“You going to tell me what this is all about, aside from people-smuggling and prostitution?” I asked as we set off along the ridgeline.
“Not yet—first I want you to see what’s going on here with your own eyes before you judge The Establishment.”
“Okay,” I agreed cheerfully, “The Establishment. That’s a good place to start.”
“No. First you must see.”
Radakov took the lead of our little column, scouting with the NVGs. We walked for maybe another hour, down into the next valley, where there was a village pretty similar to the one we’d visited earlier, except for one reasonably crucial detail: It was swarming with Russians. Russians, Chechens, high explosives, and AP rounds. I’m no clairvoyant but I could see that noise, death, and trouble were just around the corner. Confirming as much, Radakov handed me a ski mask.
We took the long route, skirting the village, avoiding contact with Radakov’s enemy. Eventually, we arrived at a farmhouse, outside of which were a couple of Russian vehicles—LAVs. It was a moonless night, ideal for NVGs. Two Russian soldiers stood outside, on sentry duty. They were smoking. Two of Radakov’s men snuck up behind them and silently slit their throats, holding their hands over the wounds to muffle the sound of the sucking, bubbling noise. Another Russian sitting in one of the vehicles met the same fate. A short while later, two Russians walking out of the farmhouse were clubbed to death soundlessly with fence posts conveniently lying about. Radakov walked into the small building and I heard two muffled shots. He exited seconds later and motioned for me to join him. When I hesitated, the weasel tapped me on the shoulder with his rifle, indicating that I should get a hustle on.
The stench of vomit and feces reached me before I stepped inside. But nothing could have forewarned me of the scene I was confronted with. Two Russian soldiers were sprawled against a wall, each with a gunshot wound to the eye, their brains sliding down the rough walls. One of Radakov’s men hawked up some mucus from the back of his throat and spat it on the nearest of the dead Russians.
The reason for the Russian presence in this farmhouse, and now ours, was a man in his early twenties duct-taped into a chair, sitting unconscious in his own filth. His face was battered raw, and fresh purple bruises and welts stood out on his body. But that was not the worst of it, not by a long shot. His mouth was smeared with blood, which I assumed was the result of the numerous beatings he’d sustained. Then I realized it was caused by something else. Radakov lifted the man’s right hand, revealing the bloody stumps of his index and middle fingers. Mounted on a small table nearby was a meat grinder of the type used to turn bovine muscle and bone into sausage. The realization of what had been happening here hit me: They had ground off the man’s fingers and forced them into his own mouth. Suddenly I found myself kneeling on the floor, the contents of my stomach burning the back of my throat as they passed through on their way out. One of Radakov’s men was beside me on the floor doing the same.
The weasel, who by now I assumed was the band’s medic, was checking over the man strapped to the chair. When my stomach finally stopped convulsing, I stood. One of the Chechens pulled the jacket off a Russian while another untied the dead victim. Then they wrapped him in the jacket and the two of them carried the corpse out of the farmhouse.
A night breeze was creeping down off the hills, bringing with it a chill mixed with damp moss and decay, the smell of the grave. A shiver like scuttling beetles ran under my skin. Radakov said something quietly. The group separated. The weasel and one other man made their way to the Russian vehicles. The rest of us, including the body wrapped in the jacket, went off in the other direction. Soon after, a deafening explosion split the air. I looked back. The LAVs were burning brightly, lighting up the night sky.
“We don’t have much time. There is only one way in,” Radakov explained as he motioned at the road. We double-timed across the steepening fields and out of the immediate vicinity. When he muttered something to the men carrying the body, we stopped. The bigger of the two Chechens hoisted the corpse over his shoulder and then continued toward the hills. Radakov and the rest—me included—doubled back and took a course that paralleled the road, and scouted for cover. Radakov found it behind a weed-choked mound of earth overlooking the road, two hundred yards back from it. He made a hand signal. We dropped behind the mound and waited.
I heard the vehicles before I saw them. They were moving slowly along the road. There was a foot patrol reconnoitering the way ahead. The approaching Russians were cautious. Experience probably gave them a fair idea of what they were dealing with. I counted four vehicles: three LAVs and some kind of truck. It looked like the entire Russian presence in the village had come to investigate.
A prodigious explosion suddenly engulfed the lead vehicle; the mighty percussion wave filled with shrapnel hacked into the foot patrol. We ducked behind the earth as the pressure wave rolled over us. I heard the nearby crash and thump of a large piece of metal hitting the upper branches of a tree and then falling to the ground. As the sound boomed and reverberated through the hills, I heard some of the Russians whimpering. The sound they made reminded me of the U.S. hospital back in Baghdad. Radakov and his men were merciless. They stood up from behind the berm and, using the light provided by the burning LAV, fired off rocket-propelled grenades at the last two vehicles. The RPG rounds found their marks with earsplitting crashes. Halfhearted small-arms shots were fired blind by the pathetic survivors. These were countered by the men Radakov had sent to bury the deadly IED in the roadside. Within minutes, the rifle fire was silenced and everyone in the Russian patrol lay dead. I stood and saw the torn, ripped bodies in the light of the flames roaring among the vehicles. Secondary explosions sent showers of dancing orange sparkles toward the stars.
THIRTY-SIX
The ambush was a long way behind us now. The glow from burning tires and fuel oil was no longer visible from our position high in the hills. No one had spoken a word, saving our breath for the climb. Radakov called a halt and some bread and cheese was passed around. A couple of the men joked privately. No fire was lit. “How does it feel to be a Chechen rebel, eh?” asked Radakov in a whisper as he carved off a chunk of cheese with a knife that glinted in the starlight and fed it into his mouth.
“You going to answer my questions now?”
“Why don’t you ask them and we’ll see how far we get?”
This was not quite the response I had hoped for. I said, “Did General Scott come on one of your little field trips, too?”
“Yes.”
“Why did you bring him?”
“I wanted him to witness the important work being done.”
“Being done by the separatists?”
“No, by The Establishment.”
“This is an Establishment operation?”
“What isn’t?” he replied.
“These answers aren’t going to make much sense until I know who or what The Establishment is,” I said.
“I can’t tell you that.”
“You can’t because you don’t know the answer? Or can’t because you’ve been told not to?”
He gave an ambiguous shrug.
I took a different tack. “So the mission you brought the general on was what? An attempt at recruitment?”
“You could say that.”
“You wanted Scott to join The Establishment?”
“Yes.”
So the general wasn’t a member of this…this ultracovert organization. “Did you tell General Scott what The Establishment was?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I didn’t have to.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’d been told.”
“By whom?”
“By his wife.”
“Harmony?”
Radakov nodded.
I don’t know why I was surprised to hear this. “Did Harmony Scott conspire to kill her husband?”
Another shrug.
We heard the dist
ant thump of helicopter rotor blades way down in the valley. The Russians would have a Hind out searching for the insurgents who whacked their patrol, so the men were keen to vacate the area.
“Is that why you’ve brought me here, too? Part of your recruiting drive?”
“No.”
“Then why?” I could only think of one other possible answer to that question: to make me disappear. I’d had two attempts on my life in the past week. Was The Establishment going to go for third time lucky? I felt a presence over my right shoulder. I knew who it was before I looked—the weasel. Radakov got to his feet and I followed. The three of us stood there for what seemed like half a lifetime, the cold starlight sheening off our perspiration. Radakov appeared uncertain, maybe putting the question of whether to kill me or not on the scales. I turned my back on the pair of them and walked off to sit on a rock. Nothing I could do would influence the situation in my favor. Up here, with no one around for miles, I was completely at the mercy of these men.
I watched Radakov speak briefly to his lieutenant, who then slipped something sharp and metallic into his belt. Both men came toward me, Radakov’s man smiling, which, even in the poor light, was not a pleasant sight. Radakov stopped beside me but the weasel kept walking. “I should kill you,” he said.
“Why don’t you?” I said while the voice in my head screamed, What are you doing? Don’t fucking taunt him!
“If you are killed, someone else will take your place.” He said this as if it was a matter of fact. Maybe it was, but I had my doubts. I was now pretty certain I’d been chosen for this gig because no one expected or wanted a result. Not great for my self-esteem. Lucky for me, I have a thick skin. And it made me all the more determined to shove it all back in their faces. I was suddenly deeply committed to peeling the scab off this little sore, because I was now certain that a voracious and malignant cancer was hiding below it.
The wind shifted slightly. It brought with it the thump-thump of helicopter blades, closer this time. “We must go now,” Radakov said, looking down the valley. We resumed the climb and reached the ridgeline a short while later, where the going became easier. There were a lot of questions in my head. I took potluck and asked one: “Were General Scott and Varvara lovers?”
Radakov actually laughed at that. “Lovers? No. He was full of American sexual repression. Just like you.”
“So, if they weren’t lovers, then why would Scott go to all the trouble of taking Varvara back to Ramstein?”
“He did not like my business. After his son died in Iraq, he wanted to save someone. It was as simple and as complex as that.”
The image of the two women back in the village came to mind. They were beautiful and young, born into a life of grinding poverty, war, and zero choices. Thanks to Radakov, they would spend that youth and beauty being screwed by loveless men for money, none of which they’d ever see. They were purchased human beings: slaves. Could I imagine General Scott, grieving over the loss of his son, risking everything to save just one person from this life?
That got me thinking about Abraham Scott. He’d been a mystery man when I began this investigation, but I was getting to know him. He was a man with morals, admired and respected by the people in his command. Something had disillusioned him and so utterly compromised his belief system that he risked his only child to bring it down. It was a gamble he had lost, and the guilt of it had crushed his spirit.
“Why do you trade in women?” I asked Radakov.
“Because it is easy money. There is a ready market and a willing supply. We Chechens are fighting a war, Cooper. Guns and bullets don’t fly into our hands.”
“You mean, grow on trees.”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
And I finally saw it. Perhaps it was the fucked-up metaphor, not mine but his—the one about guns and bullets not flying into their hands—that peeled back the clouds over this case and let me see those confused markings on the ground with clarity for the first time. “When did General Scott realize that you were using NATO planes to fly sex slaves into Germany?”
Radakov didn’t answer right away. At that moment, he was probably reconsidering his decision not to kill me. “You are a clever man, Cooper. He is right to fear you.” The men walking up ahead paused to listen. I wondered exactly who “he” was. I was about to ask when Radakov raised his hand to stop me. The night was filled with the noise of crickets and frogs, but no more sounds from helicopter blades, distant or otherwise. Satisfied, the men ahead trudged on, climbing steadily into the frost, picking their way through the trees. “Over a year ago, Scott came to Riga looking into some unauthorized NATO flights,” said Radakov softly.
Yeah, the flight-progress strips, the highlighted RIX entries on the ATC log… I also remembered glimpsing Varvara’s passport. “What about identities for the people you smuggled in?”
“German passports are not all biometric yet. They are relatively easy to forge. Moving outsiders around Ramstein was the only difficulty, but we found a way.”
“That wouldn’t have been by giving each of them a CAC card, would it?”
He glared at me, perhaps thinking he’d given up too much information. “You know about these?”
I nodded. There were those three hundred missing CAC cards the general had been checking into. Scott must have put two and two together and come up with a big fat rat. Radakov’s human cargo had been smuggled into Ramstein on NATO C-130s, posing as returning U.S. servicewomen. I almost laughed—a breakthrough at last. “So you must have a contact inside Ramstein. You going to tell me who it is?”
“No.”
“Is this still happening? Using Ramstein as a slave port?”
“No. There were six flights over a year ago—none since.”
The flights Scott was looking into. I let all this sink in. Who was Radakov’s inside man? I knew it couldn’t have been Harmony Scott, and not because she was the wrong gender. It had to be someone who had complete access to the base, someone who could authorize flights, someone with top-level security access. Then it hit me. Jesus H. Christ! I knew exactly who it was. And this time, I did laugh. And, yeah, he had every damn right to fear me.
“You will be quiet now, Cooper,” said Radakov, tense.
Not in a million years would I have guessed the identity of Radakov’s Ramstein connection. I sucked in a breath to get the mirth under control. There was nothing remotely funny about killing or slavery. I’d been looking forward to getting back to Ramstein to see Anna. And now I had something else to look forward to—the pleasure of stomping very hard on a murderous asshole.
THIRTY-SEVEN
I got nothing more from Radakov. If there was anything else for him to give, he’d decided to keep it to himself. We trekked in fatigued silence for four more hours as the terrain steepened. The body we’d taken from the farmhouse was making the trip on a litter made from saplings roped together with bootlaces. I got the impression that none of the men felt particularly heroic or inspired about the enterprise earlier in the evening. Either they’d killed too many Russians over the years to give it any thought, or they would rather have been at home with their wives and children—if they had any—than walking cold, wet, and hungry toward the dawn. Perhaps they knew that the Russians would exact their revenge from people who were innocent of any crime, except for the one of being Chechen. Or maybe these men were just the walking dead, the light of their souls extinguished by a lifetime of hatred and bloodshed. In the end, did either the Russians or the Chechens gain anything except for a bunch of fresh holes dug in the ground?
Scott’s fascination with Russia’s spats with Chechnya still puzzled me. I couldn’t see how it fit in anywhere, unless it was to get an insight into Radakov. But I doubted that. There was something I’d missed, or something I didn’t know yet. According to Scott’s notes, the Russians had been fighting these people off and on for centuries. Apparently, even Leo Tolstoy had fought here, back in 1851, and the fighting was just as brutal
then. Now, however, there was a new factor in the mix: oil. Moscow wanted it. Was that what this was all about? Oil? Or was the fighting here about something else entirely? There was nothing that stood out from Scott’s research, nothing that struck me as being related or significant.
The moon rose at some time during the night. It just appeared, a sliver of dull tin beaten over a cold, black stone. It emitted a ghastly light that fell exhausted through the trees. After this, if there was an after, I was taking a goddamn vacation.
We eventually came through the trees onto a muddy, rock-strewn road and picked our way along it for a time. Up ahead, a truck was parked, nuzzled into the bushes. One of the men whistled softly and the notes were echoed back by someone hiding in the deep shadows. It was the man with the red face, his rhubarb-colored splotches showing black in the ghost light. Another man jumped down off the back of the truck. I recognized him as being the man who’d read through Radakov’s purchasing agreement for the two teenagers, the same man who also—I assumed—provided the intelligence on the activities and whereabouts of the Russian interrogators. There was some quiet conversation between him and Radakov’s men, and then he knelt beside the body on its litter, wiped its face with a rag, and then gently kissed its dead lips. I heard him cry.
“It was his brother. He will be buried here,” said Radakov beside me, as the corpse was carried back into the trees.
“Where to now?” I said to Radakov.
He answered with a gesture indicating that I should get into the truck with the rest of his men. I didn’t have much choice. I pulled myself up, stepped under the tarp, and entered the familiar cocoon of smells that included shit, animal hide, and the rotten-egg stench of crude oil. I took a seat on one of the benches and found myself looking at the bent heads of the two young women from the village. They were sitting opposite. Wherever we were going, the girls were coming with us. One of the men stuck his hand up the skirt of the girl beside him. What he found there appeared to amuse him because he gave a hearty laugh like he was some pseudo Mexican bandit in a B-movie. Radakov stepped into the truck and whispered hoarsely at him to pull his finger out, or words to that effect. There was a brief, angry exchange of whispers between the two men, which, I suspect, had nothing to do with protecting the girl’s morals and more to do with not spoiling the merchandise.
The Death Trust Page 30
