“Fuck! Are the comms going through?” he yelled.
“Diagnostics look fine, Mr. Berg. It’s a simple satellite connection,” said one of the techs from the front of the room.
“There’s nothing simple about any of the connections in here,” Berg snapped.
He was worried. Farrington had cut out in midsentence, and he thought he had heard gunfire. An ambush wasn’t out of the question with the Vympel detachment activated.
“Is there any way we can find them with satellite?” he said, knowing that this wouldn’t be easy.
Satellite tracking didn’t work like the movies, where savvy ground-station operators could follow a car for hundreds of miles using a joystick to pan the camera. Current technology allowed for imagery and camera control, but on a more limited scale, subject to satellite positioning and object-tracking algorithms that take into account moving object estimation, target behavior modeling and target match processing. Much of the process was automated due to the complex mathematics involved, and restricted the satellite’s imaging capacity to a small fixed area around the target. They had decided from the outset not to restrict their satellite capability by tracking the team’s vehicles.
“I can coordinate a search along the road leading from their last checkpoint. It’ll take a few minutes,” said a dark-haired woman a few computer stations away.
“No. I don’t want to lose the bigger picture. We already have one satellite moving to a better position over the border-crossing area, and we need to keep an eye on the military base outside of Novosibirsk,” he said, sitting back down.
He tried the team again, but received no response, switching over to Sanderson’s communication net.
“Base, I lost communications with Blackjack during the middle of a satellite phone conversation. Can you make contact?” Berg said.
“This is base. Stand by.”
Ten seconds later, Sanderson came back on the line. “The call won’t go through. What happened?”
“I don’t know. Blackjack was in the middle of a sentence and that was it. I thought I heard gunfire. NSA confirmed Vympel signalled intelligence less than a minute after Vektor burned,” Berg said.
“The self-destruct system must have triggered their activation. I can’t imagine they could have caught up with our team,” Sanderson said.
“I don’t know. Maybe satellite communications are down. If we don’t hear from them within the next few minutes, I’ll redirect all satellite assets to find them. Until then, there’s not much we can do, aside from keeping our fingers crossed. It would be a real fucking shame to lose them at this point,” Berg said.
“You should have a little more faith in my people, Sanderson chided. “They haven’t let you down yet.”
“I just want to get them back. I owe them that much,” Berg said.
“We’ll get them back.”
A few seconds later, Farrington’s voice returned to Berg’s headset.
“Berg. Are you still there?”
“I’m still here. What happened?”
“Part of the suspected Vympel detachment rammed the lead car, killing Grisha and severely injuring Sasha. Seva is still unconscious, but his vitals are strong. We’re back on the road in one vehicle, headed to the reservoir,” Farrington said.
“I’m sorry about Grisha. Are you able to continue with the exfiltration plan?”
“Affirmative. We’re on our way to the second checkpoint.”
“That’s good to hear. We’re going to get you out of there. Contact base to report your status,” Berg said.
“Understood. Blackjack out.”
Berg turned to Audra Bauer, who shook her head slowly.
“Grisha’s dead, and Sasha is severely injured. Seva is unconscious, but appears to be fine,” he said.
“Shit,” she muttered. “We’ll have to pass this on to Manning.”
“Nothing for them to get worried about. The exfiltration plan remains the same.”
He knew that the mission couldn’t suffer any more unexpected setbacks without jeopardizing the helicopter exfiltration option. The president had been skittish about using helicopters from the very beginning. His most recent restrictions to Black Magic’s ROE underscored the delicate situation. It wouldn’t take much at this point for the president to send Black Magic back to Kyrgyzstan without Blackjack. He’d need to put his own secret play into action soon. It might be Farrington’s only hope.
Chapter 54
Farrington leaned inside the car and released the emergency brake, starting their car on a slow descent down the neglected public boat ramp to the dark waters of the reservoir. Gosha helped him expedite the process by joining him behind the vehicle’s open trunk and pushing. By the time the car reached the water, it had gained enough momentum to continue all the way into the gently lapping waves of the manmade lake. The car floated into the lake for several seconds, hissing as the cold water filled the remaining air pockets in the chassis. Once the black water started to pour into the open windows, the car gave up and plunged to the bottom, temporarily erasing any trace that they had come this way.
In his estimation, the concrete boat launch hadn’t been used in decades, and their car would probably remain hidden for weeks, depending on the level of the reservoir. Of course, he was probably wrong on that account. Nearly everything in this part of Russia either appeared to be in a state of decades-long disrepair or had been hastily cobbled back together without the benefit of an architect or skilled labor, including the community of lake homes they had passed in Leninskoye on their way to this isolated stretch of lakefront — thirty miraculously uneventful kilometers from Vektor.
So uneventful that Farrington could scarcely believe their good fortune after the disaster outside of Koltsovo. The Vympel team clearly hadn’t expected to find them so close to Vektor, instead stumbling upon them out of sheer random coincidence while travelling south. No detailed calls had been made to law enforcement units in the Sovetskiy City District, as evidenced by the complete lack of even the most rudimentary police presence. The streets had been deserted, as expected on a Sunday night in a university town, but to completely avoid running into one patrol car had been nothing short of a miracle, especially driving around in their shot-up sedan.
One close look at their car would have been enough to raise the suspicions of even the most apathetic police officer. One of the side mirrors had been sheared clean by a bullet. The windshield had been peppered by at least four hits. The side windows along the right side of the car were down in forty-degree weather, mainly because the multiple bullet strikes to that side of the car had shattered the windows inside the doors. They had tried to roll one of the windows up, but it had jammed after a few inches, yielding nothing but broken safety glass. Finally, their left front headlight had been destroyed, making them an easy target for a police officer looking to make a few dollars with a warning ticket. Then again, he mused, their car didn’t look half bad for the streets of Novosibirsk. Maybe two officers sitting in a well-hidden patrol car had watched them pass, each shrugging at the sight of another beat-up car on the road.
Farrington ran with Misha along an overgrown dirt path to a flat stretch of sandy beach fifty meters down the shoreline. Their mafiya contacts had picked this spot for its isolation along the northern shore, and its correspondingly rare shallow-entry sandy beach. Hard-to-find spots like this along the lake were usually accessed by boat, which gave them some hope that the car wouldn’t be found by someone trying to back their boat trailer into the water tomorrow morning. Early June was still a little cold for recreational boaters, but in Siberia, a fifty-degree day in June was treated with more enthusiasm than a seventy-degree day in July. Either way, they should be on a helicopter headed to Kyrgyzstan by the time anyone decided to take their boat out for the day.