Hail turned toward Kara and said, “Kara, you have the floor.”
Kara had been organizing information on her laptop for the last few minutes, poking her finger at keys and moving the mouse around the screen. She looked up from her laptop and pointed at the big screen on the wall.
“We have determined the location of the world’s largest arms dealer, Victor Kornev. He is staying in this house right here,” she said, pointing the laptop’s cursor to the sizable white house.
“Where is this house?” Nolan asked, recalling Kara’s boss mentioning the country was Uzbekistan — wherever the hell that was. But he couldn’t recall the town.
“Termez,” she said, zooming out on her laptop until the town turned into a country. “As you can see, it’s located in the southernmost tip of Uzbekistan.”
The group looked at the country and all the strange countries surrounding it, places that never came up in general conversations. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan were the countries that bordered Uzbekistan. The celebrity country of those four was certainly Afghanistan, having been in the headlines for years. But the others most people could barely pronounce.
“Why is he there?” Hail asked.
“Convalescing is what our advanced team has told me. He is on the mend from a gunshot to his hand, as well as several other injuries caused from being in the proximity of an exploding hotel in North Korea,” Kara said, shooting both Hail and Nolan a look.
Nolan looked as if he wanted to crawl under the table, but Hail shrugged it off and simply said, “I wish I would have killed him that day.”
“OK, enough of that talk,” Kara said in a scolding tone. “We know the plan is to turn him, and the only way we are going to do that is by first letting him know he has no other choice. And then, when he blows off our first warning, we’ll come back a second time, and then we’ll show him that we mean business.”
“And how do you want to warn him?” Hail asked.
“Face-to-face,” Kara said. “Your face-to-face meeting. Like I told you before, Kornev does not fear weapons. He fears the men behind the weapons. Thus, you need to have a face-to-face meeting to earn his respect.”
“What do you want me to do? Knock on his front door and when he answers, I punch him in the face?”
“That would probably not be a good idea, because he would just kick your sorry ass, and we would be back to square one,” Kara told Hail with a satisfied smirk.
Hail looked hurt, and she continued.
Kara zoomed in, and the country blurred before refocusing on Kornev’s compound.
“We need to get him out of his home, or compound, or whatever you want to call this fortress he is holed up in. We need to lure him out into the open, where there is no place to hide, and nowhere to run, and no chance of him having any backup support.”
Hail looked over the compound.
“Can you zoom out a little so we can get a layout of the town?” Renner asked.
Kara zoomed out and displayed five miles of the town surrounding Kornev’s home.
“Looks like a lot of farmland,” Nolan remarked.
Hail said, “Yeah, but look at the area north of the airport. It looks like nothing but desert. Not a lick of green anywhere for hundreds of miles. If we can get him out there, we can do anything we want to him.”
Kara looked at the area that Hail was referring to. He was right. On the map, it was labeled as the Surkhandarya Province.
Kara suggested, “The airport is very close to no-mans-land, the area you are talking about,” Kara said, resting the mouse pointer on the single runway. “If I e-mailed Kornev and let him know I was flying into the Termez airport, after one wrong turn, we would be headed into the desert.”
Renner asked Kara, “So, you just pull a gun on Kornev and insist he drive you to the desert?”
“I don’t want to give up my cover unless I have to,” Kara informed the group. “I don’t know what type of leverage we will need against Kornev, but being turned
by a female CIA agent might be more of a slap in the face than Kornev’s ego can handle.”
Everyone was quiet, each of them pondering the situation.
“If no one has any suggestions then I think I know a way,” Kara said.
“Is it going to blow your cover?” Hail asked Kara
“Nope, I would just be along for the ride. But it’s going to be a bumpy ride.”
“I can handle that,” Hail said.
“OK, this is what we’re going to do,” Kara stated.
Termez, Uzbekistan
The weights that Victor Kornev was lifting were not particularly heavy, but each of the dumbbells, in each of his hands, felt as if they were connected to the ground by rubber straps. Sitting upright on his weight bench in his home gym, Kornev curled each dumbbell up to his chin, alternating hands, counting the reps until he reached twenty for each arm. His muscles burned and he felt, at one point, he might pass out from the exertion.
Perspiration poured from his forehead and dripped onto the matted floor. He had started working out a few days ago, understanding he would heal faster if he put a little effort into it. Sitting around and allowing his muscles to atrophy would not get him back on his feet. Thus, he had begun with a leg workout. His back had hurt so badly during that first stint in the gym that he dreaded going back that same afternoon and doing an upper body workout. But he had. The Russian had worked through the pain, and he was still working through it.
Each morning he awoke, dreading going back down to the gym located in the basement of his home. Pushing through discomfort was not uncommon to a former soldier. He had been hurt dozens of times during his career in the Russian military, and then with his cargo company, Air Cress. He had been shot twice, stabbed many times, beaten up and left for dead more times than he cared to remember. That had all occurred after he had deserted the Soviet Army. His unceremonious exit from the military had taken place during the Soviet Union’s breakup. With the crumbling army in disarray, no one had really given a damn any more what happened. Kornev had taken advantage of the opportunities that had come his way. As far as Kornev was concerned, if you didn’t take advantage of a government in crisis, then you deserved to end up with nothing. Maybe even less than nothing. If your life was meaningful to you, that might be all you walked away with. After the fall of the Soviet Union, for years Russia had turned into the wild, wild west. Everyone was on the take. Everyone who had struggled to become someone was working an angle. Crime was so rampant and so deeply entrenched in the new Russian empire, that common street thugs were getting rich. And a related nuance was the rich were turning into common street thugs. Why? Because they had not played the game, and they had lost everything. It all depended on how much you wanted and what lengths you were willing to go to get it.
Kornev grunted and set the dumbbells down on the floor. He arched his back and winced in pain. That last series of reps was about all his damaged body could take today. He got up slowly, moving like an old man, and walked sluggishly to the bathroom. Moving as little as possible, he dropped his gym pants, pulled off his shirt and stepped into the walk-in shower. He turned the faucet and stepped under the cool water; it felt wonderful. He would let the water cool him down for a moment before turning on the hot water, letting it bake his sore muscles.
Fifteen minutes later, Kornev emerged from the shower, steam coming off his red skin, feeling a little more like his old self. He arched his back again. It didn’t hurt as bad as it had a few days ago.