Scorpion: A Covert Ops Novel (Second Edition) Read online

  SCORPION

  A Covert Ops Novel

  Ross Sidor

  The CIA employs contractors recruited from elite military units for bodyguard and security work in high risk environments and for deniable ops. The most skilled and lethal of these operatives are known as scorpions.

  One of these scorpions is a former Airborne Ranger and disgruntled ex-CIA paramilitary operator named Avery, codenamed Carnivore.

  When a high ranking CIA officer is abducted by terrorists in Tajikistan, Avery is tasked with securing the hostage’s release before dozens of classified operations and agents are compromised.

  But a high-stakes raid on a terrorist safe house in lawless Gorno-Badakhshan Province yields clues pointing in another direction entirely, and Avery and his team of paramilitary operators are soon unraveling a conspiracy involving an American traitor, double agents, and Russian gangsters to arm the Taliban with weapons of mass destruction.

  From the remote terrorist enclaves of Central Asia, to the nuclear facilities of the former Soviet Union, Scorpion is a riveting debut novel, packed with gritty, violent action and authentic details that will captivate readers of Vince Flynn, Brad Taylor and Andy McNab.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Scorpion: A Covert Ops Novel. Second Edition. Text copyright © 2014 Ross Sidor.

  All rights reserved.

  No parts of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without express written permissions by the publisher.

  Published by Ross Sidor

  CONTENTS

  ONE

  Tajikistan

  TWO

  Dushanbe

  THREE

  Virginia

  FOUR

  Tajikistan

  FIVE

  Dushanbe

  SIX

  Dushanbe; Dayrabot

  SEVEN

  Dushanbe

  EIGHT

  Dushanbe

  NINE

  Gorno-Badakhshan

  TEN

  Yazgulam

  ELEVEN

  Yazgulam

  TWELVE

  Dayrabot

  THIRTEEN

  Ayni Airfield

  FOURTEEN

  Dayrabot

  FIFTEEN

  Langley

  SIXTEEN

  Minsk

  SEVENTEEN

  Dushanbe

  EIGHTEEN

  Dayrabot

  NINETEEN

  Minsk

  TWENTY

  Minsk

  TWENTY-ONE

  Sosny

  TWENTY-TWO

  Minsk; Over the Caspian Sea

  TWENTY-THREE

  Dushanbe

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Bagram Air Base

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Gorno-Badakhshan

  ONE

  Tajikistan

  Tom Wilkes spent the last ninety-minutes driving west on the M41 Pamir Highway from Dushanbe to Khorugh. He gripped the steering wheel two-handed as he traversed the Land Rover Defender 90 over the rough, weathered surface of what passed for a road and maneuvered around chunks of rock that had fallen from the overhead mountain passes.

  The Pamir Highway was over a thousand years old and the second highest altitude highway in the world. Once a vital part of the ancient Silk Road trade route, the majority of the highway’s length was narrow and unpaved and was heavily damaged from landslides and erosion. The highway was mostly empty, but near the larger villages or trading posts, vehicular, pack-animal, and pedestrian traffic picked up. Tajikistan didn’t have a booming tourist industry, but the highway was a must for sightseers.

  Wilkes had made the drive twice before and had previously enjoyed the scenic view of the Pamir Mountains and the streaming Panj River, but he drove with urgency this morning and found that watching the unending brown and tan fields and the sloping mountains passing by was mind numbingly monotonous this time.

  He’d received the phone call from Robert Cramer, chief of station (COS), Dushanbe, at seven that morning, rousing him from his sleep and requesting his presence in Cramer’s embassy office at eight sharp.

  Skeptical about the urgency but wishing to maintain an agreeable and respectful professional relationship with Cramer, Wilkes got dressed, ate a quick breakfast of eggs and toast, and walked the four blocks to the American Embassy compound where Cramer showed him the message left in the shared Gmail account overnight by DB/CERTITUDE, the cryptonym by which one of Dushanbe station’s most prized agents was known.

  Using a shared e-mail account allowed multiple parties to communicate without transmitting anything that could be intercepted, making it an unsophisticated but secure means of communication, barring the physical seizure of someone’s hard drive. This was an especially necessary component of operational security in Tajikistan, where FAPSI, Russia’s signals and communications intelligence agency, swept a broad and invasive electronic canvas.

  The brief note requested a face-to-face meeting and provided the time and place.

  CERTITUDE’s message caused a stir, because everyone who was in the know knew that he’d just returned from a foray into Afghanistan on an assignment to locate Ali Masood Jafari, a disaffected Pakistani nuclear scientist offering his services to the Taliban, and was reportedly spotted in southern Tajikistan.

  The previous month, GKNB, the Committee for National Security, Tajikistan’s KGB, arrested an ethnic Uzbek, a card carrying member of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), who had in his possession a thumbnail sample of weapons grade uranium. Although not anywhere near a sufficient quantity for construction of a weapon, it was enough to trigger the sensors installed by the US Department of Energy at major Tajik border crossings. A fanatic with supreme devotion to the cause, the IMU courier kept silent and died under interrogation.

  The report of the smuggling incident went straight to the White House. With frequent reports coming out of Afghanistan that the Taliban were seeking to establish a WMD program, with the help of Pakistani scientists, alarm bells rang across the Intelligence Community. CIA wanted a specialist in the country, and Wilkes was assigned from the Agency’s Counterproliferation Center.

  Geographically, Tajikistan was ideal land for smuggling and hiding terrorists. The country had only two major population centers—Dushanbe and Khorugh—with small villages scattered in between. The landscape was mountainous, with porous borders, making it easy to travel unseen and disappear. Security along the eight hundred mile shared border with Afghanistan consisted of remote outposts manned by inadequately trained and underpaid conscripted soldiers. Gorno-Badakhshan, an autonomous province where the Tajik government exercised zero authority, occupied nearly two thirds of the country’s landmass.

  Over eighty percent of Afghan heroin bound for Western Europe transited through here. Human trafficking was rampant, with Tajikistan serving as a significant source of children and women headed to Russia where they became sex slaves. The men ended up in Russia or Kazakhstan to work in forced labor.

  But it wasn’t slaves or drugs that concerned CIA, but rather the proliferation of the assorted components—human, mechanical, and scientific—to build a dirty bomb, including the vast quantities of assorted radioactive materials that simply disappeared from scientific research institutions inside the politically unstable countries that once comprised the Soviet Union. Quantities of these materials were poorly inventoried, with records lost or destroyed, so once a sample was found in
the possession of a smuggler, it was nearly impossible to determine the source. In just one year, the International Atomic Energy Agency recorded over one hundred incidents of illicit smuggling of radioactive materials, most of them in Central Asia.

  So far, Wilkes had spent most of his time here conferring with scientists from Tajikistan’s Institute of Physics and Engineering and GKNB border security officers. Adding to his difficulties, he often had to fight for access to Dushanbe station’s agents—the foreign nationals recruited by CIA officers to act as spies—who would have insight into smuggling and, maybe if they were lucky, have contacts within the IMU. Cramer’s agreeable cooperation with Wilkes all but ended when it came to his agents, of whom he was fiercely protective.

  In fact, Wilkes was more than a little surprised that Cramer had asked him to see CERTITUDE alone. Usually Cramer or Gerald Rashid, the station’s best Tajik-Farsi speaker, dealt with CERTITUDE. But Cramer had a meeting later that afternoon, and Rashid was away on other business until tomorrow. So in the interests of showing the prized Tajik agent a familiar face, Wilkes was sent. He’d met CERTITUDE once before, when he’d tagged along with Cramer.

  Overall, Tajikistan was a relatively safe posting and was classified as neither a denied area of operations nor a non-permissive environment in CIA vernacular. Wilkes had refused a contractor to accompany him for personal security during his stay in the country, but he still kept a Glock 19 concealed beneath his leather jacket, especially when making forays into bandit country.

  Although the country had grown far more politically stable and secure since a violent civil war that came close to turning the former Soviet republic into an anarchic failed state, it was still not without its dangers. Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Province was home to numerous warlords with private militias and a rebel movement growing increasingly popular amongst disaffected Tajik Pamiris. Attacks were on the rise over the past several months, although so far the militants had set their sights on government and military targets.

  But Wilkes was no stranger to operating in hostile environments. He’d served on the task force that dismantled AQ Khan’s nuclear proliferation network in Pakistan and Malaysia. He’d searched for WMDs in post-Saddam Iraq. He’d entered war torn Libya after Ghadaffi was slaughtered to secure the remnants of that dictator’s chemical weapons arsenal. Most recently, he’d accompanied an insertion element into Syria to recover soil samples after a chemical weapons attack against rebel held villages. He thought he was capable of handling himself in this pacified, backwater ex-Soviet republic.

  Another hour passed, and Wilkes came up onto Khorugh.

  This is the capital of the Gorno-Badakhshan province, home mostly to ethnic Pamiris, and located within a deep river valley at the confluence of the Panj and Ghund rivers. The city is surrounded on all sides by mountains. Although a quiet and beautiful city largely untouched by modern development, it’s also one of the poorest places in a country already known for its rampant destitution. Vehicular traffic was light, and many parts of the city appeared downtrodden, with beggars and assorted vendors in the streets. Khorugh’s geographic location made it an ideal place for rafting and mountain climbing, but the tourism industry was small here, and insufficient to bolster the local economy.

  Navigating the narrow streets, Wilkes, the broad-shouldered ex-marine from Oklahoma, didn’t stand out too badly. The various NGOs and international organizations providing food, medical aid, and utility services to the locals all drove around in SUVs and 4x4s, so a Land Rover driven by a Westerner didn’t inherently draw attention.

  Wilkes took thirty minutes to run an SDR, or surveillance detection route, which came up dry, as expected, but in a country where the Russian and Chinese intelligence services, not to mention the Iranians, actively targeted Americans, one needed to be sure. The Tajiks were a concern, too, but GKNB didn’t venture far outside of Dushanbe.

  Wilkes pulled over in front of a coffee shop across the street from Khorugh State University. Classes were in session this time of year, and the area flourished with activity. He put the Land Rover in park and waited. CERTITUDE appeared on time. Wilkes recognized him immediately and spotted the rolled-up newspaper tucked under the man’s right arm, signaling that he was clean. A newspaper under his left arm was the signal to abort.

  Wilkes threw the Land Rover into gear and accelerated. He made a right at the first intersection, drove another two blocks, and passed CERTITUDE, who was still walking in the same direction, his back to Wilkes.

  Wilkes stopped alongside an abandoned factory, away from the busy streets. He turned the wheel, pointing the tires to the left, the signal for CERTITUDE that he, too, was secure.

  A few blocks ahead, the street eventually ran to a dead-end, a closed-off construction site that hadn’t seen any progress since Wilkes’ last visit here the previous month. Off the main street and away from the university campus and the local shops, the sidewalks and streets were much less congested here.

  Stealing glances into his rearview mirror, Wilkes slowly grew anxious. A few minutes passed—he was glancing constantly at the digital clock in the console—but no CERTITUDE.

  Over a minute passed, an inordinate amount of time for the short distance CERTITUDE had to cover, and long enough for it to consciously register in Wilkes’ mind as an abnormality. He shifted around in his seat and turned his head around to look back through the rear windshield.

  Then he saw a figure step up beside the front passenger side door.

  Wilkes couldn’t see his face in its entirety, just the stubble growth around the thin, cruel line of a mouth. The man was too tall and standing too close to the Land Rover for Wilkes to get a good look at him, but his wide, solid build, although disguised by loose-fitting gho knee-length robe, was inconsistent with CERTITUDE’s slight, gaunt frame.

  It took a further millisecond for Wilkes’ brain to register certain sensory input and become cognizant of the fact that the ring-finger on the hand now reaching for the door handle did not have CERTITUDE’s trademark Pamiri ring. It was a simple and bland thing, silver with an inscription in Tajik Farsi, a gift from CERTITUDE’s wife. Its absence triggered the final alarm bell.

  Wilkes’ right hand instinctively made a pass for the Glock, while his left moved to the console, to lock the door, but his finger didn’t make contact with the switch in time, and the passenger door swung open.

  Wilkes never got a clear glimpse of the man’s entire face, but he saw the short barrel of the Makarov PMM double-action hover in the open doorway.

  He didn’t panic, but strapped into the limited space of the driver’s seat, with no room in which to maneuver, prevented him from reacting as quickly as he otherwise was able.

  Somewhere inside his mind, he heard his training instructor at the Farm reprimanding him for not throwing the Land Rover into gear and putting his foot against the gas the second he saw that the man outside the Land Rover wasn’t his contact. Too late now, he realized, that would have been the course of action to save his life, but he’d already chosen another and was now stuck seeing this one through.

  The holster was on his left side. Wilkes had always been more comfortable with reaching across with his right to cross-draw, but he’d never trained to do that seated behind a steering wheel with the threat standing outside his passenger door.

  Time seemed to slow and so, too, did his body, or so it frustratingly seemed. His hand felt suddenly slow and heavy in withdrawing the Glock. The weapon just wasn’t clearing the holster swiftly enough.

  He heard the hammer of the Makarov’s discharge and felt the 9mms hit.

  The first one grazed below a rib on its way into his liver, which ruptured. The second burrowed easily through the soft tissue of his right lung, deflating it. He convulsed in his seat and reached around with his left hand to clasp the wound in his side. Dark blood soaked through his shirt. Futilely, he continued trying to raise the Glock with his right hand, the only thing he could do, but the next shot drilled through the
side of his head and terminated his brain function.

  TWO

  Dushanbe

  Robert Cramer’s office occupied the corner of a five room office suite on the third floor of the American embassy building on Rudaki Avenue in Dushanbe’s American Corner. Low and squat, the embassy was a yellow and gray compound made of marble and cement, with dark, reflective glass windows. Its modern trappings and fortress-like design stood out amongst the surrounding Islamic and Central Asian-style architecture and Soviet-era structures of the Tajik capital.

  Cramer’s official position was public affairs assistant. Only eight people on the embassy staff—including the ambassador, deputy chief of mission, regional security officer, and the staff of the small CIA section—were officially cleared and aware of his true position as the Central Intelligence Agency’s Dushanbe chief of station, although speculation naturally ran rampant in such a small building.

  Outside the embassy walls, GKNB was also probably aware of Cramer’s position. In friendly countries, like Britain, France, or Germany, the local CIA station chief was declared to the host government, and the host government was likewise informed of intelligence operations launched on their soil. While Tajikistan wasn’t hostile, it also wasn’t exactly friendly, and Dushanbe maintained much closer ties with Moscow than it did with Washington, so Cramer’s real position became a poorly kept a secret.

  Currently a GS-12 on the US Government’s civilian pay-scale, Cramer had spent twenty-six of his fifty-five years in the service of the Central Intelligence Agency, and seven years before that in the air force. He’d attended Dartmouth College on an ROTC scholarship, graduating with degrees in Economics and International Relations. He was quickly assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency as a specialist in Soviet weapons systems.