ROGUESTATE, page 39
Harvey kicked the door shut to Clinton’s office and folded his arms impatiently.
Clinton glowered at the ex-FBI agent and grumpily focused on Cecil’s finger. “That’s a hard one.”
Harvey shifted his stance and asked, “What’s so hard about?”
Clinton resigned himself to the Bureau’s presence and made the erroneous assumption that Harvey was FBI as well. He moved towards the map grid and explained, “That’s one of the places where the old sewer meets the new sewer system.”
“How new?” queried Cecil.
“About a hundred years or so.”
Harvey grunted and asked, “How old is the old part?”
Clinton shrugged, “It was probably built around when the British burned Washington in 1814 or so.”
Cecil nodded absently. “Who knows the system?”
Clinton did not like these two and decided he could show them the sewer in a way they had not imagined. “I do.”
* * * *
The eleven-passenger van disgorged ten men including, Eduard Gurov, along Rock Creek just north of Connecticut Avenue
. They skittered down the embankment and into Rock Creek, wading across the cold water wearing insulated hip boots and body armor. Beneath their coats, they carried AK-74-SU submachine guns.
The AK-74-SU is a smaller and lighter version of the AK-74 assault rifle. An eight-inch barrel replaced the standard length barrel, and a folding stock replaced the wooden stock. Unlike many other SMG weapons that were built around a pistol caliber, the AK-74-SU fired the Russian 7.62x39mm standard infantry rifle round. Each carried a specialized muzzle brake to handle the higher-than-normal gas pressures present in a SMG weighing less than six pounds. Along the underlug of the barrel where a soldier generally held the rifle’s forend was a pressure-activated Xenon flashlight.
Gurov had his pound of flesh and he was going to war again. He stared at the brick and barred entrance to Washington’s combined sewer system with a sense of dread and fevered anticipation. He knew the hunt would end today and he would have his Chechen—he had not adequately counted the cost.
The lead soldier sheared off the padlock and chain with a bolt cutter purchased at a local hardware store. It took two soldiers to pull the gate open, and another two to pull it back closed as they ventured into the gloomy lair Parvez had chosen. Gurov was suddenly aware these nine men were not veterans of the Grozny campaign—not that it mattered; there were not many living veterans of the sewer campaign.
* * * *
Harvey’s cell phone beeped. “Yes?”
Jonas sat next to Mark Schaeffer in his Chevy. “Harvey, I think something is going down.”
Harvey looked at Clinton and Cecil as they examined yellow rain slickers, helmet lights, and boots. He had just learned the combined sewers handled all manner of waste. He was not looking forward to the next couple of hours, and he suspected Clinton took a special relish in describing the more ghoulish delights inhabiting Washington’s sewer system.
“What do you have?”
Jonas checked his notes and said, “Ten men—I think the FSB guy—Gurov—was with them. They just got out of a Russian passenger van and waded into Rock Creek off of Connecticut Avenue
.”
A cold droplet of fear reverberated in Harvey’s gut. He cursed under his breath. “Where are they now?”
“Brian says they went into a tunnel or something, and he thinks he saw some sort of short-barreled weapon.”
He checked the clock on the wall. It was getting close to four in the afternoon. It would be dark soon, and they had a good part of the District to cross during rush hour.
“Must be one of those outflows they were telling us about,” muttered Harvey.
“What do you want us to do?”
“Sit tight.” He clicked off the phone.
* * * *
Parvez Hyder wiped the sweat off his forehead as he bit into a moldy sandwich. He was stripped to his waist as he strung the last shaped charges below 24thStreet NW as it wound around between Calvert and the Potomac Parkway
. Detonator wires hung down three feet, wrapped in electrical insulating tape and plastic Baggies to stay dry in the very damp weather and cold water.
He had rigged a scaffold between two ladders, and he had anchored the ladders to the bottom of the sewer tunnel. Once in a while, the current would strengthen and he had to catch himself against the top of the tunnel. Two hurricane lamps hung on either side of him softly burning an alcohol-based fuel. His back ached from the five days of constant work, but he had accomplished the groundwork for his goal—to kill Russians.
His explosives ran under the major thoroughfares a Russian would use to traverse the distance from their embassy to the White House. The Russian Embassy could not facilitate helicopters very easily—there were too many trees and overhead wires. The normal mode of transport was an armored limousine so that the photographers from both sides could capture the two leaders sharing a handshake. Symbolism was so very important to these charlatans.
He had lined Calvert Street NW, Connecticut Avenue NW, Massachusetts
Avenue NW, and parts of the Potomac Parkway
with explosives. His Iranian minders had instructed him on the best manner to place weapons in order to create maximum damage to the roadway and cause it to collapse atop the sewers. The charges were rigged to fire a concentric blast and rupture the concrete and asphalt street layer. It would stop the limousine completely, and the M-72 LAW rocket would incinerate the inside of the car—a fitting end to the butcher who had unleashed the Red Army on Grozny.
* * * *
Inside a rented apartment less than a thousand yards from the intersection of Calvert Street
and Connecticut Avenue
, Parvez’s two Iranian watchers observed the arrival of the Russians through a series of miniature cameras. A bank of monitors surrounded them, and the computers managing the remote cameras performed a rotation every fifteen seconds.
The Iranians were the only people in Washington who knew the approximate location of Parvez’s underground command post. They had secreted cameras at each of the major intersections crossing Potomac Parkway
and Rock Creek, outside the Russian Embassy and above each sewer outflow leading into Rock Creek.
A different system monitored the radio frequencies used by the D.C. Metropolitan Police, the Secret Service, and the FBI. Although the FBI and the Secret Service used encrypted communications, the Iranians had purchased decoding software from an Indonesian concern with extensive ties to the Red Chinese. Both men had been educated at Oxford and maintained an extraordinary fluency in the Great Satan’s native tongue.
The Russians feared the intrusive nature of the National Security Agency and their incredible capabilities to monitor all wireless communications using ECHELON. The Russians chose not to augment their short-barreled SMGs with wireless radios. They would rely on hand signals. They essentially entered the killing ground blind.
The Iranian watchers decided to intervene in the death dance between Eduard Gurov and Parvez Hyder. Like the caged canary in the coalmine, one of the watchers tapped in a message for Parvez’s display pager. It was the last overt act. Neither man expected Parvez Hyder to survive the night, and their orders were quite clear regarding capture. Neither the Russians nor the Americans should ever suspect they were dupes in Ayatollah Kambiz Abbasi’s great game. There would be additional opportunities. They would need to verify Parvez’s demise; after all, it would not do for the Americans to capture him alive.
* * * *
Parvez Hyder checked the pager on his belt, read the message, and nodded quietly. The Russian who had been hunting him had arrived. Grimly, he shutdown the hurricane lamps, and grabbed the backpack containing the master detonator switches for the shaped charges and a pair of night vision goggles (NVG).
He slid into the knee-deep water, tensing as the cold flowed around his legs. The sewer cavern took on a faint gray green aspect, as he moved into the gloom, no longer feeling his way along the walls. The combined sewers were a familiar home, and a superb killing ground. Parvez had prepared for this moment.
Parvez had been one of the last defenders to leave Grozny. Shamil Basayev and he had learned how to move through the sewers, how to hide, and how to bring sudden and murderous death. Unlike Grozny, where the Russians learned to drop flaming fifty-five gallon fuel bombs down manholes, there would be no rear guard ambush. It had come down to the basic essence of warfare—man-to-man and hand-to-hand combat. A time when combatants could get close enough to see each other’s eyes as the end arrived.
After a while he could hear the noisy Russians sloshing through the water and see them paint the night with thin, orange-light beams. It was a simple thing to elude his clumsy attackers by darting down one of the many side tunnels. He slid down to his neck in the water and watched the Russians as they blundered past his position. He counted ten men and then waited. No one followed.
The fool had kept his men together—probably fearful they would lose themselves in the tunnel maze. Parvez slipped away from his hunters and moved towards one of the M-72 LAW anti-tank rockets. The battle for Grozny proved that bullets were inadequate ordinance below the streets. He suspected that just as many men were wounded from friendly ricochets as were from enemy fire. However, explosives proved decisive.
It was time for the Russians to start bleeding.
* * * *
Eduard Gurov stopped his men at a major intersection. He shined his flashlight down the vacant tunnel. Sweat dribbled off the tip of his nose, and his breath came out in a cold cloud between his lips. He squinted his eyes, willing the Chechen phantom to materialize on the edge of his light.
He tried to separate the movement about him from the rest of the flowing water and heard nothing. He stepped away from the milling soldiers and tilted his head into the darkness. Was he wrong? He worried his cheek and turned back to the men under his command. He was looking for a single man in a citywide sewer system. He decided to separate his forces.
In the cold, dank, darkness death raised its expectant head and awaited the inevitable.
* * * *
Harvey, Cecil, and Clinton arrived in a pale blue WASA truck and pulled off the Potomac Parkway
. The rain that had been threatening all day long had started to pelt the streets with cold, hard drops. Clinton hit the hazard lights and gripped the steering wheel. The evening traffic was rolling past them.
Stillwell got out of Jonas’ car, stuffing his hands deep in his pockets.
“Which way did they go?” asked Harvey as he checked his Smith & Wesson Model 1066.
Stillwell pointed down the creek towards the outflow nestled behind a couple of shrubs. “About forty-five minutes ago.”
Clinton bundled out of the cab and rummaged about in one of the storage lockers. He came up with three waterproof torches.
Cecil produced his Sig Sauer and checked a spare magazine.
The black General Manager eyed both men and said, “This is a sewer; you shoot somebody down there and it’s gonna be awful hard to bring them out.”
Cecil slid his pistol back into his holster. “Why’s that?”
Clinton nodded south along the creek. “The sewers flow into the Potomac and all this rain has produced a good current. You can fall down inside there and end up ten, twenty feet from where you started. The currents are running pretty fast right now.”
“The idea is not to get shot,” explained Harvey as he hefted one of the torches.
“Yeah, that’s a good idea,” muttered Clinton Kennedy.
“Got any communication gear that will work while we’re inside?” asked Cecil.
Clinton handed Stillwell a wireless FM radio. “It’s good for about three hundred yards. If we get beyond that, we’ll have to come back out. The problem is all the outflow gates are padlocked.”
“Not all of them,” offered Stillwell. “This one was sheared off with a bolt cutter.”
“Kids,” muttered Clinton disgustedly.
Harvey shook his head. “No, these vandals probably have diplomatic immunity.”
“How’s that?” asked Clinton.
“They’re Russians,” replied Cecil firmly. In Cecil’s mind it explained everything.
Clinton shrugged and scampered down the embankment. “Yeah right,” he muttered under his breath. It was time to show these uppity white boys a thing or two.
None of them had ever dealt with a Chechen before.
* * * *
Parvez rolled around a smooth curved wall, holding one of the M-72 LAW rockets. The Russian’s Xenon lights stabbed the darkness and appeared as flares in his NVG enhanced sight. He removed the pull pin and rotated the cover as he cocked the weapon to its full length. There was an audible crack, but the Russians downstream were making too much noise and the water was beginning to run harder at the back of his legs; they heard nothing.
He lifted the launcher to his shoulder and sighted on the center man. The last thing he wanted to do with a high explosive round is hit the top of the tunnel. His firing hand wrapped around the top of the launcher tube and he took aim through the reticle reading the luminous stadia lines on the sight. He aimed slightly above the fifty-yard mark. He breathed out and stilled his body just as he would if he were firing a rifle at a Russian along a gorge in Chechnya. His felt himself returning to the ragged streets and burnt-out buildings. He sensed widows staggering down cratered garden paths and children sipping tepid water from ditches.
Parvez the soldier never considered the folly of his actions. The Second Chechen War found a new battlefield below the busy Washington streets half a world away. He did not dwell on the training he had received in Iran, or the Ayatollah’s grand plan. The cold water biting into his flesh, and armed Russians milling half a block away, only strengthened his resolve to kill. It was not logical or sane; it was war.
He pressed down on the firing bar, striking the primer and igniting the black powder charge. The 66mm high explosive anti-tank (HEAT) round shuddered as it blasted out of the launcher tubes at a sedate 475 feet per second. The rocket fins sprouted and stabilized the warhead’s flight as the white-hot motor roared towards the kill zone.
Parvez dived into the water immediately and let himself be carried by the current towards the Russians. The HEAT round arrived in less than a second—far faster than the ill-fated soldiers could react. The two-pound rocket slammed into the trauma plate of the middle soldier. The impact crushed the nose cone and activated the fuse, which caused the main charge to explode. Quite literally it produced a gas bloom that punched a five-inch wide hole through the man’s sternum, and vaporized the body tissue that had once been a man.
Death had returned.
The M-72 is designed to destroy the interior of its target with projectile fragments and incendiary effects. As it emerged through the back of the body armor, the spalling effect produced a blinding white light and sent murderous shards into the immediate area. Parvez never heard the screams; he only drifted towards the carnage.
Guns rattled as men convulsively pulled back on the triggers; others dropped their weapons shielding their eyes from the sun-like brilliance. The warhead shrapnel burned through everything it touched. By the time Parvez raised his head from the murky water, the terrible light had dimmed. Two men still stood clawing at their coats, attempting to get away from the burning metal. Neither man still held his weapon. They had never faced a Chechen before, and Gurov’s mistake cost a great deal of blood.
It was terribly easy.
Parvez reached into the dark, running water and grasped one of the SMGs by its muzzle. The Xenon flashlight told him exactly where to reach. He hefted the short-barreled weapon and jammed it into the nearest man’s neck. “This is for all the widows!” He pressed the trigger lightly and three steel-cored, copper-jacketed rounds ripped his neck apart. Blood splattered across the old wall.
He swung to the last man standing. Blood was creeping from behind his upraised bruised knuckles and he whined, “No! Please no!”
Parvez smirked. “A Russian begging for mercy.” He spat into the water and lifted the gun even with the man’s eyes. “Where were you when women asked not to be raped and small boys screamed for their mothers?”
Fear of the unknown afterlife streaked across the soldier’s features as the sodden, filthy Chechen standing before him pulled the trigger again.
Parvez was a practical fighter. He reached over, grabbed three extra magazines, and switched off the Xenon light. These were his sewers, and unlike the battle beneath Grozny, he did not intend to retreat this time. He owed the men he left floating for the rats the honor of finishing the job Shamil had sent him to do. Silently he turned away from the dead men as they drifted towards a Rock Creek outflow or the Potomac River.
The killing had started again, and it felt good.
* * * *
The explosion’s shockwave dissipated over distance, but the rifle shots echoed like murderous hammers. Clinton Kennedy stopped Harvey and Cecil, and cocked his head curiously. “What was that?”
“Gunfire,” replied Cecil matter-of-factly.
“Maybe they found their man,” suggested Harvey.
Cecil shrugged. “Where did it come from?” The sounds swam about them and Cecil already had lost track of direction in the shadowy world where Parvez and Eduard had decided to finish their duel.
Clinton said, “It came from upstream.”
Harvey pulled his Smith & Wesson and asked, “You’re sure?”
The big black man nodded, uncertain as to what lessons might be learned tonight. None of them had ever fought a war in the sewers before.
* * * *
Gurov spun like a cat as the explosive heat wave rolled over the back of his neck. He cursed under his breath as the disjointed rifle fire followed the muffled thunder and then two short bursts. The Chechen had maneuvered around the other group. He knew the tactic. He wondered if anyone was still alive. He had four men left.
Gurov sent one to take point and another to watch their backs. They started moving quickly towards the area where they had separated. They carried their SMGs at ready and the safeties were flipped off. Gurov allowed his finger to curl inside the trigger guard and rest softly on the trigger. He wanted this Chechen, and he wanted him dead.
