Part One

The Plan

Chechen Suicide Bombers Kill More Than 1,000 Hostages In Moscow Concert Hall

Separatists Press Fight Against Russian Forces

MOSCOW (RIA-Novosti: 15 SEPTEMBER 2006) FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE—Chechen separatists killed more than a thousand hostages when they blew up the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall, home of the State Symphony Orchestra. The hall was packed with 1,600 men, women, and children attending a Rachmaninoff concert.

The attack in the Russian capital was carried out by 50 heavily armed men and women, members of a Chechen suicide squad, seeking the withdrawal of Russian troops from their country. The terrorists, armed with automatic weapons, grenades, and explosives, held Russian security forces at bay by threatening to kill the hostages if their demands were not met.

A masked rebel told a correspondent for RIA-Novosti, the government information agency, that the theater was wired with explosives and that the hostage-takers were ready to sacrifice themselves for Chechnya’s independence. They warned that any attempt to storm the theater would set off the explosives. The Russian president’s refusal to negotiate with the terrorists brought denunciations from the unidentified rebel leader, who had demanded an end to Russian occupation of Chechnya.

The standoff ended when security forces attempting to enter the hall via an underground service tunnel opened fire on the rebels, who then detonated their explosives.

1

Murmansk, the Kola Peninsula, Russia

Radchenko hunched his shoulders against the bitter Arctic wind and swung down off the Number 8 electrobus onto Ulitsa Kipnovich. His boots crunched on the early October snow that had swept in from the Barents Sea across the taiga and low surrounding hills with their glistening stands of birch. The city’s mask of white hid its dark, crumbling heart. Like a whore made up to fool an unsuspecting customer. A whore paid to turn tricks, thought Radchenko.

The dimly lighted street was a canyon of deserted apartment blocks bisected by the shimmering electrobus catenary. Radchenko felt utterly alone and for a moment wondered if he had stepped into a trap. He crossed the street and stood in a block of shadow, waiting for something or someone to move. He lit a cigarette, waited a beat, then set out, keeping to the shadows.

The Novy Polyarnyy Hotel was an ugly pile of yellow brick that Radchenko entered through an unlocked rear service door. He walked past the drunken night porter dozing before an ancient black-and-white TV broadcasting an eerie blue light into the worn lobby. Radchenko shunned the lift, thinking of the noise it would make, and instead took the stairs, their risers and treads creaking under his weight. He reached the second landing, stopped, but heard only muffled voices behind closed doors. Somewhere a toilet flushed.

Radchenko reached the third floor, turned left, and found the room. He took a deep breath, knocked twice. The door shivered open and Radchenko slipped into the room. He quickly inventoried the double bed, the battered greasy dresser and chair, the rusty washstand, the drawn blinds.

Relax. We’re alone.

Radchenko faced the tall American. He had a weathered face and short iron-gray hair. He wore well-cut khakis and a bulky black turtleneck sweater. His Russian was elegant, faultless.

Perhaps he had a beautiful blond wife; didn’t all American men have blond wives? What would she think if she knew her husband was with a Russian sailor in a hotel in Murmansk?

Vodka? The American opened a fresh bottle of Sinopskaya, a premium brand Radchenko had never heard of. Smoke? He pointed to a carton of Marlboros that lay open on the bed.

Radchenko downed the vodka, smoother and sweeter than any vodka he had ever tasted. The American refilled Radchenko’s drink, then refilled it again.

I said relax; no one knows you’re here.

You have money to pay? Radchenko said. He went to the window, peered through a gap where the blind met the wall. All he could see was a forest of TV antennas and satellite dishes on the roof of the apartment building next door.

Yes.

Dollars?

Yes.

The American watched Radchenko pace the room drinking vodka. He stopped to tear open a pack of cigarettes and light one.

Take the whole carton; I don’t smoke.

Radchenko heard that American men and their blond wives didn’t smoke. Unhealthy. But they liked alcohol and sex. Usually taken together. He considered the American through the curling smoke from his cigarette.

The American sat down on the bed. He hadn’t touched his drink. At length he said, You had no trouble getting away?

The idiots who guard the base don’t pay attention. We come and go as we want.

No one else saw you leave? A shipmate, perhaps?

No one.

Are you on the fleet duty roster?

I have the midwatch: midnight to 0400.

The American rucked a sweater sleeve to uncover a chunky stainless-steel wristwatch. Then we have plenty of time. Take off your jacket and be comfortable.

Radchenko stopped pacing. He refilled his glass but didn’t remove his jacket. He said, around the cigarette stuck in his mouth, How much will you pay?

The American swung his legs up on the bed and leaned back against the headboard, glass of vodka balanced on his chest. His feet were shod in a pair of scarred Wellington boots. What I promised: five hundred. Another five hundred if you do what I want.

A fortune, thought Radchenko. More money than he could ever make as a sailor serving in the Russian Navy, which had seemingly run out of cash to pay its rankers—its officers too. Desertion and suicide were common, as was talk of mutiny. To make matters worse, Radchenko’s commanding officer, an iron-fisted disciplinarian, had also become disillusioned. Radchenko remembered being scared to death by what he had overheard him discussing with other officers in the wardroom of the submarine K-363. And when Norwegian nuclear scientists surveying radioactive waste at the Olenya Bay submarine base brought the tall American and his assistant aboard the submarine to interview the crew, Radchenko, sensing an opportunity to earn some money, made an approach.

Radchenko stripped off his jacket, threw it on the bed. The American responded with a look of expectancy. Radchenko felt the vodka but poured more. The alcohol would make it easier to provide the service the American was eager to pay for. Wind rattled the window glazing. Somewhere a door slammed. Radchenko heard the elevator start up. He chewed a nail. He hadn’t ever done this before and wasn’t sure how to get started.

The American had five folded hundred-dollar bills in his hand. For you.

Radchenko felt the tension mounting in his body. He reached for the money even as he realized something was wrong. The American heaved himself off the bed an instant before the door splintered inward off its hinges and two men burst into the room.

A barrage of raindrops exploded against black steel. A filthy morning topside at U.S. Navy Atlantic Fleet Headquarters, Norfolk, Virginia, had the watchstanders’ chins tucked into their sodden peacoats. Belowdecks, where it was warm and dry, the canned, conditioned air smelled from ozone. Commander Jake Scott waved his executive officer, Commander Manny Rodriguez, into the small stateroom that doubled as his personal quarters and private office aboard the USS Tampa, a Los Angeles-class nuclear attack submarine.

What’s up, Skipper? said Rodriguez.

ComSubLant, that’s what’s up, Scott said. The squadron commodore just called. Ellsworth wants to see me.

You in trouble?

No more than usual.

The commodore give you a hint what the boss wants to see you about? Rodriguez asked.

Possible change of orders.

Hell, Skipper, we already have our orders.

Change of orders for me.

What?

The Tampa had just completed a refit and was scheduled to depart Norfolk for sea trials and, later, deployment. Scott had been the Tampa’s commanding officer for over two years and she was his home. Whatever it was that Ellsworth had in mind for him, the admiral was in for a fight. Especially if it meant giving up command of the Tampa. She was his ship and he didn’t want anyone to take her from him. He thought about Tracy. Someone had taken her from him; now this. No, that wasn’t true: Tracy had left him. Big difference.

There had been all those intelligence-gathering patrols into hostile waters, all those weeks and months away from her. She had complained that he was more intimate with his sub crew than he was with her. The phone calls had hurt too. Like the one on his first night ashore after a hellish sixty-day patrol off North Korea. He had picked up the phone and heard loud music in the background. A man’s voice said, Trace, it’s Rick. Wanna party, wear that red-hot outfit of yours? Not tonight, Scott had said icily. Click! At least he hadn’t walked in the door and found Rick’s face buried between Tracy’s legs. Why blame her? She just wanted a normal life, not the one he’d given her. He wondered if she had found her new life satisfying, if the things she liked to do in bed excited the guy she was running with now…. He caught himself in time and reeled back from the edge of misery.

Scott stood. I’m to report to Ellsworth at fifteen hundred.

What about the party at the O club? Rodriguez brayed. You gonna make it?

Better stow it for now.

Scott looked at all the untouched paperwork piled on the desk, reports and correspondence awaiting his review and signature. What he really wanted to do was shit-can all of it and get back to sea. He took a dirty work jacket down from a hook on the bulkhead. Take care of my ship, Manny.

Vice Admiral Carter Ellsworth, commander, Submarines Atlantic, peered through a pair of thick wire-rimmed glasses that magnified his pale blue eyes. The benign look on his face masked a cunning personality. His desk, except for coffee in a fine china cup, had been cleared of papers. Flags, framed photos of the president, the civilian service chiefs, and plaques bearing the names of U.S. submarines were the only items on display in Ellsworth’s spartan office.

"Consider yourself detached from the Tampa," Ellsworth said without preamble.

Scott felt he’d been gut-punched.

"You’re detached for TDY. Chief of staff has your orders. You can pick them up when you leave, Captain."

Captain? Scott said.

You’ve been frocked for your new assignment. Ellsworth tossed Scott a plastic bag containing a pair of silver eagle collar devices. Meanwhile, see if these fit.

Scott’s frocking was a mixed blessing. He’d bragged, had even worn as a badge of honor, that he was probably the oldest commander in the Navy, passed over for promotion to captain once and doomed if he was passed over again. But reassignment meant giving up command of the Tampa and he’d worked too hard rehabilitating himself to do that.

Karl Radford wants to see you, Ellsworth said. The cup rose to his lips; gold braid on his sleeve sparkled like a bolt of raw electricity.

Scott digested this. Karl Radford, a retired United States Air Force major general, headed the Strategic Reconnaissance Office, a supersecret intelligence agency with intelligence-gathering assets in place world-wide. Scott had always suspected that most—if not all—of the missions he’d conducted at sea had been ordered by the SRO. Perhaps even the one that had almost ended in disaster. And had been hung around his neck.

Ellsworth looked at Scott. He saw a man in his early forties, tall, with dark hair flecked with gray. He had rough-edged good looks and a bearing that indicated he knew how to handle himself in tough situations. Any idea why he’d want to talk to you?

Scott shrugged. No, sir. Do you?

Ellsworth ignored this and said, Wrap up whatever you have pending. Radford wants you in Washington day after tomorrow. Any problem with that?

Perhaps he’d consider someone else in my place.

Ellsworth set his jaw. What are you saying, Scott?

"That I’d prefer to retain command of the Tampa. Whatever General Radford has in mind for me can’t be more important than what I’m doing now."

Ellsworth pushed the coffee aside. His pale blue eyes had turned dark. Let me tell you something, Scott. You’re still hanging by a thread. You’ve had your second chance and admittedly you’ve made the most of it. A lot of men who have been in your position are out of the Navy. Some are selling appliances for Sears; others are reading the want ads.

Scott felt pressure building at the base of his skull.

Ellsworth plunged ahead. Those men didn’t deserve a second chance, but you did. I don’t intend to give you another.

Admiral, I fought hard for it and I don’t plan to end my career on the beach all used up.

Apparantly General Radford agrees. He wouldn’t ask for one of SubLant’s best skippers unless it was damned important. More important than driving subs. He knows your background and all the rest. He wants someone with a brain who knows how to use it. I told him you wouldn’t disappoint him.

Thank you.

Now let me give you some advice, Scott. A lot of people around here think you’re a hero and that you got the shitty end of the stick—that we brass hats needed a scapegoat and you were it. No need to go over old ground, what’s done is done. But keep this in mind: I know Radford, and he isn’t impressed by heroes. He’ll dice you up if he thinks even for a second that you might customize the orders he gives you. This time try sticking to the rules—his rules, not Jake Scott’s. I don’t think you’d be very successful selling appliances.

Ellsworth stood. That about does it. Oh, one more thing. Rodriguez. In your judgment, he’s fully qualified for command?

Scott stood too. He is.

"I’ll be riding the Tampa during her shakedown. See how he handles it. The pressure, I mean."

Scott put a hand to the base of his skull.

Ellsworth saw Scott to the door and shook his hand in a mechanical fashion. By the way, it was Radford who wrangled your frocking out of BuPers, not me, Ellsworth laid a finger beside his nose. I gather it wasn’t easy.

Scott finished a beer and wrapped up the remains of Chinese takeout in a brown paper sack. He gazed numbly at a muted CNN female talking head with plastic hair and Chiclet teeth yapping about the president’s upcoming summit meeting with his Russian counterpart in St. Petersburg, city of the czars. And on Capitol Hill, the Senate majority leader … He punched the power button and she vanished.

Broken noodles, greasy paper bags, and cardboard containers went into a garbage pail. Was garbage picked up on Thursday? Or was that recycling day? He was out of sync with the daily rhythms of life ashore. But his apartment was cheap and close to the base, which was all he cared about. And that his neighbors minded their own business. A Marine Corps colonel two doors away had never spoken a word to him.

Scott started packing a bag for Washington. Radford’s summons, like everything about him and the SRO, was a mystery. Black ops and a secret budget to carry them out gave Radford enormous power to influence events around the world. Like the Yellow Sea operation. Scott shuddered inwardly. It had been a nightmare. And even though the board of inquiry had exonerated him, it had not erased the uncertainty about his fitness to command a nuke that lingered in the minds of many of his superior officers. Maybe the summons from Radford would change some minds.

Scott finished packing, then looked around to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything. His gaze settled on the door to the spare bedroom, which held boxes filled with the remnants of his former life as a husband. He kept the door closed so he wouldn’t be reminded of it. Yet, it was hard not to be, especially when he heard the couple next door arguing, their fights punctuated by exploding crockery. Not like the Scotts, he thought. They had always fought their battles in thundering silence.

The memory of the last time he saw Tracy was burned in his brain. Her lovely wide mouth a tight, angry slash, she had held him in a withering gaze, violet eyes dark with anger. To avoid a scene when Rick arrived in his new Corvette to pick her up, she had aimed her cell phone at him like a gun and screamed, Get out! Get out or I’ll call the police. When Scott returned the next morning, Tracy was gone.

That night Scott dreamed he was looking through a periscope at a North Korean frigate. Her twin stacks vomited smoke as she swung around and charged. Christ, they’ve spotted us! In a heartbeat the frigate’s bow began to fill the periscope’s field of view. Fear rippled through his guts. Too late now to run for it: He was committed; the SEALs had to be recovered. He had to fire torpedoes, had to save the men, but his orders went unheeded, shouted down by Tracy yelling, Get out! … Get out! … Get out!

2

St. Petersburg, Russia

Thick clouds pressed down on the golden spires and gilded domes of the imperial city. A snarl of traffic wormed around Moskovsky Station at the Square of Insurrection, with its tangle of southbound rail lines, trolley buses, and trams. On Nevsky Prospekt the traffic inched past a narrow street, at the dead end of which was a scrubby car repair shop surrounded by rusty Volgas, Moskvichs, and Zhigulis. Parked out of sight in a lot next to the shop strewn with crumpled fenders and car doors was a burgundy BMW sedan and a gray Volvo station wagon.

Alikhan Zakayev warmed himself at a kerosene heater in an unoccupied bay of the shop. Greasy tools, engines, and dismantled transmissions littered the floor and workbenches. Zakayev, a smallish man, wore a cashmere navy topcoat like a cape over a double-breasted suit. His hooded eyes took in several thickly built, unshaven, menacing-looking men sitting on a bench. One of them stroked a thin black-and-white cat happily kneading his pant leg. Another man toyed with a SIG 220.45 pistol equipped with a laser sight, its red dot coursing over walls, ceiling, and Zakayev’s body.

Put that away, Zakayev said.

The SIG disappeared instantly.

Zakayev didn’t like the flamboyant display of arms for which his followers had a penchant much like their penchant for expensive German cars. Zakayev’s taste in cars ran more to Volvo station wagons.

Zakayev touched his pencil-thin mustache and said, What are you doing?

A beautiful young girl perched on a stool, her leather miniskirted bottom protected from grease by a clean shop rag, looked up from a thin paperback book. Reading.

You can read later. Zakayev jerked his head in the direction of a storeroom off the main part of the shop from which a desperate keening sound emerged. Find out what’s taking so long.

The girl was very tall and had huge, heavily made-up eyes. She had on dark purple stockings and spike-heeled boots. She strode across the shop on a pair of long, wonderfully shaped legs and, with a handkerchief to her nose and mouth, entered the storeroom only to emerge a moment later.

He says it is no use, the girl said from behind the handkerchief.

No use?

See for yourself.

Zakayev stepped gingerly across the shop floor, avoiding patches of grime and oil. He entered the store room. The strong smell of shit and piss shocked his nostrils, but he ignored it. He couldn’t ignore another smell: burned flesh and hair. A naked man built like a bull hung by his wrists, which were bound with wire, from the hook of a chain fall rigged from a ceiling beam. Mechanics employed the chain fall to lift engines out of cars; now it held what looked like a charred side of beef.

The bull had been badly beaten and his hair and scalp had been burned away, leaving only a blackened skull. Zakayev’s eyes went to the man’s groin, where his genitals had been. What he saw was the charred stump of a penis and carbonized testicles. That he was still alive was a tribute to his physical condition or perhaps all the vodka he drank.

Another man, a huge hairy ape wearing dark glasses and with a black cloth band wound around his head, stepped back from his work. He had on a leather apron over black clothes and in one hand held an acetylene torch, its roaring tapered blue-white flame capable of biting through case-hardened steel.

Sweat glistened like diamonds on the ape’s forehead. He shrugged and thumbed the gas valves closed. The flame sputtered, popped, died. You won’t get anything else out of him, General.

So it’s the Winter Palace.

He swore it. And I believe him. The ape looped the torch and hoses over a pair of gas tanks lashed to a hand truck. He wiped sweat from his eyes.

Zakayev gazed at the bull—what was left of it—hanging from the hook. The stench was overpowering. It reminded him of another time, in Chechnya. He and his men had waited all night in a soaking drizzle, hidden in rubble off the main street in Grozny where it intersects the city’s main square and the Sunja Neva.

To their rear was Minutka Square, where refugees came to seek family members and buy food and medicine, and which Russian forces repeatedly attacked with artillery and air strikes. After more than eight years of fighting, thousands of Chechen civilians had been killed there.

The Russian assault unleashed at dusk had left more than two dozen women and children mangled in their own viscera near the market, which had been reduced to a pile of broken sticks and mortar. Zakayev assumed that Russian Spetsnaz—special forces—would launch a follow-up probe to assess the damage. He looked around at his men, most of whom were young enough to be his sons. Gripping their weapons, eager for revenge, they huddled against the cold. It was a spectral scene: a jagged landscape lit by yellow gas flares from broken pipes, smoke blacker than night roiling skyward. Nothing moved but a few stray cats and dogs and a homeless old man on crutches seeking shelter.

He heard it first. Listen.

A snorting diesel engine. A Russian BTR-80 armored personnel carrier poked its camouflaged boatlike prow around a sharp bend in the road and rocked to a halt. The BTR’s turret, sprouting machine guns, smoothly traversed the killing field. Zakayev silently urged the Russians on. He knew they were wary, especially at night.

Another snort and the BTR inched forward, its big tires throwing off clods of mud. Perhaps these Russians were new arrivals and still fearless or just plain stupid. Whatever, Zakayev got ready. He stripped a plastic bag from an RPG-7 grenade launcher, pulled the safety pin from the conical warhead, and, shouldering the weapon, poked its nose through an opening in the rubble. He took aim on the lumbering vehicle and, as it drew abreast of his hide, squeezed the trigger.

Zakayev ducked behind the wall yet felt the heat from the blast rake his face and hands. Ammunition in the BTR cooked off and sent the Russian three-man crew and seven Spetsnaz sprawling out of the vehicle’s flung open hatches into fierce Chechen small-arms fire.

Zakayev stood over a badly burned Russian soldier, a teenage conscript begging for his mother. The stench of burning diesel, of scorched flesh, of shit and piss, hung in the night air. The other Russians were dead. How long had this boy been in Chechnya? Zakayev wondered. Not more than a few days, judging by his new cammies and polished boots. But his eyes were already old and filled with fear and pain. Sorrow too. Not for what his comrades had done to the Chechen women and children in Minutka Square, but for his bad luck to have been sent to this living hell of a country. He probably had no idea why the Chechens wanted freedom from Russia. Perhaps he had been thinking of his girlfriend back in Moscow and dreaming about becoming a rock star. But all he could do now was cry, Mat’, Mat’, Mat’.

Zakayev shot him in the head.

Who was he? she asked.

Who?

The bull. The girl had on a luxurious black sable coat. The silky pelts caressed her purple-stockinged thighs, which held Zakayev’s attention for a moment. Together in the Volvo, driving away from the repair shop, they looked like successful Russian entrepreneurs on their way to a meeting with foreign venture capitalists. Or a man with his young mistress.

Nobody. Zakayev put his eyes back on the road. Traffic was still heavy. Linked metal barricades had been spotted along the prospekts in anticipation of the crowds sure to be drawn to the presidential motorcades sweeping through the city. He changed lanes, made sure the turn signal went ka-pick, ka-pick, ka-pick. An infraction might draw the attention of the militia. Their identity cards would hold up to scrutiny, but he was not eager to test them.

Ali, tell me. She twisted around in her seat, peeled off a purple kid glove, and reached over the console to fondle his crotch.

An FSB officer.

The girl stopped manipulating him. She slowly took her hand away and faced forward again. Ali, an FSB officer? The Russian Federal Security Service—Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, or FSB—had responsibility for providing security at the summit.

We weighed the risks, Zakayev said. They were acceptable.

Instinct had told him that the Winter Palace—Russia’s Versailles, recently restored to its former imperial splendor—would be the focus of the upcoming summit meeting between the American and Russian presidents.

A Chechen woman who works for a St. Petersburg catering service that has a contract to supply meals for the FSB—she told us that one of their men assigned to the press motor pool had access to the summit schedule. She said that sometimes this man didn’t show up for work at the parking lot because he was drunk and that his FSB supervisors didn’t seem to mind because his friends filled in for him.

And you took him?

Late last night, after he completed his shift. I concluded that if he suddenly disappeared he wouldn’t be missed for days.

Snow flurries had changed to rain; the wipers zickzicked over the greasy windshield glass.

For more than a month St. Petersburg had been teeming with American and Russian security personnel preparing for the summit. Parts of Dvortsovaya Ploshchad had been sealed off and access to the Hermitage and Winter Palace, former residence of Czar Nicholas II and the Russian imperial family, had been severely restricted. Already a whole section of the city from the Neva south to the Obvodnyy Canal had been sealed off to traffic and pedestrians.

He told us what we wanted to know about the summit. The schedule. Times and dates. Everything.

Zakayev had learned that after all the pomp and circumstance attending the American president’s arrival, he and the first lady would be given a tour of the Winter Palace by the Russian president and his wife. They would see personal items from the imperial family on display in the Malachite Room and stroll the White Dining Room, where the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917 from Kerensky’s provisional government. After all the festivities and a state banquet, the real business of the summit would take place in one of Catherine the Great’s private apartments in the Hermitage.

But, Ali, said the girl, eventually they’ll go looking for him.

By the time they get themselves organized, it will be too late.

Zakayev turned onto Nevsky Prospekt and pulled up at the Nevsky Palace Hotel. It was popular with successful European businessmen who liked to show off their mistresses while prowling the lobby or cutting deals in the restaurant over caviar and sturgeon mousse. It was the perfect place for a wanted man like Zakayev to hide in plain sight.

Scott’s eyes went to the two-inch-thick file folder emblazoned with diagonal black stripes and labeled, DIRECTOR—PURPLE.

Karl Radford, standing behind his desk, ignoring regulations that prohibited smoking in government buildings, shifted a cigarette to his left hand so he could pick up the folder with his right. In a husky voice that matched his thick build, he said, I was told you know Frank Drummond.

Rear Admiral Frank Drummond? Yes, sir, I do.

Radford viewed Scott through a scrim of cigarette smoke. How well do you know him?

"He’s an old friend. My patrone. I served two tours under him—as exec on the Nevada, then a shore billet at Net Warfare. He also straightened out a few