| "The Deputy" | ||
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On Route To Japan June 14, 2008, 1519 hours Maksim sat facing his Team Leader. The seats were extremely comfortable, nothing like the ones he used to sit on in his Spetsnaz days; those had been cold and hard because military aircraft denied them creature comforts in order to decrease weight. This hadn't troubled him back then; he had been young and eager to engage in battle. Now it was different. He found himself very much at home in the RGZS, like he was born to be there. Nothing had ever felt so right to him, something he wouldn't have believed when he had been back in the Spetsnaz. That had been his home once. His unit had been his family, nurturing his young talents and moulding him into the scourge of terrorists everywhere that he was today. Now things were different. He was an elite member of an organisation that did not exist, and would never exist. Nikolai was looking out of the window and smiling to himself. That made Maksim smile. Nikolai had told him of what he and Yelena had done before he left for the mission. He wondered what it was like to place your hands on the stomach of the woman you loved and feel your own unborn child fighting to break free. Maybe one day he would get to find out. For now he would concern himself with the mission at hand. He had been engaged in rescues before, but none like this. Their target was not caught up in some jungle, engaging in sporadic firefights with the local guerrillas, waiting for the sound of a chopper or a burst of friendly gunfire. No, their target was hiding in a city. The people hunting him may still carry guns, but they weren't able to fire at will. There were civilians around after all, and that created problems for both sides. This was the intelligence side of the business, he realised. Sneaking around gathering information or extracting people, all done whilst avoiding the counter-intelligence officers that were hunting around for you. He had never given much thought to that; for him reconnaissance had been something that had been done out in the boonies with enemy eyes hiding behind AK-47 clones. This would be a challenge, but one he was ready to take. Nikolai was by training a spook, and he guessed that his Team Lead had had experience in such situations. He must of, Maksim thought to himself, he's been working with the Commander. Sergei Popov was a man that received Maksim's total respect. His name had been spoken with more than a little fear by his comrades in Spetsnaz for it was said that if a job couldn't be done then they would send in Zmeya, the Snake, and he would complete the mission and make you look like a fool, which in turn would cause you to incur the wrath of your commander because an outsider did what you couldn't. That had happened to Maksim twice, and at the time he had cursed Popov's name for embarrassing himself and his unit. Now he thought differently. Now he knew just what a legend his Commander was. There wasn't a man in Russia who had done anything to rival Popov, and Maksim believed that there wasn't probably anyone in the world who was as skilled as the man in charge of the RGZS. Most of the missions were classified, he had learned from Lisovsky, and a number of them were encrypted with a system that the computer genius had never seen before in his young life. He hadn't been able to crack it either; that was something that had shaken him but had not concerned Maksim. He knew that there were ways to achieve such things, and ways to keep information from others. There had been rumours of a secret program run out of the KGB that took some of the brightest minds in Russia and put them to work on highly technical projects, and at the conclusion of those projects they were executed. This was for security; if only they had knowledge of how to decipher their systems then by removing them the chances of the system being beaten was slight at best. It made sense to him, especially if the reports that the scientists had been willing participants in this were true. This would mean that the files Lisovsky found impossible to open would be virtually impossible for anyone to open. Lisovsky, himself a literal genius when it came to code breaking, confessed as much to him. Sitting in the comfortable seat, watching the world fly past him out of the small window, he wondered what was in those files. He would have given a lot to find out. The Commander did not achieve his prestige in the intelligence community for doing simple missions. Even his enemies had feared him, the man without a name (to them at least), the man whose footsteps had never been heard, the man who had played the greatest of games and come out on top. They had feared him almost as much as he had, Maksim realised. Damn but the man had balls! "Thirty-five minutes out," the pilot announced. Nikolai turned to face him, a small smile beginning to form on his lips. It quickly disappeared. "We have confirmation on the target?" he asked, himself putting his `game-face' on. It was something all soldiers did, and he was still a soldier despite the boundaries being blurred by all this intelligence business. Then again, an intelligence officer was what Nikolai was first and foremost, yet he still went into mission-mode in a way akin to that of a soldier. Maybe the whole business was changing. He shook his head; these thoughts could wait. "No. Kovalenko is still trying to ascertain his current location, but the SVR case officer is having trouble getting assets into place. It seems our Japanese friends have stepped up observations on all foreigners, meaning that it's risky getting visual confirmation that the subject is in one of his designated boltholes." Nikolai sighed. "Seems we are going to be going in blind. As Sergei would say: its just like the bad old days." Return |
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