When the light vanished, Jon and Fiona exchanged horrified glances. Neither of them had any real hope that Kirov could have survived the murderous ambush and crash they had just witnessed.
Brandt waited until the two Americans turned away in sorrow. Still holding his pistol on Smith, he picked up the radio mike. “Fadayev? This is Brandt.
We’re finished here. Listen, get back in your car and come up the hill after us.
I want you to investigate the wreckage of that jeep and to retrieve any documents carried by the driver. See if you can learn the name of the man we just killed. Understand?”
A flat, emotionless voice crackled back across the radio. “I understand.”
Brandt nodded. “Good. When you’re finished, report back to Group headquarters in Moscow. The rest of us will proceed to the monastery.”
He listened for the sniper’s acknowledgment and then signed off.
Tie gray-eyed man looked across the seat at Smith and Fiona. He shrugged. “So much for your friend.” Then he smiled coldly. “And soon we can begin the painful process of finding out just who employs you and how much you have already told them ? “
PART FOUR
Chapter Thirty-Six
The wide boulevards and narrow alleys of Baku, the largest and most sophisticated city in the Caucasus region, stretched for miles along the shore of the Caspian Sea. As billions of euros and dollars poured in to finance new oil and natural gas ventures, Baku was more than ever a city of striking contrasts. It was both a bustling, prosperous twenty-first-century boomtown of glittering steel-and-glass skyscrapers, and also an ancient metropolis of mosques, royal palaces, and bazaars set amid a maze of shaded cobblestone lanes.
On a hill rising just outside the walls of the Old City lay the ugly concrete building that housed Azerbaijan’s president and his staff. Scowling Azeri soldiers patrolled the surrounding streets, making sure that visiting oil company representatives and curious tourists looking for the nearby Baku Philhar-monic and the state art museums kept moving along.
Deep inside the Presidential Administration building, one of the household staff emerged from a central elevator. He was pushing a heavy cart piled high with covered dishes. Troubled by what appeared to be a threatening buildup of Russian troops in neighboring Dagestan, the republic’s Defense Council was meeting in emergency session. As the night wore on, the generals and government ministers had ordered food sent in from the kitchen.
Two hard-eyed men in dark suits stepped forward. “Security,” one said. showing an identity card. “We’ll take that from here. Only authorized personnel go any farther.”
The waiter shrugged wearily. “Just make sure you get their orders right,” he said, handing over a sheet showing the meals requested by each member of the Defense Council. Yawning, he turned back into the elevator.
Once the doors closed, one of the security service officers quickly lifted the lids of the dishes on the cart, comparing them with the list now held in his hand. He stopped once he found the bowl ofpiti, a stew of mutton, chickpeas, fat, and saffron. He turned to his comrade. “This one,” he said quietly.
“Looks delicious,” the other man said with a quick, cynical grin.
“So it does,” the first man agreed. He glanced swiftly up and down the corridor to make sure no one was looking. Satisfied, he took a vial out of his pocket and stirred the liquid it contained into the stew. The vial went back into his coat pocket while his colleague slowly trundled the cart up the corridor. Another HYDRA variant was moving toward its chosen target.
The outlook of those sitting around the crowded White House Situation Room conference table was unreservedly bleak, President Sam Castilla realized, observing the grim, set faces of his national security team. Most were deeply worried that the United States could soon be facing a serious clash with Russia, but no one felt confident enough in the available information to offer any solid suggestions on how to handle the terrifying diplomatic and military crisis they feared might be rushing toward them.
Basically, the president knew, they were all tired of stumbling around in the dark. Right now all they had were tiny bits and pieces of data ?the accelerating wave of mysterious deaths both here in the States and abroad, whispers of intensifying Russian military preparation, and the steady drumbeat of Russian propaganda decrying the “dangerous instability” in countries around its borders. Unfortunately, everyone lacked the broader evidence and analysis needed to tie those bits and pieces into a clear-cut pattern, into something that would convincingly reveal what Dudarev and his generals were really planning. Without that clear blueprint, no one in Europe or elsewhere would be willing to confront Moscow.
Castilla turned to William Wexler, his new national intelligence director.
“Can we alter the orbit of our surviving Lacrosse satellite to obtain good cov-erage over these Russian frontier districts we’re most concerned about?”
“I’m afraid not, Mr. President,” the trim, handsome former senator admitted reluctantly. “Lacrosse-Five was the newer of the two satellites. Lacrosse-Four has been up too long. It just doesn’t have enough maneuvering fuel left to reach the required orbit.”
“So how long will it take to launch a replacement for Lacrosse-Five?”
Castilla asked.
“Too long, sir,” Emily Powell-Hill, his national security adviser, interjected flatly- “The CIA says six weeks, at a minimum. If I had to put serious money on it, though, I would bet that three to five months is probably a more realistic time-frame.”
“Good God,” the president muttered. By that time, the Russians could have marched the troops and tanks they were hunting for all the way to Siberia and back again. He looked across the table at Admiral Stevens Brose, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “What’s your evaluation of the destruction of our satellite. Admiral? Was it an accident?or a deliberate attack to blind us?”
“I don’t know, sir,” the wide, powerfully built Navy officer said carefully.
“Space Command has only been able to conduct a preliminary analysis of the images our early-warning satellites picked up. However, General Collins and his staff report that the explosions they observed onboard the Russian COSMOS-8B vehicle were extremely powerful.”
“Powerful enough to knock out another satellite hundreds of kilometers away?”
“Frankly, I doubt it, Mr. President. Given their different orbits, the odds against so many fragments from COSMOS-8B hitting Lacrosse-Five seem, well, astronomical,” Brose said drily. Then he shrugged. “But I’m only guess-ing. As of this moment, we don’t have the data to prove anything one way or the other.”
Castilla nodded grimly, seething inside. Without proof that the Russians had acted intentionally, the United States had no practical recourse but to write off the suspicious loss of a multibillion-dollar spy satellite. His mouth tightened to a thin, angry line. “What about our KH-series photo-recon satellites?” he demanded.
“We’re already running significant numbers of orbital passes over the target areas,” Emily Powell-Hill replied. “But cloud cover is the big problem. The weather is incredibly bad over most of the Ukraine and the Caucasus right now. Even with our thermal sensors, we’re not able to pick up much detail through the heavy cloud masses blanketing those regions.”
Left unsaid in all of this, Castilla realized gloomily, was the fact that even the best satellite photographs required skilled interpretation and analysis to reveal usable data, and too many of the best U.S. photo interpreters were fatally ill or already dead.
Charles Ouray, the White House chief of staff, spoke up from his end of the table. “Then why not take a stab
