The Company We Keep

by Robert Baer

As I get closer, it strikes me as odd that there are no police, fire trucks, or ambulances racing down the road. When I stop and roll down the window to listen, I hear a plane taking off. I keep driving until I come to a policeman standing by the road. I ask him what happened with the attack. “What attack?” he asks, genuinely puzzled. I drive into the airport and stop in front of the terminal, where people are coming and going as usual.

  I never do find out how the rumor started.

  I’ve been in Tajikistan nine months now, and still live in Dushanbe’s old Communist Party hotel, the Oktyabrskaya. It’s off-the-rack Soviet sixties architecture, constructed of cheap concrete. Water streaks and cracks run down the side. And it’s an even bigger dump inside. The wallpaper’s bubbled, the curtains filthy. Plaster crumbles off the walls. There’s a plague of cigarette burns on the furniture. The city water goes off for a week at a time, and there never is any hot water. Mornings I don’t bother pulling the curtains in my room because the view is a dusty park with scorched grass and a couple of dead maples and poplars.

  My room is on the third floor, at the end of a corridor I share with the Russian embassy. Two Russian soldiers with automatic weapons sit behind a desk at the stairwell. Every couple of weeks I give them a carton of Marlboros, and now they know me by my first name. The Russian diplomats I pass in the hallway smile at me, not seeming to mind my living in their midst. The bloom isn’t yet off glasnost.

  I’m still struck by the irony of holing up in the back of a Russian embassy. Since its founding in 1947, the CIA spied on the Russians. They were the enemy. We spent our lives trying to recruit them as moles, and they us. And now all of a sudden we’re on the same side, in my case I’m practically a roommate. We depend on the Russian division here to stanch the chaos sloshing across the border from Afghanistan. The dumb fear is that if the Russians fail, one Central Asian country after another will fall to the Mujahidin. An Islamic domino effect.

  Still, things are pretty calm these days. The occasional tank rumbling down Dushanbe’s main street is about the only reminder that Tajikistan is in the middle of a civil war. Russia’s 201st Motorized Rifle Division is gradually retaking ground, one village at a time, moving up into the rebel sanctuaries high in the Pamir mountains. But the rebels keep moving up higher and higher. Now it would take a three-day climb just to reach them, too high even for Russian helicopters.

  The Russian soldiers call the rebels the dukhi—the ghosts, the same word the Soviets used for the Afghan Mujahidin, who also had a knack of disappearing into thin air. The Russians can’t even tell me who the rebels’ commander is. You know it’s a messy war when you don’t even know who the king of the barbarians is.

  When I first got to Tajikistan, “Central Asia” for me was shorthand for “exotic.” All I had to do was close my eyes, and I could conjure up the steppe empires, the Silk Road, Alexander the Great’s marches up and down the Pamirs. It was here that Alexander found a wife, Roxanne, one of history’s great beauties. Bucephalus, Alexander’s horse, died not far north of Dushanbe, and the myth is that at midnight, if you’re lucky, you will see its ghost running around a certain mountain lake.

  I needed only a day walking around the capital to figure out that I got the “exotic” wrong. There is no old Dushanbe. There’s no trace of the Silk Route, or of Alexander the Great and the other ancient empires that once rivaled Greece and Rome. I drove up to the lake where Alexander’s horse supposedly died. But there wasn’t an epigraph or anything else to mark it. History deleted Central Asia’s empires, and no one more efficiently than the Soviets.

  That’s what I’ve really learned here: what great haters Marx, Lenin, and Stalin were. They hated Central Asian culture, its babel of languages, its religions, and in particular Islam. No doubt they hated the mysterious East itself. The Marxists believed that before they could build their delusional utopia they had to efface from the earth every trace of ancient Central Asia. Over the years, Soviet proconsuls flattened the old Mogul forts, the mosques, the bazaars, and the caravanserai, and turned the ancient cities of Samarkand and Bokhara into cheap theme parks.

  Now the Soviets are gone, but the ex-Communists have kept their grip on Dushanbe. Like the old Soviet apparatchiks, they race around in their Zils and Volgas, tailed by police chase cars with flashing blue lights on the top. They all live in a party compound. In their dull, somber suits they remind me of Brezhnev. I once sat next to the Tajik president at a state dinner. A taciturn, colorless man, he said maybe two words the entire time. I caught him pouring his vodka into the planted palm behind him so he wouldn’t get drunk like everyone else.

  I’m starting to have my own idea why Dushanbe’s water shuts off, and it has nothing to do with the government’s explanation about routine cleaning and flushing. I suspect deeper machinations at play. In Central Asia, he who controls the water is he who rules. That once meant the ancient irrigation canals, but now it’s a city’s water supply. My theory is that the rebels sabotage Dushanbe’s water to undermine the legitimacy of the ex-Communists. If they can turn it off permanently, the city falls.

  Granted, it’s a theory easier to believe than to prove, but I’ve been flying by the seat of my pants ever since I got here. The fact is, I have only the haziest understanding of Central Asia, or even of Tajikistan and its civil war. The place is a spy’s nightmare; American baseline knowledge is zero.

  As an example, we’re not even sure who the important political players are in Tajikistan. We know who the president is, of course, the man I sat next to at dinner, and the ministers. But there’s a small, secretive clique that really runs the country. A Central Asian scholar at Harvard, Richard Frye, calls these cliques “charismatic clans”—tight-knit extended families who ruthlessly look to their own for survival. Nationalism and ideology come into play only when it serves the interest of the clan.

  So far, so good, but all we know about the charismatic clan that runs Tajikistan is that it can be traced to Kulyab Province, or, to be precise, a village called Baljuan. The president is only the clan’s face, while a handful of members in the shadows run the army and the security services. Kulyab was the site of a former Tsarist penal colony, and today many Tajiks look at the Kulyabis as a band of unreconstructed criminals.

  From time to time I stop by the door of the Russian political officer, hoping he can clear up the question of the Kulyabis for me. After all, the Russians have been here for more than a century, while I’m still short of year one. But all I get out of my visits is a cup of tea and a cookie.

  The fortunate side of it all is that Washington doesn’t really care whether I understand the place or not. I don’t have a shred of evidence for it, but my hunch is that James Baker, George H. W. Bush’s secretary of state, opened our embassy in Dushanbe solely to remind the Russians that Tajikistan is no longer a piece of their empire. An embassy here is an act of pure defiance. The fact that the Russian 201st is all that keeps the peace and prevents our plucky embassy from being sacked and burned to the ground is a detail Washington doesn’t like to consider.

  SIX

  Most of the highly experienced officers in the study, in contrast, concentrated their visual focus on the target/suspect, catching only a fast glimpse of their sights in their peripheral vision and relying primarily on “an unconscious kinesthetic sense to know that their gun is up and positioned properly.”

  In the recent study … elite officers were able to read danger cues early on and anticipate the suspect’s actions ahead of time so they could stay ahead of the fight. They knew where a gun was likely to appear and were focused there before it did. So they were able to get protective rounds off sooner than the suspect and sooner than the rookies.

  That anticipatory skill can only be developed through experience. At the training level, that means extensive experience with dynamic force-on-force encounters and realistic simulations in which you learn by “being there” over and over again in a wide variety of encounters what to expect and how to look for and
recognize danger cues.

  —Force Science Research Center

  Northern Virginia: DAYNA

  It’s still dark when a white van with government plates drives under the Marriott’s portico and pulls up next to me. The driver’s window slides down a couple of inches. “You Dayna?” It’s dark, and all I can see of him is the Oakley wraparound sunglasses cocked on his forehead. He doesn’t wait for my answer. “Get in. We’re late.”

  I walk around and open the panel door to find nine guys asleep, backpacks and duffel bags piled everywhere. The only place free is occupied by a leg. The guy it belongs to wakes up and looks at me blankly. He doesn’t move, and I look at the driver for help. Finally the guy grumbles and moves his leg. I squeeze in, but there’s no place for my duffel bag, and I hold it on my lap.

  As we drive away from the Marriott, someone in the back tells a crude joke. I don’t laugh, and no one else does, either. I can only think it was meant for me. I close my eyes; this is going to be a very long one-and-a-half-hour drive, and I don’t even want to think about the coming months. I try to occupy my mind by going through the list of things they told me to bring, from a web belt to polarized shooting glasses. I also brought one of those all-in-one pocket tools, a Leatherman. I’m definitely my father’s daughter, the civil engineer who never went far from home without some sort of tool.

  We drive west on Route 50 in silence until the driver starts flipping through radio stations, probably more to keep awake than anything else. Just as it turns light, he stops in front of a grim little McDonald’s in a mini-mall. I let the guys go ahead, watching them stretch and walk across the parking lot. Their patched and sun-bleached fatigues and scuffed desert boots make them look like stragglers from some defeated army heading home. In fact, many of them were in the Gulf War.

  I wince when I catch one of the guys studying my laced Timberlands. I bought them the day before at the Tysons Corner mall, and there’s not a scratch on them. I’m already self-conscious about my hair pulled back in a ponytail, my new black military-chic rollneck sweater, and my tan cargo pants. The darts I sewed in the butt to hold them up make it look like I’m auditioning for a slightly more rugged J. Crew catalog.

  After another thirty-minute drive, the van turns off Route 50 onto a two-lane rural road. We pass a few white clapboard houses with enclosed porches and American flags out front. It’s late October, the trees are bare, and piles of copper leaves blow across the road. The van startles a deer that bolts into the underbrush. We turn down a gravel road where there’s a neatly painted sign that says simply PRIVATE. A mile farther down, the van comes to a guard blockhouse with a ten-foot drop barrier, a spinning yellow light on top. On either side of the blockhouse runs a chain-link fence with razor wire on the top. You can’t mistake the place for anything other than a government base.

  A guard in a camouflage uniform opens the van’s panel door, and we hold up our blue badges for him to see. He first checks to make sure the badge numbers match the numbers on the paper on his clipboard. (There are no names on CIA badges.) Then he matches the pictures on our badges with our faces. From somewhere on the base I hear a slow, throaty dah-dah-dah. A heavy machine gun.

  We drive into some pine woods and stop in front of a rickety wooden building with dirt floors. A wooden overhang serves as a roof for an outdoor classroom set with high metal chairs and waist-high tables.

  There’s a clump of students out front talking, Styrofoam coffee cups in their hands. In the middle of them is a girl in faded camies, her boots as scuffed as the guys, with a pair of yellow range glasses on top of her head. The only thing that sets her off is a pair of pearl earrings. It’s the first familiar thing I’ve seen all morning, and my nerves ease up a bit.

  I walk over, and she sticks out her hand to me. “Hi, Sunshine, I’m Cheri.”

  I must look at her a little funny. “Oh, sorry,” she says. “I got ‘Walking on Sunshine’ stuck in my head. So, where’d you learn to shoot?”

  She walks over to the coffee urn to get me a cup of coffee, and I follow her.

  “I have no idea what I’m doing here,” I say, in a voice only Cheri can hear.

  Cheri puts her hand on my shoulder. “If you need help, just ask.”

  Cheri tells me she’s here only for a refresher. For the last three years she’s been overseas, training foreigners to shoot. This course is like a vacation for her.

  Jeff, the head instructor, looks up and down at our tables to make sure we each have a holster and a Glock 9-mm semiautomatic pistol. He’s about forty, with a receding hairline, hollow cheeks, and a pair of cold, silver blue eyes. He has a briskness that tells you he’s run this course more times than he cares to remember.

  “Small-town cops wear their weapons on their hips,” he says. “It’s not the way we do it here. You holster your weapon on the small of your back.”

  I watch the others as they undo their web belts and thread their holsters through them to the back. I do the same. I remember my Leatherman, take it off, and thread it back on my belt on the left side.

  I wait until everyone else grabs his Glock off the table before I pick up mine. I follow suit as they pop out the magazine, rack back the slide, and hold the weapon up to show that the chamber is clear.

  “It’s a hot range,” Jeff says. “Get your ammo.”

  We line up in front of a table set with boxes of ammunition, and cram fistfuls of rounds into our cargo pockets. Walking to the range, we load fifteen rounds into each of our magazines. Jeff takes us to a ten-foot-high berm with twenty-five black-and-white silhouette paper targets lined up in a row. It’s quiet except for the wind whistling through the metal frames. We spread out to pick a target. I take the last one at the end.

  “You may dry-fire before you qualify,” Jeff shouts.

  I’ve never drawn a gun from a holster, and for a few seconds I watch the others draw their pistols, cup them in their hands, aim, and squeeze the trigger. They do it all in one smooth, even motion, and all very quickly. I try to imitate them, only a lot more slowly. Thank God no one is looking at me.

  “Load and make ready,” Jeff yells. “One round, two seconds. On the whistle.”

  Please, please, please, I tell myself. Just get them all on the paper. My hand shakes, and my heart pounds. What if I do something really, really stupid—like hit someone else’s target.

  Jeff blows the whistle, and loud pops fill the range. I force myself not to close my eyes, and concentrate on squeezing the trigger rather than jerking it. It’s the one basic I can’t forget. The Glock bucks up when I fire, but I bring it back down, and then holster it. I look at my silhouette, but it’s too far to see what I hit.

  We do this five more times and then move back ten feet and do it again. We shoot from behind a barricade, on both the right and the left. The last thing we do is shoot with our weak hand.

  “Unload and show clear!” Jeff yells. We take out the magazines, pull back the slides, and hold our Glocks up in the air for Jeff to see. “Downrange!” he yells.

  I walk toward my silhouette with my eyes on the ground. When the time comes for Jeff to count the holes in my target, I hold my breath and stare at his back.

  “All there,” he finally says.

  I look up and count them. I can’t believe it. They’re all there on the paper! Who cares if half are outside the man’s silhouette.

  “Next time put them here.” Jeff makes a fist and puts it in the middle of the man’s torso. “Center mass.”

  Cheri walks over. “You’ll get there, Sunshine. Just a little practice.”

  And practice is just what we get for the rest of the day, the next day, and the day after that. For a few minutes each morning we start by drawing our unloaded Glocks from our holsters. It’s to get a feel for the weapon. Jeff watches, prodding us to move faster and faster. “It’s either you or them,” he says.

  Then there’s a live qualification on the silhouette targets. Almost everyone passes on the first day, except for me and
a couple of others. “We don’t move on to higher-speed stuff until everyone qualifies,” Jeff says.

  We settle into a routine. Mornings are “live fire” on the paper silhouette targets, and afternoons are on the “pop-up” range—metal targets that only go down when you hit the figure’s torso or head. We shoot standing, kneeling, and on our stomachs. One afternoon it rains, but we keep at it. By day three, the Glock starts to feel like an extension of my arm, and I finally qualify, the last to do so.

  On Friday morning the Glocks are gone, and 12-gauge shotguns are waiting on our worktables. “One chance to qualify, people,” Jeff says. “You won’t need more than that anyway.” I have no idea why we only get one chance, but from the way everyone stands around joking, planning their weekends, I can tell they all agree this is going to be easy.

  I’ve never picked up a shotgun before, and the moment I fire it, I hate it. It’s heavy, loud, and obviously determined to dislocate my shoulder when I pull the trigger. I don’t have the strength to hold up the shotgun with my left hand while I fumble in my pocket for shells to reload. It’s not like you can set it on the ground to do it.

  Jeff tells us we will shoot three rounds (slugs) at twenty-five yards. We then reload three more shells while holding the shotgun pointed at the target, a “combat load,” and then fire them. Finally, we will move up to “cover the threat,” firing a final three shells at fifteen yards.

  Jeff blows the whistle, and I pull the trigger. But the gun doesn’t fire. I realize too late that I didn’t flick off the safety. My first shot goes way wide, missing the target altogether. I get off the next two shots and then try to reload, but drop a shell on the ground. When Jeff blows the whistle to change position, I haven’t even finished loading the third shell. I move forward with everyone else to the fifteen-yard line and shoot three shells. But now I have to combat-load four to make up for the one I dropped. I don’t even have time to aim, and can’t see if I hit the target. When the whistle blows to fire the last three rounds, I realize too late that I’ve miscounted, leaving one unfired.