Stalin's Final Sting

by Andrew Turpin

  Holding the missile brought back mixed memories: the camaraderie and triumphalism of successful operations, the shared danger, the exultation of destroying the enemy. But also, grim thoughts about the devastation wreaked by the Russians they had been aiming at. His wife and daughter, long gone.

  “How many shall we take?” Noor asked.

  “Nine Stingers,” Javed said. “That’s more than enough. We can put three on each mule. We’ll take two gripstocks and the BCUs, and the six RPGs and two launch tubes that are left here as well.” He carried the Stinger tube through to the main cave and placed it carefully on the floor before returning to take the next from Noor.

  Twenty minutes later, all the equipment, similarly protected by clear plastic, was lying on the floor of the main cave. Javed unwrapped one of each item and took them outside so he could examine them in the daylight.

  “These all look in remarkably good condition,” he said, squatting down and running through his own mental checklist as he ran his hands around the components. The fact that the missiles themselves were in hermetically sealed tubes meant there was every likelihood they were still in perfect working order. But the BCUs too, which had been his biggest worry, looked fine.

  “Yes, it’s cool and dry in there,” Noor said. “It’s like keeping them in a fridge.”

  Javed looked up at him. “Let’s hope it’s done the job, then. I’m not going to test them. There’s too much chance of being spotted and caught before we’re even out of the valley.”

  Javed removed the Motorola radio from his backpack and flicked it on to text message mode. The device was capable of sending messages up to two hundred characters long. But Javed wasn’t going to need that many.

  He quickly tapped out a two-word missive to Baz.

  All OK.

  He wasn’t going to run the risk of communicating in anything other than coded language. The US Army would almost certainly be monitoring all frequencies, and quite likely, the Taliban too. He pressed send.

  Soon after, a crackle of gunfire erupted from somewhere across the other side of the valley, followed a few seconds later by another volley of shots from a position farther west.

  “Taliban again,” Noor said. “Probably the same lot we saw earlier.”

  “I’m certain they weren’t tracking us, though.”

  “They weren’t, but if we move from here, the chances of them spotting us rises. I think we should stay and sleep here, then head back tomorrow.”

  “Agreed,” Javed said. He picked up the Stinger components and carried them back into the cave, where he rewrapped them. “We can’t risk Taliban or the Americans finding us with a load of Stingers on the mules.”

  Saturday, June 1, 2013

  Kabul

  Johnson ended the forty-five minute Skype call with Carrie and Peter and put his phone down on the table. His two teenagers had been understandably worried at the news that their father was going to be traveling through dangerous areas of a country far from home about which they knew little, other than what they’d seen in the news. And that wasn’t reassuring.

  He had attempted to downplay the dangers and instead talked about the fascinating history of Afghanistan and the beautiful mountainous countryside he would be traveling through. But it wasn’t cutting much ice, he could tell. Even the family dog, Cocoa, seemed subdued and spent the whole call lying on his mat in the background.

  It was difficult as a single dad, trying to ply his trade, follow his passion, and earn enough to keep his family solvent without having to resort to boring hometown investigations in which he had little interest. Johnson often called it his own personal trilemma.

  He picked up the Beretta M9 semiautomatic from the table. The familiar shape felt reassuring in Johnson’s hands. He didn’t ask Haroon where it had come from, nor about the Walther PPS that he had obtained for Jayne.

  He ran his hands over the sleek black casing, and then he took the magazine out and racked the slide back. There was no live round in the chamber. The fifteen-round magazine was full, as were the two spare magazines that Haroon had brought along to Johnson’s villa.

  Meanwhile, Jayne was checking the Walther over. She seemed similarly happy: preparations for their journey from Kabul to Wazrar early the following morning seemed to be on track.

  Haroon grinned, looking alternately at Johnson, then Jayne. “Will those do?”

  “Yes, good for me,” Jayne said. “Thanks a lot.”

  “And me,” Johnson said. “Don’t let me ever say you ISI people aren’t resourceful.”

  Haroon laughed. “In this part of the world, being resourceful is the first skill you learn when you pop out of the womb, Joe.” He slipped his hand beneath his jacket and pulled out a Heckler & Koch P2000 semiautomatic. “Couldn’t bring mine on the plane so I got myself one too,” he said with a smirk.

  Johnson nodded in approval.

  “I’ve also emailed both of you a photo,” Haroon said. “It’s a picture of Wazrar in 1988, after it had been blitzed by a bunch of Russian Hind helicopters. Have a look.”

  Johnson took out his phone and clicked on the email that Haroon had sent. The attached photograph, a scanned copy of a slightly dog-eared print, showed a collection of mud-brick houses that had been almost entirely demolished, their walls fallen in and roofs collapsed. People were sitting in the dirt next to them, weeping.

  He looked up at Haroon, who pointed toward the photo. “Shocking, isn’t it?” Haroon said. “Someone sent me a copy of that picture years after the war was finished, but it made me think we were right to help the mujahideen. You’ll see the difference when you go. They’ve rebuilt the village.”

  “The Pashtun spirit,” Johnson said.

  Jayne leaned over his shoulder to look at the photograph. “Pity they can’t rebuild lost lives,” she said.

  Johnson turned back to his list of tasks. Another tool he had added to his collection in recent months had been micro tracking devices, roughly thirty-five millimeters square and only eight millimeters deep. He had used them to good effect to track a terrorist sniper rifle on its journey across the Atlantic on a previous job in Northern Ireland.

  That success had underlined to him the potential of such devices for personal security. At only a few hundred dollars each, they were well worth the investment.

  He had commissioned a contact in New Hampshire who specialized in covert tracking to create a tiny cavity in his rubber shoe sole into which a tracker could be inserted when necessary. Jayne had required little persuasion to also have one installed in a pair of her walking shoes. The trackers, with a battery life of around two weeks, could be monitored anywhere in the world using an iPhone app.

  Johnson removed the insole from his right shoe and, using the blade on his Swiss Army Knife, he slowly levered out a finely cut segment of the honeycombed rubber midsole beneath, revealing a shallow cavity in the heel. He slipped a tracker inside, then replaced the rubber segment. He took Jayne’s shoe and installed one in hers too. Then they both synchronized the trackers with their phone apps so both could be monitored from either device.

  Johnson gave Omar, the driver, three backpacks and other mountain gear borrowed from the US embassy to be loaded onto the Hilux along with water, dried food, and three jerry cans of spare diesel. Then he called the ICC office in Kabul to let them know his travel plans, in case they needed to contact him regarding the investigation contract, and that they should allow for potential delays in replying to messages, as cell phone reception would be unpredictable.

  Next came a meeting with Frank Rice at the Serena Hotel, where he was staying, to brief him on progress so far and to ensure he was on board with their plan to track down Javed and investigate Severinov—and just as importantly, to ensure that he was prepared to underwrite the cost.

  Rice was happy to do so. He rapidly grasped the significance of the apparent linkages between Javed’s and Severinov’s present and past roles and the importance to his own investment decisions of getting
to the bottom of those. To his mind, if there was a possibility of uncovering damaging revelations about rival bidders that might give him and his client a big advantage, he was 100 percent behind it. In the context of a potential multibillion dollar investment, the charges for a driver, the Hilux rental, Johnson and Jayne’s daily rate, a payment to Haroon, and other incidental costs were insignificant.

  Given Rice’s commitment, Johnson had been relieved to receive the report from Vic, giving the British investment banker and his client a green light.

  Next, he and Jayne briefed Haroon on developments since their meetings with the three passport forgers on the Friday morning. They had spent the following twenty-four hours working on plans for the trip to Wazrar, and Johnson wanted to make sure Haroon was comfortable with everything.

  Johnson was also insistent that for security reasons, the US embassy was kept in the loop, and they had spent some time with Sally O’Hara to get her up to speed with their plans.

  Because of the number of Taliban and Haqqani attacks in the Khost-Gardez area, O’Hara initially tried hard to dissuade them from traveling there. But after realizing that wasn’t going to work, she suggested that Johnson get in touch with Seb Storey, the US Army lieutenant colonel to whom she had introduced him at the US embassy reception the previous week.

  It made sense. Storey was located at Firebase Wilderness, an army command post midway along the Khost-Gardez highway—roughly fifteen kilometers from Wazrar. From a security point of view, it would pay to try to get Storey onside. Johnson’s only concern was that he might end up being hamstrung by the US military machine and prevented from doing what he wanted to do: finding Javed.

  Johnson wrote a short email to Storey, which he copied to Jayne, outlining his plans and suggesting they try to arrange a meeting while he was in the vicinity.

  Finally, he decided on one final visit to the address he had for Javed on Street Ten, just to make sure.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Sunday, June 2, 2013

  Wazrar

  It was almost eight o’clock in the morning as Baz made his way up the hill from the small shop in his village, carrying the bread and yogurts that he had just bought for his breakfast.

  There had been no rain for more than two weeks, and the early summer sun had dried out the surface of the Khost-Gardez highway, turning it to dust. Every time a truck passed through the village, it threw up a dense cloud of gray particles that smothered everything, from vegetation to houses and vehicles.

  A group of children ran past him, playing in the street, as they seemed to do every day at the moment. Their school had been closed for the past three days, since the Taliban had thrown a grenade into the building—thankfully while it was unoccupied—and caused extensive damage. It would probably take another two weeks of repair work before it could reopen.

  As he arrived back at his house, he felt the Motorola radio hidden beneath his shalwar kameez vibrate in his pocket. Immediately his heart rate rose a little. He had agreed with Javed and Noor that they would keep any communications to an absolute minimum and use only text messages unless in a real emergency. They all knew that radio frequencies were monitored by the US military and quite possibly by insurgent rebels too.

  But Javed and Noor were to let him know, using brief, cryptic language, whether the Stingers were in the cave as expected and whether they looked in usable condition.

  This could be good or bad news.

  He shut the door behind him, placed the bread and yogurts on a table, removed the radio and, using the LCD screen, scrolled to the message in-box.

  All OK the message said.

  Baz breathed out. He clicked on reply and sent a two-character response: ok.

  Then he placed the radio in a drawer beneath the kitchen table and closed it. He didn’t want any of his extended family to see it if they happened to walk in; they knew little of what his extracurricular activities involved. And as the patriarch of the extended family, since the death of his and Noor’s father, Feroz, in 2001, Baz was conscious of trying to set a good example for the younger members of the family, particularly his own children.

  Baz checked his watch. He had no idea what time Noor and Javed would actually leave the cave, but it didn’t really matter; the Toyota was in place, ready for them farther up the valley. He would wait to hear from them again.

  He filled his kettle with water and set it to boil. There was little else to do but have a cup of chai and wait. He turned on a black radio set that stood on the table and settled down to listen to a news program.

  Then, behind him, he heard the door latch click.

  Baz whirled around, just in time to see two men, both clad in charcoal gray shalwar kameezes and wearing black ski masks that covered their mouths and noses, slip through the door and move fast toward him.

  “Don’t move, stay still, and do what I say,” the first man said in basic, heavily accented Pashto.

  One of them was holding a gun, the other a long knife.

  Sunday, June 2, 2013

  Wazrar

  Severinov walked around the plain wooden chair that stood in the center of the darkened kitchen. He repeatedly smacked the rubber truncheon that he was holding into his open left palm.

  In the chair, his hands lashed to the wooden arms, feet similarly tied to the chair legs, was Baz. A ball of rag was stuffed into his mouth, and a steady trickle of blood coursed from his nose down over his upper lip, staining the rag crimson.

  “Tell me exactly how to get to that cave,” Severinov said in Pashto, his voice level and menacing. “You’ve got ten seconds.” He patted the Makarov pistol stuffed into his belt and began to count slowly downward. “Ten, nine, eight . . .”

  With each number, he smacked the truncheon into his palm. When he got to two, Baz shook his head a little, the whites of his eyes showing in the gloom.

  “. . . one, zero.”

  Baz shook his head again.

  Severinov stood and stared at the Pashtun for a couple of seconds. It had been quite some time since he had been up close and hands-on like this with an interrogation victim. He had almost forgotten how it felt: the adrenaline rush, the sense of power. The fact that Baz had been involved in the shooting down of the helicopters in 1988 in the K-G Pass added to his satisfaction.

  He bent down, raised the truncheon, and smashed it hard into Baz’s right shin just below the knee. Baz’s head jerked back in agony as his tibia splintered into three pieces, one of which was pushed sideways so that it protruded out through the skin on the inside of the upper calf. He issued a muffled scream through the gag and then another, his face contorted and purple like a rubber mask on Halloween night.

  It was a technique that Severinov had learned from his father, Sergo, who had occasionally enjoyed telling his teenage son tales of extracting information about plots against his boss, Josef Stalin, during the 1940s. Stalin had ordered confessions, so Sergo, who had no option but to comply, made sure he had obtained them, whether true or not. He had proved himself good at his job. In turn, Severinov himself had deployed similar techniques during his stint in Afghanistan with the KGB in the ’80s, although then the victims were mainly mujahideen who had been captured by the Soviet 40th Army.

  “Just nod if you’d like to tell me where the cave is, and I’ll remove the gag so you can talk,” Severinov said.

  Baz’s body sagged into the chair. Severinov watched it sink with approval. That was always a good sign. He turned to Vasily, who was keeping watch, a Makarov in his hand.

  “He’ll talk soon,” Severinov said, switching to Russian. “We’ll just keep going until he starts squealing.”

  Vasily nodded in approval. “Do another countdown. He’ll break.”

  Severinov began another lap around the chair, like a prowling lion around a wounded buck. “Okay,” he said. “Left shin this time. Tell me, Mr. Babar, where is the cave? I know you have a map that shows the route.”

  Sandjar had told him that Baz had a map somewhere
in his house that showed the precise location of the cave in the mountains.

  Again Severinov began to steadily smack the truncheon into his left palm as he walked and counted. “Ten, nine, eight . . .”

  But Baz didn’t budge. He just shook his head as the countdown finished. Again, Severinov bent down and this time smashed the truncheon into his prisoner’s left shin, with a similar outcome to the right, although this time, the broken fragments of bone did not pierce the skin.

  “You stupid bastard,” Severinov said in Russian, this time raising his voice. Without any further warning, he smashed the truncheon down onto Baz’s right hand, which was fastened in position on top of the wooden armrest. The blow instantly flattened and broke Baz’s thumb joint and the first two knuckles. Again, Baz’s head jerked back in a spasm of agony, this time with his eyes closed.

  Sandjar had told Severinov that Baz was a tough nut, but his comment had been made in passing. He certainly hadn’t said he would be this difficult to break. These damn Afghans. How the hell do they breed them like this? Severinov wondered to himself.

  “Let’s try a little knife work,” Vasily suggested.

  “Yes. Pass it here.”

  Vasily picked up the fifteen-centimeter hunting knife that he had bought upon their arrival in Kabul and handed it to Severinov, who held it up in front of Baz’s face. “We’re going to start with your fingers, and then I’ll move on to your toes. One at a time.”

  Severinov smacked the flat of the knife against Baz’s pulped right hand a couple of times to check if there was any reaction. But Baz remained silent and still.

  Suddenly Severinov turned the knife over, placed the blade against Baz’s right little finger just above the knuckle, and pressed hard downward, using both hands together for added power. The finger severed after a couple of wiggles of the blade and fell on the floor. Immediately, blood began to pour from the wound.