IRKTAN, CENTRAL CHECHNYA— THREE DAYS LATER
As they’d expected, they found no particularly interesting radiation hot spots at any of the spurs, although there were slightly higher than normal background hits at three sites. None of the buildings near the railroad sidings were housing waste-processing operations. If alpha- and high-gamma-level waste had been handled at any of the spots, it had been done expertly.
But back home, Corrigan had discovered that the FSB was working with Kyrgyzstan police on Sheremetev’s murder, looking for a pair of Chechens described as extremists, though the bulletin describing them made them sound more like killers for hire. Even more interestingly, Corrigan had tracked Sergiv Kruknokov’s movements. They had arrested a man in Chechnya who had visited a prisoner in a high-security prison outside the capital. Not just any prisoner: one of the men who had been involved in the plot to explode the radiation bomb in Moscow more than a decade before.
The Russians thought that the visitor was acting on behalf of a guerrilla leader they called “Kiro.” Corrigan was still tracking down Kiro’s identity—it wasn’t clear whether the
name was merely a pseudonym for someone else, a mistaken identity, or the nom de guerre of a heretofore unknown troublemaker. He did not appear to be one of the major leaders of the separatist movement. Over the past few years, radicals of all stripes and allegiances had moved into the Chechen hills, using the lawless territory for various purposes. Tracking them was a difficult task, even for the Russians, who had more than a hundred men assigned to the job.
This one was clearly worth finding. The Russians had clearly not put everything together yet, but the fact that they were nosing around told Ferg they were worried, very worried.
The ability to go where his gut told him to go was one of the most important aspects of the Special Demands setup, but even Ferguson knew driving into Chechnya without hard evidence of a link to the waste he was looking for was unlikely to yield results. Team missions weren’t always this open-ended; the idea of having so much firepower at his fingertips was to find a good place to use it. But he didn’t hand out the assignments, Slott did. His job was to play them out as far as they would go.
And so the Team had driven to central Chechnya, passing through miles and miles of burned farmland and bulldozed villages, arriving at a town called Irktan south of Urus-Martan. Irktan was located in the center of Chechnya, just at the foothills of the rugged southern mountains. At present, it was not particularly close to the front lines of the conflict, which was concentrated farther west. Russian troops patrolled the streets, but things were relaxed by Chechen standards ; there were armored vehicles but no tanks manning the checkpoints into town. Ferguson sent Conners and Guns in to nose around while he and Rankin looked for a place to set up shop. Rankin for once didn’t bitch—he tended to be happier, or at least less cranky, when he had the more dangerous job.
Two Russian soldiers flagged Guns and Conners down as they were entering town. Guns translated the nearly
five minutes’ worth of conversation into a single sentence: “We better get guns if we plan on staying.”
Their papers said they were part of a Mormon charity group running a clinic at the far end of town. The soldiers knew all about the clinic and pointed out the building, a redroofed one-story at the end of the main street. The walls had last been painted white; the outer coat was chipped away in a dozen places, each revealing a different shade. Two Russian soldiers with a dog were standing outside the clinic, eying them warily as they drove by.
“Explosives dog,” Conners said.
“Yeah.”
They drove along to the end of the block, then turned left. The buildings abruptly disappeared; on both sides the lots were covered with rubble that seemed to run all the way back to the mountains in the distance. They got out and grabbed two suitcases packed with medicine, along with smaller bags. Conners holstered the Makarova in plain view—a fifty-ruble note would take care of the “fine” assessed to foreigners who broke the law against possessing weapons.
Assuming the guards weren’t in a bad mood.
They didn’t seem to be, and in fact didn’t mention the pistol. The dog sniffed them and stood back, waiting while the soldiers looked through the bag of medicines; they took a bottle of Tylenol but nothing else.
Cleared inside, they found Sister Mariah Baxter, the director of the clinic. She pulled a stray strand of her long black hair back behind her ears as she inspected their gifts, eying the wares suspiciously but taking them nonetheless. A forty-year-old missionary from Utah, Sister Baxter knew how the game was played; she called over one of the nurses and told her to take the two men to Mr. T, who served as the clinic’s unofficial security officer.
Conners was surprised to find that Mr. T was barely twenty and skinnier than a rake handle. The Chechen nodded when Guns told him they needed information.
“We want to find out about a man named Kiro, who operates around here,” Guns told him in Russian.
Mr. T shook his head and clamped his teeth tightly together, his face flushing as Guns switched to Chechen and tried cajoling him with the few words he knew well. Conners took a step backward, his gaze drifting through the door back out into the large open room of the clinic. Half the room was a waiting area; the rest looked like triage stations where nurses tried to determine what was wrong with the patients. There were some slings for broken arms and bandages that might cover deep flesh wounds, but for the most part the people had less-visible ailments, probably a lot of the same stuff that people went to the doctor for in New Jersey—headaches and viruses and walking pneumonia, pregnancies, ear infections, coughs that wouldn’t go away. The difference was that here, with sanitary conditions for shit, food scarce, and medicine difficult to obtain, even a cold might be fatal.
Guns, meanwhile, fumbled with the words as he tried to get information from Mr. T. He had listened to Chechen language files for the past two days on the MP3 player, refreshing his memory, but it was difficult to get into the rhythm of the language. Mr. T wasn’t helping either, though obviously he knew who Kiro was.
“Think I should pound him?” he finally asked Conners.
The question caught Conners by surprise. “What good’s that going to do?”
“Scare him so he’ll talk.”
“He’s already pissing his pants,” said Connors. “If Kiro is that scary, odds are Sister Baxter knows who he is.”
Mr. T started to move past Guns to leave the room. Instinctively, the Marine threw his hand out to bar his way. The Chechen glared, but moved back and sat down.
“Don’t hit him until I come back,” said Conners.
He found Sister Baxter cleaning a scabbed knee on a nine-year-old girl. Conners watched her fingers daub the wound. They were a man’s hands, rough and worn, too big for the slender body they belonged to. Sister Baxter’s long hair was tied back with a piece of household string. She wore plain black pants and a blue denim shirt, and Connors realized as he approached that she was pretty despite her
age, or maybe because of it. He didn’t understand the kind of religious devotion that would lead a woman here, though as a young boy going to Catholic school he had seen enough of it. Back home his grandmother and her friends still went to church every weekday at 6:00 A.M., sitting in the front pews and mumbling the rosary, repenting sins they only dimly recalled.
Sister Baxter straightened, smiled at him, then picked up a roll of gauze bandage. “She was playing in a field with barbed wire. It could have been a mine. Maybe next time.”
Connors wasn’t sure how he was supposed to react to that—her tone implied that he had put the barbed wire there himself, and maybe even planted the mine.
“What do you want?” she said, cutting the wrap after several winds. Her fingers moved gently despite their size, and though the girl looked at her apprehensively, she seemed calm.
“We have to talk to a certain man. A rebel.”
Sister Baxter’s lip curled in a way that suggested a sarcastic smile, yet Conners saw there was something else there, too.
Fatigue? Weariness? Sorrow?
“Mr. T is not being particularly helpful, and it’s important,” said Conners. “I don’t want to hurt him. Or anyone else.”
“Are you threatening us?”
“The opposite. The man we’re looking for is going to hurt a lot more kids like her,” he said, thumbing toward the little girl.
In another place, under other circumstances, Sister Baxter’s eyes as she looked into his would have made him fall in love. Even here they made him reluctant to continue, as if a simple question might hurt her somehow.
“The man’s name is Kiro,” said Conners.
The sarcastic smile again. “Why don’t you ask the Russians where he is?” she said.
“If I thought they would help me, I would.”
She got up and gestured to the row of people sitting in the chairs, adding something in what Conners thought was
Chechen. One of the women came forward, talking excitedly. The two women conversed for a while; they seemed to be arguing.
“She thinks you’re a doctor,” explained Sister Baxter finally.
“I, uh, well, I have some medic training,” said Conners. Some was correct.
“Yes, well, how are you at gynecology?”
Conners could feel his face starting to burn.
“I need to do a pap smear,” said Sister Baxter. “Her symptoms sound like cervical cancer. But she wants a doctor, not a nurse. I’ll do the real work, but I’ll tell her you’re the doctor.”
“OK,” said Conners.
“I’ll get the speculum.”
Conners watched her move across the room as the patient began talking to him nonstop. He nodded and smiled in a way he hoped suggested he had been to medical school.
“We’re going to do this here?” he asked, when Sister Baxter returned and rolled out a fresh rug.
“You have a better place?”
“Don’t you have an examining room?”
“This is it. The other two rooms we have are filled with patients. One is for people who are missing limbs. The other is for operations.”
Connors nodded. Sister Baxter, meanwhile, had the patient lie down.
“Don’t be shy,” she told him.
He got down on his knees and took the instrument. But that was just for show—as he smiled as reassuringly as possible for the patient, Sister Baxter took the actual sample.
“You did all right for an American,” she told him after she had logged the information on the sample and told the woman when to return.
“Thanks.”
“Kiro has a small group outside of the town,” she told him.
“Near here?”
“Near enough.”
“Why don’t the Russians attack him?”
“There is the philosophy of live and let live,” she said.
“And there is also the fact that this is a very poor place for a commander to be posted.”
Conners assumed that she was hinting that Kiro bribed the local commander, something that was not unheard of though obviously not condoned by the central authorities. While a bribe might not even be necessary—if the guerrilla wasn’t going out of his way to make trouble, he might not be attacked—it would explain why the FSB people hadn’t been able to obtain a lot of information about him—and why the CIA hadn’t then been able to steal it.
“I have a person who can guide you, but it will cost you money,” added Sister Baxter.
“How much do you need?”
“We need a lot. But the money’s not for us. One hundred dollars, as soon as it’s dark in front of the gas station going out of town.”