by Scott McEwen
Neither wanted to end up in prison.
The adrenaline rush they experienced in their new line of work was as important to them as the cash, most of which they blew in Vegas anyhow. For them, life outside of Special Ops just moved too slowly, and they scarcely knew how to function among regular people with no concept of the things they had done and seen during their time in combat.
“I find myself unable to adjust,” Crosswhite had said dryly, by way of explanation, on the morning he’d first pitched his idea to Tuckerman.
“Yeah, well look at me,” Tuckerman had replied, gesturing at his vomit-stained shirt, the two of them sitting in a buffet breakfast joint on the northern end of the Vegas Strip. “I’m not exactly the poster child for assimilation.”
They waited until the men in the Hummer came back out and drove off before dismounting the van and moving quickly into the shadows alongside the house. The night vision monoculars attached to their IBH helmets allowed them to see everything with perfect clarity. The two moved stealthily around to the back of the house, where they would use a double length of commercial detonating cord to blow the reinforced steel door off its hinges. Their main armament were suppressed M4s, with suppressed .45 caliber Sig Sauer pistols for backup, all of it equipped with laser sighting. They hadn’t yet acquired fragmentation grenades, but their load-out did consist of six flash-bangs apiece. The body armor was of Special Forces quality and would stop an AK-47 round point-blank. They were not loaded out for speed or agility. They were loaded out for hard-hitting, break-your-fucking-head-open combat, and they were prepared to do whatever it took to get what they came for.
To their way of the thinking, the drug dealers they took down—and had so far twice ended up killing—were no different from any other enemy they’d ever encountered in combat. In many cases, they were probably worse. Take Terrance Booker, for example, a twice-convicted child molester and meth dealer. How many lives had this joker helped destroy during his thirty-five years on the planet? The figure likely stretched into the thousands.
Tuckerman opened the storm door, and Crosswhite duct taped the det cord across the hinges, lighting the fused end of the blasting cap and ducking back around the corner of the house, each man wearing earplugs, goggles, and a black balaclava to cover his face.
Ten seconds later, the det cord exploded with a sharp blast, and Crosswhite jumped out to kick the door into the house, where it fell with a crash against the kitchen floor. A woman started screaming immediately from the living room, and Crosswhite shouted “FBI!” at the top of his voice as they bounded inside.
“FBI!” Tuckerman echoed as they moved into the living room. Two men sat looking stunned on the couch in front of the television. “FBI! Everybody down on the fucking floor—now!”
Crosswhite shoved the woman into a chair and told her to shut the fuck up as the two men threw themselves onto the floor with their hands over the backs of their heads.
Neither one of them was Terrance Booker.
“Where the fuck is Booker?” demanded Crosswhite.
“Upstairs, man,” said one of the men on the floor. “He upstairs.”
Tuckerman kept them covered while Crosswhite moved toward the stairs on the far side of the living room. Four shots rang out, and Crosswhite felt the bullets pelt against the back of his armor. He spun around, cutting loose with the M4 and spraying twenty rounds of 5.56 mm straight down the hallway through the bathroom door just as it was slamming shut. He charged down the hall and kicked the door open to see a bloody Terrance Booker sprawled backward over the edge of the bathtub.
He bounded back into the living room. “All clear back there,” he said. “Booker’s dead. Punish those cocksuckers for lying!”
Tuckerman put a round through each of their knees, and they both howled in agony, crippled for life. The woman began to scream again, one of the men apparently being her boyfriend, and Tuckerman busted her in the face with the stock of the M4, sprawling her out cold on the floor.
“You ain’t no fuckin’ FBI, motha’fucker!” the boyfriend bellowed, gripping his knee with blood gushing through his fingers.
Tuckerman delivered him a kick to the face and signaled for Crosswhite to move up the stairs.
The black backpacks were sitting in plain sight on the bed in the master bedroom. Crosswhite took a moment to check them out, making sure they were full of money, as their informant had told them they would be. He was slinging them over his shoulder and turning for the door when the sound of someone coughing stopped him. The cough had come from the closet and sounded like that of a child. He opened the door, and a young black girl sat on a pillow looking up at him. She could not have been more than nine or ten years old, her big brown eyes wide and hopeful. From the looks of things, she had been living in the closet for some time.
“Can I go home now?” she asked.
Crosswhite knelt down and lifted her up. “You bet you can,” he said, carrying her into the hall. “Coming down!” he shouted.
“Clear!” Tuckerman answered.
Crosswhite made the landing and stood at the bottom of the stairs with the girl in one arm and the backpacks of cash in the other. “What’s wrong with this picture?” he said. “She’s been living in a goddamn closet.”
“Are these people your family?” Tuckerman asked the child, pointing at the men on the floor.
The little girl, too scared to speak, just shook her head no. “Get ’er out of here,” Tuckerman said. “I’m right behind you.” Ninety seconds later, he climbed in on the passenger side of the van. “Hit it.”
Crosswhite shifted into drive and pulled away from the curb. He wasn’t surprised that the neighbors were all still inside their homes. This wasn’t the part of town where people came out to gawk when the feds showed up blowing holes in the walls; that was a good way of getting caught in a crossfire that had nothing to do with you.
“Are we solid back there?” he asked a couple of minutes down the road.
Tuckerman took a moment to pull off his balaclava. “I made it look like a gangland hit.” He looked into the back, where the little girl was sitting on the floor, resting against the backpacks full of money. “I’m sorry it’s not more comfortable back there, sweetheart. Where do you live?”
“Chicago,” she said.
Tuckerman slugged the door panel, wishing he could kill the little girl’s abductors again.
“Take it easy,” Crosswhite said quietly. “Do we have any accounts in Chicago that need servicing?”
“Yeah. There’s a guy on the South Side who can put something together for us.”
Crosswhite turned the corner as a police cruiser passed them going in the opposite direction without any lights flashing. “And still nobody’s called it in,” he said, watching the cop in the side-view mirror. “I think I might actually miss this town. It’s been good to us.”
“Too good,” Tuckerman said, pointing a thumb toward the back. “This here is definitely a sign that it’s time to go.”
“Roger that,” Crosswhite replied. “I was just thinking the same thing. Chi-Town’s a good place to expand our business.”
10
LAS VEGAS
Born in Novosibirsk, Russia, in 1962, Nikolai Kashkin was not pure Chechen. His mother had moved from Chechnya in the months before his birth to marry his father, who was a soldier in the Soviet Army. Raised to follow in his father’s footsteps, Nikolai served as a lieutenant in his father’s armored battalion late in the Afghan War.
Their service together was not lengthy. His father was killed in action in the Panjshir Valley during the same battle in which Kashkin himself was taken prisoner along with seventeen other Soviet tankers. His fellow prisoners were summarily executed by Tajik fighters, but because Kashkin was half Muslim, an officer, and the son of a Russian colonel, he was spared until the Mujahedeen warlord Ahmad Shah Massoud could determine his
value as a potential hostage. It was during his time as a prisoner of the Mujahedeen in the Afghan village of Bazarak that he first came to truly appreciate his Muslim heritage.
To that point in his life, in keeping with the policies of the Supreme Soviet, his father had forbidden Kashkin to practice any religion at all, while at the same time insisting that Kashkin’s mother keep her own religion private. Kashkin’s father was rarely home during his childhood, however, so his mother had been able to teach him about Islam in secret. Though Kashkin did not grow up a devout Muslim by any stretch of the imagination, he did reach adulthood with an intimate understanding of the Islamic faith, and it was this understanding of his mother’s faith that had saved his life in the Panjshir Valley.
During his meeting with Ahmad Massoud, the warlord spoke with Kashkin about his childhood, questioning him at length about the teachings he had received from his mother. By the end of their discussion, Massoud decided that the young Russian lieutenant was merely a misguided Muslim who had never been given the opportunity to properly allow Allah to come into his life. He then assigned to him a mentor named Orzu Karimov, and over the next eleven months, Karimov taught Kashkin how to walk the enlightened path of Muhammad.
When the fighting finally ended, and the Soviets agreed to leave Afghanistan in 1989, Kashkin was released to return home as a brother Muslim. Shortly thereafter, he and his mother relocated to Grozny, Chechnya, and it was there that Kashkin was exposed to the radical Salafi movement for the first time. Though he had not remained particularly loyal to the Russian army after the fall of the Soviet Union, nor had he bore it any ill will. It was not until his mother was killed by Russian artillery fire during the First Chechen War in the mid-1990s that he first took up the sword against the Russian Federation and, ultimately, all of Western democracy.
Kashkin was now sitting in front of the television in his Las Vegas hotel room watching CNN’s coverage of a so-far-unexplained explosion in southern New Mexico. As the hours passed, word got out that Texas’s Fort Bliss was on a nuclear alert status, and it was reported that a large-scale evacuation was taking place in the city of El Paso, where radiation levels were said to be on the rise. Ciudad Juárez, directly across the border from El Paso, was being evacuated as well, with the population there streaming south, deeper into Mexico. Fortunately, the land east of both cities was largely barren and sparsely populated.
There were no aerial shots provided of ground zero because a strict no-fly zone had been imposed by both governments, which were said to be working closely together in an effort to determine exactly what had happened. By two in the morning Vegas time, the talking heads on all major US news networks were blabbing a hundred words a minute, spouting all the possible worst-case scenarios, and managing to drive the national anxiety level off the charts with half the nation still asleep. A tired Wolf Blitzer of CNN eventually appeared in the wee hours to report that people all across the country were calling friends and relatives in the greatest call volume seen since September 11, 2001.
Kashkin had no way of knowing exactly what had occurred down on the Mexican border, but he was pleased to have chosen Zakayev to carry the second bomb, realizing that Zakayev must have been forced to make a choice between capture and detonation. The fact there had been limited immediate loss of life was a disappointment to Kashkin, but the news wasn’t all bad.
The New York Stock Exchange had announced that it would remain closed for at least the next thirty-six hours, and damaging the Western economy was at least as important as taking Western lives. Westerners were like flies on a manure pile—you couldn’t possibly hope to kill them all. What you could do was devastate their already struggling, interdependent capitalistic economies on both sides of the Atlantic. You could frighten their greedy, corporate-owned governments into imposing more and more restrictions upon their beloved freedoms.
Nuclear terror was the number one way to accomplish this.
Kashkin’s ultimate goal was far more ambitious than taking lives. He wanted to push the United States to the breaking point of its depraved society, steadily applying more and more pressure until Americans were finally killing one another in the streets, burning their own cities to the ground in protest over ever-increasing austerity measures. He did not expect to live to see the end results of his work any more than bin Laden had expected to, but the attacks of September 11, 2001, had taught Kashkin a very important lesson in the war with the West. Bin Laden’s strategy had exposed not only how fragile America’s economy truly was but also, even more importantly, it had exposed the fact that, as went the US economy, so went the economies of the rest of the Western world.
This was the key to defeating them.
Final victory was at last within sight, within the collective reach of the arm of Islam, and all for the cost of a few million wicked American dollars won at a Las Vegas poker table, passed on to a dying old KGB agent wanting to live out his last few months in the South Pacific being pampered by exotic women.
Kashkin switched off the television as the sun was beginning to dawn in the east, opening the drapes to a bright new day. He ran his fingers through a head of gray hair and drew a deep breath to alleviate the tension in his chest over his heart, gazing out at the Luxor pyramid, the Sphinx, and the obelisk, shaking his head with antipathy. What decadence, what an obscenity. The United States had just been attacked with a nuclear weapon, and this city of vice and greed continued to function as though nothing had happened. He felt it fitting that the money he’d used to purchase both RA-115s from Daniel Mulinkov had been won right across the street in the Luxor casino.
He’d been friends with Mulinkov since the Afghan War, and Kashkin had long suspected the KGB man to be in possession of a Cold War suitcase nuke, but Mulinkov had always denied it. “There’s no such thing, Nikolai,” he would say, waving his hand. “There never was.”
Then came the day five months ago when Mulinkov had arrived unexpectedly at Kashkin’s home in Grozny, the whites of his eyes just beginning to yellow, the cancer in his pancreas having spread to his liver. He admitted to being in possession of not just one but two RA-115s, confiding in Kashkin that it had been his responsibility to retrieve them from East Berlin in the final days of the Soviet Union. Very few people in the Soviet government had been privy to the bombs’ existence in those days, so when Mulinkov’s direct superior died of a heart attack while making love to his mistress, there had been no one left alive who knew that Mulinkov was in possession of the weapons. It was in this manner that a pair of two-kiloton nuclear bombs had simply ceased to be.
Kashkin’s cellular phone beeped on the nightstand. He picked it up. “Hello?” he said in English.
“What went wrong?” asked a voice in English with an Arabic accent. “Did one of your stupid couriers make a mistake?”
Kashkin looked at himself in the mirror, his pale blue eyes smiling back at him. “There have been no mistakes, Faisal. Everything is fine.”
“So then you people won’t be bothering me for more money?”
“I don’t think so,” Kashkin lied. “Everything is going according to plan.”
“That’s it then,” the caller replied. “I’m out. Leave me alone.”
The caller hung up without another word, and Kashkin tossed the phone onto the bed.
He was packing his bag a short time later when there came a knock at the door.
It was his nephew Bworz, another blue-eyed Caucasian from the Caucasus. “What happened?” was the first thing he said after closing the door behind him.
Kashkin shrugged, going back to packing his bag. He had important business up in Montana. A request had been made by his AQAP allies living in Windsor, Canada, two brothers named Akram and Haroun al-Rashid. He had met the fundamentalist Wahhabi brothers through his contacts in the Riyad us-Saliheyn Martyrs’ Brigade, and they had arranged for the funding he needed to purchase the RA-115s, asking only a simple quid
pro quo in return . . . to kill an American hero at his own game . . . on his own soil.
“Obviously something went wrong,” he said. “There’s no point to worry about it. What’s important is that Zakayev did his duty. The bomb did not fall into enemy hands. Your men are protecting the other weapon?”
“Yes,” Bworz said. “We rented the house on the corner . . . the one you suggested. It’s extremely close to the target.”
“Good.” Kashkin flipped the suitcase closed and buckled it. “I’ll meet you there as soon as I’m finished in Montana, and we’ll work out the details of our escape.”
Bworz stood staring at him. “I don’t like the idea of you going after Shannon by yourself. He’s dangerous . . . as dangerous as any the Americans have.”
“I can travel more easily alone.” Kashkin handed him a small blue laptop from the dresser. It was one of two, the only difference between them being the color. “There’s no need for the red one now that the second bomb has been lost.”
“There’s no need for this one either,” Bworz said, tucking the blue laptop under his arm. “We’ve studied the target area in great detail. My men know it by heart.”
“Then be sure to destroy the hard drive before you get rid of it.”
“I will,” Bworz promised. “Have you purchased a rifle for the hit?”
“I found one yesterday at a local gun show,” Kashkin replied. “I had to pay the vendor quadruple his asking price because I’m not a citizen, but it’s a good rifle. The Germans killed many Russians with it during the Great War.”
“A Mauser,” Bworz muttered. “Shannon will have something much better.”