First Team [First Team 01] Page 3

  “Not until tomorrow night.”

  “Great. Can you work it out with the NSA?”

  Corrigan didn’t say anything, but Ferg could picture him leaning back in his black vinyl armchair away from the computer screens and looking up toward the ceiling. “Working it out with the NSA” meant setting up a special channel to capture and analyze the links, and even under the best circumstances it could be a bureaucratic nightmare. These wouldn’t be the best circumstances, either—there were very few Kirghiz language specialists at the NSA. In fact, Ferg knew of only one—a rather curvaceous beauty with too much overbite but a darling accent.

  “I guess,” said Corrigan finally.

  “Talk to you when it’s done.”

  “Look, Ferg, this is probably just another wild-goose chase of yours. The DDO has been asking—”

  Corrigan probably said something else, but Ferguson had slapped off the phone before he could hear it.

  ~ * ~

  4

  KYRGYZSTAN, THE NEXT MORNING

  It was Conners who started the singing.

  They were on the road from Talas, driving in two cars—a car and a truck actually, the first another Honda Accord, the other a Zil, a large truck that had once belonged to the Soviet army. Roughly equivalent to an American 6x6, it easily held the Team’s gear as well as extra gas. Since many were owned either by mafiya members or ex-soldiers with heavy connections, it was a relatively safe vehicle to drive. The only problem for Guns, who was at the wheel, was the clutch. It caught only at the very bottom of the floor when it decided to work at all, and he ground the gears on every second or third shift. Rankin groused every time he did, but didn’t take up the offer to change places.

  In the Accord, Conners slumped against the door and after an hour or so of driving began to hum. After a while, Ferguson recognized the tune.

  “Whiskey you’re my darlin’ drunk or sober,” he sang out, when Conners hit the chorus.

  “You know that one, Ferg?”

  “My uncle used to sing it all the time,” said Ferguson. “He was the black sheep of the family.”

  “Poor drunk Irishman?”

  “Drunk and definitely Irish, but not poor,” said Ferg.

  His family had made a fortune in the construction industry—probably thanks to a good deal of graft—by the turn of the twentieth century. Conners, by contrast, had been born and raised in suburban New Jersey, nowhere near rich but not by his sights poor, either. His father had been a union carpenter in New York City.

  “You know this one?” asked Ferguson, changing the subject by starting “Finnegan’s Wake.”

  The two men traded verses of the old Irish folksong about a painter who’d fallen down from a ladder dead. Finnegan was revived by whiskey at his wake.

  “What the hell’s going on up there?” asked Rankin over the radio. Conners had inadvertently hit the mike feed on his belt, regaling the others with their singing.

  “Old Irish drinking songs,” Conners explained.

  “Yeah, well, lay off the vodka,” griped Rankin.

  “You can join in if you want,” suggested Ferguson. “You, too, Guns.”

  “I’m not much of a singer,” said Guns in the background.

  “Neither are they,” said Rankin. “And if you start singing, too, I’m taking the Uzi out.”

  Ferguson and Conners both laughed. Conners spent the next hour teaching the CIA officer the words to “A Jug of Punch.”

  ~ * ~

  G

  uns hadn’t been in the town yet, so Ferguson chose him to go inside the police station and plant the flies, miniature microphones with transmitting devices about the size of a large freckle. Foreigners were required to report in anyway, and they figured it wouldn’t be particularly difficult to come up with an excuse to get back into the detective area—all he had to do was claim that he’d been robbed on the way into town.

  “You think they’ll ask me a lot of questions and try and trip me up?”

  “Nah, they’re not going to be interested at all,” said Ferguson. “They’ll pretend to fill out the paperwork. You slide the fly in under the desk, and we’re good to go. Leave one in the men’s room, and another out near the front desk. Easy as shit. There’s only three rooms in the whole place—front, back, and the restroom off the hall. Bing-bang-boing, you’re done.”

  Though not entirely convinced it was going to be half that easy, the Marine nodded. They were now all in the back of the Zil, parked at the side of the gas station near the center of town. It was 05:45 local; if Guns timed it right, he could go in, be given a seat and told to wait out the shift change, plant his devices, then say he’d come back.

  “In and out,” said Ferg.

  Guns had joined the Marine Force Reconnaissance for a variety of reasons, including the fact that his older brother had gone through the program. The training was a blast, rigorous but a blast, and he’d proven an adept free-fall jumper. His first assignment had been to the Persian Gulf, where among other gigs he’d infiltrated an oil rig and taken down a two-man suicide boat operation. Everything after that had been rather boring. He was forced—he used that word, though in fact the school was voluntary and his superiors had merely suggested it—into enrolling in a number of language courses run for the military by a company that did a lot of work for the CIA; it was through them that he’d come to Ferg’s attention.

  Ferg had made the Team sound as if it was direct action twenty-four/seven. But so far it had been all spy bullshit—talking to people mostly, along with a fair share of sitting around in hotel rooms and driving places. Maybe the Army guys got off on this, but Guns was already thinking he’d join the stinking SEALs before signing up for another round.

  “Hey, you going IBM on me?” Ferg asked, noticing Guns wasn’t paying attention.

  “What’s that, sir?”

  “You’re not thinking, are you?” Ferg frowned at him. “Don’t think. Just do. If you think, you’re going to get sweaty.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Screw the sir shit, right? Makes me think I’m my old man. And he’s dead.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Ferguson smiled at him, then playfully pushed the Marine toward the back of the truck. As he reached the tailgate, he stopped and twirled him around.

  “You can’t go with this,” said Ferguson, holding up Guns’s Makarova pistol.

  He’d managed to grab it out of his belt without Guns feeling him take it. The Marine was torn between belting him and asking him how he’d managed to get it away so smoothly.

  “I’m going in there unarmed?”

  “We’re here for you, Guns,” said Ferg. “Just walk in there, do it like we rehearsed. You can seem nervous, that’s fine. Be nervous.”

  “I ain’t nervous.”

  “Yeah, right,” said Rankin. “Give us your fuckin’ phone, too.”

  Guns scowled at him but handed it over. He ducked out the back of the truck.

  Rankin had climbed up a telephone pole down the street from the station an hour ago, sliding a thick rubber sleeve containing the bugging mechanism over the wires; it was already uploading stolen data to an NSA eavesdropping satellite. Once the flies were in place, Ferg would activate the booster transmitter nearby, and they could split.

  “All right children. Be ready. I’ll take the walk,” Ferg told the others, getting out to cover Guns into the station.

  “Long as Conners don’t sing, I’m fine,” said Rankin, picking up his Uzi.

  Ferg cocked the beak of his cap down over his head. If the others had argued that he’d been seen too much to shadow Guns—a fair argument—he’d have told them their Russian sucked too bad for them to get out of trouble. But he’d have gone no matter what; he was a little worried about the Marine.

  ~ * ~

  T

  he police inspector’s right and left eyes didn’t work together, and Guns had a hard time not staring at them as he gave him the basic information for his report. The man loo
ked to be about fifty; his fingertips were stained brown from cigarettes. He asked his questions in Russian though Guns had started out in Kirghiz.

  The story Guns told of being robbed was common enough—a roadblock on a dark road after making a wrong turn. The policeman could probably have copied it from a dozen reports in his computer. Instead, he hunt and pecked it in, using a keyboard so old half the letters were worn away.

  “Occupation?”

  “Sales representative,” said Guns. He was a Belgian working for an Italian firm interested in shipping medical waste. There was in fact an appointment at one of the furnaces that the inspector could check if he wished.

  The phone rang. The inspector reached over to answer, continuing to type with one finger. His bored expression didn’t change, though his left eye rotated a little.

  Guns got up from the chair, making as if he were stretching his legs. He’d planted the first fly near the front desk when he came in, but had waited to find a good spot for the second. Ferg had told him he could put it under the lip of a desk or under a chair if all else failed, but it would be better if it were higher. It was so small that it could sit out in the open and not attract attention.

  According to Ferg anyway.

  A nude calendar hung on the wall. Guns inspected it, pausing over Miss MaPT (March). As he did, he pressed his hand against the wall, sliding the fly beneath the calendar.

  As he backed away, he watched it slip to the floor.

  He froze. As nonchalantly as he could, he stepped back, glancing toward the detective. The man was still hunting and pecking with one hand, holding the phone up with another. Every so often he grunted. He didn’t seem to be watching Guns at all, though it was hard to tell with those eyes.

  Guns took a few steps as if stretching, then bent to tie his shoes.

  Which were loafers.

  He slid the fly onto his thumb, got up. As he did he lost his balance, banging against the waste can and falling against the wall. Once more he pushed the bugging device in—this time sticky side against the paint.

  If the detective had noticed his display of coordination and lust, he didn’t let on. The man finished his conversation and looked at Guns with skewed eyes, asking where he was staying. Guns gave the name of one of the city’s hotels, noting that he hadn’t had a chance to get over there and check in yet, though he had a reservation.

  More hunting and pecking followed.

  “We will contact you if anything comes of it,” said the inspector finally. His tone of voice pretty much admitted that there was no possibility of this ever happening. “Would you like advice?”

  “Sure,” said Guns.

  “Next time, fight back. It’s legal.”

  Given the circumstances Guns had described—two men with shotguns approaching the car in the dark—fighting back would have been suicidal. But Guns thanked the inspector as if he had given him the soundest advice in the world.

  He stopped in the restroom on the way out and got rid of the last fly. Two officers in the front were joking about how fat they were getting as Guns passed. He pretended not to hear and started for the front door.

  “You’re an American, aren’t you?”

  In a perfect world, Guns would not have reacted to the question. But the sharp tone, and more importantly the fact that the words were in an almost unaccented English, took him by surprise. He turned to the right and saw a man in a rumpled yellow jacket staring at him from a metal chair at the side of the room near the door, his legs sprawled forward on the floor and his head propped up by two fingers stuck against his nose.

  “No, I’m Belgian,” Guns answered in English. He gave it a slight French accent, or at least what he hoped would sound like a French accent. He reached into his pocket and took out a business card to give to the man, though a voice inside his head was screaming at him to get the hell out of there.

  The man reached his hand up and flicked the card away.

  “Arrest him,” he told the police officers who had been joking together. “He’s an American spy.”

  Before Guns could protest, another policeman came through the front door, blocking any possibility of escape.

  ~ * ~

  5

  KYRGYZSTAN

  Ferguson, sitting at a cafe next to the police station, glanced at his watch. Guns had been inside for over two hours.

  The wait wasn’t particularly long by Kyrgyzstan standards, but Ferguson didn’t like it. Several men had gone inside since Ferg had gone into the restaurant, and while most were clearly policeman, he guessed that the man from the FSB had been among them.

  Ferguson leaned back in his seat, hiding his face behind a newspaper. He had an earbud in his left ear, which was facing the wall. He lifted his hand to his face, pretending to scratch his nose.

  “Rankin, Conners, what do you guys think?”

  “I think I got to take a leak,” said Rankin.

  “That’s helpful,” said Ferg.

  “Can we use your boom to listen in?” asked Conners.

  The boom was a long-distance microphone with several modes, including one that could pick up vibrations off windows. But it was rather bulky and could be easily spotted.

  “Better to switch on the flies,” said Ferg. He’d hesitated doing so because there was a theoretical possibility that they could be detected.

  “I say do it,” offered Rankin.

  “Yeah, all right. I’ll go hit the transmitter. You know the routine, Dad.”

  “Take a minute,” said Conners in the truck.

  The flies transmitted to a receiver they’d placed in a sewer a short distance away, and from there would upload to the same satellite system the phone tap used. Corrigan could access the line from the Cube and relay it back via the secure sat phones. Conners would call and arrange for the relay while Ferg slipped out to activate the transmitter.

  He was just getting up when the door opened at the front of the police station. Two policemen emerged, shouldering Guns between them to a police car down the block. A short man in a yellow sports coat followed outside, casting his eye up and down the block before getting into his own car.

  “Shit,” muttered Ferg.

  “I see it,” said Rankin.

  “Meet me at the sewer.”

  “Story of your life,” said Rankin.

  By the time Ferg was close enough for his phone to turn on the transmitter, the car had a good head start. He jumped into the Zil as Rankin hit the gas.

  “We lost ‘em,” said Conners, sitting between them.

  “Fuck,” said Rankin.

  “All right, let’s not get a speeding ticket,” said Ferg. “Rankin, slow down and take that left. I think I know where they’re going.”

  Ferguson guessed that they were taking Guns to the detention facility in the basement of the old Soviet building at the end of town—a logical guess borne out by the fact that the car, or one that looked just like it, was double-parked in the street as they passed.

  “Let’s hit ‘em now,” said Rankin.

  “Relax, Skippy,” said Ferg, who knew the sergeant hated the nickname. “Let’s reconnoiter first.”

  “We can’t leave Guns in there,” said Conners.

  “We’re not going to,” said Ferg. “But we don’t want to be guests ourselves, right?”

  Rankin turned the truck down a broad but empty street just past the building, going as slowly as he dared while looking out the side window. The building looked solid, and while there were no soldiers or guards outside, getting Guns out wasn’t going to be easy.

  To Ferguson, Guns’s arrest represented a break, but it was difficult to explain to the others that the longer he remained in the Kyrgyz custody, the more information they were likely to gather. That was the downside of working with the SF people— they were bodacious in firefights and quick on their feet, but they tended to want to reduce everything to bangs and bigger bangs. Sometimes you had to put a little sweat in.

  “What are we doing, Ferg?
” asked Rankin as he took a second turn around the block.

  “I think I have a spot where we can put the boom up, see what we get. Park the truck as close as you can get. Dad, did you set up the bug relay?”

  “Didn’t have a chance.”

  “Go for it as soon as you park. Let me out here.”

  “Why?” asked Rankin.

  “All that chay made me have to pee,” said Ferg.