Between Two Scorpions

by Jim Geraghty

  “The world’s our oyster. But he’s determined to apply to Langley. Won’t get over something about his dad and the IRA and some girl he knew that disappeared. And I say sure. Then the recruiter is practically begging me.” She took a deep breath. “And I’m still waiting to hear from the Foreign Service, so I think, sure. This is another path. Fix the world. Make it a better place. Protect those who need protecting. I go down to the Farm and everybody says I’m great at this. And I never really stop to ask, ‘Is this really what I want to do with my life?’”

  Raquel put a hand on her shoulder.

  “Then that Tuesday happens, world changes. They need Uzbek speakers. Suddenly I’m in Afghanistan, translating deals to get warlords who have done God knows what before we arrived to switch to our side against the Taliban.” She paused again. “You read the reports. I’m walking around with a Beretta, then a Glock 19, and then I’m drawing one of them when a negotiation goes bad. And then I’m using it. And then I’m using it a lot. Men are dead because I pulled the trigger. And I go back, thinking … what is Alec going to think of me?”

  Raquel looked confused. “Come on. You had to know Alec would always love you.”

  Katrina looked sadder than before. “Oh, it wasn’t that. He was jealous. Never said it outright, but while I’m out there, he’s spending months staring at international bank records, finding rich foreigners who are funding terrorism and trying to get somebody to extraordinary rendition them. He thinks I’m making a difference, and he isn’t. I keep going places. Proving myself. He’s going stir crazy in offices. And then you come along, with this idea for a special group. Outside the system. A little clique doing things our own way.”

  Raquel studied Katrina’s face. “Are you more worried about yourself, or Alec?”

  Katrina looked at her, and then the sky, and then back at Raquel. “I can handle a lot. I’ve proven it. You put me in a bad situation, I’ve got as much chance as anybody else on earth to walk out alive. Right now, it feels like only one thing scares me. Not bombs, not snakes, not shootouts with cartels. You want to know what really scares me?”

  Raquel waited.

  “Being a widow … the one who has to go on afterward.” Another deep breath. “If I wanted this, I could have married a Navy SEAL or a cop. I picked the preppie goofball accountant with the heart the size of Connecticut. He’s not supposed to be the guy running into a burning room or getting bitten by snakes or shot at. I’m not supposed to be the one worrying about whether he’s going to come home alive. I can handle the danger to me. I don’t know if I can handle the danger to him. I don’t want to handle the danger to him.”

  Raquel nodded in understanding. Then after an appropriately long pause, sprung the trap.

  “How do you think he felt all those times you were out there?”

  Katrina grumbled.

  “He’s stronger than you realize,” Raquel said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have him doing this. You’re a virtuoso. He improvises. You execute the plan. He rewrites it on the fly. That’s why you two work well together. Yin and yang.”

  Katrina was about to respond when their phones buzzed simultaneously with a text. They both exhaled with dread and checked their phones.

  It was Alec: got it got it got it found em found em found em come to the office quick now now now

  Both women couldn’t help but laugh at the message’s tone.

  “You going to resign?” Raquel asked. She felt only mildly frustrated that they would have to skip lunch, and debated grabbing takeout.

  “No,” Katrina sighed. “I just … I told you what my father used to say about Bukhari, right? That living as Jews between the Communists and the Muslims was like living between two scorpions.”

  Raquel nodded. “A burden few Americans can really understand.” Raquel wondered if what her friend was really struggling with was a sense of guilt—an easier, better life in America than her parents had enjoyed in the old country.

  Katrina unlocked her car. “Scorpions just sting, it’s just their instinct. It’s not good or evil, no malevolence, just their nature, it’s what they do. I just … ” She opened the door. “I don’t want to wake up one morning and feel like I’ve become a scorpion.”

  They got in their cars, and Raquel wondered if Katrina had ever read Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.

  CHAPTER 41

  LIBERTY CROSSING INTELLIGENCE CAMPUS

  TYSONS CORNER, VIRGINIA

  Alec had a smug smile on his face when Raquel and Katrina got to the office.

  “Suppose I said we had figured out Atarsa’s base of operations.”

  Raquel paused. “Where?”

  He held up a plastic bag containing a well-worn, heavily wrinkled black shirt, removed it, and grinned widely. “Somewhere near Darvaza, Turkmenistan.”

  Off her frown, he held the shirt up to her face.

  “Jesus, that stinks!” she exclaimed. “What is that, rotten eggs? Sulfur?”

  He nodded enthusiastically, eyebrows approaching the stratosphere. “So I started looking for sulfur sources in Turkmenistan.”

  “VEVAK believes he operated out of Turkmenistan and Cyprus …” Katrina murmured, weighing Alec’s stinky evidence. “That doesn’t really narrow it down, Alec. Turkmenistan is one of the world’s largest producers of sulfur. Jaguar’s Mexican, and his home country has got at least one sulfur mine, too.”

  Alec smirked and shook his head.

  “Jaguar’s a world-class bad-guy, kidnapping Americans, producing hallucinogenic drugs, living in a luxury condo in Mexico City. He’s living the high life, baby!” Alec reviewed, snapping his fingers and waving his arms like one of Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd’s “Wild and Crazy Guys.” “How many sulfur mines do you think this guy hangs around in? Look at this shirt—it’s a nice shirt, beyond the stink. This is not a sulfur miner’s shirt. He didn’t go digging somewhere. He went here.”

  He pointed to the flat-screen monitor behind him.

  “The Darvaza crater,” Raquel read off the screen. Alec handed a map printed off from Google.

  “Some giant fire pit that never burns out and apparently smells like sulfur. It’s out in the middle of nowhere, but just off a major highway. Two villages nearby. Good place to disappear if you’re Gul and Sarvin Rashomon, Starvin’ Marvin, whatever her name is.”

  Raquel finished reading the website about the Darvaza crater, and looked at the map for a long time. She even picked up the shirt again and gave it another sniff, then winced.

  “Okay,” she said quietly. “Might as well check the latest satellite photos.”

  ***

  Two hours later, they gathered around the report from the National Reconnaissance Office.

  “NRO is the best,” Alec murmured.

  NRO had looked along the highway that ran alongside the Darvaza crater, fifty miles in each direction. They found a half dozen small campsites and structures that could represent a remote site for Atarsa’s base of operations. But by comparing them to archived images, they could determine that only one had been continually active for several months.

  “Twelve hours ago, one truck, at least two structures, could be tents, some stuff around them, maybe crates,” summarized Dee.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, Atarsa headquarters,” Alec announced confidently.

  “Not so fast,” Dee interrupted. “No satellite dishes. Could have them inside the tent at that time, or maybe they just don’t have them. No guards, no sign of any security at all.” She looked at Alec skeptically. “That could be anybody in there.”

  “If a drone isn’t an option, we need another way to get eyes onto that site,” Katrina said. “We monitored the compound in Abbottabad for months before the Osama bin Laden raid.”

  “We know what …” Alec paused to check her name on the paper. “Sarvar Rashin looks like from her video messages and the alias passports, and we’ve got an old passport photo of Gul from the time he flew through Amman,” Alec continued. “All we need to do is get a
person to that site to look inside those tents. Send us.”

  All of the women looked at Alec like he was crazy.

  Raquel shook her head. “Don’t get any ideas. I’m just letting you look at these images to indulge you. The decision to send anybody into the North Korea of Central Asia is way above my pay grade.”

  Katrina didn’t feel much relief. It made no sense to send Alec to Turkmenistan, but it made at least some sense to send her.

  Alec was undeterred and followed Raquel as she left the office suite. “You’ve heard of dress for the job you want, not the job you have, right? Why not make the decisions for the job you want?”

  CHAPTER 42

  CIA HEADQUARTERS

  LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  SUNDAY, MARCH 28

  Alec wasn’t invited to Raquel’s big meeting on the CIA’s seventh floor with Acting Director Mitchell. There she laid out everything she and the NSA team had learned from the Iranian consulate’s communications, Alec’s theory about the Darvaza crater, and the potential Atarsa hideouts along the desert road.

  Acting Director Mitchell decided CIA stations in Cyprus and Northern Cyprus would be instructed to hunt down any leads to Sarvar Rashin and Gholam Gul’s location. The US Treasury Department would trace every account ever associated with Rashin and Gul, and any known aliases. The FBI was instructed to put out a BOLO—be on the lookout.

  But then the point was raised about how to proceed if Gul and Rashin were still in either side of Cyprus’ tense border or in Turkmenistan, and whether it was best to try to cooperate with local intelligence agencies and counterterrorism authorities. Raquel gently reminded the table that the raid that killed Osama bin Laden hadn’t been cleared with Pakistani authorities.

  The deputy director of operations suggested a CIA team should be involved in any effort to capture or eliminate the pair, and the Department of Defense liaison in the back of the room cleared his throat and pointed out that this was precisely the sort of work SEAL Team Six and Delta Force trained to do.

  The director of the Clandestine Service noted that Turkmenistan was a particularly difficult place for covert operations, either Agency or military, because of the paranoid local counterintelligence services, who still demonstrated old Soviet habits. This led to a lot of debate about whether the US had a reliable ally in the region from which to base a special forces mission; Uzbekistan was ruled out; the rather oppressive regime had told US forces to leave about fifteen years earlier after the Bush administration objected to a brutal crackdown full of human rights abuses. After that, the country realigned itself closer to Russia and China.

  Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan was an option, but tricky; the Taliban and a fractured band of hostile warlords effectively ruled much the country outside of Kabul, and the remaining US forces in the country debated whether the best historical comparison to their situation was Saigon 1975, Tehran 1979, Somalia 1993, Benghazi 2012, or Mosul 2014.

  Azerbaijan was more promising, and still periodically expressed interest in NATO membership, but NATO was wary every time fighting flared up the country’s internal dispute with the breakaway region Nagorno-Karabakh.

  The Department of Defense still used Ashgabat Airport in Turkmenistan for a refueling stop for C-17 and C-5 cargo planes between NATO air bases and Bagram Air Base. The US government paid considerable “air navigation fees” and “air company infrastructure charges” in exchange for an extremely loose Turkmeni definition of “humanitarian aid,” which included Turkmen officials choosing not to notice several shipments of humanitarian small arms and humanitarian ammunition heading to Afghanistan to assist with humanitarian assaults on the Taliban. A small US Air Force team of about a half dozen to a dozen personnel managed the refueling operations.

  Acting Director Mitchell said he would take their findings to the White House and said he would ask the Pentagon to begin prepping plans for an attack on the site suspected to be the Atarsa camp.

  CHAPTER 43

  Katrina came away from the seventh-floor meeting with a sense of progress. She was almost relaxed for much of dinner, and afterward she threw herself into a form of stress relief she felt she had neglected too long.

  After she and Alec had climaxed, she rolled over. She thought she had heard her phone buzzing a few moments earlier, when the pair were too distracted by the moment’s passions. Two messages from Raquel, one after another, both indicating urgency.

  She picked up the phone and simultaneously clicked on the television in the bedroom.

  “Why are you doing that?” Alec groaned. He knew eventually Katrina would tune to a news channel, which would just remind them of all the troubles in the world.

  “Raquel called, I just want to know if—” she stopped.

  Angra Druj, a.k.a. Sarvar Rashin, was on the screen again, but the image was different. New.

  Katrina’s gasp turned into a sigh. “I’m going to kill that woman,” she murmured, staring at the screen.

  A few minutes earlier, the local CBS affiliate in Washington had begun the eleven o’clock news with an update on the day’s Metro station shutdowns and other police responses to suspicious packages. Then, as in New York weeks earlier, the signal intrusion began. The image was going out to broadcast customers, not cable, but within a few minutes the local affiliate program directors concluded the Atarsa message was news, and that all of their viewers should see it. They switched to the incoming Atarsa message.

  Rashin sat, still veiled and in shadow, with the same ornate painted symbols and bloody handprints behind her. But the camera had moved, she was a little closer to it now.

  “This … does not stop,” she said. “It will not stop. It will continue for the rest of your days. You have put your faith in false gods. You will be punished tenfold.” She picked up a knife and ran it slowly across her left hand.

  “Our knives will come for you all, including the children,” she said matter-of-factly.

  Then the video of her changed to a series of video snippets. Each one appeared to have been recorded on a phone and began at an unidentified person’s feet and the pavement. Then the camera rose, and the hand of the person holding the phone held up a small sheet of paper with the Atarsa symbols on it. As the camera softened the focused on the piece of paper, the sites of the recording came into focus. Some of the sites were instantly recognizable—first Ground Zero in New York City; the Sidwell Friends school in Washington, DC, then Independence Hall in Philadelphia. The final three were unclear until Twitter and Facebook exploded with people recognizing their hometowns—Church Street Marketplace in Burlington, Vermont, the city hall in Peoria, Illinois, and the Wren Building at the College of William and Mary in Virginia.

  The signal continued and then was interrupted. The confused anchors realized they were live again, and began excitedly trying to explain to viewers what they had just seen. Within a few moments, the national news bureaus interrupted the local coverage, dissecting the video, and warned viewers that Atarsa appeared to be telling Americans they were ready to strike both iconic landmarks and smaller cities.

  But unlike the New York messages, this time there was a second interruption, beginning about twenty minutes later. Washington’s ABC affiliate, broadcasting from a different tower, had its signal hijacked.

  Angra Druj returned again, but she simply stared at the camera and chanted softly for a good two minutes, with few words discernible other than the occasional “help you.”

  Finally, after one of the longest and most unnerving awkward silences in television history, Druj said, “It is coming, and there is nothing you can do to avert it. No one can help you.”

  Then the signal switched to a series of recorded images. The first was particularly unnerving video of a distant yellow school bus, pulled off to the side of a road in a grassy field, tilted on a hill and on fire. No people could be seen outside of it; it was unclear if anyone was inside. The smoke continued to billow from the bus for thirty seconds; the only sound was a roaring wind. Th
ere was no clear indication of where or when the video had been recorded.

  Then it was a rapidly cut sequence of video segments of terrifying airplane crashes from Taiwan, a 747 crashing in Afghanistan, a smaller plane from Iceland, and rapidly edited computer-generated footage reenacting a mid-air collision over Staten Island in 1960. Until this was later identified and clarified by the armchair experts on Twitter and the in-studio terrorism analysts, for a few moments people wondered if Atarsa had broadcast several deliberately crashed planes in sequence.

  “Come follow us,” Angra Druj whispered.

  The video concluded with a flashing sequence of rapidly blinking red and blue lights that many viewers said caused immediate headaches, dizziness, and nausea. A subsequent forensic investigation indicated that this was similar to the strobe-like effect in a 1997 Pokémon cartoon that had sent nearly seven hundred children to the hospital with seizure-like symptoms.

  ***

  Ward called Alec in between the two videos, and began the call: “Did you see that last one? The hand with the Atarsa symbol? It was right in front of the Wren building, right there in Williamsburg!”

  Ward swore an elaborate blue streak before Alec could interrupt.

  “All right, buddy, all right, calm down,” Alec said. He grabbed underwear. What a mess, literally caught with his pants down. He had to get Ward thinking clearly again. A terror video filmed in your nearest town was ominous but not an imminent threat. “You’ve trained Marie and the kids on how to use a gun. They know how to protect themselves. You and they don’t live that close to the campus or the historic district.”

  Ward was calmer, but still angry.

  “It feels like it’s right at my damn door.”

  “That’s exactly what they want you to feel,” Alec said. “But they’re not. We’re the ones who are hunting them. They’re showing this to freak people out, and they’re doing this because they can feel us getting closer. We’ve already put a bunch of ’em in the ground. You’re the apex predator.”