Authors: Greg Rucka
CHAPTER 27
Uzbekistan—Dzhizak Province—
Syr Darya River, 77 km SSW Tashkent
21 February, 0458 Hours (GMT+5:00)
Chace took the Audi off the road as
soon as she could, on the northern edge of the bridge spanning the Syr Darya along the M39, turning southeast to follow the water. The Audi bumped and slid on the ground, spitting out chunks of earth and pebbles from beneath the tires. The Range Rover, for all its problems, had been built for off-road use. The Audi obviously hadn’t been, and now Chace was forced to slow in an attempt to keep from catching the car on the rocks and ruts that peppered the path down to the bank of the river. The darkness made the terrain look different, and Chace knew she was close to the LS, but was uncertain as to just how close.
With a free hand, Chace popped open the armrest, pulling the GPS from where she’d stored it, handing it to Ruslan without looking at him. “Turn that on, take a reading.”
Ruslan fumbled with the device, then read out longitude and latitude, degrees, minutes, seconds. The information confirmed what she knew, and Chace barely nodded, her focus on keeping the Audi moving in the right direction. She appreciated the fact that he didn’t try to hand the GPS unit back to her.
From the backseat, Stepan said,
“Ota?”
Ruslan turned, answering in Uzbek, and Chace saw the boy sitting up on the backseat, bleary and confused and looking more than a little frightened. He babbled something in response, and Ruslan spoke again, soothingly but it wasn’t enough, and in the reflected glow of the one working headlight, Chace saw the boy’s eyes growing wet as he started to sob.
“We’re close now,” she said. “We’re almost there.”
She saw Ruslan nod, speaking again to his son, and she assumed he was repeating her words, but she had no way of knowing. The headlights caught the water, reflected it, and she downshifted, urging the car forward, feeling the Audi beginning to lose itself in the softer earth fed by the river. Then she saw the bend, a dry wash of shore cut by the water sometime long ago, spreading out in a crescent of river sand. She downshifted a last time, turning the car slowly about in the wash until they faced the way they had come, killing the headlamp as the Audi came to a stop. She left the engine running, put the car into neutral, and hit the trunk release.
“Stay put,” Chace said.
She climbed out of the Audi, went around to the trunk. She’d switched from the hush puppy to the Sarsilmaz when they’d changed cars, keeping the pistol at her back, but now she moved it around so it rested at her waist in the front. The Kalashnikov, hush puppy, and grenades were all in the trunk, but she took only the automatic rifle, throwing the strap over her shoulder. She shut the trunk.
The river burbled past on her left, the water sixty feet away at its closest point. To her right, the ground rose sharply, turning into a low cliff, describing the outer edge of the crescent. Chace looked up, saw thin strips of cloud whipping past, obscuring the stars. The wind had risen, both in strength and in altitude.
From inside the car, she heard Stepan sobbing, watched through the rear window as Ruslan contorted himself in the front seat, lifting the boy onto his lap. The crying subsided.
Chace checked her watch and saw it was oh-five-hundred, exactly.
Almost immediately, she heard the first echo of the rotors, the helicopter’s rumble bouncing off the Syr Darya. She took the Kalashnikov off her shoulder, racked the bolt, holding the automatic rifle in both hands. The copter’s sound was growing louder, but that was all there was—no visual, no telltale lights. She wondered if Porter was flying with NVG, if that had been one of the incidentals her seventy thousand pounds had bought him.
Then she saw the bird, almost skimming the river as it came around the bend, spray flying from the wash of the rotor blades, a big, old, ugly Russian Mi-8 helicopter, and she knew it was Porter. He’d picked a workhorse, one common enough in this part of the world to be easily acquired and maintained, one that would raise no suspicion. She let her grip on the Kalashnikov go to one hand and stepped out from behind the car, to make certain he could see her.
The helicopter altered course, slowing and descending, and now the sand was flying, too, and Chace brought her forearm up to protect her vision, moving to the passenger’s side of the Audi. She opened Ruslan’s door, and he peered up at her, Stepan wrapped in his arms, the bloodstained flak jacket still around him.
“Our ride’s here,” Chace shouted. She adjusted the strap on the Kalashnikov, letting the weapon lie against her back, then held out her hands. “Here.”
Ruslan nodded, bent his mouth to Stepan’s ear, then lifted the little boy to her. Stepan turned his head to her, eyes wide with suspicion and fear, his mouth closed. Chace took him in her arms.
“It’s all right,” she told him in Russian, and stepped back to give Ruslan room to exit. The Mi-8 was louder than ever, the sand it was throwing up stinging her skin. She put a hand on Stepan’s head, pressing his cheek to her shoulder to shield him from the spray, adjusting the flak jacket around him more for protection from the cold and sand than anything else.
Then she heard an echo, what she thought was an echo, the sound of the bird reverberating off the cliff to her right, but the pitch was wrong, too high, and she knew it wasn’t an echo. She raised her head from Stepan to the Mi-8, seeing Ruslan emerging from the Audi in her peripheral vision at the same moment, and caught a glimpse of Porter behind the stick in the cockpit just before the helicopter exploded.
Fire and metal blew through the air, the remnants of the helicopter pitching nose forward, flipping into the earth, and the rotors snapped free, and Chace felt herself knocked off her feet. The world cracked, and she felt pain race along her spine, and she knew she’d landed on her back, on the Kalashnikov. She was dimly aware that she still had Stepan in her arms, and that amazed her.
She opened her eyes and couldn’t see anything but the after-image of the blast. The sound of the second helicopter cut through the ringing in her ears. She forced herself to roll, still gripping the boy, managed to get to her knees. Her vision cleared to pinpoints of dancing white, and she stumbled, turning, disoriented.
Light flared over the ground, blasting daylight into an oblong that skimmed the wreckage of the Mi-8, running over the sand toward her. Chace could barely see the helicopter beyond the flare of its searchlight, hovering twenty-five feet off the ground, and she thought it was a Sikorsky, a civilian model, and she knew that was where the missile had come from, the second Starstreak in the same night, this one used to kill not only Porter, but their chances of escape, too.
Starstreak,
Chace thought.
Another fucking Starstreak, and Jesus, but how many of them do these sons of bitches have?
She was already running for the Audi, clutching Stepan to her with her left hand, using her right to draw the Sarsilmaz from her waist.
“Ruslan!” she screamed. “In the car! In the fucking car!”
She fired as she ran, squeezing off rounds, trying to hit the light, or above the light, and not having any hope of success. The Sikorsky bobbled, turning, and Chace had reached the driver’s door, had shoved the boy back into the car, and was yanking the Kalashnikov’s strap from her shoulder, when she saw what the searchlight saw, and for a fraction, she froze.
Ruslan was sprawled in the dirt facedown, fifteen feet from the car, his arms splayed out in front of him, one of his legs bent back across the other. The searchlight struck him at an angle, pushing shadows off his motionless body. Chace thought she saw blood, but she couldn’t tell how much.
“Ruslan! Ruslan, get up!”
He didn’t move.
“Get up! Damn you, get up!”
The searchlight broke away from the body, the Sikorsky swiveling as it hovered, playing its ruthless light across the Audi’s hood. The beam struck Stepan inside, then Chace, and she saw the port-side door of the helicopter was open, and two men were crouched there, automatic rifles in their hands. She raised the Sarsilmaz in both hands and emptied the gun at them, flinging herself back into the car. One of the men pitched forward and fell.
Chace rammed the car into gear, then stomped on the gas, and the car lurched forward. She floored it, feeling the tires desperate for traction, and beside her, Stepan was screaming, pressing himself to the passenger window. Bullets punched holes along the edge of the hood, and then the wheels caught, the Audi shooting forward. Chace saw the man who had fallen trying to get to his feet and out of the way, and she ran him down before he had the chance, feeling the car jump slightly at the impact. More bullets struck, now hitting the roof, and between her hands on the wheel, Chace saw the dashboard shatter, and wondered fleetingly how the round had missed her.
“Ota!”
Stepan wailed.
“Ota, Ota!”
She wrenched the wheel, fighting the Audi up the side of the bank, and the car popped onto harder ground. The searchlight flashed on them again, and she saw the orange blossoms of muzzle-flash in her mirrors, and the rear window exploded. The Audi hit the pavement, and Chace slid the car into a right, the rear wheels squealing as they bit into the asphalt.
Stepan had slumped, gone silent, and Chace glanced over and for a horrifying second saw only the blood on the flak jacket. She forgot the stick for a moment, reaching for the boy with her right hand, yanking back the fabric, and saw nothing beneath, no fresh blood. Stepan’s face was streaked with tears, snot running from his nose over his lips.
“Ota—”
“I’m sorry,” Chace told him, the ache in her chest sudden, making the words sound like a companion sob.
She put her hand back to the stick, her focus back on the road, trying to think of an escape.
The Sikorsky was fast, faster than the Audi, and she weaved on the road, trying to stay out of the searchlight. They weren’t shooting now, and they weren’t trying to get ahead of her, and she assumed that meant they liked where she was headed, and wanted her to keep going there. On radios, probably, she decided, maybe a roadblock, but the problem was that she didn’t have any other choice. She had to get back to Tashkent, Tashkent was the only option, and Chace cursed herself for not having planned a fallback exfil, no other way out of the country.
She had to get to one of the embassies, either the American or the British, it didn’t matter. To hell with Crocker and his secret plans, to hell with keeping things quiet, they’d gotten very loud now, and she’d run out of options. She’d lost Ruslan, she’d blown the mission, but she was damned if she was going to lose the son, too. She’d fucked it up, but she wasn’t going to lose the son, too.
Over her dead body would she lose Stepan.
Then she saw the headlights, and she saw the silhouette of the man standing in front of them, and more, saw the silhouette of what he was raising onto his shoulder.
“Oh, fucking hell,” Chace said.
Yanking the handbrake, she twisted the wheel, stomping the pedal. The Audi slid, spinning left, and Chace shot out her hand to catch Stepan before the boy could be thrown about the interior of the car. The car screeched to a stop and the engine lurched, then died.
Pulling Stepan after her, Chace shoved her door open and tumbled out of the car, onto the cracked highway. She wrapped her arms around the boy as she regained her feet, felt him clinging to her, whimpering. The searchlight found them both again, and she winced in its glare, half running, half stumbling for the side of the road, desperate to get away from the Audi. The Sikorsky was coming around on her left, trying to block her passage, descending, but keeping distance.
It knows what happens next,
Chace thought.
The world split, and she felt heat sweep over her back, pain following after it, her legs knocked from beneath her. Everything turned around, surrounding her in weightlessness and vertigo, and Chace knew her feet weren’t on the ground anymore. She tightened her grip on the child, flashed for a final instant on his face pressed against her chest, his eyes squeezed closed, black hair shining in the light of the exploding car.
She saw Tamsin.
Then she saw nothing.
CHAPTER 28
London—Vauxhall Cross,
Office of the Chief of Service
21 February, 0016 Hours GMT
Frances Barclay looked like a man under siege.
His shoulders were hunched inward, his hands laid flat on the blotter on his desk, his neck lowered, his chin thrust forward, and his eyes behind his glasses brimming with hatred. And for once, that hatred wasn’t being directed at Crocker himself, but rather at the Deputy Chief standing beside him, though Crocker knew it was only a matter of time before he became its focus again.
“You knew about this, you knew about
all
of this, and you failed to inform me?”
“The operation was undertaken in response to a directive by the FCO,” Alison Gordon-Palmer said evenly.
“Not an official directive!”
“The PUS acted with both the Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister’s blessing, sir. If PUS felt it necessary to omit you from the conops, then you’ll have to take it up with him. But D-Ops was acting as ordered, and the paper trail exists to prove it.”
“Placed after the fact, no doubt.”
Gordon-Palmer didn’t respond, and Crocker, for his part, continued standing in silence beside her. Another chapter to be written in his manual of desk usage, Crocker thought. In any other instance, the Deputy Chief and the Director of Operations standing at C’s desk while C himself railed at them from his chair would have been the perfect portrait of subordinate reinforcement, more akin to the dressing-down of ill-mannered children than not. Yet this time, with C seated and the two of them standing, it seemed the players were entirely reversed.
Barclay seemed to sense it, as well, because he chose that moment to get to his feet and lean on the desk.
“I know what this is,” he told the Deputy Chief. “This is a coup d’état. Don’t think I won’t fight it.”
“If that’s how you see it, sir,” she replied.
“There’s another way I should see it?”
“The disposition of the operation is still in question. Should it be successfully concluded, you’ll certainly be entitled, even expected, to take full credit for it.”
“Which is your way of saying that, when it fails, I’ll be expected to own it?”
Crocker was impressed that Gordon-Palmer managed to sound mildly indignant. “Not at all, sir. Should the operation fail, you have the perfect scapegoats.”
“You.”
“And D-Ops, yes, sir.”
It didn’t reassure Barclay in the slightest. If anything, the look on his face hardened further. “So you say. Yet you’ve also said that the White House is adamant that Sevara Malikov and not her brother becomes Uzbekistan’s next President. Even if the operation is successful, it will be a failure.”
“Not necessarily,” Crocker said. “If Ruslan and his son are lifted, they can be positioned for an eventual return to the country and an attempted ouster of the sister.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Barclay snapped. “The operation is pointless, at least as declared. It does nothing but expose Ruslan and force his sister and her supporters to move against him, perhaps overtly, and the results of an overt move will do nothing but damage U.K. relations with Uzbekistan. In the final analysis, it solidifies her power, not diminishes it.”
Crocker held his tongue, mostly because he couldn’t argue the point. Until three hours earlier, he would have argued that Ruslan had every chance to become Uzbekistan’s next President, especially with Seccombe’s promised support for the coup. But that was no longer the case. According to Gordon-Palmer, in fact, it never had been.
So he stayed silent and let Barclay and the Deputy Chief continue their bitter dance, all the while struggling with his own guilt. It was one thing to have failed Chace before, in Saudi Arabia, to have been boxed both politically and professionally, and thus prevented from helping her. In that case, he had done everything in his power to protect her, and had, quite simply, been defeated. He had never, however, lied to her.
This time he had, and he had known he was lying when they stood in the Pendle churchyard. A lie of omission rather than deceit, but a lie nonetheless, because Crocker had known—he had
known
—that Seccombe was using him. But he had permitted it, desperate to keep his job. And in so doing, he’d put himself and his career ahead of Chace’s safety and well-being.
Espionage was ultimately a game of sacrifice. Truths revealed to protect lies, relationships twisted to steal secrets, lives surrendered in exchange for gains that could range from the incremental to the absurd. But sacrificing Chace had never been in Crocker’s plans, and now, more than anything, he feared he’d done precisely that. He would argue until the day he died that what happened to send Chace to Saudi Arabia was not his fault, that Tom Wallace’s death, as much as it pained him, was not his to own. Her anger, while righteous, he still believed was misplaced.
But if Tara Chace managed to come back from Tashkent alive, Paul Crocker was sure that she would never forgive him.
And at this moment, standing in Barclay’s office, listening with half an ear to Gordon-Palmer’s soothing falsehoods and Barclay’s rapidly dwindling patience, Paul Crocker knew that if Tara Chace
didn’t
come back from Uzbekistan, he would never forgive himself, either.
“And you,” Barclay was snarling at him. “I offered you a hand in friendship, and you returned it with betrayal.”
Crocker blinked, looking at his C. “As the Deputy Chief has said, I was acting under orders from the FCO. And as for your hand of friendship, if I may be so blunt, you offered nothing of the sort. You were blackmailing me.”
The red phone on Barclay’s desk began trilling for attention. “And now the both of you are blackmailing me.”
Turnabout is fair play,
thought Crocker.
Barclay answered the phone, listened, then thrust it out to Crocker. “For you.”
Crocker took the phone. “D-Ops.”
“Duty Ops Officer,” Ronald Hodgson said. “Latest from Tashkent, sir.”
“Give it to me.”
“It’s just come in, sir. State media has issued a statement saying that Ruslan Malikov and his son were kidnapped from their home early this morning by members of Hizb-ut-Tahir, possibly the same cell responsible for the kidnap and murder of Dina Malikov earlier this month. The statement goes on to say that the terrorists used a surface-to-air missile to destroy the Malikov home in an attempt to cover their tracks, but that police and state forces were able to recognize the misdirection and engage in an immediate pursuit along the M39, the main road out of Tashkent toward Samarkand.
“During this pursuit, a second SAM was used to shoot down a state helicopter, killing twelve. State forces surrounded the terrorists and attempted to negotiate. The terrorists then executed Ruslan Malikov, at which point state forces moved in and rescued the son.”
Crocker felt his throat constricting, closed his eyes. “Confirmations?”
“None as yet, sir.”
“I’m coming down.”
He replaced the phone on Barclay’s desk. Both C and Gordon-Palmer were watching at him, waiting.
“Ops Room, Tashkent,” Crocker said. “State media reports that Ruslan Malikov is dead.”
“Paul—” Alison Gordon-Palmer began.
“Later,” Crocker said. It was petulant, and he believed it was unintentional, but he slammed the door on the way out.
“Call
Grosvenor Square,” Crocker ordered as soon as he hit the floor. “Have them wake Seale and get him over here, now.”
Ronald Hodgson put his headset over his ears, began dialing, saying, “What do I tell him?”
“Just tell him it’s about Chace.”
Ron faltered for a second, and all movement in the Ops Room came to a halt as the staffers who knew the name reacted to it, and those who didn’t wondered at the sudden silence. At the MCO Desk, Alexis turned in her seat, the same look of confusion now on her face that the rest of the room seemed to be wearing.
“You heard me,” Crocker barked at Ron. “Do it.”
“Yes, sir.”
Crocker strode to the MCO Desk, where Alexis was still staring at him. Her astonishment might have been amusing in any other circumstance. Now it just made Crocker all the more anxious. “Anything?”
She took a second, almost dithering, then nodded and punched at her keyboard. “Yes, possibly related.”
“Are you going to tell me or do I have to take you out to dinner first?”
Alexis stiffened. “There are reports that President Malikov is dead, and that both chambers of the Oliy Majlis are being called into session for later this morning. That’s unofficial—the Number Two picked it up from a contact in the NSS, who apparently heard it from a man named Ahtam Zahidov.”
Crocker swore, moved his glare from Alexis to the plasma wall. “Name the operation, put it up on the wall, and tag it as pending, bring in a control.”
He heard the clattering of her keyboard, scowled as the central quadrant of the plasma screen redrew its picture of Central Asia, a red highlight outlining Uzbekistan, with a red dot now pulsing brightly on Tashkent. On the map, to the south, a yellow dot appeared over Khanabad, marking the Karshi-Khanabad air base, Air Base Camp Stronghold Freedom, where the Americans launched their missions from the country into Afghanistan. The callout came up next, and he watched as the text Alexis was typing at her keyboard translated to the screen, filling the information box.
Operation: Crystalgate.
Status: Pending.
“Allocate Chace.”
Alexis stared at him blankly.
“Allocate Chace, she’s the agent of record. It’s a Special Op.”
“But—how? As what? What designation?”
“Don’t be a fucking fool, Alex,” Crocker snarled. “She’s Minder One.”
At Duty Ops, Ron called out, “Sir!” and Crocker turned away from the MCO station to see that he was holding out a telephone. He grabbed the phone, pinning it between his ear and shoulder, leaving his hands free to find his cigarettes.
“Crocker.”
“Seale. What the fuck is this about?”
“You damn well know what it’s about. Get on to your people in Tashkent and find out what the hell’s happened there, and find out where my agent is. I’ve got nothing, I’m getting bits and pieces, and they’re no use at all.”
There was a silence for a moment as the American digested what he’d said, and Crocker took the opportunity to feed a cigarette into his mouth. Ron held out a light, and Crocker leaned into it, accepting the flame.
“We’re on the same page about this now?” Seale asked.
“If you mean the page where I’ve got an agent caught in the cold and quite possibly dead, then yes, we’re on the same fucking page, Julian.”
“I’ll be there in half an hour,” Seale said, and hung up.
Crocker handed the phone back to Ron, pivoted, looking back to the plasma wall. Nothing had changed. Nothing would change, not for a while yet. He could stare at it for another hour, and it would tell him nothing he didn’t already know. The anxiety that had propelled him into the Ops Room began to wane, and the seething in his veins began to settle into the familiar queasiness of uncertainty. He tried to think of what else he could do, what else he should do.
“Lex? The line still open to Tashkent?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Put me on.”
She nodded, quickly plugging in a second headset to her coms station, handing it over to Crocker as soon as he reached her. He settled the earpieces, adjusted the boom.
“Craig? D-Ops.”
“Good morning, sir,”
Craig Gillard said in his ears. There was a hiss on the line, and beneath Gillard’s voice a low, regular beeping, indicating the communication was being scrambled.
“Not very,” Crocker said.
“No, sir. I’m a little unclear as to what to make of things here.”
“I can imagine. You’ll receive a proper directive from me later this morning, but for now I need you to proceed as if you’ve already received the appropriate authorizations, do you understand?”
Gillard hesitated before answering, and Crocker didn’t blame him. He was thirty-six, and Tashkent was his first posting as a Number One, after twelve years within SIS. He’d been in-country for eleven months, with another year scheduled on his tour. It was a well-earned posting—Crocker wouldn’t have endorsed the placement if he’d felt Gillard couldn’t do the job—and one of priority, for all the same reasons the Americans made Uzbekistan a priority. Gillard was looking at coming back home to a senior desk position under Rayburn’s eye, and then possibly further promotion within SIS. All of that incumbent, of course, on his doing his job not just well, but discreetly.
And Crocker had yet to meet a Station Number One who ever was well pleased when things started exploding on his or her watch.
“Yes, sir, I understand,”
Gillard said.
“What seems to be the trouble?”
“I’ve heard the Hizb-ut-Tahir nonsense. Do you know what really happened?”
“Hayden’s been beating the bushes,”
Gillard answered, referring to the Station Number Two.
“Got himself a contact in the NSS he’s been working on for the last few months, since November, name of Jamshid Nalufar. Nalufar says that it wasn’t the extremists, but Ruslan’s people trying to get him out of the country, he thinks in the wake of President Malikov’s death. Problem with that, sir, is that Ruslan doesn’t have much in the way of people, and those he does have are all in the south, mostly centered in Qashqa Darya Province, cities like Karshi, Shakhrisabz, and Samarkand. It’s not making a lot of sense.”
Crocker exhaled smoke, then said, “No, it’s not Ruslan’s people, it’s ours. The operation is called Crystalgate. You’ll get the brief on it in the morning, as I said.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Still with me?”
“Jesus Christ,”
Gillard repeated.
“You’re running a bust-out in Tashkent, you didn’t bother to notify me?”
“Believe me when I tell you it was not by choice,” Crocker said. “No one was looking to burn you, Craig. The agent has had no contact with either you or your Number Two. The orders were to steer clear of the Station.”
“For all the good that’s going to do. The operation’s a bust, it’s completely blown. Hayden says the NSS shut it all down, they’ve got the kid, Ruslan’s reported dead—”