One Child (11 page)

Chapter

19

Outside Spin Buldak, Afghanistan

They were ready to roll.

A line of Strykers wound out of the Forward Operating Base onto the road leading from Spin Buldak to Kandahar. Each eight-wheeled light armored vehicle was topped with either a .50 Caliber machine gun or a 40mm grenade launcher. The two-man crew, driver and commander, was augmented by six infantry troops in each vehicle. Light for a vehicle that could comfortably fit nine. Two Javelin shoulder-fired anti-tank rockets were strapped to the sides. Inside the Strykers, the men were serious.

The target was the Taliban force in the medium-size village of Dabarey, about sixteen kilometers northwest. Dabarey was positioned mid-way between the main highway linking Spin Buldak and Kandahar and a secondary road to the south. The Taliban were using the secondary road as a fast and safe way of moving men and supplies for their attacks on the ISAF forces. 5th Stryker Brigade was in charge of changing all that.

Andrew
was in the sixth Stryker from the front. Seven more of the fast-response vehicles were lined up behind his. He was settled in against the armored plating, his M-4 resting comfortably on his chest. Five other soldiers mirrored his image.
Russell
Matthews sat next to
Andrew
, near the back, dressed in cargo pants, a tan shirt and a flack jacket, his camera case on his lap. The Strykers rolled out of the FOB and onto the main road. They reached forty miles an hour and kept a tight formation.

"I knew they were using these in Iraq,"
Russell
said above the road noise. "I didn't know they had Strykers in Afghanistan."

"We brought this Brigade in last July. Great vehicle, but not as good here as it was in Iraq,"
Andrew
replied.

"I heard about that,"
Russell
said. "Something to do with having a better road system over there."

"Exactly. Here, if there's one road that's better than a goat path, we use it, so the bad guys know our route. It's not hard for them to sneak in at night and plant an IED or two."

"Big problems, IEDs,"
Russell
said.

The Stryker hit a larger-than-average pothole and the men inside the vehicle bounced high enough to bang their heads on the ceiling. They picked themselves up and retook their seats. The interior was heating up and the air conditioning unit was straining to keep the temperature in check. Each soldier had a water bottle in hand and drank often to keep hydrated.

Andrew
pushed his helmet back off his forehead. "No kidding. They're getting better at it. Some of the charges they're burying are large enough to flip one of these things or take a track off a tank. You try to go around a disabled piece of equipment and there's another IED in the rocks and crap beside the road. While you're sitting and waiting for a recovery vehicle, they pepper you with small arms fire and lob in a few mortars."

"How often does that happen?"
Russell
asked.

Andrew
smiled. "Pretty much every time we go outside the wire."

"You expecting it to happen today?"

"Chances are about nine on a scale of ten. We're not just driving around waiting for them to fire at us, we're going after them. But we're not expecting big numbers today, or the CO would have put nine or ten guys in each Stryker."

"You think they know we're coming?"

Another smile. "They always know we're coming."

The Stryker slowed and the road surface changed. They were on the unpaved secondary road running south of the main highway. IED heaven. The ride inside the Stryker was rough and the noise levels somewhere close to pandemonium. Rocks banged off the undercarriage, a constant barrage of loud, sharp pings.
Russell
focused on the soldiers. They didn't seem to notice the small bumps and showed little reaction to the bone-jarring reverberations when they hit large holes in the road. Their faces remained impassive - unconcerned by the unimportant stuff. No sense getting upset by a few potholes when no one was shooting at you.

Russell
had seen it before. Somalia was the worst. The troops were outnumbered and outgunned by the locals to the point where each day held the promise of being overrun and slaughtered. At least in Iraq and Afghanistan the logistics were better. Or so he'd been told. He'd find out soon enough if it were true.

"What sort of resistance do you think we'll hit today?" he asked.

"Sixty to eighty tier three, maybe a handful of tier two. We're not expecting any tier one bad guys on this run."

"Tiers? What's that?"
Russell
asked.

"Tier three are basically farmers with rifles. They get recruited because they need the money. They're dressed the worst, so sometimes you can tell who they are. It doesn't stop us from shooting them. But if you kill one, it gets all the relatives pissed off and the next day there's more of them with guns."
Andrew
took a sip of water and continued. "Tier two are the Afghan religious nutcases. They think they're fighting a
jihad
of some sort. They're still getting paid way more than they could earn doing anything else, but they have a bit of ideology left in them. If I was low on ammo and had the option of taking out a tier three or a tier two, I'd take the tier two every time."

"What about the tier one guys?"

Andrew
's face steeled and his eyes grew cold. "Mercenaries," he said. "Former professional soldiers from Chechnya or Iran, sometimes Bosnia. These guys know what they're doing and they're dangerous. They're all about the money. And they like to kill us. Nasty fuckers. You get one of those guys in your sights, you take him out."

"Do they ever come after you?"

"Nah, not often."
Andrew
shook his head. "We always have reinforcements reasonably close and the chances of the Taliban putting together a well organized attack are slim. It's not their MO. Sneaking about planting IEDs and taking pot shots from the hills are what they're good at. They're pests. Very dangerous pests." He grinned and his eyes shifted from cold to mischievous. "They tried attacking the FOB one night but that didn't work out very well for them."

"Makes sense. The FOBs are well protected,"
Russell
said.

"Yeah. The COPs, on the other hand, get overrun all the time."

"Combat Outposts?"
Russell
asked and when
Andrew
nodded he said, "I haven't heard any reports of us taking casualties from that."

Andrew
shook his head. "It's mostly Afghan National Army guys manning those posts. If the bad guys know we're there they tend to leave them alone. They wait until the ANA are alone, then they take it out. If they kill a handful of US or Canadian soldiers, it's like stepping on an anthill. We're all over them. They don't like getting us too mad."

Russell
looked dubious. "Are you saying that you don't care if the ANA guys get killed?"

Andrew
shook his head. "No, not saying that at all. OMLT works really hard to get the ANA self-sufficient, so it's a bad day when they get overrun. But not quite the same as having US or Canadian troops on site when it happens."

"What's omelet?"
Russell
asked, pronouncing the acronym like the word, as
Andrew
had.

"O-M-L-T." He spelled out the letters. "Operational Mentor and Liaison Force. It's a Canadian program and we picked up on it. OMLT mentors the Afghan National Army and trains them to take over once we're gone."

"So it's our exit strategy."

"Yeah. We're kinda hoping it works."

"
Contact. Out.
"

The voice came over their headsets on the frequency reserved for the Tactical Operations Center in Kandahar.
Contact
meant someone in the line of Strykers was taking fire from the enemy.
Out
signaled the TOC that the Stryker commander who had called in did not expect, or want, a response. A Contact Report would be coming over the radio in a minute, detailing what sort of fire they were taking and estimated enemy strength. The line of Strykers kept moving and the report followed thirty seconds later.

"Small arms fire coming from the ridge at seven o'clock. Four to six shooters. Keep rolling to Dabarey, about three clicks."

Andrew
leaned in toward
Russell
. "We've got a handful of bad guys with rifles firing at us from a ridge. Not worth stopping for. We're heading into the town."

"Okay,"
Russell
said. He adjusted the camera bag, even though it didn't need it.

The Strykers were moving slower now, almost at a crawl, and
Andrew
noticed concern spreading across
Russell
's face. He said, "The secondary road we traveled on to get here was cleared this morning before we left the FOB. They checked the culverts for IEDs, so we could move a bit faster. This short stretch from the road to the village hasn't been cleared, so we have to go a bit slower. The first vehicle is at the greatest risk and he sets the pace. The drivers coming up behind all follow in exactly the same track, so in a way, the road has been cleared for them."

"How do you get to be the lucky guy in the front?"
Russell
asked.

"Piss someone off,"
Andrew
said, then grinned. "Just kidding. Sort of."

Russell
wasn't sure whether
Andrew
James was kidding or not. He was two days into his assignment, on his first trip outside the wire, and he was already feeling the incredible stress that the soldiers manning the FOB felt every day. It was the same as Somalia and Iraq, and he wondered how they managed. How they distanced themselves from everything they'd known as teenagers and young men and women in their twenties, living in John Mellancamp's America. The lyrics floated through his mind as the Stryker commander came over the radio and told them to be ready. They were rolling into Dabarey.

Little Pink Houses. Ain't that America.

Man, America had changed.

Chapter

20

Moscow, Russia

Friday afternoon and Moscow was teeming with life. Traffic was impossible and the heat was stifling. It almost made Trey Miller wish that U2 had booked their concert during the winter. Almost. Until he remembered Russia in the dead of winter - bone-chilling cold and everything frozen. It shocked him back to reality. August was just fine.

Alexi Androv had secured moderately accurate drawings of the stadium, showing some of the conduits that housed the electrical wiring and most of the water mains entering the structure and the sewers leaving. His contact inside the local office at MosEnergo had promised him more detailed drawings of the electrical system by the following Wednesday. That was five days away - too long to sit and wait. They needed to make significant progress in the next week if they hoped to be successful. Which meant they had to start with what was at hand.

Androv laid the plans on the table in Miller's suite in the Korston Hotel. All four members of the team were comfortably seated with a clear view of the schematics. Laid alongside the new plans were the ones Trey had brought with him from Paris that showed the structural components of the stadium.

"Luzhniki was built in 1956, so its basic infrastructure is getting old," Androv said. "There have been six major upgrades to the services over the last fifty-four years. Four of these were to bring the electrical systems up to date with the latest advancements in technology. The events in the stadium these days draw more power than they use to, so they've upped the voltage coming in and have used numerous incoming lines to ensure the power can't fail simultaneously across the stadium."

Trey leaned back in his chair. "Does that make it easier or harder for us?"

Androv shrugged. "A bit of both, I think. I don't know if we can knock out everything at the same time. A lot of that depends on Petr. He's the one who has to identify where we cut into the system." Androv lit a foul-smelling cigarette and continued. "We can trip the relay networks or breakers or whatever you want to call them, and shut everything down, but that doesn't work if you want to have the blame passed on to
Volstov
. He'll simply deflect it and say some terrorist group targeted the concert. The problem we have is making this look like incompetence, not sabotage."

Trey nodded in agreement. "That's the key to this whole thing. Tripping the circuits is not an option."

Petr Besovich studied the plans showing the utilities. He pointed to the entry points for the electrical lines. Six of them in total. "This is a problem," he said, his voice heavy with a Russian accent. "We need access to the sewer system in six different places. Then we need to find the main lines and splice in contactors. These are switches that we can open and close to allow or disallow the electrical flow. But there is some good news. Since the incoming power is split into six separate lines, the voltage and amperage on the lines is much lower than if the stadium was being fed by one line." He pointed to another section of the drawings. "Six hundred volts and three hundred amps in each line. That means the wires won't be too thick, which makes attaching the contactors much easier."

"Well, that's good news," Trey said.

Petr held up a finger. "But having six lines complicates things. Since we can't work on live wires, we need to cut the power on the incoming lines in order to make this happen. To do this once is difficult. To do it six times in such a short time frame is crazy. Someone at the stadium will notice the power losses and report them."

Trey considered the words carefully. "Good point, Petr. Maybe there's a way around that. What if there was an advisory from the city to the stadium that they were conducting upgrades to part of the grid and needed to take the power down in different sectors at specific times. Always late at night, maybe two in the morning. And only for a short period of time. Half an hour, max. That way the guys working the night shift at the stadium are ready for the interruption."

"That might work, but how do we get the city to send out that memo?" Androv asked.

Trey grinned. "They don't send it. We do. We create a profile for a fictitious department head and e-mail the stadium. Then we set it up so any response from the stadium comes directly back to us."

Besovich nodded. "That could work. If we had success with one interruption, the other five would probably be a run in the park."

"Walk in the park," Trey corrected him. "It's a walk in the park, not a run in the park."

Besovich looked confused for a moment, then turned to Maelle. "Maybe for most guys, but for me, it's a run." He tapped his barrel chest. "The girls like it when their man is in good shape."

Maelle rolled her eyes.

"Ahh," he grinned. "You want me for my mind, not just my body."

"Oh, Christ," Maelle said.

"We need an entry point to the underground system," Trey said, bringing the conversation back on track. "A safe place to cut through the concrete and brick so we can get into the storm sewer."

"I've already thought of that," Androv said. "There's an empty retail space on Usaceva, just across Hamovniceskij Val on the north side of the stadium. I think it's the closest we're going to get. The space around Luzhniki is all parks and grass or parking lots, and the river is to the south, so there's no chance of coming in from that direction."

"Can we access the storm sewer from there?" Trey asked.

Androv nodded. "It runs directly underneath the building. The only problem is, getting from the entry point to the stadium is a fair distance."

"How far?"

"Between 150 and 200 meters."

"That's doable," Trey said. "Once we're underground and moving there should be little to keep us from making good time. We'll be going in at night, so we won't have to worry about running into any maintenance workers."

"There could be security gates," Besovich offered.

"In the sewer system?" Trey asked. "That's pretty anal, don't you think?"

"It's Moscow," Besovich shrugged. "You never know what you're going to run into here."

"Okay, we can figure out how to get through them if it becomes a problem. I'm not going to worry about it right now." He turned back to Androv. "What are the chances of getting this place on Usaceva?"

Androv dug into his leather briefcase and pulled out a legal-size document. "I think they're pretty good. This is a six-month lease. All we need to do is sign it and give them a bank draft for a hundred thousand rubles. We can get the key tomorrow."

"A hundred thousand rubles," Trey said. "The conversion rate is about thirty to one right now, so that's around $3,200 US dollars. Reasonable for a deposit."

"I thought so."

"Okay, good work," Trey said, taking the lease and quickly scanning it. He glanced up at Androv. "We're putting in a chocolate shop?"

"Seemed harmless."

Trey handed the lease back to the Russian. "I'll give you the money in dollars and you can convert it and pay for six months. We'll need equipment to cut through the floor and the top of the sewer pipe."

Petr Besovich said, "I'll get whatever equipment we need. We should make a list."

"Sounds good." Trey turned to the lone woman in the group. "Maelle, once we're inside the sewers and have access to the electrical conduits, that will give you a direct link to the city and stadium computers. Once you're tied in, you'll be able to manipulate them as we need."

She nodded. "Yes. That shouldn't be a problem."

"She speaks," Besovich said.

"Petr, you're going to fuck this up," Maelle snapped at him. "I don't want things going wrong because you're distracted, so get your mind out of the gutter."

A tense silence settled on the table, until Trey said, "She's right, Petr. We need you focused. Wait until we're finished, then see if you met Maelle's criteria."

Besovich measured the words for a minute, then smiled. "All right, that's a deal. No more comments until I take care of things, then I collect my reward."

Maelle looked disgusted but didn't disagree.

"Alexi, you get this lease signed and cover the front windows with construction paper. Petr, you secure the equipment we need to cut into the sewers. Maelle, I need you to go over every scrap of information we have on the city and stadium computer systems so you're ready when we need to hack into them." He folded up the plans and slipped them into his briefcase. "It's August 6
th
. We have nineteen days to do this. Let's get to it."