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On the flight from Uzbekistan to Islamabad, CIA Agent Kara Ramey listened to the Victor Kornev interrogation recordings she had conducted and recorded on her phone. In Termez she had used Kornev’s phone to record the locations of the arms dealer’s many safe houses. She had verified that the records were written to the tiny SD card on his Android phone. As she had left Kornev tied up in a tunnel beneath his home, she had removed the SD cards from both his and her phones. After she pocketed the tiny flash drives, she’d placed both phones behind the rear tires of Kornev’s Hummer and backed over them. Later, she’d picked up an inexpensive phone at one of the airport’s shops and inserted the SD card into it so she could listen to the audio. Now, flying above a thick mass of dark clouds, Kara pressed the PLAY icon and used a cheap pair of ear buds. Kornev’s voice was clear. It had been recorded in Kornev’s tunnel–a quiet space with lots of dirt to absorb extraneous noises.
At times during the recording, his voice was full of hatred. Other times there was a mixture of exhaustion, despondence and possibly fear. The longer he talked, the more fatigued he sounded. While she was questioning Kornev, Kara had purposely misinformed the Russian, saying the CIA knew the locations of all safe houses, although they really only had intelligence about the one in Termez. To get the information she wanted, she’d “harassed” him into reciting an entire list of all the safe houses he owned including the addresses. He spilled the beans begrudgingly. It was the CIA agent’s imminent threat to leave him alone to die in his tunnel beneath his home that had loosened his tongue.
Furthermore, because Kara’s held over his head the threat of leaving him to rot in the tunnel, Kornev had told her the name of the man who had killed her parents in the terror attack everyone referred to as The Five. The men responsible were part of the TTP and lived in Peshawar, Pakistan. The surname of the brothers was burned into her brain the moment Kornev spoke it―Shallah.
Moreover, Kornev even supplied her with the address of the man he believed had pulled the trigger. Kara had not allowed the scumbag to die decomposing and at the mercy of time and vermin. She had mercifully called a doctor friend of his who lived in the city of Termez. The doctor’s tape-based answering machine had recorded her message describing Kornev’s location and his ugly fate if the doctor didn’t intervene. It was at this point, with the knowledge of her parents’ murderers finally in her possession, that Agent Ramey had gone rogue.
During the long flight to Pakistan, Kara used Google to look up the address of Zain Shallah. Using Google Earth on her phone, she studied his home and the surrounding vicinity. Realizing once her feet touched the ground she would be very busy, she took the time to Google Kornev’s safe house located in Peshawar. She was confident Kornev had acquired a bug-out location there because his best client lived in that city. If he was on the run, having that safe house and contact provided Kornev access to shelter, food, weapons, and protection from those who meant him harm.
Her plane touched down in Islamabad. With no luggage, Kara cleared customs using a fictitious CIA passport belonging to Tonya Merkalov. The photo on the paperwork matched her image, but the name was one she had used on her previous CIA undercover assignment. Dressed conspicuously in American-looking clothes, Ramey immediately hailed a cab and left the Benazir Bhutto International Airport.
Speaking Punjabi, she directed the driver to take her to the nearest market that sold clothes and electronics. It took less than fifteen minutes and thousands of beeps from the taxi’s horn to reach the shopping center. She paid the driver in American dollars and entered a clothing store.
Half of the clothing sold inside was Pakistani and Muslim in nature. It was dedicated to providing different sizes of black abayas, a gown-like garment that came with a matching head covering or scarf called a hijab. The other half of the store sold burqas, all-encompassing garments with a headpiece to cover the entire face. It occurred to Kara if the headscarf or khimar, was pointy on top, and if the entire outfit were white, she would look like a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Shopping for clothes didn’t require much time since Kara liked the abaya’s traditional black. It would provide her excellent concealment at night. She also liked that it had several roomy interior and exterior pockets. They would provide room to hold extra magazines and an assortment of additional offensive weapons. During the day, she would look like one of the millions of women who wore the identical clothing. She pulled the traditional black Muslim abaya over her clothes and looked at herself in the mirror. The outfit covered everything except her eyes. The clothing made her feel almost invisible and consequently less vulnerable.
But even completely covered, her eyes would be an issue. With emerald green eyes against very fair skin, blending in would be difficult. Her supply of make-up would easily conceal her fair skin. The problem was her green eyes. If only the CIA had furnished her with brown contacts instead of assuming she wouldn’t need them in her repeated role as nothing much more than a honeypot. She considered buying sunglasses but noticed none of the women she had seen in Peshawar wore sunglasses, which made sense since the only physical characteristic the women in this region were permitted to show was their eyes. How would their husbands recognize them if they wore sunglasses? Alas, wearing sunglasses would only draw more attention to her. In the end, she decided against buying the sunglasses. She paid for the clothes and headed to the electronics store located in the same market.
Every possible square inch in the small store was packed with all the electronic contraptions known to man. Products traveled up the walls to the ceilings using hooks. The plastic packages took up every bit of space within the store and included any gadget customers could ever want, including spy cameras, listening devices, tablets and transistor radios.
Kara nodded to the middle-aged man behind the counter as she walked deeper into the store. She mulled around a little before picking up a Samsung tablet, as well as two sets of noise-cancelling headphones. She located an area that had burner cell phones encased inside thick plastic packaging and selected one of the more expensive models. She verified the phone would work as a hotspot for her tablet and that it came with 1000 minutes of voice/text as well as 10G of data. Just in case she would have company during her stay in Peshawar, she chose a headphone splitter and took her items to the counter.
The Pakistani storeowner did a classic double take when he saw her, which she realized was troublesome. Even though her abaya covered her like a nun, which should have made her invisible to him, the man must have noticed her green eyes, because he stared at her for a moment or two before he rang up the first of her purchases.
Kara asked in her best Punjabi, “Do you have a collection of movies I can purchase for this tablet?”
At first, the man pretended not to understand what she was asking for, and Kara assumed that even in Pakistan pirating movies was illegal. To assist with the communications gap, Kara produced an American twenty-dollar bill from the pocket of her new abaya. Suddenly the clerk was all smiles.
He placed four USB flash drives on the counter and explained, “This one is all adult films, like films for adults.” He laughed nervously. “This one is PG-13 movies for adults,” he explained, pointing his stubby finger at the second drive. “This one has some PG-13 and some movies for kids; this one is just for kids―like Disney movies.”
Kara placed her twenty on top of the flash drive that had the mix of adult and kid’s movies. The man rang up her items, placed then in a large plastic bag, and slipped Kara’s money in a drawer as she left.
Once outside the shop, she removed the SD card from the phone she had purchased in Termez’ airport and installed it into her new phone. Next, she stealthily pressed the old phone against the lip of a trashcan until she heard it snap in half. She got her bearings and headed to the Islamabad bus station, becoming just another faceless, powerless, hell, virtually invisible women walking the streets of Islamabad.
Knowing it was rare to see an unescorted woman walking on a Pakistani street, Kara tagged onto the first male she found headed in her direction and followed closely behind him. She maneuvered behind one unsuspecting Pakistani male after another, keeping her eyes down and avoiding direct eye contact with passing men. One hundred years ago, Kashmir had almost 50% light-colored eyes and ultra-Caucasoid features, just like their neighboring Pashtuns. Now a century later, the result of light-eyed Kashmiris mixing with black-eyed Indians rarely produced offspring with light eyes. Thus, much attention would certainly be given to her vivid green eyes, as she had already witnessed in the electronics store. For this reason, Ramey kept her eyes glued to the ground, glancing up every so often to confirm her direction and to ensure a male was still in front of her. Using this method of navigation, she eventually found her way to the bus station. Standing patiently in line for thirty minutes behind an odoriferous Pakistani man unaware of her presence, the rogue CIA agent waited her turn to purchase a bus ticket to the big city of Peshawar. An hour later she boarded the bus and sat next to the same man from the bus depot.
Ramey could have flown directly into Peshawar and landed at the Bacha Khan International Airport, but she wanted her trail to end in Islamabad since the CIA director, Jarrett Pepper, would by now consider her rogue and would deploy agents and assets to track her down. No real reason for the expenditure of taxpayers’ money, but that’s what the CIA did. A single missing agent and it was all hands-on deck. Kara had considered calling her boss to tell him she would be going AWOL, but what was the point? It wasn’t as if he was going to tell her to have a good time and to please mail the office some postcards. The CIA director would first say that her job was on the line. Jarret Pepper would mostly be concerned she might give the Agency a bad name and threaten to disavow Kara if things went sideways. If she were anyone else, Pepper would try adding a guilt trip, telling her she was leaving her family. However, Pepper knew of her parents’ death in the infamous terror attack, making such a ploy ineffective. That left Pepper with the option of pleading for her return. But, Pepper was not a pleader. He would get mad before he got sad which was too bad. In the end, her boss would tell her she was in deep doo-doo and that would be that. There was nothing to gain; Kara didn’t call him.
The crowded, hot and smelly bus only made two stops to exchange passengers. Most of them were men―half exited at the city of Wah where more dirty men who smelled to high heaven refilled the bus. Kara doubled the thickness of the scarf covering her face, especially over her nose to help mitigate the stench. In the town of Nowshera, the bus stopped again. More men got off. More men entered. A few women and children completed the mass of humanity cramming the old bus to capacity. The bus creaked and moaned on its final leg toward Peshawar.
Once off the bus in Peshawar, Kara took in a massive breath of relatively clean air and turned her attention toward flagging down a taxi. Fate was on her side. Across the street she spotted a man dressed in a three-piece suit trying to flag down a passing taxi. Kara quickly maneuvered through the dense traffic, careful not to be hit by one of the million scooters threading the traffic like a tailor’s needle weaving in and out of fabric. When the well-dressed man had successfully gotten the attention of a taxi driver, Kara stood directly behind him. He reached down and pulled open the back door of the cab. Before he could close it, Kara scooted in next to him on the back seat, closing the door behind her.
The man gave her a queer look of disdain but decided to let it go. He barked out an address to the driver. The driver apparently assumed Kara was with the man, so he didn’t ask for her destination. Instead, with a preemptive beep of his horn, the driver stomped on the accelerator and weaved back into traffic.
Kara hadn’t bothered remembering any of the streets other than those that led to the safe house. She knew they were headed north on Charasadda Road. So far, so good. She looked out the window at old, bland, single-level homes on either side of the highway and tried to clear her mind.
She knew by now that everyone in Washington, D.C., especially her boss at the CIA, would consider her actions dangerous and even a little crazy. Maybe a lot crazy. Moreover, she also realized they were right. Straight up, she had broken away from the CIA and Marshall Hail. They would easily deduce she had struck out on a personal mission to track down and kill those responsible for killing her family―for ruining have been her wonderful life. She had been as scarred as any frontline combat soldier in an American-sanctioned war. She was the poster child for screwed up. Half of fixing the problem was admitting you had a problem, and the other half was killing the problem. Wasn’t that how the saying went? It didn’t matter. She was going to do what her heart told her to do and that was that. If the consequences meant spending some time in a CIA detention center, she surely would enjoy the downtime. Three hots and a cot sounded damn good about now.
The cab eventually stopped in front of an office building that looked a little nicer than the other office buildings in the area. The man sitting next to her paid the driver in Pakistani rupees and exited the cab. The driver glanced back at Kara, apparently surprised to see the abaya -clad woman with the green eyes still sitting in the back.
Since the other man had spoken in Punjabi, Kara recited to the driver the address of the safe house in the same language. The driver gave her an odd expression but put the car into gear and resumed driving.
During the drive she mused how those at the CIA didn’t understand her or care about her quest, but Marshall Hail got it. That was not necessarily a comforting thought. It was like hanging out in an insane asylum and being comforted that the other patients understood you. Hail was also damaged. His family had also been killed in the terrorist act known as The Five. Five shoulder-fired missiles shot by five different terrorist organizations within five minutes of one another brought down five commercial aircraft in five different countries. Shortly thereafter, the billionaire Marshall Hail had come off the rails. He went on a shipbuilding frenzy, outfitting his cargo ships with the latest in both defensive and offensive weaponry. He built offensive drones and a command center that could send those drones to do his bidding. Within the short time Kara had been assigned to Hail, he had successfully killed two people from the FBI’s Top Ten Terrorists list, exhibiting no signs of slowing. Yes, Marshall Hail understood the motivations leading her toward Kornev’s safe house. Again, Hail was a lunatic who understood a madwoman. Why did she find that comforting?
The cab turned onto a dirt road that snaked its way between dozens of fields, mostly of sugarcane or tobacco. The melding aromas of the two plants pleased Kara. She was also pleased her sense of smell hadn’t been obliterated by the odoriferous bus ride. After a mile or two down the dirt road, the cab stopped in front of a quaint farmhouse. Kara checked her surroundings before exiting the vehicle. Once she was satisfied that they weren’t being followed, she stepped out of the cab, paid the driver, and received change in the form of Pakistani rupees. Pretending she lived there, Kara strode toward the front door. The taxi driver ground the cab’s gears for a moment before getting the little car rolling. Turning on the circular dirt driveway, he headed back down the narrow dirt road. Kara watched the cab until it disappeared into a cloud of dust.
Instead of attempting to enter the home from the front door, Kara walked to the back of the property and located a potting shed in the backyard. When she had questioned Kornev about his safe houses, he had initially told her to get a key from under the mat and enter via the front door. When she had then told Kornev Hail would immediately kill him if anything happened to her, he told her to use the potting shed entrance instead.
Kara pulled open the shed’s old wooden door and stepped inside. A string hung from a bulb and she gave it a tug. The dusty 100-watt bulb flickered on and Kara began to examine her surroundings. Kornev loved tunnels. Knowing that, she began searching the shed’s musty wooden floor for a hidden trapdoor. She moved a rusted wheelbarrow out of the way and looked beneath it. Nothing. Scanning the objects stored on the innermost portion of the shed, she searched for something large enough to obscure what must be an opening at least three feet square. After all, Kornev was a large man so the shaft had to be large enough for Kornev’s broad shoulders to fit through. Finding no such opening and running out of places to look, Kara turned to the twenty or so 50-pound bags of fertilizer stacked in the corner.
“Great,” she mumbled to herself.
Kara began moving the bags, thinking it was stupid for Kornev to make this so difficult. Eventually, she realized no potential robber would opt to move this much stuff unless he knew it would get him inside. Halfway through the task, Kara thought Kornev’s security precaution was quite brilliant. As she removed the last bags, a weathered thick plywood trapdoor became visible.
Kara located a screwdriver on the worktable. Sticking the tip in the gap between the trapdoor and its wooden frame, she applied sufficient pressure to pry open the wooden hatch. Once it angled open, she used her phone’s flashlight to investigate the hole. Taking her time, she inspected the immediate area, closely watching for tripwires or pressure-sensitive triggers Kornev may have installed. She found none.
Inches below the hatch, a substantial wooden ladder led down the shaft to the tunnel below. Kara stood, reversed her stance and carefully placed her foot on the first rung of the ladder. Moments later, she touched down at the base of the tunnel. Again using her phone’s flashlight, she found a loose electrical plug and after carefully checking for possible traps and disengaging a suspicious wire, she stuck it into a vacant socket. One string of light bulbs flickered to life, while a second, parallel string remained dark. Separate light strings meant the tunnel could be lit up by plugging their ends into outlets on either side. Kara
Estimating the tunnel vectored toward the direction of the farmhouse aboveground, Kara walked toward whatever lay ahead continually scrutinizing her surroundings for any booby traps. She hated the idea of the tunnel exploding and herself being buried in this isolated grave. Worse yet was the idea of being trapped within the tunnel to die of natural causes―that is if dying of thirst or hunger could be considered natural causes. Once she reached the other end of the tunnel, Kara let out a breath, unaware she’d been holding it. Prior to ascending yet another wooden ladder, which had to lead to the house, she allowed her heart to slow. The tunnel continued beyond the ladder toward her left. The lights of this section of tunnel were not illuminated, and she had no idea where it led. More fun for another time.
Several large shelves had been dug into the sides of the tunnel where she stood. Each shelf had stacks of weapons and ammunition, including dozens of assault rifles, handguns, grenades of many types, square packages of plastic explosives, land mines and other assorted tools useful in the death trade.
“Damn, Victor,” Kara said to herself. “Are you ready to go to war or what?”
The shelf closest to her held no less than fifty handguns stuffed into wooden slots. Kara recognized the butt end of a Russian-made TT-33 semi-automatic pistol that used the 7.62 x 25mm Tokarev cartridge. She plucked a pistol from its wooden slot and popped out the magazine. Boxes of its ammo were stacked on the shelf above the guns. The gun was well oiled and appeared to be in good functioning condition. She loaded its magazine, stuffed it into the grip of the pistol and racked a shell. She pulled the trigger and eased the hammer down with her thumb.
Feeling a little more prepared, she slid the gun into her abaya’s front pocket and began climbing the ladder. When Kara reached the top, she pushed open the wooden door using the top of her head. She glanced out of the tunnel and saw nothing but darkness. She climbed an additional rung and allowed the trapdoor to fall open on its heavy hinges.
She found herself in a dark closet. As she felt for the doorknob, she readied her pistol with the other hand. She opened the door a crack and peered into the room. Empty. No one in sight. In the event she needed to make a quick exit, she left the trapdoor open. Kara stepped into what appeared to be a bedroom, furnished with only a bed, a dresser and nightstand. There were no pictures or knickknacks. She walked through the bedroom looking out the window into the side yard to verify there was no activity. The bedroom emptied into a short hallway from which she passed one bedroom on her left and another to her right. Each bedroom had been furnished with the basics; presumably with whatever Kornev found that would fill the space. The hallway terminated in a big room, or in Western terms, either the great room or living room. Except for the bedrooms, the attached kitchen and a single bathroom, this was the only other room in the house no matter what you called it.
Kara entered the kitchen and checked the contents. The cabinets contained an assortment of well-used pots and pans, glasses and plates. She also found some Russian vodka. The pantry contained several freeze-dried foods―the type campers took on long hikes. There was nothing in the freezer or refrigerator other than some stale ice cubes in four plastic white trays. She retrieved a glass, rinsed it in the sink, poured three fingers of vodka and added an ice cube.
Thank you, Victor, she thought as she drained the contents of the glass in one gulp.