Page 109 of The Collector
“Yes, Semenov. You?”
“Not terribly. My son has a dreadful cough.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” Petrov placed the attaché case on his desk and popped the latches. “Nothing serious, I hope.”
“I don’t think so, but Yulia is quite worried.” Semenov draped Petrov’s coat over his forearm. “Is there anything you require for the morning staff meeting?”
“Some breakfast and a few moments to gather my thoughts.”
“Of course, Secretary Petrov.”
Semenov withdrew, closing the door behind him. Alone, Petrov sat down at his desk and lifted the receiver of his secure phone. With the press of a button, he rang General Igor Belinsky. The director of the GRU emitted his standard monosyllabic greeting.
“How was your trip yesterday?” asked Petrov.
“I couldn’t get out of that shithole fast enough.”
“You have a good man to handle the delivery?”
“A very good man. He’s waiting for the order.”
“Then perhaps you should issue it.”
“Are you sure, Secretary Petrov?”
“I’m sure.”
“And the state president?”
“He gave his approval last night.”
“In that case, Secretary Petrov, please give me the proper code word, just so there are no misunderstandings later.”
“Aurora.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Aurora,” repeated Nikolai Petrov, and hung up the phone.
In thehamlet of Sokolovka, the wind was raging, and there were gritty pellets of snow in the air. Head down, Anatoly Kruchina trotted across the frozen mud of the yard to the door of the corrugated metal outbuilding. The two men guarding it were half dead with cold. Kruchina informed them that they were relieved of duty, then rammed the key into the padlock.
The damn thing was so frozen it took Kruchina a minute to wrench the shackle from the body—and another minute to roll aside the rusted door. The flat-nose cab-over cabin of the KamAZ-43114 filled nearly the entire opening. Kruchina shimmied past the heavy-duty bumper, slamming his left eye into the mirror in the process, and opened the driver’s-side door.
There was a built-in step at the front of the cab, about three-quarters of the way up the wheel. Kruchina put his left foot on it and, swearing softly in anger, hoisted himself into the cabin. His eye was throbbing painfully. His first wound of the entire campaign. Hardly an auspicious start to his historic mission. What was next? An empty fuel tank? A dead battery?
He managed to close the cabin door without causing further injury to himself and placed his satcom radio on the passenger seat. Thekey was in the ignition. Kruchina gave it a twist to the right, and the engine roared to life. A moment later he was headed west along a frozen single-lane road, bound for the Ukrainian border.
It took only five minutes for word of the truck’s departure to reach Gabriel in the PET’s op center in suburban Copenhagen. It was Adrian Carter, in veiled language, who delivered the news. The truck had left the farmhouse at 6:12 a.m. If the border town of Maksimov was its destination, it would arrive sometime between eight and eight fifteen. The instant the truck stopped, the HIMARS missiles would go up. And ten minutes after that, they would come down again.
“At which point,” Gabriel told Lars Mortensen after the call, “Nikolai Petrov and his friend Vladimir Vladimirovich will go positively apeshit.”
“They might assume the device malfunctioned.”
“Unless Russian air defenses detect the Ukrainian missile launch. Then they’ll know exactly what happened.”
Eli Lavon was staring at the winking blue light on his computer screen.
“Where are they now?” asked Gabriel.
