Hard Passage

“I don’t trust them, either, but for now we’re forced to work with them. I have assurances from my people that once we’ve accomplished this mission we will no longer have to deal with them.”

Briansky’s eyebrows rose. “Does that mean we will also be able to start choosing our own targets?”

“I choose our targets,” Kovlun countered. “Now and in the future. Not you, not anybody else. Got it?”

Briansky nodded.

Kovlun didn’t like having to slap them down—they had actually turned out to be fairly competent operatives despite their youth—but he’d learned as a leader that young men full of piss and iron who were anxious for a fight occasionally needed to have their reins jerked so they didn’t go off half-cocked and do something stupid.

“Have you heard the status on the little problem I brought to you earlier, Mikhail?”

Pilkin shook his head. “We’re still working on it. Which reminds me that we may have another problem with that.”

“I don’t want to hear of any more problems. I’ve already had my ass torn apart one time for this and I don’t want to bear any further criticism. Cherenko and Rostov are part of the Sevooborot, not part of this unit, and that means they shouldn’t be my problem. I thought I’d made that clear the first time.”

“You did, but this is a new development, and I have to tell you about it, especially when there’s a chance it could compromise our operations here.”

Kovlun’s hair stood on the back of his neck. “And what is that?”

“An American agent,” Pilkin replied. “Not the two men from the CIA. We managed to take care of them easily enough. This is another man, one we do not recognize and who doesn’t show up on file with any of our contacts inside the intelligence networks. Even the Brit who made the initial contact with Kisa Naryshkin can’t tell us who this man is.”

“So what?” Kovlun said. “I don’t see the problem. He’s one man.”

“Yes,” Briansky interjected. “But this ‘one man’ has already taken out more than two dozen of our best operatives. So he may be one man but he fights like an army! Unless, of course, the reports we’ve received are exaggerated.”

Pilkin continued, “Not to mention that he somehow found out about the idea you had to grab Kisa Naryshkin and hold her out as bait until Leo Rostov came calling for her. Now the American’s disappeared with her and we have no idea where they’ve gone.”

“What about her old man?” Kovlun demanded.

“He’s onto us, too. He’s got so many guns watching him now there’s no way we could get to him even if we wanted to. And he’s chosen to protect this American by claiming it was him who took out all of the men at the house.”

“Yeah, as if anyone would actually believe that,” Briansky added with a disgusted wheeze.

Kovlun had lit a cigarette and begun to pace the floor. “Oh, they’ll believe whatever General Tolenka Naryshkin tells them to believe, you can be sure of that. I’m not even confident my people can get their hooks into him. And if he’s covering for the American, your resources will never be able to track a man who doesn’t allegedly exist.”

“The cops are too busy cleaning up the mess of bodies this man has already left behind,” Briansky pointed out.

Not to mention that most of them are Sevooborot, Kovlun thought. Which meant they wouldn’t be looking too hard for the perpetrator, especially not when they heard stories about some lone, shadowy American who committed all these heinous acts. The St. Petersburg police didn’t have much cause to feel empathetic when a young revolutionary fell under violent means. They had certainly committed enough acts of violence against others, many of them low-ranking members of the Russian government. The Sevooborot couldn’t very well expect the full weight of justice to rush to their aid when the tables were turned. Kovlun understood that, and he’d never really been a fan of civilian revolutionaries trying to overthrow the government by force of arms. That was better left to those trained for that kind of activity.

Finally, Kovlun said, “I would agree this does present a bit of a problem. Very well. I’ll make some phone calls and see what I can find out about your mysterious American. In the meantime, the shooting drills are wrapping up and I want inspections on equipment and weapons to start immediately after lunch. Your units will depart for their respective targets at 2000 hours sharp. The men are free to engage in recreation on site once inspections are completed, but nobody leaves and no alcohol from now until we’ve returned. Any man caught sneaking a drink will be shot on sight. The same goes for drugs.”

“Yes, Comrade,” the men declared in unison.

Kovlun wheeled and headed for the club exit. He needed to head downtown, find a decent place to have a late breakfast. On his way, he would make those phone calls. Yes, he would find this American, if he even existed.

And then he would destroy him.

CHAPTER SIX

“Coffee?” Barbara Price inquired, the carafe poised over Hal Brognola’s cup.

The big Fed pulled the unlit cigar from his mouth and held up a hand. “No thanks, and especially no thanks if Bear made it. His coffee’s strong enough to straighten the prehensile toes on a chimp.”

Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman, head of the Farm’s cyberteam, looked up from where he’d busied himself at the computer terminal and frowned. “I’m hurt, Hal. I thought everybody liked my coffee.”

“Everybody does like your coffee, Aaron,” Price said, arching one eyebrow and fixing Brognola with an amused gaze. “But not everyone has Ironman’s constitution.”

Brognola shrugged and chuckled, then felt the rise of heartburn in his chest and tugged a roll of antacids from his vest pocket. He popped three, studied the package for a moment, then sampled one more for good measure before returning the half roll to his pocket. The burn started to subside almost instantaneously, as it always did, and Brognola sighed with relief. At least now he could focus on the briefing.

“Okay, let’s get started,” Price said after topping off Kurtzman’s cup. Price was Stony Man’s mission controller and often held the lives of the Farm’s action teams in her capable hands.

Kurtzman tapped a key on the terminal and the lights dimmed as the face of a young man in the uniform of a Soviet army officer materialized on the massive screen on the far wall.

“Bear has compiled every scrap of intelligence we have on the SMJ, aka the Youth Revolution,” Price began, “and cross-referenced that with potential suspects who might have some reason to profit from their activities. We pulled quite a number of names out of the hat, but this man is our prime candidate.”

“Anatoly Satyev,” Brognola interjected.

“You know him,” Price said.

“You bet. He would have been one of my first choices, too. High-ranking officer, colonel as I recall, in the KGB and a first-rate pain in this country’s butt. Current location?”

Price shook her head. “We’re not sure. Satyev dropped off the radar for quite some time after the fall of the Soviet Union. About seven years, actually. He resurfaced in 1998 with an entirely new agenda, new credentials, the works. Even with our extensive resources we haven’t been able to pinpoint him or his source of operations. We know he maintains several businesses, some paper corporations and a few legit, under a variety of pseudonyms. He’s appointed CEOs for every company he ever started, though.”

“Pardon the interruption,” Kurtzman chimed in, “but there are a lot of suspicions from agencies like the NSA and FBI that he may be here in the United States. We just haven’t been able to find him.”

“What about photo recognition?” Brognola asked. “Surely the guy has to have a driver’s license or passport…something to identify him.”

“Well, if he does, he hasn’t gone through official channels of any kind to obtain those identities.”

“A guy like Satyev would go through the best paper guys in world, anyway,” Price continued, “the vast majority of whom we have under surveillance. In all that time we’ve seen nothing, which leads us to conclude either he has others do all his work and monitor his business interests for him or he’s altered his appearance.”

Brognola grunted. “Keep working on it, Bear. I want to know where this guy is as soon as possible. What else?”

Price nodded to Kurtzman and he displayed the photograph of a second man, this one much younger and wearing the uniform of a Spetsnaz commando.

“This man we have identified as Jurg Kovlun, although he’s using the alias Georg Mirovich here in the U.S., according to the California DMV,” Price said.

“What’s his connection?” Brognola inquired.

“There is none that we can ascertain, at least not to the SMJ, although he did work for a special detail that operated under none other than Colonel Satyev.”

“Too much to be a coincidence.”

“Right.” Price pulled a manila folder from the stack on the table in front of her and passed it to Brognola. “This contains a complete dossier on Kovlun’s activities. To no great surprise, he’s been under observation by the FBI off and on for the past couple of years, and then one day they just dropped it and nobody’s been on to him since.”

Brognola furrowed his brow. “Why?”

“I wish we could tell you. Call it bureaucratic red tape or just plain apathy, but none of our sources inside the FBI can give us the first clue why their agents stopped following him. In fact, nobody could even tell me why they’d initiated a surveillance order to begin with. There’s no originating paperwork on it, and no follow-up orders from the offices by any of their agents in charge.”