66
Titov groaned as he lifted himself off the floor. It wasn’t the burning in his chest — that was minimal, he’d been wearing body armor — but the thought of what had just transpired that really pained him.
Sava.
He should have known the American would pull something like this. But Sava’s lung really had collapsed on him. He really had to be hurting. Just not as much, evidently, as Titov had thought.
“Vlad!” called Titov.
“Here, sir!”
Titov stumbled into the main room. His right thumb was dripping blood. He thought his nose might be broken. And his balls were killing him. He observed Vlad — a twenty-year veteran of the FSB — on one knee, back pressed against the wall adjacent to the stairwell entrance, AKS rifle pressed to his chest, finger on the trigger. The bullet-riddled stairwell door was open.
“Where did he go?”
“The roof, sir.”
“Who’s hurt?” Titov was tempted to admonish his operative for having let Sava run past him, but to do so would have only emphasized Titov’s own lapse.
“Sergei’s down.”
“Dead?”
“Maybe.”
Two piercing beeps sounded from the communications table. That would be the command center at FSB headquarters in Moscow, Titov knew. He cursed.
“Sir?”
“Keep watching the stairwell. I have to take this.”
Moscow had told him they would let him know when the Russian ground forces were about to cross the border. Shortly thereafter, Titov could expect to see Russian tanks rolling into Nakhchivan City and a Russian helicopter on the roof of the Tabriz. Russian ground troops would clear the hotel from the bottom up while Titov’s men and a spetsnaz platoon from the helicopter would clear from the top down. Once the hotel was clear, the Tabriz would serve as the main communications center of the Russian occupation.
But now the roof was not secure. That had to change.
He jogged back to his communications table and answered his satellite phone.
“We are at the border. Prepare yourself,” said the voice on the other line.
“Understood,” said Titov.
As he hung up the phone, Titov heard screaming. At first he was confused as to its origin, but after a moment realized it was coming from the roof.
Titov took a step toward the window that overlooked the parking area in front of the Tabriz. An Azeri armored car had just pulled into the lot. Sava was yelling, thirteen stories down to them, at the top of his lungs. The Azeri in the armored car appeared to be listening to him.
Titov could make out some of the words. Russians, taking over, restaurant, killing Azeris…
67
At first it wasn’t even a fair fight, thought Daria.
“JDAMs,” said Decker, with whom Daria was communicating via the radio headset she was wearing. “Probably five-hundred pounders. Anything more would be overkill.”
She was in northern Nakhchivan, crouched in a decades-old trench that overlooked the Armenian border, peering out of a small hole that had been cut through a low stone wall that ran parallel to the trench. The Russian T-90 tanks had seemed so large and menacing, their diesel engines so loud, that it had been hard for her to imagine anything could resist them. They’d stopped at the border fence, but only to demand that the Azeri troops let them pass. A man claiming to be a Russian general had stood in front of the tanks with a bullhorn.
We come in peace, to help defend the southern border of Nakhchivan from an Iranian attack. Open the gates now or we will drive through them. You have one minute.
A minute had passed. The gates had remained shut. So the tanks had advanced, pounded through the gates as if they were made of paper, and then — before a single shot had even been fired by the Azeris — the first two tanks in the Russian column had been blown to hell by a single B-2 stealth bomber circling some fifty thousand feet above. Daria could see the two tanks now, smoldering. She felt awful for the soldiers who’d been inside them. Because one thing she knew for certain — this invasion loosely disguised as assistance certainly hadn’t been their idea.
The Azeri general who commanded the defense stood by her side, dressed in desert camouflage.
Boom! Then two seconds later, Boom!
Two more Russian tanks that dared to cross the border were destroyed. And then two more after that. It was clear to her that the Russians hadn’t been prepared to encounter anything close to such resistance. The advance, which had been thrown into disarray after the first two tanks were hit, halted.
Below Daria, on the Azeri side of the border, were some thirty Azeri military vehicles, most of which were Russian-made: T-90 tanks, but older versions than the Russians were using; armored personnel carriers topped with antiaircraft machine guns; and a few surface-to-air missile systems. The trenches closer to the border were packed with heavily armed troops, as were the surrounding hills. The Azeris were waiting for the Russians to advance further before engaging them. Daria wasn’t sure that was even going to happen.
One of the Rangers’ voices sounded on her headset.
“Tell the Azeris to expect incoming! Someone’s lighting up the friendlies!”
Daria passed along the message to the Azeri general standing next to her. Moments later, an Azeri armored personnel carrier was hit by a missile that streaked down from a neighboring hillside.
Turning to Daria, the Azeri general said, “We have Russians behind the lines. I need you to relay these GPS coordinates to your team.”
The general read them off; as he spoke Daria translated the numbers into English for the Ranger she was linked to via a secure radio connection.
Seconds later, there was an explosion on a nearby hillside.
68
Alarms began to sound all over Nakhchivan City. Army trucks rumbled through the streets.
The Azeri soldier Sava had called down to had radioed for backup. Titov and his men had disabled the elevator right after Sava had pulled his stunt, so the Azeri infantry men sent to investigate Sava’s claim had been forced to trudge up the stairs. After two were shot, the rest had fled, but minutes later, what Titov guessed was an entire infantry platoon had pulled up to the hotel and raced inside.
So the Azeris were coming; it was just a matter of time.
And the minute Titov saw the antiaircraft lighting up the sky to the north, he knew something else had also gone wrong. The Russian MiG fighter jets that had been assembled at the air base in Armenia weren’t supposed to be part of the incursion unless the Azeris used the few MiG fighter jets they had stationed in Nakhchivan to attack the advancing Russian ground forces. The MiG made a distinctive sound, audible from many miles away, but Titov couldn’t hear any in the air.
In fact he couldn’t hear any fighter jets in the air.
Which meant there should be no need for antiaircraft fire at all. But there was antiaircraft fire, so something had to be up there, way up high, where it couldn’t be heard. The randomness of the antiaircraft fire suggested that whatever it was couldn’t be seen by radar any more than it could be heard.
Which meant the Azeris had, at the last minute, found someone to help them. The Turks, perhaps, or more likely, the Americans. FSB counterintelligence would eventually find out who — their mole in the US embassy probably already knew — but by then it might not matter.
Titov’s satellite phone began to ring. Ignoring it, he walked to the emergency stairwell.