The Russian with the AK-47 eventually returned, carrying Johnson’s Beretta and Haroon’s H&K. “There’s these two pistols but nobody in there and no sign of any other weapons,” he said in Russian. “There’s definitely been people and mules in there recently—there’s shit on the floor and food wrappers.”
“They must have taken the weapons,” Severinov said.
So they know about the Stingers, Johnson thought.
Severinov stood for a moment, visibly thinking, then spoke again in Russian. “Vasily, get that boy’s body in the cave. Put it out of sight and kick dust over the blood. Then we have to get these two out of here. I’m thinking they might be useful to us. Empty their pockets and tie their hands behind their backs.”
The man who Johnson now knew to be Vasily dragged Imran’s body into the cave, then reemerged a couple of minutes later. After kicking dust over the trail of bloodstains that now led to the cave entrance, he removed Johnson’s wallet and phone from his pocket and took out the SIM card.
Then Vasily did the same to Haroon. He put the two pistols, the wallets, and the phones and their SIMs into his backpack and removed a length of blue climbing rope, which he cut into two pieces. He lashed first Johnson’s hands behind his back, then Haroon’s.
Severinov stood and watched as Vasily carried out the work. Then he spoke to the Afghan in Pashto. “Can you track where the mules went? Or can you follow any footprints?”
The Afghan walked along the path, away from the cave, studying the ground in both directions, heading west toward the village, then east away from it. Then he came back, shaking his head. “The ground is too rocky and the trail is not obvious. I can see some signs that they went east, but the prints then disappear. We could waste a lot of time. I’m not a tracker.”
“All right, then,” Severinov said. “We will go back to the village and look for Javed from there.”
He instructed the Afghan to lead the way back, then pointed his Makarov at Johnson and spoke in English again. “You. Follow on. I will be behind you, so if you try anything, you’ll get a bullet. Understand?”
Johnson just nodded.
Sunday, June 2, 2013
Sulaiman Mountains
Severinov’s first instinct after working out who Johnson and his Pakistani friend were had been to shoot them, leave the bodies for the wolves and the jackals he had seen on his walk up through the Hindu Kush mountains, and then immediately get back on the trail of Javed, his main target.
He cursed the delay caused by the death of Baz; if it hadn’t been for that, and if they had taken Baz at gunpoint as their guide, Severinov estimated they would probably have reached the cave at least an hour earlier. Maybe they could have even arrived before Javed had left. Now it seemed foolish to do anything that would slow them down further.
But then, after thinking it through, the words of Putin at his meeting at the Rublevka mansion suddenly came back to him.
. . . Fedorov is a good man and I want him back. I’m thinking in terms of a prisoner exchange. But at present, we have no bargaining chip to offer . . .
Suddenly, Severinov’s opportunistic mind saw that here he had a chance to not only neutralize a war crimes investigator who was a potential threat to him, his reputation, and therefore to his chances of success in the Afghan oil and gas investment process but also, maybe, to exchange him for Fedorov.
It seemed a long shot, and the fine details of how it might be done eluded him. But he trusted himself to think of a solution. He always did.
As he walked at the back of the line of men trekking back over the tortuous mountain paths toward the Khost-Gardez highway, Severinov’s mind was elsewhere, trying to get two steps ahead.
That was what his father, Sergo, had instilled in him. “One step ahead, and you’ll be cut down by the man behind. Two steps and you’re safe,” echoed his father’s voice in his head. He had usually added that that was how he had navigated the shark-infested waters surrounding him during his seven years working for Josef Stalin. His mother, Olga, had used similar rhetoric, but she seldom talked about Stalin.
His parents had met while working for the Russian leader. Olga Orlov, as she was known before marrying, had been a cook at Stalin’s dacha in the Kuntsevo District just outside Moscow for eight years, from 1944 until 1952—a year before Stalin died. She got used to having her meals tested for poison by Stalin’s team of tasters.
Sergo began work at the dacha in 1945, after an outstanding career in the Red Army during the Second World War, in which he spent most of his time fighting against the Germans and was decorated with the Order of the Red Banner. He remained part of Stalin’s inner security circle until 1952.
The couple had gotten together in 1948, when Olga was thirty and Sergo thirty-six, and had married in 1950. Yuri was born seven years later. Severinov often had to try to wipe some of the difficult moments in his parents’ marriage from his mind, but they somehow stuck it out and died within nine months of each other in 1994, before they could see their son start to succeed in his post-KGB business life.
After two hours spent walking under the baking sun, Severinov needed a drink. Never mind that the Pakistani, who looked to be in his sixties, was visibly wilting, and Johnson also looked tired. He ordered a halt for water at an ice-cold stream that ran down the side of a north-facing scree slope and sat on a rock to think. Meanwhile, Vasily stood guard with his AK-47 pointed at Johnson and Haroon as they drank and splashed themselves.
There was little doubt in Severinov’s mind that Javed was likely to attempt another attack on him. His assumption was strengthened by the fact that Sandjar had been certain there were other weapons, possibly Stingers, in the cave and that they had now disappeared.
And if Javed was to attempt another attack, then most likely he would be heading back to Kabul in order to carry it out.
Perhaps the best option would be to get Johnson and Haroon back to the safe house in Kabul, near the airport. Perhaps there might then be a way to smuggle them, using his private jet, from there to Moscow. If Johnson were, say, to be discovered trying to break into some government official’s mansion—maybe even Medvedev’s—and accused of spying, there might be scope to engineer the exchange that Putin wanted. It was exactly the type of exchange that Russia and the US had carried out on many occasions before.
Alternatively, Severinov could somehow “discover” through one of his sources in Afghanistan that Johnson, like many of his American nongovernmental organization colleagues before him, had been kidnapped by the Taliban or the Haqqani network. That would be plausible. Then he could offer to lead the push to have him released via those same sources in exchange for Andre Fedorov’s return to Russian soil?
Maybe that might also be a viable solution.
Whatever the answer he ultimately came up with, it seemed that keeping Johnson secured in Kabul would at the very least give him trading options.
Importantly, it would also put him out of harm’s way until the oil and gas stake sale process was safely concluded in Severinov’s favor. The Pakistani Haroon would have to go with him, given he had witnessed everything. He would then be dispensable.
Severinov felt confident that he could distance himself from any allegations of kidnapping—the Kabul safe house had been bought for cash in a false name, which gave him anonymity and deniability.
Vasily, who had been walking at the front of the single-file convoy, moved to the back and joined Severinov, both of them keeping their weapons ready for use if needed. Thankfully there had been no sign of Taliban so far.
“What are we going to do with these idiots?” Vasily asked, nodding toward Johnson and Haroon.
“Wait,” Severinov said. “Drop back. These two may speak Russian.” They slowed until they were walking forty meters behind the others. “I’m thinking the Kabul safe house,” Severinov said.
“Good idea,” Vasily said. “If Lvov temporarily takes care of them at the house, then you can take care of the oil bid, and I can co
ntinue searching for Javed.”
“Yes, I want Javed dead. I’m guessing he’ll head back to his house in Kabul. We’ll get him there.”
“Yes, don’t worry,” Vasily said. “But you’ve never said exactly why.”
Severinov waved his hand dismissively and looked in the other direction. “It’s a revenge issue that goes back a long time,” he said.
“And you can’t tell me more?”
“No.”
“Why’s that?”
“I swore an oath,” Severinov said, glancing at his colleague.
Vasily hesitated, his mind almost visibly ticking. “An oath? Who to?”
“To the leadership.”
“Ah, I see,” Vasily said.
Severinov knew that Vasily understood what he meant and not to ask further questions.
An hour later, the group arrived back at the Ford Ranger, which, slightly to Severinov’s surprise was where they had left it.
“Truss them up; they’ll have to go in the back,” Severinov said to Vasily, gesturing toward the hard-top cover over the back of the double-cab pickup. He lowered his voice to a whisper. “And gag them. I don’t want them shouting out while I’m bribing my way through the police checkpoints.”
Part Three
Chapter Eighteen
Sunday, June 2, 2013
Washington, DC
The text message that went from Robert Watson’s burner phone in Washington, DC, to a similar device in an office just off Abdul Haq Square in Kabul was short and succinct.
The message followed a couple of days of hard thought by Watson, who had been struggling to work out a strategy to neutralize any potential threat from Johnson to EIGER and Zilleman’s investment project in Afghanistan. The simplest approach—and one that Watson had generally adopted to good effect across his entire career—was to get someone else to do his dirty work for him.
I believe US national Joseph Johnson is “undertaking espionage work for the US in Afghanistan.” He may be claiming to work for the International Criminal Court. Johnson is ex-CIA. He is understood to be traveling outside Kabul. Suggest you apprehend for as long as possible and interrogate. My usual terms.
Watson then followed it up with a second text message containing Johnson’s passport number from the list he had obtained from his mole within the State Department.
The recipient of Watson’s messages was Mohammed Burhani, executive assistant director in Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security, the intelligence agency that was formed in 2002 to succeed the KHAD. He was third in command of the agency, which was headed by the director, Asadullah Khalid. Watson knew that Burhani would understand exactly the meaning behind the quotation marks in his message—he could picture him grinning as he read it.
Burhani, like virtually all of the senior people in the NDS, was a graduate of the old KHAD school of intelligence gathering. And Watson knew very well that like many of his Afghan government colleagues, he was paid so little that the chance of earning some extra cash for carrying out a task that had little risk was difficult to turn down.
The previous day, Watson had made a telephone call to the office of the ICC in Afghanistan, posing as a business associate of Johnson who needed to contact him urgently.
The ICC official to whom he had spoken informed him that Johnson was traveling around the country and that his precise location wasn’t known. But that was enough information for Watson’s purposes.
Burhani was a man whom Watson—after considerable effort, much risk, and a not-insignificant initial payment—had gotten to know during his time as Islamabad station chief in 1988. Burhani at that time was much further down the chain of command at the KHAD. Watson had put him on his payroll in return for snippets of information about KGB and KHAD activities in Afghanistan.
Most notably, he had earned his money in 2009 when Watson, then running the CIA’s Pakistan drone strike program against insurgents along the Pakistan-Afghan border, paid Burhani to detain a man who Watson believed had knowledge that four particular Taliban targets were about to be hit and was poised to warn those in the camps.
Not long after Watson had sent his message about Johnson, a reply came back from Burhani.
That is not a problem. If Johnson is traveling outside Kabul it is easier. I will make alert regional offices to arrest at police/army roadblocks and will update you with progress. Will try to hold in jail one week then deport and refuse future visa applications. There are other “options” available.
Watson smiled to himself. He didn’t know for certain what Johnson’s agenda in Afghanistan was, but if history was anything to go by, his presence didn’t bode well for Watson’s current plans. So deportation after a week in custody would be an ideal scenario. With any luck it would be long enough for Johnson to get a good beating or two in whichever prison the NDS decided to detain him. It would not be a pleasant experience, of that Watson was sure.
If that didn’t work, then Burhani’s “other options” might need to come into play.
Sunday, June 2, 2013
Wazrar
For the sixth time in an hour, Jayne checked her cell phone. There was still no signal, either for data or voice traffic. From her position sitting on the floor cushions, she glanced across at Nazia, who had been tearful all day and yet had to try to help her relatives make arrangements for her husband’s funeral.
“It seems to take them several hours to get the towers going again if the Taliban have forced a local engineer to turn them off,” Nazia said, rubbing her red-rimmed eyes with the back of her hand. “They take them at gunpoint and make them do it. But if they’ve actually blown up the tower, it can take far longer—days or weeks.”
Jayne tugged at her hijab. She had been trying all afternoon to use the monitoring app on her phone to check where Johnson was. It was frustrating because the GPS tracking device inserted into Johnson’s shoe had been operating perfectly when he had left with Haroon and Imran.
She had watched a blue dot on her cell phone map move slowly eastward into the mountains from Wazrar. But then, suddenly, just after lunchtime, it had vanished.
Without a data connection, there was no chance. The landline phone was also dead because the Taliban had cut the cables farther down the valley the previous week, Nazia told her.
“You’ll just have to wait for them to switch the cell phone network back on,” Nazia said. She seemed resigned to the disruptions, which were just another example of how daily life was taken hostage by the insurgents.
“It’s really frustrating,” Jayne said. Her Pashto, like Johnson’s, had rapidly regained its fluency while in Afghanistan.
“Yes. It is everything from transport and food supplies to fuel, electricity,” Nazia said. “You learn to live with it. This is making it hard to arrange for my husband’s funeral.”
However, it didn’t require a cell phone network for news of Baz’s death to spread through the village. Everyone knew. Two men had arrived with a kind of wooden cot, which they placed in the courtyard outside the house.
Baz’s body had been lifted onto the cot, with his big toes tied together and his eyes closed, his face carefully aligned so that it faced toward the Kaaba. Then a constant stream of visitors had come in during the afternoon, chiefly women who sat in a circle around the cot and alternately chanted and wept. Nazia frequently joined them, sometimes beating her face and chest with both hands in anguish.
The sight made Jayne feel as though she was seriously intruding on the family space at a time of immense grief, which in turn made her occasionally tearful.
She forced herself to focus on the task at hand, which was trying to ensure Johnson’s and Haroon’s safety. Her level of concern mounted when one of Nazia’s cousins came to the house to pick up something and mentioned that a large squad of US and Afghan soldiers had been seen heading into the mountains just north of Wazrar. The assumption was that the Taliban were active and that the military had gone in to try to track them down.
&nb
sp; Finally, after nine o’clock in the evening, her phone burst into life with a string of six text messages from various friends and contacts. The network was back on.
Quickly, she logged onto the GPS monitoring app and waited for it to load. Even with a signal, the 3G data transfer rate was painfully slow. After a couple of minutes, a map loaded, and then finally a blue dot appeared.
To Jayne’s surprise, the dot was in the center of a yellow highway. She quickly reduced the scale of the map so she could see where it was. Then she sat up straight.
“Shit!” she said, involuntarily. “How the hell . . .”
The dot wasn’t located in the mountains east of Wazrar. Instead, it was on the highway north of Gardez, heading in the direction of Kabul, at least an hour away from where she sat.
This was so far off the plan that they had pulled together that she was certain something was wrong. Johnson would definitely have tried to call or send her a text to let her know about such a drastic change, and in any case, he would have had to return to the village before moving on.
Jayne immediately tried to call Johnson’s cell phone. But all she got was the usual recorded message. The phone you are calling is unobtainable. Please try later.
Was Johnson alone? Was Haroon with him? What happened to Imran?
Her options, she quickly realized, were limited to probably one immediate course of action. That was to call Lieutenant Colonel Seb Storey at the number Johnson had given her.
She dialed the number. The phone rang, but Storey’s cell phone went to his voice mail, which had a recording advising callers to ring another number if it was an emergency and he wasn’t available.
She tried the second number.
“Hello, Wilderness,” said a man with an American accent. “Staff Sergeant Chris Thollen speaking.”
Jayne briefly introduced herself and asked for Storey, explaining the circumstances succinctly.
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