by John Ringo
"Mike," Pierson said, "we can get you transport."
"Hold one," Mike said into the phone, hitting the mute. "I don't want to be begging for transport, Bob," he said, shrugging at the colonel. "And I figure I can afford a charter." He unmuted to the sound of the receptionist talking to someone in the background. "Is there a problem?"
"No problem, Mr. Jenkins," Gloria said. "Chartering a jet is . . ."
"Expensive, I know," Mike said sharply. "I take it you take American Express?"
"We do," the receptionist said cautiously. "However . . ."
"It's got a hundred-thousand-dollar line," Mike said. "And it's paid up. Or I can hand your pilots a sack of cash. I need a jet and I need one now. Or do I call the next charter company on the list?"
"Not a problem, Mr. Jenkins," Gloria said. "Hold on while I take your information . . ."
* * *
"Everybody's running around like a chicken with its head cut off, Colonel."
Tech Sergeant Walter Johnson was career Air Force. He'd started off in satellite imagery and had slowly migrated to general intel and analysis. He was the only analyst currently assigned to the American embassy in Moscow and, as such, he was very busy. But he'd seen the directive for Colonel Pierson and the civilian he'd mentally pegged as CIA spec ops, Mike Jenkins. So when Pierson had come in with his latest intel dump, he'd dropped everything else on his desk. They were meeting in a secure room and Johnson had brought in a disc with his current analysis to use on the room's computer.
"Normal in the early stages of the game," Pierson said, sighing, "all the intel groups will be going ape-shit and the spec-ops boys will be running scenarios. What's the current playboard look like?"
"Well, you didn't give us much to go on," Johnson admitted. "Right now, the current thinking is that it's a Chechen operation. The Chechens, though, don't have anyone we know of who can do work with a nuke. So they'll probably sell it to someone or do a combined op. Whatever they do, whoever uses it, they'll have to call in an expert."
Johnson brought up an image on the screen of a "Middle Eastern Male."
"Assadolah Shaath," Johnson said. "The most likely 'expert.' Thirty-seven. Born in Islamabad, Pakistan. Dad is a minor official in the government. Educated at boarding schools in Pakistan and England, took a BS in Physics at Reading University and was working on his masters at Princeton when he was recruited by the Popular Front for the Islamic Jihad. Also picked up a BA in English literature, of all things, while at Princeton, centering on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American poets. Wrote a very nice paper on Longfellow, according to his analyst, and was a big fan of Poe. Went to Poe's grave and such like. Sexual tastes run to long, slim blondes. Reported to be rather heavy handed with them. Also likes rock and roll, heavy metal and Goth music."
"Great," Mike grumped. "A mujahideen poet-engineer with my same sexual and musical interests. Just what we need."
"Trained in Afghanistan in mujahideen techniques," Johnson continued, frowning slightly at the input. "Appears on several captured Al Qaeda lists as an 'engineer,' what we would call a demolitions expert. Appeared to be working on nuclear assembly with the Al Qaeda, unsuccessfully. Possibly worked with the Pakistani nuclear program for up to a year. Possibly connected to the Shoe Bomber, Richard Reid. Tagged as one of the mujahideen involved in the Andros Incident, but that might be false info since there's a high probability he was spotted by a Mossad informant in Lebanon three months ago."
"One of them got away," Mike pointed out. "The one that armed the nuke."
"Really?" Johnson said, looking at his notes. "I don't have that."
"Trust me," Mike said. "Your intel is wrong. The one that got away probably set the timer."
"You're sure?" Johnson asked, quizzically.
"He's sure," Pierson said dryly. "Go on."
"Ooo-kay," Johnson said, reevaluating the civilian. "He's the top guy for potential weapons refiguring that we know of. There are two others that have almost his training and background. We've got a call in to Mossad to see if they can track him down."
"Preferably followed by a nine millimeter to the medulla," Mike said. "What about the van?"
"Lots of Mercedes vans running around," Johnson said. "The FSB has an all points out for it, but don't get your hopes up. It's probably in Chechnya or Georgia already."
"I'm bugged by one thing," Mike said. "It was a passenger van. Why a passenger van?"
"I'd thought about the same thing," Johnson admitted. "And I've got an idea, but it's a long-shot." He brought up a picture of a similar van. This one was apparently filled with people, and unless Mike was mistaken, they were all female except the driver. "The Chechens are into everything you can think of in the way of illegal moneymaking. Money laundering, drugs, gun running, what have you. All of them aren't funding the resistance in Chechnya, but a good bit of the money flows that way. But one of the things they're into is the sex trade."
"Slaving," Mike said.
"Bingo," Johnson replied. "It's not exactly the way that it's portrayed in the news media, though. Yeah, some of the girls are snatched off the street. But most of them are sold by people that have authority over them. Parents, orphanages, what have you. The Chechens go on regular rounds and gather up girls, then sell them to various buyers."
"There's a main market," Pierson said. "Eagle Market in Bosnia."
"Agreed," Johnson said. "I ran that idea past the analysts and Langley and they put it as a low-order probability. The max prob is the device is going through Georgia or St. Petersburg to be shipped elsewhere, or down to Chechnya, possibly into Georgia, to be refurbished and used against the Russians."
"Yeah," Mike said. "But if it's internal to Russia, it's not our ballgame. And all of that more or less ignores the passenger van anomaly."
"You want to try to track it?" Pierson asked.
"That's why I'm here," Mike replied. "And why I put that jet on standby. Do we have anyone in Bosnia that's a kind of expert in the slave trade?"
"I don't have that info right here," Johnson said. "But I can round it up."
"Call me," Mike replied, standing up. "Pierson will give you my scrambler code."
"You're going to Bosnia?" Pierson asked. "Now?"
"Better now than later," Mike said, shrugging. "We're five days behind them. I don't know how long it takes to refurbish a nuke . . ."
"Depending upon their equipment," Johnson interjected, "as little as ten hours. I checked. If they're planning on planting it somewhere, they'll probably trap it. Longer for that."
"But we don't have all the time in the world," Mike finished, looking at the face of the terrorist "engineer" and burning it into his brain. "When I get there, I'm going to need a radiation detector. Preferably something I can secret on my person and use covertly."
"We can do that," Pierson said, standing up as well. "I'll get you a contact in IFOR to get the stuff and the name of a person to guide you around."
"Johnson, thanks for the brief," Mike said, walking to the door. "And you need to update your intel. At the island—one got away."
"Yes, sir," Johnson said as Mike left the room. "Although, I'd love to know where he gets his intel. As far as I knew, just about everybody on that island got vaporized. And I didn't know that the guy who armed the nuke escaped."
"Let's just say that some people are tough to get an after-actions report out of," Pierson replied with a sigh.
* * *
The Gulfstream V was sitting at an out-of-the-way hangar at Moscow International when Mike arrived. He paid off the taxi driver and strode over, his jump bag on his shoulder. It was all the luggage he was carrying. It held the usual toiletries, a couple of pairs of socks and underpants and two shirts. Between that and the jacket and jeans he was wearing, he figured it would do. It also held his "walking-around money," about sixty thousand dollars in mixed euros and dollars, mostly hundreds. The door of the plane was open and the steps down, but nobody seemed to be around.
"Hello, th
e plane," he called, stepping up to the door.
"Mr. Jenkins?" the pilot asked, stepping out of the cockpit. He had a strong southern British accent and a military bearing. Mike pegged him immediately for former Royal Air Force.
"The same," Mike replied, handing over his entirely fictitious passport.
"John Hardesty, sir," the pilot said handing back the passport after a searching study. "I'm pleased to be piloting you to wherever your destination might be."
"Former military?" Mike asked, stepping past him and tossing his jump bag on one of the front seats.
"Astute of you to guess, sir," the pilot replied neutrally.
"Okay," Mike said, shrugging. "RAF . . . Tornadoes. Close?"
"Bang on, sir," the pilot replied, frowning.
"And you got out as . . . oh, a major I'd say," Mike continued, grinning. "Because you could see from there on out it was going to be, at best, squadron command and much more likely a coalition staff position. Flying was going to go away."
"Did you read my bio or something?" Hardesty asked, going from somewhat annoyed to amused.
"No," Mike replied, shrugging. "Just a very 'astute' judge of character. Bit of a hobby figuring out plane drivers' backgrounds."
"And may I ask what your profession is, sir?" Hardesty queried carefully.
"I do odd jobs," Mike replied, sitting in one of the forward seats.
"If you'll pardon me, sir," the pilot said, still curious. "You don't get the money to charter a jet, much less have it sit around on call, by digging ditches with a shovel."
"I've used a shovel in my time," Mike said, smiling broadly. "But I usually prefer to find the local guy with a backhoe. Quicker and easier to hide the bodies. You ready to go?"
"Of course, sir," the pilot said, reevaluating his passenger. "We're refueled. I need to do a preflight."
"Make it snappy, please," Mike said, pulling out his satellite phone. "I'm in a bit of hurry."
"Well, Mr. Jenkins," Hardesty replied, smiling faintly, "it would help if we knew where we were going."
"Someplace in Bosnia," Mike said. "Just head for Sarajevo and I'll try to get a better read when we're in-flight. I'm expecting some calls."
* * *
Mike looked out at the tiny airport that served the town of Herzjac and thought about its recent history.
Herzjac was on the border of Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, just over the Bosnian side. The Bosnian civil war had raged for years, with the various factions gaining and losing ground. As soon as it broke out, the UN, with the connivance of the Russians and certain European countries, notably France and Germany, had slapped a weapons embargo on the entire region. The problem with that was that the Serbians had, traditionally, held most of the military bases and production in their areas. Tito had been a Serb, and while forcing everyone into a "pan-Slavic" society, he had ensured that some Slavs were more equal than others. Since Russia and France had long running ties to the Serbian factions, it quickly became clear that rather than being a "humanitarian" move, the weapons embargo was designed to disarm, and keep disarmed, the "other" sides of the multisided war.
This meant that the Serbians had an immediate jump-start in the war and they had pressed their advantage home mercilessly. Thousands had been killed in the fighting and in "ethnic cleansing" in areas the Serbs overran. Of course, they were not the only perpetrators; when Croats or Bosnian Muslims retook regions that had been "ethnically cleansed" of their families, they were less than gentle with the Serbian inhabitants.
There had been various attempts to bring peace, but it wasn't until the U.S. stepped in, covertly, that peace had actually been possible. The U.S. had secretly supplied the Croatians with training personnel, equipment and even real-time intelligence. Using those assets, the Croatians had retrained their army along American lines and used American real-time intel and "shock" tactics, multipronged heavy armor converging columns, to entrap the main Serb field army and virtually destroy it.
The surprise of having the Croats, whom they had been forcing back left and right, suddenly show such massive competence, not to mention military intelligence and supplies, had driven the Serbs to the bargaining table. At Wright-Patrick Air Force Base, outside of Dayton, Ohio, the Serbs had been forced to sign the Dayton Accords, fixing the borders of their country and those of the Bosnians and Croats and permitting an "Implementation Force," IFOR, to enter the various countries and enforce peace on all sides.
So when IFOR arrived, the obvious place for it to set up was Herzjac, one of the most embattled towns in the war.
IFOR consisted of an American mechanized infantry or armor division, depending upon what was available to deploy, along with a large number of "allied" support personnel. When the Americans arrived, as Americans do, they had first set up a large and virtually impregnable camp in a manner very much like the Roman Legions. But they were in the country to do far more than just enforce peace. The "nation builders" among the State Department, and the military, quickly went to work trying to "rebuild the local economy." Besides letting contracts to local firms for everything from laundry service to construction, they set up a market outside the base. Since the base was named Eagle Base, they naturally named it Eagle Market. It was something of a flea market, initially selling everything from cheap Southeast Asian electronics to shoes. Security was provided by the U.S. military and it quickly was recognized as the most secure such market in Eastern Europe.
It was that security that drew the slavers. Just like drug dealers, slavers had their conflicts. Fights over bad deals, fights over the girls, fights over "turf," fights over bad blood between different ethnic groups or clans. But in Eagle Market, they were on neutral territory. The U.S. military prevented the conflicts from getting out of hand.
The military quickly became aware of what was going on and a very covert discussion broke out. On one hand, the chain of command was horrified. Slavery, especially slavery of rather young and almost invariably pretty to beautiful girls, was against everything the U.S. military believed in. The motto of the Special Forces is De Opresso Liber: To Liberate the Oppressed. But it was a motto that any American fighting man, or woman, would agree with. However, short of eliminating the slave trade, there was no way to stop the dealing from going on. And at least in Eagle Market the military could prevent the worst of sins being committed against them.
So a tacit "ignorance" existed, with American MPs strolling past men with strings of girls, bluntly, for sale. It was uncomfortable on many levels, especially since many if not most of the hookers in Herzjac, whose primary customer base were the enlisted men and officers of IFOR, had passed through Eagle Market. But the situation was still maintained.
As the plane rolled to a stop outside of an outlying hangar, a Mercedes sedan pulled up alongside. Before the customs vehicle could reach the plane, a man in a suit stepped out carrying a briefcase.
Mike saw the sedan inbound and by the time the plane stopped he had the hatch undogged. As the man reached the plane, he flipped down the stairs and stepped back.
"Mr. Duncan," the man said, stepping up into the plane and setting his briefcase on the front seat. "I'm Charles Northcote, the IFOR liaison at the American embassy in Sarajevo."
"Pleased to meet you," Mike said, frowning curiously.
"I have your documents here," the man continued, pulling out a manila envelope and handing it to Mike. "I think you'll find they're all in order."
Mike frowned again and opened up the envelope, spilling it out on one of the seats. There was a diplomatic passport in the name of Michael Duncan along with various secondary IDs. A Florida driver's license, American Express, Visa and hotel "frequent user" cards. All the usual things that a frequent traveler would carry.
He dumped out his pockets and started changing out materials as Mr. Northcote continued to speak.
"You're checked in to the Hotel Krcelic. It's a pensione in Herzjac on a side street. I'll take you there and drop you off after I deal with customs. Mr.
Dukhovic is going to meet you there this evening. He's a former slaver who now does various odd jobs for the embassy."
"An intel source?" Mike asked. "I don't want to burn one of your sources."
"Your cover is that you're a State Department official investigating the slave trade," Mr. Northcote said. "It's well known that Mr. Dukhovic is a source for us. He also is a source for the French, the British, the Russians, what have you."
"Well, we're not investigating the slave trade," Mike said, finishing switching his documents and putting his "real" stuff in the open envelope. "Are you briefed on what I'm here for?"
"Fully," Northcote said, smiling faintly. "I'm the Bosnian Station Chief. And I've got my other sources looking as well. I think it's a long ball play, but sometimes they go right. Oh, and on that subject," he continued, dipping back into his attaché case and pulling out a device covered in wires. "This is a Geiger counter. There's an earbud that can be run up through your clothing. Not entirely invisible, unfortunately, but unobtrusive. The detector goes down your arm and the counter clips to the waist."
"Perfect," Mike said, taking the device.
"I'll go talk to customs while you get the rest of your gear in order," Northcote said, handing him a card. "By the way, technically diplomats are not to be armed. But since you also cannot be arrested, or even detained, carrying is not an issue. Just don't carry anything that can't be concealed. If you run into shooting trouble, call me and I'll call in IFOR. They have an alert team standing by in support, and we have nuclear specialists who are currently in Germany but can be here in a couple of hours. I'll go take care of customs."
Mike dumped the detector in his jump bag and took the envelope to the cockpit.
"The gentleman is going to be clearing me through customs," Mike said to the pilot. "Hang onto this for me and put it in a secure location on the plane. As long as it doesn't leave the plane, it doesn't come to the attention of customs, right?"
"Yes," Hardesty said uncertainly.
