Ross Sidor
Scorpion: A Covert Ops Novel
ONE
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.