A Shadow Intelligence

by Oliver Harris

  A spade hit the frozen soil outside. I listened to the clink and shuck of its blade. The darkness began to soften. My guard stepped out of the room and I watched his shadow on the bare concrete floor as he knelt and prayed. Fajr, dawn prayer. A time worth marking. I tried to remember all the different calls to prayer that had interrupted my sleep in various countries; all the men I’d watched praying: complacent ones, desperate ones, ones who did not know they were about to die. His shadow pointed to the front of the house, which meant Mecca was in the opposite direction to my barred window. That was south-west then; at least I had my bearings. There was something unusual about his muttered prayers, and after a while I realised he was praying in Dari. A Dari like that spoken in West Afghanistan, cut off from Kabul by five hundred miles of mountains. I thought of the deep blue lakes of Band-e Amir, and the pristine Panjshir Valley, and the people there, serene and welcoming as the landscape, as if environments worked so transparently. I watched his face when he returned.

  ‘From Herat?’ I asked, trying to rustle up what remained of my own Dari.

  He looked suspicious.

  ‘It’s a beautiful place.’

  No answer. From West Afghanistan to Kazakhstan: that sounded like a heroin route. I thought through the various warlords who controlled the trade.

  ‘Can I stretch for a few seconds?’ I asked. ‘I can’t feel my legs.’

  He kept the gun on me as I got to my feet, bent my body left and right to stretch the spine. A vehicle pulled up outside and there were new voices: talk of firefights, low ammo, faulty radios.

  Around 6 a.m. I was untied and marched out. They’d dug a shallow grave. Given the conditions, it was more trouble than I was worth. Eight men stood around and I scanned for the weapon intended to kill me. No one had a knife out; no camera ready to film. One of the new arrivals, arm in a bloody sling, came and looked at me. He wore the uniform of a Kazakh border guard.

  The situation started to make hazy sense.

  I was led to the edge of the grave, hands still bound. The sky was a washed-out blue. In its half-light you saw the spindly fence around the farm buildings, dividing a hazy, infinite pallor. Borders. One man controlled the roads all the way from Balkh in Afghanistan to Kazakhstan’s border with Russia. I had sat on a carpeted floor with him, toasting our friendship with fermented camel’s milk.

  ‘Kneel.’ My knees touched the cold ground. The Chechen raised his gun.

  I said, ‘Akan Satayev.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I know Akan Satayev. I’ve worked with him.’

  The Iraqi boss came over. ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘I was at his wedding two years ago in Aktobe. Akan’s. I met him through General Abdul Dostum. I imagine you came here via Mingdon, on the Uzbek border, under Akan’s protection.’ I didn’t expect anyone to believe me; I just needed to make any potentially wrong decision too risky for them to make.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Tell Akan it’s Christopher Bohren. The British want to help.’

  The safety catch eased down. Someone lifted me to my feet, and I found myself eyeball to eyeball with the boss.

  ‘You lie.’

  ‘You’ve got half the Russian army coming in,’ I said, switching to Arabic, which got his attention. ‘Low ammunition, bad radios. How long are you going to last? Let me speak to Akan.’

  The senior men consulted. I was made to go through my story once more, before the buttons of a satellite phone were punched.

  I don’t know what was said. After five minutes I was begrudgingly given a blanket, driven again.

  FORTY-FIVE

  I was spared the boot this time. We drove in a straight line east, by my estimation. After 20 miles or so there was a change of vehicles. I was blindfolded, passed over to someone with a different grip, led over broken branches for a couple of hundred metres to a car with good heating and leather seats. We drove for what felt like an hour. Then I was pulled out.

  Ten metres of tarmac underfoot, into the warmth of a building with a smell of bleach. I was led down a long flight of stairs through two doorways with beaded curtains trailing over me. Someone unknotted my blindfold.

  I stood in the basement dining room of a restaurant with plastic vine leaves over the ceiling. Akan Satayev sat at the furthest table watching me. I was shoved into the seat facing him.

  His hair had greyed, eyes dark. He wore a cashmere coat over a creased jacket, and a white shirt that wasn’t fresh today. A rich man who hadn’t slept in his own home for a while. We’d both aged less than we deserved. His career had clearly done better than mine, although, until last week, he was more likely to be the target of an assassination. Hence the missile-proof basement, I imagined.

  Satayev had started out as a regular mid-level thug. His family was heavily involved in the transportation of heroin and lapis lazuli. He became boss, expanded the empire a little, gained some notoriety for extortion and kidnappings. Then the Kazakh President had trouble with Cossack gangs who wanted the North Eastern region transferred to Russia. Satayev was given carte blanche to get rid of them, which he did, ruthlessly. That handed the Satayev family not only regional power but control of the smuggling route across the border.

  Afghanistan is the world’s biggest producer of heroin. Russia’s the world’s biggest consumer. In between the two lie Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, depending on your route: 100 kilograms of raw opium cost a thousand dollars in Osh. In Moscow you could sell it for fifteen times that, more again in Western Europe. Labs around Moscow processed it into heroin. Smuggled into Sweden by boat, then all over world, the epidemics raging meant big money. I’d spent a lot of time beside the US-built Nizhny Pyanj Bridge that connected Afghanistan and Tajikistan, getting blind drunk with border guards, but not so blind I couldn’t see the bulky sacks coming through on the backs of Satayev’s trucks. From Tajikistan, the heroin and opium should logically pass through Uzbekistan, only the Uzbeks are paranoid, hate their neighbours, and so actually pay border guards to do their job. Which meant Kazakhstan was good traffic.

  Satayev got filthy rich. And like any business person who finds themselves sitting on several million dollars he expanded. Guns, oil; most of all, he controlled men. His money funded the armed wings of various criminal enterprises in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. He was a blissfully unidealistic fulcrum of several shit-storms, which made him as appealing to MI6 as he was to anyone else. His routes were precisely those along which NATO wanted to move armies. So I set up shop beside the historic Jayma bazaar in Osh – buying cheap cotton for a fictitious textiles company – and in less than a month I was sharing boiled sheep’s head and negotiating pay-offs.

  Like a lot of barely literate, power-hungry criminals he had an instinctive grasp of international diplomacy. It had been a while since his name did me any favours. He might decide to kill me anyway but there was a shred of comfort in being killed by someone who knew at least one of my lives.

  ‘A ghost,’ Satayev said.

  ‘It’s good to see you, Akan.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  He studied my damaged face. The wars and deaths since our last meeting had carved a depth behind his eyes. He retained some of that aura of the rich, of moving through the world in a slightly slicker substance, but there was a gravity there, a melancholy that I associated with military figures more than with criminals or businessmen, both of whom could go a long way without knowing the names of those killed on their behalf.

  My phone and gun were on the table. The table’s polished black surface reflected the plastic vine leaves above us so that they seemed to reach up like pond weed. A decent restaurant suggested some habitations nearby. I considered the scale of the place, the distance driven – a town between Semey and Pavlodar.

  One guard stood to the side of Satayev. Another took the doorway, gun on me.

  ‘It looks like you have trouble,’ I said. ‘Maybe I can help.’

  ‘You were
sent to find me?’

  ‘To assess the situation.’

  The vagueness was reassuring, it seemed. He ordered my cuffs removed and sent the guards away with orders to bring water and tea.

  ‘Is this a good place to talk?’ I said.

  ‘That is why we’re here.’ The drinks arrived. He stirred a sugar cube into his tea.

  ‘What do the Russians want?’ I said.

  ‘What do you think?’

  I let this ride, curious.

  He continued: ‘There have been drone strikes on my men, my vehicles.’

  ‘From across the border?’

  ‘We think so. Russians closed the border, set up checkpoints. Said they were a “local militia” defending ethnic Russians against fanatics. Bullshit. They have seized my relatives, my money. There is no law, nothing.’

  I let his outrage at lawlessness pass.

  ‘So you got some jihadis,’ I said.

  He dismissed the word. ‘I don’t believe you’ve become that naive.’

  ‘Do they belong to the Islamic Movement of Kazakhstan?’

  ‘I’ve never come across any such group.’

  ‘Where did you get the guns?’

  ‘The usual places.’

  ‘You’re using Chechens and Syrians as hired muscle. That’s an unfortunate look. It’s not going to win you friends.’

  ‘Who would you like me to use? Or shall I tell the Russians that Block Nine is all theirs?’

  ‘Block Nine?’

  ‘What do your bosses say to that? Is the UK government backing Saracen?’

  ‘I don’t know about Block Nine,’ I said.

  Satayev looked puzzled. ‘Why do you think Saracen are here?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Because it’s big. Their big new discovery.’

  ‘How big?’

  ‘According to their estimates, around 30 trillion cubic feet of gas, over 5 billion barrels of oil.’

  I stared at him in astonishment as my brain did the calculations. If what he was saying was true, it was the biggest discovery of the last twenty years. Satayev, at least, seemed sure of the numbers.

  ‘You’ve seen data?’

  I asked. ‘I’ve seen data.’

  ‘Where did you get it?’

  ‘Friends in Russia.’

  ‘Where did they get it?’

  ‘Stolen from Saracen. Hacked, leaked, I don’t know.’

  ‘I need to see that data.’

  ‘Of course – if you’re in a position to help. Saracen have been buying up every square kilometre of land around. They use front companies, but we’re not stupid. Nor are the Russians. You could have saved yourself a lot of trouble by speaking to me in the first place.’

  He reached into his pocket and tossed over a dog tag: four digits, no name. The numbers given to soldiers by the Russian defence ministry usually have a single letter of the Russian alphabet followed by a six-digit number. Russia’s PMCs – Private Military Contractors – only had four.

  ‘Sigma Group,’ I said.

  ‘You know them?’

  They’d turned up in Ukraine aiding the separatist forces of the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. Then we picked up the same men in Syria, fighting on behalf of the Syrian government. Their chief mission was capturing ISIS-held oilfields. A former special forces brigade commander was in charge, and the company was named after his old call sign; he headhunted elite troops, some from the Russian army’s Nefte polk, the Oil Protection Regiment created to protect Chechnya’s oil infrastructure, some Spetsgruppa A, a counterterrorist sub-unit of special forces. The company was registered in Argentina, offices in St Petersburg. By our estimations it controlled between over six thousand men. They got good pay. In return, they signed ten-year confidentiality clauses, handed over their phones, received a nameless dog tag with a four-digit number. I handed it back.

  ‘Private military. Possibly used as cover for Moscow, possibly more renegade.’

  Sigma had a Serbian unit that had cropped up briefly in Palmyra. That startled the GCHQ listeners initially, especially those who’d been around in the Nineties. Like the West, the Kremlin had become keen on the PMCs as a way of lowering official casualty numbers – but the situation wasn’t without friction. When US air strikes ended up killing a lot of Sigma men attempting to capture a Kurdish base last year there were accusations that information hadn’t been shared by Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate – suspicions that the defence ministry might have been hostile towards private entities conducting a major operation without its approval.

  The scale of things made sense now: the information warfare, the cultivation of Zhaparov, the Agentsumpf. It was possible that a lot of the information warfare online was Sigma-produced. I knew they had advanced cyber capabilities; there’d been run-ins over signal jamming and electronic warfare with both the US and China when Sigma deployed in Sudan. Did mercs do social media now? Brave new world. It looked like Akan needed help, which was fortunate for me.

  ‘Who else are you speaking to from the UK?’ I asked.

  ‘No one.’

  ‘You have contact with GL5?’

  ‘Informal.’

  ‘They pay you so they can operate here.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And when did the Russians arrive?’

  ‘Six days ago.’

  Just after Joanna had gone missing.

  ‘Have you come across an English woman?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you still have contact with Jan Jágr?’

  He looked surprised to hear the name. Jágr was a former military translator from Slovakia. He ran an air-freight company based in Namibia, with two Ukrainian-registered Ilyushin-76 cargo aircraft originally designed for delivering machinery to remote areas of the USSR. The hulls were sheathed in lead to deflect bullets, and he managed to land them almost anywhere. More important, he was a master of paperwork, with a web of thirty or forty front companies under his command, re-registering aircraft every couple of months. This was the way he’d survived three decades as a priority for Interpol. Still, I had to get him out of German custody in 2015, so he owed me a favour.

  ‘You can contact him?’ Satayev asked.

  ‘I can try.’

  ‘We need communications equipment, ammunition, satellite pictures and radio interception. But until I have the roads back, I cannot throw money around. I cannot fight the Russian army out of my own funds. They are already raping, cutting throats, stealing homes.’

  ‘I can get you what I can.’

  ‘That is all you’ll say? After I saved your life?’

  ‘I need to speak to people.’

  ‘How do I know you have anything to do with anything?’

  ‘You know me, Akan.’

  ‘You disappear from the scene, cut all ties, then turn up again in a Russian truck. Explain to me why I have saved your life.’

  ‘Speak to Saracen, tell them you’ve got a Vectis employee here.’ I gave him a number to call. He walked off. I was left watching the vines in the tabletop and feeling the tickle of the gun on me. So I’d been picked up by a new militia. More men with nowhere left to go except into new zones of conflict. Army of exiles. The future: swarms of mercs and militias chasing each other around the globe like weather systems, a constant rumbling in the background as we lock down air-conned shopping malls, and wait for the coffee to run out.

  Satayev came back ten minutes later. I don’t know who he spoke to, or what was exchanged, but he seemed open, keener.

  ‘They say you should go back to Astana.’

  ‘Who does?’

  ‘Saracen.’

  ‘Is that right.’

  ‘I said I’d help.’

  He told me about jets I could use, then we talked supply routes for equipment. I said I could get small arms to Uzbekistan. Moving them on was the difficulty.

  ‘Taraz airfield,’ I suggested.

  ‘We don’t have access to it any more.’
r />   ‘Sigma got it already?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Things were moving fast, and strategically.

  ‘On the ground then,’ I suggested. ‘Tashkent to Shymkent to Taraz.’

  ‘Maybe. We can try. What about Reza Nikfar? Are the Americans with you on this?’

  ‘This is a different situation to last time, Akan. I need you to understand that. I may not be in such a strong position.’

  ‘Yet you are in a position to endanger your life and be saved by me.’

  My pose was convincing, and had kept me alive so far, but it wasn’t a roleplay I could back out of easily.

  ‘Saracen have given me their guarantee.’

  ‘Then we need to be clear on styles: no suicide bombs, no beheadings. No bearded men on YouTube waving rifles.’

  ‘I understand.’

  Did he? We exchanged secure means of communication. I asked where I was.

  ‘Glukhovka.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘North-east. I can arrange a flight to Astana. I have contacts in Astana who can collect from you.’

  I was a hostage, essentially. But it was the only way I was going to get out of here. And I’d been in Satayev’s jets before. They had coffee machines. Things like that can help you feel immortal.

  ‘Checks at the other end?’

  ‘Not for an internal flight. Not with my set-up. I have jets in Semey or Pavlodar. Pavlodar is probably safer right now.’

  ‘What’s the news from Semey?’

  ‘Twenty dead. More protests.’

  ‘Twenty dead?’

  ‘So it seems.’

  ‘I’d like to take a look.’

  ‘It’s on the edge of going very bad.’

  ‘Give me an hour in the town. I heard it has a Dostoevsky museum.’

  ‘A Dostoevsky museum?’

  ‘I thought I’d check it out while I’m in the area.’

  FORTY-SIX

  My belongings were returned, although the gun had no bullets. I was led out. Glukhovka was pretty much just a crossroads, with a petrol station, the restaurant and not much else apart from six blacked-out armour-plated SUVs scattered across the frozen mud.