Authors: Dale Brown
Northeastern Moldova
R
ather than waiting for the morning and the iffy connections north, Danny, Nuri, and Flash took two cars and drove up in the direction of the farm. Given that his visit to the cemetery might have tipped someone off, Danny decided they would bypass the town where he’d stayed as well as the old athletic facility and cemetery. That meant a more circuitous route, swinging farther west before turning back toward the farm from the north.
Nuri and Flash took one car; Danny drove alone. He spent much of the ride brooding about Stoner and the past.
If things had gone differently following the mission, Dreamland itself could have sent a team to check the wreck. But Dreamland had been going through its own transition. Colonel Bastian was being replaced.
Dog wouldn’t have left Stoner behind if he could have helped it. He’d blow up half the world getting one of his people back home.
They didn’t make them like Colonel Bastian anymore. He was a balls-to-the-wall SOB to anyone that crossed him. If you were one of his, however, he didn’t just have your back, he had your soul. He didn’t command you, he cared about you. He made you a better soldier. And a better person.
Dog.
Danny felt his eyes welling up, thinking about his old commander, Breanna’s dad. He reached over and turned on the radio, hunting for some music to get his mind off the past.
Hell, Danny, you’re making me into some kind of cardboard saint. You know that’s not me.
Danny felt a shudder through his body. He knew the voice was just the product of his over-tired imagination, but he was so spooked he turned the radio off and drove in silence for the next two hours.
“M
agnetic field, fifty meters,” said Nuri, reading the screen on the MY-PID unit. “Runs all along the far side of the stream.”
Danny focused the night glasses, then swept slowly along the creek. These were big glasses, the size of binoculars, and besides being able to pick up the thermal image of a mouse at two hundred yards, they could accept data from MY-PID, superimposing it to create what the scientists called an “enriched and interpreted image.”
Notes from the computer. Imagine what a school kid could do with that.
“Show magnetic field,” he told the computer.
A blue wall appeared on the other side of the stream. It stretched all the way to the road, a good kilometer away, and ran into the hills on the south. It encircled the entire farm. The perimeter measured nearly thirteen kilometers.
“It has to be some sort of detection field,” said Nuri.
“Like a force field?” asked Flash.
“It’s not going to zap us, if that’s what you mean,” said Nuri. “But I’d guess that anything that moves through it would be detected.”
“As long as it’s metal?” asked Flash.
“It may be pretty sensitive,” said Danny. “Anything that could conduct electricity could set it off. There’s something similar at Dreamland. You can’t breach it without it being detected.”
He slipped back from the trees. Someone had spent a lot of money to set up the perimeter.
Clearly, they had the right place. Or at least one of them.
The property consisted of three gently rolling hills, spread out over land that included two streams and bordered a third. Woods formed an inner ring around a border of open fields, an arrangement that Danny surmised was intentional—the woods would provide cover for defenders. Warned of anyone attempting to approach them, they could slip into the trees and pick them off as they came.
The next ring consisted of farm fields, nearly all idle. At the center were a number of farm buildings and one large house.
The house looked like a nineteenth-century Moldovan manor house, a three-story masonry structure with a sharply pitched roof. Two wings extended off the back, giving the building a U-shape. MY-PID calculated there was just over 8,000 square feet of space inside, not counting the basement.
There were three buildings a short distance away. One was an old barn, in an architectural style similar to the house. A six-bay garage sat next to it, at the end of the driveway. Flat-roofed and skinned with pale concrete stucco, it was somewhat newer, probably built sometime around World War II.
The third building was made of steel and didn’t look to be more than four or five years old. It reminded Danny of the gym he’d seen at the training center, though it would have fit nicely in any industrial park across the world. It was large, 92 feet by just over 280. You couldn’t quite get a football field inside, but it would be close.
It was also heated—the glasses showed that the exterior walls were warmer than the garage’s. The heat was uniform, and the walls apparently well-insulated enough to prevent the night glasses from picking up details from the interior.
Unusual for a warehouse, especially one that appeared empty.
A perfect place to set up a training exercise, Danny thought darkly. You could rehearse a dozen killings inside, run two or three teams and not have them bump into each other.
“No guards on the interior roads,” said Nuri, watching the feed on the laptop from a Predator V. The aircraft had flown from Germany, and would be assigned to Whiplash for as long as they needed it. A second was on its way; both would operate out of Ukraine. They were CIA assets, controlled from a site on Cyprus.
“Two video cameras in the front woods,” said Nuri. “They’re focusing on the road coming up to the house. And there’s a mine system.”
The Predator was reading electric currents as well as heat. The mines were wired; a belt ten meters wide surrounded the house. There were also patches in different areas where trees or bushes provided cover to approach the center of the compound.
“Parachute drop might work,” said Nuri. “Get right past the defenses.”
“We got to land on the roof?” asked Flash. There was the slightest tremor in his voice—though he had jumped often, Flash did not like parachuting. “If their ground defenses are that elaborate, you don’t think they’d have something to protect against airplanes?”
“You think they have SAMs in the barn?” asked Danny.
“Gatling guns in one of the lower buildings would do it.”
“Do they?” Danny looked at Nuri.
“I don’t see anything in those buildings,” said Nuri. “But we only have infrared at the moment.”
“We’re better off going on the ground,” said Danny, considering. “If they have this much technology, they’ll trust it. Once we’re past the magnetic wall, the rest will be easy. We’ll just pick a path around the sensors.”
“That’s like Moses saying once we cross the Red Sea, we’ll be free from the Egyptians,” said Nuri.
“You know what, Colonel?” Flash held up his control unit. He had zoomed in on a small section of the property. “Can I see this grid on the big screen?”
“Go ahead.”
Flash hunkered down with Nuri, coordinating the grid numbers.
“You look at these plants?” Flash asked after they zoomed the image. “You know what they are?”
“No.”
“It’s cannabis. Pot. They have about two acres worth of marijuana growing down that hillside.”
“Two acres?”
“Shit yeah.”
“You sure?”
“Have a look.”
Danny wasn’t an expert in plant morphology, but MY-PID was. Flash was right.
“Two acres worth of weed,” said Flash. “You sure we ain’t bustin’ a drug operation?”
White House
C
overt operations were among the most top secret of all government undertakings, but that didn’t meant they didn’t have their own bureaucratic infrastructure and procedures. On the contrary: the bureaucracy and its pathways were in some ways even more elaborate for “black” operations than those involving the rest of the government.
Legal opinions—many more than the average person would believe—as well as myriad logistical decisions and arrangements had to be formulated, reviewed, rejected (more often than not), reformulated, and finally decided upon.
These were all subject to the “serendipitous conundrums,” as Jonathon Reid put it: chance, accidents, and, last and very often least, official policy, which acted like grit in the wheels of the churning system. Even when the chain of command was set up in a streamlined way to purposely get quick decisions and emphasize flexibility, it could take days, if not weeks, to get the outlines of an operation approved.
There were surprisingly few ways to short-circuit the process. The one surefire way, however, was to go directly to the President herself.
Which was what Reid did, arranging to stop by the White House residence to play cards after dinner.
Not with the President—Mrs. Todd abhorred gambling, whether it was cards or horse racing or even the state lottery, something which hadn’t won her many friends when she proposed it be abolished while running for the state legislature at the start of her career. She’d lost that election; it was the last time she ever mentioned the lottery, on or off the record.
Her stance on gambling was 180 degrees different than her husband’s. Mr. Todd—no friends called him the First Husband, even as a joke—held poker games at the residence twice a week. Reid was a semiregular, and had been since well before the venue change that came with the President’s election.
More than just the venue had changed. There was now a butler available to keep the drinks filled.
The cigarette smoke was still horrendous. Mr. Todd was an unreformed hacker.
The President visited the session generally at 10:00
P.M.,
ostensibly on her way to bed, but most often on her way to do more work in her private office upstairs. She was a night owl, and in fact rarely got more than four hours of sleep.
“My God, Mr. Todd,” she said, coming into the family dining room where the games were held. “So much smoke!”
Everyone, except her husband, stood.
“Next week we do cigars, Mrs. Todd,” he answered.
It was a routine of theirs: she always complained about the smoke; he always threatened more. She walked around to the head of the table and gave him a peck on the cheek.
“Good cards?” he said.
“Four queens,” she said dryly. “Should I be jealous?”
Her husband smiled. No one was ever sure if she was reading the cards accurately or if they were teasing each other. But the prudent thing to do was drop out, and they all did.
“Mister
Rockfert,” she said, noticing Sam Rockfert. “We haven’t seen you here in quite a while.”
“No, I know, Mary. Been a while.”
She went over to Rockfert. He was an old friend—a plumber who had befriended the Todds even before the lotto election, when Mr. Todd was working as a Senate staff assistant. He was the only person besides her husband who would use her first name—including her brother-in-law James, who was sitting on her husband’s right.
“How’s Margaret?” the President asked.
“Her knee has been giving her fits. Or I should say, giving me fits.” Rockfert laughed. “Other than that, she’s fine. Grandkids came up last week.”
“You have to arrange to bring them around. We’d love to see them.”
She was sincere, though her schedule meant that it was unlikely she’d be able to spend more than two or three minutes with them, even if such a meeting could be arranged.
“Mr. Reid, I hope you are not betting your pension money,” said the President, seeming to spot him for the first time.
“It wouldn’t be much to lose,” said Reid.
“It’s the money he got from selling guns to the Contras that he doesn’t want to lose,” quipped James. “You notice he doesn’t bet that.”
The President looked over and scowled at him. Her husband laughed.
“Ignore them, Mr. Reid,” said the President. “They’re just jealous of your good fortune. I wonder—could you spare me a moment? I have a few questions, now that you’re here.”
“Of course. The way my luck has been going, I’m glad to take a break.”
Reid got up and followed the President down the hall to the study.
“You have something new for me?” asked the President, sitting down in a chair next to her desk. It was a reproduction of a piece of furniture that James Madison was said to have brought into the White House. The original was in a Smithsonian storeroom.
“We think we’ve found a complex the Wolves use,” said Reid. “In Moldova.”
“Interesting.”
“We’d like to send Whiplash in to find out. But that may involve bloodshed.”
“In Moldova.”
“Yes, I’m afraid so. If they are there, striking them now—before the conference—would preempt the possibility of their attack. The conference could go off without a hitch.”
“How good is the evidence?”
Reid laid it out.
“Sketchy,” said the President.
“At this stage, things often are.”
“Yes.”
The President leaned back in the chair. She stared at the wall behind him, her eyes facing a portrait of Teddy Roosevelt, one of her favorite predecessors.
“Can we pull this off without being detected?” she asked. “In and out, no complications? No witnesses?”
Reid had given the question considerable thought. An American raid in any foreign country would create a major incident, even if it went off without a hitch. He believed that Whiplash could get into the compound and complete its mission, but there was no way to guarantee it could be done without attracting attention, especially if the Wolves chose to resist. And everything indicated they would.
“I can’t guarantee that nothing would come out,” said Reid. “There is always some possibility of failure.”
The political dynamics were difficult. President Todd was trying to wean Moldova toward the West, as she had done with Ukraine. But the government was on even shakier grounds, with a poor economy, and Russia anxious to prevent further defections to NATO.
Go in and out quietly, and no one would complain. No one would even know. Strike too loudly or trip over the wrong contingency, and the Moldovan government would be forced to renounce the attack, and the U.S., playing right into Russia’s hands. And if they didn’t, popular opinion would surely turn against the Moldovan government, an even better development for Russia.
Those considerations don’t outweigh the necessity of striking, Reid thought, but he could understand the President’s hesitation.
And he had a solution.
“I was speaking with the men in the field before coming over tonight,” he said. “It turns out that a very large amount of marijuana is grown on the site where we would like to strike.”
“Marijuana?”
“Quite a cash crop in Moldova, as it happens.” Reid reached into the pocket of his jacket and took out two sheets of paper. They contained satellite photos of the property and the marijuana. He handed them to the President. “I wasn’t aware of its importance until today. But apparently the farmers do quite well. They seem to supply much of Europe. There are almost two acres of it here,” he added. “You can see in these photos. The leaves are very distinct. They are pointy, with five—”
“Jonathon, I hope you don’t think I have no idea what marijuana looks like,” said the President. “This is the Wolves’ compound?”
“Yes.”
“They sell it?”
“Possibly. They may use it on their own—medicinally, shall we say?”
Reid wasn’t exactly sure why the plant was being grown there. While two acres was a lot, given the security measures and their location, they could easily grow considerably more. That seemed to rule out the possibility that the Wolves were running a drug operation on the side, though there was no way to tell. It might even be a way to explain the secrecy surrounding the property, if neighbors became too curious.
“If we told the Moldovan government that this was a drug operation,” he said, “we would give them cover for anything that happened.”
“Under what pretense does an American military force make a drug raid?” asked the President skeptically.
“As part of a NATO task force operating under UN auspices,” said Reid. “As directed by the UN last year. It’s a fig leaf, but it is authorized. The European Union has been pushing for more antidrug enforcement actions.”
“When do you tell them?”
“Right before the raid.”
“What if they want to come along?” the President asked.
“We let them. Once the place is secure. Then we can use Moldovan facilities to hold the Wolves until they can be extradited for murder. Assuming they survive the raid.”
“There’s a place where they can be held?”
“I’ve spoken to our station chief in the capital. He’s confident they could be held at a Moldovan military base. We’d only need to have them stay until we had charges ready in Poland for the murders there. That should only take a few days. It would avoid having to take them to Ukraine on attempted charges. We also wouldn’t have to reveal how we got the evidence against them. It’s much better than taking them to one of our bases.”
“Granted,” said the President. “But what do we do if the Moldovans won’t cooperate?”
“We’ll be back at the same starting point,” said Reid. “You will have to decide whether to proceed without their permission. But then they’ll at least think this was about drugs. And the Russians will as well.”
Reid assumed that the Moldovan government had been penetrated by Russian spies.
“I’d suggest you make that decision beforehand,” he added. “And that we only proceed if we’re prepared to go alone.”
“Hmmmm.”
“Our station chief reminded me that the Moldovan government received thirty million euros in enforcement money from the E.U. Drug Fund six months ago, without anything to show for it. This will allow them to pretend that they are quite on top of things.”
“You must be very good at poker,” said the President.
“I hold my own.”
“Go. All the way. Make it work.”