John Weisman - Soar: A Black Ops Mission

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From the New York Times bestselling author who takes the reader into the very heart of CIA and Special Operations (Robert Baer) comes

JACK IN THE BOX,

a knife-edge tale of international intrigue and covert spy craft and the chilling follow-up to SOAR.

Edward Lee Howard, the only CIA officer to defect to the KGB, redefects with incredible charges against the President of the United States. But, before the traitors stunning allegations can be verified, Howard disappears. Then he turns up dead. Are Howards accusations real? Thats the enigma former CIA Moscow station chief Sam Waterman must solve. Traveling to Moscow, Paris, and D.C., he struggles to unravel a conspiracy involving a mole in the highest reaches of government while friends and enemies die around him. Filled with cutting-edge tradecraft, Jack in the Box uses actual CIA operations and gets deep inside the Amercian intelligence community as few novels ever have.

Sam Waterman spent the morning of his forty-fifth birthday a hostage to his profession, stuffed rudely onto the rear floorboard of one of the consulates 1985-vintage four-door Zil sedans, the driveshaft hump wedged uncomfortably against his kidneys, his long legs tucked fetal, his body hidden under a damp blanket. Even though he knew he couldnt be seen through the dark-tinted windows, he still held his breath as the car clunked over the antiterrorist barriers just prior to passing the Russian police checkpoint outside the garage gate. He exhaled slowly when the drive-shaft under his side whined as the car merged into the late morning traffic.

Keep going, keep going, Sam instructed tersely from under musty cover. Dont check your mirrors. Just drive. Nice and easy.

Dont have a cow, man. That was Consular Officer Tom Kennedy, imitating Bart Simpson. Tom, whod been recruited to do the driving, could impersonate Bart perfectly. He was still working on his Homer, though, running and rerunning the videotapes his sister sent him through the mail pouch, night after night after night. Which kind of told you what Moscows social life had to offer a reasonably good-looking African-American junior-grade diplomat, even in these post-Soviet days.

Sam grunted and shifted his position slightly, trying to reduce the pressure on his kidneys as the car turned left, heading west.

Were on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, Homer told him. Doh. Crossroads of the world.

Tom, put a cork in it. Christ, hed warned the kid this was serious business, and the youngster still wanted to talk. Not good. Because they werent safe. Not by a long shot. FSB, the Russian internal security agency, had inherited the KGBs elaborate passive surveillance system. Vizirs they were calledlong-range, high-power telescopes mounted on sturdy tripods, positioned in buildings along Moscows major thoroughfares. The watchers would scan for diplomatic plates, and peer inside the cars. If they saw your lips moving, theyd take note. Were you talking to someone hidden in the car? Were you operating a burst transmitter in the open briefcase on the passenger seat? Were you broadcasting? If they thought you were up to no good, theyd dispatch one of the static counterintelligence teams that were all over the city to do a traffic stopdip plates or no.

And Sam couldnt afford a traffic stop. Not today.

Today he had to meet General Pavel Baranov at precisely five past one, and failure wasnt a viable option. The rendezvous was critical. Baranov had used his emergency call-out signal, an inconspicuous broken chalk line on a weatherworn lamppost sixty yards from the entrance to the Arbatskaya metro stop. Sam had seen the long-short-short Morse code signal last night on his regular evening joga five-mile run that began outside the embassys faded mustard-colored walls and took a long, meandering, but unfailingly consistent route that brought him all the way to the western boundary of the Kremlin, and thence back toward the embassy.

The Arbatskaya signal site and the letter D were to be used by Baranov only under crisis conditions. Still in his running gear, Sam sent Langley a code-word-secret criticom, an urgent cable alerting his division chief to Baranovs emergency signal (in the cable Sam referred to Baranov not by his true name, but by his CIA cryptonym, GTLADLE; Sams CIA in-house pseudonym, which he used to sign the cable, was Cyrus N. PRINGLE). and requested comment. Today he was awake by five, running and rerunning the operation in his mind. By six he was in the office, checking for response from Langleythere was none, which was typicaland removing gear from the duffel he kept in walk-in safe.

The next step was to shanghai young Tom Kennedy, one of three greenhorn consular officers Sam had identified as potential decoys. The decoy factor was critical. As CIAs Moscow chief, Sam was declared to the Russians. He even held regular meetings with his counterparts at SVR, the Russian foreign intelligence service. And thanks to an American defector, a CIA turncoat named Edward Lee Howard whod been transferred into FSB, Russias internal security and counterintelligence service by Vladimir Putin, the Kremlins aggressive new director of counterintelligence, FSB pretty much knew who was Agency and who wasnt.

Ed Howard and Sam Waterman had history. In fact, sometimes Sam felt as if the traitor was shadowing him. He and Howard had been members of the same basic Russian-language studies class at Georgetown University. Subsequently, Howard sat next to Sam at the CIAs language institute in Rosslyn during the two-year, advanced Russian course. Theyd even shared a room at , the Agencys case-officer training facility near Williamsburg also known as the Farm, for the six-week class in advanced tradecraft procedures required of all case officers assigned behind the Iron Curtain.

But thats where the relationship stopped. As he readied himself for his first Warsaw Pact tour, Sam was already an experienced case officer with a successful tour in Germany. Hed run an agent network and worked against a KGB