Five minutes later she was clean and dried off and dressed in jeans and a black cotton shirt, and she sat on her cot looking at the phone.
A minute later it rang again.
“Allo?”
Her control officer talked for only two minutes, and when Zoya finally got a chance to reply, she was cut off, told the decision was final.
She hung up the phone and sat quietly on the cot in the little office.
But only for thirty seconds. Then she stood, opened the door, and descended the staircase.
There the seven surviving members of the Zaslon team all sat on their cots in the living area on the small warehouse floor; most of the men by now wore just their boxers or civilian tracksuits.
Sasha’s bunk lay empty.
It was clear the men had been talking together, but everyone shut up as Zoya approached.
Anna One still wore his grimy clothing, and he still held his sat phone in his hand. She knew he’d been on a long call.
Zoya walked up to him and stopped, just looked him hard in the face.
Vasily said, “Look, Koshka. These things happen. You tried to bite off more than you could chew, you got in over your head, and then you—”
“You told them I ordered you into Omega.”
“You did order us into Omega.”
“Initially, yes, but when the PAVN trucks arrived, I told you to stand down. You know that, you son of a bitch.”
The big commando shrugged. “By then it was too late. By then we were already taking accurate fire, and I determined the only way was forward.”
“You lying piece of shit. There was no fire. That came after you hit the building.” She looked around the room. “Every one of you heard my order.”
No one spoke.
“Really? Are you all going to back up Vasily when you know he was the one who directed you to hit a building with two dozen PAVN around the perimeter?” She turned back to Vasily. “You had me removed from the task force. You had me recalled to Moscow. All to cover your ass and to make you feel better about your fuckup, the fuckup that got Sasha killed.”
Vasily pointed a finger at her, got it right in her face, but before he could speak she snatched his arm and jerked it down with her right hand, yanking the unsuspecting paramilitary officer off balance.
She threw a hard left jab to his face, connecting perfectly with his jaw and mouth, compounding the magnitude of the punch by pulling him down and into it.
Vasily’s head snapped back and he fell to the ground.
And then he got back up.
None of the other Zaslon operators moved while Vasily touched his hand to his mouth and then looked at his blood-covered fingertips.
Zoya stared him down. She didn’t have the strength to defeat Vasily in hand-to-hand combat; objectively she knew that. But her fury had surpassed her judgment. She wasn’t going to run, and she wasn’t going to hit him again. Instead she waited for what she knew was coming.
“Davai!” she shouted. Come on!
The paramilitary operator slammed the back of his hand against her face, sending her spinning to the ground like a rag doll. He stood over her while she slowly rolled onto her knees.
“You are done, Koshka. You never were a team player. Go home.”
She remained there on her hands and knees. Blood dripped from her nose, and the inside of her mouth began to swell. She spit on the floor. “We could have had him. We could have just sat back and watched the villa from distance until the PAVN left. We could have taken Fan at a time of our choosing. The actor who took him couldn’t have done it if we sat back and secured the area and Sasha would still be here.” She pointed to the empty cot. “Sasha would still be sitting right fucking there, with the rest of you idiots.”
Vasily wiped his mouth with a dirty rag from the gun-cleaning table. He said, “Anna team doesn’t sit back and watch. My men are not the guys you send in to run surveillance.”
“Right,” Zoya said, slowly climbing to her feet now. “Next time I’ll do everything myself.”
“The only thing you will be doing by yourself is flying home to Moscow. Me and my guys will take it from here.”
Zoya gave one last look at the team, and then she stormed back up to the office. Five minutes later she returned with all her gear loaded in two backpacks. Her nose had tissue jammed in it, and the right side of her face was puffy from the blow she’d taken.
The SVR motor pool had allotted the team four vehicles, which were parked side by side on the warehouse floor: three Toyota Sienna minivans and a twenty-year-old Toyota Tundra pickup truck. Zoya opened the chain-operated garage door, climbed into the Tundra, and drove off without even a glance at the men standing around watching her go.
As soon as Zoya was out of the parking lot she fished in one of her packs for her satellite phone. Quickly she dialed a phone number as she drove through the darkened streets of Phnom Penh.
She knew that the local assistant resident of the SVR for Cambodia would be home asleep, and there was no way he would be aware of the decision Moscow had just made regarding her status on the task force. She didn’t know the man well at all; they had just met for a few minutes the day before. He’d given her his mobile number and she knew his instructions had been to give her whatever she needed for her mission.
The man answered with a rough sleepy voice. “Allo?”
Zoya said, “Ivan? I need help.”
“Sirena?”
“Da. I need information… fast. Either I can come over to your place now, which will probably piss off your wife, or you can tell me over the phone.”
The man coughed sleepily. “I’ll meet you at the embassy. Give me an hour.”
“I don’t have an hour.”
Ivan cleared his throat, and then she heard him moving around. She assumed he was leaving his bedroom.
Finally he said, “This is an open line.”
Zoya ignored the comment and said, “Just tell me who we can send to help me find someone along the border to the east of the city.”
“That’s a little vague, isn’t it?”
“I’m talking about a force. A persuasive force.”
“I thought you had a force.”
“Someone who knows the area. Who won’t stick out. A proxy unit. I don’t care if we never use them, have no relationship to them. I don’t care if they are communists, drug dealers… fucking headhunters or cannibals. I don’t care. I need them, and I need them now.”
“An open line, Sirena.”
“Help me.”
“Okay…” Ivan thought a moment. “What’s in it for them?”
“The guy I’m looking for… He’s valuable. Very valuable. If they can find him… they can have him.”
“How does that help you? What the hell is going on?”
“This is an in extremis situation. I don’t know the local underworld here in Cambodia, and neither do my guys… but you do. Right now I know where my target is, generally speaking. But if someone doesn’t go get him right now, then he’s in the wind, and we may never pick him back up. I want him caught by a known entity, so I can find him again.”
This pause was even longer. Finally the assistant resident said, “The group you are looking for… they aren’t Cambodian. The guys you want are Thai. They are well connected in that part of the country. But we don’t work with them. We don’t touch them. Ever.”
“I need a phone number.”
“Shit, Sirena, it’s three a.m.”
“And by four it will be too late!”
“Okay… I’ll send it to you. They are based in Bangkok, but they smuggle over the border through Cambodia and into Vietnam all the time. The route they use is just east of the capital, the area you are talking about.”