by J A Heaton
Daniel lunged at the man to grapple and disarm him. He saw that Rex was trying to fend the dog off.
Daniel took the man down to the ground and knocked the pipe from his hand.
Daniel grabbed the pipe and ordered the man to call off his dog just as the animal saw his master in danger.
“Stop! Sit!” the man yelled in Uzbek.
The dog immediately sat and looked at him expectantly. The dog’s puffy brown hair nearly concealed his dark eyes.
Rex brought over a flashlight and shined it in the man’s eyes.
“It’s okay,” Daniel said to Rex while regaining his breath. “This guy is no assassin.”
Daniel asked, “Who are you?”
“My brother-in-law and my sister-in-law live here,” the man said. “I saw lights, and I knew that nobody should be in here.”
“Then you know Dmitri and Zuhro?” Daniel said. “We’re trying to solve Dmitri’s murder.”
“What happened to Dmitri?” the man asked. “We only know that he died in Tashkent. Why isn’t Zuhro here?”
Before Daniel could explain, Rex said, “Ask him how he got an attack dog that’s part brown bear and part Ewok.”
Only minutes later, Daniel and Rex were seated on the ground and drinking tea in the middle of the night with the man. His own apartment was just a few minutes’ walk away. The light was dim due to the electricity’s low voltage, but it didn’t seem to bother the man. Daniel learned that his name was Jamol and that he was married to Zuhro’s older twin sister, Fatima.
After Fatima had prepared a meal, despite Daniel’s protestations, and they were on the second pot of tea, they finally got to talking about what was on everybody’s mind.
“What happened to Dmitri?” Jamol asked Daniel.
“I can’t tell you much at this point,” Daniel answered.
“Did you see Fatima’s sister? How was she?”
“She was fine,” Daniel said. “But Dmitri is dead. That’s why we, unfortunately, had to search Dmitri’s apartment.”
“Something more must have happened for that to be necessary.”
Fatima entered with another pot of hot tea and sat down.
“Is Zuhro safe?” Fatima asked.
Daniel hesitated before he answered. “We think she is safe. She has not done anything wrong.”
“What is she asking about?” Rex asked Daniel in English, assuming the other two did not understand.
Daniel explained she was asking about her sister and whether or not she was safe.
“But we can’t guarantee anything,” Daniel said, switching to Uzbek. “If Dmitri told her something, or if she is aware of something, even if she doesn’t know its significance, then your sister could be in danger. Tell me about Dmitri and Zuhro’s relationship. You might know something that could help. Was there anything odd about their relationship?”
“They had a baby that died,” Fatima said. “That made my sister very sad. But it only got worse.”
“How so?” Daniel asked.
“They had another child, but then he died when he was two years old. It was an illness.”
“Are you sure?” Daniel asked.
“Of course I’m sure,” Fatima said defensively. “If you had seen the boy, you would’ve known he was sick.”
“What about before they had children?”
Fatima bit her lip and looked away. She looked down and tried to hold back tears.
“Did she not want to marry Dmitri?” Daniel asked.
Instead of answering, Fatima got up, covered her face with her hands and walked out of the room to the kitchen.
“I’m sorry if I’ve offended her in some way,” Daniel said to Jamol. The Uzbek man leaned over the table and told Daniel why Fatima had left crying.
“Her sister slept with Dmitri before they were married. She was married to another man.”
Daniel sensed it was difficult for Jamol to say these words. An unfaithful woman brought shame upon the entire family.
As Daniel explained to Rex, he noticed a young boy, about ten or twelve years old, peeking in through a crack in the doorway from another room.
So Zuhro has lost all of her children, but Fatima had at least one, Daniel thought.
“Now we know of somebody other than the Wolf who has a motive to kill Dmitri,” Rex observed. “Zuhro’s first husband. And Zuhro lied to us. She said she had never married before.”
Daniel nodded with understanding before continuing with Jamol.
“Thank you for telling me. I know it is not something Fatima would like to talk about. But if I did not know about it, it could end up hurting Zuhro in some way.”
Daniel wanted to press for more details, but he had to do so delicately.
“Are you certain she had done such a thing?” Daniel asked.
“It was suspicious at first because she went to work on the weekend when she normally would not work,” Jamol explained. “Her husband found out she wasn’t going to her normal workplace. She was going to a place in the mountains. She said it was a dacha connected to work. But, of course, it was Dmitri’s dacha in the mountains.”
Daniel knew that such flimsy evidence was sufficient to convince an Uzbek husband of his wife’s unfaithfulness, but Daniel needed more details. The fact that Dmitri had a country house in the mountains added another wrinkle to investigate. Sensing this, Jamol continued.
“She had no children with her first husband, but then after she started working at the dacha, she had to get rid of a baby before it was born. I don’t know exactly what happened to her first husband. I heard that he went to Tashkent.”
“Can you tell me where this dacha is in the mountains?” Daniel asked. Daniel then translated for Rex to catch him up.
“This country home is another potential hiding place for clues,” Rex said.
“Traitors have been known to squirrel away classified information below dacha floorboards,” Daniel said in agreement. “We may find just what we’re looking for there.”
“For Fatima’s sake,” Jamol continued, “I followed Zuhro to the dacha once. I will never forget its location.”
Daniel retrieved a map from the car, and after a few moments of thought, Jamol pointed at the dacha’s location. It was just inside one of the large blank areas on the map, somewhere in the mountains. Daniel wasn’t sure if that was a good sign or not.
His eyes were heavy, and Jamol rolled out mats onto the sitting room floor for Rex and Daniel to sleep on. Daniel gratefully stretched out and began to drift off to sleep. As he did so, he reminded himself to ask for the name of Zuhro’s first husband before they left in the morning.
Daniel woke after sunrise the following morning. Rex was already awake, anxiously pacing about the room.
“Time to wake up, sunshine,” Rex said. “We need to call in, now that we haven’t been murdered in our sleep. Jamol gave me this.” He handed Daniel a piece of paper with a name scribbled on it. It was Zuhro’s first husband’s name.
Daniel pulled himself up to the short table and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. Rex handed him the satellite phone. He dialed Jenny in D.C.
“Glad to hear you two are still alive,” Jenny joked over the satellite phone. “Guess who’s here? Muhammad is working with me, and he’s a great partner. Say hi, Muhammad.”
Daniel heard Muhammad bashfully say hello in the background.
“By the way,” Jenny said before Daniel could continue, “Ambassador Fitzpatrick knows you ditched the Land Cruiser. Its GPS says it’s been sitting in Samarkand. He is super pissed. He told me to inform him of your position if I learn it. And he pointed me to classified material he wants you to know about. And Edwards has a message for you also.”
“I’ve got a lot to tell you right away,” Daniel cut in. “First, I found the location of Dmitri’s dacha in the mountains.” He read off the longitude and latitude from the map.
“I’ll have Muhammad look at satellite imagery as we talk,” Jenny said.
“Se
condly,” Daniel continued, “it turns out that Zuhro, Dmitri’s widow, was previously married. Dmitri was an affair. Her first husband, last we knew, lived in Tashkent.” Daniel read off the man’s name for Jenny. “See if you can dig anything up on him before I ask around myself.”
“Got it,” Jenny replied. “More?”
“Lastly,” Daniel began, but then paused for a moment. “We uncovered what we think might be a coded message. And we’re guessing it used a book as the key. How do you feel about cracking a code?”
“That depends. What exactly do you have?”
Daniel explained the note he found inside The Communist Manifesto, which he hoped was the key to decoding the message.
“Normally, to encode a message,” Jenny began to explain, “you would use a randomly generated key. Like static from outer space. Unless the message was long enough and a supercomputer used brute force to repeatedly guess until it arrived at a combination that formed intelligible language, such a code is unbreakable. But even then, that could take so long that by the time it was cracked, it wouldn’t be useful.”
“But what if the key is The Communist Manifesto?” Daniel asked.
“In that case, the key wouldn’t be random, and so that could conceivably speed up the process, but it would still take too long.”
“How long?” Daniel asked.
“If ever, it could take supercomputers days, weeks, months, or even years.”
“I’ll read the Russian letters to you, and you and Muhammad begin working your magic, okay? I don’t know Russian so it could be more obvious than I’m guessing, too.”
“Don’t get your hopes up,” Jenny warned.
Daniel took several minutes to read off the sequence of Cyrillic letters to Jenny. Once he was done, he asked about the intelligence Fitzpatrick wanted him to know about.
“Interestingly,” Jenny said. “It’s related to Dmitri’s country home. And it looks like Muhammad has satellite imagery.”
“Can you tell me anything about getting to the dacha?” Daniel asked.
“I’m sure you can see on your map the road into the mountain that takes you closest?”
“Yeah,” Daniel confirmed.
“There’s a building at the foot of the mountains, and then there are two more along the road. At the second one, that’s where you want to get out and go by foot into the mountains. Of course, I don’t know what’s in that building, though.”
Daniel hoped it was empty, or a harmless tea house.
“But here’s what Fitzpatrick wanted you to know. There’s what we would call a ‘black site’ in those mountains, just north of Dmitri’s dacha, apparently.”
“Is it dangerous?” Daniel asked.
“Well, Fitzpatrick wants you to approach it with caution, armed, and with backup.”
“What’s there?”
“We don’t know, but the Uzbek government gave Fitzpatrick their approval for us to use any means necessary to carry out our mission there.”
“The Uzbek government doesn’t know what’s going on at their own black site?” Daniel asked with frustration.
“Or, they do know, but they don’t want anything to do with it,” Jenny said. “Officer Carter consulted with Fitzpatrick and Edwards about it, and they think it’s controlled by the Russian mafia. The Uzbek government would be happy for us to clean up their mess without any cost to them. It looks like a few buildings with a helipad, all fenced in.”
Rex gave Daniel a look as if to say, What the hell? This is messed up.
“Edwards ordered Gunner and Walters directly to K2 to support you,” Jenny continued. Daniel remembered that those two were part of Rex’s squad that raided a Taliban village to recover a nuke.
Rex was grinning now.
“And Edwards also ordered Tina to join you as well. She’s already flown in to Tashkent and is already on her way to K2.”
“Tina?” Daniel asked. He both anticipated and felt nervous about seeing her. Recovering from the surprise, Daniel said, “Send Gunner and Walters the coordinates of the dacha. We’ll meet them there. We can’t wait for them.”
“You sure you shouldn’t wait?” Jenny asked. “There is a reason you’re getting more firepower.”
“We need to search that place as soon as possible. We don’t have time to waste.”
“Don’t get yourself killed before Gunner and Walters arrive,” Jenny said.
“Tell them to keep as low a profile as possible.” Daniel imagined the two special forces men, fully armed, cruising around the city in a Humvee and then going off-roading in the mountains.
“Give Rex a hug for me,” Jenny said. “I will inform Officer Carter, Ambassador Fitzpatrick, and Edwards of your location and plan. Fitzpatrick and Edwards, though, will be busy at the security conference that’s starting today in Tashkent. And I learned not to call the ambassador Fitzy, by the way. Let’s talk again in twelve hours.”
The communications link ended.
“She told me to give you a hug,” Daniel said. “But I think you get the idea.”
“You made the right decision,” Rex said. “We don’t have time to wait around here for the big guns. We need to get to that country home and search it immediately. If we have a chance of uncovering the Wolf’s identity, we can’t delay several hours.”
Jamol’s twelve-year-old son entered with a tray of tea and round bread. Daniel thanked him and devoured breakfast.
Minutes later, after promising Jamol and Fatima they would find answers for Zuhro, Daniel and Rex went to get into the Nexia. They paused to pet Jamol’s dog, who now appeared as a giant teddy bear. Daniel drove with Rex towards the road into the mountains. He pulled over at the empty building at the mountain’s base so they could prepare for their insertion. About fifteen minutes later, they proceeded up the road, their guns no longer in cases.
10
“You sure we can’t stop for tea?” Rex asked as they got out of the Nexia at the second building along the mountain road.
Daniel gave a look down to Shahrisabz below and said, “Maybe we can get some osh on our way back.”
An elderly man sat on a raised platform, drinking tea in silence, but he watched Daniel and Rex pass to the rear of the building and then into the mountains. They carried their handguns in holsters, and their packs contained the other equipment they anticipated they might need. They hiked until the tea house was out of sight.
Surrounded by mountains in every direction, Daniel checked the map one last time.
“That way,” Daniel said as he pointed up a mountain ridge.
A gentle breeze carried the bleating of goats. Daniel spotted the animals near their route up the mountain.
Daniel and Rex both instinctively took cover behind a boulder when they saw a man near the goats.
“You think he saw us?” Daniel asked.
“Have a look,” Rex said as he handed Daniel a pair of binoculars.
Daniel studied the man from a distance for a few moments before reporting to Rex.
“If I had to guess, I would say he looks Russian but is posing as a goat-herder. He disappeared over the mountain ridge, but I don’t know if that’s because he saw us or not.”
The two waited several more minutes, but the man didn’t return. Coming out from behind the boulder, they continued their path up the mountain. They soon reached a steep incline covered with small rocks. Before the demanding progress that would require going up on all fours, they drank a few sips of water. Daniel tested the satellite phone.
“No signal,” Daniel reported.
“Could be lots of reasons,” Rex said. “Are the batteries dead?”
“Very funny.”
“I’ll keep my short-range radio on. We’ll know as soon as Gunner and Walters are in range.”
“Until then, it’s just the goats and us,” Daniel said as he began picking his way up the rocks. Rex followed, and they sent trickles of stones and pebbles tumbling down as they worked their way to the top of the ridge. Keep
ing his head down, Daniel focused on putting one foot in front of the other.
Daniel looked up to see if the goats were still there, or if the Russian had reappeared. Sweat got into his eyes as he saw that the goats had wandered away.
He went to put his next hand down, but the rocks shifted.
Daniel let out a short yell.
A tan snake slithered among the stones and right past his hand.
“Jesus!” Daniel yelled as he recoiled and slid down the rocks for several feet before regaining his hold near Rex. “I nearly grabbed a snake. It freaked me out.”
Rex chuckled and continued his way up the ridge. Daniel looked about and saw nothing but mountains. Not even the goats were in view anymore. After a few deep breaths, Daniel resumed the ascent with Rex.
When he finally reached the top, Rex was crouching among the goats. Nobody else was in sight. They were on a shelf that led to another ridge after about one hundred yards. The flat area was about fifty yards wide, and to their left, the mountains continued their rise. To their right, the mountain dropped off. One hundred yards forward, and then they would have to climb again. Large boulders littered the flat area. A few were large enough to provide cover, though the sun was no longer low in the sky. Daniel slumped down in the sliver of shade and took another sip of water.
“Tired?” Rex said, looking down at him. “This is a warmup.”
“Hey, I didn’t bust you up for not knowing how to speak Uzbek with Jamol and Fatima,” Daniel pointed out.
“Point taken,” Rex said. He pressed a button near his ear and tried to hail Gunner and Walters. He waited and then shook his head in the negative. Pulling his Glock from the holster, he cocked it and confirmed he had extra magazines of ammunition. Daniel followed Rex’s lead and checked his equipment.
“Ready for anything,” Daniel said.
Daniel and Rex moved forward among the boulders along the shelf towards the next ridge.
“After we go up that ridge,” Daniel said while pointing ahead, “the black site will be another ridge over to the left, and the dacha will be to the right. I’ll lead the way.” There were another fifty yards of flat ground before they would have to resume climbing.