Assassin's Edge

Book 7: David Slaton

by Ward Larsen

Genres: Thrillers; War & Military; Spy Thrillers

Synopsis

USA Today bestselling author Ward Larsen's globe-trotting assassin, David Slaton, returns for another breathless adventure in Assassin's Edge!

A U.S. spy plane crashes off the northern coast of Russia at the same time that a Mossad operative is abducted from a street in Kazakhstan. The two events seem unrelated, but as suspicions rise, the CIA calls in its premier operative, David Slaton.

When wreckage from the aircraft is discovered on a remote Arctic island, Slaton and a team are sent on a clandestine mission to investigate. While they comb a frigid Russian island at the top of the world, disaster strikes yet again: a U.S. Navy destroyer sinks in the Black Sea.

Evidence begins mounting that these disparate events are linked, controlled by an unseen hand. A mysterious source, code name Lazarus, provides tantalizing clues about another impending strike. Yet Lazarus has an agenda that is deeply personal, a thirst for revenge against a handful of clandestine operators. Prime among them: David Slaton.

A Macmillan Audio production from Forge Books

Release date: April 12, 2022

Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

Print pages: 336

Sample

ONE

On appearances, the two events could not have been more disconnected. In reality, they could not have been more intimately entwined.

Raven 44 cut smoothly through thin air, floating effortlessly in one of the earth’s most hostile environments: the lonely sky above seventy degrees north latitude. As the big RC-135 skirted the northern border of Russia, the air outside registered sixty degrees below zero. At that temperature water goes instantly to ice, and fuel in the wings must be constantly heated. The jet’s cabin, of course, was warm and dry, aeronautical engineers having long ago conquered such environmental adversities.

Other threats, however, were far less foreseeable.

“I’ve got an intermittent strobe bearing three-four-zero,” announced Staff Sergeant Kyle Trask over the intercom. He was one of seven airborne systems operators manning workstations in the airplane’s tunnel-like cabin.

“From the north, not landside?” asked Major Tom Meadows, the mission commander who oversaw the sensor suites.

“North,” confirmed Trask. “Looks like it’s coming from 401. Really high power, broad spectrum, comes and goes … haven’t seen anything like it before.”

The major rose from his own console, fighting stiffness from the long mission, and went to stand behind Trask. He studied the sergeant’s display, which was a composite map of the surrounding area: a terrain relief of glacial coastline that hadn’t changed in a million years, overlaid by airspace boundaries that hadn’t existed when his grandfather was born. To Raven 44’s left was the northern coast of Russia, the ice-rimmed frontier where the wilderness of Siberia met the Arctic Ocean. On the starboard side there were no land masses whatsoever, only sea and ice all the way to the North Pole. Thirty miles ahead, however, Meadows saw dashed lines representing restricted-use airspace. Aptly named Danger Area 401, it was a twelve-hundred-mile-long corridor that encompassed all the airspace from the sea’s surface to outer space. DA 401 was used, on rare occasions, by the Russian military to conduct missile tests.

“Is it hot now?” Meadows asked.

“It is, sir. Went active a few hours ago.”

“This is the first time I’ve seen it go live.”

“I have a couple of times,” Trask replied, “but it’s pretty unusual.” He had been running the northern surveillance tracks longer than Meadows.

DA 401 was exceptionally large, stretching hundreds of miles out to sea, and so it was rarely activated—doing so impinged on highly lucrative commercial airline overflights. Yet both men knew an advisory had been issued days earlier announcing its impending use. Indeed, this was probably why their mission had been moved up twelve hours: headquarters wanted to see what the Russians were up to.

Raven 44 was an RC-135W, a highly modified version of the venerable KC-135 tanker. The type had been in service with the Air Force since the dawn of the Cold War, and this particular jet had rolled off the production line in 1964—making it twenty years older than its oldest crewmember. Yet if the airframe was dated, its instrumentation was not. The jet had undergone extensive modifications ten years earlier to become the cutting edge platform known as Rivet Joint, and now the adopted child of the defunct Strategic Air Command was lurking along the borders of the old Soviet Union much as it always had.

Rivet Joint aircraft had a very specific mission: they trolled along the edges of hostile airspace—places like Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran—in the hope of capturing scraps of electronic intelligence, or ELINT. Radar emissions, telemetry data, communications intercepts. All were fair game, collected passively and recorded for later analysis. It wasn’t as swashbuckling as dogfighting in fifth generation fighters, but in the bigger scheme of things the mission was no less vital to national security. And the intelligence gleaned made the F-22s and F-35s that much more lethal.

The crew was weary. It had been four hours since the last aerial refueling, twelve since they’d taken off from their home drome: Kadena Air Base in Japan. Long missions were typical for Rivet Joints, augmented crews standard. The coffeepots got a workout, as did the bunks in the rest area. Even so, with the crew nearing its second shift change, everyone was in circadian arrhythmia, their senses dull and caffeine no longer bridging the gap.

“What spectrum are we talking about?” Meadows asked, trying to ID the raw-data signal.

“S-band, roughly three gigahertz, but it’s not in the library. Looks like they’re painting us, although that’s not unusual.”

Meadows weighed how to handle it, and only one thing came to mind. He flicked a switch on his intercom and called the flight deck.

---

The chime on the intercom didn’t exactly wake the aircraft commander, but it recaptured his thoughts, which had drifted to the barbeque he’d been planning for the weekend. Captain Bryan Crossfield tapped a switch to make the connection. “What’s up?”

“Hey, Bryan,” Meadows said from in back. “We’re coming up on Area 401. Just wanted to make sure you were planning on staying clear?”

“Yeah, this course should keep us a good ten miles south of the active sector. Why?”

“We’re getting some solid S-band from one o’clock. The library doesn’t recognize the signal.”

“Okay, thanks for the heads-up. We’ll stay clear.” Crossfield flicked off the intercom and addressed his copilot. “Sounds like they’re testing a new one.”

“Guess that’s why we’re here,” said Lieutenant Rico Huerta as he gazed out the window on the right.

“How far to the end of our track?”

Huerta checked the flight management screen. “Nine minutes.”

“Let’s extend it.” This was standard procedure. The Rivet Joint airframe was not ambidextrous—if they turned back east, the twenty-foot-long side-scan antenna on her starboard hip would no longer have a view of the test range. Unknown signals were always worth watching.

“We can’t go more than about forty extra miles,” said Huerta. “We’re due at the last refueling track in less than an hour, and that’s three hundred miles behind us.”

“Fair enough. Let’s just give them what we can so that—” Crossfield’s words cut off abruptly.

“What?” the copilot asked, sensing his skipper’s unease.

“Did you feel that?”

“No, what?”

“Like … I don’t know, maybe a vibration.”

“No, I—”

This time there was no mistaking it. Crossfield’s hands instinctively seized the control column as the great airplane shuddered. Amber warnings lit on the main display, and then the ominous vibration seemed to stop.

“Fault on the weather radar and Sat-Com 2,” said Huerta.

“That’s the least of our worries. Maybe we picked up some ice on the engine fan blades when—”

A great crack stunned both pilots, and in a flash the side window near Huerta’s shoulder spider-webbed, then failed. The decompression was explosive, rocking the airplane from nose to tail. All hell broke loose on the flight deck; the humid inside air crystallized to an icy fog, and papers and Styrofoam coffee cups flew through the breach. The cabin altitude, which had been at eight thousand feet, spiked to thirty-five thousand in seconds.

“Masks!” Crossfield shouted, reaching for his oxygen. He donned his O2 mask amid a riot of audible warnings and red lights. The autopilot kicked off, and the airplane began rolling into a dive—not a bad thing given their situation. “We need to get down to ten thousand feet!” he yelled as he pushed the control column forward.

The noise was overwhelming, and having removed his headset to put the oxygen mask on, Crossfield couldn’t hear the intercom. What he did hear was shouting from the cabin behind. He glanced right and to his horror saw his copilot rag-dolling against the failed side window. There was blood on his face and he was clearly unconscious.

Crossfield shouted for help, but doubted anyone in back could hear him. He began running through the procedure for an emergency descent—a maximum speed dive to a lower altitude where supplemental oxygen would no longer be needed. With the nose continuing to drop, he tried to right the airplane, but found the controls sluggish. In the back of his mind he recalled one exception to the emergency descent procedure: if structural damage was suspected, a high-speed dive was ruled out.

Another great shudder from the airplane, like nothing he’d ever experienced. The jet seemed disconnected from his inputs, like a train no longer on the tracks. He fought the yoke desperately as the nose continued to bury. Rolling past ninety degrees—one wing pointed at the sea, the other toward the sky—the airspeed neared the redline. Just like that, the depressurization emergency became secondary to what was always priority one: maintain aircraft control.

Crossfield hit the stops on the control column, but the airplane kept rolling. Approaching an inverted attitude, but still flying, the airplane emitted a terrible groan. The controls went suddenly light in his grasp, as if the great beast was hesitating. In a near vertical dive now, the windscreen filled with sea—still miles away, but closing in fast. Crossfield’s instincts told him—rightly, as it turned out—that the jet had suffered damage.

The airspeed was approaching Mach 1—never a good place to be in a sixty-year-old airframe that wasn’t designed to go supersonic. For a moment his inputs seemed to find purchase, the flight controls beginning to respond. Then a second explosion, more disastrous than the first, sent everything tumbling.

Crossfield was thrown to the left, his lap belt the only thing keeping him from slamming against the side window. Whatever had happened, he knew it was catastrophic. They were screwed, falling out of the sky a thousand miles from nowhere. Amid the Christmas tree of warning lights on the panels in front of him, he picked out the hydraulic pressure gauges. All were pegged to zero. It meant he had no flight controls, along with a damaged airframe and an incapacitated copilot. With g-forces pinballing him around the cockpit, Crossfield did the only thing he could do—he kept fighting the listless controls and prayed for an idea … any idea.

Despite all his training, all his years of experience, nothing came to mind as the ice-clad Arctic Ocean filled the front windscreen.

TWO

The second critical event took place two thousand miles away. It involved not one of the world’s most technologically advanced aircraft, but rather a melon stall in a market in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

In the stirring early morning, a slim young woman laced her way through the crowd. She was strikingly attractive yet had gone to great lengths to hide it. Her dress was long and shapeless, and a scarf cloaked her luminous raven hair. Her most arresting feature, a pair of olive eyes set above high cheek bones, was lost behind a pair of cheap sunglasses. Her ethnicity was vague, although in Kazakhstan such labels were often elusive. The country had long been a crossroads, a place where East met West, where traders intersected and gene pools mingled. While Asian features prevailed, faces bearing Slavic and Mediterranean traits were quite common. The dominant language was Russian, and the young woman spoke it with a local accent. This was no less than a tribute to her tenacity—when she’d arrived here, slightly over a year ago from warmer environs to the west, her Russian had been of the serviceable kind learned in a classroom. As with so much in her twenty-four years, the woman, whose name was Ayla, had set her mind to improving.

The market was active under a crisp blue sky, a chill rain having kept the crowds away in recent days. Ayla had been here twice before, on both occasions to prepare for today. This morning she ran a more intricate surveillance detection route than on her other visits, like an athlete warming up for a big game.

The agent had insisted she come alone. Ayla didn’t like that part, yet there was little she could do about it—communications had been a one-way affair. It had all begun two weeks ago when a street urchin handed a message to a guard at the entrance of the Israeli embassy in Nur-Sultan. It was a suspicious contact by any measure, and made even more so by one particular demand: a request that the assigned case officer be female. Ayla was the only Mossad katsa in Kazakhstan fitting that description, and since the source seemed dubious to begin with, it landed on her desk with all the import of a discarded gum wrapper.

She’d followed the directions to a seemingly innocuous Gmail account, and there, deposited in a draft folder and left unsent, were instructions for a dead-drop pickup. As tradecraft went, the draft folder ploy was old school and marginally secure. Skeptical but intrigued, Ayla got approval from her supervisor to make the retrieval, and the next day, behind a loose brick in a churchyard wall, she found one USB memory stick. Back at the embassy she tried to see what was on it but was stymied by the stick’s security. Sensing a dead end, she sent it via secure courier to headquarters and heard nothing for five days.

Finally, she was called in by her supervisor, who briefed her on the situation: the source, who’d begun as little more than a curiosity, had provided highly valuable information. After a second dead drop, Ayla got a call from a deputy director in Tel Aviv, whose instructions had been unequivocal: We like what he’s giving us. Do whatever is necessary to keep the flow going. This source will want something from us eventually. Until then, do nothing to compromise our good fortune.

Despite her short time in the field, Ayla had already developed a distaste for directives from the soft-bottomed chairs of Glilot Junction. She also knew a great deal about Mossad’s history, and understood that its greatest successes had come from risk-taking. And anyway, I’m the one putting my rookie ass on the line. Perhaps it was raw enthusiasm, being new to the game, or maybe the bulletproof assuredness of youth. Even more likely: the inherited obstinance of her father was taking hold. Whatever the reason, Ayla made up her mind. I’m going to do whatever it takes to get eyes on this source.

And what it took that morning, apparently, was a visit to a melon stall in Almaty.

---

The marketplace was open air, row after row of vendor stalls: fresh produce, dried meat, bread, spices. Those who couldn’t afford rent set up on blankets in shaded corners. The traffic lanes that connected it all were thick with people—thick enough to make countersurveillance all but impossible. The previous dead drops had been in far quieter places—the first in a church courtyard on a rain-sodden Tuesday, the second on a walking path in the foothills of the Ile-Alatau Mountains. Both retrievals had gone flawlessly.

But this …

Instructions for today’s rendezvous had been included on the second stick. At nine a.m. she was to go to a melon cart near a certain power pole, and the next memory device would be in the bottom of the back right-hand bin. Clearly, at some point before that, either the source, or possibly a courier, would arrive to make the drop.

Ayla was determined to see who it was.

She had arrived two hours early, just in time to watch the vendor in question, a weathered old man with a wrinkled forehead and gray beard, lift his crates onto an empty table. From a distance Ayla watched closely, rotating between vantage points she’d scouted the day before. So far, she’d seen nothing suspicious: a few customers who seemed typical, no one loitering near the corner bin, nothing but cash and coin going openly to the vendor. Mossad had already identified the merchant, a testament to the importance of what they’d been receiving. A team from the embassy, at Mukhtar Auezov Street 8, had followed him for two days. Another had mined government records. Neither found anything to suggest he might be complicit. No revolutionary leanings, no connections to police or organized crime. No visits to other embassies. He was simply a sixty-four-year-old Kazakh who, by all accounts, had been hauling produce to the market for the better part of thirty years.

Concealed beneath the shadow of a tarp, Ayla checked the time. Five minutes to go.

The crowds were getting thicker. A young boy hawking prepaid phone cards darted from stall to stall like a hummingbird on espresso. The flower cart beside her was run by two querulous old women, and they were too engrossed in their harping to pay her any heed. Just to be sure, Ayla mimicked thumb-tapping her phone as if in a heated texting session, the pleasant scents of their roses and hyacinths going unappreciated.

From her staging point she had a clear view of the old man and his table a hundred feet away. At two minutes before nine, Ayla relented. She had seen no evidence whatsoever of a drop.

She set out at a metered pace, pausing occasionally to survey the area. When she arrived right on time, she was the only customer at the stall.

“Do you have sweet melons today?” she asked, because to say nothing would have been odd.

“These are the best,” the old man replied, gesturing near where Ayla wanted to go.

She briefly held the old man’s gaze, searching for recognition. Seeing nothing, she smiled and ran her long fingers over his fare. She squeezed a few, as she’d seen other women do, checking their softness or texture or whatever. The old Kazakh turned away as she reached the critical bin. She half lifted a melon as if testing its weight, then lowered it and let her fingers probe. She felt nothing. Ayla didn’t panic. She tested a second melon, went through the same drill. Still nothing. This was a contingency she’d thought through ahead of time. She would search the other bins, but that would take time. Which meant getting the merchant on her side.

“I’ll take this one to begin,” she said, setting a melon aside without negotiating the price. She glanced at him, expecting a smile—and that was when everything went wrong.

The man seemed suddenly wary.

Feeling the first stab of caution, Ayla said, “Do you have any—”

“No,” he said cutting her off. He put the melon she’d chosen back in a bin. “There is nothing here for you!” A harsh, clipped tone.

For this Ayla had no contingency, so she did the most natural thing that came to mind. She picked up an orange and turned it in the sun. She saw the man’s eyes snag on something behind her. As much as she wanted to turn, Ayla kept her cool. She set down the orange, turned left, and walked away calmly. Steady and unhurried. In her peripheral vision she discerned two heavy shadows ten paces behind her.

She willed herself to ignore them.

Ayla had come to the market alone—the source was adamant about that—yet she wasn’t without backup. Two members of her team were waiting in a car on a nearby street. She made a right turn, which took her in that direction. Ayla ventured a quick glance behind and saw them: two men, casually dressed and definitely following her.

Her support detail was two blocks away. They’d discussed setting up closer, but the chief of station had overruled it—he didn’t want to risk irritating the source. It was clearly a mistake. Outside the market, Ayla picked up her pace on a charmless cobblestone sidewalk. Not running, but damn near it.

There were fewer people here, and Ayla realized she should have stayed in the market, let the team come to her. Another mistake. She pulled out her phone and discovered how hard it was to text while walking fast over cobblestones. She got off a one-word message: Aborting.

With the situation degrading quickly, Ayla tried to think clearly. She scanned ahead for options. A storefront fifty feet away had its door blocked open. Was there a back door if she turned inside? Perhaps an alley behind that would take her in the right direction? She should have known. The footsteps behind her quickened, and out of nowhere a sedan bounded over the curb ahead and cut her off.

No more pretenses.

She stopped and turned, saw the two men closing in. They looked at her with glares meant to intimidate. The one in the lead towered six inches above her own five-foot-seven frame and had to be twice her well-conditioned weight. The other was smaller and squat, a pugilist’s face.

Ayla kept her composure, kept searching. To her right she noticed a damaged section of sidewalk near the gutter, and she was suddenly very glad she’d taken her Krav Maga training seriously.

As the bigger of the two men closed in, she looked at him questioningly, all doe eyes and slack posture. Then, the moment he was in range, she lashed out and kicked him in the balls. She made solid contact, and the man grunted and dropped to his knees, his hands cradling his crotch.

Ayla pretended to stumble to her right, dropping a hand as if to arrest her fall. As she did, she picked up the only improvised weapon within reach, a loose cobblestone the size of a beer stein. The second man rushed full force. Ayla feinted right, then moved left and spun, swinging the stone toward his head in a wicked forehand arc. It caught him a glancing blow and he reeled toward the car. But it was only half a victory. On contact she lost her grip on the stone, and the pugilist seized a handful of her dress—never the clothing of choice for close-quarters combat. It put Ayla off-balance, and together they careened into the car’s fender.

Ayla was first to regain her balance, and she lashed out with a solid kick to his knee. He screamed as it buckled and started to go down, but he never lost the fistful of fabric. Ayla heard a car door open behind her, and before she could turn something hard struck her in the head.

She lurched away, dazed. Her vision went blurry and she felt her arms being seized on either side. She tried to swing an elbow, making marginal contact before a fist struck her on the temple. She thrashed and writhed, trying to twist her limbs free. Trying to fight. It was hopeless. There were too many of them—three, four?—all bigger and stronger.

Still, she never gave up, and it took another thirty seconds for them to wrestle her into the car’s backseat. Once inside they pummeled her without mercy, her face and her body, and she was sure she broke a nose in return. They cursed in a language she didn’t recognize. A massive blow to the head stunned Ayla, and the next thing she knew she was hopelessly immobilized on the floor, big hands and boots holding her down.

To her credit, she kept gathering information, all the way to the moment when the needle sank deep into her thigh. Only then, finally, did fear take its grip.

---

There were but a handful of witnesses to the donnybrook on the curb. A mailman down the street saw the end of the scuffle, and a nearsighted spinster knitting at the window of her second-floor flat caught a few flashes of motion. A teenager on his way to a music lesson saw the car bump onto the curb and watched a woman get accosted, but organized crime being what it was in Almaty, the boy instinctively turned and ran away with his violin clutched to his chest.

Only one person saw the row in its entirety.

He was sitting in a mostly empty coffee shop, across the street and on a slight diagonal. Dressed in simple work pants and a worn jacket, he was rooted to a stool at the window-side counter. A small tablet computer was in front of him, a lukewarm café Americano near his left hand—he’d been born right-handed, but an injury had forced him to adjust. Once a robust man, lean and athletic, he sat crookedly on the stool with one leg askew. He was thirty-eight years old, although on first impression most gave him ten more. The lines in his leathered face were deeper than they should have been, and flecks of white in his thinning hair were well ahead of schedule. His most remarkable feature was a pair of emerald-green eyes, although these, too, were faded beyond his years. At that moment, they were obscured by a pair of wire-frame glasses.

He’d spotted the woman as soon as she turned out of the market, two burly men trailing behind her like loosely joined boxcars. He had seen her before, but never this close, and even from across the street he was struck by how pretty she was. He had once appreciated beautiful women, even pursued them. That, however, was a thing of the past.

The car came out of nowhere, and he watched it veer onto the curb and cut her off. The girl’s reaction was perfectly natural. He sat transfixed by the violence taking place not thirty meters away and was impressed—and not completely surprised—by the fight she put up. He glanced once around the nearly empty coffee shop to see if anyone else was watching. There were only three others, including the nose-studded barista, and none of them were in a position to see the melee.

He held his coffee and sat still, mesmerized, while the altercation played out in what seemed like slow motion. In fact, it was over in less than a minute. When the car finally backed into the street and spun away in a squeal of burning rubber, the man let go a long breath, no idea how long he’d been holding it.

He knew he had to leave—remaining here would be inordinately risky. He needed to get across town, to the safety of his room. If the police arrived quickly, he might be questioned, even compromised. Still, he had wanted to get one look at her: the woman who was risking her life for his information.

And so he had.

The agent, who Mossad now knew as Lazarus, never tried to call the police. Ten minutes earlier, he’d composed a hasty message and placed it in the draft folder. It was a warning that the drop had been compromised. Now, of course, the point was moot, and anyway, they never could have reacted quickly enough. Still, they would at least know he’d tried.

He folded the tablet closed, drained his cup, and slid carefully off his stool. On the sidewalk outside he turned left and set out at his usual slow pace into the chill morning. He walked with a distinct limp—the cold weather worsened the pain in his right hip. Lazarus looked up and down the street, listened for approaching sirens. So far, nothing. The poor woman, his primary link to Mossad, was probably a mile away by now. Swept up cleanly and professionally. He was sure Mossad would find a replacement—the information he’d been providing was first-rate. Teams of case officers would follow up, discover his too-late warning in the email account, and watch for new messages.

He was mentally composing the next one—he had no shortage of information to give—when the first sirens began rising in the distance. Lazarus tried to quicken his pace, but his hip protested. He cursed under his breath.

With one look over his shoulder, he turned left at the first corner and disappeared.

THREE

Reaction to the two events ran distant parallels.

The loss of Raven 44 launched through the power corridors of Washington, D.C., like an unguided rocket. It lit off at the Pentagon, shot toward the director of national intelligence, and apexed in the Oval Office.

President Elayne Cleveland was pulled from her morning intelligence briefing to be apprised of the fast-moving situation. The messengers were Secretary of Defense John Mattingly and Air Force deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, Lieutenant General Margaret Tran. After the doors were closed, the SecDef took the lead.

“One of our Rivet Joint aircraft has gone down in the Arctic, very near the Russian border. It was conducting a standard surveillance mission last night when it disappeared suddenly.”

“Suddenly?” the president remarked. “Does that imply a hostile act?” Having long ago served as an intel officer in the Army Reserves, Cleveland was better versed than most politicians in the nuances of military vernacular.

“Based on what we know so far, it doesn’t look that way. We were able to layer data from certain air and space sensors, and there’s nothing to suggest a missile launch or an intercept by fighters. Rivet Joint aircraft also stream live sensor information over the course of their missions. Raven 44—that was the mishap airplane’s call sign—was picking up some radar activity, but nothing high rate to suggest missile guidance.”

“Well, that’s good at least. What else do we know?”

“We’re in the initial stages of planning a search, but the extremely remote location, combined with the impending weather conditions—there’s a fierce Arctic storm on the way—will tie our hands for the next thirty-six to forty-eight hours.”

“What about the Russians? Could they help with a search?”

The SecDef’s answer was measured. “That is something we need to discuss.” He yielded to Tran, a three-star general who’d risen through the Air Force’s technical side—an outlier in the pilot-dominated upper ranks of the service. Tran had a PhD in engineering and a proven knack for translating technical breakthroughs to strategic implementation.

“Madam President, our intelligence networks are in overdrive trying to determine if the Russians have even noticed this crash. Based on radio traffic and communications intercepts, we see no sign of it. I will tell you straightaway that the fate of the crew, seventeen good airmen, remains foremost in everyone’s mind.”

“As it should be,” the president seconded.

“Unfortunately, the initial reports are not promising. Our Rivet Joints have been upgraded with a system that streams snapshots of flight information in near real time. What it shows, unfortunately, is a dive that could not have been survivable. Because the RC-135 is a standoff platform, not meant to go behind enemy lines, it’s not fitted with ejection seats or parachutes.”

The president looked on grimly. “Are you telling me there’s no chance of survivors?”

“I can’t say that with absolute certainty. Yet there is further damning information. Two years ago, NSA began a program to pry into Russian air defense networks. They were surprisingly successful, and the northern-tier facilities proved especially vulnerable due to undersea cables that proved … accessible.”

This was news to Cleveland. She tried to recall if it had been in any of her daily briefings but drew a blank. “You’re saying we’ve hacked Russian air defense?”

“Not everywhere, but we get solid information from certain regional networks. Relating to Raven 44, NSA has forwarded their data for the last twenty-four hours. A radar station in Kotelny had a solid primary return on Raven 44. It documented her final plunge.”

“Primary return?”

“That’s the most basic kind of radar data, with no identifying information. The Russian operators would have seen Raven 44 as a blip on their scope. We fly surveillance routes regularly, and there’s airline traffic as well, so they probably weren’t watching too closely. If anyone saw the return disappear, ...