Scorpion: A Covert Ops Novel (Second Edition) (6 page)

The deputy chief
of mission was the second-in-command at the embassy, after the ambassador. And
the ambassador was the president’s personally appointed representative and had
authority over all US Government employees in the country, including CIA
officers. The regional security officer came from the State Department’s
Diplomatic Security Service and was the senior most law enforcement officer in
the country.

Avery had no
intention of speaking with either one. They would try to put him in his place,
as they saw it, and control him, try to shoot him down before he even got off
the ground, the way they likely did with any CIA officers on their turf. He was
just surprised that they’d already been tipped off about his arrival.   

Gerald seemed to
read his thoughts. “Hey, I didn’t say anything, but it’s a small post, you
know. Word gets around fast.”

“Yeah,” Avery
said. “You think maybe that’s why we’re in this mess in the first place?”  

Getting around the GKNB watchers didn’t
prove to be terribly difficult, but it still cost valuable time. When Avery
asked Gerald if the station had a JIB, he wasn’t surprised by the younger
officer’s befuddled expression. Avery knew CIA’s Directorate of Science and
Technology made its own jack-in-the-box and provided them to stations where
officers were likely to encounter heavy surveillance from a hostile agency.

The CIA-manufactured
version of a jack-in-the-box is a two dimensional cut-out of a man or woman’s
upper torso and head that fits into a medium-sized briefcase and could be
quickly erected inside a car. From a distance, it looked like a passenger. The
purpose of a JIB was to allow someone to slip out of a car while in transit, so
that the watchers won’t notice a missing head in the car.

But Dushanbe
station didn’t have a JIB, so Avery improvised. Following a walk through the
embassy, he was able to procure various odds-and-ends to assemble his own custom-made
JIB. These items included a toilet plunger, wire coat hangers, packing tape,
and glue, plus various articles of clothing from Gerald’s cooperative and
amused colleagues.

The station kept
various accessories for disguises, including a wig roughly matching the color and
shade of Avery’s black hair. He trimmed the wig down to match his own close
buzz-cut and used the scraps to shape together a short, unkempt looking beard. He
assembled these hairpieces around a white balloon, which would serve as the
head.

It didn’t matter
that Avery’s decoy didn’t exactly look like a human being. It had the general appearance
of one matching his description. Plus the GKNB watchers would be observing from
a distance, and the Forerunner’s tinted windows would further help conceal his
JIB.

Next, Avery sat
down in the embassy’s Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facility, or
SCIF, literally a room within a room, with Gerald Rashid, an ops officer named
Darren, and two marines from the security detail. Avery laid out what they
needed to do.  

They looked over
a street map of Dushanbe and discussed what routes to take and where best to
make the slip. Darren’s input was especially valuable here, as he knew the
streets, traffic patterns, and layout of the city. However, this became overly
confusing, because most Dushanbe streets do not have names. To navigate
Dushanbe, you went by landmarks, not streets.

The biggest
hurdle was going to be Avery’s equipment. He could easily take his backpack and
duffel bag with him, but his two cases of gear would be cumbersome and
potentially slow him down or even blow the whole maneuver. So these would be
dropped off at a secondary location and quickly retrieved by one of Sideshow’s
operators.

At 6:45PM, as
the sun began to drop behind the mountains, they exited the embassy through a
rear service door. Two identical Toyota Forerunners waited there, engines
rumbling. The Forerunners sat one in front of the other and had pulled up a
couple minutes earlier, so they surely had the GKNB’s full attention now. A
marine in civilian clothing sat behind the wheel in each vehicle.

The Forerunners
were behemoths and parked so that they blocked any view of the open service
door. The GKNB officers sitting in the car across the street were unable to see
exactly who was emerging from the embassy. They couldn’t even get complete
descriptions and could barely get an accurate head count. To add further
confusion, Avery and the others were dressed similarly, in windbreakers and
black baseball caps.

Avery and Gerald
slipped into the first Forerunner. Avery carried his backpack and duffel bag
and took the spot behind the driver’s seat. Gerald carried the briefcase
containing the components of their jack-in-the-box. Darren took Avery’s gear
into the second Forerunner, and they were soon on their way.

 The GKNB car slipped
into traffic behind them, following them three blocks north to Shohtemur
Street. There, the Forerunners split ways, the first going west, and the second
east.

The driver of
the GKNB car was forced to react immediately. He impulsively made the left-turn,
going after the first Forerunner and swearing out loud as he did so. The GKNB
officer riding shotgun struck a fist against the dash, and then called in the
situation and requested a second vehicle to find the first Forerunner heading
west.

Avery’s marine
driver announced that the tail was still with them. At least if the GKNB had
gone east after the second Forerunner, it would have been a simple matter of
slowing down, so Avery could simply step out of the SUV with his gear. The guys
in the second Forerunner would have to be alert now and identify their new tail
before they dropped off Avery’s gear.

Avery assembled
the pieces for the jack-in-the-box. He affixed the coat hanger to the end of
the plunger and taped the balloon to the top of the hanger. Then he taped pieces
of cardboard around the coat hanger, to give the upper body a bit of mass. He slid
out of his jacket, fit it over the hanger, and zipped it up. He took off his
cap and gently fit it on top of the balloon.

Gerald gave it a
once-over and nodded his approval. He was too tense and anxious, having never
done anything like this before outside of training. He didn’t want to be picked
up by the GKNB. Avery told him to relax, breathe, and remember what he needed
to do, and Gerald straightened his back and composed himself.

Four minutes
later, the marine up front alerted Avery that they were very soon coming to the
turn. Avery acknowledged the marine, even though he’d been keeping track of
where they were going the whole time and was already aware of this. The GKNB
vehicle was five car lengths back, with a taxi and a trailer-truck between
them.

The left-turn
onto Karamov Street would provide them several seconds completely out of sight
of the GKNB chase car, while the Forerunner made the turn and before the GKNB
car reached the intersection. That’s where Avery would make the slip.

Avery leaned up
against his door, unlocked it, and gripped his left hand around the latch. He
leaned forward to look over the driver’s shoulder, his eyes fixated on the road
ahead, looking out for what was around and potential obstacles. Gerald was
getting into position as well, to shut the door and move the JIB into position
as Avery exited the vehicle.

The marine
decreased speed, rolled through the intersection, and steered the Forerunner
through the left-hand turn.

Avery scanned
the street ahead and looked for an area to land, a spot clear of street signs,
holes, curbs, and parked vehicles. The ground was all pavement or concrete, so
there was nothing softer like grass or soil to aim for, but there were plenty
of trees up ahead—planetrees with long and thin stumps were everywhere in
Dushanbe—that would make good cover.

The Forerunner
was doing twenty-five miles per hour. That meant Avery’s body would travel
approximately two-hundred feet at the same speed when he left the vehicle
before hitting the ground. It was going to hurt. There was no way getting around
that. He came prepared. He wore two layered t-shirts beneath a heavy sweatshirt
and had on kneepads underneath thick utility pants.

He sat on the
edge of his seat and leaned his weight against the door and angled his body
forward, so that when he left the Forerunner, he’d roll away from the vehicle
and the direction of traffic.

The marine decelerated
as much as he could without interfering with the flow of traffic and drawing
attention, maybe twenty miles per hour. A complete stop would be ideal or just
a slow roll or pulling over to the side, and then quickly stepping out of the
car, but that wasn’t feasible with KGB-lite wanna-bes less than a hundred feet
behind and seconds away from turning and having eyes on the Forerunner.

Avery locked
eyes on his intended landing spot and waited until the Forerunner was a
five-second count away. Then he yanked the latch and pushed the door open,
keeping one hand on it so that the thing wouldn’t swing back and smack him as
he jumped.  He lifted his ass off the seat, lowered his head, and crossed his
arms across his chest, hugging his duffel bag tight against his body, with his
knuckles pressed into his shoulders. He sprung off his feet and out of the
Forerunner, facing in the direction in which the SUV travelled.

He struck the
pavement hard, letting out an involuntarily grunt, and rolled, directing his
body away from the oncoming trailer truck, off the street, and toward the line
of trees. He kept his arms tucked around him, chin down and neck tight so that
he didn’t bash his head against the concrete. He rolled through the pain of the
impact and didn’t stop moving until he reached the copse of tall planetrees.

Looking over the
tree trunk, he saw the taillights of the Forerunner, and the door was already
pulled shut.

Avery sat up on
his haunches and leaned his back against the tree. He turned his head left and soon
saw the taillights of the trailer truck, followed seconds later by another pair
of lights, belonging to a mid-size sedan and thought that was the GKNB car. Traffic
continued down the street. He waited and didn’t observe any of the same
vehicles coming back around or making a second pass.

As the effect of
the adrenaline diminished and his sensory input returned to real-time, Avery
became aware of blunt pain in his lift side and the ache in his right shoulder
and the stinging sensation of the little cuts and scrapes in his knuckles and
the backs of his hands, and he felt suddenly exhausted.

He hopped onto
his feet, brushed off his pants and sweatshirt, and started walking. Two blocks
later, he hailed the first cab he saw. He gave the driver directions to the
rendezvous point where he was to be picked up by one of Poacher’s crew. Along
the way, he switched cabs twice, taking a few walks in between, satisfied that
he wasn’t being followed.

He hoped the
drop with his kit went as smoothly.

Following
Avery’s instructions, Darren’s Forerunner would drive around the city for
thirty minutes or so before returning to the embassy. At that point, as he and
Gerald exited the vehicles, the GKNB would do a head count and realize they’d
been given the slip.

On Shestopalov
Street, Avery spotted the ugly beige Lada with one gray fender and a plastic
bag taped over the missing left rear window. The car blended right in with the
other vehicles in the city.

Avery greeted
the former navy SEAL sitting behind the wheel and slipped into the passenger
seat

The ex-chief
petty officer was Matt Monroe, who went by the unfortunate call sign of
Flounder. Operators didn’t choose their own handles. Their teammates picked
them, and there was often a story behind it. Avery knew better than to ask Flounder
the origin of his handle. He supposed that he’d lucked out with Carnivore.

Near 8:30PM,
they reached the safe house in Dayrabot. This is a small residential area surrounded
by farms, about three miles east of Dushanbe, between the M41 highway and the
Kafirnigan River. Sideshow had established their little base of operations inside
an apartment in a three-story building with multiple entrances and exits.

Poacher had paid
for two months’ rent up-front, explaining in advance that his team was here to
research a book and may keep odd hours or be out of town for days at a time. They
rarely crossed paths with their neighbors, but to maintain cover, they’d take
turns leaving the building in pairs with their photography equipment and
visited tourist attractions in and around Dushanbe.

The safe house
was sparsely furnished. Other than the two bedrooms, it had one large living
room and a small kitchen. Cots were set up in the bedrooms, with the cases or
bags containing the Sideshow operator’s personal belongings, most of it still
packed. In the living room, there was a desk with two laptop computers, a
SATCOM communications unit, a few folding chairs, and cases containing the
team’s weapons and kit. The shelves in the kitchen contained mostly canned food
and freeze-dried packaged MREs—meals ready to eat; known colloquially as meals
rejected by Ethiopians—with energy drinks and bottled water in the fridge. The
shades were drawn over the windows at all times. There was no air conditioning,
and the apartment was uncomfortably dry and hot. Two ceiling fans whirred at
high-speed, uselessly pushing the air around.

Poacher greeted Avery
with a handshake and the typical exchange of pleasantries and joked that Tajik
KGB better not have tracked him here. He also reported to Avery that Reaper had
already picked up his equipment from the second drop and made it back without
any issues.

Formerly a
master sergeant in the army’s Combat Applications Group, the cover name for
Delta Force, and in the Asymmetric Warfare Group, Poacher’s real name was James
Dalton. Tall, lean, muscular, tattooed, and bearded, Dalton was thirty-nine
years old and came from Arizona. He first met Avery during ANACONDA, when his
Delta troop and Avery’s Ranger chalk assaulted al-Qaeda strongholds in the
mountains of northeastern Afghanistan. Shortly after, Poacher put in a
recommendation for Avery to Delta’s recruiters, but Matt Culler, then an Agency
insertion element leader in Afghanistan and later head of the Counterterrorism
Center, recruited him first, for SAD.