Scorpion: A Covert Ops Novel (Second Edition) (16 page)

The Antonov’s wheels skidded over the runway,
Wednesday, at 8:18AM, three hours behind Dushanbe time.

Minsk National provided
an ideal node for Aleksander Litvin’s operations in Central Asia. The airport
was relatively small, making it easily secured by the Belarusian KGB. A scant
million passengers came through here yearly, and the airport serviced only
eleven civilian airlines, most of which belonged to members of the Commonwealth
of Independent States, with the two most frequent of these being Belavia, the
Belarusian flagged carrier, and Russia’s Aeroflot. Only two other cargo
carriers utilized the small freight terminal, Belarus’ Genex, and Turkish
Airline Cargo.

The Belarusian KGB
augmented the security of Litvin’s freight operations, although they didn’t
know the details of Litvin’s business. Even Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus’s
outspoken anti-Western president, was reluctant to become involved with
something as toxic as arming the Taliban. Litvin didn’t fear repercussions
should the government discover he was bringing in over a ton of Afghan heroin.
He worried only about the enormous cut of the profits he’d be forced to share
with corrupt Belarusian officials to ensure his freedom and their silence.

The last time
Robert Cramer had been to Minsk was during the Cold War, as an air force
lieutenant serving with DIA. He’d been assigned as a technical expert on the
American diplomatic team involved in strategic weapons reduction talks. After,
he’d never expected to return to Minsk. Eager, conservative, idealistic, and
patriotic then—naïve and misguided he thought now of his younger self—he’d held
a particular disdain for the authoritarian, repressive police states that
comprised the Soviet Union. Even after the Cold War, he’d viewed Belarus
loathsomely, in the same league as other communist despots like Cuba, North
Korea, or Vietnam. Now, he held a much more pragmatic view of the world. He
thought his younger self incapable of making the decisions he’d made in the
past months.

A Russian crew
already waited at the hangar, ready to unload the Antonov’s cargo and transport
it to a safe location where the heroin would be divided up and sold to the
Krasnaya Mafiya, and the Albanian gangs in the Balkans, for cash, and
distributed to the streets of western European cities.

Cramer wore a
pair of dark sunglasses and a plain baseball cap. Four days of beard growth
concealed his face. Although Minsk was one of the last places the Agency would
search for his body, and CIA maintained only a small, token presence here, he
still wanted to go unnoticed. The last thing he needed was some officer from
Minsk station who he’d worked with five years ago in Tbilisi spotting him at
the airport in one of those “it’s a small world” moments of unlikely, random
chance.

A tall, fit, stone-faced
man with Slavic features waited for Cramer in the concourse. Cramer at once
recognized the ex-Red Army/KGB pedigree common to members of the Krasnaya
Mafiya.  The man wore jeans and an open leather jacket so that his holstered
pistol was both concealed and easily accessible, not that the local authorities
would much care if he was armed.

 The Russian escorted
Cramer through customs, and he was waved through without being searched or
questioned. Cramer used his forged Russian passport and ID, prepared for him in
Tajikistan by Oleg Ramzin, and showed his GlobeEx Transport badge. Cramer knew
that there would likewise be no search of the Antonov or inspection or
inventory of its cargo.

The Russian then
escorted Cramer outside to an armored Mercedes Benz with tinted windows and
delivered him to the Crowne Plaza Hotel, where a suite was already reserved for
him under the name on his Russian-supplied papers. The closet contained several
fresh changes of clothes in his size, expensive European designer labels that
he normally would not wear. A bottle of scotch sat on the nightstand, with two
glasses, next to a business card for a local escort agency.

Against Litvin’s
advisement, Cramer declined the presence of a bodyguard. He wanted total
privacy and time alone to recharge. He wasn’t concerned for his personal
security anyway. He’d worked out of far more dangerous places than Minsk and
against agencies far more proficient than CIA or the Belarusian KGB. Plus he knew
Litvin would have people stationed in the hotel’s lobby around the clock.

Most likely, so
would the Belarusian KGB.

This agency
remained the only Eastern Bloc spy service unashamed to hold onto the original,
tainted name of KGB, and all its negative connotations, after the dissolution
of the Soviet Union. It was fitting, since Felix Dzerzhinsky, who founded and
headed the Cheka, the first Soviet security agency, was born in Belarus.

Cramer took a
steaming hot shower, his first in almost a week, and then collapsed onto the
king size bed, shut his eyes, and was fast asleep. He awoke five minutes before
the alarm clock was set to go off at noon, feeling not quite refreshed but at
least like he was able to function for the rest of the day. He dressed in khaki
pants and a navy blue polo shirt from his suitcase. Before faking his
abduction, he’d arranged with Oleg Ramzin for a weeks’ worth of clothing from
his personal residence to be packed and forwarded to Ayni.

Next, he powered
up his laptop and logged onto the Internet. He searched his name on Google News
and found several articles reporting the kidnapping and murder of a senior CIA
officer in Tajikistan by the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, complete with
quotes from the CIA director and public affairs director, mourning his loss and
commending his service. There were also reports of a counterterrorism raid in Gorno-Badakhshan
by a special American-trained Tajik unit that resulted in the death of Otabek
Babayev. The White House would release a statement later.

That was good to
hear about Babayev, Cramer decided. The IMU commander had served his purpose
well, but he’d always been too much of a wild card, too unpredictable and
difficult to control. His death left no loose ends.

At 1:00PM, the
hotel’s front desk called to tell him he had visitors.

 Cramer
immediately went to the door, Beretta in hand and held low, and squinted into
the tiny peephole. A minute later, he relaxed and opened the door to allow Aleksander
Litvin into his suite. The Ukrainian was accompanied by the towering, shaved
headed Caucasian Russian with the spider tattoo, and Litvin’s bodyguard, who
was not introduced. Greetings and handshakes were exchanged, with Litvin eyeing
Cramer up and down and observing that he looked exceptionally well for a dead
man.  It was the first time Cramer had seen Litvin in over a month.

Litvin and
Cramer filled the armchairs around the tiny round table near the window that
looked out over the traffic on Kirova Street below. The Krasnaya Mafiya enforcer
known as Karakurt remained on his feet, his posture ramrod straight, hands
clasped in front of him. Litvin’s bodyguard remained near the door.

Cramer produced
from his pocket a small, black square-shaped device the size of a cell phone,
with a short, stubby antenna and tiny LED display. The miniature countersurveillance
unit was the latest model produced by CIA’s Directorate of Science &
Technology and had a built-in radio frequency locator capable of finding and jamming
any audio listening devices within its vicinity. He trusted Litvin, to a
certain extent at least, but the Belarusian KGB still bugged hotel suites. Unsurprisingly,
the device instantly detected and blocked numerous transmissions.

Cramer first met
Aleksander Litvin during a formal black tie diplomatic reception when he ran
the CIA base in St. Petersburg. Litvin attended as a guest of the Russian
defense minister. CIA had caught wind of Russian endeavors to arm belligerents
on both sides in various African civil wars and tasked Cramer with penetrating
the arms dealer’s organization. Given Litvin’s political connections in Moscow,
the Seventh Floor later called off the op, under orders from the White House,
but Cramer held onto Litvin as a contact, even using GlobeEx, through one of
CIA’s Russian agents, to deliver weapons to the Northern Alliance.

Cramer met
Mullah Adeib Arzad during his last Afghanistan tour, when the US Government
implemented the Afghan Peace and Reintegration Program, wherein members of the
Taliban and other groups were paid cash to disarm and then invited to civilly take
part peacefully in Afghan politics. Many of the participants were militants
responsible for the deaths of numerous NATO soldiers and Afghan civilians. Not
long ago, many had been on JSOC’s capture/kill list. But the diplomats and
politicians saw Reintegration as a way forcing a peaceful conclusion to a war they
had no interest in winning, and these terrorist and insurgent leaders were welcomed
as politicians and community leaders.  

In reality,
Washington was simply handing the country over to the Taliban, who were using Reintegration
to infiltrate their agents into the Afghan government. Cramer became a vocal
critic, sending scathing reports back to Langley. In retaliation, the Seventh
Floor recalled him from Afghanistan.

Cramer had long
believed that there were two enemies. The enemy in the field presented the more
immediate, physical threat. But there was another enemy. This one consisted of
the politicians, diplomats, bureaucrats, and reporters back home who were far
removed from the realities of the battlefield and cared only about their image,
prestige, and advancing their own agenda. The latter was just as likely to get
people killed as the former, and they were far more duplicitous.

 Tajikistan
proved to be an ideal starting ground for Cramer’s new war, which had started
in an unlikely way.

Shortly after taking
over Dushanbe station, Oleg Ramzin made a brush pass on a crowded city bus,
slipping Cramer a piece of paper with a time and location for a future meeting.
Suspicious but seeing a recruitment prospect, Cramer attended the meet. He was
surprised when Ramzin instead attempted to recruit
him
. But Ramzin hadn’t
made the pass on behalf of Russian intelligence. Like most FSB officers, Ramzin
was deeply connected with Russian organized crime. His offer came on behalf of
the Krasnaya Mafiya. Cramer left the meeting, but stayed in sporadic contact
with Ramzin. In order to cover his own ass and, rather than arousing suspicion
by meeting with Ramzin in secret, Cramer put him in the files at Dushanbe station
as CK/SCINIPH.

Several months
later, Cramer made a new proposal for the Krasnaya Mafiya, and reestablished
contact with Aleksander Litvin.

 “There is a
problem, two actually.” Litvin’s English and was educated, with the barest
trace of an accent.

Cramer had expected
complications to arise at some point. It was just a question of the severity.
So far, everything had gone
too
smoothly. Any good planner took into
account the basic, fundamental caveat that anything that could go wrong inevitably
would.

Litvin looked to
his mafiya colleague and nodded.

The Krasnaya
Mafiya enforcer with the spider tattoo said, “The Taliban has reported to my
man in Peshawar that their trucks are long overdue and never reached their
Afghan checkpoint.”

“That’s their
problem, not ours,” Cramer said, perhaps a little too defensively. Despite the
current arrangement, he was still no supporter of the Taliban. They had killed
a few of the rare people he truly considered friends. He detested having to
form partnerships with reprehensible, vile creatures like Mullah Arzad, but
that was the job of a spy. Most of CIA’s foreign agents were scumbags—killers,
terrorists, thieves, smugglers, drug dealers, arms traffickers, gangsters, and
traitors. “We weren’t responsible for delivering the weapons into Afghanistan.
We fulfilled all of our obligations in Tajikistan.”

“This is true,”
Litvin agreed, “but there are early news reports indicating Americans are
combing over the wreckage of multiple large vehicles on the highway, thirty
miles south of the Tajik border. So…”

“So if the
convoy was interdicted,” Cramer said, finishing Litvin’s statement for him, “how
did they know about the delivery and the route?”

“It is
troubling.”

“Perhaps my
colleagues at CIA finally caught up with Arzad. After all, last time I checked,
he was still on the White House’s kill list.”

“Perhaps, but
then as you say: never assume.”

Cramer rolled
his eyes. “You said there were two problems. What’s the other?”

The mafiya
enforcer answered. Unlike his Litvin, his English was heavily accented and
slowly delivered. “I received a call from Oleg. An hour after we departed Ayni,
the Russians discovered the bodies of one of their soldiers behind the hangar.
His throat was slit. This morning, in the light, they found footprints in the
mud.”

“Moscow is not
pleased to hear this, nor with having to explain to that soldier’s family how
he ended up with his throat hacked open in Tajikistan. That creates publicity
and raises questions,” Litvin said. “The official story is that he wandered off
base and was killed by local bandits, but somebody was at Ayni last night, when
you made the transfer.”

Cramer could
have said this also wasn’t his problem, but he didn’t. As good a job as he’d
done at covering his tracks, was it possible he’d still missed or overlooked
something? No, that couldn’t be it. It had to have been in Yazgulam, when the
IMU safe house was taken down. They still didn’t know exactly what had
transpired there.