The Colonel's Mistake (10 page)

“Let’s say I just don’t share your optimism about her safety given your recent track record.”

“No one’s denying that we got hit pretty bad—”

“
Pretty
bad—”

“But now we’re gearing up to play offense and—”

“Find a way to get her out.”

“Talk to me in a couple days.”

“All I can say is that if anything happens to Buckingham, there’ll be hell to pay. I hope you understand that. I hope the DCI understands that. We—and by we I mean the president,” lied Amato, “don’t abandon our own.”

Since Amato’s boss was James Ellis, the president’s personally appointed national security advisor, and since the president did indeed direct national security largely through Ellis, and Ellis in turn directed much of the president’s policy through Amato, it
could genuinely be said that on matters related to Iran, Amato usually did speak for the president.

But Kaufman wasn’t easily bullied.

“No one’s abandoning her, Colonel. She’s alive and safe and we’ve let the Azeris know we’d like her to stay that way. If the president feels we should be doing otherwise, have him contact the DCI. Meanwhile, I’ve got other priorities.”

In a vast desert south of Baku, Mark lay hidden amid an elevated cluster of mud volcanoes—bizarre little cratered hills that popped out of the desert like acne and burped up gray mud and methane gas. He held a pair of Zeiss binoculars to his eyes, focusing on an isolated collection of low-slung buildings visible in the far distance. Decker lay a few feet to his right.

The summer sun remained a brilliant, blinding white. No shade existed for miles around and the heat rising up from the baked earth was brutal. Beyond the mud flow in front of him, Mark could see patches of white salt crystals, the desert equivalent of a dusting of snow. The rest of the expansive landscape was dotted with dry scrub brush, wild lavender, and black puddles where oil had oozed naturally out of the ground. Gobustan Prison looked like a lifeless island surrounded by a sea of desert.

The road leading up to it was lined with steel pylons, remnants of the jail’s former incarnation as a stone factory. Just beyond the prison lurked the bottom half of a mountain—its top half had been blasted apart and carted off to Baku in the form of limestone blocks. Mark wiped the sweat off his forehead and thought about all the poor schmucks who must have slaved away at that factory for their Soviet overlords. A couple decades of hell and then dead by
forty. His life hadn’t always gone as planned but at least he hadn’t been born into that.

He refocused on a point just past the pylons where there was a gated break in the high chain-link fence surrounding the prison compound.

At ten past five, an olive-green van with military markings on it passed through the gate. It was similar to the one Mark had been stuffed into the night before.

“That’s us,” he said.

They hopped in Mark’s Niva and took off across the desert, bouncing over rocks and smacking down scrub brush until they intersected the road ahead of the van at a secluded railroad crossing. Mark pulled over in a cloud of dust and parked the Niva in the middle of the road where it narrowed just before the train tracks. He popped open the hood as though he were having engine trouble. When the van came into view, he told Decker to get out.

“Flag him down. He should know what to do.”

It was all supposed to be a big charade, so that Orkhan could cover his ass. A fake ambush.

Decker got out and raised his arms, but the van just sped up.

“Uh, he ain’t stopping, boss.”

“Fire a warning shot above him.”

Decker did, but the van just blew by them at top speed.

“Well, shit,” said Mark.

“Game on.”

Mark wondered whether they had the right van. He held up his binoculars and looked down the road toward the prison. It was empty.

“Get in. We’ll take him out on the road.”

But the van reached the highway to Baku before they could catch up and as they drove through Gobustan, Mark kept his distance. Other cars were on the highway, weaving in and out of their lanes. On the edge of town they passed a collection of modest houses and then the landscape opened up again—just desert and power lines to the left and the Caspian Sea and a couple offshore oil platforms to the right.

“I’ll get you close enough to take out the tires,” Mark said. “Be ready.”

But then the van made a sharp turn off the highway and started bouncing along a dirt road, headed east toward the sea. Mark turned off as well and floored it. The Niva’s engine screamed and the rear shocks sounded like gunfire. Decker’s gear bag fell from the backseat to the floor.

At the water’s edge, the dirt road turned into a decrepit wood platform held up by rotting stilts. The platform skimmed the surface of the water, snaking as far as the eye could see out into the Caspian. Mark had seen roads like it before—they were decaying relics of the Soviet empire and inevitably led to aging offshore oil derricks.

He followed the van onto it, slowly gaining ground.

“I don’t like this,” said Decker.

“Me neither.”

As the Niva bounced over the rickety wood planks, Mark squinted, leaned forward in his seat, and gripped the steering wheel even tighter. They were about ten feet above the sea. In some places, there were holes in the road where the wood had fallen away.

“Ah, you want me to drive, boss?” asked Decker.

“I got it.”

“You sure? Because I’m pretty good behind the wheel.”

“I said I got it. Where the hell are you going?” Mark said, thinking aloud. What was out here? He guessed that the road would dead-end at the last oil derrick, but that could be miles away. The blue sea that surrounded them was disturbingly vast.

Decker picked up the binoculars and did a 360-degree scan. There was no one behind them and no one other than the people in the van in front. They passed a series of rusting derricks, each one rising forty feet out of the water. Little iridescent oil slicks were visible under most.

When they’d gone about five kilometers, and the coast was nothing more than a distant brown blur in the heat, Decker said, “Fuckin’ A, there’s a boat out there. Two o’clock.”

Mark couldn’t see anything. Just waves, a few whitecaps, and an indefinite horizon blurred by low clouds. “Where are they headed?”

“Toward us.”

“What kind of boat?”

Decker fiddled with the binoculars. “Looks like a Zodiac. Hauling ass.”

Mark’s plan had been to drive to the end of the stilt road, block the way back, and then confront whoever was in the van. “Can you take out the tires from here?”

“Maybe, but it could send them swimming.”

Mark glanced down at the water. It looked shallow, but twenty feet was plenty to drown in. “Check the boat again.”

“Same course,” said Decker. And then, “I can see three men.”

Mark considered—had someone gotten to Daria’s guards? Someone who inspired more fear, or was shelling out more money, than Orkhan? “Take out the tires.”

Decker retrieved his Glock from his ankle holster, rolled down the window, leaned his head out, and then shot twice
without even appearing to aim. Both rear tires on the van burst. The van veered to the left, but then the driver overcompensated and sent the vehicle careening over the right edge.

For an instant Daria felt weightless, and then suddenly the bottom of the van slammed up into her with an explosive smack.

She bolted up in the darkness and fumbled for the rear door handle, hoping the force of what had to have been a crash had somehow popped open the lock. It hadn’t.

Then came the water—first lapping at her ankles and seconds later rising to her shins. As it reached her knees, she swiveled and waded toward the front of the van, finding in the dark the locked metal door that led to the driver’s compartment.

She was about to cry out for help when someone ripped it open.

Blinding sunlight spilled in. A face slowly came into view. Through the windshield of the van all she could see was open sea. She wondered whether she was losing her mind.

They’d been driving. On a dirt road, she’d thought, bumping over what had felt like potholes.

A huge hand encircled her arm and yanked her into the open water. The van was sinking, its driver swimming away at top speed. A strange wood road loomed above her.

“Can you swim?”

The man who’d pulled her out had an enormous rectangular head and blue eyes. He smiled at her in a goofy way that put her at ease.

“I think. Who are—”

“John Decker! Mark sent me!”

“He’s here?”

“Up on the road.”

Daria saw him now. He was staring down at her, looking worried.

“Get your ass up here!” Mark yelled. “We’re going to have company!”

Daria crawl-stroked to the road and began to shimmy up one of the thick wood stilts just as Mark appeared from above and extended a hand down. With a wiry strength that surprised her, he hauled her up onto the road.

Decker joined them a second later.

“I can’t outrun them in reverse,” said Mark.

Daria saw the boat—a distant black Zodiac filled with armed men. And that was when she understood how disastrously she’d miscalculated. Dragging Mark into this had been wrong, so wrong. She’d been deluding herself—thinking that it had been some kind of bad-luck coincidence that she’d been with Campbell when he’d been shot.

It hadn’t been a coincidence. It had been blowback for what she’d done. She’d been a target then, just like she was now.

“Turn the car!” said Decker. He groaned as he leaned his barrel chest into the front fender. When Mark joined him, the Niva moved a bit.

“Push!” said Decker through clenched teeth.

Daria threw her weight into it too and together the three pivoted the car so that it was facing the shore. They all jumped in. Mark threw the car into gear, slammed his foot down on the gas pedal, and didn’t look back.

A half hour later, Mark pulled onto a narrow dirt road that intersected the highway to Baku and cut between two shallow salt lakes. He stopped at a pumping station near the south lake and parked between the empty building and an enormous wastewater pipe that had once drained toxins from a nearby Soviet factory into the lake.

“We need a little privacy,” he said to Decker. Then he remembered how the guy had vaulted over the side of the stilt road, and added, “Please.”

He hadn’t told Decker anything about Daria’s relationship to the CIA, or why she’d been imprisoned at Gobustan.

“Where do you want me?”

“Take cover somewhere, watch the road. And let us know if anyone’s coming.”

Once they were alone, Mark told Daria about the carnage at the Trudeau House, and about what had happened at Peters’s apartment. He finished by saying, “Aside from the support staff at the embassy, the two of us are the only CIA personnel in Azerbaijan. For now at least.”

Daria put her hand to her mouth as she listened. She was in the passenger seat, still soaking wet. With her black silk blouse plastered to her body, she looked thin and fragile. Eventually she whispered, “I can’t tell you how…” She put her hand to her mouth
again, as though trying to stuff the emotion back inside her. He could hear her breathing through her nose. “…how grateful I am.”