First Team (33 page)

A figure approached from the right side of the car. Even though he knew it had to be Corrine, Rankin tensed, caught awkwardly unprepared. He let go of the bottle and pulled his arm back as he saw her face, nodding, then reaching over to unlock the door for her.

“It’s cold,” she said.

“Everything seems cold to me,” he said.

She slid in, adjusting the seat though she’d fiddled with it several times since they parked there two hours before. Corrine had had to relieve herself at the edge of the woods. She hadn’t had to squat outdoors since a family camping trip when she nine or ten, but it wasn’t exactly the sort of thing she could talk to Rankin about. The Special Forces soldier had hardly said anything since they’d taken the shift together watching the waste train for the night.

“I didn’t see anything from the road,” she told Rankin. “I walked up and around. There’s a gravel road out to the town.”

“Yeah,” said Rankin. “Listen, I spilled a bunch of water in the back.”

“Oh.” She twisted around to look.

“It’s on the floor,” he said. “Nothing really got wet.”

“We have another bottle of water,” she said.

“That’s yours.”

“We can share. I don’t have cooties.”

“Thanks.”

A small video screen projected and magnified the view from a set of night glasses positioned on the dashboard. They could see all five cars carrying the waste material from where they sat, though they couldn’t see the three diesels that drove the train or the flatcar and four boxcars that had been tagged on to the back, the flatcar for the guards and the others merely cars going south.

Starting from Buzuluk earlier in the day, the train had been escorted by a small detachment of soldiers in a second train, along with a pair of helicopters. Now it had only a small contingent of guards—Russian sailors in civilian dress, according to their backgrounder—and two local policemen. Most of the dozen sailors were asleep in the boxcar nearest the containment cars; the policemen were dozing in a car near the tracks. Four members of the six-man train crew had left earlier, presumably going to the local hotel for the night.

“You get to the point where you almost wish something would happen,” said Corrine.

“You got that right.” Rankin shifted in the seat. His back muscles were starting to tighten. “Shoulda brought a book or something.”

“What book would you read?” she asked.

Rankin shrugged. “Whatever.”

“You read thrillers?”

“Nah. Biographies,” said Rankin.

“Really?”

Rankin didn’t like the surprised tone in her voice. “Brant’s history of James Madison,” he said, naming the work he’d started the last time he was back in the States. It was a six-volume set of the man who’d been the country’s fourth president and principal author of the Constitution.

“Is it interesting?” Corrine asked.

“It’s long.” He leaned back in the seat, trying to stretch his back. “It explains the War of 1812 a little better than I’ve seen before.”

“How’d you get into that?”

“I just did,” said Rankin.

They were silent a minute or so. Rankin decided he didn’t want her to think he was mad at her—he wasn’t, really. He just didn’t like people thinking he was a stupid shit, when he wasn’t.

“What do you read?” he asked.

“Depends. If I’m in a mood for a mystery, I’ll read something by Lawrence Block maybe, or P. D. James. If I want to laugh, I read Wodehouse.”

“Bertie and Jeeves?”

“You know the series?”

“Sure.”

“I think the TV shows they did, the BBC shows—they were better than the books.”

“Didn’t see it. Excuse me. Gotta take a leak.” He got out of the car and went into the woods to pee.

Corrine turned her attention back to the small viewer screen, where the large cars sat like unmoving ghosts. She knew she had offended him by being surprised at what he was reading—but she
was
surprised, and whether he was a soldier or not, biographies about James Madison weren’t exactly everyday reading.

That was the way it was going to be from now on—no matter what she did or tried to do, everyone from Slott on down would see her as an interloper. She’d just have to deal with it.

Corrine pulled her coat tighter around her, fighting off the chill.

~ * ~

7

THE ROAD TO GROZNYY

 Conners’s German was nonexistent, but Ferguson convinced him that if he spoke English with a quasi-German accent, he’d fool most anyone they encountered, since there were rarely German businessmen in Chechnya. Conners began practicing his inflections as they drove along the highway toward the Chechen capital. At some point Ferg found his accent too ridiculous not to laugh aloud, and it became a joke between them. At one point Conners began singing his Irish drinking songs with a German accent, and Ferguson joined in, words and accents morphing together into a new language punctuated by laughter.

The drive might have been interminable otherwise. There were checkpoints every ten or fifteen miles. Usually the two men were waved through with no more than a cursory glance at their papers and car. But several times the Russian soldiers ordered them out and conducted brief searches, which were more like shakedowns than pat-downs.

Carrying weapons was theoretically forbidden, but the realities of travel through the countryside meant that many Russians and even foreigners armed themselves, and in most cases a soldier who saw a rifle in the backseat of an otherwise unsuspicious car—that is, a car that clearly didn’t belong to a Chechen—wouldn’t blink, as long as the owner agreed to pay a nominal “fine” on the spot. On the other hand, it was also possible that the soldier might “confiscate” a weapon that looked much nicer than his own. They, therefore, carefully hid their Clocks and PKs—they had only pistols—and left a Makarova peeking out from under a blanket in the back to attract attention.

They got off the main highway about six miles from the city, driving north through the ruins of a village that had been burned two or three years before by Russian troops. The land that straddled the village had been farmed for centuries before the rebellions; now the fields were thick with weeds. Here and there the rotted carcass of a shed or a barn, its wood too deteriorated even to be burned for fuel, stood like the starched bones of a horse picked over by buzzards in the desert. They drove north for about five miles, then took a local road to the east. A town appeared off to the side; they found the road for it and drove up the main street, surprised that there were no patrols checking traffic in or out.

“German,” Ferguson told Conners as they got out of the car. A small house nearby had a handwritten sign advertising rooms in one of the windows.

“Ya-vole,” said Conners in pseudo-German. He started to crack up.

“Don’t schpecken ze jokes,” replied Ferguson. He knelt and retrieved his small Glock from under the seat. Palming the gun, he slid it into his pocket, then took his battered overnight bag and led Conners into the three-story brick building, which sat about a foot below street level. The structure probably predated the road, but it seemed as if it had slid into the earth, hunkering down to avoid the years of war.

The front hall smelled of fresh paint. A very short older woman with glasses appeared at the far end as they came in, her fingers layered with paint. She introduced herself in Chechen, then switched to Russian, eying them suspiciously. Ferg gave her the cover story—German businessmen who’d come to sell electronic switches for furnaces. They had business in the capital.

“Why aren’t you staying there?” she asked.

“Too expensive,” he told her. “Besides, this is such a lovely place. Do you speak German?”

She did not, but the promise of payment in euros allayed her suspicions and she showed them to a pair of rooms at the top of the first set of stairs. They decided Conners’s was more private, and after searching and scanning for bugs using a small frequency detector, Ferguson took the laptop from the bag, using the sat phone to connect to their encrypted Web site.

“That where we’re going?” asked Conners, pointing to the sat photos.

“This one,” said Ferg. He double-clicked on the thumbnail and a large .jpg file began filling the screen.

“Looks like an old castle.”

“It is. Supposedly built by the Turks about six hundred years ago.”

“The Turks were here?”

“Turks have been everywhere,” said Ferg. “It’s a jail now.”

“We’re going there?”

“What’s the matter? Don’t want to leave the Happy Acres Motel?”

“Well it does have TV,” said Conners, thumbing toward the set in the corner. It looked like it dated from the 1950s.

“True enough.”

“So what’s the deal, Ferg? What are we doing?” Ferguson still hadn’t explained what they were up to—unusual for him. The SF soldier didn’t need long-winded explanations, but he didn’t like it when people started acting differently than they had before. In his experience, it wasn’t a good sign.

Ferg killed the telephone connection. With the Web browser down, he launched a scrubber program to erase the history files and all traces of what they’d just seen.

“We got a lawyer poking around now, Dad. We have to watch what we do,” Ferguson told him.

“She told you not to tell me what was going on?”

Ferguson didn’t answer.

“We ain’t gonna get you in trouble, are we?” Conners stood against the door, his arms folded. “Ferg?”

“I’m just following my original orders until I’m told not to.”

“I’m not arguing with you,” said Conners. “I just want to know what the hell’s going on, that’s all.”

“Das is goot.” Ferguson took a beat-up black knapsack bag from the suitcase and slid the laptop into it. “Let’s go get something to eat.”

~ * ~

he roast beef not only tasted like beef, it seemed to be nearly fresh. The beer the cafe served was thin, but that made it easier to order a second. It was between lunch and dinnertime, and the cafe was nearly deserted; they sat in a booth at the back end of the dimly lit room, speaking mostly in English, though Ferg threw in Russian and a little German every so often.

“I want to get the guy Kiro’s guy talked to,” he told Conners. “Jabril Daruyev. He’ll know what’s going on.”

“How do you get him to talk?”

“Ve haf our vays,” said Ferguson.

Conners frowned.