First Team

by Larry Bond

  He knocked, though he knew that anyone inside wouldn’t answer. After a second knock, he walked around to the window with the curtain. He couldn’t see much of the interior, and when no one appeared after two hard raps, he went around to the back.

  An old man stood in the doorway, aiming an ancient hunting rifle at him.

  “Zdráktvuitye,” Ferg said to him in Russian. “Hello.”

  The old man didn’t move. Ferguson then tried his Chechen, explaining that they were friends who had to help someone reach his rightful place. When that didn’t impress the man—Ferguson wasn’t entirely sure that his pronunciation could be deciphered—he switched to English, realizing that while the man wouldn’t understand it, it might convince him he wasn’t Russian.

  “It’s all right,” he told the man. “We’re friends. I need a place to keep my truck.”

  He switched back into Russian and repeated the sentence. Ferg guessed that the man’s sympathies lay with the rebels, and that he would leave them be if he thought they were connected with them. Whether he could be trusted beyond that was a question Ferguson couldn’t answer; there were no telephone lines, and no obvious radio antenna, so as far as that went the old man wasn’t going to be notifying anyone very soon.

  “So can I park my truck?” Ferg asked in Russian.

  A voice inside the house said something Ferguson couldn’t hear. The old man waved his hand in that direction, as if shushing them.

  “That the missus?” asked Ferg.

  The man told him something in Chechen that Ferg couldn’t understand. He smiled and asked for food in Russian. The Chechen frowned, then started toward the door. Ferguson decided to follow. Inside, he found the old man’s wife standing with a long knife by a stove. Behind her were five small children, ranging in age from a few months to two years. The woman was so short and bent over from osteoporosis that her head was just barely above Ferg’s knee, but her arms were thick, and her wrists flicked the knife as if she were one of the three musketeers. Ferguson waved at her, then leaned to the side to smile at the children, who were trying to puzzle out exactly who he was.

  One of the children started to laugh, and the old woman drew back, still on her guard but no longer menacing. The old man, meanwhile, had hung the rifle on a pair of hooks and taken some paper and matches to the stove, which had a tinderbox for wood directly under the top. Fire started, he moved a kettle toward the front and turned to his wife, haranguing her for not being hospitable. Ferguson reached into his pocket and found some coins; it would have been an insult to give them to the old man, but the children were fair game. The oldest clinked two large coins together, then passed one to the next toddler in line, who promptly tried to taste it. This elicited a tirade from the old woman, who chastised Ferguson as well as the children before confiscating the coins.

  Out in the truck, Conners felt his legs falling asleep when Ferg finally appeared. The old people had given him a few hard-boiled eggs, some tea, and bread. Conners fell on them hungrily.

  Ferguson had asked for a chisel or saw, but either the old man had neither or just couldn’t understand what he was talking about. They got Daruyev out of the cab and brought him around to a broken-down stone wall at the side of the road. Using the tire iron, they managed to break the chains between his legs, but there was no question of getting the manacles off.

  “I’m trusting you,” Ferguson told him. “But if you move an inch to escape, I’ll have to kill you.”

  “Yes,” said Daruyev.

  Conners looked up and saw the old man coming out from the house. He took a step back and raised his rifle. The old man ignored him, jabbering to Ferguson that he had a jug of water, and then pointing to a better place to put the truck.

  “They’ll have that thing apart in a half hour,” said Conners as they began walking south across the road, toward what looked like a narrow trail in the satellite photos.

  “Nah,” said Ferg.

  “Sell it then.”

  “The truck will cause them considerable difficulty if the Russians come,” said Daruyev. “They won’t be able to explain it.”

  “Why would they have to?” said Conners.

  “If a Russian asks a question, you have to have an answer.”

  “There aren’t too many Russians in the area,” said Ferg.

  “Good thing for them,” said Daruyev.

  “Good thing for all of us,” said Ferg.

  By nightfall, they had reached a narrow plateau in the mountains about seven miles east of Verko. They were making much better time than Conners had predicted, so good in fact that Ferg decided to press on. The night was clear, and according to the sat photos a pass ran to the south which would make it easier to hook around from the southwest, the side opposite the only road into the base. If they could make it, a mountain about a mile from Verko in that direction had an only partially obscured view of the landing strip there, according to the 3-D rendering Corrigan had supplied.

  So they kept walking, moving in single file, spread out along the rock-strewn path. Daruyev moved silently; if he was familiar with the way, he didn’t let on. Several times Conners, at the tail, lost sight of him and had to hustle to catch up, but the Chechen made no sign of trying to escape.

  By midnight, they had reached the other side of the mountain Ferg wanted to use as a vantage point. The cold air clawed at their fingers and legs; their cheeks hollowed out, and their ears began to ring with the wind. They stopped for a rest. Ferg noticed that Daruyev’s shoes were stained black; his feet were bleeding.

  “I’m thinking one of us stays here, while the other scouts around that ridge there,” said Ferguson. “If there’s going to be a lookout post, it’ll be up over there. You going to fall asleep?”

  “You don’t have to worry about me,” Conners told him.

  “Don’t sing too loud,” Ferg told him, setting out.

  It took Ferguson more than three hours to climb up the mountain far enough to cut across to what looked like a lookout post on the 3-D map Corrigan had created and posted on their secure Web site for him. To cross the last hundred yards he had to climb up a crevice and get up and across an overhang. Tired and cold, he sent several loose stones tumbling below. The first time he froze; he was too precariously placed to swing his gun up for defense. When nothing happened after a few minutes, he began climbing again. When more rocks spilled a few seconds later, he barely paused. Either the people in the lookout were sleeping—or the post wasn’t manned.

  A half hour later, standing behind the ridge, he discovered that the latter was correct—the ridge dropped off sharply, and it wasn’t as a good a spot in real life as it appeared on Corrigan’s simulation.

  But there was a better spot off the side of the road and down about three hundred yards. In the darkness he couldn’t tell if there were rocks there or people. Nor was the question academic—the ridge gave him some cover to pass, but anything beyond it would be easily visible, certainly once the sun came up. The only thing to do was to track back down about a quarter mile, where he could pick up a narrow ledge that angled in the opposite direction, skirting around the mountain before rejoining the trail near a V-shaped rift about three miles below.

  In the daylight, the climb would have been merely difficult. The combination of nighttime and growing fatigue, not to mention the proximity of the guerrilla guards, lifted it into the interesting category.

  There was enough of a moon that Ferguson picked out the start of the ledge easily; he found as he went that he could see the wall fairly well, probably nearly as well as if he’d been wearing his night glasses on a pitch-black night. But after he’d gone about a half mile the ledge began to slope sharply toward the mountain, making it harder to walk on. Clouds had been moving in, making it more and more difficult to see. Still, Ferg was only about fifty feet from the rift when he lost his balance. As his right foot slipped on a loose rock, his left hand reached for a hold that proved to be a shadow. In the next second, he felt himself momenta
rily defying gravity.

  “Oh, shit,” he said to himself.

  Then he started to fall.

  10

  AKTAU, RUSSIA

  The airport was large by Russian standards, and with decent security. To pass to the main area where her charter to Turkey was supposed to be waiting, Corrine had to show ID and pass through an X-ray gate. The woman guard checking her purse and bags was more interested in her aspirin than the satellite phone; as she held up the bottle to examine it Corrine started to explain that it was for headaches.

  “I know what it’s for,” said the guard frostily in English, tossing it back in the bag and dismissing her.

  The terminal had all the charm of a 1970s American bus station, with two rows of plastic-backed seats dividing a scuffed linoleum floor. The seats were empty; the few passengers waiting for planes at that hour milled near the gates at the opposite end of the hall. Corrigan had told Corrine to go to a window with a long name in Cyrillic letters; the word was “special” and when pronounced in Russian sounded almost like it did in English, but with the dots and backward symbols it looked more like a magic spell than a sign. She found the words on a door, not a window, though in roughly the place he’d said; she walked back and forth twice before deciding it had to be the place. But no one answered when she knocked.

  She checked her watch; the flight north had taken less time than Corrigan had predicted, and she realized she was probably just a little early. Still, she wanted to call him and see, so she ducked into a restroom nearby. But it was a private facility, with an attendant hovering near the sink. She tipped the woman and went back out without using the facilities or the proffered toilet paper.

  Before she could get her bearings in the large room, a man in a long leather jacket stepped in front of her. Corrine took a step around him but he put his hand out to stop her.

  “Off,” she said sharply in English, brushing his hand away.

  “Ms. Alston, I’m your pilot,” said the man.

  Corrine could tell there was a problem and didn’t even bother using the authentication sequence Corrigan had supplied. She started to spin away. But as she did, a short, balding man in a brown polyester coat blocked her way.

  “Excuse me, Ms. Alston,” he told her in English. “My name is Dolov. I am with the Federal Security Bureau. You will come with me, please.”

  “Excuse me, I don’t understand what you’re saying,” said Corrine, though the man’s English had been excellent.

  “You will come with me,” he said calmly.

  “Are you putting me under arrest?”

  “That depends on what comes from our conversation,” said Dolov, in a way that suggested jail might be the most desirable of the possible outcomes.

  11

  SOUTHERN CHECHNYA

  Conners jumped to his feet when he heard what sounded like the faint echo of gunfire.

  “Up, up,” he told the Chechen. He kicked his shoes when he didn’t move.

  Daruyev groaned, then turned over and got up slowly.

  “Let’s go,” said Conners. Cursing, he told Daruyev to walk ahead of him. They had to take the trail; there was just no way he could cover his prisoner on the slope, even if Daruyev had been able to climb.

  Conners debated whether it would just be easier to kill the Chechen and be done with it.

  It took twenty minutes to get to the stop below the ridge where they’d thought the lookout was; by the time they got there the sun was starting to rise. As they came close to the lookout spot Conners grabbed the Chechen by the back, using him as a shield.

  “Call them out,” Conners said.

  “Call who?” said Daruyev.

  “Your bastard friends.”

  “These are not my comrades.”

  “Call them.” Conners nudged his rifle against Daruyev’s neck.

  The Chechen whistled. There was no answer.

  “Again,” said Conners. “Use words.”

  “They wouldn’t.”

  “Call them.”

  Daruyev called in a calm voice that he had escaped from the Russians and needed help. But there was no response.

  The mountain fell off too sharply on the left to give an ambusher a place to hide, and the ridge on the right angled away, but Conner still felt exposed. He pushed his prisoner forward; after twenty yards or so he saw another spot up a hundred yards farther where an outlook post could be hidden. They backtracked; Conners peered over the side and decided they could skirt the position by climbing down to a rift that skirted the rocks northward.

  “We go down here,” Conners told his prisoner.

  “That’s going to be hard.”

  “Tough.”

  “Take the gun from my back.”

  “No,” Conners told him, pushing him to start. As he started to follow, there was a noise behind him; he whirled, gun ready.

  “Relax, Dad, it’s only me,” said Ferguson, appearing on the slope.

  “Ferg, where the fuck have you been?” said Conners.

  “Waking sleeping dogs,” said Ferguson. “Quiet. There’s a pair of guards up the trail that way about a half mile. I fell before, and they started shooting up the place.”

  “I heard them.”

  “They didn’t bother looking for me,” said Ferguson. He’d banged his shins and scratched the side of his face in the fall, but otherwise was in decent shape. “I thought half the mountain was going to come down on top of me.”

  “Did it?” asked Conners.

  Ferguson laughed. “I’m still here, ain’t I?” He pointed a finger at Daruyev. “You were going to make him climb down the other side there?”

  “I didn’t know where the hell you were.”

  “So you were going down to the bottom?”

  “I figured that cutback ahead could be covered. I could get around it down there.”

  “Sure, if you have a week.”

  “Don’t bust my chops, Ferg. I thought you were dead.”

  Ferguson smiled at him, then pointed to the way he had come. “There’s a ledge here. It’s narrow, but if you don’t slip, it’ll take you across the road. Then we can get up and across and check out the base.”

  “If it’s there,” said Conners.

  “Don’t be such a pessimist.” Ferguson checked the grenade launcher on Daruyev’s back. He angled it slightly, so the weight would help anchor him to the mountain. “Lean in,” he told him. “You walk just behind me. If you get scared, say so.”

  “I’m not scared.”

  “No shit?” said Ferguson, starting out. “Come on. If we hurry, we can wave for the satellite when it comes overhead.”

  12

  AKTAU, RUSSIA

  Corrine sat in the small room, waiting for Dolov to reappear. She had her lawyer face on, assuming that she was being observed, and well aware that anything she said might tell the FSB considerably more than she wished. She sat alone in the room for more than an hour, head up, eyes straight, knowing that Dolov’s absence was part of the interrogation process.

  Finally, the door swung open. Dolov and the woman who had checked her pocketbook earlier entered. The FSB officer apologized for keeping her waiting, saying that he had to locate a female guard so he could talk to her.

  “There’s no need for that,” said Corrine.

  “I have to follow the law,” said Dolov. He brushed his hand across his scalp, where he was going prematurely bald. He squinted, then bobbed his head; finally he put his finger to his chin. “The airplane that landed to pick you up—and we do know it’s here for you, Ms. Alston—is contracted to a company that works with the American CIA.”

  Corrine considered what to do. As an attorney, her advice to a client would be to say nothing. But would that help her now?

  “Well I’m not with the CIA,” she said.

  Dolov clearly did not believe her. Corrine realized she needed to find out why he’d stopped her—the fact that they thought she was a CIA officer wouldn’t ordinarily be reason to stop her
. Were they just sending some sort of message, hassling a suspected agent for passing through the territory? How was the game played? She had no feel for the rules.

  She was out of her element. She was a lawyer, not a spy.

  Except that she was; her boss had made her one.

  “Do you always accuse Americans of working for the CIA?” she said finally.

  “Two days ago, a very dangerous man was broken out of prison near Groznyy,” said Dolov. “The CIA was involved.”

  “That’s terrible,” she said. “But what does that have to do with me?”

  Dolov said nothing.

  Corrine realized that she had to give him something, a story he could use to justify letting her go. But saying anything meant taking a risk. If she said something that didn’t check out, he might jail her for lying. And, of course, she couldn’t say anything that would jeopardize the others or the operation.

  If you didn’t take risks, you didn’t succeed. That was what Ferguson was all about. He wasn’t a cowboy; he just existed in a system that demanded audacious risks.

  “What were you doing in Kyrgyzstan?” asked Dolov. His voice was more aggressive than before; he wanted results, and he would modify his tactics until he got them.

  “Mr. Dolov, perhaps we should be honest with each other,” she said.

  “I would appreciate it,” said Dolov.

  Corrine turned to the guard. “You’ll leave us, please,” she told the woman.

  The guard looked at Dolov, who nodded.

  “There is a train of radioactive waste, heading toward Kyrgyzstan. When it left Buzuluk, there were five boxcars that were not part of the removal operation. Now there are four,” she said.

  “Boxcars?”

  “They must have some way of slipping one or two of the waste casks into the other cars. The regular shipments proceed untouched. They’re heavily guarded and all accounted for.”