“Who? The Russians?” asked Reaper.
“Maybe,” Avery said. He yawned, rubbed his eyes, and stretched his arms out behind his back. “The Russian connections are starting to add up. I’d even go out on a limb and posit that the IMU action is a Russian false flag job. Regardless, we need eyes on Ayni ASAP. M-Bird, can you head out there today? Make note of every aircraft coming in or taking off, get registration numbers if you can.”
“No problem.”
“Reaper, you go with him,” Poacher instructed.
“Sure thing,” the former SEAL said, glad to finally have something to do.
“When do you want to get started on prepping the Ayni job?” Poacher asked Avery.
“I’d like to do it immediately, but I don’t think we’re in condition to do that at the moment. Best we rest now and wait for night. According to Babayev, Cramer is being moved out early tomorrow morning, possibly before first light. Babayev also said Cramer was dead. Maybe that’s bullshit, maybe it’s not. There’s easier ways of disposing of a body in a country like this than flying it out. It could be more false leads, but we have to check it out.”
Avery paused and glanced across the room. Flounder lay passed out on his cot, temporarily shut off from the rest of the world. “Let’s let Reaper and M-Bird get the wheels rolling on this one. Flounder has the right idea. We need a few hours to re-charge. Let’s talk again in five.”
They broke it up.
Avery reached into his pants pocket for his cell phone. He texted Dagar Nabiyev and told him to return to Dushanbe late tomorrow afternoon. In the interests of saving time, he planned on having Dagar deliver the money and bring in the Uzbek prisoner. The thought also prompted him to send Jack, who had put him in contact with the Tajik, a quick text: “How do you know Dagar?”
Then he got up from the table and walked across the floor. Still wearing his cargo pants and boots, still smelling of sweat, cordite, and death, Avery collapsed onto a cot, shut his eyes, and fell asleep within seconds.
When Avery awoke six hours later, he took a cold shower. At its coldest, the water here was still a bit warmer than what he could get back home, but it did the job of shocking his body out of its fatigue. Then he chugged bottled water and ate a couple energy bars. The sleep did him good. Although still drowsy, he felt functional, and his mind was at least capable of thinking again. As there had been no updates from Reaper or Mockingbird, Poacher had decided not to wake Avery, and instead allow him the extra time to sleep.
During that time, Poacher ventured into Dushanbe to meet up with Gerald Rashid, who was accompanied by Darren, the station’s ops officer, at a pre-arranged location. As requested, Gerald provided a briefing docket on the Ayni air force base, and Poacher gave Gerald the IMU cell phone and told him that there was a house and five dead bodies in Yazgulam that the Tajiks might be interested in checking out. He also arranged to have Gerald and Darren deliver the $20,000 cash to Dagar in Gorno-Badakhshan. Dagar was then to await further word from Avery before returning to Dushanbe with the Uzbek prisoner.
Avery and Poacher sat now in the Dayrabot safe house with the satellite imagery and maps spread out over the surface of the table.
Located several miles west of Dushanbe, Ayni Airbase was currently under Russian lease, but the Russian military stationed only a small force at the base. Ayni had zero strategic value for Russia. The Kremlin simply wanted to prevent Dushanbe from leasing it to anyone else, especially the US or India. India was keen to expand its reach in Central Asia, Tajikistan in particular.
Ayni Airbase looked more like a desolate air strip than a modern military base. It supported two 10,000-plus foot long runways angled diagonally northwest to southeast capable of supporting flight operations for cargo planes or MiG and Sukhoi fighters. Off the west side of the runways were large aircraft hangars. Vast open wheat fields surrounded the base on the east side, with a lightly forested area of planetrees directly west and behind the hangar. The trees would provide a perfect spot from which to observe and possibly infiltrate the base, but they would still need someone across the way, more vulnerably positioned in the fields, to get line of sight into the hangars.
The nearest town, Ayni, where Reaper and Mockingbird were currently positioned and watching the skies, was over four miles away. The base was accessible from the M34 Highway, with Russian army checkpoints and barriers positioned at the entry and exit ramps leading onto the airfield itself.
Avery considered and decided against bringing Culler up-to-date for the simple reason that Matt might tell him to stand down. While Culler allowed Avery a certain degree of autonomy, running an op with an Agency asset like Sideshow against a Russian military base, and creating a potential international incident if anyone was caught, was the type of thing to make him uneasy.
But as far as Avery was concerned this was a straight forward recon, not a direct action assault.
After all, even if they did spot Cramer, what could they do about it? The answer was absolutely nothing. They couldn’t charge across the airfield, waste a platoon of Russian troops, grab Cramer, and make a clean exfil. And it was extremely unlikely they would simply get lucky and find Cramer within easy reach, where they could covertly slip him off the base.
This wasn’t a movie. In real life, you didn’t wing it. That only got people killed. Direct action required planning and preparation. They hadn’t even barged into the IMU safe house in Yazgulam blind.
The best Avery could hope for was a sighting of Cramer, possibly in Russian custody, and the jet they put him on, photographic proof to provide Langley. Then Culler and D/NCS could take it from there.
THIRTEEN
Black non-glare grease paint was smeared over Avery’s face and any other areas of exposed flesh. He lay prone in the tall, dry grass. His rifle rested in front of him, on its bipod legs, the stock nestled comfortably against his right shoulder.
Nearby, he heard crickets chirp, and eight feet away, a rabbit lazily chewed on the ends of grass, oblivious to the human’s presence.
Although his finger was poised over the trigger guard, he was relaxed and not looking for targets, at least not with the intention of shooting. The Trijicon advanced optical scope allowed him to see out to two thousand-plus feet. At the moment, however, there was little to observe. Other than a couple Russian troops occasionally wandering by or stepping out of a hangar for a smoke, there’d been no activity.
Avery didn’t use night optics. There was ample lighting around the airfield at 10:00PM. The main hangar, a tall, wide building large enough to hold four MiGs, and the control tower were both well lit. The runway itself was illuminated, too, by high floodlights.
Poacher and Flounder were positioned almost half a mile southwest on the opposite end of the airfield. Mockingbird was setup on the other side of the runway, in the wide field of wheatgrass, across from Avery’s position, with clear line of sight into the open hangars. Reaper was two miles away, sitting on the shoulder of the highway in the van, with his lights turned off and listening in on the comms. From here, he also had eyes on the north and south exit ramps leading from the highway to the base.
Security at the airfield was non-existent. Tajikistan was probably regarded as an easy, if not boring, post for Russian troops. There weren’t even watchtowers, which Russians were always fond of putting up at their bases. The biggest danger came from someone in the high control tower spotting the CIA intruders.