After taking a walk around the block on foot and performing a quick recon, Flounder returned to the van and suggested they break into one of the empty shops across the street. They could gain entry through the back door. Once night fell, they could easily plant audio and video surveillance equipment around the target house with less chance of being seen.
Avery and Poacher both liked it, so this is what they did.
First, they broke in through the rear entrance of what, from the looks of it, used to be a grocery store and deli. The lock was simple, and Flounder picked it in under thirty seconds. There were no alarms or security systems to overcome. In fact, there wasn’t even electricity here or in most of the city, but that was okay, since they wouldn’t be able to turn on any lights anyway, which would give away their presence. Any of their gear that required power was already fully charged.
Avery and Flounder then moved the vehicles they came in, so that they would be out of sight from the occupants of the target house and not potentially alert them to the presence of strangers on the block. They left the van near the door behind the old grocery store in case they would need to get away quickly.
From behind the blinded windows of the darkened, dusty storefront, they observed the target house for the remainder of the day. Other than the occasional lights going on or off, there was no other activity at the house. No one came or went. From this vantage point, they did not have eyes on the target’s back door, but they would still clearly be able to see if someone was coming or going.
By midnight, the neighboring apartment building and houses were all blacked out. A few blocks had electricity, but most households relied on lanterns or candles. Others, including the target house, utilized portable generators bought in Dushanbe or Kazakhstan.
Poacher and Flounder waited another two hours, during which time there was absolutely no activity from either the target house or its neighbors, before slipping across the street and planting the surveillance equipment. Avery covered them from the storefront, keeping a close eye on the target and ready to warn them if anyone came their way. Given the lack of functioning street lights, stealth was not a problem for the two seasoned paramilitary operators.
Thirty-five minutes later, when Poacher and Flounder returned, Avery ventured across the street with his Radar Scope II motion detector.
Developed by DARPA, this is a handheld device weighing less than two pounds and roughly the size of a brick. The Radar Scope is capable of detecting motion as tiny as a human heartbeat or a person breathing through up to twelve inches of concrete and fifty feet into the selected room. It does this by emitting stepped-frequency radar and then detecting the tiniest alterations of the return signal’s Doppler signature. Additionally, it has a sensor array capable of “seeing” through multiple walls and rendering a 3D image of the room itself. An earlier, less sophisticated model was first introduced to soldiers going house-to-house in Iraq.
After making a trip around the perimeter of the target house, Avery determined that there were five people inside and knew the rooms in which they stayed. He used this information to prepare a floor plan of the house, complete with current placement of its occupants. Avery joked to Poacher and Flounder that maybe the next generation of Radar Scope would be able to even differentiate hostages from the bad guys.
When they’d completed the night’s work, it neared 3:30AM.
They agreed to take turns of six-hour shifts in observing the house and manning the audio surveillance gear. Poacher volunteered to take the first shift, and Flounder insisted on taking the second, to give Avery time to recharge, since he was operating on the least amount of sleep. Both of the CIA operators had been able to get a full night’s sleep the previous night, but by this point, it had been nearly two days since Avery last slept, so he was grateful to finally shut his eyes. He didn’t even care that it was in a sleeping bag on the dirty, dust-covered floor of an old grocery store that was now home to big, black, monstrous-looking arachnids known as trapdoor spiders.
At 9:30AM, Poacher woke up Flounder.
When they switched places, Poacher informed Flounder that there’d been no activity from the target house overnight. He’d made a written log of any vehicular or pedestrian traffic, with descriptions of the passerby in each entry. Seven people had walked past the house, including a drunken bum and a group of four teenagers out late. Only three cars and a bicyclist had come by. Two militants on a roving patrol had passed along the street. There’d been no sighting of any official government police or troops.
Avery woke up at ten, ate a couple protein bars, and joined Flounder at the storefront. Flounder brought him up-to-speed and showed him the activity log. The only relevant occurrence was that at 9:45AM a man exited the target house and left in the pickup truck, heading south, but he hadn’t said anything within range of any of the audio surveillance equipment they’d installed. Flounder had gotten a clear picture of the man and showed it to Avery.
At 10:27AM, the man was apparently still in the pick-up truck, because he made a phone call and Sideshow’s bugs heard everything. Both Avery and Flounder were familiar enough with the language to determine that the man spoke Uzbek, with a spattering of Russian thrown in. Flounder recorded it, and they listened to it several times, breaking the two minute conversation apart and taking out the words they recognized and trying to put them into some manner of context. The only thing they could clearly piece together was the Uzbek telling whoever he was speaking to that they would give it “one more day” and “see if they showed” and then “move out.” It was also apparent by his tone and inflection that the Uzbek spoke to a superior over the phone. The Uzbek returned to the house forty minutes later.
This time, catching a frontal view of the Uzbek’s face, Avery immediately identified him as Otabek Babayev. There was no mistaking him. The face from the CIA file was seared into Avery’s mind.
Flounder had the voiceprint of the Uzbek speaker in the IMU’s Cramer video — the man the Russians claimed was Otabek Babayev — on his laptop. Computer analysis determined this voice to be an 88 % match with that of the man they’d just listened to. The mask Cramer’s captor wore in the video could have muffled his voice and account for the discrepancy.
Babayev’s presence seemed to confirm that this was an IMU job, Avery thought. He’d been skeptical of the Russian report claiming that Babayev was the masked man in the video. After all, CIA and NSA had no sample of Babayev’s voice on file and therefore no way of confirming it. But here was Otabek Babayev right in front of his eyes.
Flounder woke up Poacher and showed him what they had. Avery suggested, and Poacher and Flounder concurred, that they go into the house that night.
ELEVEN
They continued their surveillance of the house throughout the remainder of the day and observed nothing else of interest. Discouraging, they also saw and heard nothing to confirm whether or not Cramer was on the premises.
Avery wasn’t going to contact Dushanbe station or sit around waiting for the green light from Culler. In the meantime, Cramer could be completely brutalized and beaten to within an inch of his life, placing more assets at risk. The worst would be to wait another day, go in, and find Cramer’s freshly slaughtered corpse.
As far as Avery was concerned, there was no other option, not with a life potentially on the line, and this is what they’d come here to do. If Cramer wasn’t present, then Babayev’s crew almost definitely knew where he was or what happened to him and could provide the next piece of vital intelligence. Either way, the only point forward now was through that house.