“No matter how this plays out in the end, one thing’s sure: I’m royally fucked, Sergeant,” he said gloomily.
“Well, that depends,” Isayev said slowly.
Surprised, the captain looked up. “Depends on what?”
“On whether those two really are who they say they are,” the sergeant replied.
Leonov stared at him. While he’d been moaning about his fate, Isayev had obviously been thinking very different thoughts. “Zakharova and Solomin? Who else would they be?”
“I don’t know, sir.” The sergeant lowered his voice even more. “But their arrival sure seems conveniently timed to avoid awkward questions. I mean, here we are on the weekend with all the senior officers away. And then, bang, two total strangers storm in flashing identity cards and demanding access to all our files?” He shrugged. “Doesn’t that seem sort of odd to you?”
“Well, that’s the whole point of a surprise inspection!” Leonov argued. “To catch people off their guard.”
“Maybe in books, sir,” Isayev said patiently. “But that’s not the way the game is usually played. See, higher-ups like Colonel Andreyev almost always have pals or connections on the staff who give them a little friendly warning — quietlike — about things like this before they happen. The system’s set up so that nobody gets embarrassed and everybody looks good.” He swung around in his chair to glance carefully down the hall. “All of which makes me wonder who these people really work for.”
Leonov felt cold. “You think they’re foreign spies?”
“Maybe.” The sergeant hesitated. “Or they could be some of our own spooks.” His mouth tightened. “Those rat bastards in the GRU or the FSB might be running a no-warning security exercise on us. If so, letting them poke around in our databases isn’t going to look too good.” He looked back at the captain. “Either way, sir, you’d better check up on these people.”
For what felt like an eternity, Leonov stood frozen. My God, he thought, fighting down a rising sense of dread. Isayev was right. His situation was bad enough if this were just a genuine probe into the brigade’s records. If, instead, it turned out that he’d given spies — whether foreign or domestic — unchallenged access to their computer systems, he was a dead man walking. Unless, that was, he could find out for sure in time to stop whatever they were doing.
“The colonel has a direct link to the Ministry of Defense in his office,” the sergeant reminded him.
“Yes! That’s right,” Leonov realized abruptly. He shook himself like a sleeper throwing off a nightmare. “Make sure those two don’t leave until I confirm their identities, Sergeant.”
Isayev nodded. The veteran Spetsnaz noncom’s eyes were expressionless. “No problem, Captain.”
With that, Leonov spun on his heel and hurried away down the hall.
Inside the captain’s office, the big man who called himself Oleg Solomin sat in front of the computer, rapidly scanning through files and then copying them onto a special, ultra-high-speed USB flash drive.
“How’s it going?” his companion asked. Zakharova leaned casually on one corner of the desk, keeping her eye on the door.
“Almost finished,” he grunted.
Her smartphone buzzed once. She fished it out of her uniform jacket. “Yes.”
“You’ve got trouble, Sam,” the lilting Welsh voice of David Jones, their backup man, told her. “Someone on that base just placed a secure call to Moscow, to the Ministry of Defense. I doubt that’s a coincidence.”
Samantha Kerr frowned. “Understood,” she said. “We’re pulling out now.” She looked across at Marcus Cartwright, her fellow Scion field operative. “We’re blown. Or in the process of being blown.”
“That’s unfortunate,” the big man replied calmly. “But not wholly unexpected.” With quick, economical movements, he detached the USB drive and slipped it into his own coat. Then he got up and moved toward the door, taking the lead.
The hard-faced Spetsnaz sergeant who’d first greeted them stood waiting in the hallway right outside. “Going somewhere, Mr. Solomin?” he asked Cartwright with a mocking smile. “So soon?”
The big man offered him a polite smile and nodded. “The colonel and I have finished our work, Sergeant Isayev. You should be glad to get us out of your hair.”
Smoothly, the Russian unholstered his sidearm, a 9mm Udav pistol. “If you are who you claim to be, you have my apologies.” His smile turned uglier. “But if you are what I suspect, your next of kin will have my condolences.”
Ashen-faced with fear, Cartwright sagged to his knees. He raised his hands. They were visibly trembling. “Please, this isn’t what you think.” Words spilled out of his slack mouth in an almost incoherent jumble. “Really, I swear. We are not—”
Phut. Phut.
Shot twice by Samantha Kerr at point-blank range with a tiny, Russian-made PSS pistol, the sergeant stumbled backward. He slid down the wall, smearing bright red blood across dingy white paint. His mouth opened for one last desperate cry. And then Marcus Cartwright lunged upward, crushing his trachea with one powerful hammerblow.
Working swiftly, the two Scion agents dragged the corpse back into Leonov’s office and dumped it behind his desk.
“Well, that’s annoying,” Sam said quietly, reloading her little pistol — originally developed by the Soviets for use in covert assassinations by KGB agents and Spetsnaz operatives. Though its slow-moving 7.62mm subsonic rounds were almost useless beyond twenty-five meters, the weapon was almost perfectly silent. “I hate it when the opposition wakes up just a bit too soon.”
In the brigade commander’s much larger and better-furnished office not far down the hall, Captain Leonov was on the phone. Grimly, he listened to the dry, disinterested voice of the personnel clerk he’d finally been able to reach. Finding someone at the Ministry of Defense who was willing and able to answer his questions had taken much longer than he’d hoped.
“Colonel Zakharova? Irina Zakharova?” the clerk said. “Yes, there is such an officer attached to the general staff. But she is on medical leave, or so my records indicate. Apparently, she had suffered a mild heart attack last month. Why do you ask?”
Leonov clutched the phone tighter. He had been tricked. “Because she—”
Behind him, the door into the office swung silently open. Sam Kerr leaned around the doorframe with her pistol in hand and a look of intense concentration on her face. Coolly, she squeezed the trigger twice.
Hit by both shots, Dmitry Leonov crumpled across the desk. The phone dropped out of his hand.
Cartwright scooped it up. “This is Senior Sergeant Isayev.”
“Isayev? What’s going on there? Where is your captain?” the clerk in Moscow asked, obviously puzzled. “And what is this business about Colonel Zakharova?”
“Apparently, we have an impostor on the base,” Cartwright explained. “Captain Leonov is taking a squad to deal with the situation immediately. But he wishes me to thank you for your extremely valuable assistance.” Then, without waiting for a reply, he hung up.
The big man looked at Sam. “That’s torn it. I’d estimate we have about thirty minutes before all hell breaks loose here. Probably less.”
She nodded. “I’m on it.” Taking out her smartphone, she tapped in a one-word text message—DAMOCLES, the request for an emergency extraction. Message sent, her phone reported.
Ten