attached map—a large portion of which was covered with a thick red circle.
“No, sir.”
“This is the fucking search area?”
“Yes, sir.”
The General rubbed his meaty face with his even meatier hand. “Are you kidding me?”
It was a rhetorical question. The deputy knew better than to respond.
“Wasn’t the aircraft outfitted with an emergency locator transmitter?”
The young man checked his notes. “Yes, a portable version that must be manually activated by survivors.”
“And?”
“And there has been no activation.”
Minayev was not happy. “What about search planes?”
“They can’t take off until the weather improves.”
“Fine. How about one of our satellites with infrared?”
The deputy drew in a sharp breath of air between his teeth.
The General cocked a bushy eyebrow. “What’s wrong with satellites?”
“Nothing. But the Air Force would have to request it. Technically, that flight never happened. And, as far as anyone is concerned, our people had nothing to do with it.”
His deputy was correct. It was a black flight. There was no record of it, or of its passengers. The Kremlin had been crystal clear.
They wanted all knowledge of the operation kept to as few people and as few agencies as possible. Plausible deniability for Russia was paramount.
As head of the GRU’s special missions group, Minayev had had the idea to snatch Scot Harvath in New Hampshire, smuggle him out of the United States, and render him to Russia.
A festering, debilitating thorn in their side for years, he had interrupted countless critical operations and had been responsible for the deaths and suspected disappearances of untold numbers of operators.
The plan was to wring as much intelligence out of him as they could and then kill him.
The order had come from the Russian President himself. In fact, it was he who wanted the honor of doing the killing. That was why Minayev had told Josef to leave Harvath’s face unmarred.
He could abuse his body, break his bones—pretty much whatever he wanted—but when the GRU handed him over to the President, he had to be recognizable.
The General wanted there to be no mistake in what he had accomplished and whom he had delivered to the President. This would be a high point in his career, and he was going to take it all the way to the bank.
When pleased, the President could make men’s wildest dreams come true. Minayev had watched lesser men deliver lesser achievements and be handsomely rewarded.
Having just turned sixty, he had spent more than forty years in the Russian military. No one could argue that he hadn’t served his country. Now, he wanted it to serve him.
He needed investors and government approval to launch a timber company, which would exploit the rich forests of Siberia. This was a dream that the President could make a reality, if he was so moved. The General had every intention of “moving” him. This news about the plane vanishing from radar, though, threatened everything.
Everything on the aircraft was replaceable: its crew, the Spetsnaz team, even Josef—one of the absolute best operatives the General had ever trained and put in the field. They were all replaceable. The only person on that plane who wasn’t replaceable was the American—Harvath.
If this operation went south, the closest Minayev would come to becoming a timber baron was being beaten to death with an axe handle and buried in a shallow forest grave. In that regard, the Russian President had also been very clear. He was not a man you disappointed—ever.
“We also don’t have a satellite with infrared capabilities on station,” his deputy explained. “I checked.”
The General could feel his blood pressure rising.
“Retasking one,” the deputy continued, “would raise a lot of questions, and not only in Russia. With the Chinese, the Europeans, and especially the Americans all monitoring the positions of our satellites, altering an orbit would draw unwanted attention.
“What’s more, we’d be pulling in an additional agency from which there’d be pushback. They’d want to know what was so important about a transport plane that it required such valuable and immediate attention.”
His deputy was right. They couldn’t risk it. “How long until the storm is forecast to pass?” he asked.
“A day. Possibly two.”
“What are the chances of anyone surviving in that weather, provided they even survived the crash?”
It was another rhetorical question, but the deputy answered anyway. “Not very good.”
Minayev agreed. But if anyone could survive something like that, it was Josef.
He was a man of extraordinary focus. He would kill and eat his own men if that’s what it took to complete the mission.
“How many search teams are standing by?” the General