Enemy of the Good

by Matthew Palmer

  There was a burst of static.

  “I read you, Stallion. How’s the drive? Dusty?”

  “Umid, we have a problem.” Ruslan let a note of urgency creep into his voice and used the pilot’s name both to establish his bona fides and to send the subtle message that some emergency had made him grow sloppy in his radio discipline.

  “What’s the issue, Stallion?”

  “There was an attack on the convoy. RPGs and machine guns. We beat them back and killed a few, but we have casualties. One critical. We need an air evacuation.”

  “I can relay the message to base, Stallion. And they can send up another flight.”

  “That’ll take too long. Sascha’s got a sucking chest wound. He’ll die before they can get here. We need you.” Ruslan was acutely aware that he was making things up as he went along, things like the name of the wounded guard. The more he said, the greater the risk that he would say something that would give the game away. But he had to keep talking and not allow the pilot time to think.

  “I have a prisoner on board, Stallion,” the pilot protested.

  “Does she have someplace to be? That bitch will be in Kosh-Dobo for the next twenty years. She can be a little late.”

  There was silence on the other end as Umid considered the options.

  “Sascha reports directly to the Georgian,” Ruslan said in what was either a flash of inspiration or a desperate grasping at straws. But no one, he reasoned, wanted to get on Chalibashvili’s bad side. “The bastard will be very unhappy if he dies.”

  The pause lengthened and Ruslan tried to think of another angle. He was coming up empty.

  “Roger, Stallion. State your position.”

  Ruslan had no real religious leanings, but he offered up a short prayer to Allah and read off the GLONASS coordinates from the screen mounted on the dashboard.

  “I’m ten minutes out,” the pilot said. “Keep him alive.”

  “Thank you, Eagle Flight.”

  Ruslan opened the door to the cab and shouted to the Scythians that they had eight minutes to get ready. Then he turned to his prisoner.

  “Bogdan.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m going to need your clothes.”

  —

  Minutes later, a single helicopter, a Russian MI-8 transport, flew in low and hard, following the bend in the river. Seven of the Scythians were dressed in police uniforms, their original owners stuffed standing room only into the back of the truck.

  “Sorry about this,” Ruslan had said as he shut the door. “But I need the weight.”

  The emergency gear in the truck included a backboard and Ismailov was lying on it, his chest soaked in sheep’s blood. Another half dozen Scythians, Ruslan among them, lay scattered on the ground “dead.” From the air, he hoped, it would look like a scene of panic and chaos. As long as the pilot did not look too closely or start wondering where all the horses had come from.

  Two of the Scythians waved frantically at the helicopter, pointing at a flat patch of ground that made for a suitable landing spot. The only obstacle, a dead raider in a gray head scarf, was easy enough to avoid.

  The pilot settled the helicopter down skillfully and the rotors kicked up a wave of dust and small stones that forced Ruslan to shut his eyes. Otherwise, he did not move. Choking would spoil the illusion of being dead.

  The rotors slowed perceptibly and the cloud of dirt settled on Ruslan’s upturned face. He opened his eyes a crack, but he did not dare turn his head. The MI-8 was no more than ten meters away settled hard on its landing gear with the rotors turning slowly enough that he could make out the individual blades. Deprived of centrifugal force, the blades were starting to bend to the will of gravity.

  The pilot and copilot were visible in the front seats. Ruslan strained to get a glimpse of Bermet, but the MI-8’s windows were too small and the plastic too rough and pitted.

  Four Scythians hustled to the helicopter carrying Ismailov on the backboard. The side door of the MI-8 swung open and a short, squat man in a green jumpsuit beckoned them forward. Ruslan started to crawl toward the helicopter, dragging the cable from the winch at the front of the truck. When he was still five meters from the helicopter, the rotors quickly began spinning and the helicopter started fighting against the pull of the earth. The pilots must have realized that something was wrong. Abandoning any pretense of being dead, Ruslan rose to a crouch and scuttled the last few meters to the belly of the helicopter. He pushed the cable through the frame of the landing strut and wrapped it around the base of the wheel three times before securing it with a chunky carabiner just as the MI-8 gathered sufficient torque for liftoff.

  The stocky crewman in the doorway pulled a pistol from a shoulder holster and started shooting. But it would have taken both great skill and phenomenal luck to hit a moving target from a lurching helicopter. His shots went wide.

  Ruslan ran back to the truck, hoping that whoever had welded the winch in place had been a master craftsman. He also had to hope that the truck designers had not stinted on the armor plate. The MI-8 could lift a sizable load.

  As he settled into the driver’s seat, the helicopter reached the end of its tether and the entire front end of the truck lifted up almost a meter into the air before settling back to the ground with a crash of metal. The MI-8 lost altitude but recovered quickly, and the cable was pulled taut as a guitar string.

  The winch controls were simple. Ruslan tried to reel in the helicopter. The MI-8 was a strong machine, however, and the winch did not have enough power. The motor whined as it strained and Ruslan was afraid that the cable would snap at any moment. The truck was running and he put it in gear, driving forward toward the helicopter. The cable went slack briefly and Ruslan used the winch controls to haul in five meters or so of its length before it tightened up.

  After that, it was like catching a big fish. Ruslan drove backward with the MI-8 fighting him for every centimeter. Then he reversed direction and wound in another few meters of slack. If the helicopter had been armed, it would not have been possible. But the crew did not seem to be carrying anything more powerful than the pistol that had already demonstrated its impotence.

  When the MI-8 was no more than eight meters off the ground, Ruslan pushed it toward a stand of trees. The message was clear. The pilot settled the aircraft down with a petulant thud and the Scythians quickly surrounded it.

  Bermet was the only passenger and she ran to Ruslan, throwing her arms around his neck and burying her face in his chest.

  “I knew you would come for me,” she said.

  “Of course I did,” Ruslan replied, stroking her hair. “No one gets left behind.”

  14

  If Kate had thought that Boldu was going to send her an engraved invitation for a private meeting with the mysterious Seitek or otherwise roll out the red carpet, she was doomed to disappointment. She had heard nothing from Val since their prearranged meeting under the stone bridge in Kara-Su Park to deliver the transfer order with the presidential seal. Val had been visibly impressed.

  “You know, I really didn’t think you were going to be able to do this,” she had said.

  “Gee. Thanks, Val. Your confidence is inspiring.”

  Valentina had stuck out her tongue.

  “Does this earn me an audience with Oz himself?”

  “We’ll be in touch.”

  But they had not. And Kate was frustrated.

  Screw this. She wasn’t the type to sit breathlessly by the phone waiting for some boy to call. She was an American diplomat and she would engage the powers of that position to figure out what the hell was going on.

  The transfer form had included a date. Bermet, the Tier I political prisoner and Seitek’s sometime girlfriend, should have been moved from the central prison to the labor camp at Kosh-Dobo three days ago. Boldu had been planning to intercept the convoy an
d free Bermet. So had that happened? Had Boldu succeeded? Or was Seitek himself now confined to a prison cell somewhere in the dungeons of Number One? From what little Kate knew of him, the Boldu leader did not sound like someone who would put minions at the point of maximum danger while he “led from behind.” Maybe he was dead, lying in some shallow grave in the mountains after a failed rescue attempt.

  There had been nothing in the Kyrgyz press about an attack on a prison convoy. But there wouldn’t be. The press was hardly free. The newspapers published whatever the Eraliev family told them to publish. Television was even worse. So what did the United States government know about what had happened? More to the point, what information did it possess that it did not yet know about? The intelligence community spent some sixty billion dollars a year on collecting and analyzing information from around the world. And that did not even count the classified budget for military intelligence operations and some of the more exotic space-based collection systems.

  The various collectors gathered up significantly more data than the analysts could process. Orders of magnitude more. Often, a particularly interesting or important data point or piece of information would float unrecognized on an ocean of information until it was too late to be of utility. After 9/11, the intelligence community was sharply criticized for failing to connect the dots and provide law enforcement with the leads that might have disrupted the plot. But what was poorly understood by the public and the pundits was that those particular dots were only really meaningful in retrospect. On the tenth of September, those particular dots had not formed an especially alarming pattern. There were, in fact, so many dots that you could draw from them whatever picture you might like.

  Somewhere inside the system, Kate suspected, was some information about what had happened three days earlier somewhere on the road from Bishkek to Kosh-Dobo. All that she needed to do was to find that one particular needle in a haystack-sized pile of needles.

  There was no getting around it. She would need Crespo’s help. The CIA station chief had largely ignored her since their first unpleasant conversation. It might have been possible to avoid talking to him if Kate had been willing to go directly to the ambassador, but that would require dancing around the question of how she knew enough to go looking for a particular event. She certainly had no intention of telling either her uncle or Crespo about “borrowing” the president’s personal seal. And she did not want to lie to her uncle. Lying to the CIA was something else. That was only fair. The boys from Langley were professional liars. They lied for practice. Even, at times, when it was easier and more efficient to tell the truth.

  Rather than try to set up a meeting through his scheduler, which would likely have taken days, Kate walked up to the imposing metal airlock in the basement and hit the buzzer. It was a good five minutes before the angry librarian opened the door.

  “Can I help you?” she asked with a level of enthusiasm that implied she would have been happier to find a group of Jehovah’s Witnesses or vacuum cleaner salesmen buzzing at the station’s door.

  “I’m here to see Larry.”

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  “He’ll want to see me.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s important.”

  “Wait here.”

  Kate spent another ten minutes standing in front of the door tamping down her growing impatience. Finally, the door opened again with a pneumatic hiss, and Crespo’s sour assistant ushered her in.

  The CIA station chief was sitting behind his cheap particle-board desk poring over a stack of paper reports. His jacket was draped over the back of his chair, but his tie was pulled up snug to his stiff collar. There was nothing relaxed about Larry Crespo.

  “Sit down, Kate,” he said without looking up.

  Kate sat on Crespo’s uncomfortable couch.

  “Thanks for seeing me.”

  “You’re persistent,” Crespo said, still giving more attention to the papers on his desktop than to Kate. “I’ve gotta give you that.”

  “Thank you. I suppose.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “I need your help.”

  “I don’t chase geese.”

  “No need. I caught the goose.”

  Crespo looked up at her for the first time. He put down his pen.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I made contact with Boldu.”

  Crespo smirked.

  “Or someone pretending to be Boldu,” he suggested.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Have you met Seitek?”

  “Not yet. But I’m close.”

  “Sure. You keep telling yourself that.”

  Kate ignored the jibe.

  “Well, here’s something you may be interested in. Boldu conducted its first direct attack on Eraliev’s security forces three days ago.” Kate tried to project absolute confidence in this statement with none of the caveats or qualifiers that too often led type A–plus men like Crespo to dismiss the opinions of women as tepid or—worse still—uninteresting.

  “You have my attention.”

  “How generous of you.”

  “But not for long,” Crespo warned.

  “Valentina Aitmatova is, in fact, in a leadership position in Boldu. I believe she may be in Seitek’s inner circle. But I need more time to confirm that. A woman named Bermet, who is reportedly quite close to Seitek, was arrested at the palace when Boldu turned the pigs loose on Eraliev and his cronies. Seitek wanted to get her out. They arranged somehow for Bermet to be transferred to a labor camp in the Kosh-Dobo region, and they made plans to hit the convoy and free her.”

  “Hit the convoy with what?” Crespo asked.

  “I don’t know,” Kate admitted.

  “Why did Aitmatova tell you this? What did she want in return?” It was a shrewd question, but one Kate had anticipated.

  “Val wanted us to know they did it. If the government tried to pin the blame on ISIS, or the Taliban, or some Russian criminal gang, Boldu wanted to be on record announcing the operation in advance.”

  “And you didn’t think to report the conversation at the time?” Crespo asked skeptically.

  “To what end? There was no evidence beyond this one claim, and we weren’t going to do anything about it in any event. We didn’t have a dog in the fight.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I don’t know. There hasn’t been anything in the press about an attack on a prison convoy.”

  “And you haven’t heard anything from Aitmatova?”

  “Not a thing,” Kate said with just a hint of apprehension. Crespo, of course, was trained to pick up on exactly these kinds of clues.

  “And you’re afraid that she’s dead,” the station chief said without any trace of sympathy. “That Seitek’s dead. That they failed to free this girl, Bermet, and instead the government succeeded in decapitating Boldu in a single strike.”

  “Something like that,” Kate acknowledged.

  “And what do you want me to do about that? Ask the local services if they’ve misplaced any prison convoys?”

  “No. Nothing active. I’d just like you to ask Langley to review the database for any information about an incident on the road somewhere between here and Kosh-Dobo over the last three days. I’d like to know what we already have in the system that we haven’t looked at yet.”

  Crespo was quiet as he considered the issue. The muscles in his jaw quivered as he clenched and unclenched his teeth. A nervous habit, Kate supposed. She had never met a man who burned with such nervous energy as the chief of Bishkek station.

  “All right,” he said finally. “I’ll ask. No promises.”

  “Thanks, Larry.” Kate tried to smile, wishing that she was better at it.

  —

  The next afternoon, Kate was sitting in her cubic
le trying to finish a draft of the annual labor relations report when the phone rang.

  “Hello.”

  “Mr. Crespo would like to see you.” It was the angry librarian. Kate still did not know her name and she had never seen her anywhere other than in the world of the subterranean.

  “When?” Kate asked.

  “Right now, of course.” She sounded somewhat surprised that the answer to that question was anything other than self-evident.

  This time the door opened almost as soon as Kate buzzed.

  “This way, please.”

  Wow. Please. Kate was definitely moving on up.

  Crespo was sitting at his desk, wearing the same blue suit, white shirt, and striped tie that he had been wearing the day before. He probably had a closet full of the same cheap suits and the same shirts from Macy’s or Nordstrom’s—extra starch.

  Crespo’s desktop was clean with the exception of three documents spread out in front of him like cards on a blackjack table. Kate sat in the chair directly across from him and Crespo pushed the documents to her side of the desk. They were already oriented for Kate to read.

  “That’s all there is,” he said.

  “What are they?”

  “Two pieces of imagery from NGA. One NSA intercept.” The National Geo-Spatial Intelligence Agency was a little-known member of America’s sprawling and expensive intelligence community. Among other things, NGA was responsible for taking pictures from space. The National Security Agency’s particular area of expertise was signals intelligence, or SIGINT, principally listening in on other people’s phone calls.

  “No HUMINT?” Kate asked using the standard intelligence community abbreviation for human intelligence.

  “Too early. And we didn’t know to ask.”

  “So what’s the upshot?

  Crespo pointed to the picture on the left, a single sheet with a black-and-white image of what Kate could see was a road cutting through improbably steep mountains. The satellites could, of course, take color photos, but the analysts preferred to work in black and white, which offered greater contrast. There were vehicles on the road. Without special training in imagery analysis, however, it was hard to tell what they were. White text boxes with arrows pointing to details in the picture served as a helpful guide to end users like Kate who were policy people rather than analysts.