Storm Front

CHAPTER 6

JOWZJAN PROVINCE, Afghanistan

From the outside, it looked like there was no inside. That’s what made it such a good hiding place.

Gregor Volkov had come across the cave complex during the early nineties, back when he was a young operative with the secret Soviet police force known as the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, back when there was still such a thing as the KGB.

This was only a few years after the USSR had publicly given up on the folly of trying to tame Afghanistan — and a decade or so before the United States took up the same fool’s errand. The Soviets still had secret operations in the country, even though it was clear they could not conquer it. In the vacuum created by the Soviet departure, many groups competed for power. It was a wild time in a wild place, which made it perfect for Volkov, the wolf. The Taliban were slowly taking hold in some of the cities, but out in the mountains, it was the same as it had always been. The notion that there even was such thing as a nation state called Afghanistan — or that the locals owed it some sense of fealty — was not commonly accepted. Political power was wielded behind the muzzle of a gun by whoever had the fortitude to assert it.

This kind of might-makes-right ruling structure appealed to Volkov. When he found the cave, he knew the USSR was not long for this planet. In some ways, he was ambivalent about its demise. Mother Russia had weakened herself by taking on so many dependent children. It was better for Russia to cut the apron strings and pursue an empire without them. In the meantime, Volkov was also envisioning his own independence, one that involved a future as a freelancer. As the USSR entered its final spasms of dissolution — and order began to break down in the KGB — Volkov returned to this small crevice in the side of a mountain and made it his base of operations.

Through the years, he had turned it into an effective launching pad and a comfortable home. The entrance was only a few meters wide and well covered with trees. But inside, nature had burrowed out a generous labyrinth that led deep into the mountainside. Volkov had hired local laborers to help broaden parts of it, smooth out other parts, generally civilize it. Then he killed the laborers one by one, to keep them from talking about it.

From there, he installed a makeshift plumbing system, with clean water piped in from a nearby spring. He brought in generators to give him power and heat and stashed enough barrels of diesel fuel — stolen from the Red Army as it crumbled — to keep the lights on for many years. He replaced the empties one by one. He installed a few strategically hidden satellite receivers that allowed him to communicate with the outside world or, if he chose, just kick back and surf the Internet.

Volkov could come and go as he pleased, crossing the border from Turkmenistan via any number of mountain passes. He didn’t have to worry about the authorities, because there were none. The only passport he needed was whatever automatic or semiautomatic weaponry he was carrying at the moment. The nearby villagers — who only knew he was somewhere in the mountains and only saw him when he came to town for supplies — lived in mortal terror of him. There was a warlord known to operate in the region. He did not bother with Volkov. There was plenty of room for everyone, what with hundreds of square miles of basically uninhabited mountain terrain. Besides, Gregor Volkov was not the kind of man anyone wanted to pick a fight with.

He only brought his crew here when he needed something done, and now he needed their help. And so, having successfully completed their latest job in Switzerland, Volkov and his crew had spent one wild night in Monaco, indulging their taste for girls, booze, drugs, and gambling. Then they stole a Monex 4000, broke it down into small enough pieces that it could be transported without detection, and then reassembled the pieces in the cave, so that Volkov could attempt to turn this already profitable job into something even more lucrative.

“Yuri, have you secured the link-up yet?” Volkov barked at a young man with a mane of fiery red hair tied back in a ponytail. Yuri’s fingers were flying across a keyboard that was connected to a computer that, in turn, remotely controlled the angle and direction of Volkov’s satellite dishes.

“Yes, General, I’m just getting them now,” Yuri answered. General. Volkov insisted all his men called him General. He believed that if the USSR had held together, he would have eventually risen to the top of the KGB, then switched to the military, where he would have ascended to that rank and exerted his influence on the Politburo. That none of that ever came to pass did not change Volkov’s opinion that he ought to be addressed in that manner.

“And you’ve got this terminal set up?” Volkov asked.

“Yes, General. I’ve been working on it, but I…”

“All right, let’s see it then,” Volkov interrupted, strolling across the branch of the cave that served as his communications center.

The MonEx 4000, protected by a casing of beige-painted steel, was the size of a footlocker and weighed several hundred pounds. It looked not unlike a large server. Not all digital electronics had yet shrunken down to handheld size, and this was one the complexity of which necessitated its ample dimensions. It fit on the top of a table one of the crewmen had brought into the communications center.

“General, with all due respect, I don’t understand why we’re doing this,” Yuri said.

“You don’t understand what?”

“Our employer is paying us generously for each MonEx code we supply, am I right?” Yuri asked. Volkov had not told his crew how generously. He was getting a million dollars per code, but he told his crew it was a hundred thousand. Each member of the five-man crew thought he was getting a decent deal — ten thousand each, with the other half going to Volkov. If any of them suspected the split was, in fact, much less fair than that, none of them dared let on.

“That’s correct,” Volkov said, feeling his anger starting to grow. He did not like being questioned by an underling.

“So why don’t we just keep supplying codes? A hundred thousand to kill a paper-pushing banker — it’s good money for easy work, is it not?”

“Shame on you, Yuri. You think so small,” Volkov said.

“How so, General?”

“Simple logic. If someone is willing to pay us a hundred thousand for a code, it must be worth more than that, yes?” Especially when he’s really paying us a million, Volkov thought.

“But maybe it’s only worth that much to him,” Yuri countered. “Maybe, we should…”

“Yuri,” Volkov said, grabbing the young man’s ponytail and jerking it backward. Yuri’s eyes grew wide as Volkov slapped a hand on his throat. “You are correct in that we may not be able to exploit these codes for our own purpose, in which case we will accept our bounty and move to our next job. But I would like to think optimistically. Don’t you want to be an optimist, Yuri?”

“Yes, General,” he choked out.

“In chess, a grand master does not just approach the game one way,” Volkov said, tilting Yuri’s head farther back. “He has many different strategies, all working at the same time. That way he is prepared, no matter what his opponent does. Do you understand this?”

“Yes, General.”

“I waste my breath on you, Yuri. Just show me what you have,” Volkov said, and released his grip, then subconsciously adjusted his eye patch, which had been knocked just slightly off center.

Yuri rubbed his neck. He did not relish what he had to say next.

“That’s the problem, General. I don’t… We don’t… We don’t have anything.”

“What do you mean? The terminal was reassembled perfectly. We took pictures. I studied the schematics myself.” The volume of Volkov’s voice crescendoed to at least a mezzo forte.

“It’s not that, General. I…”

“Is it the connection? I thought you said you had the satellites set up properly.”

“Yes, General, I do. It’s just…”

Volkov was now at forte. “Then what is the problem?”

“It’s this,” Yuri said, tilting the screen so it was directly facing Volkov.

The Russian’s one good eye scanned back and forth across the text on the screen, his confusion growing with each passing second. It was not that the letters were unfamiliar — they were from the Roman alphabet, one Volkov had long ago been taught. It was not that the words were undecipherable — it was clearly English, which Volkov spoke fluently. But the screen, when taken in its entirety, was incomprehensible. Or at least it was incomprehensible to someone who had not received extensive training in the peculiarities of the MonEx’s unique operating system. And neither Yuri nor Volkov had.

“You’ve entered the code properly?”

“Yes, General. I double-checked it twice.”

“Then what’s… what’s this?”

“I’m just not sure,” Yuri said.

“We must be able to… transfer funds out of this somehow… or… something.”

“I’ve tried, General. As you can see, the func—”

“Get out of my way,” Volkov ordered, gripping Yuri’s shirt and using it as a handle to toss him roughly from the chair.

Volkov sat, tilted his good eye at the screen, and surveyed the keyboard. Surrounding the familiar QWERTY setup were rows and columns of buttons the purpose of which he could not even guess. He typed transfer funds. The screen lit with:

[INVALID COMMAND ERROR]

Access account, Volkov typed.

[INVALID COMMAND ERROR]

Show funds, Volkov tried.

[INVALID COMMAND ERROR]

With each error message, Volkov felt his blood pressure rising. He started experimenting by hitting the strange buttons along the side. Some did nothing. Others made random, odd-looking characters appear on the screen — or strings of letters that made no sense to Volkov. Then there was the baffling series of error messages:

[IMPROPER NULL FUNCTION]

Or:

[OPERATOR VOIDED TRANSACTION]

Or:

[INTERNAL CONSISTENCY CONFLICT]

Or, more simply and most frequently:

[ACCESS DENIED]

This was going nowhere. Volkov’s anger only grew. The MonEx had not been easy to steal in the first place. It had been even more difficult to smuggle into this country and lug halfway up a mountain. He should be rewarded for this effort, not stymied by it. Volkov stood and snarled at Yuri.

“Sit back down,” Volkov ordered. “How dare you shirk your duty?”

“But, General, I…”

“You said you could make this work!”

“I thought it was Linux-based,” Yuri protested. “I didn’t know it had its own operating system. I’ve been trying to find an instruction manual, but you need to have a licensing code and we don’t—”

“Your excuses are feeble,” Volkov shouted. He was at a full fortissimo.

“General, if you could please just give me a week or two to—”

“We don’t have a week or two,” Volkov sputtered.

“We have a deadline.”

And they did. Volkov’s employer had been very explicit: Volkov had to deliver six codes, from the six bankers designated by the employer, all on a strict time line. If Volkov failed to deliver even one of them, he wouldn’t get paid a cent. He could hardly ask for more time because he was trying to figure out how to use the codes for his own illicit purposes.

“General, I…”

“Your incompetence galls me,” Volkov said.

“But, General, if—”

The remainder of the sentence never got out. Volkov yanked the Ruger from its holster, held it to Yuri’s forehead, and depressed the trigger three times in rapid succession. Ribbons of crimson shot across the room, followed by flesh that had previously been attached to Yuri.

Two other members of the crew rushed into the communications center to respond to the gunfire. They stopped short when they saw that the flowing strands of red on Yuri’s head were not, for once, merely his hair. Volkov passed by them and was on his way out of the room before he spoke.

“Yuri has decided to retire,” he said. “Get him out of here.”

“Yes, General.”

“And when you’re done with that, get packed,” Volkov said. “We have another job to do.”

“Oh,” he added, looking at the MonEx, “and find me someone who knows how to work that machine.”