Arctic Gold

States and Russia had on several occasions proven surprisingly useful.

“We don’t yet know if the opposition got a good look at our aircraft,” Rubens said mildly. “It’s not really important, one way or another.”

But Dean knew it was important. A critical failure on an intelligence op inside Russia would inevitably spawn serious interagency trouble down the line. The CIA, especially, didn’t like the fact that the NSA was trespassing on what it considered its turf, its particular area of responsibility. Hell, they’d been trying to shut down Desk Three or get it transferred to their Directorate of Operations ever since its inception.

“What is important,” Rubens continued, “is that we secure our people over there, get them out safe, resolve Operation Magpie, and follow through with Operation Blue Jay. Miss DeFrancesca has provided us with a vital link between Magpie and Blue Jay. We need to take advantage of this before the trail goes cold.” He nodded to one of the men at the table. “Mr. Ryder, if you please?”

Tom Ryder was the designated briefing officer for the morning’s meeting, a small and fussy analyst from the Russian Section. He stood up, took his place behind a lectern at the front of the room, and used a handheld remote to bring up an image on the large flat-panel screen on the wall behind him.

The man’s face was shown full-front and profile, with numbers and Cyrillic lettering on a board in front of him. Two more photos showed what appeared to be surveillance photos of the same man-on a street corner and at a table in a restaurant. The face was lined and heavily scarred. The photo taken in the restaurant showed him with his mouth open, displaying black and uneven teeth.

Ryder cleared his throat, then launched into his presentation without preamble. “Victor Mikhaylov,” he said. “Agent DeFrancesca positively identified him as the leader of the gunmen at the warehouse. Mikhaylov, we believe, is the number-one enforcer for this man, Grigor Kotenko.”

Kotenko’s photographs replaced those of Mikhaylov. Where Mikhaylov had the look of a street rat, a thug, Kotenko looked smoother, more urbane, a businessman, perhaps, or a lawyer, with a thick walrus mustache and a cold-eyed squint.

“This guy’s a real piece of work,” Ryder said. “When he was eighteen, he was sent to a gulag for armed robbery, kidnapping, and rape. While there, he made some important contacts within the Leningrad criminal underworld, and when he got out four years later-with the help of a wealthy uncle in the Organizatsiya-he went to work for Vladimir Kumarin as an enforcer. We believe he was the triggerman in a particularly brutal murder-of Peter Talbot, an American hotel entrepreneur who was shot ten times at point-blank range on a metro platform… while surrounded by six hired bodyguards, no less. Seems Talbot had refused to ‘share’ his partnership in a new hotel chain over there.

“Since then, however, Kotenko has gone from enforcement to administration, working his way all the way up to the top echelons of the Tambov organization. After Kumarin’s arrest by Moscow officials in 2007, Kotenko may have moved up to the number-two or -three position in the gang’s leadership, though reports indicate that Kumarin is still running things from prison.

“So if Kotenko is involved, it means we’re dealing with the Tambov Gang.”

“This is the so-called Russian mafia you’re talking about?” an Air Force colonel in Blakeslee’s entourage asked.

“One branch of it, sir,” Ryder replied. “And there’s nothing ‘so-called’ about it. The Russian Mafiya is an extraordinarily large and complex organization made up of many groups, some in alliance, some mutually hostile, all more or less in competition with one another.

“The Tambov Gang was formed in 1988 by two men from the Tambov Oblast, Vladimir Kumarin and Valery Ledovskikh. They started out by providing protection to businessmen in what was then Leningrad. Today, the Tambov Gang is the most powerful organized-crime element in St. Petersburg, numbering at least six hundred hard-core members, and thousands of occasionals. They are known to control outright over one hundred of the city’s industrial enterprises, including the Petersburg Fuel Company, which maintains a monopoly on all fuel bought and sold within the city. Their membership roster includes members of both the state Duma and the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly.”

“Nice to have friends in high places,” Dean murmured.

Ryder ignored the interruption. “Desk Three became concerned with Kotenko’s activities when one of our sources reported that he had sold some five hundred kilograms of beryllium sheeting to an agent of the Iranian government. The beryllium sheets had been discarded by a nuclear reactor facility at Rybinsk, and were mildly radioactive when they were stolen. Reportedly, they were destined for a freighter of Liberian registry, which would have taken them to Bandar ’Abbas.

“Currently, Desk Three is running two distinct operations in Russia aimed at the Tambov Gang-designated Magpie and Blue Jay. Magpie was intended to track the stolen beryllium to Iran. Our agents would plant a small transponder chip on one of the sheets-a device the size of a postage stamp, colored and textured to be indistinguishable from the beryllium itself. It would have given us some insight, we hoped, into the Iranian nuclear program… especially insofar as their attempt to manufacture fission weapons is concerned.

“Yesterday, our agents succeeded in planting the tracker. However, they were discovered, and we don’t yet know if the opposition has found the tracking device, or if they’ve guessed what we were up to.

“Grigor Kotenko, we believe, is behind not only the beryllium sale to Iran but another major Tambov operation… which is the target of Operation Blue Jay. We have learned that they are attempting to gain control over Russia’s oil and natural gas industries.”

“Just a minute,” General Blakeslee said, interrupting. “Where’s the Russian government in all this? Where’s the military?”

“That, General, is part of the problem.” Ryder held up his hands, clasping them together with fingers intertwined. “Government and organized crime are like this. Over there, the Organizatsiya is how things get done. It was that way under the Soviets. It was probably that way under the czars. It’s much, much worse now. As for the military… many of the Organizatsiya’s members are ex-military or -KGB. A lot of military personnel were cut loose when the Soviet government fell, remember. As a result, there’s a kind of oldboy network in modern Russia that includes the military, the government, and the organized-crime syndicates. We believe that over eighty percent of all Russian businesses either are controlled outright by organized crime or, at the very least, pay a cripplingly large percentage of their profits to the syndicates for ‘protection.’

“This has had a terrible effect on the Russian economy. People over there are actually yearning for the good old days when the Soviets had everything controlled and orderly. Of course, the criminals were active under the Soviets as well, but in a state-run economy, the problem was pretty well hidden. Now, it’s out in the open and clearly out of control.”

Ryder continued his presentation, but Dean listened with only half an ear. He knew most of this already. He’d seen the moribund state of the Russian economy firsthand… the poverty, the hopelessness on the faces of people in the streets and on the subways, the dead factories and boarded-up shops, the crumbling facades in a state without enough free money to rebuild the infrastructure, to say nothing of launching into new business ventures.

Ryder spoke for another ten minutes on the threat of the Russian mafia, touching on the sales of weapons to terrorist groups, the suspected theft of nuclear weapons and materials, the destabilizing effect the Organizatsiya was having globally. He mentioned, to a few chuckles, the sale of a Russian Tango-class diesel submarine to a Colombian drug cartel in the late nineties. The sale had fallen through, thank God, when the Colombians, thinking the plan just a bit too ambitious, had backed out. Had the sale been completed-just $5 million would have purchased the submarine and a trained crew of twenty for a year-the Cali Cartel would have been delivering multi-ton loads of cocaine and heroin to the California coast, completely eluding the web of land-, sea-, and air-based radar guarding the southern approaches to the United States.

“But we know the Russian mobs have been delivering other military hardware to Colombia for over a decade,” Ryder continued. “Thousands of automatic weapons, millions of rounds of ammunition, at least two military helicopters, and a number of advanced surface-to-air missiles that are going to make our interdiction efforts in South America extremely difficult. The point is… the Russian Mafiya thinks big, very big, they have more money than God, and they don’t give a damn who they deal with or what the consequences might be.”

The Russian Mafiya, Dean thought, had an overly developed sense of drama. He found himself thinking about various supervillain groups in spy fiction-Ian Fleming’s SPECTRE or even Thrush in the old Man from U.N.C.L.E. TV series, comic-book criminal organizations bent on world domination.