That stunned him some—but not quite enough. He rolled off the wall, scrambled to his knees, then launched himself toward where the pistol lay, about two yards down the hallway.
I shoestring-tackled the cocksucker. But like a good running back, his legs just kept churning and churning, and he reached out, grabbed the pistol by the muzzle, then tried to work it around in his fat hands.
No fucking way. I slammed him in the small of the back with my right fist hard enough to make him gag. He used the pistol butt to open a nasty cut on my forehead, then tried to open my forehead itself.
Big fucking mistake. I sensed the second blow, reached up, and trapped the pistol in my extra-large paw.
That didn’t fluster the POG at all. He worked the gun so that the muzzle was pointing vaguely in my direction, then tried to work his thumb into the trigger guard so he could fire the fucking weapon. I don’t think he gave a shit where the round might go, either.
But I did—and fuck, the muzzle was getting too close for comfort. I wrestled his arm, caught it under mine, and hyperextended it with enough power to break the elbow.
The goddam joint didn’t break, but it must have hurt like hell. He screamed at me in Russkie, but he didn’t let go of the fucking pistol. In fact, he worked even harder to squeeze at the trigger.
I fought back, and finally was able to jam my thumb, right up to the joint, behind the fucking trigger. Now, if he tried to pull it, nothing would happen.
My strategy kept the pistol from firing—but it took my right hand out of the fight. So it was time to end things before the situation deteriorated any further.
I raked his eyes with my left hand—which hurt me just about as much as it hurt him. He tried to swat me away with his one good arm. That opened him up—took his free hand out of things for just a microsecond. It was enough for me. I caught him with an elbow, then a knee, then twisted him up and around, using the pistol as the fulcrum. As he went over the top, his right wrist snapped.
Oh, that must have wounded the sumbitch one whole lot because he screamed, and nasty froth came out of his mouth. Holy shit, I hoped the cockbreath wasn’t rabid.
I used all my strength to wrestle the pistol away from him. Reversed it. Extracted my thumb. Got my paw around the grips, and my finger on the trigger, then brought the gun around so the business end was pointed in his direction. He saw it coming out of the corner of his eye, and he fought against it real hard. But there was no escape. I had this asshole, and I was gonna waste him. I knew it—and he knew it, too, because I could see the fear in his eyes.
That look meant he was mine. I pushed the pistol up into his armpit and let him feel the pressure of the muzzle. I looked at his sweaty, round, red, soon-to-be-dead face, and whispered, “Zamochit, baklan.”46
I pulled the trigger three times as he struggled, wild-eyed, against me. The trio of shots was muffled by his body. He fought back another few seconds. I put another round into him and he then went limp.
He dropped in a messy pile, facedown. I put the muzzle of the pistol to the back of his neck, kneeled, held him at arm’s length to keep myself out of the blood spray, then sent a final round into his brain, just to make sure he stayed where he was.
I pulled myself to my feet, exhausted. The one positive aspect of the past few minutes—aside from the fact that the POG was dead—was that, at some point during the fracas, my left pinky had snapped back into proper alignment. It was sore as hell, but at least it was working again.
Well, to be honest, “working” is a relative term. Frankly, friends, I used to be able to do this sort of thing with fewer detrimental aftereffects when I was closer to the tadpole stage of my life cycle. That was when there was never too much beer or too much pussy, sleep was an unnecessary impediment to one’s existence, and my dick was hard all twenty-four hours a day. Ah, but youth, my friends, is wasted on the young. And—
I heard a noise behind me and looked up, alert for a new threat. But it was only the fucking dweeb editor, blue pencil in hand, who’d snuck up into the hallway to tell me, “Enough with the fürshtunken rhapsodizing already. Get on with the effing story line.”
I guess he’s right. Time was a-wasting.
Okay, first of all I was a little surprised that not a single door had cracked open to see WTF was going on. Then I realized that this was Baku, the first boom-town of the twenty-first century. And in boom-towns—Dodge City and San Francisco in the nineteenth century come to mind—you don’t stick your schnozz into other people’s business unless you’re Wyatt fucking Earp and carrying a bad-ass Buntline Special. But just to make sure Mister Murphy or the Azeri equivalent hadn’t called the cops from behind some closed door, I got down to work. I wiped the POG’s blood off the little pistol—it was an old Sig Sauer 230—and dropped the weapon into my vest pocket.
Moving quickly but efficiently I rifled the POG’s pockets. There wasn’t much. I used my dirty handkerchief and his clean pocket handkerchief to staunch the bleeding on my forehead. I took his wallet, riffled through it, and discovered that the POG was named Feliks Maximov. He had an old Russian Army ID, a CIS driver’s license, neither of which I could read, and an American Express Platinum card, expiration date 03/02, with his name embossed in English. A disorderly bunch of business cards were stashed in the wallet’s inside compartment. I pocketed the billfold, as well as his thick ring of keys. And I plucked out of his vest pocket the little cellular phone that had somehow survived the battle. In fact, I was on my way down the stairs—gingerly, given my dinged condition—when the fucking thing rang.
I kept going, taking the phone out of my pocket as I hobbled, flipped it open, and growled, in the most authentic accent I could muster, “Pree-vet?”47
I was answered with a flood of polysyllabic Russkie, a language that, as you know, I do not understand, all spoken in a resonant and uniquely mellifluous tone. It was like . . . Da Voice speaks RUSSIAN. No, really. It was like listening to one of those unctuously lubricious announcers from Radio Moscow introducing the weekly broadcast from Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Concert Hall. And, boy, did this asshole like to talk uninterrupted. He provided a monologue long enough to carry me down the stairway, out the front door, through the courtyard, and back into the bustle of the street market.
As I moved onto the sidewalk, I checked quickly but carefully to port and to starboard, peering down to the end of the line of stalls and carts. Beemer Man was nowhere to be seen.
I suddenly realized that Da Voice had paused, as if waiting for an answer. Well, why not give him one.
“I’m sorry, but Feliks can’t come to the phone right now. Can I take a message for him?”
I heard intake of breath, so I continued. “Not that he’s in any condition to hear it.”
Now, there was nothing but shocked silence. But what’s one shock without a follow-up? So, I gave Da Voice a wake-up call in Russki: “Otsosi, pedik—blow me, you miserable cocksucker.”
The connection was suddenly broken with an electronic bleep. Rude sonofabitch, wasn’t he?
I looked down at the phone. I pressed the “end” button, then AutoDialed the first number in the phone’s memory. It went through a nine number sequence, then started to ring. After nine double rings, and no answer, I fiddled with the phucking phone until I found the second stored telno, and dialed it up.
I listened as a long, long sequence of numbers beeped off. Then two raucous bring-brings, the double rings you hear when you dial up European phones. Then: “Pree-vet?”
Ah, the sweet sound of success. It was . . . Da Voice. And even from that one-word response I could tell he was PIC’d, which is pronounced piqued, and stands for Pissed, Irritated, and Confused. Good for me. I love it when I can PIC on assholes like this one.
“I asked if you wanted to leave a message for Feliks, and you fucking hung up on me, you rude motherfucker. Maybe I should come around and kick the shit out of you, cockbreath.”
I gave the Russkie ample time to answer. When he didn’t, w
hen all I heard was breathing, it was my turn to slap the receiver shut. V pizdu48 with him.
I dropped the cell phone into my vest pocket, got my bearings, then turned southeast toward Ashley Evans’s flat, periodically checking my six as I limped along, working my throbbing, swollen left pinky, and wondering what the politically incorrect Azeri idiomatic for Gimme a fucking Rogue-size bottle of your most effective extra-strength painkiller might be.
7
“GEEZUS, YOU LOOK LIKE HELL.” ASHLEY’S EYES WERE saucer-wide as she stared at me through the half-opened door to her flat.
“You gotta do something about the road rage in this city, Major,” I deadpanned. “Say, you got any aspirin in this here joint?”
“Aspirin? You want aspirin? Dick, you’re a candidate for a Syrette of morphine and about thirty stitches.”
We caught up while I dealt with my newly acquired dings and dents. Since Ashley had her flat swept twice a week for bugs by the embassy techies, she felt secure about talking. Even so, I made sure we had the radio and TV turned on full blast. Never, ever assume, right? Anyway, she told me that there were two developments she thought I should know about. First, about two hours ago she’d heard through an Azeri military source with close ties to what’s known as the chornye smorodiny,49 or Caucasian Mafiya, that a contract might have been put out on me.
“I could have told you that.”
“Yeah, well you weren’t around to confirm it. I called the hotel, but you’d already left. I didn’t want to leave a message.” She looked critically at my collection of black-and-blue (not to mention purple, green, and raw-meat-red) bruises as I applied Betadine liberally to my torso. “I will upgrade that particular source from a B to an A,” she said, dutifully jotting a reminder to herself on the legal pad on which she’d been keeping notes.
I worked on the long cut that ran from my forehead into my hairline, wincing as I moved my sore-as-hell left pinky. “Any idea who ordered the hit?”
“Not really. If it was a Mafiya job it could have been anybody—Azeri, Russian, Iranian, Armenian. Hell, Dick, you’re so politically incorrect it could have been the Pentagon Gay Women’s Support Group.”
I considered that particular possibility then dismissed the thought: “Nah. The crew looked Russkie.”
“That doesn’t tell me anything. You can hire ex-Spetsnaz Alpha Team specialists for fifty bucks a day in these parts.”
“What about the guy on the phone?”
She wrinkled her nose. “Maybe significant, maybe not. Problem is there’s no way to tell who he was, because we have no way of checking cell phone numbers here. There are so many black-market cell phones, faxes, wireless transmitters, and other stuff, the one you took off Maximov’s body might have been stolen in London, or Rome, or who knows where. They blue-box everything out here.” She hooked her thumb in the direction of the plain-paper fax on her desk. “That’s probably one of the few legally acquired faxes in Azerbaijan.”
I nodded. Another dead end.
Her face brightened. “One piece of good news is that you can check on the Amex card. There’ll be records. Maybe someone paying the bills.”
“I’ll get Merc on the case as soon as I get back to my secure phone.” I squinted into the mirror, evaluating my handiwork, and was gladdened by the results. I turned to face Ashley. “So—how do I look?”
“Like someone tried to beat the crap out of you.”
“Killjoy.”
“Yeah, well truth is truth.” She paced nervously back and forth. “There’s something else you should know,” she said.
“Shoot.”
“You’ve been declared persona non grata at the embassy.”
I’d sensed that from my brief chat with the RSO, and told Ashley as much. She explained that even though Ambassador Madison couldn’t force the Azeris to have me declared persona non grata and tossed out of Azerbaijan, she could box me out so far as the embassy was concerned. So, she’d put a memo out to the embassy staff, and I was now officially an untouchable. No one was to have anything to do with me, or my men. No support. No assistance. No nothing.
I shrugged. “What’s your point?”
“Well—”
“Look, Major—” I told Ashley in RUT—Roguishly Unvarnished Terms—what I thought of Ambassador Madison and her way of doing business. And since I don’t give a damn about Article 88,50 I also told her what I think of the current administration, and our commander in chief. Oh, I will salute his ass if I am in his presence, because the office, if not the man, has my respect. But when I salute, and I say, “Aye-aye, sir” to this commander in chief, I’m spelling sir C-U-R. That’s because, so far as I am concerned, this slimy sphincter is a traitor who has sold this country—and its armed forces—out for his own political gain.
Then, having made my views clear, I made sure Ashley understood that we SEALs don’t need a lot of support from people like Ambassador Madison. Hey, we are force multipliers. We develop our own networks for operations, intel, supply, and logistics. Bottom line? What the ambassador did, or didn’t do, frankly didn’t concern me one iota.
At the same, time, I knew that I couldn’t work in a vacuum. It’s dangerous to do so, because on this mission, everything had political ramifications. And while I’m not political, my big Slavic butt could be scorched pretty bad if I wasn’t plugged in. Bottom line? I would need someone inside the embassy to toss me infobits and political intel. Someone I could trust to watch my back.
Ashley threw up her hands. “Gee, Dick, given the long list of possibilities, I guess that person would have to be me.”
“You don’t have to volunteer—I can probably find someone else to help me out.”
She made a dismissive gesture. “You don’t believe that any more than I do. Look, Dick, I’m sure you and I don’t agree on everything—my feelings about the president, for example, aren’t as, ah, extreme as yours. And maybe I’m not altogether fond of your methods, either. But we are soldiers. We are military people. Now, the ambassador thinks that buying off the enemy works. ‘Expediting,’ she calls it. I know better—and so do you. Most of the political people at the embassy think that talking is an end in itself. It’s kind of like diplomacy by way of Montel, or Hey-Raldo. They think that simply by negotiating, they’ll solve problems. Well, you and I know from experience that all that talk, without some kind of political muscle to back it up, is meaningless. Look at the way Saddam Hussein walked all over Kofi Annan. Look at how the Serbs screwed Richard Holbrooke. There are dozens of examples.”
She paused to catch her breath. “And in this part of the world? Political muscle means military force—or the very real threat of it. You know what they understand out here in dikiy dikiy vostok—which in case you didn’t know, means the wild, wild east? They understand that power comes either from the barrel of a gun—or from a barrel of oil. The Russians know that, and they’re trying their best to muscle in on the action. So are the Iranians. And so, frankly, are we, although we’re not quite as brazen about it as the Russkies or the Iranians. So, it’s not a good situation.” She took a gulp from her can of Coke. “Anyway, this is a long-winded way of saying that I think we have serious problems here, and I’m willing to help.”
It gratifies me, friends, to see youngsters like Ashley Evans; young officers who are willing to put their butts on the line for what they believe in. That kind of grit, pluck, fortitude, is growing rarer and rarer in today’s military. And I know when to take yes for an answer. “You’re on. And I’ll keep you out of it as much as I can.”
We spent the next couple of hours working out the essential elements of information I’d be needing from the embassy, and figuring how Ashley could get ’em for me. I didn’t tell her about my plans to hit the Fist of Allah camp with Avi Ben Gal, because the less she knew about what I was up to, the further out of trouble she’d be when the shit hit the fan.
I had a string of messages as long as my dick waiting for me when I got back to the Grand Europe Hot
el, just after 1600. I thumbed through the thick pile of pink slips and counted eight from one caller alone. Starting just after midday, a Miss Ivana from the Sirzhik Foundation had called repeatedly, asking me to get back to her as soon as possible. There was also a pair of messages from Avi Ben Gal.
Yes, I wanted to learn all I could about Sirzhik. But Avi came first. I dialed his private number and he picked up directly. “Ben Gal.”
“Lech ti-Zedayeen—go fuck yourself.”
“Gee, I wonder who this is.” He laughed. “Where the heck have you been?”
“I’ll tell you when we’re face-to-face.”
I heard him groan in mock horror. “Listen—I called to say two things. One is that I have some of the information we’ll need to move ahead on our joint project.”
That was great news. “Terrific. I’d like to move as quickly as possible on that, Avi. Maybe as soon as tomorrow or the day after.”
“That’s going to be a problem,” he said.
I don’t like hearing about problems, and I let Avi know it in my customary RUT.
“This has to do with you,” he said. “Don’t you realize that you’re already a celebrity here in Baku.”
“Oh?”
“Oh, absolutely,” he said. “You are bona fide vatchamacallit, glitterati, Dick.” I could hear bemusement creeping into his tone “You’re even having a party thrown for you.”
I was? That was news to me.
“The Sirzhik Foundation office in Baku has decided to honor you.”
Oh, c’mon. This was unreal. It was like manna from heaven. It also explained all those calls from the mysterious Miss Ivana.
And Avi made sure I knew why I had to accept, even on this obviously tapped telephone. “Take it from me, you’ll want to get a good look at Sirzhik’s offices.”
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