The Defector (ePub)

Gunter Wayan is again in over his head, accepting an assignment from the Indonesian Minister of Defense that sends him, Eka, and Persik to Russia to rescue a defecting scientist and his wife from the FSB. Before they leave, the Minister makes clear that if they're captured, the government will deny any involvement and say they acted alone rather than create a diplomatic incident. The defector, a Ukrainian scientist on the brink of achieving the holy grail of camouflage technology, which is making a moving object invisible, was kidnapped from his lab near Odesa and brought to a facility in downtown Moscow. To motivate the scientist to complete his work, his wife is taken to Oymyakon, the coldest inhabited settlement on earth, and placed under FSB guard. If he's unsuccessful in delivering the technology, she'll live the remainder of her life there without him. With the Indonesian embassy across the street from his lab, he finds a way to communicate with an official, offering his technology in exchange for getting him and his wife out of the country.
To accomplish this nearly impossible task, they decide to first rescue the wife from the Siberian settlement, which has no airport and is a fourteen-hour drive over snow-covered roads from the nearest town, then evade capture on their thirty-three hundred mile trek across the Russian Federation to retrieve the scientist. As if things couldn't get more complicated, soon after entering the country, they learn that the Minister's plan for getting the couple out of Russia has fallen through and that once they rescue the couple, it's up to them to find a way to get them out of a country which has the tightest border security in the world.