Stalin's Final Sting

by Andrew Turpin

  Omar swung the Hilux out of the terminal and west onto the busy Airport Road, a divided highway hectic with speeding taxis and heavy trucks, around the traffic circle at Shahid Square, and then south down Forty Meter Road before entering Qala-e-Fatullah Road, past Cheragh University and the hospital.

  Omar drove straight past the house on Street Nine, but as usual, the gates were closed and there was no sign of movement.

  “Turn around near the medical center and face the car the other way,” Johnson instructed. “My guess is he’ll head out that direction.”

  Omar nodded and glanced in his mirror. Then he visibly stiffened, which Johnson immediately noticed. “Seen something?”

  “Yes, he’s just driven out of his gate and headed the other way,” Omar said.

  “Shit,” Johnson said, turning his head around 180 degrees. Through the rear window, in the distance, he could see a dark pickup heading away from them. “Turn around. Go into the medical center driveway, then out again. Quick.”

  Omar accelerated into the medical center driveway, with its white-painted concrete gateposts and red-brick paving, startling the crew of an ambulance who were getting into the vehicle near the entrance. He shot around the half-circle driveway, his tires squealing on the bricks, then out the other side into the street, turning back the way they had come, the engine whining in second gear as he pushed the gas pedal down.

  He barreled back toward the intersection with Qala-e-Fatullah Road. But Javed’s pickup had already disappeared.

  Wednesday, June 12, 2013

  Kabul

  Javed accelerated out of Street Nine and up Qala-e-Fatullah Road for about two hundred meters, overtaking a fuel truck, a yellow rickshaw, and two taxis. He cut a sharp right followed by a stair-step route through the backstreets of the Taimani and then Qala-e-Fatullah districts, taking one corner after another. He glanced in his mirror, although he knew instinctively that the silver Hilux wouldn’t be visible.

  The timing couldn’t have been better. He had been preparing to leave his house but was still concerned about the possibility of surveillance at either end of Street Nine. Then, from his second-floor window, he had seen the Hilux heading slowly toward his house. He knew straightaway that the car wouldn’t stop nearby—that would have been far too obtrusive.

  So the moment it was down the street in the opposite direction, he had a window of opportunity to get out. And he had taken it. He had run down the stairs, flung himself into the driver’s seat, and exited his property just as the Hilux was rounding the bend near the medical center.

  That had given him at least a thirty-second head start, which was all he needed.

  Now Javed relaxed a little, continuing on his backstreet route eastward. Normally, he would have taken a route around the north side of the airport, through the Khaje Bughra area until he came to Tajikan Road.

  Today, however, he was certain that if Putin was heading into the city, there would be a huge security operation in place on all the obvious routes around the airport.

  In that, he was correct. At almost every turn that took him across or near to a major street, he caught sight of Afghan National Police checkpoints, flanked by green Ford pickups. At most there were long lines of vehicles waiting to pass through.

  But with their restricted budget, Javed knew for sure there was no way in which the hard-pressed security services could cover all the rat runs as well.

  So he opted for a tortuous route that ran through the suburbs south of the airport but north of the city center, through Wazirabad, Deh Sabz, and Khwaja Rawash. It was a route that certainly would not show up on any satellite navigation device, involving a shortcut through a scrap metal yard, across a bombed-out factory unit, and along dirt roads with potholes almost deep enough to swallow a person. The open sewers running alongside many of the streets were another constant hazard.

  Within three-quarters of an hour, he was parking his black pickup in the same alley he had used on his previous visit to the apartment block overlooking Severinov’s property.

  In the back of the pickup, safely stashed under the false bed, were three Stinger missiles. He pulled them out, placed them in a large backpack, and put the gripstock, the sight, and six battery coolant units into a black carry case.

  Javed glanced at his watch. It was ten minutes to three. He pulled the large backpack rain cover over the top of the missiles, concealing them as best he could. Then he slung the backpack over his shoulder, picked up the carry case, and set off down the alley toward the apartment building across the road.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Wednesday, June 12, 2013

  Kabul

  The barrier of roughly painted red and white concrete barriers and plastic orange cones stretched halfway across the northbound side of Forty Meter Road, funneling traffic into a police checkpoint, where officers went through all drivers’ and passengers’ passports and identification documents before searching their vehicles. The checkpoint was flanked by two green twin-cab police Ford pickups, with machine guns mounted on the back, manned by nervous-looking officers.

  It took ten minutes to get to the front of the line and then another few minutes while a solemn policeman checked all their documents and had a quick look in the cab and the back of the Hilux.

  By the time they were finally waved through, Johnson, in the front passenger seat, had given up on all chance of successfully tailing Javed. Behind him, Jayne’s phone beeped.

  “I’ve just had a message from Seb,” Jayne said from the rear seat behind Johnson. “Police and army checkpoints have had no luck so far.”

  Johnson stared out the windshield as the Toyota headed east along Airport Road. That was no surprise.

  “We’re not going to tail him or outrun him,” Johnson said. “And I doubt the police will pick him up. He probably knows these streets like his way to the toilet on a dark night. We’ll have to outthink him.”

  Jayne’s phone beeped again. “That’s Seb saying the first of the flights in is expected at ten past three now,” she said, reading the screen. “He doesn’t know which one.”

  Johnson turned to Haroon and Jayne in the back of the Toyota. “Where would he do this job from?”

  “I would say the hills,” Haroon said, pointing out the window at the khaki-colored mounds that rose into the azure sky a mile and a half north of the runway. “That’s the obvious spot.”

  Johnson glanced at his watch. It was five past three. “Yes, the hills are the obvious spot. But the army and police know that. They’ll be up there.”

  Haroon nodded. “I hope so.”

  “And the airport is guarded like a fortress,” Johnson went on. “So he won’t be able to do anything from around there. I’m thinking it has to be somewhere farther out but still on the flight path coming into land.”

  Suddenly Johnson’s mind went back to his rescue from Severinov’s property in eastern Kabul by Storey and his US Army helicopter. He recalled the sound of planes passing low overhead as they droned in to land and then the comment that Jayne had made.

  “Jayne,” he said, swiveling around. “When you were in Storey’s chopper pulling me out of the Severinov shack east of the airport, you said you thought you saw a gunman on the roof of an apartment building.”

  Instantly Jayne banged the back of the driver’s seat with the flat of her hand.

  “Shit, that’s it,” she said, her voice rising sharply. “The guy with the missile launcher, an RPG or whatever it was. Standing on the roof when I glanced up. By the time that door gunner tracked on the roof, he was gone.”

  “Well, let’s get down there,” Johnson said. “Nothing to lose.” He turned to Omar. “Get us down to the Nangarhar highway; it’s about two kilometers beyond Camp Phoenix. I can’t even remember the damn road name, but I’ll know it when I see it.”

  Omar accelerated along Airport Road to the end, then cut a zigzag course through the backstreets of Khwaja Rawash, just south of the airport. He hammered past a series of
massive apartment building projects that were midway through construction, the back of the pickup bouncing over potholes and ruts in the road. He then steered through an industrial area with its fuel and chemical tanks and lines of trucks waiting to load before finally getting onto the highway.

  As they drove eastward past Camp Phoenix to their left, Johnson could see ahead of them in the distance a plane coming in westward toward the airport, its landing gear down, its lights on.

  Wednesday, June 12, 2013

  Kabul

  As soon as the tiny black outline of the plane appeared in the distance, Javed knelt on his right knee and screwed the battery coolant unit into the base of the green gripstock. He glanced around him one more time from his semi-concealed spot beneath the small shelter on the roof of the apartment block. There was nobody else there: he had the place to himself.

  Then he checked the screen of the laptop that lay on top of its case next to him. The screen showed an aerial satellite view of Kabul, with the airport runway visible in the top left, the long straight line of the Kabul-Nangarhar highway below it, the wiggling snake of the Kabul River, and the distinctive bicycle spoke outline of Pul-e-Charkhi prison and the mountains to the bottom right.

  A blue dot, visible just over Pul-e-Charkhi, was moving slowly but steadily toward Javed and the airport.

  This was it. The chance he’d been waiting for since 1988.

  Javed placed the long, slim Stinger missile tube in position on his shoulder, then put his eye to the sight and focused on the incoming plane, which he could see now was the white Bombardier Global Express that he knew Severinov owned, with its distinctive T-tail and twin rear engines.

  He glanced down one more time at the laptop. The blue dot, representing the position of the tracker device built into the spine of Severinov’s prospectus file, had advanced farther and was now on a path that looked as though it would take the aircraft almost directly overhead. His plan was to let it pass over, then trigger the Stinger just as the aircraft approached the airport—that way, the Stinger’s infrared tracking mechanism would shove the missile right up the Bombardier’s engine exhausts. Javed almost smiled at the thought.

  The plane would then, in all likelihood, crash on the airport site or very near to it. That would be the most spectacular outcome, which would hopefully avoid wreckage smashing into residential housing.

  Javed stepped out from beneath the shelter and watched as the plane drew gradually closer, its outline clearer as it emerged from the haze that hung over Kabul, its drone growing louder.

  The roar reached a peak as the Bombardier passed over him, and then as it continued toward the landing strip, Javed lifted his Stinger. The plane was now filling the sight. He activated the missile against the blue sky by pressing on the safety and actuator switch and realigned it with the aircraft, which resulted in a loud beep as the infrared mechanism locked on to the Bombardier.

  Javed clicked on the uncage button at the front of the device, allowing it to automatically track the plane. There was little need to compensate for gravity here, given the relatively short distance between him and the aircraft.

  Now was the time. He pulled back the trigger and a second later there came an explosion as the launch motor ejected the missile from its tube. With a loud whoosh, the missile’s flight motor activated, and the weapon flew directly over Kabul’s eastern suburbs toward the retreating Bombardier—a slim tube of death, arcing toward Severinov’s jet at a speed of about 2,500 miles per hour, its direction dictated with minute accuracy by the infrared detector that was locked onto the aircraft’s engine exhaust heat.

  Instinctively, Javed punched the air with his left fist. Yes!

  He almost felt a sense of shock that the Stinger had operated the way it was intended—his biggest fear had been that the missile itself or, more likely, the BCU simply would not function after such a long time in storage in the cave.

  Seconds later, and just a short distance from touching down on the Kabul runway, the Bombardier exploded in a deafening white and orange firework display.

  Most of the tail section, housing the engines, fragmented and was catapulted away in a cloud of debris in all directions, away from the rest of the aircraft, while the nose of the plane turned upward but then fell along with the main body of the fuselage vertically onto the tract of land that formed the approach to the runway. There it exploded as it landed, throwing up a cloud of black smoke and dust that drifted up into the air like a giant mushroom.

  Javed stood and stared at the exploding aircraft in awe. His plan had worked spectacularly well. Severinov was dead. Finally, he had extracted his revenge.

  He jerked himself out of his semi-trance and began to place the spent Stinger tube, the gripstock, the sight, and the remaining BCUs back in their bags. He flipped the laptop lid down and stowed it in a small carry case. He now needed to get out of there, as quickly as possible.

  Wednesday, June 12, 2013

  Kabul

  Johnson caught a glimpse of the white vapor trail scorching westward against the brownstone mountain backdrop just a second or two before the Stinger struck the aircraft. The ensuing explosion and fireball physically rocked the pickup in which they were traveling.

  “Shit . . . that goddamn plane’s just been hit,” Johnson said, his shoulders tensing as he craned his neck to get a view. “It’s gone down.”

  “We’re too bloody late,” Jayne said as a dark mushroom cloud of smoke and dust began steadily rising up into the atmosphere from the direction of the airport, about a mile and a half northwest of where they were driving along the highway. There was another distant bang, presumably from a secondary explosion.

  “Looks that way,” Johnson said. But he had seen enough of the vapor trail to confirm the direction it had come from. “Keep going,” he shouted at Omar, who had put his foot on the brake and was pulling onto the side of the highway. “Quick, give Storey a call and put him on loudspeaker. We need to tell him what’s happened and say we’re heading toward where the missile came from.”

  “Where did it come from?” Jayne said, grabbing at her phone.

  “There, where we were heading,” Johnson said, pointing ahead of them toward the east. “Not the hills. I think that apartment building. Can he get a unit from Camp Phoenix?”

  Jayne nodded and began tapping on her cell phone screen.

  Johnson knew they probably had a matter of minutes, perhaps less, to cut Javed off before he vanished from his firing position and into the labyrinth of backstreets in the northern suburbs surrounding the airport.

  Then he remembered there were two other aircraft coming in at the same time.

  Putin.

  Surely Putin’s pilot would have realized what had happened to Severinov’s jet—he could hardly have missed it if coming in behind on the same flight path—and would have headed out of the danger zone, although Stinger missiles had a long range, he knew that.

  Storey answered the call. “Colonel Storey.”

  Jayne spoke first. “Seb, if you’ve not heard already, we’ve got a major incident here in Kabul. A jet, we believe belonging to Severinov, has just been shot down on the way into land and—”

  “I know,” Storey cut in. “I’m at Camp Phoenix. I came in on a chopper an hour or so ago. So I’m aware of what’s going on, but we have no more details yet.”

  “Two things,” Johnson said. “We saw roughly where the missile came from. We suspect the same apartment where Jayne saw a gunman when you got me out of Severinov’s place, and we’re certain it’s Javed Hasrat. We’re heading there right now. Can you get a team from Phoenix there?”

  “I’ll get it done. Good thinking. I’ll join the team and come with them. What vehicle does he have?”

  Jayne gave Storey details of Javed’s black Toyota Hilux and the license plate.

  “Thanks,” Storey said tersely. “And the other thing you wanted to mention?”

  “You know Putin’s plane is due in at the same time—right now,
” Johnson said. “It needs to be diverted. Might be a follow-up attack.”

  “Yes, they’ll know what’s going on—I’m sure they’ll take action. But I will double check anyway. Anything else?” Storey asked, his voice level but strained.

  “No, that’s it,” Johnson said.

  Storey ended the call with a brief instruction to keep him updated.

  While Johnson was talking, Omar had accelerated down the highway, about three-quarters of a mile past Camp Phoenix. Now he braked hard and swung a left into a potholed side road heading north, just as the sound of wailing sirens began in the distance.

  After about five hundred yards and a couple of left and right turns past industrial units, Johnson recognized exactly where they were. Ahead of them, on the left, was the building where he had been incarcerated by Severinov. On the right, on the opposite side of the road, was the apartment building where Jayne had spotted the gunman.

  At the intersection two blocks ahead of them, a cloud of dust blew up as a dark-colored pickup truck sped across it from right to left without stopping, heading southward toward the Kabul-Nangarhar highway.

  Before Johnson could open his mouth, Jayne spoke from the rear seat. “That must be him. He’s got a black pickup.”

  Without instruction, Omar accelerated toward the intersection where the truck had crossed, the silver Hilux bumping across the heavily potholed surface. He turned sharply left, and immediately they saw the black Toyota speeding away from them, halfway down the long straight street, throwing up dust behind it.