Operator - 01 (18 page)

Three minutes.

The warehouse floor has dissolved to chaos as I survey it again. I take down three more Russians brandishing weapons. Then a single man stands and puts his rifle down carefully on the ground, raising his hands above his head. Four more men follow his lead, surrendering. I pause for a moment to consider this. Then I pull a handful of glow sticks from another pouch on my vest. Wrapping them in a chamois cloth, I crack them and toss them in a bunch towards the warehouse floor. They separate from the chammy halfway to the floor and rain down like the arc of a rainbow in four different colors.

“Drop your weapons and move to the light markers with your hands above your head,” my voice booms in Russian. I shout upward, towards the aluminum warehouse ceiling, hoping to mask my location. There is a moment of utter and complete silence when I wonder if I’ve just identified myself as a target. Then the clatter of another assault rifle shatters the silence as another Tambov thug drops it to the ground. Through the scope I see other stragglers follow suit. Eight men in total shuffle to the vacant area on the floor ten feet from the cages and drop first to their knees and then flat on their stomachs, hands stretched forward and legs crossed behind them. That’s all of them, or at least all that I counted.

I secure a line around the steel girder with a carabiner, drop it and fast-rope down to the warehouse floor, with both the Vintorez and the P90 strapped to my back. As I hit the ground, one of the Russians on the end of the line of prone men rolls and half-stands, pulling a small automatic from his pants. I drop to one knee and smoothly draw the Kimber, which roars as I squeeze the trigger. The man is blown back off his feet, and the top half of his head dissolves in a spray of blood. Nobody else moves after that.

I single out the smallest Russian on the ground and kick him in the leg. When the longhaired Russian looks up, I drop a set of quick zip trash bag fasteners at his feet before stepping back and ordering him to bind his compatriots at the wrists and ankles. When the other men are secure, I holster the Kimber then secure my assistant before pulling out a thick roll of duct tape to ensure that the Russians will take some time to escape their bindings. I look at my watch. The entire action has taken less than six minutes, but the FBI helicopters will be overhead in two more. Worse still, I can hear sirens in the distance. It is most likely the Conestoga volunteer fire department, but Sheriff Peterson won’t be far behind them. I have no time to waste.

I pull a sturdy metal flashlight from my chest rig and trot over to the cages, shining the narrow beam inside. What I see stops me cold. There are eight girls in the first cage my flashlight hits. They are clustered in a group near the middle of the cage, which is crudely fashioned from chain links, like a low-rent dog kennel. The girls are wearing flimsy cotton dresses, far too light for the cool autumn Conestoga weather and they are obviously dehydrated. I can smell perspiration and human excrement. And as I’ve seen while surveying the warehouse, they are children – all of them. The oldest can barely be eleven years old, the youngest no more than six. I have a flashback to a moment in a village in the Sudan where I’d been sent in to record proof of the genocide in Darfur and found house after house full of slaughtered families. What has happened to these girls seems no less awful.

I moved from cage to cage with my flashlight. In the fourth cage, backed in a corner, sweaty and trembling, I see Veronica. A weight I didn’t know I was carrying lifts. I shout to the men, asking who has the keys. One of them grunts and I walk over and fish through his pockets until I find a ring of keys. It takes too long to find the key and open the lock. The young girls shrink away from me as I point to Veronica. She doesn’t know me at first, and I bring a finger to my lips as I see hope blossom in her eyes. She catches on quickly, remaining silent as I release her. After a second’s consideration, I re-lock the cage and leave the keys on the floor a few feet away. One of the girls still inside makes pleading eye contact with me, a bedraggled, stick-thin waif with stringy, elbow-length blonde hair who looks all of eight. I address her in Russian, raising my voice so all of the girls will hear me. “The American police will be here soon. The men wearing black will help get you back to your families. You can trust them.”

I consider releasing all of the girls and decide against it. It is infuriating to see children treated like animals, but I have only moments before I risk being detained. It’s also better that the FBI witness exactly what has happened here. Besides, there is no telling what kind of power the Russian men have over these children and I don’t want the girls freeing them.

Keeping an eye on the bound men, I lead Veronica to the door near the exit bay. I peer outside and see that the parking lot is still clear. The panel van has been reduced to a smoldering skeleton of scorched steel. My watch tells me that FBI helos will be overhead any second. I pause for a moment on the threshold of the doorway, thinking about the story I want to paint for the crime scene investigators. Reaching a decision, I gently remove the Vintorez from my shoulder, laying it down on the ground near the door. I’ve never handled it without gloves on, but I wipe it down quickly with a soft cloth. Then, pulling Veronica along behind me, I sprint out of the parking lot and down the block where we duck onto a side street. In the dumpster behind the abandoned office building I recover our bags and a gear bag I’ve expropriated from Stokeley’s. I have another pang of guilt before reassuring myself that I have just returned sole ownership of the business back to Don Miller. I take the P90 off my back, strip off my molle vest and drop the bags into the trunk of the Crown Victoria. A few seconds later we peel away, passing three fire trucks and a series of sheriff’s cars streaming toward the warehouse on the two-lane road. Three minutes later, as we pull the blue Ford onto the freeway, I hear the unmistakable sound of UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters overhead.

Veronica is still in shock. Her face is ashen white and she looks like she’s thrown up recently. I keep the Crown Victoria riding smoothly on the Thruway, heading south toward Kingston where abundant cheap motels near the Thruway exit will allow us to get some sleep anonymously. Neither of us talks. Finally, she stirs, seems to come out of the trance, and looks at me as if seeing me for the first time.

“Who are you?” she asks. “That, in the warehouse – and what you did to George – I have never seen anything like that before.”

I consider this for a moment. She deserves some kind of answer and I really want her to understand. “I’m – I was – a professional, an operator. This is what I was trained for.” It doesn’t register with her. She lives in the same world that most nice kids from wealthy families inhabit. That world doesn’t have room for men like me.

“I think I understand,” she says, but she doesn’t. I can see her struggling with shock, starting to lose control. She takes a sharp breath in and pulls it back together. Tough girl.

“So you speak Russian?” she asks off-handedly.

“Yeah, small world,” I answer.

Chapter Six – Wednesday

“Good morning, this is CNN. In the news this morning – explosions and a dramatic gunfight in upstate New York last night as a major sex trafficking ring crumbles. We take you live to CNN correspondent Joanne Meeker in Conestoga, New York.”

“Good Morning, Robyn. This sleepy town in the Catskills region erupted last night in explosions and gunfire as the FBI raided a warehouse here just after 7pm. Federal agents rescued nearly four-dozen underage girls from this warehouse behind me, some reportedly as young as five years old. While they have no official comment on the investigation that led to this confrontation, some locals are comparing this to Ruby Ridge. What we do know is this, however: at least twenty-one men are dead and most of them are Russian citizens. These men appear to be members of a Russian criminal syndicate. The good news, Robyn, is that it appears that none of the hostages, none of these young girls, were injured. Although they will not comment on the record, sources tell me that the FBI’s elite Hostage Rescue Team conducted the operation in cooperation with local law enforcement authorities based on information from a confidential informant. Local residents here in Conestoga were shocked to learn that this type of criminal enterprise was operating right in their town. The FBI is continuing this investigation, which has expanded to include raids on locations throughout the town this morning. We understand from the Conestoga sheriff’s office that they are seeking two people for questioning related to this incident and the murder of a New York City banker just three days ago. One is Michael Herne, a decorated U.S. Army Sergeant and Afghanistan war veteran. The second is Veronica Ryan, a reporter for the White Plains Gazette. We have no idea what part either of them played in these events…”

My mind reels as the
Stars & Stripes
photo of me receiving the Silver Star flashes on the screen. I look at Veronica. “Was there a TV behind the desk when you got the room last night?” We’d checked into the motel, a Super 8, just before nine in the evening, after I’d showered and changed in a truck stop, scrubbing most of the blood off of me and dropping the clothes I’d worn into a dumpster. Veronica got the room, paying cash and registering as Jean Smith, playing the part of a married woman only planning to use the room for a few hours.

“No, I didn’t see one. The woman on duty didn’t look at me twice.”

I look at my watch. It’s 6am. “We need to have a serious conversation,” I say to Veronica. “The Russians were all from a gang operating out of St. Petersburg.” I let that stand for a moment. “You have to tell me what you know.” She sits down heavily on the bed and nods. Drawing her knees to her chest, she begins to talk. She doesn’t look at me.

“I fell in love, that’s how it all started. I had only been in St. Petersburg for a few months. The mother of one of the children I was teaching at the school hired me to give private English lessons to her daughter. Her husband was there in the evenings when I came to tutor the girl. He would joke around with me. He was funny. One day the girl and the mother weren’t there when I arrived. She’d had to leave town for a funeral and took the daughter with her but forgot to ring me. The husband took pity on me and bought me dinner. After that…well after awhile…I became his mistress. At first it was like…it was amazing. He took me places I had never seen, to restaurants that weren’t in any guidebook and fantastic clubs. He made me feel special. And I met amazing, powerful people. He knew everyone. We grew closer and he started to talk about leaving his wife. His name was Constantine.

“And then one day Constantine told me that he was in a difficult situation. He said that he wouldn’t be able to leave his wife unless he resolved his issues at work. He used to have a big job in Moscow but he’d been outmaneuvered politically and sent to St. Petersburg. He had an opportunity to revive his career, to get a big new promotion, but he needed to come up with a plan to impress his superiors. I never really understood what he did other than the fact that he worked for the government.

“That topic never really came up again, but it was always in the back of my mind. I don’t know if it was the way he said it, but it was the first time I got a feeling about Constantine that something wasn’t quite right.” She stops and laughs harshly at herself. “As if the infidelity didn’t already tell me that. Anyway, there was this one time that he was over at the apartment. He knew Mel by then and the three of us were watching TV. There was this American show on called ‘To Catch a Predator’ – you know the one, where a reporter goes online pretending to be an underage girl and arranges to meet some pedophile, then confronts him? Well, he thought it was just brilliant and I remember him asking a bunch of questions about American attitudes towards that stuff. How strong is the social embarrassment, are the laws really enforced, that kind of thing. It was really weird, like he wanted to know everything about being a child molester. Then he started joking that there had to be a pretty good business in trapping perverts. The way he said it was really odd. Mel felt the same way.

“Of course, Mel didn’t like Constantine much, anyway, but she was hardly in a position to judge me, given how George was treating her. Anyway, the subject of sexual predators never really came up again, but there was this one other conversation we had in St. Petersburg that I keep remembering. This was just after Constantine got the big promotion and I found out that he was moving to New York City. We were out for dinner with Mel and George. This was the beginning of the mortgage crisis and Mel started talking about how she got a letter from her parents about how many people in Conestoga were losing their houses and how many vacant homes there were. Then all of a sudden, Constantine starts asking Mel all of these random questions: how far is Conestoga from New York, do rich people have their vacation houses nearby, what are the neighborhoods in Conestoga like, how far is it from the interstate? It was really specific stuff, very strange. But it was just after that when Mel got that black eye and…it was Constantine who got me photos of George with the other women. Then he left Russia and took his wife with him and I thought that was the end of it.

“But he started calling after he got to New York, telling me that he missed me and that he made a mistake not leaving his wife. He pressured me to come back home and eventually I did. I had vowed that I wasn’t going to see him again, that I was never going to be that other woman ever again, but I folded like a house of cards when he sent for me. At first, it was wonderful in New York. He set me up in an apartment near the consulate on the Upper East Side. He brought me to a lot of cocktail parties, a lot of social functions. After a while, I realized he was never going to leave his wife. I ended it about a year ago.”

I start to say something but Veronica shakes her head and I close my mouth. “There’s more. It may not mean anything, but I…I have a feeling. This one time we were at a U.N. event, a family day thing and I’m talking with this woman, an American woman. Her daughter is there with her as she’s talking to me, a cute little girl with red hair and freckles, maybe seven, eight years old. This guy comes up to us, another American, and says hello, and pats the little girl on the head, then talks to her for a moment. You know, typical kid stuff. There was nothing really wrong with it, but there was something about how he looked at that girl that really creeped me out. The mother must have had the same reaction because as soon as he walked away she knelt down in front of that little girl and started talking to her. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but you could tell she was lecturing that girl, telling her to stay away from strange men. I mentioned it to Constantine in passing because it freaked me out. He asked me to point out the guy. When I did he seemed really shocked, but somehow excited, too. ‘Do you know who that is?’ he asked me. I didn’t. He named a name – I can’t remember it, but apparently it was somebody important. I didn’t think anything about it at the time. Anyway, that was right before the end. When I broke it off with Constantine, I moved back in with my parents.”