agent has planted a bug on the mobile phone of the target. But we are not getting further GPS updates. We assume he has discarded the phone. We will be going forward with physical surveillance if we don’t see immediate results. That will involve you, me, and perhaps others. I don’t have to tell you that this would entail long hours of uncomfortable work.”
“I can’t do that. I have a job and a family to come home to.”
“Obviously we won’t do anything to cause suspicion with the FBI. You will not have to conduct surveillance at times you need to be at your office. Your family, on the other hand, is your problem, not ours.”
Lipton stared at Kovalenko for a long moment. “I could snap your scrawny little fucking neck.”
Now Kovalenko smiled. He may not have known anything about Lipton’s agent, or Lipton’s agent’s target, but he
Lipton turned away, and looked out the windshield of the minivan.
Kovalenko said, “Child pornography, Mr. Lipton, on one’s computer, certainly of the quantity and variety that was found on
Lipton bit his lip while he looked out the windshield. His fingers began drumming on the steering wheel now. “I get it,” he said softly, a tone much different than his tone earlier in the conversation. Again he said, “I get it.”
“Excellent. Now it’s time to put all pressure possible on your agent.”
Lipton nodded, still not looking at the Russian in his passenger seat.
“I’ll be checking in on you.”
Another nod. Then, “Is that it?”
Kovalenko opened the door and climbed out of the minivan.
Lipton started the engine, then regarded Kovalenko before he closed the car door. With a shake of his head he muttered, “The goddamned Russians.”
Kovalenko closed the door, and the Toyota backed out, then drove toward the exit ramp of the parking garage.
“You fucking wish,” Valentin Kovalenko said softly as he watched the car’s taillights disappear.
Darren Lipton met Melanie Kraft at the Starbucks at King Street and Saint Asaph. She was rushed this morning; she was on a task force set up at the office of the Director of National Security to evaluate any security leaks that might have led the Prosper Street safe house to be compromised, and there was an eight-o’clock meeting that she could not be late for.
But Lipton had been beyond insistent, so she told him she’d give him ten minutes before she caught the bus for work.
She could tell immediately he was more stressed-out than usual. He wasn’t leering over her like he usually did. Instead, he was all business.
“He dumped his phone,” Lipton said as soon as they sat down.
This made Melanie nervous. Had Jack found the bug? “Really? He didn’t say anything to me.”
“Did you tip him off? Did you say anything about the FBI locator?”
“Are you kidding? Of course not. You think I can just confess this whole thing to him over a beer?”
“Well,
“Maybe he suspects,” Melanie said, her voice trailing off as she thought about how distant he had been to her all weekend. She’d called him to do something Saturday night, but he had not called her back. When she called the next morning he said he had not been feeling well, and had planned on taking a couple days off work. She offered to come over and take care of him, but he’d told her he just wanted to sleep it off.
And now Lipton was telling her it was possible — likely, even — that Ryan had discovered the bug.
She shouted at him, “That tracker was supposed to be impossible to detect!”
Lipton put his hands up. “Hey, that’s what they told me. I don’t know. I’m not a tech.” He smiled a little. “I’m a people person.”
Melanie stood up. “I did exactly what I was told to do. No one said anything about me getting burned in the bargain. You can tell Packard or I will tell him, I’m done with you guys.”
“Then you and your dad will go to jail.”
“You don’t have anything on my father. If you did he would have been arrested years ago. And if you don’t have anything on him, that means you don’t have anything on me.”
“Sweetheart, it doesn’t matter, because we are the FBI, and we have the best polygraph technicians and equipment on planet earth, and we will take your little ass into a room and hook you up to that whoopee cushion, and we will ask you about Cairo. You will be the one that sends both you and your dad to prison.”
Melanie turned away and stormed up King Street without another word.
It was called a hot seat. Trash and Cheese ran out onto the tarmac and stood below two Hornets that had just landed as the other Marine pilots climbed out and the refueling team gassed them up, leaving one engine on so that they would not have to refire all the aircraft systems. Then Trash and Cheese climbed aboard the jets, slid into the cockpits, still warm from the last pilots. They quickly strapped themselves in, hooked up communications lines and air hoses, started the second engine, and taxied back to the runway.
Three days ago, when they first started their CAPs over the Taiwan Strait in ROC aircraft, there had been as many planes as there had been pilots. But the heavy use had taken a toll on the older C-model Hornets, and four of the aircraft had been taken off the flight line for maintenance, necessitating the hot seat.
One more had been shot down; the young pilot had successfully ejected and was picked up by a Taiwanese patrol boat full of sailors shocked to scoop an American out of the water. Another jet slammed into debris after it shot down a Chinese J-5, and this pilot had to crash-land at an airport on the southern tip of the island.
The pilot had survived but with serious injuries, and the word was his flying days were over.
In the past three days the United States had suffered one real combat loss, and they had inflicted nine kills on the PLAAF. The ROC F-16s had lost eleven aircraft and six pilots, a painful toll for the small force but a small fraction of what it would have been if there hadn’t been two dozen American fliers in country doing everything in their power to keep the menacing Chinese at bay.
Things were getting dicey at sea level as well. A Chinese anti-ship missile had sunk a Taiwanese cruiser. The PLA claimed to have done this only after the cruiser sank a Chinese diesel sub, but all signs indicated the sub had sunk itself while laying mines in the strait when one of the mines was improperly set and exploded against the submarine’s hull.
There were more than one hundred fatalities on both sides in the two sinkings. This was still something less than open war, at this point anyway, but the losses of men and material were increasing by the day.
Trash and Cheese were ordered to fly south this morning; storms were predicted, and the Chinese had not been sending up as many harassing flights in bad weather, but the two young Americans knew better than to assume they would have a quiet CAP.
Cheese had recorded his second kill the day before. With Trash as his wingman supporting and watching his “six,” Cheese had fired a radar-guided AIM-120 AMRAAM missile that took down a J-5 attacking a flight of Taiwanese F-16s thirty miles to the north of Taipei.
That meant the two Marines had four total combat kills, and Trash’s two gun kills of Super 10s were already becoming a source of legend around the Corps. That very few knew, even among the Marine Corps, that this squadron was here in Taiwan still flying against the Chinese was a bit annoying to the men, especially so to Cheese, who would not get to paint the record of the kill on his own aircraft when he returned to his base in Japan.
Still, through the fear and the stress and the danger and the exhaustion, the two young American fighter pilots would not trade their predicaments with anyone else on earth. Flying, fighting, and protecting the innocent
