Arctic Gold Read Free Page A

with an SA-3 missile. The pilot had been rescued, but Yugoslav forces had grabbed the wreckageand almost certainly turned it over to the Russians for study. The Russians, it was well known, were very
interested in learning how to defeat American stealth technology.
Rubens had just kicked up the ante in an already dangerous game.
He reached for a telephone on the console beside him.
DeFrancesa
Operation Magpie
Waterfront, St. Petersburg
0025 hours
Well, they’d warned her she might find herself out of communications with the Art Room. There was nothing Lia could do about it now, however.
Like all Desk Three field operatives, Lia had a tiny speaker unit implanted in her skull just behind her left ear. The microphone was attached to her black utilities, while the antenna was coiled up in her belt. The system provided safe, clear, secure communications usually. It was a bitch, though, when the technology failed.
Still, the satellite dish receivers at Fort Meade were a lot better as antennas than the wire in her belt. It was possible that they were receiving her back in the Art Room even if she couldn’t hear them.
She would have to keep operating on that assumption.
What she couldn’t rely on was the Art Room warning her of approaching threats.
She tried raising her backup. Romeo, this is Juliet.
Nothing. And that was
worrying. It meant she and Alekseev were on their own.
Alekseev had moved ahead and was searching the huge chamber now with his own flashlight. She could see stacks of crates, some covered in tarpaulins, looming out of the darkness.
But one large crate was off by itself, near the back wall of the warehouse. She could see words stenciled in bold, black Cyrillic lettering on the sides: stahnka
.
Machine parts.
Akulinin
Operation Magpie
St. Petersburg
0026 hours
Ilya Ilyitch Akulinin peered ahead through fog and cold drizzle, past the monotonous beat of the rented car windshield wipers. Kosaya came to a T at Kozhevennaya Liniya
, and he turned the ugly little CitroICn right.
That put him in a narrow canyon, with two- and three- story structures, most with faI\$?ades of either concrete blocks or rusting sheet metal, looming to either side. Lia should be in the third warehouse in the row on the left side of the street; he pulled over to the curb and parked. He didn’t want to get too close.
Akulinin was new to the National Security Agency and Desk Three. Born in Brooklyn, the son of naturalized Russian immigrants, he’d joined the Army out of high school and served as a Green Beret with the Army Special Forces, where his fluency in Russian had put him in great demand in joint operations with America new ally, the Russian Federation. His had been among the first American boots on the ground in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, just prior to the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan.
Leaving the car, he dropped a button- sized sensor on the street, then walked across the street with casual nonchalance. If anyone was watching, they would see a tall, blond man in laborer coveralls, carrying a large toolbox. Reaching a warehouse two down from the one Lia should be in, he stepped into the narrow junk- and garbage- littered space between two buildings and began looking for a way up. There was a ladderor the remnants of onebut it began halfway up the side of the building. The rest had rusted away, or been stolen long ago.
Much of St. Petersburg infrastructure showed the same advanced state of decay and crumbling collapse. Many of the buildings in this area were abandoned, and scavangers had long since stripped them of copper, lead, brass, and anything else they could pry loose, haul off, and sell.
He stepped over a pile of garbage and a set of rusted
bedsprings. Something large and furry squeaked as it scuttled from beneath an overturned two- legged chair.
At least, he thought, he shouldn’t have an audience here tonight.
Except for the rats.
DeFrancesa
Operation Magpie
Waterfront, St. Petersburg
0027 hours
Removing yet another small gray case