Capture (Butch Karp Thrillers) (6 page)

H
ALFWAY AROUND THE WORLD FROM WHERE
B
UTCH
K
ARP
chatted with Edward Treacher, and about twelve hours ahead in time, Nadya Malovo gazed indifferently out of the passenger-side window of the Soviet-era troop transport as it bounced along a rutted dirt road in the Caucasus Mountains of Dagestan.
Wretched country
, she thought, not bothering to hide the look of distaste on her face as the truck slowed to make its way around a small horse-drawn cart.
Peasants, horseshit, barren mountains, and backward, illiterate Muslims everywhere I look.

Although Dagestan was officially a Russian Federation Republic on the eastern border of Chechnya, Muslim insurgents controlled the rugged terrain outside its cities and major towns. The men she was riding with, as well as those in the transports ahead and behind, were Muslim, but not Dagestanis. They were foreign fighters, mostly Arabs, aligned with al-Qaeda and hoping to create an Islamic state in Dagestan. They knew her as Ajmaani and believed that she, too, was dedicated to the establishment of a caliphate, a one-world order based on a strict interpretation of Shari’a, or Islamic law as interpreted by the radical mullahs. Dagestan was to be one of the stepping stones to world domination by a single leader, the caliph.

As Ajmaani, she was a legend, the leader behind a Chechen
Muslim takeover in 2004 of a Beslan school in which several hundred people were murdered, including nearly two hundred children. She smiled at the memory.

Since then she continued to make a name for herself among the mujahedeen with attacks on civilian targets in Russia. And then her employers had asked her to branch out. Some of the men with her in the truck were aware that she’d been involved with the attack on the Pope at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, and more recently, the effort to destroy the “Great Satan” by the destruction of the New York Stock Exchange.

Both missions had failed in their ultimate goals, but not completely. The psychological effect of the attacks was almost as important as whether they had succeeded.
Especially to the Sons of Man
, she thought.

Just like her Russian bosses, the American power-group was using the bogeyman of fanatical Islamic terrorists to prime the public into accepting a takeover of the government by highly placed men in politics, the military, law, and business. They were already on the precipice; now all that was needed was one last nudge and frightened Americans would abdicate their precious rights in favor of safety.

A former KGB agent, Malovo had found a more lucrative calling after the fall of the Soviet Union working for a confederacy of mob bosses, corrupt politicians, and former military officers. Then the shared aims and strategies of her employers and the Sons of Man brought her into contact with the latter, especially a former SOM council member named Andrew Kane, a man she detested personally but admired for his ruthless pursuit of power.

Malovo’s musings were interrupted when the driver failed to avoid a pothole, causing her to hit her head on the roof of the truck. “
!” she cursed. The man apologized profusely, wiping beads of sweat from his brow and glancing nervously at his passenger.

Most of the men in the truck usually saw women as nothing more than chattel. Certainly not mujahedeen, holy warriors. Yes, the occasional, usually dimwitted female could be persuaded to wear a martyr’s vest beneath her robes and blow herself up at a police
checkpoint. But even then they were controlled and used by men as nothing more than a means to an end.

However, none of the men would have dared put Ajmaani in that class. She was a beautiful woman, somewhere in her mid-to late forties—as an orphan, even she wasn’t exactly sure—with short blond hair and azure blue eyes set wide apart above her high cheekbones, courtesy of her Slavic ancestors. She purposely dressed in what she knew these conservative religious men would consider inappropriate, provocative clothing—form-fitting pants and blouses that she would leave partly unbuttoned to draw their attention to her breasts. She enjoyed the anger, and lust, she saw on their faces, knowing they were too afraid to say what they were thinking.

They were all aware of her penchant for summarily executing anyone who irritated her or got in her way. All of them had known men who enjoyed killing—some were those men—but no one they’d ever met reveled in death quite the way she did. She’d been known to kill—usually with her knife but willing to use whatever was available—men for what she called insubordination, which was anything she said it was. Even the toughest of them had been bled like sheep on a holy day.

They feared her even more than they respected her. And that’s exactly what she wanted.
A fearful man hesitates before striking, which is long enough to kill him. A man who respects you will wait for the right moment, and then strike without thinking.

Malovo was getting tired of the company of such men. She’d never believed in any social movements. Lectures from her political teachers at public school in Moscow about revolution and freeing the masses from the yoke of capitalism had left her cold.

Fortunately, her old KGB instructors were practical men who used ideology only as a tool to control others. They didn’t care what she believed in, only that she was smart, vicious, and obeyed orders without question. She wasn’t motivated by ideas, she was driven by lust—for power, for money, for death and dominion over others, and occasionally, for other women. Because of this she was in Dagestan, preparing one more time to risk her life.

Malovo sighed, though she was careful to turn away from the driver so that he did not notice. She was tired. Not of the killing;
she still found satisfaction in that. But of risking her own life, the only thing in the world she deemed precious. There had been several near misses of late, and deep in her gut there was a feeling that time was running out.

If the attack on the stock exchange had gone down as planned, she would have been officially retired, traveling the world, living off the millions in gold that would have been deposited on her behalf.
No paper transfers. Paper money would have been worthless with the U.S. and world economies crashing. But gold, gold was always a girl’s best friend.

Unfortunately, the plan had failed. Thanks, in part, to Ivgeny Karchovski, her former lover and now mortal enemy.

The assassin’s reverie ended abruptly when the driver started honking the horn. Looking ahead, she saw that the convoy she was in was barely crawling around an obstruction. A horse-drawn wagon piled high with hay was partly blocking the road, one of its wheels having fallen off and rolled into a ditch.

As the truck drew close to the cart, the farmer turned away to berate his horse, which still pulled at its traces and rolled its eyes wildly. The farmer was a tall, stooped man dressed in the local peasant garb, as was his stout wife, who in the conservative style of the countryside had covered her head and most of her face with a shawl.

Malovo couldn’t see the man’s face, not that she particularly cared, but for a moment her eyes locked with the other woman’s. The gold-flecked gray eyes had a Slavic cast to them, not unusual in that part of the world, which had seen a multitude of invaders, from Greeks and Huns to Mongols and Russians.

They exchanged a look for only a moment, and she’d seen nothing in the other woman’s eyes except a dim curiosity. Then the woman turned away and started yelling at her husband in Avar, one of the three main languages of Dagestan. Malovo only knew a few words of Avar but gathered that the woman was comparing him to the rear end of their horse.

What a life,
she thought, sneering.
Married at puberty to be a brood sow for some Neolithic caveman. She probably squats in the field to deliver the next generation of subhumans. Someday all such
worthless people—the peasants, the Muslim fanatics, the beggars and cripples—will be eliminated or enslaved.

While the plan to destroy the U.S. economy was brilliant in concept, and would’ve been devastating if it had worked—the American public would have had no choice but to turn to strong men willing to take control during a time of crisis—it was too complicated. Too much reliance on one domino crashing into another, tumbling into a pattern leading to a disaster.

Malovo much preferred more direct action. Which was why she thought Operation Flashfire, a plan set in motion by the failure of the stock exchange attack, was much more likely to succeed. Not that it was a simple strategy—there were timetables and a certain amount of reliance on the abilities of her coconspirators—but overall there were many fewer, interrelated steps.

However, there was one major glitch. The presence of Amir al-Sistani, the despicable little toad who insisted he be called the Sheik, was integral to both plans, which had come as a surprise. Without anyone’s knowledge within the Sons of Man, or her current employer, he’d set up a rescue operation in the event he was apprehended by U.S. authorities if the stock exchange attack failed.

For the second plan to be implemented, his required presence had ensured that maximum efforts would be taken to secure his release from U.S. custody, which wouldn’t have proved too difficult to accomplish. The Sons of Man were a powerful organization with tentacles running throughout the U.S. political, legal, military, and business worlds; reasons would have been found to turn him over to another government for “prosecution” that would never occur. Or something would go wrong with the U.S. case against him, forcing it to be thrown out on some technicality and requiring his deportation to a friendly country.

However, for all of his cunning, Amir al-Sistani had not counted on falling into the hands of a madman who answered to no government. Malovo’s eyes narrowed as she thought about David Grale. Her spies told her that Grale was keeping al-Sistani prisoner, stalling the implementation of Operation Flashfire. The meeting she was driving to in an obscure village in the Caucasus Mountains was an attempt by her employer to get around his absence.

The convoy swung around a bend in the road, and she saw what she presumed was the village, a collection of a couple dozen mud-walled and thatch-roofed houses set on both sides of the road at the bottom of a hill. She noted the lack of locals, who she presumed had fled, were in hiding, or lying in mass graves. The only people she saw were armed men on patrol, or standing idly by, breaking off their conversations as the trucks entered the village.

The convoy stopped in front of the largest of the houses, the dust hardly settling before several of the men she would be talking to walked out of the doorway.
Idiots,
she thought,
better to remain in the building and wait for me rather than come out into the open unnecessarily
.

She scanned the surrounding hillsides, noting the distant figures of armed men standing sentinel. Everything appeared to be reasonably safe, but she still waited until her cadre of bodyguards from the other trucks had surrounded her vehicle to shield her from sight. Only then did she open the door and step out.

Two miles back along the road, the stout peasant woman complained to her “husband,” but in Russian, not Avar, which he did not speak. “Oh my God, I’m sweating like a pig in all of these clothes,” Lucy Karp said.

Ivgeny Karchovski stood rubbing his back, which ached from stooping over in the posture of an overworked farmer. Six feet four, he usually stood straight as one of the local fir trees. “Don’t complain,
dorogaya moya
, people see what they expect to see,” he replied as he removed the horse from its harness. “Even someone as perceptive as Nadya saw only two stupid peasants, a bent old man and ‘fat’ older woman.” He hesitated. “That was her, wasn’t it? I glanced when they first approached but couldn’t let her see my face.”

“How nice! You called me ‘my dear,’ Uncle Iv.” Lucy smiled. “
Dorogaya moya
has a nice sound to it. But yeah, it was her. For a moment, I was afraid that she recognized me even though she’s only seen me twice, briefly, and this time I had my face covered.”

Ivgeny grimaced. “I didn’t like Jaxon sending you on this mission.
I know Nadya—unfortunately all too well and better than anyone, and I know how dangerous she can be. She has a sixth sense about danger; it’s how she’s lived this long.”

“Yeah, well, all I can say is your taste in women is questionable.” Lucy wrinkled her nose and shook her head. “Besides, someone who knew the local language and wouldn’t be a dead giveaway had to come. You don’t know Avar or Lezgi, and your Russian pretty much pegs you as raised in and around Moscow, not Dagestan. And none of the others are any better at the language. Besides, I’m a covert operative employed by the government of the United States and a certain amount of risk comes with the job—though if I’m caught, my story is that I’m an interpreter for a United Nations fact-finding team who has lost her way.”

“Uncle Iv? How impudent the young are becoming,” Karchovski replied. He studied the young woman in front of him with admiration. Her gift for languages was astounding. Even the men who worked for his family’s “import-export” business in Dagestan swore that her Avar and Lezgi—ethnic languages of the region and spoken worldwide by perhaps a million people—were that of a native speaker. Several times on this mission her ability to speak the local dialect had saved them from suspicion; Russian was spoken in Dagestan, but Russians were not popular.