Echo Platoon (14 page)

See, unlike us, the Israelis don’t give a shit about violating Armenian or Iranian sovereignty. They need information—and they are willing to do what they have to do to get it. Without good intelligence, they could be overrun; their country destroyed before they could react. And so, they operate proactively in their own national interest. In fact, they sometimes piss us off mightily, because from time to time, the Israeli national interest has nothing whatsoever to do with the United States’ national interest, and the United States comes up holding the short end of the stick. We tend to think of the other guy in situations like that. The Israelis don’t. If it comes to a question of us or them, they will take them—and I can’t blame ’em. In fact, we could learn a few lessons about acting like WARRIORS, instead of pussies, from the Israelis if you ask me.

But this wasn’t the time for one of my sermons about how the politicians and the bureaucrats make messy pudding out of national policy. It was time to get some intel on the Iranian tangos. And let me tell you, I owe my pals Pepperman and Mercaldi big time. You already know that the FA
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tangos we’d waxed on the oil rig had been based at the old CIA listening post at Astara.

Well, Pepperman risked his job and faxed me some interesting imagery. From the look of things, there
had been a Spetsnaz Alpha Group training mission on site. How could I tell? I could tell because they’d set up the obstacle course, the kill houses, and the sniping ranges in the very same pattern I’d seen during the Cold War when I pored over satellite imagery of Spetsnaz training facilities in the Soviet Union. Just to be certain, I secure-faxed the images back to Tony Merc at DIA.

Merc called me on the secure phone not sixty seconds after the fax had been transmitted. “Holy shit,” quoth he, “why the fuck hasn’t anybody sent this stuff over here before?”

A good question. Why hadn’t this significant development become apparent to our army of qualified analysts at Langley, Fort Meade, and Bolling Air Force Base? The answer is that those analysts were never given the imagery in the first place. The administration’s orders were that satellite imagery was to be concentrated on monitoring the tense situation in India and Pakistan (where they have not a single HUMINT source), keeping tabs on the North Korean nuclear program (ditto), watching drug growers in South America (ditto, because the CIA has been forbidden to utilize agents who may have committed any crimes), and using our 2.3-million-bucks-a-day-to-keep-’em-in-orbit surveillance devices to help keep the peace in Northern fucking Ireland, where the political situation has, of late, turned into the proverbial goatfuck.

Now, you know and I know that using a multi-billion-dollar Lacrosse satellite to monitor the situation in Northern Ireland is a total waste of money. We’d be better off if the CIA had half a dozen agents in IRA splinter groups and Protestant paramilitaries. But that might mean recruiting someone who has, at one point
in their lives, done something naughty. And the zero-defect CIA wants only the purest of the pure as agents these days. Maybe they could recruit a bunch of two-year-olds. But BJB wants to show his Brit pals how “committed” we are to the Good Friday peace agreement. And so we spent twelve billion dollars last year flying a bird over Belfast. Then there’s the pair of Keyhole-13s we have sitting twenty-two thousand miles above Colombia and Peru. Guess what—the twelve billion bucks they cost us don’t mean that we allow one gram less of cocaine into the United States.

“Those birds are nothing but political priorities,” is how Pepperman put it. “The administration cut our budget by forty percent over the past six years. Now we’re being told we gotta give ’em only what they ask for an’ no more, or we get cut back some more. It’s like they don’ wanna know nuthin’ about nuthin’.”

Kinda makes you want to puke, doesn’t it? So far as I am concerned, it’s almost as if our intelligence-gathering agencies are being misdirected on purpose. It’s almost as if our foreign policy is being directed by agents of our adversaries.

Which is not out of the question. You already know about all those Chinese campaign donations to Clinton and Gore. You already know that Chinese military officials were given access to the White House and its secrets. You already know that hundreds of thousands of dollars were donated to the 1996 Clinton/Gore campaign by quiet emissaries of the Colombian drug cartels. You don’t? Then you should start reading the newspapers. Because there’s more: agents of other foreign countries, from Thailand to Lebanon, realized early on that they could buy access and influence to the highest levels of the United States government simply
by putting large amounts of what’s known in politics as “soft money” into organizations that then channeled the funds into Clinton/Gore coffers. Shit, many of my friends in the intelligence community believe that the whole Monica Lewinsky mess was brought about to distract the country from the real damage being done, i.e., the subversion, the leaks of TECHINT, and other traitorous acts allowed by this administration.

So I had good reason to believe that attention was being drawn away from this area of the world on purpose. Could I prove it? Not yet—but if you know me, you know that I will ultimately ferret out the traitors, then kill ’em.

But first things first. I’d scheduled a meeting with the RSO for 1000 hours to discuss the general situation, and get his read on the local players.

At 0730, said RSO called and cancelled the meet. He was apologetic. He was sheepish. I knew from the way he danced around the subject that he’d been ordered not to see me.

So, to make absolutely sure I’d read the situation correctly, I suggested we meet for a quiet, private drink at the Filarmoni Club, a seafood joint on the corner of Milari Gashai Prospekt (that’s the Russkie word for
avenue)
and Nizami Street, after he got off from work.

There was a long, and very awkward pause, which I allowed to go on, and on, and on, at his end of the line. Then he said, “I’m real sorry, Captain, no can do.” There was another pause equally as painful. Finally, he sort of whispered: “Look, Dick, it’s just impossible. We can’t do any business. That’s just the way it has to be. Sorry.” And he hung up.

Message received. Loud and clear. And so, it was
time for Plan B. I made contact with Ashley Evans on the secure cell phone, by working through Tony Mercaldi, who just loved playing “telephone” at zero dark hundred Washington time, and asked for a meeting, ASAP.

By 0820, we’d made our arrangements. For obvious reasons, we both needed to keep our rendezvous private. And so, after checking for static surveillance outside her flat and finding none, Ashley had suggested I come over to the apartment she occupied on the fourth floor of what Merc described as a five-story rococo, 1920s apartment house on Evendiyev Street, about a fifteen-minute walk south and east of the embassy compound on upper Azadiyg Avenue, and a twenty-minute ride through Baku traffic from the Grand Europe Hotel, where I was staying.

But I knew my trip to Ashley’s would take a lot longer than twenty minutes. Before we could meet I’d have to deal with whoever the fuck was surveilling me.

Surveilling? You bet. You already know my room is bugged. And my guys had already alerted me to the fact that there were surveillance teams, counter-surveillance teams, and counter-countersurveillance teams outside the Grand Europe Hotel. A CNN producer was lurking in the lobby. A
Washington Post
reporter was sniffing around. The word was obviously out. I had two questions. First, who’d leaked information about JCET to the press, and second, who was doing the watching: Russkies, Iranians, spies from Ambassador Madison’s office—or all of the above.

I slipped on my HK P7-M13, adjusted the inside waistband holster to just where I wanted it, and dropped two extra thirteen-round mags into the left-hand back pocket of my jeans. Then I pulled on my
photographer’s vest,
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took my cellular phone and a few other goodies, and decided to find out.

First, let me give you a little geography lesson. The city of Baku sits on the southern rim of the Apsheronskiy Peninsula, which juts out into the Caspian. The peninsula itself looks like a short arm, and Baku’s downtown is in the armpit position, which is appropriate enough, given the constant stink of petroleum, sweat, and dirt in the always dusty air. The city itself is an eclectic mix of architecture. There’s old Azerbaijan: the mosques, and the sorts of two-, three-, and four-story houses with louvered windows and marble floors that are common from Damascus to Kabul. There are scores of ornate palaces and hotels from the days of the 1920s’ oil boom, most of which have deteriorated over the years. There are the boxy relics of the Soviet Union: massive, ugly fortresslike apartment blocs and office complexes. And there are the spanking new glass-and-steel towers of the post-Soviet era, evidence of the new capitalism that has made millionaires of the hundreds of Azeris who know how to get things done—what the late and unlamented Roscoe Grogan would call expediting—in this rapidly metamorphosing society.

I came out of the hotel, pressed a five-dollar bill into the doorman’s hand, elbowed a proper businessman
in a three-piece striped seersucker suit, straw boater, and two-toned shoes out of the way, and jumped into his waiting taxi. “Hyatt,
pazhalstuh.”

The driver swiveled, looked me over, rubbed his left forefinger back and forth over a thick, handlebar mustache in which the remnants of a recent meal could be discerned, then grunted,
“Da.”
Then we both went to work. He eased his old Peugeot station wagon into gear, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, and sputtered down the driveway, while I scanned the area for hostiles. And it didn’t take long to find ’em. A Mercedes coupe with two round-faced, heavy-set men inside pulled away from the curb on the opposite side of the road, U-turned, and swung into the knotty traffic flow half a dozen cars behind us.

Mark one.

The next pair of hostiles was just as easy to spot. The driver was a kid with long, slicked-down hair pulled back from a face so pockmarked it looked like the fucking Sea of Tranquility, wearing wraparound Oakley knockoffs and sitting astride a big Kawasaki at the end of the hotel driveway. Either he was wearing a black radio earpiece or he had the worst case of earwax known to medical history. I double-checked the Mercedes, looking closely. Yup: Moon-face took directions from the goon riding shotgun in the Mercedes, who was talking into a small transceiver.

Moonface kick-started the bike, and veered into traffic, weaving in and out as he maneuvered close to me. His armed passenger held on to a strap with his left hand, like a practiced bronco rider. Moonface’s rice rocket was quickly followed by a second greaser wannabe, a kid in a UCLA tank top and black Levi’s
knockoffs, who was riding a dinged, black BMW 750 that needed a lot of muffler work.

How did I know the passenger on the rice rocket was armed? I knew it because he was wearing a three-quarter-length leather coat, zipped up to his throat. You do not dress like that in hundred-plus-degree weather unless you are carrying your own brand of heat.

Now, as we embark on this sequence, allow me to tell you a few things about surveillance, my friends. Surveillance is a tough job. The best surveillance crews in the world are from British, Frog, and Israeli units. The Brits have a bunch of operators (the unit was formerly known as 14 Intelligence Company
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), which made its bones working Northern Ireland. Unlike most other surveillance units, the folks at
are shooters as well as sneak & peekers. They were able to put a dozen people on an IRA bomb maker while she was working an SDR, or surveillance detection route, without her suspecting anything. Then, when she’d led the team to her bomb cache, they waxed her ass and retrieved two hundred pounds of plastic explosive.

The Israelis have
Shabak
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(Internal Security) units capable of close-tracking Hamas tangos in the safe
havens of the Gaza Strip, or Palestinian-controlled towns like Nablus or Jenin. Like their Brit brethren, the Israeli units do double duty as shooters if they have to. The Frogs are good too. They use single-purpose teams from the DST (the Directorate for Surveillance of the Territory, the organization that is responsible for counterintelligence on French soil), known as Groupes Chasse, or more commonly, GC, pronounced Jay-Say, which may entail as many as 150 people, to surveil a single target, if the threat is high enough.

I’ve operated with DST. My old
compagnon d’armes
Jacques Lillis is an
inspecteur
with the GC. If the target is important enough, he’ll use multiple automobiles, vans, trucks, and mopeds. DST Groupes Chasse have operators dressed as street people, students, tourists, priests—you name it. And the French understand the subtleties of surveillance. When DST agents change their clothes, they also switch shoes. Because the easiest way to check on whether or not you are being followed is not by looking at someone’s face, or their clothes. It is by watching for the same pair of shoes or boots.