“I’m pretty sure, Matt, unless you’re leaving something out? Unless Cramer’s in the middle of some super secret spook shit, which I don’t believe to be the case, because that would mean you sent me to Tajikistan under false pretenses. And you wouldn’t play those kinds of games with me, would you?”
“Let me be clear. If you saw Cramer at a Russian airfield with the Taliban, he is mostly certainly not operating within official parameters. As of this morning, as far as everyone here at Langley is concerned, Robert Cramer died in IMU captivity at the hands of Otabek Babayev and we’re looking for a body to bring back home.”
“Yeah,” said Avery. “That’s what I thought. Look, Matt, there’s something else that’s really bothering me about this.”
“What can possibly be worse?”
“Cramer’s been the top priority at Langley the last couple days, but he wasn’t the only reason you sent me here.”
Culler paused, and Avery pictured the gears moving in his head. “Wilkes.”
“He was investigating a nuclear smuggling pipeline when he was killed, along with CERTITUDE, who’d been tasked with identifying Pakistani nuclear scientists working with the Taliban. I’m just a trigger puller, not a fancy Ivy League analyst, but it’s pretty clear that Cramer’s dealing in more than guns and missiles.”
“It doesn’t make sense,” Culler said. “We’re pulling out of Afghanistan.”
“Yeah, and Cramer’s not too happy about that, after devoting the last several years of his life there. And with the foreign occupiers leaving, don’t you think the Taliban are thinking about retaking power, and keeping it this time? Maybe with WMD capacity.”
“All right, for now, until we learn more, we’ll play it your way. I have other shit to deal with at the moment, like a shipment of missiles headed for Afghanistan. And Avery, if you find Cramer…”
“You don’t have to worry about that. I’ll handle it.”
“There can be no mistakes on this. We need to be absolutely certain of Cramer’s complicity before taking direct action. Are we clear?”
“Clear,” Avery said, impatient. “Trust me, I’d like to give Cramer the benefit of the doubt, too, but there’s no mistaking what I saw.”
“One more thing, Avery.”
“Yes?”
“I want Cramer alive, if possible. Once you get him, he’s going to our darkest black site for interrogation. We need to know the extent of the damage and just how badly he’s compromised our operations and assets. Understood?”
“Understood.”
Culler ended the call.
“I’ve got a lead on that Antonov,” Mockingbird announced before Avery even set the phone down. Mockingbird’s laptop glowed in front of him in the darkened apartment. Poacher entered the room. “It’s registered to GlobeEx Transport, an air freight company owned by Aleksander Litvin.”
The name meant nothing to Avery, but Mockingbird, who’d done two years at CIA’s Counterproliferation Center, knew all about Litvin and gave Avery the rundown.
Aleksander Litvin, an ethnic Ukrainian from Donetsk, was a former Soviet Air Force major assigned to the Navigation and Air Transport Regiment, which was once responsible for delivering arms to anti-Western Third World dictators and insurgents. His talent for languages and overseas experience saw him transferred to GRU, military intelligence, for assignments in Afghanistan, Angola, and Nicaragua.
After the Cold War, Litvin started an air freight company delivering Red Army hardware for sale on the international black market. Thanks to the numerous African wars of the 1990s, Litvin’s business grew rapidly. He now owned and operated an air cargo fleet of Antonov and Ilyushin jets, delivering everything from AK-47s and RPGs to T-81 tanks and Mi-24 gunships to any government, African rebel, South American guerilla, or Asian militia with enough cash, blood diamonds, or drugs to pay for it. In the last year alone, he’d been spotted in Burma, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, and Vietnam. He survived a suspected Mossad assassination attempt last year, when he was in Beirut, negotiating a deal with Hezbollah to upgrade their Katyusha rockets with guidance systems.
Litvin maintained close connections to the Kremlin. His former commanding officer in GRU now served as a deputy defense minister under Putin and publicly maintained that Litvin was an air transport entrepreneur turned humanitarian, providing aid and medical supplies to impoverished nations. Russian agencies overtly impeded investigations and operations by American and European law enforcement agencies into Litvin’s organization. He was one of dozens of Putin-affiliated Russians and Ukrainians sanctioned by the West after Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula. NATO and European Union members banned GlobeEx employees from travelling to their countries and froze Litvin’s assets.
Mockingbird flipped his computer around so Avery could see the screen. Aleksander Litvin was tall and built, with a head of messy black hair and a bushy mustache. Dressed in rumpled, ill-fitting clothing, he looked more like the regular at a dive bar than a multimillionaire. He looked to be in his early fifties and had a long, narrow face with deep-set intelligent, predatory eyes and an oversized nose laced with thin, red veins.
“Is there any way we can track that Antonov?” asked Avery.
Mockingbird explained that while normally it’d be simple to track a commercial or private aircraft by its registration number, Rosaviatsiya — Russia’s Federal Air Transport Agency — did not make GlobeEx flight data, plans, and records publicly accessible.
This wasn’t a problem. NSA would start snooping and try to obtain audio recordings or transcriptions of radio communications between control towers and pilots during landings and take-offs, and target airports frequented by this aircraft. Information from other sources Mockingbird utilized indicated that this particular jet had been recently spotted at Minsk National and Chelyabinsk International airports, in Belarus and Russia, respectively.
“We don’t have time to sit around waiting for NSA,” Avery said impatiently. He didn’t need to mention that trying to obtain anything from No Such Agency, as the National Security Agency was colloquially known, was slightly worse than pulling teeth. NSA would be grateful for the lead, and then they’d keep everything they gathered to themselves.
But Mockingbird had alternative avenues to pursue, turning to open source intelligence.
“There are websites where aviation enthusiasts keep track of planes coming in and out of airports all over the world. Some also monitor aircraft with blocked flight plans. These are usually private jets belonging to politicians, diplomats, corporations, celebrities or anyone else journalists have an interest in, including less savory characters. I’ve put in requests to look out for a GlobeEx An-22 with the RA8564G tail number. Let’s wait and see if anything pans out.”
A half hour later, as Avery started drifting to sleep, his cell phone vibrated with an incoming text. His eyes snapped open, and his hand lashed out to scoop the cell phone off the floor near his cot. In response to Avery’s earlier inquiry, the message from Jack simply stated: “FOB Chapman; 2007.”
Forward Operating Base Chapman was an old airfield in Khost, Afghanistan, near the Pakistani border, turned into a CIA base. In 2009, one of the CIA agents, Humam Khalil al-Balawi, a Jordanian doctor who was really an al-Qaeda double agent sent to infiltrate American intelligence networks, detonated a suicide vest at FOB Chapman. The base chief there didn’t want to offend al-Balawi by appearing to not trust him, so security never searched al-Balawi. Consequently, seven CIA officers and contractors, an Afghan agent, and a Jordanian intelligence officer were killed.