Private Wars (27 page)

“It’s about Tashkent.”

“Will it make me happy?”

“It’s not about the last Starstreak, if that’s what you’re asking, no.”

Crocker took the next paper waiting for him at the top of his stack, readying his pen. “You’re still certain they only used three of them?”

“Technically, they used two of them, I used one,” Chace clarified. “And yes, I am certain, as certain as I can be considering that I was unconscious for a time.”

“I don’t like loose ends.”

Chace grunted agreement. In the past sixth months, there’d been no sign nor whisper of the fourth of Barclay’s four missiles, and try as Tashkent Station might, they’d heard nary a whisper of its whereabouts. If it was still in Uzbekistan, in Ahtam Zahidov’s possession, perhaps, there was no proof of the fact. If it wasn’t in Zahidov’s possession, then God only knew who had it, and what they were planning to do with it. Neither Chace nor Crocker nor the DC nor C doubted it would come back to haunt them. Where and when were the only questions.

Chace handed the sheet over, watched as Crocker unfolded it. It was a simple printout out of a news piece Chace had pulled from online earlier that morning, a Reuters story carried on the wire, with a photo. The printer in the Pit was a cranky old laserjet, and incapable of color, though it had tried its best to reproduce the graphic. The photo had been taken in Tashkent the previous week, outside the Bakhor Concert Hall in Tashkent, and showed President Sevara Malikov-Ganiev speaking to the American Ambassador, a man named Michael Norton.

Crocker skimmed the article, examined the photo, then sent it back to her across the desk. “I do not see the missing Starstreak.”

“As I said, this isn’t about the missing Starstreak.”

“Then please explain the operational significance of this photograph.”

Chace pushed it back toward him, this time tapping an index finger on the photograph. “There.”

Crocker looked again, and either didn’t like what he saw or didn’t like where he suspected Chace was going with this. “That’s the boy?”

“Stepan, yes.” Chace took the paper back. In the photo, Stepan was in the background, in the cluster of bodyguards behind Sevara. The boy had been dressed up, wearing what passed for formal clothing for a two-and-a-half-year-old. Chace had looked for, but hadn’t seen, Zahidov in the shot. “I’m wondering if she knew they’d be photographed.”

“It looks unstaged,” Crocker said.

“So maybe the Ambassador didn’t know the camera would be there. But maybe she did.”

“You think she’s parading the boy? Why?”

“I don’t know.” Chace put out her cigarette. “But you read my after-action, you know what I was asked during the torture. If Zahidov was trying to play psychological games along with the physical ones, that’s one thing. But if Ruslan actually escaped, that’s something else. Sevara brings his son out for a photo op, that’s a warning to him. ‘Hey, look—hostage.’ ”

Crocker scowled, tilting forward in his chair. “You could just be paranoid.”

“There’s that, too.” She smiled thinly, to show that she didn’t think she was. “But no one ever confirmed Ruslan’s death, boss. I didn’t get a good look at him, and no one from our team ever saw the body.”

“There were two state funerals held in Uzbekistan the week after you got home. One for President Malikov, one for his son.”

“Closed casket,” Chace pointed out.

“For Ruslan, yes. And if he died the way you thought he died, that would make sense, because he would have caught a faceful of shrapnel.”

“You don’t think he’s alive?”

Crocker exhaled smoke. “I don’t know. There’s been no sign of him, there’s been no word of him. What I do know, however, is that Ahtam Zahidov tortured you and intended to kill you. And you’ve never been the type to forgive and forget.”

“I’ve forgiven you.”

“I’d like to think you don’t group me and Zahidov in the same class.”

“No, of course not.” Chace leaned forward again, serious. “I’m not trying to make up an excuse to go back to Tashkent, boss. That’s not what this is.”

“I don’t think you are,” Crocker said mildly. “But you’re not beyond finding an excuse for me to send you there.”

Chace fell silent, thinking, then sitting back once more and looking away, to the bust of Winston Churchill that Crocker kept atop his document safe. It was one of the few appointments he kept in the office, the bust, a bookshelf filled with the latest in Jane’s titles, and a Chinese dragon print on one wall. He’d had the dragon for as long as Chace had known him to occupy the office, and she sometimes wondered at its significance, but she’d never asked.

He had her number, of course—but that didn’t mean that Chace was wrong about the possibility Ruslan had survived.

Since returning from Uzbekistan, she’d made a point of staying informed about what was happening in the region, and as much as she could claim the interest was operational, it clearly went to the personal. She’d spent dozens of hours reviewing files, viewing photographs, in particular attempting to identify the two men who had helped Zahidov torture her. She knew their names now. Tozim was Tozim Stepanov, the older man with the tools Andrei Hamrayev. She remembered them.

There were nights when she dreamed about Tozim Stepanov and Andrei Hamrayev and, worst of them all, Ahtam Zahidov. Memory had blunted nothing, and Chace recalled him perfectly. Zahidov’s thin-lipped smile and his insistent fingers, and the practiced nonchalance with which he’d hurt her. She remembered Zahidov’s hands burning on her as he had moved to strip the last of her clothes, his eagerness to rape her.

Chace didn’t just want Zahidov dead. She wanted to be the one to kill him. There would be a reckoning, she was certain. The only question was when.

And no one in the Firm who knew what Zahidov had done to her could expect her to do anything less when the opportunity came.

Crocker said, “I do understand, Tara, you know that.”

“I know.” She looked back to him, then got out of the chair. “I’ll be down in the Pit.”

“Tara.”

She stopped at the door, looking back.

“It’s been six months,” Crocker said. “You’re going to have to let it go.”

Chace thought about the terror of that room and the cruelty of the men who had filled it. There were still times, six months after the fact, when she would lift Tamsin or reach above her for a high shelf, when her right shoulder would send fire down her arm. When she touched the skin around her eye, she could feel a spur of bone, floating just above the orbit. And, condom bouquet notwithstanding, the only people she’d allowed to touch her in any way but the most formal or accidental since Tashkent had been her daughter and her physician.

“No,” she told him. “Really, I don’t. And you wouldn’t, either, boss.”

Time didn’t heal all wounds, not for her.

Especially not this one.

CHAPTER 32

Uzbekistan—Surkhan Darya Province—
Termez, “Friendship Bridge”

20 August, 0621 Hours (GMT+5:00)

Zahidov stood in the dawn light at the
foot of the bridge beside an Uzbek army captain named Oleg Arkitov, took the offered binoculars from the man’s hand, and looked into Afghanistan. Across the Amu Darya River, past the newly built Customs houses and immigration offices staffed by the Afghanis, the Salang Highway joined the road that ran parallel to the tracks, cutting straight to Mazar-i-Sharif, and then on to Kabul, winding through the red hills in the distance. A train was rumbling up the tracks toward them, returning empty, Zahidov suspected, having been emptied of the UN relief supplies it had delivered earlier in the day. It would be stopped by the border guards on the Uzbek side and thoroughly searched before being allowed to proceed.

“You look upriver, Minister, you can see the barges coming, too,” Arkitov told him.

Zahidov swiveled, turning east to follow the river. The Uzbek side of the border was lined with a 380-volt electrified fence, and beyond it, land mines covered the banks down to the water. The fence and the mines had been laid in the late nineties in response to incursions from the extremists who then ruled Afghanistan. The bridge, at that time, had been all but permanently closed, reopened only in late 2001. Since then, the border operated almost at random, the Uzbek side shutting down whenever the government responded to a security alert or a bombing. Despite continued American insistence to keep the border open, there were still times when the border was ordered shut.

Zahidov lowered the optics, handing them back to the captain. “They hit before the bridge?”

“Last night, just after three in the morning, sir. We could see the muzzle-flashes and the rocket grenades.”

“How many trucks made it?”

“One.”

“And how many were coming?”

“Three.”

Zahidov felt his frustration well. This was the fourth time the heroin had been hijacked before reaching the border. Twice in May, once in July, and then again this morning. Four times, and there could be no doubt in his mind any longer. He was being persecuted, he was being targeted specifically.

When it first happened, he’d been angry, but willing to accept the loss. The north of Afghanistan was populated by warlords and drug lords, each leading a private army of Pathan soldiers eager for nothing more than a chance to fight. The Pathans’ favorite sports, the saying went, were dog racing, horse racing, and fighting each other, not in that order. If Zahidov’s heroin was lost in this cross fire, it wasn’t ideal, but it was survivable, it was the cost of doing business with the Afghanis.

But when it happened again, less than two weeks later, and the replacement shipment had also been lost, he had become immediately suspicious, and just as quickly considered the possibility that it was Ruslan Malikov behind it all. No proof, of course, except for the fact that the man had escaped him in February, and when he thought back to that, all of his rage returned. He’d been a fool, so filled with hatred for the bitch spy he’d ordered the Sikorsky in immediate pursuit of her, instead of commanding the pilot to set down first, to allow him to finish what they had begun with Ruslan.

The fact was, he’d been so eager to catch and kill the spy that he hadn’t even considered the possibility that Ruslan wasn’t dead. It had been almost two hours later, after he’d brought Stepan to Sevara and was making his way back to the Ministry to begin the interrogation, that he’d received the call. Ruslan had vanished, there was no sign of him.

And there had been no true sign of him since then, Zahidov’s suspicions notwithstanding. But there was logic to the idea that the President’s son had gone south. His support had always been strongest there, in Bukhara, Samarkand, Qashka Darya, and Surkhan Darya provinces. He would have been able to find some aid, some shelter, at least enough to provide for his immediate needs. It was even possible he had jumped aboard a UN relief shipment, either hiding in one of the train cars or riding in one of the trucks that traveled the thousand meters across the river alongside the tracks.

Why
he’d gone to Afghanistan was the question, and it wasn’t a terribly difficult one to answer. There were few places better in the world for a man to hide, the terrain placed by God, it seemed, only for that purpose and no other. Add to that the central government’s lack of actual power in the outlying regions, the scores of bickering warlords and tribesmen, all of them bound by their peculiar code of honor, what they called Pashtunwali, the Law of the Pathan. And first among the laws was the demand that they provide sanctuary and hospitality to any and all who request it. It was how bin Laden’s people had survived when the Coalition had come for their blood.

Sanctuary was given to any and all who asked for it. The Pathans would shelter Ruslan, if the bastard asked. They would have to: their culture allowed them no other choice.

So Zahidov had become convinced it was Ruslan persecuting him, stealing his heroin. And it wasn’t simply to hurt him or Sevara, no, though that was certainly an added benefit. Zahidov was certain Ruslan was selling it, perhaps to the same Moscow buyers that Sevara and he dealt with. Ruslan was selling it, and making a lot of money. Money he could use to pay the warlords and their men, money he could use to raise an army.

It wasn’t far-fetched. In 2000,
taleban
-backed extremists had poured over the border from Afghanistan in an attempt to overthrow the country. They had closed to within one hundred kilometers of Tashkent before they’d been stopped by Uzbek forces. If Ruslan tried to do the same, he stood an even better chance. He knew the land, and if his support in Uzbekistan still held, if those in the military rose to join him, it would be either a coup or a civil war.

These were Zahidov’s fears, and watching as the rising sun turned the already red hills of Afghanistan bloody, he gave them their due. A coup, or worse, a civil war, would destroy Uzbekistan, and at the end of the day, despite everything he did or had done—or perhaps because of it—Ahtam Zahidov was a patriot. He saw no conflict in wishing to do himself well in the process of serving his county, he saw no fault in the viciousness he showed his enemies. He wanted what was best for his nation, and he did what he did to ensure it. All his love for Sevara notwithstanding, it was why he had supported her as President in the first place. It was why he continued to serve her, despite their troubles.

It was why he was in Termez now.

The problem was—or had been, until that morning—there was no proof at all it was Ruslan behind these attacks.

Then Andrei had woken him before dawn, rousing Zahidov from a lonely, fitful sleep. He’d told Zahidov that the Ministry had received a call from Captain Oleg Arkitov in Termez, that the captain had in his custody a Pathan who swore he’d seen Ruslan Malikov to the south of Mazar-i-Sharif, enjoying the hospitality of General Ahmad Mohammad Kostum, an ex–Northern Alliance commander and one of the more notorious warlords of the region. That the Pathan in question, a man using the name Hazza, had successfully identified Ruslan Malikov from a set of photographs.

Proof, at long last, but Zahidov needed to hear it for himself.

He turned to Arkitov, saying, “I want to speak to Hazza.”

They
went by armored personnel carrier from the bridge to the barracks, Zahidov riding with Arkitov and four of his rangers. The soldiers sat on their benches, their automatic rifles in hand, bored. After the extremists had tried to overthrow the country in 2000, the Uzbek Army had been redeployed and remodeled, breaking away somewhat from its Soviet antecedents. Now the soldiers here in the south, the rangers, imitated the Americans, in training, unit composition, and tactics.

Zahidov looked back at the bridge, the only ground route joining Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. Friendship Bridge, the Soviets had called it, although the Americans had tried to rechristen it “Freedom Bridge” once their war against the
taleban
began. It was the Soviets who had built the bridge, who had established this sole land crossing of the 130-mile-long border between the two countries, formed by the Amu Darya. It was over this bridge the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan in 1979, and it was over this same bridge that they had limped back ten years later, defeated. It was a refugee bridge, had seen thousands of Afghanis cross it, fleeing both the
taleban
and the Coalition. It was a terrorist’s bridge, one of the ways al-Qaeda foot soldiers used to infiltrate his country.

When the Americans had secured the rights to use Karshi-Khanabad, they’d argued for the bridge to be reopened. The UN kept offices in Termez, both for UNICEF and UNESCO, and the organization continued to use the city as a staging point for distribution of humanitarian aid to Afghanistan. The International Security Assistance Force, ISAF, resided in Termez as well, its efforts more focused on the military than the humanitarian. Staffed by the Germans, Airlift Detachment 3 had supported Operation Enduring Freedom since the war’s start. The Germans had renovated the old Soviet airfield, built their own infrastructure, pouring millions of euros into Uzbekistan in the process.

The APC jostled Zahidov as it made its way back into town. He was sweating already, could feel beads of it trickling down from his hair along his spine, inside his cotton shirt. Nowhere in Uzbekistan got hotter in the summer; the temperature today was liable to hit 49 Celsius, over 120 degrees Fahrenheit, and that was cooler than it had been for a week.

Just another of the thousand reasons that Zahidov hated Termez.

They
disembarked at the Border Watch HQ, a cluster of Soviet-era buildings that had served as command post, once upon a time, for the ground soldiers being deployed into Afghanistan. Now it was staffed by Arkitov and his rangers.

The captain led him from the garage into the air-conditioning of the dormitories, entering a common room with television and tables. The television was on, broadcasting the news, but the room itself was unoccupied. They moved into a hallway, and Arkitov led him to a door, knocked once on it, then opened it.

There were three men inside, two of them rangers, and both of them were coming to their feet before the door had fully opened. Both snapped salutes to Arkitov, and he dismissed them, then nodded to Zahidov and stepped out after them, closing the door once more, leaving Zahidov alone with the man who remained.

“Hazza?” Zahidov asked.

The man nodded to him, eyeing him with blatant suspicion and fingering the Kalashnikov resting across his thighs. Zahidov guessed him to be in his late thirties, perhaps older, but with the Pathans, after a certain age, it was hard to tell. They were the ethnic Afghanis, sometimes called the Pashtun or Pushtun, a collection of peoples that together constituted the largest patriarchal tribe in the world, and a fierce enough enemy to have driven the Soviets out of their homeland.

“When do I get paid?” Hazza asked.

Zahidov pulled out his PDA, brought up the picture of Ruslan he’d stored there. “This is the man you saw with General Kostum?”

Hazza squinted, and Zahidov wondered if his eyes were bad, if his ID would be useless. In July, Zahidov had ordered Arkitov to begin circulating rumors of a reward, paid to anyone who could prove he had seen Ruslan Malikov. If it was greed that had brought Hazza here, then his information was, by necessity, suspect.

“Looks like him,” Hazza said, after a second. “But he has a beard now, and covers his head.”

Zahidov considered, tucking the PDA back into his coat. “When did you last see him?”

“Yesterday. He took tea with the General.” Hazza’s suspicion had not eased. “When do I get paid?”

“When I believe you.”

Hazza’s expression clouded with anger, and he gripped the handle of his rifle. “You insult me.”

“Prove to me that you’ve seen the man.”

“My word is not enough? You insult me again.”

“You will get paid after I have proof.”

Hazza scowled, scratched at his beard with a filthy fingernail. “He limps. His left leg, it has a brace. I asked once how he was wounded, and he said it came trying to protect his son from the godless.”

“More.”

“I asked about the battle, and he said Allah smiled on him but also turned away, because he lived, but his son was taken from him. He said his wife and his son both were taken from him by a godless man.”

“He speaks like a good Muslim. Is he a good Muslim?”

“He tries to be.”

Zahidov ran his tongue along the back of his teeth, measuring the words. It sounded possible, it sounded like Ruslan, self-righteous and simpering, taking shelter in religion in the face of his losses.

“And Kostum?” Zahidov asked. “What is his relationship with Kostum?”

“Kostum has Uzbek blood, they are brothers. They talk as friends, and the money Kostum gets makes him like Ruslan all the more. He will not betray your man, he has given him sanctuary. If Kostum betrays him, his life is worth less than a goat’s.”

Zahidov digested that. “Thank you. I’ll see that you are paid.”

“Soon,” Hazza said. “I must return before they can learn where I have been.”

“You’re going back there?”

“Yes, as soon as I can.”

“I will see you are paid immediately then,” Zahidov said, and stepped out of the room, to find Arkitov and the two soldiers waiting in the hall.

“He had what you needed, Minister?” Arkitov asked him.

Zahidov nodded, then indicated over his shoulder at the closed door. “I don’t want him warning Malikov or Kostum. Kill him.”

Arkitov nodded, and signaled to the soldiers, then joined Zahidov walking down the hall. They heard the shots before they were back in the common room, and neither of them looked back.

“He’s
building an army, I’m more sure of it than ever, Sevya,” Zahidov said. “He will wait until he has the men and the guns, and then they will come over the border, and they will come here, and they will try to kill you.”