Seven feet away, the pair of IMU presented their backs to him. They approached the Datsun from either side, their AK-74Us shouldered and pointed toward the rear of the car, ready for Poacher to pop up and present a target when he tried to come up to get another shot off. Avery put three rounds between the right-side Uzbek’s shoulder blades. The man grunted and fell over.
The remaining IMU immediately snapped around before his partner even hit the ground, his AK-74U held in the ready position, his eyes on Avery. Avery snapped off a quick shot — too far to the left — and retreated back alongside the side of the van as the IMU sent a stream of 5.56mm in his direction.
Poacher saw his opening. He broke cover and drilled the IMU through the side of his chest and arm with multiple .45 hollow points. The Uzbek still clung to his rifle as he went down, his right arm now disabled and dangling uselessly at his side. He dropped onto one knee and then fell over onto his side, moaning and breathing hard. Avery stepped out from his cover and put a round through the Uzbek’s head to finish him off.
Not sure how many men the van had carried, Avery kept moving, stepping over the dead body and kicking the rifle away from its hands, and moved cautiously around to the other side of the van and stopped his search for more targets after Poacher shouted “clear” and announced that only three tangos had gotten out of the van.
Avery proceeded back along the length of the shoulder to the Lada. His eyes flicked constantly onto the highway, paranoid about going the way of Raymond Davis, the CIA contractor who was arrested by Pakistani police after killing two bandits in Lahore. Unlike Davis, Avery knew he couldn’t expect the president to appeal to the Tajiks for his release. Traffic continued to whir by along the highway. Motorists stared as they passed, but no one stopped. There were no police cars, no sounds of sirens, yet.
As he walked toward him, Avery met Poacher’s gaze and saw his eyes shift and react to something, and Poacher threw up his SOCOM pistol once more, two handed, and yelled at Avery to get down.
Avery reacted immediately. He dropped to the ground out of Poacher’s line of fire, and rolled onto his back to see Dagar standing twelve feet away scooping an AK off the ground.
Poacher fired first and hit Dagar in the chest. Dagar dropped the rifle, staggered forward, and tripped onto the highway directly into the path of an oncoming truck. It smashed through him doing sixty, and Dagar went beneath the tires and undercarriage and was split open. As the truck braked and grinded to a halt some fifty feet away, it dragged with it the tattered, crushed body and left a trail of blood and pulped organs on the highway.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Avery told Poacher.
They returned to the Lada and slipped inside. Avery put the car into gear and accelerated.
The total duration of time spent on the side of the highway was fifty-seven seconds. The firefight, starting with Avery’s first shot, took twelve of those seconds.
Only with the adrenaline wearing off now did Poacher notice the blood dripping down his left arm from beneath the sleeve of his t-shirt. He examined the source and found a hole in the fabric and saw that he’d taken a hit, likely just a ricochet that had grazed across his arm, but still bad enough.
Avery got off at the next exit, knowing that there had been no shortage of witnesses and that Tajik police and GKNB would be on the scene soon and likely looking out for the Lada.
Poacher contacted Mockingbird and Reaper. Avery and Poacher met them in Dushanbe seven minutes later and transferred into their vehicle. They left the Lada behind, abandoned.
EIGHTEEN
Bordering Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine, Belarus is a tiny, landlocked, heavily forested former Soviet republic with a population of ten million, with the capital city Minsk located roughly in the center of the country. President Aleksander Lukashenko’s authoritarian government is referred to as the last dictatorship of Europe or the North Korea of Europe. Like North Korea, this country is a lingering despot of communism clinging to power, regarded as an international pariah, and often the subject of controversy and sanctions amongst the United Nations and the European Union. The latter banned the travel of Lukashenko and a hundred sixty of his top advisers, cabinet officers, and officials to their countries. Lukashenko has been in power since 1994, and most of his political opponents are in prison. Belarus’ state-controlled, Soviet style economy is dependent entirely on Russia for financial assistance, importation of raw materials and natural resources, and exportation of domestically produced goods.
Aside from the government’s rampant human rights violations and un-democratic practices, Belarus is also a notorious exporter of weapons, selling over two billion dollars worth of small arms, technical components, and military vehicles each year. Most of this money goes directly into a special fund for the president and his closest advisers. The president personally oversees every arms transaction through state-owned export companies.
In the late 1990s, Genex ltd, the Belarusian cargo carrier, delivered to Afghanistan weapons and equipment that Usama bin Laden purchased from Serbia. In 2004, Veronika Cherkasova, a journalist investigating Belarusian arms sales to Iran, was murdered outside her apartment. Belarus armed Ghadaffi as he struggled to maintain power during the Libyan civil war, and the UN secretary general personally called out Belarus for shipping military helicopters to the Ivory Coast’s internationally condemned regime. Most recently, Minsk armed Syria in its war against the Islamic uprising. Private jets from rogue regimes and outlaw groups have been caught landing in Minsk, delivering gold and diamonds to senior officials of Lukashenko’s government. The West is especially concerned by Belarus’s negotiations with Tehran to sell Russian-made S-300 missiles to Iran.
In addition to selling military hardware directly, Belarus is also a safe haven from which Kremlin-sanctioned arms merchants can store and export their merchandise, most of which originates from nearby Bulgarian or Czech factories. The Kremlin itself frequently uses Belarus as a proxy to provide arms to clients that the Russian Federation cannot do business with directly for political reasons, like Sudan or, previously, Saddam Hussein. Many Western diplomats believed that Belarus did very little in its foreign relations without the approval, if not outright backing, of Moscow.
Most recently, in response to American and European Union economic sanctions, Belarus has threatened to withdraw from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and reacquire its status as a nuclear power. In the first two years after Belarus became an independent country in 1991, like Ukraine and Kazakhstan, it was briefly in possession of nuclear missiles from the Soviet Union, but Belarus eventually turned the warheads over to Russia in exchange for security guarantees. In August 2013, Moscow and Minsk finalized plans to begin construction of a permanent base on Belarusian soil that will host Russian nuclear bombers. In November of the same year, Lukashenko announced construction of a nuclear power plant.
Although a frequent target of CIA’s Counter Proliferation Center and Europe Division, as well as British, Polish, and German intelligence services, Belarus is a difficult country for the Agency to operate in, due to the closed, repressive nature of Belarusian society and the reach of the security services. In 2008, Minsk expelled several CIA officers with diplomatic cover for their involvement with opposition politicians and parties.
The photographs provided to Mockingbird by an anonymous source with the Internet handle ADen80 showed the GlobeEx An-22 sitting on a parking revetment at Minsk National. The aircraft’s identification number— RA8564G — was in clear view on the tail. The geographic coordinates in the photo’s time and date stamp matched those of Minsk. The distance between Ayni and Minsk, and the timing of the aircraft’s departure and arrival, was consistent for a nonstop flight between the two countries, and Mockingbird was convinced that the picture was genuine.