First Team

by Larry Bond

It did not.

  Jabbing off the side, the vehicle came to a shaky halt. A soldier jumped down from the cab, rifle in hand, walking around warily to the back. A minute later the driver got out, stretching his legs and hoisting his own rifle from the cab.

  He walked directly toward the ruins where Ferguson was hiding. Ferg slid back into the shadows, aiming his gun, then realized what the driver was up to. He did his best to hold his breath as the Russian’s urine splattered on the blackened rocks nearby. The other man came up, making a joke about watering Chechen ashes.

  They finished and zipped up, joking loudly as they walked back toward the truck. The driver had a hip flask; as they stopped to share a gulp Ferg pushed his way up through the ruins, trying to avoid the area they’d just wet down.

  “Halt,” he said loudly in Russian, not more than ten feet behind them as they drank. “Drop your weapons or you’re dead.”

  He gave a quick burst of gunfire as he spoke. The driver, whose gun was hanging at his side, dropped it, but the other man swung the rifle off his shoulder and squared to fire.

  “No,” said Ferg, but it was already too late. As his finger squeezed the trigger, he caught a blur out of the corner of his eye. He just managed to duck as the rocket shot past, missing the KAMAZ and igniting in the hillside. Dirt and rocks sprayed everywhere.

  Ferg’s burst had killed the Russian before he could fire. The driver meanwhile flattened himself against the dirt.

  Ferguson kicked both guns away and waited for Conners, who ran up with his AK-47.

  “I can’t believe I missed,” said Conners.

  “You have to compensate,” said Ferguson, mocking Conners’s earlier advice. But he was glad his companion hadn’t hit the truck, and even more so when he pulled open the plastic tarp covering the back. Two small chests at the side held a cache of AK-74s, automatic rifles chambered for 5.45 mm ammunition. There were also two PKs, 7.62 mm light machine guns, oldish but very dependable squad-level weapons, and an AGS-17, an odd-looking grenade launcher that the Russians liked because it could loft its wares into overhead hills. Besides the ammunition for the guns, there were a dozen jerry cans of diesel.

  “What do you say we give them our truck and take theirs?” Ferg asked Conners.

  “Sounds like a fair trade.”

  “Yeah, just about.” Ferguson hopped up and examined the AGS-17. Remembering the two small grenades Ruby had presented him with, he dug into the ruck and retrieved one.

  “What is that?” Conners asked.

  Ferg handed it over.

  “This grenade doesn’t go in this gun,” said Conners, eying the fat slug.

  “Figures.”

  “It’s a Russian mebbe.”

  “Mebbe?”

  “Maybe it goes off, maybe it doesn’t,” laughed the SF trooper. “They don’t have the highest quality control, and this sucker looks corroded to boot.”

  “Har-har.”

  “It’s a VOG-25L or something,” said Conners, his voice more serious. “It’s kind of like the 40 mm grenade you shoot from a 203. Russian launcher is shorter. More propellant here, see?” Conners held it up. “Plus this sucker, the nose detonates, and it kicks up again after it lands. It throws shrapnel all over the place. Nasty.”

  “I’ll attend the seminar later,” said Ferg, stuffing the small grenade into his pocket. He took the AGS-17 grenade launcher and carried it to a point on the slope where he could see the entire compound. He slapped on the round drum that contained the grenade cartridges, then swiveled it up and down, not entirely sure how the mechanism worked. Russian weapons in general were known for their simplicity of operation, but the boxy gun looked more like something a mad scientist had invented than a weapon. Finally, he settled behind the trigger and fired. The grenade whizzed out across the compound, landing just beyond their truck. It took two more shots before he got the hang of it and scored a direct hit.

  Conners meanwhile finished trussing the Russian, leaving him near the road. He took a single swig of the vodka, then thoughtfully offered a swallow to the man before tossing it away.

  Daruyev spit in the dirt at them as Conners led him past.

  “That’s not nice,” said Conners, chuckling.

  “I have been thinking about what you said before,” Daruyev said to Ferguson, as he helped him into the truck.

  “Yeah?”

  “There are three possible places where they might storehouse material to prepare a bomb,” said Daruyev. “I can take you to each one of them.”

  “Tell us where they are first.”

  The Chechen shook his head. “Then you won’t need me.”

  “I don’t need you now.”

  “If I lead you to them, and you find a bomb, you will need me to help you neutralize it,” said the Chechen.

  In truth, he could count on getting all sorts of help to dismantle a bomb. “What do you get?” asked Ferguson, though he suspected he knew the answer.

  “If I help you, will you let me go free?” added Daruyev.

  “I don’t know if I can do that.”

  “Take me to America then. Put me in prison there.”

  “America?” said Conners.

  “Can you?” asked the Chechen.

  Before Corrine Alston had “joined” the Team, Ferguson would have agreed easily—and sincerely. Now, though, with a lawyer looking over his shoulder, he wasn’t sure.

  “I don’t know if I can,” said Ferg truthfully. “Help me anyway.”

  The Chechen stared at him. They had come from entirely different places to the same valley of gray, both living with the ambiguity of the death they inevitably faced. Ferguson’s prognosis might be slightly better, and his cause more clearcut, but the two men walked in the same land of shades and shifting sands.

  But Ferg was the one with the gun.

  “If you say you will try, that will be enough,” said Daruyev.

  “I will try,” said Ferg. “Take us to the closest spot.”

  ACT IV

  I am one, my liege,

  Whom the vile blows and buffets of the world

  hath so incensed that I am reckless …

  —Shakespeare, Macbeth, 3.1.107-9

  1

  BUILDING 24-442, SUBURBAN VIRGINIA

  Thomas Ciello sat on the floor of his new office, a viceroy of paper. He had estimates, reports, briefings, hints, and scraps of sheer speculation spread in various piles before him; they covered every square inch of the twelve-by-twelve room, including the desk, the three computer monitors, the bookcases—some pages were on the shelves, which were empty except for a dictionary—and two chairs.

  He had started with a system, but the organizing principle now involved several layers of calculus, and Thomas had never been very good at math.

  “Oh, my God.”

  Thomas looked up at the door, where Debra Wu was standing.

  “I think I almost understand it,” he told her.

  Debra glanced down the hall, then bent to her knees and scooped up pages and files so she could get inside. Thomas noticed that her short black skirt rode up high on her thighs.

  “You can’t do this. These papers—this is such a massive security violation—they’ll hang you by your toes.”

  “I signed everything out, and nothing’s left the room,” he told her. “A lot of this isn’t even classified, I mean, beyond secret. It’s just—”

  Exasperated, Debra put down the papers she had gathered. “Security is—it’s, it’s psychotic—”

  Indignation welled up in Thomas’s chest. The staff assistant was hinting that he was less than professional. He tried to temper his response—it was a very short skirt, after all—but it was difficult to remain calm.

  “If we’re talking about security,” he said, “are you allowed to see these reports? Are you even allowed in my office?”

  Debra rolled her eyes. “Corrigan wants to see you in ten minutes.” She pulled open the door and left, papers fluttering as she went.

 
Thomas went back to sorting and sifting. Leaving the office was certainly problematic security-wise, but as far as he understood protocol—and if there was anything he prided himself on it was his understanding of protocol—he simply had to cover all of the compartmented material and lock up when he went out. In his desk was a gray blanket, ordinarily used to cover the desktop. There were actually two of them in his desk, which helped him cover a good portion of the floor. A wall map of the world, several empty manila folders, and his jacket took care of all but two small piles near the door; he considered taking off his Oxford shirt and leaving it on them, but it was one of his favorite shirts. Instead, he simply carried the folders with him as he went to see Corrigan.

  Downstairs in the Cube’s situation room, Corrigan used a video feed to watch Thomas clear a security gate before being allowed down the stairs. Debra Wu had buzzed to say the new staffer was “on another planet,” but Thomas seemed perfectly reasonable as he went through the security. He had some documents with him, which he quite properly refused to show the guard at the post. The request was actually a nasty trick; if Thomas had agreed, the man would have written him up for a security violation since he didn’t have the proper clearance for the compartmented data.

  Cleared, Thomas walked down the corridor and into the stairway, practically hopping as he walked to the sit room. That was just the sort of enthusiasm Corrigan liked, and he awaited Thomas’s approach with growing optimism.

  “All right,” said Thomas as he was buzzed through the glass door. “You wanted to see me?”

  “Yes, I did,” said Corrigan. “What do you know?”

  The question caught Thomas off guard. “About the mission or about anything in general?”

  “The mission,” said Corrigan. He reached for his coffee cup.

  “The mission. Okay. The ship was clearly not related to the plot. See, Kiro—he and the Iranians don’t get along. The Iranian defense minister—”

  “We’re a little past that,” said Corrigan. “Tell me about the waste.”

  “Which waste?”

  “The stuff we’re tracking.”

  “Oh that. Nasty. They’ve scraped uranium—most of it’s uranium, but there’s strontium, cesium, other by-products—nickel, that’s ugly. Now if that were stolen, it’d be important. See, it’s being placed in these long containers. They call them casks, but they’re actually flat, and you can handle about fifty at a time with a forklift. The French process allows them to get high-level waste in manageable quantities. As long as it doesn’t get into the air, you’re OK.”

  “How are they getting it?” asked Corrigan.

  “Uh, aren’t you working on that?” said Thomas.

  “I was just wondering what you had found from your end,” said Corrigan, his faith in the new man starting to slip.

  “They have bought two forklifts,” said Thomas.

  “Who?”

  “Allah’s Fist. They’re in Chechnya.”

  “Are you sure? Bin Saqr is supposed to be dead.”

  “Ha-ha.” Thomas had a quick, tight laugh, as if it were powered by a pneumatic drill. “No. There’s absolutely no evidence that he’s dead. He just hasn’t showed up anywhere. And two companies that were associated with his organization in the past still exist. There are other connections. A Pakistani scientist named Zedian. And the hospitals— there’s a real connection there. They’ve collected and diverted material from cancer-treatment wards. It’s gamma-wave generators, mostly low-level, but if there were enough of it—a matrix, see, with all sorts of different wastes together. You explode it in a bomb, there’s stuff all over the place, and it’s a real bitch to clean up.”

  “Let’s focus on the problem,” Corrigan said. “Where is Bin Saqr now?”

  “Good question.” Thomas scratched his side with his folders. “The evidence points to Chechnya, but that’s a big place.”

  “We need a place where the SF team can make a pickup,” said Corrigan. “Colonel Van Buren has a couple of suggestions, but we want to make sure there are no guerrillas there. Or Russians, for that matter.”

  Corrigan handed him a piece of paper with the names of three villages written phonetically.

  “These are in Chechnya?” Thomas asked, looking at the names.

  “The spelling may not be correct,” said Corrigan. “They were former Russian bases that were abandoned. I think there may be a civilian field in there. Anyway, check them out and see which would be closest to those coordinates at the bottom, where Ferg is. When you’re done with that, let’s put together a theory on what the delivery system would be. Truck bomb? Ship?”

  “UFOs,” said Thomas.

  “UFOs?” said Corrigan, so incredulous he couldn’t say anything else.

  “I recognize one of the names, I think, from a UFO sighting,” explained Thomas. “I didn’t mean they were using a UFO to drop the bomb.”

  “Oh,” said Corrigan, still unsure.

  Thomas thought he sounded disappointed.

  “If it were UFOs, we’d really have trouble, right?” he said brightly. His suspicions about Corrigan were con firmes—his ew boss was a believer. God had finally smiled

  “We’ll figure it out. I’ll be back as soon as I can,” said Thomas, snapping the paper in the air. He turned and practically ran out of the room as Corrigan rubbed his forehead, worried that Debra Wu’s assessment was too kind by half.

  2

  TASHKENT, KAZAKHSTAN, NEAR THE BORDER WITH KYRGYZSTAN—SEVERAL HOURS LATER

  Corrine gave the binoculars to Rankin and got out of the car, stretching her stiff back. She missed her workouts. Who would have thought that this job actually involved more sitting than her old one?

  It isn’t my old one, she told herself. She was still the president’s counsel.

  Rankin got out of the car. “Fresh truck of Russian troops,” he told her, gesturing with the binoculars. “We ought to get ready.”

  Corrine nodded. The train had been met by a contingent of uniformed Russian border guards near Kzyl-Orda. They had added two flatcars at the very end of the train, boarding them and riding along. Obviously, the Russians were worried about something, though they, too, had missed the action.

  “I have the next few stops mapped out for us,” Rankin told her. “The tracks parallel the road for a ways, and we can use the transceivers to keep tabs. Little town about ten miles from here where we can quick grab something to eat—there’s a long stretch with no sidings or any possible stops, so it’ll give us some leeway.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You down about the missing boxcar?” he asked.

  “You could call it ‘down.’”

  “At least we figured out what they’re doing.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You were right about following the train. We can’t expect to pull it all together in one shot. Nobody does that, not even Ferguson.”

  “Thanks for the pep talk,” she said, walking around the back of the car. “You drive.”

  Guns called her on the sat phone just as they parked at one of the spots Rankin had picked out for a food stop.

  “Lost it totally. Massette thinks they took the trucks north, because the road connects in that direction, but anything’s possible. What do you want us to do?”

  There was no one right answer, Corrine realized—it wasn’t like she could pull down a few law books, find some precedents, and present an invincible argument. Whatever she told them to do would be open to second-guessing and interpretation.

  As were Ferguson’s decisions on the original mission, Corrine realized.

  “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” McCarthy would have said—his point being to do something.

  “All right,” Corrine told Guns. She could see the train pulling up an embankment ahead. “Figure out the most likely route to Chechnya. At the moment it’s our best bet for a destination. Consider that they probably would prefer to drive at night over decent roads where they’re less likely to be stopped. It�
��s a wild-goose chase, I know, but it’s better than sitting around with our thumbs in our noses. I’ll tell Corrigan what’s going on and see if they can supply any information that will be useful. In the meantime we’ll see if the survey of the satellite photos has turned up anything.”

  “You sure you don’t want us to come and back you up?”

  “No,” said Corrine. “I think the theft has already been made. Stay in touch,” she said, hitting the kill button.

  Rankin pulled open the passenger door and got in, filling the car with a strong odor.

  “Some sort of cabbage bilini thing,” he told her. “It was the only thing that sounded edible.”

  Corrine was too busy to argue the point. The train had rounded the curve and was out of sight. She pulled back onto the road ahead of a slow-moving bus, accelerating quickly. It didn’t take long to get the train back in view.

  “Want some?” asked Rankin.

  “It smells hideous.”

  “It doesn’t taste as bad as it smells.”

  “Gotta make a phone call first.” She juggled the phone in her hands, hitting the preset to connect to the Cube sit room. As she did, the wheels slipped off the pavement; she nearly lost the phone regaining control.

  “We want to stay in one piece,” Rankin said.

  “Preferably,” she said, glancing at him. She started to laugh.

  “What?”

  “You have cabbage on your chin.”

  “Just camouflage,” he said, wiping it off.

  Corrigan, meanwhile, was asking what was going on.

  “I’d like Mr. Ferguson to set up some surveillance at the border areas of Chechnya,” Corrine told him after a brief summary of the situation. “I don’t know what extra resources we can spare, but at the moment that’s the most logical destination.”

  “Um,” said Corrigan.

  “Um?”

  “Uh, I think you’re probably right about that being the likely destination,” said Corrigan. “Did Ferg talk to you?”

  “No.”

  “He’s already in Chechnya.”

  “I thought he was waiting for us to find something.”