Divide and conquer - Tom Clancy [49]
"Hello?" Hood said.
"Paul, it's Sergei," Orlov said. Op-Center's translator was on standby.
It only took her a moment to get on the line.
"General, I need your trust, and I need it fast," Hood said. His urgent tone left no room for discussion.
"Of course," Orlov said.
"Our team searching for the Harpooner suffered a catastrophic hit at a hospital in Baku," Hood informed him.
"It happened a little over an hour ago. Two of our men were killed. The first was taken down by a sniper outside the hospital. The second had his throat cut inside the lobby. The last man is a patient. His name is David Battat, and he is ill with a fever of some kind." Orlov took a moment to write the name down.
"The police are at the hospital, but we don't know who the killer is,"
Hood said.
"He or she may still be in the hospital."
"The killer could be a police officer," Orlov pointed out.
"Exactly," Hood said.
"General, do you have anyone in Baku?"
"Yes, we do," Orlov said without hesitation.
"In what room is Mr. Battat located?"
"He's in one fifty-seven," Hood said.
"I will send someone at once," Orlov said.
"Tell no one." Hood gave him his word. Orlov hung up. The three most powerful Russian intelligence groups had their own personnel. These groups were the MBR; the military's Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravlenie, or GRU, the Main Intelligence Directorate; and the Ministerstvo Vnutrennikh Del, or MVD, the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The Russian Op-Center did not have the financial resources to maintain its own network of intelligence and counterintelligence personnel, so it was necessary to share people with other relatively small Russian agencies. These were administered by the Sisteme Objedinennovo Utschotya Dannych o Protivniki, or SOUD, the Interlinked System for Recognizing Enemies.
SOUD also provided personnel for the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, or SVR, the Foreign Intelligence Service; the Federal'naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, or FSB, the Federal Security Service; the Federal'naya Sluzhba Kontr-razvedky, or FSK, the Federal Counterintelligence Service; and the Federal'naya Sluzhba Okhrani, or FSO, the Federal Protective Service.
Orlov quickly accessed the SOUD files. He input the highest-priority code. Red Thirteen. This meant that the request was not only coming from a senior official-level thirteen-but involved a case of immediate national emergency: the apprehension of the Harpooner. The Red Thirteen code gave Orlov the names, locations, and telephone numbers of field personnel around the world. Even if the operatives were involved in other situations, he would be authorized to commandeer them. Orlov went to the file for Baku, Azerbaijan. He found what he was looking for. He hesitated. General Orlov was about to ask a deep-cover operative to try to help an American spy. If the Americans were planning an operation in Baku, this would be the quickest way to expose and neutralize Russian intelligence resources. But to believe that, Orlov would have to believe that Paul Hood would betray him. Orlov made the call.
Washington, D.C. Monday, 9:00 p.m.
Paul Hood was angry when he hung up with Orlov. Hood was angry at the system, at the intelligence community, and at himself. The dead men were not his people. The man at risk was not his operative. But they had failed, and the Harpooner had succeeded, partly because of the way spies did business. The Harpooner commanded a team. Most American agents worked as part of a team. Theoretically, that should give the operatives a support system. In practice, it forced them to operate within a bureaucracy. A bureaucracy with rules of conduct and accountability to directors who were nowhere near the battlegrounds. No one could fight a man like the Harpooner with baggage like that. And Hood was guilty of supporting that system. He was as guilty as his counterparts at CIA, NSA, or anywhere else. The irony was that Jack Fenwick had apparently done something off the books. It was Hood's