Ghost Force

Mikhallo Masorin, and was the uncrowned ruler of Western Siberia. 'Where's he gone?' grated Lenny. 'And what about his Chief of oil operations, Anton Katsuba? He's a really tough ex- drillmaster on the rigs. Was he really killed in a goddamned plane crash that no one can find? His wife does not think so. He never mentioned anything about a journey by air, and neither did the rest of them. They all were just going to Yekaterinburg.

And that included, apparently, the First Minister of the Central Siberian Federal District, and the new Chief Executive of the Russian Far East, plus his renowned Energy Minister, Mikhail Pavlov, the man who literally masterminded the Trans-Siberian pipeline. All of them vanished.

'Nine of them,' yelled the excitable Lenny. 'How you say? Vamoosed. And no one seems to know anything. The Air Force claims to have lost its plane, won't even name the missing aircrew. And the government wishes it could help. Yeah, right. I've known these bastards for too long.'

Jimmy sat pensively listening to the irate Lenny, predictably furious at behavior from the modern Russian government that mirrored that of the old Soviet Union.

At length he said, 'Lenny, are all of the families agreed the missing guys were going to Yekaterinburg?'

The CIA spymaster checked his file. 'Yes, they're agreed on that.'

'Okay, then whatever happened may very well have happened in Yekaterinburg, right?'

'Correct, Jimmy. And I can tell you are about to wander down the investigation path I went down, and then steal my best lines. Selfish Australian bastard, hah?'

Jimmy laughed. 'Yeah, well, I was only going to mention that when the government announced the plane crash, just one day after it apparently happened, they must have been damn certain right then the guys were never going to be seen again.'

'Precisely,' said Lenny. 'So the guys were either transported away from the city and executed, or murdered right there in the city…right?'

'Any report of anything unusual happening in the downtown area…?'

'Keep quiet, Australian bastard…I'm coming to that! Now, I have one report from our agent, and we only got the report because I asked him if he noticed anything. He did not think it important enough to mention by himself…'

'And did he?'

'He did. He remembers from his diary he was downtown in Yekaterinburg on Monday morning, September twenty-seventh because he was having his hair cut. God knows why, he's damn near bald. Anyway, usually he parks his car and walks down Central Avenue and then cuts through one of the side streets to the barbershop.

'But on this day he remembers one side street was cordoned off…'

'Did he remember which one…?'

'Silence, Australian bastard,' said Lenny, routinely. 'No, he didn't. But when I asked him he said he couldn't remember the name, but it was the street down the side of the big SIBNEFT office building…'

'Get outta here!' said Jimmy incredulously. 'Ole Sergei Pobozhiy's place, one of the missing guys, right?'

'How the hell do you remember that?'

'Mostly because I'm an Australian bastard, I suppose.'

'I wonder if you also remember my man in Noyabrsk, the one who tracked Roman Rekuts into town from the airport the week before, tracked him to another SIBNEFT office, where Sergei was also in residence…'

'Jesus. And did he know why the street in Yekaterinburg was blocked off?'

'No. But he remembered there were several big military transporters in there, and the guys guarding the barriers on Central Avenue were Army, not police. Trouble was, he might have gone down that street, but he did not need to. So he just kept going — but he noticed it was closed, right down the side of the SIBNEFT building.'

'You don't think they massacred those guys right there in the building in cold blood?'

'Don't I?' said Lenny. 'I am afraid you don't know them like I do.'

'What time did the Russian Air Force issue that press release, the one about the plane crash?'

'Midnight, Jimmy. Same day. And you know that was deliberate, getting the story played down in Russia. I'm sure they had it ready many hours before that. I mean, Christ! The President, or at least the Prime Minister, must have been involved. And I checked both their timetables that day. The PM was watching an ice hockey game, and the President was ensconced in the royal box in Theater Square.'

'Where the hell's Theater Square?'

'Moscow, James,' replied Lenny, haughtily. 'It's the address of the Bolshoi Theater, home of the greatest ballet company in the world. Christ, there's a few gaps in your world knowledge…'

'Well, Lenny, old mate,' said Jimmy, reverting to his best Crocodile Dundee accent, 'we don't get a lot of par day durr in the outback. Upsets the koalas.'

'Fuck me,' said Lenny, with mock exasperation. 'Anyway, listen…what I'm trying to say is, that press release must have been agreed to sometime in the afternoon. By which time the highest level of government in Russia knew, beyond doubt, the guys were all dead, and they were not coming back. Ever.'

'Guess so. By the way, is anyone kicking up a major fuss about the guys…I mean, a wife or a son?'

'I don't think anyone dares. But Mrs. Anton Katsuba is about ready to make a few demands. She says her husband never went on any journey without telling her exactly where he was going. And since she's about twenty years younger than him, a very beautiful ex-actress, you can't blame him for that.

'She's called Svetlana, and they live in Yekaterinburg. He told her there was a meeting downtown at SIBNEFT that he thought would be over late afternoon. Said he'd meet her at seven p.m. at the cinema. But he never turned up. Never called. Was never heard from again. Going to Murmansk? She told our man that was the biggest lie she'd ever heard.'

'Beginning to sound like the biggest lie I've ever heard,' said Jimmy.

'Anyway, my boy,' said Lenny, 'to return to the big picture, we plainly have a very disturbing situation between the Russian government and Siberian oil. There must have been a threat of some kind by the Siberians. A threat that apparently could not be tolerated.'

'I guess that's it for now…oh, by the way, I just heard they've released Masorin's body to return to Russia.'

'Have they? That's a pretty old corpse by now, Jimmy.'

'Yeah, but it's frozen. Poor old Mikhallo's preserved, cold.'

'I bet he's not as cold as the other nine guys, buried somewhere in northern Siberia,' replied Lenny, darkly. 'Stay in touch.'

The young Lt. Commander replaced the phone and returned to his studies about Argentina and the Falklands War. He did not, of course, connect the two subjects, centered at opposite ends of the globe, which had thus far dominated this Monday morning in early November.

Instead he decided to familiarize himself with the Falkland Islands…just in case the bloody gauchos make another grab for 'em.

Three hundred and forty islands altogether. Two big ones, East and West Falkland, divided by the wide seaway of Falkland Sound. Only 320 miles from the nearest point on the Argentinian mainland. Less than 5,000 square miles, about the size of Connecticut, or Ireland. The computerized facts popped out at him.

Jimmy scanned down the screen, muttering to himself snippets of key information, in his normal, quaint Aussie phraseology…'Been British since Captain John Strong fell over 'em in 1690. Home to a coupla thousand sheep-shaggers (country farmers). Nearly all of 'em Poms (British). A Pom colony with Her Maj Head of State. Same as Australia. Christ, Queen Elizabeth of the Falklands. When you think…her Great-Great-Granny Victoria was Empress of India. That's what I call a significant decline.

'Still, it says here the Falklands are home to the rare and bloody fragile rockhopper penguins, not to mention the ole black-browed albatross. Wouldn't want to lose either of 'em, myself.'

He came to the section on oil exploration, staring for a long while at the numbering systems used for the quadrants and blocks contained in the massive 400,000-square-kilometer Designated Zone. This is almost as big an area as Texas, and surrounds the islands completely, ending sharply to the west, where Argentinian waters begin, over the Malvinas basin.