The blood, the heat, and the stink of raw sewage in the ocean, had left Town lightheaded and filled with distaste for this foreign adventure.
He returned to the hotel, walked through the glacial lobby with its carpeted walls and potted spider plants (The Crusader’s “Street Life” throbbing through hidden speakers) and out onto the terrace that overlooked a palm-lined beach and the khaki Atlantic beyond. He stripped down to his trunks, dived into the tepid pool built in the shape of the hotel’s namesake continent and swam three lengths under water.
Town surfaced, gripping the tiles, confronted by an elegant pair of chukka boots, buffed to such a sheen that he could see his reflection in each toecap.
A man in his mid-thirties wearing a white seersucker suit, a crest of black hair combed back from his high forehead, sat beside the pool in the shade of an umbrella sipping a gin and tonic. A second drink stood on the whicker table beside him.
The man pointed to the glass. “Care to join me?” he said in an unplaceable accent.
Town hoisted himself from the water and stood dripping on the tiles. The seated man slung him a towel and watched him dry his body and Town, the last bloom of youth still lending him a delicate prettiness, wondered if he was being picked up. The man waited until Town wrapped the towel around his middle before he, without standing, extended a languid hand.
“Arkady Andropov.”
Town hesitated, but he took the hand and shook it.
“I am a colonel in the First Chief Directorate of the KGB,” Arkady said, gesturing to the empty chair beside him. “Sit.”
Town knew he should go up to his room and call the station chief at the U.S. embassy, but he sat and lifted the gin and sipped it.
Arkady flapped away a circling meat fly and smiled, showing fine teeth for a Russian. He raised his highball and said, winking, “Nothing runs like a Deere.”
“What do you want?” Town said.
“Just to talk.”
“Talk about what?”
The Russian reached for the unfiltered cigarette fuming in the ashtray on the table, took a drag and exhaled slowly, removing a fleck of tobacco from his tongue before he spoke.
“Doing what I do, traveling the globe in the name of the revolution, makes me somewhat akin to a papal emissary. Marxist nuns in central America, British socialists, shop stewards in your own country, all are in my flock. A flock stitched together by a thin skein of what could be called, I suppose, belief. And the desire for a better world.”
“And you and your masters can give it to them?” Town said. “This better world?”
“Alas, no. But this idealism, this desire for the improvement of humanity, is intoxicating and I find myself adding to this patchwork quilt, stitch by stitch.”
“And why are you talking to me?”
Arkady looked at Town and smiled, the setting sun washing him with a syrupy light as he made his pitch. It was direct and simple. The intellectuals, the thinkers, the men and women of sensibility in both the U.S. and the USSR were powerless. In Soviet Russia they were in the Gulag or locked away beneath the onion domes of Lubyanka Prison, in the United States they were to be found in academia, fomenting revolution perhaps, but toothless. The real power in both countries was in the hands of the thugs and the dangerous ideologues who were pushing the world ever closer to a nuclear apocalypse.
Arkady leaned forward to light Town’s cigarette and said, “Men like us need to keep the scales in symmetry. We need to maintain the balance of power, in a very real sense, by keeping our masters informed, or, where necessary, misinformed, about what is happening in the so-called enemy camp.”
“You want me to be your asset?” Town said.
Arkady waved his match dead. “No, no. That’s far too crude.”
“What then? You want me to join in the stitching of this quilt? Adding to this idealistic patchwork?”
“If you choose to, yes.”
Town shook his head. “You do understand that I can’t?”
“Or won’t?”
Town shrugged. “Both.”
“This is really how you feel?”
“Yes, this is really how I feel.”
“Very well.” Arkady lifted one shoulder and gazed out at the sun drowning itself in the dirty ocean.
“And that’s it?” Town said.
“Yes.”
“No threats?”
“That would be melodramatic and what would it achieve?” The Russian stood. “But perhaps you could reflect on what we have discussed?”
Arkady had disappeared into the hotel lobby and for the rest of his stay in West Africa Town had not seen him. But he’d done his research and had discovered that Andropov was who he’d said he was: a very senior man in the KGB.
Town had returned to Langley before being posted out, and he’d thought less frequently of Arkady Andropov. Then six months later, in Karachi, working with Pakistani Intelligence to supply weapons to the anti-Soviet mujahideen in neighboring Afghanistan, Town had received an unmarked envelope containing information on Soviet troop movements. The information had passed muster and had been forwarded to the Afghan rebels.
Over the next months these tidbits continued to arrive. Details of Soviet ventures in Asia, Africa and Latin America, each morsel adding to Town’s caché.
Almost a year after their meeting at the Hotel Africa, Town had been in the Philippines consulting with the Marcos regime on counterinsurgency operations. One sweltering monsoon night in Angeles City Arkady had joined him at the bar of the Whisky a Go Go where naked Pinay bargirls gyrated robotically for an audience of drunken American airmen from Clark Base.
“So, Peter,” Arkady said, “I have shown you samples of my wares and they are good, no?”
“Yes, Arkady, they are very good.”
“Then, perhaps, when you are ready, you can reciprocate?”
Arkady had smiled and faded into the hot rain to the sound of Blondie’s “The Tide is High.”
Town had meditated on Arkady’s request, well aware of the weight of what he was about to undertake. A month later he’d floated something the Russian’s way: details of the planned assassination of a moderate Latin American political leader—a man Town had admired, but who had landed on the Reagan administration’s kill list.
The assassination had been thwarted and—even though the politician would die a few months later, the victim of a car bomb—Town had been seduced by the potential of this partnership with Arkady Andropov.
Over the next decade he and the Russian became a doubles team that grew in skill and effectiveness, influencing the outcomes of small wars across the globe—Sudan, Angola, Somalia, Uganda, Grenada, Panama, Iran, Peru. Subtly changing the DNA of the larger conflicts for which these local skirmishes were proxies.
And then one day it was all over.
Glasnost.
The Soviet Union on the chopping block.
Arkady had stayed in Russian intelligence, finding a berth in the SVF, the foreign intelligence service.
Town and Arkady had stayed in touch, and, though the game grew murkier and harder to read, they had still exchanged their tidbits: the first Gulf War, the Balkans, Kosovo, Chechnya and, of course, Afghanistan.
It had been a scrap of intelligence from Arkady—nothing concrete, more in the nature of a hunch—that had firmed up Town’s intuition that the Pakistani informant couldn’t be trusted.
Town had believed Arkady, but nobody had believed him, yesterday’s hero, the old gray man unfurling his umbrella even when the sun was shining.
But, of course, the Russian had been right, as he had so often been, and it was to Arkady Andropov whom Town had turned in Los Angeles when the law of unintended consequences had kicked him in the gut with a steel toecap.
- - -
At LAX, waiting to board the private jet with Kirby Chance, Town had found an internet kiosk and, using an old anonymous Yahoo account of his, had emailed the number of his burner phone to an address he’d last contacted
years before.
A Hail Mary pass if ever there was one.
But minutes later the phone had rung and Town had heard a tired, breathless voice that he’d taken a moment to recognize as Arkady’s.
“You know, of course, that she is for sale?” The Russian had said, as if they’d last talked hours not decades before.
“Yes,” Town said, impatient with Arkady’s outdated intelligence, “it’s a scam.”
“I am not speaking about the misbegotten charade you have cooked up.”
Town paused. “Then what?”
“She’s alive. The real one.”
“Alive?”
“Yes. She survived the strike.”
“Jesus Christ.”
Arkady had coughed a protracted, breathless cough.
“Are you okay?” Town said.
“Yes. Yes. Now, listen and listen very carefully.”
And so it had begun. They had created a scenario, the elements revealed like a series of Russian nesting dolls, taking Golding’s murderous plan and redrafting it. It had brought Town here, to the rear of the old SUV bucking through the Syrian desert in convoy with six other vehicles, ready to rescue Catherine Finch using the might of Bashar al-Assad’s militia, the shabiha. The “shadow men.”
Like their president they were Alawites, Shi’a Muslims. Thugs who’d started out as racketeers and smugglers and were known for their savagery. And since Putin was in bed with Assad, it was logical that Arkady would enjoy their protection.
It had fallen to the Russian to track down and kill the rebels employed by Golding to waylay and murder Kirby Chance, and to find men who could impersonate them believably enough to fool the American contractors and their Syrian guide.
The driver and the man sitting beside him in the front of the SUV were enormously muscular with shaven heads and dense beards, sporting heavy skin art, wearing the trademark shabiha garb: black jeans and T-shirts and white running shoes. The passenger sat with his Popeye arm flung across the back of the driver’s seat, a crude tattoo of Assad glowering from a bicep thick as a side of beef.
The vehicle rattled across a plateau of small rocks and Town leaned in close to Arkady and said, “You look like death.”
The Russian laughed. “Exactly. This is my last hurrah.”
“How long?”
“A few months.”
“And you’re here?”
“And where must I be, Peter? In a dacha on the Black Sea with a rug over my knees?”
“What is it?”
“What’s killing me?”
“Yes.”
Arkady wagged a hand dismissively. “Oh, there’s some fancy name, but essentially my body has turned on itself, which is ironic in its own way, is it not?”
“If you say so.”
“Ah, you Americans,” Arkady said, “I always forget that you understand irony differently and sometimes not at all.”
Town let this go. “So, what’s this you’re doing?” he said. “Some bucket list thing?”
Arkady laughed and wheezed and coughed and Town looked away, his gaze falling on Kirby Chance who sat behind him and the Russian. She was asleep, her mouth slightly open, terror and emotional overload shutting her down.
“She’s well cast,” Arkady said, nodding at the slumbering woman.
“Yes, she is.”
“And you have spared her life.”
“At the cost of those of the men back there.”
Arkady jutted his lower lip contemptuously. “Mercenaries, Peter. Dogs of war. They knew what they were signing on for.”
“And that’s meant to make me sleep better?”
“No, but you don’t sleep anyway, do you?”
“No. Not much.”
“It comes with the territory, dear Peter.”
They drove in silence for a while and Town tasted dust in his mouth and smelled the toxic sweat of the giants up front.
“How are things with Ann?” Arkady asked.
“Complicated.”
“I’m sorry that I revealed what I did. Put it down to the arrogance of the dying.”
“It was time.”
“She knows everything?”
“No. Only that I knew she was your asset.”
“Will you tell her the rest?”
“I don’t know if I can. I find I’ve started second-guessing myself.” Town sighed. “I’m no longer driven by the certainties that I once was.”
“That’s what happens to us all.”
“Do you believe in anything anymore, Arkady?”
The Russian looked at him. “Like a God?”
“No, Jesus,” Town said and laughed. “No, like that idealism you hooked me with back in Liberia.”
“That quilt thing?”
“Yes.”
“That was my elevator pitch, don’t judge me too harshly.”
“It worked.”
“Well, we were much younger and those were simpler times.”
“Yes, they were.” Town sat for a minute letting the desert roll by before he said, “How did Catherine Finch survive?”
“I don’t know exactly. She’s badly wounded, but, yes, still alive. There are survivors of drone strikes.”
“Apparently so.”
“Which is why you people often double tap, yes?”
“Yes. But this time there was no double tap,” Town said. “Just one Hellfire.”
“Her good luck,” Arkady said.
“Who has her?”
“A couple of Dagestanis who joined Islamic State and then went rogue, trying to make some money. They’re holding her in a Kurdish settlement close by here, hard on the Turkish border.”
“And you know this how?”
“One of them is my asset.”
“Can you trust him?”
“No, of course I cannot trust him. At first he lied to me, told me that he witnessed the death of Catherine Finch in that drone strike. Omitted to tell me that he had dragged her from the rubble and spirited her away in the hope of auctioning her off to the highest bidder.”
“So what’s changed?”
“When I caught a whiff of subterfuge I reminded him about his kith and kin back in Khasavyurt. That prompted him to tell me the truth.”
“Yes?”
“Oh yes. I have told him that if he betrays me again they will be executed, one by one, starting with the youngest, with the others watching.” Arkady coughed into his fist. “He has one of those sprawling peasant families, so it would be quite a bloody undertaking.” He sighed when he saw Town’s face. “As you know only too well, Peter, to defeat evil one must first speak its language.”
SIXTEEN
Kip Littlefield lay on his back in the flatbed of the Ford truck out in the Syrian badlands, looking up at the yellow sky, the foul boots of the American jihadist resting on his chest.
The journey was damned near intolerable. His head hit the corrugated metal every time the truck went over a rock. He needed to urinate and the bouncing had caused his bladder to leak and he could feel a spot of urine spreading on the crotch of his pants.
He’d lost track of time and he was parched and sunburned and when he’d tried to speak, to ask, “How much longer?” the gunman had stamped down on his mouth with the heel of the boot, chipping his enamel molar and causing his lip to bleed.
Littlefield had made no further attempt at conversation.
The men on the rear of the truck rocked in a kind of hypnotized slumber, the barrels of their weapons swaying like reeds in a river. Littlefield, too, despite the discomfort, was nodding off when, he detected something at the very edge of his hearing, something that cut through the clatter of the truck and its grinding engine: the unmistakable burp of an AK-170 carbine, which was answered by the chatter of an M70 in full auto mode.
This call and response continued for a few seconds, rousing the men on the flatbed, who shouted in some guttural tongue and swung their weapons in frenzied arcs. The hammer of a belt-fed Kord 12.7 mm Russian
heavy machine gun joined the ensemble, along with a chorus of FNs, all brought to a nifty crescendo by a grenade (an F1, Littlefield was certain), its report a flat smack, a bit like a door slamming.
He heard yells and screams and the M70s asked questions that were answered, a little tremulously, by the AKs that were clearly on the losing end of the battle. He even detected the much softer, almost affectionate slaps of a Makarov PM semi-automatic pistol, which hinted that things had got all up-close and intimate.
Then there was another sound. Much nearer. Louder. The anvil-like clang of rounds slamming into the body of the Ford.
One of the men yelled “Inshallah!” and stood and fired and howled and fell from the truck.
The other men in the Ford were hosepiping their M70s, firing chattering bursts on full auto, the air filled with the slot machine pings of spent rounds being ejected. The driver was trying to fight the vehicle into a turn, the truck responding like a stubborn mule digging its heels into the sand.
Littlefield, realizing he was free of the restraining boots, sat up and looked over the side of the truck, down a rise onto a mud house that was surrounded by a laager of six vehicles. One of them had the Kord tripod-mounted on its flatbed, the machine gun firing at them with terrifying accuracy. The weapons of the men on the other trucks were flaying the house and as he watched he saw a figure run out and get raked and spun and fall to the dust.
Another man on the back of the Ford was struck and he moaned and slumped forward, his mouth open. Littlefield could see the yellow and black stumps of his rotten teeth through his bread-mold beard.
The American jihadist, hunkered low, fired down at the trucks, cursing in English. The driver of the Ford, giving up on the attempt at a turn, forced the vehicle into reverse without the use of a clutch and it jounced and rattled as it backed away.
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