ROGUESTATE, page 6
“He claims to have sunk theKursk ,” snarled Admiral Patrushev.
“And to have set fire to the Ostankino Tower,” added Putin. The tower fire represented a greater threat to Putin’s government than the loss of an attack submarine. The one hundred eighteen sailors had a limited constituency, and those people could be controlled. The loss of television signals to twenty million viewers, and their collective disappointment at missing American soap operas and British comedies, represented a far more volatile and potentially lethal constituency.
The room held its collective breath awaiting a further outburst from Patrushev. When none came, Sergeyev continued. “He included the same arming information as bona fides for his threat.”
Eduard looked around the room and asked the obvious question: “Who else would know the code?”
A dismayed glare ricocheted about the room until the decision finally stuck with Putin. “The Americans would know, perhaps a few others. The knowledge was very limited,” Putin replied smoothly.
Eduard nodded. “If it was so well guarded, then how could Dudayev get the codes?”
“Presumably from the people from whom he purchased the weapon,” Putin answered flatly. It was an astounding revelation.
Eduard gulped involuntarily. The concept of a Chechen bomb left Eduard cold. Another possibility occurred to Eduard. It seemed more likely the Chechens stole the bomb and acquired the arming code from the previous owner. Eduard knew about Chechen interrogation techniques—they could teach the old KGB a couple of tricks.
Rushaylo fished out a sanitized version of Basayev’s letter and pushed it across the polished table to Eduard.
President Putin,
It is time for you to cease your genocide of my people. If you continue, then I shall inflict pain you will truly feel. As proof of my seriousness, I acknowledge that my people sabotaged the submarine KURSK and set fire to the tower OSTANKINO.
I could order the assassination and kidnapping of your Duma, but I doubt it would matter to you.
Therefore, I have ordered that you and your Security Council are subject to assassination.
You have ten days to leave Chechnya forever. After that, your lives are forfeit.
Shamil Basayev
Eduard ignored the blacked out section of the letter and looked up from the table to find Putin’s dead eyes dissecting his actions. “Captain, they tell me you’re the best at tracking these bandits. Find Basayev and stop his assassins.” Putin’s dead eyes glistened at the end of the table.
Eduard nodded his head slowly. These men believed Basayev’s letter as they had believed Dudayev’s letter four years ago. He realized these men expected a miracle, and should Basayev make good on his threat before Eduard stopped him, the survivors would ensure Eduard’s demise.
PART 2
Hunters and Prey
“The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.”
General George Patton (1885-1945)
CHAPTER SIX
Chechnya,London Telegraph,Nigel Turner, April 17, 2000 –Lord Judd, a representative of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) recommended that the Russian Federation’s membership be suspended. He justified this radical move based on the near genocidal treatment of Chechen refugees by the Russian Army.
PACE compromised and suspended the Russian delegation’s voting rights. The Putin government angrily denounced the move as further evidence that PACE was little more than front organization for NATO.
North Caicos Island, Turks and Caicos
Sunday, October 1, 2000
8:00 A.M. EDT
Conner Fadden ran along the beach—his eyes hidden behind a pair of multicolor reflective shooting glasses. He met no one on his run. The front and back of his T-shirt were soaked through with sweat and the powder-white sand stuck to his calves. He ignored the surf pounding on the northern coast of North Caicos Island. Hints of salt flitted through his nostrils and crawled down the back of his throat.
A few hours later and the morning sun would make the sand too hot to run on without shoes, and the shoes would only collect sand. Ahead he could see the beach house and the overweight ex-FBI agent propped on the deck overlooking the turquoise sea. It was hurricane season and the angry gray plumes marched across the horizon. He wondered if Harvey Randall had any intention of evacuating to a safer place. Not that Conner worried about safety; he was much more concerned about judgment.
The beach house was perched atop sixteen-foot stilts. Wood slats were nailed into the supporting timbers at forty-five degree angles. They sheltered the interior stairway, carport, emergency generator, and air conditioner. Harvey demanded his creature comforts. Power and phone service came across the property on a series of stubby phone poles that looked like transplants from an Iowa roadside thirty years ago. The blue-green insulators glistened in the morning sun.
These were strange people Conner found himself amongst. None of them feared he would cut and run from the island, and he suspected if he attempted such a venture it would end badly. The International Airport was located on East Caicos, and no doubt, Harvey had people at the ferry points who knew to watch for him. Harvey would know if he attempted to run. The question that troubled Conner was what would Harvey do?
Harvey had enough phone numbers, contacts, and connections that he might just let Conner run. The alternatives were simple:
Harvey could lift the phone and log an anonymous call with the FBI—they certainly were interested in talking to him, and he did not fancy his chances in the American Justice System. Once the news media made the connection between the car bomb in Panama and Conner, the twenty-four–hour media cycle would replay the news footage and America would be justifiably horrified. Conner did not fancy himself a guest of the Bureau of Prisons for the next twelve years. He did not want spend twenty-three hours a day in cage, wearing an orange jump suit, and shuffling about in leg irons and waist chains during his exercise period. Conner intended to die, but not by lethal injection.
On the other hand, Harvey might just know the whereabouts of Damon Layne. Layne had been Conner’s control officer in Panama, and Layne had given him his orders. If there was one thing keeping Conner Fadden alive, it was the overriding desire to rid the world of Damon Layne before he removed himself. Of course, Layne might get lucky and use his favored .22 pistol and triple-tap him through the eyeballs. Conner wondered if he would even see the muzzle flash.
Nighttime was the worst. Alone with his thoughts and memories he could hear her little voice drifting through the mad clutter. The dancing blond hair, a pixie cute smile, and dazzling blue eyes wrapped up in a spring dress. She called after her daddy—Pavel Chobota, former Chief of Station for theSluzhba Vneshney Razvedki —the Russian Federation’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) in Panama. Her voice chimed through his head like great gongs announcing the time.
Daddy! Daddy!
Conner had been trained to kill by the best—the United States Special Operations Command. He went through Ranger School at Fort Bragg, and Panama’s jungle school before America abandoned her commitments. He had been schooled on all manner of small arms—American, Russian, and Chinese. He could make napalm out of household cleaners, and break a man’s neck in three seconds. He was a soldier. He finally ended up in sniper school, because someone discovered he could hit a Washington Quarter at two hundred yards whenever he wished. It no longer mattered to Conner, for he had become an anathema.
Daddy! Daddy!
The words never left his conscience for long. He considered drinking himself silly, but it only gave him a headache. It never permitted him to forget the crime—the searing, terrible crime. Pavel Chobota had been a soldier for a less than benevolent service. He was trained by the old KGB and managed to migrate into the new SVR. His primary job was to make sure Columbian shipments of cocaine, and to a lesser extent heroin, made it from Panama’s Darién Gap to Mexico. The Mexican National Police gave lip service to the American Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) while they pocketed Pavel’s money. Assisted by the Mexican National Police, Pavel ferried poison to the streets of Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston.
Daddy! Daddy!
Pavel was a solider in a dirty war, spreading drugs across the American heartland for fun and profit. Conner thought he was doing his duty. He followed his orders and held duty’s sharp stick. The target was Pavel, not the entire street where he lived in theEl Cangrejo District of Panama City—not the blond haired, blue eyed little girl. Conner shivered at the memory when he turned a placid morning into burning hell.
Daddy! Daddy!
Her voice, her eyes, her outstretched hand never left his vision for long. The blue sky, seductive surf, and dazzling sunshine could not erase the mark behind his eyelids. Somewhere along the way, Conner lost his zeal for honor and the naked purity truth brings. He vaguely remembered someone discussing forgiveness in a Sunday school room with yellowed plaster walls and dark brown woodwork. He knew about sin, crime, and deceit—he only had to examine the mirror. On that beautiful morning, he became death incarnate.
Daddy! Daddy!
Conner found he did not have the courage to stick the barrel of his Glock between his teeth and pull the four-pound trigger. Four pounds of pressure and he would face oblivion or hell, but certainly not heaven. He had played with the gun a couple of times. The boxy slide would rip his front teeth apart as it charged backwards from the recoil’s blow back. The 230-grain hollow point round would expand to plaster his brains, blood, and bone in a spastic mural on the wall behind his head. Conner did not have the guts to end his miserable life.
Daddy! Daddy!
Usually, Conner managed to cry himself to sleep. The guilt would sweep across his visage, and shame galloped behind. It racked his muscles, and for the briefest of moments he forgot everything. The heated rush of tears tended to cleanse his soul. Eventually, exhaustion overtook his tortured mind and he drifted away. Honor, duty, country were little more than anachronistic terms. His honor was tarnished. His duty had become an uncertain task without direction. His country would just as soon hunt him down as acknowledge he had acted under orders. Conner was beyond redemption.
He plodded the last fifty yards to the edge of the deck. The sea spray from the surf reached across the hundred yards of beach and dune. It played along his lips and he wiped the sweat from his eyes. A hurricane was building in the Atlantic, and Conner welcomed the chance for something to squash him like a June bug hitting a windscreen in summer.
“Enjoy your run?” asked Harvey from his perch on the deck.
Conner grunted.
“We’ll get started again after you shower,” continued Harvey.
“Yeah,” murmured Conner. “You worried about the hurricane?”
Harvey tilted back his cowboy hat and peered between his sandaled feet. “Nah,” he replied boldly.
Forty-foot waves and hundred knot winds were nothing to ignore. Conner had experienced both. “You got a shelter around here?”
“I’ve got another place further up the hills. It’s basically a concrete, upside-down bathtub. I don’t plan to use it until I have to.”
The hills were maybe fifty feet higher than the beach. A direct hit would send water across the entire island. He shrugged and headed towards the shower stall next to the stairs.
Harvey examined the thunderheads. When it was time to leave, the Jeep Cherokee in the carport would get them to the bolthole. For now, the ponderous clouds danced thirty miles out and surf pounded harder with each passing hour. Harvey had passed through the storm of disgrace and divorce—wind and rain was hardly worth his attention.
He considered his charge, the cassette tapes carefully transcribed to DVD and encrypted for satellite transmission to an antennae farm atop the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Virginia. The signal snaked its way through the Byzantine nether world of switches, routers, and computers. It was checked for authenticity, viruses, and any number of other digital predators before it entered into a guarded gateway.
Harvey’s raw intelligence product fired through electronic synapses and appeared on encrypted protected hard drives in a small government consulting firm located in Crystal City, Virginia. The decoded files also slithered down the digital corridors to an obscure office on the third floor of the CIA’s headquarters. It was secreted next to the janitor’s closet. The door was protected by a cipher lock and retinal scan.
The fall of the Soviet Empire and the end of the Cold War left a number of obsolete departments. However, the titanic and mostly secret struggle that occupied the lives of men and women for forty years had left too much embarrassing and pointedly lethal debris. The Cold War, like so many of its predecessors, was awash with dangling secrets. No one knew how many secrets Louis Edwards kept tucked away between his ears, and no one dared to learn those answers. Louis was a spymaster cast in the mold of the legendary Bill Donovan. These days people looked upon him as a relic worthy of distrust and fear. He was given an office, a miniscule budget, and several quiet epitaphs to keep out of the way of new world order.
Harvey called it the fall when he went from one of the Bureau’s top counterintelligence officers chasing a Chinese agent known asGoldenrod to a disgraced agent in West Yellowstone riding herd on nettlesome tourists. The Bureau took its cues from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
and spy hunters were out of favor—unless of course the idea emerged from the bowels of the Oval Office.
After a fashion, Louis and Harvey were chasing the same interests to the consternation of the White House, the J. Edgar Hoover Building, and their prey. Harvey understood that the cardinal sin for any FBI agent was to consort with the enemy—the CIA.
Louis offered Harvey a second crack atGoldenrod . He had come close, but it became a story for the black file—a legend that never happened. The truth was a scarce commodity in the underworld peopled by Louis Edwards. Harvey had made three excursions into Edwards’ world, and Conner Fadden was the latest result.
Harvey did not have the entire story yet, but he knew the tale was big, ugly, and dangerous. Harvey did have a name for Conner’s story:Spanish Poppy. There were parts Conner lied about and hid from Harvey. Their relationship had evolved into penitent and confessor.Spanish Poppy had a sordid cast of characters.
Commander Zeto could best be described as a psychotic killer. His men had cut a swath through the Panama cocaine trade and had systematically pissed off the Cubans and Russians.
Damon Layne seemed to linger on each of the discarded puzzle pieces. He had been in Washington, Chicago, Baltimore, and Panama. His fingerprints lingered over despicable murders and his actions bordered on treason. Harvey and Damon had exchanged shots on a desperate August day not too long ago.
Major Paco Cruz worked for the Cuban Government’s Directorate General of Intelligence (DGI). He operated inside the Cuban Embassy manipulating drug traffic out of Cristóbal for the sea route to Cuban ports and points beyond—namely Miami and Spain.
Pavel Chobota worked for the SVR managing the Pacific side of the cocaine trade. Pavel ended up scattered across his neighborhood after a car bomb shredded him. Harvey did not consider Pavel’s passing a great loss, but he sensed Conner knew more than he admitted.
Iafim Raosav eagerly took over Pavel’s responsibilities in the SVR, which operated more like a mafia family than an intelligence agency.
And stuck to this mess was the most dangerous man Harvey had ever met. Major Jim Harper, Special Forces (Retired), had established a tremulous link between Conner’s work for Damon Layne in Panama, and Layne’s complicity withGoldenrod in Baltimore. Layne appeared to have been involved peripherally with an attack on Harper’s family in suburban Chicago.
It was Conner who saved Harper’s life during a final showdown inside the Canal Zone. He carried Harper—burnt and bloodied—to his Ford Explorer and made it out of Panama. In the heat of a Presidential campaign, no one wanted to discuss the terrible almost war between America and China. It was a tale buried quickly and effectively. To hear Sergeant Darby Hayes recount their hot night in Panama, Conner Fadden had performed heroically.
Hero was not a word that easily passed Darby’s lips. He spent twenty years in the Corps as Gunnery Sergeant assigned to Force Recon. He had seen good amount of bravery and foolishness, but heroism was a word he reserved for few people. Darby reserved the word for Jim Harper as well, but public awards were not given to the secret warriors who fought the nation’s black wars.
Harvey preferred to view Harper as a weapon to be used against America’s worst enemies. Unlike a gun or missile, Harper walked around on two legs struggling to keep the savagery at bay. He could not be put away in a locked cabinet, and he had certainly earned the right to walk free. In the current politically-correct climate, Harper did not find any acceptable categories he could embrace. Harvey had dealt with the aftermath of the four men who attacked his family in Chicago. Harper had been frighteningly fast and deadly efficient.
Conner refused to acknowledge his actions in Panama. He treated the entire affair like an open sore weeping pus. Harvey did not understand the demons haunting Conner, but he did review the video recordings from Conner’s room. The psychiatric profile Louis had prepared suggested a deeply troubled and potentially deadly man lived in Harvey’s second bedroom.
Harvey kept his Smith & Wesson Model 1066 10mm autoloader close by. He heard the door slam from below and measured steps up the stair. Harvey gave the hurricane clouds another look and headed inside. It was time for another round of revelations; maybe he would get closer today.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Chechnya,London Telegraph,Nigel Turner, April 2, 2000 –Is the vaunted Spetsnaz Vympel (Banner) operating in Chechnya? There have been two suspiciously successful assassinations during the last two months.
