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  PROLOGUE

  Tropic of Cancer

  September 3, 1962, 11:00 A.M.

  “We are putting one of our hedgehogs down the Americans’ trousers.”

  Rear Admiral Dmitri Merkassov stood on the forward deck of the Komsomol class freighter Mikula, his winter-bronzed bare hands firmly gripping the iron rail. Like the deck beneath his ankle boots, the bars were slick with sea spray. The fifty-seven-year-old officer had to squeeze tightly to keep from shifting with the sway of the ship. The distant chug of the steam turbine engines was nearly lost in the loud, clapping sound of the ocean water as it met the hull. Each slap tossed a mist of salt spray over the gunmetal jacket of Merkassov’s casual service uniform. The dampness evaporated swiftly in the sharp sunlight.

  The officer allowed himself a smile. Everything here was different. The spray was warm and the motion of the ship was rolling instead of jerky. The 12,285-ton vessel would shift atilt for a second or two before lolling upright and then dipping in the other direction. This back-and-forth motion required a less firm-legged stance than the choppy, fast-changing waters of the north.

  Merkassov had spent most of his career in the Arctic Ocean, serving mostly on Soviet Northern Fleet Novik-class, Type 7 and 7U destroyers. There, under cold blue or even colder slate gray skies, the Beringovsky native experienced nothing like a comforting morning sun and invigorating sea breeze. In just over an hour, shortly after noon, the Mikula and the convoy of which it was a part would cross into the southern hemisphere and the winds would blow in the opposite direction.…

  The rear admiral breathed deeply of the Caribbean-tinged winds. It was the first time in his military career that he had taken this voyage through the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean to the Atlantic Ocean. To serve in the Soviet navy had always been his dream, it didn’t matter where. The son of a father and mother who had fought in the Revolution, that honor was his only goal. But now that he had made this passage, seen a crew that was not dressed in thick winter jackets lined with sheep fur, he began to realize how small his world had been. Full and deep, yes, but in a very narrow field of operation. Perhaps, when this action was complete he would request a transfer to the Fifth Operational Squadron stationed in the Mediterranean. Just for a while, maybe to iron some of the wrinkles from his long, leathery wind-blasted face.

  But it was a passing notion. Just to be part of Operation Anadyr was an honor that he did not take lightly. It had been bestowed upon him and his counterpart Rear Admiral Blinnikov personally by Commissar Khrushchev. Blinnikov was the one who would be handling the hedgehog—as Khrushchev had put it in his refreshingly blunt, colorful, peasant’s way. That flotilla would be bringing the nuclear weapons to China. But the role of the Mikula and the Vsevelod was equally important. It would be both spearhead and heart of what the Kremlin quietly referred to as maskirova: the art of deception.

  A naval infantry intelligence officer in a dark blue work uniform trotted over, saluting and handing the rear admiral an envelope. “Thank you, Lieutenant Bolshakov,” Merkassov said, then indicated for him to wait. It was a decoded message from Blinnikov.

  Flagship will cross boundary at 12:06.

  Merkassov folded the message into his shirt pocket. “Please inform the rear admiral that his message has been received and is acknowledged,” he said to the other. “I will be along momentarily to advise the Vsevelod.”

  “Yes, Commander!” the young man said smartly, saluting and turning back toward the bridge.

  The rear admiral inhaled. He would not want to be in Blinnikov’s position. To mask the immensity of this effort, the small convoys had departed from eight ports: Kronstadt, Liepāja, Baltiysk, and Murmansk in the north, and Sevastopol, Feodosiya, Nikolayev, and Poti on the Black Sea. Western access to these ports was briefly closed off so absolute secrecy could be maintained. The success of his mission depended not just on the proficiency of his own crew—and they were working in a strange land with a different language, unloading equipment that had a low tolerance for any mishandling. It also depended on the reliability of an intermediary, a Cuban woman code-named Buntovshchik—rebel—who had no experience with this particular of cargo, only a general knowledge of the science behind it.

  The world suddenly seemed to spin around him, around this proud arm of the Soviet fleet. He looked a final time at the serene blue sea and the proud array of freighters, frigates, and corvettes that stretched ahead. To be part of this armada was, yes, an honor. But to be a part of history was greater still. Operation Anadyr would change the world, and his part in it created maskirova with a difference.

  This deception would have fangs.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Op-Center Headquarters, Fort Belvoir North,

  Springfield, Virginia

  July 1, 2019, 7:30 A.M.

  “Will there be vegan hot dogs?”

  Meteorologist Gary Gold turned from his laptop to the speaker, Dongling Qui. Gold had been reviewing the morning’s low-orbit satellite views of Poland, where NATO maneuvers were scheduled to begin that afternoon. He regarded the young woman with his pleasant blue eyes.

  “I don’t know,” Gold said, folding his arms. “I think we did have turkey burgers last Fourth of July.”

  “A turkey is meat,” Dongling pointed out.

  “Yes, I know that,” he replied. “But what I’m saying is—there’s a diverse menu. I’m sure if you ask, Aaron will make sure he has some.”

  “I wouldn’t want to impose after just a week on the job—”

  “Dongling, it’s a tradition,” Gold assured her. “Everyone shows up, invited or not. And their plus-ones. You can be mine, if you feel like you’re forcing yourself.”

  She made a face that reflected her ongoing hesitancy.

  “How about this: I’ll ask,” Gold offered. “And I promise you: frankless-furters will be served.”

  The twenty-eight-year-old geologist smiled gratefully and returned to her examination of soil analysis from Syria. She was tracking the movement of soldiers based on samples scraped from the soles of dead ISIS fighters.

  Gold lingered for a moment in the silence she left behind. He wasn’t sorry he brought up the annual bash thrown by his boss, Aaron Bleich. Dongling was new, just a week on the job, and was coming in early to acclimate herself. Beijing-raised and educated, the daughter of a U.S. diplomat and Chinese embassy worker, she was one of the few women who worked in the Tank, the electronic and scientific brain-center of Op-Center. Along with former U.N. translator, linguist Salim Singh, he and Dongling were also the only people here at this hour.

  “All I can tell you is that it’s like working as a hedge fund guy,” Gold had told his parents when he was hired seven months before. “I’ve gotta be there when certain European markets open.”

  The European “markets” were the Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium, Meteo France, the Irish Meteorological Service, among dozens of other facilities around the globe. It was Gold’s job
each morning to study the world’s microclimates, searching for sudden events that could not be explained by the weather: for example, suboceanic thermal signatures that could be North Korean midget submarines and not whales, or decreased pollution over Beijing or Shanghai that might indicate downtime and thus decreased production for Chinese factories. There was also a need for actionable global weather reports, since Director Williams never knew when and to where it might be necessary to dispatch the Joint Special Operations Command out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina. JSOC was Op-Center’s military wing; military “fist,” as their commander, Major Mike Volner preferred to call it. Volner was an observer assigned to the Polish drills. Williams liked to know whether his people were in sun or storm and the most efficient way to reach them in a crisis.

  The staff of mostly twenty-somethings trickled in over the next hour, bag-breakfasts in hand and dressed as if they were going to a university protest. Williams and most of his senior staff did not approve of the informality but concessions were the only way to get the sharp, millennial talent Op-Center needed. The sole exceptions to the lazy conformity were three women: Dongling, in her white blouse and black skirt; cartographer Allison Weill, who was said to be descended from one of the noncoms who journeyed west with Lewis and Clark; and thirty-four-year-old Kathleen Hays, a Hollywood computer graphics designer who was discovered, by Aaron, at a comic book convention nearly eight months before. Hays was Op-Center’s visual analysis specialist, a shy, private woman who favored black pantsuits that matched her raven hair. Her station formed the third piece of the triptych with Gary Gold in the center. There were no cubicles in the small but open Geek Tank: the stations formed a rectangle with the fourteen “geeks” facing inward. Only Aaron had his own office, though a small one was being carved out for Charlene Squires, the RES—reverse engineering specialist. It was being constructed on the same spot from which her father, Charlie Squires, had commanded Striker, the military arm of Paul Hood’s Op-Center. Charlie was KIA—killed in action—on a mission to Russia with the team.

  Gold’s row faced the door and he saw Aaron arrive.

  “Six for six,” the meteorologist grumped inside as he saw the network leader smirk in his direction. The first day of Dongling’s employment had been orientation, which had been handled by Deputy Director Anne Sullivan. From day two onward, Gold had made it his personal responsibility to help the new hire in any way possible, from walking her to the fast food outlets on the base to understanding the pop culture references and ever-changing slang employed by most of the geeks. Though Dongling was seemingly oblivious to Gold’s solicitous attention, Aaron was not. There was no competition for her attention, such as it was. As everyone at Op-Center learned in their post-employment, pre-assignment orientation, proximity to target was nine-tenths of any effective land campaign.

  Gold did not look forward to telling his boss why he was asking about the Fourth of July menu. He decided to wait for an opportunity rather than make one. For one thing, Bleich was distracted by all that had to get done in the week before his annual summer vacation. For another, officially, there was a no-dating policy among coworkers at Op-Center. Fraternizing at parties and barbecues was permitted, but pillow talk was not conducive to keeping divisional secrets. These boundaries were strictly enforced even in a confined space like the Tank, when the parties were seated side-by-side. Confidential data was sent to SmartWare, eyeglasses that read the irises of the users before divulging and then destroying the information. Unofficially, however—to the disapproval of Anne Sullivan—Chase Williams looked the other way at minor infractions. He had told his deputy he would rather know who was seeing whom rather than have it occur in secret.

  To Gold’s left, Kathleen Hays nodded good morning to her neighbors and began scrolling through the results of the International Facial Scan program that was automatically run overnight. Until six weeks ago, this kind of research was time-restricted because Op-Center was piggybacking on the NSA’s mainframe. Then Aaron and Joe Berkowitz, a technical support associate, cobbled together what they called OpPrime—a nod, she later learned, to Optimus Prime and their affection for the universe of the Transformers. Part official, part dark ops, the system was designed to cobble together everything they needed from a variety of sources, without proprietary constraints or permissions. The efficiency of Kathleen’s work had increased exponentially.

  The IFS was a program that constantly sifted through all social media postings from around the globe, performing facial scans and comparing it to Op-Center’s vast database of suspected terrorists. If there were an urgent match, she would have been notified by smartphone and a member of the skeletal evening staff would have accessed the data via SmartWare. Absent that, the morning update fell into three categories: F3, nationals from hostile nations who were posing at monuments or crowded clubs, markets, or sports venues; F2, intelligence service “watch list” individuals who were spotted anywhere; and F1, known terrorists who showed up in an image. The highest level of alert, F0, was for fugitives. That was how Op-Center helped the National Intelligence Agency of the Kingdom of Thailand find the assassin who shot and killed an imam in Sungai Padi: he was spotted on a tourist’s Instagram video taken at a halal restaurant. Though he had been masked during the attack, his clothes and bodily proportions matched exactly security camera footage of the killing.

  While there was a generally predictable flow of images from around the world, two places had experienced upticks in the last six months as tourism grew. One was Costa Rica, thanks to its emphasis on ecotourism; and the other was Cuba, now that it was directly accessible from the United States.

  The world was relatively quiet, though there was an interesting F2 hit from Moscow. She didn’t need the glasses to read it. And the classification was F2B, a subset which meant that the identity was “confidently suspected” but with an uncertainty factor.

  Kathleen opened the attached dossier.

  Konstantin Bolshakov, she read. Former naval officer who became an arms dealer after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

  There were no warrants or indication of recent activity, just two photographs: a thirty-two-year-old image Interpol had taken when he met with drug dealers in Berlin; and this new image, during the May Day Parade, only just posted on Facebook. The “aging” program applied to the older photograph made for a convincing similarity and a 79 percent certainty that it was Bolshakov.

  Kathleen flagged the name and asked for a priority follow-up. That meant that security cameras to which Op-Center had access in and around Moscow, and at many Russian airports, should be searched as well. If the man were still active in gunrunning, he would be a useful bargaining chip if Moscow had anything the White House needed.

  Almost at once, the scan returned with an update. Two weeks ago, Bolshakov had flown into an international airport in Russia’s frozen northeast. No departure had been noted.

  Kathleen dutifully marked the location for further scrutiny: the frozen port city of Anadyr.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Anadyr, Russia

  July 2, 12:40 A.M.

  During his twenty-year career as an officer for the Northern Fleet Intelligence Directorate, Konstantin Bolshakov became familiar with the three common designations for cold weather. There was freezing cold, which was the norm when ships were docked in northern bases like Severomorsk and Tiksi. It was the kind of weather when even a clear sun hanging in the sky did not cause the ice to melt. Then there was bitter cold, a classification that described a vessel leaving port and thrusting itself into winds that were restless at best, brutal at worst. And then there was extreme cold, which was the typical at-sea designation for ships facing not just wind but ice, floes that lowered the sea and air temperature by ten degrees or more.

  The port city of Anadyr is none of those. Located in the permafrost zone, where the ground was frozen year-round, it is quite literally in a class by itself, nestled in one of the coldest inhabited spots on the planet. With a population of just over f
ourteen thousand, the port city is a sizeable fishing center, though it is also a significant mining center for coal and gold and is one of the largest reindeer-breeding centers in the hemisphere. Most of the people live in sturdy khrushevkas, five-story apartment buildings, and the roads are built of concrete; in the cold, lacking flexibility under heavy traffic, asphalt simply snaps and becomes granular, like little black diamonds.

  “When the ground underfoot does not crunch,” a fellow traveler on the flight had commented as they deplaned, “then I will worry about global warming.”

  Bolshakov replied with an agreeable smile. The other man—a structural engineer judging by a well-worn leather jacket that announced the name of his firm—had turned and addressed his traveling companion directly, a not-uncommon occurrence. Bolshakov had a wide, open face with relaxed, approachable features. It was one of the reasons that even career criminals and black marketers had trusted him for over thirty years.

  The airbus journey had lasted nearly eight and one-half hours, the nonstop Ural Airlines flight describing the shortest path between the two places: an arc over the top of the earth. Now eighty-eight, the former sailor had bookended the trip with sleep, his chin tucked in his shoulder, his ear pressed to the cold, rattling window, his arms tightly crossed to keep his fingers warm. He woke for meals; to stare down at the pole that explorers had clawed across—not in relative comfort, with vodka on a fold-down tray; and to visit the lavatory. At those times, when he moved haltingly down the narrow aisle, Bolshakov found that his once powerful sea legs were woefully inadequate air legs. They embraced inactivity and protested with sharp joint pain and apathetic tendons whenever he rose. The proud part of him wanted to believe he could still make the journey by sea, if required, in one of the old freighters or frigates. But the pragmatic part of him—and the one-time idealist was nothing, now, if not a realist—knew that was not the case.