Objekt 825 (Tracie Tanner Thrillers Book 9) by Allan Leverone (year 7 reading list txt) 📗

She squeezed him hard and said, “I’ll be back. I promise. I’ll be back,” and she wondered whether she was trying to convince Marshall or herself.

14

June 23, 1988

11:55 p.m. local time

Sevastopol, Russia, USSR

Tracie stifled a yawn as she stretched. She felt as though she hadn’t gotten a good night’s rest for weeks. The flight from D.C. to Finland—with a stop at Aviano Air Force Base in northern Italy for fuel—had gone off without a hitch, and she had fully implemented her plan to sleep through the trip.

Since deplaning in Helsinki two days ago, though, Tracie had been on the move almost constantly. She’d crossed the Gulf of Finland into northwestern Russia courtesy of the CIA contractor she called the “Gorton’s Fisherman” in a particularly unpleasant journey, weathering rough seas and dodging multiple Soviet patrol vessels.

From there she had driven via CIA-provided Lada—several years old, rusty and anonymous—southeast through Russia to the Crimean peninsula. The distance was roughly twenty-two hundred kilometers, or a little less than fourteen hundred miles. It wasn’t the kind of non-stop drive anyone would want to make alone, without breaks, but it was exactly what Tracie did.

Desperate to move as quickly as possible, knowing Andrei Lukashenko had departed the United States more than a week earlier, she stuck to major highways as much as possible. She reasoned that a direct route via secondary roads would likely take longer than a more roundabout route via highways.

Her plan was easy enough to execute during the early part of her journey. Highways skirting large metropolitan areas like Leningrad, and particularly Moscow, were relatively well maintained if not always particularly well engineered. But as she left Moscow’s sprawling cityscape behind and moved steadily south into less heavily populated areas, the thoroughfares became smaller, narrower, and harder to navigate.

She stopped every four to six hours for gas and food and to pee, otherwise staying behind the wheel with her foot on the accelerator. As was often the case while working in the field, she had no concrete plan of attack, other than to get to Sevastopol as quickly as possible and then take stock of her situation, continuing to move forward in some manner.

This was the part of working undercover within Russia that she had grown to detest over the years: traveling from one location to the next inside a nation so vast it was literally possible to be constantly moving for a week and still be days away from your desired location.

In that sense, she decided she was fortunate only to have to travel to the Black Sea coastline. With dogged determination and the willingness to forego sleep, Tracie knew she could reach Sevastopol in less than thirty hours.

That was exactly what she did.

She’d taken a room at a large inn located on the southeast side of the city. Typically, she would have searched for smaller lodgings, preferably located in a remote area. But Sevastopol was a decent-sized metropolis, with more than three hundred fifty thousand residents, and its location on the Black Sea made it a Soviet tourist destination to boot.

This time of year, the height of Russian beach season, Tracie guessed the population of Sevastopol proper and surrounding suburbs probably ballooned to well over than half a million. She guessed she would have no trouble blending in, provided she took basic precautions regarding her head injury.

Renting a room was a calculated risk, but given the circumstances of this assignment—she was, as usual, operating alone, and with virtually zero intel regarding the facility from which she would likely have to steal back the electronic communication device—Tracie assumed tonight would represent her final opportunity to get any significant rest for the foreseeable future.

She had no desire to spend the night sleeping in the back of her Lada.

Among the items Tracie had included in her go bag before leaving the states was the Soviet Army uniform and associated identification she’d last used in Bashkir during her unsuccessful rescue attempt of Ryan Smith. The paraphernalia had served her well then and she expected the same results now.

She had selected the inn at which she would stay on the basis of one simple criterion: it was situated as close as reasonably possible to the secret submarine base known as Objekt 825 while still catering to the crush of Russian summer tourists.

The condition of the highway had steadily improved as she approached Sevastopol, and twenty kilometers or so before entering the city, Tracie found a relatively secluded area in which to pull to the side of the road. She changed quickly into her Soviet Army uniform, doing her best to smooth out the wrinkles. She had folded and packed the uniform with as much care as possible, but six thousand miles of travel while stuffed into shoulder-carried duffel had done a number on clothing that was meant to be stored in a closet and carried inside a garment bag.

Once dressed in her uniform, Tracie continued into Sevastopol, selecting her lodgings and registering under her Olga Koruskaya persona. She’d covered her head injury as much as possible with a scarf before entering the office, but it had felt like wasted effort. The bored middle-aged woman behind the desk barely took the time to glance at “Olga’s” identification, much less check her out in person. Tracie got the impression she could have used her real name and registered as a visiting American and the woman wouldn’t have batted an eye, as long as she’d paid in cash.

Long experience had taught Tracie that cold, hard cash was always welcomed by people living under the thumb of authoritarian governments. Using it to pay for transactions like hotel stays in the USSR did not generate the same kind of suspicion a similar activity would in the United States.

And that suited Tracie’s purposes just fine.