Scorpion: A Covert Ops Novel (Second Edition)
Read Scorpion: A Covert Ops Novel (Second Edition) Online
Authors: Ross Sidor
SCORPION
A Covert Ops Novel
Ross Sidor
The CIA employs
contractors recruited from elite military units for bodyguard and security work
in high risk environments and for deniable ops. The most skilled and lethal of
these operatives are known as scorpions.
One of these scorpions is a former Airborne
Ranger and disgruntled ex-CIA paramilitary operator named Avery, codenamed
Carnivore.
When a high ranking CIA officer is
abducted by terrorists in Tajikistan, Avery is tasked with securing the
hostage’s release before dozens of classified operations and agents are
compromised.
But a high-stakes raid on a terrorist
safe house in lawless Gorno-Badakhshan Province yields clues pointing in
another direction entirely, and Avery and his team of paramilitary operators are
soon unraveling a conspiracy involving an American traitor, double agents, and
Russian gangsters to arm the Taliban with weapons of mass destruction.
From the remote terrorist enclaves of
Central Asia, to the nuclear facilities of the former Soviet Union,
Scorpion
is a riveting debut novel, packed with gritty, violent action and authentic
details that will captivate readers of Vince Flynn, Brad Taylor and Andy
McNab.
The characters and events portrayed
in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is
coincidental and not intended by the author.
Scorpion:
A Covert Ops Novel. Second Edition. Text copyright © 2014 Ross Sidor.
All
rights reserved.
No
parts of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
otherwise without express written permissions by the publisher.
Published
by Ross Sidor
CONTENTS
Tom Wilkes spent the last ninety-minutes
driving west on the M41 Pamir Highway from Dushanbe to Khorugh. He gripped the
steering wheel two-handed as he traversed the Land Rover Defender 90 over the
rough, weathered surface of what passed for a road and maneuvered around chunks
of rock that had fallen from the overhead mountain passes.
The Pamir
Highway was over a thousand years old and the second highest altitude highway in
the world. Once a vital part of the ancient Silk Road trade route, the majority
of the highway’s length was narrow and unpaved and was heavily damaged from
landslides and erosion. The highway was mostly empty, but near the larger
villages or trading posts, vehicular, pack-animal, and pedestrian traffic
picked up. Tajikistan didn’t have a booming tourist industry, but the highway
was a must for sightseers.
Wilkes had made the
drive twice before and had previously enjoyed the scenic view of the Pamir
Mountains and the streaming Panj River, but he drove with urgency this morning
and found that watching the unending brown and tan fields and the sloping
mountains passing by was mind numbingly monotonous this time.
He’d received
the phone call from Robert Cramer, chief of station (COS), Dushanbe, at seven
that morning, rousing him from his sleep and requesting his presence in
Cramer’s embassy office at eight sharp.
Skeptical about
the urgency but wishing to maintain an agreeable and respectful professional
relationship with Cramer, Wilkes got dressed, ate a quick breakfast of eggs and
toast, and walked the four blocks to the American Embassy compound where Cramer
showed him the message left in the shared Gmail account overnight by
DB/CERTITUDE, the cryptonym by which one of Dushanbe station’s most prized
agents was known.
Using a shared
e-mail account allowed multiple parties to communicate without transmitting
anything that could be intercepted, making it an unsophisticated but secure
means of communication, barring the physical seizure of someone’s hard drive.
This was an especially necessary component of operational security in
Tajikistan, where FAPSI, Russia’s signals and communications intelligence agency,
swept a broad and invasive electronic canvas.
The brief note
requested a face-to-face meeting and provided the time and place.
CERTITUDE’s
message caused a stir, because everyone who was in the know knew that he’d just
returned from a foray into Afghanistan on an assignment to locate Ali Masood
Jafari, a disaffected Pakistani nuclear scientist offering his services to the
Taliban, and was reportedly spotted in southern Tajikistan.
The previous
month, GKNB, the Committee for National Security, Tajikistan’s KGB, arrested an
ethnic Uzbek, a card carrying member of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan
(IMU), who had in his possession a thumbnail sample of weapons grade uranium. Although
not anywhere near a sufficient quantity for construction of a weapon, it was
enough to trigger the sensors installed by the US Department of Energy at major
Tajik border crossings. A fanatic with supreme devotion to the cause, the IMU
courier kept silent and died under interrogation.
The report of the
smuggling incident went straight to the White House. With frequent reports
coming out of Afghanistan that the Taliban were seeking to establish a WMD
program, with the help of Pakistani scientists, alarm bells rang across the
Intelligence Community. CIA wanted a specialist in the country, and Wilkes was
assigned from the Agency’s Counterproliferation Center.
Geographically,
Tajikistan was ideal land for smuggling and hiding terrorists. The country had
only two major population centers—Dushanbe and Khorugh—with small villages
scattered in between. The landscape was mountainous, with porous borders, making
it easy to travel unseen and disappear. Security along the eight hundred mile
shared border with Afghanistan consisted of remote outposts manned by inadequately
trained and underpaid conscripted soldiers. Gorno-Badakhshan, an autonomous
province where the Tajik government exercised zero authority, occupied nearly
two thirds of the country’s landmass.
Over eighty
percent of Afghan heroin bound for Western Europe transited through here. Human
trafficking was rampant, with Tajikistan serving as a significant source of
children and women headed to Russia where they became sex slaves. The men ended
up in Russia or Kazakhstan to work in forced labor.
But it wasn’t slaves
or drugs that concerned CIA, but rather the proliferation of the assorted components—human,
mechanical, and scientific—to build a dirty bomb, including the vast quantities
of assorted radioactive materials that simply disappeared from scientific
research institutions inside the politically unstable countries that once comprised
the Soviet Union. Quantities of these materials were poorly inventoried, with
records lost or destroyed, so once a sample was found in the possession of a
smuggler, it was nearly impossible to determine the source. In just one year,
the International Atomic Energy Agency recorded over one hundred incidents of
illicit smuggling of radioactive materials, most of them in Central Asia.
So far, Wilkes
had spent most of his time here conferring with scientists from Tajikistan’s
Institute of Physics and Engineering and GKNB border security officers. Adding
to his difficulties, he often had to fight for access to Dushanbe station’s
agents—the foreign nationals recruited by CIA officers to act as spies—who
would have insight into smuggling and, maybe if they were lucky, have contacts
within the IMU. Cramer’s agreeable cooperation with Wilkes all but ended when
it came to his agents, of whom he was fiercely protective.
In fact, Wilkes
was more than a little surprised that Cramer had asked him to see CERTITUDE
alone. Usually Cramer or Gerald Rashid, the station’s best Tajik-Farsi speaker,
dealt with CERTITUDE. But Cramer had a meeting later that afternoon, and Rashid
was away on other business until tomorrow. So in the interests of showing the prized
Tajik agent a familiar face, Wilkes was sent. He’d met CERTITUDE once before,
when he’d tagged along with Cramer.
Overall, Tajikistan
was a relatively safe posting and was classified as neither a denied area of
operations nor a non-permissive environment in CIA vernacular. Wilkes had
refused a contractor to accompany him for personal security during his stay in
the country, but he still kept a Glock 19 concealed beneath his leather jacket,
especially when making forays into bandit country.
Although the
country had grown far more politically stable and secure since a violent civil
war that came close to turning the former Soviet republic into an anarchic
failed state, it was still not without its dangers. Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous
Province was home to numerous warlords with private militias and a rebel
movement growing increasingly popular amongst disaffected Tajik Pamiris. Attacks
were on the rise over the past several months, although so far the militants
had set their sights on government and military targets.
But Wilkes was
no stranger to operating in hostile environments. He’d served on the task force
that dismantled AQ Khan’s nuclear proliferation network in Pakistan and
Malaysia. He’d searched for WMDs in post-Saddam Iraq. He’d entered war torn
Libya after Ghadaffi was slaughtered to secure the remnants of that dictator’s chemical
weapons arsenal. Most recently, he’d accompanied an insertion element into
Syria to recover soil samples after a chemical weapons attack against rebel
held villages. He thought he was capable of handling himself in this pacified,
backwater ex-Soviet republic.
Another hour passed,
and Wilkes came up onto Khorugh.
This is the
capital of the Gorno-Badakhshan province, home mostly to ethnic Pamiris, and
located within a deep river valley at the confluence of the Panj and Ghund rivers.
The city is surrounded on all sides by mountains. Although a quiet and
beautiful city largely untouched by modern development, it’s also one of the
poorest places in a country already known for its rampant destitution. Vehicular
traffic was light, and many parts of the city appeared downtrodden, with
beggars and assorted vendors in the streets. Khorugh’s geographic location made
it an ideal place for rafting and mountain climbing, but the tourism industry
was small here, and insufficient to bolster the local economy.
Navigating the
narrow streets, Wilkes, the broad-shouldered ex-marine from Oklahoma, didn’t
stand out too badly. The various NGOs and international organizations providing
food, medical aid, and utility services to the locals all drove around in SUVs
and 4x4s, so a Land Rover driven by a Westerner didn’t inherently draw
attention.
Wilkes took
thirty minutes to run an SDR, or surveillance detection route, which came up
dry, as expected, but in a country where the Russian and Chinese intelligence
services, not to mention the Iranians, actively targeted Americans, one needed
to be sure. The Tajiks were a concern, too, but GKNB didn’t venture far outside
of Dushanbe.
Wilkes pulled
over in front of a coffee shop across the street from Khorugh State University.
Classes were in session this time of year, and the area flourished with activity.
He put the Land Rover in park and waited. CERTITUDE appeared on time. Wilkes
recognized him immediately and spotted the rolled-up newspaper tucked under the
man’s right arm, signaling that he was clean. A newspaper under his left arm
was the signal to abort.
Wilkes threw the
Land Rover into gear and accelerated. He made a right at the first intersection,
drove another two blocks, and passed CERTITUDE, who was still walking in the same
direction, his back to Wilkes.
Wilkes stopped
alongside an abandoned factory, away from the busy streets. He turned the
wheel, pointing the tires to the left, the signal for CERTITUDE that he, too,
was secure.
A few blocks
ahead, the street eventually ran to a dead-end, a closed-off construction site
that hadn’t seen any progress since Wilkes’ last visit here the previous month.
Off the main street and away from the university campus and the local shops,
the sidewalks and streets were much less congested here.
Stealing glances
into his rearview mirror, Wilkes slowly grew anxious. A few minutes passed—he
was glancing constantly at the digital clock in the console—but no CERTITUDE.
Over a minute passed,
an inordinate amount of time for the short distance CERTITUDE had to cover, and
long enough for it to consciously register in Wilkes’ mind as an abnormality.
He shifted around in his seat and turned his head around to look back through
the rear windshield.
Then he saw a
figure step up beside the front passenger side door.
Wilkes couldn’t
see his face in its entirety, just the stubble growth around the thin, cruel
line of a mouth. The man was too tall and standing too close to the Land Rover for
Wilkes to get a good look at him, but his wide, solid build, although disguised
by loose-fitting
gho
knee-length robe, was inconsistent with CERTITUDE’s
slight, gaunt frame.
It took a
further millisecond for Wilkes’ brain to register certain sensory input and become
cognizant of the fact that the ring-finger on the hand now reaching for the
door handle did not have CERTITUDE’s trademark Pamiri ring. It was a simple and
bland thing, silver with an inscription in Tajik Farsi, a gift from CERTITUDE’s
wife. Its absence triggered the final alarm bell.
Wilkes’ right
hand instinctively made a pass for the Glock, while his left moved to the
console, to lock the door, but his finger didn’t make contact with the switch
in time, and the passenger door swung open.
Wilkes never got
a clear glimpse of the man’s entire face, but he saw the short barrel of the Makarov
PMM double-action hover in the open doorway.
He didn’t panic,
but strapped into the limited space of the driver’s seat, with no room in which
to maneuver, prevented him from reacting as quickly as he otherwise was able.
Somewhere inside
his mind, he heard his training instructor at the Farm reprimanding him for not
throwing the Land Rover into gear and putting his foot against the gas the
second he saw that the man outside the Land Rover wasn’t his contact. Too late
now, he realized, that would have been the course of action to save his life,
but he’d already chosen another and was now stuck seeing this one through.
The holster was
on his left side. Wilkes had always been more comfortable with reaching across
with his right to cross-draw, but he’d never trained to do that seated behind a
steering wheel with the threat standing outside his passenger door.
Time seemed to
slow and so, too, did his body, or so it frustratingly seemed. His hand felt
suddenly slow and heavy in withdrawing the Glock. The weapon just wasn’t clearing
the holster swiftly enough.
He heard the hammer
of the Makarov’s discharge and felt the 9mms hit.
The first one
grazed below a rib on its way into his liver, which ruptured. The second
burrowed easily through the soft tissue of his right lung, deflating it. He convulsed
in his seat and reached around with his left hand to clasp the wound in his
side. Dark blood soaked through his shirt. Futilely, he continued trying to
raise the Glock with his right hand, the only thing he could do, but the next
shot drilled through the side of his head and terminated his brain function.