A wheelchair. That was how they’d gotten him into the hotel, they’d just wheeled him through the front door. An invalid taking a nap.
So he was in a wheelchair, at the Tabriz Hotel, the Russians had treated his punctured lung, and he was being guarded by one of Titov’s men. Mark wasn’t sure of his strength — he wanted to try flexing his arms, or stretching his legs, to give himself a better sense of his physical condition, but he didn’t want the guard to know he was conscious.
A blanket had been draped over his lap and forearms. He risked briefly tightening the muscles on his arms and concluded that, while some of the tape he felt against his skin may have been there to hold in place IV lines, it was primarily there to secure his arms to the armrests.
61
Daria felt another flutter of nerves in her gut. She couldn’t take her eyes off the live video feed. It was playing on a military-grade tablet computer that an Army Ranger had hung on the seat back of a civilian Airbus jet, a jet she’d boarded in Bishkek a few hours earlier. Up until now she’d been trying to convince herself that this was all just a big bluff, that the Russians would never be so bold as to take real military action, that they’d just use the threat of occupying Nakhchivan as a means of extracting some concessions from the Azeris.
But this, this was no bluff. The tanks were coming, and they were coming fast.
She’d agreed to serve as a liaison between the Azeri ground forces and an undercover team of US special forces provided that, if all went well when it came to stopping the Russians, they’d then be tasked with helping her to locate Mark.
The quid-pro-quo arrangement hadn’t sounded reasonable at the time, and it felt even less so now. It still hurt to pee, and her breasts were leaky. She was glad she’d bought a decent pump before the birth; at least she’d been able to leave her friend Nazira — the only woman Daria would have considered asking for help — some breast milk to feed Lila. But she’d only been able to pump enough to last for maybe twelve hours, and she worried that Lila wouldn’t take to the formula Nazira would have to use after that.
The last of no less than fifty latest-model T-90 tanks had left the gates of the Russian army base in Armenia a minute ago and were now hurtling south toward Nakhchivan at nearly forty miles per hour, chewing up the asphalt roads and sideswiping parked cars. The tanks were being followed by mine-clearing vehicles, armored cars, transport trucks, a satellite and cell phone jamming station, and tracked vehicles mounted with sophisticated Buk surface-to-air missile systems. A batwing RQ-180 stealth drone that had flown across Turkey from the US air base in Incirlik was now circling high above Nakhchivan, relaying it all via an encrypted satellite feed.
“What’s their distance to the border?” Daria asked.
“Call it seventy clicks,” said one of the Rangers. “At the speed they’re going, they should be there in a little over an hour.”
Daria calculated in her head. Say they landed as planned in ten minutes. Five minutes to meet with their Azeri counterparts at the airport and transfer themselves and their gear into whatever vehicle was provided.
As though reading her mind, Decker, who was sitting next to her on the plane, wearing a tactical chest rig over an armored vest, scratched his head with both hands and said, “Even driving fast we’re talking, say, forty-five minutes to get from the airport to the assembly point at the border…but they won’t need us unless things get so screwed up that the drone operators can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys. And that won’t happen right away. So we should make it in time. Barely.”
Daria nodded. They’d gone over this. Before seeing the Russian tanks, though, it had all seemed so theoretical. Even signing the boilerplate legal forms that designated her adoptive parents as Lila’s guardians should something go wrong — maybe it would be better for Lila to be raised in Virginia, in a nice home — even that hadn’t made it seem real. Nor had dropping off Lila with Nazira, although that certainly had been one of the hardest things Daria had ever had to do in her life. It had felt unnatural, and wrong. Almost as unnatural and wrong as it would have felt doing nothing to try to help Mark. But it hadn’t made her experience the kind of fear she felt now, watching the tanks advance.
Fear and disgust. This game that the Russians were playing; it was so pointless. People would die, likely on both sides, and for what? Because old men in Moscow wanted something they weren’t entitled to have, and old men in Washington, DC and Baku were willing to sacrifice the lives of others to prevent them from getting it?
Knowing that the entire American ground presence would consist of just three Rangers acting as spotters for air support, her as the translator, and Decker as her bodyguard and a backup spotter in case one of the Rangers went down, didn’t make her feel any better.
“If things go to hell, medevac is all on the Azeris,” Decker had said when they’d boarded the plane back at Manas Air Base north of Bishkek. “Point being, don’t get hurt.”
A light footprint, so that the United States could deny they’d even been there, that was the idea. Just enough to get the job done and no more. Then the Azeris could take credit for having mounted a surprisingly robust defense.
The Rangers — who’d just downed multiple cans of Red Bull and, in the case of at least one, Adderall — were unplugging battery chargers that they’d set up in the back of the plane. They wore camouflage fatigues with no identifying marks on them. Decker was inspecting a scuffed-up pair of four-tube night-vision goggles.
“We’re all charged up,” said one of the Rangers as he handed a bunch of batteries to Decker.
“Thanks, buddy.” Decker inserted one battery into his night-vision goggles and then another into his SOFLAM — a Special Operations Forces Laser Rangefinder Designator — which was about the size and shape of a small slide projector and could be used to guide smart bombs to targets.
“Give me your goggles,” Decker said to Daria.
She handed them over, and Decker slotted in the battery.
“Thanks.”
“I’ll be carrying a couple spare batteries if you need them.” Decker tapped an ammo pouch on the combat vest he was wearing. “Which you won’t, but just in case. How’s the vest?”
Decker had given her an armored vest, which she was wearing over her black sweatshirt. In retrospect she wished she’d just worn one of her old T-shirts. “Hot. And too big.”
Decker nodded. “It was the smallest they had.”
“It’ll do. Better than too small.”
“These grid maps suck,” said one of the Rangers, looking at his tablet computer.
“Best they could do on the fly,” said Decker. “I don’t think anyone anticipated we’d be paying a visit to this shithole.”
62
Mark bit down hard on his tongue, intentionally severing the side of it, then coughed. He opened his eyes slowly, coughed again, and looked around, as though confused. “What…?”
The Russian agent, who was wearing what looked like a small Bluetooth headset, raised his pistol, pointed it at Mark’s head, and said, “He wakes.”
“Help,” said Mark, speaking Russian. “I need…” His voice trailed off.
“What is it you need?”
“Where am I?”
The Russian sighed. “Just be quiet.”
Mark coughed again. “Water.”
“No.”
“I can’t…”
“You can be quiet. Everybody can be quiet.”