First Team (7 page)

“Blow the truck,” he said as he pulled open the rear door. “Hit it, Rankin.”

The truck was in a lot near the building, back two blocks away. They couldn’t hear the explosion.

“Did it go?” Ferg asked, as Conners slapped the car into gear.

“It went,” said Rankin.

“You sure?”

“Fuck you.”

Ferg turned and looked at Guns for the first time. He had his face in a wet towel and the window rolled down.

“Hey, you all right, Guns?”

The Marine coughed and shook his head in a way that seemed to mean yes.

“Turn left,” Ferguson told Conners.

“Where the hell are we going?” demanded Rankin.

“We have to make sure the truck blew,” Ferg told him.

“I set the fuckin’ charge,” insisted Rankin.

“Don’t take it personally.”

“Screw you, don’t take it personally. You didn’t want a big goddamn explosion, right? So now you think I screwed up.”

Ferguson had the shotgun between his legs, the barrel pointed downward into the floorboards. He caught another whiff of nostalgia—his father instructing him on gun safety. “Keep the gun cracked in the car,” was the way he always put it.

His first shotgun, a real grown-up gun. Not a toy, said his father.

“Something’s burning,” said Conners, pointing to the red glow in the distance. It was beyond the ministry building they’d hit, about where the truck had been.

“Good,” said Ferg. “Hit the road.”

“This all would have been easier if we could’ve just killed the bastards,” said Rankin.

“Would’ve been easier with a whole A team,” offered Conners.

“Hey, next time we’ll call Delta,” said Ferg. “They would’ve done it with bare hands and sticks.”

Conners laughed, but Rankin, still angry, said nothing. In his opinion, Ferg had made the takedown too risky by insisting they not use lethal force. The CIA officer had the authority to override that directive if the situation warranted.

In the back of the car, Guns’s eyes felt like they were going to fall out of his skull. His throat felt as if it were made of rug that a dog had used to sleep on. His nose was stuffed with oily rags. The towel Conners had given him wasn’t helping his eyes any; more likely it was rubbing the irritant into them.

“You used fucking tear gas?” he said finally.

“You’re welcome, Jarhead,” said Rankin up front.

Ferguson reached to the floor and brought up a squeeze bottle. “Irrigate ‘em. I’m sorry about the gas.”

The car veered hard left, then settled back onto the roadway. Conners had lost the pavement in the dark. They’d mapped out a route to the main highway over dirt roads, but it had looked a hell of a lot easier in the daylight.

“Rankin, I need you to get out the map,” Conners said.

“Yeah, I thought so,” said Rankin, reaching for it.

Guns recounted what had happened, starting with the man with the yellow sports coat.

“Some sort of Russian,” he told Ferguson. “FSB.”

“What sort of questions?”

“Nothing really. Asked if I’d cooperate. When I played dumb, he split.”

“No other questions?”

“Asked me about some Chechen.”

“Which Chechen?”

“Jesus, I don’t know. Some sort of guerrilla. Muslim, maybe.”

“If I get Corrigan to say a bunch of names to you, you think you could pick it out?”

“ ‘Kiro,’ he said.”

“Kiro. We can check that,” said Ferg. “What else did they ask?”

Guns pushed his eyes into the towel, re-creating the interrogation. There had only been one with an FSB man. The others were with a local inspector, who asked over and over why he had killed Sheremetev.

“What’d you say?” asked Ferg.

“I said I didn’t.”

“That’s all they asked?” said Ferg.

“That’s it.”

“Where’d you get the duds?”

Guns laughed, then told him about the examination in front of the doctor and his nurse.

“Fuckin’ guy checked me over good. I’m standing there thinking I want to pork his nurse—Mr. Young starts coming to attention, I swear—and he does a hernia check.

“Shit. Stop the fuckin’ car,” said Ferguson. “Shit.”

“Huh?” asked Conners.

“Pull off the road.”

“But—”

“Now!”

As the car skidded to a stop, Ferg threw open the door. He reached back and pulled Guns out, dragging him around the back of the car to the side of the road. A row of darkened buildings sat a few feet away.

“Take off your clothes,” Ferg told him.

“Huh?”

“Take off your clothes,” said Ferguson, and he grabbed Guns’s waistband and helped. As the Marine started to undress, Ferguson reached into his pocket for his flashlight, then pulled down Guns’s underpants.

“Hey!”

“Shit.” Ferg put his fingernails on the Marine’s leg next to his scrotum and pulled off a small black disk. He held it up in front of Guns’s face just to prove that he wasn’t a pervert, then threw it toward the abandoned buildings. He took a small bug detector from his inside jacket pocket and ran it over Guns’s body, cursing himself for not taking such an obvious precaution earlier.

When Guns, completely naked without shoes or anything, got back in the car, Ferguson told Conners to get onto the highway and floor it.

“I’ll give Yellow Jacket one thing,” said Ferguson, pulling off his vest so he could give his shirt to Guns to wear. “He’s no dummy.”

~ * ~

7

ORSK, RUSSIA—TWO DAYS LATER

Ferguson unscrewed the cap on the bottled water and poured it into the tall glass. He leaned back on the balcony of the hotel, glancing down toward Conners, who was watching the street. They’d split into twos at the Kyrgyzstan border, unsure whether or not Yellow Jacket was still tracking them here. Guns and Rankin were about a half hour late.

Conners looked over and shook his head, then went back to staring at the street. After Kyrgyzstan, Cel’abinsk felt not only huge but almost luxurious. The air was clean; the weather pleasantly warm and dry. Ferg loosened his jacket and took out his phone; if he waited too long to call home, Corrigan would get nervous.

“How we doin’, Jack?” he said, leaning back against the chair.

“How are
you
doing?” said Corrigan. There was a funny note in his voice.

“What’s the problem?”

“Hold on.”

Ferg realized what was up as the phone line clicked. The next thing he heard was the melodious baritone of his boss, the deputy director of operations at the CIA.

Only his voice was melodious.

“You shot up a police station?” demanded Daniel Slott, by way of a greeting.

“Actually, Dan, it wasn’t a police station. And knowing what your reaction would be, we used nonlethal weapons.”

“Tell that to the ambassador.”

“Give me his number.”

“The secretary of state is wondering what the hell is going on,” said Slott, in a way that implied he actually cared what the secretary of state thought—which Ferg knew wasn’t true. “He asked the director in front of the president what we’re doing tear gassing Police officers in Kyrgyzstan.”

“How is the General, anyway?” Ferg asked, referring to Thomas Parnelles, who headed the CIA. Parnelles was an old CIA hand and a good friend of Ferguson’s deceased father; they’d done time together during the good ol’ bad days of the Cold War. General was a nickname from an operation where Parnelles impersonated a Jordanian officer.

Only a captain, actually. But Ferg’s dad had been a private, and to hear the story not a very convincing one.

“Don’t change the subject on me, Ferguson,” said Slott. “You used tear gas in a police station?”

“I can definitively say we did not use tear gas in a police station.”

“Then what did you do?”

“I recovered a member of my team who was being held under false pretenses.” He yawned. “I’m a little tired.”

“You’re a little reckless. More and more.”

“More and more?” asked Ferguson. “I wasn’t reckless before? I thought that was a job requirement.”

Slott made a grinding noise with his teeth. Recognizing that he would get no real details from Ferguson—and admitting to himself that he probably didn’t want any—he changed the subject. “Have you found out what’s going on?”

“Working on it.”

“Did they take uranium or what?”

“I don’t think so. The way it looks, the most likely accounting for the discrepancy is two casks of the control rods,” said Ferg. “But that’s only that one trip. I’m not really sure.”

“When will you know?”

“Not sure. We’re working on it.”

“Well work faster.”

“Aye-aye, Captain Bligh.” Ferg leaned forward and took hold of his glass. “If you’re through busting my chops, I’d appreciate talking to Corrigan again.”

There was a click. Corrigan came on the line with an apology.

“Yeah, yeah,” Ferguson told him. “You run through the satellite photos?”

“We have it narrowed down to six possible spurs,” said Corrigan.

“Just six?” said Ferg. “Not twelve?”

“Actually, it is more like twelve. But I had them arbitrarily lop off some.”

“Who the fuck is doing the analysis for you, Corrigan? Monkeys?”

“Monkeys would be faster,” said the deskman. “We’ve been screwed since Nancy left. I need someone who can coordinate this stuff for me.”

Special Demands was essentially a client to the analytic side of the Agency, which could supply a variety of intelligence reports, processed or unprocessed. The staffer who had worked to coordinate the reports—and had the more difficult job of assessing them—had gone on maternity leave two weeks before, and had not yet been replaced.