Chapter 44
LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
CIA EXECUTIVE SCIF
“I THINK WE might have a problem, Susan,” McGavran said.
“No shit we have a problem! I just heard a dead man’s voice spilling compartmented secrets to an air force colonel in Alaska, for Christ’s sake!”
The old spymaster gazed at Carter from behind his bifocals as he reached into his tweed jacket and pulled out a microcassette player. He placed it on the table next to the steel briefcase and arched a bushy eyebrow. “Excuse me?”
“Robert Gaines is alive! PEGASUS is alive?!”
“He is,” McGavran said. “What do you mean you heard him spilling compartmented secrets?”
Through gritted teeth, Carter explained that the Northern Unified Command had given her AD/MS Werner Monroe a USB of Robert Gaines’s distress call addressed to them. She held up the USB for McGavran to see. “You have ten seconds to explain what the hell is going on, Prescott, or so help me God.”
“What would you like me to explain first, Susan?”
“Let’s start with how Robert Gaines is still alive! Then maybe you can explain to me what the hell is going on in Alaska.”
“Robert is alive because of me. He is alive because I hid him and his family after the events in Moscow. I gave his family a new life. New names and a fresh start.”
“Why?!”
“You know why.”
“Robert Gaines has a star on the memorial wall upstairs. He died in the Khimki Forest!”
“That’s what everyone was led to believe.”
“Then what the hell happened in ’87?”
“For now that is not important. We need to focus on what is happening at this very moment.” McGavran fingered the microcassette player. “At 1400 hours eastern time, I received a call on an old encrypted analogue line known only to me and Robert Gaines. I set up this line as a direct mode of communication if Robert ever needed to get in contact with me. For over thirty years that line was silent. That was, until this afternoon.”
McGavran pressed play on the ancient microcassette player and Carter heard Robert Gaines’s voice again:
“This is PEGASUS. I need to speak with Susan Carter and Prescott McGavran. Tell them it’s about Striker. Tell them Robert Gaines is blown. Viktor Sokolov found me. Russian Foreign Intelligence found me. Vympel teams kidnapped my daughters. They’re taking them to the sharashka… I need help, dammit… there was a plane crash off the coast of Alaska, I’m the sole survivor. I’ll likely be taken into federal custody in Anchorage. I repeat, I need help. I need to speak with Susan Carter and Prescott McGavran.”
The message was nearly identical to the message Susan Carter had heard on the USB. For thirty seconds, the director of the CIA stared down at the microcassette player. Then she said, “Sokolov. The sharashka, do you think he’s talking about—”
“Post 866.”
“Can any of this be confirmed?”
“I recently got off the phone with Jim Brower at the FBI’s Foreign Counterintelligence Division. He spoke to the director of counterterrorism at the bureau who confirmed that a private jet crashed on Middleton Island off the coast of Alaska this morning. Five dead, one survivor. The pilot was identified as James Gale.”
“His alias?”
“Yes.”
“And is he in federal custody?”
“He was treated for injuries in Anchorage, and yes, he’s currently in federal custody at the FBI’s office in Anchorage and I’ve been unable to get in contact with him. An FBI counterintelligence team led by Jim Brower as well as a counterterrorism unit is en route to Anchorage as we speak. Turns out the plane that Robert crashed was flying east over the Gulf of Alaska and had no tail number, no transponder, or black box, and according to FBI special agents on scene, there were weapons and devices on board that suggest the deceased were all foreign operators.”
“They died from the crash?”
“Bullet wounds.”
“Robert’s work?”
“Does that surprise you?”
“No. Have the deceased been confirmed as SVR Vympels?”
“They all had the tattoo. I spoke with a contact in the NSA; the feds have run facial recognition software on them—two of the dead came up as matches on the Interpol database. These guys are tied to black operations in Syria, assassinations in Israel and Chechnya. Known SVR Vympels.”
Carter took another long moment to think everything through. She felt betrayed by her old friend, the man who had taught her the art of tradecraft, the man she looked up to.
Robert Gaines died over thirty years ago. I grieved for him, I grieved for his late wife, and now after everything that had happened, he’s alive.
And not only alive, he was supposedly in a hell of a mess with one of the most dangerous men in the world. Viktor Sokolov. Vladimir Putin’s mentor.
Every cell in Carter’s body screamed at her to force McGavran to tell her everything that had transpired in Moscow but that would have to wait.
“If what Robert Gaines is saying is true, that means—”
“It means that Russians are operating on United States soil.”
“That’s an act of war.”
“It is.”
Carter cursed. “How did they find Robert in Alaska of all places?”
“Brower also notified me of another unfortunate incident. A shooting in the township of Eagle in northeast Alaska this morning. Turns out, Robert’s youngest daughter, Cassandra, went missing in that area last week. I believe he was looking for her.”
“You think the shooting and the plane crash are connected?”
“The FBI is in the process of connecting those dots. But we do know that his eldest daughter, Emily, is now missing and his son-in-law is in critical condition in Fairbanks. That has been confirmed.”
“Jesus.”
McGavran tapped the steel briefcase with his fingers. “Susan, I believe Robert’s message was right on the money. There is no reason for him to lie, and I don’t believe this is an isolated incident. I believe the Russians have been taking Americans from US soil for a while now, just like the rumors swirling in the Soviet days. Considering the events that transpired today, I’d say there is enough evidence now to support my theory.”
Carter took in the OREA analyst and shook her head in disbelief. Prescott McGavran should have had a spectacular career given his skill set in the field, but it had all fallen apart after the Striker program debacle. While Susan Carter had escaped with her career intact, Prescott McGavran had been fired from his role as Moscow Chief of Station and was subsequently demoted to headquarters to work a desk job for the rest of his career.
“What are you talking about, your theory?”
McGavran’s fingers drummed the briefcase again, and for the first time, Carter sensed anxiety in the old man.
“What’s in that briefcase, Prescott?”
“A pet project of sorts.”
“What sort of pet project?”
“After the Striker program was abolished, I continued its OVERDRIVE case file on my own.”
Carter’s eyes grew wide in disbelief. The Striker program they ran in the eighties was a clandestine operation to find Post 866, the rumored medical sharashka run by General Viktor Sokolov and his son, Evgeny. The program was established by President Reagan after various foreign sources provided intelligence that the Soviets had a secret installation that experimented on Americans, mostly soldiers captured in war zones and sold to the Soviets.
Striker had been established by the Reagan administration as a cutout CIA program because of its sensitivity. It was an off-the-books operation; no State, no Justice, or oversight committees. The money to run the operation was siphoned through offshore proxies and the only individuals who knew of its existence were Reagan’s inner circle and the CIA agents running it. Textbook for plausible deniability.
All the HUMINT and SIGINT intelligence gathered by the Striker program was consolidated into a compartmented case file, code-named OVERDRIVE. During the six years that Striker was operational, Prescott McGavran and Susan Carter updated the White House personally on the OVERDRIVE case file. And while the location of Post 866 had nearly been discovered, it had all fallen apart in the winter of 1987.
“The OVERDRIVE case file was destroyed, Prescott. Reagan saw to that personally.”
“I know.”
“So excuse me if I’m a bit lost. But how exactly did you continue OVERDRIVE on your own?”
“I made a copy before I was demoted. After the winter of 1987, I thought I was done in the agency. The fact that Director Casey gave me a desk job in OREA, where I had access to Russian intelligence, was a blessing. Yes, I would never be officially operational again, but given the resources I still had, I felt like I owed it to those who were killed.”
“You ran a private investigation behind the agency’s back?!”
“For thirty years, yes,” McGavran said. “I couldn’t let it go, Susan. After I hid Robert, after what the KGB did to those families, after we got so close to finding the sharashka, after everything that happened—”
“You understand what will happen to you if this gets out, don’t you?”
“Of course,” McGavran said. “I will lose my job and almost certainly be investigated and probably indicted for using CIA resources for my own personal gain. That being said, I think you should see what I have gathered. If what Robert said was true, if Sokolov and his Vympels have kidnapped his daughters and are taking them to the post, I believe you should look at the contents of my updated OVERDRIVE case file.”
“Why?”
“Because I believe I might have finally located Post 866 and you are not going to believe what the Russians are doing there.”
Thirty minutes later, after McGavran finished his detailing of the OVERDRIVE case file, Carter stared at him, dumbstruck. “Why wasn’t this brought to my attention sooner, Prescott?!”
“Because until I heard Robert’s distress call, I was gathering evidence based on speculation. Now we have a firsthand account.”
“You firmly believe Post 866 is located at these coordinates on the Kamchatka Peninsula, at this old Soviet missile silo, the location you’ve dubbed in OVERDRIVE as Site X?”
“Without a doubt.”
“If I take this to the National Security Council, they are going to ask for more proof. They are going to want concrete evidence that the Gaines girls are at Site X.”
“Then I suggest we give them that concrete evidence.”
“How?”
“Look at the patterns I’ve detailed in OVERDRIVE. Somehow the Russians bring Americans across the Bering and into the Kamchatka Peninsula. We don’t know the exact mode of transportation, but we do know about the increase in activity at the Russian-owned Gazprom oil rig off the coast of the peninsula.”
“You mean the Russian stealth helicopters?”
McGavran took the specific paper from OVERDRIVE and placed it before Carter. “Precisely. Somehow, the Russians get their victims across the Bering. It could be by boat or even by submarine, I don’t know. What I do know is that I have imagery of Russian stealth helicopters arriving at the Gazprom oil rig. I have imagery of them picking up packages and then flying to Site X, before returning to Vladivostok. Emily Gale was abducted eight hours ago, if we put our spy satellites on the Gazprom oil rig and Site X, I’d be willing to bet we’d see a stealth helicopter arrive at the rig, then fly to Site X. It could be in a couple hours, or it could be a couple days, but I guarantee that’s what we’ll find.”
“Do you know what that would cost, Prescott?”
“Don’t patronize me, Susan. I understand the nuances of satellite telemetry. I also know that someone in your position could order that, no questions asked. Go talk to the geospatial and imagery directors in analytics—they can get the Keyhole images we need.”
Carter wasn’t convinced. “But we still wouldn’t be able to determine if Emily Gale was on that stealth helicopter. For us to intervene, we’d have to have definitive proof.”
“Ah,” McGavran said, looking pleased with himself. “I have a plan for that, too, but we’d need to get Robert to DC as soon as possible. I don’t think it’ll be hard to persuade Robert, but the president and the National Security Council will be a different story.”
“Bring Robert to DC?”
“Of course. His presence will be crucial in persuading the powers that be that we need to take direct action.”
For the next fifteen minutes, McGavran detailed his plan to Carter. When he was done, Carter sat silent for a long beat and then stood, heading for the door.
“Where are you going?” McGavran asked, loading the papers back into the OVERDRIVE case, before following her out of the SCIF and into the hallway.
The basement hallway was flooded with Carter’s security detail and members of her staff. Jack Crowley, her special assistant, ran forward. “Ma’am, DNI Nagle is ordering you to contact him, the chief of staff is calling for an emergency meeting at the White House—”
“Chairman Bridgewater is asking to speak with you, ma’am,” Monroe half shouted.
Carter motioned for McGavran to unlock OVERDRIVE from his wrist. He took off the cuff and handed both the keys and briefcase to Carter. “Crowley, give me your hand.”
The flustered special assistant raised his arm in confusion and Carter locked the briefcase to his wrist, then said, “Monroe, I want you to get me a direct line to General Bridgewater, now.”
“What about DNI Nagle?” Crowley asked.
“Nagle can wait. After I speak to Bridgewater, get ahold of Director Connelly at the FBI.” Carter turned to McGavran. “You are going to go to Andrews Air Force Base.”
“Why?”
“Because I want you to be the first person Robert sees when he lands. Go with him to the Hoover Building.”
“You’re going through with it?”
“He’s crucial for your plan, is he not?”
McGavran nodded.
“I’ll convince Connelly that Robert needs to be in DC.”
“How will you pull that off?”
“You let me deal with that,” Carter said, turning and fast-walking to the elevator.
“What about the satellites?” McGavran shouted after her.
Carter pivoted and faced the old spymaster. “I am going to speak with the directors in analytics now.”