The Fall of Moscow Station (32 page)

The adrenaline surge cleared her mind and her vision. She ran across the hallway to the equipment room, threw the door open, grabbed for the satellite phone, and began stabbing at the keypad. The call connected, encrypted, and she heard an American accent for the first time in days.

“Operator.”

“This is site GRANITE,” Kyra announced. “I have reason to believe this location will be raided within the hour. All remaining equipment and papers will be sanitized and I am evacuating.”

“Roger, copy that,” the male voice on the other end said. “To which other site will you evac?”

Kyra sucked in a deep breath. “None of them. All sites in this area have been compromised.”

The man on the other end was professional enough to keep his thoughts to himself about that. “Copy that, all sites in your immediate area compromised. Are you requesting evac from the country?”

“Negative. I'm heading for the embassy.”

“Copy that, good luck and stay safe.” The operator disconnected the call.

Kyra pulled the crypto card from the phone and stuffed it in her pocket. Breaking down the sat phone and its antenna took her less than a minute. That job done, she sat down in front of the classified computer and launched the program that would wipe the hard drive. The machine made her confirm twice that she really wanted the program to execute. She told it yes both times and the machine obediently began to overwrite every file on the system.

The file-deletion utility reported that it needed ten minutes to chew up all of the encrypted data on the hard drive.

Ten minutes.
It had been almost forty-five minutes since the anonymous Russian had called. She looked out the windows toward the main road, saw nothing. Kyra pulled the chair to the window, sat down, and stared out, waiting for the enemy to come. The watch on her wrist showed the seconds passing by more slowly than she had ever thought possible.

•  •  •

The hard-drive utility reported that it had finished its work on time, which Kyra thought was no small miracle. She powered the machine down, pulled the removable hard drive from its chassis, and fed it and the sat phone's crypto card into the industrial shredder in the storage closet connected to the room. The sounds of grinding metal were, at once, the most hideous and beautiful noise Kyra had ever heard as the shredder turned the drive platters into shavings. The shredder finished dining on the storage device and the card, and Kyra powered it down.

She ran for the garage.

•  •  •

It truly was an enormous house by Russian standards, and if it was a CIA safe house, Anton Semyonovich Sokolov could not fathom why the Americans had chosen it. The gates and fence provided no true security from the security forces, as the Spetsnaz had just proven by climbing the iron spikes, and the relative wealth on display could only draw attention. Perhaps the Agency had expected that to deflect suspicion, a daring move in a mind game that had stretched on for decades. Or, perhaps, some mindless bureaucrat had simply had money to burn. Whatever the logic, Lavrov's source had rendered it moot and cut through the illusions that had kept the building secure.

The sun was behind the trees and the house itself cast a long shadow that reached to the gate, giving the Spetsnaz a dark trail to follow as they ran across the lawn, carbines raised. There was no obvious movement inside the house itself, which was mostly dark. There was a light visible on the upper floor and one in the kitchen, but the rest of the windows were black. The size of the building itself had required every man at his disposal for the raid and two dozen, four teams, were moving into position to enter the house, the rest positioned on the ground to catch anyone who tried to run.

“All teams in position,” the team leader called out over the radio.

Sokolov frowned. “No response from inside?”

“
Nyet
, Colonel.”

The GRU officer scanned the compound, then looked through his field glasses at the house itself. The light inside let him see into a room on the upper story, and some secondary illumination cast a glow into one of the front rooms on the main level, but there was no movement anywhere. He pursed his lips. Something was amiss, he was sure, but he could not see it.

“Proceed,” he said, finally giving the order.

•  •  •

At the front, the team leader nodded to the officer heading the stack of four positioned by the door. The lead man nodded, drew back with the heavy sledge in his hands, and slammed the breaching tool forward into the knob. The door shuddered, but held fast. The man pulled back and swung the sledge again, this time battering it against the middle hinge. The door shook again but stayed fixed in place.

“Front door is reinforced,” the team leader reported, speaking into the microphone clipped to his uniform.

“Rear entry is reinforced,” his radio announced. The team behind the house was having no better luck.

“Side entry is reinforced.” A different voice this time, same report.

“Garage door breached, garage entry to the house is reinforced and door is secured with a keypad.”

•  •  •

So it
is
a safe house
, Sokolov told himself.
Or the owner is very paranoid. Probably a criminal who should be arrested anyway.
He raised his field glasses. Still, there was no movement inside the house.

“All teams, proceed with ballistic breach—”

“This is team four,” Sokolov's radio announced. “The doorframe of the garage entry is reinforced with heavy metal. Hinges are nonstandard. Ballistic breaching round likely will not penetrate. Permission to perform explosive breach.”

Sokolov's eyebrows went up. The teams all had specialized breaching rounds that vaporized on impact to protect the shooters and teams from ricochet. “Team four, is solid slug an option?”

“
Nyet.
The first slug almost certainly would not penetrate, and likely would ricochet. I would prefer not to risk that, given that we are standing in an enclosed space.”

Sokolov's eyebrows went up at that news. They had not run into this particular problem at any of the other reported safe houses. Those had all had wooden doors, solid oak to be sure, but nothing the men hadn't been able to breach with sledges or shotguns. The specialized shotgun rounds were preferable, as a solid slug fired point-blank from a twelve-gauge shotgun could overpenetrate a door, blowing through the wood and killing a suspect on the other side. That assumed the door was even composed of wood. Someone willing to install a hardened metal doorframe likely would not use a wooden door. The entry likely was a metal plate covered with wood veneer. His teams were trained to fire two rounds at a knob, three at a hinge, just to be sure the chosen weak point of the door was destroyed. Fired into a metal door, those rounds might go in every direction but into the house itself.

Armored against a ballistic breach? Someone is paranoid indeed
, he thought. A metal door suggested that they had found one of the Main Enemy's primary facilities outside his embassy. “All teams, prepare for explosive breach at your discretion,” he ordered through his own mic.

•  •  •

The team leader in the mudroom pulled a flexible linear charge from his pack. Doing the math in his head, he began to run lines of detonation cord the length of the door, top to bottom by the hinges. One line would have taken apart a hollow door, two would tear apart anything made from particleboard, and three could cut through solid wood. Not knowing how thick the metal core at the door's center might be, he opted to tape six lines onto the barrier. If that failed, getting through the door would require a specialist to cut through the door with a plasma torch. His team would have to resign itself to guarding the room and preventing any escape while the other teams swept the house.

He ordered his men out of the mudroom, attached the blasting cap, and connected the firing line.

•  •  •

The team leader at the front door nodded to the stack lead and the line of men while he pulled a two-inch-square block of Semtex from his pack. He fastened the putty brick to the doorknob with a loop of detonation cord connected to the explosive with uli knots. Loose ends of detcord hung down and he tied them into a square knot. He tied in the blasting cap and connected his own firing line, then fell back to his own safe position. Then he tied the detcord line into the fuse initiator.

“First team, breaching charge in place. Standing by to breach.” The other teams reported back within seconds, their own charges fixed and ready to fire.

“Go,” Sokolov ordered.

•  •  •

The team leader ripped the cotter pin from the initiator, a hard, sharp pull.

The detcord ignited, followed by the Semtex, and flames and smoke exploded from the door, with simultaneous eruptions coming from the rear and side of the house. The explosion inside the garage was deafening and the team leader out front hoped that his counterpart hadn't miscalculated the explosive required. Overloaded breaching charges had deafened more than one soldier performing such duties.

The front door slammed open and the stack of soldiers rushed forward, carbines raised. They entered the house, pushing through the gray haze—

•  •  •

The stack leader felt the pressure wave of the igniting gasoline before he smelled it. The room went up in an instant, flames spreading across the floors and walls in every direction. He saw lines of flame travel out of the room into the kitchen, the hallway, the library, faster than he could move.

A large glass jar, sealed with a lid and filled with a colored gelatin, sat in the middle of the room, the flames not quite touching it.

“Fall back!” he ordered. “All teams! Evacuate the building
now
!”

His stack turned and filed out as fast as they could move. The team leader still on the porch jumped the railing and ran with them across the lawn toward Sokolov's position.

•  •  •

Inside the front room, the glass jar heated enough to ignite the napalm inside. The makeshift bomb exploded, glass and burning jellied gasoline spreading out to fill the room in a fraction of a second. Identical explosives went off in the kitchen and by the rear and side doors.

The gas trails Kyra had laid down led the open flames to every other room in the house, where the napalm she'd spread across the walls and floors lit off, each starting a small inferno. On the second floor, the gas fumes that had collected since her departure ignited, sending a mild fireball through the upper floor, igniting the napalm puddles and everything else flammable they touched.

With less than a minute, the funeral pyre for Moscow Station was burning against the dusk, smoke rising high enough to be seen from the Kremlin.

•  •  •

A mile away, Kyra lay prone in a copse on a small knoll, looking at the abandoned estate through her own field glasses. The building was nothing more than a house-shaped flame with men in tactical gear standing at a safe distance, helpless to do anything but watch the immolation.

One man was dressed in civilian clothes, a business suit and overcoat, no hat, and speaking into a phone. She could not make out his features from this distance, but his profile was different enough that she could tell that it wasn't Lavrov. She'd hoped he would be here to see the safe house burn in person, but she was sure that he'd get the message all the same.

She pushed herself up to standing and walked back to the Tiguan. She tossed the field glasses inside, crawled in, started the engine, and drove across the green field between her and the road, not caring if the soldiers in the distance could hear the engine.

CIA Operations Center

The exact moment of the excited phone call had been a surprise, but the call itself was not. Barron entered the bullpen, his eyes immediately drawn to the array of monitors that covered the front wall. At the moment, they were mated together to display a single image, in this case a live video feed from an orbiting satellite controlled by the National Reconnaissance Office.

Barron stopped and smiled when he saw the image. Everyone in the room stared at the head of the Directorate of Operations, unable to fathom why anyone should be happy to watch an Agency facility burn so early in the morning.

The senior duty officer sidled over to his superior. “You seem very chipper for a man who's watching a very expensive safe house go up in flames.”

“Better torched than in the hands of the GRU,” he said.

Kyra's safe house

Sokolov stepped inside the charred remains of the safe house. Spetsnaz officers in tactical vests and balaclavas were still sweeping the gutted structure, Bison SMG carbines and Makarov pistols raised to eye level. They would be thorough, but Sokolov had no doubt that there was nothing to find. There had been no cars in the garage, no lights, no signs of life, but Lavrov's information had again proven correct. This had been a CIA safe house. The incendiary traps had erased any doubts he'd had about that.

The sweep took less than ten minutes to complete. “Nothing to recover?” Sokolov asked.

“Nyet”
was the answer. The Spetsnaz team leader pulled his black hood back over his head and away from his face. “Any specialized equipment or papers have been destroyed. We found the remains of an industrial shredder on the second level and its wastebin in the cellar next to a furnace. There was one computer in the same area with the shredder, but its hard drive is missing, probably fed into the shredder. Any papers were probably shredded and burned before the house went up. We will recover nothing.”

“They knew we were coming.”

The Spetsnaz leader looked around, thought, and nodded. “They used gasoline as an accelerant, possibly other chemicals as well,” he said. “Our own breaching charges ignited the fires.”