by Dalton Fury
Six weeks.
He wondered if Shiner would wait that long to reveal himself again.
NINE
Ten hours after leaving Athens, the man calling himself Dusan Juric arrived at Alexander the Great Airport in Skopje, Macedonia, where he boarded a Croatian Airlines flight bound for Zagreb. Upon arrival, he went to a dead drop established by an MIT officer working out of the Turkish embassy, and exchanged the documents for Dusan Juric with a new set of papers identifying him as Admir Osmani, an Albanian currently residing in Canada, and on his way home after visiting family in his homeland. Thirty hours after that, he deplaned in Toronto, and Osmani became Vladimir Zdorovetskiy, a Russian émigré living in Detroit, Michigan.
During the train ride from Toronto, Miric memorized the details of his new legend. The border crossing into the United States would be the moment of greatest risk, particularly since there was a good chance that he would be singled out for special scrutiny because of his ethnicity. The Canadian government did not check passports of visitors crossing into Ontario, but the Americans did for everyone returning by the same route, even for U.S. citizens. His American passport was an excellent forgery, but a forgery nonetheless, and the only way to ensure that the Homeland Security agents at the border crossing would not give it too close a look was to absolutely nail his performance as Zdorovetskiy the Russian. He would need to be able to field seemingly insignificant questions without hesitation, and more importantly, without any tells—microexpressions that might betray his answers as fabrications or outright deception.
His physical appearance would bring unwanted attention as well, but there was only so much he could do about that.
His empty left eye socket was now covered with a flesh-colored adhesive eye patch, which in turn was hidden behind dark sunglasses. He would have to remove those glasses at the border crossing, at which point his deformity would be revealed. One deviation from the norm—his pseudo-Russian background—might not stick in the memory of the DHS agents, but a second—his missing eye—would. It would probably not be enough for them to flag him, all other things being equal, but if the investigation into his apparent death in Athens revealed the truth, if international law enforcement agencies were told to be on the lookout for a one-eyed man with a Slavic accent, the memory of his passage would bubble to the surface and the hunters would know where to start looking next.
Still, there was nothing he could do about it, and soon—within a couple weeks at most—it wouldn’t matter anymore.
When his turn came, he handed the customs agent his passport. The man glanced up at him. “What’s your citizenship?”
“I am American citizen,” Miric replied, trying to inject a note of patriotic pride into his tone while exaggerating his accent. “I pass test two years ago.”
“Where are you coming from?”
“Toronto.” He nodded his head in the direction from which he had come.
The agent flipped the passport open, made a cursory visual inspection, and then passed it under a UV light, checking the seals. Miric made a conscious effort to keep breathing. There will be no problem, he told himself, willing it to be so.
“You’re returning home?”
“Yes.”
“What was the purpose of your visit?”
“Was visiting old friend.”
The agent stared back impassively, and Miric wondered if the man expected more information from him. Needlessly embellishing a cover story was the mark of an amateur, but sometimes ordinary people also volunteered too much information. “Sergei. That is the name of my friend. He lives in Toronto.”
“Take off the glasses.”
Miric did so, and noticed the subtle change in the man’s expression. Surprise, but also disgust. He had seen it many times before, the automatic response of most people to someone who was no longer whole.
The agent looked down quickly, as if embarrassed by his reaction, passed the barcode under a laser scanner, and then handed the passport back. “Next, please.”
* * *
After the incident that had cost him his left eye, Rasim Miric had spent several months subsisting on the kindness of strangers. He had no family left. The Serbs had seen to that, but his hatred for men like Milosevic and Ratko was nearly exhausted. Theirs was an honest evil. Not like the Americans, who played at being cowboy heroes, pretending to rush in to save the downtrodden, all the while cynically preserving the status quo if it served their political agenda.
His self-pity quickly became an abiding hatred for the Americans, both the government—who had stalled and dissembled in the face of the Bosnian genocide—and the people, men like the army officer who had left him maimed. He had quietly cheered when the television showed images of the Twin Towers burning, collapsing in a cloud of smoke and rubble, but beyond the mere satisfaction of that event, he had come to a profound realization.
America was not invincible.
Nineteen men, armed with box cutters and just a little bit of knowledge, had struck a blow that still resonated throughout the world sixteen years after the fact. The 9/11 attacks had upended the global economy, and goaded the Americans into a state of endless war—an asymmetrical war in which, despite having superiority of numbers and equipment, they would never achieve true victory, and therefore were already defeated.
The wars had shown Miric a way out of his depression. The loss of his nondominant eye had not affected his ability to shoot at all. If anything, the techniques he used to cope with the loss of binocular vision had resulted in a net improvement. He was still a shooter—a natural—and now there were people who would pay him to hunt Americans and their allies.
In Iraq, his deadly prowess played into the urban legend of Qanas Baghdad—the Baghdad Sniper. In Afghanistan, he notched several more kills over a four-year period, feeding the rumors of Chechen mercenary sniper teams working for the Taliban. From there, he had gone back to Iraq to fight with the emerging insurgency known as the Islamic State; not because he subscribed to their apocalyptic vision of Islam, but because he shared their hatred of the West. That was where he encountered Mehmet, who was working secretly on behalf of the Turkish government in support of the Islamic State.
Mehmet had also taught him how to play chess.
He had learned the fundamentals of the game as a child, but the Turk had shown him the importance of strategy and patience—playing the long game. The point was not to remove as many pieces from the board as possible, but rather to maneuver an opponent into destroying himself.
That was what the Turkish government was doing in Iraq and Syria. While paying lip service to the fight against the Islamic State and the effort to unseat Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, thus satisfying their duties as a NATO member nation, Turkish intelligence agents were actively working with ISIS to defeat one of their key enemies, the Peshmerga of the autonomous region of Kurdistan in Iraq.
Throughout the twentieth century, the Kurdish people had been a stateless nation, an oppressed minority in every land in which they dwelt in exile, including post-Ottoman Turkey. As was their custom, the Americans were willing to overlook the brutal oppression of the Kurds in Turkey because of the nation’s strategic importance during the Cold War, but the end of the long conflict with the Soviet Union had drawn attention to the plight of the Kurdish people, particularly in northern Iraq, where they hoped to establish a Kurdish homeland. The Turkish government, under then prime minister and now president Recep Erdogan, strongly opposed the formation of a sovereign Kurdistan following the ouster of Saddam Hussein, as that would be the first step toward legitimizing past claims of human rights violations, as well as fomenting unrest among the large Kurdish population still living in Turkey. Because the United States needed to keep Turkey as a strategic partner in its new long war—the poorly defined War on Terror—early plans to divide Iraq along ethnic lines—much as had been done in the Balkans following the breakup of the Communist Bloc—and creating a Kurdish homeland were scrapped. Iraq remained a sing
le but divided nation, fertile ground for the rise of the new Islamist insurgency, and perversely, offered yet another chance for the Kurds to gain the respect of the West, something the Turkish government could not allow.
Miric was initially appalled at the endemic cynicism on all sides of the political equation. To him, the Turks were no better than the Americans, but Mehmet had assured him that there was no other way to win the long game. Sacrifices had to be made in order to keep the Western nations in a state of perpetual war.
“America has never been weaker,” the Turkish intelligence officer had told him. “They are divided. Most of their people cannot be bothered to participate in their great democracy, and those who do are actively working to undermine their own government. They would rather burn their house down than compromise with each other. And we will let them do it.”
Fear, Mehmet had gone on to say, was now the dominant spirit in America: fear of another terrorist attack, fear of Muslims and immigrants, fear even of the government itself.
In the three years since that conversation took place, the situation in the United States had grown even more unstable. The fear was now a living thing, a monster poised to consume what had briefly been the most powerful nation on earth.
In chess terms, this was the endgame. With just a few more moves, the Americans would be maneuvered into a fatal position.
Checkmate.
It was generally believed that the term derived from a Persian phrase—shah’mat.
The king is dead.
And who better to kill a king than a knight.
* * *
Before leaving the train station, Miric located the last of the dead drops set up in advance by his handlers in Turkish intelligence. From this point forward, at least until the successful execution of the second phase of the plan, he would be working completely on his own, which did not bother him in the least. He knew he could count on himself. Relying on others was dangerous. He did not want to be undone by somebody else’s mistake.
The drop yielded a new set of documents—U.S. passport, Michigan driver’s license, credit cards, even a gym membership and public library card—all in the name of Konstantin Khavin, along with a prepaid cellular phone, still in its plastic clamshell package. Unlike the other identities he had briefly assumed in the course of his journey halfway around the globe, Khavin was as familiar and comfortable as an old sweater.
He booked a room at a budget motel near the station. He was exhausted, but although it had been more than forty-eight hours since he had slept in a bed, his day was not yet done.
After a quick shower and a change of clothes, he activated his phone and placed a call to a number he had committed to memory.
The voice on the other end was tentative, hesitant. “Hello?”
“Colonel Jeffries,” Miric said. “It is Konstantin Khavin.”
“Ah, Mr. Khavin. Of course. I didn’t recognize the number.”
“I change phones many times. You understand.” Miric laid his accent on thick, confident that the man on the other end would not be able to distinguish one Slavic speech pattern from another. “I am calling to make sure that you are still expecting me tomorrow.”
“Absolutely. We’re all very excited. It’s not every day we get a former Russian Spetsnaz sniper as a guest instructor for drill weekend.”
“You should not say such things over the telephone,” Miric said sharply. Despite the reproof, he was smiling. Under any other circumstances, Jeffries’s indiscreet comment would have been a potentially fatal slipup—fatal for Jeffries at least—but this was one time where loose lips were essential to the success of the mission. It was one of the reasons, he suspected, why Mehmet had suggested Jeffries and his New American Revolution Lightfoot Militia for the next phase of his mission.
The arrangements had been made through a cutout—an intermediary whose involvement could not be traced to the Turkish intelligence service—but Miric had been fully briefed nonetheless.
Konstantin Khavin, a former sniper for the elite Russian Spetsnaz, and émigré to the United States, where he was currently working as a private security contractor, would be joining Jeffries’s militia group for their weekend training at a commercial shooting range in eastern Michigan. The cover identity was one that Miric himself had established many years earlier—somewhat ironically, since his only experience with Russian military special forces troops had been in Chechnya, where he had put bullets through the eyes of no less than six Spetsnaz operators—but MIT had padded the legend out and smoothed some of the inconsistencies.
“Oh.” Jeffries was clearly mortified by his mistake. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think—”
“I will need transportation.”
“I’ll have one of my men collect you.”
“No. You come. I will call you in the morning with my location.” He hung up before the other man could reply, and removed the battery from the phone.
* * *
Miric spent the next two days doing what he loved most. Shooting.
His vagabond lifestyle did not often afford him the opportunity to shoot recreationally, much less on a dedicated thousand-meter range with steel targets. When he was not behind the trigger, he acted as both spotter and shooting coach for the NAR militiamen, and when he was not doing that, he kept them entertained with stories of his exploits abroad.
The stories were true, at least with respect to the technical details—the rifles, ammunition and equipment used, distance to target, and of course, the description of the kill itself—and that was all that mattered to his audience. They had seemed particularly enamored with his nationality, confiding in him that they admired Russian president Vladimir Putin for his strength and decisiveness. Miric had merely nodded, playing along.
Political differences notwithstanding, he felt a measure of admiration for these Americans. Three months earlier, when they had worked out the details of the operation, Mehmet had disparaged the militiamen as “pretend warriors,” but Miric saw something different. They reminded him of the men he had fought with in his youth. Eager. Fearless. Naïve. The only difference was that the war they were prepared to fight had not yet materialized.
“This is what I do not understand,” he said as they gathered around picnic tables for a meal at the close of the first day’s activity. “You say that your country has been hijacked. That the government is illegal and that soon they will begin taking away your weapons and arresting you.”
There were nods and murmurs of agreement.
“What are you waiting for?”
Colonel Jeffries, a slightly built man with graying hair and the false charm of a used car salesman, gave him a long-suffering smile but shook his head. “Don’t you see? That’s exactly what they want. If we make the first move, they’ll have an excuse to declare martial law. No, there’s gonna be a fight, all right, but it’s gonna be self-defense.”
This was a variation on the monologue Jeffries had given during the long drive to eastern Michigan earlier in the day. The militia leader had gone on at great length about the many crimes of the current administration and the looming threats from foreign agitators.
The position made no sense at all to Miric. If the government had, as Jeffries and his men believed, been seized by antidemocratic forces, the “first move” had already been made. And if the current regime was as authoritarian as Jeffries claimed, they would have no need of a pretext to begin carrying out their diabolical schemes.
He did not probe deeper into the question. Fomenting revolution was not his mission, at least not in this way. No, he was here for something else.
As Jeffries expounded on the patriotic nature of their opposition to the federal government, Miric watched the faces of the other men gathered around the tables. The NAR Lightfoot Militia boasted a membership of more than two hundred, but less than fifty had shown up for the weekend training event. Many were too old to suit Miric’s needs. Many more were in poor physical shape. The remaining pool of candidates was sm
all—just half a dozen—but he needed only one. He had watched them carefully throughout the day, and paid special attention to their reactions to his question.
What are you waiting for?
Not surprisingly, those six young men were part of a select group within the militia organization. Collectively, they comprised a SWORD team. The impressive acronym stood for “select weapons, ordnance, and reconnaissance detachment,” and in practical terms it meant that they had been singled out for additional training in combat skills.
The next day, while most of the militiamen continued burning ammunition, plinking away with rifles at two-hundred-meter targets and shooting on the pistol range, Miric took the SWORD team out to a remote corner of the facility to practice movement to target, and escape-and-evasion techniques.
As they fashioned field-expedient camouflage, Miric outlined his plan for a live-fire training exercise. Each man would, in turn, be given thirty minutes to move out from their assembly area and establish a hidden shooting position. At the end of that interval, Miric would begin hunting them with an airsoft pistol. If they reached the sixty-minute mark undetected, they were to take a shot at the eight-hundred-meter target and then, if possible, make their way back to the assembly area without being caught.
During those thirty-minute waiting periods, Miric continued building rapport with the young men awaiting their turn. He praised them as the embodiment of the true warrior spirit. He drew them out, invited them to express their fears and ambitions. He was a sympathetic listening ear, and he was also, without their knowledge, interviewing them. Testing them.
When the time to hunt arrived, he left the group and headed into the landscape, unfailingly locating each of the would-be snipers with plenty of time to spare. Their mistake, the last mistake many snipers made, was that they did not take into account the fact that, regardless of the conditions, there were only a limited number of places from which a shot could be taken. It was a liability that could be partially overcome with superior camouflage and movement techniques, but the young militiamen, lacking any formal training in those proficiencies, were easy to spot.