First Team [First Team 01] Read online

  Assuming the guards weren’t in a bad mood.

  They didn’t seem to be, and in fact didn’t mention the pistol. The dog sniffed them and stood back, waiting while the soldiers looked through the bag of medicines; they took a bottle of Tylenol but nothing else.

  Cleared inside, they found Sister Mariah Baxter, the director of the clinic. She pulled a stray strand of her long black hair back behind her ears as she inspected their gifts, eying the wares suspiciously but taking them nonetheless. A forty-year-old missionary from Utah, Sister Baxter knew how the game was played; she called over one of the nurses and told her to take the two men to Mr. T, who served as the clinic’s unofficial security officer.

  Conners was surprised to find that Mr. T was barely twenty and skinnier than a rake handle. The Chechen nodded when Guns told him they needed information.

  “We want to find out about a man named Kiro, who operates around here,” Guns told him in Russian.

  Mr. T shook his head and clamped his teeth tightly together, his face flushing as Guns switched to Chechen and tried cajoling him with the few words he knew well. Conners took a step backward, his gaze drifting through the door back out into the large open room of the clinic. Half the room was a waiting area; the rest looked like triage stations where nurses tried to determine what was wrong with the patients. There were some slings for broken arms and bandages that might cover deep flesh wounds, but for the most part the people had less-visible ailments, probably a lot of the same stuff that people went to the doctor for in New Jersey—headaches and viruses and walking pneumonia, pregnancies, ear infections, coughs that wouldn’t go away. The difference was that here, with sanitary conditions for shit, food scarce, and medicine difficult to obtain, even a cold might be fatal.

  Guns, meanwhile, fumbled with the words as he tried to get information from Mr. T. He had listened to Chechen language files for the past two days on the MP3 player, refreshing his memory, but it was difficult to get into the rhythm of the language. Mr. T wasn’t helping either, though obviously he knew who Kiro was.

  “Think I should pound him?” he finally asked Conners.

  The question caught Conners by surprise. “What good’s that going to do?”

  “Scare him so he’ll talk.”

  “He’s already pissing his pants,” said Connors. “If Kiro is that scary, odds are Sister Baxter knows who he is.”

  Mr. T started to move past Guns to leave the room. Instinctively, the Marine threw his hand out to bar his way. The Chechen glared, but moved back and sat down.

  “Don’t hit him until I come back,” said Conners.

  He found Sister Baxter cleaning a scabbed knee on a nine-year-old girl. Conners watched her fingers daub the wound. They were a man’s hands, rough and worn, too big for the slender body they belonged to. Sister Baxter’s long hair was tied back with a piece of household string. She wore plain black pants and a blue denim shirt, and Connors realized as he approached that she was pretty despite her age, or maybe because of it. He didn’t understand the kind of religious devotion that would lead a woman here, though as a young boy going to Catholic school he had seen enough of it. Back home his grandmother and her friends still went to church every weekday at 6:00 A.M., sitting in the front pews and mumbling the rosary, repenting sins they only dimly recalled.

  Sister Baxter straightened, smiled at him, then picked up a roll of gauze bandage. “She was playing in a field with barbed wire. It could have been a mine. Maybe next time.”

  Connors wasn’t sure how he was supposed to react to that—her tone implied that he had put the barbed wire there himself, and maybe even planted the mine.

  “What do you want?” she said, cutting the wrap after several winds. Her fingers moved gently despite their size, and though the girl looked at her apprehensively, she seemed calm.

  “We have to talk to a certain man. A rebel.”

  Sister Baxter’s lip curled in a way that suggested a sarcastic smile, yet Conners saw there was something else there, too.

  Fatigue? Weariness? Sorrow?

  “Mr. T is not being particularly helpful, and it’s important,” said Conners. “I don’t want to hurt him. Or anyone else.”

  “Are you threatening us?”

  “The opposite. The man we’re looking for is going to hurt a lot more kids like her,” he said, thumbing toward the little girl.

  In another place, under other circumstances, Sister Baxter’s eyes as she looked into his would have made him fall in love. Even here they made him reluctant to continue, as if a simple question might hurt her somehow.

  “The man’s name is Kiro,” said Conners.

  The sarcastic smile again. “Why don’t you ask the Russians where he is?” she said.

  “If I thought they would help me, I would.”

  She got up and gestured to the row of people sitting in the chairs, adding something in what Conners thought was Chechen. One of the women came forward, talking excitedly. The two women conversed for a while; they seemed to be arguing.

  “She thinks you’re a doctor,” explained Sister Baxter finally.

  “I, uh, well, I have some medic training,” said Conners. Some was correct.

  “Yes, well, how are you at gynecology?”

  Conners could feel his face starting to burn.

  “I need to do a pap smear,” said Sister Baxter. “Her symptoms sound like cervical cancer. But she wants a doctor, not a nurse. I’ll do the real work, but I’ll tell her you’re the doctor.”

  “OK,” said Conners.

  “I’ll get the speculum.”

  Conners watched her move across the room as the patient began talking to him nonstop. He nodded and smiled in a way he hoped suggested he had been to medical school.

  “We’re going to do this here?” he asked, when Sister Baxter returned and rolled out a fresh rug.

  “You have a better place?”

  “Don’t you have an examining room?”

  “This is it. The other two rooms we have are filled with patients. One is for people who are missing limbs. The other is for operations.”

  Connors nodded. Sister Baxter, meanwhile, had the patient lie down.

  “Don’t be shy,” she told him.

  He got down on his knees and took the instrument. But that was just for show— as he smiled as reassuringly as possible for the patient, Sister Baxter took the actual sample.

  “You did all right for an American,” she told him after she had logged the information on the sample and told the woman when to return.

  “Thanks.”

  “Kiro has a small group outside of the town,” she told him.

  “Near here?”

  “Near enough.”

  “Why don’t the Russians attack him?”

  “There is the philosophy of live and let live,” she said. “And there is also the fact that this is a very poor place for a commander to be posted.”

  Conners assumed that she was hinting that Kiro bribed the local commander, something that was not unheard of though obviously not condoned by the central authorities. While a bribe might not even be necessary—if the guerrilla wasn’t going out of his way to make trouble, he might not be attacked—it would explain why the FSB people hadn’t been able to obtain a lot of information about him—and why the CIA hadn’t then been able to steal it.

  “I have a person who can guide you, but it will cost you money,” added Sister Baxter.

  “How much do you need?”

  “We need a lot. But the money’s not for us. One hundred dollars, as soon as it’s dark in front of the gas station going out of town.”

  ~ * ~

  9

  IRKTAN, CHECHNYA—SEVERAL HOURS LATER

  Ferguson pushed another wad of gum into his mouth, continuing to chew furiously as he watched Guns approaching the rendezvous at the gas station. He had the NOD’s magnifier on max, but he still had trouble seeing in the distance beyond the corner. Conners was tagging along behind Guns, his MP-5 hangin
g down at his side. They’d decided the heavy weapons were necessary after dark, and Guns had his under his coat.

  “Don’t see nobody,” said Guns, still walking.

  “He’ll be watching you,” Ferguson told them. “Just keep going. Dad, you’re going to have to go in there with him so it doesn’t look like you’re waiting to ambush them. Tuck the gun beneath your coat. It should show a little, just don’t make it too obvious.”

  “You gonna fuckin’ blow their noses for them, too?” said Rankin. He was sitting next to Ferguson in the passenger seat, his Uzi in hand. He had a grenade launcher and a dozen 40 mm rounds on the floor. Both men were wearing their vests.

  “I will if I have to,” said Ferg. “What color snot you figure is in Guns’s nose?”

  Rankin gave a little laugh. Ferguson pushed against the steering wheel, noticing something moving in the station.

  “Okay, Guns, your man is in the station looking at a magazine. Look menacing.”

  “Shoulda sent Rankin for that,” said Dad.

  Ferg swung the NOD around, looking through the back window. The Russians tended to stay put once it got dark—they weren’t dumb—but there was always the possibility of a patrol.

  Anyone else on the street could be assumed to be a rebel or a member of the local black-market gangs, or both.

  Inside the gas station, Guns went to the clerk behind the counter and asked if he could buy some cigarettes. The clerk pushed a pack toward him on the counter. It said Marlboro on it, but instead of red the label was a sickish orange, an obvious counterfeit.

  The price was a hundred rubles.

  Without saying anything, Guns reached into his pocket for the money.

  Connors, standing by the door, eyed the other man. He was about five-four, and his rib cage seemed to have been shifted permanently, as if his chest were twisted on his body. He had a scar at the base of his chin and a blank look in his eyes, as if he were staring at a spot far in the distance.

  Guns dropped the bill on the counter, took the cigarettes, and went outside. Conners followed; the informant came out last.

  They walked to the side of the building. The man held up his hands, seeming to anticipate a pat-down. Conners didn’t disappoint him, pushing his legs apart as he slid the muzzle of his submachine gun in the man’s back. He wasn’t wearing a bulletproof vest, and he didn’t have a weapon. That worried Conners, because it implied that he was being watched by a bodyguard, even though they hadn’t seen one.

  Ferg told him he was worrying too much.

  “And you’re worrying too little,” said Guns.

  “Nah, we’re cool,” said Ferg.

  “Five-mile hike,” Guns said. “Up that road near the creek, then off the trail for another two miles.”

  “What happens then?” Ferg asked.

  “Won’t say. He’ll show us up the road, then that’s it.”

  “Probably an ambush,” said Rankin.

  “If it were, he’d have a vest,” said Ferg. “Go for it,” he told Guns. He watched with the NOD as they crossed the street, the Chechen in the lead. The man walked with a limp.

  “I wouldn’t trust that fuck as far as I could throw him,” said Rankin as they watched them cross the street.

  “You have a better plan?”

  “Let him point it out on the map, we check it out tomorrow night.”

  “Which only gives them more time to set up the ambush, or to shake information out of our guy,” said Ferguson. He waited a few minutes, then put the car in gear as Conners began to hum “A Jug of Punch” over the radio.

  “You do ‘Danny Boy,’ and we’re not backing you up,” Ferguson threatened, parking the car. The two American soldiers and the Chechen source were behind them now; Ferg could see them in the rearview mirror.

  “Hey, I like ‘Danny Boy,’” protested Conners.

  Ferguson and Rankin waited for the others to pass before getting out of the truck. Carrying rucksacks with gear as well as weapons—Ferg had his shotgun and Rankin the Uzi—they gave the others a good start, then began trailing them. The truck would have been too obvious and an easy target besides.

  The road twisted and turned as it climbed into the mountains. It took a little more than an hour to reach the turnoff that allegedly led to the guerrilla stronghold. Connors walked off the road about ten yards and promptly lost the trail in the rocks.

  “He’s going to have to do better than this,” he told Guns.

  Guns started to explain that the Chechen would have to accompany them farther. They weren’t going into the camp, but they wanted a better idea where it was.

  The Chechen started to back away.

  Ferg and Rankin had steadily closed the distance, and by then were only a hundred yards behind. As Guns continued to argue, Ferguson came up and put his Remington 870 against the back of the Chechen’s head. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out five one-hundred-dollar bills, pressing them into the man’s hand.

  “Five more when we see it. We won’t cause trouble,” he said in Russian. “But you have to earn your money.”

  ~ * ~

  T

  he guerrilla camp was bigger than they’d expected, and housed enough men to spare six guards on the perimeter that faced the road and town below. Rankin saw at least one ready but unmanned gun emplacement, and the configuration of the hills suggested there would be any number of weapons trained on the approach. He also thought there was also a minefield across a valley that flanked a large rock outcropping commanding the approach.

  “No way we’re sneaking in the front door,” said Rankin when he returned to the copse off the road where the others were waiting. “And the way the ridge runs off to the right and left, I don’t know if we can get in at all.”

  “We’ll have to rethink this,” admitted Ferguson. He pulled a hundred-dollar bill from his pocket and gave it to Guns, then pointed to their informant. “Tell our friend this is just extra rent—he’s our houseguest for the evening.”

  “He’s not going to be pleased,” said the Marine. “Claims he has to get back to his wife.”

  “Tell ‘em we’ll kill the person she’s sleeping with for no charge when we’re done.”

  ~ * ~

  I

  t took them more than an hour to get back to the car and drive the five miles to the abandoned building Ferguson and Rankin had found earlier. The ramshackle farmhouse had a few small holes in the roof but was otherwise intact. The road to it was another story—pockmarked by bomb craters and two rubble barriers, it was so bad they had to leave the car about a mile from the house. They slipped it in under some trees, obscuring it from the Russian helicopter patrols; as a precaution against thieves Rankin pulled the wire from the coil and took it with him.

  Conners gazed at the stars as they walked, trying to orient the unfamiliar sky against his faded memory of an astronomy course he’d taken in high school a million years before. There was a time when knowing the stars would have been a critical talent on a deep insertion like this; compass, sextant, and a clear sky would help you work out where you were. But GPS gear had made the math obsolete; now the stars were just pretty things to look at.

  When they were a little less than a half mile from the farm building, they spread out into the field, approaching slowly to make sure they weren’t walking into an ambush. Guns told the Chechen to stay with him—and to stay nearby. He didn’t bother threatening the man with his submachine gun; their informant wasn’t happy but had already proven he was the sort of man who would stick around as long as the hundred-dollar bills kept appearing.

  Even when the infrared glasses told them the building was empty, they moved in cautiously, looking for booby traps and signs that someone had been there. They found neither. Ferg divided them into two shifts—him and Conners, Guns and Rankin—and told them they’d catch some Zs, Guns and Rankin first. Their guest took a sleeping bag and curled up in the corner of the basement; Guns and Rankin tied his hands and feet together, then positi
oned themselves so he’d have to step on one of them to sneak out.

  Upstairs, Ferguson swung the antenna up on the sat phone and called home.

  “Ferg?” asked a female voice on the other end.

  “Actually it’s Joe Stalin,” he told Lauren DiCapri, Corrigan’s relief on the desk. “If I sound a little faint, it’s because it’s damn hot down here in hell, even with the air conditioners cranked.”

  “You’re real late checking in. Major Corrigan was worried. I’m supposed to call him at home.”