“Max. He’s on.”
“Ja.”
As Kovalenko drove, he listened to Max flip switches and type on his keyboard. “How long?” he called back.
“Not long.”
The Russian was careful to stay close enough to the target for the antenna to pick up the signal and far enough back to where any odd glance over the shoulder would not alert his target to the presence of an ominous-looking beige van rolling slowly at his five-o’clock position.
The assistant secretary ended his call and put his phone back in his pocket.
“Did you get it?”
“Yes.”
Valentin turned to the right at the next intersection and left the neighborhood behind.
They parked in a lot by the train station and Kovalenko climbed into the back to watch the technician at work.
The smart phone, Kovalenko knew, used a common cryptographic algorithm called RSA. It was good, but it wasn’t new, and it was easily breakable with the tools at the technician’s disposal.
Once the German had the key, the software told him that it could now spoof the device. With a few clicks, he opened the website for NATO’s secure Brussels command network, and then sent the encryption information taken from the Public Diplomacy Department man.
He then impersonated the smart phone with his software and logged on to the NATO Communication and Information Systems Services Agency’s secure network.
It was the responsibility of Max and Valentin to get into the network, just to test the access. They would do no more, other than return to the safe house and e-mail the encryption information for the diplomat’s smart phone to Center. The German would leave immediately, but Valentin would take a day or two to break down the van and sanitize the safe house, and then he would get out of Brussels.
Easy work, but that was nothing new. Kovalenko’s job, he had determined over the past month, was little more than child’s play.
He would bide his time for now, but before much longer, Valentin Kovalenko had decided he would make a break. Leave Center and his organization behind.
He still had friends, he was certain of it, in the SVR. He would reach out to someone at an embassy somewhere in Europe, and they would help him out. He knew better than to go back to Russia. There the government could pick him up and “disappear him” with little trouble, but he’d reach out to an old friend or two working at a foreign posting, and he’d start laying the groundwork to allow for his return.
But this travel and this waiting would take money, and for that Kovalenko would continue to work for Center until he was ready to make his move.
Though he’d been warned by the Russian mobster that Center would have him killed, he was not worried. Yes, Center contracted out the unpleasantness at Matrosskaya Tishina prison, but Kovalenko felt that staying out of Russia would keep him relatively safe from those thugs.
This was an organization of computer hackers and technical surveillance specialists. It’s not like the Center organization were killers themselves, after all.
THIRTY-FOUR
Captain Brandon “Trash” White looked away from his instruments, turned his attention outside his canopy, and saw nothing other than the black night and the streaking raindrops lit up by the lights of his aircraft.
Somewhere out there, off his eleven o’clock and several hundred feet below him, a tiny postage stamp of deck in the middle of the sea bobbed up and down on heaving swells. He closed on it at one hundred fifty miles an hour, except when the swirling winds at this altitude slowed him down, sped him up, or knocked him left and right.
And in just a couple of minutes he would, God willing, land on that erratically moving postage stamp.
This was a Case Three landing, night ops, and this meant he’d been “flying the needles,” watching the Automatic Carrier Landing System needles projected on the heads-up display in front of him. He kept his aircraft lined up in the center of the display as he neared the carrier, which was easy enough, but he was about to get passed off from radar control to the landing signals officer for the last few hundred feet to the deck, and he almost wished he could fly around up here in the shit a little while longer to compose himself.
The winds were said to be “down the angle” at deck level, meaning blowing from bow to stern, and this would help things a bit as he got lower, but up here he was getting knocked all over the damn place and his hands were sweating inside his gloves from the effort of keeping lined up.
Still, it was safe up here, and it was dicey as hell down there on the deck.
Trash hated carrier landings with a white-hot passion, and he hated nighttime carrier landings a hundred times more. Adding awful weather and an angry sea to the equation ensured that White was having one hell of a shitty evening.
There. Down there past all the digital information projected on his heads-up display, he saw a tiny row of green lights with a yellow light in the middle. This was the optical landing system, and it grew in brightness and size in his HUD.
A voice came over his radio an instant later, loud enough to be audible through the heavy sound of his own breathing coming through the intercom. “Four-oh-eight, three-quarter mile. Call the ball.”
Trash pressed his transmit key. “Four-oh-eight, Hornet-ball, Five-point-niner.”
In a calm and soothing voice the LSO answered, “Roger ball. You’re lined up left. Don’t go any higher.”
Trash’s left hand drew the throttle back just a hair, and his right hand nudged the stick a touch to the right.
Marines on carriers. Why? Trash thought to himself. He knew the answer, of course. Carrier integration, they called it. Marines had been flying off carriers for twenty years as a result of some bright idea thought up by some officer sitting motionless at a desk. It was a manifestation of the thinking that anything Naval Aviation could do Marine Corps Aviation was supposed to be able to do as well.
Whatever.
As far as Trash White was concerned, just because the Marine Corps could do it, it didn’t necessarily mean the Marine Corps should do it. Marines were meant to fly off flat runways cut out of jungles or deserts. They were meant to sleep in tents under camo netting with other Marines, to walk through the mud to their aircraft, and then to take off and support their fellow jarheads in battle.
They were not meant to live on and fly off of a damn boat.
That was Trash’s opinion, not that anyone had ever asked him for it.
His name was Brandon White, but no one had called him that in a long time. Everybody called him Trash. Yes, it came from a play on his last name, but the Kentucky native wasn’t really what anyone but the most blue-blooded Northerner would call white trash. His father was a doctor with a successful podiatry practice in Louisville, and his mother was a professor of art history at the University of Kentucky.
Not exactly trailer-park material, but his call sign was part of him now, and, he had to admit, there were worse call signs out there than Trash.
He knew a pilot in another squadron named Mangler, for example, which sounded cool as hell to Trash until he learned the poor guy received the moniker after one night chugging margaritas in a Key West bar. On his stagger out of the men’s room the young nugget zipped his balls in his fly, couldn’t get them out, and was rushed to the hospital. The medical term the ER nurse wrote down on his paperwork was “testicular mangling,” and though the young lieutenant recovered from the unfortunate incident, he was damn sure never going to be allowed to forget that night in the Keys, since it became his permanent call sign.