Private Wars

by Greg Rucka

  Chace ignored him. It was a turkey shoot above, she was sure: Kostum’s men trapped in their vehicles, exposed as they exited, and the ambushers using the higher ground of the mountainside for cover. She couldn’t see any movement, but she could hear the weapons fire, and it didn’t sound right. Whoever had hit them wasn’t using Kalashnikovs. The bursts were becoming more controlled, more measured. Whoever was up there killing off Kostum’s men knew what they were doing.

  “We can’t stay here,” Chace said.

  Lankford nodded, checked around them, then indicated a direction farther downslope that would wind back around in the direction the convoy had come. Seeing no better route and no immediate reason not to take it, Chace began leading the way.

  “Who do you think?” Lankford murmured, keeping his voice low. “Bandits?”

  “Sounds too precise,” Chace answered, eyes on the slope. Calling the terrain treacherous was generous, and the last thing she wanted was a broken ankle. “Sounds more like a military strike.”

  “Maybe the Americans? Removing another warlord?”

  “Christ, let’s hope not.”

  The gunfire from above had stopped, the last echoes bouncing away from them, off the mountains. Chace moved behind a substantial boulder, dropped down flat behind it.

  “Sevara?” Lankford asked, dropping down beside her.

  Chace shook her head. The timing didn’t fit, it wasn’t right. If this attack was courtesy of Sevara, she’d have had to move damn fast to make it happen. It hadn’t been twelve hours since Chace had spoken to Crocker in the Ops Room. Even if C had gone straight to the FCO and the FCO had agreed and gone straight to the U.K. Ambassador in Tashkent, there hadn’t been enough time. Not to mention that the Ambassador wouldn’t have wanted to bother the President of Uzbekistan in the middle of the night about this.

  “It’s not Sevara,” she said. “Got to be someone else. Question is who?”

  “It’s fucking Afghanistan,” Lankford muttered, peering around the side of the boulder, the Browning held in both hands. “Take your pick.”

  For several seconds, neither of them moved, listening hard for more sounds of gunfire or combat. Nothing came back to them.

  They couldn’t just sit and wait. Two of the convoy vehicles had been taken out, which meant, as far as she knew, the third was still intact. If it was a robbery, even if it wasn’t, whoever had sprung the ambush wouldn’t just leave it there. If they decided to withdraw, they’d take the vehicle with them, leaving Chace and Lankford stranded.

  And if they weren’t withdrawing, it meant that it was a hunting party who had no intention of leaving the job half done.

  She cursed the fact that she hadn’t moved the Walther to a front-carry this morning. She still had her knife, a folding Emerson blade she’d scored off Kittering in a bet years before, but it required getting very close, and from the sound of the weapons they’d heard, she didn’t think close would be terribly likely. She needed a gun of her own.

  “We need to get back up to the road,” she said. “And fast. Come around behind them.”

  “Don’t want to get stranded,” Lankford agreed. “Figure another hundred yards or so back the way we came, then up again?”

  Chace nodded. “I lost my gun. You’ll have to lead.”

  Lankford slid around her, swapping places. “Now,” he said.

  They broke from their cover, Lankford leading, running low and as fast as they could along the mountainside. The ground was covered with a layer of loose earth and rocks, and the footing remained dangerously uneven. Another chatter of weapons fire bounced off the mountains, but the echo made its direction impossible to determine, and Chace couldn’t tell if the shots were targeted at them, at someone on the road, or at someone else, somewhere else altogether.

  Lankford slid to a stop at the edge of a ravine running down from the road at almost ninety degrees, looked back over his shoulder to Chace. She nodded to him, and he wedged himself into the narrow space, using it to climb. Chace pushed herself into the crevice, trying to keep in cover as much as possible. She looked up toward the top of the ravine, saw Lankford disappear back onto the road, waited for him to reappear, to give her the signal that it was safe to climb.

  Her heart was pounding, and she could feel perspiration running down her back, stinging the skin scraped during the downhill slide. Her mouth was dry from dust, it had filled her nostrils as well, and as soon as she realized that, she had to fight the urge to sneeze.

  A pebble dropped down from above, bounced off her hand, and she looked up quickly to see Lankford sending hand signals her way, telling her to come up, and to stay quiet.

  Chace pulled herself farther into the ravine, chimney-climbed her way to the top. Lankford pulled her the last three feet, onto the narrow road, and she rolled past him, then came up. They had backtracked far enough to be beyond the bend. Black smoke drifted from farther down the trail.

  Lankford tapped her shoulder, started with the hand signals again. Three, no, six men, all armed.

  Jesus Christ, six, Chace thought. We’ll have to draw them out.

  She pulled out her knife, unfolded it, and Lankford raised an eyebrow at her, as if to question her sanity, and the look she gave him in return begged for a better option. Lankford inhaled, then pointed to himself, then down the trail, to the bend. Chace shook her head, indicated herself and the same direction, then indicated Lankford and the rising mountain slope. He saw the wisdom of it immediately, nodded, and began climbing again.

  Chace took a moment to give Lankford time, watching the bend in the road, where she was certain that, any moment, a member of the ambush team would appear. She risked a glance away to track Lankford’s progress. He climbed swiftly, and as she looked he stopped ascending and began making his way alongside, following the bend.

  There’d been a time, when Lankford had first joined the Section, that Chace had thought he wouldn’t make it, that he wouldn’t last. They’d done a job in St. Petersburg together, and he’d blown it, but then again, so had she, and Crocker had been quick to point that out when she’d returned to London complaining about Lankford’s performance. She’d wanted him out of the Section, and Crocker had refused to terminate him.

  At this moment, she was very glad for Crocker’s refusal.

  Lankford crouched down, working himself into cover behind another cluster of boulders, and she saw him glance back her way. She gave him a wait signal, then started along the road, the knife in her right hand, gripped for an upward thrust. She went as quietly as she could manage, which meant going slowly.

  She heard voices as she approached the bend, and it took her a moment to understand the words being said as Uzbek, and not Pashto. So it hadn’t been just a robbery, just an ambush. Whoever this was, they’d come looking for either Ruslan or Lankford and Chace. But Chace was positive it couldn’t have been Sevara who had sent them; it didn’t make sense. The timing simply made it impossible, not unless Sevara had somehow known that Chace and Lankford were with Kostum.

  Just shy of the bend, Chace held up. She took two deep breaths, filling herself with as much oxygen as she could, adjusting her grip on the knife. One of the voices sounded close, and she hoped it was very close indeed.

  She looked up above her, to where Lankford crouched waiting, watching, and gave him the go signal. He returned it, began moving again, this time much more cautiously. The idea was that he’d take a position around the bend but well above the road, preferably one in strong cover. As soon as he had position, he’d open fire, and Chace would move. She licked dust from her lips, waiting. He didn’t have a lot of bullets. He’d have to make them all count, and she would have to work fast.

  Then the Browning spoke, two shots, and someone cried out, and immediately upon that, there was shouting in Uzbek, and a barrage of return fire. Chace shoved off the slope and sprinted, the knife in her right held low and ready.

  The lead and follow cars had been the ones to burn, their carcasses still smol
dering on the trail as Chace came around the bend. There had been six in the ambush team, but Lankford had dropped one with his opening shots, and the man’s death had achieved the desired result. Along the trail, the remaining five were all facing the mountainside, looking up, three of them with M-16s at their shoulders, laying down a spray that chewed the rocks and earth above. Their clothing was closer to Chace’s and Lankford’s than to what Kostum and the others sported, and it confirmed it for her that these men had come from Tashkent.

  The nearest of them was fifteen feet away when she made the turn. He was firing furiously at the mountainside above, and Chace made straight for him. He caught her motion in his peripheral vision at the last second, too late, trying to turn toward her and bring the rifle down at the same time. The result was that he turned into her knife as she drove the blade into him, punching above his stomach, then thrusting up with all her might. His eyes bulged and his arm came down, and Chace yanked both her knife and the M-16 from the man, then dropped her blade, turning the automatic rifle in her hand.

  There was a shout from down the road, one of the gunmen spotting her, and the firing stopped abruptly, and in that split second the scene seared itself into her mind. She tasted her sweat and the cordite and the acrid smoke from the two burning vehicles, saw the man she’d stabbed doubled over, facedown. She saw the others, the bodies of Kostum’s men burnt and shredded by the RPGs or the M-16s, and the gunman that Chris had hit, flat on his back, his left leg tucked awkwardly beneath him, his blood sucked up by the thirsty earth. She saw Kostum himself, slumped against the rear wheel of the Jeep, bloodied and beaten, in the shadow of two men, each with pistols in their hands.

  Two men she knew in her nightmares, one young and big who had grown erect at the sight of her pain and fear, the other older and shorter and disinterested to the point of inhuman. She saw Tozim Stepanov and Andrei Hamrayev, and they saw her at the same moment the other gunmen saw her, and perhaps they recognized her then, perhaps they didn’t, but Chace had no doubts, and she understood it all in that fraction of a second; this hadn’t been Sevara’s doing, it had been Zahidov’s, and that explained everything.

  Then Lankford sprang up from behind his cover and laid down another three shots from the Browning, and another of the gunmen flailed and fell. Chace ducked low, scurrying behind the wreckage of the last car in the line. She brought the M-16 up, butt into her shoulder, and she fired. Tozim was turning and trying for cover but Andrei wasn’t as fast, and the burst caught both of them, cutting across the big man’s thighs and then tearing into the older man’s belly. Both went down.

  Chace advanced around the side of the wreck, M-16 still to her shoulder, and she saw the last gunman crouching in the road, by the Jeep, fumbling to reload his rifle, and she put a burst in his chest. He flopped back, gagging, as the M-16 went dry, and she dropped the rifle as the man fell silent.

  The gray-bearded guard lay on his side near her feet, face half-missing from shrapnel, Kalashnikov still in his bloodied hand. She took the AK, began walking through the bodies, checking for life.

  “All clear?” Lankford called from above.

  “Clear,” Chace shouted back.

  She heard him begin to descend toward her, rattling more rocks down the mountainside.

  Kostum stared at her from where he was slumped against the wheel, holding his right hand in his left, and she saw that one of them, Tozim or Andrei, had put a bullet through it. As she dropped to her haunches beside him, the General smiled at her weakly, saying something in Pashto through bloodied lips, and she nodded, then looked past him.

  Andrei Hamrayev was dead, eyes wide and mouth opened, saliva visible at the corner of his mouth, mixed with his blood. But her eyes were on the bloody smear on the ground, tracking the path of a wounded man as he tried to crawl away.

  “I’ll be right back,” she told Kostum softly, then stood, adjusting her grip on the Kalashnikov.

  Tozim had made it halfway to the ruins of the lead car, dragging himself along, and from the amount of blood he was losing, Chace figured he didn’t have much time. He was sobbing in pain, trying to keep the noise to himself, and she saw a pistol in his right hand, and she almost laughed. It was a Sarsilmaz, maybe the same one they’d recovered from her over six months earlier.

  She watched him crawling, and his progress steadily degraded, less and less ground covered with what seemed greater and greater effort. Finally she set the Kalashnikov silently on the ground at her feet, then moved to him. She kicked him hard in the face with her boot, snapping him onto his side, then brought the same foot down on his gun hand, stomping. Tozim cried out, lost the grip on the gun.

  She picked the pistol up, still looking down at him. There were tears of pain in his eyes. There was recognition on his face.

  Chace thought of all the things she wanted to say, as she checked the pistol, and she was almost positive it was the same Sarsilmaz, and it was loaded and ready, so she pointed it at his right foot. She decided there were no words to say.

  She pulled the trigger.

  Tozim screamed.

  She pointed it at his left foot and fired again.

  He screamed again.

  She tucked the pistol into the back of her pants, leaned down, and searched him. She found his wallet, a pack of American cigarettes, and a plastic lighter. She took all of them, shoving them into her coat pockets. Tozim was babbling at her, a torrent of Uzbek, and when she began dragging him, he tried to break her grip with his bloodied hands. There was almost no strength to his efforts, and when he did finally succeed in grabbing Chace’s wrist, she punched him in the face before she resumed pulling him.

  “You don’t ever touch me again,” she told him.

  She was aware of Lankford watching her, crouched beside Kostum, trying to tend his wounds, as she manhandled Tozim to the side of the trail. The slope was severe here and she looked back down at Tozim Stepanov, and she knew he was begging her not to do it, not because she understood his words, but because she heard the garbled desperation in them.

  It was another sound from her nightmares, and she would have relented then, she would have spared him then, if only, in her dreams, it hadn’t been her doing the begging.

  “Try to land on your feet,” Chace told him, then pitched him over the edge.

  They reached Mazar-i-Sharif seven hours later, and three hours and fifty-four minutes after that, Chace was on a NATO-staffed helicopter bound for Termez.

  CHAPTER 41

  Uzbekistan—Tashkent—438–2 Raktaboshi,

  Residence of Charles Riess

  27 August, 0917 Hours (GMT+5:00)

  Riess answered the door in his T-shirt and boxer shorts, the day’s first cup of coffee in his hand. He’d have been better dressed if he’d been expecting a caller, but it was Sunday morning, there was no need for him at the Embassy, and he’d been up late the night before, watching the better part of a television series he’d ordered off of Netflix, concerning cowboys with extraordinarily foul mouths. He’d dreamed of saloons and the Wild West, and perhaps because it was still so fresh in his mind, the first words out of his mouth when he saw Tracy Carlisle at his door were “Cock-sucking motherfucker.”

  “Delighted to see you, too,” she replied, and then Tracy Carlisle, whose name wasn’t really Tracy Carlisle, smiled at him like they were old friends. She smiled like she was happy to see him. “May I come in?”

  Riess thought about that for a moment, wondering what in hell he’d tell Tower when he was no doubt asked about this, then sighed. He moved back and waved her in, then looked out over his tiny yard to the street, seeing nothing that alarmed him. He almost laughed.

  As if I’d know what I’m looking for, he thought.

  “Coffee’s fresh,” he told her as he moved past, heading back to the kitchen. “I get it from a friend in San Francisco. The beans, I mean, not the coffee.”

  “Coffee would be delightful,” Tracy Carlisle said, following him.

  “You take cream?
Sugar?” Riess opened the cabinet, pulled out a mug.

  “Black, like my heart.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  He set the mug down, filled it from the pot, handing it over. She was looking at him with what he interpreted as vague amusement, and as he stood there, she ran her eyes the length of him, down, then up, then smiled again.

  “I just woke up,” Riess explained.

  “So I see.”

  Riess returned the look, and had to admit he liked what he was looking at. She wore jeans and a black T-shirt, a loose linen jacket, tan. He could smell the hint of soap, saw that her hair appeared to still be damp. Fresh from the shower, he assumed, and straight to his doorstep, but God only knew why. Then he saw what looked like dried blood on the toes of her boots, and had to wonder if the shower had been about more than just hygiene.

  “You probably shouldn’t be here,” he told her.

  “I need a favor.”

  “I don’t do those kinds of favors anymore.”

  “This one won’t cost you anything. You might even like it.”

  Riess laughed tersely. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t believe you.”

  “It’s a favor for Ruslan, Charles.”

  “Ruslan’s in Afghanistan.”

  “At the moment, yes. He wants his son back. I’m here to fetch him.”

  “Oh, God,” Riess said, his mind filling with visions of the Dormon Residence, where the President lived, erupting in flames, collapsing from a missile strike. “The way you fetched them the first time?”

  Carlisle laughed. “You really think I’m a monster, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know what to think of you,” Riess answered honestly. “You show up on my doorstep with bloodstains on your boots, telling me that you need a favor but it’s okay because it’s semiofficial, and it’s about Ruslan, and it’s about Stepan, and the last time I saw you, you were headed for the shower and I was headed out the door. So, no, Tracy, I don’t know what to think of you.”

  “My name’s Tara,” Tracy Carlisle said.