The Colonel's Mistake

by Dan Mayland

  He followed the van onto it, slowly gaining ground.

  “I don’t like this,” said Decker.

  “Me neither.”

  As the Niva bounced over the rickety wood planks, Mark squinted, leaned forward in his seat, and gripped the steering wheel even tighter. They were about ten feet above the sea. In some places, there were holes in the road where the wood had fallen away.

  “Ah, you want me to drive, boss?” asked Decker.

  “I got it.”

  “You sure? Because I’m pretty good behind the wheel.”

  “I said I got it. Where the hell are you going?” Mark said, thinking aloud. What was out here? He guessed that the road would dead-end at the last oil derrick, but that could be miles away. The blue sea that surrounded them was disturbingly vast.

  Decker picked up the binoculars and did a 360-degree scan. There was no one behind them and no one other than the people in the van in front. They passed a series of rusting derricks, each one rising forty feet out of the water. Little iridescent oil slicks were visible under most.

  When they’d gone about five kilometers, and the coast was nothing more than a distant brown blur in the heat, Decker said, “Fuckin’ A, there’s a boat out there. Two o’clock.”

  Mark couldn’t see anything. Just waves, a few whitecaps, and an indefinite horizon blurred by low clouds. “Where are they headed?”

  “Toward us.”

  “What kind of boat?”

  Decker fiddled with the binoculars. “Looks like a Zodiac. Hauling ass.”

  Mark’s plan had been to drive to the end of the stilt road, block the way back, and then confront whoever was in the van. “Can you take out the tires from here?”

  “Maybe, but it could send them swimming.”

  Mark glanced down at the water. It looked shallow, but twenty feet was plenty to drown in. “Check the boat again.”

  “Same course,” said Decker. And then, “I can see three men.”

  Mark considered—had someone gotten to Daria’s guards? Someone who inspired more fear, or was shelling out more money, than Orkhan? “Take out the tires.”

  Decker retrieved his Glock from his ankle holster, rolled down the window, leaned his head out, and then shot twice without even appearing to aim. Both rear tires on the van burst. The van veered to the left, but then the driver overcompensated and sent the vehicle careening over the right edge.

  For an instant Daria felt weightless, and then suddenly the bottom of the van slammed up into her with an explosive smack.

  She bolted up in the darkness and fumbled for the rear door handle, hoping the force of what had to have been a crash had somehow popped open the lock. It hadn’t.

  Then came the water—first lapping at her ankles and seconds later rising to her shins. As it reached her knees, she swiveled and waded toward the front of the van, finding in the dark the locked metal door that led to the driver’s compartment.

  She was about to cry out for help when someone ripped it open.

  Blinding sunlight spilled in. A face slowly came into view. Through the windshield of the van all she could see was open sea. She wondered whether she was losing her mind.

  They’d been driving. On a dirt road, she’d thought, bumping over what had felt like potholes.

  A huge hand encircled her arm and yanked her into the open water. The van was sinking, its driver swimming away at top speed. A strange wood road loomed above her.

  “Can you swim?”

  The man who’d pulled her out had an enormous rectangular head and blue eyes. He smiled at her in a goofy way that put her at ease.

  “I think. Who are—”

  “John Decker! Mark sent me!”

  “He’s here?”

  “Up on the road.”

  Daria saw him now. He was staring down at her, looking worried.

  “Get your ass up here!” Mark yelled. “We’re going to have company!”

  Daria crawl-stroked to the road and began to shimmy up one of the thick wood stilts just as Mark appeared from above and extended a hand down. With a wiry strength that surprised her, he hauled her up onto the road.

  Decker joined them a second later.

  “I can’t outrun them in reverse,” said Mark.

  Daria saw the boat—a distant black Zodiac filled with armed men. And that was when she understood how disastrously she’d miscalculated. Dragging Mark into this had been wrong, so wrong. She’d been deluding herself—thinking that it had been some kind of bad-luck coincidence that she’d been with Campbell when he’d been shot.

  It hadn’t been a coincidence. It had been blowback for what she’d done. She’d been a target then, just like she was now.

  “Turn the car!” said Decker. He groaned as he leaned his barrel chest into the front fender. When Mark joined him, the Niva moved a bit.

  “Push!” said Decker through clenched teeth.

  Daria threw her weight into it too and together the three pivoted the car so that it was facing the shore. They all jumped in. Mark threw the car into gear, slammed his foot down on the gas pedal, and didn’t look back.

  A half hour later, Mark pulled onto a narrow dirt road that intersected the highway to Baku and cut between two shallow salt lakes. He stopped at a pumping station near the south lake and parked between the empty building and an enormous wastewater pipe that had once drained toxins from a nearby Soviet factory into the lake.

  “We need a little privacy,” he said to Decker. Then he remembered how the guy had vaulted over the side of the stilt road, and added, “Please.”

  He hadn’t told Decker anything about Daria’s relationship to the CIA, or why she’d been imprisoned at Gobustan.

  “Where do you want me?”

  “Take cover somewhere, watch the road. And let us know if anyone’s coming.”

  Once they were alone, Mark told Daria about the carnage at the Trudeau House, and about what had happened at Peters’s apartment. He finished by saying, “Aside from the support staff at the embassy, the two of us are the only CIA personnel in Azerbaijan. For now at least.”

  Daria put her hand to her mouth as she listened. She was in the passenger seat, still soaking wet. With her black silk blouse plastered to her body, she looked thin and fragile. Eventually she whispered, “I can’t tell you how…” She put her hand to her mouth again, as though trying to stuff the emotion back inside her. He could hear her breathing through her nose. “…how grateful I am.”

  The sun was beginning to go down; it hung low in the sky, a red ball suspended just above the bleak desert.

  Her fingers lightly touched his shoulder.

  Mark was reminded of when they’d met up a year ago, at a crowded bar. She’d touched his shoulder then too—just before slipping a thumb drive loaded with Iranian bank records into his hand. Their faces had been inches from each other when she’d whispered the encryption code, and they’d both lingered in that intimate space for a few beats longer than they should have.

  Afterwards Mark had reminded himself that thinking with one’s dick was a dangerous way to collect intelligence. He reminded himself of that again now.

  “Listen,” he said, “I need you to tell me what was going on between you and Campbell.”

  She pulled her hand away.

  “Nothing. I’d never met him before.”

  “Well, he knew you.”

  She looked confused. “No, he didn’t.”

  “Campbell requested that you translate for him at the convention.”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah, Kaufman told me he called up the ambassador and asked for you by name. Now why would he do that?”

  “I have no idea. Campbell wasn’t even here on government business, he worked for himself as a consultant. It was a joke that I was even assigned to help him, like he couldn’t just hire his own translator. I figured the ambassador owed him a favor or something.”

  “Well, there has to be a reason that a former deputy sec. def. wanted you as his tran
slator.”

  Daria shot him a look.

  “By the way,” said Mark, “I still have my security clearance. And Kaufman authorized you to talk to me.” Which wasn’t quite true.

  “I’m not lying to you.”

  “I didn’t say that you were.”

  “You were thinking it.”

  Mark reflected on the contradiction inherent to Agency fieldwork: that so much of an operations officer’s life involved deception and lies—indeed, being a good liar was a central job requirement—but that when it came to intra-Agency communication, those same officers were suddenly expected to be scrupulously honest. Of course, that didn’t always happen. When he’d been an operations officer, he’d sometimes had difficulty respecting that sharp line between acceptable conduct in the field and acceptable conduct in the office.

  Which is to say that he’d frequently lied his ass off to Langley. There were some things they didn’t need, and in truth probably didn’t want, to know. He’d always thought that Daria was more of the straight-shooter type, but now he wasn’t so sure.

  “What were you working on before this happened?” he asked.

  Daria stayed quiet for a while, then, with some reluctance, said, “Not long after you left, I discovered through one of my agents that China and Iran have come to an agreement regarding an oil pipeline.” She looked out the windshield instead of at Mark as she spoke.

  “From where to where?”

  “From Iran, up through Turkmenistan, then east through Kazakhstan and into China.”

  “They’ve been talking about something like that for a while. And Kazakhstan and China are already connected.”

  “Not at the level they’re planning now. This isn’t just any oil pipeline. It’s huge—four million barrels a day.”

  “Jesus,” said Mark. He knew something about pipelines. A key focus of his job as station chief had been the safeguarding of the BTC—it was the West’s crucial energy link to the Caspian region. But the BTC could only handle around one million barrels a day.

  “Yeah. That’s what I thought.” Daria ran her hand through her hair and glanced briefly at Mark with a worried look on her face.

  “How are they going to fill the thing? Iran hardly even pumps that much oil.”

  “Once it’s built, they’ll get other countries to tie into it. With Kazakhstan’s Kashagan field flowing into it, they could fill the thing. Turkmenistan will probably sign up too. Of course, China’s a long way away and it would be cheaper for the oil to go through the BTC or to get shipped out of the Persian Gulf.”

  “But the Chinese are willing to pay a huge premium for the security of knowing that they’ll be able to get a steady supply of oil,” said Mark.

  “If that pipeline gets built, most of the oil that Iran exports will go to China for the next thirty years. The US and Europe can say good-bye to pressuring Iran through oil embargoes.”

  “How definite is this?”

  “Construction has already started in China and Iran. They won’t make any official announcement until they have to, but it’s well past the planning stages.”

  “Did Washington order you to take any countermeasures? Something that could have resulted in blowback?”

  “No. But I was worried to hell the agent who told me all this would get caught. That’s why I was armed at the convention, by the way, even though Logan hadn’t authorized it. I was worried, Mark. For good reason it turns out.”

  “What about the rest of the station? Were they taking countermeasures?”

  “I would have known about anything big. If you ask me, we should have been taking countermeasures, but you know Kaufman. He’s not going to stick his neck out. Maybe the Near East Division was doing something, but if they were, Central Eurasia was out of the loop.”

  Daria went back to staring out the front windshield, looking worried. And angry.

  As Mark studied her face, the feeling of dread that he’d felt in Peters’s apartment washed over him again. He wished that Daria would just walk away from all this. Go back to the States, get a real job, marry someone decent, have a few kids, and enjoy life. She was young enough that she could still do it.

  It’s not worth it, he wanted to tell her. People had been killing each other over control of Central Asia and its resources for nearly two hundred years. First it was the British versus the Russians, then it was the Americans versus the Soviets, and now it was a free-for-all, with Russia, China, and the West all clawing at each other’s throats over oil. It was the latest incarnation of the Great Game—and it would be played the same way it always had been played, with or without her.

  She wouldn’t get out, of course, any more than he would have packed up and gone home himself if someone had told him to twenty years ago. She still believed that there was some larger purpose, that she was making a difference, that it wasn’t just people killing each other over money.

  Mark said, “So Iran and China have a huge pipeline deal going on, we’re not doing anything about it, and that’s all you know?”

  “That’s all I know.”

  “Fuck it. I’m gonna get to the bottom of this, Daria.”

  They bought clothes and essentials in Baku and paid cash for two rooms at the Absheron Hotel. A sixteen-story monolith, it had been the place to stay during the Soviet era but was now a worn-out has-been. It suited their purposes perfectly, though, because the different floors were managed by different hotel operators who barely noticed who was coming and going.

  Inside Daria’s room on the eleventh floor was an ancient refrigerator that sounded like a diesel truck when it kicked on and a stained carpet that looked as though it had been installed around the Brezhnev era. The bathroom, another Soviet relic, featured rusted pipes, a wobbly toilet, and cracked tiles.

  But there were clean sheets, hot water, and a view. The Absheron overlooked the Caspian Sea and the hulking Dom Soviet, the old communist government building which was now a largely deserted curiosity, still waiting its turn, along with the Absheron itself, to be gentrified with new oil money. In front of the Dom Soviet lay a vast asphalt parade ground where the Red Army used to goose-step behind missile launchers.

  Mark followed Daria to her room. He walked to the balcony and drew the blinds closed as she stuck a new SIM card into his cell phone and proceeded to make a series of calls. She spoke in Azeri, Farsi, and even a little Chinese, reflecting the multiethnic composition of her foreign agents, of which she had many.

  Using coded language, she was able to set up meetings with the few agents she dared to call directly; the plan was to see if they had any leads on the source of the violence. Then she announced she was going to cut and dye her hair.

  “What time’s your first meeting?”

  “Ten tonight.”

  “Decker and I will follow you, play backup.”

  “Thanks, but my agents expect me to meet them alone.”

  “We’ll be discreet.”

  “I said my agents expect me to meet them alone.”

  With that she went into the bathroom and shut the door.

  After a minute, Mark knocked. Daria cracked the door and he opened it the rest of the way. She was standing in front of the mirror with a pair of scissors in her hand, cutting four inches off her hair and letting the clippings fall into the sink below. The faucet was shut off but a drip was making a sound like a metronome, slowly boring a hole in the base of the sink.

  Mark had read Daria’s 108-page personnel file twice. And she’d reported directly to him for over a year. So he figured he knew her pretty well. An idealistic overachiever who was plenty smart enough to drive herself nuts was how he’d pegged her. She was also a bit of a loner, probably due to the fact that she was half-Iranian by blood and that as a kid she’d been mocked for her ancestry—until she hit puberty that is. After that no one cared where her mother had come from. Instead it was her beauty that set her apart.

  On the flip side, he didn’t think Daria really knew him. For starters, she’d
had no access to his personnel file. And as her boss, he’d presented himself as a by-the-books, asexual, analyst-type guy who came to work on time, rarely drank, was scrupulously honest with his operatives, and wholeheartedly believed in whatever mission he was sending her out on. They’d only met in person a couple of times a month, for maybe an hour at a time, so it had been relatively easy to maintain those fictions.

  Now he wondered whether his professional persona was preventing her from telling him everything she knew. Or whether there was something else going on.

  “Did anything happen at the prison that you want to talk about?”

  “No.”

  “No nothing happened, or no you don’t want to talk about it?”

  “They pushed me around at first, but after you came last night there was no more of that.”

  She clipped off another lock of hair and it fell into the sink.

  “Did you know any of the other ops officers well?”

  He didn’t think she had. In Baku, security concerns had limited the ability of CIA personnel to interact, especially for those operating under nonofficial cover.

  “Well enough.”

  “Is that what’s bothering you?”

  “Isn’t all this bothering you? I mean, the entire station got wiped out. Are you human?”

  He considered her reactions to his questions: she was making eye contact; she wasn’t touching her throat or face; her expressions seemed genuine. But Daria knew the obvious signs of lying as well as he did. The fact that she wasn’t exhibiting any didn’t tell him much.

  “I’m just trying to figure this out, Daria.” Was he just letting Kaufman’s doubts about her get to him? Making something out of nothing?

  Or had he been a complete idiot to have trusted her in the first place?

  Because there had to have been a reason why Jack Campbell, just a few hours before getting shot in the head, had requested that she be his translator.

  They stood there silently, with Mark looking at Daria and Daria looking at herself in the mirror, until Mark said something he hadn’t planned on saying.