Flynn shook his head in disgust. “Nice. Real nice.” He looked closely at the older man. “Okay, then why don’t you believe the funding for Voronin’s Raven Syndicate is coming out of the Kremlin’s secret accounts? Where else would he get that kind of money?”
“From our own government,” Fox said simply.
“Very funny,” Flynn shot back.
Fox shrugged. “I only wish it were.” He looked off toward the lake. “My sources inside the CIA admit — very reluctantly, I might add — that Langley transferred a substantial sum to secret accounts they now believe were controlled by Dmitri Grishin. And this money has never been recovered.” He turned back to Flynn and Van Horn. “I suspect Voronin now controls those same secret accounts… and that they were a motivation for betraying his employer to Zhdanov.”
“Wonderful,” Van Horn muttered caustically. “Basically, then, we’re up against a bunch of highly trained Russian spies and special ops soldiers who’re using our own taxpayer dollars against us?”
Fox nodded. His face was impassive.
Flynn eyed him. “But that’s not the worst of it, right?” he challenged.
“Perceptive as ever, Nick,” Fox said with the faintest ghost of a smile. He shook his head. “No, what troubles me more is that we now know this Raven Syndicate is run by someone who is both supremely ruthless and a consummate survivor. A man, moreover, who seems drawn to daring, large-scale schemes.”
“And now we have clear confirmation that Voronin and his agents are working hand-in-glove with Iran’s radical regime,” Flynn pointed out quietly.
Fox nodded again. “Yes, and very clearly with explicit authorization from President Zhdanov himself,” he added.
“Which brings us right back around to square one,” Flynn realized.
“True,” Fox said. “Knowing the identity and quality of our opposition is useful indeed, but I admit that it doesn’t bring us any closer to understanding the top-secret project Arif Khavari gave his life to warn us about. We still don’t know how the Iranians — and their Russian backers and allies — actually plan to use this heavily retrofitted oil tanker, the Gulf Venture. All we have right now is the code name they’ve given to this operation: MIDNIGHT.”
“MIDNIGHT?” Van Horn repeated. She frowned. “That’s it? Just the code name? Nothing else?”
“Nothing,” Fox confirmed. “From what we can tell, the full operational details are tightly restricted to a very small group. Bit players like Skoblin and his men are only given the bare minimum of information they need to carry out their assignments.”
Flynn sat quiet for a moment, thinking things through. There was only one place left they might be able to find the answers they needed — inside Iran itself. And acquiring and repositioning the equipment and personnel required would take time, some weeks at a minimum… which meant they were already right up against the clock. Further delay could be fatal. He looked straight across the table at Fox. “You know we don’t have any easy options left,” he said deliberately. “Except, I guess, maybe just sitting back on our hindquarters and hoping that someone else, somewhere else, will take care of this problem for us.”
Slowly, and with evident reluctance, the older man’s mouth twitched in a tiny, almost imperceptible, smile. “Sadly, Nick, sitting idly by is not a real option. Not for those of us in Four — as you’re well aware. In this particular case, we are the only ‘someone else’ available.” He shrugged his narrow shoulders. “As my colleagues at the other Quartet Directorate stations now also admit.”
“Does that mean I’m authorized to go into Iran?” Flynn pressed.
Fox nodded. “You are.”
For a moment, Flynn felt a wave of satisfaction. And then he realized the magnitude of the task he’d just set himself. Successfully infiltrating Iranian territory was one thing — and a damned difficult thing at that. Surviving undetected long enough to penetrate the veil of secrecy the Revolutionary Guards and Voronin’s Raven Syndicate had thrown up around the Gulf Venture was quite another. I must be out of my fricking mind, he thought with a touch of dismay.
“Oh, man, I am such an idiot,” he muttered under his breath.
Laura Van Horn patted his shoulder. “No, you’re not, Nick,” she said consolingly.
“I’m not?”
She grinned at him. “An idiot? No. Suicidal? Oh, hell, yes.”
Almost unwillingly, Flynn laughed. “Fair enough.” Crazy or not, he was committed now. Which meant he didn’t have any real choice left but to buckle down and make sure that his complicated plan, which looked workable enough on paper, would actually pan out in practice.
He rose to his feet with a fleeting smile. “What’s that British commando watchword? ‘Who Dares Wins,’ right? Well, I guess I’m about to find out if that’s true.”
Twelve
A twin-engine An-72AT cargo plane sat on the airfield’s long concrete apron. Painted in the subdued white and gray colors of the Russian Air Force, it was dwarfed by the dozen or so much larger Tu-160M2 swing-wing supersonic bombers lined up nearby. Dubbed the “Cheburashka” after a famous Soviet-era children’s cartoon animal with huge eyes and huge ears, the An-72AT had two enormous jet nacelles mounted above its wings and very close to the fuselage. The extra lift provided by engine exhaust blowing over its wings made it a short-takeoff-and-landing aircraft able to operate from rough, improvised airstrips.
Cradling AK-12 combat rifles, security troops in body armor formed a perimeter around the plane. No one without express written authorization from the base commander could approach within a hundred meters of the An-72AT’s open rear ramp and forward fuselage door. The officer in charge, a major, walked slowly around the ring of soldiers, making sure they were alert and prepared for anything.
Abruptly, his phone beeped. He answered it impatiently. “Yes? Mishnev here.”
“This is Captain Storchak at the main gate, sir. The convoy from the Saratov-Sixty-Three Weapons Storage Complex has cleared our position and is heading your way.”
“Understood, Storchak. We’re ready.” The major ended the call and stuffed his phone back into a pouch clipped to his battle dress. Briskly, he rubbed his gloved hands together trying to work some warmth into his fingers. Spring was still a few weeks away and it was bitterly cold.
“Here they come,” one of his men called out. The major peered toward the airfield’s southwestern edge. There, about a kilometer away, he saw the weapons convoy turn off an approach road and drive onto the apron’s wide, concrete surface. A column of several heavy-duty Ural-5323 cargo trucks lumbered along behind a single, olive-drab GAZ Hunter four-wheel drive out in front. They were closely escorted by lethal-looking, low-slung BTR-82 wheeled armored fighting vehicles.
The jeep-sized Hunter accelerated ahead of the rest of the slower-moving convoy and pulled up in front of the major. He stiffened to attention and saluted as two officers, a colonel and a lieutenant colonel, swung down out of the vehicle. Their shoulder flashes bore the badge of Russia’s 12th Main Directorate — a red shield topped by a silver mace inside a stylized atom symbol.
The senior officer returned his salute rather causally. “These are your troops, Major?”
“Yes, sir.”
The older man nodded abruptly. “Right, then. I need you to widen your security perimeter. Nobody gets within two hundred meters of my trucks or that aircraft. Not your regimental commander. Not the general in charge of this base. Not even the Archangel Michael himself. Is that clear?”