Marc Cameron
State of Emergency
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For Daniel—
A man of genuine good
EPIGRAPH
Ne puero gladium
(Don’t give a sword to a boy.)
PROLOGUE
Riley Cooper inhaled slowly, ignoring the metallic odor of violent death. He lay on his chest, watching, flat against a long wooden table four feet off the stone floor of the kill house. Once a fortified rest stop for man and beast on the ancient Silk Road, the dilapidated caravanserai was now a patched stone structure of cell-like rooms. Sagging sheep pens ran along the west side, forlorn and empty in the purple darkness. A toothed wind, heavy with the smell of wool, swept through the open window from the northern desert. S-shaped metal carcass hooks clanged like blood-rusted wind chimes above his head.
Cooper pressed an eye to the night-vision monocular and wished it was attached to a rifle. Coming into Uzbekistan unofficially was dangerous enough for a man in his position. Possession of a sniper rifle could cause an international incident. Still, he wasn’t the type to be completely unprepared. Just after he’d arrived, he had haggled with a small-time gun dealer in Tashkent for a Russian GSh-18 nine-millimeter pistol. The handgun, along with eighteen armor-piercing rounds, had cost him his five-thousand-dollar Rolex Submariner. He loved the watch, but such things were often the coin of the realm and the price was well worth the comfort the pistol brought resting on his hip under the navy-blue hooded sweatshirt.
Cooper was slender, a shade under six feet tall. His narrow waist and powerful, ostrich-like legs had shouted Olympic sprinter when he was in high school, but, on the advice of a family friend, he’d decided to go another route. That route had put him here in a freezing Uzbek desert with a night-vision scope to his eye.
A ring of curly blond hair bristled from the edge of the black watch cap pulled tight over his head. His skin was on the pale side — making him particularly visible in the darkness. Before climbing into position in his hide, he’d taken the time to smear black paint over the high spots of his nose and cheekbones, breaking up the form of his face in the moonlight to anyone who might glance his direction.
Nestling down against the chill of the night wind, Cooper peered through the green reticle of his night-vision scope to study the Russian less than thirty feet away. They had met two years before in a bar outside Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan. Mikhail Ivanovich Polzin had honest eyes and a no-nonsense manner. Cooper liked him as much as a man in his position could like a communist agent. They’d shared many bottles of Ak-sai Kyrgyz vodka and stories of home. Some of them were probably even true. Still, meets like this were touchy and had the Russian known he was being secretly watched from the slaughterhouse, he might very well have put a bullet in Cooper’s head on principle alone.
Polzin stood along a ribbon of moonlit dirt track, facing the feeble twin headlights of an approaching truck, emerging from the frowning black mouth of the desert. A chilly wind wracked his body with a violent shiver and Cooper watched him snug the fleece collar of his greatcoat up around his ears. The American found it ironic that Polzin wore a coat and hat made of Astrakhan, the finely curled pelts of day-old Karakul lambs. Tens of thousands of the tiny things were slaughtered here at this very kill house and places like it every spring. The slaughter had to take place only hours after the lambs were born, before their pelts, valued for centuries because they were smooth as wet silk, lost their curl. Within a few days of birth the Golden Fleece became nothing but coarse wool.
Cooper tried to push the stench of old death out of his mind. His thoughts drifted for a quick moment to his fiancée, Jill, back in Richmond. He couldn’t help but chuckle. As much of a meat eater as she was, had Jill seen this Russian wearing the fleece of a half dozen day-old lambs, she would have clawed his eyes out.
Rattling in from the darkness, the rusted green hulk of a UAZ flatbed truck squeaked to a stop beside Mikhail Polzin. A plume of fine dust blossomed around the truck as the driver’s door creaked open. A stooped and bony man who looked to be in his sixties — which in the hardscrabble life of this part of the world could mean late forties — climbed from the rounded, egg-like cab. He approached the Russian agent, right hand over his heart in traditional Muslim greeting.
A big-busted woman with a body shaped like a fuel drum sauntered around from the passenger side, rocking back and forth in a waddling walk as if she had a bad hip. The grimy belly and frayed knees of her smock and trousers suggested she was used to a life lived close to the dirt. A black headscarf pulled her jowly face into a permanent scowl. She took no time with the niceties of introduction and began to wave gnarled fingers at two boxes in the bed of their truck. One was the size of a military footlocker, the other, made of the same olive drab material, the size of a large suitcase. She ranted in a shrill mix of Uzbek and Russian, her words pulled tight as an overly wound clock. A gust of wind ripped away the bulk of her animated lecture, but the part Cooper heard caused him to lean forward, straining to hear more.
Their small peasant farm had been cursed with sick livestock and bad water. She spit disdainfully on the ground and threw her hands into the air, clutching at her headscarf with both hands for effect. Rheumy eyes glowed through the green pixilated image of the night-vision scope.
Cooper understood some of the words all too well. Gritting his teeth, he rolled slightly to remove the pistol from his waistband and place it on the table within quick reach. He slid the satellite phone from the cargo pocket of his pants. His position was several feet back from the window, making it impossible to get a signal, but he punched in a number anyway, entering a coded text before pressing send. The phone was programmed to continue its search and send the message in an instantaneous burst as soon as it located a satellite, even if it was turned off and on again.
Outside, the Russian took an envelope from the breast pocket of his wool coat and handed it to the old man. The Uzbek passed it to his wife, who promptly opened it and began to count the thick stack of what looked like American bills.
Polzin followed the old man to the bed of the truck, took something from his pocket, and played it back and forth across the boxes, nodding.
“Many thanks, my friend,” Cooper heard the Russian say. “There will be another payment, double the one in your wife’s hands, as soon as I get these items back in safekeeping.”
“What good is money if our sheep are dead?” The old woman took the time to stuff the envelope inside her smock before throwing up her hands again. “Take our truck, we will walk ba—”
The desert suddenly erupted with a swarm of blinding lights as four all-terrain vehicles roared in to surround Polzin and the Uzbeks. Clouds of dust cast crossed shadows from the headlights as they all came skidding to a stop. A tall, slender man in a puffy, lime-green ski parka and designer blue jeans dismounted his four-wheeler with a theatrical flourish. Even in the darkness, Cooper could make out the black line of a thin mustache. Striding purposefully to the ranting Uzbek woman, the newcomer raised a pistol and shot her in the face.
The man spun, giving an exaggerated shrug. “What? Isn’t anyone going to thank me for shutting her up?” He spoke in accented Russian, slurring heavily as if he had marbles in his mouth. “I should think you of all people would be grateful,” he said, addressing the old man. “No? Well, you may as well join her then.” He pressed the muzzle of his pistol to the trembling Uzbek’s chest and pulled the trigger. He stepped back to let the old man sag, then pitch headlong into the dust beside his dead wife.