First Team (8 page)

“You’ve been moaning about this for days, Corrigan. Get somebody.”

“Easy for you to say. Just finding a warm body that has something approaching the background and clearances—”

“Man, you’re a whiner.” Ferg glanced at his watch. “We’ll look at them all.”

Having lost their source in Kyrgyzstan, they were back to grunt work—looking at all of the places where something might have been taken from the containment cars. It seemed logical that it had happened at a siding, and there were twelve between the last sensor and the border. The Team had extremely sensitive radiation meters—detectors based on gallium-arsenic chips that were as sensitive as gas-tube Geiger counters but fit in the palm of the hand—that would detect trace radioactivity. Unfortunately, this was likely to find something only if the material had been handled or some stray waste had attached to the train and been deposited accidentally.

“So tell me who Sergiv Kruknokov is,” Ferguson said, sliding around in the seat. “You’ve had enough time to write the guy’s biography.”

“I keep telling you, I need someone to handle real-time intelligence. I literally got this as your call came through.”

“Whine, whine, whine,” Ferguson told him. “You have it or not?”

“Yes.”

“So?”

Conners gave him a thumbs-up from the side; the others had finally come in. Ferg waved to him, and Conners left to make sure the others had no problem getting settled.

“Antiterrorism division of the Federal Security Bureau. High-level guy,” said Corrigan, who was scanning a paper report.

“I didn’t think he handled shoplifting.”

“Yeah, well, listen to this. He was involved in a case in 1996 involving a plot to explode a dirty bomb in Moscow.”

“Whoa, no shit. Give me the details.”

“Chechens wanted to blow up a dirty bomb in Moscow. They broke it before the bomb went off.”

“Dirty bomb. What kind of waste?”

“Um, that was cesium, I think. Medical stuff. Nowhere near as dangerous as spent uranium or the control rods you’re after.”

“Nasty stuff though?”

“You saw the science reports—depends who you’re talking to. You have enough of it, and it’s a problem.”

Ferguson sat back, thinking about what they had: a discrepancy in a waste shipment, a Russian investigator with expertise in dirty-bomb investigations, a question about someone named Kiro who apparently operated in Chechnya, and an attempt to explode a dirty bomb nearly a decade before in Moscow. Shit.

“Was this ‘Kiro’ involved?”

“We haven’t ID’d Kiro yet. All the known conspirators are dead or in jail.”

“Those spurs connect to Chechnya?” Ferguson asked Corrigan.

“Uh, hold on, let me get the map up. Remember, Ferg, the satellites showed all the cars made it. Hell, if they had a car missing, that would have set off all sorts of alarms. This may all be a wild-goose chase.”

A waiter poked his head out from the doorway. Ferguson pointed to the bottle of water and asked for another, just to get rid of him.

“Ferg? You with me?”

“Just a distraction,” Ferguson said.

“You could get there by train, but it’s awful convoluted and far.”

“Truck?”

“Sure. Same thing.”

“Where’s Sergiv been lately?”

“The Russian?”

“No, my brother-in-law.”

“Don’t have a good line on it.”

“Find out. Because if it’s in Chechnya, that’s where I’m going next. And run down Kiro, okay?”

“I’ve been trying. Listen, Ferg, that’s not as easy as you think. If Nancy were still here—”

Ferguson smiled as Corrigan gave him his usual song of woe. Any second now it would segue into the terrible time he had had in Egypt during the Gulf War— Corrigan had been in PsyOp as part of USSOCOM during the conflict. His main claim to fame before coming to work for the Company had been placing anti-Saddam dialogue in Egyptian soap operas.

“Yeah, well listen, dude, I have to get rolling here,” said Ferg, cutting the performance short. “And listen, tell VB I may need an equipment drop.”

“Where?”

“Well let’s think this through, Corrigan. I just asked you to track down where a Russian FSB agent was in Chechnya, and to get information on a guy we think is a Chechen. Now do you think it’s possible that I might be going in that direction?”

“Yeah, OK. I get it now.”

Ferg clicked off the phone and sipped his water, waiting for the second bottle to arrive. He signed the bill, finished his glass, then took both bottles up with him to the room. The others had already gathered inside.

“Skip, Guns—how was the trip?”

“Brutal,” said Rankin. “Fuckin’ Marines drive like they screw—all over the place.”

“Sounds like a compliment to me,” said Conners.

Guns shrugged. “We got some stares, but as far as I could tell, nobody tagged along.”

Ferguson pulled out the laptop from beneath the bed and powered it up. Turning it on after leaving it alone a few hours was always an adventure—if someone had fiddled with it, the machine was hardwired to eat the hard drive. The bright double beep indicated it was all right; Ferguson entered his passwords and opened the file with the area map.

“There were twelve spurs where the train could have pulled off the main line after the last measurement, before it got down to Kadagac.”

“That’s it?” said Rankin. He wasn’t being sarcastic; he imagined that there would be many more sidings in the fifty-mile-or-so stretch.

“Yup,” said Ferguson.

“You sure it happened on a siding?” asked Guns.

“At this point, I’m not sure of anything,” said Ferg. “Corrigan got some NSA geeks into the computer system that our murder victim used in Kyrgyzstan, but they didn’t find anything except a lot of URLs for porn sites.”

“My kind of guy,” said Conners.

“So maybe he knew something and maybe he didn’t. We’re watching the investigation and trying to play connect the dots. In the meantime, we do a little slug work and run the meters around in case they got sloppy.”

Ferguson clicked two keys on the laptop, and a satellite image filtered in.

“It stopped along this siding for the night. Guards front and back. You could get a truck right here,” Ferg said, pointing.

“So let’s say we get some hits on the counters,” said Rankin. “What then?”

“Then we follow those hits,” said Ferg.

“And if we get nothing?” asked Guns.

“Then we go to Chechnya.”

“Chechnya?” said Rankin. “Fuck.”

“Probably not. They’re pretty religious there.”

~ * ~

8

IRKTAN, CENTRAL CHECHNYA—THREE DAYS LATER

As they’d expected, they found no particularly interesting radiation hot spots at any of the spurs, although there were slightly higher than normal background hits at three sites. None of the buildings near the railroad sidings were housing waste-processing operations. If alpha- and high-gamma-level waste had been handled at any of the spots, it had been done expertly.

But back home, Corrigan had discovered that the FSB was working with Kyrgyzstan police on Sheremetev’s murder, looking for a pair of Chechens described as extremists, though the bulletin describing them made them sound more like killers for hire. Even more interestingly, Corrigan had tracked Sergiv Kraknokov’s movements. They had arrested a man in Chechnya who had visited a prisoner in a high-security prison outside the capital. Not just any prisoner: one of the men who had been involved in the plot to explode the radiation bomb in Moscow more than a decade before.

The Russians thought that the visitor was acting on behalf of a guerrilla leader they called “Kiro.” Corrigan was still tracking down Kiro’s identity—it wasn’t clear whether the name was merely a pseudonym for someone else, a mistaken identity, or the nom de guerre of a heretofore unknown troublemaker. He did not appear to be one of the major leaders of the separatist movement. Over the past few years, radicals of all stripes and allegiances had moved into the Chechen hills, using the lawless territory for various purposes. Tracking them was a difficult task, even for the Russians, who had more than a hundred men assigned to the job.

This one was clearly worth finding. The Russians had clearly not put everything together yet, but the fact that they were nosing around told Ferg they were worried, very worried.

The ability to go where his gut told him to go was one of the most important aspects of the Special Demands setup, but even Ferguson knew driving into Chechnya without hard evidence of a link to the waste he was looking for was unlikely to yield results. Team missions weren’t always this open-ended; the idea of having so much firepower at his fingertips was to find a good place to use it. But he didn’t hand out the assignments, Slott did. His job was to play them out as far as they would go.

And so the Team had driven to central Chechnya, passing through miles and miles of burned farmland and bulldozed villages, arriving at a town called Irktan south of Urus-Martan. Irktan was located in the center of Chechnya, just at the foothills of the rugged southern mountains. At present, it was not particularly close to the front lines of the conflict, which was concentrated farther west. Russian troops patrolled the streets, but things were relaxed by Chechen standards; there were armored vehicles but no tanks manning the checkpoints into town. Ferguson sent Conners and Guns in to nose around while he and Rankin looked for a place to set up shop. Rankin for once didn’t bitch—he tended to be happier, or at least less cranky, when he had the more dangerous job.

~ * ~

wo Russian soldiers flagged Guns and Conners down as they were entering town. Guns translated the nearly five minutes’ worth of conversation into a single sentence: “We better get guns if we plan on staying.”

Their papers said they were part of a Mormon charity group running a clinic at the far end of town. The soldiers knew all about the clinic and pointed out the building, a red-roofed one-story at the end of the main street. The walls had last been painted white; the outer coat was chipped away in a dozen places, each revealing a different shade. Two Russian soldiers with a dog were standing outside the clinic, eying them warily as they drove by.

“Explosives dog,” Conners said.

“Yeah.”

They drove along to the end of the block, then turned left. The buildings abruptly disappeared; on both sides the lots were covered with rubble that seemed to run all the way back to the mountains in the distance. They got out and grabbed two suitcases packed with medicine, along with smaller bags. Conners holstered the Makarova in plain view—a fifty-ruble note would take care of the “fine” assessed to foreigners who broke the law against possessing weapons.