First Team [First Team 01] Read online

  Conners waited impatiently for Ferguson, suspecting that the Chechen had lied to them to make his escape.

  “Have a turnip,” said Ferguson, looming from the shadows. He tossed one to Conners.

  “What the fuck?”

  “Turnips.”

  “Yeah, I see that,” said Conners, turning it over. It was shriveled.

  “How long you figure it takes a vegetable to rot?” Ferg asked.

  “Jesus, Ferg, how the hell do I know?”

  “That’s how long ago the Russians burned the village,” said Ferguson. “Daruyev didn’t know.”

  “Real test will be if he’s still there,” said Conners.

  “That just means he couldn’t escape,” said Ferguson.

  ~ * ~

  4

  INCIRLIK, TURKEY

  At one point in its venerable career, the Douglas DC-8 had served as an electronic warfare aircraft, mostly for training but in two instances supporting combat operations. Like many an old soldier, however, its days of glory were long gone, and the only hints of its past were a few scars on the gray-painted fuselage where sensors had once hung.

  Van Buren—who was just a few years younger than the plane—tried to stretch some of the kinks out of his back as he trotted down the steps to the Incirlik tarmac. Two members of his command team were waiting with the Hummer nearby—Major Corles, who coordinated G-2 or the intelligence aspects of the mission, and Danny Gray, an Air Force major who liaisoned with Air Force Task Group Charlie, a specially constituted command that “owned” and maintained the aircraft Van Buren would draw on for his mission. Like 777th itself, Task Group Charlie was arguably the most versatile in the Air Force, fielding everything from helicopters to Stealth fighters.

  “CentCom has some people coming over,” said Corles. “We’re going to draw on them for some logistics support. Pete’s working it out. All we need is a target, and we’re good to go.”

  Van Buren grunted. He’d spoken to Ferg an hour or so earlier; the officer said he had three sites to check out, and one was bound to be golden.

  That was Ferg; always the optimist. But if he did find something, they had to be ready to hit it right away. At the same time, they had to plan an exfiltration in case he didn’t; he had a valuable source for debriefing back at Guantanamo.

  The others updated him on the situation there as the truck sped toward the hangar that had been appropriated to house their unit temporarily. Much of what they said was now routine, and Van Buren’s mind drifted back to his lunch with Dalton. The lure of the job—the lure of the money—continued to tease him; he hadn’t gotten much sleep on the flight over though the plane had a special bunk for that purpose.

  He was thinking of James, and what he might owe his son. A good college education, certainly.

  He could get that if he applied to West Point. Van Buren realized on the plane that they’d never discussed that; in fact, he had no idea where his boy wanted to go to school—or even if he did at all. They hadn’t discussed much of anything about his future, except for baseball.

  The realization that he didn’t know what his son wanted shocked him. It was possible, probably even likely, that James didn’t know himself. But as his father, Van Buren realized he had a duty to find out. He wanted to pick up the phone and call him, but of course he couldn’t; he hadn’t even been able to do that while he was in the States.

  If he wanted to go to Harvard, what then?

  What would keep him from taking Dalton’s job? The colonel himself? The thrill of getting shot at?

  Van Buren just barely kept himself from laughing out loud—getting shot at was no thrill, though there was a great deal to be said for having survived being shot at. He did love the action, the adrenaline pumping in your chest. But he personally hadn’t been under fire for quite some time, and in truth that was the way the Army wanted it. Colonels, even Special Forces colonels, weren’t supposed to put their noses on the firing line.

  Planning a battle, helping run it—that was an incredibly difficult and important job, the sort of thing only a very few men could do, and even fewer could do well.

  But adrenaline was part of the reason he was here. If there was an operation, he was going to be in the thick of it, and no one could tell him not to be.

  Except maybe his son.

  “We should have F-117s available, if needed,” Gray was saying. “I’m a little sketchy on when we can get them over here, though.”

  Van Buren snapped upright. No one who worked for him should be sketchy about anything.

  “We’ll get everything crystal clear,” he told the others. “Everything.”

  There was a bit more snap in his voice than he’d intended, and the others responded with studied silence.

  ~ * ~

  5

  GURJEV, KAZAKHSTAN

  Guns waited in the front of the basement cafe near the center of town while Massette called Corrine to update her. The server’s Russian had an accent Guns wasn’t familiar with, but he’d nonetheless managed to order tea and sandwiches. He wasn’t exactly sure what was between the bread, but was so hungry it didn’t matter. By the time Massette came back Guns had already cleared his own plate and was eying Massette’s food.

  Gurjev was a large crossroads in western Kazakhstan on the Caspian Sea. They’d driven nearly four hundred miles without finding a trace of their quarry. “Mon ami,” said Massette, pulling back the chair. “They got something?”

  “No. But Alston is very stubborn,” Massette said. “She wants us to keep looking.”

  “Yeah. She’s almost as bad as Ferg.”

  “Stubbornness is overrated as a personality trait,” said Massette, taking his sandwich.

  ~ * ~

  6

  VERONVKA, CHECHNYA

  Daruyev hadn’t escaped. Ferguson and Conners found him huddled over his chains, snoring loudly.

  “Shame to wake him,” said Conners.

  “Too heavy to carry,” said Ferg. He took out his pocketknife and hacked off the rope. “Let’s go,” Ferg told Daruyev. “Time for door number two.”

  Daruyev blinked his eyes open. “Nothing?” he asked.

  “Not today. Where we going next?”

  “A place called Verko. The Russians abandoned it years ago. It’s safe.”

  “Safe for who?” asked Ferguson.

  The Chechen smiled, but said nothing, instead tracing out the general direction on the map Ferguson showed him. The base wasn’t marked there.

  “What was the village like?” Daruyev asked, as they started down the mountain. “Did you talk to people?”

  “Russians blew up whatever was there a while ago,” Ferguson told him.

  “The village?”

  “Yup.”

  “My mother and sister were there two years ago. I got a letter.”

  They drove down the mountain. The APC was gone. At this time of night, the real danger was from Chechen guerrillas. But they saw no one as they made their way northeastward. Daruyev slept; Conners, too, dozed off. Ferguson stopped before dawn and pumped diesel into the tank.

  They’d have to take one of the main roads northward to get to Verko. It would be risky even without a prisoner, and as he stowed the empty jerry can, Ferguson considered whether just to evac him out now. But Ferg decided that for the moment he’d proceed as planned, using the Chechen’s help to scout the other two possible sites before taking him home. Assuming they drove during the day, they ought to be able to get to them both by nightfall anyway.

  Conners cranked open an eye when he climbed into the truck.

  “Long leak,” he said.

  “I was peeing in the gas tank,” Ferguson told him.

  “You want me to drive?”

  “Nah, sleep a bit. I’m thinking we’ll drive into the day.”

  “That safe?”

  “Of course not.” He started the truck and put it in gear, winding down the dirt road. Conners rubbed his eyes and stretched as much as he could with Dar
uyev leaning against him.

  “Where are we?”

  “Near Noza-Jerk,” Ferg said, smiling at the name.

  “Noza-Jerk. What a town,” said Conners.

  “Then there’s Gora Krybl,” said Ferg.

  “I been to Grznyj, Ordzon, Chrebet—I been everywhere, Jack. I been everywhere,” sang Conners.

  “Sounds like a song,” said Ferg.

  “It is.” He sang a few verses with the names of American cities in Texas. “Old hobo song.”

  “Not Irish?”

  “Came out of New Zealand or Australia or someplace,” Conners said. “Changed around a lot. Geoff Mack wrote it, or at least a version of it, that a lot of people did.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Your loss,” said Conners.

  “Why do you like those old songs?”

  “Why do you?” said Conners. “Remind you of being a kid?”

  “The childhood I never had.”

  “Don’t get philosophical on me, Ferg.”

  “I’m not philosophical.”

  Bullshit, thought Conners, but he didn’t say anything.

  “You think I’m philosophical?” asked Ferg.

  “That and reckless,” said Conners.

  “Reckless?”

  “I’d call it a death wish.”

  “That why I hang around with you, huh?” The CIA officer rolled down his window halfway. The blast of cold air stung his eyes, reminding him he was awake.

  “You’re not an SF type,” said Conners. “Not a soldier.”

  “Not enough discipline, huh?” said Ferg.

  “Got that right. You don’t like following orders. And you take too many risks.”

  “Got to.”

  “You were lucky, Ferg, damn lucky.”

  “Which time?”

  Conners laughed.

  “You’re telling me no SF soldier is reckless?” said Ferguson.

  “Not the ones who are alive.”

  “Bah.”

  Conners didn’t bother arguing.

  “Rankin’s not reckless?” suggested Ferg.

  “Rankin? No.”

  “Bull.”

  “Taking risks and being reckless aren’t the same thing, Ferg.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  “Rankin’s a professional.”

  “You Army guys like to stick together.”

  “You don’t like him, that’s all. Not that I blame you—he hates your guts.”

  “That doesn’t make him not reckless,” said Ferg. “Let’s try that turnoff over there,” added Ferguson, spotting the road.

  ~ * ~

  7

  BUILDING 24-442, SUBURBAN VIRGINIA

  When Thomas matched Corrigan’s scribble with the name on the map—Verko—he felt as if the ceiling had lit up with spotlights. Verko was connected with several UFO sightings during the 1950s and ‘60s, all reported by villagers in the nearby mountains. The sightings had proven false; at the time Verko was a secret Russian base devoted to a squadron of spy planes.

  It looked fairly isolated, a good place to arrange a pickup—but only if he could be sure the Russians weren’t using it anymore.

  Or the guerrillas. Thomas threw himself into researching it, gathering every slither of information he could. He began with the generic, pulling up SpyNet and working from there. The base had been officially closed in 1992, though it hadn’t seen much activity for at least ten years prior to that. Thomas jabbed at the keyboard, calling up a set of satellite photos. He culled through a file, then went over to a collection made by a commercial satellite over the past several years without finding any that showed activity on the runway. He did find shadows undoubtedly related to activity there, though there was no new construction.

  A scan of NSA intercepts turned up several hits that contained Verko, but most had not been decrypted. The one that had contained something seemed pure gibberish.

  He continued to work, guessing logically and illogically. He lost track of time. He didn’t eat. He didn’t emerge from his room. At some point he decided he needed a break. Thomas got up and gathered all of the papers that he’d arranged on the floor in a big pile next to his desk, then dropped to the floor and did a hundred push-ups. When that didn’t rev him, he tried a hundred more. A third set left him so tired he fell asleep on the floor.

  How long he slept there, he couldn’t say. He finally woke up because someone was pounding on his door.

  “Yes?” he asked, opening it.

  Debra Wu stood in the hallway, eying him suspiciously. She was wearing a different skirt, though this one seemed just as short as the other.

  “Thomas, the security log says you’ve been here all night,” she said.

  “Might be.”

  Verko wasn’t a Russian base, he realized—it was a guerrilla stronghold.

  “Corrigan wants to see you. Does he know you were here?” she added.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You want some coffee?”

  “Why not?” He got up, orienting himself among his papers. “Tell Corrigan I’ll be down in a while. I have to put some things together. I need to make a few queries.”

  “Okey-dokey,” said Debra, retreating.

  “Don’t forget the coffee.”

  ~ * ~

  E

  ven though Debra warned him that “the loony slept under his desk,” Corrigan wasn’t quite prepared for the analyst’s disheveled appearance when he entered the secure chamber about an hour later. His hair stuck out in every direction; his shirt was half-out of his pants, and he seemed to have dust and lint pasted all over his body.

  “I figured it out,” said Thomas.

  “What?”

  “They’re putting the bomb together at this place called Verko. It’s in the mountains, and it used to be an airbase.”

  “Verko—that was one of the pickup possibilities,” said Corrigan.

  “Verko’s the place you’re looking for,” said Thomas. “Allah’s Fist bought ammonia nitrate and had it tracked into a village a few miles away nine months ago. We have two sat photos showing those trucks on the road to the facility.”

  “When?”

  “Six months ago.”

  “At Verko?”

  “No, but that has to be where they’re going. And one of the companies that was associated with Bin Saqr rented a house in the village. Medical waste—they’ve been grabbing all the cesium they can get. Maybe other stuff. The analysts warned about this—I know the man who put the estimate together. Very reliable. I have an inquiry into NSA to see what intercepts may link with this.”

  Thomas’s hair poked out at odd angles, and his eyes nearly bulged from his head. As much as Corrigan wanted to believe that the analyst had solved the problem, the portrait he saw before him did not inspire confidence.

  “Take me back to the beginning,” he told Thomas.

  Thomas explained what he had found a second time. Even laid out in a semilogical manner the shadows and glimpses of trucks near but on the base sounded less than definitive. Corrigan brought up a sat picture of the abandoned base on one of the computers.

  “Where exactly would they do the work?” he asked. “The Russians dismantled the hangars they had there in the eighties. These buildings—are they big enough?”

  “That is a problem,” said Thomas. “I don’t know.”

  Corrigan frowned. “What do they do with the bomb once they put it together?”

  Thomas shrugged again. “I haven’t figured it out yet. But it would be a perfect site. It hasn’t been under Russian control for the past five or six years, exactly when the head of Allah’s Fist disappeared.”

  “That’s all you have? No intercepts there, no nothing?”

  “Not yet.” Thomas peered over Corrigan’s shoulder. Maybe the Russians had burrowed into the side of the mountain, putting the planes in a nukeproof shelter. Or maybe there was a ramp elevator along one of the aprons.

  Now if it had been an alien base,
the transnuclear engines would allow it to slide through a fissure in the mountains without detection.

  Probably he could rule that out.