Stalin's Final Sting

by Andrew Turpin

  A few minutes later he returned. “The boss is in a crisis planning meeting. He’ll get back to me as soon as he can. Shouldn’t be too long.”

  Jayne groaned inwardly.

  “Just tell me what you’re hoping to achieve with this Russian,” Storey said, glancing impatiently at his watch. “You can’t take him to the international court for something that happened here in the ’80s. You’re wasting your time—and you’re wasting ours.” He gestured toward a bunch of soldiers who were loading rifles and RPG launchers into a collection of armored cars.

  In the distance, Jayne could see a cloud of dust that was being thrown up by an armored car or other vehicle that was speeding toward Wilderness along the track that led from the Khost-Gardez highway.

  “The ICC may not want to take him to court, though let’s leave them to decide that,” Jayne said. “But you can ruin people’s reputations by telling the truth about them. The media love stories like that if the perpetrators are now in positions of power.”

  Storey shook his head. “You realize we’re stretched to the limit here without having to handle your problem. I’ve spent the last two days in firefights against a bunch of trigger-happy terrorists whose only objective in life is to blow us back where we came from.”

  “I can see that,” Jayne said.

  “And I’m going to have to try to explain what you were doing here to the general. He’s under extreme pressure and is going to be furious.”

  Shit, she thought. Just get on with it. Every minute counts.

  Then she had an idea. She took out her phone, clicked on the email containing the photograph of the devastation at Wazrar in 1988 that Haroon had sent to her and Johnson, and showed it to Storey.

  “Send him this photo. This is what the Russians did to Wazrar,” she said. “Just so you know. And I’m guessing a kidnapped US citizen will become big media news very quickly back home. It’ll go right up the political agenda. Even more so if he dies.”

  Storey gave a slight nod as he studied the photograph. “Appalling,” he said. “I tell you what: email that to me, and I’ll send it to the general. That explains more than words will about what you’re doing here.”

  Jayne immediately forwarded the photo to Storey. A few minutes later, his phone beeped as a message arrived, and he disappeared into the other room.

  She heard the faint sound of Storey’s voice from behind the closed door. Outside, a group of soldiers jumped into a Guardian M1117 armored security vehicle, which shot off.

  Five minutes later, Storey reappeared. “The boss has seen your picture. I’ve explained everything to him. He’s told us to get on with planning a rescue operation.”

  Monday, June 3, 2013

  Kabul

  The razor wire that topped the ten-foot-high walls surrounding the building in Kabul looked new to Johnson. There was no chance of getting through it, even if he managed to scale the walls, which were possibly rough enough to allow some hand- and footholds. And the black metal gate was also topped with razor wire.

  But in the daylight, during the ten minutes that Vasily allowed him out in the yard for exercise at gunpoint, Johnson was at least able to work out where he was. The intermittent roar of jet passenger aircraft passing low overhead and the orientation of the mountaintops—the only things visible over the wall apart from the top half of a nearby block of apartments—gave him enough clues.

  This building, which seemed more like a business unit or workshop than a house, was in northeastern Kabul, maybe a couple of miles southeast of the airport. Not that knowing his location was going to help much, he thought.

  The yard looked considerably larger in the daylight than in the faint glow of night. The plot was perhaps fifty yards long and maybe forty wide, with the building, made from concrete pillars infilled with brick, positioned in the northeastern corner. There was not one scrap of green vegetation to be seen, only gray dust and piles of sand, cement, and gravel. The hum of traffic told him that he might be near the Kabul-Nangarhar highway. His mind went back to the RPG attack on the highway he had witnessed from his aircraft window the previous week.

  Johnson also realized that the property was only a mile or so from the giant US Army base, Camp Phoenix. From the yard, he could hear the frequent sound of helicopters descending and ascending as they came into and out of the base. That was doubly frustrating: there, almost within reach, were the men who could extricate him from this mess.

  “That is enough, get back inside,” Vasily ordered, waving his Makarov in now familiar fashion. He ushered Johnson through the door, where Severinov stood waiting.

  Johnson stopped and stared at the Russian. “What is the point in keeping me here? What do you want?” he asked Severinov. “Let me know and I’ll see if I can help.”

  “There’s a lot of point,” he said, a faint smirk on his face. “For the time being, you’re out of action, you can’t do any damage. And you’ll have other uses in the future. You might even get to go home, if your government plays ball. You might become the spy who came in from the cold, as they say—the CIA spy.”

  His face now straight, Severinov added, “But if they don’t, well . . . ” His voice tailed off and he shrugged.

  “What do you mean?” Johnson asked. “And if they don’t play ball?”

  “Never mind,” Severinov said. “But I’ll tell you this much: people think the Cold War is finished but it isn’t. It has never been over and probably never will be. There’s just been a lull in hostilities. Vladimir Putin hates you lot and so does all of Russia. You don’t understand the Motherland and all that it stands for.”

  “You’re living in the past,” Johnson said. “Just like you were when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in the first place. That was a mistake—trying to revive the Great Game.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” Severinov said. “Russia’s been great in the past and will be again. We won the Great Patriotic War and we’ll ultimately win the new Cold War. The occupation of Afghanistan in 1979 was about defending the interests of the Motherland—the Afghan Communist government there. You watch—we’ll do it again.”

  “Where?” Johnson asked.

  “The Crimea would be a good start,” Severinov said. “We’ll have it back, and maybe sooner than you think. Now, just get down those stairs and back into your room.”

  He nodded at Vasily, who prodded Johnson in the small of the back with his gun.

  Johnson lurched forward and walked down the stairs and into the room. Vasily turned the key in the lock behind him.

  It felt to him as though the clock had just been turned back twenty-five years. Once again, it was all about Russia and the United States, with Afghanistan as the battleground. He looked down at his shoe. All he could hope for was that the modern technology buried in the heel was working as intended.

  Monday, June 3, 2013

  Kabul

  The vagaries of the Afghan cell phone network and internet system had plagued Javed ever since his return to his home country. If it wasn’t the Taliban blowing up the towers and their antenna, it was power failures or computer systems breakdowns.

  In any case, once he had revived himself from his journey back from Wazrar with a strong coffee, Javed’s thoughts were far from his cell phone. They were about 170 kilometers away, to be precise, in his home village, where he knew his old friend Baz was being laid to rest.

  At just before noon, when the burial was due, he washed, then took out his prayer mat, laid it carefully in the direction of Mecca, sank to his knees, and murmured, “Allahu akhbar.” Then he began a long prayer. He pictured the washing of the body, the candles, the procession to the village graveyard, the prayers, the distribution of alms, or Iskat, to the poorest villagers. Then he wept.

  It was almost an hour later when he rose to his feet again. What am I doing here instead of there? he asked himself.

  Having had no data on his phone for two days, not since leaving Wazrar for his walk into the mountains with Noor a
nd the two youngsters, Javed half-heartedly checked it at just after two o’clock. By then, service had been restored, so he logged onto his GPS tracker service.

  Javed had to check the map carefully to be certain of what he thought he was seeing: the tracker was located about eight kilometers away to the east, on the other side of the airport, just off the main Kabul-Nangarhar highway.

  Taken by surprise, Javed refreshed the screen again, just to be sure. There was no mistake. He scratched his head, of two minds about what to do. He momentarily thought about loading a couple of RPGs into the back of the pickup and blasting whatever building Severinov happened to be in off the face of Kabul immediately.

  But then he thought better of it; such a hasty move wasn’t a good idea, especially at this hour of the day. Without a carefully thought-out plan, there was every chance he would end up being spotted by some Afghan or American security patrol. The site was quite near to Camp Phoenix, the US Army base, which made it doubly sensible to take a cautious approach. He would rather just go and check it out and work out whether an attack under cover of darkness was viable.

  Javed went to the Toyota and hid his Browning 9mm Hi-Power in an underfloor cavity beneath the front passenger seat. Half a minute later he was on his way out the gate of his brother’s house.

  It took him over half an hour to negotiate his way through the usual Kabul traffic chaos. Eventually he located the site where Severinov appeared to be.

  All he could see from ground level was a tall concrete wall, at least three meters high, topped with thick razor wire. Even the gate, a solid black metal unit, had razor wire above it.

  Not wanting to be too obviously interested in the property, Javed drove past once in each direction, then cut onto a side street that ran parallel to the one in which Severinov was located and parked to think through what to do next. Here he was almost directly beneath the flight path into the airport, which was about two and a half miles away; every so often a jet passed low over his head on its way in to land. Three military Chinook helicopters buzzed in overhead and descended rapidly into Camp Phoenix.

  Across the road he saw a five-story block of apartments, which was the only building taller than two stories in the vicinity. Maybe there was a way to see over the site from there?

  He moved the Toyota up an alleyway between two workshops near to the apartment block where, barring the most careful of checks, it was out of sight of the street.

  Javed put on a pair of sunglasses, got out of the truck, and walked purposefully across the street and into the apartment block, which had no security door. He then began climbing the exterior concrete stairs that ran up the left side of the building. Each floor had its own security door, giving access to a corridor from where the apartments could be accessed. But Javed found that the stairwell continued beyond the fifth floor and up onto the flat roof of the block. Two laundry lines had been strung up between pairs of metal poles that had been bolted to the concrete roof. The lines were fully laden with kids’ clothing. At the far end of the roof was a small shelter consisting of corrugated sheeting mounted on four poles, with a couple of rusty old bicycles chained beneath it next to some wicker laundry baskets.

  Above, the clatter-clatter of another helicopter grew louder. Javed looked up. It was another US Army Chinook. Presumably that was also heading into Camp Phoenix.

  Javed walked to the edge of the roof closest to the property where Severinov’s tracker was located, using the clothing on the line as cover. Now he had a good view down over the entire plot, which was about 120 meters away. To his surprise, it looked like a building site. There was a building there, but—typical of so many construction sites across the city—it was not finished, and there were piles of bricks, sand, gravel, and other detritus everywhere. Was this really the kind of property that a Russian oligarch would purchase? Javed thought it highly unlikely—unless there was a specific purpose. His aerial view confirmed that the entire site was secured by the three-meter concrete wall topped with razor wire. Next to the house, a gray double-cab pickup was parked.

  As he watched, he noticed a US Army armored vehicle drive slowly up the street past the house, then turn left and head toward the highway. That type of patrol was routine across the city.

  Above him, the Chinook was now hardly moving, its twin rotors creating a noticeable downdraft, its engine noise deafening. Then its engine pitch rose, and it moved rapidly off to the north, in the direction of Bagram, the US military air base that was about forty kilometers away.

  It didn’t take Javed long to decide on a course of action. The obvious thing to do was to wait until nightfall, then return to the apartment block roof with an RPG via a more circuitous backstreet route to avoid the security patrols. Then he could pump a couple of missiles straight into the property below. It would be easy. He could get down the stairs afterward and away down the highway. That would destroy the house, pulverize the Russian, and avoid the complications and uncertainties involved in using the Stingers to bring down Severinov’s aircraft, particularly as he wasn’t 100 percent sure whether the Stingers were still functional.

  Everyone would assume it was just another random Taliban attack.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Monday, June 3, 2013

  Firebase Wilderness

  Storey bent over the three aerial photographs he had printed and stabbed his index finger at the first. “We can fast-rope a couple of guys into the site from one of the Black Hawks.” He gestured through the window toward the helicopters out on the landing area. “Or, even better, we can just land the chopper if there’s enough space. We’ll take the other Blackhawk too, with a team to secure the site perimeter. I’m minded to go myself on this job.”

  “You are going?” Jayne asked. She was surprised that a commanding officer would get involved in a hands-on operation such as the one they were now discussing.

  Storey was still looking at the photos. “I don’t like asking my men to do things I don’t do myself,” he said. “I could ask the guys at Phoenix or Bagram to do it, but it’s only forty-five minutes away from here, and I need to go to Phoenix anyway. We’ll go. It’s easier.”

  He turned to Thollen, standing next to him with Randall. “Isn’t that right, Staff Sergeant?”

  Thollen nodded. “Yes, sir. We lead from the front here. It’s a slightly different way of doing things, but it works well in this environment.”

  The lieutenant colonel had swung quickly into action after his discussion with his boss about the possibility of launching a rescue operation. Her emailed photo and comments about the likely media and political storm if Johnson died had clearly done the trick, Jayne thought.

  Using satellite photographs, Storey had quickly identified the property where Johnson’s tracker device was located: a building on a plot just off the Kabul-Nangarhar highway.

  He had then requested a set of high-definition aerial photographs from his counterpart at Bagram Airfield, just outside Kabul, who had sent a Chinook overhead with a cameraman on board. He had also sourced some ground shots of the property from another senior officer he knew well in Kabul, who had arranged a drive-by of the property. Jayne was impressed that the pictures had been emailed to him within an hour and a half.

  “Can you give me a photo of your friend Joe?” Storey asked. “Headquarters is asking for one, for the record.”

  Jayne emailed him a picture of Johnson that she had on her phone, taken on their previous operation together in Northern Ireland.

  “If you’re going in there, what’s the risk to Joe?” Jayne asked. “Won’t the Russians hear the choppers and maybe do something stupid?”

  “You’d be surprised,” Storey said. “The Black Hawks are fairly quiet, and quick, and there’s so many choppers over Kabul anyway people don’t even notice them anymore. We’ll be in there before they realize it. Don’t worry. We’re trained for this type of operation—we rescued a journalist who was kidnapped by the Taliban from a similar compound six months ago.”<
br />
  Storey paused. “The only possible hiccup is whether the general gives the plan the green light. He needs to sign it off.”

  Jayne nodded. “Will you get it?”

  The lieutenant colonel shrugged. “I think so. I’m also informing the US embassy. I don’t want them complaining that they haven’t been kept in the loop. And I need to get an all-clear from the Afghan army HQ as well. Should be a formality.”

  “As long as it’s kept quiet from the bloody media,” Jayne said. “The last thing we want if we’re carrying out an investigation is a ton of TV and press coverage.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Storey said.

  “And I’d like to come on the chopper too,” Jayne said. “That okay?” She felt that she should definitely be on hand to help exfiltrate Johnson from the building in Kabul.

  Three other staff officers who were working at a desk in the corner turned round and glanced at Jayne, clearly surprised at her request.

  Storey hesitated. “It’s not normal for us to allow civilians on such operations.”

  “I’ve done this sort of thing several times before on MI6 operations. Joe and I are looking for evidence on Severinov, and I don’t want to miss anything critical.”

  Storey pressed his lips together. “Okay, I guess I’ll make an exception. I don’t want you with us when we’re breaching the building, though. There might be a firefight, and I don’t want to take responsibility for you taking a bullet.”

  Jayne nodded. “That’s fine.”

  “Good. We’re aiming to get the birds in the air within the next hour. I don’t want to waste any time. You’re fortunate that the Taliban seem to have gone a little quiet over the past twenty-four hours. It’s given us a small window where we can spare some resources. So, just to warn you, if something blows up here and we need the choppers, we’ll have to scrap the rescue operation.”