Arctic Gold by Stephen Coonts

well- meaning one. They’d racked up some impressive environmentalist victories worldwide in the campaign to reduce unnecessary whaling, for instance. If they were an annoyance for the industrial West, however, with their protests against nuclear power and industrial pollution, they were doubly so within the borders of the former Soviet Union. There, the nation disintegration had left a festering morass of environmental problemstoxic waste spills and dumps, radioactive zones, dying seas and rivers, and abandoned rust- belt factory complexes, a situation driven to crisis proportions by a fast- disintegrating infrastructure, the breakdown of authority, local wars, and rampant corruption.
Greenpeace International had opened an office in Moscow in 1989. Since that time, Greenpeace Russia had conducted a number of protests within the countryagainst the resumption of nuclear testing on Novaya Zemlya, against a pipeline near Lake Baikal, against the illegal timber trade with Finland. With a long tradition of nonviolent protest and confrontation, the organization had for almost twenty years struggled to call world attention to the fast- worsening environmental situation within the Russian Federation.
And they’d scored some important successes with their David- and- Goliath tactics. For the most part, however, the Russian authorities maintained the same gray, grim, and stolidly monolithic presentation of absolute control as their Soviet predecessors. News reports and photos only rarely made it out of the country or had much of an impact among native Russians.
In 2006, some of the more radical elements within Greenpeace had split off to form a new group.
Greenworld was smaller than Greenpeace, more secretive, more elusive, but at the same time, more
confrontational. During the past couple of years, they’d staged several massive protests in Great Britain, Belgium, and Russia, grabbing a lot of media attention with flashy banners, hurled rocks and bottles, and mass arrests. Where Greenpeace insisted on using purely nonviolent means to get its message across, Greenworld was not quite so fastidious. Several of its members had been arrested for sabotaging an oil refinery in England, and in 2007 the car- bomb death of a German industrialist had been blamed on the group, though no arrests had been made. The NSA had been maintaining a file on the group, which appeared ready and willing to use terrorist tactics, unlike its parent organization.
One week ago, a routine NSA electronic intercept had picked up a blogger page that talked about assassinating Dr. Spencer at the Environmental Symposium in London. The blogger was a London teenager but the kid had a police record. He’d been arrested for his part in the Men- with Hill affair and, five years later, had joined Greenworld.
The tidbit had been passed up the bureaucratic totem pole inside the Washington Beltway and ultimately trickled back down to Rubens’ desk. The State Department was taking seriously the possibility that Greenworld was going to try to kill Spencer.
As a result, Rubens had initiated Operation Sunny Weather, assigning Tommy Karr to the FBI team escorting Spencer to London and back.
Braslov, Rubens said, reading further, was one of Greenworld founders?
We think so, sir, Telach told him. We don’t have much intelligence on Greenworld inner workings, but we know that Johann Ernst’ was a close associate with Peter Strauss and Emily Lockyear, who were the official founders.
And here he is tailing Sunny Weather. Rubens considered this for a moment. Have you passed this tidbit on to Karr yet?
She shook her head. No, sir.
Let him know who he dealing with. I Rubens stopped in mid- sentence. Uh- oh.
Sir?
Rubens had been leafing through the electronic pages of Braslov file. He’d come to a photo of the man, grainy and poorly focused, obviously a surveillance photo taken of Braslov at long range, but clear enough to show a ragged scar on the left side of his face. He appeared