Scorpion: A Covert Ops Novel (Second Edition) (22 page)

After a couple
minutes, Aleksa got her breathing under control. She raised her window and
wrapped her arms around herself. She shivered and stared vacantly through the
windshield, through the wipers, at the street ahead. Avery knew she would have
nightmares about this moment for the rest of her life. Christ, this was the
last thing he needed to deal with now. He turned on the heat full blast for her.

“Where are we
going?” Aleksa finally asked.

“We’ll stay at
the Sputnik tonight and figure something out from there. Do the Belarusian
authorities know you were staying with Yuri?”

“No. I falsified
my visa application and contact form.”

 “Good. If we’re
lucky, we won’t have the police and KGB looking for you once they discover
Yuri’s body. Those guys back there were mafiya”

“We should leave
Belarus immediately,” Aleksa said.

“And go where? It
might not be safe for you to go back to Russia either.”

“I have friends
in the West, Russian expatriates.”

“You do what you
need to do, but I’m not leaving yet.”

“Why not? Are
you crazy?”

“I can’t leave
now. I need to track the HEU shipment. If we lose track of it, there’s going to
be a lot bigger problems for everyone.”

 “I don’t
understand. Can’t you go to your embassy?”

“Not exactly,”
Avery said. If he went to the embassy, the chief of station would be more
interested in what Avery was doing on his turf than he would be in the HEU
delivery.

Near the city
center, after making a thorough dry clean run, Avery abandoned the Siena. They
walked a couple blocks before hailing a cab to take them the rest of the way to
the Sputnik. There, they walked around to the rear stairwell door. When he’d
left earlier, Avery had stuck a doorstop in the doorway to prevent the door from
locking behind him, and they went inside and proceeded to his room, undetected
by the hotel staff.

Avery proceeded
cautiously into the room, and then carefully examined it, making sure
everything was exactly how he’d left it and that there were no signs of
visitors while he was away.

Aleksa took a
long shower and changed into clean clothing, while Avery made her hot tea.

“You should try
to get some sleep,” he told her. He sat at the little desk with the Glock and
spare magazines laid out in front of him. “I’ll keep watch.”

She looked at
him as if he’d just sprouted a third eye. “How can I possibly sleep after what
happened?”

“Then don’t.” Avery
shrugged. He wasn’t going to worry about it. “Tell me how Yuri knew about the
uranium deal.”

“He had a source
in Belarus’s Institute for Power and Nuclear Research, in Sosny. This man
mentioned to Yuri the deal with Russia, and Yuri had him press for more
information. We were supposed to see this man tomorrow morning. He thinks he
may have details on the flight schedule by then. I know the delivery will be
soon. This afternoon, a GlobeEx Ilyushin arrived from Moscow. That’s the
official aircraft that will deliver the uranium to Russia. Litvin is going to
split the stockpile and divert a portion to Tajikistan. I’ve checked flight
records, and there’s also an outbound GlobeEx jet to Ayni tomorrow.”

“We need to see
this man as soon as possible. Do you have any way of contacting him? If these
people have Yuri’s laptop and phone, they may identify his sources and track
them down.”

“Yuri arranged
the contact,” Aleksa said. “There’s nothing I can do, and no way for me to
reach him. Besides, Yuri was careful about protecting his sources. I don’t believe
he’d save names in his files.”

“Let’s hope not,”
Avery replied. They would have to take the risk and show up at the meet
tomorrow. “So what’s your story? Why are you doing all this? There must be
easier ways to make a living in Russia.”

Avery asked
because he was genuinely curious, and he also wanted her to talk and focus on something
other than the attack and Yuri’s corpse.

Aleksa Denisova
was thirty-four years old. Estonian by birth, she was from Perm, in what was
then called the Russian Federative Soviet Republic, where her grandparents had
emigrated to shortly after World War II.

She’d never wed
and had no children. Her only time for men had been during her time at university.
After that, the few men who attempted courtship were quickly put off by her
constant travelling and the demands of her work, not to mention the numerous
death threats she received from gangsters. She maintained only a small, trusted
circle of people she called friends. She’d devoted most of the last decade of
her life, the time when others found spouses and started families, to her work.
She didn’t strive for fame and success, but she was driven and dedicated and
possessed a sense of purpose that had been instilled in her early in life.

Her father had
been a Red Army officer. She’d never really gotten to know him. In 1987, when
Aleksa was barely five years old, an American-supplied Stinger missile brought
down his helicopter in Afghanistan. A few handwritten letters to her from her
father and photographs of him—always in uniform—were all that she had left of
him. Her memories of him were only the distant memories of a young child and
perpetually faded and grew hazier through the passage of time.

Nine years later,
Aleksa’s older brother, was conscripted into the army of the new Russian
Federation and ambushed by Chechen separatists while on patrol in Grozny. He
was pulled out of his burning armored vehicle and decapitated. Her brother came
to her mind with greater clarity than their dad. As was often the case with
siblings, they’d played together as children and fought with one another in
their teenage years. A day didn’t go by where she didn’t think of him and
wonder where he would be now and what type of man he might have become.

Her mother died
a year later of alcohol poisoning, from an extreme intake of vodka over a three
day binge, leaving twenty year old Aleksa, who was then preparing to go to
university abroad, completely alone in the world.

Aleksa left
Russia the first chance she got and studied journalism and writing at the
University of Buckingham in Britain. Shortly after graduation, she went to work
for Reuters, taking assignments in the former Soviet republics. She returned to
Russia in 2008 when Boris Gorshkov, a well-known Russian opposition journalist
and her closest friend, started his own newspaper investigating corruption at
the highest levels of the Russian Federation. In the process the paper made
powerful enemies, including corrupt government officials, oligarchs, and organized
crime bosses.

Two years ago,
Boris Gorshkov was killed in an alley behind a Moscow bar. He was shot three
times in the head at close range. There had been neither signs of a struggle
nor a search of his body, and his wallet and personal belongings were all left
untouched. But local police classified the crime as a mugging. A Moscow Militia
lieutenant later sought out Aleksa and told her, on condition of anonymity,
that an FSB captain had pressured the militia lieutenant’s department into not
pursuing the investigation and that FSB was to take over as a matter of state
security.

Boris’ younger
brother, Grigory, took over as editor-in-chief of the paper, which has since
gone mostly digital. Aleksa remained onboard as its chief national
correspondent. She still thought of Boris constantly. She’d held onto this
idealistic notion of finding his killer and seeing him brought to justice, but
as years passed, that seemed increasingly unlikely.

Like Boris,
Aleksa too had been the victim of a supposed mugging. Less than a year after
his death, she was ambushed outside her apartment by two men. They beat her and
put her in the hospital with a concussion, broken nose, three broken ribs, and
a head wound requiring seven stitches. She has found her apartment burglarized
and wired for audio surveillance and had her laptop computer, with all of her
files, stolen. Her e-mail accounts have been hacked. She’s found her name
placed on terrorist no-fly watch lists, and she’s received anonymous death
threats.

It was the risks
that came with engaging in the practice of independent journalism in Russia.

Within the last
year alone, there had been over forty assaults against Russian journalists. Ten
were murdered. Each of them had covered corruption from the lowest to highest levels
of the Russian government. An oligarch bribing government officials for gas
contracts. A company owned by a mayor’s brother removing trees in a local
forest to build new roads. Only when an incident is widely publicized by
international media will the police investigate. A few hit men with mafia
connections have been arrested, but never the people at the top who contracted
the hit men. New legislation with safeguards to protect journalists is proposed
but never passed by the Duma.

Aleksa and her
colleagues were now banned from government press conferences. Public affairs
departments from government agencies were prohibited from speaking to anyone
from her organization and other banned news services. The FSB formed a special
unit to investigate and catch government employees providing information to
reporters in an effort to dry up their sources.

European
newspapers and television networks continued to offer Aleksa positions and
frequently turned to her as a source inside Russia. They offered Aleksa her
choice of assignments and competitive salary, but she continued to decline. She
held no idealistic delusions about her work and changing Russia. She never
regarded herself as an activist or liberal crusader, but she would maintain
that above all else she was a loyal friend.  

She stayed in
Russia only for Boris and the others, and continued the work they had believed
in and died for. She thought to do otherwise was to turn her back on them and
abandon them simply because it became convenient and safer to do so. She
thought that perhaps she would accept a job with the BBC or
The
International Herald Tribune
and move west and find a man only after Boris
Gorshkov’s killers were identified, prosecuted, and sentenced.

“What about you,
Nick? Is that even your name?”

“Yeah.”

But no one ever
called him that. Through school, the army, and the Agency, he’d always just
been Avery.

He gave Aleksa
the condensed version and explained how his mother had died when he was
seven—he never really knew her—and he joined the army immediately after high
school, to get away from his abusive, alcoholic father. He never saw his dad
since. After three years in the army, he passed Ranger selection.

When she pressed
him about relationships, he told Aleksa about how in Afghanistan, waiting to
assault an al-Qaeda stronghold, he’d received a letter from his fiancé—a girl
he’d known since high school—calling off the wedding and ending their
relationship. She’d met someone else, a med student with a condo, BMW, high
earning potential, and who was there for her. Avery hated her and never spoke
to her again.

 After three
tours in Afghanistan and one in Iraq, he left the army to work as an
independent security contractor. He omitted the part about CIA, but he thought Aleksa
was smart enough to have it figured out.

It was a strange
conversation, because it was the first time in years he’d spoken to anyone, let
alone a woman, about himself. He didn’t like the feeling of opening up to someone,
and he already regretted this conversation, but at least it kept her mind off
what happened tonight and seemed to calm her down.

“Thank you,
Nick.”

Aleksa was in the
bed, under the blanket. Avery still sat at the desk, five feet away.

“For what?”

“What do you
think? For everything you did tonight. Just for being there.”

Fuck
. “Try to get
some sleep.”

Belarus’s Institute for Power and
Nuclear Research is located in Sosny, a suburb about twenty miles outside of
Minsk. This is where Belarus housed its first nuclear reactor, which was shut
down after the Cold War and was no longer operational. With help from Russia
and Iran, Lukashenko intended to re-start the reactor and build nuclear power
plants. The first reactor, currently under construction, is supposed to go
online in 2016, the second in 2018. Western intelligence agencies had little
doubt that the plants will be used to develop bombs and allow Belarus to
re-claim its status as a nuclear power. Belarus, with a small inventory of
SS-25 Topol missiles they hadn’t returned to Russia after the Cold War, already
possessed a delivery system for warheads.

Avery thought
that within a couple years, it’d be the North Korean nuclear crisis all over
again, this time in Europe. At least by then, he’d be too old to be doing this
shit any longer.

Avery and Aleksa
arrived in Sosny at 10:00AM in a rental car, a Volvo he’d picked up at the airport.
He drove this time, wanting to be the one behind the wheel in case a situation
arose requiring tactical defensive driving. He’d left her alone at the hotel
when he picked up the car. She’d insisted on going with him, but if the mafiya
used their connections to have the police and KGB looking for her, the airport
was the last place she should be.

When he returned
for her at the hotel, two hours later, he found her curled up in a ball on the
floor, behind the bed, sobbing and shaking, but she thankfully snapped out of
it quickly, overcome with relief when she saw him, as if she hadn’t expected
him to come back at all. She was still shaken up from what had happened last
night, barely twelve hours ago, and she hadn’t slept well, waking up every hour
or two from vivid nightmares reliving the attack. Avery didn’t tell her that
she’d probably be messed up for a long time and would probably need
professional help to deal with it. Once, in her sleep, she was badly shaking
and crying out, and Avery had to gently wake her up and calm her down.

Avery would be
relieved when they parted ways.

Other than the
first time he saw someone die violently, a buddy in the army, Avery had never
reacted that way toward violence again. After Mike Gomez bled out in Avery’s
arms, aboard a Black Hawk, Avery had simply decided that this wasn’t something
he wanted to deal with, and he put up brick walls in his mind and secured
everything behind it. He just hoped the walls stayed intact.

Yuri’s contact
was a nuclear technician named Vasil Romanchuk. Fifty-six years old, a
functioning alcoholic, his time at the research facility went back to the Cold
War days. He’d helped Yuri, coming forward with what he knew of the uranium
transfer, only because he’d become increasingly suspicious that he was being
set up to take the blame. If anything went wrong with the HEU deal, or word of
it became public, he suspected the KGB would show up at his home to arrest him
for selling weapons grade material to the Krasnaya Mafiya. Then he’d probably
be killed quietly in prison, and the Belarusian government would have covered
up its involvement in the affair.

The institute
itself was a sprawling complex consisting of several low-laying compounds and
two silos occupying a large plot of land with clean, freshly paved streets and
lush, well-maintained lawn. There was a heavier uniformed police presence
around the premises, Avery observed as he drove south on Mullovsoye Road, along
the northeastern length of the facility’s perimeter, surveying the target along
the way.

“That building
is where the HEU is stored,” Aleksa said. She pointed to a large warehouse
sitting behind a high fence, with a guard booth and barrier at the street
entrance. Avery could make out a uniformed security officer checking the
credentials of a car that had just pulled up.

“Where are you
supposed to meet the contact?” Avery asked.

Aleksa directed
him to a street café three blocks away. There were other restaurants and stores
nearby, and she said that it was an area where staff and students from the
nuclear institute regularly came on their breaks, and there’d be nothing
suspicious about Romanchuk leaving work to come here.

 “What’s the
contact look like?”

“He’s short,
overweight, bald, and has a mustache and glasses. And he’s always pale, because
he rarely sees the sun. He’s either inside here working or at home drinking until
he passes out.”

“I’m going to take
a walk and have a look around. Litvin’s thugs or the police may be looking out
for you, and we don’t know if Yuri compromised the meet before he died.”

Avery didn’t
need to mention that Yuri’s killers would have tortured him and put him through
hell before finally killing him. He had to assume that the Ukrainian reporter
had revealed everything he knew.

“But Vasil
doesn’t know you,” Aleksa protested. “He’ll never talk to you. You’ll scare him
off. Besides, he doesn’t speak English.”

“I’m only going
to check for surveillance and see if he’s even here,” Avery said. “If he is,
and it’s clear, I’ll come get you, and you’ll talk to him.”

“You can’t
accompany me. He’ll already be suspicious and paranoid because Yuri’s not
here.  I can’t walk in with a stranger.”

“I’m not going
inside,” Avery assured her, trying to hide his impatience. “I’m going to stay
outside and keep an eye on things while you take care of business, okay? Tell
him whatever bullshit you need to about Yuri, just get him to talk.”

“I can do that.”

“Are you sure?”
Avery pulled over four blocks from the meet site. He put the car in park and
turned to face Aleksa. He doubted her readiness to go into a potentially
dangerous situation alone. “If you’re not, tell me now.”

The comment had
the desired effect. Her expression hardened. “I said I can do it.”

Avery left it at
that and got out of the car. Aleksa slipped behind the wheel and watched him
walk away. He carried his Glock beneath his windbreaker this time. If they were
ambushed again, he wanted to be prepared. If the enemy did send someone else
after them, they’d have more guys and guns this time. They only survived last
time because the mafiya killers had been expecting Aleksa to be alone, and they
made the dangerous assumption that she’d be an easy hit. But now they knew she
was accompanied by someone who could put up a fight.

It was 10:25AM,
thirty five minutes before the meet. Vasil Romanchuk always took a break at
this time, Aleksa had explained, but usually at a different restaurant. He
switched locations when meeting with Aleksa and Yuri, because he knew the KGB
and security would be familiar with his normal daily routines and patterns, and
most personnel at a sensitive facility like the Institute for Power and Nuclear
Research would warrant a close watch by the KGB.

Avery first executed
a rudimentary surveillance detection run, covering the distance to the meet
site and doubling back to cover his tracks. It came up dry, but, by necessity,
it had been a rush job, plus he wasn’t familiar with the area to do a proper
job of it.

He soon made his
way back around to the café. This time, when he walked past, he spotted a fat
man fitting the contact’s description sitting at a table alone. Avery crossed
the street, called Aleksa on her cell phone, and told her to proceed to the
meet with Romanchuk.  

A minute later,
he spotted Aleksa parking across the street from the café. As she got out of
the Volvo and walked down the sidewalk toward the café, Avery’s eyes never
rested, taking in every face and vehicle nearby and assessing what they were
doing and their threat level. A lot of passing eyes gazed over Aleksa, but
Avery easily attributed that to the attention any reasonably attractive woman
received from males.

As Aleksa entered
the café and sat down across from the fat man—Avery could just barely see them
from across the street through the front window of the café—he returned to the Volvo,
got behind the wheel, keyed the ignition, and continued watching and waiting,
his muscles clenched tight and the hairs on the back of his neck stood out. He
didn’t know why he was so on edge, but he trusted his instincts to tell him
when something was wrong, and they were screaming at him to grab Aleksa and get
the hell away from here. 

 Barely four
minutes later, a police car pulled up near the café and rolled to a stop. Two
officers got out and went inside. Nothing unusual, Avery told himself, but he
tensed when he saw a second police cruiser drive past. The officer riding
shotgun eyed Avery as they passed him. Avery looked straight ahead until the
cruiser was gone, then observed it in his rearview corner as it turned the
corner.  

Aleksa finally
emerged from the café at 11:13AM. As she headed for the Volvo, Avery watched
closely, expecting police or mafiya to intercept her and throw her into the
back of a car. If it was the former, there wouldn’t be much he could do about
it other than put distance between himself, and hope that his passport wasn’t
flagged so he could get out of Belarus. If it was the latter, he could follow
them and possibly even take action. But if he smoked a cop, even a corrupt one,
there’d be a nation-wide manhunt for him.

But nothing
happened. There was no intercept or ambush.

As Aleksa slid
into the passenger seat, Avery became aware of someone watching them, and as he
shifted into drive, he locked onto the pudgy face of Vasil Romanchuk as the
Belarusian exited the café. Romanchuk watched them, and then looked away when
he caught Avery’s glare and continued walking, while his hand pulled a cell
phone from his pants pocket.

“How’d it go?” Avery
asked, merging into traffic.

“They’re
removing the uranium from Sosny today at noon. GlobeEx trucks will be here
shortly, and the police will escort them to the airport.”

Avery did
another sweep for surveillance—it was becoming an obsessive habit now—and took
them back onto Mullovsoye Road. He stopped along the shoulder from a point
where they had a clear view of the storage facility, a hundred yards away,
across the wide expanse of grass. There was little traffic on the two lane road,
but just in case, Avery popped the hood, and got out of the car. He stood over
the engine block, pretending to check for problems. Aleksa remained inside.
They both stared across the grassy field at the storage site.

Ten minutes
later, during which time only three other vehicles had passed them on the road,
Avery saw a large, eighteen-wheeler tractor-trailer truck stop in front of the
barrier at the guard post. It was escorted by police cars. Even from here, he
recognized the colors and design of the GlobeEx Transport logo on the truck’s
trailer. The driver climbed down from the cab as the uniformed security officer
stepped out of his booth. The driver showed the officer some papers, and the
guard consulted a clipboard, flipping pages. Then they parted ways, and the
officer raised the barrier and waved the truck through. Another officer
signaled with his hands and directed the truck to the storage compound’s
loading dock area. The driver turned his truck around and slowly backed the
trailer into the dock.

Although
confirming what Aleksa had said and what they already suspected, Avery knew
there was nothing he could do about what he was seeing. Maybe follow the truck
to the airport and witness them load portions of the HEU onto a flight not
bound for Mayak. Then he could get the hell out of Belarus and report
everything back to Culler and start thinking about how he’d catch up with
Cramer again.

He didn’t know
what Aleksa was going to do next, and he kept telling himself that it really
wasn’t his problem and not to think about it. She seemed intent and capable of
taking care of herself, anyway. But the thought still lingered in his mind. He
supposed he’d at least offer to help get her out of the country. Culler could
pull some strings, if Avery persisted. He knew she’d decline, but at least he’d
have done his part to placate his conscience.

Another vehicle
approached from the south. It was something big from the sound of it, and the
low, steady rumble of the engine intruded upon Avery’s thoughts. Avery stuck
his head out from under the open hood and saw a shiny gray SUV approaching,
about a quarter mile away in their lane. Sunlight shimmered off the tinted
windows. After several seconds, Avery averted his glare back to the storage
site across the field. There were a number of figures, men in uniforms, milling
about outside the storage site now.

Soon the sound
of the oncoming engine picked up from a steady, guttural hum to an aggressive
roar, and Avery snapped his head back around with his internal threat detectors
lighting up like a fighter pilot’s heads-up display.

The vehicle was
a Dartz Kombat, a bulky, wide Russian-made SUV with a V8 Vortec engine capable
of doing a hundred plus miles hour. Right now, Avery figured it was topping fifty,
and the driver turned the wheel and steered straight for the parked Volvo.
Avery started to react, shouted out to Aleksa, when he heard an identical
engine coming from behind, the driver gunning it.

 Avery’s hand
reached beneath his windbreaker and went for the Glock, for all the good that
would do. He took a step back just as the oncoming Kombat slammed straight into
the Volvo, plowing through the driver side fender, and continued accelerating,
pushing the much smaller vehicle off the road and down the slight slope onto
the grass. There was the ear splitting shatter and screech of metal grinding
against metal. Before the Volvo flipped over, Avery caught a glimpse behind the
cracked windshield of Aleksa rocked forward and caught against her seatbelt
while air bags deployed, exploding around her.