First Team [First Team 01]

by Larry Bond

  Baku was an oil town, the center of one of the most prolific producing areas in the world outside the Middle East. It was also a place where other things could be had and arranged; the Caspian washed its shores with the rhythmic sound of possibility, and if a foreigner didn’t find hospitality there, it was surely because he wasn’t trying hard enough.

  Ferg and Conners sat at a table overlooking the sea, waiting to meet Ferg’s contact, who was running about an hour late. Rahil—Rachel in English—was a raven-haired beauty, the daughter of a smuggler who had inherited the business from her father. Ferguson had had occasion to do business with her once before, and so he wasn’t surprised or disappointed by the fact that she hadn’t yet shown up at the cafe. He nursed a coffee while Conners sipped at a vodka, staring through the yellowed plastic panel at the edge of the porch.

  “My darling, you are here already,” said Rahil. She floated to them across the porch, her hand trailing across Ferguson’s shoulder. He rose; she kissed him. Four men in black pants and sweaters fanned out across the room behind her—the family business had not thrived for three generations without taking certain precautions.

  “Your friend?” Rahil said.

  “Dad,” said Ferg, pointing to him.

  “Your father? But he’s so young.”

  “Just a nickname.”

  “Ma’am.”

  “You must watch Mr. Ferguson,” Rahil advised him. “He will go light on the paycheck.”

  “We merely deducted for expenses,” said Ferg. She was referring to their last encounter, which had involved smuggling a set of hard drives out of Russia. The disks had “been damaged—probably because Rahil had tried to have her people read them— and Ferg’s supervisors had insisted on delivering only partial payment.

  “You will make it up today?”

  “Maybe.”

  Rahil let a waiter pull over a chair for her, then ordered champagne. She began telling Ferguson about how beautiful the sea was this time of year—how beautiful it was at all times of year.

  Conners sipped his vodka, taking in only enough to sting his lips. Rahil looked to be about thirty, though like a lot of women he’d seen there she put her makeup on so thickly it made her look older. She had a thin body, but she moved it the way a dancer would, thrusting it around as she spoke. Her bodyguards eyed them jealously, and Conners guessed that she herself had at least two weapons, including a barely concealed pistol at the belt of her flowing skirt beneath her black blouse, which was not tucked into the waistband.

  “I’m going to Groznyy,” said Ferg

  “Yes?” she said. The waiter arrived with the champagne, a Tattinger brut, 1995.

  “I’d like to stay in a convenient place there,” said Ferg, who took a glass of the wine.

  “There are many hotels,” she told him.

  “You know my tastes.”

  “Expensive.”

  “Not necessarily. Just discreet.”

  “As I said, expensive. The authorities.” She shook her head. “Groznyy is not a nice place these days.”

  “When was it ever?”

  “True. The Chechens are a dirty people. Why go there? Stay here with us. Baku is a very rich place.” She turned to Conners. “You are not drinking my champagne?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Ferguson is paying.” She laughed.

  “Thanks anyway,” said Conners.

  The waiter reappeared. Rahil called him over and ordered some blintzes, then told him to see to her men. There were three dozen tables on the veranda, more than half of them occupied, but the waiter had no trouble figuring out whom she meant.

  “So, a place to stay. That’s it?” said Rahil. “The CIA needs my services as a travel agent?”

  “I’d like some contact among the rebels.”

  Rahil shook her head. “No.”

  “No one who owes you a favor?”

  “These sorts of favors would have me dead in a week,” she said. “We do not deal with the Islamic madmen.”

  “They’re not all mad, are they?”

  “The crazy ones are the sanest. Of course they’re mad. They’ve been mad for centuries. But now they are worse. In the past two years…” She waved her hand in the air, as if brushing away smoke. “Drink more champagne, Ferguson. Drink, drink.”

  “They may have something I want to buy,” suggested Ferg.

  “Such as?”

  “Things,” he said.

  “Stay away from them. Better to deal with the Russians.”

  “I deal with them all the time.”

  “See? I knew you were a wise man. Here, let me write you an address that may come in useful.”

  ~ * ~

  I

  nteresting woman,” said Conners, as they rode in a taxi toward the dock. Ferguson had hired a boat to take them north to Machachkala, where they’d hire a car to go to Groznyy. They were supposed to be German representatives from an oil company, though it didn’t seem as if anyone particularly cared. “Pretty, too.”

  “Drug smugglers usually are,” said Ferg.

  “We going to stay in her hotel?”

  “Nah.”

  “You wanted the guerrilla contact?”

  “No.” Ferguson pointed out the dock and had the driver let them off. When the car had pulled away, he told Conners to grab his bag and follow him.

  “Where?”

  “There’s a ferry we’re taking. It leaves from that pier up there.”

  “I thought you hired a boat.”

  “I did,” said Ferg.

  “You sharing information these days?”

  “Only on a need-to-know basis.”

  “What do I do if you get shot?” asked Conners, serious.

  “Cash in the plane ticket in your pocket and go home.”

  “Ferg.” Conners grabbed his shoulder. “You’ve been taking some awful chances lately.”

  “Name one.”

  “Walking into that police station, the DVD operation in Iran ...”

  “It’s okay, Dad. It’ll all make sense eventually.” Ferguson adjusted the shoulder strap on his leather duffel bag and started for the ferry.

  “That I doubt,” said Conners.

  ~ * ~

  F

  erg waited until they were about halfway to Machachkala to call Corrigan. By then the clouds had thickened, and it looked as if they were sailing toward a storm. He stood out on the upper deck, wind whipping against his face as the call went through.

  “Where you been?” Corrigan asked.

  “Pulling my pud,” Ferguson told him. “What do you have for me?”

  “The guy Kiro sent a message to is named Jabril Daruyev. You can download the full dossier anytime you want.”

  “And the FSB investigator?”

  “As far as we can tell, he’s back in Chechnya. I can’t run him down definitively.”

  “You have him definitely ID’d as Kruknokov?” asked Ferg.

  “If you had given us a better picture, I could be definitive,” said Corrigan. “But there’s a Kruknokov who was in Kyrgyzstan, then went to Chechnya. I have a picture and it looks like your guy. I see a yellow sports coat.”

  “That’s got to seal it,” said Ferg.

  He was being serious, though Corrigan thought he was making fun of him.

  “Don’t you bust my chops,” said Corrigan.

  “I wasn’t. How are Guns and Rankin making out with the Dragon Lady?”

  “She’s not that bad. No worse than Slott.”

  “I’ll tell him you said that.”

  “Please stop busting my balls.”

  “When I go online, am I going to have all that data on the prisons?”

  “It’s waiting for you.”

  “Fair enough, Corrigan. I take back everything I said about you.”

  “What a guy.”

  Ferg snapped off the phone.

  ~ * ~

  6

  NEAR ORENBURG, RUSSIA—THE NEXT NIGHT<
br />
  Rankin reached over the seat, fishing for the bottle of water in the back of the car. He hadn’t screwed the top tightly enough when he’d put it on, and the carpet of the Fiat was soaked; worse, he had only a few small gulps left. Even though the train carrying the waste material had parked for the night on a siding, they’d have to stay there watching it, and that meant he wouldn’t be able to restock for another six hours, until Conners and Jack Massette took over. His few days in the Middle East had left him dehydrated, maybe permanently; he felt as if he could drink several gallons of water and not quench his thirst. Holding the bottle up in the dim light, Rankin gauged that there were four gulps’ worth left. He decided he’d have to parcel them out, a gulp an hour. Postponing the first gulp, he tightened the cap securely and rose in the seat to place the bottle more carefully against the transmission hump. Their gear was on the seat at least, and so remained dry.

  A figure approached from the right side of the car. Even though he knew it had to be Corrine, Rankin tensed, caught awkwardly unprepared. He let go of the bottle and pulled his arm back as he saw her face, nodding, then reaching over to unlock the door for her.

  “It’s cold,” she said.

  “Everything seems cold to me,” he said.

  She slid in, adjusting the seat though she’d fiddled with it several times since they parked there two hours before. Corrine had had to relieve herself at the edge of the woods. She hadn’t had to squat outdoors since a family camping trip when she nine or ten, but it wasn’t exactly the sort of thing she could talk to Rankin about. The Special Forces soldier had hardly said anything since they’d taken the shift together watching the waste train for the night.

  “I didn’t see anything from the road,” she told Rankin. “I walked up and around. There’s a gravel road out to the town.”

  “Yeah,” said Rankin. “Listen, I spilled a bunch of water in the back.”

  “Oh.” She twisted around to look.

  “It’s on the floor,” he said. “Nothing really got wet.”

  “We have another bottle of water,” she said.

  “That’s yours.”

  “We can share. I don’t have cooties.”

  “Thanks.”

  A small video screen projected and magnified the view from a set of night glasses positioned on the dashboard. They could see all five cars carrying the waste material from where they sat, though they couldn’t see the three diesels that drove the train or the flatcar and four boxcars that had been tagged on to the back, the flatcar for the guards and the others merely cars going south.

  Starting from Buzuluk earlier in the day, the train had been escorted by a small detachment of soldiers in a second train, along with a pair of helicopters. Now it had only a small contingent of guards—Russian sailors in civilian dress, according to their backgrounder—and two local policemen. Most of the dozen sailors were asleep in the boxcar nearest the containment cars; the policemen were dozing in a car near the tracks. Four members of the six-man train crew had left earlier, presumably going to the local hotel for the night.

  “You get to the point where you almost wish something would happen,” said Corrine.

  “You got that right.” Rankin shifted in the seat. His back muscles were starting to tighten. “Shoulda brought a book or something.”

  “What book would you read?” she asked.

  Rankin shrugged. “Whatever.”

  “You read thrillers?”

  “Nah. Biographies,” said Rankin.

  “Really?”

  Rankin didn’t like the surprised tone in her voice. “Brant’s history of James Madison,” he said, naming the work he’d started the last time he was back in the States. It was a six-volume set of the man who’d been the country’s fourth president and principal author of the Constitution.

  “Is it interesting?” Corrine asked.

  “It’s long.” He leaned back in the seat, trying to stretch his back. “It explains the War of 1812 a little better than I’ve seen before.”

  “How’d you get into that?”

  “I just did,” said Rankin.

  They were silent a minute or so. Rankin decided he didn’t want her to think he was mad at her—he wasn’t, really. He just didn’t like people thinking he was a stupid shit, when he wasn’t.

  “What do you read?” he asked.

  “Depends. If I’m in a mood for a mystery, I’ll read something by Lawrence Block maybe, or P. D. James. If I want to laugh, I read Wodehouse.”

  “Bertie and Jeeves?”

  “You know the series?”

  “Sure.”

  “I think the TV shows they did, the BBC shows—they were better than the books.”

  “Didn’t see it. Excuse me. Gotta take a leak.” He got out of the car and went into the woods to pee.

  Corrine turned her attention back to the small viewer screen, where the large cars sat like unmoving ghosts. She knew she had offended him by being surprised at what he was reading—but she was surprised, and whether he was a soldier or not, biographies about James Madison weren’t exactly everyday reading.

  That was the way it was going to be from now on—no matter what she did or tried to do, everyone from Slott on down would see her as an interloper. She’d just have to deal with it.

  Corrine pulled her coat tighter around her, fighting off the chill.

  ~ * ~

  7

  THE ROAD TO GROZNYY

  Conners’s German was nonexistent, but Ferguson convinced him that if he spoke English with a quasi-German accent, he’d fool most anyone they encountered, since there were rarely German businessmen in Chechnya. Conners began practicing his inflections as they drove along the highway toward the Chechen capital. At some point Ferg found his accent too ridiculous not to laugh aloud, and it became a joke between them. At one point Conners began singing his Irish drinking songs with a German accent, and Ferguson joined in, words and accents morphing together into a new language punctuated by laughter.

  The drive might have been interminable otherwise. There were checkpoints every ten or fifteen miles. Usually the two men were waved through with no more than a cursory glance at their papers and car. But several times the Russian soldiers ordered them out and conducted brief searches, which were more like shakedowns than pat-downs.

  Carrying weapons was theoretically forbidden, but the realities of travel through the countryside meant that many Russians and even foreigners armed themselves, and in most cases a soldier who saw a rifle in the backseat of an otherwise unsuspicious car—that is, a car that clearly didn’t belong to a Chechen—wouldn’t blink, as long as the owner agreed to pay a nominal “fine” on the spot. On the other hand, it was also possible that the soldier might “confiscate” a weapon that looked much nicer than his own. They, therefore, carefully hid their Clocks and PKs—they had only pistols—and left a Makarova peeking out from under a blanket in the back to attract attention.

  They got off the main highway about six miles from the city, driving north through the ruins of a village that had been burned two or three years before by Russian troops. The land that straddled the village had been farmed for centuries before the rebellions; now the fields were thick with weeds. Here and there the rotted carcass of a shed or a barn, its wood too deteriorated even to be burned for fuel, stood like the starched bones of a horse picked over by buzzards in the desert. They drove north for about five miles, then took a local road to the east. A town appeared off to the side; they found the road for it and drove up the main street, surprised that there were no patrols checking traffic in or out.

  “German,” Ferguson told Conners as they got out of the car. A small house nearby had a handwritten sign advertising rooms in one of the windows.

  “Ya-vole,” said Conners in pseudo-German. He started to crack up.

  “Don’t schpecken ze jokes,” replied Ferguson. He knelt and retrieved his small Glock from under the seat. Palming the gun, he slid it into his pocket, then took his battered o
vernight bag and led Conners into the three-story brick building, which sat about a foot below street level. The structure probably predated the road, but it seemed as if it had slid into the earth, hunkering down to avoid the years of war.

  The front hall smelled of fresh paint. A very short older woman with glasses appeared at the far end as they came in, her fingers layered with paint. She introduced herself in Chechen, then switched to Russian, eying them suspiciously. Ferg gave her the cover story—German businessmen who’d come to sell electronic switches for furnaces. They had business in the capital.