The Widow's Strike (4 page)

E
lina Maskhadov sipped
the small
cup of coffee and waited, fingering the simple detonator poking out of her sleeve. Not out of nervousness, which would have been understandable, given that the button would shred her along with every other human in a fifty-foot radius, but for reassurance. Even out of reverence for what she was about to achieve.

The café began to pick up with government functionaries, and she waited still. Waited on her targets. She hated anyone associated with the traitorous Chechen regime of Ramzan Kadyrov, but her targets deserved special attention. A blood-feud eye-for-an-eye.

Only twenty-six, her entire existence had been spent under the constant threat of death, living like an animal in the hills outside of Grozny—or Dzhokhar, as the Chechens called it, after Dzhokhar Dudayev, the assassinated first president of separatist Chechnya.

In the old days, she had been too young to understand why the Russian Federation came to put an end to the separatist movement, but she had understood well the toll it had taken. The first battle for Grozny had ended in 1996, and calling it brutal was an understatement, with the Russian military preferring to simply carpet bomb than try to achieve any discrimination between targets. Despite the devastation, the Chechens had prevailed, and the Russians withdrew. Nine years old at the time, she had moved back to the city with her family, only to find a wasteland of rubble.

Three years later, the Russians came again, this time with even less restraint. The war lasted until the new century, when the Russian Federation finally managed to take Grozny again. Or take what was left of it. She couldn’t believe the devastation. It was as if a giant had descended with a sledgehammer, then set about methodically destroying every single building. At sixteen, she found it ironic when, in 2003, the United Nations declared Grozny the most destroyed city on earth.

Throughout her life she had only wanted the fighting to stop. She’d had cousins and uncles who had taken up arms, and had even lost her fiancé to an unlucky artillery round when he had gone to get water, but she had never considered joining the cause. Never felt the urge to fight. Until the “peace” came.

Elina glanced across the intersection and saw her partner at another café, also patiently waiting. The Chechens had learned their lessons well, the primary one being to always alter their tactics. Always keep the enemy guessing as to how the next strike would come. In this case, they had deployed in an X ambush, with all four corners of the busy square holding an instrument of death: a female with enough Semtex and ball bearings to butcher anyone near her.

The initial strike would be done autonomously, by whomever achieved the biggest target first. The other three would wait for the reaction. When the response came, they would then trigger, one by one, taking out targets of opportunity along all three approach routes.

Elina looked back into her café and felt the blood begin to pump. Four men belonging to the Kadyrovtsy
entered, laughing and joking
.

Probably just worked up an appetite beating someone to death.

Initially a part of the presidential security service, the Kadyrovtsy,
as they were called
,
had grown into a militia of their own, answering only to the puppet president installed by the Russian Federation, Ramzan Kadyrov.

Ramzan, a Chechen himself, understood the familial dynamics of the conflict and developed his own counterinsurgency plan. In his words, if you want the insurgents, target the families. And this he began to do, dragging in anyone remotely associated with the separatists. As it would be hard to find anyone in Chechnya who didn’t know someone fighting, that left the population wide open.

The Russian Army pulled out and left him to it, and a reign of terror began, with men literally ripped off the streets, never to be seen again. Or to be found later brutally tortured to death.

Elina’s surname, Maskhadov, brought special attention, as she shared it with Aslan Maskhadov, the Chechen general who was credited with victory in the first Chechen war and designated the number two wanted man in Russia after the Chechen loss in the second war, when he’d become a guerilla fighter in the hills.

She’d felt the first sting when she’d left her apartment one morning and found her uncle on the front stoop, naked and dead, covered in puckered scars from a blowtorch. There followed one after another, with cousins and brothers found brutally tortured or simply never seen again. She felt an impotent rage.

There was nothing anyone could do. There was no money to travel somewhere else and no way to stop Ramzan’s Kadyrovtsy
from doing whatever they wanted. In truth, many in Grozny turned a blind eye to the secret war, as Russia liked the results and had let the money flow as a reward, giving Ramzan credit for the rebuilding of the city.

In 2004, she, like everyone else in the world, became entranced by the Beslan school crisis engineered by Chechen separatists. Over a thousand people were held hostage, including hundreds of schoolchildren. Among the other hostage takers, in plain view of the television cameras, were nineteen black-clad women wearing suicide vests, demanding vengeance for the loss of their loved ones at the hands of the security forces. The talking heads nicknamed them the Black Widows.

Ending in tragedy on all sides, the crisis was a dramatic introduction, but it wouldn’t be the last. Elina began to follow the shadow war, and the Black Widows began to show their terrible power. Whenever they struck, they killed twice as many as their male counterparts. And they struck often: in Moscow subways, on commercial aircraft, at government offices. They were everywhere, and death followed them slavishly.

The Black Widows had captivated her in an abstract way, as a sort of fantasy to which she could relate. Six months ago, it had become concrete. On a brisk, clear morning, Elina’s father was taken away, this time in front of her. The Kadyrovtsy
refused to listen to her pleas and beat her into submission with batons when she wouldn’t let go of him. He was found in the woods three days later, the official story stating that he had tried to escape. The scars on his body said otherwise. Burying his body by hand with her mother, Elina decided to fight back.

To become what the enemy feared the most.

In the coffee shop, Elina waited, hoping and praying that the man who had taken her father would appear. She toyed with the idea of saying something to him. Perhaps, right before setting off her explosives, asking him if he still hit women. Letting the realization blister his brain just before the explosives did.

There were now five Kadyrovtsy
around the table. A pretty good target. She debated a moment longer, then stood, slipping the detonator into her palm. As she approached the table, two more men entered, and Elina saw her father’s murderer.

They went to their own table, and Elina was torn. Kill two, or kill five? Her orders were to cause as much damage as possible, but her overwhelming desire was to kill a single man.

Before she could decide, an enormous explosion rocked the air no more than seventy meters away, throwing her to the ground. She recovered quickly, knowing what the others did not: The attack was on.

She stood, looking for the larger group, pausing when she saw a leg no more than four feet away, a shoe still on its foot, the top shorn at midthigh, the femur stark against the red meat.

A second explosion cracked through the air, this one farther away. She knew she was running out of time. She looked for the murderer and found him with the larger group, all of them animatedly shouting, as if to determine what to do. She suppressed a grim smile.

She began a slow stalk toward them, silently chanting, “
Allahu akbar
,” over and over. They decided on a course of action just as she came abreast of them.

She closed her eyes and pressed the trigger.

And nothing happened.

She hit it again and again, and still she remained standing. Still remained of this earth. She was thrown aside as the group of Kadyrovtsy
raced into the street, toward the explosions.

No! No, no, no. Don’t let him escape
.

She watched the group reach the far side of the road, a stinging sense of failure dragging her down. The men swerved and ran along the closest clear path, the one avenue that hadn’t been touched. Yet.

When they reached the corner, she saw her partner stand, dressed completely in black. As they ran by her, the Black Widow raised her fist, and a blinding flash erupted. The shock wave knocked Elina down a second time. When she stood again, she saw the castoffs of a charnel house. Bodies torn apart haphazardly and pieces thrown a great distance. Spinning around like a lopsided top was the head of her father’s murderer.

I
kept my eye
on the
front door, watching for Kurt Hale, while Jennifer scanned the menu. We’d managed to catch a nonstop flight to Reagan National Airport at noon, and I’d convinced him to meet us for lunch instead of dinner. As owner of Grolier Recovery Services, I couldn’t go to Taskforce headquarters without a threat of burning the cover, since the headquarters staff ran around telling everyone they were working at Blaisdell Consulting. Going inside “Blaisdell” headquarters might have raised a question as to what “Grolier Recovery Services” was doing, so we picked a third location. Actually, I picked it because I didn’t want to go to something like Starbucks, which would have been Jennifer’s choice. We went to a nice little watering hole right near Georgetown, so the clientele would be an eclectic mix of students and businesspeople.

Jennifer put the menu down, glanced along the length of the bar to the door, and said, “Why is it that every time you pick a place, it’s some saloon?”

“Marshall’s isn’t a saloon, it’s an institution. And it was the first place I could think of that would allow us to talk without being bothered. I knew it would be deserted right now, and the floor plan gives us a clear visual of anyone who enters. No surprises.”

“Please. Spare me the tradecraft BS. I caught the beer specials on the way up the stairs.”

The door opened, and I saw Kurt silhouetted by the light from outside. He was dressed in khakis and a blue button-down, looking like eight thousand other businessmen and lobbyists in Washington. Well, that is, until you saw him up close. He was larger than most men, and his nose was slightly bent, like he’d been punched a few times too many. Nobody was going to confuse him with an environmental lobbyist.

He sat down across from Jennifer, ignoring the seat that would put his back to the door. He shook our hands, saying to Jennifer, “How come every time I meet Pike it’s at some local pub? Whatever happened to a coffee shop?”

Jennifer smiled and looked at me, waiting on an answer.

“Hey, sir, take a look at the layout and you’ll know why. Besides, L Street is hell and gone from Arlington, and you said get away from Taskforce headquarters.”

He waved his arm as if shooing off a fly. “Whatever. I read the chalkboard outside.”

He said nothing else as the waitress took our order, waiting until she was out of earshot. I let him take the lead.

“Knuckles has been arrested on suspicion of breaking into an official government building. I need you to go to Thailand as the owner of Grolier Recovery Services to see if you can get him out. At the very least, just to act like an owner concerned about his employee, to strengthen his cover.”

“Why? What the hell was he doing using
our
cover?”

“We’re tracking a facilitator in Bangkok and found out the Thai police were on him as well. We needed to know what they knew to help complete the picture and to find out if they were going to arrest him. If they were, we needed to know how much time we had to play with. If the Thais get him, he’ll just sit in jail. We wanted to beat them to the punch. Drain his brain for a potential follow-on hit in Manila.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

He laid it out for me, the whole Ministry of Education connection and Grolier Recovery Services, ending with the details of the mission.

“Brett, Retro, Buckshot, and Decoy are still in country, still covered by Grolier. They’ve done what they could, but the Thais have moved Knuckles to a holding prison in Chiang Mai. They don’t have anything concrete, and Knuckles left no traces of the B & E in the ministry, so it’s become a bit of a standoff. They smell something but don’t know what it is. I need you to get over there and engage the State Department. Get them on board with his case.”

Speaking of stink, the last statement definitely had an odor. “I don’t get it. The secretary of state is a member of the Oversight Council. Can’t he pull some strings? What am I going to do that he can’t do ten times over?”

The Oversight Council was the approval authority for all Taskforce operations. Since it operated outside of traditional statutes embodied in US code—a nice way of saying “illegally”—it had its own chain of command, so to speak. Comprised of thirteen individuals, including the president, it had final say on anything the Taskforce did. The secretary of state was a voting member and could get Knuckles out in short order.

“The council has decided not to intervene on any official level.” He saw me start to bristle and held up a hand. “The consensus is that such interference will only provide proof that Knuckles was doing something illegal on behalf of the United States government. It’ll just make matters worse. They want to handle this as if he truly
was
an employee of Grolier, which is why you, as a concerned employer, will now rush over to Thailand and begin raising a ruckus to get him out.”

“Sir, I’ve been to Thailand a ton of times when I was in Special Forces. They can hold his ass for as long as they like without charges. He could stay in jail for years without US government help.”

“I know. We won’t let that happen. If we need to pull the trigger on the big guns we will.”

I’d known plenty of commanders who would tell me what they thought I wanted to hear, but Kurt wasn’t like that. He had never lied to me before, and I knew he wouldn’t now.

I said, “Are they afraid they’ll make matters worse for Knuckles or for themselves? Is this about getting him out or about protecting their own sorry asses from Taskforce discovery?”

He said nothing, but his face betrayed the truth.

“That’s just great. They know Knuckles will rot in jail forever before he’d say anything, so they’re just going to let that happen to protect themselves.”

“Pike, I won’t let it get that far.”

“What about a breakout? You have almost two whole teams over there.”

“Pike, come on. Get real. You think the Oversight Council is going to sanction a jailbreak? Anyway, we pulled the other team. That entire operation is on hold until we get this sorted out.”

Jennifer spoke for the first time. “How are we getting there?”

I turned to her, surprised. “You want to go?”

“Of course. I’m not going to let Knuckles rot, and all you’ll do is make everyone mad. I’m fifty percent owner too.”

Glad for the change of subject, Kurt said, “I’ve got the Rock Star bird fueled up and ready to go. It’s still leased to Grolier, and it’s what I used to get Knuckles over there in the first place.”

“Is it loaded with a package?” I asked.

“Yes. It is.”

Hmmm . . . no question about why I asked.

The Rock Star bird was a Gulfstream IV, just like the rock stars used. The primary difference was that instead of guitars and hot tubs, it had a package of weapons and a technical kit hidden in special compartments. Its lease and origins covered under about forty-two different layers, it had ended up on our company ledger sheet from an operation a couple of years ago.

Kurt stood, throwing some bills on the table to cover his meal. “Look, I’ve got to get back. I know how you feel. I feel the same way. It’s why I’m giving you the Rock Star bird. Just get over there and get Knuckles out.”

I had about four hundred other questions but remained mute. I shook his hand, and we began our fifteen-minute wait, giving Kurt time to clear the area and break any connection to us. Jennifer said, “You didn’t ask him why they used our company in the first place without consulting you or me.”

“There’ll be time for that later. It wouldn’t have mattered here anyway.”

“Are we going straight to Dulles?”

“You are. Get the plane ready to go; file a flight plan for Charleston, then Chiang Mai. Wait for me at the FBO.”

“What are you going to do?”

“A little mission prep.”