Power Play

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The Republic of Karelia runs from St. Petersburg on the Gulf of Finland all the way north to the Arctic Circle. Half of it is pure forest, the other half mostly water, including sixty thousand lakes, two of which, Ladoga and Onega, are the largest in Europe.

Many of its residents are the descendants of prisoners sent by Stalin in the early 1930s to dig the Belomorsk Canal, the inland water route linking Russian rivers and lakes to the White Sea, on the rare occasions when they are not frozen solid.

Petrozavodsk is the capital of Karelia. It stands in the West of the region. And, like so much of this frigid republic, it has a grim history, having been used for centuries by both czars and Bolsheviks as a place of exile, imprisonment, and torture for political troublemakers, a bastion for Stalin’s gulag system of brutal banishment.

In the freezing month of February 2018, Petrozavodsk, ice bound on the shores of the frozen Lososinka River, harbored yet another “troublemaker”—not yet captured, not even identified, but a man whose intentions were in direct opposition to those of the quasi-corrupt and ruthless rulers of Russia.

His name was Nikolai Chirkov. He was a thirty-five-year-old
kapitan leytenant
in the navy of the Russian Federation, identified by the two-and-a-half gold-braid stripes and gold star on the black cloth cuffs of his uniform. In a Western navy, he’d have been a lieutenant commander.

He was a tall, blond, athletic-looking officer, assigned to the Northern Fleet, and serving in the nine-thousand-ton Udalov II Class guided-missile destroyer
Admiral Chabanenko
, currently undergoing minor engineering work in the shipyards of Severodvinsk, nearly four hundred miles northeast on the shores of the White Sea. Icebound like almost everywhere else.

Nikolai’s present location was in the downstairs bar of the Hotel Severnaya on Lenin Square. Tonight he was in civilian clothes. Despite the relative warmth of the room, he wore his naval greatcoat, collar upturned as he sipped his fruit-flavored vodka. His back was to the long bar and the barmen. His thick fur hat rested on the table beside the armchair. Outside it was snowing like hell.

Six tables away sat a swarthy, thickset English businessman, John Carter, whose six-month mission was to come to this chilly Russian outpost as the representative of an enormous Birmingham paint manufacturer. Petrozavodsk, with its endless, windswept waterfront, more than a thousand islands, and seagoing populace, annually uses more gallons of paint than vodka.

Like Nikolai, Carter still wore his heavy, fur-lined overcoat. Like Nikolai, he was not what he seemed. Despite immaculate travel documents and visa, the “Englishman” was an Israeli, real name Rani Ben Adan, a member of the family of the great Israeli general Bren Adan. An ex-IDF Special Forces officer, Rani was a Mossad field agent and one of the most dangerous combat practitioners in the world, armed or unarmed.

If the Russian authorities had known his true identity, they’d have shot Rani Ben Adan right there in the hotel, no questions asked. Which was why he always sat with his back to the wall, dark glasses shielding deep brown eyes with pure laser vision. Tucked into his leather belt, in the small of his back, was the standard Israeli Special Forces combat knife.

At 6:30 p.m., Lieutenant Commander Chirkov rose from his chair and headed for the exit. He crossed the hotel foyer and pushed his way through the revolving door. The snow was still falling, but the wind had dropped, and he walked almost silently in his heavy sea boots, heading toward Lake Onega along Marksa Street.

Almost a hundred yards behind him, virtually out of sight, Rani Ben Adan followed. He followed for a distance of five hundred yards before the Russian turned left and used a key to enter a low apartment block. He
waited for Rani, and both men joined a young Russian couple in the elevator, before disembarking on the fifth floor.

They did not speak until they were safely inside apartment number 506, a two-bedroom inexpensive residence owned by the Mossad, under the cover of a Russian drama coach at the nearby National Theatre. The coach lived somewhere else when Rani was in town.

This policy of complete separateness was familiar to both men. No one had ever seen them together. They sat far apart at the Severnaya bar, walked alone, and never spoke until they entered number 506.

“Welcome, Mr. Carter,” said Nikolai Chirkov.

“Lieutenant Commander,” replied Rani, bowing his head and shaking the snow off his fur hat. “It’s been too long.”

The apartment was warm and comfortably furnished, several cuts above the average Russian city residence. Both men stayed here in complete anonymity whenever they met, but never for more than thirty-six hours. Rani had arrived in the city after eighteen hours on the train from Moscow. It had been a long and tiresome journey, but these are the hazards of the trade endemic to a Mossad spymaster operating in the Russian Republic.

He had recruited Nikolai Chirkov three years earlier, but took no credit for it. The young Russian Naval officer had presented himself personally at the Israeli Embassy on Bolshaya Ordynka Street, south of the Moscow River. There, after a three-day debriefing, he had declared to two Israeli “defense” attachés an undying allegiance to the US government.

Riven as these matters were apt to be by almost atomic suspicion and lack of trust, the men from the Mossad decided to give the Russian a few months’ trial as an informant before sharing their prize with the Americans. Even though Mossad and CIA field agents frequently work so closely together, it’s not always easy to tell the difference.

Which was precisely where Rani Ben Adan came in. Nikolai Chirkov was placed in his care and would henceforth be “run” by the Moscow-based ex–Israeli Special Forces commando. In the ensuing months, the two men became so close there never seemed a reason to have him reassigned to a US agent where there would be, in any event, a heightened chance of discovery.

This utterly unlikely alliance between Tel Aviv and the Russian Naval officer suited all parties. The Mossad shared with Washington every
worthwhile detail of Nikolai’s information, but decided against revealing their source, particularly since Nikolai Chirkov was a deeply complicated man, part political thinker, part devoted military commander, Russian to his bootstraps, and absolute traitor to his homeland and its government.

Rani believed Nikolai was a tortured soul. Tutored from an early age by his father, Grigory Ivanov Chirkov, a high-ranking minister in the Department of Foreign Affairs, Nikolai understood more about world trade than most members of the Politburo. He understood with crystalline clarity that Russia was an approximate disaster area without its oil and gas reserves.

He understood too that the oil had to be placed on the world market, especially in America. His father believed the new deepwater tanker base near Murmansk was critical to the nation’s survival as an exporting nation. And he could not understand the almost messianic fervor with which the Kremlin sought to antagonize the West, or the childlike way they bridled at everything American. Privately, he thought the Russian administration was probably collectively insane.

Their philosophies, their political compulsions, their disregard for the serious business of making money for the nation, and above all their senseless saber rattling toward their potentially biggest customers struck him as the actions of a confederation of nutcases.

He wanted everything good for his nation. He wanted peace and prosperity. He was devoted to Mother Russia but detested the ignorance of the men who ran the place. He could not understand their support for the plainly unstable Islamic Republic of Iran, with its reckless determination to manufacture nuclear weapons. Of course, the Americans would begin strategic moves to relocate their antiballistic missile system just in case they had to crush a threat from Tehran.

What else would anyone expect the world’s most powerful nation to do? But Russia’s reaction was always so stridently anti-American—threatening this, threatening that, announcing plans to deploy missiles to the West and South of the country, in readiness to take out the US systems—that it was, in the opinion of Nikolai Chirkov and his venerable father, the ranting of imbeciles.

Did anyone in the modern world really want the fanatical ayatollahs of Iran running around with atom bombs?

Lieutenant Commander Nikolai believed the death knell for modern
Russia would be any kind of a military strike against the United States—a guided missile, a clandestine action against a US facility or embassy, an attack on a US warship or naval base, even deliberate cooperation with Iran in its pugnacious threat to blockade the Strait of Hormuz.

Like many a self-appointed political missionary, he felt he had a pivotal role to play in the devious twenty-first-century game of protecting the people from the ignorance of politicians. Hence the visit to the guarded building behind the high walls in Moscow’s Bolshaya Ordynka Street three years ago.

And hence his presence here in this apartment, in snowy Petrozavodsk, meeting with the Mossad spymaster. Rani was, in Nikolai’s view, the one man in all of the world who could hold Russia’s rulers in check; he had the ear of the CIA in Washington. He could warn the United States and NATO of Russia’s erratic intentions. And Rani Ben Adan, a Sabra of the blood, had nothing but respect for the knowledge of Nikolai Chirkov. In three years he’d never been wrong about one single Russian Naval operational plan or program. Both men were, one to the other, priceless.

In fairness, Nikolai’s information had never been of a pressing nature. But it had been steady and reliable, especially in data about the construction of new and improved Russian warships and state-of-the-art sonar systems. This latest summons to the diabolically cold North, however, was edged with urgency: a coded text message, transmitted on a cell phone, which had been instantly hurled into the ship’s garbage crusher on board the
Admiral Chabanenko.

 

As mass confusion goes, that was more or less as bewildering as it gets. Czar Nicholas II had been dead these hundred years, and there’s more Lenin Squares in Russia than snowballs in Siberia. Lieutenant Commander Nikolai laid a mean and mystical trail. Rani knew exactly where to go, what time to be there, and how to travel.

His own training was military to the most infinitesimal degree. Born in Tel Aviv, Rani was only three years old when his mother died during the opening days of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Along with thousands of
other young Israeli women, she had raced to the forbidding slopes of the Golan mountains to join the human chain passing shells and ordnance up to the tank commanders on the heights, as they fought to hurl back the marauding army of Syria.