First Team

by Larry Bond

“You get to the point where you almost wish something would happen,” said Corrine.

  “You got that right.” Rankin shifted in the seat. His back muscles were starting to tighten. “Shoulda brought a book or something.”

  “What book would you read?” she asked.

  Rankin shrugged. “Whatever.”

  “You read thrillers?”

  “Nah. Biographies,” said Rankin.

  “Really?”

  Rankin didn’t like the surprised tone in her voice. “Brant’s history of James Madison,” he said, naming the work he’d started the last time he was back in the States. It was a six-volume set of the man who’d been the country’s fourth president and principal author of the Constitution.

  “Is it interesting?” Corrine asked.

  “It’s long.” He leaned back in the seat, trying to stretch his back. “It explains the War of 1812 a little better than I’ve seen before.”

  “How’d you get into that?”

  “I just did,” said Rankin.

  They were silent a minute or so. Rankin decided he didn’t want her to think he was mad at her—he wasn’t, really. He just didn’t like people thinking he was a stupid shit, when he wasn’t.

  “What do you read?” he asked.

  “Depends. If I’m in a mood for a mystery, I’ll read something by Lawrence Block maybe, or P. D. James. If I want to laugh, I read Wodehouse.”

  “Bertie and Jeeves?”

  “You know the series?”

  “Sure.”

  “I think the TV shows they did, the BBC shows—they were better than the books.”

  “Didn’t see it. Excuse me. Gotta take a leak.” He got out of the car and went into the woods to pee.

  Corrine turned her attention back to the small viewer screen, where the large cars sat like unmoving ghosts. She knew she had offended him by being surprised at what he was reading—but she was surprised, and whether he was a soldier or not, biographies about James Madison weren’t exactly everyday reading.

  That was the way it was going to be from now on—no matter what she did or tried to do, everyone from Slott on down would see her as an interloper. She’d just have to deal with it.

  Corrine pulled her coat tighter around her, fighting off the chill.

  7

  THE ROAD TO GROZNYY

  Conners’s German was nonexistent, but Ferguson convinced him that if he spoke English with a quasi-German accent, he’d fool most anyone they encountered, since there were rarely German businessmen in Chechnya. Conners began practicing his inflections as they drove along the highway toward the Chechen capital. At some point Ferg found his accent too ridiculous not to laugh aloud, and it became a joke between them. At one point Conners began singing his Irish drinking songs with a German accent, and Ferguson joined in, words and accents morphing together into a new language punctuated by laughter.

  The drive might have been interminable otherwise. There were checkpoints every ten or fifteen miles. Usually the two men were waved through with no more than a cursory glance at their papers and car. But several times the Russian soldiers ordered them out and conducted brief searches, which were more like shakedowns than pat-downs.

  Carrying weapons was theoretically forbidden, but the realities of travel through the countryside meant that many Russians and even foreigners armed themselves, and in most cases a soldier who saw a rifle in the backseat of an otherwise unsuspicious car—that is, a car that clearly didn’t belong to a Chechen—wouldn’t blink, as long as the owner agreed to pay a nominal “fine” on the spot. On the other hand, it was also possible that the soldier might “confiscate” a weapon that looked much nicer than his own. They, therefore, carefully hid their Glocks and PKs—they had only pistots—and left a Makarova peeking out from under a blanket in the back to attract attention.

  They got off the main highway about six miles from the city, driving north through the ruins of a village that had been burned two or three years before by Russian troops. The land that straddled the village had been farmed for centuries before the rebellions; now the fields were thick with weeds. Here and there the rotted carcass of a shed or a barn, its wood too deteriorated even to be burned for fuel, stood like the starched bones of a horse picked over by buzzards in the desert. They drove north for about five miles, then took a local road to the east. A town appeared off to the side; they found the road for it and drove up the main street, surprised that there were no patrols checking traffic in or out.

  “German,” Ferguson told Conners as they got out of the car. A small house nearby had a handwritten sign advertising rooms in one of the windows.

  “Ya-vole,” said Conners in pseudo-German. He started to crack up.

  “Don’t schpecken ze jokes,” replied Ferguson. He knelt and retrieved his small Glock from under the seat. Palming the gun, he slid it into his pocket, then took his battered overnight bag and led Conners into the three-story brick building, which sat about a foot below street level. The structure probably predated the road, but it seemed as if it had slid into the earth, hunkering down to avoid the years of war.

  The front hall smelled of fresh paint. A very short older woman with glasses appeared at the far end as they came in, her fingers layered with paint. She introduced herself in Chechen, then switched to Russian, eying them suspiciously. Ferg gave her the cover story—German businessmen who’d come to sell electronic switches for furnaces. They had business in the capital.

  “Why aren’t you staying there?” she asked.

  “Too expensive,” he told her. “Besides, this is such a lovely place. Do you speak German?”

  She did not, but the promise of payment in euros allayed her suspicions and she showed them to a pair of rooms at the top of the first set of stairs. They decided Conners’s was more private, and after searching and scanning for bugs using a small frequency detector, Ferguson took the laptop from the bag, using the sat phone to connect to their encrypted Web site.

  “That where we’re going?” asked Conners, pointing to the sat photos.

  “This one,” said Ferg. He double-clicked on the thumbnail and a large .jpg file began filling the screen.

  “Looks like an old castle.”

  “It is. Supposedly built by the Turks about six hundred years ago.”

  “The Turks were here?”

  “Turks have been everywhere,” said Ferg. “It’s a jail now.”

  “We’re going there?”

  “What’s the matter? Don’t want to leave the Happy Acres Motel?”

  “Well it does have TV,” said Conners, thumbing toward the set in the corner. It looked like it dated from the 1950s.

  “True enough.”

  “So what’s the deal, Ferg? What are we doing?” Ferguson still hadn’t explained what they were up to—unusual for him. The SF soldier didn’t need long-winded explanations, but he didn’t like it when people started acting differently than they had before. In his experience, it wasn’t a good sign.

  Ferg killed the telephone connection. With the Web browser down, he launched a scrubber program to erase the history files and all traces of what they’d just seen.

  “We got a lawyer poking around now, Dad. We have to watch what we do,” Ferguson told him.

  “She told you not to tell me what was going on?”

  Ferguson didn’t answer.

  “We ain’t gonna get you in trouble, are we?” Conners stood against the door, his arms folded. “Ferg?”

  “I’m just following my original orders until I’m told not to.”

  “I’m not arguing with you,” said Conners. “I just want to know what the hell’s going on, that’s all.”

  “Das is goot.” Ferguson took a beat-up black knapsack bag from the suitcase and slid the laptop into it. “Let’s go get something to eat.”

  The roast beef not only tasted like beef, it seemed to be nearly fresh. The beer the cafe served was thin, but that made it easier to order a second. It was between lunch and dinnertime, and
the cafe was nearly deserted; they sat in a booth at the back end of the dimly lit room, speaking mostly in English, though Ferg threw in Russian and a little German every so often.

  “I want to get the guy Kiro’s guy talked to,” he told Conners. “Jabril Daruyev. He’ll know what’s going on.”

  “How do you get him to talk?”

  “Ve haf our vays,” said Ferguson.

  Conners frowned.

  “Personally, I’d like to just beat the shit out of him,” said Ferguson, “but the Russians have probably tried that.”

  “Even if we grab this guy, Ferg, what makes you think he’ll talk?” asked Conners.

  Ferg sipped his beer. Grabbing the Chechen was the right thing to do, but he was bound to take shit for it. Ferguson didn’t particularly mind; his dad had taught him that lesson long, long ago. The bureaucracy would get its pound of flesh from you no matter what; better to follow your conscience so you could live with yourself when they cut the rope. The old man had lived and died by that creed.

  “They have this stuff similar to thiopental sodium,” said Ferg. “Only it works.”

  “That like Sodium Pentothal?”

  “Something like that.”

  “It’s OK to use?”

  “It works.”

  “You have some?”

  “No. They have it at Guantanamo, though. We’ll send him there.”

  “Why didn’t they use it on Kiro?” asked Conners.

  “Because the lawyer wants to put him on trial,” said Ferg. “If they shoot him up, she figures it’ll come out and queer the case.”

  “That’s the only reason?”

  Ferg shrugged. Sodium—TFh4—the “street” name of the drug, whose chemical name ran about a paragraph long—would also do fairly serious damage to a person’s liver, but no one seemed to worry about that. “Daruyev doesn’t have to stand trial for anything he did in America. No objections to using the drugs.”

  “Lawyer told you that?” asked Conners.

  “Not in so many words.” Ferg picked up his beer.

  “If they’re building this thing in Chechnya, maybe they’re targeting the Russians,” suggested Conners.

  “Could be,” said Ferg. “But you notice that the Russians weren’t all that concerned about Kiro until we blew up the commander’s car, right? You think we ought to count on them to stay on top of it?”

  Even Ferguson realized that breaking a prisoner out of the Brown Fortress, as the Russians called the prison ten miles away, was impossible. So he had decided to let the Russians do it for him.

  The idea had started to form when they were in Chechnya, as a hazy backup plan to the snatch of Kiro. The details remained slightly hazy, because a great deal of it depended on the Russians themselves.

  But it was already in motion.

  Conners drove into Groznyy early in the evening, wending his way through the streets toward the address Rahil had given Ferguson in Baku. He now had a completely different cover story, one that accounted for his halting Russian—he was back to being an American, sent there as a sewer plant expert by UNESCO. Ferg assured him the cover wouldn’t be tested, though he had a folder on the car seat detailing various bacterial tests just in case. Rahil’s friend acted as if she had no idea who he was, and even mentioning Rahil—as Ferguson directed—brought no response. A hundred-dollar bill, however, got him a room with working electricity on the second floor of the small hotel.

  Inside, he took out his pistol and sat in the armchair opposite the door, waiting.

  The store looked more American than Russian, shelves crammed around a cash register at the side close to the door, displays of newspapers and candy in easy sight of the cashier. Ferg walked to the back cooler—it was filled with Coke—opening it as another customer came in. Then he let it snap closed and walked around to the right, where the door to the back room was ajar, a sagging chain lock holding it closed.

  “I’m looking for Ruby,” he said in Russian. “Ruby?”

  A tall, thin man with a black shock of hair hanging over his forehead stuck his face in the crack.

  “I’m looking for Ruby,” Ferg said, this time in English.

  The tall man said something in Chechen that Ferguson couldn’t decipher. Instead of answering, Ferg held up his wrist and slid off his watch.

  “Where’s Ruby?” he repeated.

  The tall man reached for the watch. Ferg drew it back. That brought a fresh spree of indecipherable Chechen. When the door did not open, Ferguson slid the watch back on his wrist and walked over to the cooler. He took out a Coke and walked toward the front of the store.

  A gnomelike man with a closely cropped beard met him in the aisle. The man wore a long sweater that was so worn it looked like an old woman’s housecoat; thick as a brush, his short gray hair stuck up from his scalp as if he’d put his hand in an electrical socket.

  “I’m Ruby,” he said. The accent was so thick that Ferguson at first wasn’t sure it was English. “Come.”

  The man shuffled to the last cooler at the back of the store. He opened the door and slid the case rack back, passing into the storage area as if he were walking into the secret chamber of a haunted mansion. Ferg followed, waiting as Ruby slid the rack of soda back in place. His steps made a kind of snuffling sound as he went, not unlike the sound rough sandpaper makes as a craftsman finishes off the edge of a piece of furniture. Produce sat in wooden crates beyond the row of soda; behind them were large metal canisters for propane or some similar gas. At the very back of the space was a doorway; as he followed the gnome through it, Ferg slid the Glock down from his jacket sleeve and brought his hand up, and so both he and Ruby faced each other with loaded pistols in the dimly lit room beyond the store.

  Ruby started to laugh. Ferg smiled.

  Ruby pulled back the hammer on the pistol, a Zavodi Crvena Zastava .357 revolver that looked like a cannon in his tiny hand.

  Ferg’s Glock, small for an automatic, permitted no such intimidating gesture, though at this range it would do sufficient damage to make the situation a draw.

  “I think we can make a deal,” ventured Ferguson.

  “Your watch is counterfeit.”

  “No. It’s real.” Ferguson actually felt insulted.

  “Bah.”

  “Seriously. I got it in New York.”

  “Now I know it’s fake.”

  “I can arrange other payment.”

  “Perhaps I will look at it.” Ruby held out his hand.

  Ferg heard something behind him. His eyes and gun still frozen on Ruby’s face, he took a short step to the right, then another.

  “I hope he’s coming back with a credit approval,” said Ferg.

  Ruby shouted to the man outside, telling him to go back. The man outside began arguing with him. Ruby shook his head and lowered his gun.

  “Children,” said the Chechen. He went to the door and leaned into the storage room, his body shaking as he unleashed a string of invective. The man outside—Ferg guessed it was the man he’d seen at the chained door, though he’d looked no more like Ruby than Ferg did—whimpered once or twice, then retreated.

  Ruby returned to the room, gesturing wildly and mumbling to the effect that the world was a disappointing place, and there were no greater disappointments than sons. Without glancing at the American or otherwise acknowledging his presence, he walked to the only pieces of furniture in the room—two large four-drawer filing cabinets, legal size, in the corner.

  “Chay?” he asked, pulling open one of the drawers and removing a teapot.

  “Good,” said Ferg. He kept his gun in his hand as Ruby removed the pot and two small cups from the drawer, then went back into the storage room and returned with a card table and an extension cord. Several more trips were needed before the kettle was bubbling with water and metal chairs had been unfolded around the table.

  “Strong,” said Ferg, when he finally sipped the tea. The dark green liquid tasted as if it had been made of anise and cinnamon as
well as tea leaves.

  “Yes. There is no more good tea,” said Ruby, speaking in Russian. The Chechen had left his gun on the file cabinet and now had the air of a professor down on his luck. There was no hint in his voice whether he thought the liquid an exception to the rule, or proof.

  “If anyone were to have good tea, it would be you,” said Ferg.

  “It would. If anyone did.”

  “I need weapons,” said Ferg.

  “Why else would you be here?”

  “Why else?”

  Six AK-47s—Ruby would sell no fewer than that—and two RPG-18s, single-shot antiarmor missiles with a 64 mm warhead, were available for about three times what they should have fetched, according to the information Ferg had obtained through Corrigan. Which was a pain, not because he couldn’t pay it—he had a stack of counterfeit rubles with him—but because to do so would signal him as an easy mark and cause considerable trouble down the line.

  A long series of negotiations followed, with Ferg starting at a quarter of the going rate—as much an insult as Ruby’s asking price—then working slowly toward one and a half times what Corrigan’s data indicated was a fair price. It took nearly twenty minutes for them to reach that point, and it was only the addition of two dozen grenades and six mines that sealed it. They celebrated the agreement by brewing a fresh pot of tea.

  “Now a truck,” said Ferguson, and the bargaining began all over again. It took another half hour before he finally obtained a pickup with petrol at what he thought was a good price—he could judge that only by how long it took to reach agreement. By then his bladder was overflowing, and he excused himself, positioning some of the necessary cash in his pocket on the way back.

  When he returned, Ferguson asked if it might be possible to obtain the services of a few men. The Chechen hesitated sufficiently to let him know it would not be easily done. When he did not protest when Ferguson told him to forget it, the American realized that there would be no way to hire the mercenaries he was hoping for. While that lack complicated his plan, it did not torpedo it, and after one last cup of chay he left a small deposit and went immediately with Ruby’s son to round up the truck. Ruby was so pleased with the entire day’s work that he gave Ferguson two VOG-25 grenades completely gratis—a thoughtful gesture, even if the grenades were useless without their rifle-mounted launcher.