

“Not really, but I guess they have a pretty damn big one pumping all that oil over the biggest land mass in the world.”

“It’s a truly colossal system, Jim. The biggest in the world. The Southern Druzhba—that’s the export line west of Moscow—runs oil right across the Ukraine, north into Prague, and southwest across Hungary and Croatia to the Adriatic oil port of Omisa. The same system branches to Odessa on the Black Sea and the Caspian.

“There is a branch farther north, the Baltic Pipeline System, running oil to the ports of Butinge and the new tanker terminal at Primorsk on the Gulf of Finland. Siberian oil flows everywhere, across Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

“And the new northern pipeline all the way to the new terminal at Murmansk up on the Barents Sea is one of the engineering marvels of the modern world. Right out of the West Siberian Basin, it’s over twelve hundred miles long through terrible country, mountains and marshes, ice fields, and shocking climate.”

“And then some bloody upstart threatens to turn the tap off, right?”

“You always had a way with words, young Ramshawe.” Lenny grinned. “But you’re right. Some bastard suddenly threatened to turn the tap off. Mikhallo may not have been absolutely serious, but Moscow has no sense of humor at the best of times.”

“And didn’t I read somewhere about the row over the Far Eastern pipeline?”

“You sure did. The key to that is the Siberian city of Angarsk—
that’s a place on Lake Baikal to the north of Mongolia. It used to be the end of the oil pipeline, but then they extended it, right around the lake for twenty-five hundred miles to the Siberian port of Nakhodka on the Sea of Japan, and a new market, okay?”

“Gottit,” said Jimmy. “More big profits for Moscow, right?”

“Right. But somewhat sneakily, the East Siberian government moved ahead with a fifteen-hundred-mile new pipeline directly into the inland Chinese oil city of Daqing. The Chinese built and paid for a huge length of it, and the Siberians pretended it was all part of the general expansion of the Russian oil industry. But if push came to shove, we know who would control, and service, that particular stretch of pipeline.

“The fact is the Siberians now have a direct line into one of China’s comparatively rare, but extremely well organized, oil complexes, with excellent pipelines to transport the product everywhere. And China will take damn near all the oil it can get its hands on. And they’ll pay the price. That scares Moscow.”

Lt. Commander Ramshawe was thoughtful. “I suppose,” he said slowly, “it’s kind of a natural marriage. China’s got a zillion people and hardly any resources, Siberia’s got a zillion resources and no people.”

“Precisely so,” replied Lenny Suchov. “And no one knows quite what would happen if the Siberians, who would most certainly have been led by the brilliant but dead Mikhallo Masorin, declared autonomy from Moscow, and elected to go their own way. Russia would be virtually powerless. You can’t fight a modern war in a place that big. And anyway Russia does not have the resources for that kind of operation.

“Siberia could shut down the oil for a while, and get along just fine. Moscow, and Russia with it, would perish. You still wonder why Mr. Masorin is no longer alive?”

“I sure as hell don’t. In fact it’s a bloody miracle he lasted so long.”

“Considering the mind-set of his enemies, that is exactly so,” said Lenny. “Moscow could easily negotiate a better deal for Siberia and make everyone happy. But the Russian government is no good at that. They see a problem and instantly try to smash it. Kicking down the door, even if it’s unlocked.”

“And what will happen now?”

“Who knows? But I imagine there is seething anger in Siberia. They will have guessed what happened to their leader, and I imagine they will begin to level huge demands on Moscow. Always with the unspoken threat…
whose oil is it anyway, and do we need interference from Central Government in Moscow?

“They will surely point out that all the other independent states from the old communist block are thriving, why not us?
And we’re biggger than all the rest put together, including yourselves.”

“Jesus. Moscow will not love that,” said Jimmy, unnecessarily.

“No, Jimmy, they will not. They most certainly will not.”

The two men continued their slow walk around the memorial garden, in silence. Eventually Lenny said, “Have you finished with me? We just took delivery of some surveillance film from the White House. There was a camera on that dinner and we might just see who delivered the fateful attack on Mr. Masorin.”

“Probably just one of their goons,” said Jimmy. “And it’s dollars to doughnuts he’s safely tucked up in bed in Moscow by now.”

“I agree. But we may recognize him. Or I may. And we’ll slip his name into one of our little black books, hah?”

“Yeah, I guess so. But thanks, Lenny, for the geopolitical lesson. It’s bloody unbelievable how much trouble the oil industry causes, eh?”

“Especially since it’s mostly owned by despots, hooligans, and villains…”

Jimmy chuckled, and then, almost miraculously, his guide from the Russian desk arrived to walk him back to the parking lot.

“Bye, Lenny, stay in touch.”

And Jimmy watched the double agent from Bucharest, on little spring-heeled steps, still smiling as he made his way back into one of the most secretive buildings on Earth.

0800 (LOCAL), MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 20
WESTERN SIBERIA

Winter had arrived early on the great marshy plains above the oil fields. And the road up to Noyabrsk was already becoming treacherous. Two
hours out of the industrial oil town of Surgut, heading north, a mere four hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle, the huge articulated truck from the OJSC oil giant had its windshield wipers flailing against the vicious snow flurries that would soon turn the ice-bound landscape milk white.

Temperatures had crashed during the night and the great wheels of the truck thundered over ice crystals already forming on the highway. In the passenger seat, Jaan Valuev, President of the OJSC Surgutneftegas Corporation, sat grimly staring into the desolate emptiness ahead, clutching his arctic mittens.