NATO had no such problems, and was using artillery of all calibres upon the town along with airstrikes. He was losing men with every artillery and air strike, but it was creating a landscape that favoured a defender more than it did an attacker. So long as he had his landing grounds in the north, astride the autobahn, to keep his men supplied with ammunition then he would hold.
CHAPTER FOUR
A figure moved cautiously over the snowy forest floor north of Moscow, there was only a couple of inches on the ground, which in itself was unusual because as a rule this far north they received at least three times what would fall on western Europe. The thaw from the winter proper, had barely finished before the weather went crazy, decided the figure, but it was still bitterly cold all the same.
Hunkering down in the snow his one-piece hooded coveralls blended in with the white forest floor and he raised a thermal imager to his eyes, studying a building ahead.
Udi Timoskova had been nicknamed ‘Weasel’ very shortly after starting elementary school, and the name not only stuck into adulthood, it fitted too. A flair for burglary and a talent with all things electronic had brought Udi to the notice of the authorities, following a long run of thefts from the IT community. Udi would bypass the electronic security to gain entry to whichever site had the latest software and hardware, remove what he wanted and depart, carefully covering his tracks as he went. No evidence of the burglary was detected, but the losses were. Suspecting a crooked employee to be responsible, one firm installed a tracking device within its latest hardware products, and a young Udi Timoskova had been caught red handed.
The thefts had not gone unnoticed by the intelligence service, which viewed them potentially as a matter of state security, so Udi was visited in his cell and ‘rigorously interrogated’ to ascertain what, if any, threat to the state existed.
After four long days in custody Udi was given a choice, spend fifteen years as some lifers bitch or work for the state counter espionage arm, it wasn’t much of a choice really but it meant his ultimate goal of getting to the USA and starting his own private enquiry agency, was almost unreachable from that moment on.
He was a loner and once his trustworthiness had been established, then that was how he generally worked.
Since the start of the war his department had been exceedingly busy, bugging the homes of anyone the premier felt could possibly be a threat to his position, and that turned out to be an awful lot of people.
This present assignment involved someone who was away from the city, and if not at the premier’s side, then at his beck and call. The brief stated that the subject had some cause to return to the city on operational matters on occasion, so all possible haunts were to be covered. Udi himself could not see why the subject would come to their personal dacha, if he were that person he would spend as little time as possible away from the hardened bunker they’d come from.
The imager showed a totally cold building, and his other devices showed that infrared, ultra violet and ultra-sonics were not present either, not inside nor out. He could have wasted an hour or so looking for other detection systems, such as old-fashioned pressure pads just below the surface of the earth but it would have been a waste of his time. Packing away his various electronic gadgets he moved around to the driveway and simply walked straight up to the front door.
Gaining entry took but a few moments, and once inside Udi took out a digital camera, photographing all the rooms. He was disappointed that the interior had little by the way of luxury items, everything was basic and functional. One bedroom at the top of the stairs held nothing but a few plain chairs and a mattress on the floor, covered in a dustsheet, as was everything else in the building.
Udi would have preferred to use fibre optic to connect the tiny cameras and microphones to the telephone lines, but he did not have the time for that. He placed his remote devices where the dacha’s own electrical appliances magnetic fields would hide them from electronic sweeping, checked their batteries were full and then fixed his receiving device to a tree 50m away. From this he ran thin cables to a telephone cable junction box beside a road, and spliced them in before finally checking all was functioning properly. Returning to the dacha he again got out his camera, bringing up the images of each room he made sure everything was exactly as it had been before he had gotten to work and then he left, leaving no clue that anything was amiss.
From their orbit high above RAF Gütersloh, ‘Chain Gang’, a flight of four F-16s had escorted the Boeing VC-25A, tail number 28000, as it left Europe the way it had arrived, far lower than peacetime regulations allowed. The low altitude gave it the option of hiding in the ground clutter of radar returns if necessary. The further from the front it, and its escort travelled, it gained a little more altitude until passing Ireland it began a slow climb from 10,000’ to 30,000’.
Lt Colonel Arndeker, commanding the F-16s, was 2000’ above the Boeing with combat spacing between himself and his wingman, the second pair were in trail five miles behind. All aircraft were totally blacked out as an added precaution against interception, and an air exclusion corridor was being maintained. In another 230 miles the escort would tank and then himself and the pair in trail would head back to Germany, leaving one F-16 to continue on in company with the diplomatic flight to the States. They had drawn straws for that duty, as it meant the winner got to spend a few precious hours with loved ones before returning to the war. Even for the remaining three pilots it constituted something of a breather, the duty was in stark contrast to the previous sorties flown since war had raised its ugly head, this hop was almost boring in comparison.
Aboard the blue and white liveried airliner Senator Rickham was annoyed that a young woman in Air Force blue, and a mere Sergeant at that, was strictly enforcing a seat belts on, and no movement about the cabin rule. He had however managed to get himself seated in the Presidential office of the aircraft with the German Chancellor and British PM, playing the ‘Special Envoy’ and alluding to confidences greater than he actually had with the President. Both men were friendly enough but would only engage in subjects non-related to sensitive issues, even without the Presidents warning, there was little about Senator Rickham that inspired confidence and trust in the PM. Aside from the premiers and senior representatives of the governments, there were their aides and personal assistants, in all forty-two passengers had boarded in Germany and were now enroute to the first face-to-face summit since the war began.