The Skorpion Directive by David Stone

Author:David Stone
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Intelligence officers, Fiction - Espionage, American Mystery & Suspense Fiction, Micah (Fictitious character), Revenge, Fiction, Dalton, Suspense, Thriller, Thrillers, Espionage
ISBN: 9780399156328
Publisher: Penguin Group USA
Published: 2010-09-15T20:15:43.048000+00:00

Sevastopol

THE SEVASTOPOL HOTEL, ARTBUHTA EMBANKMENT, EIGHT P.M. LOCAL TIME

Thirty-one hours and 1,756 kilometers later—290 from Venice to Zagreb, 390 from Zagreb to Belgrade, 450 from Belgrade to Bucharest, and another 626 from Bucharest to Sevastopol—and Dalton, who had somehow managed to sleep much of the way in spite of the five different planes involved in the journey, each one more rickety and bone-shaking than the last, was finally installed in a wicker chair on the shining-white pillared balcony of the Sevastopol Hotel’s restaurant. In honor of a Free Ukraine, he was smoking a sky-blue, gold-tipped Sobranie Cocktail, nursing a G & T so cold it was hurting his fingertips, and watching the lights of Sevastopol Harbor come flickering on all around the shoreline. The broad bay, steely under a pinto sky, was studded here and there with the matte-gray spearheads of six Russian destroyers moored out in the offing, their amber running lights shimmering in the damp evening air. Because the eye-blink-brief tourist season was now under way, an armada of pleasure craft and tour boats was circling around the gunships like tropical fish darting around in a shark tank.

Sevastopol, shelled into ruins by the Brits during the Crimean War and halfheartedly repaired by czarist Russia, today nominally a Ukrainian holding, was still living under the shadow of the Russian Navy, which had a twenty-year lease on the port, granted in 1997 by the Ukrainians, a reluctant concession profoundly influenced by the guns of the Black Sea Fleet.

The town itself was pleasant enough to look at, full of lights and glitter, with many charming white limestone homes, blue-roofed town-house developments, gaily canopied seaside restaurants scattered along the embankment, dense, tree-shaded neighborhoods of apartments and town-house blocks rising up into in a cascading range of green hills, some neoclassical buildings dotted here and there about the town, and a large drum-shaped war museum set out on a hilltop, dominating the town and the harbor.

But to Micah Dalton, it looked, walked, talked, and smelled like a Russian satrap, which to him had always meant the dead-meat stink of totalitarian oppression and the mute, miasmic dread of a captive citizenry. Dalton had been here before. He had followed the progress of a Russian trawler through the Black Sea, a trawler that was suspected of carrying a shipment of missile-guidance systems to the Iranians. Dalton had found the place . . . unfriendly, having to leave by private boat under the cover of darkness just a few hundred yards ahead of a detachment of Russian naval security forces.

He was back now, checked into a nice suite of rooms under the name of Dylan Castle, an investment analyst working for a London-based private bank known to the fiscal set as Burke and Single. The Castle “legend,” which had worked well enough to get him out of Venice and all the way to the Crimean, had been laid out by Porter Naumann under the cover of Burke and Single, a CIA false-front bank monitoring currency transactions around the world.

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