First Team [First Team 01]

by Larry Bond

  “Maybe you should get some sleep while we work this over,” said Corrigan. “I’ll put in a request to NRO for every scrap of satellite data they have.”

  “I have that all under way already,” said Thomas. “But I’m sure this is the place.”

  “Sure sure, or just sure?”

  “Sure,” said Thomas.

  Corrigan debated calling Ferguson. If he was wrong, the officer would bash in his head.

  “Get some more backup,” said Corrigan finally.

  “On it, boss,” said Thomas, running from the room.

  Corrigan finally realized there might be such a thing as too much enthusiasm, not to mention eccentricity.

  Even so, he picked up the phone to call Ferg.

  ~ * ~

  8

  NEAR KASHI, KYRGYZSTAN

  The marshaling yard was less than two years old, and while small by Western standards, it stretched out across the landscape like a city unto itself, with close to a hundred miles worth of track. Freight cars from all over Russia and Europe were scattered along the various spurs, each located and tracked by computer as massive freight trains were put together. Nearly all contained garbage.

  The cars carrying the rad waste were in their own section of the yard, heavily guarded. They’d found a spot to watch the yard nearly two miles away from the perimeter of the facility, and though the view was unobstructed, Rankin had to sit on the roof of the car with his binoculars to see.

  Corrine slept inside. Rankin had almost had to slug her to get her to take a rest. He was worried that she was going to burn herself out; she was clearly pushing herself because she thought she’d screwed up somehow losing the boxcar.

  Rankin reached across the roof for the thermos of tea—coffee had become increasingly difficult to find—and poured himself a cup. He was just taking his first sip when the sat phone rang. To answer, he had to enter a personal ID code, then say his name into the receiver. The computer analyzed his voice pattern; if it didn’t match its records, the phone was temporarily locked into transmit mode and Corrigan—or whoever was making the call—alerted. Once the embedded GPS device gave a positive marker on the phone’s location—a matter of two seconds—the person on the other side could decide how to proceed.

  “This is Corrigan. We have new information,” he said. “There’s a former Soviet airbase in the southern mountains of Chechnya called Verko. Ferg’s en route to check it out, but we think they’re gathering their waste there. Van Buren needs Corrine to authorize the SF mission if it pans out.”

  “She’s sleeping right now,” said Rankin.

  “Well, wake her the fuck up,” said Corrigan.

  “You sure it’s the place?”

  “Just wake her up and let me talk to her. Her phone’s off-line.”

  Rankin climbed down and tapped on the window. Corrine opened her left eye slowly, then closed it. He tapped again, then opened the door and gave her his phone.

  “Corrigan,” he told her.

  “Thanks,” she said sleepily. She pulled herself upright in the seat. “I’m here.”

  “We think we know where the waste is headed. Ferguson’s on his way to check it out—it jibes with some information he already had. This could be it.”

  “All right,” she said. “Tell Mr. Ferguson to proceed. Inform the assault group and give them whatever preliminary data on the target is appropriate. But no action until my authorization.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  Corrine waited a moment before answering, reminding herself that not everyone was against her—and that even if they were, she wasn’t going to help herself by blowing up.

  “I’m absolutely sure,” she said in an even voice. “I need you to get me on a plane out to Turkey to meet with the strike force ASAP.”

  “Civilian or military?”

  “What’s faster?”

  Corrigan hit some keys on one of his computers. “I can get you on a flight to Aktau, if you can get to the airport in fifteen minutes.”

  “Where’s Aktau?”

  “It’s on the Caspian. From there I can get you to Turkey, no sweat. Or Chechnya.”

  “Turkey will do.”

  “Someone will be there. It may be a contract; going to be hard to get a military plane in there without drawing attention. I’ll round up whatever I can.”

  “You’re a regular travel agent,” she said, hanging up.

  ~ * ~

  9

  SOUTHERN CHECHNYA—SEVERAL HOURS LATER

  Ten miles east of Verko the highway turned into a minefield. Two burned-out Russian tanks tipped them off; Conners pulled off the road and got out of the truck, scouting it out. They were on a ridge that ran along the side of a mountain maybe twenty-five hundred meters high, with the peak another thousand or so meters above them. Conners felt as if he were being watched, and guessed that the tanks had been mined.

  Ferg, who’d been sleeping lightly, climbed down out of the cab and walked over.

  “Looks like a bitch,” said Conners.

  “Yeah, this has got to be the place,” said Ferg.

  “How we gonna get there? Take us two or three days to drive all the way north and around on the other highway, and we got joker boy in the cab.”

  Ferguson looked up at the ragged walls. “Got to be paths we can pick our way across.”

  “Take us two days.”

  “Maybe.”

  Ferguson glanced back at the truck. They’d have to take Darayev’s leg chains off to travel by foot.

  Corrigan’s intelligence jibed with Darayev’s information; they might indeed be closing in on the site. But if they were, terrorists might be all around them. The Chechen was potentially a serious liability—even if he wasn’t trying to steer them toward an ambush, he might find the opportunity to escape irresistible. He could easily lead the terrorists back to them, or at least alert them to their presence.

  On the other hand, Corrigan’s track record on vital data wasn’t necessarily impressive. They’d need Daruyev to get to the next site if this one was a bust.

  “All right. Let’s assume we’re being watched,” Ferg told Conner. “We back up, go down to that blown-out farm we passed, get the satellite photos, pick our way back over.”

  “Long way, Ferg.”

  “Just a day’s worth of climbing. Van’s going to need time to get everything in gear anyway.”

  “Daruyev coming?” asked Conners.

  “Somebody’s gotta carry the gear,” said Ferg.

  Like most of the other buildings they’d passed, the walls of the main house of the small farm down the road were scorched black, the soot so embedded in the rocks that years of rain had only pushed it deeper. The farm looked like just another abandoned homestead as they parked nearby—until the curtains in the window moved.

  “Shit,” said Conners. “People are living in there? The roof’s gone.”

  It was too late simply to back out onto the road; the people had seen them and might alert the Russians, or the guerrillas—or both—to their presence. Conners felt angry, illogically blaming them for intruding—they’d have to kill them, he thought.

  “Well let’s go say hello,” said Ferguson, hopping out of the truck. He slung his gun nonchalantly over his shoulder and—once Conners had his own weapon pointing toward the front of the house to cover him—walked toward the front door.

  He knocked, though he knew that anyone inside wouldn’t answer. After a second knock, he walked around to the window with the curtain. He couldn’t see much of the interior, and when no one appeared after two hard raps, he went around to the back.

  An old man stood in the doorway, aiming an ancient hunting rifle at him.

  “Zdrátvuitye,” Ferg said to him in Russian. “Hello.”

  The old man didn’t move. Ferguson then tried his Chechen, explaining that they were friends who had to help someone reach his rightful place. When that didn’t impress the man—Ferguson wasn’t entirely sure that his pronuncia
tion could be deciphered—he switched to English, realizing that while the man wouldn’t understand it, it might convince him he wasn’t Russian.

  “It’s all right,” he told the man. “We’re friends. I need a place to keep my truck.”

  He switched back into Russian and repeated the sentence. Ferg guessed that the man’s sympathies lay with the rebels, and that he would leave them be if he thought they were connected with them. Whether he could be trusted beyond that was a question Ferguson couldn’t answer; there were no telephone lines, and no obvious radio antenna, so as far as that went the old man wasn’t going to be notifying anyone very soon.

  “So can I park my truck?” Ferg asked in Russian.

  A voice inside the house said something Ferguson couldn’t hear. The old man waved his hand in that direction, as if shushing them.

  “That the missus?” asked Ferg.

  The man told him something in Chechen that Ferg couldn’t understand. He smiled and asked for food in Russian. The Chechen frowned, then started toward the door. Ferguson decided to follow. Inside, he found the old man’s wife standing with a long knife by a stove. Behind her were five small children, ranging in age from a few months to two years. The woman was so short and bent over from osteoporosis that her head was just barely above Ferg’s knee, but her arms were thick, and her wrists flicked the knife as if she were one of the three musketeers. Ferguson waved at her, then leaned to the side to smile at the children, who were trying to puzzle out exactly who he was.

  One of the children started to laugh, and the old woman drew back, still on her guard but no longer menacing. The old man, meanwhile, had hung the rifle on a pair of hooks and taken some paper and matches to the stove, which had a tinderbox for wood directly under the top. Fire started, he moved a kettle toward the front and turned to his wife, haranguing her for not being hospitable. Ferguson reached into his pocket and found some coins; it would have been an insult to give them to the old man, but the children were fair game. The oldest clinked two large coins together, then passed one to the next toddler in line, who promptly tried to taste it. This elicited a tirade from the old woman, who chastised Ferguson as well as the children before confiscating the coins.

  Out in the truck, Conners felt his legs falling asleep when Ferg finally appeared. The old people had given him a few hard-boiled eggs, some tea, and bread. Conners fell on them hungrily.

  Ferguson had asked for a chisel or saw, but either the old man had neither or just couldn’t understand what he was talking about. They got Daruyev out of the cab and brought him around to a broken-down stone wall at the side of the road. Using the tire iron, they managed to break the chains between his legs, but there was no question of getting the manacles off.

  “I’m trusting you,” Ferguson told him. “But if you move an inch to escape, I’ll have to kill you.”

  “Yes,” said Daruyev.

  Conners looked up and saw the old man coming out from the house. He took a step back and raised his rifle. The old man ignored him, jabbering to Ferguson that he had a jug of water, and then pointing to a better place to put the truck.

  “They’ll have that thing apart in a half hour,” said Conners as they began walking south across the road, toward what looked like a narrow trail in the satellite photos.

  “Nah,” said Ferg.

  “Sell it then.”

  “The truck will cause them considerable difficulty if the Russians come,” said Daruyev. “They won’t be able to explain it.”

  “Why would they have to?” said Conners.

  “If a Russian asks a question, you have to have an answer.”

  “There aren’t too many Russians in the area,” said Ferg.

  “Good thing for them,” said Daruyev.

  “Good thing for all of us,” said Ferg.

  ~ * ~

  B

  y nightfall, they had reached a narrow plateau in the mountains about seven miles east of Verko. They were making much better time than Conners had predicted, so good in fact that Ferg decided to press on. The night was clear, and according to the sat photos a pass ran to the south which would make it easier to hook around from the southwest, the side opposite the only road into the base. If they could make it, a mountain about a mile from Verko in that direction had an only partially obscured view of the landing strip there, according to the 3-D rendering Corrigan had supplied.

  So they kept walking, moving in single file, spread out along the rock-strewn path. Daruyev moved silently; if he was familiar with the way, he didn’t let on. Several times Conners, at the tail, lost sight of him and had to hustle to catch up, but the Chechen made no sign of trying to escape.

  By midnight, they had reached the other side of the mountain Ferg wanted to use as a vantage point. The cold air clawed at their fingers and legs; their cheeks hollowed out, and their ears began to ring with the wind. They stopped for a rest. Ferg noticed that Daruyev’s shoes were stained black; his feet were bleeding.

  “I’m thinking one of us stays here, while the other scouts around that ridge there,” said Ferguson. “If there’s going to be a lookout post, it’ll be up over there. You going to fall asleep?”

  “You don’t have to worry about me,” Conners told him.

  “Don’t sing too loud,” Ferg told him, setting out.

  ~ * ~

  I

  t took Ferguson more than three hours to climb up the mountain far enough to cut across to what looked like a lookout post on the 3-D map Corrigan had created and posted on their secure Web site for him. To cross the last hundred yards he had to climb up a crevice and get up and across an overhang. Tired and cold, he sent several loose stones tumbling below. The first time he froze; he was too precariously placed to swing his gun up for defense. When nothing happened after a few minutes, he began climbing again. When more rocks spilled a few seconds later, he barely paused. Either the people in the lookout were sleeping—or the post wasn’t manned.

  A half hour later, standing behind the ridge, he discovered that the latter was correct—the ridge dropped off sharply, and it wasn’t as a good a spot in real life as it appeared on Corrigan’s simulation.

  But there was a better spot off the side of the road and down about three hundred yards. In the darkness he couldn’t tell if there were rocks there or people. Nor was the question academic—the ridge gave him some cover to pass, but anything beyond it would be easily visible, certainly once the sun came up. The only thing to do was to track back down about a quarter mile, where he could pick up a narrow ledge that angled in the opposite direction, skirting around the mountain before rejoining the trail near a V-shaped rift about three miles below.

  In the daylight, the climb would have been merely difficult. The combination of nighttime and growing fatigue, not to mention the proximity of the guerrilla guards, lifted it into the interesting category.

  There was enough of a moon that Ferguson picked out the start of the ledge easily; he found as he went that he could see the wall fairly well, probably nearly as well as if he’d been wearing his night glasses on a pitch-black night. But after he’d gone about a half mile the ledge began to slope sharply toward the mountain, making it harder to walk on. Clouds had been moving in, making it more and more difficult to see. Still, Ferg was only about fifty feet from the rift when he lost his balance. As his right foot slipped on a loose rock, his left hand reached for a hold that proved to be a shadow. In the next second, he felt himself momentarily defying gravity.

  “Oh, shit,” he said to himself.

  Then he started to fall.

  ~ * ~

  10

  AKTAU, RUSSIA

  The airport was large by Russian standards, and with decent security. To pass to the main area where her charter to Turkey was supposed to be waiting, Corrine had to show ID and pass through an X-ray gate. The woman guard checking her purse and bags was more interested in her aspirin than the satellite phone; as she held up the bottle to examine it Corrine started to explain that i
t was for headaches.

  “I know what it’s for,” said the guard frostily in English, tossing it back in the bag and dismissing her.

  The terminal had all the charm of a 1970s American bus station, with two rows of plastic-backed seats dividing a scuffed linoleum floor. The seats were empty; the few passengers waiting for planes at that hour milled near the gates at the opposite end of the hall. Corrigan had told Corrine to go to a window with a long name in Cyrillic letters; the word was “special” and when pronounced in Russian sounded almost like it did in English, but with the dots and backward symbols it looked more like a magic spell than a sign. She found the words on a door, not a window, though in roughly the place he’d said; she walked back and forth twice before deciding it had to be the place. But no one answered when she knocked.