by Marc Cameron
Yao gazed out across the water, dizzy, like he might throw up. “Shit!” He shook his head. “I’m the one who asked her to interview Beg. This is my fault.”
“No,” Foley said, her voice weighed down with the exhaustion that came from knowing heavy things. “It is not. I hate to tell you this on the phone, but you need to know. Leigh was tortured before she died, methodically and extensively. Toxicology screen is still preliminary, but the coroner contracted by the embassy found traces of ketamine, midazolam, and scopolamine in her system.”
“Dissociatives,” Yao whispered. “Interrogation drugs. This is absolutely my fault. They wanted to know what she learned from Urkesh Beg . . . Someone should check on him—”
“He’s disappeared,” Foley said. “Could he have had something to do with this?”
“Not from the way Leigh talked when I spoke with her,” Yao said, thinking how that had been just the day before.
“Listen to me carefully,” Foley said. “Whoever killed her wanted information, and we have to assume that they got what they were after.”
Yao chewed on his bottom lip, trying to steel himself against the sudden flood of emotion. Everyone eventually broke under interrogation. Resistance training was about holding out long enough that your handlers could change codes or get assets to safety. No one was expected to hold out forever, not when drugs were involved.
“The mole got her killed,” Yao said, clenching his teeth. “SURVEYOR must be someone who has access to my field reports.”
“You’re partially right,” Foley said. “We’re doing our best to wall you and what you’re doing off from the rest of the intelligence community—for obvious reasons, including the team you happen to be working with.”
“But?”
“But there’s another way SURVEYOR could have found out.”
“How?”
“We’re working on that now,” Foley said. “I’ll be able to let you know next time we talk.”
“Don’t shut me out,” Yao said, knowing he was overstepping his bounds, making demands of a member of President Ryan’s cabinet, not to mention his closest adviser. “Please.”
“You’ll be in the loop the whole way,” she said. “Now we don’t have much to go on. According to my contact at RENEA”—Albania’s counterterrorism squad—“a woman in an apartment overlooking the alley where police found Joey Shoop’s body saw a tall Chinese man in a long coat wearing what she called a ‘gangster hat.’”
“That’s the same general description we got from the Russian woman who escaped the bakery massacre in Huludao,” Yao said.
“Looks that way.” Foley paused again to let him process. She was good that way. A beat later, she said, “We have to assume this guy with the hat is extremely dangerous, and that he’s looking for Medina Tohti. If he knows you went there looking, he may already be there as well.”
Yao agreed to call Foley back with a situation report as soon as was practical, and she agreed to let him know if any new information popped up about Leigh Murphy’s murder.
“Listen up,” he said over the net as soon as he ended the call. “We have a situation.”
* * *
—
I don’t like this,” Jack Ryan, Jr., said after Yao gave them the news. “Lisanne’s out there on her own.”
“Keep trying her phone,” Chavez said. “She’s probably just in a spot with no service.”
“I really want to meet this tall guy with a hat,” Adara mused, still on her binoculars. “He’s—”
She stopped short, watching the hotel. “Smoke break’s over. Our guy is taking a trail off the back lot, heading for the tree line.”
Chavez let the binoculars hang around his neck, thinking, rubbing his hands. The temperature was falling fast as darkness settled in. The Uyghur in question wasn’t that far away, maybe two hundred yards, but the shadows along the edge of the forest rendered him almost invisible to the naked eye.
Yao was clearly preoccupied with the information about his friend’s death. Chavez understood. It was natural to want retribution. Justice. That would come later. Yao was professional enough to know that. He just needed time to process, time they didn’t have.
“What’s back there?” Chavez asked, giving him something to focus on.
Yao snapped out of his stupor for the moment. “Hemu Village. Beyond the hotel to the east. Cattle farms, log houses, very rural, smack in the middle of a nature preserve. The village itself is ten miles away or so, but the map shows several cabins scattered throughout the forest.”
“Lots of chimney smoke hanging out above the treetops,” Adara said. “Good place to hunker down and hide if you were an anonymous freedom fighter.”
Ryan looked up from his binoculars long enough to catch Ding’s eye. “Still four people on the Eternal Peach. How do you want to play this? It’ll be too dark to see soon. Those guys could be spending the night on there, as far as we know.”
“Let’s keep an eye on the boat as long as we can,” Chavez said. “Just in case this Han guy doesn’t pan out as Wuming.” He looked around the parking lot, the plank viewing platform, and surrounding shoreline. Snow fell harder now, huge popcorn flakes, giving the entire valley the feeling of a snow globe. As tourists, the group had made no attempt to hide their curiosity at the sights. As soon as it got dark, people would start to wonder why they were still hanging around with binoculars and cameras. “You and Adara keep trying to reach Lisanne.”
“We could try the sat phone,” Adara said.
“No good,” Jack said. “I’m getting her voicemail, so I have a signal. Either she doesn’t have a signal or she’s not able to pick up.”
“Okay,” Chavez said, thinking over his options. “Maybe they’re giving her the runaround at the police station.” He pitched the extra set of van keys to Ryan. “Give her an hour. If you don’t hear something by then, go get her. Adam and I will head toward the hotel like we’re going to get a tea or something, and then cut into the woods, see where this Han character leads us.”
“Roger that,” Ryan said. “We—”
Adara cut him off. “Hey, guys,” she said, all business, a tense edge to her voice. “Uyghur female at the edge of the tree line. My two o’clock. White ski jacket. Fur ruff around her hood.” Adara paused, took her eyes off the binoculars, blinked to refocus, and then looked through them again, speaking into her hands. “I’m thinking this could be Medina.”
Chavez took a quick look. “Same nose. Dark brow . . . Only one way to find out.” He tucked the binoculars inside his jacket so they wouldn’t swing and started walking. “Adam,” he said. “You’re with me.” He shot a quick glance at Ryan and Adara as he passed them. “Belay that order about picking up Lisanne. Medina Tohti is the mission. Give us five minutes for spacing, then follow at a distance.” He tapped his cheek over the Molar Mic. “Keep trying Lisanne, though. Tell her to get her ass back here ASAP.”
49
Fu Bohai was seated in the back office of the Jiadengyu police station when his man Qiu told him about the woman.
The local police sergeant, a cadaverous fellow with eyes that sank deep in his skull, clicked a few buttons on his keyboard and brought up the lobby camera.
“Ah,” he said. “Yes. One of four Finnish tourists. She came to retrieve the passports for her group. I spoke to them earlier at their hotel. I believe their Chinese guide has taken the others to view the lake.”
“You say they are Finnish?” Fu watched the monitor as the woman exited the front door. He flicked his fingers at the sergeant, getting him to switch to an exterior camera. “Do you get many European visitors?”
“Oh, yes!” the sergeant said, brimming with pride. “Tourists from all over the world to view our magnificent park. Russians, Japanese, even Americans. Our scenery is quite pop—”
Fu held up his hand to shush the babbling fool
and then leaned forward to get a better look at the woman. The sergeant switched from camera to camera, staying with her as she walked down the street, moving in and out of other tour groups, who were out for evening strolls. The footage was remarkably clear considering how dark it was, allowing Fu to see the flashing shift of the woman’s eyes as she studied her surroundings. Periodically, a flake of snow loomed large, almost obscuring the view as it fell inches from the lens.
Fu ignored the local sergeant and spoke directly to his man. “Notice how she stops periodically,” he said. “Turning to face a shop or café window as if to look inside, but . . . there, she casually steps into a shop, and then almost immediately back out again to see if she is being followed. What sort of tourist runs countersurveillance in a scenic park?”
Fu stood, retrieving his hat from the sergeant’s desk. “Follow her,” he said. “The rest of us will go check the tour boats.”
“Yes, Boss!” Qiu pulled down sharply on the hem of his skintight leather coat, making it pop—as he always did after he received an order. Fu had begun to think of it as a sort of salute—and liked it.
50
Hollywood depictions of military vs. CIA bad blood notwithstanding, Captain Alan Brock, team leader ODA-0312, actually got along well with Roy Grant, his counterpart from that Other Governmental Agency.
Stationed at Camp Vance, a stone’s throw from Bagram Air Base in eastern Afghanistan, Brock and his men made up a U.S. Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha, commonly called an A-team. The four-numeral ODA designator, 0312, signified Brock’s team was 0–10th Special Forces Group, 3–3rd Battalion, 1—first company in 3rd Battalion (A Company), 2—second team in the company, in this case, mountaineers and horse soldiers.
ODA-0312.
It was Grant who’d spun up this mission—less than an hour earlier, bursting into Brock’s team room with a contagious air of secret urgency. The guy knew how to get a team excited—without telling them a damn thing. All he’d said to this point was that they were going to “recon up the Wakhan” riffing on the rhyme as he said the words.
Since the Global War on Terror began, cable programs had made much of the notion that Afghanistan was this unconquerable graveyard where every army that set boots on its plains came to grief. Pundits observed that the Soviets became hopelessly embroiled. The British Empire had failed to conquer. Even Alexander the Great had failed.
Brock knew it wasn’t all that simple. Alexander’s Greeks had ruled the area for something like two hundred years—not too shabby, as empires go. The Russkies pulled up stakes and left for a number of reasons, chief among them because of the kickass work that CIA had done arming and advising the mujahideen (though U.S. forces would eventually fight these men’s sons and grandsons). The British Empire of the nineteenth century had suffered some horrific defeats in Afghanistan, but in the end they’d gotten exactly what they wanted, a thin strip of land to separate British India from the Russian Empire in Turkmenistan—the Wakhan Corridor, roughly two hundred and twenty miles long and forty miles wide, wedged between the high Pamirs to the north and the Karakoram Mountains to the south, and terminating at the border with China. The area was so far removed from the rest of Afghanistan that many of the tribes who lived there didn’t even know there was a war on. A portion of the ancient Silk Road, the far-flung paths and trails through the high Pamirs, was still used by the occasional opium smuggler—though there were much easier routes into and out of China than trudging over impossibly high mountain passes in a place locals called the Roof of the World. The battalion S2 had intel on some recent Chinese patrols in the corridor with the Afghan Border Police. The ABP brass denied it, but border guys were hanging way out there by themselves—and the Chi-Comms could be awfully persuasive if they showed up in force and wanted to “help hunt terrorists.”
Brock had inserted into the Wakhan half a dozen times, for recon and training with Afghan forces. It was a wild place—beautiful, and, like much of Afghanistan, something out of an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel.
Now Roy Grant wanted to go on recon for some yet-to-be-explained reason. He was worried about leaks, he said. Moles. He’d brief them on the chopper, he’d said, but pack for a three-day mission.
If it had been anyone else, Captain Brock might have nailed him to the wall until he gave up more than that, but Roy Grant was different. Instead of BDUs or the khaki tacticool pants and polo shirt many of the SAC/SOG guys wore under their rifle plates on missions, Grant had on tan shalwar kameez, the traditional baggy trousers and thigh-length shirt of Afghanistan. Brock and his men sometimes dressed the part as well, when the mission called for it, but generally preferred good old American load-bearing gear. Besides, it was difficult to truly fit in unless you skipped a shower or two and carried around a shitstick like the locals. Brock preferred toilet paper, but Grant went native, the whole shebang, stick and all. You couldn’t blame him. The dude was by himself enough that he needed to blend in to the fabric of Afghanistan. At first, Brock thought it would be unpleasant to ride next to a dude like that on a chopper, but the whole country smelled like woodsmoke and a sewer fire, so he didn’t really notice. Grant spoke fluent Pashto and worked outside the wire enough that the dark beard and local dress had become part of his persona. From a distance, the only way to tell him apart from a local was his propensity to carry around a cup of coffee from the Green Beans on Bagram.
The two men could have been brothers. Both were tall, runner-fit, with workman’s hands and dark, grizzly-bear beards like many of the guys at Camp Vance. As OGA spooks went, Grant was a good shit. Brock wasn’t even sure if that was the guy’s name. He looked like a Roy Grant, but then, this was headquarters for Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force, or CJSOTF—home for both white operations and the more secretive black ops—hence the highest percentage of beards per acre than on any other U.S. military base on the planet.
Brock’s five-year-old son had recently told him via Skype that he looked like a caveman. Brock had agreed and said he wouldn’t have been surprised if a bunch of velociraptors came stampeding over the desolate mountains beyond the base. The brainy little shit had set his dad straight about “humans and dinosaurs not living during same period.”
Brock missed that kid—but if he had to be away from home, this was the place.
When op tempo was high, Camp Vance was crawling with U.S. Special Forces A-teams like Brock’s, along with Marine Recon, Air Force combat controllers, Navy Special Warfare DEVGRU, Delta Force, Task Force Orange surveillance operators, air ops guys from 160th SOAR, operators with British Special Boat Service and, of course, the spooks from CIA Special Activities Center/Special Operations Group. The atmosphere was often like a reunion when the SAC/SOG came in from training. More often than not, the Agency recruited its fresh meat from among the active duty ranks operating at Camp Vance.
Half the guys there could have been named Roy Grant.
At the moment, Captain Brock and his six-person split-A, or half his Alpha team, were dressed in full battle rattle, gunned up and ready to go in the back of a Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk, piloted by two of the Task Force Brown guys from the 160th. Brock had flown with these two before and trusted them to put them where they needed to be, and, more important, to come back and get them when the work was done. The other half of the split, led by Brock’s second-in-command, Warrant Officer Morales, was aboard an identical chopper. Morales had the team sergeant with him. Peplow, the 18F—intelligence sergeant—acted as Brock’s second in Morales’s absence. Once they were on the ground, the team could merge back into one, or remain split—depending on what Grant had in store. Sergeant Peplow had noted when they boarded that both choppers were wearing stub-wing tanks, indicating a mission likely greater than the Black Hawk’s combat range of around three hundred and seventy miles.
Four of Brock’s five men carried M4 rifles with EOTech sights, six thirty-round magazines, SIG Sauer M17 nine-millimeters,
four pistol magazines, thermite grenades, radios, PVS-14 night-vision goggles, ear pros, assorted knives, chemical light signaling spinners, food and water, blood chits, medical pouches, and, among other gear, next-generation poncho liners that helped hide their heat signature. Morales called it the “woobie of invisibility.” Townsend, the weapons sergeant, carried the same basic loadout, but instead of an M4, he carried an FN SCAR-H in 7.62 NATO.
Captain Brock waited for Grant to get buckled in, then tapped his headset. “Okay. Let’s have it.”
Grant gave him a thumbs-up.
“We’re heading toward the Wakhjir Pass.”
“To China?”
“In that general direction,” Grant said. “Two MQ-9s started that way . . .” He checked his G-Shock. “Twenty-one minutes ago.”
Peplow, the 18F, cocked his head. “The Chinese have troops stationed at a Tajik base less than twelve clicks south of the border. They’ll spot the Reapers and us, even if we fly nap of the earth, scraping our gear on the valley floor . . .”
“Maybe,” Grant said. “Maybe not. We’ll be in Afghan airspace, and the Afghans are on board with our trip, being a rescue mission and all.”
Brock gave the CIA officer a wary side-eye. “A rescue mission?” He shook his head and settled back in his seat. “You should have led with that.”
The pilot in command, an Army warrant officer named Avery, half turned from the right seat. The engines were already whining, and he spoke over the intercom, doing one last safety check with his crew chief.
All good in back and gauges in the green up front, he lifted off.
“As rescue missions go,” Grant said, “this one is . . . unique.”
51
Chavez groaned, staring into the trees behind the hotel. “Are you seeing this?”
