by Dan Mayland
No, not nothing. An image of a needle flashed across his mind—they’d slid it into his arm—and then an enormous stainless-steel needle, this one plunged into his chest. What in God’s name had that been?
Control your breathing. Don’t show anger.
Breathing, thought Mark a moment later. He was breathing easily.
And he didn’t feel drugged up any more. He focused his thoughts on his chest. There was pain there, pressure, but it was bearable. In the left side, he felt something foreign, pressing against his shirt. He sensed tape on his arms. Holding an IV line in place?
Think.
Broken ribs, jumping out of the van driven by Orkhan, slamming into that rock on the side of the road. He’d been having trouble breathing, he’d spit up blood.
But he could breathe now, which suggested the needle in his chest—now that he thought about it, he realized it was right about where his left lung should be—might have been there to help him. To drain away blood so that he could breathe again?
Which would mean the Russians had saved him. But why? It certainly hadn’t been an act of mercy.
So that Titov could continue to interrogate him, of course.
In his mind, Mark tried to study the scene he’d glimpsed when opening his eyes. He’d focused on the Russian, but what else had he seen? He recognized the décor of the room they were in. It was…institutional, like…
The Tabriz Hotel. That’s where he was. He recognized the slate-gray carpet and the heavy ivory-colored window shades and the black lacquer table and the floral-patterned bedcover. There was more, though. He was seated, but not in a normal chair; he’d glimpsed footrests—he studied the mental image in his head—and a bit of a wheel by his foot.
A wheelchair. That was how they’d gotten him into the hotel, they’d just wheeled him through the front door. An invalid taking a nap.
So he was in a wheelchair, at the Tabriz Hotel, the Russians had treated his punctured lung, and he was being guarded by one of Titov’s men. Mark wasn’t sure of his strength—he wanted to try flexing his arms, or stretching his legs, to give himself a better sense of his physical condition, but he didn’t want the guard to know he was conscious.
A blanket had been draped over his lap and forearms. He risked briefly tightening the muscles on his arms and concluded that, while some of the tape he felt against his skin may have been there to hold in place IV lines, it was primarily there to secure his arms to the armrests.
61
Above Nakhchivan
Daria felt another flutter of nerves in her gut. She couldn’t take her eyes off the live video feed. It was playing on a military-grade tablet computer that an Army Ranger had hung on the seat back of a civilian Airbus jet, a jet she’d boarded in Bishkek a few hours earlier. Up until now she’d been trying to convince herself that this was all just a big bluff, that the Russians would never be so bold as to take real military action, that they’d just use the threat of occupying Nakhchivan as a means of extracting some concessions from the Azeris.
But this, this was no bluff. The tanks were coming, and they were coming fast.
She’d agreed to serve as a liaison between the Azeri ground forces and an undercover team of US special forces provided that, if all went well when it came to stopping the Russians, they’d then be tasked with helping her to locate Mark.
The quid-pro-quo arrangement hadn’t sounded reasonable at the time, and it felt even less so now. It still hurt to pee, and her breasts were leaky. She was glad she’d bought a decent pump before the birth; at least she’d been able to leave her friend Nazira—the only woman Daria would have considered asking for help—some breast milk to feed Lila. But she’d only been able to pump enough to last for maybe twelve hours, and she worried that Lila wouldn’t take to the formula Nazira would have to use after that.
The last of no less than fifty latest-model T-90 tanks had left the gates of the Russian army base in Armenia a minute ago and were now hurtling south toward Nakhchivan at nearly forty miles per hour, chewing up the asphalt roads and sideswiping parked cars. The tanks were being followed by mine-clearing vehicles, armored cars, transport trucks, a satellite and cell phone jamming station, and tracked vehicles mounted with sophisticated Buk surface-to-air missile systems. A batwing RQ-180 stealth drone that had flown across Turkey from the US air base in Incirlik was now circling high above Nakhchivan, relaying it all via an encrypted satellite feed.
“What’s their distance to the border?” Daria asked.
“Call it seventy clicks,” said one of the Rangers. “At the speed they’re going, they should be there in a little over an hour.”
Daria calculated in her head. Say they landed as planned in ten minutes. Five minutes to meet with their Azeri counterparts at the airport and transfer themselves and their gear into whatever vehicle was provided.
As though reading her mind, Decker, who was sitting next to her on the plane, wearing a tactical chest rig over an armored vest, scratched his head with both hands and said, “Even driving fast we’re talking, say, forty-five minutes to get from the airport to the assembly point at the border…but they won’t need us unless things get so screwed up that the drone operators can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys. And that won’t happen right away. So we should make it in time. Barely.”
Daria nodded. They’d gone over this. Before seeing the Russian tanks, though, it had all seemed so theoretical. Even signing the boilerplate legal forms that designated her adoptive parents as Lila’s guardians should something go wrong—maybe it would be better for Lila to be raised in Virginia, in a nice home—even that hadn’t made it seem real. Nor had dropping off Lila with Nazira, although that certainly had been one of the hardest things Daria had ever had to do in her life. It had felt unnatural, and wrong. Almost as unnatural and wrong as it would have felt doing nothing to try to help Mark. But it hadn’t made her experience the kind of fear she felt now, watching the tanks advance.
Fear and disgust. This game that the Russians were playing; it was so pointless. People would die, likely on both sides, and for what? Because old men in Moscow wanted something they weren’t entitled to have, and old men in Washington, DC and Baku were willing to sacrifice the lives of others to prevent them from getting it?
Knowing that the entire American ground presence would consist of just three Rangers acting as spotters for air support, her as the translator, and Decker as her bodyguard and a backup spotter in case one of the Rangers went down, didn’t make her feel any better.
“If things go to hell, medevac is all on the Azeris,” Decker had said when they’d boarded the plane back at Manas Air Base north of Bishkek. “Point being, don’t get hurt.”
A light footprint, so that the United States could deny they’d even been there, that was the idea. Just enough to get the job done and no more. Then the Azeris could take credit for having mounted a surprisingly robust defense.
The Rangers—who’d just downed multiple cans of Red Bull and, in the case of at least one, Adderall—were unplugging battery chargers that they’d set up in the back of the plane. They wore camouflage fatigues with no identifying marks on them. Decker was inspecting a scuffed-up pair of four-tube night-vision goggles.
“We’re all charged up,” said one of the Rangers as he handed a bunch of batteries to Decker.
“Thanks, buddy.” Decker inserted one battery into his night-vision goggles and then another into his SOFLAM—a Special Operations Forces Laser Rangefinder Designator—which was about the size and shape of a small slide projector and could be used to guide smart bombs to targets.
“Give me your goggles,” Decker said to Daria.
She handed them over, and Decker slotted in the battery.
“Thanks.”
“I’ll be carrying a couple spare batteries if you need them.” Decker tapped an ammo pouch on the combat vest he was wearing. “Which you won’t, but just in case. How’s the vest?”
Decker had given her an armored ve
st, which she was wearing over her black sweatshirt. In retrospect she wished she’d just worn one of her old T-shirts. “Hot. And too big.”
Decker nodded. “It was the smallest they had.”
“It’ll do. Better than too small.”
“These grid maps suck,” said one of the Rangers, looking at his tablet computer.
“Best they could do on the fly,” said Decker. “I don’t think anyone anticipated we’d be paying a visit to this shithole.”
62
Mark bit down hard on his tongue, intentionally severing the side of it, then coughed. He opened his eyes slowly, coughed again, and looked around, as though confused. “What…?”
The Russian agent, who was wearing what looked like a small Bluetooth headset, raised his pistol, pointed it at Mark’s head, and said, “He wakes.”
“Help,” said Mark, speaking Russian. “I need…” His voice trailed off.
“What is it you need?”
“Where am I?”
The Russian sighed. “Just be quiet.”
Mark coughed again. “Water.”
“No.”
“I can’t…”
“You can be quiet. Everybody can be quiet.”
On the table to the right of the Russian lay a pack of cigarettes and an old-style Zippo lighter. Using one hand, the Russian tapped out a cigarette, stuck it between his lips, and lit it with the Zippo.
The blood flowing out of the cut in Mark’s tongue was pooling in his mouth, mixing with saliva.
“I can’t…breathe.” Mark spoke in a pained whisper. “Oh, God…” Mark coughed again, and this time spit up blood, which rolled down his chin and dripped onto the bright-orange fleece blanket that covered his lap and forearms.
The Russian let loose a string of expletives.
Mark began to make croaking noises, as though he could barely get air into his lungs. Then he spit up more blood and coughed again, trying to make it sound like he was choking on his own blood, or vomit.
The Russian relayed what was happening into his Bluetooth, then said, “How should I know? Am I a doctor?”
“I’m drowning,” said Mark.
Ignoring Mark and speaking instead into his headset, the Russian said, “All I know is what I have told you.” Then, “OK, OK. Two minutes.”
Mark rolled his eyes back into his head and kept up the labored breathing.
The Russian stood, Grach pistol in hand. “OK, sick man. We are going on a little trip.”
Upon being wheeled out of the room, Mark learned two things: the first was that he was on the twelfth floor of the Tabriz, and the second, from the speedy and surreptitious manner in which he was transferred to the elevator, was that the Russians didn’t fully control the twelfth floor.
The same could not be said, however, for the top floor.
When the elevator doors opened, arranged in front of a waist-high decorative garbage bin-cum-sand-filled ashtray were four corpses, piled atop one another. The armed Russian who stood near the bodies spoke into his radio headset. “They’ve arrived.” A pause, then, “Yes, sir.” To the Russian who was wheeling Mark around, “Follow me.”
In an alcove attached to the main restaurant, a black baby grand piano, a lonely little fish tank, and several circular tables had been pushed aside to make room for a large rectangular table that had been placed in the center of the red marble floor. General Dmitry Titov sat at the table amidst a jumble of communication equipment: two army-green radio stations, several tactical headset systems, smaller commercial headsets, a satellite phone, two laptop computers, and a tangle of extension cords and assorted wires.
An AKS-74 rifle, equipped with a thermal night-vision sight, also lay on the table. Titov put his hand on the grip.
Mark coughed up more blood and wheezed.
“How long has he been like this?” asked Titov.
“Since he woke up.”
“Open his shirt.”
Mark didn’t resist as the Russian agent who’d been wheeling him around stripped the blanket off his lap and then ripped open his shirt.
63
Titov sighed.
The elderly medic who had performed the operation on Sava was in the field, supporting the Vympel commandos who were operating near the northern border. Though Titov and the agents he had with him at the Tabriz were all trained in first aid, this situation with Sava’s lung was beyond their ability to address.
The American really was a mess. And that flexible plastic tube sticking out of the side of his chest was just repulsive. At this point it might be a kindness to kill him, thought Titov, but he’d delayed doing so for a reason.
“Can you talk, Sava?” Titov spoke loudly, as though addressing someone with a hearing problem.
Sava didn’t answer.
“Maybe he should be lying down,” said Titov. “Maybe the tube is getting crimped.”
“You want me put him on the ground?”
“Do it. But give me your weapon, just in case.”
The Russian operative handed his Grach, grip first, to Titov, then pulled out a long double-bladed combat knife from an ankle holster. He pressed the tip into Sava’s throat. “You try to fight, I cut. Understand?”
Sava took a few quick, shallow breaths, as if trying to get the air he needed to respond. “Understand.”
The agent cut the surgical tape away from both of Sava’s forearms, hoisted him out of the wheelchair, then laid him on the red marble floor. Sava rolled to his good side and lapsed into a coughing fit. Blood dribbled out of his mouth.
“Leave us,” said Titov to his man. “Help Sergei with guard duty.” When they were alone, Titov pulled Sava’s leather satchel off the communications table. He flipped open the top flap and removed the painting of Katerina.
Standing over Sava, holding his pistol in one hand and the painting in the other, Titov said in English, “You had collapsed lung. Broken ribs, other things. Very big problems. We operate to relieve pressure, lung is better—very good doctor, I work with him in Chechnya for very long time, he heals my shoulder once when I am shot.”
“I need him…now.”
“Not possible. You can breathe better now, no?”
Sava pushed himself up, so that he was on his hands and knees.
“Stay down.”
“This position…it’s better, there’s not so much pressure.” Sava spit out more blood, then glanced down his shirt. “What the hell was that needle you stuck in my chest…and what is… what is that plastic tube with the rubber thing stuck to it…doing there now?”
Titov watched Sava warily.
“Needle was to let air out, and create path for plastic tube. Once plastic tube goes in chest, needle comes out. Rubber tip from glove at end of plastic tube makes air not go back in.” Switching back to Russian, Titov said, “I wish to speak about the painting.” He walked around to the front of Sava, and let the painting fall to the floor near Sava’s face. “You saw her and this painting after you escaped.”
“I was in the desert after I escaped…I saw nothing, I passed out and then your men caught me.”
“Not today, idiot! In 1991. After you escaped from me in Tbilisi with the help of your criminal friend Bowlan. You must have seen this painting then. Otherwise, you would not have recognized it three days ago. And I think I know why you are lying to me about it now. But I want to hear it from you.” Titov waited a moment, then added, “I tried to help you with this injury to your lung, Sava, but it was only a temporary measure. You are going to die here. If not from your wounds, then…” Titov tapped his Grach pistol against his thigh. “I think you understand what I mean. As we Russians say, life is not a walk across a meadow.” Speaking those words caused Titov to think of his mother. She’d buried two husbands and a daughter before she’d died of heartache and cancer. It was hard to complain about his own lot in life, or to feel pity for Sava, when he thought about all the pain she’d borne. “It is time for the truth.” Titov stared at Sava, waiting for the Americ
an to respond. When he didn’t, Titov asked, “Are you dying now?”
“No. Thinking. Trying to remember.”
“Remembering what?”
“That phrase, life is not a walk across a meadow. I’ve heard it before.”
Titov wondered whether Sava was losing his grip on reality. “It was a line in a poem from Doctor Zhivago. That is why you know it. The truth, Sava.”
“Did you know Katerina and I used to visit the botanical gardens?”
“What botanical gardens?”
“In Tbilisi. We went there the last night we were together, just before your men kidnapped me. But we’d been going there for weeks before that. There was one day, it was early spring, if you’d been there you would understand.”
64
Tbilisi, Georgia
May 1991, seven months before the dissolution of the Soviet Union
Marko and Katerina had stationed themselves near the center of the preserve, next to a stand of bamboo that was ringed by English ivy. All the redbud trees, which had been bright pink the month before, were now fully leafed out. Songbirds were calling out from their high perches up in the cedars. Katerina was seated on a small folding camp chair, in front of an easel and canvas, painting a brilliant red poppy flower. The reflecting pool beyond her was covered with lily pads and formed the backdrop to her painting.
Marko sat cross-legged on a blanket beside her, reading and smoking.
After a half hour of silence, he put down his book and, in Russian, asked, “What do you think about Ioseliani?”
The book he’d been reading—or at least trying to read, it was in Georgian and he was having difficulty with the language—was about the Mongol invasion of Georgia in the 13th century. But he couldn’t focus on the distant past when so much was going on right now. Jaba Ioseliani was a modern-day criminal-turned-paramilitary who was, at present, advocating for Georgian independence from the Soviet Union.