ROGUESTATE, page 14
Isaac rapped his shins along the bottom of the window frame. He came down hard on his shoulder and rolled over the unforgiving desert ground as the trailer’s sidewall buckled. He covered his face with his hands, bumping over the top of the computer case painfully pounding his ribs. His night vision goggles were lost amidst the conflagration. The world thundered and burned.
He kept rolling inside a cloud filled with burning shrapnel. The roar slowly subsided as Isaac attempted to remember what day it was. His head throbbed and his ears rang. His face, and hands were scraped and bruised. Blood dribbled from his nose and more blood rolled down the back of his mouth. He staggered to his feet before slumping back to his knees. Blindly he rooted around until he found the dented computer case. He picked it up and pushed off towards the outcropping behind Damon’s trailer.
Away from the barking dogs and curious neighbors, Isaac melted into the shadows. He lugged the computer under one arm and used his free hand to scramble up the rocks. He wondered if the disk drive’s parked heads had survived the night. Hopefully it would tell him where Damon Layne had gone.
* * * *
Panama City, Panama
Kurt Martin followed Captain Miguel Sanchez across the police barrier into the burnt out building. It had been a handsome turn of the century mansion built by a French man who opted to remain in Panama after the failed attempt by the French to build the Panama Canal. He figured the swamps, malaria, and mosquito swarms would stymie the boastful Americans.
Sanchez was a member of the Panamanian National Police. He also had twenty thousand dollars of Kurt Martin’s money tucked away in his pocket. Kurt Martin had the original police report describing the fire and the men who perished inside.
Together they picked their way through the charred timbers and fire-blasted bricks. Martin paged through the photographs comparing them to the photograph of Conner Fadden he had in his briefcase.
He had spent three days stumbling over Spanish phrases and relying on pidgin English. Yesterday, he found a hotel clerk that might remember Conner. While fifty dollars improved the clerk’s memory, Kurt remained skeptical that the information brought him any closer to Conner Fadden.
Kurt maintained a healthy distance from the American Embassy and the local FBI office. It served no one’s interest to involve or alert the Bureau to his interest in Conner Fadden. Adrian Bridger made it abundantly clear that Kurt was to stay clear of the Bureau. He was given a substantial sum of money—it was the currency of truth and justice inside the National Police.
It seemed like the jungle had swallowed Conner. A credit card check revealed Conner had not used any known credit or checking accounts. Passport control had no record of Conner exiting Panama; of course, it did not have any record of Conner entering Panama either.
Conner was a loose end who could potentially connect Damon Layne toSpanish Poppy , andSpanish Poppy led to the office of the outgoing administration’s National Security Advisor. The NSA could be tracked to the Lexington Compact and its shadowy banking connections throughout the Caribbean and, more importantly, in Asia. In the end,Spanish Poppy had nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with money. Bridger would be satisfied with nothing less than a corpse or a very convincing grave.
The lack of either suggested Conner had relied on other skills. Conner was part of a special group of soldiers trained to slip seamlessly through airport security, national borders, and other bothersome protective service squads. Conner had been recruited and trained to become a long-range assassin; as such, he had been equipped with the necessary escape and evasion skills.
If Conner was running, then it would only be a matter of time before he turned to face his pursuer. Kurt needed to be ready when the time came.
* * * *
Arlington, Virginia
The Kinkos next to the Court House and north of Arlington National Cemetery had a few cars parked outside. The late hour on a weeknight eliminated most people who needed to be up and struggling with the traffic by six or six-thirty the next morning, and left only the desperate self-employed business crowd and graduate students in search of a high-speed printer for tomorrow’s term paper. The service staff was reduced to the graveyard shift, and they assumed a bored indifference. The circumstance suited Damon Layne.
Damon signed onto the PC and slipped a floppy into the drive slot. He slid the mouse over to the Windows Explorer icon and clicked on Drive A. There was only one file on the floppy. Once opened, it launched an Internet connection and automatically logged into a Yahoo mail account.
The only message had a file attachment. Damon downloaded the file to the floppy and blew away the message on the account. He would never use the account again. The file copied to the floppy was encrypted using PGP with a 1024 bit single-use key. The National Security Agency might be curious, but without further reason the file would be shuffled to an anomalous directory of encrypted communications.
The encryption was only part of the layered security. Ron Babcock had encoded the message using a simple book code. Babcock had supplied no software to facilitate that part of the decoding process. He was paranoid enough to worry about ECHELON and CARNIVORE, and naïve enough to believe he had evaded the digital sentinels.
Damon popped the floppy out of the machine and logged off. He walked over to the cash register and paid for his computer time. Even for this trivial transaction, he wore a disguise and had not parked next the Kinkos. Once the killing started, the Bureau would eventually discover Babcock’s communications scheme. They might not be able to read it, but they would be searching. He fully expected them to descend on this Kinkos before it was all over.
He walked down to 14thStreet North where he had parked the car. His visit had taken less than ten minutes. Next time he would use a library system in a different state. He knew he had to be careful not to triangulate his visits against his location. Driving a couple of hundred miles was not out of the question. Every bit of tradecraft he had ever learned came to bear as he confronted the Bureau. Daman knew he had engaged in a death match; before long, the Bureau would come to the same conclusion.
PART 3
Days of Rage
“Moral cowards never win in war; moral cowards never win in life. They might believe that they are winning a few battles here and there, but their victories are never sweet, they never stand the test of time and they never serve to inspire others. In fact, each and every one of a moral coward’s ‘supposed victories’ ultimately leads them to failure.”
Remarks for: The Lighthouse Project ’99,
Central High School, North Carolina
January 29, 1999
Gen. Charles C. Krulak
Commandant United States Marine Corps
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Chechnya,London Telegraph,Nigel Turner, August 1, 2000 –The Russian Army has introduced increasing harsh methods to deal with the increasingly savage Chechen rebellion. The new security measures include stringent discipline for troops caught sleeping on duty or trading in the black market, a shoot-on-sight curfew and further restrictions on civilian movements.
Western experts compare Chechnya to Northern Ireland and the Middle East. The military will continue to crack down harder, and the rebels, in response, will develop even more savage and clever forms of terrorism.
Washington D.C.
Saturday, October 21, 2000
1:00 P.M. EDT
Parvez Hyder strolled down Wisconsin Avenue
, trailing a Yorkshire terrier. A camera bounced on his chest, and most people would mistake the GPS Color TRAK for a bulky cell phone. He wore dark sunglasses and a red beret favored by European diplomats. The uniformed Secret Service patrols driving along Embassy Row considered him a harmless foreigner taking the dog for a much-needed walk. No one noticed that he studiously recorded his location in a spiral bound notebook.
Putin would be most vulnerable when he visited the United States and the new President next January. The Iranian insisted Putin should be assassinated on American soil, and Parvez understood the logic to the Ayatollah’s demand.
He had rejected an attack on Putin’s aircraft as impractical. He could not determine whether Putin would land at Dulles, Reagan National, or Andrews Air Force Base. Undoubtedly, the Russian Presidential aircraft was outfitted with countermeasures for both radar homing and heat-seeking missiles. The Secret Service and airport security police used man/dog teams every time a VIP arrived or departed.
Equally difficult were the likely places Putin would visit during his stay in Washington. The White House, State Department, and Commerce Department were hard targets. Massive concrete barriers, multiple layers of uniformed and plainclothes security, and electronic sensors stood between Parvez and any attempt on Putin’s life.
He strolled past the Russian Embassy for the third time in as many days. The Russian Federation’s Embassy was a complex of half a dozen interconnected buildings, residing on Wisconsin Avenue not far from the Naval Observatory—the official residence of the Vice President. Behind the wrought-iron fence were motion sensors buried in the ground and hidden behind the shrubbery. Cameras were mounted in the larger trees and atop the perimeter buildings. Everything was routed to the security office located in one of the sub-basements.Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki— Foreign Intelligence Service officers—kept track of the cameras watching the perimeter, and the microphones listening to the Embassy’s residents.
The white, blue, and red striped flag fluttered from two flagpoles. It had replaced the hammer and sickle nine years earlier. While the flags had changed, the security practices established by theNarodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennykh Del , People’s Internal Affairs (NKVD), andKomitet Gosudarstvennoe Bezopasnosti, Committee for State Security (KGB), persisted. It was a legacy of fear and death.
The Soviet Union’s dissolution led to Boris Yeltsin’s ascension, and the new Russian State reached back into its history for national symbols. Yeltsin revived the symbols of the besmirched and beheaded Russian monarchy to represent the new Russian Federation.
The two-headed eagle rehabilitated with the demise of the Soviet Union returned as the dominant symbol for the new Russian State. Its heritage could be traced back to the fifteenth century and Sophia Paleolog, a member of the last Visantium Dynasty. She became the wife of Ivan III, the Great Duke of Moscow. The golden-headed eagle was resplendent against a red background. For four hundred years, it represented the monarchy and the state until the 1917 October Revolution. Curiously, the communists who no longer believed in a worker’s paradise, and whose predecessors had mercilessly executed the last Czar’s family, restored the two-headed eagle to its former prominence.
Peter the Great had hoisted the same white, blue, and red banner that was flying above the Embassy. In 1705 it flew as a trade flag on all Russian ships plying the waters of the Moscow, Volga, and Dvina Rivers. Tradition held that white stood for nobility, blue for honesty, and red for courage and love.
Parvez cynically viewed the ancient symbols as white for the overlords who refused to grant his homeland freedom; blue for the soldiers without honor who raped, murdered, and pillaged his people; and red for bloody-handed cowards hiding behind their modern weapons. Shamil Basayev had trained him to hate Russians, and he discovered he enjoyed killing Russians. The Iranian—Ayatolla Kambiz Abassi—refined his revolutionary zeal with a twisted sense of faith, honor, and duty. Parvez was programmed to hate and fashioned to kill.
Parvez was a zealot in the land of the Great Satan.
It was a simple thing to kill a Russian from a distance using modern weapons. It was also impersonal and detached. Parvez received the greatest satisfaction when he could hear the life breath whistle effortlessly past his victim’s teeth for the last time and watch the vibrant life flame fade from their eyes. He wanted them to know who was killing them. It was why he took extra risks to garrote or knife his prey. The thrill was electric, and he mused as he strolled by the wrought-iron fence as to how he might make Putin experience similar terror. He fed his hate off the sketchy reports from the field in Chechnya. Parvez no longer wanted tojust kill Putin; he wanted the man to experience terror—the same terror his army inflicted on widows and orphans.
Parvez rejected the Embassy as well. Inside the wrought-iron gates and safely behind the guards toting their automatic weapons, a security layer similar to the White House protected Putin. It left the space in between the Embassy and Putin’s scheduled appointments. Putin would be sealed within the protective cocoon of a motorcade consisting of an armored limousine and a pair of armored Suburbans, one carrying Russian goons and the other their American counterparts. The D.C. Metropolitan Police Department would provide a minimal two-man motorcycle escort. It was the weak link.
Washington’s street map is a series of rambling parks, wide circles, and radiating boulevards. Grozny was an old city where the streets ended in “T” intersections and circles. Nothing followed broad, straight lines, and the Russian Army discovered to its dismay a new type of killing field. In 1996 Parvez had been part of Dudayev’s three thousand fighters. His AK-47 had bounced on his shoulder as he fired steel core rounds into a demoralized and lice-ridden enemy. Gasoline bombs, homemade nitroglycerin, and captured rocket propelled grenades blasted the night and the following days.
In the first Chechen War, the center of Grozny became a Russian graveyard. Russian tanks and armor personnel carriers exceeded the gridlock found in a beltway traffic jam. The Russians lost their way because the street signs vanished, and burning barricades cut off avenues of escape. Soviet-style concrete apartments corralled Russian soldiers. They bled white along the crooked and curved streets comprising Grozny’s Central City. The ragtag Chechens held the high ground and they made the Russians pay a butcher bill not seen since the ill-conceived Afghan Invasion.
Historians suggest the first Chechen war claimed as many as seventy thousand casualties. While Washington had not suffered the chaos unleashed on Grozny, the streets and avenues were similarly snarled. Examining his Washington map finder and the roads surrounding the Russian Embassy, there were only so many venues available to Russian and American security teams. Parvez intended to channel his prey into a killing field and unleash a merciless fusillade. Assassination using a single bullet was strictly an American phenomenon.
Parvez walked away from the Russian Embassy for a final time. Recent history and tactics taught him well. He even whistled as he walked down Wisconsin Avenue
towards Westchester. He could not remember whistling over the last ten years, and now with the prospect of killing Vladamir Putin, President of the Russian Federation and the Butcher of Grozny, he felt positively lighthearted.
The geopolitical implications of an American-born, Chechen rebel fighter assassinating the President of the Russian Federation on United States soil never entered his mind. Of course, Ayatolla Kambiz Abbasi understood more clearly the firestorm he was kindling. The two Iranian watchers noted Parvez’s preparations and reported everything they saw to Abbasi.
* * * *
Chicago, Illinois
Eduard Gurov left his rental car parked at one of the strip malls dotting the Chicago landscape. He had reconnoitered the house for three days. He counted Parvez’s mother, Elisa, in her sixties, his grandfather pushing ninety, and a sister, Marianna, who appeared to be attending college. He had figured out the schedule for mom and granddad, however, Marianna tended to be erratic.
He had used his special contact number to request that theWild Bunch track down all registered vehicles, credit cards, and bank accounts associated with the three people living in the house. Last night he spent the evening working through the data he had downloaded to his laptop.
He accounted for two of the three cars. In three days of watching, he never saw the third car, a seven-year-old Honda Civic.
TheWild Bunch ran a cross check against a group called The American Committee for Chechen Freedom. Elisa Hyder was the old woman listed as the newsletter’s editor. While she was better nourished and more vibrant than the Chechen widows wandering between Grozny and Gudermes, nonetheless, she was clearly a smelly Chechen.
Eduard waited for Elisa’s daughter Marianna to leave for college, before slipping over back fences and across yards. Hate pounded in his heart as loudly as the blood hammered in his ears; Eduard planned to kill Chechens. The familiar weight of a Makarov pistol banged against his chest. He slid through the lengthening autumn shadows until he came to the back door.
He removed the pistol from his shoulder holster and opened the door. He found himself inside the kitchen. A pot simmered on an ancient electric stove, and dishes dried on a rack next to the sink. Beyond the linoleum-tiled room, the ghostly shadows from a television danced along the walls and the sound was turned up. To his left a door opened into the basement and he could hear the shambling of someone below.
The mail was scattered over a cheap table from K-Mart that had been purchased decades earlier, and the wall held faded pictures of thesesub-humans and their kin.Hatred came easy to Eduard, and the fear of failure drove him to ignore the consequences of his actions. He would ensure Putin and his Security Council survived. Killing a few more Chechens seemed a small price; it was almost a pleasure.
Moscow intended the second Chechen war to conclude differently than the first. It was rumored that Putin had signed a contract with former members of theSpetsnaz Vympel to systematically hunt down and assassinate the top and middle level Chechen commanders. It was a logical step for a man like Putin to consider. After all,Spetsnaz was the creation of the former KGB, and its first mission had been to topple the Afghan President in his own palace and usher in a puppet government. Eduard was just another cog in the grand plan to ethnically cleanse the land.
Eduard slipped through the kitchen toward the blaring television set and found the old man sleeping in his chair. The room stank of sausage, laundry, and urine. He never thought about the human being living out his last days, or the uniqueness of life as he leveled the pistol and squeezed the trigger twice. The old man bucked in his chair. His brains splattered across the back of the room, and the roar of a college football game swallowed the pistol’s bang. Eduard viewed the murder akin to smearing ants across the dirt with his shoe.
