Scorpion: A Covert Ops Novel (Second Edition)

by Ross Sidor

  For many of the Agency staff present, it made an exciting diversion from their normal daily routine of manning a cubicle or shared office space, and writing or reading reports. They just hoped it wouldn’t take too long. Most of the CIA headquarters staff worked a routine nine-to-five shift, and had anticipated returning to their upper middle-class suburban homes and families in time for dinner and their preference of evening television.

  Matt Culler had already called his wife to let her know that it would be another late night.

  The director of the National Clandestine Service was present, along with the director of the Counterterrorism Center, and the Near East Division chief. So was the president’s national security adviser, digitally, by way of video teleconference from her West Wing office. The national security adviser was unwed, practically lived out of her office, and, despite her lack of experience with intelligence matters, liked to micromanage everything on behalf of the president.

  The pair of MQ-9 Reaper unmanned combat aerial vehicles had been on the Taliban convoy for the last twenty minutes. The GPS tracker Avery had planted on the truck was still transmitting, allowing the Reapers’ pilots and sensor operators to locate the target.

  When the Reapers caught up with the convoy, the trucks had been stopped near the Tajik town of Kulob, about fifty miles north of Afghanistan. Here, one of the Reapers also spotted a man getting into the lead truck. The variable zoom feature on the Reaper’s DLTV 955mm Spotter provided a remarkably close-up and clear image that had allowed for positive identification of Mullah Adeib Arzad. His face was well known to everyone watching in the Ops Center and to the airmen operating the Reapers. He’d been at the top of the White House’s kill list for the past two years.

  But the fervor died quickly out. When the trucks started rolling again, Mullah Arzad was no longer with them. He stayed behind with two bodyguards.

  It was briefly debated whether or not one of the Reapers should kick-off a rocket into the house Mullah Arzad had gone into, but this option was shot down by the national security adviser. They had no intelligence on this place, and she wasn’t going to authorize a strike on Tajik soil that could result in civilian casualties. The administration was already taking plenty of heat for collateral damage from drone operations in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen.

  The Op Center, which had been tracking the GPS signal even before the Reapers were put into the air, reported that the convoy had stopped here for an hour. Analysts took note of the farm, for future reference. It was obviously a safe house for Mullah Arzad, and the Taliban didn’t have much of a presence within Tajikistan, so that likely meant the property belonged to a trusted ally, like the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. This information would be passed to Colonel Sergei Ghazan of GKNB’s counterintelligence section at the appropriate time.

  The four Ural trucks now continued south on the highway in the direction of the Afghan border.

  The weather was optimal for drone flights. The sun had risen early and shined brightly over Tajikistan, and the sky was clear, with high cloud coverage. If someone on the ground looked up and concentrated their attention, it was possible they’d see a tiny, glimmering object hovering in the sky and think it not quite large or fast enough to be an airplane or they may hear a feint buzzing sound. By this point, with over a thousand drone strikes conducted in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Taliban and al-Qaeda were alert for the signs of UAVs in the sky.

  Al-Qaeda and Taliban feared drones the most, even more than they did JSOC search-and-destroy teams breaking into their huts or caves in the dead of night. Like any extensive ongoing counterterrorism operation, the drone strikes resulted in a survival of the fittest situation, whereby the dumb or lazy terrorists were immediately located and killed, and the smarter ones learned from the mistakes of their predecessors and continuously adapted and survived and became ever more challenging prey. Mullah Adeib Arzad definitely fell into the latter category, and he’d likely disappear once he received word of his close call.

  Arrangements were already being made to task the next available drone to the Tajik farm providing Mullah Arzad sanctuary. But it would be two hours before the air force would be able to put a Predator on target, and by that time, there would be no further sighting of the Taliban commander at this location.

  The Reapers, two of them, were deployed from Bagram Air Base near Kabul, where CIA still maintained an active base for launching drone missions against targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan. USAF technicians at Bagram had performed a pre-flight maintenance check on the drones. Then, locally-based air force pilots had steered the Reapers down the runway and put them into the sky and transferred control of the drones to the 432nd Wing’s Reaper command-and-control center at Creech Air Force Base, in Indian Springs Nevada, near Las Vegas. Here, airmen with identical command stations piloted the Reapers by way of Ku-band satellite link.

  Contrary to common misconceptions and poor journalism, CIA does not own or operate the drones it utilizes, and CIA staff does not fly Predators and Reapers from the Langley headquarters building. The drones are owned, operated, and maintained by the air force. Through the CIA Office of Military Affairs, headed by a USAF general, the Agency is able to relinquish operational control over drone missions. CIA also maintains covert bases across Africa and the Middle East from which drones are deployed.

  The possibility of intercepting the trucks and seizing the cargo and taking Mullah Arzad’s entourage alive had been considered and turned down. Thanks to Avery obtaining the registration number of the aircraft that delivered the weapons, it was now clear who supplied the weapons. The GPS tracker would only continue transmitting for another twenty hours or so before its Iridium battery died, and it would take time to organize the ground troops and prepare an assault, especially as US military forces were in the process of withdrawing from Afghanistan and had all but ceased offensive operations.

  And any American military op had to first be approved by a committee of senior Afghan military and security officials. Not coincidently, the Taliban often had advance warning of American military offensives.

  So with a cargo of SA-24 missiles, the national security adviser and intelligence chiefs decided to take no chances and simply eliminate the threat outright, and also deliver a significant blow to the Taliban by eliminating one of its top commanders.

  The convoy reached the Afghan border crossing at 9:14AM, Tajik time. Culler and the others assembled in the Ops Center and at Creech AFB watched unsurprised as the four Ural trucks passed through the border checkpoint without being stopped by the Afghan troops manning the border crossing.

  “I think this is as a good an opportunity as we’re going to get,” the USAF general who headed the CIA Office of Military Affairs observed several minutes later, barely hiding his impatience.

  And D/NCS agreed.

  The targets were well within the borders of Afghanistan now. There was little civilian traffic on the highway, so collateral damage wasn’t a concern. But there were nearby villages, and the Reapers would wait for the convoy to reach a more desolate area, so that there would be no one to witness the strike.

  D/NCS, under Culler’s urging, hadn’t elaborated but had stressed to the national security adviser the importance of keeping the operation quiet. There would be no statements or press releases after this. If Cramer or his accomplices learned the convoy had been hit, they might realize that they’d been compromised.

  The pilots at Creech AFB were ordered to fire their missiles.

  On the main monitor in the Ops Center, a cross hair was centered over the lead truck, which did about sixty miles per hour on the highway. An abrupt white flash suddenly filled the screen, briefly blinding the camera’s photoreceptors. The image was restored a second later, in time for the observers to watch the Hellfire missile streak into the Ural truck and transform it into a smoldering, twisted heap of wreckage. A thick black cloud of smoke spiraled into the sky as the diesel burned.

  The truck’s passengers were likewi
se reduced to microscopic residue that would later be scraped off pieces of scorched debris for examination. The only shame, Culler thought, was that these Taliban never knew what hit him, and they likely never felt a thing, which was far better than what they deserved.

  Two MQ-9 Reapers were overkill, but Reapers never travelled alone on a strike mission. Each drone carried four AGM-114 Hellfire air-to-ground missiles, doubling the armament of the Reaper’s predecessor, the infamous Predator. Each Reaper’s multi-spectral targeting system was capable of tracking and taking out multiple ground targets simultaneously. But like any piece of technology, malfunctions did occur, however rare in the case of the Reapers, and intelligence indicated that the Taliban were in possession of surface-to-air missiles, which would have little trouble knocking a drone out of the sky.

  The Hellfire missiles, originally designed to bust armored battle tanks, made quick work of the Ural trucks. It was almost anti-climatic for those anxiously watching from the Langley Ops Center. For the pilots, it was simply a routine sortie, one of a half dozen such strikes they would carry out that week.

  The Hellfires bored into their targets at over nine hundred miles per hour, at which point their twenty pound HEAT warheads detonated. One second the trucks were cruising down the highway, the next they were obliterated wrecks and piles of mechanical and human debris scattered across the Afghan landscape. The explosions were more spectacular than the usual targets of Toyota Land Cruisers, the preferred vehicle of Taliban and al-Qaeda, or mud brick huts, given the combustible cargo the trucks carried.

  Watching the attack, Culler hoped it wasn’t too little, too late.

  SIXTEEN

  Minsk

  The Antonov’s wheels skidded over the runway, Wednesday, at 8:18AM, three hours behind Dushanbe time.

  Minsk National provided an ideal node for Aleksander Litvin’s operations in Central Asia. The airport was relatively small, making it easily secured by the Belarusian KGB. A scant million passengers came through here yearly, and the airport serviced only eleven civilian airlines, most of which belonged to members of the Commonwealth of Independent States, with the two most frequent of these being Belavia, the Belarusian flagged carrier, and Russia’s Aeroflot. Only two other cargo carriers utilized the small freight terminal, Belarus’ Genex, and Turkish Airline Cargo.

  The Belarusian KGB augmented the security of Litvin’s freight operations, although they didn’t know the details of Litvin’s business. Even Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus’s outspoken anti-Western president, was reluctant to become involved with something as toxic as arming the Taliban. Litvin didn’t fear repercussions should the government discover he was bringing in over a ton of Afghan heroin. He worried only about the enormous cut of the profits he’d be forced to share with corrupt Belarusian officials to ensure his freedom and their silence.

  The last time Robert Cramer had been to Minsk was during the Cold War, as an air force lieutenant serving with DIA. He’d been assigned as a technical expert on the American diplomatic team involved in strategic weapons reduction talks. After, he’d never expected to return to Minsk. Eager, conservative, idealistic, and patriotic then—naïve and misguided he thought now of his younger self—he’d held a particular disdain for the authoritarian, repressive police states that comprised the Soviet Union. Even after the Cold War, he’d viewed Belarus loathsomely, in the same league as other communist despots like Cuba, North Korea, or Vietnam. Now, he held a much more pragmatic view of the world. He thought his younger self incapable of making the decisions he’d made in the past months.

  A Russian crew already waited at the hangar, ready to unload the Antonov’s cargo and transport it to a safe location where the heroin would be divided up and sold to the Krasnaya Mafiya, and the Albanian gangs in the Balkans, for cash, and distributed to the streets of western European cities.

  Cramer wore a pair of dark sunglasses and a plain baseball cap. Four days of beard growth concealed his face. Although Minsk was one of the last places the Agency would search for his body, and CIA maintained only a small, token presence here, he still wanted to go unnoticed. The last thing he needed was some officer from Minsk station who he’d worked with five years ago in Tbilisi spotting him at the airport in one of those “it’s a small world” moments of unlikely, random chance.

  A tall, fit, stone-faced man with Slavic features waited for Cramer in the concourse. Cramer at once recognized the ex-Red Army/KGB pedigree common to members of the Krasnaya Mafiya. The man wore jeans and an open leather jacket so that his holstered pistol was both concealed and easily accessible, not that the local authorities would much care if he was armed.

  The Russian escorted Cramer through customs, and he was waved through without being searched or questioned. Cramer used his forged Russian passport and ID, prepared for him in Tajikistan by Oleg Ramzin, and showed his GlobeEx Transport badge. Cramer knew that there would likewise be no search of the Antonov or inspection or inventory of its cargo.

  The Russian then escorted Cramer outside to an armored Mercedes Benz with tinted windows and delivered him to the Crowne Plaza Hotel, where a suite was already reserved for him under the name on his Russian-supplied papers. The closet contained several fresh changes of clothes in his size, expensive European designer labels that he normally would not wear. A bottle of scotch sat on the nightstand, with two glasses, next to a business card for a local escort agency.

  Against Litvin’s advisement, Cramer declined the presence of a bodyguard. He wanted total privacy and time alone to recharge. He wasn’t concerned for his personal security anyway. He’d worked out of far more dangerous places than Minsk and against agencies far more proficient than CIA or the Belarusian KGB. Plus he knew Litvin would have people stationed in the hotel’s lobby around the clock.

  Most likely, so would the Belarusian KGB.

  This agency remained the only Eastern Bloc spy service unashamed to hold onto the original, tainted name of KGB, and all its negative connotations, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It was fitting, since Felix Dzerzhinsky, who founded and headed the Cheka, the first Soviet security agency, was born in Belarus.

  Cramer took a steaming hot shower, his first in almost a week, and then collapsed onto the king size bed, shut his eyes, and was fast asleep. He awoke five minutes before the alarm clock was set to go off at noon, feeling not quite refreshed but at least like he was able to function for the rest of the day. He dressed in khaki pants and a navy blue polo shirt from his suitcase. Before faking his abduction, he’d arranged with Oleg Ramzin for a weeks’ worth of clothing from his personal residence to be packed and forwarded to Ayni.

  Next, he powered up his laptop and logged onto the Internet. He searched his name on Google News and found several articles reporting the kidnapping and murder of a senior CIA officer in Tajikistan by the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, complete with quotes from the CIA director and public affairs director, mourning his loss and commending his service. There were also reports of a counterterrorism raid in Gorno-Badakhshan by a special American-trained Tajik unit that resulted in the death of Otabek Babayev. The White House would release a statement later.

  That was good to hear about Babayev, Cramer decided. The IMU commander had served his purpose well, but he’d always been too much of a wild card, too unpredictable and difficult to control. His death left no loose ends.

  At 1:00PM, the hotel’s front desk called to tell him he had visitors.

  Cramer immediately went to the door, Beretta in hand and held low, and squinted into the tiny peephole. A minute later, he relaxed and opened the door to allow Aleksander Litvin into his suite. The Ukrainian was accompanied by the towering, shaved headed Caucasian Russian with the spider tattoo, and Litvin’s bodyguard, who was not introduced. Greetings and handshakes were exchanged, with Litvin eyeing Cramer up and down and observing that he looked exceptionally well for a dead man. It was the first time Cramer had seen Litvin in over a month.

  Litvin and Cramer filled the
armchairs around the tiny round table near the window that looked out over the traffic on Kirova Street below. The Krasnaya Mafiya enforcer known as Karakurt remained on his feet, his posture ramrod straight, hands clasped in front of him. Litvin’s bodyguard remained near the door.

  Cramer produced from his pocket a small, black square-shaped device the size of a cell phone, with a short, stubby antenna and tiny LED display. The miniature countersurveillance unit was the latest model produced by CIA’s Directorate of Science & Technology and had a built-in radio frequency locator capable of finding and jamming any audio listening devices within its vicinity. He trusted Litvin, to a certain extent at least, but the Belarusian KGB still bugged hotel suites. Unsurprisingly, the device instantly detected and blocked numerous transmissions.

  Cramer first met Aleksander Litvin during a formal black tie diplomatic reception when he ran the CIA base in St. Petersburg. Litvin attended as a guest of the Russian defense minister. CIA had caught wind of Russian endeavors to arm belligerents on both sides in various African civil wars and tasked Cramer with penetrating the arms dealer’s organization. Given Litvin’s political connections in Moscow, the Seventh Floor later called off the op, under orders from the White House, but Cramer held onto Litvin as a contact, even using GlobeEx, through one of CIA’s Russian agents, to deliver weapons to the Northern Alliance.

  Cramer met Mullah Adeib Arzad during his last Afghanistan tour, when the US Government implemented the Afghan Peace and Reintegration Program, wherein members of the Taliban and other groups were paid cash to disarm and then invited to civilly take part peacefully in Afghan politics. Many of the participants were militants responsible for the deaths of numerous NATO soldiers and Afghan civilians. Not long ago, many had been on JSOC’s capture/kill list. But the diplomats and politicians saw Reintegration as a way forcing a peaceful conclusion to a war they had no interest in winning, and these terrorist and insurgent leaders were welcomed as politicians and community leaders.