Echo Platoon (12 page)

I turned off the radio and plucked up the receiver. “Marcinko.”

“Velcome to Baku,
haver.”

I knew that voice.
I blinked twice—and came up empty. I blinked twice again. Still nada. Then the brain fart passed, and the mouth kicked in. “Avi, you sonofabitch, how the fuck are you and where the fuck are you?”

“I’m in the lobby. I’m coming up. B’bye, b’bye,” he said by way of reply, and hung up his receiver. That was par for Avi. Israelis have never been partial to small talk, and Avi was all Israeli.

While he’s on the elevator, let me introduce him to you. Avi Ben Gal and I met back in the mid-1980s, when he was a young captain working for AMAN,
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the Israeli military intelligence organization. We were
assigned to a joint mission in Syria, where we became friends and have been ever since. Last year, he was promoted to
tat aluf,
which is Hebrew for brigadier general. I flew to Tel Aviv for the ceremony. Belay that. I flew to Tel Aviv for the party he gave afterward. It went on for three days, during which time I had managed to have a short yet extremely meaningful relationship with a svelte, young, raven-haired Yemenite lieutenant from AMAN named Rahel. That’s Israel for you: every day a holiday; every nite a Yemenite.

Anyway, Avi is the kind of operator I’m willing to put my back up against anytime, anyplace. He’s short, and probably doesn’t weigh in at more than 120 pounds. But he has the soul of an Old Testament Warrior, and the courage of a, well, an Israeli. There’s no place he won’t go, and nothing he won’t do if the mission requires it. And that includes jumping out of planes, something he happens to hate. He speaks English, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Farsi, German, French, and Turkish in addition to his native
Hevrit
. And, oh, yes, he’s married to one of the most beautiful women in the world, the beautiful Miriam, who towers over him like Sophia Loren towered over Carlo Ponti.

I’d tell you about how he won his three
Tzalashim—
the tiny crossed daggers that are Israel’s second highest military decoration, but I hear him rapping at the door and he’s modest when it comes to talking about his own accomplishments.

I peered through the fish-eye to make sure who was knocking, then opened the door, pulled Avi inside, and grabbed him in a Rogue-size bear hug.

He hadn’t changed much since I’d seen him last. Maybe a little bit grayer around the edges. But he was
still the small-framed skinny
marink
I’d met in Lebanon more than a decade ago. He stepped back, looked me up and down, and before I could get a word in, said, “So, boychik, you’ve been here less than a day and your own ambassador is ready to deport you as persona non grata.”

I shrugged. “I guess it’s my natural charm at work.”

Avi threw back his head and laughed. “Well, you can always seek asylum in Israel. We’d take you—after a small bit of surgery, of course.”

I crossed my legs in mock horror. “I’ll remember you said that if I ever want to defect.” I headed toward the minibar. “You want something to drink?”

“Sure—a bottled water would be great.” Avi tossed his thumb in the direction of the bathroom door. “Who’s in the shower, Ambassador Madison?”

The mere thought sent shivers down my back. “Yech—I wouldn’t touch her. Not even with
your
schwantz.” I opened the minibar, found a half liter of Evian, tossed the plastic bottle at Avi, and gave him a thumbnail on Boomerang while he broke the seal and took a swig.

Then he set the bottle on a glass-top coffee table and got to the point. “So, Dick, what brings you to this neck of the woods?”

I gave him the cover story, but judging from the look on his face he didn’t buy a single word of it.

Then it was my turn to pry. The last time we’d worked together, in Moscow,
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Avi had been operating under political cover as an agricultural attaché. I asked what position he’d been given here in Azerbaijan.

“Things have changed,” he said with a smile. “Here I am what I am: the defense attaché. I have a nice flat in one of the new high-rise apartment houses. I rate a car and a driver twenty-four hours a day. And best of all, since all the kids are out of the house and she gets diplomatic rates on El Al so she can go home and visit them whenever she wants, Mikki decided Israel could spare her for three years, and she joined me on this assignment.”

I grinned.
“Mazel tov.
That is really great news.”

“Todah rabah
—thank you, and yes it is.”

“How’s the job, Avi?”

The diminutive Israeli shrugged. “It’s a challenge. You probably know we have a close relationship with the Azeris. One nonstop El Al flight a week between Baku and Tel Aviv, even. Not to mention a security agreement, since you Americans won’t help in that area. And we’re helping them clean up the environmental mess the Soviets made for so many years.”

Environmental mess? That was an understatement. I hadn’t been here long, but I can tell you that Azerbaijan is an ecological disaster zone. For sixty years, the Soviets drilled for oil, and every bit of waste matter from the process, every noxious chemical they used, was left to drain into the Caspian Sea. Even the earth of Azerbaijan smells polluted. It stinks of rancid petroleum and chemicals. Tens of thousands of tons of broken Soviet equipment has been left to rust and disintegrate. Hundreds of square miles of Azeri territory is uninhabitable: a vast, barren, ravaged, desolate, toxic wasteland.

But Avi wasn’t here to clean up oil spills, which is exactly what I told him.

He reached up, put his hands on my shoulders,
and drew me toward him. “Right you are, boychik. But you’re not here to teach Araz Kurbanov how to climb an oil rig, either,” he whispered.

I shrugged Avi off and pointed toward the ceiling. I wasn’t going to talk about anything like that in a place like this.

So I walked over to the TV and turned the set on. It took a while, but CNN International finally faded in.

Avi squinted at the screen, slapped a hand to his right cheek, and wagged his head to and fro.
“Oy, vay iss mir,”
he said in mock Yiddish, a mischievous grin on his round face, “it’s Voolf Blee-tzair. He’s vatchamacallit, you-
biq
-vit-us. We can’t escape him—even here.” Avi picked up the remote control and pressed the volume button, turning the sound way up. Then he beckoned me over to where he stood, silent-signaling me that the walls probably had big ears.

I nodded in agreement and motioned for him to turn the TV even higher. He complied. Then, with Voolf blitzing about the latest White House scandal, I gave him the sheaf of Russkie writing I’d taken from the corpse on the oil rig, he read the material quickly, a look of grave concern on his face as he did so, and then the two of us engaged in what could only be called a quiet, earnest, and totally honest conversation.

I could recount to you all of what we said. But I won’t—it would take too long, and besides, the dweeb editor wants me to move on to the next action sequence. Suffice it to say that Avi and I agreed that we’d team up again. Why? Because our objectives weren’t all that dissimilar. Avi, for example, was interested in making sure
that however things in Azerbaijan ended up, Israel would be assured of getting a permanent source of Caspian Sea oil. That meant keeping both Russian and Iranian hands off the valves that controlled the pipelines. So far as I was concerned, that wasn’t a bad idea at all.

He was also worried about the spread of weapons of mass destruction, which the Russkies had a bad habit of selling to whoever had enough greenbacks. The thought of Russkie nukes, or chemical/biological weapons being sold to Iraq, Iran, or one of the tin-pot dictators in the Balkans was frightening to me, too.

And Avi was also worried about the bigger picture. Both the Iranians and Ivans were already working hard to destabilize the region. In the nine months he’d been in Baku, Avi said, more than a dozen political leaders, journalists, and businessmen had been assassinated. Four car bombs had killed scores of Azeris. The oil rig takeover, he told me, was just the latest in a nasty series of terrorist events. There had been a half dozen incursions from Iran, and twice that number from the Armenian separatist strongholds in western Azerbaijan. On a more personal level, six of Avi’s best sources—which was his way of telling me he was running at least one network of agents—had been murdered in the last four months.

“And,” he added, “I’m not the only one. I’ve got good reason to believe that the CIA’s single net in the region had been rolled up, too.”

I’d thought CIA was blind in Baku, but if Avi believed they’d had a net and it had been rolled, I was willing to believe him. Of course, if it
had
happened, there’d been absolutely no reporting on it, or even RUMINT. Because I’d gone around the system to get a
no-shitter from my old friend Wink, and Wink hadn’t said anything about agent nets being rolled up here in Baku.

But even without the loss of intelligence assets, it was obvious that the Azeris were being squeezed from two directions. And no one was doing anything about it.

In fact, according to some of Avi’s remaining sources, the American Embassy, he said, wasn’t reporting most of the incidents.

I asked if he knew why.

He shook his head. “I can give you vatchamacallit, RUMINT,” he said.

“And?”

“Look,” Avi said, “The ambassador is in the oil business. Oil is big money. If this region is known to be unstable, then the oil companies will not invest as much capital as they might do in a stable environment.”

I nodded in agreement. Do you see what Avi’s getting at? If not, allow me to give you a little geopolitical background that’ll help you understand the dynamics of what’s going on, and what’s at stake. First, you should understand that the entire Caspian region is basically Muslim. It was in Avi’s interest, and ours, too, to make sure that the Muslims in Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakstan (all of them potentially as oil-rich as any Gulf emirate) maintained balanced, even cordial relations with the West, so that all their oil and natural gas could be piped westward and used in Europe and the United States.

The Iranians, however, saw the Caspian region as an extension of their brand of fundamentalist Islam. To Iran, the vast Caspian petroleum reserves were a
political fulcrum to be used against the West. And so, Avi said, Tehran had engaged in a systematic program of espionage, subversion, and intimidation to keep the Caspian region Muslims in line. On the overt side were the editorials in Tehran newspapers. Avi pulled a photocopy of a news clip complete with yellow highlighting out of his briefcase. “Look at this leader
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from the
Kayhan International.”

I did—and guess what? It was all very Farsi-cal to me.

Avi, who speaks fluent Iranian, did the honors.
“ ‘It is not in Baku’s best interests’,”
he read, his finger moving along the highlighted type,
“ ‘to annoy its giant southern neighbor. Iran is not willing to see any foreign powers stationed along its borders.’ ”

That was the Iranian point of view. Here is the other: the Russkies still consider the whole Caspian region as a part of a Greater—and decidedly non-Islamic—Russia. They have worked diligently for the past half decade or so to keep the former Soviet republics destabilized, and out of the Iranian camp, by using various surrogates to wage guerrilla war on the indigenous populations.

Evidence? You want evidence? Well, the papers I’d just shown Avi, all that Russian ordnance left at the ambush site, and the state-of-the-art Russian communication devices used by the tangos were all pretty strong evidence of Russkie involvement. Avi agreed. The circumstantial evidence, he said, indicated that the Ivans were helping to equip and train a force of Iranian irregulars, who would be used to harass the Azeris
from the south, while Russian-supported Armenian nationalists attacked from the west.

The fact that the Russians and the Iranians were working together was confusing to me at first glance. Because it appeared—on the surface at least—that Tehran and Moscow had very different objectives for the region, and no reason at all to cooperate with each other. But, my friends, what appears on the surface is usually not the real story. The Russians have historically appeared to do one thing when in fact they are doing just the opposite. So, while they might appear to be helping the Iranians, I realized that they were in fact probably operating in their own narrow national interest.

And what was that national interest? To be succinct, it was the two hundred billion—that’s right,
billion
—barrels of oil and uncounted cubic tons of natural gas that lay buried beneath the surface of the Caspian. Those oil and gas reserves and the trillions of dollars they would generate, the Russians understood, would re-establish the former Soviet Union as a strategic player on the world stage. Historically, we know that the Soviets allied themselves with many of their enemies, from Hitler’s Germany, to Iraq, Iran, and even China, if it was deemed politically advantageous to do so. Well, I had no doubt that what tactics Russkies have followed in the past, they would repeat now.

And right in the middle of all this, Avi volunteered, was the Sirzhik Foundation.

My nose must have twitched, because he took notice. “You’ve heard of Sirzhik?” he asked.

“Grogan wanted to use it as an intermediary.”

Avi nodded. “That makes sense,” he said, “knowing Grogan.”

I looked at him. “Spill, Avi—what’s this fucking thing all about?”

“Ah,” he said, “Sirzhik is ver-r-r-y interesting, Dick. Very interesting indeed.” He explained that the foundation had its fingers in almost every pot from Moscow to Baku. Officially, Sirzhik was an NGO (NonGovernmental Organization) headquartered in New York, in the old Whitney mansion on upper Fifth Avenue. From there, as well as from its network of offices in Washington, London, Paris, Moscow, Prague, Tbilisi, Baku, and Yerevan, Sirzhik’s CEO, Steve Sarkesian, bankrolled economic and social development all across the former Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact.