First Team ft-1

by Larry Bond

  Special Demands was essentially a client to the analytic side of the Agency, which could supply a variety of intelligence reports, processed or unprocessed. The staffer who had worked to coordinate the reports — and had the more difficult job of assessing them — had gone on maternity leave two weeks before, and had not yet been replaced.

  “You’ve been moaning about this for days, Corrigan. Get somebody.”

  “Easy for you to say. Just finding a warm body that has something approaching the background and clearances—”

  “Man, you’re a whiner.” Ferg glanced at his watch. “We’ll look at them all.”

  Having lost their source in Kyrgyzstan, they were back to grunt work — looking at all of the places where something might have been taken from the containment cars. It seemed logical that it had happened at a siding, and there were twelve between the last sensor and the border. The Team had extremely sensitive radiation meters — detectors based on gallium-arsenic chips that were as sensitive as gas-tube Geiger counters but fit in the palm of the hand — that would detect trace radioactivity. Unfortunately, this was likely to find something only if the material had been handled or some stray waste had attached to the train and been deposited accidentally.

  “So tell me who Sergiv Kruknokov is,” Ferguson said, sliding around in the seat. “You’ve had enough time to write the guy’s biography.”

  “I keep telling you, I need someone to handle real-time intelligence. I literally got this as your call came through.”

  “Whine, whine, whine,” Ferguson told him. “You have it or not?”

  “Yes.”

  “So?”

  Conners gave him a thumbs-up from the side; the others had finally come in. Ferg waved to him, and Conners left to make sure the others had no problem getting settled.

  “Antiterrorism division of the Federal Security Bureau. High-level guy,” said Corrigan, who was scanning a paper report.

  “I didn’t think he handled shoplifting.”

  “Yeah, well, listen to this. He was involved in a case in 1996 involving a plot to explode a dirty bomb in Moscow.”

  “Whoa, no shit. Give me the details.”

  “Chechens wanted to blow up a dirty bomb in Moscow. They broke it before the bomb went off.”

  “Dirty bomb. What kind of waste?”

  “Um, that was cesium, I think. Medical stuff. Nowhere near as dangerous as spent uranium or the control rods you’re after.”

  “Nasty stuff though?”

  “You saw the science reports — depends who you’re talking to. You have enough of it, and it’s a problem.”

  Ferguson sat back, thinking about what they had: a discrepancy in a waste shipment, a Russian investigator with expertise in dirty-bomb investigations, a question about someone named Kiro who apparently operated in Chechnya, and an attempt to explode a dirty bomb nearly a decade before in Moscow. Shit.

  “Was this ‘Kiro’ involved?”

  “We haven’t ID’d Kiro yet. All the known conspirators are dead or in jail.”

  “Those spurs connect to Chechnya?” Ferguson asked Corrigan.

  “Uh, hold on, let me get the map up. Remember, Ferg, the satellites showed all the cars made it. Hell, if they had a car missing, that would have set off all sorts of alarms. This may all be a wild-goose chase.”

  A waiter poked his head out from the doorway. Ferguson pointed to the bottle of water and asked for another, just to get rid of him.

  “Ferg? You with me?”

  “Just a distraction,” Ferguson said.

  “You could get there by train, but it’s awful convoluted and far.”

  “Truck?”

  “Sure. Same thing.”

  “Where’s Sergiv been lately?”

  “The Russian?”

  “No, my brother-in-law.”

  “Don’t have a good line on it.”

  “Find out. Because if it’s in Chechnya, that’s where I’m going next. And run down Kiro, okay?”

  “I’ve been trying. Listen, Ferg, that’s not as easy as you think. If Nancy were still here—”

  Ferguson smiled as Corrigan gave him his usual song of woe. Any second now it would segue into the terrible time he had had in Egypt during the Gulf War — Corrigan had been in PsyOp as part of USSOCOM during the conflict. His main claim to fame before coming to work for the Company had been placing anti-Saddam dialogue in Egyptian soap operas.

  “Yeah, well listen, dude, I have to get rolling here,” said Ferg, cutting the performance short. “And listen, tell VB I may need an equipment drop.”

  “Where?”

  “Well let’s think this through, Corrigan. I just asked you to track down where a Russian FSB agent was in Chechnya, and to get information on a guy we think is a Chechen. Now do you think it’s possible that I might be going in that direction?”

  “Yeah, OK. I get it now.”

  Ferg clicked off the phone and sipped his water, waiting for the second bottle to arrive. He signed the bill, finished his glass, then took both bottles up with him to the room. The others had already gathered inside.

  “Skip, Guns — how was the trip?”

  “Brutal,” said Rankin. “Fuckin’ Marines drive like they screw — all over the place.”

  “Sounds like a compliment to me,” said Conners.

  Guns shrugged. “We got some stares, but as far as I could tell, nobody tagged along.”

  Ferguson pulled out the laptop from beneath the bed and powered it up. Turning it on after leaving it alone a few hours was always an adventure — if someone had fiddled with it, the machine was hardwired to eat the hard drive. The bright double beep indicated it was all right; Ferguson entered his passwords and opened the file with the area map.

  “There were twelve spurs where the train could have pulled off the main line after the last measurement, before it got down to Kadagac.”

  “That’s it?” said Rankin. He wasn’t being sarcastic; he imagined that there would be many more sidings in the fifty-mile-or-so stretch.

  “Yup,” said Ferguson.

  “You sure it happened on a siding?” asked Guns.

  “At this point, I’m not sure of anything,” said Ferg. “Corrigan got some NSA geeks into the computer system that our murder victim used in Kyrgyzstan, but they didn’t find anything except a lot of URLs for porn sites.”

  “My kind of guy,” said Conners.

  “So maybe he knew something and maybe he didn’t. We’re watching the investigation and trying to play connect the dots. In the meantime, we do a little slug work and run the meters around in case they got sloppy.”

  Ferguson clicked two keys on the laptop, and a satellite image filtered in.

  “It stopped along this siding for the night. Guards front and back. You could get a truck right here,” Ferg said, pointing.

  “So let’s say we get some hits on the counters,” said Rankin. “What then?”

  “Then we follow those hits,” said Ferg.

  “And if we get nothing?” asked Guns.

  “Then we go to Chechnya.”

  “Chechnya?” said Rankin. “Fuck.”

  “Probably not. They’re pretty religious there.”

  8

  IRKTAN, CENTRAL CHECHNYA — THREE DAYS LATER

  As they’d expected, they found no particularly interesting radiation hot spots at any of the spurs, although there were slightly higher than normal background hits at three sites. None of the buildings near the railroad sidings were housing waste-processing operations. If alpha- and high-gamma-level waste had been handled at any of the spots, it had been done expertly.

  But back home, Corrigan had discovered that the FSB was working with Kyrgyzstan police on Sheremetev’s murder, looking for a pair of Chechens described as extremists, though the bulletin describing them made them sound more like killers for hire. Even more interestingly, Corrigan had tracked Sergiv Kraknokov’s movements. They had arrested a man in Chechnya who had visited a prisoner in a high-se
curity prison outside the capital. Not just any prisoner: one of the men who had been involved in the plot to explode the radiation bomb in Moscow more than a decade before.

  The Russians thought that the visitor was acting on behalf of a guerrilla leader they called “Kiro.” Corrigan was still tracking down Kiro’s identity — it wasn’t clear whether the name was merely a pseudonym for someone else, a mistaken identity, or the nom de guerre of a heretofore unknown troublemaker. He did not appear to be one of the major leaders of the separatist movement. Over the past few years, radicals of all stripes and allegiances had moved into the Chechen hills, using the lawless territory for various purposes. Tracking them was a difficult task, even for the Russians, who had more than a hundred men assigned to the job.

  This one was clearly worth finding. The Russians had clearly not put everything together yet, but the fact that they were nosing around told Ferg they were worried, very worried.

  The ability to go where his gut told him to go was one of the most important aspects of the Special Demands setup, but even Ferguson knew driving into Chechnya without hard evidence of a link to the waste he was looking for was unlikely to yield results. Team missions weren’t always this open-ended; the idea of having so much firepower at his fingertips was to find a good place to use it. But he didn’t hand out the assignments, Slott did. His job was to play them out as far as they would go.

  And so the Team had driven to central Chechnya, passing through miles and miles of burned farmland and bulldozed villages, arriving at a town called Irktan south of Urus-Martan. Irktan was located in the center of Chechnya, just at the foothills of the rugged southern mountains. At present, it was not particularly close to the front lines of the conflict, which was concentrated farther west. Russian troops patrolled the streets, but things were relaxed by Chechen standards; there were armored vehicles but no tanks manning the checkpoints into town. Ferguson sent Conners and Guns in to nose around while he and Rankin looked for a place to set up shop. Rankin for once didn’t bitch — he tended to be happier, or at least less cranky, when he had the more dangerous job.

  * * *

  Two Russian soldiers flagged Guns and Conners down as they were entering town. Guns translated the nearly five minutes’ worth of conversation into a single sentence: “We better get guns if we plan on staying.”

  Their papers said they were part of a Mormon charity group running a clinic at the far end of town. The soldiers knew all about the clinic and pointed out the building, a red-roofed one-story at the end of the main street. The walls had last been painted white; the outer coat was chipped away in a dozen places, each revealing a different shade. Two Russian soldiers with a dog were standing outside the clinic, eying them warily as they drove by.

  “Explosives dog,” Conners said.

  “Yeah.”

  They drove along to the end of the block, then turned left. The buildings abruptly disappeared; on both sides the lots were covered with rubble that seemed to run all the way back to the mountains in the distance. They got out and grabbed two suitcases packed with medicine, along with smaller bags. Conners holstered the Makarova in plain view — a fifty-ruble note would take care of the “fine” assessed to foreigners who broke the law against possessing weapons.

  Assuming the guards weren’t in a bad mood.

  They didn’t seem to be, and in fact didn’t mention the pistol. The dog sniffed them and stood back, waiting while the soldiers looked through the bag of medicines; they took a bottle of Tylenol but nothing else.

  Cleared inside, they found Sister Mariah Baxter, the director of the clinic. She pulled a stray strand of her long black hair back behind her ears as she inspected their gifts, eying the wares suspiciously but taking them nonetheless. A forty-year-old missionary from Utah, Sister Baxter knew how the game was played; she called over one of the nurses and told her to take the two men to Mr. T, who served as the clinic’s unofficial security officer.

  Conners was surprised to find that Mr. T was barely twenty and skinnier than a rake handle. The Chechen nodded when Guns told him they needed information.

  “We want to find out about a man named Kiro, who operates around here,” Guns told him in Russian.

  Mr. T shook his head and clamped his teeth tightly together, his face flushing as Guns switched to Chechen and tried cajoling him with the few words he knew well. Conners took a step backward, his gaze drifting through the door back out into the large open room of the clinic. Half the room was a waiting area; the rest looked like triage stations where nurses tried to determine what was wrong with the patients. There were some slings for broken arms and bandages that might cover deep flesh wounds, but for the most part the people had less-visible ailments, probably a lot of the same stuff that people went to the doctor for in New Jersey — headaches and viruses and walking pneumonia, pregnancies, ear infections, coughs that wouldn’t go away. The difference was that here, with sanitary conditions for shit, food scarce, and medicine difficult to obtain, even a cold might be fatal.

  Guns, meanwhile, fumbled with the words as he tried to get information from Mr. T. He had listened to Chechen language files for the past two days on the MP3 player, refreshing his memory, but it was difficult to get into the rhythm of the language. Mr. T wasn’t helping either, though obviously he knew who Kiro was.

  “Think I should pound him?” he finally asked Conners.

  The question caught Conners by surprise. “What good’s that going to do?”

  “Scare him so he’ll talk.”

  “He’s already pissing his pants,” said Connors. “If Kiro is that scary, odds are Sister Baxter knows who he is.”

  Mr. T started to move past Guns to leave the room. Instinctively, the Marine threw his hand out to bar his way. The Chechen glared, but moved back and sat down.

  “Don’t hit him until I come back,” said Conners.

  He found Sister Baxter cleaning a scabbed knee on a nine-year-old girl. Conners watched her fingers daub the wound. They were a man’s hands, rough and worn, too big for the slender body they belonged to. Sister Baxter’s long hair was tied back with a piece of household string. She wore plain black pants and a blue denim shirt, and Connors realized as he approached that she was pretty despite her age, or maybe because of it. He didn’t understand the kind of religious devotion that would lead a woman here, though as a young boy going to Catholic school he had seen enough of it. Back home his grandmother and her friends still went to church every weekday at 6:00 A.M., sitting in the front pews and mumbling the rosary, repenting sins they only dimly recalled.

  Sister Baxter straightened, smiled at him, then picked up a roll of gauze bandage. “She was playing in a field with barbed wire. It could have been a mine. Maybe next time.”

  Connors wasn’t sure how he was supposed to react to that — her tone implied that he had put the barbed wire there himself, and maybe even planted the mine.

  “What do you want?” she said, cutting the wrap after several winds. Her fingers moved gently despite their size, and though the girl looked at her apprehensively, she seemed calm.

  “We have to talk to a certain man. A rebel.”

  Sister Baxter’s lip curled in a way that suggested a sarcastic smile, yet Conners saw there was something else there, too.

  Fatigue? Weariness? Sorrow?

  “Mr. T is not being particularly helpful, and it’s important,” said Conners. “I don’t want to hurt him. Or anyone else.”

  “Are you threatening us?”

  “The opposite. The man we’re looking for is going to hurt a lot more kids like her,” he said, thumbing toward the little girl.

  In another place, under other circumstances, Sister Baxter’s eyes as she looked into his would have made him fall in love. Even here they made him reluctant to continue, as if a simple question might hurt her somehow.

  “The man’s name is Kiro,” said Conners.

  The sarcastic smile again. “Why don’t you ask the Russians where he is?” she sai
d.

  “If I thought they would help me, I would.”

  She got up and gestured to the row of people sitting in the chairs, adding something in what Conners thought was Chechen. One of the women came forward, talking excitedly. The two women conversed for a while; they seemed to be arguing.

  “She thinks you’re a doctor,” explained Sister Baxter finally.

  “I, uh, well, I have some medic training,” said Conners. Some was correct.

  “Yes, well, how are you at gynecology?”

  Conners could feel his face starting to burn.

  “I need to do a pap smear,” said Sister Baxter. “Her symptoms sound like cervical cancer. But she wants a doctor, not a nurse. I’ll do the real work, but I’ll tell her you’re the doctor.”

  “OK,” said Conners.

  “I’ll get the speculum.”

  Conners watched her move across the room as the patient began talking to him nonstop. He nodded and smiled in a way he hoped suggested he had been to medical school.

  “We’re going to do this here?” he asked, when Sister Baxter returned and rolled out a fresh rug.

  “You have a better place?”

  “Don’t you have an examining room?”

  “This is it. The other two rooms we have are filled with patients. One is for people who are missing limbs. The other is for operations.”

  Connors nodded. Sister Baxter, meanwhile, had the patient lie down.

  “Don’t be shy,” she told him.

  He got down on his knees and took the instrument. But that was just for show — as he smiled as reassuringly as possible for the patient, Sister Baxter took the actual sample.

  “You did all right for an American,” she told him after she had logged the information on the sample and told the woman when to return.

  “Thanks.”

  “Kiro has a small group outside of the town,” she told him.

  “Near here?”

  “Near enough.”

  “Why don’t the Russians attack him?”

  “There is the philosophy of live and let live,” she said. “And there is also the fact that this is a very poor place for a commander to be posted.”