“Shut up and don’t lose them, asshole. I think you secretly drank two gallons of scorpion tea, and now you want to get rid of us to amuse yourself elsewhere...even if you have to pay for it,” BAT FK23 Bantam said, laughing.
22
At five o'clock the next morning, the three trucks packed with opium and the cargo van loaded with wheat were in the queue at the border; they were discretely letting other convoys go ahead of them, waiting for the exact moment when the garrison changed at the customs checkpoint at 6:30 am.
Mark watched the bustling chaos of people in the queue gesturing, eating and selling their wares; patchwork trucks loaded to unsafe levels, smugglers and moneychangers negotiating inside the cabs of vehicles, and then huddling together and talking about deliveries.
There were dozens of stolen cars abandoned on the side of the road, looted for their parts, and even cars loaded with drugs that had been seized, gutted and left to die by the border police outside the customs office.
Suddenly, there was a burst of Kalashnikov fire just outside the van and the two operatives immediately grabbed their weapons ready to fire.
“Stop! Don’t move! Pretend nothing happened! It's all right...fuck! Didn't they teach you anything in school?” Kamaal shouted furiously. “Here people manufacture and recycle weapons of all kinds, street vendors sell them directly in the queue at the border...the guy with the green pakol is showing off a very old Kalashnikov used by the Russian armed forces. They often shoot in the air.” Kamaal kept talking between his teeth and lowered his voice. “Are you interested in a light machine gun, ladies?”
“If you don't stop calling us ladies, we’ll buy it and shove it up...where the sun doesn’t shine after trying it out on the ground; maybe we’ll even see how well you dance,” answered BAT FK23 Bantam pointing to the weapon that was being examined with interest by a Turkish trucker, three vehicles ahead of them.
At 6:25 am, the trucks started their engines and the convoy didn’t let anyone else in front of them, arriving at the barrier at the agreed hour.
Mark and the other two operatives saw the three truck drivers get out of the vehicles and enter the guards’ booth to discuss things with them. After less than a minute, they came out and climbed back on board, crossing the border without any inspection.
The patrol service started to approach their vehicle and Kamaal got out, leaving Li-2 and Bat on board. The Afghan began, showing their documents and explaining that they were farmers and traders carrying a load to sell in Rawalpindi.
The customs officers decided that a quick inspection was necessary, but they didn’t ask for money having already pocketed enough earlier.
After about ten minutes, the three agents were able to resume their journey and enter Pakistan.
“We have to catch up with them again.” BAT FK23 Bantam said worriedly.
“Yes, we’re twenty minutes behind them, but since this is the only way to Rawalpindi for a truck of that size, I'm not worried at all. I’m sure we’ll catch them up shortly. This van will start moving faster once we get away from the prying eyes of the patrols,” Kamaal said, blowing his nose loudly.
In fact, after twenty minutes, they were once more behind the trucks and they followed at a distance as they turned off towards Nowshera.
They drove through the city and headed several miles into a barren and hilly area, then they stopped in front of a dilapidated and seemingly abandoned building, the only one that could be seen on the horizon and that must have been a goat farm a long time ago.
23
Kamaal parked the van behind a rock wall and covered it with a sand-colored truck cover, then he joined the others with the last of the equipment and they sneaked behind a boulder a safe distance away.
“Who the fuck is that guy, he’s a Westerner!” Li-2 exclaimed while taking photos of a man in his forties with dark blond hair and blue eyes.
“I don’t have the faintest idea,” said Bat surprised, too.
The Westerner directed the unloading of one of the trucks. Following his orders, the other two trucks had been parked and locked up in a sort of garage equipped with metal shutters.
“I don’t see Bouda,” Kamaal said.
“We should set the bugs and micro cams in place as soon as possible, if this is indeed the refinery of Bouda, he will be here at any moment. Based on the conversations we heard, someone has to come and get the trucks that are in the garage and pay for the opium.”
“I'm hungry. What about you?” said BAT FK23 Bantam, biting at a piece of two-day old bread.
At ten o’clock, they heard the sound of a car approaching the building: three men got out while the driver stayed in the car with the engine running.
One of them, with almond-shaped eyes, dressed in a suit and tie, began talking to the Westerner, pointing to the garage with the other two standing behind him.
“They’re negotiating for the truck load,” said Mark. “Clearly, Bouda is not there.”
After five minutes, the two men returned to the car and got a briefcase and a bag that they opened in front of the Westerner.
“Those are US dollars,” said Bat, who was closely following the situation with his binoculars while Li-2 took photographs of the scene.
“They are counting the money; clearly the blond guy doesn’t trust them. Look at that, now he’s putting a wad of cash in his pocket that the Chinese guy took from the other bag. Cute. He’s taking money from Bouda and also from the buyers by giving them more product without Bouda knowing about it?” BAT FK23 Bantam said.
“He is a Westerner. He can make sure that the opium gets where it needs to go,” Mark replied. “That doesn’t surprise me. During the Soviet occupation, some members of the CIA controlled the heroin trade and Bouda was an agent of the ISI trained by the CIA. Is it just my imagination running wild or is this gentleman more than forty years old and perhaps Bouda too?”
As soon as the negotiations ended, the Westerner lifted the metal shutter and let the buyer’s two men get into the trucks. They quickly left the mock refinery, preceded by the car that had brought them and which now held the driver and the man with almond-eyes.
The Westerner then called over four men and talked with them for a few minutes. He paid them and then he got on a motorcycle that was leaning against the north wall of the building and went away.
Immediately afterwards six other men left the place, two were the drivers that had driven the truck from the Helmand region of Afghanistan.
“It's almost lunchtime and everything stops in Pakistan; let's get ready to enter the building, Li-2,” said BAT FK23 Bantam.
The two agents arranged all the necessary equipment and waited until a small group of people had gathered at the corner of the garage to eat together.
“Kamaal keep your eyes peeled and warn us immediately if there are any problems. In five minutes, we’ll go into action. Let's synchronize our watches, please. Once we’re inside, Bat and I will each work on our own, following procedures. We will have seven minutes to place the micro cams and bugs and record information.”
After a couple of minutes, the two agents entered the structure.
Mark and BAT FK23 Bantam looked around: the ground floor of the building had only one room used as a kitchen: there were four rickety chairs, a wooden table full of holes, a wood stove and a cupboard that contained a few pots and some chipped dishes. Some dusty glasses stood on a shelf above a bowl of water now being used as a smelly sink.
The two officers went over the four walls of the room with their hands. They tapped on the walls with their fingers to see if there were any hidden passages or cavities.
“Bat, there must be a laboratory and it can’t be outside: the satellites would have detected it immediately. Let's try the floor.”
Both of them began meticulously searching the simple concrete floor.
We’ll place three cams and the same number of bugs, I'll take care of the bugs,” Mark said.
“Li-2!” whispered BAT
FK23 Bantam after installing the last cam.
“Look under the cupboard, there is a wooden trap-door!”
Mark joined Bat. They gently moved the cupboard and lifted the hatch.
“Kamaal, what’s the situation out there?” asked Li-2.
“Calm, they are still eating and doing some real drinking, but we cannot be sure. You have four minutes.”
The two agents went down to the basement and turned on their flashlights: they found themselves in a large fully equipped and well-organized laboratory for transforming opium into morphine and part of the morphine into heroin; there was also an electronic machine for weighing and sachet packaging the two drugs.
At the end of the room on a metal table sat a desktop computer that was turned off. Mark wasted no time getting the first password.
“Take care of the micro cams and bugs Bat. I’ll take care of the computer,” he said as he was turning on the computer to extract the hard disk and copy it quickly using software also used by the Pentagon. The data transferred to another device would be sent to the two agencies.
As soon as Bat turned to place the last micro cam, Li-2 made a copy of the hard disk and hid it in an inside jacket pocket. Then he put the hard disk back into the computer.
“We have to go! Kamaal can we get out?” asked BAT F.K.23 Bantam.
“Affirmative, they are singing and drinking like crazy, the road is clear, no suspicious movement.”
Bat and Mark, after making sure they hadn’t left any clues behind, went back into the kitchen, closed the hatch and repositioned the cupboard in the same spot where they had found it; and, after checking that they had left no signs of their presence in the kitchen, joined Kamaal at the observation post.
“Must be payday, they are all completely drunk,” Kamaal said.
“Bouda is missing and we did not find anything that leads us to believe that he is the owner of the laboratory. Let's hope we have more luck with the hard disk and the micro devices,” said Mark, nervously inspecting the food bag in search of something to put in his stomach.
24
The rest of the day was very boring and the laboratory, like the kitchen, was deserted; the people had gone after the earlier revelry, leaving only four men on guard.
The three agents got ready for the night; they opened some cans of meat with vegetables and drank beer.
“Both the micro cams and the bugs have now self-destructed and they did not provide any useful information. Tomorrow we have to go in and install them again,” said BAT FK23 Bantam.
“I’m sending the contents of the hard disk to the agencies,” said Mark. “Let's hope that there’s something interesting. Meanwhile, I have to say goodbye to you for a while; I need to stretch my legs and stroll around a little bit behind the rocks.”
After walking a safe distance away from the other two agents, Li-2 took out the device to which he had copied the contents of the hard disk, he inserted it in the smartphone and opened the protected line with Pavel; he did not trust the two agencies and hoped that there was some information that would be useful in the search for his father’s murderer.
“Digitrevenant69, HD data incoming, payment when translation completed, he who seeks finds. MK.”
Mark destroyed the device and buried the pieces as Pavel returned the following message, “Digitrevenant69, QSL, the early bird gets the worm.” Pavel was implying he’d get to work on it the next morning in his time zone.
Mark returned to the observation point and began his two-hour stretch of guard duty.
25
“How about some scorpion tea?” BAT FK23 Bantam asked the other two agents at seven in the morning, picking up the bottle.
“No thanks, better to open a bag of cookies; Kamaal, I gladly leave you my ration of dried meat. Bat, please hand me that condensed milk crap, I’ll dilute it with some water,” said Li-2.
“Last night the four guards were all asleep!” Kamaal went on talking sarcastically. “We should tell that asshole Bouda that he is paying dormice instead of sentries.”
He did not complete the sentence before Mark said, “But what the fuck!” He was messing around with his smartphone and was very annoyed.
“What is it?” asked BAT F.K.23 Bantam.
“A message from the two agencies...they say that the image files sent yesterday were corrupt, so no pictures, fuck!”
“That's strange,” said Kamaal. “I checked everything carefully, besides it's a brand new device.”
“I will take some others of the Westerner. Kamaal, do you have the backup?” asked Li-2.
“Of course, just because we’re in Pakistan or Afghanistan does not mean that taking a picture is stealing the soul of the people and that it is sacrilegious. I'm going to look for it in the car and come back.”
“Very funny and clever this Pashtun,” Mark said, giving him a pat on the butt.
“Mmm, this scorpion tea is really good, I feel like Apollinaire when he wrote The Eleven Thousand Rods," said BAT FK23 Bantam laughing, as he sipped Kamaal’s tea after he had gone.
“Aha! Kamaal, we have one who delights in early 20th-century erotic literature!” exclaimed Li-2 as Kamaal took his seat again and handed him a new photographic device.
“Bat, go fuck yourself. You have finished the tea that you found so disgusting and now you pretend to be a professor on a topic that you would do better not to talk about.”
“Yeah! Now we have a philosopher as well!” Mark added.
At noon, the building was still empty, there was no movement and no one had arrived: the Westerner had not shown up.
“When the guards take their break we’ll go back in and place the devices again,” BAT FK23 Bantam said. “Hopefully, the spider will come out of its hole.”
“You had better hope that it’s not another scorpion Bat,” replied Li-2 with a laugh. He was completely bored with the situation by now.
BAT FK23 Bantam did not have time to answer because their three smartphones announced a new message simultaneously.
“Ah...” Mark was the first to open his message.
“Well?” Bat asked.
“The mission is over. Bouda is neither in Pakistan nor in Afghanistan but presumably in Europe. I have to leave the country immediately and go to Langley –documents and tickets at the airport – hand delivery. Kamaal, you have to take me to Peshawar.”
“I read it; we’ll leave in ten minutes. Bat, are you coming back to Herat with me? Can you confirm that?”
“Affirmative, Kamaal. What a pity that we can’t return to your brother, he was so nice!”
“Fuck you, Bat! And it's the second time that I’ve told you that in such a short time. Maybe you like it? Look here you, neither Li-2I nor I...”
“Let's go, I’ll take care of the equipment,” said Mark with a laugh. He was glad to be getting out of there even though he had collected no other information.
After a dusty and boring trip, they said goodbye and parted at the Peshawar airport. The British agent found his documents and his plane ticket in his jacket pocket after running into a careless Emirates Airlines’ hostess, who apologized for having bumped into him.
26
Savannah arrived in Washington a day and a half later, the first thing he did was send the VHS tapes to Sofia from the airport.
He went to the toilet and activated his smartphone on Pavel’s secure line and sent the message, “Digitrevenant69, books for you incoming, weather in Washington today is gloomy.”
“QRV-Digitrevenant69, the hard drive was a breeze.”
“QRX in the afternoon.”
“QSL later.” both ended their transmissions.
Pavel and Mark had fun transmitting part of their messages in Q code, but more out of habit than a real need; the code was commonly used by amateur radio operators and consequently was well known and so they enjoyed themselves.
The line was completely secure and Pavel was convinced that it was even safer than those used by the CIA after having perform
ed several hacker tests on its security levels himself: no one had ever been able to crack the data line that he had built using innovative criteria, and checked and updated daily.
Mark left the airport, rented a car and went straight to Langley; he wanted to sleep in the city and arrive on time for the 8:30 appointment at CIA headquarters, so he got a room at the Holiday Inn, had a shower and ordered room service, then suddenly it occurred to him that he had to call Elizabeth.
“Elizabeth, hello, how are you?”
“I'm fine, thank you. Where are you? Why haven’t you called me before now? You didn't even send an e-mail.”
“I told you that I would be very busy...I'm still in Washington and will be busy for a while. The conference is over but I agreed to visit some patients at the psychiatric hospital, they need a second opinion. I'll be here for another week.”
“I understand of course,” replied Elizabeth coldly, “but I had hoped to hear from you earlier. You don't miss me; that is clear to me. You're always distant and now you're actually far away from me, tell me what can I expect from you? It's stupid to talk like this to you on the phone so many miles away…without looking into your eyes, but I believed we had something. It obviously wasn’t the same for you.”
“Elizabeth...”
“Please, let me speak. You’re a specialist in human behavior, and that makes me laugh, considering the way you behave. What's wrong with me? You don’t love me, Mark; and you show it all the time, whether you say it or not.”
“So what do you want?” asked Savannah, remaining calm.
“I'm asking you, Mark, not play games with me because I no longer want to play.”
Black Hawk Day Rewind: An action packed spy thriller (Mark Savannah Espionage Series Book 1) Page 6
