But we didn’t do it in the single day I’d scheduled. Remember how I just knew that Ashley would be home? Well, she wasn’t at home. It took me two hours to make contact. And then she informed me—very brusquely, now that I come to think of it—that it would be another five hours minimum before she could make the drive south, give Butch and Pick a cell phone that I could dial, and tell them what I needed ’em to do.
“You should not have gone off without telling me,” she said, her voice deliberate, cold, and angry.
“What I’m doing is ‘need to know,’ ” I told her.
“Screw ‘need to know.’ I have been trying to help you all along, and you left me in the dark. That was stupid, Dick. It was shortsighted.”
“Shortsighted?”
“The situation here has changed dramatically.”
“How so?”
“I’m not going to talk about it now. I’ll explain when you’re back up north.”
It struck me she was being coy. I had a wounded man to look after, I hurt like hell, and I wasn’t in the mood for coy.
“Tough shit,” she said, very uncharacteristically. “Deal with it.” And then the phone went dead.
And so, I dealt with it in the only way I know how: one fucking step forward at a time. We made our way slowly down toward the sea, moving carefully because it was daylight, picking our way meter by nasty meter. And then, we hunkered just west of the coastal road until it was dark, and the traffic let up, and we crossed carefully, obscuring our tracks, into the sandy, thorn scrub-and-sea-grass-covered dunes.
At 2140, I stood atop the highest dune I could find, my night vision on, my left arm throbbing like hell, and flashed Infrared out to sea. Three dots, four dots, one dot and a dash said it all, so far as I was concerned.
And of course I got no response. Yes, it was the perfect end to a perfect mission. And yes, I am employing the literary device known as irony here.
Sixty-eight seconds later (I was definitely counting, dammit), the signal was finally returned, in reverse. I flashed the light pattern once a minute for the next eighteen minutes until I could make the RIBs out as they cut through the chop, their faint wakes heading straight toward my IR. We loaded Rodent first. The rest of us clambered over the gunwales and hunkered down in the heat. The extraction took two hours, plus another four and a half in those fucking wheezing diesels chugging up the coast road to Baku. I rode in the back of the lead truck, splitting my attention between the satchel of intel we’d taken, and checking on Rodent.
The tiny SEAL looked tallowy, and he was running a fever. He’d lost a lot of blood—he was probably in the first stages of exsanguinary shock. But he was holding on—barely. Like all my men, he had so much sheer WILL and DETERMINATION that he would fight right to the end, no matter how badly he’d been wounded.
I checked to see the IV was dripping properly, mopped his sweaty forehead with a damp cloth, and lay my hand along his carotid artery to feel the pulse in his neck. It was weak. But it was regular. The way I looked at it, since Rodent hadn’t died yet, there was no way I was gonna allow him to croak on me now.
Part Three
THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY
16
THE ONLY WAY TO DESCRIBE THE HOTEL LOBBY AS I came through the doors was that it looked like the opening scene from a big Broadway musical. That was because the whole fucking cast was milling around waiting, looking as if they were about to break into the Big Opening Number. Ashley was there, in BDUs. So was Araz, and a squad of his shooters, all combat ready in camouflage BDUs and carrying automatic weapons.
And so was Oleg Lapinov, standing next to the reception desk, wearing a wide-lapeled, double-breasted pinstriped suit, a plaid shirt, and a loud tie with a knot bigger than Half Pint’s fist that made him look like Mr. Clean® playing Good Ol’ Reliable Nathan (Nathan-Nathan-Nathan) Detroitski in the Moscow summer stock version of Guyskis and Dollskis.
Except he wasn’t good ol’ reliable anything. He was the same no-load shit-for-brains pus-nutted pencil-dicked scumbag who’d been involved in killing the wife of my friend. That made him my enemy.
And that meant it was time for him to die. I pushed past Ashley and Araz, scattering bellmen, spooks, tourists, and Turkish Mafiosi as I plowed across the marble at flank speed. I went up to the desk, took the big Russkie’s lapels in my hands, and pulled him close to me. “You fucking pussy-ass cockbreath opushchiny,” I whisper-growled by way of greeting, calling him a prison whore. Then I kneed him in the balls.
But the sonofabitch was just as fast as I. He deflected my leg, used my own momentum against me, turned my rib cage toward him, then swiveled and used the point of his elbow to smack me with a quick and nasty chop to the solar plexus as he bounced me off the counter edge.
The blow took the breath out of me, but my rage carried me forward and made me forget any pain I might have had from the previous days. I smacked his ears, grabbed the rolls of fat on the back of his neck, then stunned him with a head butt.
His eyes rolled back for an instant, but then he was on me again like stink on shit. We struggled, each of us trying to gain the advantage as the lobby emptied. Then he wrapped me up in a bear hug and used his weight to drop us both onto the marble floor. We fell over like a couple of trees, caroming off the furniture.
Fuck—he kicked the outside of my sore knee, and the pain took my breath away. But then I saw Mikki Ben Gal’s face and I fought back. I brought my fist down on his clavicle. He grunted and loosened his grip on me. That gave me an opening. I slapped his head toward the floor, trying to smack his big bald skull against the marble. But he was too fucking fast, and he twisted away from me, his hands moving whap-whap-whap, making me keep my distance.
I tackled him, my fists pounding paradiddles on his face and torso. I tried to get my legs around him, but he rolled away and escaped again, planting the sole of his shoe in my face as he did so. I grabbed the foot and twisted—and was rewarded with an angry bellow and an explosion of nasty Russkie. I pulled myself up his churning legs and hit him in the balls hard enough to make his eyes cross.
He might have been hurt, but he wasn’t stopping. Shit—this guy had to be seventy years old, but he was still moving like a fucking thirty-year-old Spetsnaz Alpha Group shooter.
Well, you know me. I’m an EEO kind of Rogue. Which means I’ll kill a seventy-year-old just the same way I’d kill a thirty-year-old: by reaching down his fucking throat, tearing his fucking heart out, and fuckin’ eating it raw.
I think he saw what I was thinking, because he backpedaled and tried to put some distance between us. I was having none of it, however, and I stayed close, elbowing and clawing and biting and gouging, trading blow for fucking blow until I knew I had the motherfucker on the run, and I could batter his fucking Ivan shit-for-brains out against the marble floor.
Which was when Boomerang, Gator, Hammer, Mustang, Nod, Digger, Nigel, Butch, and Timex gang-tackled the two of us and pried me off the asshole, just as I was beginning to make some progress disassembling his face.
Boomerang sat on my chest. “Chill, Boss Dude.”
“Fuck you.” I tried to wrestle out from under him. Believe me, I was white-hot. I wanted no part of chilling.
Ashley. It was fucking Ashley who’d ordered Boomerang to break things up. I gave her a dirty look—and when I got my hands on her I’d do worse.
She stared down at me with derision. “I told you the situation had changed,” she said. Then she went over to Oleg Lapinov and started to help the KGB one-star off the deck.
Oleg Lapinov brushed her hand away and waved her off with a throaty growl. He shook off the SEALs holding him down, pulled himself to his feet, and began to brush the lobby dust out of his clothes. He spat blood onto the marble floor and looked over at me. “Not bad for an old man, eh?” he said in decent enough English.
I was in no mood for cuteski fucking banter with this Ivan asshole. “Yob tvoy mat—Fuck you.”
He looked down at me, laughed contemptu
ously, and answered with a torrent of AK-47 full auto Russian.
Of which, of course, I understood not a word. “Huh?”
The big Ivan looked down at me. Then he gestured to Boomerang in a way that told me he knew how to command. Boomerang rolled off me, and Lapinov’s big, heavy hand took my wrist and pulled me to my feet. “So, Captain, you only learn the good words from the mother of all tongues, is that it?”
I guess he was asking a rhetorical question, because he didn’t give me a chance to respond. Instead, he looked me squarely in the eyes, and said, “We must talk. It is important for the interests of both our nations that we do so.”
“The interests of both our nations?” What was this highfalutin’ shit all about. Now, as you know, I trust Russkies about as far as I can toss the Empire State Building. But there was something about the way that Lapinov was talking—plus the fact that neither Boomerang nor Rotten Randy was protesting—that gave me pause.
“I’m listening,” I told him, warily.
“Not here. In private.”
That made sense—unless he wanted to get me outside so some Alpha Team shooter could snipe me. But I had to deal with a couple of more important issues before I spent a second of my time talking to some fucking Russkie.
I waved Ashley over, and jerked my thumb at Rodent’s litter. “We have to get him taken care of ASAP. He took a bullet through his lung—he’s got to be evac’d to Rhine Main, stat.”
Ashley didn’t need to hear any more. She flipped open her cell phone and got on the case. Then I dealt with my men. I put Boomerang in charge. He knew what had to happen without being told.
With my men taken care of, I could confront new business—i.e., Oleg Lapinov. I looked over at Araz. “Can you and your guys make a little breathing room for Oleg and me outside?”
The big Azeri colonel nodded. “Can do, Captain Dickie.” He wheeled, and barked a series of orders. His shooters surrounded Oleg and me, putting us in a rough approximation of what the Secret Service calls The Diamond. As Oleg and I moved toward the hotel doors, the Azeris moved with us, keeping us inside a protective bubble.
I looked back at Araz. “They’re learning,” I said.
He gave me an offhanded salute cum wave. “Thank you, Captain Dickie.”
We started down the long, curved driveway, Araz’s squad giving us more and more room as we moved farther from the hotel. Across the four lanes of traffic, opposite the hotel entrance, was a small park. I gestured toward it.
Lapinov scowled and shook his head once up, once down, in considered assent. “That will be good,” he said.
We crossed the avenue and made our way into the little park. Lapinov swept the area with practiced eyes, then gestured toward a bench that faced away from the hotel and the traffic. “We can sit there.”
We strolled over. Araz silent-signaled his people, who set up their perimeter six yards from us. I looked around. Our backs were to the hotel. Across the park was a row of apartment flats. The sun reflected off the windows.
Lapinov settled himself on the bench and beckoned for me to join him. From the pocket of his jacket he extracted a newspaper. He unfolded it carefully, then handed me one edge of the page while he held the other.
“Now we have a privacy curtain,” he explained, “just in case anybody is watching from the flats on the far side of the park and reading our lips.”
Okay, so he understood security procedures. BFD.65 I didn’t have the time, or the patience, for nicey-nicey. I was in the revenge mode, and he hadn’t said or done anything to make me change my mind.
He turned his face slightly toward me. “I had nothing to do with the murder of the Israeli woman.”
“Who did?”
“It was Ali Sherafi’s operation,” he said matter-of-factly. “Ali Sherafi and the IRGC66 control the Fist of Allah.”
This szeb was just stating the obvious. “With help from assholes like you, Oleg. The fucking camp is set up like a goddam Alpha Team base, and there was a fucking Ivan shooter on the oil rig.”
“He was not one of mine,” Lapinov insisted. “And my people have never worked with Sherafi.” He rustled the newspaper. “Just like in your country, there are political factions in Russia that operate at cross purposes with the government.”
“So?”
“The Iranians turned to Sarkesian for help,” he said matter-of-factly. “And certain elements of my government encouraged him to help them, because they believed Sarkesian works for them, and they could control him. Or at least that’s what they wanted to believe.”
Have I mentioned that I wasn’t in the mood for coy? “What’s this we-they shit, Oleg?”
He looked straight ahead into the newspaper and scowled, then continued in a monotone. “I do not like you, Captain,” he said. “When we had the Cold War, I would have liked to—how is it said?—go up against you. I would have killed you, too. And it would have given me great pleasure to kill you.” He paused. “But I am a soldier. And while I may disagree with what my government does, I cannot work against it the way some people do.”
At least in that aspect of life, I understood where he was coming from, and told him so. Warriors cannot operate outside society. When they do, they become terrorists, or worse. The Warrior must operate from within a defined chain of command. He may not like it, and he may occasionally skirt it—but in the end, he must submit to it.
“Sarkesian works for the Iranians and he has worked in the past for us. But mainly, we have recently discovered much to our great regret, he works for himself and himself only. Currently, he is playing my country against your country, by employing both Iranian terrorists and renegade Russians, and trying to shift the blame for what they do to my government.” A cold-eyed expression came over the Ivan’s red face. “And he almost succeeded, until he was pushed over the brink, and panicked, and ordered Ali Sherafi to assassinate the Israeli and killed his wife in the attempt.”
“Oh?”
“His conversation was intercepted by Moscow, and the information was passed on to me.” He paused. “It was also shared with your people.”
“My people?”
“Your intelligence apparatus.”
That piece of information rocked me. I mean, if we knew how dirty Sarkesian was, then why the F-word wasn’t I informed, since General Crocker and SECDEF dropped me into this confusing pile of merde in the first place. “By whom?”
“That is, as you say in English, above my pay grade.” Lapinov’s tone told me he was ending that particular part of the discussion. Then he continued. “Very recently, Sarkesian also managed to obtain a set of very sensitive diplomatic documents from our foreign ministry,” the Russian said, his face coloring in what appeared to be discomfort, “and I was tasked with retrieving them.”
“So?” I knew exactly which set of diplomatic documents he was talking about. They were, of course, the top secret docs I’d purloined from Steve Sarkesian’s briefcase at the Sirzhik Foundation. But I wasn’t about to make Oleg’s job any easier—or offer to give ’em back.
He looked at me in a way that told me he realized exactly what I was doing. “I am not in the mood for childish games,” Oleg Lapinov said, a nasty edge creeping into his voice.
“Then fuck you very much, asshole.” I brushed the newspaper out of his big hands and stood up. “See you around the playground, Oleg.” Frankly, I didn’t need this creep. I had other things to do. Like hit the Armenian nationalists, who were being supported by the Russkies. Russkies just like Oleg. In fact, it occurred to me right then that maybe I should kill him right now and save myself the trouble of doing it later.
He stood up, the veins in his big thick neck pulsing. He was as big as me, even a little bigger—and even with the suit and tie, I could see that this seventy-year-old worked out. “I am not asking for your help getting the documents back,” he said, reaching down to pluck the newspaper without taking his eyes off me. “That is not the point of this exercise.” There was blood on his teet
h when he spoke. It gave him a sinister yet clownish look.
Then what was the point, I asked?
“My situation was compounded when you broke into Stephan Sarkesian’s office.” He deflected my question so matter-of-factly I almost didn’t see what he was doing.
Then I realized what he’d said—and that he hadn’t answered my question. But, so what if he knew. BFD. I didn’t see what I’d done as a problem, and I said so.
Lapinov gazed at me the way drill instructors regard stinking trainees. “Your taking the documents pushed Sarkesian to act,” he said slowly. “And we were not prepared for him to act. Not yet.”
“What’s this we shit, Oleg?”
“My government, and your government,” Lapinov said. “We. Our governments. Acting in concert.”
Now I have to admit, friends, that Oleg’s second little info-shard also smacked me like the proverbial ton of brickskis. Except . . . now I realized what Major Ashley had been hinting at over the cell phone. And more to the point, why Chairman Crocker had groaned so long and loud when I’d told him what I’d done in Steve Sarkesian’s office, and then insisted on learning every minute detail of my actions.
Are you confused, gentle reader? If so, let me explain.
What I’d done was insert moi right in the middle of a classic bait-the-trap scheme, jointly run by us, and, so it would now appear, the Russkies. And the target of this subtle joint exercise was . . . the Iranians. No wonder Jim Wink had been able to come up with so much nasty info about Steve Sarkesian so fast. He’d had the information right at his North Philadelphia fingertips. Because despite his bitching and moaning about operating blindfolded, and no assets, and all the other b.s. he’d handed me back in Washington, Christians In Action was obviously running an operation.
Not only were they running an op, they were running it jointly with their former adversaries, the Russkies. And left sitting out in the cold (along with me) about this little wrinkle to the plotski had been . . . our own fucking ambassador. Well, that made sense, too. If Madame Ambassador Madison was boffing Steve Sarkesian, there was no reason to bring her into the loop and risk a pillow-talk leak.
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