Stalin's Final Sting

by Andrew Turpin

  As the aircraft descended further, Johnson looked out the window over the city that had battled so hard, and in vain, to retain security and normality in the face of constant waves of Taliban attacks in recent years.

  They were now quite low in their approach to Kabul International Airport. His attention was caught by a black car racing westward toward Kabul along the two-lane divided highway, swerving to overtake other vehicles.

  From somewhere ahead of the car there was a large puff of black smoke, and a truck appeared to jackknife and roll over. The car swerved to avoid the truck. Then Johnson noticed another puff of smoke, this time from a minibus ahead of the fast-moving car, and a second later the minibus erupted in a ball of orange flame.

  The aircraft passed directly over the highway as it came in to land, causing Johnson to lose sight of what happened next.

  He turned to Jayne. “I’ve just seen a couple of serious smashes on the highway down there,” he said, jerking his thumb downward. “Looked like there were explosions on the road or something. Clouds of black smoke coming up and a minibus caught fire.”

  Jayne looked up. “Probably normal for Kabul,” she said in her whiskey-low voice.

  “Didn’t look normal.”

  She shrugged. “Maybe a car bomb or RPG attack—they happen all the time.”

  Nothing much fazed Jayne. And it was true—there had been a continual string of attacks by the Taliban and other insurgent groups on American military and civilian vehicles. These tended to involve vehicles packed with explosives or rocket-propelled grenades fired from ambush points along the road.

  For both of them, it was their first visit back to the region since 1988. At that time, Johnson had been a CIA case officer in the Directorate of Operations’ Near East Division, working out of the Pakistani capital Islamabad with occasional covert sorties across the border into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. He had applied for the role inspired partly by disgust at the way the Russians had carried out a virtual genocide across the country. The posting, which began in June 1986, was his first overseas role with the CIA, which he had joined in 1984. Jayne, also based in Islamabad, was an officer for the British Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6—she had also been Johnson’s girlfriend for a short while.

  Now their roles were somewhat different. Johnson was a freelance investigator, specializing in war crimes, and Jayne had worked with him on several projects. Both had come to Afghanistan for an exhausting series of interviews, presentations, and meetings over the previous two days in Mazar-i-Sharif about a potential consultancy contract with the International Criminal Court. The ICC was considering a full-scale investigation into war crimes committed in Afghanistan by all sides during the current ongoing conflict—not just the Taliban and other factions but also US, British, and other NATO military forces—since 2003, when Afghanistan joined the ICC. The contract, if secured, would involve running a significant portion of the research work required.

  Although confident, they both now had to wait a couple of weeks to find out whether they would win the contract. Privately, Johnson agreed with the many human rights campaigners who argued that the scope of the proposed inquiry was too narrow. He and the campaigners thought that the Afghan government should extend investigations into human rights abuses back to 1978, when the Soviet army invaded the country. But that was never going to happen.

  Johnson popped a mint into his mouth as the aircraft touched down on the Kabul runway. While the plane was taxiing toward the terminal building, the pilot made an announcement over the intercom in the same respectable albeit heavily accented English he had been proudly deploying at intervals during the flight.

  “I have some unfortunate news for passengers who are traveling onward by road into Kabul city center. We have just been informed there has been a security incident on the highway outside the airport. There may be delays while the authorities deal with the situation. I would like to apologize to all of you for this. There will be updates available when you get into the terminal building. Thank you for flying with Ariana Afghan Airlines.”

  Chapter Two

  Tuesday, May 28, 2013

  Kabul

  The windshield of Yuri Severinov’s black Porsche Cayenne 4x4 had a spiderweb of cracks where it had been hit by flying debris, and the driver’s side wing panel was heavily dented where it had clipped the bumper of another car.

  Severinov accompanied his Afghan chauffeur and his head of security in Afghanistan, Ivan Lvov, who had been in the car along with his close protection bodyguard, on a quick inspection of the damage. The vehicle was now parked behind a maintenance hangar at Kabul International Airport.

  He knew he was lucky to still be alive. Thankfully, the chauffeur, a highly skilled driver, had managed to avoid a minibus slightly ahead of him that had been hit by some explosive device on the highway heading toward the airport. Severinov guessed it had most likely been a rocket-propelled grenade. That had come just after his driver had miraculously avoided a jackknifing truck that also appeared to have been hit by an RPG.

  Severinov was certain that the two missiles were not intended for the minibus or the truck. They were aimed at his Porsche. The distance between the two strikes was at least three hundred meters, and his was the only vehicle close to both of them. It was no coincidence.

  It was likely that he had been saved by the speed at which his chauffeur had been driving, making it difficult for whoever had launched the missiles to aim accurately. So he had survived, and several other innocents had undoubtedly died.

  Severinov shook his chauffeur’s hand and nodded his head in acknowledgment. “Thank you. You did a good job,” he said in Pashto, because the Afghan spoke virtually no Russian.

  He surveyed the damage once more. “Take the car and get it repaired,” Severinov said. “Then get it back to Sherpur as quickly as you can. I will need it on my next visit.”

  “Of course, sir,” the chauffeur said. “You have been watched over by Allah today, that is certain.”

  Severinov stifled a grin and ran his fingers through his wiry dark hair, now heavily mottled with gray and receding down both sides. “Yes, of course. He watched over us both very well. Off you go.”

  Two months earlier, Severinov had bought a new nine-bedroom, four-story, luxury villa on a hillside in the Sherpur Cantonment area—known among US expatriates as the Beverly Hills of Kabul—a kilometer or two west of the embassy district. It would be perfect if he needed to live in the city in the future, which he anticipated would be the case. There was enough space there for him and his staff, although unlike many other Russian oligarchs, Severinov tended to travel with a minimal number of assistants. Lvov, who had his own suite of rooms at the villa, had installed an array of high-tech security devices, including infra-red intruder detection alarms and eye-retina and fingerprint entry systems.

  At around the same time he had bought a safe house—actually a small concrete and brick business unit on a site protected by a high brick wall and razor wire—from a fellow Russian entrepreneur. It was just off the Kabul-Nangarhar highway in northeastern Kabul, only about four kilometers from the airport. It was ugly, and the previous owner had been only partway through converting it into a residential property, so it still had piles of building materials scattered around the site and was unfinished. But it was secure and it was all Severinov needed. He wouldn’t be living there, so its condition didn’t matter much.

  Despite its poor state, the property blended well into its surroundings, and Severinov considered it unlikely to attract attention, which was a principal reason he had chosen it, along with its proximity to the airport. It was only a kilometer to the east of the sprawling Camp Phoenix US military base, which in Severinov’s view reduced the chances of it being a target for the Taliban.

  Severinov headed around the side of the hangar and onto the apron, where his leased $50 million Bombardier Global Express private jet was being prepared for the trip back home to Moscow. Lvov, who was busy on
a phone call, followed. The Global Express was Severinov’s main aircraft, particularly for longer trips. He also had a smaller Cessna Citation. Both were normally kept at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport, only eleven miles south as the crow flies from his expansive home near the banks of the Moscow River in the Gorki-8 district.

  Nodding at a security guard who stood at the bottom of the aircraft steps, Severinov climbed into the cabin, slowly removed his jacket, and asked the steward to pour him a vodka.

  Lvov, who had now finished his phone call, caught up with him. “Sir, I’ve just been speaking to a contact in the Afghan police. I thought I’d better report what happened on the highway to him—off the record, of course. But I did not anticipate this: he now wants to come and speak to you. But I’ve put him off. I said we were leaving soon.”

  Severinov turned to face him and paused for a moment before answering. “Why the hell did you want to report it to them? You know I want to keep a low profile in this country. I don’t want to get involved in this. I’m not talking to their police people if I can help it. Definitely not.”

  Lvov nodded, running a hand through his short blond hair. “Sorry, sir, I shouldn’t have called him. I’m glad I at least put them off, sir.”

  The steward returned holding Severinov’s chilled vodka, his usual Beluga. It hadn’t quite been the outcome he had expected when he had headed out of Kabul earlier that day for a couple of meetings. The first was with a top-level source he had cultivated inside the Afghan government machine who was now helping him prepare for a giant and audacious bid for a stake in the oil and gas production projects that the Afghanistan government was opening up to international investment. The second was a quick chat over chai with an old informant of his dating back to his KGB days in Afghanistan.

  Assuming that he had actually been the target of the attack on the highway—and all his instincts told him that was a correct assumption—the puzzling question that remained was, why?

  True, at home in Russia, his huge wealth as an energy oligarch, his status as a close ally of the Russian president Vladimir Putin, his political ambitions, and his ruthless business methods meant that he did have a number of opponents, some of whom might be pleased to see the back of him.

  But it had been a long time since he had engaged in any meaningful activity in Afghanistan—twenty-five years, in fact, dating back to his time as a KGB officer. So what had just happened didn’t seem to make any sense.

  Tuesday, May 28, 2013

  Kabul

  The sun had just set as Johnson and Jayne strode across the small plaza toward the US embassy’s modernistic sandstone chancery building, past the manicured flower beds, decorative lawn, and trees. They headed through the entrance, inset into an enormous glass frontage beneath a concrete canopy.

  Johnson’s first reaction on seeing the expanse of glass was that it must be an irresistible target for Taliban bombers, despite the extensive security checks required to get anywhere near it. Indeed, there had been a couple of attacks in the previous couple of years, resulting in casualties, although none to embassy staff. He was surprised there hadn’t been more since the new building’s opening in 2006.

  A familiar figure stepped forward to greet them as soon as they passed through the door.

  “Better late than never,” said Sally O’Hara, assistant chief of mission at the embassy, who had invited him and Jayne. “Come through. You’ve missed Donnerstein, unfortunately. He’s made his speech and gone to the airport already. But there’s a lot of other people I’d like you to meet.”

  “Yes, I’m sorry. Nothing we could do,” Johnson said. “We got held up in Mazar for ninety minutes, then there was the Taliban attack out on the highway, which meant we couldn’t get out of the airport for half an hour. Crazy. Were the speeches and presentations recorded?”

  O’Hara, a serious-looking slim woman with a gray bob cut, nodded. “Yes, they were. I can arrange for you to see the video if you like.”

  “Yes, that would be good. Thank you. You’re getting a stream of VIP visitors through here at the moment, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” O’Hara said. “It’s crazy busy. We’ve got a lot of investment bankers here. There’s Richard Lorenzo, the Silverson Renwick chief executive, over there.” She pointed to a bespectacled figure talking to three other men near the stairwell. “He’s meeting local businessmen and is also speaking here tomorrow as part of Silverson’s women-in-business initiative. And next week Paul Farrar is in town. He’s got meetings with Karzai and then both he and Lorenzo are speaking at a big security conference in Delhi immediately afterward.”

  Farrar was the US secretary of state and had been pushing the Afghanistan president, Hamid Karzai to keep American troops in the country beyond the scheduled end of the NATO combat mission in 2014.

  “It sounds hectic. Do you know if Frank Rice is still here?” Johnson asked. “I was supposed to meet with him.”

  “Yes, I saw him not long ago,” O’Hara said. “He was enjoying a scotch. Come on. You’ll both need a drink after that long delay.”

  She led Johnson and Jayne through the reception area toward the central atrium. Johnson could hear the clinking of ice cubes in glasses and the murmur of conversation before they entered the room.

  There was a crowd of at least two hundred people gathered in the ground floor area at the foot of the central stairwell, overlooked by the internal office windows and landings of the floors above. At the front, there was a heavy wooden lectern, placed on a red carpet, from where Donnerstein had presumably made his speech earlier.

  But now the group of diplomats, energy industry executives, Afghan government representatives, and other expatriate hangers-on were getting down to the real business of the evening—schmoozing.

  O’Hara caught the arm of a tall, slim man with a gray crew cut and a tanned face who was passing them in the other direction.

  “Joe, I’d like to introduce you to Seb Storey before he leaves us,” O’Hara said. “Actually, Lieutenant Colonel Seb Storey. He’s in charge of the US Army operation down in the Khost-Gardez Pass—it’s his job to keep it open. You might have a few things to talk about. Seb, this is Joe Johnson. He worked in Afghanistan years ago, and now he’s talking to the ICC about a war crimes investigation here.”

  Storey looked Johnson up and down. “Just as long as you don’t investigate us,” he said with a serious face. “We play it straight.”

  “I’m sure you do,” Johnson said. “Good to meet you. You’ve got quite a task on your hands, keeping the Taliban at bay down there. I’d like to have a chat at some point. I think you’d have valuable insight into the issues we’re dealing with.”

  Storey nodded. “Sure. Not now, though. I need to run. One of my staff officers can set something up. Sally here has my contact details—Sally, can you give them to Joe?”

  O’Hara nodded. “I’ll get them to you tomorrow,” she said to Johnson.

  “Give me a call anytime,” Storey said. “Although you might need to be patient. The Taliban keep blowing up the cell phone towers. Enjoy the evening.” He turned and left.

  As they edged across the cream stone floor, inset with a yellow, blue, and black pattern, Johnson spotted Rice heading in their direction, wearing the same striped shirt and tie as in the photograph he had emailed a couple of days earlier.

  Rice, a London-based investment banker for Brownhill & Co., a small operator that specialized in the global oil and gas sector, was holding a scotch. He shook Johnson’s hand and then Jayne’s as she introduced herself.

  “I’m sorry we were late,” Johnson said. “There was a security alert outside the airport on the way in.”

  “There always is,” Rice said, scratching his fleshy cheek. The three of them spent a few minutes chatting about the security situation and the difficulties it caused expats in going about their day-to-day business. It was the usual embassy cocktail party routine.

  Johnson glanced around to ensure nobody was paying them too much atten
tion or eavesdropping. “So,” he said to Rice, “what did you want to talk about?”

  “It’s all focused around the huge potential of Afghanistan’s oil and gas reserves,” Rice said, sipping his scotch and looking alternately at Johnson and Jayne. “The most recent assessment is showing massive, and I mean massive, potential. There’s 1.6 billion barrels of oil potential and 16 trillion cubic feet of gas, plus another half a billion barrels of natural gas liquids. Look at that lot and it’s a big asset. Development of it has hardly scratched the surface. There’s billions and billions of dollars at stake here. We can discuss the precise details of what I might like you to do if we sit down privately.”

  During their previous phone conversations Johnson had already run through his background. He had detailed his history working for the CIA in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the late 1980s, followed by a long stretch through to 2006 at the Office of Special Investigations (OSI), the US Nazi-hunting unit that was part of the Department of Justice. He had also explained how he had subsequently set up his own business as a private investigator with a focus on war crimes and had worked closely with Jayne, giving some of her background as well.

  “I’ve been doing some more research of my own since we last spoke,” Rice said, “including reading press coverage about some of your cases. I was impressed.”

  Johnson nodded. Rice seemed well informed, which Johnson expected but still felt was a good sign before he went into business with someone. “Jayne’s played a big part in those investigations. She’s former MI6, from your patch in London.”

  Jayne took the cue to give Rice a little more background about herself, briefly mentioning her early MI6 days and her decision to leave the service and go freelance in 2012, when she started working regularly with Johnson.

  Rice looked thoughtful. “Interesting. Well, here’s the deal. I’m looking at this Afghan gas and oil investment project on behalf of a US client, and given your background, I’d like you to do some in-depth research on some of the potential rival bidders. Deep background stuff, political as well as financial checks. You’d have to sign nondisclosure agreements and so on before I can tell you anything further. It needs to be confidential. Is that something you might consider?”