First Team

1

The wind blew without mercy. The man preparing to enter it was a man of great faith, but at twenty thousand feet in the pitch-black night, even faith had its limits.

Samman Bin Saqr took a breath, then uttered a prayer of praise and trust he had learned as a boy. He edged his feet forward, poised at the lip of the apparatus that would help free him from the aircraft’s slipstream. The plane held to its course, guided by the hand of an automated pilot, which was also being tested on this flight. The copilot — human — called from the seat a few feet away that they were approaching the target area.

Samman Bin Saqr went by many names in the West. To some, he was Ibn Yaman, the mastermind of the attack on the British embassy in Beijing. To others, he was Umar Umar, who had shown the Australians that Sydney was not immune to suicide attacks. To the Americans, he was either Abu Akil, whose plot to blow up Independence Hall in Philadelphia had been foiled only by a dead car battery the morning of the planned attack, or Kalil Kadir Hassan, whose genius had turned an IRS tax center in Massachusetts into a fireball.

The latest of those attacks, the one that had consumed the devil’s tax collectors, had occurred five years before. Because he had not struck since then, Samman Bin Saqr was presumed by many to be dead, or worse, to have lost his nerve. But in fact he had spent the entire time planning and building his next operation.

The idea for it had come to him one evening in Karachi, Pakistan, where he had gone to meet some associates in the Bin Laden group to discuss funding. He happened to pick up a Western magazine and saw a picture of Honolulu. And from that moment, he knew what he would do.

It was a momentous decision. It had stretched his skills beyond belief. It meant locating in a place — Chechnya — he was unfamiliar with. It meant learning a great deal about a wide range of subjects and risking his life in ways the infidels could never imagine.

But more importantly, it meant doing nothing against the enemies of his faith for five long years. Samman Bin Saqr was a man of belief whose whole life had consisted of sacrifice, but even he was not immune to the temptations of glory. It had proven impossible at first to obtain the materials he wanted, and several times he had nearly changed direction to execute a lesser plan.

But he had not. Obstacle after obstacle had been pushed away. Allah had overseen and blessed all, in the end supplying the most coveted ingredients through the greed of the French and the idiocy of the Russians.

After five years of labor, Samman Bin Saqr was nearly ready. But as the project drew close to fruition, he had begun to consider its consequences on a deeper level. From the start, the plan had called for his demise; it seemed fitting and fair that he should reach paradise as a reward for his struggles. But his death would necessarily bring the end of his organization and the scattering of its abilities.

Was he not being selfish, he wondered, to choose this moment to die?

To reach heaven would truly be wonderful — yet even he realized that his blow would not end the struggle with the West. On the contrary, as Bin Laden himself had taught, it would only provoke them. It would take many such provocations until the final war began; at that point, and at that point only, would Allah assure victory. Did Samman Bin Saqr, whose plan would prove his greatness as an agent of the true Lord, not have a duty to see the battle further?

After much prayer and thought, he had realized that the answer was yes. And after further consideration, work, and prayer, a solution had been found. He had now only to test it.

Assuming that he could overcome his fear. Samman Bin Saqr had jumped from airplanes five times before, but never from this height in the darkness of the night. Nor had he had to pass through such a tricky and potentially deadly slipstream.

His engineers had solved the problem of the howling, wrathful wind by building what amounted to an extendible tube or funnel that could expel him past the fuselage. It had been tested twice, and it worked, but Samman Bin Saqr reserved the final test to himself — it was necessary, he felt, so that he would not be surprised when the time came.

He felt the plane vibrating, then saw his hand shake. To calm himself, he thought of his place in paradise.

Then, still waiting for his copilot to give the signal, he pictured the American paradise covered with radioactive dust, a ghost town filled with the walking corpses, rendered unusable and unliveable for centuries to come. He heard the cries of his enemies, felt their anguish, and was at peace.

“Now,” said the copilot.

In the hushed howl as the wind kicked through the apparatus, the word sounded as if it came from God Himself. Samman Bin Saqr pushed the lever and left the plane, plunging through the whirling vortex into the dark night.

2

Bob Ferguson liked to think of himself as a reasonable man, so when the two rather large fellows confronted him in the restroom of the Samovar Cafe, he smiled benignly and asked in Russian what they wanted. When the man on the left called him a dirty foreigner, Ferguson wholeheartedly agreed — he hadn’t, after all, had a chance to shower for nearly forty-eight hours. And when the one on the right asked how much money he had, the American answered truthfully, “not much.”

But when the second man took a knife from his pocket and slashed the air in front of him, Ferguson sighed and started to reach into his pocket. As he did so, however, the first lurched toward him, and Ferguson found it expedient to duck forward, at the same time swinging his hand into the man’s windpipe so sharply that he cracked the man’s Adam’s apple with the flat part of his palm. The momentum added speed to his right leg as it swept up and landed in the other man’s groin.

“How much money do you want?” Ferguson asked, as the men rolled on the floor.

The man he’d kicked in the groin blubbered something in what was probably Kirghiz, the native language.

“Sorry, didn’t catch that,” said Ferguson. He bent and propped the man up against the wall — probably a little too quickly, as the man’s skull smacked against the wall, knocking him unconscious. Ferguson decided whatever he’d been saying wasn’t particularly important and let him slump to the floor next to his dozing partner.

“I admire people who can fall asleep anywhere,” said Ferguson. He stepped over to the sink, washing his hands, then running them through his hair, which had a tendency to get mussed up when he did a snap kick. Satisfied that he was looking his best, Ferguson stepped over the local toughs and left the restroom, walking up the steps and through the long narrow hallway to the cafe’s dining room.

Punctuality was not highly prized in Kyrgyzstan, but as he’d been waiting for nearly two hours, Ferguson decided that the man he’d come to meet probably wasn’t going to show at all. And so, rather than returning to his table, he merely waved at the proprietor and slid a few bills out on the counter to pay his tab. Besides a few son for his tea, Ferguson left fifty dollars euro to cover the mess in the restroom.

A dark, inky haze hung over the street, spread by the incinerator smokestacks that clustered around the city like trees the developers had forgotten to clear away. Tall and thin, built of bricks that were once bright yellow but were now black almost to the bottom, the brick forest vented the smoke from the region’s only moneymaking industry — waste disposal. The furnaces beneath the stacks handled refuse from all over Europe; encouraged by the former Soviet Republic’s lax environmental standards and even laxer bureaucracy, the waste industry had made this corner of the landlocked country a cosmopolitan capital of refuse. The countryside around it was a repository for everything from onion skins and spoiled lettuce to spent nuclear waste. Located twenty miles south of Talas near a new railroad spur, the city had been a ramshackle collection of one-story hovels and played-out mine shafts ten years before. Now it boasted wide, macadam streets and new town houses, three movie theaters and a Western-style grocery that outshone anything in Bishkek, the capital far to the northeast.

For many of the inhabitants the fine layer of soot that covered everything was a small price to pay for relief from grinding poverty; others had never known the city without it. Anything that could be burned was burned here, and many things that couldn’t be burned often found their way to the furnaces as well. The waste dumps were located on the other side of the railroad spur beyond the incinerator forest. The largest dumps were for ash and chemical refuse, but there were smaller, deeper facilities for more toxic materials as well. On a good day, the wind slashed through the sweet, terrible odor, leaving the city with a merely nauseous smell; on bad days, it formed an impenetrable barrier to the outside world.

Today was a good day. Ferguson jabbed his hands into his pockets, practically bouncing as he walked briskly past the local police station, head tilted slightly as if to increase his forward momentum. Though dressed in clothes almost identical to what the two thugs he’d met in the restroom were wearing — dirty black jeans, a plain brown shirt over two thick T’s, a black leather jacket — there was no question that he was a foreigner, and most of the natives who saw him would undoubtedly think he was some sort of spy — CIA, probably, because that’s what every foreigner was considered in Kyrgyzstan. Russians from Moscow, French nuclear waste engineers, the Spanish interior commissioner who had concluded a deal just yesterday to bury waste near here — all were perceived to be spies in the employ of the American Central Intelligence Agency. Most visitors welcomed this perception, if for no other reason that spying was a considerably more glamorous profession than garbage, though at their heart their concerns were exactly the same.

It happened that Ferguson — or Ferg as he was more often called — was in fact in the employ of the CIA, though in the Agency’s parlance he was an operations “officer” as opposed to an agent, “agent” generally meaning someone of foreign extraction persuaded to supply information. Ferguson had a cover — he was in the country as the American representative of a small firm that manufactured gas nozzles used in waste combustion apparatus. The CIA officer was so thoroughly “covered” that he actually was authorized to make a sale on behalf of the firm, though if it came to that he would not be entitled to the sizable commission — 60 percent — independent sales representatives for the company normally took.

Ferguson turned the corner to Yeliseev Street, making his way to the office of the man he had come to the city to meet, Alex Sheremetev. His appearance there would undoubtedly throw the eminently corruptible official into something approaching a panic. But in Ferg’s view panic was a healthy thing; he quickened his pace as he turned the corner and crossed the dusty street, ducking between ten-year-old Ladas and even more ancient Hondas, which here were considered symbols of wealth.

Sheremetev — though Russian, he was no relation to the family that gave Moscow its famous garden — worked on the second floor of the Municipal Order Building #2. In a cramped room overlooking a dusty alley, Sheremetev processed permits for a number of waste projects. One in particular interested Ferguson — a French-Russian project to contain and dispose of experimental nuclear reactors built in Russia during the 1980s. Spent fuel, reactor rods, and assorted machinery from the devices were processed at a site south of Buzuluk on the Samara River. From there, special casks of the material were shipped by train in special cars south to Kazakhstan and then into Kyrgyzstan, where they were buried in a deep-earth facility. The material was transported under heavy guard and carefully accounted for. But two months before, the CIA had detected a discrepancy between the radiation count taken by an American monitoring station near the Kazakhstan border and the one officially recorded at the waste facility.

Ferguson had been sent to Kyrgyzstan to account for the discrepancy by the Joint Services Special Demands Project Office — a CIA-Special Forces unit that answered directly and only to the deputy director of operations at the CIA. Generally referred to either as the “First Team” or simply “the Team,” Ferguson worked with a Joint Special Operations Forces (SOF) unit headed by Colonel Charles Van Buren, who not only had a battalion of Army Special Forces soldiers under his command but controlled a range of resources to support them as well. The Team had been created to address unconventional threats in an unconventional way, without interference from the bureaucracy of either the intelligence or military establishments. The arrangement made Ferguson and the SF troopers who worked with him essentially free agents, and Ferg was a free agent par excellence.

Ferguson had never been in the municipal building before, but he had studied its floor plan earlier, thus knew to go in through the side entrance, avoiding the security officer in the lobby. A quick turn to the left, a jog up the steps, and the caffeine rush from all the tea he’d drunk earlier was almost entirely dissipated.

Sheremetev’s secretary momentarily revived it, her short skirt riding up on her hips as she hunched over a filing cabinet behind the desk. She wore a tight sweater despite the fact that it was spring and comparatively warm outside; Ferguson smiled at the fit, then asked in Kirghiz for her boss.

The secretary frowned and replied in Russian that he wasn’t there. Ferguson apologized for his accent, then asked where she thought he might be. She said in Kirghiz that she had no idea, and repeated the information in Russian.

Under other circumstances, Ferguson might have lingered a bit to refine his accent and admire the scenery, but he knew that the two SF soldiers who comprised his trail team were probably getting antsy. So he left a business card and brochure on the desk and trudged back down the steps, carrying the slight glow a pair of smooth legs always left him with.

Out on the street, a black Lada whipped toward him. Ferg kept one eye on it as it barreled past, noting that there were three men crammed into the backseat. He resisted the impulse to throw himself to the ground; when the back of his head wasn’t ripped by bullets, he congratulated himself on his good judgment and told himself that he was being much too paranoid. Continuing down the block, Ferg smiled at an old lady pulling a two-wheeled folding shopping cart, then cut through the gas station — a special deal on A92 petrol today and every day — turning down a street lined with apartment houses that looked as if they’d been built by Stalin in the fifties, though in fact they were only a year old. Beyond the apartments were industrial warehouses waiting to be demolished for more housing. Sheremetev’s apartment was on the other side of the buildings in a row of town houses that marked the outskirts of the affluent neighborhood.

Three boys were playing soccer in a field near the end of the block. The ball bounded away and rolled toward him; Ferguson ran to it, dribbling back and forth, then passing off to one of the kids on the left. The boy fumbled badly, sliding as he went to kick it; his friends started to goad him. Always one for the underdog, Ferguson swept back and dribbled the loose ball toward the goal, marked by upside-down water buckets. The others gave chase belatedly. He bounded back and took them on, ducking left and right, then launching a bullet that smacked one of the buckets so hard it left a dent. Laughing, he caught the ball on the rebound and headed it skyward.

The kids started jabbering in Kirghiz that he should play. Ferguson laughed and told them thanks, eying the black Lada moving slowly along the nearby road. It looked exactly like the car he’d seen earlier — but then that might be said of any black Lada, which came in dozens of varieties and had been made for decades.

Ferg reached into his pocket for a few coins, tossing them to the kids. Then he launched the ball in the direction opposite to the vehicle. Two men were just getting out; Ferguson made like he was running with the boys after the ball before veering off to the left, crossing the road, and running toward a pair of squat factory-type buildings. He bolted over the chain-link fence, hustling to the right and back around, running the whole way though he didn’t think the men in the car had given chase.

It took a good ten minutes to work his way back around to the street where Sheremetev lived, and he waited another ten minutes against the alley of a garage to see if the Lada reappeared. Finally, he went to Sheremetev’s door, knocking discreetly at first, then pounding to make sure he was heard. When no one answered, Ferg decided to play tourist — he reached into the pocket of his coat and took out a set of picklocks so he could sightsee inside.

The dead bolt at the front was about as secure as any tumbler lock in the West, which meant it took him nearly five seconds to open.

“Sheremetev,” said Ferguson, closing the door behind him. “Yo!”

Middle-class opulence in Kyrgyzstan was still a work in progress and, like most other city residents, Sheremetev hadn’t quite gotten the hang of it. His front room looked like a combination bedroom, den, and storage area. A small TV sat on a pile of books perched between two bookcases on the right. A daybed with tangled sheets sat opposite it. There were some paintings on the wall — Kandinsky as drawn by a five-year-old. Tall piles of newspapers and magazines sat against the rear wall; one of them had a lamp on it.

Ferguson walked toward the open doorway at the back, stepping over a pair of pajama bottoms on the floor.

The next room was a kitchen. Sheremetev sat with his back to him, head slumping over his chest as if he were dozing.

“What the hell, Sheremetev, sleeping off a drunk?” said Ferguson, stepping into the room.

It was only then he realized there was a pool of blood on the floor. Sheremetev had been shot once in the back of the head, slightly off center.

“Shit,” said Ferguson.

He might have said more but there was a knock on the door.

Hugh Conners and Stephen Rankin sat in the front seat of the van, Conners sipping tea from his thermos and Rankin sliding his thumb obsessively back and forth against the trigger housing of his Uzi pistol. They’d lost track of the CIA officer after he started playing with the kids and had circled around to Sheremetev’s apartment just in time to see a black Vax-21063 Zhighuli — better known as a Lada — pull up in front. Two men had gotten out and gone to the front door.

“Got a walkie-talkie,” said Rankin, pointing out the man waiting at the front door. “Think they’re cops or mafiya?”

Before Conners could answer, the man at the door knocked, then stepped back and drew a Makarova from a holster beneath his coat. Then he shot through the lock and rammed inside the apartment.

“Shit,” said Rankin.

Conners grabbed him before he could jump out.

“He’s out already,” said Conners, pointing at the small LED screen propped on the transmission hump. “Relax.”

Conners flicked the key and started the truck.

“Siren,” said Rankin.

“Yup,” said Conners.

“He fucking likes to cut it close.”

“That he does.”

As the siren grew louder, Conners reached down next to the seat and located his Beretta. He was just about to suggest they get out and take a look when something in the mirror caught his eye. In the next moment the back of the truck flew open.

“About fuckin’ time,” said Rankin.

“Relax, Skip,” Ferguson told him, closing the door behind him and coming forward in the open van. “Dad, get us the hell out of here.”

“Good idea,” said Conners, putting the car in gear. He saw a flashing light behind him as he pulled out; one of the men from the Lada jumped into the roadway, his hand out to halt him.

Conners stomped on the gas pedal. The man in the road was obviously rather thickheaded, for he blinked several times before ducking off to the side, barely missing getting run over. Conners wheeled the van down a narrow street to the left, then screeched his wheels on the hard pavement of the main drag. There was a knot of traffic ahead, so he slapped the van down a side street, taking out a clothesline but emerging on the cross street otherwise intact. He took a right and managed to get two more blocks before running into a dead end and having to turn around.

“We’re going back the way we came,” Ferguson told him calmly as he turned.

“That’ll confuse the shit out of them,” said Rankin.

“Let’s just drive to the Fiat,” said Ferguson.

“You really think that’s necessary?” said Rankin. He hated the little car.

“Yeah.”

“Cops,” said Conners, as a car with the light and siren passed on the street. Its driver immediately hit the brakes and pulled into a 180, slamming against a car that had been following.

“Guess you’re right,” said Conners. He started to turn down the next block, then saw that there was an intersection with a traffic light ahead; he feinted right, then went straight through, barely missing two cars in the intersection.

“They’re coming for us. Gonna have to clip ‘em,” said Rankin, looking back.

“Hate to do that,” said Ferguson.

“Gonna have to.”

“We won’t make the Fiat, Ferg,” said Conners.

“All right, the dump then,” Ferguson said.

“Place smells like hell,” said Conners.

“The rest of the town doesn’t?”

They took a corner a little too tightly, making one of the leaning telephone poles lean a little farther. Conners pushed the van left down a long dirt road, dust whipping behind them. The entrance to one of the waste areas was ahead, but they’d noticed yesterday that there was no fence and no attendants farther down the road. Inside the waste area they took a sharp turn past a stack of boulders, zigzagging down a hill constructed of treated ash from the furnaces. The police siren had begun to fade, though all three men assumed it was still in pursuit.

The road led down to the main area of the dump, where a pair of forklifts were heaving masses of compacted waste from one pile to another. Behind them, smoke curled from a ribbon of smoldering flames. A large orange dump truck blocked their path, spreading ash either to extend the road or smother the fire.

“This is where we get out,” said Ferguson, at the back door.

Conners grabbed his gun and the ruck holding their small laptop computer as Rankin and Ferg jumped out the other side with their own gear. Someone shouted something, but they didn’t stop to listen, running toward the front of the dump truck. Conners, called “Dad” because at thirty-five he was the oldest of the group, fell in at the tail end of the formation as they climbed across a pile of trash. His stomach turned over three or four times with the stench before they reached the far side.

A flock of birds — they looked like vultures, only uglier — swirled a few feet over the surface. Garbage stretched halfway up the ravine on the left, but to the right was an administrative building and then an abandoned factory shed, which was where they had put their second hideaway vehicle, a 1986 Honda Accord.

A large excavator threw its claw around the base of the refuse heap so close that Conners ducked to the right. He immediately lost his balance, tumbling into the decomposed household waste. Choking, he felt himself lifted up and for a moment thought the claw had him — but it was only Ferguson, pulling him from the muck.

“Not the time for a swim.” The CIA officer pushed him upright, steering toward the administration building.

Two workers stopped and stared at them as they ran. Undoubtedly others had noticed them — it was, after all, the middle of the day, and they didn’t particularly look like they belonged. But no one bothered them, either out of sheer surprise or because Rankin and Conners both had their guns in their hands.

The shed had looked abandoned yesterday, but that was because they had come there early in the morning. Now it was late afternoon, and a crowd of men had gathered there to drink. Three or four men were leaning against the Honda, which was parked at the front of the shed.

As Rankin raised his gun to threaten them, Ferguson grabbed his arm.

“Not necessary,” he said.

The CIA officer had a wad of twenty-dollar bills in his other hand. With a flick of his wrist the money scattered across the gravel; by the time the first bill had been recovered, Conners was pulling open the door on the driver’s side of the car.

“No offense, Dad, but I’ll drive,” said Ferguson, already behind the wheel. “You already raised our insurance premium far enough today.”

3

Six hours and several long showers later, Ferg and the two Special Forces soldiers sat down in a hotel room in Talas, trying to figure out who had killed Sheremetev. They were examining the digital photos Ferg had taken, which he’d loaded onto their laptop. Copies had already been uploaded to the CIA for analysis.

“Professional job,” said Rankin, who had two towels on his head and a third around his shoulders. He’d stayed in the hot shower long enough for his toes to wrinkle. “Nothing to do with us.”

“Awful convenient timing,” said Ferguson.

“Guy was taking all sorts of bribes for signing his papers,” said Rankin. “Maybe he asked for too much. Boof, they take him out.”

“Boof, Skip?” Ferguson smirked. Rankin had worked with him on an assignment in Russia two months before. Ferguson had specifically asked for the weapons sergeant to be assigned to him on the mission, but Rankin nonetheless tended to irritate him. He was a middle linebacker type; Ferg had played quarterback in prep school and college. Defense and offense rarely mixed well.

“You don’t know boof?” said Rankin. “I thought that was one of those Harvard words.”

“Fergie graduated Yale,” said Conners. “Bitter enemies.”

“Summa cum laude,” said Ferguson.

“What’s that mean?” said Rankin.

“He screwed everybody in sight,” said Conners.

“Just the girls and the sheep,” said Ferguson.

There was a knock on the door. Ferguson took his P7 H&K pistol out and asked in Kirghiz what they wanted.

“Shit, don’t screw with me. I’m paranoid as it is,” said the man outside in English.

The others laughed. Ferg swung open the door and pulled Jack “Guns” Young inside the room. A Marine who’d been recruited by Ferguson primarily for his language skills, Guns had come to Joint Demands via Marine Force Recon. Though the unit was thought of by many as the Marine equivalent of Special Forces, its emphasis was actually very different; Recon lacked such traditional Army SF missions as foreign internal defense and wasn’t a career specialty like SF was in the Army. He felt a bit out of synch with the others, who bore a typical Army prejudice toward members of the more enlightened military brotherhood — namely, the Corps.

Guns carried two large canvas bags, which contained bread, several large paper-wrapped parcels, a jug of water, and two bottles of vodka.

“Party time,” said Rankin, handing the liquor to Conners.

“How’d we do, Guns?” Ferguson asked.

Guns — Young was a Marine sergeant who had achieved the E-7 rank, commonly known as “gunnery sergeant,” hence the nickname — shrugged. His accent might be perfect in five languages, but he wasn’t particularly adept at bargaining or currency conversion, and only the inherent honesty of the Kyrgyz shopkeepers had kept him from getting ripped off too badly.

The room rapidly filled up with the scent of the food. Ferg took a hunk of the lipioshka, a thick, unleavened bread that tasted a little like Italian peasant bread left in a cupboard with turnips for a few days. He ripped open one of the parcels, which contained charcoaled mutton, called shahlyk, and made himself a sandwich.

“Plov,” said Rankin, scooping up a bunch of the fried rice mixture with his bread. “Good for what ails you.”

“Yeah, if what ails you is your colon,” said Ferg.

“What’s this?” asked Conners, ripping open the last parcel. “Some sort of meat?”

It looked like a stew with a thick sauce. Guns told him the word quickly. Conners picked up a piece and plopped it in his mouth. “What’s that in English?” he asked.

“Horse meat,” said Guns, and Conners promptly spit it back into the pile.

“Horse is good for you,” Ferguson told Conners. “Plenty of protein.”

“You eat it then.”

Ferg got up and opened one of the vodka bottles. There were no glasses; he took a long pull, then set the bottle down. “How’d it look outside?” he asked Guns.

“Same as always.” The Marine had stayed behind in Talas the last two days, arranging for transport and poking around. He’d also met with a local police official who was on the CIA payroll, though there was some question as to the value of his information.

Ferguson glanced at his watch. He was supposed to call home for an update in five minutes.

“All right. Opinions,” said Ferg. “This is what I think — Sheremetev got bumped off because he knew what happened to the shipment, and he was going to tell us,” said Ferguson. “Police are involved somehow.”

“Why police?” asked Conners.

“Because the mafiya doesn’t drive Ladas,” said Ferguson.

“You’re a foreigner, and you beat the shit out of two guys in the restroom. One of them might’ve woken up and called them,” said Rankin.

“Those guys are probably still sleeping,” said Ferguson.

“Bottom line,” said Rankin, “we still don’t know shit, one way or the other.”

“Well duh, Skip.”

“Hey, if you don’t really want our fuckin’ opinions, don’t ask for them,” said Rankin.

“Sheremetev’s still our best bet,” said Conners. “We ought to concentrate on him, check him out, who he knew, who he didn’t know.”

Ferguson took out his phone. Each man carried one of the high-tech devices; though the size of cell phones, they connected to a dedicated and secure satellite communications system. The only giveaway was a tubular antenna at the side about the size of a fountain pen, which had to be extended to communicate. The phone included a GPS locator chip and a distress mode, which if activated would allow the folks back home to find the phone to within a tenth of a meter. It could also act as a modem for the laptop, and had two silent modes — a vibration alert and a blinking light, as well as associated voice mail.

Ferg keyed in the combination for the special operations center in Virginia known as the Cube, where a mission coordinator — the title sounded more dignified than “gofer” — was on duty twenty-four/seven while the Team was deployed. Unlike a traditional case officer or control arrangement, the coordinator was subordinate to the head of the operation, which was always the officer in the field. The desk handled support, which could literally mean anything; most often it came down to sifting through intelligence and making sure money and cover stories were in place.

Technically, orders for the SF units backing up the Team passed through the desk to the DDO, who then issued them to Van Buren, the head of the SOF group supporting the field operation. In reality, Ferguson and Van Buren generally short-circuited the procedure by speaking directly. While the Team was deployed, an SF unit — generally though not always two ODAs, commonly known as A teams — along with supporting assets — were standing by to bail them out if things got nasty.

“What?” asked Jack Corrigan as the connection snapped through.

“What yourself, Sunshine,” Ferg said.

“It’s fuckin’ two o’clock in the morning,” said Corrigan. “You want cheerful, call back in twelve hours.”

“You got anything for me?” asked Ferg.

“Yeah, you’re off the hook — bullet was definitely a.22 or thereabouts.” Corrigan had had the photos analyzed by an FBI lab.

“Well thank God, because I thought I was a murderer,” Ferguson said. “Who killed him?”

“You’re going to find this hard to believe, but I haven’t a clue.”

“We’re counting on you, Jack.” Ferg reached over and took a swig from the vodka, which burned slightly as it went down his throat. “You think the police down there know?”

“NSA intercepts say they’re looking for you guys as primary suspects. Driving a van, right?”

“Yup.”

“Ran through a garbage dump?”

“Rankin got homesick.”

Corrigan snorted. “They have some sort of Russian investigator coming down to their office.”

“Yeah?” Ferg sat down on the edge of the bed, then lay back. “What’s it all about?”

“Damned if I know. But he’s not police. FSB.”

FSB — the Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti or Federal Security Service — was one of the successor agencies to the KGB.

“What division?”

“Antiterrorism. Rock your socks?”

“Right off. So the murder had to do with the waste?”

“Maybe, maybe not. Your guy was into everything. Mafiya might just have gotten tired of paying him off.”

“Maybe we can liaison some information out of them.”

“Oh yeah, right after we turn you over to be arrested,” said Corrigan.

Ferg rolled off the bed. “I can bug the police station down here. Maybe the Russians know more than we do.”

“Set up a tap on the line,” said Corrigan. “Easier.”

“Yeah, but the conversations inside the office are going to be the real thing. He there yet?”

“Not until tomorrow night.”

“Great. Can you work it out with the NSA?”

Corrigan didn’t say anything, but Ferg could picture him leaning back in his black vinyl armchair away from the computer screens and looking up toward the ceiling. “Working it out with the NSA” meant setting up a special channel to capture and analyze the links, and even under the best circumstances it could be a bureaucratic nightmare. These wouldn’t be the best circumstances, either — there were very few Kirghiz language specialists at the NSA. In fact, Ferg knew of only one — a rather curvaceous beauty with too much overbite but a darling accent.

“I guess,” said Corrigan finally.

“Talk to you when it’s done.”

“Look, Ferg, this is probably just another wild-goose chase of yours. The DDO has been asking—”

Corrigan probably said something else, but Ferguson had slapped off the phone before he could hear it.

4

It was Conners who started the singing.

They were on the road from Talas, driving in two cars — a car and a truck actually, the first another Honda Accord, the other a Zil, a large truck that had once belonged to the Soviet army. Roughly equivalent to an American 6x6, it easily held the Team’s gear as well as extra gas. Since many were owned either by mafiya members or ex-soldiers with heavy connections, it was a relatively safe vehicle to drive. The only problem for Guns, who was at the wheel, was the clutch. It caught only at the very bottom of the floor when it decided to work at all, and he ground the gears on every second or third shift. Rankin groused every time he did, but didn’t take up the offer to change places.

In the Accord, Conners slumped against the door and after an hour or so of driving began to hum. After a while, Ferguson recognized the tune.

“Whiskey you’re my darlin’ drunk or sober,” he sang out, when Conners hit the chorus.

“You know that one, Ferg?”

“My uncle used to sing it all the time,” said Ferguson. “He was the black sheep of the family.”

“Poor drunk Irishman?”

“Drunk and definitely Irish, but not poor,” said Ferg.

His family had made a fortune in the construction industry — probably thanks to a good deal of graft — by the turn of the twentieth century. Conners, by contrast, had been born and raised in suburban New Jersey, nowhere near rich but not by his sights poor, either. His father had been a union carpenter in New York City.

“You know this one?” asked Ferguson, changing the subject by starting “Finnegan’s Wake.”

The two men traded verses of the old Irish folksong about a painter who’d fallen down from a ladder dead. Finnegan was revived by whiskey at his wake.

“What the hell’s going on up there?” asked Rankin over the radio. Conners had inadvertently hit the mike feed on his belt, regaling the others with their singing.

“Old Irish drinking songs,” Conners explained.

“Yeah, well, lay off the vodka,” griped Rankin.

“You can join in if you want,” suggested Ferguson. “You, too, Guns.”

“I’m not much of a singer,” said Guns in the background.

“Neither are they,” said Rankin. “And if you start singing, too, I’m taking the Uzi out.”

Ferguson and Conners both laughed. Conners spent the next hour teaching the CIA officer the words to “A Jug of Punch.”

Guns hadn’t been in the town yet, so Ferguson chose him to go inside the police station and plant the flies, miniature microphones with transmitting devices about the size of a large freckle. Foreigners were required to report in anyway, and they figured it wouldn’t be particularly difficult to come up with an excuse to get back into the detective area — all he had to do was claim that he’d been robbed on the way into town.

“You think they’ll ask me a lot of questions and try and trip me up?”

“Nah, they’re not going to be interested at all,” said Ferguson. “They’ll pretend to fill out the paperwork. You slide the fly in under the desk, and we’re good to go. Leave one in the men’s room, and another out near the front desk. Easy as shit. There’s only three rooms in the whole place — front, back, and the restroom off the hall. Bing-bang-boing, you’re done.”

Though not entirely convinced it was going to be half that easy, the Marine nodded. They were now all in the back of the Zil, parked at the side of the gas station near the center of town. It was 05:45 local; if Guns timed it right, he could go in, be given a seat and told to wait out the shift change, plant his devices, then say he’d come back.

“In and out,” said Ferg.

Guns had joined the Marine Force Reconnaissance for a variety of reasons, including the fact that his older brother had gone through the program. The training was a blast, rigorous but a blast, and he’d proven an adept free-fall jumper. His first assignment had been to the Persian Gulf, where among other gigs he’d infiltrated an oil rig and taken down a two-man suicide boat operation. Everything after that had been rather boring. He was forced — he used that word, though in fact the school was voluntary and his superiors had merely suggested it — into enrolling in a number of language courses run for the military by a company that did a lot of work for the CIA; it was through them that he’d come to Ferg’s attention.

Ferg had made the Team sound as if it was direct action twenty-four/seven. But so far it had been all spy bullshit — talking to people mostly, along with a fair share of sitting around in hotel rooms and driving places. Maybe the Army guys got off on this, but Guns was already thinking he’d join the stinking SEALs before signing up for another round.

“Hey, you going IBM on me?” Ferg asked, noticing Guns wasn’t paying attention.

“What’s that, sir?”

“You’re not thinking, are you?” Ferg frowned at him. “Don’t think. Just do. If you think, you’re going to get sweaty.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Screw the sir shit, right? Makes me think I’m my old man. And he’s dead.”

“Yes, sir.”

Ferguson smiled at him, then playfully pushed the Marine toward the back of the truck. As he reached the tailgate, he stopped and twirled him around.

“You can’t go with this,” said Ferguson, holding up Guns’s Makarova pistol.

He’d managed to grab it out of his belt without Guns feeling him take it. The Marine was torn between belting him and asking him how he’d managed to get it away so smoothly.

“I’m going in there unarmed?”

“We’re here for you, Guns,” said Ferg. “Just walk in there, do it like we rehearsed. You can seem nervous, that’s fine. Be nervous.”

“I ain’t nervous.”

“Yeah, right,” said Rankin. “Give us your fuckin’ phone, too.”

Guns scowled at him but handed it over. He ducked out the back of the truck.

Rankin had climbed up a telephone pole down the street from the station an hour ago, sliding a thick rubber sleeve containing the bugging mechanism over the wires; it was already uploading stolen data to an NSA eavesdropping satellite. Once the flies were in place, Ferg would activate the booster transmitter nearby, and they could split.

“All right children. Be ready. I’ll take the walk,” Ferg told the others, getting out to cover Guns into the station.

“Long as Conners don’t sing, I’m fine,” said Rankin, picking up his Uzi.

Ferg cocked the beak of his cap down over his head. If the others had argued that he’d been seen too much to shadow Guns — a fair argument — he’d have told them their Russian sucked too bad for them to get out of trouble. But he’d have gone no matter what; he was a little worried about the Marine.

The police inspector’s right and left eyes didn’t work together, and Guns had a hard time not staring at them as he gave him the basic information for his report. The man looked to be about fifty; his fingertips were stained brown from cigarettes. He asked his questions in Russian though Guns had started out in Kirghiz.

The story Guns told of being robbed was common enough — a roadblock on a dark road after making a wrong turn. The policeman could probably have copied it from a dozen reports in his computer. Instead, he hunt and pecked it in, using a keyboard so old half the letters were worn away.

“Occupation?”

“Sales representative,” said Guns. He was a Belgian working for an Italian firm interested in shipping medical waste. There was in fact an appointment at one of the furnaces that the inspector could check if he wished.

The phone rang. The inspector reached over to answer, continuing to type with one finger. His bored expression didn’t change, though his left eye rotated a little.

Guns got up from the chair, making as if he were stretching his legs. He’d planted the first fly near the front desk when he came in, but had waited to find a good spot for the second. Ferg had told him he could put it under the lip of a desk or under a chair if all else failed, but it would be better if it were higher. It was so small that it could sit out in the open and not attract attention.

According to Ferg anyway.

A nude calendar hung on the wall. Guns inspected it, pausing over Miss MaPT (March). As he did, he pressed his hand against the wall, sliding the fly beneath the calendar.

As he backed away, he watched it slip to the floor.

He froze. As nonchalantly as he could, he stepped back, glancing toward the detective. The man was still hunting and pecking with one hand, holding the phone up with another. Every so often he grunted. He didn’t seem to be watching Guns at all, though it was hard to tell with those eyes.

Guns took a few steps as if stretching, then bent to tie his shoes.

Which were loafers.

He slid the fly onto his thumb, got up. As he did he lost his balance, banging against the waste can and falling against the wall. Once more he pushed the bugging device in — this time sticky side against the paint.

If the detective had noticed his display of coordination and lust, he didn’t let on. The man finished his conversation and looked at Guns with skewed eyes, asking where he was staying. Guns gave the name of one of the city’s hotels, noting that he hadn’t had a chance to get over there and check in yet, though he had a reservation.

More hunting and pecking followed.

“We will contact you if anything comes of it,” said the inspector finally. His tone of voice pretty much admitted that there was no possibility of this ever happening. “Would you like advice?”

“Sure,” said Guns.

“Next time, fight back. It’s legal.”

Given the circumstances Guns had described — two men with shotguns approaching the car in the dark — fighting back would have been suicidal. But Guns thanked the inspector as if he had given him the soundest advice in the world.

He stopped in the restroom on the way out and got rid of the last fly. Two officers in the front were joking about how fat they were getting as Guns passed. He pretended not to hear and started for the front door.

“You’re an American, aren’t you?”

In a perfect world, Guns would not have reacted to the question. But the sharp tone, and more importantly the fact that the words were in an almost unaccented English, took him by surprise. He turned to the right and saw a man in a rumpled yellow jacket staring at him from a metal chair at the side of the room near the door, his legs sprawled forward on the floor and his head propped up by two fingers stuck against his nose.

“No, I’m Belgian,” Guns answered in English. He gave it a slight French accent, or at least what he hoped would sound like a French accent. He reached into his pocket and took out a business card to give to the man, though a voice inside his head was screaming at him to get the hell out of there.

The man reached his hand up and flicked the card away.

“Arrest him,” he told the police officers who had been joking together. “He’s an American spy.”

Before Guns could protest, another policeman came through the front door, blocking any possibility of escape.

5

Ferguson, sitting at a cafe next to the police station, glanced at his watch. Guns had been inside for over two hours.

The wait wasn’t particularly long by Kyrgyzstan standards, but Ferguson didn’t like it. Several men had gone inside since Ferg had gone into the restaurant, and while most were clearly policeman, he guessed that the man from the FSB had been among them.

Ferguson leaned back in his seat, hiding his face behind a newspaper. He had an earbud in his left ear, which was facing the wall. He lifted his hand to his face, pretending to scratch his nose.

“Rankin, Conners, what do you guys think?”

“I think I got to take a leak,” said Rankin.

“That’s helpful,” said Ferg.

“Can we use your boom to listen in?” asked Conners.

The boom was a long-distance microphone with several modes, including one that could pick up vibrations off windows. But it was rather bulky and could be easily spotted.

“Better to switch on the flies,” said Ferg. He’d hesitated doing so because there was a theoretical possibility that they could be detected.

“I say do it,” offered Rankin.

“Yeah, all right. I’ll go hit the transmitter. You know the routine, Dad.”

“Take a minute,” said Conners in the truck.

The flies transmitted to a receiver they’d placed in a sewer a short distance away, and from there would upload to the same satellite system the phone tap used. Corrigan could access the line from the Cube and relay it back via the secure sat phones. Conners would call and arrange for the relay while Ferg slipped out to activate the transmitter.

He was just getting up when the door opened at the front of the police station. Two policemen emerged, shouldering Guns between them to a police car down the block. A short man in a yellow sports coat followed outside, casting his eye up and down the block before getting into his own car.

“Shit,” muttered Ferg.

“I see it,” said Rankin.

“Meet me at the sewer.”

“Story of your life,” said Rankin.

By the time Ferg was close enough for his phone to turn on the transmitter, the car had a good head start. He jumped into the Zil as Rankin hit the gas.

“We lost ‘em,” said Conners, sitting between them.

“Fuck,” said Rankin.

“All right, let’s not get a speeding ticket,” said Ferg. “Rankin, slow down and take that left. I think I know where they’re going.”

Ferguson guessed that they were taking Guns to the detention facility in the basement of the old Soviet building at the end of town — a logical guess borne out by the fact that the car, or one that looked just like it, was double-parked in the street as they passed.

“Let’s hit ‘em now,” said Rankin.

“Relax, Skippy,” said Ferg, who knew the sergeant hated the nickname. “Let’s reconnoiter first.”

“We can’t leave Guns in there,” said Conners.

“We’re not going to,” said Ferg. “But we don’t want to be guests ourselves, right?”

Rankin turned the truck down a broad but empty street just past the building, going as slowly as he dared while looking out the side window. The building looked solid, and while there were no soldiers or guards outside, getting Guns out wasn’t going to be easy.

To Ferguson, Guns’s arrest represented a break, but it was difficult to explain to the others that the longer he remained in the Kyrgyz custody, the more information they were likely to gather. That was the downside of working with the SF people — they were bodacious in firefights and quick on their feet, but they tended to want to reduce everything to bangs and bigger bangs. Sometimes you had to put a little sweat in.

“What are we doing, Ferg?” asked Rankin as he took a second turn around the block.

“I think I have a spot where we can put the boom up, see what we get. Park the truck as close as you can get. Dad, did you set up the bug relay?”

“Didn’t have a chance.”

“Go for it as soon as you park. Let me out here.”

“Why?” asked Rankin.

“All that chay made me have to pee,” said Ferg.

“Fuckin’ officer material,” said Rankin, unleashing his worst slur as he stopped the truck.

Why are you interested in the Chechen?”

Guns gave the man in the yellow jacket a quizzical look. It wasn’t difficult — he had no clue what the SOB was talking about.

The man frowned. He’d told Guns that his name was Sergiv Kruknokov, that he was Russian, attached to the Federal Security Service or FSB, and that he had no jurisdiction here.

Then he urged him to cooperate.

Guns stuck to the story about being Belgian and working for an Italian waste company. He even rattled off a few words in Italian.

“The police won’t torture you,” said Sergiv. “But they will complicate your plans, whatever they are. Should we call your embassy?”

Guns didn’t know whether there was a Belgian embassy in Kyrgyzstan or not, so he shrugged and again insisted that he was who he said he was.

The Russian shook his head, took a cigarette from his pocket, and left him in the basement room alone. Guns sat back in the chair, looking at the walls. Any second, he figured, Ferguson and the others would come in guns blazing and rescue him.

It figures, he thought to himself. There’s finally going to be a little action, and I’m not in on it.

Ferguson walked up the steps, his weave just this side of sober. He reached for the door handle and pressed it open, pulling it open and starting inside.

He took about half a step before he found his way blocked by two rather large soldiers.

“ Vinavat,” he said in Russian, starting to apologize. “I need to use the can.”

The soldier pushed him back. “Not here, asshole.”

“Where’s Misha?”

“Get the hell out,” insisted the soldier, and the door was slammed shut.

“You were lucky, Ferg,” said Conners, coming up behind him.

“What are you doing out of the truck?” asked Ferguson.

“I figured you were up to something stupid.”

“Just looking for a place to pee.”

“You like to push it to the edge, don’t you?”

“Always,” said Ferguson.

Rankin was getting antsy in the truck. He had the Uzi in his lap, trying to look nonchalant but so tense that when Conners pulled open the passenger-side door he nearly blasted him.

“What’s the story?” he asked.

“They don’t have any bathrooms,” said Ferg, climbing in behind Conners. “Bad sign.”

He pulled the door shut. “Let’s go someplace and get something to eat, take a breather.”

“A breather?” Rankin nearly slammed the machine gun against the dashboard. “Are you out of your fuckin’ mind?”

“They have soldiers inside. We have to get the layout before we can go in.”

“Fuck that,” said Rankin.

Ferg leaned across Conners to look at the SF sergeant. “When you’d get to be such an asshole, Rankin?”

“I’m not an asshole. I don’t want my guy getting killed.”

“Makes two of us,” said Ferg.

“Three,” said Conners. He hadn’t talked to Corrigan yet; he took out his sat phone to do so.

“See if Corrigan can get us a map of the place from the library,” Ferguson told him.

The CIA had an extensive database stocked with information about foreign buildings, kept for just such emergencies.

“We’ll see what the bugs tell us, what else is going on. We’ll get him,” Ferguson told Rankin.

“When?”

“Sooner or later, Skippy.”

“Don’t fuckin’ call me Skippy.”

“Then don’t be such an asshole.”

“Hey, Ferg, Corrigan wants to talk to you,” said Conners, handing him his phone. “They already have information from the phone tap. They’re charging Guns with Sheremetev’s murder.”

6

Their rules of engagement dictated a nonlethal takedown, which made the whole thing much more dangerous and a bigger pain in the ass than it would have been.

Not that it wouldn’t have been a big pain in the ass anyway.

While Rankin set some M118 C4 block charges at the front of the building, Ferg and Conklin put their knives to the rubber of all the vehicles in the area, preventing anyone from following them when they were done.

From what they could tell with their infrared sensors, there were no more than six men in the building, not counting Guns, who was being kept in one of the basement rooms along the west side. Two and sometimes three guards worked the hallway; another sat in a guardroom near the stairs. The others were up on the first floor, which only connected to the basement from the front stairwell.

Ferg crouched on his haunches, checking his watch. In his hand was a Mossburg twelve-gauge shotgun loaded with solid lead shot, its sole purpose to blow out the hinges on the door. As soon as the door was gone, he’d reach down and grab his MP-5 — his was the only lethal assault weapon on the team, a necessary backup in case things somehow got out of hand. He also had an M79 grenade launcher loaded with a special canister of tear gas to cover their exit, as well as a sawed-off Remington loaded with M1012 twelve-gauge nonlethal point target cartridges for any odd contingencies.

Conners and Rankin had Jackhammers — combat shotguns that contained ten-round cylinders or “cassettes” loaded with rubber-bullet cartridges. The twelve-gauge cartridges contained plastic-wrapped rubber cylinders that would bruise and perhaps break bones, but were not likely to kill the guards. Rankin’s gun was slung over his shoulder; in his right hand he had an M79 grenade launcher, loaded with an M1029 40 mm crowd dispersal round. Though designed to disperse a crowd, the forty-eight cartridges in the launcher would take down anyone within thirty meters. Conners also had a flash-bang — officially, an M84 stun grenade, which they would pop in as soon as the door came off to disorient the guard or guards in the hall.

All three men were wearing respirator masks with NODs; the charges would take out the electricity and lights, along with the telephone. Conners and Rankin had AN/PVS-14s, lightweight monocles that were preferred by most SF troops because of their weight and the ease of switching over to regular light. (Unlike the older AN/PVS-7, only one was strapped into the device.) Ferguson had a pair of Air-Force-issue Panoramic Night-Vision goggles, which gave him a hundred-degree field of vision. The wide angle would be more useful in the alley and leading the way out. The gear was somewhat bulkier than the others’. They were also wearing lightweight Kevlar vests.

“Ready, boys?” asked Ferg over the com system, staring at his watch.

“None of us are boys, Ferg,” said Rankin.

“Girls, excuse me. Sixty seconds.”

The charge at the front right side of the building — activated by a timer — blew about five seconds sooner than they’d planned. Ferg stepped up and took out the door hinges; as he pulled it away Conners pitched the flash-bang. A second later Rankin leapt into the hallway and unleashed the M1029.

There had been three men the hall; all were taken down by the exploding canister of rubber balls. Rankin, breathing heavily in his respirator, kicked their weapons away, moving down the hall, expecting others to burst in at any second. He pulled the CS grenade off his vest; as soon as he was close enough to get an angle on the guardroom, he tossed it inside.

Conners meanwhile was trussing the Russian guards with plastic hand restraints while Ferg pounded on the doors, yelling for Young with the aid of a loudspeaker device that fit inside his hood. He heard something at the second door, shouted at the Marine to stand clear, then brought up his submachine gun and fired out the lock. It took two kicks to get the door open. Ferg waited half a beat, then threw himself across the frame, sweeping his gun around.

The room was empty.

At the far end of the hallway in the guardroom, Rankin pumped a shell into a coughing, writhing figure on the floor in front of the bunk beds, then pulled the door to the room closed, sealing in the incapacitating gas. As he jumped back outside, something clattered down the steps at the front of the building.

Rankin hit the first man down square in the stomach, bowling him over with a shell. Bullets ricocheted down the stairwell — real bullets, which sent chips of masonry from the walls splattering into Rankin’s bulletproof vest.

“Let’s move it,” he yelled into his mike. “Get that fuckin’ Marine the hell out of bed and let’s go.”

Ferg went to the next door in the hallway, shot it open, and leapt inside. Through his viewer he saw someone coughing on the floor. He grabbed at the man’s arm, pulling him outside.

“Guns?” he asked. The man was wearing different clothes — military-style khakis — but he was the right size and shape, and he didn’t have a weapon or a belt. “Guns?”

The man coughed in reply. Ferg had to stare a moment at his profile to make sure it was his man, then began dragging him backward just as a fresh burst of automatic fire ripped down the stairwell at the front of the hall.

“Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go,” said Rankin. He waited for the gunfire to stop — whoever was firing had burned the whole clip — and tossed another tear gas grenade up the stairwell. His ears felt like they’d been hit with large rocks.

This would have been a hell of a lot easier if we could just kill the bastards, Rankin thought to himself.

One of the guards on the ground near him started to move. Rankin cursed and threw himself across the hall, kicking the bastard in the head. A fresh round of bullets stuttered down the stairwell.

“Ferg? Conners? What the fuck?” he yelled.

“Yeah, I got him,” said Ferg. He left Conners to help Guns out and ran to the exit to make sure they were clear. “Time to go, boys.”

“We ain’t fuckin’ boys,” said Rankin. As soon as the rounds from above stopped, he leaned the Jackhammer around the corner and leaned on the trigger, sending three rounds of the rubber balls ricocheting upward. Then he began retreating backward.

Ferguson slammed his canister of tear gas down the hall, but it didn’t explode properly. Cursing, he grabbed a smoke grenade from his pocket and thumbed away the tape he’d applied to keep them from accidentally going off. Smoke from the cartridge began whispering out as Conners emerged from the building. When Rankin didn’t appear immediately behind him, Ferg put his hand on Conners’s side and pushed him toward the alley. Rankin was about ten feet from the exit. A shadow moved at the far end.

“Duck,” said Ferguson. He’d grabbed the Remington, and now he pumped it twice, the shells and shadow disappearing in the smoky interior. An AK-47 barked; Ferg fired two more shots and started to run. As he cleared the alley he tripped the two small M5 MCCM bangers set near the doorway — pseudoclaymore mines, they unleashed a hail of plastic balls with a good loud boom and fierce flash, stalling any pursuit.

Firing the Remington conjured a bit of unwelcome nostalgia — he was nine, learning to shoot clay pigeons with his father at a range in Connecticut. Ferg pushed the memory away from his mind, but it was impossible to banish it from his hands, which caressed the stock even as he ran for the Honda, which they’d parked two blocks away. By the time he reached it, he’d pulled off his gas mask and night goggles. They weren’t being followed, at least not as far as he could tell, and the charge that had taken down the electric lines seemed also to have knocked out power to that part of the city.

“Blow the truck,” he said as he pulled open the rear door. “Hit it, Rankin.”

The truck was in a lot near the building, back two blocks away. They couldn’t hear the explosion.

“Did it go?” Ferg asked, as Conners slapped the car into gear.

“It went,” said Rankin.

“You sure?”

“Fuck you.”

Ferg turned and looked at Guns for the first time. He had his face in a wet towel and the window rolled down.

“Hey, you all right, Guns?”

The Marine coughed and shook his head in a way that seemed to mean yes.

“Turn left,” Ferguson told Conners.

“Where the hell are we going?” demanded Rankin.

“We have to make sure the truck blew,” Ferg told him.

“I set the fuckin’ charge,” insisted Rankin.

“Don’t take it personally.”

“Screw you, don’t take it personally. You didn’t want a big goddamn explosion, right? So now you think I screwed up.”

Ferguson had the shotgun between his legs, the barrel pointed downward into the floorboards. He caught another whiff of nostalgia — his father instructing him on gun safety. “Keep the gun cracked in the car,” was the way he always put it.

His first shotgun, a real grown-up gun. Not a toy, said his father.

“Something’s burning,” said Conners, pointing to the red glow in the distance. It was beyond the ministry building they’d hit, about where the truck had been.

“Good,” said Ferg. “Hit the road.”

“This all would have been easier if we could’ve just killed the bastards,” said Rankin.

“Would’ve been easier with a whole A team,” offered Conners.

“Hey, next time we’ll call Delta,” said Ferg. “They would’ve done it with bare hands and sticks.”

Conners laughed, but Rankin, still angry, said nothing. In his opinion, Ferg had made the takedown too risky by insisting they not use lethal force. The CIA officer had the authority to override that directive if the situation warranted.

In the back of the car, Guns’s eyes felt like they were going to fall out of his skull. His throat felt as if it were made of rug that a dog had used to sleep on. His nose was stuffed with oily rags. The towel Conners had given him wasn’t helping his eyes any; more likely it was rubbing the irritant into them.

“You used fucking tear gas?” he said finally.

“You’re welcome, Jarhead,” said Rankin up front.

Ferguson reached to the floor and brought up a squeeze bottle. “Irrigate ‘em. I’m sorry about the gas.”

The car veered hard left, then settled back onto the roadway. Conners had lost the pavement in the dark. They’d mapped out a route to the main highway over dirt roads, but it had looked a hell of a lot easier in the daylight.

“Rankin, I need you to get out the map,” Conners said.

“Yeah, I thought so,” said Rankin, reaching for it.

Guns recounted what had happened, starting with the man with the yellow sports coat.

“Some sort of Russian,” he told Ferguson. “FSB.”

“What sort of questions?”

“Nothing really. Asked if I’d cooperate. When I played dumb, he split.”

“No other questions?”

“Asked me about some Chechen.”

“Which Chechen?”

“Jesus, I don’t know. Some sort of guerrilla. Muslim, maybe.”

“If I get Corrigan to say a bunch of names to you, you think you could pick it out?”

“ ‘Kiro,’ he said.”

“Kiro. We can check that,” said Ferg. “What else did they ask?”

Guns pushed his eyes into the towel, re-creating the interrogation. There had only been one with an FSB man. The others were with a local inspector, who asked over and over why he had killed Sheremetev.

“What’d you say?” asked Ferg.

“I said I didn’t.”

“That’s all they asked?” said Ferg.

“That’s it.”

“Where’d you get the duds?”

Guns laughed, then told him about the examination in front of the doctor and his nurse.

“Fuckin’ guy checked me over good. I’m standing there thinking I want to pork his nurse — Mr. Young starts coming to attention, I swear — and he does a hernia check.

“Shit. Stop the fuckin’ car,” said Ferguson. “Shit.”

“Huh?” asked Conners.

“Pull off the road.”

“But—”

“Now!”

As the car skidded to a stop, Ferg threw open the door. He reached back and pulled Guns out, dragging him around the back of the car to the side of the road. A row of darkened buildings sat a few feet away.

“Take off your clothes,” Ferg told him.

“Huh?”

“Take off your clothes,” said Ferguson, and he grabbed Guns’s waistband and helped. As the Marine started to undress, Ferguson reached into his pocket for his flashlight, then pulled down Guns’s underpants.

“Hey!”

“Shit.” Ferg put his fingernails on the Marine’s leg next to his scrotum and pulled off a small black disk. He held it up in front of Guns’s face just to prove that he wasn’t a pervert, then threw it toward the abandoned buildings. He took a small bug detector from his inside jacket pocket and ran it over Guns’s body, cursing himself for not taking such an obvious precaution earlier.

When Guns, completely naked without shoes or anything, got back in the car, Ferguson told Conners to get onto the highway and floor it.

“I’ll give Yellow Jacket one thing,” said Ferguson, pulling off his vest so he could give his shirt to Guns to wear. “He’s no dummy.”

7

Ferguson unscrewed the cap on the bottled water and poured it into the tall glass. He leaned back on the balcony of the hotel, glancing down toward Conners, who was watching the street. They’d split into twos at the Kyrgyzstan border, unsure whether or not Yellow Jacket was still tracking them here. Guns and Rankin were about a half hour late.

Conners looked over and shook his head, then went back to staring at the street. After Kyrgyzstan, Cel’abinsk felt not only huge but almost luxurious. The air was clean; the weather pleasantly warm and dry. Ferg loosened his jacket and took out his phone; if he waited too long to call home, Corrigan would get nervous.

“How we doin’, Jack?” he said, leaning back against the chair.

“How are you doing?” said Corrigan. There was a funny note in his voice.

“What’s the problem?”

“Hold on.”

Ferg realized what was up as the phone line clicked. The next thing he heard was the melodious baritone of his boss, the deputy director of operations at the CIA.

Only his voice was melodious.

“You shot up a police station?” demanded Daniel Slott, by way of a greeting.

“Actually, Dan, it wasn’t a police station. And knowing what your reaction would be, we used nonlethal weapons.”

“Tell that to the ambassador.”

“Give me his number.”

“The secretary of state is wondering what the hell is going on,” said Slott, in a way that implied he actually cared what the secretary of state thought — which Ferg knew wasn’t true. “He asked the director in front of the president what we’re doing tear gassing Police officers in Kyrgyzstan.”

“How is the General, anyway?” Ferg asked, referring to Thomas Parnelles, who headed the CIA. Parnelles was an old CIA hand and a good friend of Ferguson’s deceased father; they’d done time together during the good ol’ bad days of the Cold War. General was a nickname from an operation where Parnelles impersonated a Jordanian officer.

Only a captain, actually. But Ferg’s dad had been a private, and to hear the story not a very convincing one.

“Don’t change the subject on me, Ferguson,” said Slott. “You used tear gas in a police station?”

“I can definitively say we did not use tear gas in a police station.”

“Then what did you do?”

“I recovered a member of my team who was being held under false pretenses.” He yawned. “I’m a little tired.”

“You’re a little reckless. More and more.”

“More and more?” asked Ferguson. “I wasn’t reckless before? I thought that was a job requirement.”

Slott made a grinding noise with his teeth. Recognizing that he would get no real details from Ferguson — and admitting to himself that he probably didn’t want any — he changed the subject. “Have you found out what’s going on?”

“Working on it.”

“Did they take uranium or what?”

“I don’t think so. The way it looks, the most likely accounting for the discrepancy is two casks of the control rods,” said Ferg. “But that’s only that one trip. I’m not really sure.”

“When will you know?”

“Not sure. We’re working on it.”

“Well work faster.”

“Aye-aye, Captain Bligh.” Ferg leaned forward and took hold of his glass. “If you’re through busting my chops, I’d appreciate talking to Corrigan again.”

There was a click. Corrigan came on the line with an apology.

“Yeah, yeah,” Ferguson told him. “You run through the satellite photos?”

“We have it narrowed down to six possible spurs,” said Corrigan.

“Just six?” said Ferg. “Not twelve?”

“Actually, it is more like twelve. But I had them arbitrarily lop off some.”

“Who the fuck is doing the analysis for you, Corrigan? Monkeys?”

“Monkeys would be faster,” said the deskman. “We’ve been screwed since Nancy left. I need someone who can coordinate this stuff for me.”

Special Demands was essentially a client to the analytic side of the Agency, which could supply a variety of intelligence reports, processed or unprocessed. The staffer who had worked to coordinate the reports — and had the more difficult job of assessing them — had gone on maternity leave two weeks before, and had not yet been replaced.

“You’ve been moaning about this for days, Corrigan. Get somebody.”

“Easy for you to say. Just finding a warm body that has something approaching the background and clearances—”

“Man, you’re a whiner.” Ferg glanced at his watch. “We’ll look at them all.”

Having lost their source in Kyrgyzstan, they were back to grunt work — looking at all of the places where something might have been taken from the containment cars. It seemed logical that it had happened at a siding, and there were twelve between the last sensor and the border. The Team had extremely sensitive radiation meters — detectors based on gallium-arsenic chips that were as sensitive as gas-tube Geiger counters but fit in the palm of the hand — that would detect trace radioactivity. Unfortunately, this was likely to find something only if the material had been handled or some stray waste had attached to the train and been deposited accidentally.

“So tell me who Sergiv Kruknokov is,” Ferguson said, sliding around in the seat. “You’ve had enough time to write the guy’s biography.”

“I keep telling you, I need someone to handle real-time intelligence. I literally got this as your call came through.”

“Whine, whine, whine,” Ferguson told him. “You have it or not?”

“Yes.”

“So?”

Conners gave him a thumbs-up from the side; the others had finally come in. Ferg waved to him, and Conners left to make sure the others had no problem getting settled.

“Antiterrorism division of the Federal Security Bureau. High-level guy,” said Corrigan, who was scanning a paper report.

“I didn’t think he handled shoplifting.”

“Yeah, well, listen to this. He was involved in a case in 1996 involving a plot to explode a dirty bomb in Moscow.”

“Whoa, no shit. Give me the details.”

“Chechens wanted to blow up a dirty bomb in Moscow. They broke it before the bomb went off.”

“Dirty bomb. What kind of waste?”

“Um, that was cesium, I think. Medical stuff. Nowhere near as dangerous as spent uranium or the control rods you’re after.”

“Nasty stuff though?”

“You saw the science reports — depends who you’re talking to. You have enough of it, and it’s a problem.”

Ferguson sat back, thinking about what they had: a discrepancy in a waste shipment, a Russian investigator with expertise in dirty-bomb investigations, a question about someone named Kiro who apparently operated in Chechnya, and an attempt to explode a dirty bomb nearly a decade before in Moscow. Shit.

“Was this ‘Kiro’ involved?”

“We haven’t ID’d Kiro yet. All the known conspirators are dead or in jail.”

“Those spurs connect to Chechnya?” Ferguson asked Corrigan.

“Uh, hold on, let me get the map up. Remember, Ferg, the satellites showed all the cars made it. Hell, if they had a car missing, that would have set off all sorts of alarms. This may all be a wild-goose chase.”

A waiter poked his head out from the doorway. Ferguson pointed to the bottle of water and asked for another, just to get rid of him.

“Ferg? You with me?”

“Just a distraction,” Ferguson said.

“You could get there by train, but it’s awful convoluted and far.”

“Truck?”

“Sure. Same thing.”

“Where’s Sergiv been lately?”

“The Russian?”

“No, my brother-in-law.”

“Don’t have a good line on it.”

“Find out. Because if it’s in Chechnya, that’s where I’m going next. And run down Kiro, okay?”

“I’ve been trying. Listen, Ferg, that’s not as easy as you think. If Nancy were still here—”

Ferguson smiled as Corrigan gave him his usual song of woe. Any second now it would segue into the terrible time he had had in Egypt during the Gulf War — Corrigan had been in PsyOp as part of USSOCOM during the conflict. His main claim to fame before coming to work for the Company had been placing anti-Saddam dialogue in Egyptian soap operas.

“Yeah, well listen, dude, I have to get rolling here,” said Ferg, cutting the performance short. “And listen, tell VB I may need an equipment drop.”

“Where?”

“Well let’s think this through, Corrigan. I just asked you to track down where a Russian FSB agent was in Chechnya, and to get information on a guy we think is a Chechen. Now do you think it’s possible that I might be going in that direction?”

“Yeah, OK. I get it now.”

Ferg clicked off the phone and sipped his water, waiting for the second bottle to arrive. He signed the bill, finished his glass, then took both bottles up with him to the room. The others had already gathered inside.

“Skip, Guns — how was the trip?”

“Brutal,” said Rankin. “Fuckin’ Marines drive like they screw — all over the place.”

“Sounds like a compliment to me,” said Conners.

Guns shrugged. “We got some stares, but as far as I could tell, nobody tagged along.”

Ferguson pulled out the laptop from beneath the bed and powered it up. Turning it on after leaving it alone a few hours was always an adventure — if someone had fiddled with it, the machine was hardwired to eat the hard drive. The bright double beep indicated it was all right; Ferguson entered his passwords and opened the file with the area map.

“There were twelve spurs where the train could have pulled off the main line after the last measurement, before it got down to Kadagac.”

“That’s it?” said Rankin. He wasn’t being sarcastic; he imagined that there would be many more sidings in the fifty-mile-or-so stretch.

“Yup,” said Ferguson.

“You sure it happened on a siding?” asked Guns.

“At this point, I’m not sure of anything,” said Ferg. “Corrigan got some NSA geeks into the computer system that our murder victim used in Kyrgyzstan, but they didn’t find anything except a lot of URLs for porn sites.”

“My kind of guy,” said Conners.

“So maybe he knew something and maybe he didn’t. We’re watching the investigation and trying to play connect the dots. In the meantime, we do a little slug work and run the meters around in case they got sloppy.”

Ferguson clicked two keys on the laptop, and a satellite image filtered in.

“It stopped along this siding for the night. Guards front and back. You could get a truck right here,” Ferg said, pointing.

“So let’s say we get some hits on the counters,” said Rankin. “What then?”

“Then we follow those hits,” said Ferg.

“And if we get nothing?” asked Guns.

“Then we go to Chechnya.”

“Chechnya?” said Rankin. “Fuck.”

“Probably not. They’re pretty religious there.”

8

As they’d expected, they found no particularly interesting radiation hot spots at any of the spurs, although there were slightly higher than normal background hits at three sites. None of the buildings near the railroad sidings were housing waste-processing operations. If alpha- and high-gamma-level waste had been handled at any of the spots, it had been done expertly.

But back home, Corrigan had discovered that the FSB was working with Kyrgyzstan police on Sheremetev’s murder, looking for a pair of Chechens described as extremists, though the bulletin describing them made them sound more like killers for hire. Even more interestingly, Corrigan had tracked Sergiv Kraknokov’s movements. They had arrested a man in Chechnya who had visited a prisoner in a high-security prison outside the capital. Not just any prisoner: one of the men who had been involved in the plot to explode the radiation bomb in Moscow more than a decade before.

The Russians thought that the visitor was acting on behalf of a guerrilla leader they called “Kiro.” Corrigan was still tracking down Kiro’s identity — it wasn’t clear whether the name was merely a pseudonym for someone else, a mistaken identity, or the nom de guerre of a heretofore unknown troublemaker. He did not appear to be one of the major leaders of the separatist movement. Over the past few years, radicals of all stripes and allegiances had moved into the Chechen hills, using the lawless territory for various purposes. Tracking them was a difficult task, even for the Russians, who had more than a hundred men assigned to the job.

This one was clearly worth finding. The Russians had clearly not put everything together yet, but the fact that they were nosing around told Ferg they were worried, very worried.

The ability to go where his gut told him to go was one of the most important aspects of the Special Demands setup, but even Ferguson knew driving into Chechnya without hard evidence of a link to the waste he was looking for was unlikely to yield results. Team missions weren’t always this open-ended; the idea of having so much firepower at his fingertips was to find a good place to use it. But he didn’t hand out the assignments, Slott did. His job was to play them out as far as they would go.

And so the Team had driven to central Chechnya, passing through miles and miles of burned farmland and bulldozed villages, arriving at a town called Irktan south of Urus-Martan. Irktan was located in the center of Chechnya, just at the foothills of the rugged southern mountains. At present, it was not particularly close to the front lines of the conflict, which was concentrated farther west. Russian troops patrolled the streets, but things were relaxed by Chechen standards; there were armored vehicles but no tanks manning the checkpoints into town. Ferguson sent Conners and Guns in to nose around while he and Rankin looked for a place to set up shop. Rankin for once didn’t bitch — he tended to be happier, or at least less cranky, when he had the more dangerous job.

Two Russian soldiers flagged Guns and Conners down as they were entering town. Guns translated the nearly five minutes’ worth of conversation into a single sentence: “We better get guns if we plan on staying.”

Their papers said they were part of a Mormon charity group running a clinic at the far end of town. The soldiers knew all about the clinic and pointed out the building, a red-roofed one-story at the end of the main street. The walls had last been painted white; the outer coat was chipped away in a dozen places, each revealing a different shade. Two Russian soldiers with a dog were standing outside the clinic, eying them warily as they drove by.

“Explosives dog,” Conners said.

“Yeah.”

They drove along to the end of the block, then turned left. The buildings abruptly disappeared; on both sides the lots were covered with rubble that seemed to run all the way back to the mountains in the distance. They got out and grabbed two suitcases packed with medicine, along with smaller bags. Conners holstered the Makarova in plain view — a fifty-ruble note would take care of the “fine” assessed to foreigners who broke the law against possessing weapons.

Assuming the guards weren’t in a bad mood.

They didn’t seem to be, and in fact didn’t mention the pistol. The dog sniffed them and stood back, waiting while the soldiers looked through the bag of medicines; they took a bottle of Tylenol but nothing else.

Cleared inside, they found Sister Mariah Baxter, the director of the clinic. She pulled a stray strand of her long black hair back behind her ears as she inspected their gifts, eying the wares suspiciously but taking them nonetheless. A forty-year-old missionary from Utah, Sister Baxter knew how the game was played; she called over one of the nurses and told her to take the two men to Mr. T, who served as the clinic’s unofficial security officer.

Conners was surprised to find that Mr. T was barely twenty and skinnier than a rake handle. The Chechen nodded when Guns told him they needed information.

“We want to find out about a man named Kiro, who operates around here,” Guns told him in Russian.

Mr. T shook his head and clamped his teeth tightly together, his face flushing as Guns switched to Chechen and tried cajoling him with the few words he knew well. Conners took a step backward, his gaze drifting through the door back out into the large open room of the clinic. Half the room was a waiting area; the rest looked like triage stations where nurses tried to determine what was wrong with the patients. There were some slings for broken arms and bandages that might cover deep flesh wounds, but for the most part the people had less-visible ailments, probably a lot of the same stuff that people went to the doctor for in New Jersey — headaches and viruses and walking pneumonia, pregnancies, ear infections, coughs that wouldn’t go away. The difference was that here, with sanitary conditions for shit, food scarce, and medicine difficult to obtain, even a cold might be fatal.

Guns, meanwhile, fumbled with the words as he tried to get information from Mr. T. He had listened to Chechen language files for the past two days on the MP3 player, refreshing his memory, but it was difficult to get into the rhythm of the language. Mr. T wasn’t helping either, though obviously he knew who Kiro was.

“Think I should pound him?” he finally asked Conners.

The question caught Conners by surprise. “What good’s that going to do?”

“Scare him so he’ll talk.”

“He’s already pissing his pants,” said Connors. “If Kiro is that scary, odds are Sister Baxter knows who he is.”

Mr. T started to move past Guns to leave the room. Instinctively, the Marine threw his hand out to bar his way. The Chechen glared, but moved back and sat down.

“Don’t hit him until I come back,” said Conners.

He found Sister Baxter cleaning a scabbed knee on a nine-year-old girl. Conners watched her fingers daub the wound. They were a man’s hands, rough and worn, too big for the slender body they belonged to. Sister Baxter’s long hair was tied back with a piece of household string. She wore plain black pants and a blue denim shirt, and Connors realized as he approached that she was pretty despite her age, or maybe because of it. He didn’t understand the kind of religious devotion that would lead a woman here, though as a young boy going to Catholic school he had seen enough of it. Back home his grandmother and her friends still went to church every weekday at 6:00 A.M., sitting in the front pews and mumbling the rosary, repenting sins they only dimly recalled.

Sister Baxter straightened, smiled at him, then picked up a roll of gauze bandage. “She was playing in a field with barbed wire. It could have been a mine. Maybe next time.”

Connors wasn’t sure how he was supposed to react to that — her tone implied that he had put the barbed wire there himself, and maybe even planted the mine.

“What do you want?” she said, cutting the wrap after several winds. Her fingers moved gently despite their size, and though the girl looked at her apprehensively, she seemed calm.

“We have to talk to a certain man. A rebel.”

Sister Baxter’s lip curled in a way that suggested a sarcastic smile, yet Conners saw there was something else there, too.

Fatigue? Weariness? Sorrow?

“Mr. T is not being particularly helpful, and it’s important,” said Conners. “I don’t want to hurt him. Or anyone else.”

“Are you threatening us?”

“The opposite. The man we’re looking for is going to hurt a lot more kids like her,” he said, thumbing toward the little girl.

In another place, under other circumstances, Sister Baxter’s eyes as she looked into his would have made him fall in love. Even here they made him reluctant to continue, as if a simple question might hurt her somehow.

“The man’s name is Kiro,” said Conners.

The sarcastic smile again. “Why don’t you ask the Russians where he is?” she said.

“If I thought they would help me, I would.”

She got up and gestured to the row of people sitting in the chairs, adding something in what Conners thought was Chechen. One of the women came forward, talking excitedly. The two women conversed for a while; they seemed to be arguing.

“She thinks you’re a doctor,” explained Sister Baxter finally.

“I, uh, well, I have some medic training,” said Conners. Some was correct.

“Yes, well, how are you at gynecology?”

Conners could feel his face starting to burn.

“I need to do a pap smear,” said Sister Baxter. “Her symptoms sound like cervical cancer. But she wants a doctor, not a nurse. I’ll do the real work, but I’ll tell her you’re the doctor.”

“OK,” said Conners.

“I’ll get the speculum.”

Conners watched her move across the room as the patient began talking to him nonstop. He nodded and smiled in a way he hoped suggested he had been to medical school.

“We’re going to do this here?” he asked, when Sister Baxter returned and rolled out a fresh rug.

“You have a better place?”

“Don’t you have an examining room?”

“This is it. The other two rooms we have are filled with patients. One is for people who are missing limbs. The other is for operations.”

Connors nodded. Sister Baxter, meanwhile, had the patient lie down.

“Don’t be shy,” she told him.

He got down on his knees and took the instrument. But that was just for show — as he smiled as reassuringly as possible for the patient, Sister Baxter took the actual sample.

“You did all right for an American,” she told him after she had logged the information on the sample and told the woman when to return.

“Thanks.”

“Kiro has a small group outside of the town,” she told him.

“Near here?”

“Near enough.”

“Why don’t the Russians attack him?”

“There is the philosophy of live and let live,” she said. “And there is also the fact that this is a very poor place for a commander to be posted.”

Conners assumed that she was hinting that Kiro bribed the local commander, something that was not unheard of though obviously not condoned by the central authorities. While a bribe might not even be necessary — if the guerrilla wasn’t going out of his way to make trouble, he might not be attacked — it would explain why the FSB people hadn’t been able to obtain a lot of information about him — and why the CIA hadn’t then been able to steal it.

“I have a person who can guide you, but it will cost you money,” added Sister Baxter.

“How much do you need?”

“We need a lot. But the money’s not for us. One hundred dollars, as soon as it’s dark in front of the gas station going out of town.”

9

Ferguson pushed another wad of gum into his mouth, continuing to chew furiously as he watched Guns approaching the rendezvous at the gas station. He had the NOD’s magnifier on max, but he still had trouble seeing in the distance beyond the corner. Conners was tagging along behind Guns, his MP-5 hanging down at his side. They’d decided the heavy weapons were necessary after dark, and Guns had his under his coat.

“Don’t see nobody,” said Guns, still walking.

“He’ll be watching you,” Ferguson told them. “Just keep going. Dad, you’re going to have to go in there with him so it doesn’t look like you’re waiting to ambush them. Tuck the gun beneath your coat. It should show a little, just don’t make it too obvious.”

“You gonna fuckin’ blow their noses for them, too?” said Rankin. He was sitting next to Ferguson in the passenger seat, his Uzi in hand. He had a grenade launcher and a dozen 40 mm rounds on the floor. Both men were wearing their vests.

“I will if I have to,” said Ferg. “What color snot you figure is in Guns’s nose?”

Rankin gave a little laugh. Ferguson pushed against the steering wheel, noticing something moving in the station.

“Okay, Guns, your man is in the station looking at a magazine. Look menacing.”

“Shoulda sent Rankin for that,” said Dad.

Ferg swung the NOD around, looking through the back window. The Russians tended to stay put once it got dark — they weren’t dumb — but there was always the possibility of a patrol.

Anyone else on the street could be assumed to be a rebel or a member of the local black-market gangs, or both.

Inside the gas station, Guns went to the clerk behind the counter and asked if he could buy some cigarettes. The clerk pushed a pack toward him on the counter. It said Marlboro on it, but instead of red the label was a sickish orange, an obvious counterfeit.

The price was a hundred rubles.

Without saying anything, Guns reached into his pocket for the money.

Connors, standing by the door, eyed the other man. He was about five-four, and his rib cage seemed to have been shifted permanently, as if his chest were twisted on his body. He had a scar at the base of his chin and a blank look in his eyes, as if he were staring at a spot far in the distance.

Guns dropped the bill on the counter, took the cigarettes, and went outside. Conners followed; the informant came out last.

They walked to the side of the building. The man held up his hands, seeming to anticipate a pat-down. Conners didn’t disappoint him, pushing his legs apart as he slid the muzzle of his submachine gun in the man’s back. He wasn’t wearing a bulletproof vest, and he didn’t have a weapon. That worried Conners, because it implied that he was being watched by a bodyguard, even though they hadn’t seen one.

Ferg told him he was worrying too much.

“And you’re worrying too little,” said Guns.

“Nah, we’re cool,” said Ferg.

“Five-mile hike,” Guns said. “Up that road near the creek, then off the trail for another two miles.”

“What happens then?” Ferg asked.

“Won’t say. He’ll show us up the road, then that’s it.”

“Probably an ambush,” said Rankin.

“If it were, he’d have a vest,” said Ferg. “Go for it,” he told Guns. He watched with the NOD as they crossed the street, the Chechen in the lead. The man walked with a limp.

“I wouldn’t trust that fuck as far as I could throw him,” said Rankin as they watched them cross the street.

“You have a better plan?”

“Let him point it out on the map, we check it out tomorrow night.”

“Which only gives them more time to set up the ambush, or to shake information out of our guy,” said Ferguson. He waited a few minutes, then put the car in gear as Conners began to hum “A Jug of Punch” over the radio.

“You do ‘Danny Boy,’ and we’re not backing you up,” Ferguson threatened, parking the car. The two American soldiers and the Chechen source were behind them now; Ferg could see them in the rearview mirror.

“Hey, I like ‘Danny Boy,’” protested Conners.

Ferguson and Rankin waited for the others to pass before getting out of the truck. Carrying rucksacks with gear as well as weapons — Ferg had his shotgun and Rankin the Uzi — they gave the others a good start, then began trailing them. The truck would have been too obvious and an easy target besides.

The road twisted and turned as it climbed into the mountains. It took a little more than an hour to reach the turnoff that allegedly led to the guerrilla stronghold. Connors walked off the road about ten yards and promptly lost the trail in the rocks.

“He’s going to have to do better than this,” he told Guns.

Guns started to explain that the Chechen would have to accompany them farther. They weren’t going into the camp, but they wanted a better idea where it was.

The Chechen started to back away.

Ferg and Rankin had steadily closed the distance, and by then were only a hundred yards behind. As Guns continued to argue, Ferguson came up and put his Remington 870 against the back of the Chechen’s head. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out five one-hundred-dollar bills, pressing them into the man’s hand.

“Five more when we see it. We won’t cause trouble,” he said in Russian. “But you have to earn your money.”

The guerrilla camp was bigger than they’d expected, and housed enough men to spare six guards on the perimeter that faced the road and town below. Rankin saw at least one ready but unmanned gun emplacement, and the configuration of the hills suggested there would be any number of weapons trained on the approach. He also thought there was also a minefield across a valley that flanked a large rock outcropping commanding the approach.

“No way we’re sneaking in the front door,” said Rankin when he returned to the copse off the road where the others were waiting. “And the way the ridge runs off to the right and left, I don’t know if we can get in at all.”

“We’ll have to rethink this,” admitted Ferguson. He pulled a hundred-dollar bill from his pocket and gave it to Guns, then pointed to their informant. “Tell our friend this is just extra rent — he’s our houseguest for the evening.”

“He’s not going to be pleased,” said the Marine. “Claims he has to get back to his wife.”

“Tell ‘em we’ll kill the person she’s sleeping with for no charge when we’re done.”

It took them more than an hour to get back to the car and drive the five miles to the abandoned building Ferguson and Rankin had found earlier. The ramshackle farmhouse had a few small holes in the roof but was otherwise intact. The road to it was another story — pockmarked by bomb craters and two rubble barriers, it was so bad they had to leave the car about a mile from the house. They slipped it in under some trees, obscuring it from the Russian helicopter patrols; as a precaution against thieves Rankin pulled the wire from the coil and took it with him.

Conners gazed at the stars as they walked, trying to orient the unfamiliar sky against his faded memory of an astronomy course he’d taken in high school a million years before. There was a time when knowing the stars would have been a critical talent on a deep insertion like this; compass, sextant, and a clear sky would help you work out where you were. But GPS gear had made the math obsolete; now the stars were just pretty things to look at.

When they were a little less than a half mile from the farm building, they spread out into the field, approaching slowly to make sure they weren’t walking into an ambush. Guns told the Chechen to stay with him — and to stay nearby. He didn’t bother threatening the man with his submachine gun; their informant wasn’t happy but had already proven he was the sort of man who would stick around as long as the hundred-dollar bills kept appearing.

Even when the infrared glasses told them the building was empty, they moved in cautiously, looking for booby traps and signs that someone had been there. They found neither. Ferg divided them into two shifts — him and Conners, Guns and Rankin — and told them they’d catch some Zs, Guns and Rankin first. Their guest took a sleeping bag and curled up in the corner of the basement; Guns and Rankin tied his hands and feet together, then positioned themselves so he’d have to step on one of them to sneak out.

Upstairs, Ferguson swung the antenna up on the sat phone and called home.

“Ferg?” asked a female voice on the other end.

“Actually it’s Joe Stalin,” he told Lauren DiCapri, Corrigan’s relief on the desk. “If I sound a little faint, it’s because it’s damn hot down here in hell, even with the air conditioners cranked.”

“You’re real late checking in. Major Corrigan was worried. I’m supposed to call him at home.”

“Major’s not an honorary title,” Ferguson told her. “You don’t keep it after they kick you out, especially on a dishonorable discharge.”

“How are things going?”

“Shitty. I have some GPS coordinates on a guerrilla camp near here where our source is. I need satellite snaps ASAP. Not just library stuff — I need an 8X,” he added, requesting an up-to-date and detailed satellite image of the target area.

“This is where you think Kiro is?”

“Yeah.”

“I have more information on him.”

“Let me read you the coordinates first,” said Ferg. He actually didn’t “read” them — he’d recorded them using the phone’s GPS gear earlier and merely had to hit a key combination to send them over to her.

“Got ‘em,” she said, as the transmission went through.

“So how come the camp wasn’t in our brief?” he said.

He could hear her checking back through their files to see.

“Um, you’d have to ask Corrigan,” she said. “The notes here are that there was activity and probably a base.”

“Cross out ‘probably.’”

“It’s possible that the Russians don’t know.”

“Right.”

“FSB doesn’t.”

“That I believe.”

“Let me tell you about Kiro,” said Lauren.

“Make it dirty.”

“Is that supposed to be funny?”

“It’s late over here.”

“Kiro is on the FBI wanted list. He’s gotten al-Qaida funding and blew up the Carousel Mall in Syracuse, New York, more than a year ago. We want him. Slott’s already approved an extraction.”

“I think we just got hit with a sunspot,” Ferguson said. “I’m in Chechnya, but you just said something about New York.”

More patiently than Corrigan would have, Lauren explained that Kiro was believed to be Muhammad al Aberrchmof, an Islamic militant thought to have escaped from Afghanistan during the American action there in 2002. He had gone to Pakistan, where he was responsible for a bombing in a Karachi nightclub. Then he had managed to slip into the United States through Canada, masterminding a suicide attack on a Syracuse shopping mall. Following that, he had been spotted in Georgia — the one next to Russia, not Florida — and was now believed to be leading some of the Chechens.

“His friends are even worse. He seems to have met with Allah’s Fist, the people who tried to blow up Independence Hall and got the IRS center in Massachusetts,” said Lauren. “Nasty bunch.”

“How associated?” asked Ferg.

“Not sure. Allah’s Fist hasn’t done anything since the attack on the IRS center. The leader, Samman Bin Saqr, disappeared right after that attack, just fell off the map. He might be dead. In any event, you have a green light to bring Kiro out. They want this guy, Ferg. They want to put him on trial for murder.”

“I can’t clip him?” said Ferg.

The term, taken from the American mafia, was slang for an assassination. It had to be approved by Slott and the CIA director, either from a list of high-level terrorists or on the president’s direct command. An extraction generally applied to a lower level of terrorist or enemy prisoner of war, though there were exceptions.

Three people had been killed in the mall attack, and dozens wounded. Ferguson shook his head — that ought to be enough to have the bastard’s heart cut out, no questions asked.

Five hundred people had been killed or wounded in the IRS attack. Was that what it took?

“They really want him, Ferg. They want a scalp. We don’t have a positive connection,” Lauren added. “But the people at the NSA have a voice match that we think is good, and there’s one photo. We’ll upload them.”

“The Russians know who he is?” Ferguson asked.

“Not as far as we know.”

“We’re going to tell them?”

“Not until you bring him home. Slott has been on Corrigan’s back since we made the connection. He wanted to call you right away. Corrigan held him off.”

Ferg held the phone down and took a few steps along the front of the building, scanning in the distance of the road. The team was getting a little ragged; they’d been out in the field for about two weeks.

If Kiro really was Aberrchmof, he ought to be grabbed.

Then castrated, burned, and pissed on.

He put the phone back to his ear.

“Ferg?”

“Yeah, I’m here, Beautiful.”

“Colonel Van Buren has already been alerted.”

“OK,” said Ferg, even though he knew an all-out assault on the fortress would be out of the question, even if they were absolutely sure Kiro was there. Too many Russian troops were nearby, ready to gum up the works. They’d either have to get the Russians in on the game or find a way to finesse it. “I’ll get with him,” he told her.

“You need anything else?”

“Well my inflatable doll sprang a leak last night.”

“Very funny.” She killed the connection.

10

Rankin spotted it, staring at the images upside down.

“They run out that tunnel, then pick up the vehicle there,” he said, pointing at the laptop screen. “You can see the wheel in the hide.” Everybody squinted over the screen.

“So we knock on the front door, they run out the back?” said Ferguson.

Rankin snorted. “Yeah, right. They could take two companies on before they felt the heat. Even then, you don’t have armor, you’re not getting in.”

“What do you think, Dad?” Ferg asked Conners.

“Got to figure they have at least one guy inside the cave at all times,” he said, pointing at the escape route. “I have to tell you, I don’t quite see the cave, let alone the tire or even the hide Skip’s talking about.”

“It’s there,” said Rankin.

“I’m not arguing with you. I just have older eyes.” Conners smiled at him. Rankin reminded him of a racehorse that had been shot up with amphetamines for a race, always jittery, sensitive to the touch. Great in the race, but hell before and after. “Be booby traps, probably twists and turns. You’d never get in that way.”

“I don’t see us getting in at all,” said Rankin.

“Yeah, Skip’s right on that. We’re going to have to make him come out,” said Ferguson. He got up and started pacing around, thinking over the situation. It was now almost noon. Every hour they stayed there increased the chances they would be found by either the Russians or the Chechen rebels, or both. They still had their informer, but even holding on to him was not without risk.

The Russians had two companies in Irktan. That was probably the reason they didn’t attack the camp; they figured it wasn’t worth the effort.

That would have to be changed.

“Rankin, you see any guard posts on that back end there?” Ferguson asked.

“They have people on this road way the hell over here,” he said, pointing at a highway nearly two miles from the rear of the fortress area. “The thing is, there’s no way in from the roads. So if they’re dealing with the Russians, they probably figure they don’t have to guard along this area here. Terrain’s for shit, and the Russians never go anywhere without either a caravan of armor or helicopters, or both. If you’re in the fortress, you don’t need to be anywhere else.”

“And this?” Ferguson pointed to a ravine that ran out the back of the fortress.

“The escape route,” said Rankin, repeating what he had told Ferguson earlier. “Got a bike right there.”

The hide for the bike was visible on an earlier photo; the area was not quite as sharp in the most recent shot. But Ferguson decided it must still be there.

“Why only one bike?” asked Guns.

“Only one person is important enough to escape,” said Ferg.

“Only one’s chicken enough,” said Rankin.

“Maybe it’s for a messenger,” said Conners.

“Could be,” said Ferguson. One of the briefs on the rebel organization that Lauren had posted with the satellite data emphasized that the leaders looked at the war as a long-term affair — survival was important. In his opinion, the bike was Kiro’s parachute, nothing else.

“We might be able to sneak in that way, take them by surprise,” said Rankin.

“We don’t know what’s beyond that opening,” said Conners. “Assuming it is an opening.”

“Got to be,” said Rankin.

“Yeah, OK. Listen, I gotta talk to Van,” said Ferguson, standing up. “In the meantime — Rankin, that mortar we have in the kit—”

“The English piece of shit?”

“The same,” said Ferguson. “You think you could rig it so some of the shells it fires don’t explode?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean they fire and land somewhere, but don’t go boom.”

“I could do that,” said Conners.

“Yeah, I could figure it out,” said Rankin quickly.

“Good. Only a couple. Don’t blow yourselves up, guys,” said Ferguson. As he jogged up the basement steps, the plan began to form in his mind.

11

Rankin finished setting the charge, waiting beneath the car behind the army headquarters building. He could hear Guns haranguing the guards a few feet away, asking about the clinic — demanding to know in very loud and seemingly drunk Russian why foreigners were allowed to poison people there.

The guards were getting impatient. Rankin heard one of them shove Guns and rolled away from the car. They started kicking the Marine, who’d fallen to the ground as part of his diversion.

It took Rankin all his self-control not to jump up and run to help his companion. Instead, he got up slowly, walking toward the battered Accord, where Conners was waiting with their Chechen informer.

A woman was walking near the road. Rankin looked at her for a moment, worried that she would stop and say something to him. But she hurried on.

The sergeant looked back in time to see one of the men give Guns a kick in the ribs, leaving him in a heap against the wall. He waited for him to make it to the corner and start across the street. Then Rankin opened the car door and pulled the Chechen informer out.

“In two days,” he said, repeating the Chechen words Guns had told him. “Go to Sister. You’ll be paid.”

The Chechen’s eyes were glued on the hundred-dollar bill in Rankin’s hand.

“Two days. Understand?”

The man nodded.

“Now run.”

The Chechen understood that. He shook his head and put up his hands.

Rankin took the pistol from under his jacket. “Run,” he said. “Run.”

He had to bring the gun up almost to the man’s face before he started.

The soldiers didn’t see him until he was a good distance down the block. One began yelling; the other knelt to aim at him. As he prepared to fire, Rankin pushed the button on the radio detonator, blowing up the car.

When Ferguson heard the explosion, he dropped the round into the LI 6, involuntarily ducking back as the 81 mm projectile whipped upward from the small mortar. In quick succession, he loaded and fired five more rounds from the British-made weapon, raining a half dozen shots on the Russian headquarters. Had these been normal rounds, they would have done considerable damage; the bombs weighed a bit over nine pounds, much of it explosive. Rankin had fiddled with them, essentially turning them into duds. Still, it was very possible that the attack would injure someone, and while Ferguson had no particular love for the Russians or locals, his own people and the Mormons were down in the village. He finished with the dud rounds and moved the mortar to bomb out the road; these rounds sounded the same as they left the tube but their booms were potent cracks that shook the air even where he was positioned, roughly two thousand meters away.

Ferguson kicked over the mortar, then kicked dirt all around to make it seem as if there had been more people there. Grabbing his gear, he hiked up the ridge he’d scouted earlier, tracking down, then across the hills to a point north of the Chechen stronghold, where he was supposed to meet Rankin and Guns. Conners was already watching at the rear of the fortress; if Kiro tried to escape before the rest of the team got there, Ferg had told him to blow him away Authorized or not, the death would not be lamented in Washington.

It took nearly an hour for Ferguson to reach the rendezvous point. As he reached it, he heard an airplane approaching and worried that perhaps the plan had succeeded a little too well — perhaps the Russians were so angry they’d pound the guerrillas so severely that they wouldn’t have a chance to escape.

The jet was too high and too fast for Ferguson to see. It circled twice over the camp, which was between two and three miles away. On its second orbit the steady hush of the jet seemed to stutter. Then it roared louder than before. Ferguson instinctively ducked; a few seconds later he heard the muffled thud of two medium-sized bombs exploding near the fortress.

As the plane zoomed away, the CIA officer climbed up the rock with his MP-5 and Remington over his shoulder, looking in the direction of camp. White smoke curled into the sky from beyond the rocks, but he couldn’t see the fort itself from where he was.

“That bomb get you, Dad?” he asked Conners.

“Thought we were on silent com,” grumbled the SF soldier.

“Just checking.” 64 I Larry Bond and Jim DeFelice

Ferguson went back to the ledge and stowed his gear, then took his binoculars and scouted the approach, adjusting his com set to make sure he’d hear the team when they got into range. He sat down cross-legged, shotgun in his lap, submachine gun at his side, and made himself as comfortable as possible to do the thing in the world he hated the most — wait.

Guns had been beaten pretty badly, but he was able to walk, and when the car exploded, Rankin ran around the block and met him as they’d arranged. The mortar shells began falling in the field short of the center of town; the timers on the other charges he’d set around town began going off. Rankin applied the coup de grace to the attack by igniting the charge on their Accord; a fireball shot straight up from the gas tank, a spectacular show that would have rated a ten at a fireworks display.

They took a quick left turn off the main drag and jumped in a truck they’d stolen earlier. Guns slumped against the door as Rankin drove around to the road that led to the rendezvous point.

“Fuckin’ Russkies don’t have a clue,” he told the Marine, who merely groaned in response. “They’re little rabbits, cowering in their holes. Assholes had any sense, they’d have their knives out — cream us just as soon as look at us.”

In Rankin’s opinion, the Russians’ entire posture had invited attack — he would have had a better perimeter force, better sweeps, checkpoints — he wouldn’t have let a couple of foreigners, one of them a gimp, waltz right out of town under his nose. A machine gun would have commanded the top of the ridge beyond the road, wiping them out as they drove.

“You complaining?” Guns asked him, as they stopped to get rid of the truck just beyond the ridge.

“I’m just saying they’re awful lazy.”

“They kick pretty good.”

“You all right?”

“Yeah.”

“I was worried they were going to arrest you.”

“Ferg said they wouldn’t.”

“Yeah, well, Ferg’s not always right.”

“Think they broke my rib.”

“Bastards. We shoulda killed every one of them,” said Rankin.

He climbed on top of the truck and turned his field glasses back toward the town. Two BMPs, armored personnel carriers mounting a light cannon, had taken up a position at the nearest end of town.

“They coming for us?” Guns asked.

“Not yet. They better get their act together, or we’re back to square one.”

“You don’t think blowing up the commander’s car will piss them off?”

Rankin spun around so quickly he nearly fell off the truck. “What the hell are you doing here?” he asked. “You’re lucky I didn’t shoot you.”

“With what? Your binoculars?” Ferguson looked at Guns, who was hunched over the front of the truck. “You all right, Marine?”

“I’m fuckin’ fine.”

“That’s what I like to hear. Come on, boys; we got a long walk to catch up to Dad, or he’s going to have all the fun.”

12

After more than two hours in the woods, they were still a good mile Mr£W& and a half from the back of the fortress. With the sun starting to set, Ferguson decided they’d have to split up. He was worried that the rebels would decide to sneak out of the fortress as soon as it was dark.

“Conners’ll just blast ‘em,” argued Rankin.

“If he has to, that’s OK. But he also might get his ass handed to him,” said Ferg. “You help Guns come up as fast as you can.”

“I can make it by myself,” said Guns. “Both of you guys go.”

“I don’t know, Guns,” said Ferguson. “Go on.”

“I don’t need no Marine Corps macho bullshit,” said Ferg. “I need you in one piece.”

“Fuck yourself, I am.” “He can make it,” said Rankin.

Ferguson debated with himself. If there was a firefight behind the fortress, Rankin would be extremely useful. On the other hand, Guns wasn’t likely to go too much faster with Rankin helping him.

“You sure you can make it?” he said to the Marine. “Yeah, I can do it,” said Guns.

“I’m counting on you. I got to keep these Army guys in line. One Marine, two Army — about right.”

“You need five grunts for a jarhead,” said Guns, wincing through his smile.

“Yeah, that’s about right,” said Ferg. “You use the radio if you get stuck. You got me?”

“Yes, sir.”

They had to stop after a mile and put on their night goggles. The quickest way to the ravine over the cave exit was across a sheer rock wall. It would be impossible in the dark — Ferguson had mapped a route below, which would have brought them almost opposite the vehicle hide — but if they got across it they’d be almost on top of the exit, in perfect position to control it. From there, one man could cover the other as he went across to the left down to the spot where Conners was waiting near the vehicle, which he’d already incapacitated.

“You’re out of your mind,” said Rankin, looking at it through his goggles. “No way.”

“Leave the pack if it’s too heavy,” said Ferg. “Come on. I’ve gone across rock quarries that were tougher.”

“At night?”

“Oh shit yeah,” said Ferguson, examining the wall. “There’s plenty of handholds, couple of ledges. Won’t be a problem.”

“You’re crazy man. I’m not doing that.”

“Your call,” said Ferguson, starting out.

“Fuck,” said Rankin, snugging his ruck tighter and following.

Ferg found a ledge about chest high and climbed up onto it. It was about eight inches wide, and he didn’t have to lean too much to keep his balance as he went. He stopped after a few feet to tighten the shotgun; the MP-5 was in its Velcro rig. There was a guard post about a hundred yards farther up the ridge to the left, but to see down here the lookout would have to crawl out and peer over the rocks, extremely unlikely as long as they were quiet.

The ridge ended twenty feet out. A hundred and fifty yards of nearly sheer wall separated Ferguson from a pile of rocks that would be easy to scramble across. The drop was at least two hundred feet.

Rankin really didn’t want to know how far down it was. He could feel the sweat swimming down his fingers. He watched Ferguson begin climbing the wall, working his way across. Fucker probably wants me to fall, Rankin thought to himself, pushing his fingers into a rock and kicking for something to put his foot into.

Ferguson was about ten feet from the rocks when he ran out of places to put his hands and feet. At first he thought it was just because of the darkness and eye fatigue — the goggles tended to make his eyes blurry after a while — but gradually he realized it was a real problem. He climbed up a few feet, only to find his way barred in that direction as well. He stared and stared, trying to find a hold, and was still staring at it when Rankin finally reached him.

“Now what?” whispered Rankin. He was breathing hard, probably hyperventilating.

“I don’t know,” said Ferguson. “The rock’s so smooth I can’t find a hold anywhere. No cracks. Nothing.”

“Well you better find one. I’m getting tired.”

“We could turn around,” said Ferguson.

“I’m not going back.”

“Just wanted to give you the option. I’m going to push off and jump.”

“You’re out of your mind.”

“Better keep your voice down,” said Ferguson. He went back to studying the wall. If he were wearing climbing shoes, he might take a risk on a nub just out of his reach; the face sloped ever so slightly, and he thought — knew — he could get his finger there before his balance got too unwieldy.

Nah. Too far. He had to jump.

“Hold my gun,” he told Rankin, sliding the shotgun off his shoulder. He took one last look with the night goggles, then took them off and worked them into his ruck, figuring — hoping, really — they’d be safer there.

“Shit,” said Rankin.

“Dude, you got a ledge there, you ain’t fallin’.”

“It’s three inches wide.”

“Suck it up.”

“Fuck you.”

Ferguson took his gun back. “When I get on the rocks and get the NOD back on, you can toss me your gear.”

“You’re nuts.”

“Well, jump with it if you want. And be quiet. The guard post isn’t that far away. If you curse when you land, do it quietly.”

“Shit.”

Ferguson shifted right, shifted again, got his left leg in place, and sprang to the rocks.

His belly caught the side, but he held on without slipping. He got up, unsteady but intact, then put his NOD back on. He waved at Rankin, waiting.

Rankin tossed the MP-5 to him. Ferg caught it with one hand, a stinking circus catch.

What a hot dog, the SF soldier thought as he eased himself out of his ruck. He waited until his head stopped spinning, then tossed it out to Ferguson, who used two hands this time.

“Your NOD,” said Ferguson in a loud whisper.

Rankin had already decided he was keeping it on. He shook his head, then waited as Ferguson began moving toward the edge of the rocks, positioning himself so he could grab Rankin if he fell short.

Rankin waited a second more, then jumped. Heavier than Ferguson and without the experience of midnight daredevil sessions in college, he came down short of his mark but still on the rocks, bowling Ferguson over as he fell.

“Serves you right,” he groaned, getting up.

“You got to lose weight, Skip.”

Conners watched them come down the rocks, picking their way down the right side of the ravine.

“You took your time,” he told Ferguson, as the CIA officer made it to the base of the hill.

“You’re still here? I thought the Chechens would have asked you inside for a little training.”

“There’s two motorcycles,” he told Ferguson. “I moved them. I figured they might come in handy.”

“Good thinking, Dad.”

“Guns hasn’t checked in, has he?” asked Conners.

“Would’ve been with you. We weren’t in line of sight coming down the hill. He’d only use the sat phone if there were a problem.”

“Unless he couldn’t.”

“You worry too much, Dad.” Ferguson laid out the terrain for the others, showing how the escape route was lined up. The crevice that opened below the mouth of the cave made an offset Z as it descended toward the woods where the bikes had been hidden; Conners guessed that there would be booby traps or mines to further narrow the route. Ferg doubted that — the route had to be secret and usable in haste, and mines would pose a danger to the escapees as well as be potentially detectable.

They moved back behind the rocks near where the bikes had been hidden and waited.

“You sure the Russians are going to come?” asked Rankin.

“If I blew up your car, wouldn’t you want to punch me out?” said Ferg.

“I want to punch you out anyway.”

Between his roundabout route and bum leg, it took four hours for Guns to make it to the ambush. By then the cold had seeped beneath Rankin’s skin, turning his bones into rods of ice. He worked back and forth in his spot near the mouth of the cave, the motion more to keep him awake than warm.

“Anybody else, I’d think you were doing some Buddhist meditation,” Ferguson said to him.

“Maybe I am,” said Rankin.

They showed Guns the layout and told him the plan. Once Kiro was out of the cave, they’d close off pursuit by dumping grenades in and detonating the charges Conners had set along the ravine. The explosives hadn’t been placed close enough to seal the mouth of the cave — that would have risked tipping off any guard inside — but Rankin pointed to a spot about fifty feet above the cave entrance and slightly to the left.

“After you put the grenades in and set off the charges, put another grenade on those rocks. That oughta start an avalanche.”

“And run like hell,” Ferguson added, eying the hill.

“All right,” said Guns, though he didn’t feel much like running. His ribs were pounding, and his ears were swollen; he thought he looked like Mickey Mouse. “You sure you can tell who Kiro is?” he asked Ferg.

Corrigan had given them a series of FBI sketches and one blurry photograph, along with some physical descriptions from Russian FSB files. Kiro had a scar on his cheek and stood only five-four, but it was a fair question.

“Shit yeah,” said Ferguson.

Rankin sniggered. “We oughta just kill ‘em all and be done with it.”

“We may,” said Ferguson.

Rankin moved back near the hide, taking Conners’s position. He had the grenade launcher, which was armed with a ponderously long charge that protruded from the mouth of the weapon like a rectangular lollipop. The tube contained a large Teflon net and a stun charge. The net would cover a twenty-foot-round area when it exploded; though the netting was strong, its effect was probably more disorienting than anything else. The charge that fired it was roughly the equivalent of a flash-bang grenade, generally not harmful unless it happened to land exactly in your face.

Which of course would be where he’d aim it.

Ferguson walked back and forth between the positions, his body racing with adrenaline. He had reloaded the shotgun with nonlethal shot and slung it over his shoulder with the submachine gun, both weapons ready. Conners took the safety position, deep in the backfield. He had a Minimi M249 machine gun with a two-hundred round belt — anyone who made it past the others wasn’t staying alive very long. While small for a machine gun, the weapon weighed fifteen pounds empty and without its scope, and having lugged it this far, Conners would just as soon use it.

The men used various ploys to stay awake, biting lips, rocking, thinking about how cold they were. Ferguson was mostly worried about Guns and kept checking on him, but the Marine had endured worse in boot camp, or at least was thoroughly convinced that he had. The memory of getting through that — along with the fear that he might let his friends down or, even worse, disgrace the Corps — was more than enough to keep him alert.

A little past five, they heard a helicopter in the distance. Each man stretched his arms and legs, then fell into position — Guns propping himself against a tree, Conners and Rankin on one knee, Ferg standing and watching. The sound grew, but then faded.

The hills remained silent for another half hour. This time the low drone came from trucks and tanks, a column moving along a road.

“Five of ‘em,” said Conners over the com set. “Two tanks at least. Trucks, personnel carriers.”

“What’d they have for breakfast?” asked Ferg.

Conners was still trying to think of a smart-alecky comeback when the heavy whomp of helicopter gunships began shaking the ground. They were flying in from the northwest, crossing from the team’s left, almost over their shoulders.

It was still dark, but with his night goggles Ferg watched the six smudges in double echelon roar toward the fortress. They were Ka-50s, single-seat attack birds powered by a pair of counterrotating rotors and armed with rockets and a monster cannon. They swung into an attack on the other side of the hill, launching rockets at the east and west sides of the encampment. One of the first rounds caught something flammable, and a series of secondary explosions began shaking the ground.

“Be ready,” said Ferg.

The onslaught moved to the front door of the fortress, rockets and cannons blasting the rocks and caves that looked down in the direction of the town. As one of the helicopters started away, a shrill zip sounded from the other side of the hill; a shoulder-launched missile veered upward and caught it on the side. Its fellows moved in for revenge, and at roughly the same time the tanks began to pound the caves, firing point-blank into the mountain.

“Be ready,” said Ferg again.

But nothing happened on their side of the fort. An hour after the attack had begun, the gunfire began to ease off. It was impossible to know what was going on from where they were, but it seemed unlikely that the Russians had made much of a dent in the rocks. A half hour later, two jets appeared; one of their bombs struck near the top of the hill over the cave, sending dirt far enough to dust Guns’s face.

“Fucking bastards. We’re going to have to go in there and get him ourselves,” said Rankin.

Ferguson’s real fear was that the Russians would try flanking the cave network and stumble across the Americans. Van Buren had raised the possibility earlier, pointing out that he didn’t have a large enough force to protect the flanks, but had reluctantly agreed when Ferg said bringing more men in — and waiting the day or two it would take to do so — presented other problems. It had been Ferguson’s call in the end, and he’d opted for surprise and quickness.

“Movement,” said Guns.

Everybody pushed forward a half step, weapons ready.

“Two, three men. First has a gun, the third,” said Guns.

“Guy in the middle,” said Rankin, who could see them from about twenty yards. “He’s short.”

“No, they’re all scouts,” said Ferg. “Hold on.”

“Going for the hide,” said Rankin.

“Hang tight.”

“Something else,” said Guns. “More people in the cave.”

“I got these three guys covered,” said Rankin.

Two more men came from the entrance to the cave. One was very much shorter than the other, stooped a little.

“The midget in the second group,” said Ferg. “Rankin?”

“Yup.” He shifted to his left — he didn’t have a shot on the target group, and the first trio was almost at the hide.

“Guns, get the grenade ready,” said Ferguson, seeing the two men now below them.

One of the trio that had come out first started shouting. A moment later someone in the cave began firing an automatic rifle toward Rankin. Guns fired the grenade into the cave, then tripped the charges. As the hillside shook, he put a grenade into the pile of rocks Rankin had pointed out. Dust and dirt flew everywhere. He launched another, then lost his balance as the rocks clattered down the hill in a roar.

Rankin still couldn’t see the target pair. He dashed down the hill toward the crevice, trying to get close enough to fire the net grenade. Bullets ricocheted all around him, the air humming with automatic weapons fire. Losing his balance, he slid down, falling on a direct line to the mouth of the cave, which was obscured behind a cloud of dust and rocks. He steadied the launcher but couldn’t find a target.

Ferguson pushed his submachine gun up and emptied the clip into the three figures who had come out first. By the time the last of the three men fell to the ground, rocks were sliding down the hillside.

Rankin cursed into the com set — he couldn’t find Kiro.

Ferguson pulled up the Remington, realizing that the terrorist had somehow managed to get beyond Rankin, possibly by climbing up the embankment. As he started to move toward the shallow ravine, he lost his footing. The slide saved him — one of the Chechen guerrillas had popped up on the slope directly across from him and begun firing. Ferguson scraped his fingers to hell as he fired back, the rubber slug slapping his target with a thud.

Ferg jumped to his feet and fired twice more, crazy with adrenaline now. He took a few hard shots to his chest before he had a target; he saw legs and fired the shotgun point-blank at the man’s face. His target howled and fell down. Ferg reached to grab him, then saw the other man climbing the rocks at his left to get away. He raised his gun and fired but either missed or didn’t do enough damage to stop him. Ferg fired again, then started after him, running and shooting until his gun was empty. He threw down the weapon and kept going, closing the distance to five yards before the man whirled.

He had a pistol in his hand. Part of Ferg’s brain saw the weapon and tried to tell his body to duck away; the rest missed it entirely. One of the bullets landed hard against the top of his body armor, but Ferg didn’t feel it — he’d already launched himself into the man’s midsection, tackling him against the stones. His right hand fished for the man’s neck and found a knife blade instead. Ferguson swung around, pinning his opponent and smacking his head back at the same time.

There was a flash, and Ferguson felt his head slammed to the side. Rankin had caught up and nailed them both with the net.

Ferguson, his back caught in the netting, saw the shadow of his assailant in front of him. He punched at it; the knife clattered away, and the Chechen, already stunned by the flash-bang, fell senseless. Ferguson stood up, pushing against the Teflon material of the net.

“Looks like you caught dinner,” he said to Rankin, who had his Uzi practically in Ferg’s face.

“This better be him.”

“There was one back on the lip of the ravine,” said Ferguson.

“I got him,” said Guns. He’d had to put a burst from the MP-5 into the man’s head when the bastard reached for his gun.

Conners and Rankin helped Ferguson out of the netting, then pulled the other man out and trussed him with handcuffs that looked like twists for Hefty garbage bags.

“Kiro,” said Conners, shining a flashlight in his face. “Yeah, that’s the bastard.”

“Take his picture so we can upload it to Corrigan and make sure,” said Ferg, handing the small digital camera to Rankin. As he ran back and grabbed his shotgun, something exploded at the top of the hill; Ferguson heard the heavy thump of the helicopters and started shouting to the others.

“Go, let’s go! Go!” he repeated, over and over.

Conners carried the Chechen over his back like a sack of potatoes. He started to slide him onto the seat of one of the bikes behind Guns, but Ferg stopped him. The CIA officer jabbed two syringes of Demerol into the terrorist’s rear, counting on the synthetic narcotic to keep him dazed for a while. Then he pushed him onto the bike, holding it while Conners got on at the rear. It was a tight squeeze, but it beat walking.

The helicopters were taking turns pounding the front of the fort and circling nearby. There was a chance they would see the bikes as they headed into the forest, but once they were in the trees, the choppers would have a hard time pursuing them.

“Do it,” said Ferguson over the com set.

Guns stalled the bike, then kicked three times before it started again. This time they jerked forward, nearly falling over but finally gaining their balance.

Something exploded behind them. Conners heard the roar of the helicopter and leaned his head into his prisoner’s shoulder, waiting for the cannon shells to tear them apart. They were nearly a mile away before he realized they were going to make it.

13

The prisoner’s moans weren’t enough to match his voiceprints, but Ferg decided they’d keep the bastard incapacitated with the Demerol rather than trying to get him to say something coherent over the sat phone. The visual image was a match at least, and as far as he was concerned, that was good enough. According to Corrigan, the Russians were telling headquarters that they had completely obliterated the guerrilla stronghold. Sixteen Chechens had been killed. The attackers had suffered three fatalities and five wounded.

The skies overhead were filled with Russian aircraft, complicating the team’s escape plans. They were about fifteen miles southwest of the cave complex, holed up in rocks with a good view of the valley to the west, all the way to the east-west train line to Georgia. There was an airstrip about three miles to the south where they had originally planned their pickup, but Van Buren had put the operation temporarily on hold. The Russians had put some Hinds there, along with supporting troops.

“Shouldn’t have pissed them off, huh?” Ferguson told him.

“Guess not.”

“It was an old car. Could have used a wash and wax.”

“So you saved him money.”

“Yeah.”

“We’re working on finding a better site,” the SF colonel told Ferguson. “But the Russians are watching the main airports pretty closely. We may end up going to a backup plan, maybe getting a pair of helicopters.”

“We’re not particular,” said Ferg. “Just get us the hell out of here.”

“It’s safer for you to sit and wait. Only be a few days.”

“I don’t like waiting around, VB.”

“Neither do I.” Van Buren sighed on the other end of the line. “Corrigan says there’s a car for you at Narzan. Some CIA ops drove it down from Moscow in case you needed it. Fully fueled and everything.”

“Yeah, he already told me. But that’s seventy-five kilometers away. We might just as well walk to Georgia.”

“Your call.”

Ferguson snapped off the phone without saying anything else.

“Maybe we can take the bikes and swing up to the train line west of Groznyy,” said Conners, who’d been listening nearby. “Ride it all the way to Moscow.”

“There’s an idea,” said Rankin sarcastically.

“I’m serious,” said Conners. “Once we’re in the car, we can get pretty far. I’ve been looking at the maps, Ferg. Turn on the laptop.”

Ferguson humored him, though he realized it would be far safer to wait there than try and hop a freight. A train line did run north out of Chechnya, and Conners showed Ferg from sat photos that it wasn’t well guarded beyond Groznyy heading north.

“We need two spots to get on,” said Conners. “Nice grade with a curve would be perfect. Two guys get on, blow a lock off a boxcar, climb in, dump out shit, get the door open, make it easy to throw raghead over there in.”

“What, you saw this in a dream?” asked Ferguson, impressed.

“We used to hop trains all the time when I was a kid. Rode one up from Jersey to Ramapo up in New York once, caught another back. Be like old times.”

“Patrol,” warned Guns, who had the lookout. “Trucks, a BMP.”

Ferguson went to the edge of the mountainside overlooking the road. He could see the Russians moving in a small caravan southward. Suddenly a white cloud appeared near the lead vehicle.

“Great,” said Ferguson. “Just what we need.”

They watched as a group of Chechen rebels picked off the Russian patrol from a hillside about a mile and a half away. By the time a pair of helicopter gunships arrived to assist the ground troops, it was too late; three of their trucks had been destroyed, probably by radio charges planted in the road though the rebels had also used rockets and possibly grenades.

“Nice little operation,” said Rankin, genuinely admiring it.

“That’ll take the heat off,” said Guns.

“All right boys, saddle up,” said Ferg. “Narzan’s about fifty miles away. We have a car waiting for us. We walk fast, we can make it in two nights.”

It was in fact less than fifty miles to the Chechen city, which sat west of Groznyy on the main east-west highway in central Chechnya, but they couldn’t travel in a straight line. They took turns carrying their prisoner on a makeshift stretcher, trekking over trails that roughly paralleled what passed for the main road west.

After about three hours of walking, they came to a small settlement at the intersection of three different mountains. They’d gone about five miles at that point — fantastic time considering the terrain — but the village stopped them cold. There were a dozen buildings scattered along the main road, which was more a trail than a highway. Rankin and Ferguson scouted the approach and saw two sentries in sandbagged positions next to barricades that blocked the way. They were Chechen guerrillas.

Given the topography, there were dozens if not hundreds of spots where reinforcements might be lurking. If not for their prisoner, they might have been able to work a deal with the rebels. Instead, they had to find a way to skirt the tiny village; it was nearly light before they managed to get beyond it by crossing a field to the east and climbing a fifty-foot sheer wall. They pulled Kiro up by a rope, slipping and sliding, until they found their way to a cave about two miles southeast of the hamlet.

They were so tired that they all actually slept.

The first two miles the next night were not only uphill, but were very uphill — they climbed five hundred meters within a half mile on a remarkably wide path. From the satellite photos, they knew that there was a farm in a high valley on the other side of the ridge; when they arrived there they found a small cart with rickety wheels parked next to a shed. Ferguson’s conscience pricked at him when he stole it, and he left an assortment of small bills in its place. The money might be a fortune to the poor farmer — or it might be completely useless in this isolated spot, sure to raise questions if he dared spend it.

The cart made it possible to go much faster on the road. Within an hour they had come to another farm, this one obviously belonging to someone much more prosperous — there was a truck next to a shed near the barn.

“I say we steal it,” said Rankin.

“You think you can hot-wire it?” Ferguson asked him.

“I can,” said Conners. “If it’s old enough.”

They sneaked into the yard, Guns and Rankin standing guard between the house and shed as Conners worked open the hood. The truck was an old Zil based on a Western European design that probably dated to the fifties. Conners lifted the hood and hunted for the ignition coil and starting solenoid, trying to get a feel for the wiring. He had just found the coil when the engine rumbled. Startled, he jerked his head up and smacked it against the hood.

“Keys are in it,” said Ferg.

A light came on in the house as they were backing out. Rankin fired a burst from the Uzi at the side of the building, and the warning was enough to slow down whoever was inside.

Ferguson changed plans, and with the help of the satellite photos they were able to get within sight of Gora Tebulsikva on the border with Georgia several hours before dawn. They left the truck outside the town, continuing by foot to the southwest, where the hills were rutted with paths. The Russians had fenced the border with two rows of razor-wire fence and a series of guard posts, but Ferguson figured it shouldn’t be too difficult to find a passage.

He took out his phone and sat down to call Corrigan, whom he’d promised to update every hour when they were on the move.

As he was talking, Kiro woke and began struggling against his restraints. They were out of Demerol. Guns tried talking to him in Russian, but he pretended not to understand. The Marine offered him food, but Kiro refused, continuing to struggle though he must have realized it was useless. Rankin put his Uzi in his face; Kiro smiled but continued to straggle until a hard smack on the side of the head with the short but hard metal stock rendered him senseless.

As they rolled him over to make sure his restraints were still snug, Conners noticed that the prisoner’s pants were soiled. He felt a twinge of sympathy for the bastard, but it quickly passed.

“The good news is, the helicopter will meet us in the pass five miles on the other side,” Ferguson told them, snapping off his phone. “The bad news is the asshole they set up to pick us up ran off with a better-paying customer, and they’re not coming until tomorrow night.”

“Fuck,” said Rankin. “Why isn’t this an SF operation?”

“We don’t need all that fuss,” said Ferguson, who had turned down Van’s offer to send in an evac team. In the CIA op’s opinion, that would draw way too much attention and was only a last-resort option. “You worried, Skip?”

“We can’t stay here. We’re too damn exposed.”

Ferguson rubbed his face. He was tired, but if he fell asleep now he wouldn’t wake up for hours and hours. He figured the same must be true of the others.

“Let’s get across the border now,” he said, pulling his ruck back on. “We should be able to find someplace to sleep on the other side of that hill there, in those woods.”

They found a well-worn passage underneath the fence about a half mile farther south. Ferguson and Guns scouted along the fence line until they came to another somewhat less worn. Worried that despite Corrigan’s intelligence to the contrary there were high-tech sensors between the fence, Ferguson sent Guns through. By the time he made it back, it was nearly dawn.

Conners and Rankin carried Kiro between them as they approached the fence, then dragged him under like a trussed pig. Meanwhile, Guns and Ferguson scouted the area for a place to hole up. About a half mile into Georgia they spotted a military post manned by six guards, who had a jeeplike vehicle mounting a machine gun near the post. The shoulder of the road dropped off a good eight feet as it passed, but to get by without being seen they’d have to crawl along it — impossible to do with Kiro. They trekked back up the hill, moving along the valley and actually crossing back into Chechnya before coming around through another pass, this one unguarded.

It was nearly midmorning before they finally found a secure place to camp, throwing themselves down against the rocks as if they were down-filled pillows. Ferguson started talking about the plan for tomorrow; he had them climbing aboard the helicopter before realizing not one of the others was awake.

14

In the early stages of the war against terrorism, the U.S. had sent ten UH-1 Hueys to Georgia to help fight against Islamic rebels. Ferguson thought one of the Hueys would be coming for them now, so when the helicopter descended low enough for him to see clearly with his NOD that it wasn’t a Huey, he hesitated before blinking his flashlight. The chopper descending toward the patch of dirt across from the mountain stream had large struts extending from its cabin to giant wheels at the side. Its massive engines groaned and wheezed as the seventy-foot rotor above lowered it precariously close to the streambed.

A crewman jumped out and blinked a flashlight several times. Ferguson blinked his in response.

“Corrigan sent us,” yelled the crewman.

Actually, the words sounded more like “Car came sent blues.”

“And us,” said Ferguson, stepping forward.

“Fregunski?” said the crewman.

“Close enough,” Ferg told him. He waved the others forward from the copse where they’d been hiding.

“Quickly,” said the crewman. “It’s not safe. The rebels are everywhere.”

The man turned out to be the pilot, and the only man aboard. Ferg slipped into the unoccupied copilot’s seat. The pilot smiled, then concentrated on getting the helicopter launched. The old Mi-8 shuddered, then groaned upward, passing so close to the cliff at the left that Ferguson closed his eyes.

“Ten minute,” said the pilot cheerfully.

“Ten minutes to where?” asked Ferguson. The airport at the capital was close to a half hour away, if not longer given their plodding pace.

“Pandori,” he said, practically signing the name of the mountain village.

“We’re going to Tbilisi,” said Ferg.

The pilot turned toward him. “Nynah,” he said, drawing out the no.

“Tbilisi, yeah,” said Ferguson.

The man began speaking in Georgian. Ferguson told him in English and then in Russian that he couldn’t speak Georgian, but that didn’t stop the tirade.

“We need to go to Tbilisi,” Ferg told him. He put his hand on the man’s right arm.

The helicopter pitched forward sharply. Ferguson, who hadn’t belted himself in, slammed against the dashboard. He threw himself around and took out his gun.

“No more of that,” he told the pilot.

“Tbilisi, no,” said the pilot.

“What’s going on?” asked Guns, poking his head between them.

“Our friend doesn’t want to go to the capital,” said Ferg. “How’s your Georgian?”

Guns shook his head, but between them they puzzled out some information. The pilot had been challenged at the airport before taking off and had been buzzed by a Russian fighter just before finding them. He was afraid of being arrested if he returned to the capital. The closest he would take them was Micheta, a town about five miles north of Tbilisi.

Ferguson called Corrigan and told him to get a car up there.

“That’s not as easy as you think,” said the desk man.

“We’re not walking,” said Ferguson. “Why the hell didn’t you get us a real helicopter?”

“It is a real helicopter.”

“Corrigan, you and I are going to have a serious talk when I get back. You’re supposed to facilitate my mission, not make it harder.”

“I’m sorry. The embassy made the arrangements.”

“They know we’re on the same side, right?”

“Hold on the line while I talk to them,” said Corrigan.

“Good idea.”

“The embassy’ll send a car,” Corrigan told Ferguson finally. “It’s on the way now. Plainclothes Marines.”

“Guns’ll be overjoyed,” said Ferguson, snapping off the phone.

The pilot had apparently been to the small town before, barely hesitating as he angled in between a set of power lines to land in a small field behind a school building. He stayed in his seat, with the rotors moving.

“It’s been real,” Ferg told the pilot in English.

The man gave him a thumbs-up and a wide smile, as if they’d had the time of their lives. Ferguson barely got the door up and closed before the helicopter whipped back upward.

“Starting to rain,” said Guns.

“Figures,” said Rankin.

“We have to move up to the road,” said Ferguson, checking his watch. The Marines were due in ten minutes.

“ ‘All the money that ever I spent, I spent it in good company,’” started Conners, singing an Irish folk tune, as he picked up Kiro and slung him over his back. The prisoner groaned; Conners sang louder.

“All the comrades that ever I had, they’re sorry for my going away,” he sang. “All the sweethearts that I once had, they wish me one more day to stay. But since it falls unto my lot, for me to rise and them to not, I’ll gently rise and softly call, good night and joy be with you all.”

“See, the guy’s dying,” Conners explained to the others. “It’s that kind of song.”

“Yeah, no shit,” said Rankin.

“You got a good voice, Dad,” said Guns.

“And you’re fuckin’ crazy,” said Rankin.

“And the rest of you aren’t?” said Conners, spotting a pair of headlights approaching.

The Marines took them to a house in the southeast quadrant of the capital, bringing them in through an alley, which made Kiro a little less obvious. Fully conscious, the prisoner had either reconciled himself to the fact that he wasn’t going to escape or had decided to conserve his energy. He meekly allowed himself to be carried from the car into the house.

Ferg left the others to work out shifts for showering and sleeping while he went over to the embassy. He was met not by one of the resident CIA spooks he’d expected but the charge d’affaires — a young woman in a black silk miniskirt who could have stepped out of any one of two dozen wet dreams he’d had as teenager.

And any number of others since.

“You need a shower,” said the charge. Two buttons of her mauve shirt were unbuttoned, giving a hint of lace beneath.

“I need a plane,” said Ferguson.

“We’re working on it.” She brushed back her curly blond hair. Obviously she’d been woken up a short while before — Ferguson wondered what she’d look like if she had time to prepare.

“You really do need a shower,” she said.

She must be right, he reasoned. Despite all of his innate animal magnetism and the powerful ESP messages he was beaming into her brain, she remained across the room.

“First I need to talk to the, uh, consul security coordinator,” said Ferguson, using a euphemism for the CIA chief.

“I’m her. Really, Mr. Ferguson — you need a big-time shower.”

“Really?”

“If I had a fire hose, I’d hose you down myself.”

Ferguson spread his arms. “Take me, I’m yours.”

“Up the steps, to the right.”

“You really are getting me a plane, right?”

“We’re working on it. We were told that you were to be picked up by your own people in Chechnya in a few days.” She looked at him accusingly, as if he’d been boogied out of a date.

“Didn’t make too much sense to hang around there,” Ferguson said. “Russians were beefing up their patrols, and the Chechens were kicking them in the face.”

“I’ll find you some clothes.”

“Why don’t you help me in the shower instead?”

“I doubt I’d make it without passing out.”

“I have first-aid training.”

“I’ll bet.”

Ferguson used half the hot water in Tbilisi washing Chechnya out of his skin. He found a fresh set of clothes — but no charge — in the room outside the shower.

The outfit included polyester boxers — not his style, but at least his size. The rest of the outfit was so preppy it came complete with tasseled loafers.

Miss Miniskirt was waiting downstairs.

“You missed a great shower,” he told her.

“Sounded like it. You were singing.”

“If I’d known you were close, I would have taken requests.”

“I heard you down here.” She held out her hand. “I’m Amanda Scott.”

“Pretty name,” said Ferg. “Goes with your eyes.”

“I think you’ve been on assignment too long.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” said Ferguson. “You going to offer me a drink?”

He followed her into a reception room, then through a side panel to a smaller, book-lined study.

“What are you drinking?” she asked.

“Whiskey. Pour yourself one.”

“No thank you.”

Ferg watched her pour out two fingers into the tumbler. He touched her hand as he took the glass; it was warm, as if her internal thermostat was set several degrees higher than his.

“So I hate to ask — Why the hell didn’t you get us a real helicopter up to make the pickup?” he asked after a sip.

“We tried. It was sabotaged.”

“By who?”

“Take your pick — drug runners, arms smugglers, Muslim crazies, Russians. Place is out of control.”

She gave a weak shrug. Her breasts heaved up in a way that made it difficult to question her further.

“We’ll have an airplane ready no later than tomorrow afternoon,” she told him. “The Marines will stay with you until then.”

“I could stay here.”

“I’m afraid the ambassador wouldn’t approve.”

“I’ll go to your place then.”

“My boyfriend wouldn’t approve.”

“He’s an idiot anyway,” said Ferguson.

“True,” said the woman. “But since he’s standing out in the hall with a gun, maybe we’d better not talk too loud. He’s the Marine who drove you here.”

15

Colonel Charles Van Buren tried rubbing the fatigue out of his eyes as he powered up his laptop, waiting to hear from Washington that his people were not needed to grab the team and its prisoner. He’d received unofficial word already — from Ferguson himself — which had allowed him to order most of the men and equipment tagged for the operation to bed. Van Buren sympathized with the complaints as they’d disembarked from their MC-130 — to a man his volunteers preferred action to sleep — but nonetheless he’d been sincere when he offered them a job well-done.

The colonel felt strongly that it was the outcome that mattered. If the team had gotten out without needing them, then the mission had been accomplished as surely as if Van Buren’s two planeloads of paratroopers and Special Forces A teams had gone into action. Indeed, the military people on the Team had been drawn from Van Buren’s own force, and he felt nearly as paternal toward them as he did toward his own son, James.

Ferguson was a different story — more brother and friend than son, though he was nearly young enough to be one. Van Buren admired the CIA officer a great deal; though they’d worked together for only a short time, they were good friends. On a professional level, they were a good match, Van Buren’s caution and ability to plan balancing Ferg’s tendency to work by the seat of his pants.

Still waiting for the official order to stand down — it had to come through the Pentagon — Van Buren pulled out his laptop to compose an e-mail home to his wife and son. Since taking the appointment as the commander of the 777th Special Forces Joint Task Group six months before, Van Buren had communicated with his family almost exclusively through e-mail. It had its advantages — it was certainly quicker than writing a letter, nor did he have to worry about time zone differences. But it surely wasn’t the same as seeing them in person.

Van Buren brought up the most recent e-mail from his son, James. It was typical James, a terse account of his Babe Ruth League baseball game:

Dad — 2 hrs., trip.; won 7–2. — james

Two home runs and a triple — Van Buren wondered if his son might have the makings of a pro ballplayer. He’d always thought of James as athletic and brilliant, but now that his boy was fifteen he wondered how brilliant and intelligent and athletic he really was. He had a ninety-five average at school and had started on the varsity football and baseball teams since freshman year. But the school was in a small rural community, and there was no way of knowing how it really compared to the rest of the world.

Van Buren selected the text of the message and hit reply. Then he began to type.

James:

Great game, son.

He backed up the cursor, erasing “son.” It sounded too stiff.

Van Buren hunched over the laptop, searching for something else to say. His writer’s block was interrupted by the phone. He grabbed the handset.

“Yo, Van Buren, who the hell do you think you’re fooling, playing with snake eaters?”

The voice caught him off guard, but just for a second.

“Dalton, what the hell are you doing calling Dehrain?”

“Oh is that where I’m calling?”

“How’d you track me down?”

“Friends.”

“Look, it’s 2300 here, and—”

“What, you keep banker’s hours now that I’m not around to kick your butt?”

“Yeah, that’ll be the day.”

“Listen, I can’t really go into much detail on the phone, not this phone anyway, but I have something I want to talk to you about the next time you’re in Washington.”

Van Buren leaned back in his seat. Like Van Buren, Dalton had served as a captain with Army Special Forces, bringing home a Purple Heart from Central America. He’d gone on to hold several important posts with USSOCOM, before retiring a year ago to join the private sector.

Dalton joked about his medal, claiming it was certified proof that he was an asshole, but the fact of the matter was that he had earned it rescuing two civilian DEA agents from a guerrilla ambush, and had humped one of his own men to safety besides. Few officers, even in Special Forces, could make such a claim; in Van Buren’s opinion, the military had lost a good man when he separated from the service.

“So?” asked Dalton.

“I’m going to be in Washington pretty soon,” said Van Buren. Assuming the Team’s assignment wrapped up without a problem, he’d be returning to debrief with Ferguson.

“Good. When?”

“Soon.” Van Buren wouldn’t elaborate even if he knew, not even for an old friend.

“Need to know, huh?” Dalton laughed after a few moments of silence.

“My schedule’s not really my own.”

“When you’re here, I want you to drop by and talk about career opportunities. Give me a call at home. Just leave a message where I can get you. Don’t worry about the time.”

Van Buren laughed. “What, you have an inside track for general?”

“Something better, VB. Much, much better.”

And with that, Dalton hung up.

16

Even Rankin felt better after a shower and shave, and he didn’t complain when Ferguson laid out the itinerary the next morning. A car and a van would take them to the airport, where they’d meet a C-12 at a hangar borrowed from a Turkish freight company. The C-12 was a two-engine Beech aircraft once used as an observation platform for an Army unit, now painted gray with a civilian registration ostensibly from Germany. While not exactly a jumbo jet, it was more than adequate to take them to Incirlik. Once at the large Air Force base in Turkey, they and their prisoner would board another plane and fly to the military detention center at Guantanamo on Cuba. Linguistic experts and interrogators were already en route to Turkey to get the interrogation process started as soon as they arrived.

Thanks to the Kiro lead, analysts at the CIA were eying Chechnya as the nexus for a large operation aimed at stealing nuclear waste. Presumably Kiro would tell them something once they got him to Guantanamo; in the meantime more than two dozen people were poring through intercepts, studying satellite photos, and rummaging through mountains of data looking for hints of an operation that had thus far remained hidden.

Ferguson hadn’t forgotten that the shipment of waste that had started all of this hadn’t been tracked down, nor was he necessarily impressed by the analysts’ efforts thus far. He would have liked to talk to the imprisoned Chechen who knew about making dirty bombs. But he was ready to go home and take a few days off.

Tbilisi sat in the center of ancient trade routes connecting Europe and Asia, and was a prized possession and sometime victim for Persians, Byzantines, Arabs, Mongols, Tartars, and Turks, all of whom had occupied and occasionally mugged it for centuries after it was founded in A.D. 455. The Russians came to the city in 1801; Georgians tried rebelling but were ultimately crushed in 1905, their revolt a little premature. When the successful revolt came, Georgia remained in the empire.

Under the Soviets, life had been constrained and drab. Deep in the heart of the Caucasus, the city had a European feel to it; the buildings and bridges over the Kura reminded visitors of Austria or eastern Czechoslovakia, as the Czech Republic was then known. An industrial center with a population over a million, the city boasted a major university as well as important research facilities and a lively theater. But years of civil war and failed economic reform since the end of the Soviet Union had helped transform the country into a kingdom of gloom. Tbilisi now was the forlorn capital of chaos, ruled by crime lords, corrupt politicians, drug runners, and committed madmen. Armed escorts did not draw a raised eyebrow here, and when the Marines — dressed in plainclothes though even a casual passerby would know they were Americans — blocked off the street in front of the safe house, no one even bothered to glance their way.

The Marines brought three vehicles — two Mercedes sedans borrowed from the embassy and a van that carried the bulk of the security team. Ferg put Kiro in the backseat of the second Mercedes between Conners and Rankin. They’d changed his clothes and handcuffed him, nudging him into a compliant haze with a shot of Demerol; he also had a hood so he couldn’t see where he’d been or where he was going. Guns, sitting in the front with his MP-5 and three clips on the floor, had a syringe with another double dose of Demerol in his pocket in case the prisoner began acting up.

Ferguson got in the front of the van, which was trailing immediately behind the sedan with the bulk of the security team. The first Mercedes started out as they locked up; it would run ahead to make sure there were no problems with traffic.

They were just crossing the river when Ferg spotted the small yellow station wagon. It had only a driver, no passengers, and at first the fact that it made the same turns they made seemed just a coincidence.

“Let’s take some turns,” he told the others, and the Marine drivers worked out a quick set of detours along the river, driving through a tourist area. The station wagon stayed with them for a while, then disappeared; a panel truck seemed to take over as they came back onto the main street.

“May be that I’m just paranoid,” said Ferguson. “But I think we’re being followed.”

Their backup plan called for them to divert to the embassy, pick up more Marines, then drive out to a military field about seventy-five miles away. Ferg also had the option of driving straight out to the military field and calling for the C-12 to meet them there. He took out his sat phone and called Amanda, who was at the airport waiting for them.

“You really should have showered with me,” he told her when she answered the phone.

“Mr. Ferguson, where are you?”

“My girlfriends call me Ferg.”

“We were told you were en route.”

“I think we have a tail. It’s an operation, at least two vehicles, one a panel truck, which doesn’t make me feel too good.”

“Where are you now?”

Ferguson had to ask the driver for the highway name. Amanda didn’t answer when he relayed it.

“You around, Beautiful?” he asked. He saw the panel truck turn off behind them, but couldn’t tell what car was following them.

“We think the Russians are watching the airport,” said Amanda, returning. “We’re checking.”

“All right, let’s go over to plan B. We’ll drive right out to the second pickup,” said Ferg. “I think it’d be better if we had the security teams meet us en route.”

“I agree,” said Amanda.

“I knew you were easy.” Ferg glanced at the mirror, trying to make out if there was another car. The Marines were edgy in the back, and even the driver had checked his pistol, snugged into a shoulder holster beneath a sports coat. “Let me think on this a second. Keep the line open.”

“What’s going on?” asked Guns over the com set.

“People at the airport. Probably pissed that we didn’t choose Aeroflot.”

“We going over to the field?”

“Maybe. Let’s do another loop, what routine are we up to driver — C?”

The driver nodded. They had worked out a series of streets to follow to lose trails without executing high-risk maneuvers.

Assuming those were the Russians behind him, Ferguson realized they’d invested an awful lot of resources into the operation. Given that, they might have staked out the backup airfield as well — it was, after all, the next best choice, and pretty obvious.

Back to the embassy then. Have a helo come in. Too bad they couldn’t just land the C-12 on the roof.

“Hey, Beautiful, our airplane ready to go?” Ferguson asked Amanda.

“Yes, of course.”

“Tell him to take off.”

“Huh?”

“Tell him to take off. He’s going to pick us up.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know yet. I have to talk to the driver and look at a map.”

“Ferg—”

“See, I told you I’d grow on you.”

Once they were sure the C-12 was in the air, the driver in the lead car pulled a sharp 180 on the highway they were driving on. As the others sped on, he rammed into the panel truck, taking out the only vehicle they’d spotted that could be carrying a sizable force of troops. Veering as he was sideswiped, the driver of the van tipped over his truck, smashing into an oncoming car. Meanwhile, the Mercedes with the prisoner and the van sped off the road back onto city streets, racing through a series of alleys and lots to a stretch of warehouses at the eastern edge of the industrial section.

“You with us?” Ferg asked Amanda back at the airport. She was the only one whose radio could communicate with the pilot of the plane, which had taken off and was spinning back toward the edge of city.

“We’re ready.”

Ferg saw the plane overhead.

“Do it,” he told the driver.

The Marine slammed on the brakes as they turned the corner to Swvard Avenue, cutting off the station wagon following them. Ferg jumped from the truck as the Marines piled out in the back, brandishing weapons. The station wagon and a black Russian Lada behind it slammed to a halt; a large truck stopped behind them and men started coming out of the back. Someone got out of the Mercedes — a man in a yellow sports coat.

“Ah, the FSB,” yelled Ferg over his com set as the Marines with him in the van piled out, weapons as obvious as they could make them. “Amanda, honey, you guys have a serious security problem at your end of the operation. You have to watch that pillow talk.”

At the other end of the long, wide street, Rankin slammed against the prisoner as their car veered across the roadway, blocking off the path of traffic. He pushed to his left as Guns jumped from the car, brandishing his MP-5 at a small vehicle that had stopped twenty yards away, waving at the dazed driver to pull off into the lot on the left. Out of the car, Rankin grabbed the prisoner’s side and started pulling him along with Conners.

The C-12 roared down onto the pavement, so close to Ferguson that it knocked him off his feet. It veered slightly to the right, then the left on the long roadway, bouncing in a pothole and nearly tilting too far forward before finally stopping. By the time Ferguson reached the door of the plane, Rankin and Conners were dragging their prisoner around the wing. Guns, taking up the rear, was coming on a dead ran.

“Go, just go!” yelled Ferguson as he pushed Kiro into the airplane. “Get this thing up.”

Conners crawled over Kiro into the C-12; on his haunches, he pulled the prisoner up and pushed him toward one of the two military crewmen. Belatedly, he realized that the soldier had a gun at his belt. Conners jumped up and pushed his way between the prisoner and the man; even with his prisoner handcuffed, blindfolded, and doped up, Conners knew better than to take a chance he might get the gun.

Rankin jumped in. The plane started to move. The door slapped shut, then flew open. Guns’s head appeared in the doorway, followed by Ferguson’s.

The plane was already lifting off the ground. As they struggled to close the door, Guns suddenly slipped and for a split second felt as if he were going out headfirst.

Ferg grabbed him, hauling him back as the plane lifted, then tilted over on its wing, sending them sprawling inside.

“That’s another one you owe me, Marine,” the CIA officer told his team member.

The door slammed, then opened, then slammed again as the pilot banked hard over the abandoned factory, narrowly missing a chain-link fence before finally stabilizing and heading southwestward.

Ferguson went over to one of the windows, looking down on the scene they had just left. The Marines had jumped back into the van and were speeding off. There were a dozen troops standing near the truck behind the Mercedes; at the head of the knot was the man in the yellow jacket.

“Doesn’t have much taste in clothes,” said Ferg. “But otherwise he knows his business.”