25
ROME,
Italy
Fresh off the plane from Athens, agent Max Steiner showed up at the CIA safe house in Rome for a meeting with Chief of Station Ben Walton. They had served together in the Med with US Naval Intelligence during the latter part of the Cold War, and Steiner had been the CIA’s go-to man in Greece for the past seven years.
“So what’s going on?” Steiner asked. He was in his midforties, very tanned by the Grecian sun, and with thinning dark hair. “I got an operational immediate pulling me out of my province and sending me here. I don’t even speak Italian.”
Walton was a thick, barrel-chested man in his early fifties with a deep voice and close-cropped gray hair. “I sent the OI,” he said. “A rogue element of the GRU hit the
Palinouros
and greased her entire crew—including Miller. The Italian navy is all over it.”
“A
rogue
element
?” Steiner’s confusion was evident. “You’re talking about Kovalenko’s people—
our
people?”
“That’s right.”
“What the hell they do that for?”
“They’re tying up loose ends,” Walton said. “Yeshevsky’s dead in Paris; so is Lerher. The entire op is blown.”
Walton and Steiner had both helped to dupe Pope by falsely identifying Yeshevsky as the real Dokka Umarov during his voyage across the Mediterranean.
“Sounds like the nutty professor Pope went on the warpath.”
“He did,” Walton said. “And somebody just tried to kill his ass back in DC, but the hit went bad, and he survived. Now the president’s naming him as director, and that can only mean one thing.”
Steiner’s tan complexion turned white. “Hell, they’re on to us. It may even have been Pope’s people who wiped out the
Palinouros
.”
“Not likely.” Walton turned to pour from a pot of coffee. “My GRU contacts here in the city tell me it was Kovalenko’s men. I just got off the phone with the Maltese chief of station about ten minutes before you got here, and he said he was ordered by our people back home to hit Gil Shannon in Messina. And
that
operation fell flat on its face, too.”
“Shannon got away
twice
?”
Walton nodded. “He’s a slippery fucker.”
Steiner took a chair, massaging his temples. “This isn’t good, old buddy. If Shannon’s operating in the Med, then he knows about us—he has to—and that means he knows who set him up in Paris. Does Pope know about the plot to sabotage the pipeline?”
“I think we have to assume so.” Walton pushed a cup of coffee across the table. “But if we’re blown—or even just under suspicion—why haven’t we been recalled to Mannheim for debrief?” Mannheim, Germany, was the location of the United States’s military holding facility in Europe.
“Shit, that’s obvious, old buddy. We’ve been disavowed.”
Walton shook his head. “It’s only forty-eight hours since the Paris op went bad. That’s not time enough for all the facts to filter up. I’m thinking Peterson put the contract on Pope to prevent him consulting the president.”
“But he fucked up,” Steiner said. “It’s only a matter of time before we’re either recalled or disavowed.” He got back to his feet, ignoring the steaming cup of coffee. “Look, it’s obvious we backed the wrong horse. Senator Grieves’s little intel coup isn’t going to happen. The president pulled an end around and named Pope as director—which none of us saw coming. So the wishy-washy young Webb doesn’t matter anymore. Pope’s an entirely different animal. His nomination will absolutely be approved, and that bastard’s gonna run the Langley guillotine day and night until he’s cleaned out the entire agency.”
Walton sipped calmly from his coffee, peering over the rim of the cup. “So what are you saying?”
Steiner smirked. “I’m saying it’s time we sold our secrets to the Arab Emirates and got ourselves a change of venue, old buddy. A couple of million for what we know about the CIA is more than reasonable, and I don’t know about you, but I can live just fine on a million bucks.”
Walton sipped again. “You haven’t touched your coffee.”
Steiner picked up the cup, obligingly taking a sip. He retched instantly, dropping the cup and stumbling back against the counter, his face contorting horribly as he grabbed his throat, just managing to croak out “You fuck—!” before crashing to the floor, dead of cyanide poisoning.
Walton stepped over and stood looking down at the body, an ugly white drool oozing from the corner of Steiner’s mouth. “Sorry,
old buddy
, but two million goes twice as far as one, and I’ve put in too much time to spend my retirement living beneath my means.”
He went into the operations room and picked up a secure line, dialing a stateside telephone number from memory.
“Senator Steve Grieves’s office,” answered a young woman’s voice.
“This is Ben Walton. Put the senator on the phone.”
“Just a moment, sir.”
The senator came on the line a minute later, saying, “I hope you’re calling from a secure line.”
“Secure as they come,” Walton said. “Is it true what I heard about Pope? That he’s going to be named director?”
Grieves replied, “I guess bad news does travel fast.”
“Have you been in contact with Peterson?”
“Peterson knows better than to call me directly—as do you.”
“I’ve called to tell you that I’m out,” Walton said. “Don’t bother looking for me. You won’t find me. From here on, I think we should agree to keep each other’s secrets and leave it at that. What do you say, Senator?”
There was a slight pause at Grieves’s end. “I thought you’d want money.”
“I’m covered for cash,” Walton said. “Besides, this was never about money. It was about keeping the agency out of the hands of men like Webb and Pope. We tried, and we failed. That’s just how it goes.”
“What about Miller and Steiner?”
“Both dead. Miller was killed in the Med by the GRU, and I just found Steiner’s body here in Rome. Looks like cyanide. It could’ve been anybody. That’s why I’m getting out now—
today
—before it happens to me.”
“What about Peterson?” Grieves asked. “Can I trust him?”
Walton chuckled. “You can trust Ken Peterson about as far as you can throw him, but I wouldn’t worry too much. He’s extremely good at keeping his ass covered, which means yours is probably covered too. Besides, people don’t assassinate senators. It doesn’t look good on CNN.”
“Well, I guess this is good-bye and good luck then, Ben. You’re right. We tried.”
“One more thing before I go,” Walton said. “If Peterson asks you for help with Gil Shannon, I seriously suggest you give him whatever he asks for.”
26
NORTH OSSETIA,
Russia
Dokka Umarov sat around a smoky daytime campfire in a mountain forest, meeting with a group of commanders from the unrecognized Islamist Chechen Republic of Ichkeria. Even though the forty-nine-year-old Islamist militant enjoyed a certain amount of protection from “corporate” elements within the Russian government, he was careful never to remain in one place for very long. The Tenth Independent Spetsnaz Brigade of the Russian army wanted him dead, and it would stop at very little to take him out if it ever succeeded in nailing down his exact location long enough to coordinate an attack.
As the self-proclaimed emir of the unrecognized Caucasus Emirate, he was known to his Chechen supporters by his Arabized name: Dokka Abu Usman. To the Russian people, however, he was better known as “Russia’s Bin Laden,” owing to his many ter
rorist attacks against Russian civilians and Russian military targets. In 2014 he had even vowed to prevent the Sochi Olympic Games through acts of terror—an unrealized threat that was later regarded by many as a feeble attempt to draw additional Islamist militants to his cause.
Since then, he and his commanders had devised a more feasible strategy. They would blow up three separate pumping stations along the Georgian stretch of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, a bold plan with three primary objectives:
Disabling the BTC would immediately disrupt Western economies by driving oil prices even higher than they already were. In addition, it would set the United States and Russian governments immediately at odds. For it was no secret that Russia was distressed by the fact that Western powers were enjoying unfettered access to oil fields beneath the Caspian Sea, and this was at least a partial reason for its 2008 invasion of Georgia via the Roki Tunnel, a three-thousand-yard underpass running beneath the North Caucasus Mountains. The third and most important objective of sabotaging the pipeline was to inspire an authentic insurgency, finally uniting Chechen Islamists under a single banner within the region.
Umarov had recently learned from his coconspirators inside the GRU—corporate men who desired renewed friction between Russia and the United States in order generate more military spending—that Spetsnaz operator Andrei Yeshevsky had been killed in Paris by the now-infamous Gil Shannon. Umarov knew of Shannon as the elite American sniper who had somehow managed to survive a coordinated Chechen–Al Qaeda attack on his Montana home the previous summer.
“What does this mean for us, Dokka?” asked Umarov’s second in command, Anzor Basayev. “Will we have Spetsnaz support if Kovalenko and his men are dead as well?”
“Kovalenko is still alive.” Umarov was Caucasian, light skinned with a long, deep beard. He always dressed in camouflage, much the
way Bin Laden had chosen to dress, though Umarov was not an Arab and therefore never wore a turban.
“He’d better be,” said one of the Ichkeria commanders. “We’re going to need Spetsnaz operators. Our own men don’t have the necessary training to infiltrate the pumping stations.”
Unconcerned, Umarov drew patiently from a Russian cigarette, saying, “There are plenty of Zapad men available if we need them.”
The Special Battalion Zapad of western Chechnya was the sister battalion to the vaunted Chechen Vostok Battalion of Eastern Chechnya, which had been sent to the Crimean Peninsula in the aftermath of the Ukrainian Revolution in February 2014. Both battalions were Spetsnaz, and both were composed of ethnic Chechens, but the Zapad Battalion had recently been disbanded, with many of its operators “released” from the Russian army due to concerns over their loyalty to the Russian Federation. A large number of these former Spetsnaz men had since become like Japanese
ronin
: disavowed mercenaries, guns for hire.
“I don’t like the idea of using mercenaries,” remarked another, lighting a cigarette of his own with a smoldering stick from the campfire. “They’re expensive, and it’s impossible to know where their loyalties lie. With Yeshevsky dead, Kovalenko’s the only man left with personal knowledge of the pumping stations.”
Umarov was accustomed to these common equivocations. Prevarication was the reason the Caucasus needed a single, undisputed leader, and a successful attack on the pipeline would bring him the requisite credibility and power. He almost had it now, but without an authentic insurgency, his troop numbers would remain too few. This was the most tragic aspect of the recent debacle in Paris. Umarov needed the Al Qaeda support that Yeshevsky had been sent there to negotiate for, and it would be months before another conference could be arranged.
In the meantime, the trick was to prevent his commanders from sensing his desperation. “I wouldn’t worry too much about their loy
alty,” he said casually. “The Russian army has already turned them out. Who else are they going to fight for?”
“They should fight for Allah, not for money,” said Umarov’s nephew Lom. His name meant “lion.” He was a hard-minded, spirited Muslim at the age of twenty-eight with dark hair and eyes, his beard closely trimmed. A solid unit leader and tactician, he possessed nearly ten years of combat experience against the Russian army.
Umarov drew from the cigarette, eyeing his half sister’s youngest son, still in the process of determining the young man’s value as a counselor. “Is Allah personally putting food on your table, nephew? If he is, then you are the only man I know to be blessed in this manner. A soldier of Allah needs to feed himself, to feed his family, to put a roof over their heads. Allah provides the means for this, but He does not choose the method.
War
is the means, and it is our duty to employ whatever method of making that war we can. Whether the Zapad men know it or not, they
will
fight for Allah. I remind you again that nothing happens which is not His doing.”
Without rebuttal, Lom deferentially lowered his gaze to the fire, his calloused hands gripping the barrel of the AK-47 propped between his knees.
One by one, Umarov looked the rest of his commanders in the eye, allowing each man to feel the weight of his will. Then, sensing no significant disagreement, he smiled and remarked, “That being said, I sometimes wouldn’t mind if Allah chose to move a little faster in our favor.”
The men laughed dutifully, passing cigarettes to lighten the mood further. Then the sky began to shudder with the sudden roar of multiple turboshaft, rotary-winged aircraft.
“Crocodiles!” one of the security men shouted, and everyone sprang to their feet. The security detail grabbed up their PKM light machine guns and RPG-7s, scrambling to take up firing positions among the rocks and hardwoods.
Lom slung his AK-47, ducking into a nearby cave to reemerge
with an Igla-S MANPADS (man-portable air-defense system). The Igla was a shoulder-fired, 72 mm antiaircraft missile with an effective range of twenty thousand feet, and it was the only one in camp.
“Do not miss!” shouted Umarov.
Lom gave his uncle a menacing grin and scrambled off up the craggy slope toward the summit, where there would be no trees to hinder his shot.
Three giant Russian Mi-24 “Hind” helicopter gunships roared over the camp in a tight V formation, their crocodile camouflage schemes and sky blue underbellies clearly visible through the bare tree limbs.
“One of them is a PN,” Basayev observed as the helos flew on out of sight. He was referring to the latest and deadliest night-attack variant of the heavily armed aircraft. He looked at Umarov. “We’re betrayed, Dokka. Your friends in the GRU have turned their backs on us.”
“No.” Umarov shook his head, tossing the cigarette into the fire. “The Tenth ISB has reconnaissance units operating in this region. We must have been observed over the past couple of days.” He stalked off through the trees, where his forty fighters were rapidly digging in, calling out to them: “We’re in for a fight! Spetsnaz will be hitting the ground to the west, but they won’t attack until the crocodiles have returned to soften us up with rockets and cannon fire. Do not waste your RPGs on moving aircraft—but if one should be foolish enough to hover, hit it in the tail or high in the fuselage near the engine!”
Often referred to as a “flying tank” by Russian pilots, the Mi-24 was the most heavily armored helicopter in the world, its flight crew shielded within a titanium “bathtub” strong enough to protect them from 37 mm cannon shells. By design, the Hind—as it was referred to among NATO forces—could transport eight Spetsnaz troops in addition to its heavy load of ordinance, which included but was not
limited to a 12.7 mm Yak-B minigun in a chin turret, up to four unguided free-fall bombs, and forty 80 mm rockets mounted on the helicopter’s stub wings.
Four hundred meters to the west, the flight of three Hinds touched down in the tall grass near a shallow river just long enough to off-load twenty-four heavily armed Spetsnaz operators of the Tenth Independent Spetsnaz Brigade. The great birds of prey then lifted back into the air, resumed formation, and flew off again to begin their attack run on Umarov’s camp.
Captain Smirnov, piloting the hi-tech Mi-24PN, was the flight leader at the point of the V. His aircraft carried a load-out of four five-hundred-pound iron bombs and a double-barreled 30 mm GSh-30k auto-cannon pod-mounted to the right of the cockpit. His job was to shock and devastate the enemy by dropping the five-hundred-pounders right in their midst. He would then provide support with the 30 mm auto-cannon while his wingmen, flying Mi-24Ds, hammered whatever remained of the encampment. Each 24D was loaded out with a Yak-B minigun and a pair of 80 mm rocket pods of twenty rockets each.
After the helos had expended the bulk of their ordnance, the Spetsnaz men would move in and mop up any survivors, their chief responsibility being the retrieval of Dokka Umarov’s remains.
Smirnov spoke to his wingmen over the radio: “Keep it tight on approach. By now, they know we’ve off-loaded ground troops, so we’ll make it look like we’re leaving. No firing until after my bombs have hit. Then break right and left. We’ll stand off at three different points and pound them to dust. Stay alert for RPGs and be ready to take evasive action.”
LOM CROUCHED LOW
on the rocky outcrop that overlooked the encampment below, watching the Hinds rise up from the valley floor to the west and come rumbling back in his direction. The bright sun glinted off their bubbled canopies, each deadly machine
bristling with weaponry. His target was obvious: the shiny new Mi-24PN at the point of the formation, its load of four five-hundred-pound bombs evident even at four hundred meters. He would have to knock the machine from the sky before it could overfly the encampment; otherwise his compatriots below would be devastated.
Though the Hind was already within range, Lom knew it was equipped with improved countermeasures, so he decided to wait until the last possible second. He would be firing from a position about one hundred feet below the flight of helos as they approached from his right, and the missile would home in on the infrared heat signature of the Hind’s twin turboshaft engines. The Mi-24PN had a cooler heat signature than the 24Ds, however, and Lom didn’t want the missile locking onto either of the older aircraft.
He’d shot down an Mi-24D the year before, killing ten Russian soldiers, but he’d used an older MANPADS to do it—a Strela-3—so he could rely on previous experience only to a point. Living in the mountains and fighting with black-market weaponry made it difficult to stay in step with rapidly emerging technologies.
THROUGH HIS FLIR
(forward-looking infrared) targeting system Smirnov could see the images of the Chechens hurriedly preparing their fighting positions among the trees and the rocks as he swept toward the target area. He chuckled over the net to his copilot, “Like shooting fish in a barrel. Five seconds . . .”
Then he heard the dreaded warning buzzer, and the instrument panel lit up with red lights flashing in the Cyrillic alphabet:
PAKETbl ВОЗДУХ=ЗЕМЛЯ
. Surface-to-air missile.
He cut a startled glance out the left side of his canopy, just managing to glimpse the vapor trail of the missile streaking upward toward him at 1,300 miles per hour.
Detonating an instant before impact, the warhead’s directed-energy fragmentation blast utterly devastated the engine compartment of the Hind, severing three of five control rods to throw the rotor completely out of balance, causing it to cant backward and
slice off the aircraft’s tail. The helo exploded midair, falling out of the sky along with its bomb load nearly a hundred yards shy of the enemy encampment, erupting against the forest floor in a giant secondary explosion that shook the earth for a quarter mile in every direction.