Stalin's Final Sting

by Andrew Turpin

  The next stop was Gul Shah’s graphic design studio, about a mile from Din’s shop and sandwiched between several other arts-related businesses in a small courtyard near Abdul Haq Square. The studio was on the second floor of a converted warehouse and required Johnson and Haroon to climb a rickety external fire escape to reach it.

  Haroon knocked on the solid black metal door. After a short wait, it swung open and there stood a man whose proportions were diametrically opposed to Din’s. Gul was immensely obese, to a degree that made it visibly difficult for him to walk, and although Haroon tried to engage him in a friendly conversation, his monosyllabic responses and body language told Johnson all he needed to know within the first thirty seconds: Gul Shah seemed unlikely to be of any help. But he at least invited them in.

  Johnson and Haroon sat on stools next to a bench on which three iMac computers stood, while Gul remained standing. The building had high ceilings and bare brick walls. Again Haroon went through his explanation of what he was seeking.

  “Did you know Abdul Akbari?” Haroon asked.

  Gul shook his head. Johnson saw the faint outline of a pistol beneath the linen waistcoat he was wearing above his shalwar kameez. He very much doubted that the graphic designer would be particularly quick on the draw if it came down to that, though of course he hoped he wouldn’t have to test out his theory.

  A few minutes later, Johnson and Haroon were making their way back down the fire escape. “Was he always that helpful?” Johnson asked.

  “I only met him twice before,” Haroon said. “The second time, I heard he shot his deputy manager just a few minutes before he saw me. You’d never have guessed. His face never changed. What you have to bear in mind with these guys is that it’s quite likely they were doing work for both sides during the Soviet occupation. They wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of anybody, and because they were good at what they did, they were useful to everyone. That’s most likely why they’re so cagey, even now. They’re survivors.”

  The third man, Ali Jadoon, owned a book publishing and printing warehouse just south of the airport in a small business park. He snorted when Haroon brought up Akbari’s name.

  “I was in a different building then,” Ali said. “But I remember him—a nasty son of a mule, like all the KHAD people who were close to the KGB. He came in once. He wanted a new Afghan birth certificate and a French passport. I could do neither, because my machinery was broken at the time. He started off by offering me more money, but then he got angry and shouted at me, but it made no difference. Sorry, I don’t know if he got the work done somewhere else.”

  “Who else might he have used?” Haroon asked.

  “There were two other guys, Gul Shah and Din Khan, who did my type of work. They’re both still around in Kabul. Go and ask them.”

  Afterward, as they stood in the parking lot, Johnson felt they had made at least some progress.

  “It’s not Ali,” Haroon said. “Let’s give Din a few days to find his records. Hopefully he’ll come up with the goods.”

  “At least we know what Akbari wanted,” Johnson said. “But I hope we’re not on a wild goose chase here—do you really think he’s worth the effort?”

  Haroon paused. “Possibly not. It’s a long shot. And regarding the forgeries, yes, we know now what he wanted. But we need the name in which the documents were issued. Without that, we’re stuck.”

  “I saw that Gul had a pistol under his waistcoat,” Johnson said. “Jayne and I both need one too before we go to Wazrar, probably on Sunday. I’m certainly not going along the K-G Pass without a weapon. Is there anyone here who might supply one and some ammunition? I’d need a Beretta M9, ideally, and Jayne a Walther. Can you help with that?”

  Haroon scratched his head. “I do know someone. I’ll take care of it.”

  Friday, May 31, 2013

  Langley, Virginia

  Vic was always anxious about using the National Security Agency for non-CIA jobs. It was strictly prohibited, of course, but like Neal and one or two of his other colleagues, he occasionally slipped the odd private request into the massive workstream that flowed in and out of the NSA’s huge offices complex in Fort Meade, Maryland.

  When the response took some time to come back, his anxiety levels rose as he began having visions of some senior supervisor scrutinizing the request he had submitted, finding it suspicious, and then escalating it up the chain of command.

  The request that Vic had submitted on behalf of Johnson was for a trace on all phone, email, and internet traffic involving Rex Zilleman. The fact that Zilleman was an American made his request all the more dicey, since the NSA was strictly forbidden by law to monitor US citizens for any reason. The risk and potential consequences were a big step up from simply taking a peek in the CIA’s vast files.

  Finally, late on Friday evening, just as Vic was about to head home from Langley to his smart red-brick house on the corner of Sherier Place NW and Manning Place NW, in the Palisades suburb of DC, an email popped up in his personal account from his contact Steve at Fort Meade.

  Vic had been about to shut down his PC. Instead, he opened the short report and the attached spreadsheet and scrutinized the contents.

  The sheet consisted of an analysis of communications involving Frank Rice and his client Haze, which showed a lot of international traffic but nothing warranting concern. That corroborated Vic’s own research at Langley, where there was no file on Rice.

  The report also contained full details of the phone numbers that Zilleman had called and emails that he had received and sent from his three different accounts over recent weeks. There was a cross-check of the phone numbers to which the connections had been made.

  The NSA, Vic knew, would have collected all the data by tapping into the myriad of cables that connect mobile networks across the globe, both in the United States and elsewhere.

  The report found nothing out of the ordinary apart from calls to and from two cell phones that appeared to be throwaway burner devices. The cross-checks had shown that twenty-four hours after the calls had taken place, the SIM cards had been deactivated and the phones rendered untraceable—they had disappeared from all networks and could not be found by triangulation, GPS, or Wi-Fi. To have one call to such a device would be classed as unusual; to have two raised a red flag at the NSA.

  The assumption was that the batteries and SIMs had been removed from the corresponding phones, which was very typical of the behavior seen among criminal elements or those engaged in other activities that they wanted to keep undercover.

  Zilleman received or made the calls using his normal cell phone from a variety of locations, including Zürich, Washington, DC, and London. One of the other parties using the burner phones was located in the Brazilian capital São Paulo, where the device had been bought, and another in DC.

  Vic wrote a quick thank-you note to Steve and asked him to continue monitoring Zilleman’s cell phone, with a specific focus on calls to or from throwaway devices. He wanted as much information as possible about those devices’ locations and where they were purchased.

  Then he forwarded the report to Johnson.

  Chapter Twelve

  Saturday, June 1, 2013

  Wazrar

  The three mules flicked their tails continuously to try to rid themselves of flies as they climbed their way slowly up the narrow gray dirt track that led out of Wazrar. By eight o’clock the sun was high in the sky, and the exertion was making Javed sweat.

  Noor walked at the front, turning decisively at each of the myriad forks in the path along the way; he had no need of a map. Meanwhile, Javed remained at the rear of the convoy to ensure the mules kept moving.

  With them were two of Noor’s nephews, Hashim and Kabir, aged eighteen and nineteen, respectively, who were acting as lookouts and, if necessary, messengers who could relay details back to Wazrar if cell phone coverage via the recently installed masts proved problematic. The two youngsters said little. Just like Javed, Baz, and Noor h
ad been at that age, they were extremely fit, thanks to the amount of time they spent on foot among the mountains.

  The group had set off just after seven thirty after finalizing their plans with Baz. He remained in Wazrar and was to take the Toyota to a shed behind a cousin’s house four kilometers north at a remote spot just off the Khost-Gardez highway. Once they had collected the Stingers from the cave, Javed and Noor would then return to the pickup truck and load the missiles beneath the false bed before driving it to Javed’s brother’s house in Kabul. Meanwhile, Baz would walk back to the house in Wazrar.

  There was a lot to do, including checking that the Stingers and RPGs were still in good order after such a long period lying in the cave.

  They would keep in touch using a pair of Motorola SRX 2200 walkie-talkies that a Wazrar villager had acquired from a group of Taliban found shot dead on a mountain near the village. The radios were not always reliable in the mountains but were far better than cell phones, despite the recent installation of new masts.

  Noor told Javed that because the radios were military-grade devices, he guessed the Pakistan intelligence service may have supplied them to the Taliban, with whom they were widely suspected of being complicit.

  As they left the village, Javed, anticipating that they would lose their cell phone connection soon after heading into the mountains, checked his tracker monitoring app. Zilleman was still in DC, but Javed’s stomach muscles contracted involuntarily as he realized that Severinov appeared to be on the highway heading south of Kabul toward Gardez—the same route that he and Baz had taken two days earlier. The blue dot that showed his location was moving slowly down the highway. He was obviously in a vehicle.

  Why is the Russian back in Afghanistan? Javed wondered. There was no obvious answer, but the speed and unexpected nature of Severinov’s movements underlined the difficulties he was going to face in taking him down.

  As they walked, his mind went back two and a half decades to the last time he had taken this route. Little had changed. The track was perhaps broader and more worn than he remembered. He was glad to see there was no sign of the opium poppy cultivation that had caused such problems in some areas of Afghanistan in the early 2000s.

  Even Noor, now aged sixty-one, looked almost as nimble and slim as Javed remembered him to be in his thirties, although his hair had gone quite gray and his face was far more creviced.

  They continued steadily upward. Where the terrain flattened out from time to time, there were always expanses of cultivated land, split like a patchwork quilt into informally shaped small areas of vegetation and grazing land. The track lay parallel to the broad stream that ran a few meters below.

  The farming carried out here was very limited in commercial terms and was more designed to feed extended families.

  After about four kilometers, the cultivated green area ended, and the track climbed more steeply into a barren, arid brown landscape.

  Noor stopped, holding up his hand. He took the halter of the lead mule and guided it off the path and behind some bushes to the left, where he crouched on his haunches. Javed did likewise.

  “What’s up there?” Javed whispered.

  “Taliban or Haqqani’s people,” Noor said.

  Eventually Javed spotted the tiny figures on the mountainside across the other side of the valley walking in single file along a path, almost invisible against the khaki-colored earth behind them.

  A firecracker splattering of gunfire broke the silence, coming from farther away to their right.

  “Shit, I think those are Americans—firing at the Taliban,” Noor said. “There they are.” He pointed. Yet again, it took Javed several moments to see the dark figures huddled up against a rocky outcrop. Noor was correct—US soldiers.

  The Taliban or Haqqanis immediately began moving back toward where they had come from and then disappeared behind some boulders.

  “We need to be very careful,” Noor said. “Those Americans sometimes come up here from their base a few kilometers away—Wilderness, they call it. Don’t want them mistaking us for Taliban. Two guys from the village were caught like that last month. They had Taliban firing at them from one direction, they ran the other way, and then they were being fired at by American soldiers. They were lucky to get away alive.”

  Javed knew about Firebase Wilderness, which was one of several outposts operated by US and Afghan army forces to try to ensure security along the K-G Pass. He had read reports about the base coming under mortar and rocket fire from Taliban or Haqqani insurgents from time to time.

  “Not good timing for us, midsummer,” Javed said. That was when the rebels were always most active, when the passes and pathways were clear of snow.

  “No, it’s not the best for us,” Noor said. “I came up here a few weeks ago when there was still some snow on the ground, and there was no sign of Taliban.”

  While they were waiting, Javed saw three gray wolves emerge silently from behind some rocks and walk across the path, only 150 meters from where they were hiding. They vanished as quickly as they had appeared. It was the first time he had seen such animals since the 1980s.

  Javed also checked his cell phone tracker monitoring app again, but there was no coverage now. They were too far into the mountains to get anything other than a sporadic signal.

  The two men, together with Hashim and Kabir and their mules, waited behind the bushes for another half an hour before Noor and Javed judged it safe to move on.

  Soon they reached the part of the path that Javed had always hated on his previous visits: a segment where it became no more than a ledge on an almost sheer rock face, a steep drop of more than one hundred meters falling away to their right. One false step would mean instant death, but it was the only way to get to their destination.

  Javed wasn’t especially afraid of heights, but even he was forced to walk as far to the left as he could, pressed up against the cliff wall. The mules seemed to have no such issues and plodded sure-footedly onward.

  A couple of kilometers farther on, they finally stood under a rock overhang. It was the spot where, twenty-five years earlier, Javed had arrived with Baz and four heavily laden mules, each carrying four FIM-92 Stingers; a cargo of weaponry that in 1988 had been worth well in excess of $1 million. Over the years he had occasionally wondered to himself why he hadn’t simply sold the missiles and set himself up for life. But back then, the cause and the fight seemed the most important thing of all. It was a fierce patriotism that overrode all material considerations.

  As he had continued to do during their journey, and with special care following the near-encounter with the Taliban and the US Army, Javed stopped and did a final check for any kind of surveillance. But as previously, there was nothing. In truth, it was unlikely that Taliban would find their way to this spot; the cave was near the edge of a cliff and was a long way off the various paths and trails that crossed the mountains. One of the villagers in Wazrar had originally come across it while searching for some lost sheep and had happened to casually mention it to Javed. There was simply no reason for anyone to be there, which was why he had chosen it.

  “Shall we go in?” Noor asked.

  “Yes, all looks good,” Javed said.

  Noor took two strap-on headlamps from his backpack, put one on his head and turned it on, and handed the other to Javed, who did likewise.

  They led the mules beneath the overhang and through a natural fissure in the cliff face, behind which was a cave. The overlapping geometry of the rock surface around the fissure left the entrance virtually impossible to detect until one was almost on top of it. The gap was only just wide enough for the mules.

  To Javed, the cave looked unchanged from his last visit. It was larger than he remembered, stretching about thirty meters back from the entrance and perhaps twenty meters wide. After glancing around, he looked at Noor. “Let’s get the hardware out and have a look at it, shall we?”

  Before doing so, Noor instructed his two teenage nephews to keep a careful
check on both sides of the valley below the cave. Hashim was to take responsibility for the southern side, Kabir the northern side. “If anything moves within four kilometers of this cave, I want to know about it,” Noor told them. They both nodded and headed off.

  “Are they good?” Javed asked after they had gone.

  “They are excellent,” Noor said. “We use them as an alarm system for the Taliban if we are out in the mountains and need to know if we’re getting into a dangerous situation.”

  “That sounds like a risky role.”

  Noor looked slightly nonplussed, as if he hadn’t considered the risk factor. “A little. But they’re quick and almost invisible, and they’ve not let me down yet. You can rely on them.”

  Javed, reassured, walked with Noor to the back of the cave and slipped through another much narrower fissure into a cavity deeper inside. Noor clambered up on a couple of rocks and levered himself up to a ledge that was above head height.

  “They’re all still here,” Noor said. He reached over, and Javed heard a scraping noise as he pulled the first Stinger across the rock surface toward him.

  A second later, Noor carefully passed him a one-and-a-half-meter fiberglass launch tube, tightly wrapped in heavy-duty clear plastic sheeting and secured with insulating tape. Javed grasped it in both hands—it was heavier than he recalled—and lowered it to waist level, where he held it for a few moments, his hands spaced wide apart, cupping it beneath. The plastic sheeting was covered in a deep layer of gray dust. He brushed a little of it off with his thumb to reveal the familiar dull green surface beneath the plastic wrapper. The breakable glass disks at either end of the launch tube were intact.