The officer was dressed in a white uniform and looked upset. Perspiration discolored the material around the man’s neck and underarms. He said in English, “You go,” and he pointed toward the open ocean.
Afua pulled himself out of the water and climbed up and over the side of his boat. He rolled into his tiny watercraft and sat in the driver’s seat. He started his boat’s outboard engine.
This time Afua repeated the words, “I go,” and he pointed out at the ocean as well.
The officer in the Coast Guard boat appeared satisfied that they had gotten their point across, and their vessel began to pull away from the jihadi’s boat. Afua watched as their boat rounded the end of the jetty and pulled out into the open water. A moment later it had disappeared behind the wall of rocks.
The second the other vessel was out of sight, Afua killed the engine and dove overboard. He wasted very little time in bringing the case to the water’s surface. It took five big steps on five big rocks, and his boat’s fake middle hull broke the surface of the water. With its ballast tanks still full of water, the case weighed about seventy pounds. Afua grunted as he heaved it up and over the bow of the boat. He allowed the case to tumble onto the floor of his boat before hefting himself back into the boat.
Moving quickly, not bothering to check his watch, Afua grabbed a screwdriver out of the glovebox and opened the latches that sealed the watertight case. He looked up to make sure that the Coast Guard ship was not coming back to check on him. Remembering everything the Russian arms dealer had taught him, Afua took out the launcher and prepped it to receive the missile. Afua’s hands were wet, and the missile was heavy. As he carefully fed the projectile into the launch tube, he was extra careful not to drop it. In his mind, Afua worked through all the settings that needed to be made to fire the weapon. He understood that he would only get one chance to make this work. If the mission was successful, his life would change forever. However, if he failed, his life would change forever—just not in a good way.
Now, with the weapon loaded and ready to fire, Afua walked between the split windshield of his boat up to the bow that was tied off to the rocks. Placing the heavy weapon on his shoulder, the jihadi stepped out onto the driest rock he could find, leaving the boat. With great care, Afua stepped from rock to rock, and he ascended toward the narrow road above him. Just before leaving the safety of the rocks, he stuck his head up for a quick look around. The road was empty. Realizing he was running out of time, Afua climbed up the remaining five feet and walked out onto the open and level surface.
Only then did he check his watch. It read 10:02 a.m.
He was still within the operational window in which he had been told to fire the weapon. He turned toward the airport across the bay. It was less than a mile away with only a blue strip of water separating him from the outbound flights. Afua steadied the weapon on his shoulder and put the metal sight up to his eye. A strong breeze was coming in off the water, and Afua wondered if the wind would have any bearing on the missile’s trajectory. Realizing it was too late to worry about such matters, Afua stood there patiently and waited.
Less than thirty seconds later, a large commercial jet left the runway. It was going to fly directly over Afua’s position on the jetty. He tracked the plane, placing the sight on the plane’s soft shiny underbelly.
He thought he should say something before pulling the trigger, something meaningful. He knew that his Boko Haram brothers would say something like Allah Akbar, which meant God is Great, but all that came out of Afua’s mouth were two English words, “Don’t miss.”
PHILIPPINE SEA—ABOARD THE HAIL NUCLEUS
A fter ending the video conference with the Hail Proton, Hail and his staff turned to the other topic of the meeting. Hail said in a begrudging tone, “In return for the intelligence on locating Afua Diambu, the CIA has asked us to undertake a mission that I think is next to impossible, but that is pretty much what we do.”
Hail turned toward Kara and said, “Kara, you have the floor.”
Kara had been organizing information on her laptop for the last few minutes, poking her finger at keys and moving the mouse around the screen. She looked up from her laptop and pointed at the big screen on the wall.
“We have determined the location of the world’s largest arms dealer, Victor Kornev. He is staying in this house right here,” she said, pointing the laptop’s cursor to the sizable white house.
“Where is this house?” Nolan asked, recalling Kara’s boss mentioning the country was Uzbekistan—wherever the hell that was. But he couldn’t recall the town.
“Termez,” she said, zooming out on her laptop until the town turned into a country. “As you can see, it’s located in the southernmost tip of Uzbekistan.”
The group looked at the country and all the strange countries surrounding it, places that never came up in general conversations. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan were the countries that bordered Uzbekistan. The celebrity country of those four was certainly Afghanistan, having been in the headlines for years. But the others most people could barely pronounce.
“Why is he there?” Hail asked.
“Convalescing is what our advanced team has told me. He is on the mend from a gunshot to his hand, as well as several other injuries caused from being in the proximity of an exploding hotel in North Korea,” Kara said, shooting both Hail and Nolan a look.
Nolan looked as if he wanted to crawl under the table, but Hail shrugged it off and simply said, “I wish I would have killed him that day.”
“OK, enough of that talk,” Kara said in a scolding tone. “We know the plan is to turn him, and the only way we are going to do that is by first letting him know he has no other choice. And then, when he blows off our first warning, we’ll come back a second time, and then we’ll show him that we mean business.”
“And how do you want to warn him?” Hail asked.
“Face-to-face,” Kara said. “Your face-to-face meeting. Like I told you before, Kornev does not fear weapons. He fears the men behind the weapons. Thus, you need to have a face-to-face meeting to earn his respect.”
“What do you want me to do? Knock on his front door and when he answers, I punch him in the face?”
“That would probably not be a good idea, because he would just kick your sorry ass, and we would be back to square one,” Kara told Hail with a satisfied smirk.
Hail looked hurt, and she continued.
Kara zoomed in, and the country blurred before refocusing on Kornev’s compound.
“We need to get him out of his home, or compound, or whatever you want to call this fortress he is holed up in. We need to lure him out into the open, where there is no place to hide, and nowhere to run, and no chance of him having any backup support.”
Hail looked over the compound.
“Can you zoom out a little so we can get a layout of the town?” Renner asked.
Kara zoomed out and displayed five miles of the town surrounding Kornev’s home.
“Looks like a lot of farmland,” Nolan remarked.
Hail said, “Yeah, but look at the area north of the airport. It looks like nothing but desert. Not a lick of green anywhere for hundreds of miles. If we can get him out there, we can do anything we want to him.”
Kara looked at the area that Hail was referring to. He was right. On the map, it was labeled as the Surkhandarya Province.
Kara suggested, “The airport is very close to no-mans-land, the area you are talking about,” Kara said, resting the mouse pointer on the single runway. “If I e-mailed Kornev and let him know I was flying into the Termez airport, after one wrong turn, we would be headed into the desert.”
Renner asked Kara, “So, you just pull a gun on Kornev and insist he drive you to the desert?”
“I don’t want to give up my cover unless I have to,” Kara informed the group. “I don’t know what type of leverage we will need against Kornev, but being turned
by a female CIA agent
might be more of a slap in the face than Kornev’s ego can handle.”
Everyone was quiet, each of them pondering the situation.
“If no one has any suggestions then I think I know a way,” Kara said.
“Is it going to blow your cover?” Hail asked Kara
“Nope, I would just be along for the ride. But it’s going to be a bumpy ride.”
“I can handle that,” Hail said.
“OK, this is what we’re going to do,” Kara stated.
TERMEZ, UZBEKISTAN
T he weights that Victor Kornev was lifting were not particularly heavy, but each of the dumbbells, in each of his hands, felt as if they were connected to the ground by rubber straps. Sitting upright on his weight bench in his home gym, Kornev curled each dumbbell up to his chin, alternating hands, counting the reps until he reached twenty for each arm. His muscles burned and he felt, at one point, he might pass out from the exertion.
Perspiration poured from his forehead and dripped onto the matted floor. He had started working out a few days ago, understanding he would heal faster if he put a little effort into it. Sitting around and allowing his muscles to atrophy would not get him back on his feet. Thus, he had begun with a leg workout. His back had hurt so badly during that first stint in the gym that he dreaded going back that same afternoon and doing an upper body workout. But he had. The Russian had worked through the pain, and he was still working through it.
Each morning he awoke, dreading going back down to the gym located in the basement of his home. Pushing through discomfort was not uncommon to a former soldier. He had been hurt dozens of times during his career in the Russian military, and then with his cargo company, Air Cress. He had been shot twice, stabbed many times, beaten up and left for dead more times than he cared to remember. That had all occurred after he had deserted the Soviet Army. His unceremonious exit from the military had taken place during the Soviet Union’s breakup. With the crumbling army in disarray, no one had really given a damn any more what happened. Kornev had taken advantage of the opportunities that had come his way. As far as Kornev was concerned, if you didn’t take advantage of a government in crisis, then you deserved to end up with nothing. Maybe even less than nothing. If your life was meaningful to you, that might be all you walked away with. After the fall of the Soviet Union, for years Russia had turned into the wild, wild west. Everyone was on the take. Everyone who had struggled to become someone was working an angle. Crime was so rampant and so deeply entrenched in the new Russian empire, that common street thugs were getting rich. And a related nuance was the rich were turning into common street thugs. Why? Because they had not played the game, and they had lost everything. It all depended on how much you wanted and what lengths you were willing to go to get it.
Kornev grunted and set the dumbbells down on the floor. He arched his back and winced in pain. That last series of reps was about all his damaged body could take today. He got up slowly, moving like an old man, and walked sluggishly to the bathroom. Moving as little as possible, he dropped his gym pants, pulled off his shirt and stepped into the walk-in shower. He turned the faucet and stepped under the cool water; it felt wonderful. He would let the water cool him down for a moment before turning on the hot water, letting it bake his sore muscles.
Fifteen minutes later, Kornev emerged from the shower, steam coming off his red skin, feeling a little more like his old self. He arched his back again. It didn’t hurt as bad as it had a few days ago.
The Russian toweled off, returning to his bedroom to pull on some underwear. He walked to his bedroom window and looked out at the interior courtyard. He plopped down in an overstuffed chair and admired the flowers. He had hired a professional gardener to tend to the shrubs, trees and flowers in the backyard. The gardener entered his property via a tunnel. The tunnel the gardener used was the only one he knew existed. The entrance to the tunnel was in the garage of the home behind him. A narrow staircase led down into the tunnel, traversing property lines and then surfacing inside the potter’s shed within his courtyard. From the small garage in the little ramshackle house behind his own, the tunnel was wide enough for a man to carry gardening tools. It was only a tunnel out of one-half dozen tunnels leading both in and out of his compound. When Kornev had been considering building his new home in Termez, it had been contingent on purchasing the homes surrounding it. He could come and go via his tunnels, making it nearly impossible for anyone to follow or set a trap for him.
Kornev lit a half-smoked Cuban cigar. He blew out a smoke ring that drifted lazily through the room before being sucked into the air-conditioning intake vent in the ceiling. Kornev poked a finger at his laptop, and his computer woke up and showed his e-mail program. Kornev rarely received any, and on those rare occasions when someone had sent him an e-mail, most tended to be about critical business issues. Nobody wrote Kornev to ask him how his day was or if he wanted to catch a movie. But the new message that was on his laptop was close to that. It had been sent by Tonya Merkalov, the woman he had met in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia at the Volna Hotel.
With great interest, Kornev clicked on the message and read,
Dearest Victor: It’s been so long since I heard from you. I hope you haven’t forgotten about me. But how is that possible? lol.
Kornev did not know what lol was. Probably some silly American colloquialism of which he was unfamiliar.
He kept reading, hoping the message would lead somewhere—not just a tease.
It just so happens that I am between projects, and I am bored. I would love to come for a visit and maybe we could go someplace fun. Tell me that you won’t be working, else we can make it another time. I want to have fun! Do you? Your friend, Tonya
Kornev did indeed want to have some fun. He wanted to relax, drink and smoke his cigar. The only other thing he was missing was female companionship. The woman who called herself Tonya Merkalov would more than fit the bill. Other than the single night he had spent with her a month ago, he knew very little about her. He had Googled Tonya Merkalov and looked over her Facebook account. The vivacious woman appeared to be who she claimed to be—the rich daughter of an international banker. That sounded good to him as well. Who knew, if things went well with the woman, his future father-in-law could be an international banker. He could use a man like that to launder his cash. But Victor knew he was jumping the gun. There was a very good chance that the woman who called herself Tonya was not a Tonya at all. Maybe she was a Patricia, Linda, or a Barbara—American names that belonged to spies or CIA agents. Or she could even be with the Israeli Mossad and have the real name of Dinah, Eliana, or Naomi—strong Hebrew names that belonged to Jewish women. But all of that really didn’t matter. Kornev could take care of himself. Tonya hadn’t been a problem for him a month ago, and she wouldn’t be a problem for him now.
Kornev pulled his laptop onto his lap and began stabbing his big fingers at the keys.
Dearest Tonya: It was nice to hear from you as well. For a very short time, I am in a city near Termez, in the Country of Uzbekistan. Termez has an airport. Please let me know when you are arriving, and I will pick you up. We will have lots of fun. Lol.
Kornev added the lol without knowing what it meant, but since she had used it, it must mean something silly. Silly was a disarming trait, and Kornev wanted her to feel comfortable. After all, he was asking her to fly into the middle of nowhere. That type of woman either didn’t know the meaning of danger, or she didn’t care about her safety. Or the third case, she was too naive to know that shacking up with a strange man was innately dangerous. Either way, he sensed that Tonya Merkalov was not the sharpest knife in the drawer. And thinking of knives in the drawers, Kornev decided to err on the side of caution.
He got out of the chair, went to the kitchen, and removed all the knives from the kitchen drawers and hid them.
PHILIPPINE SEA—ABOARD THE HAIL NUCLEUS
K ara Ramey, Gage Renner and Marshall Hail stood motionless, dressed in workout clothes in the ship’s
gym. After their meeting was over, Hail mentioned that he needed to work out. Kara had jumped on the bandwagon and said she would like to join him. Renner, who hated working out, begrudgingly agreed to join them only because the lieutenant commander had asked all three of them if he could show them something in the gym.
Kara had thought that Nolan was going to dazzle them with how much weight he could press or provide a new regimen that could shave pounds from Hail’s waistline. Renner really didn’t care what Nolan had to show them if it wasn’t too strenuous.
All three stood in line on the thick matted floor facing Nolan. Nolan was standing in front of them with his arms dangling loosely at his sides.
The lieutenant commander said, “I know you guys are wondering what I want to show you, but I first wanted to tell you that you really need to get the kids on this ship to start exercising. I know that you spend a lot of time showing them how to fly, and they work after school in the wonderful shopping mall you guys built on board, but they aren’t getting much exercise.
“We have all sorts of stuff for them to do,” Hail said defensively. “We have a basketball court, tennis court, a small soccer court, a running track, this weight room and—”
Nolan interrupted, “I know, but do any of the kids use any of those things?”
Hail didn’t respond.
“But what I want to show you is cool. I think a lot of your kids will think its da-bomb.”
“OK,” Hail said.
“I want both you and Kara to attack me,” Nolan instructed them.
“What?” Kara asked, not sure she heard Nolan correctly.
“I want both of you to attack me at the same time,” Nolan repeated. “You know - rush me and take me down.”
Hail looked at Kara, and she just shrugged back at him.
Hail Warning Page 19