“What about her security detail?” I asked.
She’d used Sarkesian’s people, Ashley reported. The RSO hadn’t liked that, but he didn’t get a vote. It was the ambassador’s call—and she’d done what she pleased.
The DCM, a career FSO69 was running things while she was gone. He knew from past experience she didn’t like to be bothered while she took time away from the office for her social activities. So we had a small envelope of time with which to play.
Once I factored Ashley’s sit-rep into the mix, it was off to work for Dickie. As usual, the situation was not good, and the clock was ticking. But before I started on Ambassador Madison’s rescue, I had to deal with two other elements. The first was Rodent. Ashley took care of him: he was in the air, on his way to Rhine Main. The squidge would live. Second matter was the Fist of Allah targets we’d discovered in Iran. I turned all those materials over to Ashley, too, and told her to get DIA on it—real fast.
Then I began to deal with the problem at hand. Ambassador Madison had told the staff she’d be gone for three to four days. That had been roughly a day and a half ago. So my window of opportunity was somewhere in the realm of thirty-six hours. After that, I knew Steve Sarkesian would either kill her on the spot, or send her back to Baku with a lethal charge of Semtex explosive (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) hidden in her chopper.
Sarkesian had chosen his location well. Naryndzlar was accessible by a single, two-lane gravel road that wound up through the narrow mountain passes. The village itself contained no more than three, maybe four dozen homes, a tavern, and a small guest house. From the end of the main street, an old-fashioned funicular railway climbed one kilometer up the steep mountainside, to the hotel above.
Here’s some background. During the heyday of the Soviet Union, Naryndzlar had been a retreat for top Soviet officials and heroes. Yuri Gagarin, the cosmonaut, had been given a two-week vacation at Naryndzlar as a reward for his record-breaking trip into space. Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov—they’d all stayed there, too. So had Oleg, who’d been a regular guest throughout the 1970s and 1980s. These days, according to the major general, the place had become a vacation retreat for Russia’s top vory—the organized crime bosses—and the financial oligarchs who were the real leaders of the Russian Federation. “It is run by the chornye,”70 he said. “The best of everything money can buy.” He laughed bitterly. “And believe me, they have the money to buy the best of everything and everybody.”
“When’s the last time you were there?”
“Two months ago. I stayed a week,” he growled. “I have been there eight, nine times in the last year and a half. It is a secure place for meetings with the lovrushniki. I know them all, too. The managers, and the assistants; the people in the dining room and the bar. Even the women. I know what clan they come from; what crime family they belong to. Who their vory are. How they think and what they do and how they do it. I know it all—everything.” He caught me staring strangely at him. “It is my mission to get to know these people. I do not care what anyone thinks.”
I had to hand it to him. His cover, if that’s what it really was, was fucking effective, and I told him so. He’d managed to convince me—and I am the original skeptic.
“Spasiba,” Lapinov said, his head bobbing once in my direction, then continuing as if he was speaking to himself. “On my last visit I was the guest of a Georgian avtoritet named Japridze.”
“Avtoritet?”
Lapinov had to think before he could translate. “It is like a godfather, a vor. But in the economic area, not so much the criminal activities like drugs and women. The avtoritet controls banks and business.”
I had Oleg make me sketches of the village, the funicular, and the hotel grounds as best he could remember them. There was no time to ask for satellite reconnaissance. More to the point, I didn’t want to alert anyone back in Washington, even my own support network, about the specifics of what was about to happen.
Washington, after all, is like a huge machine. Once it has been started, the inertia alone makes it almost impossible to change course as quickly as necessary for an unconventional operation. Israel has kept its decision-making apparatus small. So it was able to launch an op like the Entebbe rescue without having it move through innumerable layers of military middle management. At USSOCOM,71 there are so many strata to penetrate that it is nigh on impossible to run a small, surgical operation without alerting twenty-five layers of governmental managers and apparatchiks, and word leaking out to the press—or worse, the enemy. Oh, it can be done. But it’s not easy. And it is especially not easy if the request for such an op is coming from that SpecWar officer so beloved by the bureaucracy, the old Rogue Warrior® himself.
So I knew all too well that if Washington discovered Ambassador Madison had been kidnapped, it would react as Washington always reacts. The Pentagon would do what the Pentagon does. State would do what State does. And any rescue mission would turn into a complete goatfuck.
No—I realized that the only way to handle these things was to KISS them off, and run ’em UNODIR. And keep it simple stupid is precisely what I planned to do.
The hotel itself had fifty or so rooms and eight suites, spread over two floors. The corridors fanned out along the natural ridge of a small plateau in a gentle crescent from the old monastery building, which served as the reception area and lobby, and housed the main dining room and bar area. On one side of the crescent—the inner side—the rooms looked down into the valley below. On the other, said Lapinov, the view was spectacular: you looked northeast, across a series of craggy mountain peaks that towered as high as three thousand meters.
From the lobby area, an old circular stone staircase wound down to the monastery basement, which Oleg said had been totally soundproofed, then converted into a disco. “We put out the story that Andropov liked Western music when he became premier,” Oleg said derisively. “Andropov hated Western music. Andropov hated the West as much as Stalin.” The big general turned toward me. “Andropov made them soundproof the basement so he couldn’t hear even a hint of the Western music they played down there.” Oleg’s expression told me he approved thoroughly.
There were three other major structures on the plateau, which Oleg estimated was perhaps fifteen, maybe twenty acres in all. The first was a large, three-story dormitorylike affair, built at the very edge of the plateau on the southeast side so as not to disturb the view, which had housed the staff and security element during Soviet days. A second two-story structure contained the communications equipment and had more dorm space for a reinforced security force when Kremlin leaders were in residence. Finally, there was a good-size aircraft hangar, built to house the choppers that had ferried the VIPs from the big airports at the Armenian capital, Yerevan, 175 kliks to the west, the Republic of Georgia’s capital city, Tbilisi, 240 kliks northwest, or the small, single-runway airfields at Stepanakert or Agdam. “Brezhnev wanted to build a runway,” Oleg said. “But they convinced him it would spoil the view.”
“What’s the current security like?” I asked.
“Lots of byki,” Oleg said, using the Ivan slang for hoods. “Maybe fifty, sixty guys. Plus the personal bodyguards of the guests.” He thought about it a little longer. “And the staff, of course,” he said. “Most of them are armed, too.”
I had fifteen shooters. The odds were not great. But let me tell you the truth about situations like this one. Odds, my friends, are one thing. Winning is another. In point of fact, all special operations come down to a small, well-motivated force overcoming vastly superior odds to win through speed, surprise, and violence of action. That is true whether we are talking about a hostage rescue, an oil rig takedown, or a Viet Cong tax collector snatch.
The problem here was to insert all of my shooters as quickly as possible, overwhelm the byki and any of Sarkesian’s security people with a huge volume of deadly, suppressive fire, pluck Madam Ambassador Madison’s svelte behind from Steve Sarkesian’s clutches, and then haul ou
rselves out as quickly as possible.
Easy to do—if you have an EC-130 gunship at your disposal. And a fleet of Pave Low Special Operations choppers. And all the goodies needed for a fast-rope insertion. And . . . well, you get the idea. I had no air support. I could not lay my hands on a single chopper. So, what time was it? It was Doom on Dickie Time, because I was certainly fuckee-fuckeed by circumstances.
But being a SpecWarrior means that you always—yes, always—overcome your circumstances. Being a SpecWarrior means that you control your environment—not the other way around. Being a SpecWarrior means that you always—yes always—dominate the situation, no matter what the odds may be.
Besides, it’s not as if this kind of snatch op hadn’t been done before, and done textbook successfully.
When was that, you ask?
In mid-September of 1943, before most of you were probably born, is when.
That was when a noxious, nasty Nazi major named Otto Skorzeny led a unit of Jagdverbanden—hotsy-totsy-fucking Nazi commandos—into the Campo Imperatore Hotel, which was built on a mountainside about 120 miles northeast of Rome, and rescued Benito Mussolini, the F3 (which stands for fat fascist fuck) known as Il Duce, from a bunch of anti-Fascist Italians. Skorzeny used a flight of gliders, which he crash-landed on the small plateau where the hotel was located. In the initial four minutes of the assault, Skorzeny and eight other commandos surprised a force of more than 250 Italian carabinieri and soldiers. Within fifteen minutes, the Italians had been overrun, and surrendered. Skorzeny’s men took control of the hotel, commandeered the funicular, surprising the Italians at the base of the mountain by hitting ’em from behind, and then linked up with a heavily armed Kraut konvoy sent from Rome, and ecco: Mussolini the F3 was rescued.
Now, I didn’t have gliders, and I certainly wasn’t going to exfil by convoy. No—the ambassador had her Dauphin-2 at Naryndzlar, and I knew that we could squeeze twenty-plus people in the aircraft, if we dispensed with such niceties as the seats and the VIP interior. But, just like Skorzeny, I could use surprise and speed to overcome superior odds, in order to achieve RS—relative superiority, and WIN. I could also use two major elements of Skorzeny’s plan.
• The German had taken a carabinieri general with him because he knew that the sight of the Italian would confuse the carabinieri guards about the true intent of the mission. I would have Oleg Lapinov with me. Oleg knew the lovrushniki who were in charge of Naryndzlar’s security. They would recognize him—and they would hesitate before shooting.
• Skorzeny’s main force arrived later than his initial assault team. That was good because the small number of men in the initial wave confused the Italians and allowed Skorzeny to overcome the POV—the point of vulnerability—quickly.
So, I would need two aircraft to make my assault: a small chopper that usually held no more than four people. And a big aircraft to launch my main assault force. I’d cram six of us into the chopper, and the rest would HAHO from the aircraft and fly in, hitting from the hotel’s blind side a few minutes after I’d put the chopper down. They would disable the funicular, thus preventing any reinforcements from coming up the mountain before we achieved our Relative Superiority, and then we would overwhelm the guards, snatch the ambassador, and all of us would fly out on her chopper.
The potential goatfuck factor was high. As Oleg put it so genteelly, delicately, and accurately in Russkie SpecOps slang, “Ya ve pidze, Captain—we are about to be stuck in a very deep vagina.”
He was right, too. Consider just a few of the nasty DV Factors I had to think about.
DVF One: The winds at Naryndzlar were unpredictable. They shifted quickly, which could blow my secondary force off course. Shit—they could be blown onto the next ridge, and then I’d be left with a six-man assault force, all of us holding little but our limp szebs in our hairy Froggish palms.
DVF Two: The altitude itself made jumping a problem. We had no oxygen supplies with us and none were available. That meant jumping at twenty thousand feet or less—and even that altitude was pushing the edge of the envelope given the operational situation.
DVF Three: a HAHO approach can be hazardous to the health if you are spotted coming in, because you are literally hanging out there alone. You cannot shoot effectively and steer a parachute at the same time, and so a single man on the ground with a submachine gun can wreak havoc on an incoming assault team. There were scores of bad guys with various kinds of automatic weapons at Naryndzlar.
DVF Four: we would have to jump during daylight hours, because the drop zone was U2 (unlighted and unfamiliar), and the Skorzeny ruse called for Oleg to make a Grand Entrance, something that could not be done at night.
DVF Five: We had no idea where within the huge Naryndzlar complex we would find Ambassador Madison. She could be in any of the fifty rooms. If we didn’t get to her within six minutes of our wheels down on the hotel grounds, the denouement of this book would come a shitload sooner, and it wouldn’t be a happy ending either.
But despite the depth of this particular tactical vagina, what I was planning was exactly the kind of keep it simple, stupid operation that defies the odds and succeeds. Why? Because in addition to being KISS, it was also BAD (Brilliant, Audacious, and Direct). Given those Roguish qualities, WE WOULD NOT FAIL.
18
THE TOUGHEST ELEMENT OF MY BIG, BAD PLAN WOULD be getting our hands on two aircraft and a bunch of workable chutes. That responsibility fell to Oleg and Araz, who knew the place and the people a shitload better than yours truly. Oleg said he’d be able to cumshaw an old Aérospatiale LAMA. The LAMA sits three plus a pilot. It’s not much of a chopper, but it’s better than nothing.
As for a jump craft, well, Araz said he had an idea or two, but that every one of his ideas would cost money.
That didn’t bother me. I understand that nothing comes for free in this part of the world. Besides, I had the proverbial suitcase full of cash left over from my last op, and since none of it was taxpayer money, I didn’t give a shit how Araz spent it, except that he’d better come back with a plane. I got a Rogue-size wad of hundreds out of the box, counted out fifty, and gave them to Araz. “Will that help?”
He looked at the bills. “I thought you wanted an aircraft, Captain Dickie.”
“I do. Isn’t that enough?”
Araz raised his hands in mock surrender. “Enough? Enough? There is enough here to buy a whole air force,” he said earnestly.
I do so love the third and fourth world, where the almighty dollar still goes a long, long way. “Then you should be able to . . . expedite a decent plane, right?”
He grinned at my vocabulary, and saluted. “Absolut.”
Cash-enhanced, Araz and Oleg went off in one of Araz’s big trucks to scour the landscape. Me, I took the Russkie’s sketches and worked ’em over with the help of Randy, Boomerang, and Ashley.
Ashley? Yeah, Ashley. She was working as hard as anybody I’d ever seen. While I’d been working the Marybeth Madison problem, she’d gone to the mat with Defense Imaging Agency headquarters back at Bolling Air Force Base just outside Washington, and talked ’em into putting those supercomputers to work for a change, instead of just playing solitaire and minesweeper games.
First, she had the computer dweebs input all the stake diagrams I’d lifted from the FA camp in Iran into the Defense Imaging Agency’s computers. Then she had them try to match the outlines with the millions of surveillance photographs from satellites, U-2 over-flights, and HUMINT target assessment photos available online. Within six hours, she’d wrung a thick sheaf of computer-enhanced, correctly sized photographs out of the intel squirrels at the Agency, which is buried inconspicuously amongst the warehouses, barracks, and office buildings at Bolling Air Force Base. The squirrels had been able to use their computer magic to overlay the stake patterns I’d brought out of Iran atop actual photographic images of buildings and installations. Once they sent us the results, it was like, eureka. We were now able to see just where Steve Sarkesia
n’s Fist of Allah tango allies were planning to strike.
And knowing what he planned to hit gave me the outline of Sarkesian’s overall scheme. Let’s see what you think. The American embassy in Baku was at the top of his list. Then came U.S. embassies in Qatar, Abu Dhabi, and London. His other targets included the corporate headquarters of Exxon, BP, and Shell, two Paris-based banks, and the Turkish Foreign Ministry. He also planned to hit the ARAMCO oil pumping station at AlHufüf, Saudi Arabia.
Can you connect the dots? I certainly could—and the key word here was going to be the late and unlamented Roscoe Grogan’s favorite squeaky-wheel-gets-the-grease word, expedite.
Steve Sarkesian’s diplomatic targets were also prime objectives of half a dozen state-supported transnational terrorist groups. He could hit ’em. But guess who’d be blamed: Islamic Jihad, or Hezb’allah, or one of Khaled Bin Sultan’s many fundamentalist allies, upset with the United States for sending Khaled on that one-way magic carpet ride to Allah’s side, courtesy of moi. But Steve was hitting our embassies because he wanted to send a not-so-subtle message back to Washington, i.e., that he was just as powerful as the United States, and he could hit us anytime and anyplace he wanted. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that he’d made contact at each of those diplomatic locations recently to offer his foundation’s services as a geopolitical “expediter.”
The corporate targets were being hit because they’d resisted Steve Sarkesian’s entreaties to use the Sirzhik Foundation to help them “expedite” matters in their oil-exploration programs in this part of the world. How did I know that? Because I’d heard it from Jim Wink (and so had you) when he’d briefed me about Steve Sarkesian and the Sirzhik Foundation. The French banks? They’d recently “bounced” Sarkesian’s checks by limiting his line of credit, and he wanted to get even.
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