Echo Platoon (20 page)

Why? Because intel gathering and cage rattling was what my
real
mission to Baku here was all about. Remember my real mission? I’d been tasked to assess what the Ivans and the Iranians were doing, so SECDEF could formulate the right security policy for the Caucasus. And from what I’d just learned, old Steve-o was up to his armpits in Russkies and Iranians.

Oh, yeah. I knew the Sirzhik Foundation had about 180 permanent employees. Guess what: about 65 percent of those were either Ivans, Iranians, or Armenians, with the rest about equally divided between Frogs, Krauts, Brits, and miscellaneous Eastern Europeans. There were only two Americans employed by the Foundation—and they were in low-level security positions at the Foundation’s London office, Sirzhik’s least active and smallest outpost.

And guess what else. According to my pal Tony Merc, someone was rustling the bushes back in the States, working quick and hard to assemble as much info on
moi
as possible. Tony’d run a Standing Order Seventeen
55
on the inquires, and discovered that before
they’d caromed around Washington, they’d originated at the Sirzhik Foundation.

“I figured they’d want the good stuff,” Tony giggled. “So, I made sure they got it.”

“The good stuff?”

“Yeah—your troubles with the White House. Your alcoholism. Your many brushes with the law. Your prison record. I tell you, Dick, you are in deep doo-doo with the Navy. Your career is almost over—again.”

I love my friends because they are so fucking devious. “Great work, Merc.”

“Fuck you, asshole, you owe me.”

Okay, now I was forewarned. And so, while Steve Sarkesian was trying to check me out (and not doing very well at it), I’d be doing the same thing to him. But I’d be doing my body cavity search up close and real personal. And lemme tell you: I was about to give this rich, self-important asshole a real Roguish proctoscopy—sans any lubricant whatsoever.

I
WASN’T CARRYING MESS DRESS WITH ME ON THIS TRIP
. After all, I’d come to Baku in full stealth mode, and formal wear isn’t generally required for sneaking & peeking. But I have been around long enough to follow my own SpecWar Commandments, and so, never assuming that all I’ll need are BDUs, jeans, Velcro, and Kevlar, I habitually pack one set of dress clothes, and a Class A uniform.

I decided on the civvies, because they make me stand out less in a crowd. Since I never go anywhere where there will be single women without carrying the proper sort of protection, I slipped a .32-caliber P7-K3 into a suede, inside-the-waistband holster, tucked the holster into the small of my back, and secured the clasp to my belt.

I checked my watch, picked up the secure cell phone, and made contact with Boomerang and Randy. We went over the progress they were making with the Azeris, and I was happy to be told that Araz’s training was all on track. I was even happier to learn that the covert preparations for our little cross-border excursion were all taking place on schedule.

“I’ll see your butts after the reception,” I told Boomerang.
“Save me a beer.” Then, sit-repped to my satisfaction, I fluffed a foulard silk square; stuffed it into the breast pocket of my custom-made, Seoul, Korea-tailored, double-breasted blazer; then dropped a set of custom-made, New York-tailored lockpicks behind it. Then I thought about what I’d done, removed ’em, and slipped the slim package into my shoe. Was it uncomfortable? You bet it was. But I’ve learned over the years that discomfort is tolerable if you have a goal. And I had a goal: stealth.

Major Ashley Evans, who was wearing mess dress, picked me up at 1945. She was driving her very own vehicle, a humongous, four-door blue-and-white Chevy Suburban Silverado 2500 with oversize tires. It was a relic, she explained, from her stint a few years back in Sarajevo. A gift from a DIA countersurveillance team. “See?” She pointed out a trio of well-preserved bullet holes in the rear quarter panel. “That was from my last trip up Mount Igman, on the drive out of town.”

I looked at the spacing of the three holes, stuck a finger atop one, and guesstimated. “Light machine gun?”

“You got it,” she called out to me. I stepped back and took a second look. Not bad—she’d gone to the trouble of overpainting the metal to keep it from rusting. “Nice souvenirs. I’ll bet you’re glad he missed the gas tank.”

“How do you know it was a he? There were female snipers in Sarajevo, too, y’know.”

Never fuckin’ assume, right? “Guilty. I don’t,” I said. I continued around the rear of the big vehicle, making sure she saw me unbuttoning my blazer ostentatiously through her side-view mirror as I went.

I stopped next to the passenger door and looked at
Ashley through the half-open window. “Hey, maybe you’d like to see
my
scars?”

She hit a switch and the electric door locks opened with a loud
thwock
. “Don’t even think about it.”

I opened the passenger door, hoisted myself up, climbed in, locked up, buckled down, and shut the window so we wouldn’t lose any more air-conditioning than we had to. “Thanks for being my date tonight. Of course, I’m not sure the ambassador would approve.”

The major reached forward, turned down the volume on the Garth Brooks the local country-music station was playing, and turned up the air-conditioning fan to Full Tilt Boogie. “We’ll find out soon enough if she does or she doesn’t,” Ashley said, “because she’ll be there.” The major smiled at my expression, twisted around to better check on the traffic flow behind her, and then pulled out carefully into the street. “Hey, don’t worry. Taking her abuse is all in a day’s work. Besides, I’ve wanted to see the inside of this place since I got here. But I’ve never been on the Sirzhik Foundation’s A-list.” She paused. “Heck—I’m not even on its B-list.”

“You travel first class when you travel with me, Major.”

We stopped at a traffic light and she took the time to look me up and down critically. “Well, I must say, you clean up pretty well, given your reputation, that is.”

“Don’t believe a word of it.”

“What—that you clean up pretty well, or your reputation.”

I grinned. “Both.”

That brought a smile to her face. She stepped on the accelerator and the big truck moved forward.

I reached down, straining against my seat belt, and
slid the seat back to get some leg room, then stretched expansively. “So what’s the drill?”

“Your guess is as good as mine—hold on a sec.” She signaled, turned right onto a one-way street, braked, then cruised slowly, checking our six in her outside mirror, her expression serious. “Looks as if we’re running in the clear,” she finally said.

“That would be a change—for me.”

“I bet it would.” The Suburban swerved left, then right, then left again—it needed some suspension work if you ask me—as Ashley drove down a series of unlit streets bordered by decrepit, Soviet-era housing. “There are some parts of this city that are just plain depressing,” Ashley said. “And this is one of them.”

I nodded in agreement. “Relics of the Cold War.” I peered out the window at the housing bloc. Many of the windows were dark. Behind some, I could make out flickering lights.

“Candles,” Ashley said, anticipating my question. “Ironic, isn’t it—that in the oil capital of the Caucasus, most of the people can’t afford power.”

I shrugged and said nothing. We drove on in silence for some minutes.

Finally, Ashley half-turned toward me. “So, how do we play this, Dick?”

I scratched at my beard. “Well, to be perfectly honest, at some point I want to get a look at the Foundation’s offices,” I said. “Just a short sneak-and-peek—nothing outrageous.”

Ashley nodded. “I think that’s doable.” She hesitated momentarily.
“If
we’re careful.”

“I’m always careful.”

She snuck a look at the long cut on my forehead,
which was still visible, reached out, and touched it. “Oh, yeah?”

I shrugged. “Well, almost always.”

She looked at me evenly. “Okay, let’s say I’m in, if the situation arises. Do you have a way to deal with locked doors?”

I wiggled my fingers in her direction. “These,” I said, “are educated.”

She gave me a skeptical look. “That’s not what I asked.”

“I can do what I have to,” I said. “What about you—did you take the locksmith course at spy school?”

“Why, Captain,” she said coyly, “how would you ever know about that sort of thing?”

“Because I took it myself.” What I didn’t say is that in addition to taking DIA’s spy school course when I was a tadpole, I’d had further inculcation when I ran SEAL Team Six. Back then, I hired a Noo Yawk professional known as Eddie the Burglar, who showed me and my guys not only where to find the best cannoli on the face of the earth, but also how to pick any lock we ever came across. Eddie was—still is—a scholar, and a gent, and a patriot, too, because he didn’t charge us a cent for his week-long course of instruction.

Ashley turned left now onto a wide avenue. “This is an interesting part of town,” she said as she saw my expression turn inquisitive. “Most of the houses were built in the nineteen twenties by the first group of oil barons.”

I looked. I’ve seen pictures of Fifth Avenue when it was all four- and five-story private houses owned by folks with names like Rockefeller and Carnegie, and I have to admit that it was pretty close to what I was looking at now. The avenue was broad—six lanes
wide. On either side, set well back from the curb, was a row of large stone mansions. On some blocks, they were separated by only a few feet. On others, one house sat alone, behind formidable walls and high gates. The assortment of architectural styles was staggering. Some of the mansions were baroque in style. Others were rococo. And still others had been built in the sort of pushmepullyou quasi-neoclassical, pseudo-Renaissance fashion that I refer to as Nouveau Mafia. But whatever their diverse styles, they were uniformly well kept. “They’re in real good shape.”

“Most were bought up right after the collapse of the Soviet Union, by the first Azeri capitalists.”

“Who were . . .”

“The same people who’d been running the country for the Sovs.”

Business as usual. “That figures.”

“Talk about your insider trading. Anyway, they knew all about Western interest in Caspian oil. So they bought property at pennies on the dollar, held the mansions until the oil rush, then they sold ’em to Western oil companies, banks, venture capital firms, and so on.”

I laughed. “Underneath every Commie was a decadent capitalist trying to get out, right?”

She nodded in agreement. “And that’s only half the story. Guess who controls the construction industry here in Baku? The same people who owned the houses, of course. So every damn nail, every pipe, every fixture and shingle costs three, four, five times what it should have cost. And guess what—when the oil companies tried to import their own materials, the Azeris charged a thousand percent duty on the stuff to teach ’em a lesson.”

“Nice hustle.”

“It was a hustle that worked, too.” She pointed a quarter klik down the avenue. I followed her finger and saw a lot of lights and a knot of traffic outside a huge one-to-the-block estate. “That’s where we’re headed.”

I looked closer. “Impressive.” And it was—if you liked your homes to be ostentatious. As we pulled abreast, I could see one-two-three-four-five stories of intricate hand-carved stonework topped by a frieze depicting the labors of Hercules. Above the framed upper windows, the keystones featured the faces of goddesses. The whole structure was surrounded by a ten-foot wall topped by ornate, electrically controlled wrought iron double gates that reminded me of the ones outside the Hôtel de Ville, Paris’s city hall. It looked like a movie set. Indeed, the whole estate had been professionally illuminated by soft but powerful floodlights, giving it a charming, magazine cover appearance.

But, I noted, the storybook look was only surface patina. This place had been fine-toothed by someone who understood security. Why? Because despite the fact that the house had been lit up so artfully, the grounds were also—and much more brightly—bathed in bright white light. There was no place to hide while making an approach. No shadows to work. No bushes to scamper between. I quick-checked for security cameras, and found half a dozen, on motorized gimbals, covering all the angles. I squinted at the windows on the ground floor, and saw that except for four tiny bathroom vent windows partially obscured by thick well-watered ivy vines, they had been sheathed with the latest generation of anti-grenade screens. The basement windows—at least the few I could see—were plated over in steel, and covered by heavy bars.

We drew abreast of the entry, and a uniformed security guard, perspiration drenching his light blue uniform, waved Ashley through the gate, and onto the half-moon driveway. A second pair of sweating rent-a-cops holding flashlights directed us off the driveway and onto a broad courtyard, where perhaps two dozen vehicles were jammed door-to-door and bumper-to-bumper on white pea-gravel.

We scrunched our way across fifty feet or so of stones so hot I could feel them through the soles of my shoes, and climbed six wide stairs, up to a set of double glass-and-mahogany doors. A liveried footman standing next to the right-hand door opened it for us and nodded deferentially as we passed him.

Once inside the crowded entryway, the temperature dropped by about twenty degrees. We bumped along at the end of a slow-moving knot of black-tied guests until our way was blocked by a short, extremely stocky woman in a sequined, tasseled ivory-and-gold evening dress that gave her the look of an antique lampshade with legs. She scanned her clipboard, then gave me a VTVE—that’s a Very Thorough Visual Exam—checked her clipboard again, peered over her half-glasses, and broke into an apple-cheeked smile.
“Cap
-ten Marcinko,” she oozed. “I am Ivana. We are so
vary
pleased that you could be with us tonight.”

I clicked my heels together and bowed in her direction, all lustful thoughts dismissed. “It is my pleasure, Miss Ivana.” I nudged Ashley forward. “Allow me to introduce Major Evans of the United States Marine Corps.”