Panting, Brad McLanahan struggled to climb the slippery bank of yet another sluggish stream. Every step was agony. His right leg was almost completely useless now. He couldn’t put more than a fraction of his weight on it, forcing him to rely almost entirely on his left. “I must look like a damned crab,” he muttered. “Always moving at an angle.”
Abruptly, a section of the muddy slope slid out from under him and he toppled over. Desperately, he twisted sideways to avoid coming down on his right shoulder and damaging it further. With one hand immobilized in a sling and the other clinging to his boots, there was no way he could break the fall. Instead, he took the full brunt of the impact on his left side.
Pain flared through Brad’s whole body — shooting through every nerve ending in a blaze of fire. He bit down on a scream. For a long moment, he lay dazed, half in and half out of the shallow stream… waiting for the pain to fade even a little. Finally, it eased off, not much, but enough so that he could breathe. “Okay, that really fucking hurt,” he growled, tasting blood where he’d bitten his tongue.
Exhausted, he stayed down for a while longer. Maybe he’d gone far enough for the day, he thought tiredly. Maybe he should just rest here and try to recover some of his strength. Yeah, that would be a smart move, McLanahan, his mind sneered. Like falling asleep flat on his ass in a muddy, mosquito-infested quagmire would magically make him feel better…
“Fine,” Brad groused. “I’m going.”
Wearily, he tossed his boots higher up onto dry land, rolled over, and started crawling up the bank — digging the fingers of his left hand deep into the moist soil for leverage. It took several minutes of strenuous effort just to reach firmer ground.
Finally, he made it.
Determined now not to give in to the fatigue and hunger and pain that threatened to overwhelm him, Brad scrubbed off some of the dried mud coating his feet and then hauled his boots back on. Steeling himself against another flash of agony from his injured shoulder and knee, he dragged himself back to his feet using the low-hanging branches of a small birch tree. He stood hunched over for several more minutes, breathing in shallow gasps.
At last, feeling a little better, Brad hobbled onward, holding on to branches and tree trunks to steady himself. The ground sloped upward through a tangle of trees and underbrush. After what seemed an eternity, he reached the top of the ridge and stopped dead in his tracks. He’d come right to the edge of the woods. Before him stretched a wide, grassy valley. Far off to the east, he could see the faint outline of another dirt road running north and south. In the west, the sun hung low on the horizon, casting long shadows across the open ground.
He stared out across the valley. Somewhere deep inside his drained mind, a tiny spark of hope flickered to life. Awkwardly, he tugged the satellite phone out of his survival pouch and turned it on. After a few seconds, the tiny screen lit up.
Brad stared down at the GPS coordinates it displayed. Slowly, a grin spread across his taut, pain-filled face. “I made it,” he whispered, scarcely able to believe it could be true. “I damned well made it.”
Gingerly, he slumped to the ground. A few quick key presses sent a coded text reporting his arrival to the Scion communications center back in the States.
Their reply came back almost immediately. Stripped to its essentials, the message was clear: FIND A CONCEALED POSITION NEARBY. MAKE CONTACT AGAIN AT 2200 HOURS TOMORROW AND STAND BY.
Scion field agent Samantha Kerr entered a security code on a door down the hall from the office Marcus Cartwright used in his Klaus Wernicke persona, waited for the lock to disengage, and went inside. Thanks to the racks of computer hardware stacked floor to ceiling, the windowless room beyond the door looked much smaller than it was. There was just enough space for a small desk, a chair, and a large wastebasket full to overflowing with crumpled disposable coffee cups and takeout containers.
A young man in a wrinkled, short-sleeved shirt and jeans looked up when she came in. “Hey, Sam.”
She nodded toward his keyboard. “How’s it going?”
“Good… and bad.”
Sam waited patiently for him to explain further.
Zach Orlov sometimes found it difficult to communicate with people outside his highly specialized field, especially when he was deeply immersed in a complicated task. But his other skills more than made up for these occasional lapses. From his émigré parents, Orlov had picked up a fluent grasp of the Russian language in all its permutations. Highly intelligent and focused, he’d spent his teenage years hacking every computer network he could gain access to — though not with any serious criminal intent, more out of a perverse blend of insatiable curiosity and sheer boredom with regular school. In fact, if Scion hadn’t recruited him, Sam was fairly certain he’d have ended up behind bars… or working for the National Security Agency.
“I can get inside the main Russian Railways network, no problem,” he said. “Their basic security sucks.”
Sam nodded. Russian Railways was a state-owned company set up to control both the infrastructure and the operation of the nation’s freight and passenger rail services. “That sounds promising.”
Orlov shrugged. “Sure, if we were interested in payroll data. Or corporate e-mails and financial reports.” He jerked a thumb at his monitor. “But somebody’s installed a whole new security firewall for anything to do with specific freight-train cargo manifests. And it’s good. Really good. As in ‘touch this and go straight to a Lubyanka basement interrogation cell’ good.”
“Do not pass Go. Do not collect two hundred dollars. Do lose your fingernails and collect one bullet in the back of the skull,” Sam murmured.
“You got it,” he agreed sourly.
“Is that firewall Q Directorate work?” she asked.
“Probably,” he agreed. His shoulders slumped slightly. “Anyway, I can’t crack it. Not without blowing our whole operation here sky-high. And probably not even then.”
Sam frowned. Their orders from Martindale were to look for signs of unusual freight traffic between the launch complexes at Vostochny and Plesetsk and the cities known to house Russian nuclear research institutes and production facilities — among them Moscow, Novosibirsk’s Akademgorodok, Dubna, Podolsk, Sarov, Obninsk, and Dmitrovgrad. But how could they do that without access to the detailed records of what any particular train was carrying? Especially since the cargo they were hunting was supposed to be small enough to fit on just one or two freight cars.
Ordinarily, faced with this kind of roadblock, she’d have treated it as a human intelligence problem. Given enough time, it was usually possible to find the weak link in any security system. There was almost always someone on the inside who a resourceful agent could trick, bribe, or threaten into revealing the necessary passwords or codes. Unfortunately, time was exactly what she did not have in this case.
“What’s behind this new firewall?” Sam asked curiously. “All freight operations?”
Orlov shook his head. “Just the manifests for anything even remotely considered national-security-related cargo.” He looked up at her. “Russian Railways has around a million employees. Clearing everyone who handles any kind of freight for these new security measures would have been a total nightmare.”
Sam tapped a finger against her chin, thinking hard. “So you can still pull up the company’s signal and traffic logs, right?”
He nodded. “Sure.”
Russian Railways prided itself on a centralized control system covering more than 70 percent of the nation’s rail lines. Every train moving along those lines generated an automatic, computer-generated report whenever it rolled through a station or a control signal.