Echo Platoon (21 page)

Ivana’s eyes chilled. She nodded formally. “I am pleased to meet you Major Evans. Velcome to Sir-jeek Foundation.” She presented her hand, took Ashley’s,
and worked her arm once, up/down, like a pump handle. Then she stood aside and beckoned us through a narrow portal that led into the huge foyer area itself.

I urged Ashley to precede me. I followed. As I stepped through the portal, I heard a soft gonging sound.

A footman blocked my way. “Excuse me, sir,” he said.

I put some distance between us. I don’t like to be crowded, and this guy was crowding me. “What’s the problem?”

He stepped up close again. “I’m sorry, sir, but we will have to have your weapon.”

No fuckin’ chance of that. “What weapon?”

I sensed a second body behind me and turned. Ivana had glided up. “I am sorry,
Cap
-ten, but we do not allow weapons to be carried here at Sirzhik. Our purpose is peaceful, and that is the image we insist that our guests present. It is a procedure that everyone here has been happy to honor, and it would please me very much if you, too, would conform to our custom.”

“Since you asked so beautifully . . .” I reached behind me, and placed the pistol in its soft holster atop Ivana’s outstretched palm. “Do I get a claim check, or will you remember whose gun is whose?”

Ivana giggled and batted her eyes at me coyly. “You will never need a claim check,
Cap
-ten Marcinko. Not with Ivana.” She looked down at the diminutive K3 with a look of amusement on her face. “I should have imagined that you of all people would have something . . . larger,” she said suggestively.

I grinned back Roguishly. “You probably don’t know the old SEAL saying, Ivana—‘the bigger your pistol, the smaller your gun.’ ”

Ivana thought about what I’d said, lips pursed, forehead wrinkled. When it finally translated properly, she threw her head back and roared with delight. “I vill re
mam
ber that the next time I go looking for a man,” she said. She hefted the little piece, examined it, then gave my crotch a v-e-r-y penetrating stare. She looked down at the pistol once more, laughing as she did so. “Thank you, Cap-ten,” she said over her shoulder. “I vill have this waiting for you,
van
you leave.” With that, she wheeled, and waddled, thighs rustling, back toward her station at the entrance.

We wandered to our left, made our way through the high-ceilinged foyer, and were directed toward a long, marble-floored corridor that ran almost the whole depth of the mansion. The marble was topped with a series of antique Shusha, Jebrail, Kazak-Lambalo, and Shirwan tribal rugs; the walls lined with ornately framed sixteenth- and seventeenth-century oil paintings from the Flemish school. I noticed rest rooms to our left, halfway down the hallway. A small library that would have done justice to an English club opened off the right-hand side of the corridor. At the far end, a quartet of butlers stood sentry duty at a set of paneled hand-wrought wood-and-glass double French doors. I could hear violins beyond, and the muffled tone of a big crowd as we drew closer.

We ambled up. But instead of beckoning us inside, the butler with his hand on the right-hand door stood his ground, and looked at me inquisitively.

I stood my ground and looked at him inquisitively. I mean—WTF.

Ashley, the professional diplomat, the ossifer who’d been to spy school more recently than I, realized what he wanted. “Captain Marcinko and Major Evans,” she
said, a formal tone to her voice.

The butler cracked the door and stage-whispered to someone inside, “Cap-ten Marchenko and
May
-or Ewans.”

I guess it was close enough for government work, because after a couple of beats, the butlers swung the double doors open, and we were allowed to Make Our Entrance.

Here’s the Slo-Mo version: it was like walking onto a fucking movie set of one of those 1950s costume extravaganzas. The room itself was all white and gilt and high, beam ceilings. At each end of the huge chamber I could see a long table, heavy with food. Starched waiters passed trays of hors d’oeuvres and champagne to the huge crowd of formally dressed guests. On a raised dais, a string quartet in white tie was doing a very credible job of one of Beethoven’s middle quartets. (I’ll bet you didn’t know I went in for those sorts of things. I’ll bet you thought I liked vintage rock and country music. Well, I do—sometimes. But Beethoven, Schubert, Bach, and Brahms are all good for the Warrior’s soul, which is why I’ve come to know ’em.)

And there, just inside the door, a security man shadow just behind his left shoulder, stood Our Host.

He was tall, slim, sharp featured, and distinguished looking. His face was lined around the eyes and mouth. His whiter-than-white teeth were small, and the canines were extremely pointed, giving him a vaguely predatory look that was amplified by short, black, flecked-with-gray hair spikily moussed to perfection. I noticed that his double-breasted tuxedo lapels were done in understated grosgrain, not showy silk, and that all the buttons on his jacket cuffs buttoned.

At his shoulder stood the missus, a slim woman with no bra, tiny aroused tits, and upswept hair, sporting an off-the-shoulder, form-fitting dress that must have cost more than most people make in six months. Oh, I knew them from their pictures, just as his eyes told me he knew me from mine. A half-smile crept across his face, then he turned the charm rheostat up all the way to overload, and the half-smile transmogrified into a hospitable, warm expression as he beckoned us forward.

He gave Ashley a quick-flash-of-teeth-nice-to-see-you-so-delighted-you-could-come shake of the head, then passed her off to his wife with the sort of professional, horizontal-motion handshake common to those used to being in long receiving lines. Then he fixed me with his baby violets. Yes, friends, he had purple eyes. I know—people don’t have purple eyes. So I guess he was wearing contacts. Why? Don’t ask, because I sure don’t know. But it did give him a distinctive, wolfish aura, when you combined the eyes with the spiky black-going-silver hair, the thick eyebrows, and the thin, sharp features. I wondered whether his nose was cold and wet, but suppressed any inclination to find out.

He looked me square in the face, his unblinking eyes probing my own, his cool, dry hands sandwiching my right hand, his long, aristocratic fingers reaching as far as the pulse in my wrists.

That was when he growled in one of those generically unidentifiable European-type accents, “I am Stephan Sarkesian, and I am truly delighted to meet you, at long last”—he paused—“face-to-face, Captain.”

Oh, yes, oh, yes, oh, yes. He was speaking English now, but it was . . .
Da Voice.
That same distinctive,
deep, mellow, unctuously lubricious tone I’d first heard on the late and unlamented POG’s cell phone. Now, the pieces fell into place: he knew that I knew that he’d sent a team of Rogue Russkies out to kill me. And he was gauging just how I was going to digest that info.

Okay, now, since this is all going on in Slo-Mo, let me explain what Stephan Sarkesian, aka Steve-o, who is pretty fuckin’ smart, had just managed to do.

What he’d done was that he’d put me on the poly-graph. Oh, not, perhaps, so elaborate as the lie detectors that Christians In Action use to double-check their agents. But I was being given a flutter, just as thoroughly as if I’d been sitting in a chair and with the straps around my chest and wrist, and rubber cups on my fingers.

But he was doing it all manually. He was checking my eyes for the sorts of micromomentary fluctuations that signal mendacity in answers. Simultaneously, his hands were monitoring my pulse, and my sweat, and my tactile reactions.

Was it perfect? No. But I had to hand it to him (literally!): he’d wrapped me up pretty fuckin’ good and I hadn’t seen it coming.

But here, my friends, is where the ol’ rubber really meets the road; where we separate the Warriors from the also-rans and the wannabes. The Warrior, you see, is Always In Control. In control of his body; in control of his mind; in control of the whole fucking situation. When my chute malfunctions at thirty-seven thousand feet—seven miles above what Chief Gunner’s Mate/Guns Butch Wells calls
terror firmer
—I may be surprised by the malfunction itself, but I am not surprised by the situation. Why? Because I have already
war-gamed what I will do. I will take control and defeat the malfunction.

When my body is immersed in fifty-three-degree water sans benefit of wet suit, and I still have to make my way across six hundred yards of frigid chop, I WILL PREVAIL because I will control my body; I will not allow myself to become hypothermic. Now, could I do that for an hour, or more? The answer, as you can probably guess, is a resounding NO. The laws of physics can be challenged, and they can be bent by dint of sheer will or sheer adrenaline. But in the end, they are natural laws, and natural laws cannot be permanently altered.

Here and now, in this situation, with Steve Sarkesian’s eyes boring into my own, and his hands, sensitive as any surgeon’s, waiting to perceive any minute change in my physical state, I used every molecule of my existence to MAINTAIN CONTROL OVER MY MIND, MY BODY, AND MY SITUATION.

And so, I looked directly back at him, my eyes hooded as a cobra’s, so he could not see what I was thinking, my hand absolutely steady; the pulse in my wrist and my heart all as controlled and slow as I keep ’em when I’m on the range working out at eight hundred meters with a Remington PSS sniper’s rifle, and an errant heartbeat can cause a missed shot. Oh, no—I gave him NOTHING.

I said: “It is a pleasure to meet
you
face-to-face, too, Sirzhik. I have learned a lot about you and your organization in the past day. Your employees leave a lot to be desired when it comes to efficiency and thoroughness. But a small part of what I discovered has been helpful to me and to my colleagues back in the United States, as well.”

That’s right—it was MY turn to put him on the spot and see how he handled it. I’m sorry to have to report that Steve-o flunked lunch. How did I know that? I knew it because I was watching the expression on his face. It was changing as quickly as one of those fucking dime-store kaleidoscopes I used to play with as a kid. The ones whose patterns changed when you twisted the cardboard cylinder in front of your eye. Well, Stephan Sarkesian’s expression went from charming, to rage, to confusion, to bewilderment, to horror, to the final comprehension that I’d just performed a classic “Gotcha” on him—all in a matter of about a half-second (let me remind you again that this is all happening in Slo-Mo).

I smiled. “Just kidding.”

He knew I wasn’t kidding. I could tell by looking into his eyes. The eyes really are the doorway to the soul, my friends. And among the things they told me was that this particular asshole had no soul. None at all.

But he was a game player, and so, he played his game gamely. “Really,” he said.

“Really,” I replied.

He took me by the arm, turning to Ashley as he did. “I hope, my dear Major Evans, that you will not mind if I steal Captain Marcinko for a few minutes.”

“Not at all, Mister Sarkesian.”

He looked at me with his violet eyes, took the back of my arm, and guided me toward the door of a small antechamber. “Captain . . .”

I shrugged. “It’s your party, Sirzhik. You want to talk, I’d like to listen.”

He closed the door, leaned on it, and frowned. “I do not use that name anymore, Captain.”

I grabbed a quick look-see. There was probably a couple of million bucks’ worth of art in this room, which didn’t measure more than ten by twelve. The guy obviously had good taste. Or at least his decorator did. “But you named your foundation the Sirzhik Foundation.”

“That,” he said, his face growing serious, “is to remind me who I was; and where I came from.” He paused, as if searching for the right words, even though he struck me as the kind of guy who never, ever, had to search for the right words.

“Captain,” he finally said, “I’d like to lay out for you a few realities about this part of the world.”

“I’m listening.”

And listen I did. The monologue lasted about a quarter of an hour, and it would take up far too many pages in this book for me to give you the whole, unexpurgated text. But let me play Thos. Bowdler for a couple of minutes, and give you the short version of what he said.

He claimed that NGOs
56
now play a quasi-official role in diplomacy and finance, especially in emerging economies such as Azerbaijan’s, and that, as such, he considered the Sirzhik Foundation to be an equal of the United States, or any other government, when it came to encouraging diplomacy in the Caucasus, because of the sheer amount of money he was bringing into the region. “This office,” he told me seriously, “is like an embassy. My chief of staff here is the equivalent of an ambassador. And what we provide is foreign aid.”

He explained that as a European, he understood, much better than anyone in Washington, what Azerbaijan needed in order to develop its natural resources. He insisted that the Americans, being market driven, operated in their own narrow political interest, while he and his foundation tried to operate in the interest of the entire region.

He insisted that missions such as mine only served to divide the host nations. Why? Because I was dealing with the military, and in places like Azerbaijan, the military was seen as callous, brutal, and repressive by most of the population, a throwback to the days of Soviet control. Only NGOs, he said, could bring the Azeris forward into the twenty-first century by encouraging the “right kind” (as he put it) of controlled market economy.

He gave me a real concerned look as he told me he knew about all my current problems with the Navy, and the White House, and how my career was hanging on a thread, all of which had exacerbated my drinking problem. He told me there was a real good place he could get me into if I wanted to dry out without anyone at the Navy knowing about it. I gotta tell you that Tony Merc had laid it on kind of thick when he slipped all that disinformation to the folks who were looking for dirt on
moi.