Arctic Gold

opponents were. Knowing your enemy, knowing who he was and how he thought and what his strengths and weaknesses were, all was a long part of the path to victory.

The CIA and their operating methods were well known to people in the Organizatsiya like Sergei Braslov, who’d once been GRU, Russian military intelligence. Some of their successes were known, but so, too, were many of their failures.

The public knew very little about the NSA, however, and that spoke volumes for their efficiency, as well as for their potential deadliness in the arena of international espionage. A successful spy mission was the one of which no one ever heard.

Kotenko survived because he took no chances. He prospered because he could see angles other people could not and he had the muscle to take advantage of that.

In fact, Kotenko had believed for some time that the NSA was trying to get a line on him for intelligence purposes, and the St. Petersburg affair had been arranged to give him the upper hand. He’d recruited a low-level enforcer in his organization-Alekseev-to approach an employee at the American consulate in St. Petersburg with information on the beryllium shipment to Iran, and then he’d carefully orchestrated the trap at the waterfront warehouse.

That ambush should have netted a couple of American agents for deep interrogation. Some of the people working for Kotenko had learned the fine art of interrogation with the KGB, in the basement of the infamous Lubyanka Prison in Moscow during the Soviet era. They enjoyed their work and were quite good at what they did. The information they extracted from prisoners could be most valuable.

And afterward, if there was anything left, the prisoners might prove to be profitable in other ways, either as insurance or for ransom.

But the ambush had misfired. There’d been at least two Americans, as Alekseev had promised, but they’d arrived at the warehouse separately and the men led by Mikhaylov, concentrating on Alekseev and the woman with him, had missed the second agent. That second agent had been able to help the woman escape from the trap… but evidently he’d left behind the tool kit in the chaos of the firefight.

No matter. Kotenko thought he could still make a handsome profit from the affair.

“The special Rybinsk shipment at St. Petersburg,” he said after a moment’s thought. “Is it safely away?”

“Yes, sir,” Antonov told him. “It left for Bandar Abbas two days ago, as scheduled.”

“Then it’s the Iranians’ problem now. Andre!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Alert the staff. We will be going to first-level security here at the dacha. We may be having… visitors.”

“Immediately, sir.”

He would also transmit further instructions to Braslov, though he would use Antonov to do so, using a onetime satellite phone, and from a location far removed from the dacha, just to be sure. The enemy might soon be taking an interest in Operation Cold War, as well as in his activities here in Sochi.

His opponents in this game, whether they were CIA or NSA, were not magical, whatever their reputations might be. They were good, very good, but there were limits to their powers, and to what they were able to pull off with their technology. The Americans were feared, and justly so, for their technological prowess in the military arts, but technology could only take you so far.

In this game, you needed-what was the American expression?-“boots on the ground,” that was it. The Americans would need to put boots on the ground to get at Kotenko and his operation. When they tried it, he would cut them off at the ankles.

Meanwhile, he had work to do. The Duma representative from St. Petersburg and the Gazprom industrialists needed to be convinced that their best interests would be served by a closer alliance with Tambov and what Kotenko could offer them. At the moment, he saw, looking down from the deck, his girls were doing their very best to demonstrate one aspect of Kotenko’s generosity. His guests seemed to be enjoying their visit quite a lot at the moment.

All three visitors were married, and all three had solid reputations as stolid, sober, and principled businessmen of the post-Soviet era, the new Russia. Vladymir Malyshkin, there, looked a little less than stolid at the moment, with a vodka bottle in one hand, Tanya nude on his lap, and Natasha’s bikini briefs draped over his bald pate like a bright green aviator’s cap.

Kotenko trusted that both of the film crews hidden in the house were getting all of this.

In an hour or two, he would go down to the pool and join in the fun. In a few days, at the end of their visit, he would apprise them of some of the other benefits to be found in a closer alliance with Grigor Kotenko-such as the promise that the contents of certain videotapes would not be made public.

In the meantime, he had special instructions to give to Yuri Antonov.

Baffin Bay 73° 54' N, 75° 48' W 0920 hours, GMT- 6

Dean sat on the hard, straight-backed seat in the Sea King’s cargo compartment and tried not to think of the next few minutes. He wanted this part of the trip to be over.

His journey had begun two days ago with a flight on board an aging C-2A Greyhound COD out of Lakenheath for an eleven-hundred-mile flight to the deck of the USS Harry S. Truman, cruising the North Atlantic south of Iceland. “COD” stood for “Carrier On-board Delivery,” and the ugly little Greyhound bounced him down onto the carrier’s flight deck in the middle of a rain-swept night.

He was on board just long enough for a meal and a friendly argument with the senior chief assigned to escort him, an argument over the carrier’s name. President Harry S Truman was notorious for not having a period after the S in his name, which the President jokingly had claimed was not an initial but his middle name. According to Senior Chief McMasters, though, most official documents, the Truman Library, the Associated Press Handbook, and, frequently, even Truman’s own signature all used a period… as did the carrier’s blue and orange crest on the quarterdeck, with its motto “The Buck Stops Here.”

Dean told McMasters that he was not convinced and was going to need to do some research on the question when he got back to civilization. The good-natured banter helped Dean keep his mind off the inevitable end of his journey.

Within another two hours, the COD had been refueled and he was bouncing once again through a stormy night for another thousand-mile flight to Nuuk/Godthab Airport on the rocky west coast of Greenland. That time, he didn’t even get to deplane-not that there was much to see by the cold, near-Arctic glow of sunrise at 0300, local time.

Then the COD flew him north, far north, up the coast to icebound Thule Air Force Base overlooking Baffin Bay 950 miles north of Nuuk. There he was hustled immediately across the tarmac to a waiting helicopter, an SH- 60F Ocean Hawk, for the final leg of his flight.

By this time it was the middle of the night by both his watch and his stomach, both of which were still on GMT, but a dim, gray, and heavily overcast morning according to the light, though McMasters had reminded him that the sun never set at this time of the year north of the Arctic Circle. They packed him onto the helo, which promptly lifted off from Thule and flew a straight-line course almost due west, low above the choppy waters of the bay. Soon the cloud deck lowered even more and it began to rain. The aircraft shuddered with heavy gusts of wind, and lightning flared off to the south.

Just freaking great…

On board the Truman, they’d packed him into a wet suit, over which they’d placed layers of thermal clothing, a parka, a helmet, and a life jacket, creating a fashion statement that made it tough to move and almost impossible to go to the bathroom. Somehow, though, he’d managed over the past several hours, but when the Ocean Hawk’s crew chief began strapping him into the harness, he started having serious doubts.

During his Marine career, Dean had fast-roped out of helicopters numerous times, and more than once he’d taken an unscheduled dip in the drink. This time, though, there could be no room for error.

What was bothering him at the moment was a remembered scene from an old Tom Clancy novel.

As best as Dean could remember it, the hero had been a CIA officer trying to track down a rogue Soviet submarine. At one point in the story, the officer had been lowered from a helicopter down toward the deck of an American submarine somewhere in the Atlantic. When high winds and rough seas-plus the fact that the helicopter