Echo Platoon (11 page)

You know as well as I do what I was looking at. This was the motorcade carrying the same fucking hostages we’d rescued back to Baku. The other vehicles contained innocent bystanders who’d simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

There is something inherently cowardly about terrorism, friends, in that it purposefully targets innocent people. Believe me, I have no trouble killing. But the assholes I kill usually deserve it. And if I cause what’s known in the warfare trade these days as “collateral damage,” which means civilian casualties, that fact is not taken lightly by me, or my men. Now, I know all too well that you cannot make war without killing civilians. Often, lots of them die. That is war, and war is messy, nasty, bloody business.

But I do not kill civilians just to kill civilians—to terrorize. Terrorists kill blindly. I put terrorists, domestic or foreign, in a category with wife beaters, child molesters, and animal abusers. Anybody who beats women, rapes children, or abuses animals is a cockbreath pus-nutted pencil-dicked pussy-ass coward. Anyone who kills wantonly, who targets innocents without regard, is no better than the sort of
human slime who rapes babies for fun. And don’t give me any shit about mitigating factors. There are no mitigating factors. Terrorists are cowardly cunts who deserve to be killed—and it is my goal in life to kill as many of them as I can get my calloused hands on. Full stop. End of story.

I stood up and signaled my men that it was all clear, then got on the radio to Boomerang, gave him a sit-rep, and told him to make sure the north road was clear, then get his ass up to the airfield. I swept the place with my binoculars. The fucking tangos had left everything behind, as if they knew I’d eventually show up. It was their way of giving me the finger.

Fuck—we’d have to work carefully, because the bad guys had probably booby-trapped the site. Did I know that for sure? Of course not. But I wasn’t about to risk losing anyone because I hadn’t taken precautions.

1322. I made sure we’d gone over the location stem to stern ourselves before I let Araz alert the Azeri authorities, or Ashley call the embassy. Not that the bad guys had abandoned a lot of stuff when they’d exfiltrated. The tangos had come by sea—and they’d left the same way. I could see where they’d beached their three RIBs,
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made their way up across the dunes, and set up positions alongside the service road. From the tracks, there had been a dozen, give or take one or two.

As for other evidence, there wasn’t a lot. They’d left
eight LAW tubes behind. I wrote down the lot numbers. They’d also expended a huge amount of ammunition—all of it 7.62 by 39, which is what is used in AKs. I took a handful of the brown, Chinese-made steel casings and dropped them in my pocket. They’d abandoned one unexploded Claymore, which Pick defused. It was a current-issue Russkie mine. I noted with some ironic amusement that it had been manufactured on the same day in November of 1995 that our commander in chief had received a blow job while he was on the phone lobbying a congressman to support military action in Bosnia. Yes, I do indeed keep trivia like that in my head. Don’t you?

When Ashley called the embassy to report the carnage, she got put through to the ambassador’s office. She reported what she’d seen, and described some of what we’d discovered. Then she stood, the phone to her ear, an ashen look on her face, as the ambassador obviously threw what is known in the diplomatic trade as a shit fit.

She finally turned the phone off and dropped it into her blouse pocket. “She’s not very happy.”

“I wouldn’t be either.”

Ashley scowled. “You don’t understand. She’s unhappy because she took credit on TV for rescuing people who are now dead. Now, if you want my best guess, she’s going to try to blame all this”—she swept the area with her right arm—“on you.”

That would be par for the course, especially for political appointees like the Honorable Marybeth Madison. They get where they get because they have money, or influence, or maybe they’ve given a little head to the president (or one of his best friends). Congress goes along with their nominations, because
that’s the way Washington works—each branch of government greases the other branches of government. And the people—that’s you and me—are the ones who really get screwed.

If you ask me, and no one ever has, ambassadors would be selected because they were professional diplomats who knew all about the place where they were going. They’d speak the language, and they’d make fucking well sure that they represented the United States, not their own narrow parochial political interests. No, I don’t especially like or get along with the striped-suit, pocket change–jingling, heel-rocking, fudge-cutting crowd at the State Department. But they are better than most of the political appointees by a fucking mile. Why? Because even if they are bureaucrats, they are professional bureaucrats. And you can count on professional bureaucrats to act, well, like the apparatchiks they are. Which makes ’em easy to deal with, because I know what they will do, and how they will do it. With the Schedule Cs,
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there’s no telling how irrationally they’ll act, which makes my life a lot more difficult, and accounts for much of the gray hair on my huge, Roguish balls.

Now, if I had been the ambassador, I’d be trying like hell right now to find out just how the fuck a bunch of tangos were able to divert and ambush a convoy of recently released hostages. How did they know the schedule? How did they infil? How did they exfil? Who tipped ’em off? Where did they launch from? And where did they go back to?

But so far as I knew, the Honorable Marybeth
Madison, rich-bitch Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, wasn’t checking out any of the above questions. Instead, she was trying to figure out some way to pin the blame on
moi
.

Well, fuck her—let her try. I have big, wide, strong shoulders, and I’ve taken a shitload of blame in my time. So, whatever Madam Ambassador might try, there’d be nothing I haven’t seen before—and very little I couldn’t handle proactively.

Besides, I had more important things to do than worry about blame or political correctness. I wanted to know who these tango assholes were, where they’d come from, and most important, who’d put ’em into play. Multi-part operations like this one do not just happen. They are always a component part of a much larger and more complicated series of events.

Someone was developing an intricate, elaborate, and multilayered scenario here: a plan that had Spec-War Ivans (remember the blond corpse on the awl rig) and fundamentalist Iranians running joint terrorist ops. That fact alone could have serious national security implications for the United States. And me? I wanted to know who was involved, and where it was all going to end up. I’d need Ashley’s help, too. When I took her aside and asked directly, she’d said she’d do whatever she could. But we couldn’t communicate directly. Not without the ambassador finding out.

I thought about it. “You know an Air Farce bird colonel at DIA named Mercaldi?”

“Tony? Sure. He was my rabbi at spy school.”

Good news. We could go through Merc. Ashley’s head bobbed in the affirmative. “Works for me.”

And so, we left three of Araz’s Azeri gruntz at the airfield to watch the bodies, and six more to block the entrances of the service road. Then the rest of us climbed back onto those abominable Russkie trucks, and headed back to Baku.

I
T WAS JUST ABOUT 1600 WHEN
A
RAZ LED US INTO THE
cool marble lobby of the Grand Europe Hotel, which was on the dusty airport road a couple of kliks northeast of Baku’s old city. By then we were all beyond ripe. And any pretext of saving my clandestine mission got tossed completely out the window as we trooped through the thick glass doors. Why? Because as I recced the lobby I realized we’d walked into the middle of a fucking spy convention.

Over there—near port side—a pair of Turkish/ Georgian/Azeri/who-could-tell Mafiyosi muscle, pistol bulges under the armpits of their plaid zoot suit jackets, stood next to the souvenir kiosk, talking on cellular phones. Three stooges in boxy, ill-fitting KGB-model double-breasted suits tried to look inconspicuous, as if that was possible when they were jammed side by side on a single couch, legs crossed in triplicate, all reading identical newspapers. A local gumshoe idled by the reception desk looking like a bad imitation of Bogart, a maize-papered cigarette dangling from the side of his mouth. A Georgian pimp, hair slicked back like a 1930s flamenco dancer, herded half a dozen whores d’combat toward the
neon sign entrance to the hotel bar which, according to the sign in the window, poured draft Bass Ale and served Cajun fried chicken.

So much for the multicultural local color. Then there were the half dozen spooks of various types scattered through the place, watching one another and everyone else. How did I know they were spooks? I knew because I’ve been in the business for a long, long time, and one develops a keen sense of whom is who. They had a certain look to them. They sent out vibes. Signals. So far as I was concerned, it was as if they’d had beacons implanted. I saw their reactions as we came through the doors, and I just knew that within half an hour, our arrival would be duly noted, logged, and registered with a dozen government agencies in a dozen countries, over a dozen time zones.

The spooks weren’t the only ones putting out signals. I saw the expressions on the desk clerks’ faces as we came through the door. One prim woman, hair in a tight bun, nose wrinkled in distaste, her blouse starched as stiff as an English upper lip, raised her palm in my direction schoolmarmlike and started to call out to us in language that was incomprehensible yet needed no translation. Quoth she: “Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

But Araz paid no attention to her clerkish protests. He pulled up, dead center of the lobby, and indicated that everyone should drop his gear. Then, with Ashley and me following in his wake, he marched straight as a ramrod into the manager’s office, dropped his AK on the man’s desk, and started shouting orders.

According to Ashley, who speaks the local lingo, Araz and the manager were on a first name basis, which is to say he called the manager “Fazil,” and the
manager called him, “Colonel sir your excellency.” Whatever Araz was telling the poor little guy, it brought an amused expression to Ashley’s face. And about three minutes later, a horde of bellmen descended like Azeri locusts, and we were all whisked (relatively speaking; this
is
Baku after all) to the ninth floor and ushered into eight adjoining rooms.

Ashley headed back to her place to clean up. Araz went downstairs to the bar. And
moi,
I shed my piss-stained sweat-through ragged-ass wet suit and headed for the big stall shower in the big marble bathroom before Boomerang, who was sharing the room with me, had a chance to beat me to the hot water. Yeah, I always feed my men before I eat. And I always make sure they have something to drink before I get anything to slake my own thirst. But when it comes to hot showers, rank has its privileges—and it was my privilege to be a whole shitload more rank than Boomerang was.

While Boomerang scrubbed down, I threw on a pair of UDT swim trunks and went to work. I turned the radio on, loud, then called my old pal Tony Mercaldi at DIA on the secure CipherTac 2000 cellular and pulled him out of a meeting. I passed on the lot numbers from the explosives we’d found at the airfield ambush, asked for a sit-rep on the Sirzhik Foundation, whatever that was, then plugged the secure fax into the CipherTac’s second line, sent him the six pages of Cyrillic notes I’d taken off the dead Ivan, and requested a translation ASAP.

Then I dialed up another asshole I’ve known for years, an old No Such Agency intel squirrel who’s put his job on the line for me dozens of times. He’s a former
Marine O-4, and I call him Pepperman, because he grows hundred-thou Scoville-unit Thai peppers in the front yard of his huge Crofton, Maryland, estate.

“Yo, Pepperman, fuck you, you half load round-eyes.”

There was a slight pause on the line. Then: “Oh, shit—I knew life was too good.” Another pause. “How’s it going, Dick?”

“Well, since you asked . . .” I gave him a thumbnail. I could just see him shaking his head as I spoke.

“Well,” he finally said, “you didn’t fuckin’ call just to pass the time of day. You gotta want something. So you might as well tell me straight off.”

What I wanted was a full court press. I wanted Pepperman to check NSA’s computer tapes and tell me who the dead Ivan had been transmitting to, and what they’d said. I wanted blanket coverage of every fucking phone call going into, and coming out of, this part of the world from the day before yesterday, until further notice. And I wanted all that information, neatly sorted, categorized, ordered, and arranged, and then I wanted it delivered to me
RIGHT NOW
. I wanted the satellite routes changed. The tangos, I said, had come by boat—from the old CIA listening post at Astara, Iran. I wanted to know everything about their base. I wanted the fucking blueprints. I wanted so much laser-enhanced imagery that I could do a fucking pecker check on each and every one of ’em if I wanted to. And then, with up-to-date intel and computer-generated maps, I’d pay these cock-breaths a Roguish social call at zero dark hundred.

“Y’know what I like about you, Dick? It’s that you’re such an undemanding fuckin’ soul,” Pepperman said in his still-thick New Yawk accent. “Never ask for anything
that’ll make waves.” There was a pause, and I could hear him slurp his ever-present cuppa cawfee. “I wasn’t asked for this much info when we fuckin’ bombed Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.”

“That’s because BJB
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didn’t want to kill anybody when they went after Osama baby. You know
me
better than that.”

“That I do, boyo.” He snickered and slurped. “Lemme gedonit. I’ll call when I know something.” The phone went dead.

Which was when, precisely on cue, the hotel telephone on the night table between the queen-size beds went
bring-bring.