Private Wars

by Greg Rucka

  It was why he was in Termez now.

  The problem was—or had been, until that morning—there was no proof at all it was Ruslan behind these attacks.

  Then Andrei had woken him before dawn, rousing Zahidov from a lonely, fitful sleep. He’d told Zahidov that the Ministry had received a call from Captain Oleg Arkitov in Termez, that the captain had in his custody a Pathan who swore he’d seen Ruslan Malikov to the south of Mazar-i-Sharif, enjoying the hospitality of General Ahmad Mohammad Kostum, an ex–Northern Alliance commander and one of the more notorious warlords of the region. That the Pathan in question, a man using the name Hazza, had successfully identified Ruslan Malikov from a set of photographs.

  Proof, at long last, but Zahidov needed to hear it for himself.

  He turned to Arkitov, saying, “I want to speak to Hazza.”

  They went by armored personnel carrier from the bridge to the barracks, Zahidov riding with Arkitov and four of his rangers. The soldiers sat on their benches, their automatic rifles in hand, bored. After the extremists had tried to overthrow the country in 2000, the Uzbek Army had been redeployed and remodeled, breaking away somewhat from its Soviet antecedents. Now the soldiers here in the south, the rangers, imitated the Americans, in training, unit composition, and tactics.

  Zahidov looked back at the bridge, the only ground route joining Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. Friendship Bridge, the Soviets had called it, although the Americans had tried to rechristen it “Freedom Bridge” once their war against the taleban began. It was the Soviets who had built the bridge, who had established this sole land crossing of the 130-mile-long border between the two countries, formed by the Amu Darya. It was over this bridge the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan in 1979, and it was over this same bridge that they had limped back ten years later, defeated. It was a refugee bridge, had seen thousands of Afghanis cross it, fleeing both the taleban and the Coalition. It was a terrorist’s bridge, one of the ways al-Qaeda foot soldiers used to infiltrate his country.

  When the Americans had secured the rights to use Karshi-Khanabad, they’d argued for the bridge to be reopened. The UN kept offices in Termez, both for UNICEF and UNESCO, and the organization continued to use the city as a staging point for distribution of humanitarian aid to Afghanistan. The International Security Assistance Force, ISAF, resided in Termez as well, its efforts more focused on the military than the humanitarian. Staffed by the Germans, Airlift Detachment 3 had supported Operation Enduring Freedom since the war’s start. The Germans had renovated the old Soviet airfield, built their own infrastructure, pouring millions of euros into Uzbekistan in the process.

  The APC jostled Zahidov as it made its way back into town. He was sweating already, could feel beads of it trickling down from his hair along his spine, inside his cotton shirt. Nowhere in Uzbekistan got hotter in the summer; the temperature today was liable to hit 49 Celsius, over 120 degrees Fahrenheit, and that was cooler than it had been for a week.

  Just another of the thousand reasons that Zahidov hated Termez.

  They disembarked at the Border Watch HQ, a cluster of Soviet-era buildings that had served as command post, once upon a time, for the ground soldiers being deployed into Afghanistan. Now it was staffed by Arkitov and his rangers.

  The captain led him from the garage into the air-conditioning of the dormitories, entering a common room with television and tables. The television was on, broadcasting the news, but the room itself was unoccupied. They moved into a hallway, and Arkitov led him to a door, knocked once on it, then opened it.

  There were three men inside, two of them rangers, and both of them were coming to their feet before the door had fully opened. Both snapped salutes to Arkitov, and he dismissed them, then nodded to Zahidov and stepped out after them, closing the door once more, leaving Zahidov alone with the man who remained.

  “Hazza?” Zahidov asked.

  The man nodded to him, eyeing him with blatant suspicion and fingering the Kalashnikov resting across his thighs. Zahidov guessed him to be in his late thirties, perhaps older, but with the Pathans, after a certain age, it was hard to tell. They were the ethnic Afghanis, sometimes called the Pashtun or Pushtun, a collection of peoples that together constituted the largest patriarchal tribe in the world, and a fierce enough enemy to have driven the Soviets out of their homeland.

  “When do I get paid?” Hazza asked.

  Zahidov pulled out his PDA, brought up the picture of Ruslan he’d stored there. “This is the man you saw with General Kostum?”

  Hazza squinted, and Zahidov wondered if his eyes were bad, if his ID would be useless. In July, Zahidov had ordered Arkitov to begin circulating rumors of a reward, paid to anyone who could prove he had seen Ruslan Malikov. If it was greed that had brought Hazza here, then his information was, by necessity, suspect.

  “Looks like him,” Hazza said, after a second. “But he has a beard now, and covers his head.”

  Zahidov considered, tucking the PDA back into his coat. “When did you last see him?”

  “Yesterday. He took tea with the General.” Hazza’s suspicion had not eased. “When do I get paid?”

  “When I believe you.”

  Hazza’s expression clouded with anger, and he gripped the handle of his rifle. “You insult me.”

  “Prove to me that you’ve seen the man.”

  “My word is not enough? You insult me again.”

  “You will get paid after I have proof.”

  Hazza scowled, scratched at his beard with a filthy fingernail. “He limps. His left leg, it has a brace. I asked once how he was wounded, and he said it came trying to protect his son from the godless.”

  “More.”

  “I asked about the battle, and he said Allah smiled on him but also turned away, because he lived, but his son was taken from him. He said his wife and his son both were taken from him by a godless man.”

  “He speaks like a good Muslim. Is he a good Muslim?”

  “He tries to be.”

  Zahidov ran his tongue along the back of his teeth, measuring the words. It sounded possible, it sounded like Ruslan, self-righteous and simpering, taking shelter in religion in the face of his losses.

  “And Kostum?” Zahidov asked. “What is his relationship with Kostum?”

  “Kostum has Uzbek blood, they are brothers. They talk as friends, and the money Kostum gets makes him like Ruslan all the more. He will not betray your man, he has given him sanctuary. If Kostum betrays him, his life is worth less than a goat’s.”

  Zahidov digested that. “Thank you. I’ll see that you are paid.”

  “Soon,” Hazza said. “I must return before they can learn where I have been.”

  “You’re going back there?”

  “Yes, as soon as I can.”

  “I will see you are paid immediately then,” Zahidov said, and stepped out of the room, to find Arkitov and the two soldiers waiting in the hall.

  “He had what you needed, Minister?” Arkitov asked him.

  Zahidov nodded, then indicated over his shoulder at the closed door. “I don’t want him warning Malikov or Kostum. Kill him.”

  Arkitov nodded, and signaled to the soldiers, then joined Zahidov walking down the hall. They heard the shots before they were back in the common room, and neither of them looked back.

  “He’s building an army, I’m more sure of it than ever, Sevya,” Zahidov said. “He will wait until he has the men and the guns, and then they will come over the border, and they will come here, and they will try to kill you.”

  “You believed this man?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  Sevara frowned, shook her head slightly, then waved past him at the secretary standing in the doorway of the office, dismissing the man. Zahidov watched him go. The secretary was in his mid-twenties, and far too attentive to the President for Zahidov’s comfort.

  “Could there be another reason?” she asked him when they were alone.

  “Why else take the heroin, Sevya? He’s selling it
and keeping the money, using it to fund his eventual offensive. There is no other explanation.”

  She shook her head again, this time with more certainty. “No. It would be too foolish.”

  “Why?” He struggled, managing to keep the frustration from his voice.

  “In 2000, there was no ISAF, no Coalition. In 2000, it was possible to come from the south and meet little to no resistance. Now if you come from the south, you meet the Germans in Termez and the Americans in Karshi. No—it makes no sense.”

  “It makes perfect sense,” Zahidov countered. “For just those reasons. Think how such a move would humiliate you, think how it would look to the rest of the world. It would make us—you—look insecure, even incompetent. And if Americans or Germans died as he came north?”

  “Then the Americans and the Germans and all the rest, they would join us in destroying him.”

  “And every extremist from Pakistan to Chechnya would come and join him. There is no way this is good, Sevya, there is no way we can continue to ignore this! We must act.”

  “How? How do you suggest we do that, Ahtam? You let him get away once, and now he’s in Afghanistan. Are you going to send one of your men after him? You think that man would stand even the slightest chance of success, assuming he could find Ruslan, assuming he still is somewhere around Mazar-i-Sharif? If you know all these things about his plans, then surely Ruslan must have considered that. No. As long as he remains in Afghanistan, we cannot touch him.”

  Zahidov stepped closer to where she stood by the windows of her office, looking out at the courtyard of the Presidential Residence in the Tashkent suburb of Dormon. It was late afternoon, the sunlight slanting through the glass and making her hair burn like copper.

  “If we wait for him to leave Afghanistan, it will be too late,” Zahidov said. “You could use Stepan.”

  Sevara shot him a look of warning. “No.”

  “Just take him out in public with you, have pictures taken of the two of you together. The President and her beloved nephew. Ruslan will get the message.”

  “I won’t use the boy that way,” she said. “Bad enough that he was photographed at the concert last week.”

  “It does him no harm—”

  “He wakes crying every night, Ahtam! He has nightmares, he still calls for Dina, he calls for my brother! I won’t hurt him any more, I can’t do it. He’s my nephew, he’s the only family I have left.”

  It struck at Zahidov, and he spoke before he meant to, saying, “So divorce Deniska instead of promising me that you will. Let me give you the child you want, let us make the family we talk about having! It’s been three months since you were elected, you can do it now, no one would dare say anything!”

  “Soon, not yet.”

  “When?”

  “Soon,” she repeated sharply. “And we will not discuss using Stepan again, Ahtam. Is that clear?”

  “Then we have nothing to hold over Ruslan.”

  Sevara moved away from the window, nearer to him. “There must be a way to remove him.”

  “If you had let me, I would have removed him long ago,” Zahidov reminded her. “You would never be threatened like this. I could remove Denis, too.”

  She slapped him, and the blow surprised more than it hurt, knocking his glasses askew, and he stepped back, shocked.

  “Don’t even think of it,” she hissed at him. “Do you know what trouble you have made for me already? Do you know how the Americans watch me now? Watch us? You cleared the way for me to sit in this office, but you left a mess behind you, Ahtam.”

  He touched his cheek, feeling it burn. The first time she had touched him in weeks, and it was to strike him, and for a moment, he thought he felt tears trying to rise, and that both shamed and enraged him.

  “I did it for you, Sevara.”

  She took a breath, then spoke to him again, her voice softer. “The man from the American Embassy, the one who took the woman spy away. Do you know what would have happened if he had arrived five minutes later? Or ten? Or an hour? Can you imagine the nightmare for me that would have been? The Americans and the British both, can you imagine it?”

  She touched his cheek where she’d struck him, her fingertips light on his skin. He could feel the cool of her enameled nails against the burning of his cheek.

  “You pick your targets badly, Ahtam,” Sevara said. “It makes you look like a thug.”

  She pulled her hand away. “Go back to work,” she told him. “I’ll find a way to handle Ruslan. I’ll speak to the Americans; they don’t want to see him opening the south to extremists.”

  Zahidov stood for a moment, reeling, in the grand space of her office, then did as she’d instructed. He looked back to her as he went through the door, hoping she would raise her eyes to his, that he would see some forgiveness, some sign of her love.

  But Sevara never looked up.

  CHAPTER 33

  London—Victoria Street, Number 75b, Pret a Manger

  22 August, 1301 Hours GMT

  “Salmon or Thai chicken?” Seale asked.

  “Salmon,” Crocker said.

  “The salmon’s for me.”

  “Then why’d you offer?”

  “I was being polite.” Seale handed the Thai chicken sandwich over, along with a can of Coke. “You want to eat here?”

  “We could find a bench.”

  “It’s air-conditioned in here.”

  “You’re offering me choices where you’ve already determined the response,” Crocker observed, following the American to one of the square metal tables in the corner of the eatery.

  The table had just been vacated, and Seale swiped crumbs from its surface with his left hand, holding his own sandwich and soda together in his right. Satisfied the surface was now clean enough to eat off, he sat, spreading a paper napkin like a small tablecloth, then unfolding another onto his lap before tearing open the plastic container that held his meal.

  “You keep making the wrong choice,” Seale said.

  “Story of my life.” Crocker sat opposite, cracked open his soda. “What’s up?”

  “Ruslan Malikov is in Afghanistan, somewhere in the northern part of the country, we think near Mazar-i-Sharif.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  “Chace will be pleased,” Crocker said, tucking into his sandwich. It wasn’t bad, just not what he’d have chosen for himself.

  “She won’t be for long,” Seale said, around his own mouthful. “We’ve got a problem, Paul. It looks like Ruslan’s recruiting and arming his own militia in an attempt to overthrow his sister. He’s been cozying up to one of the local warlords, Ahmad Mohammad Kostum, as well as working with some of the dope peddlers, selling heroin for financing.”

  “Someone should tell him to knock it off.”

  “Yeah, we’re thinking the same thing.” Seale wiped his mouth with the napkin from his lap. “So who are you going to send?”

  “Me? You found it, it’s yours. Besides, you’ve got your set crawling all over Mazar-i-Sharif.”

  “And we’ve worked long and hard to earn the trust and cooperation of the people there, so we’re not looking to foul it up. Besides, we didn’t turn Ruslan loose, that was you.”

  “Foul it up how?”

  “Telling him to knock it off is the nice way to put it, Paul. Ruslan’s got to be firmly dissuaded, if not permanently.”

  Crocker stopped his can halfway to his lips, staring at Seale. “You want him removed?”

  “Me, I don’t know the guy. But, as has been said twice already, he’s got to knock it off. He charges at his sister, he’s going to be kicking the door into Uzbekistan wide open for every extremist in the region to follow. And despite Tashkent’s eagerness to blame everything that goes wrong in their country on terrorists, there is a legitimate threat there.”

  Crocker thought, then took the drink he’d paused on, set the can down, shaking his head. “I’m not going to get authorization to hit Ruslan.”


  “You don’t have to hit him, you just have to get him to—”

  “—knock it off, yes, I understand. But you’ve just told me it’s going to have to stick. Which means we’re not talking about possibly removing him, we’re talking about definitely removing him.”

  Seale tucked the last bite of his sandwich into his mouth with an index finger, chewed, swallowed. “Dammit, these are good. I love this country—you get salmon and butter sandwiches as fast food.”

  “Julian.”

  Seale wiped his mouth again with the napkin, crumpled it into his fist, making it vanish. “I know you don’t like it, Paul, but I’m getting stick from Langley. The sentiment there is that this is your mess, you guys need to clean it up.”

  “How legitimate a threat is he?”

  “Legitimate enough that it has to be addressed.” Seale checked his watch, then rose. “I’ve got to get back to the office. Call me when you’ve got good news.”

  Crocker watched him go, threading out of the little restaurant through the lunch hour crowd. He thought about finishing his lunch, but discovered he’d lost his taste for it.

  “No, he’s right,” Alison Gordon-Palmer told him. “It is our mess, and we do have to clean it up.”

  “We’re talking about putting an agent into Afghanistan to kill a man under the protection of Ahmad Kostum. A man whose life, six months ago, we were trying to save.”

  C nodded. “And if Chace had been successful, we wouldn’t be in this situation.”

  If she had been successful, Crocker thought, you wouldn’t be sitting in that chair right now, either.

  “We can hardly blame Chace for this,” he said.

  C rose, capping the pen in her hand as she did so and dropping it on the blotter. “I’m not blaming Chace, Paul, nor am I blaming you. But the fact remains, the situation with Ruslan Malikov would not be what it is if we hadn’t become involved. The Americans expecting us to clean it up isn’t an unreasonable request.”