Near 8:30PM, they reached the safe house in Dayrabot. This is a small residential area surrounded by farms, about three miles east of Dushanbe, between the M41 highway and the Kafirnigan River. Sideshow had established their little base of operations inside an apartment in a three-story building with multiple entrances and exits.
Poacher had paid for two months’ rent up-front, explaining in advance that his team was here to research a book and may keep odd hours or be out of town for days at a time. They rarely crossed paths with their neighbors, but to maintain cover, they’d take turns leaving the building in pairs with their photography equipment and visited tourist attractions in and around Dushanbe.
The safe house was sparsely furnished. Other than the two bedrooms, it had one large living room and a small kitchen. Cots were set up in the bedrooms, with the cases or bags containing the Sideshow operator’s personal belongings, most of it still packed. In the living room, there was a desk with two laptop computers, a SATCOM communications unit, a few folding chairs, and cases containing the team’s weapons and kit. The shelves in the kitchen contained mostly canned food and freeze-dried packaged MREs — meals ready to eat; known colloquially as meals rejected by Ethiopians — with energy drinks and bottled water in the fridge. The shades were drawn over the windows at all times. There was no air conditioning, and the apartment was uncomfortably dry and hot. Two ceiling fans whirred at high-speed, uselessly pushing the air around.
Poacher greeted Avery with a handshake and the typical exchange of pleasantries and joked that Tajik KGB better not have tracked him here. He also reported to Avery that Reaper had already picked up his equipment from the second drop and made it back without any issues.
Formerly a master sergeant in the army’s Combat Applications Group, the cover name for Delta Force, and in the Asymmetric Warfare Group, Poacher’s real name was James Dalton. Tall, lean, muscular, tattooed, and bearded, Dalton was thirty-nine years old and came from Arizona. He first met Avery during ANACONDA, when his Delta troop and Avery’s Ranger chalk assaulted al-Qaeda strongholds in the mountains of northeastern Afghanistan. Shortly after, Poacher put in a recommendation for Avery to Delta’s recruiters, but Matt Culler, then an Agency insertion element leader in Afghanistan and later head of the Counterterrorism Center, recruited him first, for SAD.
The next time Avery’s and Poacher’s paths crossed, in Iraq two years later, Avery was with Special Activities Division and Dalton was a private contractor with Blackwater. With a wife back home and two teenagers who needed to be put through college, Poacher had accepted Blackwater’s lucrative contract. But after spending two years in Iraq as a hired gun and going through a divorce, he’d decided he wanted to be something more than just a mercenary and went to work for CIA.
Avery already knew Flounder and Reaper, too.
The name Reaper came from the fact that Ted Collins had originally gone to school to become a mortician, but he’d dropped out at the age of twenty to enlist in the navy. Two years later, he completed Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL School and was assigned to SEAL Team Four, tasked with Central and South America. Four years later, he passed selection and was accepted into the navy’s Special Warfare Development Group, or DEVGRU, the navy’s counter-terrorist unit. From there, he hunted Serbian war criminals in the Balkans and saw action in Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2008, when an RPG took down his Chinook in Afghanistan’s Kunar Province, he suffered severe wounds to his leg and back and was invalidated out of the navy. After a year of physical therapy, he completed training at the Farm and became a case officer before joining SAD. He still moved with a slight limp to his gait, but it hadn’t slowed down his run times or his performance at Harvey Point’s Kill House.
Physically, Flounder was the most distinctive member of the team and always stood out. He was short and squat, with the thick, muscled body of a power lifter. A shaved, bullet-shaped head sat on his wide shoulders. He didn’t look like a SEAL. SEALs tended to have the lean physics of competitive swimmers or runners. He came from Team Three, the SEAL unit tasked with the Middle East. After leaving the navy, he joined the Los Angeles Police Department’s Metro Division, before being recruited by the Special Activities Division when the Agency needed experienced Middle East operators to stick in Libya during ODYSSEY DAWN.
The only unfamiliar face to Avery was a former air force combat controller who Poacher introduced as Larry Rollins, aka Mockingbird, or M-bird for short. M-bird came to the Agency from USAF’s 24th Special Tactics Squadron. He did tours with Task Force 145, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) unit that hunted high value targets in Iraq. His role included directing and coordinating helicopter operations and air support for the assault teams on the ground. The handle Mockingbird was bestowed upon him as a result of friendly inter-service rivalry and the fact that his counterparts in Delta and the SEALs thought it a joke that the “air farce” fielded its own special operations troops. Although being one of the only airmen on the task force invariably made him the subject of jokes, the other Task Force 145 operators valued his contributions and treated him as an equal. Given his skin color, CIA naturally used him for assignments in Africa, including stints in Nigeria, Mali, and Somalia.
The team had just returned from southern Turkey, where they’d equipped and trained the Free Syrian Army rebels with optically-tracked TOW anti-tank rockets. Rumor at the Point had it that Poacher and the guys slipped across the border to give the rebels a live-fire demonstration against a Syrian armored convoy.
Avery and Poacher discussed business and brought each other up-to-date. Sideshow’s orders were to remain in place, on standby, in the event that actionable intelligence developed on Cramer’s location. Or as Poacher cynically described it, sit on their asses until Cramer’s body was found, and then slip back into Afghanistan and fly back home.
Avery recounted his conversation with Gerald and explained his next moves for the night. Then he shaved his two-week old beard and changed into jeans and a black t-shirt. Colonel Ghazan had only gotten a good look at him with his facial hair and sunglasses.
Avery used FalconView to find the locations where he was to meet SCINIPH and Dagar Nabiyev, because the CIA street maps Gerald provided dated back to the 1950s.
He also searched Google News. Associated Press ran a story about a murdered American tourist but did not identify the victim. Regional newspapers and Russia’s Interfax went with the story, too, but not in any significant detail, and neither Wilkes nor Cramer was named. It didn’t look like CNN, FOX, or any of the other American corporate news-as-entertainment services even mentioned it, which wasn’t surprising. Everyone was more interested in the latest congressional sex scandal, missing blond teenager, and the pop singer arrested for cocaine possession, and most Americans had no idea Tajikistan even existed.
At nine, Avery took Sideshow’s Lada to his appointment with CK/SCINIPH.
SEVEN
Like a good case officer, Avery arrived early at Cinema Jami on Gorky Street to conduct basic area familiarization, to scope out the meet site, to assess the surrounding area and security risks.
Twenty-five minutes before the movie started, he purchased his ticket. As instructed by SCINIPH, he took the third seat left of the center aisle in the last row in the darkened, musty-smelling, run down theater. Three families and two couples had already taken their seats. He left his cap on, the recognition signal for SCINIPH.