who would be thronging the district’s streets and restaurants. “What’s my cover as this John Martin character?” he asked.
“Ostensibly, you’re a pharmaceuticals salesman spending a few days in Berlin after attending a sales conference,” Klein told him. “Think you’ll have any problems fitting into that?”
“Nope,” Smith said confidentlv. “There’s just one more thing for now.”
“Go ahead.”
“I have an image to scan and send you,” Smith said. “A picture of the guy who murdered Valentin Petrenko and who tried to kill me twice. He’s dead now, but his photo might be worth running through various databases.”
“Quite probably, Colonel,” Klein said drily. “Very well. Send it along.
We’ll be standing by.”
Near the Russo-Georgian Border
The isolated town of Alagir sits at the northern end of the Ardon Valley, deep in the rugged foothills of the Caucasus Mountains. Roughly seventy kilometers to the south lies the snow-choked, nine-thousand-foot-high Roki Pass into the disputed Georgian territory of South Ossetia. The mountains themselves, jagged masses of stone, snow, and ice that gleamed palely beneath a rising moon, climb in a solid wall across the entire southern horizon.
Bright arc lights flared across the Alagir railroad yard, turning the black night into an eerie, sharp-edged mimicry of day. Sweating despite the freezing cold, Russian combat engineers clad in winter-pattern camouflage uniforms swarmed around the long freight train crowding the yard. They worked in teams, quickly unchaining the tarpaulin-shrouded shapes of T-72 tanks, self-propelled 122mm howitzers, and wheeled BTR-90 and tracked BMP-2 infantry fighting vehicles that were bolted onto flat cars behind the train’s three powerful locomotives.
Other troops worked fast to guide the newly unloaded armored vehicles onto ramps leading to a long row of enormous flatbed trucks. These were specialized tank transporters, which would ferry them farther up the cliff-lined valley. Vehicles fitted with snowplows and salt and sand dispensers waited at the head of the convoy, ready to lead the heavily laden trucks up the winding, ice-covered roads into the mountains.
Bundled in his own greatcoat, Colonel-General Vasily Sevalkin, commander of Russia’s Northern Caucasus Military District, stood near his staff car. watching the operation with undisguised satisfaction. He checked his watch and then raised a single gloved hand to signal one of his subordinates, an engineer officer.
The engineer major hurried over, snapped to attention, and saluted.
“Well?” Sevalkin asked.
“We will be finished here in less than an hour, sir,” the major reported crisply.
“Very good,” Sevalkin murmured, pleased to hear his own estimate confirmed. This new convoy of tanks, self-propelled guns, and infantry carriers would be long gone from Alagir before the next American satellite pass. And the freight train itself, now loaded with prefabricated decoy vehicles, would be plainly visible moving through the rail junction near Beslan ? to all appearances only another routine shipment of militarv equipment to the Russian forces fighting Chechen rebels west of here.
The Russian general smiled thinly. Soon he would have the arms, ammunition, and men of two full-strength motor-rifle divisions, the 27th Guards and the 56th, securely hidden within striking range of the small Republic of Georgia. Although both divisions were largely equipped with older, second-line tanks and other military hardware, their weapons were far superior to anything that could be mustered by the rag-tag Georgian armed forces just across the border.
With a casual wave, Sevalkin dismissed the major back to his duties and climbed into his car. “Take me to the forward HQ at Vladikavkaz,” he told his driver. Then he sat back against the seat, pondering the likely events of the next several days and weeks. His orders from Moscow for this top-secret deployment claimed it was only a “special mobility and readiness exercise.” The general snorted softly. Only a fool would believe the Kremlin really intended so large a movement of troops and equipment?nearly forty thousand men and more than a thousand armored fighting vehicles ?as a simple field maneuver. Certainly not in the middle of the notoriously harsh Caucasian mountain winter, with its howling winds, subzero temperatures, and blinding snowstorms.
No, Sevalkin thought, Dudarev and the others had to be planning something bold, some decisive action that would rock the world back on its heels in wonder. May it come soon, he decided grimly. For too long now, he and others like him had watched in depressed silence while Russia’s strength and influence faded, diminishing with every passing vear. But soon that would all change. When the orders were at last issued to begin restoring his country to its rightful place on the world stage, he and the soldiers under his command would be ready to do their duty.
Chapter Nine
Sam Castilla sat at the big ranch-style table made of New Mexico pine that served as his desk, briskly working his way through more than a dozen, multi-page legislative and policy analysis papers marked Urgent. Even with a top-notch White House staff serving as a filter, the amount of paperwork that required his personal attention was staggering. He scrawled a few quick comments on one memo and then turned immediately to the next. His eyes, neck, and shoulders all ached.
One corner of his mouth twisted upward in a wry grin. It was the age-old problem of the presidency. Delegate too much power and responsibility and you wound up derided by the press as a “caretaker chief executive” or tangled up in some damned foolish scandal sparked by overeager subordinates. Try to exercise too much control and you found yourself drowning in a sea of mean-ingless memoranda better handled by a junior clerk?or wasting precious time setting the daily schedule of the White House tennis courts, like poor Jimmy Carter. The trick was to find the right balance. The dilemma was that the right balance was always shifting.
There was a soft rap on the open door of the Oval Office.
Castilla took off his titanium-frame reading glasses. He rubbed briefly at his tired eyes and then looked up. “Yes?”
His executive secretary stood in the doorway. “It’s nearly six o’clock, Mr.
President. And Mr. Klein is here,” she said pointedly, not bothering to hide the look of disapproval on her waspish face. “I’ve put him in your private study, just as you asked.”
Castilla hid a smile. Ms. Pike, his long-suffering personal assistant, took her role as the dragon guarding his schedule seriously?very seriously. She made no secret of the fact that she thought he worked too long, exercised too little, and allowed his limited free time to be wasted by far too many political cronies presuming on old friendships. Like the rest of the White House staff, she was not privy to the Covert-One secret. That was his burden alone. And so, not knowing how else to classify Fred Klein, she lumped the pale, long-nosed spy chief in with the rest of the “good-time Charlie” time-wasters.
“Thank you, Estelle,” he said gravely.
“The First Lady is expecting you for dinner in the residence tonight,” she reminded him sharply. “Promptly at seven.”
Castilla nodded with a slow, easy grin. “Never fear. You can tell Cassie that I’ll be there come hell or high water.”
Estelle Pike sniffed. “I certainly hope so, sir.”
Castilla waited until she left. His smile faded. Then he rose quickly from behind his big desk and strode across the Oval Office to the adjoining study. It was filled with comfortable furniture and crowded bookcases. Like his den upstairs in the White House family quarters, this small room was one of the few that fully reflected his own tastes. A balding, medium-tall man in a rumpled blue suit stood next to the fireplace, admiring one of the several paintings of the Old West hanging on the study’s walls. He held a battered leather briefcase in one hand.
Hearing the door open, Nathaniel Frederick Klein turned away from his contemplation of a Remington original on loan from the National Gallery. It showed a small, ragged, and weary U.S. Cavalry patrol making a last stand around a dried-up desert waterhole, desperately firing their single-shot, black powder Springfield carbines from behind a rough barricade of their dead horses.
