Echo Platoon (34 page)

According to my pre-JCET intel, a good percentage of them were special operations shooters. I suggested that, since we were all being so buddy-buddy these days, maybe we should stage a joint op with some of Oleg’s Spetsnaz boys to show the folks back in Moscow and Washington how well we could all work together.

“It is impossible. We cannot use my assets,” Lapinov said, when I suggested the Russkie option.

I do not recognize the word
impossible,
and that’s what I told Oleg.

The big Ivan pursed his lips and kept silent.

I wasn’t about to lose the opportunity to give him a shiv in the ribs. “What’s the problem, Oleg? Your Russkies a little rusty in hostage rescue these days?”

Lapinov looked at me with murder in his eyes. Then he sighed a big Russkie sigh, and said, “You will recall, Captain, that we and the Azeris no longer have
a mutual security agreement. This means all our forces have been pulled back across the border of the Russian Federation.”

He was right. I had forgotten. “But you could arrange to infiltrate a Spetsnaz battalion—because that’s what we’d need. To do the job.”

“Not possible,” the Russian growled, a nasty look creeping across his round face.

I don’t like the
N
-word. A Roguish edge crept into my voice. “Why not possible, Oleg?”

He swallowed hard, his face growing more flushed with each passing second, then spoke. “Because if we did what you suggest, word would immediately escape to the wrong people, and your ambassador would be killed out of hand.”

Geezus. He was telling me that the Russkies had no Op-Sec. He was saying that his forces had been completely infiltrated by the Russian and Caucasian Mafiyas.

I looked at Oleg’s expression. The rueful demeanor betrayed the fact that he wasn’t happy about what he’d just confessed to me.

Now, I understood exactly where he was coming from. It would cause me great pain to have to admit that I didn’t trust my own troops.

“There is no alternative in this,” Oleg Lapinov said, a pathetic tone to his voice. “We must use your people to do the job.” He paused, and gave me a piercing look. “It is your ambassador who is in danger, after all. But I will support you any way I can.”

Oh, fuck—he was right. The birds were crapping, and all the merde was falling on my shoulders. Which meant that, yet again, it was about to be Doom on Dickie time.

I massaged my knee. It hurt like hell. My shoulder wasn’t in good shape, either, and a pinched nerve in my neck throbbed, sending electric jolts of pain into my brain.

I guess all the signs meant God loved me, and I was mission-ready. I stood up and stretched. “I have to talk to my people,” I said. “Because we have a shit-load of planning to do if we’re going to actually move as fast as I think we have to move.”

O
F COURSE,
I
CHECKED OUT
O
LEG’S STORY
. L
IKE
I
SAID,
I trust Russkies about as far as I can toss the Empire State Building. But Ashley vouched for much of what he’d told me concerning the chronology of the past couple of days. And she handed me a sealed envelope containing a backchannel fax from General Crocker that both reamed me a new asshole, and confirmed the bare outlines of what Oleg had said regarding the fact that we and the Ivans were cooperating on the Sarkesian problem.

“The Russians came to us about this particular problem,”
the Chairman wrote obliquely.
“And it was decided at the highest level—repeat: the highest level—to work jointly with them in this area, and this area alone, as they had an officer on-scene, and we did not. There is no wriggle room here, Dick. You will cooperate.”

The Chairman’s words left no doubt in my mind that his orders came directly from the White House. And if that was true, then this had left the military sphere and entered the world of politics. And I didn’t even want to begin thinking about the significance of it all. I mean, in this White House, where political contributions pave the way for national policy, anything could happen.

And that wasn’t even the most depressing thought.
The most relevant passage of the Chairman’s note was the part that told me we had no assets in the region. I mean, we are the world’s only remaining superpower, and yet the Russkies put Oleg Lapinov in play in Baku, the Israelis send Avi Ben Gal, and we—we had no resources.

But there was no time to mourn the loss of American gumption. I turned to Ashley. “Okay, what about Ambassador Madison?”

“What about what about Ambassador Madison?” Ashley asked rhetorically.

I didn’t need smart-ass right then, and I let her know it. I needed information. Who at the embassy knew what? Who in Washington knew what? This entire op was going to have to be off the books, unless we wanted Delta Force, the FBI HRT, and the fucking State Department SWAT team all on-scene, followed by ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and the rest of the media circus.

Ashley looked at me, a rueful expression on her face. “Gotcha,” she said. “Sorry.” And then she gave me the sit-rep I needed. The good news was that we had some time on our side. There was nothing unusual about Ambassador Madison going off with Steve Sarkesian. She’d done it before—taken her helicopter, too.

“What about her security detail?” I asked.

She’d used Sarkesian’s people, Ashley reported. The RSO hadn’t liked that, but he didn’t get a vote. It was the ambassador’s call—and she’d done what she pleased.

The DCM, a career FSO
69
was running things while she was gone. He knew from past experience she
didn’t like to be bothered while she took time away from the office for her social activities. So we had a small envelope of time with which to play.

Once I factored Ashley’s sit-rep into the mix, it was off to work for Dickie. As usual, the situation was not good, and the clock was ticking. But before I started on Ambassador Madison’s rescue, I had to deal with two other elements. The first was Rodent. Ashley took care of him: he was in the air, on his way to Rhine Main. The squidge would live. Second matter was the Fist of Allah targets we’d discovered in Iran. I turned all those materials over to Ashley, too, and told her to get DIA on it—real fast.

Then I began to deal with the problem at hand. Ambassador Madison had told the staff she’d be gone for three to four days. That had been roughly a day and a half ago. So my window of opportunity was somewhere in the realm of thirty-six hours. After that, I knew Steve Sarkesian would either kill her on the spot, or send her back to Baku with a lethal charge of Semtex explosive (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) hidden in her chopper.

Sarkesian had chosen his location well. Naryndzlar was accessible by a single, two-lane gravel road that wound up through the narrow mountain passes. The village itself contained no more than three, maybe four dozen homes, a tavern, and a small guest house. From the end of the main street, an old-fashioned funicular railway climbed one kilometer up the steep mountainside, to the hotel above.

Here’s some background. During the heyday of the Soviet Union, Naryndzlar had been a retreat for top Soviet officials and heroes. Yuri Gagarin, the cosmonaut, had been given a two-week vacation at Naryndzlar as a
reward for his record-breaking trip into space. Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov—they’d all stayed there, too. So had Oleg, who’d been a regular guest throughout the 1970s and 1980s. These days, according to the major general, the place had become a vacation retreat for Russia’s top
vory
—the organized crime bosses—and the financial oligarchs who were the real leaders of the Russian Federation. “It is run by the
chornye,”
70
he said. “The best of everything money can buy.” He laughed bitterly. “And believe me, they have the money to buy the best of everything and everybody.”

“When’s the last time you were there?”

“Two months ago. I stayed a week,” he growled. “I have been there eight, nine times in the last year and a half. It is a secure place for meetings with the
lovrushniki
. I know them all, too. The managers, and the assistants; the people in the dining room and the bar. Even the women. I know what clan they come from; what crime family they belong to. Who their
vory
are. How they think and what they do and how they do it. I know it all—everything.” He caught me staring strangely at him. “It is my mission to get to know these people. I do not care what anyone thinks.”

I had to hand it to him. His cover, if that’s what it really was, was fucking effective, and I told him so. He’d managed to convince me—and I am the original skeptic.

“Spasiba,”
Lapinov said, his head bobbing once in my direction, then continuing as if he was speaking to
himself. “On my last visit I was the guest of a Georgian
avtoritet
named Japridze.”

“Avtoritet?”

Lapinov had to think before he could translate. “It is like a godfather, a
vor
. But in the economic area, not so much the criminal activities like drugs and women. The
avtoritet
controls banks and business.”

I had Oleg make me sketches of the village, the funicular, and the hotel grounds as best he could remember them. There was no time to ask for satellite reconnaissance. More to the point, I didn’t want to alert anyone back in Washington, even my own support network, about the specifics of what was about to happen.

Washington, after all, is like a huge machine. Once it has been started, the inertia alone makes it almost impossible to change course as quickly as necessary for an unconventional operation. Israel has kept its decision-making apparatus small. So it was able to launch an op like the Entebbe rescue without having it move through innumerable layers of military middle management. At USSOCOM,
71
there are so many strata to penetrate that it is nigh on impossible to run a small, surgical operation without alerting twenty-five layers of governmental managers and apparatchiks, and word leaking out to the press—or worse, the enemy. Oh, it can be done. But it’s not easy. And it is especially not easy if the request for such an op is coming from that SpecWar officer so beloved by the bureaucracy, the old Rogue Warrior
®
himself.

So I knew all too well that if Washington discovered Ambassador Madison had been kidnapped, it would react as Washington always reacts. The Pentagon would do what the Pentagon does. State would do what State does. And any rescue mission would turn into a complete goatfuck.

No—I realized that the only way to handle these things was to KISS them off, and run ’em UNODIR. And keep it simple stupid is precisely what I planned to do.

The hotel itself had fifty or so rooms and eight suites, spread over two floors. The corridors fanned out along the natural ridge of a small plateau in a gentle crescent from the old monastery building, which served as the reception area and lobby, and housed the main dining room and bar area. On one side of the crescent—the inner side—the rooms looked down into the valley below. On the other, said Lapinov, the view was spectacular: you looked northeast, across a series of craggy mountain peaks that towered as high as three thousand meters.

From the lobby area, an old circular stone staircase wound down to the monastery basement, which Oleg said had been totally soundproofed, then converted into a disco. “We put out the story that Andropov liked Western music when he became premier,” Oleg said derisively. “Andropov hated Western music. Andropov hated the West as much as Stalin.” The big general turned toward me. “Andropov made them soundproof the basement so he couldn’t hear even a hint of the Western music they played down there.” Oleg’s expression told me he approved thoroughly.

There were three other major structures on the plateau, which Oleg estimated was perhaps fifteen,
maybe twenty acres in all. The first was a large, three-story dormitorylike affair, built at the very edge of the plateau on the southeast side so as not to disturb the view, which had housed the staff and security element during Soviet days. A second two-story structure contained the communications equipment and had more dorm space for a reinforced security force when Kremlin leaders were in residence. Finally, there was a good-size aircraft hangar, built to house the choppers that had ferried the VIPs from the big airports at the Armenian capital, Yerevan, 175 kliks to the west, the Republic of Georgia’s capital city, Tbilisi, 240 kliks northwest, or the small, single-runway airfields at Stepanakert or Agdam. “Brezhnev wanted to build a runway,” Oleg said. “But they convinced him it would spoil the view.”

“What’s the current security like?” I asked.

“Lots of
byki,”
Oleg said, using the Ivan slang for
hoods
. “Maybe fifty, sixty guys. Plus the personal bodyguards of the guests.” He thought about it a little longer. “And the staff, of course,” he said. “Most of them are armed, too.”

I had fifteen shooters. The odds were not great. But let me tell you the truth about situations like this one. Odds, my friends, are one thing. Winning is another. In point of fact, all special operations come down to a small, well-motivated force overcoming vastly superior odds to win through speed, surprise, and violence of action. That is true whether we are talking about a hostage rescue, an oil rig takedown, or a Viet Cong tax collector snatch.

The problem here was to insert all of my shooters as quickly as possible, overwhelm the
byki
and any of Sarkesian’s security people with a huge volume of deadly, suppressive fire, pluck Madam Ambassador
Madison’s svelte behind from Steve Sarkesian’s clutches, and then haul ourselves out as quickly as possible.

Easy to do—if you have an EC-130 gunship at your disposal. And a fleet of Pave Low Special Operations choppers. And all the goodies needed for a fast-rope insertion. And . . . well, you get the idea. I had no air support. I could not lay my hands on a single chopper. So, what time was it? It was Doom on Dickie Time, because I was certainly fuckee-fuckeed by circumstances.