Arctic Gold

“Copy,” Lia said. “Wait a second…”

The Art Room NSA Headquarters Fort Meade, Maryland 1632 hours EDT

“Ghost Blue is now inside of Russian airspace,” Rubens said. He held the telephone handset to his ear while looking up at the big screen above him. The map’s zoom had been pulled back to show the entirety of the St. Petersburg area, from Primorsk on the Gulf of Finland to Kirovsk, twenty-five miles east of the city. At this scale, the white pinpoints marking Lia and Akulinin had merged into a single point on the southern point of Vasilyevsky Island; a new flashing icon had just appeared at the extreme left, moving in across the Gulf of Finland on a heading straight for St. Petersburg.

“Is there any sign of a reaction from the Russians?” Dr. Do

“Not so far, ma’am,” Rubens replied.

“The President will have to be informed,” the National Security Director said. She sounded angry, and Rubens knew she had cause. Ghost Blue had been built into Magpie from the begi

The big danger was that Bing would use this in her power-play shenanigans against Desk Three. She’d tried it before.

“How long before the plane is over the city?”

“It won’t actually overfly the city, ma’am,” Rubens replied. “It will orbit about ten miles out, out over the Gulf of Finland. That should be close enough for them to pick up our agents’ transmissions. He should be at his loiter point in… five more minutes.”

“I don’t like this, Rubens,” Bing told him. “Not one damned bit. We have no business putting a military aircraft that deep into Russian airspace.”

Rubens, always the diplomat, did not point out that the United States had no outwardly legitimate business putting human agents into Russian territory, either… or that both Russia and the United States had a very long history of intruding into each other’s territories when they needed to do so.

Of course, both countries had long used all kinds of assets to keep tabs on each other, from human agents to spy satellites to submarines to ELINT and reco

No doubt the shoot-down of Captain Francis Gary Powers’ U-2 over Sverdlovsk in May of 1960 had something to do with that.

“Ghost Blue knows what he’s doing,” Rubens told the National Security Director. “He’ll know if he’s being picked up by the St. Petersburg air defense net, and he has means by which he can evade any hostiles.”

A rather sweeping generalization, that. Rubens wasn’t trying to be misleading, but he was oversimplifying to a rather alarming degree. So very much could go wrong in an op like this one. It was impossible to predict how it would come together.

Or fall apart.

“Your tail is riding on this one, Mr. Rubens,” Bing told him. “Keep me in the loop.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

But Bing had already hung up on him.

He glanced at Rockman as he replaced the handset. “We’d better tell Dean, too.”

Pistol Range Fort Meade, Maryland 1633 hours EDT

Charlie Dean squeezed the trigger twice in rapid succession, tapping off two rounds, the bangs echoing down the white-painted room. Two shots, two hits… squarely at the center of mass and less than two inches apart.

Recovering, he shifted his aim, gripping the pistol firmly in the classic Weaver stance, right hand holding the grip at full extension, finger lightly caressing the trigger, left hand cupping and holding the right. Accuracy in the Weaver stance depended on the interplay of forces as he pushed with the locked right arm and pulled with the supporting left.

Two more shots, two more hits, this time in the target’s head.

“Target left!” a voice growled from beside and slightly behind him. Dean shifted instantly, bending his left elbow slightly to pull his right arm into line with a second target, ten yards beyond and behind the first. Again, two taps at the center of mass, followed by a third… and then the slide on his.45 locked open.

Raising the muzzle, he hit the magazine release and dropped the empty magazine, before racking the slide once more to make sure the firing chamber was empty. “Clear!” he called.

Behind him, Gu

“Not bad, Marine,” Strieber said. “Not too shabby at all, in fact. A bit of spread on your third group.”

Both of the center-of-mass shots on the second target had struck within the i

“Yeah, but he’s still dead, Jim,” Dean replied, parodying a well-known line from an old science fiction show on TV.

Strieber ticked a box off on the clipboard sheet he was holding. “I’ll give it to you. This time…”

The Fort Meade pistol range was empty at the moment, except for the two of them. Dean set his weapon-a classic Colt.45 1911A1-on the table in front of him, muzzle pointed carefully downrange, along with the empty magazine. He then pulled off his hearing protectors. The devices were decidedly high-tech, with active feedback to block out sharp sounds like gunfire while permitting ordinary speech.

“So do I pass my quals?” Dean asked Strieber.

“You could use some improvement on the OC,” Strieber replied, paging through the sheets on his clipboard. Then he shrugged. “Still, for such an old jarhead, I’d have to say you’re holding together pretty damned well.”

“Ah, you young Marines don’t have a clue.”

“Cry me a river, Grandpap.”

Both Dean and Strieber were former Marines-within the fraternity of the Corps, there was no such thing as an ex-Marine-and that fact alone created a shared camaraderie, even though his experience in the service had left Dean somewhat bitter.

Dean had been one of Desk Three’s field operatives for over a year now. Strieber was employed by the National Security Agency as what was euphemistically known as a military expert consultant-which in his case translated to range boss at the NSA’s Fort Meade training center.

This particular range boss, Dean thought, got a particularly savage enjoyment out of ragging Dean about his age. Some of the comments hit a little too close to the mark sometimes. Dean was in his early fifties, now, and getting through the Fort Meade OC-the obstacle course-had been a major challenge, despite his daily routine of exercise and ru

“Charlie?” a new voice sounded in Dean’s skull. “This is Rockman.”

“What’s up?” Dean asked. Strieber raised his eyebrows but said nothing. He was used to Desk Three operators suddenly breaking into one-sided conversations, apparently with themselves. “I’m not even supposed to be on duty.”

“The DD told me to let you know,” Rockman said from the Art Room. “We’ve got a… situation here.”

“What kind of-”

Dean stopped, forcing down the sudden upwelling of cold fear. While Desk Three would be engaged in any number of ongoing operations on any given day, there were two well into their active phases that were of particular interest to Dean because both involved very dear friends. Right now, Tommy Karr would be somewhere out over the North Atlantic, helping escort some high-level government scientist or other to a conference in London. And Lia…

“Lia,” he said. “Is she okay?”

“You’d better get down here, Charlie. She’s out of contact. She may be in trouble.”

Dean bit off an unpleasant word, then forced himself to relax. Lia was a superb agent, well capable of handling herself in almost any situation imaginable.