Scorpion: A Covert Ops Novel (Second Edition)

by Ross Sidor

  The next time Avery’s and Poacher’s paths crossed, in Iraq two years later, Avery was with Special Activities Division and Dalton was a private contractor with Blackwater. With a wife back home and two teenagers who needed to be put through college, Poacher had accepted Blackwater’s lucrative contract. But after spending two years in Iraq as a hired gun and going through a divorce, he’d decided he wanted to be something more than just a mercenary and went to work for CIA.

  Avery already knew Flounder and Reaper, too.

  The name Reaper came from the fact that Ted Collins had originally gone to school to become a mortician, but he’d dropped out at the age of twenty to enlist in the navy. Two years later, he completed Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL School and was assigned to SEAL Team Four, tasked with Central and South America. Four years later, he passed selection and was accepted into the navy’s Special Warfare Development Group, or DEVGRU, the navy’s counter-terrorist unit. From there, he hunted Serbian war criminals in the Balkans and saw action in Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2008, when an RPG took down his Chinook in Afghanistan’s Kunar Province, he suffered severe wounds to his leg and back and was invalidated out of the navy. After a year of physical therapy, he completed training at the Farm and became a case officer before joining SAD. He still moved with a slight limp to his gait, but it hadn’t slowed down his run times or his performance at Harvey Point’s Kill House.

  Physically, Flounder was the most distinctive member of the team and always stood out. He was short and squat, with the thick, muscled body of a power lifter. A shaved, bullet-shaped head sat on his wide shoulders. He didn’t look like a SEAL. SEALs tended to have the lean physics of competitive swimmers or runners. He came from Team Three, the SEAL unit tasked with the Middle East. After leaving the navy, he joined the Los Angeles Police Department’s Metro Division, before being recruited by the Special Activities Division when the Agency needed experienced Middle East operators to stick in Libya during ODYSSEY DAWN.

  The only unfamiliar face to Avery was a former air force combat controller who Poacher introduced as Larry Rollins, aka Mockingbird, or M-bird for short. M-bird came to the Agency from USAF’s 24th Special Tactics Squadron. He did tours with Task Force 145, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) unit that hunted high value targets in Iraq. His role included directing and coordinating helicopter operations and air support for the assault teams on the ground. The handle Mockingbird was bestowed upon him as a result of friendly inter-service rivalry and the fact that his counterparts in Delta and the SEALs thought it a joke that the “air farce” fielded its own special operations troops. Although being one of the only airmen on the task force invariably made him the subject of jokes, the other Task Force 145 operators valued his contributions and treated him as an equal. Given his skin color, CIA naturally used him for assignments in Africa, including stints in Nigeria, Mali, and Somalia.

  The team had just returned from southern Turkey, where they’d equipped and trained the Free Syrian Army rebels with optically-tracked TOW anti-tank rockets. Rumor at the Point had it that Poacher and the guys slipped across the border to give the rebels a live-fire demonstration against a Syrian armored convoy.

  Avery and Poacher discussed business and brought each other up-to-date. Sideshow’s orders were to remain in place, on standby, in the event that actionable intelligence developed on Cramer’s location. Or as Poacher cynically described it, sit on their asses until Cramer’s body was found, and then slip back into Afghanistan and fly back home.

  Avery recounted his conversation with Gerald and explained his next moves for the night. Then he shaved his two-week old beard and changed into jeans and a black t-shirt. Colonel Ghazan had only gotten a good look at him with his facial hair and sunglasses.

  Avery used FalconView to find the locations where he was to meet SCINIPH and Dagar Nabiyev, because the CIA street maps Gerald provided dated back to the 1950s.

  He also searched Google News. Associated Press ran a story about a murdered American tourist but did not identify the victim. Regional newspapers and Russia’s Interfax went with the story, too, but not in any significant detail, and neither Wilkes nor Cramer was named. It didn’t look like CNN, FOX, or any of the other American corporate news-as-entertainment services even mentioned it, which wasn’t surprising. Everyone was more interested in the latest congressional sex scandal, missing blond teenager, and the pop singer arrested for cocaine possession, and most Americans had no idea Tajikistan even existed.

  At nine, Avery took Sideshow’s Lada to his appointment with CK/SCINIPH.

  SEVEN

  Dushanbe

  Like a good case officer, Avery arrived early at Cinema Jami on Gorky Street to conduct basic area familiarization, to scope out the meet site, to assess the surrounding area and security risks.

  Twenty-five minutes before the movie started, he purchased his ticket. As instructed by SCINIPH, he took the third seat left of the center aisle in the last row in the darkened, musty-smelling, run down theater. Three families and two couples had already taken their seats. He left his cap on, the recognition signal for SCINIPH.

  Throughout the week, Darren had been trying to setup a meet with SCINIPH. The Russian agent had already ditched him two days earlier. An agent always got nervous when he was turned over to a new handler he’d never met before. Since SCINIPH didn’t know Darren, Avery arranged with Gerald to go in Darren’s place.

  The movie started. It was a Bollywood film, not Avery’s first choice, but that didn’t matter. He looked straight ahead at the screen, but his attention was concentrated on his right peripheral, through which he monitored the aisle and the people still coming in through the set of double doors seven feet away. He didn’t know what SCINIPH looked like, and it was now too dark to make out any visually distinguishing features anyway.

  SCINIPH was in total control here. He’d picked the time and location of the meet, set the rules, and would be the one to make contact. The fact that he was the last person to have seen Cramer and was therefore possibly complicit in his abduction wasn’t lost on Avery. Either way, even if he wasn’t involved, SCINIPH would have still seen the IMU video with Cramer by now—there was no way he’d miss it since Russian intelligence would be very interested in this matter— and he’d be on edge, wondering if he’d been outed by Cramer under torture.

  Avery carried his Glock 17 with a spare magazine in a BDS Tactical Gear holster beneath his Columbia windbreaker, which he kept zippered just less than halfway. The windbreaker was baggy and loose enough to conceal the Glock and not reveal any unnatural bulges. The evening temperature outside had dropped to the low seventies, with a cool breeze, so the lightweight jacket wouldn’t look out of place.

  Twenty minutes into the movie, while the audience laughed, Avery heard the first set of double doors, those going into the vestibule, then the second leading into the theater proper. Through his peripheral, he saw a smallish figure step down the aisle and drop into the seat at the end of his row. The newcomer reeked of Turkish tobacco.

  Avery continued looking ahead at the screen and didn’t turn his head. Neither did the man two seats away.

  He sat through the next fifteen minutes of the movie. He didn’t have a clue what it was about, but the Tajiks thought it was hilarious. And SCINIPH was good. Avery didn’t even see him get up to leave and didn’t know how long he was gone. He shifted his eyes periodically to the right. One second the silhouette of the man was there, and the next it wasn’t. The scent of Turkish cigarettes still lingered in the air.

  Avery turned his head and found the end seat empty. In the seat immediately next to him, there was a paper bag of popcorn that had been left behind. He grabbed the bag and palmed the note that had been left inside.

  Five minutes later, Avery quietly left the theater and examined the note. It instructed him to go to Casa Labriola where there was a reservation for him in the name of Darren. He didn’t know where this was and didn’t have the time or means to find out, so h
e hopped in the nearest cab.

  He knew SCINIPH was giving him the run around, running countersurveillance to see if he came alone. Although he couldn’t blame him under the circumstances, it raised questions in Avery’s mind because this was exactly what the handler directed his agent to do before a meet. It also indicated that SCINIPH likely had watchers along the route. But if SCINIPH was an FSB traitor spying for the Americans, then who were his backup? This was starting to feel more like a legit FSB op.

  The cab ride lasted ten minutes.

  Avery tipped the driver, exited the vehicle, and strode inside the restaurant. The hostess spoke poor English, so he just repeated the name of the reservation and was soon shown to a corner table in a back corner near the kitchen and handed a menu. He hadn’t eaten since leaving DC, and the hunger was suddenly sinking in. He opened the menu and had only enough time to realize it was an Italian restaurant before he was aware of someone approaching his table.

  The man was short but thickly built. He had a badly receding hairline trimmed close, with a stubble beard and strong Slavic features. He pulled a chair out and sat down across from Avery and placed both hands on the table, but he could easily, and likely did, have a gun beneath his half-opened leather jacket, just like Avery. SCINIPH was FSB, and Avery had no doubt that he was armed. He looked to be in his mid-thirties, too young to be a KGB hold-over, but his 201 file indicated that he’d seen plenty of action in Chechnya, the Balkans, and Georgia, ran anti-mafiya ops in the former Soviet republics, and had more than a couple kills under his belt.

  “Sciniph,” Oleg Ramzin said in thickly accented English by way of introduction.

  “Darren,” Avery replied, holding eye contact. He returned his attention to the menu and was aware of the Russian’s eyes on him. Ramzin was a pro. He’d know how to read people. “Thanks for coming. I know you’re taking a risk being here.”

  “Robert was a close friend of mine,” Ramzin said. He took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one. It was the same scented tobacco Avery smelled in the theater. “He is a good man. I am most concerned.”

  “So are we.”

  “These Uzbeks are a nasty lot. I’ve spent time in Tashkent. I have seen firsthand what they do to their enemies. They are savages, worse than animals.”

  “What do you know about what happened to Robert?” Avery decided that Ramzin, if he was on the level, could be a valuable source. Naturally, FSB would take an interest in Cramer’s abduction, and the Russians had better sources here than CIA did. The problem was Ramzin couldn’t do anything unnatural like express too much interest in the American hostage, without arousing the Russians’ suspicions.

  “You are aware of my position, yes? I have my sources, too. I work closely with Tajik security services. I heard the early reports of a missing American from the embassy and another found dead. But I didn’t know it was Robert until I saw the video they put on Internet earlier today.” He shook his head sadly. “You know, my country hunted IMU long before America invaded Afghanistan. These Uzbeks are vicious, far worse than the Arabs or the Afghans, especially this fellow Otabek Babayev. He was in GRU once, did you know that?”

  Avery didn’t. That bit of information hadn’t been in the dossier CIA had on Babayev.

  “He was a lieutenant of vozdushno desantnye voyska, airborne forces, assigned to Military Intelligence Directorate. His father was white Russian, his mother an Uzbek and a devout Muslim. In Afghanistan, his patrol searched a village after a Soviet chemical weapons attack. The commanding officer ordered Babayev’s troops to execute surviving villagers. There was a young Afghan girl there, badly burned and suffering. Babayev tried to comfort her. He held her in his arms, but her skin peeled off. He shot her through the back of her head so that she never saw the pistol. Then he executed his commanding officer and killed the two soldiers and the KGB political officer who attempted to apprehend him. He wandered into the mountains alone and joined the Afghan mujahedeen. After the war, he returned to Uzbekistan and learned that his mother was imprisoned and tortured by the Russians in reprisal for his actions. He met up with that lunatic Namangani and joined the IMU.” Ramzin shook his head again. “Babayev killed many of my friends. Now I am afraid he has another.”

  “Your country is confident that the IMU is responsible for what happened to Cramer?”

  “Da, we know IMU is responsible. This has been confirmed by our Tajik and Uzbek agents. Unfortunately, my service will not openly cooperate with you, you understand, but I will pass along anything that I hear. Do you think I may be in danger? Have you heard anything? It would create trouble for me if my people were to learn of my association with Robert.”

  So it’s your own safety you’re concerned about, Avery though, but he understood why. If the IMU posted Cramer’s interrogation, and he named agents, Oleg Ramzin could expect a long and unpleasant stay at the Lubyanka. He probably hoped that Cramer was already dead. “I’ve heard nothing to indicate that you personally may be in danger, but you know how the game’s played. If Robert is under extreme duress and drugged, it’s a possibility that you’ll be named. Hey, just be careful and smart. If we suspect you’re compromised, we’ll bring you out.”

  That seemed to placate Ramzin, though Avery realized he’d just made a promise he didn’t know if CIA would keep. It depended on how valuable he was to the Agency. He suspected the answer was not very much. The joke was that agents, except for the rare highly placed one, were like mushrooms. They were best kept in the dark and fed shit.

  “When was the last time you spoke with Robert?” Avery asked.

  “Last month. We meet once a month.”

  “You were supposed to see him this past Sunday, in Ayni.”

  “This is true.”

  “What happened?”

  “He never came. I arrived at the café, our meeting place for this month, at three that afternoon. I wait another ten minutes, and he never arrives, never contacts me. So I leave. It happens sometimes that he may not be there, but he leaves the signal, a chalk mark, so that I know. This time, there was no chalk mark, and later there was no communication from him to reschedule.”

  The gears turned in Avery’s head. Cramer left the embassy at 2:34PM. If he never made it to Ayni, then he must have been nabbed within an extremely short time-frame. According to Gerald, it was maybe a twenty minute drive to Ayni from the embassy.

  That meant Cramer allowed himself twenty-five minutes to make a twenty minute drive. That’s nowhere near sufficient time to do a proper surveillance detection run and then make it to Ayni, signal SCINIPH they were clear, and get to the designated meeting site. That was just sloppy and lazy tradecraft. That definitely wasn’t Cramer.

  Avery’s instincts also told him that SCINIPH was omitting something. Maybe not necessarily lying outright, but he was almost definitely withholding something. Avery checked his watch. He didn’t have much time left. He continued chatting with the Russian for another several minutes, then placed some money on the table to cover his dinner and left Ramzin alone in the restaurant.

  EIGHT

  Dushanbe

  An hour later, Avery discovered that Dushanbe had an active nightlife. Near the hotels there were numerous restaurants, bars, and clubs, with bright, flashy lights and loud music blaring. An assortment of local Tajiks in Muslim-style clothing, Euro-trash with popped collars and designer labels, Westerners in jeans and t-shirts, young men from the Russian and French military contingents in the country, and local prostitutes traversed the sidewalks and flowed in and out of these establishments.

  From the outside, Port Said looked like a shabby, dirty dive bar. It was a small and low white brick building with big red doors and no exterior lights. The signs outside were in Tajik Persian, and Avery only recognized the building from pictures he’d looked up on a tourist website. He paid the cover and was ushered through the door.

  Inside, the latest European techno music blasted loud enough over a poor sound system to become distorted. Young inebriated women,
most of them prostitutes, in short, tight-fitting dresses grinded their bodies against over-eager men pumping their fists in the air and reeking of cigarette smoke, beer, and heavily lathered cologne. Local Tajik men happily danced with each other. They weren’t gay; it was just how Tajiks partied. A large throng of people surrounded the bar across from the dance floor. There were tables hosting couples or groups of people eating and chatting.

  Avery pushed his way through the crowd and got to a spot off the side of the bar offering him a good vantage point. He didn’t know what Dagar Nabiyev looked like and had no means of identifying him. He’d expected Port Said to be a quiet, local bar, not a goddamned circus.

  People started eying Avery, so he ordered a Coke. He rarely consumed alcohol, never on a job and never to excess. Last time he’d been drunk, two years ago, a rare breakdown of discipline, he’d come close to blowing his brains out, and it had taken his body three days to fully recover from the extreme intake of cheap convenience store vodka. He tried hard, struggled, to not have another moment like that.

  The Coke came in a highball glass with two thin straws and packed with ice.

  With a drink in his hand, he could better blend in now. Drunken partygoers were inherently suspicious and unwelcoming of a sober person in their midst. As he took a wad of cash out of his pocket, counted out a few bills, and paid the bartender, he was aware of a pair of tough-looking Russians seated nearby watching him. He glanced their way and maintained eye contact with them until they averted their glare, letting them know he knew what was up and warning them not to fuck with him.

  Once a stool opened up, Avery sat down. He put his back to the bar and sipped his Coke and scanned the crowd. A whore approached him with a fake smile. As she came up between his legs, brushing her hands over his knees, he shook his head and sent her away before she could even verbalize her solicitation. She pouted and moved over to the Russians. One of them slapped her ass, while the other lasciviously eyed her up and down, and she giggled.