Charlie scrambled toward him, escorted by a chorus of honking horns and epithets from the Russian mobsters. Faruz hopped out of the car, shouting, “Holy shit! I never thought you come back this fucked-up place.” Before Charlie could reply, he found himself locked in a bear hug and enduring Faruz’s traditional slobbering double kiss on the cheeks.
Charlie couldn’t be bothered with pleasantries. “We need to get to the air freight terminal. Now.”
Faruz squinted curiously as Charlie got in the car, then circled around his side and returned to the driver’s seat of his old BMW. “The air freight terminal?”
“I need to see something that’s being delivered there. Seriously, I mean now.”
“Still the cowboy, huh?”
Faruz smiled, put the car in drive and navigated his way out of the terminal. He pulled a pack of Marlboros out of his leather coat, whacked them on his palm, held out a cigarette for Charlie.
“I quit,” Charlie said.
“Look at you! Cut your hair, dressing like an old man. You pretending to be a grown-up now?”
“Julie’s in trouble,” Charlie told him. “She was kidnapped in Los Angeles and taken here.” Faruz looked at him incredulously. “She’s in a shipping container arriving at the freight terminal in twelve minutes. I’ll need to get onto the tarmac.”
Faruz lit his cigarette with a gold lighter, steering the car with his knees as he monkeyed around with the pack of Marlboros. “You’re joking, right?”
“I’m dead serious.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. We gonna have to back up a little. Flesh this out, what we up against. I mean, air freight terminal is like Fort Knox.”
“Faruz—”
Faruz held up one hand. “Look, brother, I understand you got a serious situation. Believe me, we ain’t gonna just drive up, say, ‘hey let me in air freight terminal.’ Not gonna happen.”
“We’ve got to find a way.”
“Okay. Just give me a second to think.”
Charlie nodded and examined his old friend for a moment. There was a hint of a potbelly under his handmade silk shirt, and a thin line of gray had appeared in his mane of thick brown hair. But he still exhibited the youthful charm and enthusiasm that had helped him move easily between the interlocking worlds of the democratic movement, the arts, and the fuzzy edges of the underworld. Charlie had missed him more than he’d anticipated and it was a comfort to have him as his wingman.
“Okay, look,” Faruz said, “what I can do is get you up someplace you can watch incoming flights, movement on tarmac, whatever. At least we see if this container is even there. If it’s down there, we figure out what next to do, okay?” Charlie looked at him. “I’m telling you, kid, there’s no way we get in there. No way.”
Charlie realized it was the best he could hope for right now and soon they were speeding down a one-lane road beside a chain-link fence topped with razor wire.
“Let’s try this,” Faruz said, steering the BMW off the road. It bounded and bounced up a hill. At the top was a large cluster of boulders, shattered with age and covered with lichen. “Perfect. Nobody see us here.”
He stomped on the brake and the car skidded to a stop on the bone-dry grass, throwing up an immense cloud of dust.
Faruz climbed out of the car, looked around nervously and walked to the boulders. “Behold,” he said. Sprawled out in front of them was a collection of warehouses and hangars.
Charlie found a crevice in which he could survey the entire freight terminal, but his stomach twisted with disappointment. There were literally thousands of containers stacked up in long rows from one side to the other. Charlie glanced at his watch. It was 7:56.
“What time it supposed to come?” Faruz asked.
“Two minutes,” Charlie replied, pulling out his Nikon. He screwed in a powerful 500-millimeter lens and began a slow, careful scan of the facility. Faruz wasn’t kidding about the security in the freight terminal. Roving teams of three and four armed men—some of them with German shepherds—moved throughout the facility and guard towers rose from each corner of the fence.
With the magnification of his big lens, Charlie was able to barely make out numbers on the sides of the shipping containers, but there were so many he almost didn’t know where to begin.
“You know,” Faruz reminded him, “there’s no such thing as ‘ahead of schedule’ in the U-stan. If it’s supposed get here in two minutes there’s no way it’s here yet. Nothing ever come early here. Now how’s about you tell me what fuck going on with Julie.”
Charlie glanced back at his friend. “I don’t know exactly. Except that she came here to see Byko last week and somehow got herself into trouble. She was grabbed in L.A., and whoever took her is bringing her back here. That’s your next assignment: help me find Byko.”
“No way. Nobody seen that guy for months.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Byko, man! I’m talking about Byko. Speculation, the guy got in some kind of beef with Karimov. All I know, everybody’s like, hey, Byko’s gone to the mattresses.”
Charlie considered this. If Byko had gone underground months ago, then how would he have been able to meet Julie in Samarkand or Tashkent? Then again, Charlie remembered Byko’s final email to Julie: I’ll call you on your mobile and we’ll make arrangements. At first, it seemed innocent enough. Hearing what Faruz was telling him now, Charlie figured that Byko didn’t want to give away his comings and goings online. Whatever the scenario, it seemed clear that Byko had risked his own safety and come out of hiding just to meet Julie. Or perhaps Byko had sent his men to escort Julie to one of his many outposts in the Fergana Valley. Either way, Charlie was convinced more than ever that her disappearance had to be connected to him.
Charlie looked into Faruz’s dark eyes. “If anybody can find the guy, it’s you, Faruz.”
Faruz looked out thoughtfully toward the cluster of warehouses and stacks of containers below them, then whipped out his phone and began a series of conversations, carried on in a rapid mixture of Uzbek, Tajik, Russian and English. He was putting out a net for Byko.
Meanwhile, Charlie directed his camera at the distant steel structure. A small fleet of wheeled containers sat on the tarmac behind it. Unfortunately, not only was it at the farthest point from their little promontory, but his view of many of the containers was blocked by the massive warehouse.
Suddenly, Charlie saw Faruz flattening himself against the rock.
“Get down, get down!” he hissed, switching off his phone in midconversation.
As Charlie ducked behind the rock, he saw why Faruz was panicking. A Jeep Cherokee was driving slowly by on the road below. Inside were several heavily armed men. And they would not look kindly on an American journalist snooping around up here.
Charlie lay flat against the cool rock, listening to their approach. He thought that he heard them slow but then realized it was the sound of the motor receding into the distance.
Faruz rose and stared at the receding plume of dust. “Goddamnit, I hate those people,” he said. Then he began talking on the phone again—laughing, wheedling, chiding, flattering—as though nothing had happened.
Satisfied that the security patrol was gone, Charlie rose slightly and stared through his lens again. As he tried to reorient his camera, a very large multiengine turboprop taxied slowly toward the warehouse, cutting off his view.
The airplane stopped. It appeared to be some kind of military transport—its markings on the side read aerotrade in bold Cyrillic letters. After a moment, the entire tail began to rise, opening a giant maw in the rear of the plane. Down came a big steel ramp and a low, trucklike towing vehicle crawled slowly up it.
Could this be the flight she was supposed to come in on?
Charlie zoomed the camera in on the plane. The towing vehicle was bumping down off the ramp—behind it was a container on a little flatbed trailer. As he racked focus, something in the viewfinder caught his attention. Four white letters flas
hing in front of him: a427. Those were the first four digits of the serial number he was looking for. He tracked across the container and found the last three: hxq.
A wave of excitement ran through him. That was it.
Suddenly, with a horrific clatter of rotors, a helicopter burst over the hill. Faruz threw himself to the ground and Charlie thought for sure the chopper was part of a security detail sent to apprehend them. But it screamed right past and thundered toward the forest of containers on the other side of the fence.
“I’m getting too old for this shit,” Faruz muttered. “How much longer?”
Charlie ignored him, fixated on the tarmac.
Down by the big transport aircraft, the towing vehicle slowly pulled the container into the middle of a large clearing and stopped.
“Oh shit!” Faruz said.
“What?”
Faruz merely pointed.
The Jeep that had been patrolling the perimeter road was back again. But this time it was driving across an open field, heading for the back side of the hummock on which they were situated. And it was hauling ass.
Faruz ran toward his car.
“Wait!” Charlie yelled.
“We gotta go! These guys don’t fuck around.”
“Just wait, goddamnit!”
Charlie raised his camera a little and saw the chopper lowering itself toward the container. Four slim steel cables slid from its belly, unspooling downward.
Charlie watched two men spring up onto the container and attach hooks to the ends of the cable, connecting the chopper to the four corners of the big steel box. The task completed, they jumped down to the towing vehicle and unhitched the container from the tow bar.
Faruz revved the engine. “Charlie! Don’t be fool! Come on!”
But Charlie kept snapping photos as fast as he could. A man appeared in the hatchway of the chopper. He was wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap, and carried an M4 carbine on a sling across his chest. He shouted something to the others, then tossed a duffle bag down to them.
The bag hit the tarmac and broke open, spilling stacks of banknotes onto the ground.
Charlie popped off a few shots of the payoff then swiveled the camera up to the chopper again, snapping one last picture. As he did, the man in the hatchway turned his head and looked out toward Charlie. That was when Charlie recognized him.
It was Bull.
Charlie felt a mixture of triumph and terror. Bull’s presence confirmed beyond any doubt that Julie was in the container. It also confirmed what Julie would soon be facing.
The panicked Faruz fishtailed around in a half circle, preparing to head back down the hill. “You don’t come right now, I leave without you!”
“I’m coming!” Charlie sprinted alongside the car, grabbed the open door and dove into the passenger seat.
Faruz thumped and bumped and slid down the hill, threatening to turn over at any second. The vehicle behind them was gaining rapidly, the Jeep so close that Charlie could see the individual security guards’ faces, their jaws set, weapons ready.
But Faruz made it to the road at the bottom of the hill. Back on its native territory, the BMW surged forward with a screech of tires and was soon easily outdistancing the slower all-terrain vehicle. Charlie looked back to see the Jeep slowing down and apparently giving up. Maybe they were writing off Charlie and Faruz as a couple of dumb tourists.
Faruz was sweating profusely and he gave Charlie a look as if to say, “Don’t pull that shit again!” but a roar overhead brought Charlie’s attention back to the chopper.
As he watched it fly east and disappear over the horizon, he tried not to imagine where they were taking Julie and what Bull would do to her once they got there.
Chapter Twenty
As they put a little distance between themselves and the air freight terminal, Faruz set his phone in one of the cup holders. “I got lines out to everybody I can think of. Now we gotta wait.”
“Thanks, Faruz. You know I’m going to make this worth your while.” Charlie stuffed five hundred bucks into the cup holder next to the phone.
Faruz eyed the money. “You don’t need to do that, Charlie.”
“Yeah I do,” Charlie said. “You’re taking a big risk for me.”
Faruz hesitated, then reluctantly pocketed the money—as if it was medicine prescribed by a doctor. Charlie pulled out his Nikon and scrolled through the photos he’d shot at the freight terminal. The 500-millimeter lens hadn’t let him down. Bull’s face was clear as a bell. He zoomed in a little tighter, then held the camera display out toward Faruz.
“You know this guy?”
Faruz glanced at the face briefly. “Nope. Who is he?”
“That’s what I need to find out. Is Russell Garman still around?”
“Yeah, he’s around, but frankly? That guy scare the shit out of me.”
“Yeah, I know,” Charlie conceded. “Let’s go see him.”
Faruz nodded unenthusiastically. They were reaching the outskirts of Tashkent now. Everything was drab, dusty, slapped together, ill-maintained. It felt strange to be back—that odd mixture of alienness and familiarity that you felt returning to any place that had been important to you once, but wasn’t anymore.
Charlie wondered if Julie had experienced those same conflicting emotions when she’d returned here to see Byko. Or if there was something else entirely going through her head. He still couldn’t fathom how she’d managed to pull off that kind of deception, that she’d come here to explore a romantic interlude with Byko. But in the back of his mind he kept wondering, kept hoping, that there could possibly be some other explanation.
Charlie found Russell Garman seated in his neat office on the third floor of a nondescript building in downtown Tashkent. Charlie felt pretty sure that no one in this office had ever taught any languages to anyone, but screwed to the wall next to the door was a very small sign that read: language training international, ltd.
And Garman certainly looked the part. He had the air of a certain kind of down-at-the-heels international teacher—his thinning brown hair was longish and poorly cut, floating away from his face in soft waves. He wore a button-down shirt, wide-wale corduroy pants and a lemon yellow Gore-Tex windbreaker. His expression was genial but distant, as though his mind was still occupied with the book of poetry, Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters, lying open on the desk in front of him.
To look at the man you’d never know that six years ago, Garman was one of the most dangerous men in the region. Marine recon, sniper, black belt in this or that, executive-protection trainer at Blackwater’s semisecret facility in North Carolina, almost certainly eight or ten years in the CIA’s Operations Directorate—the kind of guy who could tell you with a straight face that he couldn’t show you his resumé unless you had top-secret clearance.
As Charlie entered Garman’s lair and greeted him, the military man exuberantly popped out of his chair.
“Charlie! My goodness, how have you been?” Garman half-cooed, raising one eyebrow. His voice had a flat midwestern tinge—Missouri, Kansas, someplace like that—and the careful enunciation of a man who cared about words. “We lost track of you after your little set-to at Andijan. Sit, sit!”
Charlie quickly gave Garman the abbreviated version of the last six years of his life, but it was clear enough that he was here on business and didn’t have time to waste on pleasantries.
Sensing this, Garman gave Charlie his mild little smile. “Before we get started, may I remind you of my usual ground rules for journalists? As you may recall, I never talk on record. Anything I utter is strictly on background.”
“Understood,” Charlie said, taking out his Nikon. On the ride over here, Charlie had considered how he wanted to approach Garman. The thing about a guy like him was that you never knew whom he talked to or whom he worked for. For all Charlie knew, Bull could have been on his payroll. It was a risk even to go down this road with a snake like him, but Charlie didn’t have many options.
He pulled up his photograph of Bull and passed the camera across the desk. “I’m wondering if you can ID this guy for me.”
Garman’s smile faded and the first hint of some other, deeper figure behind the history teacher pose began to emerge. He looked at the camera for a moment then picked it up and scrutinized the photo on the camera’s display.
“I think he works for the CIA,” Charlie said nervously.
When Garman finally looked up, his eyes were cagey and guarded. Garman assessed Charlie for a long beat, then pushed the camera back across the desk. “You’re half right,” he said.
“Meaning what?”
“He was never a CIA operative, per se. But he was an independent contractor they used for a long time.”
“And now?”
“The Company gave him the boot a few years back. At which time, he came to me. Looking for work.”
Charlie watched the man closely. Was he testing him?
Garman folded his arms, leaned back in his chair. “Of course, we give all our potential hires a psych eval. Let’s just say there are reasons why he’s not working for us.”
Charlie tried not to reveal how relieved he was, but apparently it showed, because Garman laughed. “Oh my goodness, Charlie, you look like you just dodged a bullet.”
“We both know I took a chance walking in here,” Charlie said flatly.
To his credit, Garman didn’t bother denying it. “Yes, well . . . might I ask where this picture was taken?”
The affect was pleasant but Charlie knew that Garman’s generosity was reaching an end. If Charlie was going to get any more, he was going to have to give. “The cargo area at Tashkent Airport. Twenty-five minutes ago.”
“Bold, Charlie. Bold.”
“What’s his name?” Charlie asked.
“John Quinn.”
“You have a history on him? Anything I can use?”
“He’s got pretty much the standard resumé. Spent his whole career in Spec Ops. Ranger school, airborne, sniper training, all the usual tactical training. He retired under duress as a major after some kind of incident that no one ever talks about.”
Out of Range: A Novel Page 11