“I think this is as a good an opportunity as we’re going to get,” the USAF general who headed the CIA Office of Military Affairs observed several minutes later, barely hiding his impatience.
And D/NCS agreed.
The targets were well within the borders of Afghanistan now. There was little civilian traffic on the highway, so collateral damage wasn’t a concern. But there were nearby villages, and the Reapers would wait for the convoy to reach a more desolate area, so that there would be no one to witness the strike.
D/NCS, under Culler’s urging, hadn’t elaborated but had stressed to the national security adviser the importance of keeping the operation quiet. There would be no statements or press releases after this. If Cramer or his accomplices learned the convoy had been hit, they might realize that they’d been compromised.
The pilots at Creech AFB were ordered to fire their missiles.
On the main monitor in the Ops Center, a cross hair was centered over the lead truck, which did about sixty miles per hour on the highway. An abrupt white flash suddenly filled the screen, briefly blinding the camera’s photoreceptors. The image was restored a second later, in time for the observers to watch the Hellfire missile streak into the Ural truck and transform it into a smoldering, twisted heap of wreckage. A thick black cloud of smoke spiraled into the sky as the diesel burned.
The truck’s passengers were likewise reduced to microscopic residue that would later be scraped off pieces of scorched debris for examination. The only shame, Culler thought, was that these Taliban never knew what hit him, and they likely never felt a thing, which was far better than what they deserved.
Two MQ-9 Reapers were overkill, but Reapers never travelled alone on a strike mission. Each drone carried four AGM-114 Hellfire air-to-ground missiles, doubling the armament of the Reaper’s predecessor, the infamous Predator. Each Reaper’s multi-spectral targeting system was capable of tracking and taking out multiple ground targets simultaneously. But like any piece of technology, malfunctions did occur, however rare in the case of the Reapers, and intelligence indicated that the Taliban were in possession of surface-to-air missiles, which would have little trouble knocking a drone out of the sky.
The Hellfire missiles, originally designed to bust armored battle tanks, made quick work of the Ural trucks. It was almost anti-climatic for those anxiously watching from the Langley Ops Center. For the pilots, it was simply a routine sortie, one of a half dozen such strikes they would carry out that week.
The Hellfires bored into their targets at over nine hundred miles per hour, at which point their twenty pound HEAT warheads detonated. One second the trucks were cruising down the highway, the next they were obliterated wrecks and piles of mechanical and human debris scattered across the Afghan landscape. The explosions were more spectacular than the usual targets of Toyota Land Cruisers, the preferred vehicle of Taliban and al-Qaeda, or mud brick huts, given the combustible cargo the trucks carried.
Watching the attack, Culler hoped it wasn’t too little, too late.
SIXTEEN
The Antonov’s wheels skidded over the runway, Wednesday, at 8:18AM, three hours behind Dushanbe time.
Minsk National provided an ideal node for Aleksander Litvin’s operations in Central Asia. The airport was relatively small, making it easily secured by the Belarusian KGB. A scant million passengers came through here yearly, and the airport serviced only eleven civilian airlines, most of which belonged to members of the Commonwealth of Independent States, with the two most frequent of these being Belavia, the Belarusian flagged carrier, and Russia’s Aeroflot. Only two other cargo carriers utilized the small freight terminal, Belarus’ Genex, and Turkish Airline Cargo.
The Belarusian KGB augmented the security of Litvin’s freight operations, although they didn’t know the details of Litvin’s business. Even Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus’s outspoken anti-Western president, was reluctant to become involved with something as toxic as arming the Taliban. Litvin didn’t fear repercussions should the government discover he was bringing in over a ton of Afghan heroin. He worried only about the enormous cut of the profits he’d be forced to share with corrupt Belarusian officials to ensure his freedom and their silence.
The last time Robert Cramer had been to Minsk was during the Cold War, as an air force lieutenant serving with DIA. He’d been assigned as a technical expert on the American diplomatic team involved in strategic weapons reduction talks. After, he’d never expected to return to Minsk. Eager, conservative, idealistic, and patriotic then — naïve and misguided he thought now of his younger self — he’d held a particular disdain for the authoritarian, repressive police states that comprised the Soviet Union. Even after the Cold War, he’d viewed Belarus loathsomely, in the same league as other communist despots like Cuba, North Korea, or Vietnam. Now, he held a much more pragmatic view of the world. He thought his younger self incapable of making the decisions he’d made in the past months.
A Russian crew already waited at the hangar, ready to unload the Antonov’s cargo and transport it to a safe location where the heroin would be divided up and sold to the Krasnaya Mafiya, and the Albanian gangs in the Balkans, for cash, and distributed to the streets of western European cities.
Cramer wore a pair of dark sunglasses and a plain baseball cap. Four days of beard growth concealed his face. Although Minsk was one of the last places the Agency would search for his body, and CIA maintained only a small, token presence here, he still wanted to go unnoticed. The last thing he needed was some officer from Minsk station who he’d worked with five years ago in Tbilisi spotting him at the airport in one of those “it’s a small world” moments of unlikely, random chance.
A tall, fit, stone-faced man with Slavic features waited for Cramer in the concourse. Cramer at once recognized the ex-Red Army/KGB pedigree common to members of the Krasnaya Mafiya. The man wore jeans and an open leather jacket so that his holstered pistol was both concealed and easily accessible, not that the local authorities would much care if he was armed.
The Russian escorted Cramer through customs, and he was waved through without being searched or questioned. Cramer used his forged Russian passport and ID, prepared for him in Tajikistan by Oleg Ramzin, and showed his GlobeEx Transport badge. Cramer knew that there would likewise be no search of the Antonov or inspection or inventory of its cargo.
The Russian then escorted Cramer outside to an armored Mercedes Benz with tinted windows and delivered him to the Crowne Plaza Hotel, where a suite was already reserved for him under the name on his Russian-supplied papers. The closet contained several fresh changes of clothes in his size, expensive European designer labels that he normally would not wear. A bottle of scotch sat on the nightstand, with two glasses, next to a business card for a local escort agency.
Against Litvin’s advisement, Cramer declined the presence of a bodyguard. He wanted total privacy and time alone to recharge. He wasn’t concerned for his personal security anyway. He’d worked out of far more dangerous places than Minsk and against agencies far more proficient than CIA or the Belarusian KGB. Plus he knew Litvin would have people stationed in the hotel’s lobby around the clock.
Most likely, so would the Belarusian KGB.
This agency remained the only Eastern Bloc spy service unashamed to hold onto the original, tainted name of KGB, and all its negative connotations, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It was fitting, since Felix Dzerzhinsky, who founded and headed the Cheka, the first Soviet security agency, was born in Belarus.
Cramer took a steaming hot shower, his first in almost a week, and then collapsed onto the king size bed, shut his eyes, and was fast asleep. He awoke five minutes before the alarm clock was set to go off at noon, feeling not quite refreshed but at least like he was able to function for the rest of the day. He dressed in khaki pants and a navy blue polo shirt from his suitcase. Before faking his abduction, he’d arranged with Oleg Ramzin for a weeks’ worth of clothing from his personal residence to be packed and forwarded to Ayni.